For your light summer day reading, Emmanuel Macron is still working, seemingly successfully, to overawe President Trump with muscular handshakes. Even to the point of leaving a mark. Pictures in order after the jump.

Local TV interview in Chicago …

Mangiante Papadopoulos, 34, said her husband never acted in a way to collude with Russia to meddle with the election. “I have more ties to Russia than he does,” she stated during the I-Team interview.

Goudie: “What are your ties to Russia?

Mangiante Papadopoulos: “No, I was joking. I’ve been to Russia for work, I have visited Russia, I have a few friends in Russia, so I was joking saying I have more ties to Russia than George.”

The “peace plan” Michael Cohen, Felix Sater and a pro-Russian Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Artemenko met to discuss at the Loews Regency Hotel in Manhattan in January 2017 has always been part of a much larger story. That’s been clear since The New York Times first broke the news of the meeting the following month. But the other pieces of the puzzle have been long in coming. We’ve gotten a few key ones in recent weeks. But a big one emerged yesterday. So I want to take a moment to explain how the different pieces fit together.

Manafort and his Russian fixer Konstantin Kilimnik hit with new indictments.

I had a fascinating conversation yesterday with Gen. Michael Hayden, who you likely remember as President Bush’s CIA Chief. He was NSA Director in the late Clinton administration, continued in that role under Bush. Bush later made him CIA Director and he served briefly in that role under Obama. As a top intelligence official through Bush’s two terms he was at the center of all the controversies about rendition, warrantless surveillance, drone attacks, etc. He now appears an ardent Never Trumper, though I don’t think he applies that term to himself. He has a new book out called The Assault on Intelligence. We talked about a number of issues, including what someone does in a career as an Air Force intelligence officer. But the one that interested me most was how the Russians honed their ‘information dominance’ strategies first in Russia and then in Eastern Europe and then in US pre to 2016, amplifying Ebola hysteria and playing a key role playing up the Jade Helm hysteria back in 2014, which TPMers will remember from our coverage. Listen to the conversation here.

There are certain frameworks and situations in the law in which it does not matter why something happened, it simply matters that something has demonstrably happened, to establish the point, making the finding or act. I have thought for some time that we face a similar situation with the man who currently holds the U.S. Presidency. Over the course of 16+ months, President Trump has acted consistently and with some success to destabilize and break up the western alliance (both its formal manifestation in NATO) but also its less formal dimensions in trade and other partnerships. He has also worked consistently on really every front to advance the interests of Russia.

It’s Friday. Here’s what our writers and editors are watching today.

We’re roughly halfway through primary season and we’re starting to get a sense of who the candidates in many key races will be. The midterms are just five months away. Have questions about how things are looking for the Democrats’ bid to win control of the House? Wondering which Senate races are most critical?

Our senior political correspondent Cameron Joseph has answers.

Send your election-related questions our way through email, or post them in the Hive. We’ll select one each week (more or less) for Cameron to respond to.

Some fascinating reporting here by Tierney Sneed. This is probably Paul Manafort’s last week before he goes to jail.

As predicted, Eric Greitens resignation as Governor of Missouri appears to have stopped in its tracks the investigation into his dark money group.

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

I’ve been wondering the same thing as TPM Reader GG all day long. It’s a whole other issue that the President’s private criminal defense attorney shouldn’t be opining, seemingly on his behalf, about high-stakes national security issues. But this comment … Rudy told a conference in Tel Aviv that “Kim Jong Un got back on his hands and knees and begged for it, which is exactly the position you want to put him in.”

What is going on with Team Trump appearing to go for the most inflammatory possible language in relation to Kim? Between Bolton’s Libya nonsense and Rudy’s “begging on his knees” remark, surely we have to note a pattern of extreme provocation that seems laser-focused on upending the summit.