35 year old Benjamin Sparks, a prominent Republican political consultant who has worked for Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Scott Walker among others, was engaged to an unnamed woman. Sparks had his fiance sign a five page contract in which she agreed to be his “slave and property,” shortly after they started dating last November. This involved kneeling, looking at the ground while she spoke to him, being nude at all time, engaging in sex on demand at any time and wearing a collar. At the end of March he began to demand that she have sex with other men, while bound and blindfolded, while he watched. She refused. That led to a fight in which he allegedly attacked her. Sparks himself then called the police and then fled the scene. He apparently absconded to Texas where he is currently hiding out while there is a warrant for his arrest in Nevada.

We’ve rebranded our Sum Ups as ‘Weekly Primers’. In case you missed it yesterday, here’s our Weekly Primer on the Battle for Obamacare, every significant development on the health care policy front this week.

The audio is poor. But here’s President Trump with what I believe are his first public comments on the Stormy Daniels story. Key thing: he says he didn’t know anything about the payment and didn’t know where the money came from.

Audio is pretty poor. But here's Trump saying he didn't know anything about the $130k to Stormy Daniels. pic.twitter.com/QBBaugUTTO

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2018

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer makes the obvious point. This would seem to strengthen Daniels’ case since it makes it even harder to see how President Trump was a party to the agreement. More significantly, there’s a non-trivial chance that President Trump will eventually have to answer this question under oath.

We’ve seen a series of significant articles on the Trump/Russia front over the last 24 hours. CNN has reported that the FBI has detained and/or searched the communications devices of more than one Russian oligarch as they transited through the US looking for information about possible money transfers to the Trump campaign. The Times has reported that George Nader, the international fixer who arranged the Trump/Russia rendezvous in the Seychelles in January 2017 does not only have deep ties to the United Arab Emirates but to Russia as well. But it’s this article just out from The Guardian I want to focus on. It adds another piece of the puzzle about Paul Manafort’s role in the 2016 Trump campaign and the mystery of just who sent him.

The gist of the article is that between 2011 and 2013 Paul Manafort organized and okayed what one of the operatives referred to as a “black ops” campaign in the U.S. on behalf of Ukraine’s Russia-aligned President Victor Yanukovich. The details here are key. This was during a window of time when Yanukovich was still trying to build ties with the EU. Later, he dropped the EU effort and signed a deal putting him in a firmer alliance with the Kremlin. The campaign involved damaging the reputation of another top Ukrainian politician named Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovich had just defeated her in the presidential election and then had her charged and jailed for various crimes in what was widely seen as a political prosecution. The effort was to destroy her reputation.

InsideEPA, an EPA trade sheet, reports that Scott Pruitt’s downfall is the work of disgraced former White House aide Rob Porter, who leaked damaging information about Pruitt to retaliate against a former girlfriend who told White House officials about Porter’s history of domestic violence.

Trump claims that Central American immigration ‘caravan’ is marauding band of rapists.

Trump claims immigration ‘caravan’ is lumbering group of rapists. “Yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.” pic.twitter.com/MU7wEZMvAP

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2018

In fact in many cases, they’re traveling in groups because immigrants and asylum seekers are often victims of rape and theft.

For more than a year, Facebook has faced a rolling public relations debacle. Part of this is the American public’s shifting attitudes toward Big Tech and platforms in general. But the driving problem has been the way the platform was tied up with and perhaps implicated in Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. Users’ trust in the platform has been shaken, politicians are threatening scrutiny and possible regulation, and there’s even a campaign to get people to delete their Facebook accounts. All of this is widely known and we hear more about it every day. But most users, most people in tech and also Wall Street (which is the source of Facebook’s gargantuan valuation) don’t yet get the full picture. We know about Facebook’s reputational crisis. But people aren’t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook’s core business model, its core advertising business.

Facebook is fundamentally an advertising business. Almost all of the company’s revenue comes from advertising that it targets with unparalleled efficiency to its billions of users. In a media world in which advertising rates face almost universal downward pressure, Facebook’s rates have consistently risen. Monopoly power may drive some of that growth. But the key driver is efficiency. If old-fashioned advertising shows my advertisement to 100 people for every actual buyer and other digital platforms show it to 30 people and Facebook shows it to 5 people, Facebook’s ads are just worth a lot more.

As long as the rates bear some relationship to that efficiency (those numbers above are just for illustration), I’ll be happy to pay it. Because it’s objectively worth more. Indeed, as the prices have gone up, Facebook has actually gotten more efficient. As one digital ad agency executive recently told me, even if Facebook jacked up the prices a lot more, his firm would likely keep using them just as much because on this cost to efficiency basis it’s still cheap. This is the basis of Facebook’s astronomical market capitalization which today rates at over $450 billion, even after some recent reverses.

We just released a new “Extra” edition of The Josh Marshall Podcast where I talk to comedy writer Nell Scovell about #MeToo, equality in Hollywood, her new book Just the Funny Parts and what it’s like being a female comedy writer in the all dudes writers room in Late Night or Hollwood. Listen and please subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.

It sounds like some of Bill O’Reilly’s forest of NDAs may not be long for this world.

Good morning. Here’s what TPM’s writers and editors have their eyes on today.

Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gotten 87 million user files not 50 million.

Yesterday afternoon Nasim Aghdam, 39, walked onto the YouTube campus in San Bruno, California, fired dozens of shots, injured four people and then killed herself. Initial reports suggested the shooter might be a disgruntled former employee or friend. Aghdam’s name already has led some to jump to the conclusion that the attack is tied to Islamic fundamentalism. But that seems pretty clearly not to be the case. Aghdam’s activism was tied to animal rights and veganism. Her extensive online trail shows that she was intensely angry at YouTube itself for “demonetizing” her YouTube channels and in other ways purportedly discriminating against her. This seems clear to have been the motive behind her rampage. In other words, she was a disgruntled YouTube user.

All of Aghdam’s social media platform accounts have already been suspended. They were down shortly after her name became public last night. But her site remains on line. Here are a couple screen grabs of the site, both to give you some flavor of her world and to let you read some of her grudge.