As the U.S.-North Korea Summit on June 12th now seems increasingly in doubt, I wanted to review the timeline and what it tells us. Relations between the two countries appeared to take a dramatic turn on March 8th when President Trump chose to interpret a comment from a South Korean government official as a North Korean invitation to meet. Trump promptly accepted. This spurred two months of confidence-building measures and overtures, including a meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas at the DMZ and the release of three U.S. nationals imprisoned in the North. Read More

This is perhaps my favorite bizarre nugget of information of the last 24 hours – and there are many. President Trump’s lawyer’s lawyer is a foreign agent for the government of Qatar. Or at least he was last year when a lot of the shenanigans we’re discussing were happening. Read More

Key moments on the collapsing North Korean summit and “spies” in the Trump campaign from President Trump’s just completed press appearance… Read More

With so many bewildering things happening in the news, it’s important not to lose the thread. The FBI’s counter-intelligence division was confronted with evidence that the Trump campaign was riddled with operatives colluding with a hostile foreign government to throw the 2016 election. Those fears have now all been amply confirmed. The agents assigned to the case used the least invasive, most conservative means to investigate the evidence they had. Read More

Here is a very notable passage from a new Bloomberg article about PSY Group, the psy-ops company run by Joel Zamel, the Israeli social media expert who was in that Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr pitching his services in August 2016 … Read More

The BBC is reporting that after being kept at arms length by the White House, the President of Ukraine paid Michael Cohen at least $400,000 to arrange a meeting between the President Poroshenko and Trump. Read More

I just finished listening to a CNN segment where “norms” figured heavily in the discussion. It was a good segment. I clipped a couple snippets of video because they were so good. But we need to stop talking so much about “norms”. And it’s not just CNN. The term has come up a number of times in our editorial conversations at TPM just today. I’ve talked about them. But we need to stop talking so much about norms. Because it doesn’t capture what is happening or the situation we’re in. In every kind of communication, clarity is the most important thing. By talking so much about “norms” and the violation of “norms” we’re confusing the situation and even confusing ourselves. Read More

GOP Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee has introduced a bill that would set up a Kickstarter/Gofundme-style crowdfunding site to fund Trump’s wall. Read More

Diplomatic communications are usually worded with great care and precision. They aren’t letters one person writes to another. They are documents which communicate specific realities and goals between states. In this case, I completely believe that Donald Trump himself wrote this letter or dictated it. In fact, I feel almost certain he did. The words resonate with a genuine hurt and anguish, mixed with moments of menace and still hope for the future. It reads needy. It’s like a letter you write to a romantic partner who has abandoned you without saying so. You write, hurt, finalizing what is already clear. Read More

Earlier this year, we rolled out our Weekly Primers — 500 word briefings for Prime subscribers on the topics TPM covers most closely, published once a week and carefully written to include everything of importance.

So far, we’ve regularly put out Weekly Primers on voting rights, the battle over the future of Obamacare, and the Trump-Russia probe. Today, we’re rolling out a new Primer chronicling corruption and abuse of power in the Trump administration. Every Thursday, Matt Shuham will have the latest on the swamp Trump filled. Here’s the first.