Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, released written remarks on Monday before a closed-door meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee. The takeaway: Kushner maintains that he never colluded with Russian officials to help his father-in-law win the presidency.

Kushner confessed that he did attend the highly politicized meeting with Donald Trump Jr., a Russian attorney, and other officials, but left the meeting after determining that his “time was not well-spent at this meeting.” “In looking for a polite way to leave and get back to my work,” Kushner recalled, “I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.’”

He also vehemently denied the allegation that there was contact between him and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign. His alibi? After Trump won the election, Kushner asked Kislyak who in the Russian government he ought to reach out to (i.e., someone who has direct contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin). “The fact that I was asking about ways to start a dialogue after Election Day,” Kushner said, “should of course be viewed as strong evidence that I was not aware of one that existed before Election Day.” Ultimately, Kushner denied that he or anyone in the meeting with Kislyak suggested creating a secret back channel between the Trump team and the Russian government.

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As Mitt Romney understood all too well, Vladimir Putin has long sought to interfere with domestic American politics. Years before Donald Trump came down that escalator and Hillary Clinton’s staff was tricked into giving up its e-mail passwords, Russia was pouring millions of dollars into anti-fracking campaigns across Europe and the U.S.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a drilling technique in which high-pressure liquids are blasted into rock, allowing for the extraction of oil and natural gas that was previously impossible to reach. The technology is the main reason that the U.S. has moved toward energy independence in recent years, and it could potentially allow Europe to break its dependence on Russian oil and natural gas. Which, naturally, makes it a threat to the Kremlin’s interests.

In 2012, Bulgaria issued a shale-gas license to Chevron. Immediately, activists pounced, peddling hyperbolic warnings that fracking pollutes drinking water. (In reality, the practice carries a minimal risk of groundwater pollution when done properly.) Protests erupted, and the Bulgarian government caved, banning fracking entirely. Gazprom, Russia’s state-run energy company, proceeded to give the Bulgarian government a 20 percent discount for signing a ten-year contract for the provision of natural gas.

One year later, Romania fell victim to a similar campaign, believed to be spearheaded by Putin. The Pungesti commune, in the northwest, “became a magnet for activists from across the country opposed to hydraulic fracturing,” the New York Times reported. Russia “is playing a dirty game” to “keep this energy dependence,” concluded Iulian Iancu, the chairman of the Romanian Parliament’s industry committee.

And why wouldn’t it? European countries that are dependent on Russian oil and natural gas — especially those in the east — help keep Russia’s economy, and thus Putin’s regime, afloat. Gazprom supplies 30 percent of the European Union’s natural gas, which means that the Kremlin has the power to turn off much of Europe’s energy supply at any time. In fact, it already did so once, during the coldest months of 2009.

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At alarming rates, U.S. Army personnel are purchasing their own ammunition magazines prior to deployment. That’s because the Army’s official magazine, the Enhanced Performance Magazine (EPM), is far from reliable on the battlefield, and the soldiers know it. The Marine Corps and other branches of the U.S. military have made the switch to more-reliable polymer magazines. Why hasn’t the Army?

In January, just two weeks after the Marines officially switched to the polymer Magpul PMAG GEN 3 magazine, Republican senators Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton, Jim Inhofe, David Perdue, and Johnny Isakson wrote a letter to Army chief of staff Mark Milley demanding to know why the Army hadn’t yet made a similar change. The PMAG had “zero magazine-related stoppages through all of the tests,” the senators noted, and it “reduce[s] damage to the chamber face and feed ramps when using M855A1 ammunition.” In addition, it is not affected by extreme temperatures — a vital advantage for military personnel in both the Army and the Marines.

In his response to the letter, General Milley agreed to move forward with more testing of polymer magazines and release the results in the next six to twelve months. But to many, another year of testing seems rather pointless. “I’m just concerned that the Army is going through a lot of testing all over again for a magazine that is already in use in the same rifle in the Marine Corps,” Ernst tells National Review. “We are duplicating what has already been done.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to review President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban, and although oral arguments will be held in October, the justices ruled that Trump has the authority to implement his policy — with some limitations — in the meantime. The measure will take effect today at 8 P.M. Eastern time.

