Story 1: Hope Returns To The White House — White Lies Resume — Videos
Hope Hicks returning to Trump White House as senior adviser
A Trump favorite is making a return after departing for the Fox Corporation.
By John Santucci and Katherine Faulders
February 13, 2020, 9:01 AM
Hope Hicks, formerly President Donald Trump’s most trusted and longest serving aide, is expected to return to the administration in the coming weeks, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.Hicks, who departed in early 2018, will return in the coming weeks as a senior adviser reporting to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Her official title will be counselor to the president.
Since her departure, she has served as the head of communications for the Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, among other entities owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Hicks served as Trump’s closest adviser, following the president from the campaign to the White House. She ended her tenure as the White House communications director in March 2018 while Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was ongoing.
News of her resignation came the day after Hicks testified before the House Intelligence Committee that she had occasionally told white lies on Trump’s behalf, according to a source familiar with the interview. Then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders denied that her departure was related to her testimony.
Hicks met with Mueller’s teams for multiple interviews as part of the probe into Russian interference and obstruction of justice by the president.
Since her departure, Hicks appeared before the House Judiciary committee. During the closed-door hearing, Hicks answered questions related to her time working on Trump’s 2016 campaign, but declined to comment on her work in the White House.
Transcripts of the hearing later released by the committee show the White House counsel argued Hicks was absolutely immune from answering questions about her time working for Trump during his presidency.
The White House also blocked Hicks from turning over documents subpoenaed by the committee.
Story 2: Attorney General Bill Barr Will Do The Right Thing — Stone Should Get A New Trial Due To Juror Foreperson Bias– Total Miscarriage of Justice In Political Prosecution of Stone to Silence Telling Truth To Power By A Great Public Speaker — Long List of Liars To Congress Not Prosecuted — Double Standard Justice — Revenge Recommendation of 9 Years For Lying To Congress! — Vacate Stone’s Conviction — Videos
Kevin McCarthy on Democrats’ unequal standard of justice exposed
Tucker: Fairness is the most important American idea
Tucker Carlson Tonight 2/13/20 | Fox News February 13, 2020
Attorney General William Barr speaks to ABC News’ Pierre Thomas (Full)
McConnell on Trump’s tweets: He should listen to Barr
Whitaker weighs in on Barr seeking a lighter sentence for Roger Stone
The ‘remarkable’ DOJ controversy over Roger Stone’s sentencing
Napolitano explains why Roger Stone is ‘absolutely entitled’ to a new trial
DOJ likely to lessen Roger Stone’s ‘extreme’ sentencing recommendation
Roger Stone jury foreperson’s anti-Trump social media posts surface
Tucker Carlson Calls For Roger Stone Pardon, Rips Media For Wanting Longer Term Than For Rapists
Trump weighs in on DOJ’s decision to reverse recommended prison sentence for Roger Stone
The ‘remarkable’ DOJ controversy over Roger Stone’s sentencing
Trump congratulates Barr for taking control of Roger Stone case
Trump lashes out at former Roger Stone prosecutors
Gowdy on Roger Stone: Nine years is a long sentence for lying to Congress
AG Barr: I’m not going to be bullied by the President
The Five’ reacts to DOJ overruling Roger Stone’s suggested sentence
Gingrich: By Super Tuesday you’ll realize how big a threat Bloomberg is
Alex Jones Comments on Roger Stone Verdict
Roger Stone found guilty on all counts in federal trial
Roger Stone, Dinesh D’Souza react to DOJ IG’s report
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Gowdy on Roger Stone charges, Dems’ progressive push in 2020
Christie: No reason for Stone raid except to intimidate
Alan Dershowitz reacts to Roger Stone’s indictment
Roger Stone Addresses Mueller Indictment Live | NowThis
Roger Stone | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union
Feb 13, 2018
Roger Stone – BBC HARDtalk 5th February 2018
Roger Stone: Inside the World of a Political Hitman
Roger Stone jury foreperson comes forward to defend prosecutors – but social media history of the failed Democrat candidate reveals she mocked his arrest, labeled Trump supporters racist and posed with ex-DNC chair Donna Brazil
Tomeka Hart revealed on Wednesday that she was foreperson on Stone jury
Hart unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Tennessee as a Democrat in 2012
She is also a former Memphis City Schools Board President
Her social media shows a long history of anti-Trump comments
She called Trump supporters racists and tweeted about Stone case before trial
The foreperson on the jury that convicted Roger Stone has come forward, and is revealed to be a failed Democrat candidate for Congress and activist vehemently opposed to President Donald Trump.
Tomeka Hart, a former Memphis City Schools Board President, came forward as the Stone jury foreperson in a Facebook post on Wednesday, voicing support for prosecutors in the case.
Hart confirmed to The Daily Memphian that she wrote the Facebook post, but she declined an interview with the newspaper.
Stone supporters were shocked when a review of Hart’s social media posts showed that she posted on Twitter mocking Stone’s dramatic arrest prior to being seated on the jury, and frequently denounced Trump, including calling the president and his supporters racists.
It’s unclear whether Stone’s political views and social media history were disclosed during jury selection, potentially raising questions about fairness that could impact the verdict on appeal.
Hart (left) is seen with former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile
Hart retweeted a post about Stone’s arrest in January 2019, months before the trial
Hart came forward amid controversy over Stone’s sentencing, after the four prosecutors on the case withdrew in response to Trump criticizing the government’s recommendation that Stone be sentenced to nine years in prison.
Trump has said that the prosecution of his former campaign advisor Stone prosecution for obstruction, false statements, and witness tampering was handled in a manner that was ‘ridiculous’ and an ‘insult to our country.’
‘I have kept my silence for months. Initially, it was for my safety. Then, I decided to remain silent out of fear of politicizing the matter,’ Hart said in her Facebook post on Wednesday.
‘But I can’t keep quiet any longer. I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis – the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial,’ Hart wrote, referring to the prosecutors who resigned in protest.
‘It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice. For that, I wanted to speak up for them and ask you to join me in thanking them for their service,’ she said.
Hart unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012, and is an activist who has participated in anti-Trump rallies and protests
Hart unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012, and is an activist who has participated in anti-Trump rallies and protests.
Immediately, journalists and Trump supporters began scouring Hart’s social media history, finding a trove of anti-Trump sentiment.
Independent journalist Mike Cernovich was the first to report on Hart’s extensive history of anti-Trump social media posts.
In January 2019, Hart also re-tweeted a post by pundit Bakari Sellers mocking Stone’s arrest, and suggesting that racism was the reason conservatives were upset about the use of force in the FBI’s armed pre-dawn raid on his home.
Months later, Hart was impaneled on Stone’s jury. On the day the jury convicted him, she posted emojis of hearts and fist pumps.
rt has an extensive history of posting her unfavorable views about Trump
Meanwhile, it emerged that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had denied a defense request to strike a potential juror on the case, who was an Obama-era press official with admitted anti-Trump views.
That juror’s husband worked at the same Justice Department division that handled the probe leading to Stone’s prosecution.
Another Stone juror, Seth Cousins, donated to former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke and other progressive causes, federal election records reviewed by Fox News show.
Barr blasts Trump’s tweets on Stone case: ‘Impossible for me to do my job’: ABC News Exclusive
The AG spoke with ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
By Anne Flaherty
February 13, 2020, 3:34 PM
In an exclusive interview, Attorney General Bill Barr told ABC News on Thursday that President Donald Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case” but should stop tweeting about the Justice Department because his tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.”Barr’s comments are a rare break with a president who the attorney general has aligned himself with and fiercely defended. But it also puts Barr in line with many of Trump’s supporters on Capitol Hill who say they support the president but wish he’d cut back on his tweets.
“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
When asked if he was prepared for the consequences of criticizing the president – his boss – Barr said “of course” because his job is to run the Justice Department and make decisions on “what I think is the right thing to do.”
In a stunning reversal, the Justice Department overruled a recommendation by its own prosecution team that Stone spend seven to nine years in jail and told a judge that such a punishment – which was in line with sentencing guidelines – “would not be appropriate.”
The about-face raised serious questions about whether Barr had intervened on behalf of the president’s friend. It also raised questions about whether Trump personally pressured the Justice Department, either directly or indirectly.
In the interview with ABC News, Barr fiercely defended his actions and said it had nothing to do with the president. He said he was supportive of Stone’s convictions but thought the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years was excessive. When news outlets reported the seven to nine year sentencing recommendation last Monday, Barr said he thought it was spin.
Barr said he told his staff that night that the Justice Department has to amend its recommendation. Hours later, the president tweeted that it was “horrible and very unfair” and that “the real crimes were on the other side.”
“Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Trump tweeted.
The blowback from such an unprecedented move by the Justice Department leadership was immediate, both internally among the rank-and-file and in Congress. The entire four-man DOJ prosecution team withdrew from the case, and one prosecutor resigned from the Justice Department entirely. Sen. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Judiciary Committee that oversees the Justice Department and one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, said the president should not have tweeted about an ongoing case.
The Justice Department, while led by a president appointee and Cabinet member, is tasked with enforcing the law and defending the interests of the U.S. without political influence.
Barr said Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet put him in a bad position. He insists he had already discussed with staff that the sentencing recommendation was too long.
“Do you go forward with what you think is the right decision or do you pull back because of the tweet? And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be,” he said.
Barr also told ABC News he was “a little surprised” that the prosecution team withdrew from the case and said he hadn’t spoken to the team.
He said it was “preposterous” to suggest that he “intervened” in the case as much as he acted to resolve a dispute within the department on a sentencing recommendation.
Trump has been pleased with Barr’s actions on Stone, praising him on Twitter. Trump on Wednesday said he was “not concerned about anything” about the resignations at the Justice Department and suggested the prosecutors “should go back to school and learn.”
“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” Trump tweeted this week, after all prosecutors assigned to the case quit.
Trump has repeatedly come under fire for trying to influence the Justice Department, including forcing out his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in 2018 after Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. Early in his presidency, Trump also encouraged then-FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe into Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, according to a memo Comey wrote at the time.
When asked earlier this week if he would pardon Stone, Trump said: “I don’t want to talk about that now.”
“If (Trump) were to say, ‘Go investigate somebody because’—and you sense it’s because they’re a political opponent, then the attorney general shouldn’t carry that out, wouldn’t carry that out,” Barr said.
When asked if he expects the president to react to his criticism of the tweets, Barr said: “I hope he will react.”
“And respect it?” ABC’s Thomas asked.
“Yes,” Barr said.
Senior level White House sources insisted to ABC News that the president and top aides were unaware of Barr’s intentions in the interview and were informed of the content only just before it aired.
The White House had no immediate comment.
ABC News’ Jack Date, Alexander Mallin, John Santucci, Katherine Faulders, Justin Fishel, Liz Alesse and Jordyn Phelps contributed to this report.
Donald Trump goes after Obama-appointed judge who will sentence Roger Stone claiming she ‘put Paul Manafort in solitary’ after denying overruling prosecutors’ demand to jail dirty trickster for nine years
Trump found a new target on Twitter after a day of drama over the sentencing of Roger Stone, his one-time consigliere: the judge who will sentence him
Trump wrongly suggested that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had ‘put Paul Manafort in solitary,’ which she did not do
Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, is due to sentence Stone later this month for lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering
Prosecutors had asked on Monday for Stone to be jailed for maximum of nine years but Trump tweeted early Tuesday it was a ‘miscarriage of justice!’
Hours later the Department of Justice announced that leaders thought the demand was ‘excessive,’ overruling the prosecutors – who quit one by one
President Donald Trump on Tuesday attacked the federal judge who will sentence Roger Stone – after an extraordinary 24 hours saw the entire prosecution quit after their call to jail the dirty trickster for nine years was overruled.
Trump went after U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson accusing her of ‘putting Paul Manafort in solitary confinement something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure.’
In fact Manafort’s prison conditions were set by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is ultimately overseen by Bill Barr, the attorney general; Berman Jackson remanded him in custody for breaching bail conditions and was one of two judges to sentence him to prison time.
Berman Jackson has scheduled a sentencing hearing for Stone on February 20, when she will decide his punishment for lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering.
But that process had already been thrown into chaos by Trump and his Justice Department on Tuesday, after prosecutors on Monday calling for Stone to get nine years in prison.
First Trump tweeted just after midnight on Tuesday that the nine years demand was a ‘miscarriage of justice,’ then just before midday the Department of Justice overruled the prosecutors and said senior leaders found nine years ‘excessive.’
Trump rant: The president tweeted a series of claims about the investigation into Roger Stone, including a false suggestion that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had put Paul Manafort in solitary confinement, and that John Podesta’s brother Tony had escaped prosecution; the Department of Justice had edned an investigation into Podesta in September
New target: Amy Berman Jackson, the Obama-appointed federal judge who will sentence Roger Stone, found herself in Trump’s twitter crosshairs after a day of unprecedented drama involving the Department of Justice
Within hours the four career prosecutors quit the case one by one, and Trump was questioned in the Oval Office on whether he ordered them to be overruled.
He denied it but said he had the power to do so if he had wanted to, called the recommendation ‘ridiculous,’ said the prosecutors should be ‘ashamed’ for a case he called a ‘disgrace.’
Attacking Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, now puts Trump on a collision course with John Roberts, the Chief Justice, who presided over his impeachment acquittal last week.
Roberts had hit Trump hard in November 2018 when the president had lashed out at a judge for ruling against an immigrant measure calling him an ‘Obama judge.’
In response Roberts said: ‘We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.
‘What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.
‘That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.’
Trump also tweeted that ‘a swamp creature with “pull” was just sentenced to two months in jail for a similar thing that they want Stone to serve 9 years for.’
That was an apparent reference to James Wolfe, a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer who was jailed for two months in December – by a different federal judge – for lying to the FBI.
Wolfe had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with the media while they investigated a leak of classified material. Trump had gleefully tweeted that the FBI ‘caught a leaker,’ something with which Wolfe was not charged.
Trump’s widening attacks came after he denied asking his attorney general to roll back prosecutors’ recommendation that longtime advisor Stone face serious jail time.
The Department of Justice dramatically reversed its demand to jail Stone for up to nine years in a move announced Tuesday – hours after Donald Trump slammed it on Twitter as a ‘miscarriage of justice.’
The reversal prompted the extraordinary decision by three experienced federal prosecutors to remove themselves from the case – with one resigning his position with the government entirely.
Trump stood by his decision Tuesday afternoon, calling the original recommendation a ‘disgrace,’ and terming the proposed sentence ‘ridiculous.’
Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Donald Trump’s confidant Roger Stone to serve between seven and nine years in prison after his conviction in November 2019
Trump denies asking Justice Department to review Stone’s case
‘I thought it was ridiculous,’ Trump said.
‘No I didn’t speak to the Jus – I’d be able to do it if I wanted. I have the absolute right to do it. I stay out of things to a degree that people wouldn’t believe.
But I didn’t speak to them. I thought the (original) recommendation was ridiculous, I thought the whole prosecution was ridiculous,’ Trump vented. ‘I look at others that haven’t been prosecutors.’
He said he considered it an ‘insult to our country.’ He called them ‘the same Mueller people that put everybody through hell.’
But he also maintained: ‘I have not been involved.’
‘I think it’s a disgrace. See what happens.’
Trump declined to say whether he was considering commuting Stone’s sentence, whatever it turns out to be. But he did suggest another man he considers a political enemy, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, might face a military investigation.
‘We sent him on his way to a much different location, and the military can handle him any way they want. General Milley has him now. I congratulate General Milley,’ Trump said, referencing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley. ‘He can have him. And his brother also,’ Trump said. ‘We’ll find out,’ he added, without explanation.
According to its updated filing, which came after Trump’s overnight tweets: ‘The defendant committed serious offenses and deserves a sentence of incarceration that is ‘sufficient, but not greater than necessary’ to satisfy the factors set forth in’ sentencing guidelines.
‘Based on the facts known to the government, a sentence of between 87 to 108 months’ imprisonment, however, could be considered excessive and unwarranted … Ultimately, the government defers to the Court as to what specific sentence is appropriate under the facts and circumstances of this case,’ the updated memo said.
A senior Justice Department official told ABC News “it does appear” the the prosecutors asked to be taken off the case as a form of protest. But the official denied Trump’s nearly 2 am tweet played a role in the turnaround, calling it an ‘inconvenient coincidence.’
Stone has been a Trump confidant for decades, and served as an informal advisor during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s denial came after prosecutors filed a new memo in the Stone case leaving it to the judge to recommend the appropriate sentence.
Leaders at the department, which is headed by Attorney General Bill Barr, found it extreme and excessive, and disproportionate to Stone’s offenses, one official said.
Shortly after the announcement, the lead prosecutor in the case, Aaron Zelinsky, used a court filing to announce that he had resigned ‘effective immediately’ as a special assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He retains a federal post in Maryland. A second, Jonathan Kravis, followed him shortly afterwards, resigning from government service as an assistant U.S. attorney.
A third federal prosecutor, Adam Jed, also withdrew as counsel to the government in the case. Later Tuesday, it was revealed that prosecutor Michael Marando withdrew from the case.
Kravis served in the public integrity of the Justice Department, served in the White House counsel’s office under Barack Obama, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Jed clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
All four used court filings to announce their departures, apparently to the surprise of their own colleagues – in an unmistakable sign of protest.
Zelinsky was a member of Mueller’s team, but remained after Mueller departed to work on the Stone case.
Trump had tweeted in the early hours of Tuesday morning: ‘This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!’
Just before midday, the DOJ announced its walk back but one official told Fox News the decision had been made before Trump’s Twitter rant.
All three were seasoned prosecutors who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
The official did not explain why the reversal had not been announced until after the tweet. The DOJ has not said what sentence it will now seek.
The move prompted immediate anger and derision from Democrats with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying: ‘They’ll probably recommend the presidential medal of freedom!’
He said he was asking the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate whether Bill Barr had directed the reversal.
Veteran ‘dirty trickster’ Stone is due to face sentencing by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson on February 20, after a jury in November found him guilty on seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering.
Attack: Democratic congressman Bill Pascrell likened Trump and the DOJ’s move to a banana republic
Trump tweeted Monday night: ”This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!’ (pictured: at a campaign rally in Manchester last night)
Prosecutors will now have to ask the judge for permission to abandon their initial recommendation and submit a new one.
‘We look forward to reviewing the government’s supplemental filing,’ Stone’s lawyer, Grant Smith, said in an email to Reuters.
It is extremely rare for Justice Department leaders to reverse the decision of its own prosecutors on a sentencing recommendation, particularly after that recommendation has been submitted to the court. Normally, United States attorneys have wide latitude to recommend sentences on cases that they prosecuted.
Sentencing decisions are ultimately up to the judge, who in this case may side with the original Justice Department recommendation.
Long-time consigliere: Roger Stone has been advising Donald Trump on politics for more than 20 years, including in 1999 during his first putative White House run
Jackson, the judge, has repeatedly scolded Stone for his out-of-court behavior, which included a social media post he made of the judge with what appeared to be crosshairs of a gun.
The judge barred Stone from social media last July after concluding that she repeatedly flouted his gag order.
Besides, judges invariably frown upon crimes that they see as perverting the functions of the criminal justice system, such as making false statements or obstructing an investigation.
The Justice Department plans to refile the recommendation later Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors also recently softened their sentencing position onFlynn, saying that they would not oppose a probation of punishment after initially saying that he deserved up to six months in prison for lying to the FBI. The Flynn prosecution is also being handled by the U.S. Attorney´s office in Washington.
The White House referred questions about the decision to the Justice Department.
Stone is one of several people close to Trump who faced charges stemming from then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump has the power to pardon people for federal crimes, although he has yet to use it in the cases of other former aides convicted in the wake of the Mueller investigations.
His tweet hunted he could use that power, or his power to commute sentences if Stone were to get the level of custody demanded by prosecutors.
Stone’s own defense had asked for probation.
Senior Democratic lawmakers expressed amazement at the move but Trump loyalists said they now hoped Mike Flynn – the disgraced former national security advisor who is currently trying to get out of his guilty plea to lying to the FBI – would also get ‘clemency.’
As sentencing approaches, Roger Stone turns to former mob lawyer for help
Roger Stone is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 20.
By
Ali Dukakis
February 13, 2020, 5:29 PM
With his sentencing fast approaching, Roger Stone is bolstering his defense team with a veteran criminal defense attorney whose past roster of clients included John Gotti Jr. and other high-profile figures allegedly involved in organized crime.New York attorney Seth Ginsberg has an extensive background in criminal defense work. In a filing this week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson granted Stone’s request to bring Ginsberg onto his team.
“Roger has an excellent team of attorneys and I’m very pleased he’s asked me to assist them,” Ginsberg told ABC News on Thursday. Ginsberg added that he was brought on to help Stone’s legal team with their sentencing strategy.
Ginsberg has had a colorful career inside and outside the courthouse. At one point, in 2010, he was banned from a Manhattan federal detention center after he was caught walking in with marijuana in his bag while on his way to visit an alleged associate of the Gambino crime family.
He also previously represented an alleged member of the Luchese crime family.
Last November, Stone — President Donald Trump‘s longtime friend and former campaign adviser — was tried and found guilty of all charges in the seven-count indictment brought against him by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Stone, who pleaded not guilty to all charges, has maintained his innocence since his initial arrest during a pre-dawn FBI raid on his home Jan. 25, 2019, was found guilty of obstructing a congressional inquiry, witness tampering, and five counts of lying to Congress.
When prosecutors filed a memo recommending a sentencing guideline of seven to nine years in prison for Stone on Monday evening, it prompted Trump to tweet overnight that the recommendation reflected a “miscarriage of justice” and was a “horrible and very unfair situation.”
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice made a highly scrutinized decision to overrule the sentencing recommendation made by the federal prosecutors who successfully convicted Stone of all counts brought against him by Mueller’s team. The reversal prompted all four line prosecutors on the case to withdraw from the case, and one of the four to leave DOJ entirely.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News on Thursday, Attorney General Bill Barr told fiercely defended his actions in the case and said the Justice Department’s reversal on Stone’s sentencing recommendation had nothing to do with the president. He said he was supportive of Stone’s convictions but thought the initial sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years was excessive.
