New Senate Intelligence report shows “extensive” Russia 2016 election interference
The document released on Thursday afternoon — one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller testified in front of Congress on his effort — is not the entirety of the committee’s findings. It’s one of five volumes the panel will release over the coming month. This report focuses specifically on Russian efforts to infiltrate election infrastructure — that is, the actual systems that allow citizens to vote across the country.
The heavily redacted report contains almost entirely known information, so in that sense it’s not a bombshell document. But it does detail how Russia “directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against US election infrastructure at the state and local level.”
VOX
Democrats in the House of Representatives released historical documents Thursday showing that there actually is a precedent.
In the early 1970s, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) used the same tax disclosure law to obtain tax information related to then-President Richard Nixon.
Amid a controversy over questionable deductions he’d used to lower his tax bill, in 1973 Nixon publicly asked the joint committee ― which is a nonpartisan panel of tax policy experts ― to pore over four years of his returns to verify that he’d paid what he owed.
HuffPost
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is defying a congressional request to hand over President Donald Trump’s tax returns on the ground that asking for the president’s taxes is supposedly an “unprecedented” invasion of privacy.
The Washington Post is reporting, however, that Congressional Democrats this week unearthed a new set of documents dating from 1973 that show requesting Trump’s taxes is entirely within the bounds of political norms.
Raw Story
Creator of Presidential Seal Edited to Look Russian Lauds ‘Best Troll Ever’
The man who created the presidential seal edited with Russia and golf symbols that Donald Trump spoke in front of says he was shocked but delighted to see his work used in the apparent practical joke. Charles Leazott, a 46-year-old graphic designer, told TheWashington Post he’d completely forgotten about the artwork until he was scrolling Reddit Thursday morning and saw the president in front of it. “It’s been chaos… this is not what I expected when I woke up today…
the daily beast
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