Snowy Road

Been keeping up with the readings week to week though, and we’ve only had one graded assignment; an essay we wrote in-class and I got a 70 on it, so I really should be taking any advantage i can get.

There will be no physical classes next semester so I’m thinking about moving back home since all classes will be online and there’s no point to paying $1k a month for an apartment close to campus. Talked to my mom about it and mentioned my concerns about feeling like I would be moving backwards and she says I shouldnt think of it that way since I’m still progressing in my studies.

The Democratic rebuttal contains misleading claims, omits key details, and, perhaps unintentionally, actually proves the FBI and Department of Justice utilized the infamous, largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier to obtain a FISA court warrant to monitor an individual formerly associated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Here are seven key problems with the claims made inside the Democrats’ rebuttal memo.

1 – The House Democratic rebuttal opens with a seemingly deceptive statement that Steele’s dossier “did not inform” the FBI’s decision to start its investigation into Trump’s campaign in late July.

This is the first contention in the rebuttal, which relates it is trying to “correct the record.” However, the Republican memo did not assert that the dossier informed the FBI’s decision to launch its investigation in late July or anytime. Instead, the GOP memo documented that Steele’s dossier formed an “essential part” of the FISA court applications submitted by Obama-era federal agencies to monitor the communications of Carter Page, who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, even though House Democrats seem to be rebutting a contention that was not made in the Republican memo, there are possible issues with the rebuttal’s claim that the FBI’s investigative team only received Steele’s “reporting” in mid-September, ostensibly referring to the written dossier.  The Democrats entirely ignore that last July, Steele reportedly traveled to Rome, where he met with an FBI contact to supply the agency with alleged information he found during the course of his anti-Trump work.  The Washington Post reported that Steele met with the FBI on July 5, 2016.  The Democratic memo reveals that the DOJ “accurately informed the court that that the FBI initiated its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.”  That is 26 days after Steele met with the FBI in Rome.

2 – While perhaps not intending to, the Democratic memo actually confirms that the Obama Justice Department did use Steele’s largely discredited dossier for FISA court applications to monitor Page.

The memo contains a sentence stating that “as DOJ informed the court in subsequent renewals”; but the rest of that sentence is redacted. The next sentence states that “Steele’s reporting about Page’s Moscow meeting,” with the remainder of that sentence also redacted. The next sentence states that “DOJ’s applications did not otherwise rely on Steele’s reporting, including any ‘salacious’ allegations about Trump…” The word “otherwise” indicates that, according to the Democratic memo, DOJ did indeed rely on Steele’s dossier for something.

As a side note, interestingly, the Democrats only use the term “salacious” regarding the dossier, not fully quoting from former FBI Director James Comey’s famous remarks in which he testified that the anti-Trump dossier contained “salacious and unverified” material.

Meanwhile, the Democratic rebuttal goes on to cite specific instances of the FISA applications utilizing Steele’s dossier, with the applications citing Steele’s alleged sources reporting that Page took meetings in Russia.

In a clear attempt to minimize the importance of the dossier, the Democratic memo refers to a 2013 case in which Russian agents allegedly targeted Page for recruitment. In that case, Page was identified in court documents made public as “Male-1” in reference to a case involving three Russian men identified as Russian intelligence agents. The spy ring was accused of seeking information on U.S. sanctions as well as methods of developing alternate sources of energy. The FBI court filings describe “the attempted use of Male-1 as an intelligence source for Russia,” but Page was not accused of having been successfully recruited or spying. The court documents cite no evidence that “Male-1” knew he was talking with alleged Russian agents. That the Obama-era federal agencies needed to still use the dossier in light of that 2013 case may show that the 2013 episode was not enough to obtain a FISA warrant on Page. Steele’s dossier contains claims of updated meetings between Page and Russians that went into the year 2016.

The House Republican memo and a subsequent criminal referral authored by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) both state that the FISA applications relied heavily on the dossier. Grassley and Graham both reviewed the original FISA applications.