Judge Jackson is scheduled to sentence Stone on Feb. 20.
(CNSNews.com) – The federal government set records for both the amount of taxes it collected and the amount of money it spent in the first four months of fiscal 2020 (October through January), according to data released today in the Monthly Treasury Statement.
So far in fiscal 2020, the federal government has collected $1,178,800,000,000 in total taxes.
The previous high for total federal taxes collected in the first four months of the fiscal year came in fiscal 2018, when the Treasury collected $1,172,088,080,000 in constant December 2019 dollars.
While the federal government was collecting that record $1,178,800,000 in federal taxes in October through January of this fiscal year, it was spending a record total of $1,567,985,000,000.
That was up $116,800,410,000 from the $1,451,184,590,000 (in constant December 2019 dollars) that the federal government spent in the first four months of fiscal 2019.
Before fiscal 2019, the record for federal spending in the first four months of the fiscal year had been set in fiscal 2009. That year in October through January, the federal government spent $1,423,253,530,000 (in constant December 2019 dollars). Part of the spending at the beginning of that fiscal year was driven by the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which President George W. Bush signed into law at the beginning of October 2008 to bail out insolvent banks.
In the first four months of this fiscal year—while collecting a record $1,178,800,000,000 and spending a record $1,567,985,000,000—the federal government ran a deficit of $389,185,000,000.
The Department of Health and Human Services led all federal agencies in spending in the first four months of fiscal 2020 with outlays of $443,759,000,000. The Social Security Administration was second with $380,623,000,000 in spending. The Defense Department and Military Programs was third with $237,702,000,000.
Story 1: Understanding The November Jobs Report With Increased U-3 Unemployment Rate of 3.6% and Labor Participation Rate of 63.3% With Estimated 128,000 New Jobs Created — Videos
Watch Wall Street five experts react to the October jobs report
Pay attention to the manufacturing data in the jobs report, says NationsShares’ Scott Nations
October Jobs Report: 128,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 3.6 Percent | Morning Joe | MSNBC
Nightly Business Report – November 1, 2019
Alternate Unemployment Charts
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
Series Id: LNS11000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level
Labor force status: Civilian labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
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157017
157616
157014
157008
157165
156745
157188
157502
158080
2016
158371(1)
158705
159079
158891
158700
158899
159150
159582
159810
159768
159629
159779
2017
159693(1)
159854
160036
160169
159910
160124
160383
160706
161190
160436
160626
160636
2018
161123(1)
161900
161646
161551
161667
162129
162209
161802
162055
162694
162821
163240
2019
163229(1)
163184
162960
162470
162646
162981
163351
163922
164039
164364
1 : Data affected by changes in population controls.
Labor Force Participation Rate
63.3%
Series Id: LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
67.3
67.3
67.3
67.3
67.1
67.1
66.9
66.9
66.9
66.8
66.9
67.0
2001
67.2
67.1
67.2
66.9
66.7
66.7
66.8
66.5
66.8
66.7
66.7
66.7
2002
66.5
66.8
66.6
66.7
66.7
66.6
66.5
66.6
66.7
66.6
66.4
66.3
2003
66.4
66.4
66.3
66.4
66.4
66.5
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
65.9
2004
66.1
66.0
66.0
65.9
66.0
66.1
66.1
66.0
65.8
65.9
66.0
65.9
2005
65.8
65.9
65.9
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.0
66.0
2006
66.0
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.2
66.3
66.4
2007
66.4
66.3
66.2
65.9
66.0
66.0
66.0
65.8
66.0
65.8
66.0
66.0
2008
66.2
66.0
66.1
65.9
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.0
66.0
65.9
65.8
2009
65.7
65.8
65.6
65.7
65.7
65.7
65.5
65.4
65.1
65.0
65.0
64.6
2010
64.8
64.9
64.9
65.2
64.9
64.6
64.6
64.7
64.6
64.4
64.6
64.3
2011
64.2
64.1
64.2
64.2
64.1
64.0
64.0
64.1
64.2
64.1
64.1
64.0
2012
63.7
63.8
63.8
63.7
63.7
63.8
63.7
63.5
63.6
63.8
63.6
63.7
2013
63.7
63.4
63.3
63.4
63.4
63.4
63.3
63.3
63.2
62.8
63.0
62.9
2014
62.9
62.9
63.1
62.8
62.9
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
2015
62.9
62.7
62.6
62.7
62.9
62.6
62.6
62.6
62.4
62.5
62.6
62.7
2016
62.7
62.8
62.9
62.8
62.7
62.7
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
62.7
62.7
2017
62.9
62.9
62.9
62.9
62.8
62.8
62.9
62.9
63.1
62.7
62.8
62.7
2018
62.7
63.0
62.9
62.8
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.7
62.7
62.9
62.9
63.1
2019
63.2
63.2
63.0
62.8
62.8
62.9
63.0
63.2
63.2
63.3
Employment Level
158,510,000
Series Id: LNS12000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Employment Level
Labor force status: Employed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
136559(1)
136598
136701
137270
136630
136940
136531
136662
136893
137088
137322
137614
2001
137778
137612
137783
137299
137092
136873
137071
136241
136846
136392
136238
136047
2002
135701
136438
136177
136126
136539
136415
136413
136705
137302
137008
136521
136426
2003
137417(1)
137482
137434
137633
137544
137790
137474
137549
137609
137984
138424
138411
2004
138472(1)
138542
138453
138680
138852
139174
139556
139573
139487
139732
140231
140125
2005
140245(1)
140385
140654
141254
141609
141714
142026
142434
142401
142548
142499
142752
2006
143150(1)
143457
143741
143761
144089
144353
144202
144625
144815
145314
145534
145970
2007
146028(1)
146057
146320
145586
145903
146063
145905
145682
146244
145946
146595
146273
2008
146378(1)
146156
146086
146132
145908
145737
145532
145203
145076
144802
144100
143369
2009
142152(1)
141640
140707
140656
140248
140009
139901
139492
138818
138432
138659
138013
2010
138438(1)
138581
138751
139297
139241
139141
139179
139438
139396
139119
139044
139301
2011
139250(1)
139394
139639
139586
139624
139384
139524
139942
140183
140368
140826
140902
2012
141584(1)
141858
142036
141899
142206
142391
142292
142291
143044
143431
143333
143330
2013
143292(1)
143362
143316
143635
143882
143999
144264
144326
144418
143537
144479
144778
2014
145150(1)
145134
145648
145667
145825
146247
146399
146530
146778
147427
147404
147615
2015
148150(1)
148053
148122
148491
148802
148765
148815
149175
148853
149270
149506
150164
2016
150622(1)
150934
151146
150963
151074
151104
151450
151766
151877
151949
152150
152276
2017
152128(1)
152417
152958
153150
152920
153176
153456
153591
154399
153847
153945
154065
2018
154482(1)
155213
155160
155216
155539
155592
155964
155604
156069
156582
156803
156945
2019
156694(1)
156949
156748
156645
156758
157005
157288
157878
158269
158510
1 : Data affected by changes in population controls.
Unemployment Level
5,855,000
Series Id: LNS13000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Level
Labor force status: Unemployed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
5708
5858
5733
5481
5758
5651
5747
5853
5625
5534
5639
5634
2001
6023
6089
6141
6271
6226
6484
6583
7042
7142
7694
8003
8258
2002
8182
8215
8304
8599
8399
8393
8390
8304
8251
8307
8520
8640
2003
8520
8618
8588
8842
8957
9266
9011
8896
8921
8732
8576
8317
2004
8370
8167
8491
8170
8212
8286
8136
7990
7927
8061
7932
7934
2005
7784
7980
7737
7672
7651
7524
7406
7345
7553
7453
7566
7279
2006
7064
7184
7072
7120
6980
7001
7175
7091
6847
6727
6872
6762
2007
7116
6927
6731
6850
6766
6979
7149
7067
7170
7237
7240
7645
2008
7685
7497
7822
7637
8395
8575
8937
9438
9494
10074
10538
11286
2009
12058
12898
13426
13853
14499
14707
14601
14814
15009
15352
15219
15098
2010
15046
15113
15202
15325
14849
14474
14512
14648
14579
14516
15081
14348
2011
14013
13820
13737
13957
13855
13962
13763
13818
13948
13594
13302
13093
2012
12797
12813
12713
12646
12660
12692
12656
12471
12115
12124
12005
12298
2013
12471
11950
11689
11760
11654
11751
11335
11279
11270
11136
10787
10404
2014
10202
10349
10380
9702
9859
9460
9608
9599
9262
8990
9090
8717
2015
8903
8610
8504
8526
8814
8249
8194
7990
7892
7918
7995
7916
2016
7749
7771
7932
7928
7626
7795
7700
7817
7933
7819
7480
7503
2017
7565
7437
7078
7019
6991
6948
6927
7115
6791
6588
6682
6572
2018
6641
6687
6486
6335
6128
6537
6245
6197
5986
6112
6018
6294
2019
6535
6235
6211
5824
5888
5975
6063
6044
5769
5855
Unemployment Rate
3.6%
Series Id: LNS14000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Rate
Labor force status: Unemployment rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
4.0
4.1
4.0
3.8
4.0
4.0
4.0
4.1
3.9
3.9
3.9
3.9
2001
4.2
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.3
4.5
4.6
4.9
5.0
5.3
5.5
5.7
2002
5.7
5.7
5.7
5.9
5.8
5.8
5.8
5.7
5.7
5.7
5.9
6.0
2003
5.8
5.9
5.9
6.0
6.1
6.3
6.2
6.1
6.1
6.0
5.8
5.7
2004
5.7
5.6
5.8
5.6
5.6
5.6
5.5
5.4
5.4
5.5
5.4
5.4
2005
5.3
5.4
5.2
5.2
5.1
5.0
5.0
4.9
5.0
5.0
5.0
4.9
2006
4.7
4.8
4.7
4.7
4.6
4.6
4.7
4.7
4.5
4.4
4.5
4.4
2007
4.6
4.5
4.4
4.5
4.4
4.6
4.7
4.6
4.7
4.7
4.7
5.0
2008
5.0
4.9
5.1
5.0
5.4
5.6
5.8
6.1
6.1
6.5
6.8
7.3
2009
7.8
8.3
8.7
9.0
9.4
9.5
9.5
9.6
9.8
10.0
9.9
9.9
2010
9.8
9.8
9.9
9.9
9.6
9.4
9.4
9.5
9.5
9.4
9.8
9.3
2011
9.1
9.0
9.0
9.1
9.0
9.1
9.0
9.0
9.0
8.8
8.6
8.5
2012
8.3
8.3
8.2
8.2
8.2
8.2
8.2
8.1
7.8
7.8
7.7
7.9
2013
8.0
7.7
7.5
7.6
7.5
7.5
7.3
7.2
7.2
7.2
6.9
6.7
2014
6.6
6.7
6.7
6.2
6.3
6.1
6.2
6.1
5.9
5.7
5.8
5.6
2015
5.7
5.5
5.4
5.4
5.6
5.3
5.2
5.1
5.0
5.0
5.1
5.0
2016
4.9
4.9
5.0
5.0
4.8
4.9
4.8
4.9
5.0
4.9
4.7
4.7
2017
4.7
4.7
4.4
4.4
4.4
4.3
4.3
4.4
4.2
4.1
4.2
4.1
2018
4.1
4.1
4.0
3.9
3.8
4.0
3.9
3.8
3.7
3.8
3.7
3.9
2019
4.0
3.8
3.8
3.6
3.6
3.7
3.7
3.7
3.5
3.6
Not in Labor Force
95,481,000
Series Id: LNS15000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Not in Labor Force
Labor force status: Not in labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
69142
69120
69338
69267
69853
69876
70398
70401
70645
70782
70579
70488
2001
70088
70409
70381
70956
71414
71592
71526
72136
71676
71817
71876
72010
2002
72623
72010
72343
72281
72260
72600
72827
72856
72554
73026
73508
73675
2003
73960
74015
74295
74066
74268
73958
74767
75062
75249
75324
75280
75780
2004
75319
75648
75606
75907
75903
75735
75730
76113
76526
76399
76259
76581
2005
76808
76677
76846
76514
76409
76673
76721
76642
76739
76958
77138
77394
2006
77339
77122
77161
77318
77359
77317
77535
77451
77757
77634
77499
77376
2007
77506
77851
77982
78818
78810
78671
78904
79461
79047
79532
79105
79238
2008
78554
79156
79087
79429
79102
79314
79395
79466
79790
79736
80189
80380
2009
80529
80374
80953
80762
80705
80938
81367
81780
82495
82766
82865
83813
2010
83349
83304
83206
82707
83409
84075
84199
84014
84347
84895
84590
85240
2011
85441
85637
85623
85603
85834
86144
86383
86111
85940
86308
86312
86589
2012
87888
87765
87855
88239
88100
88073
88405
88803
88613
88429
88836
88722
2013
88900
89516
89990
89780
89827
89803
90156
90355
90481
91708
91302
91563
2014
91563
91603
91230
92070
91938
92107
92016
92099
92406
92240
92350
92695
2015
92671
93237
93454
93249
92839
93649
93868
93931
94580
94353
94245
93856
2016
94026
93872
93689
94077
94475
94498
94470
94272
94281
94553
94911
94963
2017
94389
94392
94378
94419
94857
94833
94769
94651
94372
95330
95323
95473
2018
95657
95033
95451
95721
95787
95513
95633
96264
96235
95821
95886
95649
2019
95010
95208
95577
96223
96215
96057
95874
95510
95599
95481
U-6 Unemployment Rate
7.0%
Series Id: LNS13327709
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (seas) Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus marg attached
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
7.1
7.2
7.1
6.9
7.1
7.0
7.0
7.1
7.0
6.8
7.1
6.9
2001
7.3
7.4
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.9
7.8
8.1
8.7
9.3
9.4
9.6
2002
9.5
9.5
9.4
9.7
9.5
9.5
9.6
9.6
9.6
9.6
9.7
9.8
2003
10.0
10.2
10.0
10.2
10.1
10.3
10.3
10.1
10.4
10.2
10.0
9.8
2004
9.9
9.7
10.0
9.6
9.6
9.5
9.5
9.4
9.4
9.7
9.4
9.2
2005
9.3
9.3
9.1
8.9
8.9
9.0
8.8
8.9
9.0
8.7
8.7
8.6
2006
8.4
8.4
8.2
8.1
8.2
8.4
8.5
8.4
8.0
8.2
8.1
7.9
2007
8.4
8.2
8.0
8.2
8.2
8.3
8.4
8.4
8.4
8.4
8.4
8.8
2008
9.2
9.0
9.1
9.2
9.7
10.1
10.5
10.8
11.0
11.8
12.6
13.6
2009
14.2
15.2
15.8
15.9
16.5
16.5
16.4
16.7
16.7
17.1
17.1
17.1
2010
16.7
17.0
17.1
17.1
16.6
16.4
16.4
16.5
16.8
16.6
16.9
16.6
2011
16.2
16.0
15.9
16.1
15.8
16.1
15.9
16.1
16.4
15.8
15.5
15.2
2012
15.2
15.0
14.5
14.6
14.7
14.8
14.8
14.6
14.8
14.4
14.4
14.4
2013
14.6
14.4
13.8
14.0
13.8
14.2
13.8
13.6
13.5
13.6
13.1
13.1
2014
12.7
12.6
12.6
12.3
12.2
12.0
12.1
12.0
11.7
11.5
11.4
11.2
2015
11.3
11.0
10.8
10.8
10.9
10.4
10.3
10.2
10.0
9.8
10.0
9.9
2016
9.8
9.7
9.8
9.7
9.9
9.5
9.7
9.6
9.7
9.6
9.4
9.2
2017
9.3
9.1
8.7
8.6
8.5
8.5
8.5
8.6
8.3
8.0
8.0
8.1
2018
8.2
8.2
7.9
7.8
7.7
7.8
7.5
7.4
7.5
7.5
7.6
7.6
2019
8.1
7.3
7.3
7.3
7.1
7.2
7.0
7.2
6.9
7.0
October job creation comes in at 128,000, easily topping estimates even with GM auto strike
Nonfarm payrolls rose by 128,000 in October, exceeding the estimate of 75,000 from economists surveyed by Dow Jones.
There were big revisions of past numbers as well. August’s initial 168,000 payrolls addition was revised up to 219,000, while September’s jumped from 136,000 to 180,000.
The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 3.6% from 3.5%, still near the lowest in 50 years.
The pace of average hourly earnings picked up a bit, rising 0.1% to a year-over-year 3% gain.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by 128,000 in October as the U.S. economy overcame the weight of the GM autoworkers’ strike and created jobs at a pace well above expectations.
Even with a decline of 42,000 in the motor vehicles and parts industry, the pace of new jobs well exceeded the estimate of 75,000 from economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The loss of jobs came due to the General Motors strike that has since been settled. That 42,000 job loss itself was less than the 50,000 or more that many economists had been anticipating.
The unemployment rate ticked higher to 3.6%, in line with estimates, but remains around the lowest in 50 years. A more encompassing measure that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons also edged up to 7%.
The unemployment rate for African Americans nudged down to a record low 5.4%. Also, the total employment level as measured in the household survey jumped to 158.5 million, also a new high.
The pace of average hourly earnings picked up a bit, rising 0.1% to a year-over-year 3% gain, also in line with estimates. The average work week was unchanged at 34.4 hours.
“This report is yet another sign that the economy is still strong right now and adds to a list of indicators that are looking optimistic of late,” said Steve Rick, chief economist at CUNA Mutual Group. “The vigor of this labor market, along with a more positive housing market and solid Q3 GDP, should offer some welcome reassurance.”
Big revisions upward
Along with the better-than-expected performance in October, previous months’ counts were revised considerably higher. August’s initial 168,000 estimate came all the way up to 219,000 while September’s jumped from 136,000 to 180,000.
Together, the new estimates added 95,000 positions for the two-month period, bringing the three-month average to 176,000, which is well above the pace needed to keep the unemployment rate around its current level.
For the year, monthly job creation now averages 167,000 compared with 223,000 in 2018.
The report helps further quell worries that the U.S. economy is teetering toward recession and helps affirm the assessment from most Federal Reserve officials.
Central bank leaders have largely praised the state of the U.S. economy, particularly compared with its global peers. The Fed earlier this week lowered its benchmark interest rate a quarter point, the third such move this year, but Chairman Jerome Powell clearly indicated that this likely will be the last cut for some time unless conditions change significantly.
“The October jobs report is unambiguously positive for the US economic outlook,” said Citigroup economist Andrew Hollenhorst. “Above-consensus hiring in October, together with upward revisions to prior months, is consistent with our view that job growth, while clearly slower in 2019 than in 2018, will maintain a pace of 130-150K per month. Wage growth remaining at 3.0% should further support incomes and consumption-led growth.”
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How the unemployment rate is calculated
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At the industry level, the biggest job creation came in food services and drinking establishments, which added 48,000.While those positions are generally associated with lower wages, they also can reflect consumer demand and the willingness to spend discretionary money. The industry has seen a surge in job creation as of late, with the past three months averaging 38,000 compared with 16,000 in the first seven months of this year.
Professional and business services added 22,000 and health care rose 15,000, part of a gain of 402,000 for that industry over the past year.
Social assistance increased by 20,000 while financial activities rose by 16,000, bringing to 108,000 the total Wall Street jobs added over the past year.
Job losses came in manufacturing (-36,000) as part of the GM strike, and the federal government, which subtracted 17,000 because 20,000 workers hired for Census duties finished their work.
The total employment level in the household survey reached another record high, swelling by 241,000 to 158.5 million.
The labor force expanded by 325,000 to 164.4 million and the labor force participation rate edged higher to 63.3%. Those counted as not in the labor force declined by 118,000 to nearly 95.5 million.
After previously sitting at a record low, the unemployment rate for Asians jumped 0.4 percentage points to 2.9%.
private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 4 cents to $23.70.
(See tables B-3 and B-8.)
The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged
at 34.4 hours in October. In manufacturing, the average workweek decreased by
0.2 hour to 40.3 hours, while overtime was unchanged at 3.2 hours. The average
workweek of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees held at 33.6
hours. (See tables B-2 and B-7.)
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised up by 51,000
from +168,000 to +219,000, and the change for September was revised up by 44,000
from +136,000 to +180,000. With these revisions, employment gains in August and
September combined were 95,000 more than previously reported. (Monthly revisions
result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies
since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)
After revisions, job gains have averaged 176,000 over the last 3 months.
_____________
The Employment Situation for November is scheduled to be released on
Friday, December 6, 2019, at 8:30 a.m. (EST).
Employment Situation Summary Table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted
HOUSEHOLD DATA
Summary table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted[Numbers in thousands]
Category
Oct.
2018
Aug.
2019
Sept.
2019
Oct.
2019
Change from:
Sept.
2019-
Oct.
