The latest news out of the Mar-a-Lago case, which Josh Kovensky explains here, really makes it hard to see how the government can avoid charging Trump with a crime even if they’d prefer not to. The government appears to have clear, corroborated evidence that after receiving subpoenas for the retrieval of classified documents, Trump directly ordered a resort employee to remove the records from the storerooms where the government’s investigation focused and to his personal residence.

Tulsi Gabbard has not walked or talked or looked like a Democrat in years, so the collective response to her announcing yesterday that she was leaving the Democratic Party was … 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃.

Yesterday I noted this odd report that Elon Musk’s weird foray into Russo-Ukraine War peacemaking was preceded by a call with Vladimir Putin. This was revealed in a global intelligence newsletter published by Ian Bremmer. Then Musk denied that any such call had happened. That’s where we got to yesterday. But there’s more from overnight that I want to update you on.

The short version is that it seems pretty clear that Musk’s denial is a lie. And the original tweets themselves have a variety of references that seem like they come from a Russian nationalist or someone very familiar with the set of post-Soviet grievances which are the mother’s milk of Putin’s political world. (They refer to “Khrushchev’s Mistake” and the conquest of Crimea in 1783.)

Here’s the somewhat longer version.