New documents show that American bank examiners delved deeper into the Russian embassy’s financial activity “than was previously known — and reveal why they flagged two of the transactions as suspicious,” BuzzFeed News reports.

“The first, made just 10 days after the US presidential election in 2016, was a $120,000 lump-sum check to then-ambassador Sergey Kislyak that was twice as large as any payment he’d received in the previous two years.”

“The second, just five days after President Trump’s inauguration, was a blocked attempt to withdraw $150,000 in cash that a bank official feared was meant for Russians the US had just expelled from the country.”

“Vladimir Putin presented President Trump with a series of requests during their private meeting in Helsinki last month, including new talks on controlling nuclear arms and prohibiting weapons in space,” according to a Russian document obtained by Politico.

“A page of proposed topics for negotiation, not previously made public, offers new insights into the substance of the July 16 dialogue that even Trump’s top advisers have said they were not privy to at the time. Putin shared the contents of the document with Trump during their two-hour conversation.”

“U.S. counter-intelligence investigators discovered a suspected Russian spy had been working undetected in the heart of the American embassy in Moscow for more than a decade,” the Guardian reports.

“The Russian national had been hired by the U.S. Secret Service and is understood to have had access to the agency’s intranet and email systems, which gave her a window into highly potentially confidential material including the schedules of the president and vice-president.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday he had invited Donald Trump to Moscow and that both he and the U.S. president want further summits, despite the uproar in Washington after the two leaders met in Helsinki last week,” Reuters reports.

“Putin did not say how Trump had reacted to the invitation to travel to Moscow. The last time Trump was in the Russian capital was in 2013, to attend a Miss Universe beauty pageant.”

National Security Adviser John Boston said that President Trump has decided that he will not meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin again until special counsel Robert Mueller concludes his investigation, CNN reports.

Said Bolton: “The President believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year.”

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted after President Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin finds 64% of Americans don’t think President Trump has been tough enough on Russia, including 47% of Republicans.

“As to whether Trump should view Putin as a friend or foe, Americans are nearly evenly split, with 45% saying he should be seen as an enemy and 44% saying he is an ally. That might be a surprise to those who grew up in the Cold War era, but partisanship might have something to do with it. Among GOP voters, 58% view the Russian leader as an ally.”

Rachel Maddow notes that the official White House transcript and video of the Helsinki news conference with President Trump and Vladimir Putin has edited out the question by a reporter asking Putin if he wanted Trump to win the election.

“The Kremlin was reticent on Tuesday about whether it would accept an invitation from President Trump to hold a summit with Vladimir Putin in Washington later this year, saying only that the two men had other chances to meet as well,” Reuters reports.

“The Kremlin’s failure to swiftly accept Trump’s invitation for a Washington summit has been noticeable. Though Moscow saw the Helsinki summit n the two leaders held last week as a success, the fiercely negative reaction by some U.S. politicians to Trump’s performance has taken some in Russia aback.”

Politico: “President Trump’s insistence on holding a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin hobbled U.S. intelligence agencies who would usually get an intimate look at such a sitdown, but American spies still have extraordinary capabilities to piece together what was discussed. That’s in large part due to the existence of a top-secret U.S. collection service that specializes in tapping adversaries’ communications on the fly, including those of Putin’s entourage at last week’s summit in Helsinki.”

“Privately, sources familiar with U.S. intelligence capabilities expressed confidence that the so-called Special Collection Service scooped up not only Putin’s readout of the two-hour meeting, but what the Kremlin’s top spymasters really think about it — and how they’re spinning it to their foreign counterparts.”

“Maria Butina, the Russian woman charged in federal court last week with acting as an unregistered agent of her government, received financial support from Konstantin Nikolaev, a Russian billionaire with investments in U.S. energy and technology companies,” the Washington Post reports.

“Nikolaev’s son Andrey, who is studying in the United States, volunteered in the 2016 campaign in support of Trump’s candidacy… Nikolaev was spotted at the Trump International Hotel in Washington during Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.”

Adam Davidson: “The former C.I.A. operative Jack Devine watched Donald Trump’s performance standing next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, and his first thought was, ‘There is no way Trump is a Russian agent.’ The proof, he told me, was right in front of us.”

”If Trump were truly serving as a Russian intelligence asset, there would have been an obvious move for him to make during his joint press conference with Putin. He would have publicly lambasted the Russian leader, unleashing as theatrical a denunciation as possible. He would have told Putin that he may have been able to get away with a lot of nonsense under Barack Obama, but all that would end now: America has a strong President and there will be no more meddling. Instead, Trump gave up his single best chance to permanently put to rest any suspicion that he is working to promote Russian interests.”

“There is no need to assume that Trump was a formal agent of Russian intelligence to make sense of Trump’s solicitousness toward Putin. Keith Darden, an international-relations professor at American University, has studied the Russian use of kompromat—compromising material—and told me that he thinks it is likely that the President believes the Russians have something on him.”