2019
Employment status
Civilian noninstitutional population
258,514
259,432
259,638
259,845
207
Civilian labor force
162,694
163,922
164,039
164,364
325
Participation rate
62.9
63.2
63.2
63.3
0.1
Employed
156,582
157,878
158,269
158,510
241
Employment-population ratio
60.6
60.9
61.0
61.0
0.0
Unemployed
6,112
6,044
5,769
5,855
86
Unemployment rate
3.8
3.7
3.5
3.6
0.1
Not in labor force
95,821
95,510
95,599
95,481
-118
Unemployment rates
Total, 16 years and over
3.8
3.7
3.5
3.6
0.1
Adult men (20 years and over)
3.5
3.4
3.2
3.2
0.0
Adult women (20 years and over)
3.4
3.3
3.1
3.2
0.1
Teenagers (16 to 19 years)
12.0
12.6
12.5
12.3
-0.2
White
3.3
3.4
3.2
3.2
0.0
Black or African American
6.2
5.5
5.5
5.4
-0.1
Asian
3.1
2.8
2.5
2.9
0.4
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity
4.4
4.2
3.9
4.1
0.2
Total, 25 years and over
3.1
2.9
2.8
2.9
0.1
Less than a high school diploma
5.9
5.4
4.8
5.6
0.8
High school graduates, no college
4.0
3.6
3.6
3.7
0.1
Some college or associate degree
3.0
3.1
2.9
2.9
0.0
Bachelor’s degree and higher
2.0
2.1
2.0
2.1
0.1
Reason for unemployment
Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs
2,858
2,876
2,572
2,674
102
Job leavers
731
781
840
849
9
Reentrants
1,914
1,801
1,669
1,703
34
New entrants
605
574
677
627
-50
Duration of unemployment
Less than 5 weeks
2,062
2,207
1,868
1,968
100
5 to 14 weeks
1,845
1,757
1,781
1,749
-32
15 to 26 weeks
859
835
819
899
80
27 weeks and over
1,370
1,243
1,314
1,264
-50
Employed persons at work part time
Part time for economic reasons
4,630
4,381
4,350
4,438
88
Slack work or business conditions
2,837
2,678
2,588
2,754
166
Could only find part-time work
1,461
1,351
1,322
1,287
-35
Part time for noneconomic reasons
21,448
21,697
21,573
21,549
-24
Persons not in the labor force (not seasonally adjusted)
Marginally attached to the labor force
1,491
1,564
1,299
1,229
–
Discouraged workers
506
467
321
341
–
– Over-the-month changes are not displayed for not seasonally adjusted data.
NOTE: Persons whose ethnicity is identified as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race. Detail for the seasonally adjusted data shown in this table will not necessarily add to totals because of the independent seasonal adjustment of the various series. Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of January data.
Footnotes
(1) Includes other industries, not shown separately.
(2) Data relate to production employees in mining and logging and manufacturing, construction employees in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in the service-providing industries.
(3) The indexes of aggregate weekly hours are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate hours by the corresponding annual average aggregate hours.
(4) The indexes of aggregate weekly payrolls are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate weekly payrolls by the corresponding annual average aggregate weekly payrolls.
(5) Figures are the percent of industries with employment increasing plus one-half of the industries with unchanged employment, where 50 percent indicates an equal balance between industries with increasing and decreasing employment.
(P) Preliminary
NOTE: Data have been revised to reflect March 2018 benchmark levels and updated seasonal adjustment factors.
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In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss the fact that the massive daily NY Fed interventions in the repo market are getting worse and worse. What was meant to be small and temporary seems now to be huge and permanent. Investors are asking, “What is the Fed hiding?” They also look at the 23% decline in the U.S. Monetary Base since 2016 and ask whether or not it signifies anything. In the second half, Max talks to David Morgan of The Morgan Report about what he sees in the turmoil in the repo markets. They also discuss China’s gold purchases and whether or not he agrees with Alasdair MacLeod’s belief that China could announce they have more than 10,000 tons of gold.
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Opinion: The Federal Reserve is in stealth intervention mode
Published: Oct 26, 2019 4:23 p.m. ET
What the central bank passes off as ‘funding issues’ could more accurately be described as liquidity injections to keep interest rates low
Getty Images
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell
By SVENHENRICH
The Federal Reserve has gone into full intervention mode.
Actually, accelerated intervention mode. Not just a “mid-cycle adjustment,” as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in July, but interventions to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every day.
What’s the crisis, you ask? After all, we live in an age of trillion-dollar market-cap companies and unemployment at 50-year lows. Yet the Fed is acting like the doomsday clock has melted as a result of a nuclear attack.
Think I’m in hyperbole mode? Far from it.
Unless you think the biggest repurchase (repo) efforts ever — surpassing the 2008 financial-crisis actions — are hyperbole:
Sven Henrich
✔@NorthmanTrader
What is the Fed not telling us?
I’m asking for a friend.
Something’s off. See, it all started as a temporary fix in September when, suddenly, the overnight target rate jumped sky high and the Fed had to intervene to keep the wheels from coming off. Short-term liquidity issues, the Fed said. Those have become rather permanent:
And liquidity injections are massive and accelerating. On Tuesday, the Fed injected $99.9 billion in temporary liquidity into the financial system and $7.5 billion in permanent reserves as part of a program to buy $60 billion a month in Treasury bills. The $99.9 billion comes from $64.9 billion in overnight repurchase agreements and $35 billion in repo operations.
But market demand for overnight repo operations has far exceeded even the $75 billion the Fed has allocated, suggesting a lot more liquidity demand. Hence, on Wednesday the Fed suddenly announced a $45 billion increase on top of the $75 billion repo facility for a daily total of $120 billion. Here’s the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the branch involved in such actions:
“Consistent with the most recent FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] directive, to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample even during periods of sharp increases in non-reserve liabilities, and to mitigate the risk of money market pressures that could adversely affect policy implementation, the amount offered in overnight repo operations will increase to at least $120 billion starting Thursday, Oct. 24, 2019.”
These actions are surprising. What stable financial system requires over $100 billion in overnight liquidity injections? The Fed did not see the need for these actions coming. It is reacting to a market that suddenly requires it.
“Funding issues,” Chairman Powell called it in October. The Fed was totally caught off guard when the overnight financing rate suddenly jumped to over 5%, and it’s been reacting ever since.
What started as a slow walk in policy reversion from last year’s rate-hike cycle and balance-sheet roll-off (aka quantitative tightening, or QT) on autopilot has now turned into ongoing interest-rate cuts and balance-sheet expansion:
To be clear: This is not a temporary rise in the balance sheet; this is the beginning of something big. The Fed’s balance sheet looks like it will expand to record highs once again.
I keep questioning the efficacy of all this, and I have to question the honesty of the Fed. After all, the central bank keeps chasing events, and its policy actions are turning ever more aggressive while it insists that everything is fine. The bank’s actions are saying things are not fine. Far from it. Otherwise, the Fed wouldn’t be forced into all these policy actions. But would the Fed cop to things not being fine? To do so would be to sap confidence — can’t have that.
What would markets look like without these policy interventions? One can only wonder. For one, we know the overnight financing rate would be much higher. That is, after all, why the Fed is forced to intervene: To keep the target rate low.
Many analysts now suggest there will be a year-end stock market rally, primarily driven by the Fed as earnings growth remains weak. If they print, you must buy.
It may well be that our financial markets have permanently devolved into a Fed-subsidized, wealth-inequality-generating machine benefitting the few that own stocks. But one has to wonder why the rate cutting and liquidity injections haven’t been able to produce sustained market highs.
Consider the evolution of the Fed’s “put” in 2019:
First came the hints in January. “Flexible on the balance sheet,” Powell suddenly was uttering following the fourth-quarter 2018 stock market massacre, producing a 3.5% rally in one day on that pronouncement. Then we got treated to a multi-month jawboning of Fed speakers increasingly sending dovish messages, and markets gladly jumping from Fed speech to Fed speech. Powell again rescued the market in early June after May’s market rout. “Ready to act” was the rallying cry then — and the market rallied dutifully into the July rate cut.
But then the dynamics changed. Rate cut No. 1 in July was sold. Rate cut No. 2 in September was sold. Then came the repo operations, also in September. And now, in October, the Fed launched the $60 billion-a-month Treasury-bill-buying program.
Did you note the accelerated pace of Fed actions here? The Fed went from pausing rate increases to ending the balance sheet roll-off to multiple rate cuts and, finally, aggressive daily repos and balance-sheet expansion. All of this since July. And guess what? Another rate cut is coming next week.
Why? Because markets want it. And what markets want, markets shall receive. That’s the only data point that matters, it appears.
And markets really want that third rate cut next week:
There’s a 94.6% probability of a rate cut. Think that a Fed that is intervening in markets daily by the tens of billions of dollars will chance to disappoint markets by not cutting rates? Please.
Investors have been chasing the Fed into corporate multiple expansion all year. But now that the Fed is forced to intervene ever more aggressively, it has to prove something: Efficacy.
Are we seeing an improvement in growth? No. Are we seeing an improvement in earnings? No. From the looks of it, the Fed is barely keeping it together and is forced to do ever more to prevent markets from falling as the principal bull rationale for buying stocks is the Fed.
And so one has to ponder a larger question:
Sven Henrich
✔@NorthmanTrader
I’ll go out on a limb here, but a financial system that requires over $100B of liquidity injections every day, temporary, permanent or otherwise, has major issues.
But, to be fair, so far the Fed has succeeded in compressing volatility as price discovery has degraded to overnight action over any intraday price discovery. Markets are back to tight intra-ranges void of any actions and elevating indices near record highs.
Whether the Fed can prompt a move to sustained new highs remains to be seen. All eyes will be on the Fed next week to see whether policy makers can achieve it.
If they can, investors can look for another run at the upper trend line on the S&P 500 SPX, -0.12% chart:
If they can’t, things may turn out quite differently, such as this speculative scenario:
You don’t think the Fed is all about markets? Where have you been? After all, the Fed’s stated policy objective now is to extend the business cycle by any means necessary. And policy makers can’t do that with falling stock prices.
And so they are in accelerated daily intervention mode. Because that is what it takes. The questions that investors have to ask themselves is: What if it’s not enough? And what is it policy makers aren’t telling us? Why are they are forced into these historic, unexpected measures? What happens if they lose control? We may know more next week.
Statement Regarding Repurchase and Reverse Repurchase Agreements Small Value Exercise
November 4, 2019
The New York Fed undertakes certain small value open market transactions from time to time for the purpose of testing operational readiness to implement existing and potential policy directives from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The FOMC authorizes the New York Fed’s Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) to conduct these exercises to test its operational readiness in the Authorization for Domestic Open Market Operations and Authorization for Foreign Currency Operations.
In connection with these authorizations, the Desk intends to conduct one small value forward-settling repo and one small value reverse repo operation during the month of November. Each operation will begin around 9:45 AM ET and end at 10:00 AM ET. The operations will be open to Primary Dealers and/or Reverse Repo Counterparties. All counterparties will be limited to one $1 million proposition per tranche during each operation. The planned schedule, including operation details, follows below:
Repurchase Agreement Operation:
OPERATION TENOR/TYPE
ELIGIBLE COUNTERPARTIES
OPERATION DATE
SETTLEMENT DATE
MATURITY DATE
COLLATERAL TYPE
MAXIMUM VALUE OF OPERATION
Term Repo
Primary Dealers
Tues, Nov 5, 2019
Wed, Nov 6, 2019
Fri, Nov 8, 2019
Multi-tranche: Treasury, Agency, Agency MBS
$75 million
Reverse Repurchase Agreement Operation:
OPERATION TENOR/TYPE
ELIGIBLE COUNTERPARTIES
OPERATION DATE
SETTLEMENT DATE
MATURITY DATE
COLLATERAL TYPE
OFFERING RATE
MAXIMUM VALUE OF OPERATION
Term Reverse Repo
Primary Dealers and Reverse Repo Counterparties
Tues, Nov 19, 2019
Tues, Nov 19, 2019
Thu, Nov 21, 2019
Single-tranche: Agency MBS -only
ON RRP Offering Rate on Nov 19
$175 million
Announcements and results will be posted on the New York Fed’s website at the start and following the completion of each operation.
A monetary base is the total amount of a currency that is either in general circulation in the hands of the public or in the commercial bank deposits held in the central bank’s reserves. This measure of the money supply typically only includes the most liquid currencies; it is also known as the “money base.”
Breaking Down Monetary Base
The monetary base is a component of a nation’s money supply. It refers strictly to highly liquid funds including notes, coinage and current bank deposits. When the Federal Reserve creates new funds to purchase bonds from commercial banks, the banks see an increase in their holdings, which causes the monetary base to expand.
For example, country Z has 600 million currency units circulating in the public and its central bank has 10 billion currency units in reserve as part of deposits from many commercial banks. In this case, the monetary base for country Z is 10.6 billion currency units.
As of June 2016, the U.S. had a monetary base of almost $3.9 trillion.
Monetary Base and the Money Supply
The money supply expands beyond the monetary base to include other assets that may be less liquid in form. It is most commonly divided into levels, listed as M0 through M3 or M4 depending on the system, with each representing a different facet of a nation’s assets. The monetary base’s funds are generally held within the lower levels of the money supply, such as M1 or M2, which encompasses cash in circulation and specific liquid assets including, but not limited to, savings and checking accounts.
To qualify, the funds must be considered a final settlement of a transaction. For example, if a person uses cash to pay a debt, that transaction is final. Additionally, writing a check against money in a checking account, or using a debit card, can also be considered final since the transaction is backed by actual cash deposits once they have cleared.
In contrast, the use of credit to pay a debt does not qualify as part of the monetary base, as this is not the final step to the transaction. This is due to the fact the use of credit just transfers a debt owed from one party, the person or business receiving the credit-based payment and the credit issuer.
Managing Monetary Bases
Most monetary bases are controlled by one national institution, usually a country’s central bank. They can usually change the monetary base (either expanding or contracting) through open market operations or monetary policies.
For many countries, the government can maintain a measure of control over the monetary base by buying and selling government bonds in the open market.
Smaller Scale Monetary Bases and Money Supplies
At the household level, the monetary base consists of all notes and coins in the possession of the household, as well as any funds in deposit accounts. The money supply of a household may be extended to include any available credit open on credit cards, unused portions of lines of credit and other accessible funds that translate into a debt that must be repaid.
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Ukraine Court Rules Manafort Disclosure Caused ‘Meddling’ in U.S. Election
Paul Manafort, center, arriving for his arraignment hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., in March.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
MOSCOW — A court in Ukraine has ruled that officials in the country violated the law by revealing, during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, details of suspected illegal payments to Paul Manafort.
In 2016, while Mr. Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign, anti-corruption prosecutors in Ukraine disclosed that a pro-Russian political party had earmarked payments for Mr. Manafort from an illegal slush fund. Mr. Manafort resigned from the campaign a week later.
The court’s ruling that what the prosecutors did was illegal comes as the Ukrainian government, which is deeply reliant on the United States for financial and military aid, has sought to distance itself from matters related to the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race.
Some of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has dealt with Mr. Manafort’s decade of work in Ukraine advising the country’s Russia-aligned former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, his party and the oligarchs behind it.
After President Trump’s victory, some politicians in Ukraine criticized the public release by prosecutors of the slush fund records, saying the move would complicate Ukraine’s relations with the Trump administration.
In Ukraine, investigations into the payments marked for Mr. Manafort were halted for a time and never led to indictments. Mr. Manafort’s conviction in the United States on financial fraud charges related to his work in Ukraine was not based on any known legal assistance from Ukraine.
Two Ukrainian members of Parliament had pressed for investigations into whether the prosecutors’ revelation of the payment records, which were first published in The New York Times, had violated Ukrainian laws that, in some cases, prohibit prosecutors from revealing evidence before a trial.
Both lawmakers asserted that if the release of the slush fund information broke the law, then it should be viewed as an illegal effort to influence the United States presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton by damaging the Trump campaign.
Artem Sytnik, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, said he had revealed the information about Paul Manafort “in accordance with the law in effect at the time.”Credit…Oleksandr Stashevskyi/Associated Press
The Kiev District Administrative Court, in a statement issued Wednesday, said that Artem Sytnik, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the agency that had released information about the payments, had violated the law. The court’s statement said this violation “resulted in meddling in the electoral process of the United States in 2016 and damaged the national interests of Ukraine.”
A spokeswoman for the anti-corruption bureau said she could not comment before the court released a full text of the ruling. In an interview last June, Mr. Sytnik said he had revealed the information “in accordance with the law in effect at the time.”
The court also faulted a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, Serhiy A. Leshchenko, who had commented on Mr. Manafort’s case and publicized at a news conference materials that the anti-corruption bureau had already posted on its website.
Mr. Leshchenko said he would appeal the ruling, and that the court was not independent and was doing the bidding of the Ukrainian government as it sought to curry favor with the Trump administration.
“This decision of the court is for Poroshenko to find a way to Trump’s heart,” he said, referring to President Petro O. Poroshenko. “At the next meeting with Trump, he will say, ‘You know, an independent Ukrainian court decided investigators made an inappropriate move.’ He will find the loyalty of the Trump administration.”
Mr. Leshchenko said the prosecutors’ revelations about Mr. Manafort were legal because they were “public interest information,” even if they were also potential evidence in a criminal investigation.
Mr. Manafort has not been charged with a crime in Ukraine, and earlier this year, Ukrainian officials froze several investigations into Mr. Manafort’s payments at a time when the government was negotiating with the Trump administration to purchase sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general said the delay on Mr. Manafort’s cases was unrelated to the missile negotiations. In total, the United States provides about $600 million in bilateral aid to Ukraine annually.
Earlier this month, the special counsel accused Mr. Manafort of violating a cooperation agreement by lying. Two of the five alleged lies, according to the filing, related to meetings or conversations with Konstantin V. Kilimnik, Mr. Manafort’s former office manager in Kiev, whom the special counsel’s office has identified as tied to Russian intelligence and as a key figure in the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Ukrainian law enforcement officials last year allowed Mr. Kilimnik to leave for Russia, putting him out of reach for questioning.
Let’s get real: Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/23/19 06:30 PM EDT 2,915
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
“I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them,” Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine’s leader.
The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats’ support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.
The Murphy anecdote is a powerful reminder that, since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections.
And that activity long preceded Giuliani’s discussions with Ukrainian officials and Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in July, seeking to have Ukraine formally investigate whether then-Vice President Joe Biden used a threat of canceling foreign aid to shut down an investigation into $3 million routed to the U.S. firm run by Biden’s son.
As I have reported, the pressure began at least as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country.
The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.
U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, the former political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who organized and attended the meetings.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That’s when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort.
The release of the evidence forced Manafort to step down as Trump’s top campaign adviser. A Ukrainian court concluded last December that the release of the evidence amounted to an unlawful intervention in the U.S. election by Kiev’s government, although that ruling has since been overturned on a technicality.
Shortly after the Ukrainian prosecutors returned from their Washington meeting, a new round of Democratic pressure was exerted on Ukraine — this time via its embassy in Washington.
Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States at the time, confirmed to me in a statement issued by his office that, in March 2016, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pressed his embassy to try to find any Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort that might reside in Ukraine’s intelligence files.
The DNC contractor also asked Chaly’s team to try to persuade Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to make a statement disparaging Manafort when the Ukrainian leader visited the United States during the 2016 election.
Chaly said his embassy rebuffed both requests because it recognized they were improper efforts to get a foreign government to try to influence the election against Trump and for Hillary Clinton.
The political pressure continued. Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in crucial U.S. aid to Kiev if Poroshenko did not fire the country’s chief prosecutor. Ukraine would have been bankrupted without the aid, so Poroshenko obliged on March 29, 2016, and fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
What wasn’t known at the time, Shokin told me recently, was that Ukrainian prosecutors were preparing a request to interview Hunter Biden about his activities and the monies he was receiving from Ukraine. If such an interview became public during the middle of the 2016 election, it could have had enormous negative implications for Democrats.
Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election, my reporting shows.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the same Hillary Clinton–funded opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who wrote the now-debunked dossier linking Trump to Russia collusion.
Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband — another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.
Politics. Pressure. Opposition research. All were part of the Democrats’ playbook on Ukraine long before Trump ever called Zelensky this summer. And as Sen. Murphy’s foray earlier this month shows, it hasn’t stopped.
The evidence is so expansive as to strain the credulity of the Democrats’ current outrage at Trump’s behavior with Ukraine.
Which raises a question: Could it be the Ukraine tale currently being weaved by Democrats and their allies in the media is nothing more than a smoke screen designed to distract us from the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report into abuses during the Democratic-inspired Russia collusion probe?
It’s a question worth asking.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
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Story 1: What Did Obama Know? — Everything He Wanted To Know — And when Did He Know It? — When He Ordered It! — Investigating, Indicting, Prosecuting The Clinton Obama Democrat Criminal Conspirators — The Trump Conspirators — Trump: “We can never let this happen to another President again. I can tell you that. I say it very strongly. Very few people I know could have handled it. We can never, ever let this happen to another President again.” — Videos
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The Lincoln Conspirators
Made from LOC images, this little pictorial shows what happen to the Lincoln conspirators at the end of the bloodletting Civil War era. All photos have been cleaned-up and some regarding the hanging of the conspirators on July 7th, 1865 have been modified to make the movie flow. The hanging, tis what it is, one needs to keep in mind as many as 750,000 Americans had just perished in 4 years of war.
Mueller and the Obama Accounting
The former President now owes the country an explanation for the historic abuse of government surveillance powers.
By
James Freeman
The Mueller report confirms that the Obama administration, without evidence, turned the surveillance powers of the federal government against the presidential campaign of the party out of power. This historic abuse of executive authority was either approved by President Barack Obama or it was not. It’s time for Mr. Obama, who oddly receives few mentions in stories about his government’s spying on associates of the 2016 Trump campaign, to say what he knew and did not know about the targeting of his party’s opponents.
If he…
Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel After Bilateral Meeting
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, thank you very much. It’s an honor to have Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval Office. We’ve had numerous great meetings, and we talk usually about trade and military and lots of things.
But today, I think we’re talking about — more than anything else, we’re celebrating the Golan Heights. It’s something that I’ve been hearing about for many years, from many people. I’ve been studying for years.
And this should have been done, I would say, numerous Presidents ago. But for some reason, they didn’t do it, and I’m very honored to have done it.
So I just want to say, Bibi, it’s an honor to have you at the Oval Office. Thank you.
PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Thank you. May I say that I’ve been here many, many, many times. I’ve been around.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: You have.
PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: And I’ve met many friends of Israel in this office. But as I said in the other room, just now, in a day of history, we have never had a greater friend than President Trump.
And I think there is a unique bond between our countries, between our administrations, between the two of us. There has been no greater bond than that. It serves the interests of Israel in ways that I cannot begin to describe because not everything that the President and I talk about can be shared with the public.
And I think that, in many ways, the President knows and the United States knows that America has no better friend than Israel. We are willing to fight for our common values. We’re willing to fight. You have an ally that is willing to take up arms in defense of liberty, in defense of our land, our people, and our common values.
We admire America, and we’re grateful to you. Thank you, Mr. President.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much.
