There are many reasons people who work in the White House are reluctant to take notes, and traditionally they center around protecting the president. But lots of people in President Trump's White House took notes for the opposite reason, report Peter Baker and Annie Karni at The New York Times: to protect themselves against "a mercurial, truth-bending chief executive who often asked them to do things that crossed ethical or even legal lines, then denied it later."
Some notes by Trump staffers have ended up as tell-all books, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report also drew from contemporaneous notes, shining new light on Trump's actions — and his strong aversion to note-taking, especially since he can no longer rely on nondisclosure agreements.
Mueller's team obtained notes or contemporaneous memos from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, his deputy Annie Donaldson, former White House Chiefs of Staff Reince Priebus and John Kelly, former Trump campaign chiefs Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, adviser Stephen Miller, and other advisers, lawyers, and government officials. Some of them kept notes of alarming conversations with Trump in safes, according to Mueller's report.
We know Trump hated note-taking from McGahn's notes and Trump himself, who alleged in a Friday tweet that some "so-called 'notes' ... never existed until needed" and contained "total bullsh--." Trump also publicly berated former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster for taking copious amounts of notes, the Times reports.
W. Neil Eggleston, who served as a lawyer for President Bill Clinton and as president Barack Obama's White House counsel, told the Times he "didn't take notes when I worked with either president," but to protect the presidents, not make sure he wasn't "part of a criminal conspiracy," like Trump's aides. "To create records of information that was quite harmful to the president, that is really remarkable," he added. "And to do it and then stay on and continue to write them, is really something to me." Read more at The New York Times. Peter Weber
North Korea said Tuesday that the U.S. will put talks aimed at getting Pyongyang to denuclearize at risk if it goes ahead with summer military exercises with South Korea, Reuters reports. The North Korean Foreign Ministry said the U.S. is continuing a pattern of "unilaterally reneging on its commitments" to North Korea, so Pyongyang has to reconsider its own commitments to discontinue missile and nuclear weapons tests while talks continue.
President Trump last month tried to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to resume talks on giving up his nuclear weapons by arranging a spur-of-the-moment meeting with Kim on the border between the two Koreas that resulted in an agreement to restart working-level talks that had been on hold since the collapse of their second summit in February. Harold Maass
Netflix is excising a graphic scene from its teen drama 13 Reasons Why after more than two years of criticism.
The Netflix original series based on a young adult novel about a high-school student who takes her own life originally contained a disturbing and explicit depiction of suicide in its finale that sparked debate when it aired in March 2017. The show's creators defended the scene as their way of showing the horror of suicide, while experts raised concerns over how the scene might affect vulnerable young viewers. A study in April found that suicides among those between age 10 and 17 spiked the month after 13 Reasons Why premiered on Netflix, although this increase could not be definitively tied to the series' release, NPR reports.
Now, two years later, the controversial suicide scene has been edited out of the show. In the version currently streaming on Netflix, only the moments immediately before and after Hannah's suicide are shown, but the series no longer depicts the character cutting her wrists as in the original version.
Netflix in a statement on Tuesday said that "we've been mindful about the ongoing debate around the show" and decided to edit the scene "on the advice of medical experts." Creator Brian Yorkey said, as he has in past interviews, that the intent of the scene was to "tell the truth about the horror of such an act" so that "no one would ever wish to emulate it" but that the creators have "heard concerns" ahead of the third season's launch. He concludes that this new version will "do the most good for the most people while mitigating any risk for especially vulnerable young viewers." Brendan Morrow
More than 100 people have been killed in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, with heavy rains causing widespread flooding and triggering landslides.
Millions of people have been displaced from their homes, including 4.3 million in the Indian states of Assam and Bihar. It is the beginning of monsoon season, and the rain started on Thursday, leaving roads and railroad tracks underwater. It's estimated that some parts of Nepal saw nearly 16 inches of rain in the last few days, and in Bangladesh, officials are keeping an eye on the swollen rivers that flow into the country from India.
During the 2017 monsoon season, at least 800 people were killed in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, with countless crops and homes destroyed. Catherine Garcia
Attorney George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and one of the most prominent conservative critics of President Trump, said he always viewed Trump as "boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic, and insensitive," but also thought he was an "equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he'll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him."
In an op-ed published Monday night in The Washington Post, Conway writes that because of Trump's tweets on Sunday, telling four Democratic lawmakers, all women of color, to "go back" where they came from, there is no doubt that "naiveté, resentment, and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear."
Conway's mother came to the U.S. from the Philippines, and while he remembers in the 1970s a woman approached her in a parking lot and said "Go back to your country," this never really bothered him, because "to my mind, most Americans weren't like that. The woman in the parking lot was just a boor, an ignoramus, an aberration." Now, he can see there are more people in the world who share this woman's point of view, and it horrifies him that Trump appears to be one of them.
"Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he's the president of the United States," Conway said. "By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What's at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What's at stake are the nation's ideals, its very soul." Read the entire op-ed at The Washington Post. Catherine Garcia