You may already have seen it. But for the record I wanted to post both the transcript and the video of President Trump’s rant against the US Justice system in which he called it a “joke” and a “laughingstock”.

President Trump took time to attack Senator Schumer on Twitter. He has yet to call either the Mayor of New York City or the Governor of New York.

President Trump took time to attack Sen Schumer on Twitter. Has not called NYC Mayor or Gov of New York. pic.twitter.com/QlLC2Pvske

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 1, 2017

Often when we are trying to understand a complex story it is the facts that we are most acclimated to that are most significant. Since they are familiar, they can hide in plain sight. With this in mind, I was particularly struck by a passage on page three of George Papadopoulos’s plea document.

One interesting backstory to the Manafort-Gates indictment: the pre-indictment fight over whether they could invoke attorney-client privilege to block their lawyer from having to testify to the Mueller grand jury. The details of that skirmish–which Manafort and Gates lost–emerged when the case was unsealed this week. Tierney Sneed explains the significance.

A former federal prosecutor with highly relevant experience weighs in on what we learned from yesterday. Upshot: Manafort’s strategy is a pardon.

I’m really glad we did this. I thought it would be helpful for me to understand the story better. Crack reporting by a number of news organizations have already identified most of the unnamed people in the Papadopoulos plea agreement document. But that’s not quite the sentence as reading the document and the individual sentences with the names of the people in place of anonymized titles like “high ranking campaign official” or “campaign supervisor.” So Allegra Kirkland pulled the reporting together and edited the document to replace those titles with the names of the people who published reports have now securely identified. Check it out.

In March of 2016 Donald Trump was getting a growing number of questions about who was advising him on foreign policy. He did not seem to have any foreign policy advisors. So when he met with The Washington Post editorial board on March 21st he announced a team of five foreign policy advisors. Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.

One of the more comical sub-threads of the Papadopoulos story is his comically inept efforts to hide his digital tracks even after he’d lied to the FBI in two successive interviews, one without his lawyer and then another with counsel present. It’s enough to make you think he’s not familiar with the surveillance state. But more prosaically, he didn’t seem to realize there’s a thing called warrants. Allegra Kirkland has the story.

I wanted to share a few thoughts about John Kelly’s remarks on compromise and the Civil War.

Ta-Nehisi Coates did a systematic take-down of John Kelly after he presented a revisionist history of the Civil War on Laura Ingraham’s new show on Fox last night. You can see that here. Kelly’s key points were that the cause (and for us the lesson) of the Civil War was an unwillingness to compromise and that Robert E. Lee was an “honorable” man.

While the world was marveling at Trump’s crowd size fetish during that fateful first week of his presidency, George Papadopoulos and allegedly Mike Flynn were lying to the FBI, Sally Yates was scrambling to warn the White House, and Donald Trump himself was pressing Jim Comey for personal loyalty in a private dinner. Notably, the seeds of what would become the first charges in the special counsel probe came four months before Robert Mueller arrived on the scene. Sam Thielman reviews the newly updated timeline for the last week of January.

This is just what I was thinking (from the Post) …

Away from the podium, Trump staffers fretted privately over whether Manafort or Gates might share with Mueller’s team damaging information about other colleagues. They expressed concern in particular about Gates because he has a young family, may be more stretched financially than Manafort, and continued to be involved in Trump’s political operation and had access to the White House, including attending West Wing meetings after Trump was sworn in.

Rick Gates is 45, 23 years younger than Manafort. He was also with Trump much longer than Manafort. Any guesses about whether he saw anything bad when he was in the Trump orbit?