Q Mr. President, so did this turn out to not be a witch hunt after all? Do you think Robert Mueller did a fair investigation?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: It’s lasted a long time. We’re glad it’s over. It’s 100 percent the way it should have been. I wish it could have gone a lot sooner, a lot quicker.
There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, very bad things. I would say treasonous things against our country.
And hopefully people that have done such harm to our country — we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening — those people will certainly be looked at. I have been looking at them for a long time. And I’m saying, “Why haven’t they been looked at?” They lied to Congress. Many of them — you know who they are — they’ve done so many evil things.
I will tell you, I love this country. I love this country as much as I can love anything: my family, my country, my God. But what they did, it was a false narrative. It was — it was a terrible thing.
We can never let this happen to another President again. I can tell you that. I say it very strongly. Very few people I know could have handled it. We can never, ever let this happen to another President again.
Thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Q Do you want the report to be completely released?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Up the Attorney General, but it wouldn’t bother me at all. Up to the Attorney General. Wouldn’t bother me at all.
Q Any news on pardons? Are you thinking about pardoning anyone, sir?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, I haven’t. I haven’t thought about it.
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BREAKING NEWS: We will open fire on the immigrant caravan if they throw stones says Trump as he promises to end to catch and release of illegals and put families in ‘tent cities’
The president unloaded on illegal immigration in a White House speech
Said he was ‘finalizing a plan to end the rampant abuse of our asylum system’
He said asylum seekers ‘never show up’ for trial
He said caravan members were not ‘legitimate asylum seekers’
He made the announcement in the Roosevelt Room of the White House
He’s promptly left for a rally in Columbia, Missouri
Anybody throwing stones, rocks … we will consider that a firearm
PUBLISHED: 13:38 EDT, 1 November 2018 | UPDATED: 18:07 EDT, 1 November 2018
President Donald Trump issued a dire warning to would-be immigrants making their way toward the U.S., warning that thousands of U.S. troops being sent to the border would return fire if caravan members throw rocks at them.
Trump has already ordered thousands of troops to the southern border, and was asked after delivering a fiery speech at the White House whether he envisioned them firing on the people making there way approaching the border on foot.
‘I hope not. I hope not. It’s the military. I hope there won’t be that. But I will tell you this: Anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police – where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico – we will consider that a firearm,’ Trump warned.
‘Anybody throwing stones, rocks … we will consider that a firearm,’ President Donald Trump warned at the White House Thursday
Video playing bottom right…
Click here to expand to full page
‘Because there’s not much difference. When you get hit in the face with a rock. Which, as you know, it was very violent a few days ago. Very, very violent,’ he added.
The president evoked a potentially violent confrontation at the border, and referenced clashes that have occurred in Mexico with Mexican authorities.
‘This is an invasion and nobody’s really questioning that,’ the president added.
Trump spoke from the Roosevelt Room of the White House
Trump issued the threat after he delivered a long rant about illegal immigration from the White House on Thursday, blasting a clogged court system, called out people who jump the line of legal immigrants, and blasted what he called ‘endemic abuse of the asylum system.’
The White House had touted the policy change, but the president was unable to deliver any new executive order, legislation, or other formal action.
A 4,000-strong caravan set out before dawn from Juchitan to Matias Romero, at La Ventosa, Oaxaca State, Mexico, after being denied buses
Asked at one point about current obligations via U.S. law and treaties to consider asylum claims, the president curtly responded: ‘They’re going to court, as crazy as it sounds.’
The president once again said the U.S. would build tent cities to manage the problem of would-be asylum seekers, and said: ‘We’ll be holding the family and the children together’ in the tents.
‘We have other facilities also. But what’s happened is, we are holding so many facilities, so many people that our facilities are overrun. They’re being overrun. And we are putting up temporary facilities. Eventually people will not be coming here anymore when they realize they cannot get through,’ Trump said.
Trump spoke about how troops would respond to any rock-throwing during back-and-forth with reporters
The migrants were hoping to compel Mexican authorities to provide transportation for them to Mexico City, but it did not happen, prompting them to continue walking
TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION STEMWINDER: HIS GREATEST HITS
Some of the more memorable moments from the president’s November 1, 2018 immigration speech and the Q&A with reporters that followed:
ON WHETHER THE MILITARY WILL FIRE ON MIGRANT CARAVANS AT THE BORDER:
‘I hope not. I hope not. It’s the military. I hope there won’t be that. But I will tell you this: Anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police – where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico – we will consider that a firearm. Because there’s not much difference. When you get hit in the face with a rock. Which, as you know, it was very violent a few days ago. Very, very violent.’
(AND LATER)
‘We will consider that the maximum that we can consider that. Because they’re throwing rocks viciously and violently. You saw that three days ago, really hurting the military. We’re not going to put up with that. They want to throw rocks at our military? Our military fights back. We’re going to consider it – I told them, “Consider it a rifle.” When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say, “Consider it a rifle”.’
ON WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO MIGRANTS’ CHILDREN WHEN THEIR PARENTS ARE HELD IN ‘TENT CITIES’:
‘We’re working on a system where they stay together. But I will say that by doing that, tremendous numbers – you know, under the Obama plan you could separate children. They never did anything about that. Nobody talks about that. But under President Obama they separated children from the parents. We actually put it so that didn’t happen. But what happens when you do is you get tremendous numbers of people coming. It’s almost like an incentive to – when they hear they’re not going to be separated, they come many, many times over. But President Obama separated the children from the parents and nobody complained. When we continued the exact same law, this country went crazy.’
ON WHETHER FAMILY UNITS WIL BE KEPT TOGETHER IN TENTS:
‘We will be holding the family and the children together. Remember this: President Obama separated children from families. And all I did was take the same law, and then I softened the law. But by softening the law, many people come up that would not have come up if there was separation.’
ON WHETHER A HARD LINE ON IMMIGRATION IS A PRE-ELECTION PLOY:
‘There’s nothing political about a caravan of thousands of people, and now others forming, pouring up into our country. We have no idea who they are. All we know is they’re pretty tough people when they can blast through the Mexican military and Mexican police. They’re pretty tough people. Even Mexico said, “Wow. These are tough people.” I don’t want them in our country. And women do not want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country. But the women don’t want them. Women want security. You look at what the women are looking for. They want to have security. They don’t want these people in our country, and they’re not going to be in our country. It’s a very big thing.’
ON WHETHER THE CARAVANS ARE BEING ORGANIZED FROM THE OUTSIDE:
‘They understand the law better than the lawyers understand the law. You have a lot of professionalism there, you have a lot of professionalism involved with setting up the caravans. You take a look at the way that’s happening. Even the countries – you look at Honduras and El Salvador. And you look at what’s happening at the different levels and different countries, or what’s happening on the streets. There’s a lot of professionalism taking place. And there seems to be a lot of money passing. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, these big caravans are formed and they start marching up. They’ve got a long way to go.’
Asked if the children will be held in tent cities, Trump responded: ‘We will be holding the family and the children together. Remember this: President Obama separated children from families. And all I did was take the same law, and then I softened the law. But by softening the law, many people come up that would not have come up if there was separation.’
Asked what would happen to the children, Trump gave a lengthy answer where he mentioned President Barack Obama three times.
‘We’re working on a system where they stay together. But I will say that by doing that, tremendous numbers – you know, under the Obama plan you could separate children. They never did anything about that. Nobody talks about that. But under President Obama they separated children from the parents. We actually put it so that didn’t happen. But what happens when you do is you get tremendous numbers of people coming. It’s almost like an incentive to – when they hear they’re not going to be separated, they come many, many times over. But President Obama separated the children from the parents and nobody complained. When we continued the exact same law, this country went crazy. So we are going to continue and try to continue what we’re doing. But it is a tremendous incentive for people to try. But it’s going to be very, very hard for people to come into out country.’
With the election just days away, the president complained about a ‘catch and release’ immigration system he said failed because people are choosing not to show up for their court appearances.
‘They never show up at the trials. They never come back, they’re never seen again,’ the president vented.
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President Donald Trump blasted ‘catch and release’ during a speech from the White House that was broadcast on cable networks
The president vowed to ‘take every lawful action at my disposal to address this crisis,’ and emphasized asylum in particular. But he was vague on providing any details.
He said he was ‘finalizing a plan to end the rampant abuse of our asylum system.’
He complained about drugs, crime, and a caravan of immigrants making its way toward the border.
‘We’re not releasing them into our country any longer. They’ll wait long periods of time.’
In one of many tangents, he vented: ‘Fentanyl is killing our youth.’
The president said members of the caravan would not be getting asylum.
‘We will be doing an executive order some time next week … it’ll be quite comprehensive.’
Honduran girls hug while waiting in line for a chance to play on the playground at a camp set up by a caravan of thousands of Central American migrants in Juchitan, Mexico, Wednesday
‘These migrants are not legitimate asylum seekers. They’re not looking for protection because if they were, they’d be able to get it from Mexico.’
He called human traffickers ‘The lowest scum on earth.’
Trump once again went after the people comprising the caravan.
‘These are tough people in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country,’ Trump said.
But he also acknowledged that many of those drawn to the U.S. were coming to reap the benefits of the U.S. economy.
‘We right now have the hottest economy anywhere in the world,’ Trump said. ‘In some cases they want to take advantage of that,’ he allowed.
In give-and-take with reporters, Trump rejected the suggestion he was just making a political move for the elections. Early voting has already begun and Election Day is Tuesday.
‘There’s nothing political about a caravan of thousands of people, and now others forming, pouring up into our country. We have no idea who they are,’ Trump said.
‘All we know is they’re pretty tough people when they can blast through the Mexican military and Mexican police. They’re pretty tough people. Even Mexico said, ‘Wow. These are tough people.’ I don’t want them in our country.’
With the views of female voters holding a potentially decisive role in control of the House with multiple toss-up suburban races, Trump said: ‘And women do not want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country. But the women don’t want them. Women want security. You look at what the women are looking for. They want to have security. They don’t want these people in our country, and they’re not going to be in our country. It’s a very big thing.’
In one of many odd features of his remarks, Trump appeared to thank the crowd when he first entered the Roosevelt Room, even though only reporters and photographers and a few aides were there, and no one had applauded him, which would have been out of the ordinary if it did happen.
This map shows the latest positions of the four Central American caravans making their way to the US border
‘Thank you very much everyone. Appreciate it,’ Trump said to the silent room.
The White House in advance touted a coming directive denying asylum to migrants who try to enter the country illegally this afternoon as he takes action to thwart migrant caravans heading toward the United States’ southern border.
Trump also said this week that he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship to discourage migrants from coming to America to giving birth to children who will automatically become United States citizens.
‘Birthright citizenship’ is derived from the 14th Amendment. Trump says that wording of the amendment leaves room for him to exercise his authority as the nation’s executive to keep children born to illegal immigrants for immediately becoming citizens.
The Immigration and Nationality Act similarly requires the federal government to follow asylum laws. However, Trump is expected to push the boundaries of his authority on immigration anyway, just like he did with extreme vetting.
It took him three tries, but the proposal was eventually held up by the Supreme Court. Trump said he barred legal residents of countries with ties to terror from temporarily coming to America, because their entry was a national security threat, not because they were from majority-Muslim nations.
This week, as he plotted executive actions that would make massive changes to the immigration system days before the mid-term elections, he pointed to Barack Obama’s 2012 decree that illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children could stat in the U.S. indefinitely through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Trump made his most audacious attempt yet on Wednesday night to turn a sea of approaching Central American migrants into a midterm voting issue, tweeting a video linking them to a death row inmate who killed two Sacramento, California police officers after being deported twice from the United States and returning each time.
Convicted cop killer Luis Bracamontes famously grinned and swore his way through his trial and sentencing this year, vowing to escape and kill more police officers.
He screamed ‘F*** you, judge!’ during a late January hearing and was banned from attending the rest of his trial in person, watching the remaining days on video monitors.
Trump’s 55.5 million Twitter followers saw his own take on the case, a recap of the trial’s most shocking moments titled: ‘Illegal immigrant Luis Bracamontes killed our people!’
CNN editorialized through its website: ‘Trump campaign releases racist ad.’
Network host Don Lemon, under fire for declaring that ‘white men’ are the greatest threat to the United States, complained Wednesday night during his show about ‘how the ad depicts Latinos and immigrants generally. Why is this blatantly racist ad his closing argument before the midterms?’
This Oct. 29, 2018 photo provided by the U.S. Air Force shows a military vehicle loading into the cargo compartment of a C-17 Globemaster III at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The aircrews provided strategic airlift to Headquarters Company, 89th Military Police Brigade, Task Force Griffin, which is deploying to the Southwest border region
Trump supporters with red ‘Make America Great Again’ hats cheer the President during the rally in Estero, Florida on Wednesday
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Salvadoran migrants embark on a journey in caravan to the United States. They are pictured in San Salvador on Wednesday
A migrant boy, traveling with a caravan of thousands from Central America en route to the United States, cries while walking along the highway to Juchitan from Santiago Niltepec, Mexico, on Tuesday
Eight-month-old Hennessy Naomi, part of a caravan of migrants from Central America en route to the United States, is held by her mother Maria Jose Sevilla as they walk to Huixtla from Tapachula, in Viva Mexico, on Wednesday
Trump insisted at his Wednesday evening rally that the U.S. Constitution does not protect birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants.
‘Congress has never passed a law requiring birthright citizenship for illegal aliens, and the Constitution does not —I say that to the media — does not [cover it] because illegal aliens are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.’
It’s the 14th Amendment that legal scholars say protects birthright citizenship for everyone born in America.
But there is now a debate as to whether illegal immigrants are indeed covered under the equal protection clause. They are foreign nationals who may not fall under the ‘jurisdiction of the United States’ for protection because they are in the country illegally, the president and his advisers have said.
U.S. soldiers from the 541st Sapper Company are shown transported in an Air Force C-130J Super Hercules aircraft in Fort Knox, Kentucky on Tuesday. The troops are being sent to areas along the southwest border to assist the Department of Homeland Security
Trump told ABC News in an interview just before he took the stage that based on his experience judging crowd sizes, the caravans are larger than most people realize.
He claimed that there are mostly ‘young men’ traveling in the group that ‘almost looks like an invasion’ and asserted his broad authority to send in the military by deeming the border crisis a national emergency.
‘It’s a lot of young people, lot of young men – they are pushing the women right up to the front – not good – and the kids right up to the front,’ he told the network, without providing evidence.
Trump, who famously instructed former press secretary Sean Spicer to tell reporters his inaugural crowd bested Barack Obama‘s, made the claim after days of media reports on the substantial masses of people making their way toward the border.
A caravan that reached Oaxaca in Mexico was around 4,000 people, a drop from an earlier count of 5,000, and still 900 miles away from the U.S.
‘You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it’s reported, actually,’ Trump told ABC News. And I’ll tell you they look a lot bigger than people would think.’
He defended his decision to send up to 15,000 active military troops to the border, and compared them to a ‘wall’ – although his plan to construct a wall on the border is not yet complete, having received $1.6 billion in funding despite his proposal to spend many times that amount.
‘We have to have a wall of people,’ Trump said.
Interviewer Jonathan Karl asked about the need for the force, noting that many caravan members are women in children.
‘It’s a lot of young people, lot of young men — they are pushing the women right up to the front. Not good – and the kids right up to the front,’ Trump said.
Trump also pushed back when his interviewer said the military was restricted in the duties it can perform and that members could not make arrests. The Posse Comitatus Act proscribes what activities the military can carry out on U.S. soil.
‘Well, it depends,’ Trump responded. ‘National emergency covers a lot of terri–,’ Trump said,’ cutting off his thought.
‘I think it could be considered an invasion of our country, we can’t have it,’ Trump added.
Trump said women and children were being moved to the front of the caravan
He said caravans are ‘a lot’ larger than is reported
Trump cited his own expertise in counting crowds. Pictures is a view of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration
Trump said Wednesday he may triple the U.S. military contingent being sent to the southern border to 15,000, as he once again pointed to migrant caravans and what he called ‘roughness’ among its members.
First 100 troops arrive at US-Mexico border and start erecting tents after Trump threatens that they will SHOOT migrants, as he warns Missouri rally ‘these are not angels and we are not letting them in’
Some 7,000 military personnel will arrive at the border through the weekend ahead of the caravan’s arrival
Trump has promised to build a ‘tent city’ to house the migrants – but the troops are also building their own
Hundreds are flying to Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona, and Lackland Air Force Base in McAllen, Texas
The president issued a dire warning on Wednesday that migrants will be shot if they throw rocks at soldiers
He said he would end catch and release, warning: ‘We’re going to catch, we’re not going to release’
The 4,000-strong caravan will depart from Matias Romero, Mexico, early Friday and make its way toward Veracruz, stopping in Donaji or Sayula de Aleman
Two more are behind it which have another 1,500 people in them
PUBLISHED: 23:17 EDT, 1 November 2018 | UPDATED: 17:00 EDT, 2 November 2018
The first 100 troops have arrived at the US-Mexico border to await the arrival of the migrant caravan slowly making its way north from Central America.
On Thursday, 109 troops from the 591st Military Police Company were taken from Fort Hood, Texas, to to Lackland Air Force Base to help with operations there.
Separately, troops stationed at the Fort Huachuca base in Sierra Vista in Arizona were seen setting up tents for comrades who are due to arrive over the weekend and in the coming weeks.
President Trump has vowed to send as many as 15,000 troops to tackle the three migrant caravans which are snaking their way through Mexico towards the U.S.
He said he will make ‘tent cities’ to keep migrants once they are detained but it is not yet clear where those will be.
The plan, he said, is to ‘end catch and release’ by keeping the migrants there to face trial once they are caught.
‘We’re going to catch, we’re not going to release,’ he said on Wednesday in a lengthy speech where he also threatened that any migrants who throw stones at soldiers will be shot.
They are still 900 miles away and weeks from getting close but the president has bolstered his promise to stop them.
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Troops unravel barbed wire at the border in Hidalgo, Texas, as Trump ramps up his rhetoric on stopping migrants from entering the US
US troops prepare to install barbed wire on the border in Hidalgo, Texas, on Friday
US Army soldiers from the 309th Military Intelligence Battalion and the 305th Military Intelligence Batallion positions their tents at Fort Huachuca in Arizona on November 1
Soldiers erect tents at Fort Huachuca in Arizona during Operation Faithful Patriot. They will sleep there during the operation. These tents are separate to the ‘tent city’ Trump has said he will build to house migrants while they search for political asylum
Members of the 309th Military Intelligence Battalion and the 305th Military Intelligence Battallion erect a tent at Fort Huachuca in Arizona
This map shows the latest positions of the four Central American caravans making their way to the US border
A US Army soldier helps build a tent at the Fort Huachuca base in Arizona. They are a tiny fraction of the 15,000 soldiers Trump has threatened to send to meet the migrants when they eventually get to the border, if they do
Some 7,000 military members will be arriving at the border through the weekend as President Donald Trump has said he’s willing to send as many as 15,000 troops to provide support to Border Patrol agents.
The migrants, of which there are now are still at least 900 miles away.
Trump issued a dire warning to the would-be immigrants with the caravan in a fiery speech at the White House on Thursday, saying that the troops would return fire if rocks are thrown at them.
With their eyes set on Texas, the 4,000-strong caravan will depart from Matias Romero, Mexico, early Friday and make their way up the Gulf coast toward Veracruz, likely stopping in Donaji or Sayula de Aleman.
Salvadorean migrants cross the Suchiate River from Guatemala to Mexico on Friday
Thousands are making their way to the US border despite Trump’s promises that they will not be allowed in
Meanwhile, Mexican federal police have been fairly tame in their efforts to stop the determined group.
The first group of troops to arrive at the port of entry in McAllen, Texas, have begun initial assessments, a Department of Defense official told Fox News on Thursday evening.
The official confirmed there are some 2,600 troops now at staging bases, largely in Texas, as several thousand more are expected to arrive through the weekend, moving into California and Arizona.
When asked at the White House if he envisioned the military personnel opening fire on the caravan, Trump replied: ‘I hope not. I hope not. It’s the military. I hope there won’t be that.
‘But I will tell you this: Anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police – where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico – we will consider that a firearm.’
Troops at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texasm are briefed on how they will support Operation Faithful Patriot on Wednesday October 31st
Soldiers from the 89th Military Police Brigade, the 41st Engineering Company and the 19th Engineering Battalion make their way to the border
An Army HMMWV is loaded onto a C-17 Globemaster at Fort Knox, Kentucky, to be taken to the border on Wednesday October 31st
Troops board a plane at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to be taken to the southwest border on Tuesday
TRUMP’S BORDER ARMY
POLICE AND INTELLIGENCE
309th Military Intelligence Battalion and 305th Military Intelligence Battalion
Two battalions from the military’s intelligence branch have been sent to the border to assist with Operation Faithful Patriot. They are often the first boots on the ground and are tasked with training other officers later once they arrive. They are stationed out of Fort Huachuca in Arizona.
89th Military Police Brigade
The brigade was activated during the Vietnam war. Its troops have provided assistance during disaster relief and at Guantanamo Bay. Its soldiers operate out of Fort Hood, Texas.
591st Military Police Company
The 591st Military Police Company are also known as the Iron Spartans. They operate out of Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. They are already perfectly positioned near the border for Operation Faithful Patriot. Officers from the company served in the Iraq war.
ENGINEERS
41st Engineering Company
The 41st Engineer Company is a Route Clearance Company. Its soldiers have previously been deployed to Afghanistan to clear routes for bridge combat teams. They are stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas.
19th Engineering Battalion
The 19th Engineer Battalion O/O deploys engineer forces in order to provide mission command and general engineer support to decisive action in support of Expeditionary, Army, Joint, or Combined Military Operations world-wide.
They operate out of Fort Knox in Kentucky.
541st Sapper Company
The 541st Sapper Company performs a variety of military engineering operations; such as bridge-building, laying or clearing minefields, demolitions, field defenses and general construction, as well as road and airfield construction and repair. They are also trained to serve as infantry personnel in defensive and offensive operations.
They operate out of Fort Knox in Kentucky.
‘Because there’s not much difference. When you get hit in the face with a rock. Which, as you know, it was very violent a few days ago. Very, very violent,’ he added.
