Mike Allen: “Top West Wing aides acknowledge that the three consecutive days of baffling, brutal disclosures about Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting during the campaign is a story that will stick, with potentially momentous political and legal consequences.”

“A consequence of these stories is that no blanket denial of anything by this White House will be believable. So the President and his team can expect to be nibbled by ducks as long as they’re in office.”

“Thought for the day: If the New York Times knows all this, imagine what Bob Mueller knows.”

Rick Klein: “Look for scrutiny next on Kushner, the only one in the meeting who now holds a government job, and who did not disclose the encounter on government forms.”

New York Times: “President Trump’s advisers recruited two businessmen who profited from military contracting to devise alternatives to the Pentagon’s plan to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, reflecting the Trump administration’s struggle to define its strategy for dealing with a war now 16 years old.”

“Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law.”

“The federal government is canceling the search for a new FBI headquarters, according to officials familiar with the decision, putting a more than decade-long search by the bureau to move out of the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building back at square one,” the Washington Post reports.

“The decision follows years of largely failed attempts by the Obama and Trump administrations to convince Congress to fully back a plan for a campus in the Washington suburbs paid for by trading away the Hoover Building to a real estate developer and putting up nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to cover the remaining cost.”