In other news, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly invited Trump to visit Pyongyang for a third "summit" at some point in the near future. It appears Trump has neither accepted or declined the offer yet. I presume he will accept.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he can "see the shape" of a new Brexit deal with the EU and that "everybody can see roughly what could be done," but EU officials say Johnson still hasn't actually presented any alternatives.
I think he's trying (and failing) to make the EU look responsible.
Finally, Yahoo News reports that the Russians compromised FBI communications in 2016 and that's was a factor in the Obama administration's decision to close Russian embassies and kick their personnel out of the country.
The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.
Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.
“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.
American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.