The president evoked a potentially violent confrontation at the border, and referenced clashes that have occurred in Mexico with Mexican authorities.
‘This is an invasion and nobody’s really questioning that,’ the president added.
Trump issued the threat after he delivered a long rant about illegal immigration from the White House on Thursday, blasting a clogged court system, calling out people who jump the line of legal immigrants, and blasting what he called ‘endemic abuse of the asylum system.’
The White House had touted the policy change, but the president was unable to deliver any new executive order, legislation, or other formal action.
Asked at one point about current obligations via U.S. law and treaties to consider asylum claims, the president curtly responded: ‘They’re going to court, as crazy as it sounds.’
The president once again said the US would build tent cities to manage the problem of would-be asylum seekers, and said: ‘We’ll be holding the family and the children together’ in the tents.
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Army Lt Ge. Jeffrey Buchanan briefs Joint Forces Land Component personnel and Air Force attorneys at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas on Thursday
The first 100 troops have arrived at the US-Mexico border to await the arrival of the migrant caravan slowly making its way north from Central America, according to the Department of Defense. Pictured: Members of the Air Force unload in Harlingen, Texas, on Thursday
‘We have other facilities also. But what’s happened is, we are holding so many facilities, so many people that our facilities are overrun.
‘They’re being overrun. And we are putting up temporary facilities. Eventually people will not be coming here anymore when they realize they cannot get through,’ Trump said.
Asked if the children will be held in tent cities, Trump responded: ‘We will be holding the family and the children together. Remember this: President Obama separated children from families. And all I did was take the same law, and then I softened the law. But by softening the law, many people come up that would not have come up if there was separation.’
In the caravan on Friday, migrants were giving each other tattoos to commemorate the journey
Asked what would happen to the children, Trump gave a lengthy answer where he mentioned President Barack Obama three times.
‘We’re working on a system where they stay together. But I will say that by doing that, tremendous numbers – you know, under the Obama plan you could separate children.
‘They never did anything about that. Nobody talks about that. But under President Obama they separated children from the parents.
We actually put it so that didn’t happen. But what happens when you do is you get tremendous numbers of people coming. It’s almost like an incentive to – when they hear they’re not going to be separated, they come many, many times over.
Members of the first caravan board a truck in Matias Romero, Mexico, before sunrise to get to their next stop. They are still 900 miles at least from where the troops are setting up . On Friday, they will trek 30 miles, to the town of Donaji
El Salvadorian migrants walk towards the border of Guatemala and Mexico. They are far behind the first group
Migrant children hug while playing in a playground in Juchitan, Mexico, on Wednesday. There are more than 5,000 migrants making their way to the US. Most are from Honduras
A 4,000-strong caravan set out before dawn from Juchitan to Matias Romero, at La Ventosa, Oaxaca State, Mexico, after being denied buses on November 1
The migrants were hoping to compel Mexican authorities to provide transportation for them to Mexico City, but it did not happen, prompting them to continue walking
‘But President Obama separated the children from the parents and nobody complained. When we continued the exact same law, this country went crazy. So we are going to continue and try to continue what we’re doing. But it is a tremendous incentive for people to try. But it’s going to be very, very hard for people to come into out country.’
With the election just days away, the president complained about a ‘catch and release’ immigration system he said failed because people are choosing not to show up for their court appearances.
‘We’re going to catch, we’re not going to release,’ he said. ‘They never show up at the trials. They never come back, they’re never seen again,’ the president vented.
The president vowed to ‘take every lawful action at my disposal to address this crisis,’ and emphasized asylum in particular. But he was vague on providing any details.
He said he was ‘finalizing a plan to end the rampant abuse of our asylum system.’ He complained about drugs, crime, and a caravan of immigrants making its way toward the border.
‘We’re not releasing them into our country any longer. They’ll wait long periods of time.’ In one of many tangents, he vented: ‘Fentanyl is killing our youth.’
The president said members of the caravan would not be getting asylum. ‘We will be doing an executive order some time next week … it’ll be quite comprehensive.’
TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION STEMWINDER: HIS GREATEST HITS
Some of the more memorable moments from the president’s November 1, 2018 immigration speech and the Q&A with reporters that followed:
ON WHETHER THE MILITARY WILL FIRE ON MIGRANT CARAVANS AT THE BORDER:
‘I hope not. I hope not. It’s the military. I hope there won’t be that. But I will tell you this: Anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police – where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico – we will consider that a firearm. Because there’s not much difference. When you get hit in the face with a rock. Which, as you know, it was very violent a few days ago. Very, very violent.’
(AND LATER)
‘We will consider that the maximum that we can consider that. Because they’re throwing rocks viciously and violently. You saw that three days ago, really hurting the military. We’re not going to put up with that. They want to throw rocks at our military? Our military fights back. We’re going to consider it – I told them, “Consider it a rifle.” When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say, “Consider it a rifle”.’
ON WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO MIGRANTS’ CHILDREN WHEN THEIR PARENTS ARE HELD IN ‘TENT CITIES’:
‘We’re working on a system where they stay together. But I will say that by doing that, tremendous numbers – you know, under the Obama plan you could separate children. They never did anything about that. Nobody talks about that. But under President Obama they separated children from the parents. We actually put it so that didn’t happen. But what happens when you do is you get tremendous numbers of people coming. It’s almost like an incentive to – when they hear they’re not going to be separated, they come many, many times over. But President Obama separated the children from the parents and nobody complained. When we continued the exact same law, this country went crazy.’
ON WHETHER FAMILY UNITS WIL BE KEPT TOGETHER IN TENTS:
‘We will be holding the family and the children together. Remember this: President Obama separated children from families. And all I did was take the same law, and then I softened the law. But by softening the law, many people come up that would not have come up if there was separation.’
ON WHETHER A HARD LINE ON IMMIGRATION IS A PRE-ELECTION PLOY:
‘There’s nothing political about a caravan of thousands of people, and now others forming, pouring up into our country. We have no idea who they are. All we know is they’re pretty tough people when they can blast through the Mexican military and Mexican police. They’re pretty tough people. Even Mexico said, “Wow. These are tough people.” I don’t want them in our country. And women do not want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country. But the women don’t want them. Women want security. You look at what the women are looking for. They want to have security. They don’t want these people in our country, and they’re not going to be in our country. It’s a very big thing.’
ON WHETHER THE CARAVANS ARE BEING ORGANIZED FROM THE OUTSIDE:
‘They understand the law better than the lawyers understand the law. You have a lot of professionalism there, you have a lot of professionalism involved with setting up the caravans. You take a look at the way that’s happening. Even the countries – you look at Honduras and El Salvador. And you look at what’s happening at the different levels and different countries, or what’s happening on the streets. There’s a lot of professionalism taking place. And there seems to be a lot of money passing. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, these big caravans are formed and they start marching up. They’ve got a long way to go.’
‘These migrants are not legitimate asylum seekers. They’re not looking for protection because if they were, they’d be able to get it from Mexico.’
He called human traffickers ‘The lowest scum on earth.’
Trump once again went after the people comprising the caravan.
‘These are tough people in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country,’ Trump said.
But he also acknowledged that many of those drawn to the U.S. were coming to reap the benefits of the U.S. economy.
‘We right now have the hottest economy anywhere in the world,’ Trump said. ‘In some cases they want to take advantage of that,’ he allowed.
In give-and-take with reporters, Trump rejected the suggestion he was just making a political move for the elections. Early voting has already begun and Election Day is Tuesday.
‘There’s nothing political about a caravan of thousands of people, and now others forming, pouring up into our country. We have no idea who they are,’ Trump said.
‘All we know is they’re pretty tough people when they can blast through the Mexican military and Mexican police. They’re pretty tough people. Even Mexico said, ‘Wow. These are tough people.’ I don’t want them in our country.’
With the views of female voters holding a potentially decisive role in control of the House with multiple toss-up suburban races, Trump said: ‘And women do not want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country. But the women don’t want them. Women want security. You look at what the women are looking for. They want to have security. They don’t want these people in our country, and they’re not going to be in our country. It’s a very big thing.’
In one of many odd features of his remarks, Trump appeared to thank the crowd when he first entered the Roosevelt Room, even though only reporters and photographers and a few aides were there, and no one had applauded him, which would have been out of the ordinary if it did happen.
‘Thank you very much everyone. Appreciate it,’ Trump said to the silent room.
The White House in advance touted a coming directive denying asylum to migrants who try to enter the country illegally this afternoon as he takes action to thwart migrant caravans heading toward the United States’ southern border.
Trump also said this week that he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship to discourage migrants from coming to America to giving birth to children who will automatically become United States citizens.
‘Birthright citizenship’ is derived from the 14th Amendment. Trump says that wording of the amendment leaves room for him to exercise his authority as the nation’s executive to keep children born to illegal immigrants for immediately becoming citizens.
The Immigration and Nationality Act similarly requires the federal government to follow asylum laws. However, Trump is expected to push the boundaries of his authority on immigration anyway, just like he did with extreme vetting.
It took him three tries, but the proposal was eventually held up in a watered-down form by the Supreme Court. Trump said he barred legal residents of countries with ties to terror from temporarily coming to America, because their entry was a national security threat, not because they were from majority-Muslim nations.
This week, as he plotted executive actions that would make massive changes to the immigration system days before the mid-term elections, he pointed to Barack Obama’s 2012 decree that illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children could stat in the U.S. indefinitely through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Trump made his most audacious attempt yet on Wednesday night to turn a sea of approaching Central American migrants into a midterm voting issue, tweeting a video linking them to a death row inmate who killed two Sacramento, California police officers after being deported twice from the United States and returning each time.
Convicted cop killer Luis Bracamontes famously grinned and swore his way through his trial and sentencing this year, vowing to escape and kill more police officers.
He screamed ‘F*** you, judge!’ during a late January hearing and was banned from attending the rest of his trial in person, watching the remaining days on video monitors.
Trump’s 55.5 million Twitter followers saw his own take on the case, a recap of the trial’s most shocking moments titled: ‘Illegal immigrant Luis Bracamontes killed our people!’
CNN editorialized through its website: ‘Trump campaign releases racist ad.’
ASYLUM, THE MEXICAN BORDER AND DONALD TRUMP: WHAT TO KNOW
WHAT IS ASYLUM?
Asylum is a protection and status granted to foreign nationals who fit the criteria of a refugee as defined by international law.
Once granted, asylum status allows that person to live and work in this country and apply for a green card after one year of residence.
HOW DO YOU GET ASYLUM?
Many people apply for asylum when they first arrive at the U.S. border – where it is legal to seek the protected status.
People already living in the country may also be able to successfully pursue asylum after their arrival – typically if they apply within one year of arrival.
People are considered eligible for asylum when they are unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country because they can’t obtain protection in that country due to past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution based on their ‘race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,’ according to the Refugee Act of 1980.
IS THE MEXICAN BORDER ANY DIFFERENT?
Trump said that he will only accept asylum applications from people who have crossed at legal crossing points on the Mexican border.
It is unclear if he can do this and it will likely be for courts to decide if that is possible.
In theory his powers are at their apex at the border and the government can reject anyone trying to enter.
But asylum is covered by international treaties enacted into U.S. laws which do not contain limits on where it is possible to claim asylum. So he is likely to face
HOW THE PROCESS WORKS
Applying for asylum can take years. In order to pursue a claim, immigrants must first pass a test known as the credible fear review before they are allowed to make their case before an immigration judge.
That review allows them to say why they are fleeing their country and establishes whether they have a legitimate fear of persecution or torture. Individuals who don’t pass the credible fear review can request a hearing to reconsider their plea, but many are quickly deported to their home countries.
In 2017, 60,566 people were found to have credible fear – meaning their cases could go to a full court hearing.
That year, 28,408 asylum cases reached a final decision in U.S. immigration courts. Of those, 10,697 applications were granted and the remaining 17,711 applicants were denied and slated for deportation. But how many leave voluntarily, and how many are deported is not clear. Immigration and Customs Enforcement do not publish a number of failed asylum seekers it has removed.
HOW IT’S CHANGED ALREADY UNDER TRUMP
It has gotten got harder to gain credible fear status under the Trump administration: in June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a decision that reversed previous guidelines that domestic violence and gangs were reasons to have ‘credible fear’ – which means that anyone now claiming asylum has a higher bar to cross.
The Trump administration has said that to be applied correctly, asylum must be granted to people who are seeking to escape persecution by a government – not from a violent family member or gang, as had widely been accepted after a 2014 immigration court ruling found those applicants were eligible for asylum.
While some legal experts believe it is still possible to argue cases on behalf of the immigrants affected by Sessions’ decision, that will be impossible if they don’t make it past their credible fear review.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you very much, everyone. Appreciate it. And good afternoon. I would like to provide an update to the American people regarding the crisis on our southern border — and crisis it is.
Illegal immigration affects the lives of all Americans. Illegal immigration hurts American workers; burdens American taxpayers; and undermines public safety; and places enormous strain on local schools, hospitals, and communities in general, taking precious resources away from the poorest Americans who need them most. Illegal immigration costs our country billions and billions of dollars each year.
America is a welcoming country. And under my leadership, it’s a welcoming country. We lead the world in humanitarian protection and assistance, by far. There’s nobody even close. We have the largest and most expansive immigration programs anywhere on the planet.
We’ve issued 40 million green cards since 1970, which means the permanent residency and a path to citizenship for many, many people. But we will not allow our generosity to be abused by those who would break our laws, defy our rules, violate our borders, break into our country illegally. We won’t allow it.
Mass, uncontrolled immigration is especially unfair to the many wonderful, law-abiding immigrants already living here who followed the rules and waited their turn. Some have been waiting for many years. Some have been waiting for a long time. They’ve done everything perfectly. And they’re going to come in. At some point, they’re going to come in. In many cases, very soon. We need them to come in, because we have companies coming into our country; they need workers. But they have to come in on a merit basis, and they will come in on a merit basis.
The communities are often left to bear the cost and the influx of people that come in illegally. We can’t allow that.
There’s a limit to how many people a nation can responsibly absorb into their societies. Every day, above and beyond our existing lawful admission programs, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 people try crossing our borders illegally. We do a very good job considering the laws are so bad. They’re not archaic; they’re incompetent. It’s not that they’re old; they’re just bad. And we can’t get any Democrat votes to change them. It’s only the Republicans that are — in unison, they want to change them. They want to make strong borders, want to get rid of any crime because of the borders, of which there’s a lot.
And we’ve done a great job with the laws that we have. We’re moving in tremendous numbers of people to get out the MS-13 gangs and others gangs that illegally come into our country. And we’re getting them out by the thousands.
But this is a perilous situation, and it threatens to become even more hazardous as our economy gets better and better. A lot of the cause of this problem is the fact that we right now have the hottest economy anywhere in the world. It’s doing better than any economy in the world. Jobs, unemployment — you look at any number.
Right now, we have more workers than any time in the history of our country. We have more people working, which is a tremendous statement. More people working than at any time in the history of our country. And people want to come in, and in some cases, they want to take advantage of that, and that’s okay. And we want them to come in, but they have to come in through merit. They have to come in legally.
At this very moment, large, well-organized caravans of migrants are marching towards our southern border. Some people call it an “invasion.” It’s like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border. You saw that two days ago. These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country. But again, we’ll find that out through the legal process.
But they’ve overrun the Mexican police, and they’ve overrun and hurt badly Mexican soldiers. So this isn’t an innocent group of people. It’s a large number of people that are tough. They’ve injured, they’ve attacked, and the Mexican police and military has actually suffered. And I appreciate what Mexico is trying to do.
So let me begin by stating that these illegal caravans will not be allowed into the United States, and they should turn back now, because they’re wasting their time. They should apply to come into our country. We want them to come into our country very much. We need people to help us, with all of these companies that are coming in. We’ve never had anything like this. We have car companies coming in. We have Foxconn — so involved with the manufacturing of Apple products — coming in in Wisconsin. We have a lot of companies coming in, but they have to apply, and they have to be wonderful people that are going to love our country and work hard.
And we’ve already dispatched, for the border, the United States military. And they will do the job. They are setting up right now, and they’re preparing. We hope nothing happens. But if it does, we are totally prepared. Greatest military anywhere in the world, and it’s going to be, and is now, in great shape. No longer depleted like it was when I took over as the President of the United States.
The government of Mexico has generously offered asylum, jobs, education, and medical care for people within the caravan, but many members of the caravan have refused these offers, which demonstrate that these migrants are not legitimate asylum-seekers. They’re not looking for protection. Because if they were, they’d be able to get it from Mexico. Mexico has agreed to take them in and encouraged them to stay. But they don’t want to stay; they want to come into the United States. So this is no longer safety, and asylum is about safety.
Asylum is not a program for those living in poverty. There are billions of people in the world living at the poverty level. The United States cannot possibly absorb them all. Asylum is a very special protection intended only for those fleeing government persecution based on race, religion, and other protected status.
These caravans and illegal migrants are drawn to our country by Democrat-backed laws and left-wing judicial rulings. We’re getting rulings that are so ridiculous, so bad. They’re writing the laws. Can’t do that. Collectively known as — as an example, catch-and-release. It’s a disgrace that we have to put up with it.
These policies lead to the release of illegal aliens into our communities after they’ve been apprehended. But we’re not releasing anymore. Big change, as of a couple of days ago. We’re going to no longer release. We’re going to catch; we’re not going to release. They’re going to stay with us until the deportation hearing or the asylum hearing takes place. So we’re not releasing them into the community.
We have millions of people that, over the years, have been released into the community. They never show up for the trials. They never come back. They’re never seen again. And those people, they know who they are. And we know a lot of where they are, who they are. And those people will be deported, directly deported.
The biggest loophole drawing illegal aliens to our borders is the use of fraudulent or meritless asylum claims to gain entry into our great country. An alien simply crosses the border illegally, finds a Border Patrol agent, and using well-coached language — by lawyers and others that stand there trying to get fees or whatever they can get — they’re given a phrase to read. They never heard of the phrase before. They don’t believe in the phrase. But they’re given a little legal statement to read, and they read it. And now, all of a sudden, they’re supposed to qualify. But that’s not the reason they’re here.
This merely asserts the need for asylum, and then often released into the United States, and they await a lengthy court process. The court process will takes years sometimes for them to attend. Well, we’re not releasing them into our country any longer. They’ll wait for long periods of time. We’re putting up massive cities of tents. The military is helping us incredibly well.
I want to thank the Army Corps of Engineers. They’ve been so efficient, so good, so talented. And we have thousands of tents. We have a lot of tents; we have a lot of everything. We’re going to hold them right there. We’re not letting them into our country. And then they never show up — almost. It’s like a level of 3 percent. They never show up for the trial. So by the time their trial comes, they’re gone. Nobody knows where they are. But we know where a lot of them are, and they’re going to be deported.
There are now nearly 700,000 aliens inside the United States awaiting adjudication of their claims. Most of these people we have no idea how they got there, why they got there. And the number is actually going to be a much larger number as we look at all of the data. So if you look at just at a minimal number, it’s the size of Vermont, or bigger. And the overall number could be 10 million people; it could be 12 million people; it could be 20 million people. The record keeping from past administrations has not exactly been very good.
As human smugglers and traffickers have learned how the game is played and how to game the system, we have witnessed a staggering 1,700 [percent] increase in asylum claims since the year 2010. They understand the law better than the lawyers understand the law. You have a lot of professionalism there. You have a lot of professionalism involved with setting up the caravans. You take a look at the way that’s happening. Even the countries — you look at Honduras and El Salvador, and you look at what’s happening at the different levels and different countries, and what’s happening on the streets. There’s a lot of professionalism taking place, and there seems to be a lot of money passing. And then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, these big caravans are formed and they start marching up. They got a long way to go.
On average, once released, an asylum case takes three and half years to complete. Think of it. Somebody walks into our country, reads a statement given by a lawyer, and we have a three-and-a-half-year court case for one person, whereas other people tell them, “Out. Get out. Just get out.” Other countries — “Get out. We have a border. Get out.”
We go through years and years of litigation because of the Democrats and the incompetent, very, very stupid laws that we have. They’re the laughingstock all over the world, including the people that are marching up. They understand. But the difference is, we’re not allowing them in, and we’re not releasing, and we’re not doing any of the things that were done for so many years that really are terrible for our country.
The overwhelming majority of claims are rejected by the courts, but by that time, the alien has usually long since disappeared into our country. So they never get to see the judge. They never get to have a ruling. They don’t care because they’re in the country and nobody knows where they are.
All told, there are approximately 1 million aliens who have received final orders of removal. They’ve actually got final orders of removal. You don’t have to go to court anymore. The courts have already issued the orders of removal, and we’ve gotten a lot of them. But who remain at large in our country. So we’ve moving them out.
This endemic abuse of the asylum system makes a mockery of our immigration system, displacing legitimate asylum-seekers — and there are legitimate asylum-seekers — while rewarding those who abuse or defraud our system, which is almost everybody. Everybody is abusing it and just doing things to our system which were unthinkable, I’m sure even by the Democrats who were largely responsible for getting it done.
These individuals disrespect the foundations of American government by voluntarily choosing to break the law as their first act on American soil.
Furthermore, contained within this giant flow of illegal migration to our southwest border is the movement of illicit and deadly narcotics. It’s in the southwest, most of it comes in. Nearly 100 percent of heroin in the United States enters through the southern border– think of that: 100 percent, almost, of heroin comes in through the southern border, along with roughly 90 percent of cocaine, and the majority of meth, and a substantial portion of the ultra-lethal fentanyl killing our youth. Fentanyl is killing our youth.
These drugs destroy the lives and kill much more than 70,000 Americans every single year. And the number goes up. It goes up and up and up, because we are so foolish with our laws that we allow this to happen. A death toll equivalent of the size of an entire American city every year.
The current influx, if not halted, threatens to overwhelm our immigration system and our communities, and poses unacceptable dangers to the entire nation. We have to have our borders. Can’t let drugs come in. Not just — it’s not just people. It’s people; it’s drugs. It’s human traffickers.
