Legal Briefs: Trump campaign aide Rick Gates had repeated contacts in the closing weeks of the 2016 election with someone connected to Russian intelligence services, according to a filing by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Gates identified the person, referred to as “Person A” in the court filing, as “a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU,” the Russian military intelligence agency.

The NY Times reports that Person A has been identified to them as Konstantin V. Kilimnik, who for years was Mr. Manafort’s right-hand man in his consultation business with the former pro-Russian administration in Ukraine.

>>One of President Trump’s personal lawyers floated the idea of pardons for the President’s former aides Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn before either man had even been criminally charged, several news outlets report.

Manafort was charged with financial fraud last fall and Flynn has already entered a guilty plea after he faced a battery of criminal charges.

Trump lawyer John Dowd, who has since left the legal team, denies he made the offers or suggestions to lawyers for Manafort and Flynn.

Dowd told reporters from The Washington Post, “I had no such discussions with them. We never talked about pardons. There was no reason to talk about pardons. No ma’am.”

>> A federal judge in Maryland has ruled that a lawsuit claiming President Trump is violating the Constitution by profiting from his office will be allowed to proceed.

Maryland Attorney Gen. Brian Frosh and District of Columbia Attorney Gen. Karl Racine claim in the suit that Trump wrongly makes bank when foreigners patronize the hotel he owns near the White House. Trump claims to have donated profits to the federal government but refused to say how much.

The Firing Line: As expected in recent days, President Trump fired Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin, the only holdover from the Obama cabinet who actually had been a Trump favorite. He did it with Twitter.

Things started to go sour after the revelation that Shulkin took his wife and some of his staff on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer. Trump and Shulkin also differed about privatizing some VA services.

Shulkin wrote in a scathing NY Times opinion piece that, “the environment in Washington has turned so toxic, chaotic, disrespectful and subversive that it became impossible for me to accomplish the important work that our veterans need and deserve.”

Trump plans to replace Shulkin with his personal White House physician, Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy. He’s the one who gave the junk-food president a glowing health review.

Net Nanny: The Ecuadorian Embassy in London has cut off internet access for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. That’s like stepping on his air hose. The Ecuadorians said Assange broke an agreement with them not to interfere with the affairs of foreign states. He’s been their guest for six years as he avoids prosecution on sex crime charges in Sweden.

Unfriended: Facebook has lost an estimated $80 billion in stock value since the story broke that a company working for the 2016 Trump campaign misappropriated user data to target voters.

It’s hard to say how many people have responded to a call to delete their Facebook accounts, but some notable companies have done it, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Playboy, citing privacy concerns. Don’t worry about Zuckerberg. He’s still worth $60 billion.

Unconnected: Seven days after a ransomware attack took control of Atlanta’s computer systems, cops are filling out reports by hand, residents can’t pay their water bills, and court proceedings are being cancelled. The city is being sketchy about the nature of the attack and what they are able to do about it.

Asked by CNN how long the situation is sustainable, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said, “Well, it was a sustainable model until we got computer systems, so … for some of our younger employees, it will be a nice exercise in good penmanship.”

Nation: A family of eight appears to be dead after their van drove off a cliff into the Pacific in Mendocino, Calif. Two women raising six children were under suspicion for child abuse and drove away in the van when child services arrived. Five bodies have been found.

Sticky Wicket: Although it’s a favorite in English speaking countries, the game of cricket is actually played in a foreign language. Beamer, Belter, Chest-on, Chucker, and Dibbly-dobbly bowlers are all cricket expressions. But there’s one there’s one term that translates well from English to English; Ball tampering.

The cricket world is stunned that a player on the Australian men’s team used sandpaper to scuff the surface of the ball in a match against South Africa. It would take a doctoral thesis to explain this, but unlike American baseball, in cricket the ball stays in the game until it nearly falls apart, so the condition of the ball early in the game is critical to how it behaves in the air and at the end of the bat.

When caught, the Aussies openly admitted what they had done and the prime minister said, “It beggars belief.”

They’re so innocent down there.