“A lawsuit arguing President Trump is violating the Constitution by benefiting from business with foreign governments can proceed, a judge for the U.S. District Court in Maryland ruled Wednesday,” Politico reports.

“The president’s lawyers had sought to dismiss the case, but the motion was denied.”

Washington Post: “By releasing audio of his covertly recorded conversation with Trump about purchasing the rights to a Playboy centerfold’s story of an extramarital affair, Cohen made a decisive break from his longtime client. The move punctuates the steady deterioration of a relationship between Cohen and Trump, and raises concerns in the White House that the former could spill secrets about the latter to the FBI.”

“In the nearly four months since FBI agents raided his office, home and hotel room, Cohen has felt wounded and abandoned by Trump, waiting for calls or even a signal of support that never came. Cohen got frustrated when Trump started talking about him in the past tense, panicked last month when he thought the president no longer cared about his plight, and became furious when Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani contradicted some of his accounts.”

Garrett Graff: “While we’ve mostly talked about Mueller’s probe as focusing on Russia, there are clearly some adjacent questions about other foreign influence in Washington involving Republican donor Elliott Broidy, among others. A key Middle East go-between, Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, is both cooperating with Mueller’s investigation and has testified before his grand jury—indicating a line of inquiry that hasn’t resulted in any public charges but is somehow central to Mueller’s underlying investigation.”

“Unlike the probe into Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Mueller hasn’t handed this thread of the investigation off to another office, which appears to indicate that, in ways not yet clear to the general public, the UAE and Qatari questions are related to the underlying Russia probe.”