Internal Affairs: With President Trump continuing to claim that the Russia investigation was illegal and a hoax, the Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the origins of it. This raises the specter that President Trump may have ordered Attorney Gen. William Barr to investigate the President’s perceived enemies within his own Justice Department. 

  The opening of a formal investigation gives John Durham, the deputy attorney general in charge, the power to subpoena witnesses and documents, impanel a grand jury, and file criminal charges.

  This is connected to the whole Ukraine mess because Trump and some of his aides believe that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that tampered with the 2016 election. Trump clings to a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine is holding the Democratic National Committee’s 2016 server with all kinds of damaging evidence on it. That’s part of what Trump demanded the president of Ukraine to investigate.

  Trump has described the Russia investigation, in which he was not cleared of cooperating with Russia, as an act of treason. He once told Fox News host Sean Hannity that, “We can never allow these treasonous acts happen to another president.”

  The Special Counsel report on Russian election tampering said there was  “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Mr. Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy, but that the campaign had welcomed the Russian sabotage and expected to benefit from it.

Dunce Cap: A federal judge has fined Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for contempt of court, because she violated an order to stop collecting loan repayments from students who attended the now-defunct for-profit Corinthian Colleges. 

  A Magistrate Judge in San Francisco ordered the Education Department to pay a $100,000 fine. More than 60,000 former students are affected by the order to stop collecting. State and federal officials found that Corinthian had lured students with deceptive recruitment and falsified job placement rates.

China Syndrome: Little known to most Americans, the NBA is wildly popular in China and makes a fortune from Chinese fans. In recent days some basketball executives and players have knuckled to Chinese pressure to back off support for anti-Beijing protesters in Hong Kong.

  Vice President Mike Pence spoke up in Washington yesterday saying, “Some of the NBA’s biggest players and owners, who routinely exercise their freedom to criticize this country, lose their voices when it comes to the freedom and rights of the people of China.” Pence said, “In siding with the Chinese Communist Party and silencing free speech, the NBA is acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of that authoritarian regime.”

Three Strikes: As the World Series teams took a day off, the Houston Astros fired an assistant general manager for verbally abusing a group of female reporters after game one and crowing about how glad he was that the team had hired a player who had been suspended for domestic abuse.

  Unless you think that kind of thing is an aberration in the culture of baseball, umpire Rob Drake tweeted about the presidential impeachment inquiry that,

“I will be buying an AR-15 tomorrow, because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020.”

The Fires of Fall: September and October are the worst months for California wildfires. As many as 50,000 people have been evacuated as fires rip through northern Los Angeles County. Up north, 16,000 acres have burned in the wine country. 

In State: The late Baltimore Rep. Elijah Cummings was eulogized in the Capitol rotunda yesterday. He is the first black lawmaker to lie in state in the location where only about 20 former senators, representatives, and presidents were honored. 

  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said Cummings “saw wrongdoing and spent his life working to banish it from our land.”

The Bulletin Board: The Washington Post and New York Times will no longer be delivered to the White House, the administration reports. — Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan announced that he’s bailing out of the race for president. — New Jersey is moving to revoke the liquor license of one of President Trump’s New Jersey golf clubs because a man who got drunk there in 2015 later caused a fatal car wreck. If the club in Colts Neck loses its license so will all of Trump’s New Jersey facilities, including his summer retreat in Bedminster.

Sexual Congress: Freshman California Rep. Katie Hill has been caught in a good old fashioned sex scandal. She’s been accused of having an affair with a male staffer, and admits to having had a fling with a female staffer of her election campaign. There’s some suggestion that it may even have been a threesome. 

  Now the Daily Mail, a good old fashioned British tabloid, has published a photo of Hill naked and smoking from a bong.

 The wood on The NY Post says, “SWING VOTE.”  

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