President Trump announced on Tuesday he would direct the Justice Department to “propose regulations to ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns.” Speaking at a White House event honoring law enforcement officers, the president spoke alongside the attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

“I expect that these regulations will be finalized, Jeff, very soon,” Trump said. For months, the White House has said the president is considering ways to ban or limit these “bump stock” modifications. The shooter who killed dozens in Las Vegas last fall used these devices. An effort in Congress to ban the devices failed to materialize in the weeks after the Vegas shooting.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in her Tuesday briefing “the president supports not having the use of bump stocks” and said the DOJ had been in the midst of a proper regulatory review since late last year. In his official memorandum to the attorney general, Trump said that although he desires “swift and decisive action, I remain committed to the rule of law and to the procedures the law prescribes. Doing this the right way will ensure that the resulting regulation is workable and effective and leaves no loopholes for criminals to exploit.”

On the President’s Schedule—The White House will host on Wednesday what it’s calling a “listening session” with parents, teachers, and students from the Parkland, Florida, high school where a week before a gunman killed 17 during a shooting spree. Also attending will be “individuals who were impacted by past school shootings, including the Columbine and Sandy Hook tragedies,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday.

One More Thing—You should always listen to the Daily Standard podcast, with host Charlie Sykes, but Tuesday’s episode with my colleagues John McCormack and Jonathan V. Last is worth listening to for those interested in the gun issue. In particular, McCormack notes that the progressive hope for a new assault weapons ban is just a pipe dream until Democrats themselves come to a consensus on it. The last time the ban was up for a vote, 5 years ago, more than 10 Democrats voted against it. Listen to the whole podcast here.

Mark It Down— “Just last week, there was an incident that will be reported in the coming days, and another way that this president was tough on Russia.” —Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, February 20, 2018.

Following special counsel Robert Mueller’s surprise indictment last week of 13 Russian nationals for conspiring to destabilize American elections, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that President Trump had not denied that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

“It’s very clear that Russia meddled in the election,” Sanders told reporters. “It’s also very clear that it didn’t have an impact on the election. And it’s also very clear that the Trump campaign didn’t collude with the Russians in any way for this process to take place.”

Sanders’ comments followed a weekend in which Trump tweeted several times about the indictment, which he said showed his campaign had not colluded with Russians. Trump also suggested that the FBI could have prevented last week’s school shooting in Florida if they had not been busy investigating members of his campaign.

Asked why the White House has not yet implemented sanctions against Russia that Congress passed last year, Sanders responded that “the countries have to violate something in order for those sanctions to go in place, and that hasn’t necessarily happened.”

Mueller Watch—The special counsel continued its work with another surprise development on Tuesday. Mueller’s team secured a plea bargain from London-based attorney Alex van der Zwaan for lying to the FBI about matters pertaining to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates’s alleged illegal foreign lobbying and money laundering. My colleague Andrew Egger reports:

Van Der Zwaan came into contact with Manafort in 2012 while working with the international law firm Skadden Arps. Manafort, who was then a consultant for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, arranged for Skadden to be hired to prepare a report on corruption charges against one of Yanukovych’s political rivals, Yulia Tymoshenko.

According to the plea deal, Van Der Zwaan told the special counsel that his last communication with Gates was an “innocuous text message” in August 2016, while in reality he had spoken to Gates about the Tymoshenko report in September 2016, “and surreptitiously recorded the calls.” The plea also charges Van Der Zwaan with deleting emails sought by the special counsel.

The Tymoshenko report first appeared in the charges filed against Manafort and Gates last October. Prosecutors alleged that the defendants used the Van Der Zwaan report to lobby “multiple Members of Congress and their staffs about Ukraine sanctions, the validity of Ukraine elections, and the propriety of Yanukovych’s imprisoning his presidential rival, Yulia Tymoshenko.” That indictment also charged Manafort and Gates with secretly funding the Skadden report by funneling $4 million through an offshore account.

After Manafort and Gates were indicted, President Trump and his allies consistently downplayed the news by insisting that the alleged crimes took place “years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign.” Tuesday’s filing contradicts these claims, suggesting that Gates was still communicating with Van Der Zwaan about the former's illegal actions as late as September 2016, while he was still working with Manafort on the Trump campaign.