I wanted to take a moment to reason through potential suspects for who may have hired Black Cube, the Israeli private intelligence firm, to spy on Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl. We don’t know who hired them. Indeed, we seem to know less now than we did when the story first broke in The Guardian over the weekend. But there are some basic logical inferences and understandings of this kind of work that can help us narrow down the suspects considerably.

First, as a friend notes, these kinds of operators are seldom purely commercial enterprises. It’s common abroad (and, painfully, more common at home) to find cronies and kleptocratic entities near the government who do these things on the government’s behalf. So wealthy crony or oligarch A, who is close to President B, hires firm or lobbyist C to advance the government’s interests. This gives everyone some distance and deniability. This is the norm.

Good morning. Here’s what we have our eyes on today.

Yesterday we discussed reports that opponents of the Iran Nuclear Deal, or at least opponents of at least two former Obama administration foreign policy staffers, had hired the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube to spy on and run a black ops operation against these two men, Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl.

Now The New York Times has obtained a copy of the report.

Four women accuse New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of a range of sexual misconduct and abusive, violent behavior. The New Yorker has the story.

So we were contacted by someone purporting to be Black Cube.

Our Caitlin MacNeal worked through almost a week of Rudy Giuliani’s evolving BS explanations about the Stormy Daniels payoffs to help you make sense of the whole mess.

I noted below that the Israeli private intelligence firm that Harvey Weinstein hired to dig up dirt and muzzle his accusers is now mounting some sort of operation against at least two Obama administration national security officials. The initial version of the story from The Guardian said they were hired by aides to President Trump. Another account from Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker went deeper but was less certain about who was paying the bill. One source told Farrow it was “part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran.”

Now Black Cube is out with its third successive response to the story, which of course should be taken with some skepticism.

For a sense of why we may care about Michael Cohen and father-in-law Fima Shusterman’s massive loans to a cratering business, look at this passage from a book to be published tomorrow, which I strongly recommend purchasing.

This passage is from Trump/Russia: A Definitive History.

This may seem a bit in the weeds. But if you’re trying to make sense of Michael Cohen’s role in all the money transactions being probed by the Feds, as well as the role of Fima Shusterman, his father-in-law, who appears to be his key connection into the Ukrainian immigrant money world, this is an important point.

There have been various reports that Cohen and Shusterman have loaned $26 million to the Shtayner family, another taxi baron family of Ukrainian immigrants who live in New York City but own a cab business based in Chicago. The story is that Cohen lent the Shtayner’s $6 million since 2012 and Fima Shusterman has lent them $20 million over the last eight months. This is the story according to the AP and also the weekend piece in the Times.

Happy Monday. Here’s what we have our eyes on as we head into the week.

With the next round of redistricting approaching after the 2020 Census, we’re seeing powerful movements in a number of states to end gerrymandering and ensure districts are drawn more fairly.

So it’s no surprise, as Allegra Kirkland reports, that the GOP is mobilizing to protect their right to rig the maps.

I want to follow up on a point I made over the weekend: the Trump Family’s decisive turn to paying cash as opposed to financing their projects with debt starting in 2006 isn’t just an odd and hard to explain in itself. The shift also dovetails almost perfectly with his shift to reliance on money from Russia and Ukraine. 2006 is also the year when Michael Cohen went to work for the President. It’s also the year the Trump Soho development project got underway.

There are still some important qualifiers to the story.