This week Trump struggled to create stagecraft and find narratives to  justify funding for his border wall, while keeping the government  shuttered. Trump delivered a prime-time Oval Office address, visited the  U.S.-Mexico border, and held an immigration round-table to make his  case, while the reality of the shutdown hurt federal workers and  contractors, and agencies started to cut back or cease operations and  functions.

This was a week of bombshells on the Trump-Russia front, as an  inadvertently unredacted filing by Paul Manafort’s attorneys revealed  Manafort had delivered 2016 president campaign polling data to  Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI believes has ties to Russian  intelligence. Michael Cohen set a date to testify before the House, and  Natalie Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who  attended the June 9 Trump Tower meeting was back in the news. Late  Friday, a bombshell story by the Times revealed the FBI had  opened an inquiry in May 2017 into whether Trump was knowingly working  for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

Read the full list: https://theweeklylist.org/weekly-list/week-113/