Russian Roulette: President Trump last June ordered White House lawyer Don McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and backed off only when McGahn threatened to resign, the NY Times reports.

This morning in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said, “Fake news, folks. Fake news. Typical New York Times fake stories.”

It’s the first evidence that Trump attempted to fire the special counsel digging into Russian election influencing and possible connections to the Trump presidential campaign. The Times reports that Mueller learned of the incident in recent months while interviewing members of the administration.

At least 20 White House employees have been interviewed, the White House announced.

The Times reports, according to four sources, that McGahn said firing Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency and that left to himself, Trump would not pull the trigger on Mueller. He didn’t.

Conspiracy Theory: The bubble burst on a Republican conspiracy theory yesterday when the FBI announced that it had found as many as 50,000 texts missing from thousands of bureau phones.

Republicans have claimed there’s a big anti-Trump conspiracy within the FBI and that the missing texts were dumped as part of a cover-up. The FBI blamed the problem on a glitch with their Samsung phones.

In particular, they recovered texts between senior FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whose previous texts showed they don’t like President Trump. Some Republicans made a big deal out of an evidently joking line about a “secret society” within the FBI.

Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Republican Rep. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said, “What this is all about is further evidence of corruption — more than bias — but corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.”

Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley wrote in a letter that the messages “raise serious concerns about the impartiality of senior leadership running both the Clinton and Trump investigations.”

Republican leaders, and talking heads like Fox’s Sean Hannity, have claimed there was a conspiracy within the FBI to go easy on Hillary Clinton in her email investigation, and to gin up the Russia investigation against Trump. They’re more upset about that than the possibility that Russia tried to tilt the election.

Hannity said earlier this week, “It’s about our Constitution, about the rule of law. It has been shredded, all because powerful people at the highest level in the DOJ and the FBI thought they knew better than you as to who should be president. There needs to be serious ramifications if we are going to save our country in all of this. People must be held accountable, they must be investigated, they must be indicted and probably many of them thrown in jail.”

Hard Bargain: The White House released a proposal that would provide a path to citizenship for 1.8 million young immigrants living in the country illegally, in exchange for more restrictions on legal immigration and $25 billion in border security, including building the President’s border wall. Some ultra-conservatives denounced it as “amnesty.” Democrats accused Trump of holding “Dreamers” hostage to his immigration agenda.

The plan would include 690,000 young immigrants who are already part of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” as well as hundreds of thousands more who never applied.

From the Balance Beam: Following the Larry Nassar sexual molestation scandal, the US Olympic Committee’s CEO has told USA Gymnastics it will lose its status as a sports governing body unless the entire board resigns by Wednesday and an interim board is in place by February 28. There’s going to be lots of fallout from this episode.

The Obit Page: Warren Miller, the ski bum who became a prolific producer of movies about skiing, has died at age 93. He started making movies in 1946 at a time when veterans of the war who had served in the mountain troops began to popularize the sport of skiing in the US. Miller’s movies helped spread the word.

He made at least 500 movies and promotional films. His first major feature, “Deep and Light,” was shot at Sun Valley in 1949 using a borrowed 16-millimeter movie camera.

Dental Records: Archaeologists in Israel have found a partial jawbone with teeth that suggests humans migrated out of Africa about 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. The scientists said the fossil was found in a cave that had been occupied for several hundred thousand years. The jawbone was found to have been from the Homo sapiens species — human — and is between 177,000 and 194,000 years old.

Fair and Balanced: Last night on the air Fox News gasbag Sean Hannity tried to undermine the NY Times report about President Trump wanting to fire the special counsel.

“At this hour, the New York Times is trying to distract you,” Hannity said. “They have a story that Trump wanted Mueller fired sometime last June and our sources — and I’ve checked in with many of them — they’ve not confirmed that tonight.”

A short while later he said, “So we have sources tonight just confirming to Ed Henry that yeah, maybe, Donald Trump wanted to fire the special counsel for a conflict. Does he not have the right to raise those questions?”

“We’ll deal with this tomorrow night,” Hannity said, then threw to a video of a dramatic pursuit and car crash in Arizona.

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