The Grassley-Graham memo relates (emphasis added):

On March 17, 2017, the Chairman and Ranking Member were provided copies of the two relevant FISA applications, which requested authority to conduct surveillance on Carter Page. Both relied heavily on Mr. Steele’s dossier claims, and both applications were granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). In December of 2017, the Chairman, Ranking Member and Subcommittee Chairman Graham were allowed to review a total of four FISA applications relying on the dossier to seek surveillance of Mr. Carter Page, as well as numerous other documents relating to Mr. Steele.

3 – The rebuttal leaves out key information that may dispute the Democratic document’s claim that the FISA warrant was “not used to spy on Trump or his campaign.”

The rebuttal claims this is the case because Page “ended his affiliation with the campaign months before DOJ applied for a warrant.” This is misleading. The FISA warrant gives access to phone calls, email, web browsing history and other electronic records, meaning agents can retrieve any emails or recorded communications from the period Page was affiliated with the campaign and would be able to access any recorded communications with the campaign from that period.  Also, according to reports, the FBI monitored Page while he spoke to then-Trump adviser Steve Bannon about Russia in January 2017.

4 – The rebuttal tries to give legitimacy to the possibly illicit surveillance of Page by noting that two of the presiding federal judges were appointed by President George W. Bush and one by President Ronald Reagan.

However, the Republicans’ issue has never been claims of partisanship on behalf of the judges, but rather the charge that key information was withheld from the judges, primarily the origins of the dossier, which was produced by the controversial Fusion GPS and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.  Republicans also charge that the FISA court was not told about credibility issues related to Steele.

5 – The Democratic memo raises immediate questions about the possible use of a second dossier authored by Cody Shearer, a shadowy former tabloid journalist who has long been closely associated with various Clinton scandals.

The rebuttal states that the DOJ provided the FISA court with “additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborate Steele’s reporting.” The rebuttal does not mention the names of the other “independent sources.”

Shearer reemerged in the news cycle last month when the Guardian newspaper reported that the FBI has been utilizing a second dossier authored by Shearer as part of its probe into Trump and alleged Russian collusion.

The Guardian reported the so-called Shearer memo was given to the FBI by Steele in October 2016 to back up some of his claims.

According to the Guardian report, the FBI is still assessing portions of the Shearer memo. The newspaper reported that, like Steele’s dossier, Shearer’s memo cites an “unnamed source within Russia’s FSB” alleging that Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence during a 2013 trip to Moscow in which the future president purportedly engaged in “lewd acts in a five-star hotel.”

Shearer’s name was reportedly associated with the Grassley-Graham criminal referral of Steele, which contains redacted information that Steele received information from someone in the State Department, who in turn had been in contact with a “foreign sub-source” who was in touch with a redacted name described as a “friend of the Clintons.”

Numerous media reports have since stated that the second dossier author mentioned in the Grassley-Graham memo was Shearer, an associate of longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal.

According to sources who spoke to CNN, Shearer’s information was passed from Blumenthal to Jonathan Winer, who at the time was a special State Department envoy for Libya working under then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

Citing the same source, CNN reported that Shearer’s dossier is “actually a set of notes based on conversations with reporters and other sources.” CNN reported that Shearer had “circulated those notes to assorted journalists, as well as to Blumenthal.”

National Review previously dubbed Shearer a “Creepy Clinton Confidante” and “The Strangest Character in Hillary’s Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.”

6 – While trying to argue otherwise, the Democratic rebuttal actually confirms the key contention in the Republican memo that the FBI and DOJ failed to inform the FISA court that Steele’s dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.

In an attempt to rebut the Republican argument that the FISA court was not informed about the dossier’s specific origins, the Democratic memo quotes from an explanation to the court that Steele:

was approached by an identified U.S. person who indicated to Source #1 [Steele] that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. (The identified U.S. person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship.) The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into candidate #1’s ties to Russia.  The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.

