IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK? Mueller’s Investigation is Missing One Thing: A Crime.

This week’s Key to Everything is Michael Cohen, the guy who lied out of self-interest for Trump until last week when we learned he is also willing to lie, er, testify against Trump out of self-interest. If you take his most recent statements at face value, the sum is the failed negotiations to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, which went on a few months longer than was originally stated, and that we all knew about already.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York submitted a sentencing memo Friday for Cohen, recommending 42 months in jail. In a separate filing, Mueller made no term recommendation but praised Cohen for his “significant efforts to assist the special counsel’s office.” The memos reveal no new information.

Call it sleazy if you want, but looking into a real estate deal is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor, even if it’s in Russia. Conspiracy law requires an agreement to commit a crime, not just the media declaiming that “Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin!” Talking about meeting Russian persons is not a crime, nor is meeting with them.

The takeaway that this was all about influence shopping by the Russkies falls flat.

We haven’t had a President this firm with Moscow since Reagan, which makes Trump the worst influence buy ever.

HMM: Mark Meadows Says Serving as Trump’s WH Chief of Staff Would Be ‘Incredible Honor.’ “Is the Freedom Caucus chairman making a bee-line for the White House?”

BUT OF COURSE: Facebook’s audit of alleged anti-conservative bias ongoing, won’t commit to releasing final report.

BREAKING: Ohio Man Arrested for Planning ISIS-Inspired Mass Shootings Against Synagogues in Toledo.

TYLER O’NEIL: Kavanaugh Support for Planned Parenthood May Doom Hopes of Roe v. Wade Repeal.

It’s a scene right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

THE PEOPLE’S PARTY: Establishment looks to crush liberals on Medicare for All.

This is Politico, so what could have been a straight reporting piece on an important fissure in the Democratic party instead reads like a Medicare-for-All-or-Else screed.

JIM GERAGHTY: James Comey, Democratic-Party Cheerleader.

Back when I reviewed former FBI director James Comey’s autobiography, I wrote:

The notion that everyone around Comey at the top level of the FBI hesitated to keep his promise to inform Congress because it could help Trump win the election doesn’t exactly dispel Trump’s claim of widespread bias against him. In Comey’s late-November private Oval Office meeting with the president, he blurts out to the outgoing Obama, “I dread the next four years.”

This is not a conspiracy of shadowy cigarette-smoking government men out of The X-Files, but it points to a disconcerting groupthink: Just about everybody at the top levels of the FBI, Department of Justice, U.S. national-security agencies, and the Obama administration thought Trump was a corrupt, deranged loon. No doubt Trump earned a lot of that criticism, but that groupthink meant the FBI’s top brass was ready to believe the worst about Trump, no matter the origin.

Around that time, I separately reported that retired FBI agents were . . . less than thrilled to see a former director becoming a hero of “The Resistance” and joking around with Stephen Colbert about the president. Other than Louis Freeh’s tempestuous relationship with Bill Clinton, most retired FBI directors retained nonpartisan reputations and largely stayed out of the spotlight after leaving law enforcement.

But that was then; today, Comey has become indistinguishable from the usual Democratic National Convention speakers.

Comey’s retirement from public service looks set to be surprisingly comfortable for a public servant.

AGING: What to Know About Rising STD Rates Among Seniors.

HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER KEVIN MCCARTHY: ‘Self-Policed’ Nature of Google to Be Probed at CEO Hearing. “What about the privacy of Americans? How long do they keep those searches that are supposed to be private that you go through?”

There’s room for bipartisanship on privacy issues, but will incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Silicon Valley Money) allow it?

FAILED (SOCIALIST) STATE: Brazil makes official intervention in state bordering Venezuela.

Brazilian President Michel Temer has signed a decree making official a federal “intervention” in the state of Roraima which borders Venezuela, the government’s official newspaper said on Monday.

Waves of Venezuelan migrants have entered the border area in recent months, seeking refuge from poverty and hunger in the neighboring country. The thousands of refugees are straining public services and the state’s finances.

Racism, straight up.

HUFFPO: Conservative Columnist Has A Wild Prediction For Trump’s Final Minutes In Office.

The “conservative” in question is Jen Rubin.

