“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility. I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.” The outgoing head of the Office of Government Ethics is worried.

+ Meanwhile, President Trump continues to argue that most politicians would have taken the meeting with the Russians, and tweeted that “Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?” (You know, he has a point. Why didn’t the media cover the Hillary email story? If they had, she might have lost the election.)

+ “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life,” he said. “The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.” The New Yorker’s Peter Hessler on how Trump is transforming rural America.