Contrary to the rebuttal’s characterization, this paragraph is a far cry from informing the court that the dossier utilized in the FISA warrant was paid for by Trump’s primary political opponents, namely Clinton and the DNC.  Also, the general mention of  “a U.S.-based law firm” does not identify to the FISA court the actual firm, Perkins Coie, which is known for its representation of Clinton and the DNC. Further, informing the FISA court about “an identified U.S. person” who hired Steele  fails to actually identify that U.S. person as Glenn Simpson, founder of the controversial Fusion GPS.

The Democrats claim that the above-referenced paragraph proves the Obama-era agencies informed the FISA court about the “political” origins of the dossier. However, the Republican memo specifically and apparently correctly charged that “neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts.”  The Democratic memo fails to dispute that charge.

7 – The Democratic rebuttal omitted key details about the FBI’s internal assessments of Steele and his reporting.

The Democratic memo claims that the Obama-era agencies “repeatedly affirmed to the Committee the reliability and credibility of Steele’s reporting, an assessment also reflected in the FBI’s underlying source documents.”

This week, the story is coffee machine maker Keurig, which pulled ads from Sean Hannity’s show at the prompting of Media Matters, and is now facing a conservative backlash of NFL-size proportions. But it isn’t just one or two companies engaging in virtue-signalling, it’s practically all of them. It’s Pepsi, which panders to antifa in its ads. Its Heineken, which salutes open borders in their adverts. It’s Twitter. It’s Starbucks. It’s KLM airlines. Despite vast differences in their products, services, and consumers, every industry seems to have the same virtue-signallers.

From the moment of Trump’s inauguration, corporations have been engaged in a frantic struggle to block his agenda. White House globalist-in-chief Gary Cohn, along with the now-disbanded CEO council, did everything they could to blunt the President’s trade policies and prevent him from exiting the Paris Climate Agreement. The same CEO council, along with Cohn, sought to pressure Trump with a series of resignations following his response to a combination of racist white nationalist and Antifa violence in Charlottesville.

And that’s corporations playing nice. When their values are threatened by people who do not sit in the Oval Office, they do far more than simply resign. Earlier this year, after being spooked by mainstream news articles claiming YouTube was a cesspit of terrorism and hate speech, corporations promptly yanked their ads from the platform en masse.

Revenues plummeted overnight, and YouTube quickly added stringent new systems that prevent even remotely controversial content from receiving ad revenue. Once, the platform was a place where bold, independent commentators could develop healthy incomes without answering to any old media gatekeeper. Now, even YouTube’s politest fast food reviewer is having trouble keeping his ad revenue, as the platform introduces ever-stricter language codes. One tantrum from corporations was all it took for free speech on one of the web’s most promising platforms to be all but snuffed out.

Corporate ambivalence to free speech and hostility to the Trump agenda is matched by their regular, almost desperate attempts to pander to progressive sensibilities. Airlines are no longer happy with just telling you about the speed and comfort of their planes; they also want you to know that they support gay pride. Pepsi doesn’t just put celebrities in their ads these days; they put celebrities attending progressive rallies in their ads. Heineken has decided that “how refreshing, how Heineken!” isn’t a woke enough slogan for the present era. They now prefer “open your world,” complete with an accompanying ad toasting a “world without borders.”

To the Trump movement, a movement that has run Democrats out of the House, the Senate and the White House, and ensured a new conservative Justice on the Supreme Court, it must be incredibly frustrating to hear that there are still more worlds to conquer. Yet the progressive culture of corporations is, if anything, more dangerous than a Democrat-controlled congress. Private corporations are not bound by the first amendment and can quell free speech far faster than the government can. If they want to cause financial ruin to a business or an individual that has the “wrong” values, they can. If they want to be a roadblock to the Trump agenda, they can.

So, If populists and conservatives want to achieve their aims, they must change the culture of corporate America. To do that, they must understand how progressive values managed to infect corporate culture. Only then will they stand a chance at containing the disease.  

