It seems that Special Counselor Robert Mueller has told President Donald Trump’s lawyers that Trump is not a criminal target of Mueller’s “investigation;” Trump is merely a subject of it.

While WaPo has based its story on sources that may or may not exist (“three people familiar with the discussions;” we don’t get to know who they are, we don’t even know if “three” is accurate), let’s take the story as accurate, arguendo.  Some of Trump’s advisors think Mueller’s remarks are just an attempt to bait Trump into sitting for a Mueller interrogation.

It turns out that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized—in a secret memo, yet—Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Paul Manafort, Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s sometime campaign manager, regarding Manafort’s work for the Ukrainian government.

To the extent what Manafort did is a crime—Mueller has indicted him on charges of

conspiring against the US, conspiring to commit money laundering, acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and making false statements. A subsequent indictment…alleges he committed tax and bank fraud.

and Manafort has both denied the accusations and formally pled not guilty—his actions would not be out of the ordinary, and they don’t warrant a special counsel’s investigation.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has declined, for now, to appoint a special counselor to investigate DoJ and FBI handling of the Hillary Clinton email “investigation” and other matters.

Instead, Sessions has gone one better.  He’s appointed John Huber, US Attorney for the District of Utah, and so not a denizen of the Beltway (like Special Counselor Robert Mueller is) to investigate the nature of the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page and connections, if any, between the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, and to work with the DoJ IG to look into the FBI’s handling of Clinton’s email fiasco and the FBI’s interaction with the FISA star chamber court.

Never minding a number of studies that indicate that coffee intake ranges from harmless to net beneficial, California has decided to require coffee companies must put cancer warning labels on their coffee.  Even more ludicrous, the presiding judge, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle wrote in part,

Defendants failed to satisfy their burden of proving…that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health.

This is the wrong criterion and the wrong holder of the burden.  California alleged carcigenic risk; it’s on them to prove the risk.  Beyond that, it’s not the State’s function to demand proof of beneficial outcomes; it’s the State’s function to demand lack of material harm.