Human trafficking is now at the highest level in the world that it’s ever been. And that’s because of the Internet. Think of it — human trafficking. You think back 200 years, 500 years. Human trafficking — where they steal children; in many cases, women, unfortunately. They steal women. The human traffickers, the lowest scum on Earth. The lowest scum on Earth. And it’s at a level that it’s never been. Worldwide — never been at a level like this.
If these caravans are allowed into our country, only bigger and more emboldened caravans will follow. And you see that’s what’s happening now. We have one that’s coming up, and it’s being somewhat dissipated, as they march. But then other people are joining it. And then it gets bigger. And now, if you look back at Honduras, and if you look at El Salvador, other ones are solving and they’re forming. They’re forming. You have new ones that are forming. And we call it “caravan number two” is unbelievably rough people. Very, very hard for the military to stop it. Our military will have no problem. But very, very hard. Mexico is having a very, very hard time with it.
Once they arrive, the Democrat Party’s vision is to offer them free healthcare, free welfare, free education, and even the right to vote. You and the hardworking taxpayers of our country will be asked to pick up the entire tab. And that’s what’s happening — medical and, in many cases, they’ve got some big medical problems before they get here.
No nation can allow itself to be overwhelmed by uncontrolled masses of people rushing their border. That’s what’s happening. They are rushing our border. They are coming up. And even before you get to the caravan, just on a daily basis, people coming in. And it’s a very bad thing for our country. It’s sad in many ways, but it’s a very bad thing for our country. And again, costs us billions and billions and billions of dollars a year.
And I will therefore take every lawful action at my disposal to address this crisis. And that’s what we’re doing. The United States military, great people.
My administration is finalizing a plan to end the rampant abuse of our asylum system — it’s abused — to halt the dangerous influx, and to establish control over America’s sovereign borders. We got borders. And once that control is set and standardized, and made very strong — including the building of the wall, which we’ve already started. $1.6 billion spent last year; $1.6 billion this year. We have another $1.6 [billion] that will be coming, but we want to build it at one time. All it does is turn people in a different direction if you don’t. We want to build it at one time.
Under this plan, the illegal aliens will no longer get a free pass into our country by lodging meritless claims in seeking asylum. Instead, migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry. So they’re going to have to lawfully present themselves at a port of entry. Those who choose to break our laws and enter illegally will no longer be able to use meritless claims to gain automatic admission into our country. We will hold them — for a long time, if necessary.
The only long-term solution to the crisis, and the only way to ensure the endurance of our nation as a sovereign country, is for Congress to overcome open borders obstruction. That’s exactly what it is: It’s open border obstruction. No votes. You can come up with the greatest border plan, the greatest immigration plan. You won’t get one vote from a Democrat. They have terrible policy. In many cases, they’re terrible politicians. But the one thing I give them great credit for: They vote as a bloc. They stick together.
And we will end catch-and-release. We’re not releasing any longer. We also must finish the job that we started by being strong at the border. When we’re strong at the border, people will turn away and they won’t bother. You will see, in a year from now, or in certainly a period of time from now, despite our very good economy, which some of them come for that — I can’t blame them for that; you have to do it legally — but you will see that the numbers of people trying to get in will be greatly reduced.
But that can only happen if we’re strong at the border. And the southern border is a big problem, and it’s a tremendous problem for drugs pouring in and destroying our youth, and, really, destroying the fabric of our country. There’s never been a drug problem like we have today. And as I said, much of it comes from the southern border.
So in the meantime, I will fulfill my sacred obligation to protect our country and defend the United States of America. And this is a defense of our country. We have no choice. We have no choice. We will defend our borders, we will defend our country.
Thank you very much.
Q Mr. President, what happens to the children then? If you’re ending catch-and-release, what happens to those children? Do they stay in these tent cities? Or what happens?
THE PRESIDENT: We’re working on a system where they stay together. But I will say that, by doing that, tremendous numbers — you know, under the Obama plan, you could separate children. They never did anything about that. Nobody talks about that. But under President Obama, they separated children from the parents. We actually put it so that that didn’t happen.
But what happens when you do that is you get tremendous numbers of people coming. It’s almost like an incentive to — when they hear they’re not going to be separated, they come many, many times over. But President Obama separated the children, the parents. And nobody complained. When we continued the exact same law, this country went crazy.
So we are going to continue and try to continue what we’re doing. But it is a tremendous incentive for people to try. But it’s going to be very, very hard for people to come into our country. So we think we’ll be able to do that.
Q With the military, do you envision them firing upon any of these people?
THE PRESIDENT: I hope not.
Q Could you see the military (inaudible)?
THE PRESIDENT: I hope not. It’s the military — I hope — I hope there won’t be that. But I will tell you this: Anybody throwing stones, rocks — like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police, where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico — we will consider that a firearm. Because there’s not much difference, where you get hit in the face with a rock — which, as you know, it was very violent a few days ago — very, very violent — that break-in. It was a break-in of a country. They broke into Mexico.
And you look at what’s happening in Guatemala, just to mention Guatemala, along with El Salvador and Honduras. It’s disgraceful that those countries aren’t able to stop this. Because they should be able to stop it before it starts.
And the United States pays them a fortune, and we’re looking at not doing that anymore. Because why should we be doing that when they do nothing for us?
Jeff. Jeff, go ahead.
Q Mr. President, how is this plan going to be legal, considering the current law?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, this is totally legal. No. This is legal. We are stopping people at the border. This is an invasion, and nobody is even questioning that.
Q But in terms of your plans to change asylum, are you going to do this via executive order?
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, you don’t have to — you don’t have to release. You have — you can hold. The problem is, to hold people, you need massive facilities. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Another country says, “Sorry, you can’t come in.” With us, we take their name, take their phone number, take their everything, and say, “Good luck.” Only because we don’t have the facilities to hold people. But we’re building the facilities now. We’re building massive numbers of tents, and we will hold them in tents. But you don’t have to release them. They released them only because they didn’t have the facilities to hold them.
Q Mr. President, is there like an executive order that you’re going to be releasing today?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, we will be doing an executive order sometime next week, yes.
Q (Inaudible) executive order dealing with ending catch-and-release and asylum?
THE PRESIDENT: It’s going to end — it’s going to be talking about everything. It’ll be quite comprehensive. Many of the things we’ve talked about today.
Q Mr. President, so you’re — so just to clarify, you are speaking of, in the tents, these family units that would arrive (inaudible) the children?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, we have other facilities also. But what’s happened is we are holding so many facilities — so many people that our facilities are being overrun. They’re being overrun. And we are putting up temporary facilities. Eventually, people won’t be coming here anymore when they realize they can’t get through.
Q So they will hold the children in those tents with their parents?
THE PRESIDENT: We will be holding the family and the children together. Remember this: President Obama separated children from families. And all I did was take the same law, and then I softened the law. But by softening the law, many people come up that would not have come up if there was separation.
Q Mr. President, what do you say to the critics who think this is a political thing before the midterms?
THE PRESIDENT: There’s nothing political about a caravan of thousands of people, and now others forming, pouring up into our country. We have no idea who they are. All we know is they’re pretty tough people when they can blast through the Mexican military and Mexican police. They’re pretty tough people. Even Mexico said, “Wow, these are tough people.” I don’t want them in our country. And women don’t want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country. But the women do not want them. Women want security. You look at what the women are looking for. They want to have security. They don’t want to have these people in our country. And they’re not going to be in our country. It’s a very big thing.
Yes.
Q Mr. President, when you talk about finalizing a plan to end asylum, is this a plan that would be included in that executive order?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, no, people are going to have a chance to go for asylum. But if you look at the records, not very many people are allowed to stay once they go to court. But what happens is they’d go into — they were using asylum — first of all, they were told what to say by lawyers and others. “Read this statement.” You read the statement, and now you’re seeking asylum. The whole thing is ridiculous. And we won’t put up with it any longer.
Q President Trump, U.S. law and international law says that people who have valid claims have a right to seek asylum.
THE PRESIDENT: That’s right.
Q So why would — why would they be —
THE PRESIDENT: Well, they’re going to go to court. They’re going to go to court, as crazy as it sounds. They’re going to go —
Q But the law say that they don’t — they’re not —
THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. Excuse me. Ready? They’re going to go to court, and a judge is going to determine. But usually, when they go to court, they’re deported. It just seems that most of the people are deported once they go. The problem is they never end up going to court, because when they come in, they’re told to come back in a year, for a court case, and they disappear into the United States never to be seen again.
But we’re going to be —
Q But the current laws doesn’t say about holding people in tent cities.
THE PRESIDENT: And they’re given deportation notices. We will be deporting those people.
Q Mr. President, you’re saying rocks are — rock-throwing, like happened in Mexico, will be considered —
THE PRESIDENT: We will consider that the maximum that we can consider that, because they’re throwing rocks viciously and violently. You saw that three days ago. Really hurting the military. We’re not going to put up with that. If they want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. We’re going to consider — and I told them, consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say, consider it a rifle.
Jeff?
Q A separate topic, sir. Did you offer Heather Nauert the job of U.N. Ambassador?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, she’s under very serious consideration. She’s excellent. She’s been with us a long time. She’s been a supporter for a long time. And she’s really excellent. So she’s under very serious — we’ll probably make a decision next week. We have a lot of people that want the job, and there are a lot of really great people. But we’ll be talking about that next week sometime.
Q Did you see Oprah Winfrey’s comments today?
THE PRESIDENT: I didn’t. What did she say?
Q She was campaigning in Georgia at the same time that Vice President Pence was.
THE PRESIDENT: At the same time as who?
Q Excuse me, at the same time Vice President Pence was, encouraging people to vote and —
THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s okay. I mean, I was on Oprah’s last week — the last week of her show. Oprah liked me very much. I’ve always liked Oprah. You know, Oprah is good. But the woman that she’s supporting is not qualified to be the governor of Georgia, by any stretch of the imagination.
And I’ll be in Georgia the next few days — the next few days — and we have a tremendous — around Macon — we have a tremendous crowd already. Nobody has a crowd like we have because people want to see a great governor of Georgia. And I think Brian is going to be a great governor of Georgia. I think he’ll be a fantastic governor. He’s totally qualified.
She is not qualified to be the governor of Georgia. She’s not qualified. And Georgia is a great state —
Q Why is she not qualified?
THE PRESIDENT: — it’s a great, great state. Take a — take a look. Take a look at her past. Take a look at her history. Take a look at what she wants to do and what she has in mind for the state. That state will be in big, big trouble very quickly. And the people of Georgia don’t want that.
Question?
Q Mr. President, really quickly, just on election integrity? Can you say for a fact that our elections are secure next week? What can you tell us?
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, yeah. I just met with — I just met with the FBI, with Chris; and the Justice Department; and with Secretary Nielsen. And they’ve spent a lot of time and effort and some money on making sure that everything with respect to the election coming up in five days is going to be perfect and safe. There will be hopefully no meddling, no tampering, no nothing. And we spent a lot —
Now President Obama had the chance to do that in September before ’16, but he chose not to do that because he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. And while everybody agrees it didn’t affect the vote at all, nevertheless he could have done things that probably would have made it a little more obvious, a little clearer. But he was told by the FBI in September before the election in ’16 about potential meddling or potential Russian meddling, and he did nothing about it. He didn’t do that because he thought that Hillary Clinton would win.
All right, one more.
Q Are you optimistic that you can still get the continuing resolution through December 7th for Homeland Security funded, even if the Democrats take the House?
THE PRESIDENT: I think if — I think we’re going to do very well in the election, I must tell you. If you look at the races, if you look at the Senate, which is very important, obviously. I’m leaving today; I’ll be in Missouri. And I’ll be touching down at a number of places over the next five days. But I think we’re doing very well in the Senate, and I think we’re doing very well in the House.
The only problem is, with the House, there’s so many people. I’d like to stop for every one of them, but there’s so many people. But I think we’re doing very well in the House. I think people want to see strong borders. I think they want to see security. They want to see good healthcare. They want to see the things that we’re providing. They don’t want to have their taxes increased. We’re decreasing their taxes.
We just announced yesterday, you probably heard — Kevin Brady put it out — a reduction of tax. We’re going for a reduction of middle-income tax or 10 percent. The Democrats want to, I mean, double up your taxes. In some cases, you’ll have to pay three times what you’re paying right now in order to get bad healthcare.
And so what we’re doing is something that I think the people want, and I think we’re going to do very well in the election, even though history says that whoever President it — whoever the President may be, it trends the other way. It certainly does seem that way.
But nobody has ever been President that has the greatest economy in the history of our country. This is the greatest economy in the history of our country. These are the greatest unemployment and employment numbers in the history of our country. Nobody has ever had that to campaign with. So I do.
Thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Breaking News: Story 1: The Windmills of Your Mind — Clinton Obama Democratic Criminal Conspiracy — A Barack Clinton Dud (ABCD) — Fake Bombs — Fake Dossier — Fake News — Real Smear Campaign — Lying Lunatic Leftist Losers — Mexican Marxist Mobs Marching — Return To Sender — Videos
The Windmills of Your Mind – Noel Harrison
Glider flying ‘Windmills Of Your Mind’ film ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ 1968
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that’s turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind
Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind
Keys that jingle in your pocket, words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly, was it something that you said?
Lovers walking along a shore and leave their footprints in the sand
Is the sound of distant drumming just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway and the fragment of a song
Half remembered names and faces, but to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over you were suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning to the color of her hair!
Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
Songwriters: Alan Bergman / Marylin Bergman / Michel Legrand
Jordan Peterson: 5 Hours for the NEXT 50 Years of Your LIFE (MUST WATCH)
New X-ray images reveal how ‘MAGAbomber’ made crude pipe bombs out of PVC tubing and an Amazon digital clock before stuffing them with sulfur and shards of glass
The pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats across the United States each had matching characteristics
Officials said the devices were contrived of PVC tubing attached to a digital clock, available for purchase on Amazon, and included sulfur as explosives and shards of glass as shrapnel
X-ray images provide a more detailed look at the explosive devices that also include a battery and wiring
Secret Service intercepted two explosive devices en route to Obama’s Washington home and Hillary Clinton’s New York residence
Another was discovered on Wednesday at the Time Warner Center in New York where CNN’s newsroom is located. It was addressed to former CIA director John Brennan
The devices are all similar to a small pipe bomb found at billionaire George Soros’ home in New York Monday
They were wrapped in black electrical tape and stuffed full of gunpowder with a digital clock timer attached
Other intercepted devices targeted California congresswoman Maxine Waters, former Attorney General Eric Holder, VP Mike Pence and actor Robert De Niro
All the packageshad former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office listed as a return address
The hashtag #MAGAbomber became a top trending hashtag on Twitter Wednesday
President Trump meanwhile condemned the pipe bomb incidents and called for unity across the nation
PUBLISHED: 21:40 EDT, 24 October 2018 | UPDATED: 16:55 EDT, 25 October 2018
The pipe bombs anonymously sent to the addresses of prominent Democrats across the United States each had matching characteristics, law enforcement officials revealed Wednesday evening.
The crude devices were contrived of PVC tubing attached to a digital clock, available for purchase on Amazon. They included sulfur as explosives and shards of glass as shrapnel.
X-ray images obtained by ABC News provide a more detailed look at the explosive devices that also include a battery as well as wiring to initiate an explosion.
Officials suspect a serial bomber likely with an intent to kill is behind the rash of homemade explosives sent in the mail this week.
Law enforcement officials said Wednesday evening the pipe bombs anonymously sent to the addresses of prominent Democrats across the United States each had matching characteristics. An x-ray of the explosive device sent to Barack’s Obama’s Washington residence is pictured
The crude devices were contrived with PVC tubing attached to a digital clock and included sulfur as explosives and shards of glass as shrapnel. An x-ray of the explosive device recovered at Time Warner Center in NYC is pictured
The digital clock is circled above. Multiple suspected explosive devices were found in the mail addressed to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and CNN’s New York newsroom on Wednesday. Pictured is the pipe bomb sent to CNN’s newsroom
Secret Service agents revealed earlier Wednesday they had intercepted two explosives en route to former President Obama’s Washington D.C. home and Hillary and Bill Clinton’s property in Chappaqua, New York.
A short time later, a police bomb squad was sent to CNN’s offices in New York City and the newsroom was evacuated because of a pipe bomb found in an envelope addressed to former CIA director John Brennan.
The devices were similar to the small pipe bomb found at liberal billionaire donor George Soros’ New York home on Monday and appear to have been sent by the same person, NYPD’s chief of counterterrorism said.
Throughout the day, a disturbing hashtag that suggests the Trump administration holds responsibility for the pipe bombs became a top trend on Twitter.
Liberal conspiracy theorists took to the social media platform to share countless viral tweets under the hashtag #MAGAbomber, while President Trump in the meantime condemned the attempted act of terror against his greatest foes and called for unity across the nation.
One user wrote in a tweet using the trending hashtag: ‘I promise you it will not be long until a crowd of people cheer at a Trump rally for the #MAGABomber.’
Another user said: ‘No one could have predicted the #MAGABomber except for literally everyone,’ while someone else wrote: ‘@realDonaldTrump you and your hateful rhetoric are responsible for the #MAGAbomber.’
Someone else suggested: ‘#MAGAbomber the hashtag fits @realDonaldTrump you must admit.’
Trump spoke about pipe bomb incidents Wednesday at a White House event, where signed an opioid epidemic law that will make medical treatment more readily available to drug abusers and crack down on the mailing of illegal substances.
Trump said in the statement: ‘I just want to tell you that in these times, we have to unify… we have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the Untied States of America.
‘The safety of the American people is my highest and absolute priority. I’ve just concluded a briefing with the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and the US Secret Service.
‘As we speak, the packages are being inspected by top explosive experts and a major federal investigation is now underway.
‘The full weight of our government is being deployed to conduct this investigation and bring those responsible for these despicable acts to justice.’
US President Donald Trump condemned the act of terror against his greatest foes and called for unity across the nation while speaking at a White House event on October 24, 2018 in Washington, DC
Trump speaks about crude pipe bombs targeting Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, CNN and others, during an event on the opioid crisis, in the East Room of the White House on Wednesday in Washington
The FBI said the packages were mailed in manilla envelopes with bubble wrap interior. The packages were affixed with computer-printed address labels and six stamps bearing the Stars and Stripes. All packages had the return address of former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida.
The explosive device intended for Holder was returned to her Florida office – also sparking an evacuation there on Wednesday afternoon.
All of those targeted are among Trump’s biggest political enemies and have been subjected to his ire on Twitter.
The White House also called the attacks as ‘despicable’, while officials described the events as a coordinated ‘effort to terrorize’ just days before polarizing US elections.
‘This clearly is an act of terror attempting to undermine our free press and leaders of this country through acts of violence,’ New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told a news conference.
The FBI has warned that other packages could also have been mailed and said they were working with multiple agencies to track down the person responsible.
The packages sent to the Clintons and Obama were discovered during routine mail screenings and were intercepted prior to being delivered to Clinton and Obama.
Bill Clinton was at the family’s home at the time the package was intercepted, while Hillary was attending campaign events for Democrats in Florida.
Multiple suspected explosive devices were found in the mail addressed to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and CNN’s New York newsroom on Wednesday. Pictured above is the pipe bomb sent to CNN’s newsroom
The FBI said the packages were mailed in manilla envelopes and were affixed with computer-printed address labels with six stamps bearing the Stars and Stripes. The packages had the return address of former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida
Two bombs have been found in the mail addressed to former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the Secret Service
CNN evacuated its New York bureau Wednesday after the pipe bomb together with an envelope containing white powder was found in the mail room of the Time Warner Center where their bureau is located,
The packaging was addressed care of CNN to former CIA director John Brennan, who doesn’t work for the network but is an MSNBC contributor. An evacuation alarm went off as CNN anchors were live on air reporting on the packages sent to Obama and Clinton.
The bomb was constructed with a metal pipe, wires and black tape, according to police. The device found at CNN was removed by the NYPD bomb squad and taken away for investigation.
A suspicious package addressed to Democratic California congresswoman Maxine Waters was intercepted by Capitol Police on Wednesday afternoon and another was found en route to her California office.
Earlier, a law enforcement source told Reuters and CNN that they believed a pipe bomb had also been sent to the White House but was intercepted at an off-site facility in D.C. The Secret Service later denied this, saying there was no suspicious package addressed to the White House.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said his office received a similar package, but New York police officials said the office was cleared and no device was found. The San Diego office of U.S. Senator Kamala Harris was evacuated early Wednesday following reports of a suspicious package, but police found nothing.
The package sent to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s property in Chappaqua, New York was found by an employee who screens their mail. Police guarded the property early Wednesday
A device addressed to former President Obama’s home in Washington D.C. was intercepted by Secret Service. Law enforcement were spotted outside the home early Wednesday morning
A short time later, a police bomb squad was sent to CNN’s offices (above) in New York City and the newsroom was evacuated because of a suspicious package
A robotic device and members of the bomb squad were deployed outside the building in Sunrise, Florida where Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has an office following reports of a suspicious device
TIMELINE: Packages target prominent Democrats and Trump’s foes
Monday: George Soros
Pipe bomb is found at George Soros’ home in Katonah, New York on Monday.
It was located in a mailbox outside the gates of the billionaire’s compound.
Tuesday : Hillary Clinton
Suspicious package is discovered at Hillary and Bill Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, Tuesday night.
The device addressed to Hillary was found during a routine mail screening. Bill was at the home but Hillary was campaigning for Democrats in Florida.
Wednesday: Barack Obama
Secret Service intercept a package en route to Obama’s Washington D.C. residence early Wednesday.
It was also discovered during routine mail screenings.
Wednesday: CNN/John Brennan
Suspicious package addressed to former CIA director John Brennan is found in the mail room of CNN’s New York Bureau on Wednesday.
CNN evacuated after a pipe bomb and an envelope of white powder was discovered. Brennan has worked as a television analyst.
Wednesday: Eric Holder/Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Bomb squad is called to Florida office of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Wednesday after package is found.
Packages that were intercepted all had Schultz’s office listed as a return address.
Package at her office was sent to former Attorney General Eric Holder but was mailed to the wrong address, so was returned to her instead.