Virtue-Signalling Smoothies

Corporations never make a decision without considering how it affect their bottom line. Why hasn’t Twitter’s hippie hobo-in-chief Jack Dorsey banned Trump yet? Because, unlike all the other conservatives he’s banned, Trump is crucial to his company’s profitability.

Profits come before political values, then. But why did global corporations decide that adopting progressive values would help their profits? Doesn’t the left hate capitalism, after all?

The answer lies with a number of upstart companies that appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s, promising a new form of capitalism. The new fad had many names: “ethical capitalism,” “social entrepreneurship,” “socially responsible capitalism,” and so forth. But all the companies shared one idea: you can be a profit-hungry capitalist and still be a progressive.

Those companies discovered that virtue-signalling could help distinguish otherwise-unremarkable products. Take smoothies: there are many different brands, each tasting fairly similar. Yet if a smoothie company pledges to give 10 percent of your sales to help humanitarian causes, as the little-known British company Innocent Drinks did in 2004, then they stand out.

Founded in 1999, Innocent Drinks combined a hipster aesthetic (grass-covered vans were a big thing at the company), a hipster target market (they initially sold their products in ultra-liberal North London and at music festivals), and, with their deliberately public virtue-signalling, hipster values. The formula proved to be successful: within a decade, the brand became one of the biggest in Europe and was eventually sold to Coca-Cola.

Ethos Water, a bottled water company founded in 2001 with a team that included current ADL CEO (and notorious Breitbart-hater) Jonathan Greenblatt, is another example of successful capitalist virtue-signalling. Few products are more generic than bottled water, yet within two years of starting operations, it had been sold to Starbucks for $8 million, and can now be bought in every one of the coffee giant’s stores. All it took for Ethos was a feel-good name and a donation, that, although tiny ($0.05 – $0.10 to clean water charities with every purchase), is proudly boasted of on the side of every bottle.

Ethos and Innocent were pioneers, and their example was quickly followed. Today, progressive virtue-signalling is built into the fabric of global corporate culture. Moreover, in an effort to distinguish themselves even further, the grandstanding is growing more radical. Even though it was later trashed by activists for being too nice to the police, Pepsi all but glorified the violent “resistance” movement earlier this year in a controversial advert featuring Kendall Jenner. Twitter invites radical race-baiters and progressive provocateurs to cosy up to senior management. Corporate donations to radical left-wing groups like the SPLC are common.

Even as the left hails corporations as the “moral voice” of America, cracks are beginning to appear in the virtue-signalling business model. First, it is no longer as distinctive as it was when Ethos and Innocent were founded. When both Coca-cola and Pepsi boast of their commitment to progressive values, they cancel each other out. In order to choose between the brands, consumers have to revert to a more traditional criteria: how good they taste.

Corporations are increasingly coming face to face with a more dangerous possibility: that, far from making consumers more likely to buy their products, virtue-signalling now alienates them.

There is no better example of this alienation than the NFL. On the face of it, the League’s job seems supremely easy: they have to sell professional football in a country where it is practically a national religion. Yet, thanks to some profoundly stupid political stunts on the part of its players, they have catastrophically failed even this simple task. Between the September 21st, when the #TakeAKnee campaign took off, and September 29th, the NFL’s public approval ratings nearly halved.

Keurig fell into the same trap this week. By bending the knee to Media Matters and yanking ads from Hannity, they’ve alienated thousands of middle-class consumers who buy their products. Leftist students don’t buy Keurigs: suburban families and business owners do. And now they’re throwing out their Keurig machines.

Even virtue-signalling from celebrity surrogates is becoming a problem for brands. Bourbon manufacturer Jim Beam is currently under boycott from conservatives because its brand ambassador, Mila Kunis, decided to troll the Vice President by signing Planned Parenthood donations in his name. It probably went down well in lefty Hollywood, but conservatives drink Jim Beam too. Or at least they did, until Kunis pulled her stunt.

