What really ought to worry the president and his inner circle is what Mueller knows about the election and has yet to reveal. The Special Counsel doesn’t have to disclose to suspects how it knows certain things, and it’s apparent that Mueller and his investigators asked Manafort about his dealings with Kilimnik, which he lied about—and the ostrich jacket connoisseur is now trying to come clean before he gets a de facto life sentence in prison.

That Mueller knew about Manafort’s 2016 dealings with Kilimnik is no surprise, given that the two men communicated frequently for many years, and the Special Counsel seized all of those communications from Manafort. But how did Mueller know about their secret Madrid meeting in early 2017, despite Manafort’s denials?

The answer lies in a highly secretive intelligence program run by the National Security Agency (NSA). It’s called travel tracking and its existence, like so many NSA top-secret operations, was revealed by Edward Snowden, the disgruntled agency IT contractor who fled to Moscow in June 2013 with over a million classified documents from the NSA and other U.S. spy agencies.

Travel tracking means that the NSA and its Five Eyes Anglosphere intelligence partners know who’s going where by air, and when, anywhere. They can even crack into WiFi and mobile phones in flight, according to top secret-plus documents stolen and leaked by Snowden. Unless you’re traveling under alias documents of the kind issued by higher-end spy services, the NSA and its close friends know where you’re headed.

Stormy Daniels says 100K (!) people watched her fold her underwear during Donald Trump's speech last night

Since hair can’t be preserved in fossils we can’t rule out the possibility that dinosaurs looked like this

With everything else that he said today, it may not get as much attention, but it still stands out that the president of the United States today said the Soviets were right to invade Afghanistan in 1979. Pretty sure that’s a first for an American leader.

Later, in a long riff about Afghanistan, Trump seemed to endorse Moscow’s 1979 invasion of the country — an act that the U.S. viewed as an attempt to spread communism and waged a long, covert operation to combat during the Carter and Reagan administrations.

“The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia,” Trump said, making a case to leave the policing of hot spots in the Mideast and Central Asia to countries in the region. “They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight.”

The Soviet Union eventually was bankrupted by its Afghan war, Trump added. “Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan.”

Historians generally agree that the Russian invasion and subsequent occupation of much of Afghanistan was one of several factors that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, although the country never went bankrupt.