Accused Russian spy Maria Butina appears to reach plea deal  —  Washington (CNN)Accused Russian spy Maria Butina appears to have reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors.  —  Butina is accused of trying to infiltrate Republican political circles and party leaders during the 2016 campaign …

Everybody Says Mueller Is Almost Done.  What If He Isn't?  —  In late 2015, the British spy agency GCHQ, and then other Western intelligence agencies, learned of suspicious interactions between Russian agents and Donald Trump's inner circle.  By the summer of 2016, James Comey testified Friday …

Meadows would give Trump a skilled brawler in the White House  —  House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows wrote a secret memo last month about how House Republicans could counter Democratic plans to investigate and potentially impeach Donald Trump.  —  Now, the president is eyeing …

Supreme Court declines to review rulings that blocked efforts to end Planned Parenthood funding  —  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review lower court decisions that blocked efforts in two states to end public funding to Planned Parenthood, refusing for now to get involved in state battles over abortion rights.

Sources: Dan Bongino Out at NRATV  —  Trump loves the guy.  But the gun rights group is downsizing its media operation and his show appears to be a casualty of those plans.  —  The National Rifle Association's media arm has dropped pro-Trump firebrand Dan Bongino from its lineup …

Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again  —  It was President Trump's signature campaign promise: He would build a wall along the nation's southern border, and Mexico would pay for it.  —  Shortly after becoming president, Trump dropped the Mexico part …

Michael Bloomberg still doesn't seem to understand how journalism works  —  The former New York mayor says he might end political coverage at his news service if he runs for president.  —  Kathy Kiely is the Lee Hills chair in free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism.

YouTube Bans Proud Boys Founder Gavin McInnes  —  YouTube banned Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on Monday, marking the latest social-media blow for the man who started the far-right men's group.  McInnes had amassed more than 220,000 subscribers on YouTube before the ban …

Sudden shift in get-Trump talk; now it's campaign finance, not Russia  —  Prosecutors investigating President Trump made big news Friday, but it wasn't about Russia.  Rather, in their sentencing recommendation for fixer Michael Cohen, lawyers with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District …

Why ‘No Hate Here’ signs are actually pretty hateful  —  My walks with my dog take me to a quiet off-street, with middle-class houses made expensive because they're inside the Beltway.  Their owners are mostly youngish attorneys who work as assistant-deputy-director-somethings in some government department or other.

An insane amount of people turned out to vote in the midterm elections  —  (CNN)President Donald Trump solved a problem that no other president before him could: Getting people to vote in a midterm election.  —  Whether they were voting for or against his agenda, it is now clear that voters turned out in record numbers in 2018.

TIME Announces 2018 Person of the Year Shortlist on Today Show  —  The shortlist of candidates for TIME's 2018 Person of the Year was unveiled Monday on NBC's Today show.  Since 1927, TIME has identified the Person of the Year, recognizing the person or group of people who most influenced …

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They're Not Keeping It Secret  —  Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds.  They say it's anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is.  —  The millions of dots on the map trace highways …

Talk About Pizzagate  —  The former Clinton campaign chairman is among the victims still recovering from a vile conspiracy theory that ended in gunfire  —  WASHINGTON — John Podesta has given it a lot of thought and believes the best way to deal with the trolls is to ignore them.

YouTube's Biggest Personality Promoted an Anti-Semite  —  Felix Kjellberg, a Swedish YouTube personality best known online by his account name “PewDiePie,” promoted, in one of his video offerings, another YouTube account that has posted white nationalist and anti-Semitic content.

LinkedIn co-founder backs $35 million voter data project in ‘existential threat’ to Democratic Party  —  Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman has teamed up with several former Obama administration officials to create an independent — and likely for-profit — database that would store …

Paul Ryan's long con  —  He betrayed his promises and left a legacy of debt and disappointment.  —  House Speaker Paul Ryan's legacy can be summed up in just one number: $343 billion.  —  That's the increase between the deficit for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2018 — that is …

US starts to withdraw troops from Trump border mission  —  WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. this week will begin withdrawing many of the active duty troops sent to the border with Mexico by President Donald Trump just before the midterm election in response to a caravan of Central American migrants, U.S. officials said Monday.

Colin Kaepernick reportedly ‘ready and willing’ to play for the Redskins  —  The Redskins' increasingly makeshift situation at quarterback has done nothing to end questions about why the team has been hesitant to sign Colin Kaepernick.  For his part, the noted free agent was reported Sunday to be …

Establishment looks to crush liberals on Medicare for All  —  The united front that helped Democrats save Obamacare just a year ago is falling apart over single-payer health care.  —  Deep-pocketed hospital, insurance and other lobbies are plotting to crush progressives' hopes of expanding …

Al-Arabiya slams Linda Sarsour as Muslim Brotherhood ally  —  Written by Huda al-Saleh and published on Sunday the article seeks to expose what it calls “details of calls to attack Trump by US ‘Muslim Sisters’ allied to the Brotherhood.”  —  Linda Sarsour is an extremist who has “roots in …

The Remarkable Tale of the Corporate Lobbyist Sworn In as a Temporary U.S. Senator  —  Late last month, two former policymakers and lobbyists teamed up for an op-ed in the Washington Post.  It was, as the genre goes, fairly mundane: a description of a problem or a threat …