They won’t admit it, but corporate America is watching. Like the games industry during GamerGate and the NFL earlier this year, consumers are sending the business world an unmistakable message: virtue-signalling is not welcome in all industries.. Ethos Water might be able to sell it in Starbucks, but middle American sports fans are a rather different market.

To really change the nature of corporate culture, though, the right must take things a step further. It’s not enough to show that virtue-signalling has ceased to be profitable. It must be shown that the real profits lie in doing the precise opposite.

Vice-Signalling Protein Shakes

In the summer of 2015, little-known fitness company Protein World stumbled, quite by accident, into culture-war stardom, reaping huge financial rewards in the process. It all started with an advert, rolled out across London’s public transit, that would prove to be both wildly controversial and immensely successful.

To a fitness company, these ads must have seemed perfectly innocent. To the feminists of London, however, they were rage-inducing on multiple levels, from sexual objectification to “body-shaming.” It didn’t take long before activists were vandalizing the ads and calling on the Mayor of London to ban them, while their allies in the media penned outraged op-eds.

A year later, the activists got what they wanted, when the leftist Mayor of London banned “body-shaming” adverts. But by then, the campaign had long since backfired. Consumers reacted to the outrage by giving Protein World their business. Within days of the controversy, the company added 20,000 new customers and made revenues in excess of $1 million.

Recognizing a winning marketing strategy, Protein World’s management decided to double down instead of apologize. After denouncing the protesters as a “vociferous minority,” the company put the offending ad on a giant billboard in New York’s Times Square, along with a marketing campaign in the city’s subways.

“Best of all,” joked the company’s outspoken marketing manager at the time, “you could say that this campaign was paid for by the protestors in London!” Just as the NFL discovered that progressive virtue-signalling can damage the profitability of a business, Protein World discovered that vice-signalling could sometimes achieve the opposite.

Another company that benefited from attracting the rage of leftists include Play Asia, a Hong Kong-based company that supplied the Japanese game Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 to western markets after its publisher declined to do so over fear of a western social justice warrior backlash against the game’s politically incorrect content. After successfully baiting “SJWs” on Twitter, the company surged to prominence after a left-wing “boycott” attempt left them with thousands of new, devoted fans.

Beyond video games and fitness, the fast food chain Chick-fil-A is a more prominent example of a brand that benefited from a “buycott” after becoming the subject of national controversy over company president Dan Cathy’s opposition to gay marriage. Despite ceaseless attacks in the press throughout 2012, the company’s sales soared by 12 percent.

The kind of industries where vice-signalling may be effective is becoming clear. Football, video games, protein shakes. They are industries typically shunned, or at least treated with ambivalence, by metropolitan hipsters. They are beloved by middle America. They are, we are told, “uncool.”

But for a business, uncool should be fine, as long as its profitable. Indeed, so many brands have been trying to be hip, cool, and on top of the most cutting-edge social justice trends, that doing the opposite is far more likely to distinguish a brand. The tipping point will be when companies realize they can make more money by being the bad boys. Just as how punk rock went from being anti-establishment to being pro-Obama, it could all one day flip back.

What’s more, vice-signalling is still a largely untapped goldmine. Chick-fil-a and Protein World fell into it by accident. It was only Play Asia that deliberately set out to antagonize social justice warriors. But the success of these companies shows that there’s an eager market out there, keen to give their money to an entirely new kind of “socially conscious” company.

A  “socially conscious” coffee company has also been thrust ino the spotlight thanks to the Keurig boycott. Black Rifle Coffee, a veteran-owned company whose marketing slogans include “Make Coffee Great Again” and “Stand for Freedom.” They have benefited from an upsurge in social media attention over the past 24 hours, including endorsements from Hannity and Donald Trump Jr.

“I will let General Kelly make that decision and he’s going to do what’s right for the country,” Trump said. “And I have no doubt he will make the right decision.”

Kelly issued a memo last week announcing that he would revoke security clearances for White House officials whose full security clearance applications have been pending since June 1, 2017.

