Under Water: Navy Secretary Richard Spencer was fired yesterday in a conflict with the defense secretary over a Navy SEAL convicted of posing with a corpse and pardoned by President Trump.

  This mess is a direct result of Trump meddling with military discipline. He pardoned three men convicted of or accused of war crimes over the objection of the military services.

  While the Navy has been moving to take away the SEAL trident of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, President Trump tweeted his opposition. He said, “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin.” 

 While publicly supporting the Navy’s quest to discipline Gallagher, Spencer was trying to cut a side deal with the White House that would allow Gallagher to keep his SEAL trident and retire. Spencer evidently didn’t tell Defense Secretary Mark Esper about his proposal, and Esper said he had “lost confidence” in Spencer.

Et Tu?: State Department documents released Friday implicate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in President Trump’s push to have Ukraine investigate Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was leading the effort and the documents reveal that Pompeo spoke to him on the telephone twice last March.

  Giuliani also orchestrated a smear campaign against Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was getting in the way, and Pompeo fired her with no explanation. 

  Pompeo had refused to release the documents that were eventually made public after a liberal watchdog group sued to get them. Austin Evers, the executive director of the group, American Oversight, said that the documents revealed “a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a US ambassador.”

  Pompeo has refused to answer questions about it. Giuliani confirmed in interviews months ago that he talked to Pompeo about his Ukraine efforts. Giuliani sent Pompeo’s office an envelope containing a series of memos detailing claims made by a pair of Ukrainian prosecutors during interviews conducted by Giuliani and his team. Those same documents eventually were passed along to the House Intelligence Committee in a Trump Hotels envelope.

  In another development, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes could be in trouble after the revelation that he met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor offering dirt on the Bidens. Information about the meeting comes from a lawyer for Lev Parnas, one of the two indicted associates of Rudy Giuliani.

   The former prosecutor in question is Viktor Shokin, the same man accused of corruption and forced out of his job by Joe Biden and other foreign leaders.  Parnas’s lawyer told The Washington Post that Shokin informed Parnas that he had met with Nunes in Vienna in December 2018.

  Newsweek reports that Nunes spent $57,000 to travel himself and staff to the meeting.

  Nunes has delivered bombastic speeches touting the conspiracy theories about the Bidens and Ukraine election meddling peddled by Shokin. While Nunes acts as one of the impeachment grand jurors on the Intelligence Committee, his meeting makes him someone who could be called as a witness, and possibly investigated for ethics violations.

Democracy on the Ballot: After months of street protests, the pro-Democracy movement in Hong Kong appears to be on the way to a stunning victory at the polls. Pro-democracy candidates pumped up by the sometimes-violent protests appeared headed to a stunning victory in local elections yesterday. Nearly seven in 10 eligible voters turned out with pro-democracy parties taking at least 201 of 452 elected seats, up from 124, and possibly over 300. 

Sudden Death: K-Pop star and television celebrity Goo Hara was found dead at her home in Seoul on Sunday. She was 28. Hara had previously attempted suicide, but the cause of death was not immediately given. Also, Harry Morton, scion of the Morton restaurant family and founder of Pink Taco, was discovered dead in his Beverly Hills home Saturday. Again, no immediate cause of death. Morton was the grandson of Arnie Morton who cofounded the Morton’s Steakhouse. His father, Peter, cofounded the Hard Rock Cafe in 1971.

The Bulletin Board: Billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has formally entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president. He’s way late and he’s got a big deficit with nonwhite voters because of his “stop and frisk” policing policy in New York. He said President Trump “represents an existential threat to our country and our values.  — Charles Schwab has agreed to buy TD Ameritrade in a $26 billion, all-stock deal, creating a mega-brokerage. The business is struggling in a competition moving toward zero commissions.

The Obit Page: Gahan Wilson, the cartoonist of the warped and bizarre often featured in Playboy, The New Yorker, and the National Lampoon, died in Arizona at age 89. His work was populated with lumpy monsters and hapless humans. One cartoon shows a skeleton sitting on a stool in front of a doctor who says, “We may already be too late, Mr. Parker.”  

  Gahan’s work was not an instant hit. Back at the beginning, “Editors would take my drawings, laugh like hell, then hand them back and say, ‘Sorry, our readers wouldn’t understand,’” he told The Boston Globe in 1973.

 — Jake Burton Carpenter, who changed the culture of skiing with the invention and propagation of snowboarding, died of cancer at age 65. Carpenter began making snowboards under the name Burton in 1977 and introduced a whole new side to winter sports, creating a split in ski culture. Snowboarding attracted the young, brash, and often the rude to the gentile atmosphere of the slopes. But it caught on and eventually became an Olympic sport.

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