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“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

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Really big jobs meeting today at the White House! 3 P.M.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to rule out the Kremlin’s request to question McFaul and other Americans. Asked during the daily press briefing if President Trump is open to the idea of having McFaul questioned by Russia, Sanders said President Trump is “going to meet with his team” to discuss the offer.

“There was some conversation about it,” between Trump and Putin, Sanders said, “but there wasn’t a commitment made on behalf of the United States. And the President will work with his team, and we’ll let you know if there’s an announcement on that front.”

“Let’s recall why Putin began making outrageous, false accusations against @McFaul,” tweeted Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. “Mike stood up for human rights and against Russian oppression. That terrified Putin. The fact that @realDonaldTrump won’t stand up for an American patriot is a travesty.”

Speaking to CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday, James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, described the potential of such an exchange with Putin as “crazy.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Clapper said. “To turn over any U.S. citizen, particularly a former ambassador, for the Russians to interrogate him? You’ve got to be kidding.”

McFaul, a Hoover fellow at Stanford University and the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, responded to the White House message forcefully on Twitter.

“I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin,” McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, wrote. “Not doing so creates moral equivalency” between a legitimate “US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin.”

“When Trump says Russia is no longer targeting America, that’s not how this American feels,” McFaul also tweeted. “Putin is most certainly targeting and intimidating me. And I’m an American.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) suggested that turning over McFaul for questioning would be grounds for impeaching Trump.

“Take this to the bank, @realDonaldTrump: you turn over former U.S. Ambassador @McFaul to Putin, you can count on me and millions others to swiftly make you an ex-president,” Swalwell tweeted.

“There’s no reason we would open up our evidence files, send our investigators over there to let them review that,” Swalwell also told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “That would be like a victim allowing the burglar to set up the home security system. That’s ridiculous.”

It betrayed a lamentable ignorance about Israeli society, which has a low rate of private gun ownership — reported at about 3.5 percent of the population. As an Israeli Ministry of Education spokesman told The Washington Post’s Ruth Eglash this year, “professionals deal with the security” in Israel’s schools, “not the teachers,” and not the children. Even in a country with compulsory military service, gun permit applicants “must justify their need to be armed” and civilians “are subjected to an array of restrictions on the types of guns they can own, on the amount of ammunition they can possess, as well as guidelines on where to keep their guns.”

Fossil fuel industry spent nearly $2 billion to kill U.S. climate action, new study finds

“I had a chance to speak with the president after his comments, and the president said ‘thank you very much,’ and was saying no to answering questions,” Sanders said. “The president and his administration are working very hard to make sure that Russia is unable to meddle in our elections as they have done in the past and as we have stated.”

But Sanders’ explanation makes no sense. If Trump was really saying “no” to answering questions in general, and not in response to the specific question the reporter asked him about Russia, then why did he spend the next block of time answering questions from reporters?

How stupid does she think people are?

Poll: Huge GOP majority backs Trump's Putin performance

Ambassadors have diplomatic immunity.

Poll: Huge GOP majority backs Trump's Putin performance