Europe is already deeply divided between populist nationalists — some of whom flirt with Vladimir Putin — and globalists who defend multilateral institutions and view Russia as an enemy.
What we're hearing: Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and coauthor of the upcoming book "The Empty Throne: America Abdicates its Global Leadership," tells me he worries Trump will side with the nationalist leaders and hand Putin a win this week.
Watch for European leaders to make moves to — hopefully, in their minds — charm and disarm Trump during his consequential visits to the NATO summit and to the United Kingdom for his first visit there.
Another storyline: German Chancellor Angela Merkel mentioned several times last week that German defense spending levels need to go up. Watch for her to make a good faith statement at NATO along similar lines.
At the end of last week, one of Washington’s most battle-hardened and sought-after lawyers forecast an ominous future for the Trump administration. We thought the lawyer's analysis was worth reproducing in full as it echoes what we're hearing from other attorneys in close touch with Trump's White House.
The big picture: "The Pruitt situation should be a warning sign to the administration about what will happen if the Democrats take the House."
President Trump is trolling everyone. Either that or he's genuinely undecided, right up until the final day before he announces, in a prime-time address on Monday night, who he's picked to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
What we're hearing: Sources who've spoken to the president over the past 24 hours tell me, as of Sunday afternoon, that he still truly hasn't made up his mind and is still vacillating in phone calls to friends and advisers between his "final four" judges: Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Thomas Hardiman and Raymond Kethledge.
"The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for 'agua,'" AP's Astrid Galvan writes from Phoenix.
What's happening: "Then it was the child's turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who ... asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings." Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old: "I'm embarrassed to ask it, because I don't know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law."
President Trump's head lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, wrote a memo to the special counsel last June which referred to former FBI Director James Comey as "Machiavellian," and "unbounded by law and regulation," according to the Associated Press which obtained the letter.
The big picture: Comey is seen as a "critical witness against the president," and undermining his credibility has been a frequent goal from the Trump camp. Kasowitz says in the 13-page document that Comey put his "own personal interests and emotions" above FBI rules by embellishing his statement before Congress, the AP reports, and therefore shouldn't be trusted by the special counsel as a witness.
A judge denied the Trump administration's request to extend the deadline to reunite families that had been separated at the border, the Associated Press reports, demanding that the government "must comply with the time frame unless there is an articulable reason."
The details: U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said that by Saturday afternoon, the administration must share a list of the 101 children under five years old that still needed to be reunited with the American Civil Liberties Union. The deadline in place for reuniting children under five is July 10, per the AP, and a Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabian told the AP that the government "has matched 86 parents to 83 children and 16 are not yet matched."
Why it matters: The Trump administration has broken records for the most White House departures in a presidency just a year and a half in to taking the oath of office. Meanwhile, juicy leaks, gossip and insider reporting on the administration's internal chaos has become standard. Take a look at the hires and fires since Trump took office.
Special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors plan to present evidence at former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's trial that a banking executive who was after a role in the Trump campaign, "helped Manafort obtain loans of more than $6 million," CNN reports.
The details: Per CNN, the prosecutors' court filing says that the executive "expressed interest in working on the Trump campaign, told (Manafort) his interest, and eventually secured a position advising the Trump campaign." The prosecutors say in their filing that despite Manafort's "serious issues" on his loan application, the executive "interceded in the process and approved the loan."
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Friday in a hearing over family separation that DNA tests being used to reunited families should be removed from U.S. government databases, CNN reports.
"The government, I gather, is saying we’re going to DNA every single person and it’s gonna delay things. We would say that DNA is a last resort. … It shouldn’t be done in every case, but if it is being done in every case, we would ask that it be used only for reunification and then expunged because I don’t know that we want to be creating a database of all these people.”
Rep. Jim Jordan continued to deny that he knew of any sexual assault allegations at Ohio State University on Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier, saying "[w]e would've dealt with it if we knew of anything that happened."
The details: Four former OSU wrestlers have come forward saying that Jordan knew of abuse from the team doctor. Jordan told Baier that the people who have come forward "know what they're saying is not accurate," and that "[w]e're going to get the truth out." Jordan also speculated that his political prominence was behind the allegations, saying that "the timing is suspect when you think about how this whole story came together after the Rosenstein hearing and the speakers race."
