Morning Scoop
Wednesday Scoop: A Terribly Sad Conclusion
Plus, Cohen and Manafort in Double Court Drama
Welcome to the Morning Scoop for Wednesday, August 22, 2018. News? Yes, there was news yesterday, just a little.
Our team of student journalists are obsessed with news. If you know someone who’s phone is always blowing up with news alerts and can’t stop talking about what someone on CNN or Fox Newx said, they should be on our team.
Suspect Arrested for Murder of University of Iowa Student Mollie Tibbetts
Cristhian Bahena Rivera in an undated police photo.
Iowa authorities announced yesterday that a man from Mexico living in the U.S. illegally confessed to kidnapping Mollie Tibbetts, killing her and dumping her body in a field outside her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa.
24-year-old Cristhian Rivera was charged with first-degree murder yesterday. Officials say he led investigators to a body that is believed to be Tibbetts. The farm where Rivera was employed said he passed a government background check and did not know he was in the country illegally.
The news was seized on by Republicans in Iowa, as well as President Trump — who mentioned the crime at a rally in West Virginia last night — as an example of a US immigration system that needs to be fixed.
President Trump’s Former Personal Attorney Strikes Deal, Pleads Guilty to Eight Charges
Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court Tuesday to eight criminal charges, admitting that he purposely kept information from going public that would have been harmful to a presidential candidate during the 2016 election cycle.
CNN reports, “The charges against Cohen, an attorney for [President] Trump until earlier this year and a member of his inner circle throughout his presidential campaign, bring an end to a months-long investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. And they expose, through the criminal information filed against Cohen in court, that he acted with Trump and his allies…to suppress potentially damaging claims against the now-President.”
While Trump is not named, the court filing refers to an individual who had become president of the United States by January 2017. The President has made no comment on Cohen as of this morning.
President Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman Found Guilty
In an extraordinary day of legal decisions (and according to some observers, victories for Special Counsel Robert Mueller), a second former close associate of President Trump faced guilt in a courtroom yesterday.
Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud. The 69-year-old could face up to 80 years in prison.
Before a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, Trump said the charges have “nothing to do with Russian collusion.” Manafort was originally charged with 18 counts, but wasn’t convicted on 10, due to mistrial. He still faces a second set of charges in a Virginia court.
Today in a Tweet: Hurricane Lane
The storm could become the first landfalling hurricane in Hawaii in nearly 30 years…
Last But Not Least: Eagles’ ‘Greatest Hits’ Moonwalks Past MJ’s ‘Thriller’ as Best Selling Album of All Time
Rolling Stone reports that The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last tallied the sales for The Eagles’ “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” in 2006, with the album at 29x platinum — and in second place to Micheal Jackson’s “Thriller” — at that time.
Now, streams on platforms like Spotify and number of views of music videos on YouTube all count towards an album’s selling numbers, dramatically changing the methods for album data collection.
CMN’s tallies up the numbers and the facts in her story.
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