ProPublica: “The bill was sent to the State Department, which objected to covering it. It was then forwarded to the White House, which paid the tab. The unusual cocktail hour underscores a unique push and pull in the current administration: Donald Trump’s White House pays a bill and Donald Trump’s club reaps the revenue.”

“The premium liquor costs are only the beginning of government spending at Mar-a-Lago that emerges in hundreds of pages of receipts and email correspondence between Trump Organization employees and staffers for the State Department, which oversees presidential diplomatic travel and works with the Secret Service and White House. The emails show that the president’s company refused to agree to what was essentially a bulk-purchase agreement with the federal government, and that it charged the maximum allowable federal rate for hotel rooms. The Trump Organization could be obstinate when it came to rates for, say, function rooms at Mar-a-Lago, a problem that was eased when the president signed a law lifting the maximum ‘micro-purchase’ the government can make.”

A new CNN poll finds President Trump’s approval rating remains largely negative — 52% disapprove and 43% approve — but that approval figure is the highest — by one point — since a CNN poll completed around the 100-day mark of his time in office.

Key finding: “The American public increasingly feels that Democrats in Congress are going too far in investigating the President — 44% say Democrats are doing too much on that score, up from 38% saying so in March. That shift stems largely from independents, 46% of whom now say congressional Democrats are going too far.”

Garrett Graff: “Back in December, I ran down the 17 investigations, which at the time focused on questions about Trump’s world and Russian influence in the US… Today, perhaps half of those cases have more or less wrapped up.”

“That leaves open at least eight of the original 17, as well at least another eight new cases that have emerged in recent months. Effectively everything with a Russian nexus appears to be over, leaving a dozen cases focused on Trump world’s finances.”

“In other words, Trump’s world still appears to face 16 known criminal and civil probes, from as many as a dozen different federal, state, and local prosecutors.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, the Washington Post reports.

“Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote a previously unknown private letter to the Justice Department, which revealed a degree of dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that shocked senior Justice Department officials.”

New York Times: “The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of the anger among the special counsel’s investigators about Mr. Barr’s characterization of their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to wrongly claim he had been vindicated.”