Kushner is currently working at the White House with a temporary security clearance and felt personally targeted by Kelly’s decision. If Kelly revokes Kushner’s clearance, he will not have access to some of the classified information contained in the presidential briefing.

In a statement last week, Kelly said that Kushner would have access to information important to his diplomatic information, but declined to say whether he would get full clearance.

The security clearance issue drew more scrutiny after White House staff secretary Rob Porter’s ex-wives accused him of abuse and he was forced to resign.

Trump said that Kelly “respects Jared a lot” and praised his son-in-law for helping the country.

Violent brawls and disruptive behavior on a 10-day Carnival Line cruise in the South Pacific led the ship to dock early so Australian police could remove a large family of 23 people.

Cellphone video from the ship shows passengers on the Carnival Legend tussling with each other and security officers amid shouting and screams from alarmed onlookers.

The video also shows security officers kicking passengers after they were down on the floor.

"We have a zero tolerance approach to excessive behavior that affects other guests," Carnival Cruise Line said in a statement. "In line with this policy, we cooperated fully with local authorities in Australia to remove a large family group who had been involved in disruptive acts aboard Carnival Legend."

Another cellphone video, published by Melbourne radio station 3AW, showed passengers cheering as police removed the men from the cruise ship Friday.

NSW Police said in a statement they were told several men fought in the early morning hours Friday while the ship was about 220 kilometers (137 miles) off Jervis Bay, New South Wales. Security officers on the ship intervened and detained the men before notifying police, police said.

"About 1.30 p.m. (Friday), six men and three teenage boys were removed from the ship at Twofold Bay, Eden," the police statement said.

"A further 14 passengers, including women and children, also left the ship. The group were transported to Canberra where other travel arrangements were made."

Carnival and police did not say what started the fights, how many people were hurt and whether any charges were filed. Both the police and the cruise line are conducting investigations.

As of Monday, no charges had been laid against the accused brawlers and no one had been detained, according to NSW Police. A spokeswoman said inquiries were still being made.

The vessel was scheduled to sail from Melbourne to New Caledonia in the South Pacific and back over the course of 10 days.

Passenger Kellie Peterson told radio station 3AW she saw a lot of injuries. "There's people been walking around with cut heads and hands and bandages everywhere," she told the station.

"They were looking for trouble from the minute they got on the ship," Peterson said, noting that she and her husband tried to move her three children out of the swimming pool when the group was around.

"Five of them surrounded my husband," she said. "And unfortunately my children witnessed it and they're scared. We've been told to watch our backs by this group. We're scared to go anywhere on the ship."

The remaining passengers disembarked Saturday in Melbourne. According to the cruise line's website, the ship is able to accommodate 2,100 passengers.

A 2002 file photo of the Carnival Legend, a 2,100-passenger, 960-foot-long cruise ship in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

One passenger, Cindy Buglisi, told the Seven Network the situation was "horrifying, like people screaming, running around, throwing glasses, everything -- like nightmare."

Another, Jarrah Boliltho, said, "They (members of the family group) were roaming the decks just looking to pick on any Aussie they could find." Some of the passengers told Seven Network they wanted full refunds from the cruise line. According to Cruise Mapper website, tickets for the cruise cost passengers at least $800 (AU$999).

Carnival said it would offer a 25% discount to these passengers on future cruises as a goodwill gesture.

Former Trump presidential campaign aide Rick Gates has agreed to testify against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and will plead guilty to fraud related charges, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times reported Sunday a revised plea will be presented in federal court "within the next few days."

CNN first reported last week that Gates was finalizing a plea deal and that he had been in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert Mueller's team for a month.

Gates can expect "a substantial reduction in his sentence," to likely about 18 months in prison if he cooperates with the investigation, according to the LA Times report. He is also likely going to have to forfeit any cash or valuables obtained through his alleged illegal activity.

Aside from the legal maneuvering, the father of four has faced personal and financial pressure to bring his legal proceedings to a speedy resolution, a person familiar with the situation told CNN.