NEIGHBORLY: Russia building up forces near Crimea amid tensions with Ukraine, satellite photos show.

In the images taken on Saturday, three Russian Ilyushin -76 cargo planes were spotted in the Dzhankoi airbase in Crimea.

The images, captured by Imagesat International, appear to show that Russia is continuing to step up and consolidate its military forces in the Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

According to social media reports in Russia, Four IL-76 planes departed on December 6 from Anapa airport in Novorossiysk and landed in Dzhankoi.

One of those airplanes returned Saturday to Anapa, while the three remain on base.

Ilushin-76 cargo planes are used by the Russian Army to deliver outsized or heavy cargo unable to be carried on the ground. The cargo planes are also used for mobilizing large numbers of troops.

The best that could be said is that Moscow is merely trying to intimidate.

YOU GET ONE GUESS: Ocasio-Cortez Spox Refuses To Divulge Where She Stands On BDS Movement.

SPENGLER: Did the Deep State Sandbag President Trump with the Huawei Arrest? “The United States took the utterly unprecedented step of arranging the arrest of a prominent Chinese national in another country, namely Canada, over sanctions violations, which until now have been addressed with economic penalties, and attempting to extradite the Chinese national to face criminal charges in the United States. And the person in question is the daughter of the founder of Huawei, one of China’s most prominent business leaders. Nobody told the president as he sat down to negotiate with Xi Jinping? That doesn’t wash.”

RAND PAUL: Barr Nomination ‘Very Troubling’ as Far as Patriot Act, Civil Asset Forfeiture.

DANIEL MCCARTHY: The Case for Trump is Stronger Than Ever.

Look—what has really happened this past week is that Flynn, supposedly a key figure in the collusion conspiracy (after all, he talked to the Russians about sanctions during the presidential transition), has come through Mueller’s inquiry without being recommended for a jail sentence. He lied to investigators, which is a procedural crime. But Mueller apparently did not find anything more serious that would justify a prison term. Treason usually gets you at least that much.

Liberal pundits who have no way of knowing what’s going on inside Mueller’s investigation insist that Flynn’s virtual acquittal is actually really bad news for the president because it means Flynn is cooperating. Robert Mueller says so, and a federal prosecutor would never fib or hype his investigations in a politicized manner. What cooperation may mean, if anything, is anyone’s guess. But again, the president’s critics don’t need to guess: they know, with all the passion in their partisan hearts.

And that’s why the New Democratic Congress won’t be able to help but overplay their hand.

Related: Top House Democrats raise prospect of impeachment, jail for Trump.

TRADE: Deflation threat returns to haunt Chinese economy as risks from US trade war linger. “A fall in both consumer and producer price indexes was a result of weakness in demand from both Chinese consumers and investors and reflected their reluctance to spend as confidence in future growth is undermined by the trade war with the US. The figures add the challenge faced by the Chinese leadership in keeping economic growth on track ahead of the annual central economic work conference, where policies for next year will be determined.”

All this is happening as President Xi has set himself up as the one-man solution to China’s prosperity and security.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller/Comey Mania and Much, Much More. “Victoria Toensing has an op-ed over at FNC asking important questions that should should not get lost in the sheer volume of anti-Trump spinning over the weekend: who leaked the classified content of the Flynn/Kisylak phone call and who leaked Flynn’s name to the media? These are gross civil liberties violations and it seems like Mueller and the DOJ do not care. Maybe they don’t.”

THAT’S MORE MARKET SHARE FOR NORTH AMERICAN FRACKERS: OPEC and non-OPEC nations agree on 1.2M barrel per day production cut.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which starting in January will have 14 members after Qatar pulls out, will be responsible for reducing 0.8 million barrels per day. Participating non-OPEC members, of which Russia is the biggest producer, will reduce 0.4 million barrels, it added.

Saudi Arabia and Russia are two of the world’s three biggest producers. The United States, the world’s biggest crude oil producer, did not participate in the talks.

Huh. It’s almost as though the White House figures we can drill our way to lower prices.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: America’s war in Afghanistan is now Trump’s increasingly bloody problem. Is it time to declare defeat? “Thus far three U.S. presidents, six secretaries of defense and five chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have presided over a war in which no one has been able to define victory, let alone remotely succeed in winning. The Soviets tried the same decades ago, with equally catastrophic results.”

