a bombshell but so far unconfirmed report from the Guardian.

The former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

three times, including in March of 2016, which is around the time Manafort joined the Trump campaign.

With Mueller now reporting to Matt Whitaker, the regulations that govern the special counsel's

office essentially say that Mueller has to run by Whitaker any major decisions about the investigation.

Your father has authorized lethal force, he says, if necessary. Does that concern you?

I don't believe that that's what he said.

Hello and welcome to Trumpcast. I'm Virginia Heffernan. You know, we try hard at

Trumpcast to think about variety and not serve up merely Trump's folly or the way he bulldozes

and tear gas as human rights or his authoritarianism or the palace intrigue around him or his

illiteracy in numeracy and depravity. But of course, we get, as T.S. Eliot said, distracted from

distraction by distraction. And I get a particularly devastating vertigo when anyone around me

confidently identifies which is the distraction and which the main event. And when those people

remind me that confusion and mystification of the people is a calculated effect of the tyrant

and I need to keep my eye on the ball or on the bullets hurtling toward us and ignore the fog of war

or is the fog the thing we're supposed to attend to knowing it's a dry ice machine clouding our

reason while Trump and company pick our pockets with tax breaks for the rich and the closing of GM

plants. Well, today we are not striving for variety in the sense that we are returning to one of

Trumpcast's one-man themes, Paul Manafort. Fortunately, Manafort is a man of infinite variety,

serving various masters, a long time leader with Roger Stone of Washington's so-called

tortures lobby. Manafort used to launder the reputations and the money of bloody dictators

and oligarchs, the better to shield them from scrutiny and let him peacock around in ostrich skin.

...