The Mueller Report: A redacted version of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report on Russian election-influencing and connections to the 2016 Trump campaign is set for release this morning. 

  Attorney Gen. William Barr is holding a press conference at 9:30 in Washington. He’s going to talk about it before journalists have had time to digest the nearly  400 pages. Also, the report is going to be released to Congress on CD-ROM format — which almost no one uses anymore. 

 Although supposedly no one outside the Justice Department has seen the report, Barr’s representatives have had several discussions about it with White House lawyers, The NY Timesreports. The talks have helped Trump’s lawyers, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, prepare a lengthy rebuttal expected to be released shortly after the Muller report. Trump claims he may even hold a press conference of his own.

  Those talks add to the suspicion that Barr is tilted toward defending Trump in the event that the report looks bad for the President. The report might reveal shady dealings between the Trump camp and Russians even if  it was determined no laws were broken.

  Barr has said that the report will be released with four exceptions; grand jury material, intelligence sources and methods, information about continuing investigations, and material that could invade the privacy of “peripheral” third parties. Early reports say it will be only lightly censored, but we’ll see.

  Barr and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein have already declared that Trump did not illegally obstruct justice during the investigation and that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Barr even suggested that US law enforcement may have illegally spied on the Trump campaign, although he provided no evidence for that. Trump has claimed compete exoneration and has called for an investigation of the investigators even before the report’s release.

  Legal commentator  Jonathan Turley said, “There’s going to be so much spin in this city it’s going to take the earth off its rotational axis. 

Rocket Man:North Korea has fired a short-range missile — what’s known as a “tactical” missile — in what is probably a symbolic demand for President Trump to resume diplomatic negotiations. The North’s leader Kim Jong-un sometimes speaks through missile launches rather than diplomatic communications. This is the first missile test since 2017, so there’s a message in there, somewhere.

Short Stogie:US relations with Cuba tend to wax and wane depending on which political party is in power. Democrats loosen things up and Republicans turn around and get tough. President Obama pried open trade and travel relations with Cuba and yesterday the Trump administration turned the screws.

  Yesterday the administration announced the restoration of rules that allow US citizens to sue any entity or person found to be “trafficking” in property that was expropriated from U.S. citizens after the 1959 revolution. Trump’s three immediate predecessors in office had suspended that right. 

  The administration is also re-imposing limits on the amounts of money that Cuban Americans can send to relatives on the island, as well as the frequency of transactions, and ordering new restrictions on travel to Cuba by US citizens.

End of the Day: After an intense hunt and the closure of school for thousands of Colorado students, a teenage girl described as being obsessed with the 1999 Columbine school shooting has been found dead at her own hands in the mountains west of Denver. Sol Pais, an 18-year-old Florida high school student, had bought a shotgun and posted disturbing comments online.

The Roundup:Former president of Peru Alan García locked himself into a bedroom and shot himself as police armed with a warrant arrived to arrest him in connection with one of the biggest corruption scandals in Latin American history. — As President Trump’s immigration crackdown continues, the federal government is planning to spend $40 million to build and run two new tent cities for migrant families and children in Texas. — Federal prosecutors charged 60 medical professionals yesterday with involvement in the illegal distribution of 32 million opioid pills. In some cases, the charges say, doctors traded drugs for sex. — Police arrested a man entering St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York carrying cans of gasoline and butane lighters. 

Remember the 60s:Judith Clark, the former 60s radical leftist who was the getaway driver in the infamous Brink’s armored car robbery in which two police officers and Brink’s guard were killed, has been paroled after 37 years in a New York Prison. She was 31 when she was arrested.

  Clark once described herself as “an anti-imperialist freedom fighter,” but was in reality a sadly misled believer who thought a handful of people could change America with bullets, bombs, and stealing money. 

  In prison, Clark abandoned her revolutionary beliefs and became a model prisoner devoted to helping others. She said in 2017, “I had to grapple with what happened to my humanity.”

Official Slime:State legislators like to designate “official” animals” as representative of their state. California has the grizzly bear and Connecticut has the American Robin.

  The  Pennsylvania legislature has voted to make the Eastern hellbender salamander their official amphibian. The hellbender looks like a streak of green slime. It’s covered in a layer of mucus and breathes primarily through loose flaps of thick wrinkled skin. It’s nickname is the “snot otter.” Come to Pennsylvania, the snot otter state.

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