Gates has told associates he had hoped for outside assistance from a legal defense fund, but deep-pocketed GOP donors have shown little interest in helping either Gates or Manafort cover their legal fees, two sources said. Once a plea deal is in place, Gates would become yet another known cooperator in Mueller's sprawling probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

First lady Melania Trump eschewed the traditional South Lawn couple's walk to Marine One on Friday amid another adultery allegation scandal, opting instead to drive separately ahead of President Donald Trump.  

"With her schedule it was easier to meet him on the plane," Stephanie Grisham, the first lady's communications director, said in a statement.Melania Trump does plan to accompany her husband when he visits with victims of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, a White House official told CNN.

Earlier Friday, The New Yorker published a report based on a handwritten account from Karen McDougal who detailed her alleged affair with Donald Trump for nine months from June 2006 to April 2007, when Trump was two years into his marriage with Melania Trump. The document was provided to The New Yorker by McDougal's friend, but she confirmed to the magazine that the handwriting in the document is hers.

A White House spokesperson denied the affair in a statement to the magazine. "This is an old story that is just more fake news. The President says he never had a relationship with McDougal," the spokesperson said.

This isn't the first break with tradition the first lady has showed in the wake of allegations of her husband's indiscretions. She drove separately from the President to the US Capitol to attend the State of the Union address on January 30.

The White House said the unusual move was so she could attend a reception with the guests joining her in the first lady's box and connect with them on a more personal level.

But it marked her first public event after The Wall Street Journal first reported a payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who allegedly had an affair with Trump in 2006, four months after Melania Trump gave birth to the couple's only son, Barron.

The President has denied the affair took place. But The Wall Street Journal reported Trump's attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to keep it covered up. Cohen also released a statement on behalf of Daniels calling the report "absolutely false."

Another bitter week that took Washington to the brink of exhaustion landed Donald Trump at the epicenter of more tragedy, scandal and rancor than a conventional president would hope to face in a full year.

The White House was sent reeling by the Florida school massacre, new indictments in the Russia probe, its own mishandling of domestic abuse claims against a top staffer, allegations that Trump covered up extra-marital affairs and another huge immigration fail.

All of this unfolded when the administration hoped to focus on infrastructure -- when the big headlines would involve the President pushing his next big agenda item.

Instead, Trump offered a fresh example of his propensity to draw the capital, and the rest of the nation into his cone of chaos. Each of the week's staggering and occasionally horrific events will have profound political reverberations. They are already further poisoning trust in Washington and stretching bonds of national unity in a way that will make the already all-but-impossible task of governing more difficult.

The sting in the tail of the week came when special counsel Robert Mueller unloaded 13 indictments on Russian nationals accused of running the Kremlin's attempt to influence the 2016 election, eventually settling on a plan to damage Hillary Clinton and to help Trump win.

Mueller's surprise strike was not just the most comprehensive account of the meddling effort so far and the first time he has laid charges relating to the core thrust of his investigation -- Russia's election meddling operation. It was also another sign of how little outsiders know about the sweep of his investigation, a factor that must worry White House lawyers.

The President quickly seized on a detail of the indictment that noted Trump campaign staffers were unwittingly approached by the Russians to trumpet his claims that his assaults on the probe were vindicated.

"The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!" he tweeted.

His crowing might be premature, however, since the indictment did not make any reference to known liaisons between Trump staffers and Russia or the activities of senior campaign and administration officials under investigation. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told CNN's "The Situation Room" on Friday that Trump was "engaged in some magical thinking here that somehow, this indictment exonerates him. Nothing of the kind."

It is still possible that Mueller exonerates Trump and his campaign. But in time to come, the indictment could also be seen as the latest jigsaw piece put in place by Mueller that could eventually serve as the legal backdrop for any eventual determination that collusion or obstruction of justice did take place. That's because Mueller established that Russian election interference was a criminal matter -- significantly increasing the consequences for anyone in Trump's orbit who has the potential of being implicated in the affair.

