Today’s edition of quick hits:
* Family separations: “The federal government was rushing on Thursday to reunite the last 1,634 migrant families separated at the Southwest border who have been deemed ‘eligible’ for reunification, in the final hours of a court-ordered scramble to reverse a contentious immigration policy that drew international condemnation.”
* Some of the initial reporting on this made it sound worse than it was: “A 26-year-old man was detained by police Thursday after detonating a small explosive device outside the U.S. Embassy in China’s capital. He was the only person injured in the blast, which sent a cloud of smoke into the air at about 1 p.m. local time (midnight ET).”
* That seems like a lot of recordings: “The government has seized more than 100 recordings that Cohen made of his conversations with people discussing matters that could relate to Trump and his businesses and with Trump himself talking, according to two people familiar with the recordings. Cohen appeared to make some recordings with an iPhone — without telling anyone he was taping them.”
* Note the Sinclair angle to this one: “The Justice Department is investigating whether television station owners violated antitrust law in ways that inflated local television advertising prices, according to people familiar with the matter.”
* Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin apparently doesn’t want people to describe the administration’s farming bailout as a “bailout.”
* Litigation worth watching: “Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, a Democrat who has crusaded against the loosening of campaign finance rules, is suing the Trump administration to block it from eliminating a mandate that politically active nonprofit groups disclose the identities of their major donors to the government.”
* It sounds like Team Trump should’ve done a background check on Ken Kurson before he was offered a seat on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. * Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to realize he didn’t handle yesterday’s “lock her up” incident especially well. * A story we’ve been watching; “After more than a week of questions, the White House has corrected a key omission in its official transcript of President Donald Trump’s news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.
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." Recommended
