New emails show just how frequently a Trump official was in touch with his former employer, a right-wing advocacy group, in the early days of the new administration.

The Trump official’s two in-person meetings with a lawyer from the group were already the subject of an ethics probe, but the emails, obtained via a public records request by Pacific Standard magazine, show just how far the official went to help his former colleagues.

Amid the ongoing fallout over President Donald Trump’s Twitter attack on four minority congresswomen, House Republicans’ campaign arm on Tuesday seized the opportunity to somehow spin a news cycle about the President’s racist comments into one about Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) decorum.

President Donald Trump’s tweet telling four Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” was quite literally textbook racism.

When President Donald Trump on Sunday told several Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” critics railed against the racist attack, a variation on the same “go back to your country” line used for generations against non-white people.

Sometimes, when a public official says something so racist that it stands out as exceptional, the Talking Points Memo team begins keeping an active tally in a shared Slack channel of others’ responses.

On Monday, as members of Congress came back to D.C. under the cloud of some exceptionally racist tweets from the President, the Slack channel buzzed with copying and pasting once again, as Caitlin MacNeal, Nicole LaFond, Kate Riga and Cristina Cabrera flagged down statements and I reached out to individual offices for comment, for what would ultimately become our headline on the response: “Top GOPers Silent.”

Deflecting criticism about the detention of large numbers of Uighurs and other minorities in large camps in China on Sunday, a Chinese diplomat based in Islamabad, Pakistan, posted a series of unusually aggressive tweets about Washington, D.C. and American politics writ-large, at one point calling former National Security Adviser Susan Rice “shockingly ignorant.”

President Donald Trump’s racist attack Sunday telling several Democratic congresswomen to go back to countries they came from (or, in reality, where their ancestors came from) was met with near total silence from top Republican officials on Monday.

The infamous smalltime Alabama newspaper owner known for his endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism has left the ink industry.

At least 18 infants and toddlers under two years old were separated from their parents as a result of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, and subsequently kept separated for weeks or months, according to a House Oversight Committee report on the policy released Friday.

Trump’s July 4 “Salute To America” came and went with a bang. Well, multiple bangs, coordinated across three companies and nearly a million dollars in donated labor and pyrotechnics.

As we reported last week, the proprietors of both Phantom Fireworks and Fireworks by Grucci denied to TPM over the phone that they expected anything from the White House in exchange for their donation of a fireworks show in the nation’s capital on Independence Day. But there is an issue near and dear to both the fireworks industry and the Trump administration: Tariffs. The American Pyrotechnics Association has been pushing hard to get fireworks imports removed from a threatened list of potential tariff targets.

The smoke-choked skies in D.C. attested, perhaps, to a lack of forethought about how much haze the “Salute to America” show would create. Phantom Fireworks CEO Bruce Zoldan described it to TPM as “dozens and dozens” of shells going off at a time.

Strip Club Golf Tournament At Trump Doral Cancelled. To slightly more dignified proceedings: Let’s just take a moment to consider that, until reporters caught wind of the story, the President’s golf course was set to host stripper caddies.

We dug into the story this week, including speaking to the director of a youth-oriented South Florida non-profit, who told us he had no idea a golf tournament at the Trump Doral in Miami, from which his group was set to benefit, was organized by a strip club.

After reading thousands of comments under the Washington Post’s report on the event, the director, Carlos Alamilla of Miami All Stars, said he’d had enough. He sent an email to the club’s marketing director saying he wanted out. The next morning, between phone calls with TPM, Alamilla confirmed as much with the Cabaret. Finally, the Trump Organization announced the event would no longer take place.

Why does this matter? As John Light notes, the event shows the kind of fare one can expect these days at Trump properties, now that a politically toxic brand has scared away former clients, like the PGA Tour.

Censored State Department Climate Scientist Resigns. We reported last month on the White House’s successful effort to block written climate change testimony from scientist and State Department analyst Rod Schoonover. The margin notes on Schoonover’s testimony document, we found, matched paid testimony that a member of the National Security Council, William Happer, had given on behalf of a coal company.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Schoonover had resigned from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research altogether. The Post said Schoonover’s resignation had been voluntary. In addition to the NSC, the paper reported, White House complaints about the written testimony came from the Office of Legislative Affairs and the Office of Management and Budget.

Satisfied Trump Customer Nominated To Fed Board. When the President announced earlier this month that he would nominate Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve Board, something smelled swampy. CREW, in a blog post this week, spelled it out. As rumors about her nomination swirled, Shelton answered questions in several high-profile interviews from a conspicuous location: the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. In one with the Financial Times, CREW noted, she wondered aloud about hosting an international conference at Mar-a-Lago.