1/ Trump offered to pardon Julian Assange if the WikiLeaks founder agreed to say Russia was not involved in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee. Assange’s lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, claimed at a court hearing in London that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017. Fitzgerald said he had a statement from another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, that shows “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange … said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.� White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham denied the allegation, saying Trump “barely knows Dana Rohrabacher� and has “never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject.� In Sept. 2017, Rohrabacher said that as part of the deal, Assange would have to hand over a computer drive or other data storage devices that would prove that Russia was not the source of the hacked emails. The White House confirmed that Rohrabacher had called John Kelly, then Trump’s chief of staff, to talk about a possible deal with Assange. Kelly reportedly declined to pass it along to Trump. (The Guardian / Daily Beast / Washington Post / Washington Post / The Verge / CNBC)

2/ Trump retweeted the claim that he was “the victim of a seditious conspiracy out of the� Justice Department and the FBI. Trump, ignoring Barr’s appeal for him to stop tweeting about the Justice Department, demanded “JUSTICE� for himself and future presidents. In a series of tweets, Trump promoted the idea by the president of a right-wing advocacy group that “Barr should clean house� at the Justice Department and that Trump can “appoint a special counsel directly� to investigate the purported conspiracy against him. (New York Times /