Mother Jones has an important follow up to yesterday’s news about the Chinese massage parlor baron who managed not only to get a selfie with President Trump but appears to be a fixture of the Trump Mar-a-Lago grease and sleaze world. She is the founder, though not currently the owner, of the massage parlor where Trump pal and frequent Mar-a-Lago guest Robert Kraft (owner of the Patriots) got busted for soliciting sex last month. But there’s even an additional thread to the story, an obvious connection, that is still yet to be made: a foreign national selling direct access to the President of the United States to other foreign nationals and one who happens to also be involved in the sex trade. The potential not only for venal corruption but blackmail, extortion and even espionage are all pretty obvious.

New reading list.

I’ve been working on a post about the Omar controversy. It’s taken a bit longer than I anticipated. But I just got this note from TPM Reader TB which captures one of the key elements of the controversy, to my mind. Many readers have a hard time really seeing anti-Semitism, recognizing it as real and complex issue in our society, when it runs into conflict with their ordinary sense of who the good guys and the bad guys are in our politics. It can be relegated to a footnote, a secondary concern, when the ‘real’ issue appears to be racism or Islamophobia. And those are very real issues. But it is just as true that the Israeli right and its supporters in the US (who are overwhelmingly evangelical Christians) have reaped the whirlwind by making the Netanyahu government’s meddling in US politics so frequent and expected. It is not only wrong on the merits. It is insanely shortsighted for Israel. It also endangers American Jews.

Here’s TPM Reader TB …

Bill Shine is leaving the White House and joining the 2020 Trump reelection campaign, an operation that has as much as anything served as a slush fund to keep fired Trumpers on the organizational payroll and in check. Maybe we’ll find out there’s some comical or horrifying scandal that triggered this move – find out in six months. But there may be a more straightforward explanation.

Wanted to flag for your attention Allegra Kirkland’s second installment on the implosion of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a decades old descendent of the American Nazi Party that has imploded to the degree that its leader says he got bamboozled into signing over leadership of the party to a black activist. Also be sure to read Tierney Sneed’s backgrounder on why Judge Ellis (P) gave Paul Manafort less than four years and finally signs Dems are looking for new connections (P) between Russia and the Trump entourage.

Manafort’s sentencing kicks off what could be a busy few weeks as the Russia probe, theoretically, winds down. Here’s more on that and other stories we’re following.

I don’t know if anyone anticipated Paul Manafort receiving such a vast downward revision from the sentencing guidelines – just under four years when federal sentencing guidelines leaned toward more than twenty (19-24 years). But if there was a judge who was going to wrench the scales in Manafort’s favor it was going to be Judge Ellis. During the trial Ellis made no effort to hide his sympathy for Manafort and hostility toward the government’s case. He attacked the government’s lawyering. He attacked the government’s case. He questioned the existence of the Special Counsel’s office itself. It came up again and again. Ellis was even compelled on to rule against his own manifest partiality in at least one instance.

I’m working on a piece with some more thoughts about the Rep. Omar (D-MN) controversy. For now, on the vote: I thought jumping to passing a resolution was always a mistake, an overreaction, too reactive. In the event, it was unobjectionable enough that every Democrat and almost every Republican voted for it. Even though I thought doing any kind of resolution was a mistake, I also thought the whole “Dems in disarray” narrative was overblown. Certainly it’s a distraction from what they want to be focused on. But these things happens. Then they’re done. Then three days later it’s like it never happened.

Paul Manafort’s sentencing hearing in Virginia should be getting underway. TPM’s Tierney Sneed and Caitlin MacNeal are present. No electronic devices allowed in the courthouse, so we’ll be doing our best with analog coverage. They have quarters for the payphone. More soon.

I agree with David that this lawsuit must irk Trump. But I had a somewhat different reaction. Just under $2 million dollars seems almost quaint for the Trump Era. It has like a vaguely Austin Powers feel to it. Trumpers seem to sue for at least $100 million, just on principle, just following Trump’s lead.

Cohen seems like a man out of time. Maybe he has really turned a corner.