Wednesday: Maxine Waters
Suspicious package addressed to California congresswoman Maxine Waters was intercepted Wednesday afternoon by Capitol Police.
Another package was sent to Waters in California.
Thursday : Joe Biden
Authorities locate two suspicious packages addressed to the former VP at mail facilities in Delaware on Thursday.
Thursday: Robert De Niro
New York Police swarm a building associated with the Hollywood actor in Tribeca early Thursday after a suspicious package was found.
The White House issued a statement regarding the devices, condemning the ‘violent attacks’.
‘We condemn the attempted violent attacks recently made against President Obama, President Clinton, Secretary Clinton, and other public figures,’ a statement from press secretary Sarah Sanders said.
‘These terrorizing acts are despicable, and anyone responsible will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. The United States Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are investigating and will take all appropriate actions to protect anyone threatened by these cowards.’
Vice President Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump also issued statements condemning the attacks on Obama, the Clintons and CNN.
‘These cowardly actions are despicable and have no place in this country. Grateful for swift response of @SecretService, @FBI & local law enforcement. Those responsible will be brought to justice,’ Pence tweeted.
Ivanka tweeted: ‘I strongly condemn the attempted acts of violence against President Obama, the Clinton family, @CNN and others. There is no excuse – America is better than this. Gratitude to the @SecretService and law enforcement for all they do to keep this nation safe.’
President Trump initially just retweeted Pence’s tweet, saying: ‘I agree wholeheartedly!’ but expanded during a White House press conference later on Wednesday.
‘I just want to tell you that in these times we have to unify, we have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America,’ Trump said.
Trump did not mention any of the recipients of the packages in his remarks.
‘The safety of the American people is my highest and absolute priority,’ he said.
His wife Melania also spoke, saying: ‘We cannot tolerate those cowardly attacks and I strongly condemn all who choose violence.
‘I’m grateful to the secret service as well as the federal and local law enforcement for all they do on a daily basis to keep us safe and encourage people across the country to choose kindness over hatred.’
Hillary Clinton said at a Florida fundraiser on Wednesday that ‘we are fine’ as she thanked the Secret Service for intercepting the device ‘long before it made its way to our home’.
Clinton, who was speaking at a fundraiser for Democratic congressional candidate Donna Shalala, said her family was grateful for the Secret Service’s ‘service and commitment and obviously never more than today’.
The pipe bomb found at CNN was safely taken away in an NYPD emergency vehicle on Wednesday to be examined by the FBI
A member of the New York Police Department bomb squad is pictured outside the Time Warner Center in the Manahattan after a suspicious package was sent to CNN
An evacuation alarm went off as CNN anchors were live on air reporting on the packages sent to Obama and Clinton
New York police block off a street after they were called to a suspicious package sent to the Time Warner building where CNN’s newsroom is located
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told a news conference that it was an ‘act of terror’. He is pictured above with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (right) and New York Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill (left)
With the country deeply polarized under President Trump, the packages brought a new level of tension to the November 6 political contests that will decide whether Democrats can challenge the majorities now held by Trump’s Republicans in Congress.
The targets are all Democrats frequently attacked by Trump online and in speeches as he defends his 2016 election victory and policies he has implemented since coming to office in January 2017.
The term #MAGAbomber was trending as the investigation unfolded.
Obama preceded him in the White House and Clinton was his 2016 election rival. Holder was attorney general in the last years of the Obama administration.
Trump has labelled CNN the leading purveyor of ‘fake news’ against him, and Brennan is perhaps his most damaging critic from the national security community. Brennan called the president’s performance during a July joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki ‘nothing short of treasonous’.
Trump often ridicules Waters, a senior Democrat, as ‘low IQ’ and has regularly attacked Wasserman Schultz, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, and Cuomo.
Alexander Soros, the son of George Soros, said in an opinion piece published by the New York Times that his father had long faced verbal criticism and threats over his involvement in politics, ‘but something changed in 2016’ when Trump was elected.
‘Before that, the vitriol he faced was largely confined to the extremist fringes, among white supremacists and nationalists who sought to undermine the very foundations of democracy. But with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, things got worse,’ Alexander Soros wrote.
He placed direct responsibility with those who sent the devices, but added: ‘I cannot see it divorced from the new normal of political demonization that plagues us today.’
Hillary Clinton said at a Florida fundraiser on Wednesday that ‘we are fine’ as she thanked the Secret Service for intercepting the device ‘long before it made its way to our home’
Melania Trump strongly condemned the attempted violence to President Trump’s political rivals on Wednesday at a White House press conference
At a press conference on Wednesday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned the ‘effort to terrorize’ as he and fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo appealed to all elected officials, including a veiled reference to Trump, to tone down rhetoric.
‘Don’t encourage violence, don’t encourage hatred, don’t encourage attacks on media,’ de Blasio said. ‘Unfortunately this atmosphere of hatred is contributing to the choices people are making.
‘The way to stop that is turn back the other way, to bring down the temperature, to end any messages of violence against people we disagree with and this has to start at the top.’
Meanwhile, during Fox News’ coverage of the events, former FBI assistant director Chris Swecker told the outlet that the Democrats might be to blame for the bombs.
‘We’re already seeing a little bit of a pattern,’ Swecker said. ‘They’re going to be looking at this as a potential terrorist motive, whether it’s on one side or the other.
‘This doesn’t necessarily mean someone is espousing some sort of conservative ideology and targeting Democrats. It could be someone who is trying to get the Democratic vote out and incur sympathy.’
INNOCENT-LOOKING MANILA ENVELOPES PACKED WITH PIPE BOMBS ‘INTENDED TO MAIM AND KILL’
A 6-inch pipe bomb wrapped in black electrical tape, hidden in a simple envelope with the return address of former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz – this is the ‘rudimentary but functional’ design behind at least five explosive devices sent out to America’s liberal elite in the last three days.
The devices sent to George Soros, The Clintons, The Obamas, CNN and Former Attorney General Eric Holder have all been described as pipe bombs and are believed to be the handiwork of the same serial bomber based on their design, according to law enforcement officials speaking to multiple outlets.
Their intention was not just to create fear but to explode and maim and kill, law enforcement sources told ABC
An envelope intended for Congresswoman Maxine Waters is also being investigated but hasn’t been confirmed as an explosive
All of the bombs were delivered in manilla envelopes with the return address of former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz
They all had bubble wrap interiors and printed labels alongside six Stars and Stripes stamps
The first pipe bomb found inside the mailbox of George Soros’ Westchester mansion on Monday afternoon was a six-inches-long piece of pipe packed with explosive powder
Images of the CNN pipe bomb, showed the explosive device wrapped in black electrical tape and linked up to a cell phone detonator
It was hand-delivered but designed to look like it had come through the mail.
The Obama and Clinton packages were intercepted in mail sorting offices but it is unclear how they were delivered.
Some have questioned whether the packages were actually sent through the postal service as that would have raised the alarm much more quickly and they wouldn’t have reached their intended targets
Images of the CNN pipe bomb, showed the explosive device wrapped in black electrical tape and wired up to a digital clock counter
It was addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan and intercepted in the media giant’s mail-room and reportedly delivered by a messenger
Images showed the small makeshift device and its envelope while a NYPD press conference reported it was stuffed with gunpowder
The bomb addressed to former Attorney General Eric Holder was somehow sent back to Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office – prompting a police investigation and evacuation of that office
A package is currently being investigated in a Maryland sorting office, reportedly addressed to Congresswoman Maxine Waters
False alarms were called in from the offices of Governor Andrew Cuomo and Senator Kamala Harris. Both suspicious packages were found to be innocent
Mailboxes stand outside the entrance to a house owned by Soros in Katonah, a suburb of New York City, in New York. The package was allegedly hand-delivered here
Pipe bombs are common improvised explosive devices. The pipe is sealed at both ends and packed with gunpowder. The tightly-packed design means even low grade explosives can have potentially devastating consequences and the pipe itself turns into shrapnel.
Often such devices are coated with metal projectiles like nuts and bolts creating an even more vicious impact on explosion. According to CNN, one of the four sent out this week was packed with shards of glass
They are linked up to a fuse and most often, a timer and battery for detonation. It is unclear how the devices in this case were intended to be detonated and what the role of the digital clock taped on the side of the pipe bomb was intended to serve
Investigators treating packages as ‘live devices,’ not hoax
By MICHAEL BALSAMO, ERIC TUCKER and COLLEEN LONG36 minutes ago
Police tape cordons off a post office in Wilmington, Del., Thursday, Oct. 25, 2018. A law enforcement official said suspicious packages addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden were intercepted at Delaware mail facilities in New Castle and Wilmington and were similar to crude pipe bombs sent to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and CNN. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators probing crude pipe bombs sent to prominent critics of President Donald Trump are trying to determine whether the devices were intended to detonate or simply to sow fear, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press Thursday.
The officials said the devices were not rigged like a booby-trapped package bomb that would explode upon opening. They had timers and batteries but never went off. Law enforcement officials were still uncertain whether the devices were poorly designed or never intended to cause physical harm. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation by name.
At a press conference Thursday, officials in New York stressed they were still treating the packages as “live devices.”
“As far as a hoax device, we’re not treating it that way,” said Police Commissioner James O’Neill.
At the briefing, authorities confirmed that at least some of the packages were distributed through the U.S. mail. They said investigators searching for additional suspicious parcels had not found any during the previous eight hours.
Details about the devices came as the four-day mail-bomb scare widened. Law enforcement officials seized three more devices Thursday — two addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden and one to actor Robert De Niro — described as similar to the devices sent to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, CNN and others.
The new discoveries brought to 10 the number of suspicious packages targeting Democrats but intercepted by authorities this week.
Much was still unanswered about the devices and authorities have said nothing about suspects. Details suggest only a broad pattern — that the items were packaged in manila envelopes, addressed to prominent Trump critics and carried U.S. postage stamped. Some were discovered in mail processing facilities. Officials said the devices are being examined by technicians at the FBI’s forensic lab in Quantico, Virginia.
The packages stoked nationwide tensions and fears two weeks before major congressional midterm elections. Even with the sender still unknown, politicians from both parties used the moment to decry a toxic political climate and lay blame.
“A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” Trump said on Twitter. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”
Former CIA Director John Brennan, the target of one package sent to CNN, fired back.
“Stop blaming others. Look in the mirror,” Brennan tweeted. “Your inflammatory rhetoric, insults, lies, & encouragement of physical violence are disgraceful. Clean up your act….try to act Presidential.”
The list of bombing targets spread from New York, Delaware and Washington, D.C., to Florida and California.
The explosive devices were packed in envelopes with bubble-wrap interiors bearing six American flag stamps and the return address of Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee who was accused by Clinton rivals of secretly helping the party’s eventual presidential nominee.
The bombs seized Wednesday, each with a small battery, were about six inches long and packed with powder and broken glass, according to a law enforcement official who viewed X-ray images. The official said the devices were made from PVC pipe and covered with black tape.
The packages discovered Thursday set off a new wave of alarm.
Two officials told The Associated Press that a person working at De Niro’s Manhattan office called police after seeing images of a package bomb sent to CNN and recalling a similar package addressed to the actor. De Niro’s office is located in the TriBeCa Film Center in lower Manhattan, and also includes an upscale restaurant and private screening room.
A police officer blocks off an area responding to reports of a suspicious package in the Tribeca neighborhood in New York. (AP Photo/Ron DePasquale)
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the packages were “clearly an effort to terrorize people politically, to choose people for political purposes and attack them because of their beliefs.”
The packages addressed to Biden were intercepted at Delaware mail facilities in New Castle and Wilmington, according to a law enforcement official who, like others, wasn’t authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Like earlier targets, both Biden and De Niro have been sharply critical of Trump. The actor dropped an expletive insult at Trump at this year’s Tony Awards and also apologized to Canadians for the “idiotic behavior of my president.” Biden said last week that the president may not “know what he’s doing” and coddles dictators.
The first crude bomb to be discovered was delivered Monday to the suburban New York compound of George Soros, a liberal billionaire and major contributor to Democratic causes. Soros has called Trump’s presidency “dangerous.”
Similar packages addressed to Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama were intercepted on their way to Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons live with former President Bill Clinton and to Washington, where Obama lives with his wife, Michelle. The Secret Service said neither package reached its intended recipient.
Others were sent to frequent Trump critics Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder. His ended up at the Florida office of Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was listed as the return address.
A police bomb squad removed the package addressed to Brennan from CNN’s New York office, which was evacuated.
As the scope of the attack became clearer Wednesday, Trump decried political violence during a scripted event in the White House East Room, and other members of the administration said violence has no place in American society.
Later at a rally in Wisconsin, he urged unity.
“Let’s get along,” he said. “By the way, do you see how nice I’m behaving tonight? Have you ever seen this?”
But at the same event, he blamed the news media and on Twitter Thursday kept up the argument that the media play a role.
“Acts or threats of political violence have no place in the United States,” Trump said.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump spoke with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Thursday morning and offered him any federal assistance needed. The president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump reached out to Chelsea Clinton, a longtime friend.
Democratic Senate and House leaders Chuck Schumer of New York and Nancy Pelosi of California said such words “ring hollow” when coming from Trump. They noted the president’s recent praise of a GOP congressman who body-slammed a reporter, among other pugnacious statements.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders took a slap at Democrats as she defended Trump.
“The president is certainly not responsible for sending suspicious packages to someone no more than Bernie Sanders was responsible for a supporter of his shooting up a Republican baseball field practice last year.”
James T. Hodgkinson, 66, was shot and killed by police after he opened fire on congressional Republicans practicing for their annual charity baseball game against Democrats in 2017. Hodgkinson’s widow said he had been a supporter of Vermont independent Bernie Sanders in 2016.
___
Sisak reported from New York. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Laurie Kellman, Colleen Long, Ken Thomas, Jill Colvin and Chad Day in Washington and Jim Mustian, Deepti Hajela and Tom Hays in New York contributed to this report.
By Jonathan Dienst, Adam Edelman and Elisha Fieldstadt
Two suspicious packages found Thursday addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden and another sent to Robert De Niro at his office in downtown Manhattan are similar to the pipe bombs sent to political and media figures in the past few days, according to the FBI.
One package addressed to Biden was discovered at a postal facility in New Castle, Delaware, and another was found at a postal facility in Wilmington, Delaware, officials. They suspected Wednesday that a package addressed to Biden was somewhere within the postal system.
A member of the bomb squad investigates a suspicious package at a postal facility in New Castle, Delaware.NBC News
The package sent to De Niro was found at 375 Greenwich St., the site of the restaurant Tribeca Grill, which the actor co-owns, and the offices of De Niro’s Tribeca Productions. There was no need to evacuate because the building was empty, police said.
An employee of DeNiro’s called authorities around 4 a.m. ET on Thursday after he realized a package he had seen earlier in the week looked like the others he was seeing, officials said.
The employee is a retired NYPD detective, according to John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.
“He was awake and watching the news and saw the image of the packaging that has been common to most of these devices as they have turned up at various locations,” Miller said, “and it struck him that the looked very much like a package he had seen on Tuesday in mail he was to screen for Robert DeNiro Productions at their offices on Greenwich Street.”
Investigators are looking into whether some of the packages were sent from Florida, two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News. Three officials said that they believe all of the packages were sent through the mail.
The CNN package arrived by mail to a screening facility in Midtown Manhattan before being delivered by courier to the CNN offices, an official said. The package was not screened because it was relatively small.
The devices were poorly made and some discovered could not have exploded, but it’s unclear if that was intentional, or if they were just badly constructed, officials said. They said some of the bombs had substantial flaws, some had subtle flaws and some have yet to be examined.
Even if some of these explosives were defective, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said they “are treating them as live devices.”
“As you (saw) the way our bomb squad detectives went into CNN yesterday, this has to be taken with the utmost seriousness,” O’Neill said. “As far as (if they are) hoax devices we’re not treating it that way.”
Officials said they are not aware of any new devices being discovered but are still concerned there could be more, and cautioned anyone who comes across a potential package of this type to treat it as dangerous.
Experts: Bomber likely left behind a mass of forensic clues
By MICHAEL BIESECKER and LISA MARIE PANEtoday
An officer with the Uniform Division of the United States Secret Service uses his dog to search a checkpoint near the home of President Barack Obama, Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2018, in Washington. The U.S. Secret Service says agents have intercepted packages containing “possible explosive devices” addressed to former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators examining the explosive devices sent to high-profile targets in Washington and New York will be working to glean forensic clues to help identify who sent them, gathering fingerprints and DNA evidence while tracking the origin of the packages and the components used to make the bombs.
Larry Johnson, a former head of criminal investigations for the U.S. Secret Service who also served as a special agent in charge of the presidential protective detail, said that bomb makers usually leave evidence behind. “If there is a human involved, there is a high probability you’re going to get somewhere investigatively,” he said. “There will be no stone left unturned.”
Johnson said it is highly likely that the person or people who built the bombs have been previously flagged by law enforcement. The Secret Service maintains an extensive database of individuals and groups who have made past threats against presidents or other top political leaders, either through letters, emails or on social media.
“A good percentage of the time, this is not the first time whoever is responsible for this will have stuck their neck out,” Johnson said. “Those looking to do revenge or harm to someone, it doesn’t just come to them one day.”
This screenshot from CNN’s Twitter account shows what CNN says is the explosive device that was delivered to their New York headquarters on Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2018. (CNN Twitter Account via AP)
Among the first steps for investigators will be retracing the path of the packages through the postal system or courier service used to deliver them.
The U.S. Postal Service operates a sophisticated imaging system that photographs the outside of each piece of mail processed across the country and can be used to determine the specific location of where it was sent. That’s how federal officials were led to a woman who sent the poison ricin through the mail to President Barack Obama and then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2013.
The envelopes and packaging materials themselves will also be closely scrutinized.
“It will be a treasure trove of forensic evidence,” said Anthony Roman, a private security and investigations consultant. “As human beings, we are filtering off our DNA everywhere we walk, everywhere we sit.”
Even the most careful bomber is likely to leave behind genetic material that could be used to identify them, especially traces of sweat, saliva or skin cells. There may also be fingerprints or hair.
Roman said investigators will also be collecting all available video camera footage taken from where the packages were mailed and delivered, as well as interviewing any potential witnesses in the area.
Because the devices were intercepted before they exploded, forensics experts will be able to carefully disassemble the devices and examine the components. They’ll examine the wiring, the initiating system, any timing device and seek to identify what type of pipe. The design of the bomb will be compared to other explosive devices recovered in the past.
Adam B. Hall, director of the Core Mass Spectrometry Facility at the Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis at Northeastern University, said most devices are made from easily available materials regardless of what specific type of device it is.
It will have three primary components: the pipe, the explosive filler and an “initiator,” or mechanism to set it off. The initiator will help identify how sophisticated the bomb maker is, whether it’s a timing device or a remote trigger.
“Your typical pipe bomb, it’s not very sophisticated,” said Hall, who previously worked in the Massachusetts State Police crime laboratory and was involved in the Boston Marathon bombing investigation. “A lot of the directions for this are available on the internet. … This is not something that would require days or weeks of planning in order to execute.”
Still, there are likely innumerable telltale signs that could help authorities track down how and where it was made, said Jimmie Oxley, the co-director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center of Excellence in Explosives, Detection, Mitigation and Response.
Some explosives can be homemade, which will make them more difficult to trace. But other materials must be purchased and can help narrow down where and how a device was made. Smokeless powder, for example, is virtually guaranteed to have been purchased. Black powder can be commercial grade or homemade, but it’s easy to discern which is which.
“All of these are signatures,” she said.
There are times, such as with the recent spate of bombings in Austin, Texas, as well as with the notorious Unabomber, when each device will have a different “signature” in an attempt to throw off authorities or as the person making the devices tests and finesses their technique.
Oxley said there will still likely be some commonalities that will allow law enforcement to zero in on a suspect or suspects.
“It’s not an insurmountable task,” Oxley said. “There’s a ton of evidence out there. Unless this is a really, really smart person, they will find out who did this.”
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Pane reported from Boise, Idaho. Associated Press writer Chad Day contributed to this report.
A woman was photographed holding a sign that read “Democrats Fake News Fake Bombs” outside the Broward College building hosting Florida’s gubernatorial debate on Wednesday.
The photo, first shared on Twitter by Florida Democratic Party spokesman Kevin Donohoe, shows a woman in what appears to be a DeSantis campaign shirt, holding the sign.
Earlier on Wednesday, a series of pipe bombs were discovered after having been addressed to CNN and a number of prominent Democrats, including former President Obama and former President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.
President Trump and lawmakers from both parties have condemned the attempted attacks, and federal and state authorities are investigating the matter. Another, similar device was found on Thursday morning at a building housing a production company owned by the actor Robert De Niro.
The sign appeared to reference conspiracy theories that have quickly circulated on social media among some on the right. Those theories suggest the bombs were “false flags” and meant to change the political conversation in a way that would hurt Trump and Republicans ahead of the midterm elections, which are less than two weeks away.
All of the people who the bombs were addressed to are prominent critics of Trump who have been frequent targets of his barbs.
Radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested that a “Democratic operative” was behind the packages, because “Republicans just don’t do this kind of thing.’
Several pro-Trump media personalities pushed the “false flag” theories on social media.
“From the Haymarket riot to the Unibomber [sic], bombs are a liberal tactic,” Ann Coulter tweeted.
Conservative writer Ben Shapiro condemned the “false flag” theories: “If your first reaction to some evil person sending bombs to a variety of politicians on one side of the aisle is ‘FALSE FLAG,’ you are officially deranged.”
Critics of Trump, including Democratic leaders of Congress, have blamed his repeated attacks on the media and political opponents.
Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin, Trump condemned the pipe bombs and called for “all sides to come together in peace and harmony.” But he also didn’t mention those targeted by the bombs, and put blame on the media and his political opponents for the political environment.
The DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to request for comment from The Hill.
Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Terrie Rizzo in a statement called on DeSantis to apologize for the supporters’ sign.
