By The Asssociated Press via NBCNews.com, Dec. 4

A fugitive Kentucky lawyer who escaped before facing sentencing for his central role in a massive Social Security fraud case has been captured in Honduras, officials said Monday.

The Honduras public magistrate's office said in a news release that Eric Conn was captured by a SWAT team as he came out of a restaurant in the coastal city of La Ceiba. The office said the arrest was "the product of arduous intelligence, surveillance and tailing by the agents."

U.S. federal agents spent months tracking Conn, who cut off his electronic monitor and fled in June. The flamboyant attorney was on home detention while awaiting sentencing, but he disappeared while in Lexington, Kentucky, at the permission of federal authorities to meet with his attorney and prosecutors [....]

By Trish Turner and Jack Date @ ABCNews.com, Dec. 4, 9:47 pm

[....] Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is rejecting Paul Manafort’s request to modify his terms of his confinement, because, in an explosive allegation, it says “as late as November 30, 2017, Manafort and a colleague were ghostwriting an editorial in English regarding his political work for Ukraine.”

In a court filing, Mueller’s team says that “Manafort worked on the draft with a long-time Russian colleague of Manafort’s, who is currently based in Russia and assessed to have ties to a Russian intelligence service.” [....]

"Benefits to marriage? You must be joking!"

Imagine that you’re in the middle of a job interview, and the interviewer asks you whether you think it’s important for women to wear bras to work. What would you do? Tell the interviewer that the question is inappropriate? Refuse to answer it? Would you feel angry that someone would ask you this question?

By Michael Kranish @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 2

Elton John blares so loudly on Donald Trump’s campaign plane that staffers can’t hear themselves think. Press secretary Hope Hicks uses a steamer to press Trump’s pants — while he is still wearing them. Trump screams at his top aides, who are subjected to expletive-filled tirades in which they get their “face ripped off.”

And Trump’s appetite seems to know no bounds when it comes to McDonald’s, with a dinner order consisting of “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted.”

The scenes are among the most surreal passages in a forthcoming book chronicling Trump’s path to the presidency co-written by Corey Lewandowski, who was fired as Trump’s campaign manager, and David Bossie, another top aide. The book, “Let Trump Be Trump,” paints a portrait of a campaign with an untested candidate and staff rocketing from crisis to crisis, in which Lewandowski and a cast of mostly neophyte political aides learn on the fly and ultimately accept Trump’s propensity to go angrily off message [.....]