Trade War Escalates: China announced today that it is striking back against President Trump’s trade tariffs with new tariffs on $75 billion worth of US goods. State media said they will also resume placing duties on American cars.

  This comes as President Trump’s trade war has the stock market in a spin of uncertainty.

The Russia House:Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of  online retailer Overstock.com, resigned after the revelation of his affair with a Russian woman now serving time in prison accused of espionage. 

  Byrne said in a letter to shareholders that his continued presence at Overstock “may affect and complicate all manner of business relationships.” He said, “Thus, while I believe that I did what was necessary for the good of the country, for the good of the firm,” he wrote, “I am in the sad position of having to sever ties with Overstock, both as C.E.O. and board member.”

  Byrne had a friendship that turned into a romance with Russian Maria Butina that lasted from 2015 to 2018. He claimed during an interview on CNNthat the FBI “directed” him to get romantically involved. He said he had broken off relations with Butina, but when the FBI became increasingly concerned about Russian election meddling they came to him and said,  “’We are the good guys, we don’t work like the bad guys, but we need to ask you to rekindle a romantic relationship with Maria Butina.’ “

  James Comey, who was director of the FBI at the time, said the bureau just doesn’t do things like that.

  Butina had tried to insinuate herself into political circles with the help of more than one man. She also had a boyfriend named Paul Erickson, a political operative who pleaded guilty to fraud in a separate case.

  Although he had clearly fallen into the honey trap, Byrne said in relation to Butina that he had helped federal investigators regarding “political espionage conducted against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.”

Circular Firing Squad:As a quiet civil war simmers within the National Rifle Association, the organization has fired its longtime outside lawyers. This comes, according to The NY Timesas the NRA’s Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre has been working with another outside counsel to fend off accusations of financial mismanagement.

  The fired lawyers appear to have aligned themselves with former NRA President Oliver North, who rose to fame during the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal.

  LaPierre said  in a statement, “It disturbs me that the NRA’s supposed ‘friends’ — a man I personally recruited to be president of the NRA, our trusted ad agency of four decades, a couple of our attorneys, and a chief lieutenant — would engage in this obviously premeditated extortion scheme to harm our association.” 

  L’état, c’est moi.

The Fire This Time:Alarm is spreading around the world as Brazil has returned to burning and deforesting the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest.

  “The ongoing forest fires in Brazil are deeply worrying,” the European Commission said in a statement on Thursday. “Forests are our lungs and life support systems.”

  Natives say they have seen wild pigs, tapirs, armadillos, anteaters, and snakes fleeing the fires. Pictures taken from space show the country obscured by smoke.

  Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro appears to have given over large swaths of the Amazon to loggers and other industries. His administration is claiming that it might be nongovernmental organizations that have started the fires to undermine the reputation of the far-right president.

The News Roundup: More than a dozen employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons have been subpoenaed to testify in the investigation into the jailhouse suicide of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. — American officials say that Israel was responsible for the bombing of an Iranian weapons depot in Iraq last month, the first known Israeli airstrike in Iraq since 1981. — Gary Ray Bowles, a serial killer who preyed on older gay men during an eight-month spree that left six dead, was executed in Florida by lethal injection. He was known as the “I-95 killer.”

Dancing Queen:Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House press secretary who stopped briefing the press, is joining Fox Newsas a contributor, a job she rehearsed for in the White House. As many as two dozen people have worked both for Foxand the Trump administration.

  It seems Sanders has landed on her feet, unlike her predecessor Sean Spicer, who landed on “Dancing With the Stars.”

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