The agency’s only copy of the The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, aka the “Torture Report,” is no more. On Monday, Yahoo News reported that “the CIA inspector general’s office—the spy agency’s internal watchdog—has acknowledged it ‘mistakenly’ destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved.” Other copies exist, but the CIA’s deletion of its copy is nonetheless significant and troubling.

There are two possible explanations here. One is that this was a nefarious and intentional act, befitting an organization which does nefarious things intentionally. The other is that the CIA is massively and comically incompetent. The CIA has, unsurprisingly, gone with the massively and comically incompetent explanation. Per Yahoo:

In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.

The full 6,000-page Torture Report has never been released. It’s currently not even subject to FOIA requests. Since the report was released in 2014, the CIA has also quietly acknowledged that some of its findings were valid. Over the same period, the White House has largely pretended the report doesn’t exist.

In January 2015, the Koch brothers were eagerly sharing their plan to drop nearly $1 billion on the 2016 cycle and other political endeavors in support of conservative candidates and causes. Less than 18 months later, insiders within the pair’s vast political network are concerned that the Kochs may be shutting off the financial spigot entirely.

On Monday, National Review published a lengthy account of changes in how the Kochs plan to invest their considerable fortune—changes that conservatives fear signals an end to their lavish spending on federal elections.

The Koch brothers have been cast as oligarchical villains for their obscene spending, a characterization that has damaged both their personal and corporate brands, according to National Review. And considering the limited return on their investments in the last presidential election, exactly how much influence their dollars wield was in doubt.

Zubik v. Burwell was supposed to be a landmark case about access to contraception. Religious non-profits objected to an Obamacare workaround that required them to fill out a form so that insurers could provide contraception to the non-profits’ employees without their direct involvement. The act of filling out the form, they claimed, made them complicit in what they believed was sin, while critics claimed nuns were trying to control the actions of third parties, which is not excused by religious liberty.

But today the Supreme Court ruled unanimously to not rule on the merits of either side’s argument. The Court vacated the decisions of the lower appeals courts and instructed everyone to find a new way to accommodate both religious liberty and the right to “full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage.” It’s a victory for no one, but a loss for no one either.

Without a tie-breaking ninth justice, court observers had suspected the court would be split 4-4 on the decision. That would have meant different regions of the country could have different legal requirements—precisely what the Supreme Court is supposed to help the country avoid. The court’s decision averts that, and until Merrick Garland, or someone else, is confirmed, it’s likely the court will punt more cases to avoid setting awkward precedents. If an upcoming decision on abortion results in a tie, for example, Texas will be left with only 10 abortion clinics in the entire state.

(Forget it, Jake. It’s Spoilertown.)

The final shot of Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones—a naked Daenarys emerging out of fire before an awed crowd—was a direct callback to the final shot of the show’s first season. After four seasons of toil—conquering cities and then getting bogged down in them—Dany is back where she started, having lost everything she had won, and she’s stronger for it.

Something similar is happening to Jon Snow and Sansa Stark, who became the first Stark siblings (well, they think they’re siblings and that’s all that matters) to share a scene since the end of the show’s first season. Their storylines are also reaching towards something resembling a reset button and it’s clear that, having emerged from traumatic experiences, they are also going to set about regaining what was lost.

Season 6 has had a very, very bloody start—if you don’t have a very specific purpose in the show, Benioff and Weiss have probably already killed you—but it’s also corrected for three of the last two seasons’ biggest weaknesses. First, the show’s most important characters are slowly but surely reuniting. Sunday night’s episode, like Episode 3, was filled with emotional reunions—Jon and Sansa, Dany and Daario and Jorah of House Friendzone, Maergary and Loras, Littlefinger and Game of Thrones—and its protagonists, after suffering immensely, are realizing what actually matters.

Second, the pace is brisk, to say the least. If Dany was captured in Season 4, she would’ve been in Vaes Dothrak for at least eight episodes. There are times when things seem to be moving too fast, but it’s still better than the alternative. And third, though I have no confidence that it lasts, the show’s female characters are taking over: In nearly every scene in last night’s episode, a woman was the strongest, most assertive character in the room (except for poor Osha). And hey, whatever else happens, we still have Brienne and Tormund to look forward to.

The theory holds that voters these days are more influenced by hatred of the other party than loyalty to their own side. In a traditional presidential election, this phenomenon would be more difficult to discern, since the parties’ nominees would presumably represent their respective sides fairly well. This is not the case with Trump, who breaks with his party on multiple issues. To consolidate the support of the GOP, he will have to rely heavily on negative partisanship.

The latest example can be found in this article in the Times about Christian conservatives coming around to Trump, despite the fact that he plainly doesn’t have a religious bone in his body. The way negative partisanship works on a rhetorical level is to claim that Trump, for all his flaws, is far better than the alternative: “[A]ny concerns I have about him pale in contrast to Hillary Clinton,” one prominent conservative says.