Trump administration officials have sought to suspend admission of all refugees to the U.S. for 120 days, to cap the number of refugees in fiscal year 2017 at 50,000, and to refuse permission for anyone to enter the U.S. from the six Muslim-majority nations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — all deemed “countries of concern” in the fight against terrorism.

Donald Trump has advocated a hardline immigration agenda during his first six months in office. But, after signing executive orders to defund sanctuary cities and to place a temporary travel ban on refugees entering the U.S., the president has quickly learned that some liberal judges on federal circuit courts are willing to blur politics and the law in order to rule against the administration and block its agenda.

Meanwhile, as federal judges continue to limit federal immigration policy, the Trump administration has come to rely on Republican state attorneys general to take a stand at the state level. Indeed, many of them are spearheading their own legal fights against lax immigration policies, particularly with sanctuary cities and the temporary travel ban.

“The Trump administration is slowly understanding the benefits they can get from working with Republican attorneys general across the country,” Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry tells National Review. Trump needs these diligent officials to ensure that his agenda becomes reality. They are some of his most important allies.

On June 6, for example, Landry joined Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and signatories representing 14 other states in filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court; the coalition argued in support of Trump’s temporary travel ban. Trump seeks, among other travel restrictions, to suspend admission of all refugees to the country for 120 days, cap the number of refugees in fiscal year 2017 at 50,000, and not allow anyone to enter the U.S. from the six Muslim-majority nations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen —deemed “countries of concern” in the fight against terrorism.

“The States have a significant interest in protecting their residents’ safety,” Paxton and his coalition wrote in the amicus brief. And since “the President’s power to limit alien admission is authorized, not only by §1182(f), but also by” the Immigration and Nationality Act’s “separate delegation to the President of power to control refugee admissions,” each state “must generally rely on the federal government to set the terms and conditions for whether aliens may enter the States.”

Paxton tells National Review that he and his colleagues are in support of Trump’s travel ban because they “are about defending the law” in light of President Obama’s eight-year assault on the Constitution. “Had Donald Trump not won the election and appointed Neil Gorsuch” to the Supreme Court, Paxton adds, “we would be in post-constitutional America.”

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Senator Sanders’s wife, Jane, has hired two prominent attorneys — Burlington, Vt.-based attorney Rich Cassidy and Washington, D.C.-based attorney Larry Robbins — as she continues to fight long-standing allegations of bank fraud.

During Mrs. Sanders’s seven-year tenure as president of Burlington College, a now-defunct liberal-arts college, the college sought to expand its campus by purchasing 33 acres of land near Lake Champlain for $10 million. But Burlington College had nowhere near $10 million to spend; its total annual budget was less than $4 million. As a result, Vermont’s Educational and Health Buildings Finance Agency offered Burlington College $6.5 million in tax-exempt bonds, and People’s United Bank agreed to give Burlington College a $6.5 million loan to purchase the bonds. That bank loan was contingent on Sanders’s promising that she had secured $5 million in donations and $2.4 million in confirmed pledges (i.e., donations that Burlington College officials had not yet received but that would be coming soon).

Despite her promise, it seems that Sanders had not secured these funds before accepting the loan.

“Burlington College ran into trouble almost immediately after the loan repayments were due,” Politico reports. “For the first fiscal year after the deal was signed, Jane Sanders signed documents that confirmed pledges of $1.2 million. But according to Burlington College financial records obtained by VTDigger, the college received only $279,000.”

The FBI is currently investigating whether Mrs. Sanders committed fraud when she told People’s United Bank that she had confirmed pledges. One confirmed pledge of $1 million, it turned out, was to be paid after the donor’s death, not in the next few years, as Sanders had stated. It is also possible that Senator Sanders will find himself under FBI investigation for involvement in securing the bank loan. In a letter sent to federal prosecutors in early 2016, Brady Toensing, an attorney and former chairman of Trump’s Vermont campaign, “alleged that Senator Sanders’ office had pressured the bank to approve the loan application submitted by Jane Sanders,” Politico reported. It is “a serious ethical violation” for a sitting U.S. senator to pressure a bank, the letter concluded.

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