Russia With Love: Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia is operating to get President Trump re-elected, The NY Times  reports, making a disclosure that angered Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him.

  The President berated the outgoing Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, for allowing the briefing to take place, the paper reports. Maguire is being replaced with a Trump loyalist who might not pass along information unfavorable to the President.

  Trump has always dismissed the intelligence assessments of Russian election interference as the product of the “deep state,” career bureaucrats with an agenda other than the truth. The President, according to the Times, was angry that Adam Schiff, the lead manager in Trump’s impeachment, would use the information as a weapon against Trump.  

They Got Roger Stone: President Trump’s friend and political associate Roger Stone was given a federal tongue lashing yesterday and sentenced to three years and four months in prison. It was quite a bit less that the 7 to 9 years originally recommended by federal prosecutors.

  Stone also got a $20,000 fine and 24 months of probation.

  Even while the sentencing was proceeding, President Trump tweeted about the unfairness of Stone’s criminal case, raising the specter of a possible pardon. He has complained that the Justice Department is out to get his friends. “A lot of bad things are happening, and we’re cleaning it out,” Trump said of law enforcement at a Las Vegas event for former convicts re-entering society. “We’re cleaning the swamp. We’re draining the swamp. I just never knew how deep the swamp was.”

  Stone was convicted in November of lying to investigators under oath and trying to block the testimony of a witness who would have confirmed his lies to the House Intelligence Committee.

  Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Stone’s behavior inspired “dismay and disgust.” She said that for months, Stone carried out a deliberate and calculated effort to hinder a congressional inquiry. Jackson said, “He was not prosecuted to give anyone a political advantage. He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the president. He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”

Rat-a-Tat-Tat: Los Angeles police are investigating the Wednesday morning murder of rapper Pop Smoke as gang related. The 20-year-old rapper, whose legal name is Bashar Barakah Jackson, was found with gunshot wounds in the Hollywood Hills home he had been renting. He was believed to have been a member of the Crips street gang.

  Friends of Jackson in New York had called the LA police at 5am to report an intrusion. Police reports say a group of people, including one wearing a mask and armed with a handgun, had entered the home. 

  Last month, the Brooklyn rapper was indicted on a charge of transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines. He was accused of taking a 2019 Rolls-Royce valued around $375,000 that he rented in California and drove to New York. Authorities found the car outside his mother’s Brooklyn home with a different license plate.

The Business Page: The investment house Morgan Stanley is buying E-Trade, the online discount brokerage, for about $13 billion. The deal would give Morgan Stanley, which caters to the rich, a major of the market for online trading including 5.2 million customer accounts and $360 billion in assets.

  It’s like when the cable television companies bought into the satellite services that were taking their customers.

Crime Blotter: The fundamentalist-Christian mother of two children who have been missing for months was arrested Thursday in Hawaii.

  Lori Vallow, 46, was detained on a warrant from Madison County, Idaho, after she missed a court-ordered deadline to bring her two children kids to the authorities. The children, 17-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old Joshua “J.J.” Vallow, have been missing since September, according to the Rexburg Police Department in Idaho.

  Vallow, who is reported to be obsessed with “doomsday” — the end of the world — and the children’s stepfather have refused to cooperate with authorities. The kids’ possessions were found in a storage unit.

The Obit Page: Sy Sperling, who went bald and made a business out of replacing  hair with “Hair Club for Men,” has died at age 78. 

  What he sold was a hair weaving system. Sperling became a late-night television pitch man in the 1980s with his line, “I’m not only the Hair Club president, but I’m also a client.”

  He put new hair on a lot of men.

Hollywood Romance: Producer Jon Peters has returned to the company of his ex-fiancée, who he dumped for a 12-day marriage to “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson.

  Peters told the NY Post, “Needless to say that when [Pam] texted me that she wanted to get married, it was kind of a dream come true, even though I was engaged to someone else and the lady was moving in.”

  Deep. Very deep.

-30-