Comparing our endeavor to the Soviet’s is a bit silly — their Afghanistan war exposed the fragility of the Communist state and helped to bring it down. We’re in no such danger. But there’s nothing we can realistically hope to achieve there that we can’t do with a radically smaller footprint on the ground, following our anti-ISIS model in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

CHANGE? A lawsuit is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a Massachusetts rule that prohibits companies from campaign contributions while exempting unions from similar restrictions.

The pro-free market Goldwater Institute and Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance petitioned the high court to review the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s unanimous ruling approving campaign finance restrictions placed on for-profit businesses. The state court ruled in 1A Auto, Inc. and 126 Self Storage, Inc. v. Sullivan that the law did not infringe on the First Amendment rights of employers by preventing them from making contributions directly or indirectly on behalf of state or local candidates. While acknowledging that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a federal ban on independent expenditures inn Citizens United, the Massachusetts justices said it did not overturn the 2003 Beaumont decision affirming limits on corporate contributions.

“The Court reaffirmed the key distinction between contributions and independent expenditures, emphasizing that contributions present a special risk of quid pro quo corruption because, unlike independent expenditures, they are coordinated with candidates,” the September ruling says. “Experience confirms that, if corporate contributions were allowed, there would be a serious threat of quid pro quo corruption.”

It’s a good thing our public- and private-sector unions are completely free from corruption and always have been.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Was Fully Aware That Tracking Who People Call and Text Is Creepy But Did It Anyway.

The business team wanted to get Bluetooth permissions so it could push ads to people’s phones when they walked into a store. Meanwhile, the growth team, which is responsible for getting more and more people to join Facebook, wanted to get “Read Call Log Permission” so that Facebook could track everyone whom an Android user called or texted with in order to make better friend recommendations to them. (Yes, that’s how Facebook may have historically figured out with whom you went on one bad Tinder date and then plopped them into “People You May Know.”) According to internal emails recently seized by the UK Parliament, Facebook’s business team recognized that what the growth team wanted to do was incredibly creepy and was worried it was going to cause a PR disaster.

In a February 4, 2015, email that encapsulates the issue, Facebook Bluetooth Beacon product manager Mike Lebeau is quoted saying that the request for “read call log” permission was a “pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.”

I’ve had a question for a while now, but have never found an answer to it. When you give the Facebook app permission to open your photo library so you can post a picture to your timeline, exactly how much access does Facebook get and for how long?

THAT’S KIND OF THE POINT: Protests Threaten Macron’s Campaign to Remake France.

The Macron government deployed the full weight of France’s security apparatus on Saturday, but it wasn’t enough to contain a movement that authorities said mobilized 136,000 protesters. They included droves of rioters who waged pitched battles with police in the heart of the French capital and other major cities, lighting fires, smashing storefronts and leading to 135 injuries and more than 1,000 arrests.

The weekend violence left Mr. Macron cornered like at no other time in his presidency. Unable to control protesters through security measures, Mr. Macron is now facing calls to placate the masses by reversing course on his signature agenda: making France more economically competitive through sweeping changes to its labor market, taxes, public spending and pension system.

The 40-year-old former investment banker is scheduled to address the nation on Monday evening, officials said. Many French are calling for a shift in both policy and tone that discards the top-down leadership style that has marked his first year-and-a-half in office.

“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.

MICHAEL WALSH: Wanna Make Your Community Unaffordable? Fill It with Government Workers.

CHANGE? ‘Zombie PM Theresa May is facing a Brexit exit.’

Migration is a gaping hole in zombie May’s Brexit scam.

Myths and scaremongering mixed with public unease were the toxic mix that ignited the narrow vote for a cataclysmic wrench.

Yet we still don’t know what the Prime Minister would do three months before Britain’s due to leave Europe and two-and-a-half years after that referendum.

The glaring gaps in the PM’s plan –what replaces the movement of people with our 27 neighbours – has been put on the back burner.

Her Cabinet’s split on this, like so many other issues including fishing, is another reason she’ll be defeated tomorrow and toppled.

We’ll know soon enough.