The true test of the theory, though, will come in the fall, when the #NeverTrump forces will face two warring impulses: Fear and loathing of the other vs. fear and loathing of their own.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the Democratic Party’s attitude toward the plight of these voters, many of whom are gravitating toward Donald Trump. George Packer, writing in The New Yorker, says liberals’ emphasis on identity politics “comes with an aversion toward, even contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and sinking.” He concludes, “[T]he Democratic nominee can’t afford, either politically or morally, to write off those Americans. They need a politics that offers honest answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps them from sliding further into self-destruction.”

The Washington Post reports today that the likely Democratic nominee isn’t writing them off at all. To the contrary, Clinton’s team is worried that Trump could make inroads with these voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and is taking action to safeguard the Democratic Party’s traditional advantages in those states. While Clinton has been criticized for her past support of trade deals that have been blamed for gutting the manufacturing industry in the upper Midwest, she intends to highlight her support for unions, a higher minimum wage, and greater government investment in job creation. “From a straight-up policy perspective, Donald Trump is on exactly the wrong side of issues for a lot of people who are turning up and supporting him,” one Democrat tells the Post.

This is true. On a level of economic policy, the Democrats are offering these voters much more than the Republicans, even when their nominee is an ideologically heteredox figure like Trump.

But of course this is not only about economics. This is about a whole constellation of issues that revolve around the question of culture. As the likely Democratic nominee, Clinton is committed to certain values—imposing tougher gun laws, proactively addressing inequality between the races and the sexes, granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants—that many of Trump’s white working class voters simply oppose. There was a time, not so long ago, when a national Democratic politician could have plausibly courted these voters from a cultural angle, but not anymore, and most Democrats tend to see that as a sign of progress.

So the question is, what else can Democrats do to appeal to these Trump-curious voters without sacrificing the values that increasingly define them as Democrats? There just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot.

We already know from a sworn deposition that Trump pretended to be his own spokesperson, “John Barron,” in the 1980s and 90s.

The Washington Post has now obtained a recording of another questionable Trump spokesperson going by “John Miller,” who talked to a People magazine reporter for 14 minutes in 1991. The conversation mostly centers around two things: that Donald Trump is great and that lots of beautiful famous women want to go on dates with him because of how great he is. Here, for instance, is “Miller” talking about Carla Bruni, who called Trump a “lunatic” for claiming he dated her in the 1990s.

Carla is extraordinarily beautiful and didn’t want to be a model, except that every time she’d go to a show to look, people like Ralph Lauren and various people would say, “Carla, you have to be in the show, et cetera, et cetera.” So she does all of the top shows, and she’s always very busy and very successful, et cetera, et cetera.

The voice on the tape sounds like a voice on a tape—it’s at least a semitone deeper than it should be and and sounds a bit like Paulie’s robot from Rocky IV. But the cadence is so similar to Trump’s that, given the fact that he’s already admitted to pretending to be his own spokesperson, it seems like a match. Still, Trump told Today that it absolutely is not him on the recording, saying, “It was not me on the phone. And it doesn’t sound like me on the phone, I will tell you that, and it was not me on the phone. And when was this? Twenty-five years ago?”

If that’s true, and John Miller is a real person who worked for Donald Trump, then Trump should be able to produce the real John Miller, or some shred of evidence that he exists. Something tells me that’s not going to happen, though.

Just under two weeks ago, everything was going according to plan. The Spurs, historically great and, by one measure, historically greater than the Golden State Warriors, blew out a disheveled and unprepared Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 1 of the Western Conference Semifinals, playing four quarters of near perfect total basketball.

And then things started to slip. The Spurs lost Game 2 after referees failed to blow as many as five whistles during one of the craziest sequences I’ve ever seen, and there was yet another officiating controversy in their Game 5 loss. But the Spurs, the NBA’s most selfless team for the past decade, stopped being able to move the ball midway through this series. Oklahoma City’s ultra-big lineup of Steven Adams and Enes Kanter absolutely befuddled San Antonio’s big men, preventing the double teams they thrive off of—San Antonio’s bigs pass out of the post better than anyone in the league. They also turned LaMarcus Aldridge, the league’s most efficient midrange shooter, into someone who couldn’t buy a basket. By gumming up one of the gears in the Spurs machine, the Thunder were able to expose San Antonio’s guards and wings, who struggled to create their own shots and facilitate. If you double team anyone on San Antonio, the open man will kill you, but in the last three games of this series, the Thunder were rarely forced to scramble on defense. (It didn’t help that Tony Parker and Tim Duncan, who we will hopefully see again, suddenly looked very, very old.) Every once and a while there were glimpses of the Spurs as they should be, but they were few and far between.

Of course, it doesn’t help when the team you’re playing has two of the most dynamic scorers in the NBA. While OKC’s offense rarely looked as good as its defense, that doesn’t matter when you have Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, who took turns being transcendent in the series. Oklahoma City will likely have a harder time with Golden State, but this series proved that if you have Durant and Westbrook anything can happen.

Even one of Trump’s most ardent Republican critics is softening his opposition. While he still hasn’t endorsed Trump, it looks like they have reached a detente, following a 15-minute conversation yesterday on issues of national security.

Graham in the past has called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot,” among many, many other insults. If you have ever wondered how such a bigot takes over a major Western political party, we are watching it happen in real time.