It will also now be far harder for Trump to claim that the Russia meddling story is a huge "hoax." Furthermore, the evidence of a genuine threat to American democratic institutions that Mueller laid out may make it much harder for Republicans to shield Trump politically if he fires the special counsel.

Pressure is also mounting on the administration to finally impose sanctions against Moscow over the election scandal. And ties between Washington and the Kremlin are sure to sour. But the picture Mueller painted of a sophisticated Russian operation is sure to enhance President Vladimir Putin's reputation as a master of the dark arts of espionage, despite Russian denials.

CNN has reported that former Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates is nearing a plea deal with Mueller, which will also meanwhile mean a nervy weekend for the White House.

As Friday's Russia story broke, Trump was on his way to honor the victims of Wednesday's school shooting in Parkland, Florida, by visiting Broward Health North hospital, where many of the victims were treated.

In the immediate aftermath of the rampage on Wednesday, Trump was absent, apart from offering condolences on Twitter, and then seemed to blame local people for not spotting the apparent mental turmoil of the suspected shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz. When he finally appeared on camera 20 hours after the attack he promised to keep America's kids safe. But one word was missing from his remarks -- guns -- as Democrats demanded reforms to deal with high-powered, military style weapons the killer used, and Republicans immediately accused them of politicizing the tragedy to snatch the guns of law abiding Americans.

The depressing familiarity of the ritual underscored how sharp political divides are likely to mean nothing meaningful happens after the tragedy.

Republicans on Friday were quick to seize on reports that the FBI had missed a tip-off about the shooter to alleviate political pressure, after students at the school appeared on television to demand changes to gun laws.

But the debate will flare back to life after the next, inevitable, massacre.

The Florida killings overshadowed what had until then been the dominant story of the week, the White House's pushback against claims of abuse against departed senior staffer Rob Porter by two ex-wives.

Trump's response, as it often does, made the storm much worse as he came across as more concerned with Porter's lost career than for the plight of the woman who told the FBI about their plight.

The political impact of the scandal was magnified because the claims caused the FBI to block Porter's security clearance, leaving him operating on an interim version, despite the fact his job required him to handle classified intelligence.

CNN then reported that at least 100 officials served with the similar interim clearances until November, in a highly unusual move that raised questions about the backgrounds and credentials of many administration staffers.

At times, the White House's shifting explanations had it digging ever deeper in to the mire. On Friday chief of staff John Kelly, whose credibility was badly damaged by the episode, issued new guidelines on the clearance process, calling on the FBI to quickly share derogatory information about staffers with the White House counsel's office and suspending background checks of officials who have been waiting for a sign-off since last June.

Kelly has also been a key player in the White House's hardline immigration policy which has left hundreds of thousands of people brought to the US illegally as children in limbo after Congress again failed to act on a compromise to shield them in return for funding for Trump's border wall.

Fierce White House assaults helped to blow up a compromise plan in the Senate, but Trump's own four-pillared proposal, which also reforms legal immigration, perished in the chamber by an even bigger margin.

The debacle meant that people affected by the expiration of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program still do not know their fate.

But the furor may have protected Trump's right flank and defused a campaign by far right media against him that has seen him labeled "Amnesty Don."

Trump began the week embarrassed by revelations that his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid $130,000 to former porn star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election. The news provoked questions on whether Cohen -- who insisted he was acting on his own initiative and with his own funds -- had infringed campaign finance laws by trying buying the silence of Daniels, who claimed she had an affair with Trump.

The President's week ended with a stunning new report in The New Yorker that detailed an alleged affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal in 2006 and 2007 and an alleged scheme involving the National Enquirer to cover it up. The report sparked fresh speculation about the state of Trump's marriage to first lady Melania Trump and questions about the activities of the President's entourage, as well as his potential exposure to more compromising situations.

Trump was also preoccupied with other peoples' scandals, specifically those of two members of his administration, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt and Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, who are both under scrutiny over extravagant travel arrangements.

New dota2 update added some new hats and broke my pokeskins.