Today’s edition of quick hits:
* Minnesota: “Three more former Minneapolis police officers were charged Wednesday in the death of George Floyd, five days after charges were brought against a fourth officer who was seen in a video kneeling on Floyd’s neck.”
* DOD: “In an abrupt reversal, Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday overturned an earlier Pentagon decision to send a couple hundred active-duty soldiers home from the Washington, D.C., region, amid growing tensions with the White House over the military response to the protests.”
* On the Hill: “Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Wednesday defended his decision to appoint Robert Mueller as a special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation and his decision to approve flawed applications for surveillance warrants through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
* Atlanta: “Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard on Tuesday announced criminal charges against six officers after the arrest of two Atlanta college students during the city’s curfew crackdown Saturday.”
* The president’s physical: “There has been ‘no interval change’ in Donald Trump’s health over the past year, the top White House doctor said in a summary of the president’s physical examination.”
* This will probably disappoint American conservatives: “Sweden’s controversial decision not to impose a strict lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic led to too many deaths, the man behind the policy, Anders Tegnell, has acknowledged.”
* The latest IG departure: “Labor Department Inspector General Scott Dahl announced Tuesday he was retiring from his post just a day after warning lawmakers of massive fraud in the unemployment insurance system, becoming the latest watchdog to exit the Trump administration.”
* A tough position to defend: “Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, on Tuesday stood firmly behind his decision not to do anything about President Trump’s inflammatory posts on the social network, saying that he had made a ‘tough decision’ but that it ‘was pretty thorough.’” * On a related note: “A group that promotes online rights filed a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s executive order targeting social-media companies, contending it violates First Amendment rights of the firms and their users. The suit, filed by the Center for Democracy and Technology on Tuesday in federal district court in Washington, D.C., seeks to have the order invalidated.” * And speaking of Trump and social media: “President Trump enjoys a vaguely-defined but formal exemption from Twitter’s policies on the grounds of his inherent newsworthiness. Recently, Twitter began putting warnings on his Tweets when they called for violent acts, which Trump considers censorship. A new Twitter account set out to see whether Twitter would simply suspend anyone else who posted what Trump does. It didn’t last long before the hammer fell.” See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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