* Peter Stone and Greg Gordon report that the Russians seem to have had an intense interest in a certain American organization during 2016:
Several prominent Russians, some in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle or high in the Russian Orthodox Church, now have been identified as having contact with National Rifle Association officials during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, according to photographs and an NRA source.
The contacts have emerged amid a deepening Justice Department investigation into whether Russian banker and lifetime NRA member Alexander Torshin illegally channeled money through the gun rights group to add financial firepower to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.
Other influential Russians who met with NRA representatives during the campaign include Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month served as a deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov, head of one of Russia’s largest philanthropies, the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. The foundation was launched by an ultra-nationalist ally of Russian President Putin.
Note that the NRA spent more than twice as much trying to get Donald Trump elected as they did on Mitt Romney four years before.
Barack Obama has in recent months met with at least nine prospective 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Deval Patrick, pulling them in for one-on-one sessions at his Washington office.
All the meetings were arranged quietly, without even some close advisers to the people involved being told of the conversations, in part because of how much Obama bristles at his private meetings becoming public knowledge.
If he’s seen meeting with Beyoncé, we’ll know something is up.
* Andy Slavitt and Nicholas Bagley explain how and why the Trump administration just made health care a central issue of the 2018 elections.
* Nathaniel Rakich goes over what to look for in this week’s primaries.
* Jeffrey Goldberg asks administration officials to articulate what the Trump Doctrine is, and the results are terrifying, particularly this from one top official:
“The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”
* At the American Prospect, I argued that Trump is causing all this chaos now because he can’t bear to allow anyone — a person, an institution, an international alliance — tell him what to do.
* And Annie Karni reports that in order to comply with the Presidential Records Act, there are people whose entire job is to take the papers Trump tears into little pieces and scotch-tape them back together.