President Donald Trump told reporters he supports releasing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings to the public. Plus: Who is funding Maria Butina?
It’s Wednesday, March 20.
‣ President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House today that he thinks Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on his investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election should be made public.
Here’s what else we’re watching:
Mother Russia: Maria Butina, the first Russian to plead guilty to attempting to influence American policy makers before the 2016 election, has had a bad year. She’s currently being held in a Northern Virginia detention center awaiting sentencing. But she still has powerful allies: An NGO partly funded by the Kremlin is paying her legal bills, and as Natasha Bertrand reports, “One of her backers has been trying to promote fringe separatist movements in the U. S. since well before 2016.” The mystery of Russian influence operations, and Butina’s role in them, continues.
A Segregated System: When data released by New York this week revealed that out of the 952 students accepted into the city’s elite Stuyvesant High School for the next school year, just seven were black, the city erupted in outrage. Black-student enrollment at Stuyvesant peaked in 1975, with 303 black students out of 2,536 total students. In 2000, that number dropped to 109.Last year, there were 24. This is the nth verse of the same story for elite New York schools, writes Adam Harris.
Facebook Folds: In a victory for civil-rights groups across the country, Facebook just settled in a landmark case.
