Much of what we knew about Giuliani, Hunter Biden, Burisma, and the FBI is wrong, according to a new interview with FBI whistleblower Johnathan Buma.

"Imagine, just imagine, if Barack Obama in any of his 8 years in office had proudly and publicly referred to himself as ‘the apple of [Putin’s] eye,'" he wrote Friday. "The right would have had an immediate and nonstop meltdown. Fox would have demanded impeachment and indictment 24/7."

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss took a more historical approach:

"Never heard Truman boast of being the 'apple' of Stalin’s eye," he said.

"turned over quickly, without any intent to conceal" versus "protracted battle"

sounds like quid pro quo to me, if "selling access" to a "family brand" is a thing

"The newspaper ads promise that buyers who order apartments in the development by Thursday will get “a conversation and dinner” with Trump Jr. a day later.

President Trump has pledged to avoid any new foreign business deals during his term in office to avoid potential ethical conflicts. While the projects that Trump Jr. is promoting in India were inked before his father was elected, ethics experts have long seen the use of the Trump name to promote even existing business ventures as tricky territory."

In the Clinton case, FBI Director James Comey decided after an investigation that she had been careless in using a private server but it was not intentional.

Mr Trump is also accused of obstructing the investigation. But he says Mrs Clinton destroyed evidence and points to the deleted emails. At one press conference, he even urged Russia to find them.

In Mr Comey's view there was no cover-up, even though an FBI investigation found many of the deleted emails were work-related.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.

He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

The former requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But he said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape. He cited definitions offered by the American Psychological Association and the Justice Department, which in 2012 expanded its definition of rape to include penetration “with any body part or object.”

John Durham testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and admitted he didn’t know about several elements of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia: releasing stolen email through cutouts, Trump negotiating a tower deal, Manafort and Kilimnik.

On the other side, a possible point of contact might be Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI believes has ties to Russian intelligence. A former employee of Manafort’s firm, Kilimnik was sometimes described as “Manafort’s Manafort,” while Manafort reportedly called him “my Russian brain.” A poorly redacted court filing from Mueller’s team inadvertently revealed that Manafort gave Kilimnik detailed polling information during the campaign and discussed a Ukrainian peace plan, then lied about both to Mueller, even when he was supposedly cooperating. Mueller charged Kilimnik with conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting witness tampering during the Manafort investigation.

When I emailed Griffin again after the Capitol attack, he hadn’t changed his mind. “Trump is far too pathologically incoherent and intellectually challenged to be a fascist, and suffers from both Attention Deficiency Disorder, lack of self-knowledge, capacity for denial, narcissism and sheer ignorance and lack of either culture or education to a degree that precludes the Machiavellian intelligence and voracious curiosity about and knowledge about contemporary history and politics needed to seize power in the manner of Mussolini and Hitler,” Griffin wrote back.

Stanley Payne, a University of Wisconsin historian of Spain and author of A History of Fascism 1914-1945, agrees that Trump’s lack of coherent revolutionary fervor makes him fall short of fascism. “Never founded a new fascist party, never embraced a coherent new revolutionary ideology, never announced a radical new doctrine but introduced a noninterventionist foreign military policy,” Payne wrote to me in an email. “Not even a poor man’s fascist. Ever an incoherent nationalist-populist with sometimes destructive tendencies.”

If Hillary Clinton’s emails mattered so much, why shouldn’t Ivanka’s?

"That's not the correct way to say it," Mueller said. "We did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime."

That statement was more in line with his report, and with his earlier opening statement to the Judiciary Committee, where he said, "Based on Justice Department policy and principles of fairness, we decided we would not make a determination as to whether the President committed a crime. That was our decision then and it remains our decision today."