In the original 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair, the song is heard – sung by Noel Harrison – during opening credits; and, during the film, in a scene in which the character Thomas Crown flies a glider at the glider airport in Salem, New Hampshire: having edited the rough cut for this scene utilizing the Beatles track “Strawberry Fields Forever” producer/director Norman Jewison commissioned an original song be written for the glider scene which would reference the ambivalent feelings of Thomas Crown as he engages in a favorite pastime while experiencing the tension of preparing to commit a major robbery. Alan Bergman: “Michel [Legrand] played us [ie. Alan and Marilyn Bergman] seven or eight melodies. We listened to all of them and decided to wait until the next day to choose one. We three decided on the same one, a long baroque melody… The lyric we wrote was stream-of-consciousness. We felt that the song had to be a mind trip of some kind” – “The [eventual] title was [originally] a line at the end of a section… When we finished we said: “What do we call this? It’s got to have a title. That line is kind of interesting.’ So we restructured the song so that the line appeared again at the end. It came out of the body of the song. I think we were thinking, you know when you try to fall asleep at night and you can’t turn your brain off and thoughts and memories tumble.”[2]
Noel Harrison recorded the song after Andy Williams passed on it: according to Harrison: “It was recorded live on a huge sound stage at Paramount, with the accompanying film clips running on a giant screen and Michel blowing kisses to the orchestra.”[3] Harrison took issue with the couplet “Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own / Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone”, singing the word “shone” British-style with a short vowel sound making the rhyme with “own” imperfect. Marilyn Bergman: “We said ‘No, it’s shone [long vowel sound].’ And he said ‘No, it’s our language!’ And we said: ‘Yes, but it’s our song.’ So reluctantly, he sang shone [long vowel sound] and our rhyme was intact.”[2] However, Harrison evidently had the last laugh; in the finally released version he sings “shone” with a short vowel. Harrison’s version had a US single in the US in July 1968 soon after the premiere of the film and similarly was released in the British Isles at the time of the film’s 7 February 1969 premiere in the UK and Ireland. As a result, it was a current UK release when “The Windmills of Your Mind” received an Academy Award nomination on 24 February 1969: Harrison’s single debuted at #36 in the UK Top 50 dated 4 March 1969 and had risen to #15—abetted by performances by Harrison on the 27 March 1969 broadcast of TOTP and also on variety shows hosted by Rolf Harris and Scott Walker—when the song won the Academy Award on 14 April 1969, an endorsement which facilitated the Top Ten entry of Harrison’s single on the UK chart dated 22 April 1969 with its chart peak of #8 effected two weeks later.[4]
“The Windmills of Your Mind” was performed on the Academy Awards ceremony broadcast of 14 April 1969 by José Feliciano; Noel Harrison would recall: “I was invited to sing it at the Academy Awards… but I was making a movie in England at the time, and the producer (who didn’t like me) refused to let me go.” The film which caused the scheduling conflict has been identified as Take a Girl Like You directed by Jonathan Miller.[3]
Dusty Springfield version
Jerry Wexler, president of Atlantic Records, heard “The Windmills of Your Mind” on the soundtrack of The Thomas Crown Affair and championed having Dusty Springfield record the song for her debut Atlantic album Dusty in Memphis, overcoming the singer’s strong resistance; Springfield’s friend and subsequent manager Vicki Wickham would allege: “Dusty always said she hated it because she couldn’t identify with the words.”[5] During the first sessions for the track at American Sound Studio in Memphis, problems with getting the proper chords down arose, and at Springfield’s suggestion the song was arranged so the first three verses were sung in a slower tempo than the original film version.
In April 1969 the third A-side release from Dusty in Memphis was announced as “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” with “The Windmills of Your Mind” as B-side: however Wexler was prepared to promote “Windmills” as the A-side if it won the Oscar for Best Song, reportedly instructing mail-room clerks at Atlantic Records’ New York City headquarters to listen to the Academy Awards broadcast the night of 14 April 1969; hearing “The Windmills” announced as the Best Song winner was these clerks’ cue to drive a station wagon loaded with 2500 copies of a double-sided promo single of Springfield’s version – identified on the label as “Academy Award Winner” – to the New York City general post office, where the copies of the single were mailed out to key radio stations across the US.[6] Although its Hot 100 debut was not effected until the 5 May 1969 issue of Billboard and then with a #99 ranking, Springfield’s “The Windmills” made a rapid ascent to the Top 40 being ranked at #40 on the Hot 100 dated 24 May 1969 only to stall over the subsequent three weeks peaking at #31 on the Hot 100 dated 14 June 1969 with only one additional week of Hot 100 tenure, being ranked at #45 on the 21 June 1969 chart. On the Cash Box chart, the song rose as high as #22.[7] Local hit parades indicate that Springfield’s “Windmills” had Top Ten impact in only select larger markets: Boston, Southern California, and Miami. The track did reach #3 on the Easy Listening chart in Billboard a feat matched by Springfield’s third subsequent single “Brand New Me” which therefore ties with “The Windmills” as having afforded Springfield her best-ever solo showing on a Billboard chart.[8]
José Feliciano version
“The Windmills of Your Mind” was recorded by José Feliciano for his 1969 album 10 to 23,[9] and Feliciano performed the song on the Academy Awards ceremony broadcast of 14 April 1969; the song’s original singer Noel Harrison would later opine of Feliciano’s performance: “A wonderful musician and compelling singer, he made much too free with the beautiful melody in my humble opinion. But that’s jazz.”[3] It was Feliciano’s version of “The Windmills” which became a hit in the Netherlands, reaching #11 on the Dutch chart in November 1969.[10] and Nr. 4 in the Turkish hit parade in April 1970.[11]
Anne Clark on her maxi-single The Haunted Road (1993),[17] featuring Eyeless in Gaza: track included Clark’s 1996 compilation album The Nineties A Fine Collection
The Manhattans single (c. 1970);[47] bonus track on the 2015 CD release of the group’s 1971 album With These Hands
Johnny Mathis Version #1: on his album Love Theme from ‘Romeo & Juliet’(1969)[48]
Version #2: with Toots Thielemans on Thielemans’ album Chez Toots (1998)[49] Chez Toots track listing reads “Les Moulins de mon cœur (The Windmills of Your Mind)”: Mathis sings only the English-language lyrics.
Maureen McGovern Version #1: on her album Academy Award Performance – And the Envelope, Please (1975)[52]
Version #2: on her album The Music Never Ends (1997)[53]
Mathilde Santing on her compilation album Matilde Matilde (1997);[71] the track is a recording of a rehearsal of Santing’s performance of the song at the 1985 Knokke Festival (nl) revival
Janet Seidel on her album Comme ci comme ça (2004);[72] the track is listed as “Windmills of Your Mind”/”Moulins de mon cœur” and includes lyrics from both the English- and French-language renderings of the song.
Swing Out Sister on their compilation album The Best of Swing Out Sister (1996);[77]taped performance from The Jeff Graham Show on Radio Luxembourg, made in 1989: the track was included on some editions of the 1989 single release “Where in the World”, and is also included on the 2014 compilation The Essential Swing Out Sister
The lyrics for the French-language rendering of “The Windmills of Your Mind” were written by Eddy Marnay and this version, entitled “Les Moulins de mon cœur”, was first recorded in 1968 by Marcel Amont who was resultantly afforded a minor French chart hit (peak #49).[91]
“Les Moulins de mon coeur” has subsequently been recorded by:
Natalie Dessay with Michel LeGrand on their collaborative album Entre Elle et Lui(2013)[97]
Celine Dion on her concert album Céline Dion en concert (1985); in medley“Hommage à Michel Legrand: Quand on s’aime / Brûle pas tes doigts / La Valse des lilas / Quand ça balance / Les Moulins de mon coeur”[98]
Janet Seidel on her album Comme ci comme ça (2004);[72] the track is listed as “Windmills of Your Mind”/”Moulins de mon cœur” and includes lyrics from both the English- and French-language renderings of the song.
Caterina Valente on her concert album Caterina Valente Live [London Palladium] (1975);[109] track listing reads “The Windmills of Your Mind”: however it is sung completely in French
Sylvie Vartan on her album La Reine de Saba (1974);[110] the album La Reine de Saba was issued only in Japan: its tracks were all included on the 1997 box set Sylvie Vartan: Les Années RCA
In 1970 Helena Vondráčková, prior to recording “The Windmills of Your Mind” with its original English lyrics for her album Isle of Helena (1972), recorded the song as rendered in Czech: “Můžeš zůstat, můžeš jít”,[114] and also Japanese: “Kaze no sasayaki”.[115] Introduced on the album Ostrov Heleny Vondráčkové,[114] “Můžeš zůstat, můžeš jít” has become a signature song for Vondráčková: in 2012 when her three CD retrospective (Nejen) o lásce was issued, Vondráčková cited “Můžeš zůstat, můžeš jít” as “the song on the [anthology] dearest to [her] heart”.[116] An alternate Czech rendering of “The Windmills of Your Mind”: “Mlýnské kolo v srdci mém”, was recorded by Hana Hegerová to serve as title cut for her 2010 album of renderings of famous French-language songs.[117]
“The Windmills of Your Mind” has also been rendered as:
“Vinden I Min Själ” (Swedish): recorded by Lill-Babs on her album Till Mina Vänner (1979),[123]Anders Ekborg on his album Äkta Vara – 11 Sångfilmer 100% Live (2006),[124]Anita Strandell (sv) on her album Sommarbaravara (2011).[125]
Noel Harrison, singer of The Windmills Of Your Mind, dies
Noel Harrison, whose song The Windmills Of Your Mind for movie The Thomas Crown Affair won an Oscar, dies at the age of 79
Singer Noel Harrison has died at the age of 79
By Telegraph Reporters and PA
10:52AM BST 22 Oct 2013
Singer Noel Harrison, known to millions for The Windmills Of Your Mind, has died at the age of 79 from a heart attack.
Harrison, who was born in London on January 29,1934, was best known for recording the hit song on The Thomas Crown Affair soundtrack. He was the son of the late actor Rex Harrison. Harrison’s mother was Collette Thomas, the first of his Hollywood star father’s six wives. His parents divorced in 1940.
Harrison had an eventful life. He had chart success with the song A Young Girl and starred in the TV series The Girl from UNCLE. In 1953, he had become the British ski-racing champion and represented Britain at the Olympics.
After moving to Los Angeles in the Sixties, he had a US chart hit with Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen
He will remain best known, though, for The Windmills of Your Mind, a song with music by French composer Michel Legrand and lyrics by Americans Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. The song was used as the theme for the 1968 film, The Thomas Crown Affair and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1968. A version by Sting was used in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
Harrison wrote on his website that he had not anticipated the song would become so popular and “my most notable piece of work”. He wrote: “It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I went to the studio one afternoon and sang it and pretty much forgot about it. I didn’t realise until later what a timeless, beautiful piece Michel Legrand and the Bergmans had written. It won best song at the 1968 Oscars and turned out to be my most notable piece of work.”
His wife, Lori Chapman, said: “Noel will be loved and missed by more people than I ever knew.”
In 2011 played Glastonbury Festival’s Spirit Of ’71 stage. Harrison performed at the village hall in Black Dog, Devon, on Saturday. His wife said that the performance had been “extremely successful” but that he had “a long drive home” and was “exhausted” when he returned. Harrison, who lived in Devon, had five children and four grandchildren.
Story 1: Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray Responds To Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) 568 Page Report- Videos —
Former FBI Director James Comey was “insubordinate” in handling the probe into Hillary Clinton, damaging the bureau and the Justice Department’s image of impartiality even though he wasn’t motivated by politics, the department’s watchdog found.
Although the report issued Thursday by Inspector General Michael Horowitz doesn’t deal directly with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion with those around Donald Trump, the president and his Republican allies in Congress were primed to seize on it as evidence of poor judgment and anti-Trump bias within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department.
Horowitz said that five FBI officials expressed hostility toward Trump before his election as president and disclosed in his report to Congress that their actions have been referred to the bureau for possible disciplinary action.
“The president was briefed on the IG report earlier today, and it reaffirmed the president’s suspicions about Comey’s conduct and the political bias among some of the members of the FBI,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the 500-page report.
One example cited in the new document is an exchange of texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page on Aug. 8, 2016. Page questioned whether Trump would become president. Strzok replied: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
Under those circumstances, Horowitz said “we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up” on potential new evidence in the Clinton case “was free from bias.”
Zeroing in on the evidence of anti-Trump sentiment, Representative Darrell Issa of California said “it appears as though all or most of the 39 people who were tangentially involved had a bias toward believing they were going to work for Hillary Clinton — and as a result didn’t have the guts to take on wrongdoing.”
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that “any effort to use this report as an excuse for shutting down Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation is both disingenuous and dangerous. Nothing in this report detracts from the credibility and critical importance of the Special Counsel’s investigation.”
Clinton Decision
Horowitz, whose office said it reviewed more than 1.2 million documents and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, didn’t challenge Comey’s fundamental decision against recommending prosecution of Clinton for mishandling classified information.
But the inspector general called it “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors, the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same.”
He said that “we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part,” but “by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”
The report also noted that Comey used personal email at times to conduct official business.
Comey’s Response
Comey said the report “found no evidence that bias or improper motivation affected the investigation, which I know was done competently, honestly and independently.” In an op-ed article for the New York Times, he said the report “also resoundingly demonstrates that there was no prosecutable case against Mrs. Clinton, as we had concluded.”
Horowitz examined actions taken by top officials before the 2016 election, including the handling of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. The inquiry expanded to touch on an array of politically sensitive decisions by officials including Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement that John Huber, a U.S. attorney based in Utah who’s reviewing allegations of FBI bias and wrongdoing, “will provide recommendations as to whether any matter not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of Special Counsel.”
The FBI said in a statement included in the inspector general’s report that Comey’s handling of the Clinton findings may have violated regulations on releasing information and that his letter disclosing reopening of the inquiry shortly before the election “was a serious error in judgment.”
The bureau also said it accepts findings “that certain text messages, instant messages and statements, along with a failure to consistently apply DoJ and FBI interview policies, were inappropriate and created an appearance that political bias might have improperly influenced investigative actions or decisions.”
Some of what Horowitz discovered has already been made public, and Trump and Republican lawmakers have pounced on those findings in an effort to discredit Comey and, by extension, the investigation now being run by Mueller.
In tweets, Trump has called Comey’s investigation into Clinton “phony and dishonest” and said that Comey, who he fired on May 9, 2017, left the FBI’s reputation in tatters.
Trump’s Interest
Trump has expressed great interest in the inspector general’s report, as well as some skepticism it might not be as damning as he hoped.
“What is taking so long with the Inspector General’s Report on Crooked Hillary and Slippery James Comey,” Trump tweeted on June 5. “Numerous delays. Hope Report is not being changed and made weaker! There are so many horrible things to tell, the public has the right to know. Transparency!”
The inspector general reviewed Comey’s announcement in July 2016 that no prosecutor would find grounds to pursue criminal charges against Clinton for improperly handling classified information on her private email server. He also looked at Comey’s decision to inform Congress only days before the election that the Clinton investigation was being re-opened. Comey’s public announcement of findings angered Republicans, while his reopening of the inquiry outraged Democrats.
“This finding could have been reached the day of Comey’s press conference,” Brian Fallon, who was spokesman for Clinton’s presidential campaign, said Thursday. “It was obvious at the time that Comey was completely deviating from department protocols and it had a fateful impact on the 2016 campaign and the long-term reputation of the FBI.”
Anti-Trump Texts
Republican critics seized on previous revelations from the inspector general Strzok and Page, two of the FBI officials who worked on Mueller’s Russia investigation, exchanged text messages sharply critical of Trump. Mueller removed Strzok from the inquiry after the texts were discovered, and Page has since left the FBI.
But Horowitz said in the report to be issued Thursday that “we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative actions we reviewed.” Still, he wrote that “the conduct by these employees cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigation.”
Comey-Lynch Criticism
Horowitz found a “troubling lack of any direct, substantive communication” between Comey and Attorney General Lynch ahead of Comey’s July 5 press conference on Clinton and his October 28 letter to Congress.
“We found it extraordinary that, in advance of two such consequential decisions, the FBI director decided that the best course of conduct was to not speak directly and substantively with the attorney general about how best to navigate those decisions.”
Lynch had announced that she would go along with whatever Comey recommended with regard to the Clinton case, although she didn’t formally recuse herself. Lynch had come under heated criticism for agreeing to meet with former President Bill Clinton in June 2016 on her plane while it was sitting on a tarmac in Phoenix. The two sides have said they didn’t discuss anything related to the investigation.
The inspector general released a report in April finding that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor on four different occasions regarding interactions with the media, including providing information to a news reporter about the FBI’s investigation into the foundation created by Hillary and Bill Clinton. The inspector general has referred the matter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for further investigation.
Attorney General Sessions relied on the report to fire McCabe only hours before he was set to retire and qualify for his full government pension. McCabe and his lawyer have adamantly contested the allegations.
The inspector general also has opened a separate review into whether the Justice Department and FBI followed appropriate procedures in obtaining a secret warrant to conduct surveillance on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in late 2016 and early 2017.
— With assistance by Jennifer Epstein, Jennifer Jacobs, Billy House, Justin Sink, and Steven T. Dennis
(Updates with White House comment in fourth paragraph.)
The Latest: FBI attorney removed for anti-Trump messages
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on a report by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation (all times local):
5:20 p.m.
An FBI attorney was removed from the special counsel’s Russia investigation in February after the Justice Department’s internal watchdog found he had written anti-Trump messages.
This was in addition to FBI agent Peter Strzok who was removed from the investigation last year after exchanging anti-Trump texts.
The reassignment of the FBI attorney was revealed in the report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s inspector general on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
It identifies the attorney as “FBI Attorney 2” and says he was assigned to the Clinton investigation and also to the investigation into Russian interference.
The report describes some of his messages, including one the day after the election in which he said he was “so stressed about what I could have done differently.” In another message, he called then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence “stupid.”
Strzok had exchanged his anti-Trump texts with another FBI attorney, Lisa Page, who had already left the special counsel’s team when he was reassigned.
___
4:30 p.m.
In a revelation some Democrats see as ironic, the Justice Department’s inspector general report about the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation says former Director James Comey occasionally used personal email for work.
In several instances Comey forwarded items to his personal account, including drafts of messages and other unclassified items.
When interviewed by the inspector general, Comey said he used it for word processing at home when he was writing something longer. He said it was “incidental” and he forwarded the emails to his government account.
Comey said he wasn’t sure if that was in accordance with FBI regulations, but had checked it with another official and he “had the sense that it was okay.”
The inspector general says he did not follow regulations.
__
4:15 p.m.
A lawyer for FBI agent Peter Strzok (struhk) says a watchdog’s report shows his politics did not affect an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Strzok has come under fire for text messages critical of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. He left special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered the problematic texts in mid-2017.
On Thursday, a report by the inspector general revealed that Strzok had told an FBI lawyer “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president.
Strzok was also involved in the probe of Clinton’s handling of classified emails that roiled the election.
Strzok’s lawyer, Aitan Goelman, says Thursday’s report reveals no evidence that the FBI agent’s political views affected the handling of the Clinton investigation.
___
3:20 p.m.
The White House says a report by the Justice Department’s watchdog on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation is reaffirming President Donald Trump’s “suspicions” about former FBI Director James Comey’s conduct.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the inspector general’s report is also reaffirming Trump’s suspicions about the “political bias among some of the members of the FBI.” She is deferring additional comments to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The report says Comey was “insubordinate” in his conduct of the probe, but it didn’t find he was motivated by political bias.
Sanders says Trump was briefed on the report’s findings earlier in the day.
___
2:55 p.m.
Former FBI Director James Comey says he disagrees with some of the conclusions of the Justice Department’s inspector general about his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
But Comey says in a tweet that he respects the inspector general’s work and believes the conclusions are “reasonable.” He says “people of good faith” can see the “unprecedented situation differently.”
Comey’s comments come in response to the public release of a report that is heavily critical of his decisions in the probe. The report says Comey was insubordinate and departed from established protocol numerous times.
The report does find that Comey’s actions were not politically motivated to help either candidate.
Comey also wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times responding to the report’s findings.
__
2:40 p.m.
An FBI investigator who worked on probes into Hillary Clinton’s emails and into Russian interference in the 2016 election told an FBI lawyer “we’ll stop” Donald Trump from becoming president.
The inflammatory texts between Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page are highlighted in the report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, which is critical of former FBI director James Comey’s handling of the investigations.
According to the report, Page texted Strzok in August 2016: “(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
Strzok responded: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
The report says the watchdog “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence” that political bias directly affected parts of the probe, it says Page and Strzok’s conduct “cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigation.”
__
2:05 p.m.
The Justice Department has issued a stinging rebuke to the FBI for its handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The report released Thursday calls former FBI Director James Comey “insubordinate” and says his actions were “extraordinary.”
But the report, by the department’s watchdog, does not find evidence that Comey was motivated by political bias or preference in his decisions.
The report criticized Comey for publicly announcing his recommendation against criminal charges for Clinton. It also faulted him for alerting Congress days before the 2016 election that the investigation was being reopened because of newly discovered emails.
President Donald Trump has been eager for the report in hopes that it would vindicate his decision to fire Comey and undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
__
12:15 p.m.
The Justice Department’s watchdog faults former FBI Director James Comey for breaking with established protocol in his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But it found that his decisions were not driven by political bias.
The report also criticizes Comey for not keeping then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other Justice Department superiors properly informed about his handling of the investigation.
That’s according to a person familiar with the report’s conclusions who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The person was not authorized to speak on the record because the report is not yet public.
The report’s findings are set to be made public later Thursday. It represents the culmination of an 18-month review into one of the most consequential FBI investigations in recent history.
__ Chad Day in Washington
___
12:15 p.m.
President Donald Trump was expected to receive a briefing at the White House on a report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was spotted entering the West Wing on Thursday. White House officials have not yet confirmed that Rosenstein will be conducting the briefing.
The inspector general’s detailed report is set to be released later in the day. It will look at how the nonpartisan law enforcement agency became entangled in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is expected to use the report to renew his attack against two former top FBI officials — Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe.
___
11:55 a.m.
President Donald Trump is bashing the special counsel investigation into Russian election meddling as a “pile of garbage” ahead of the release of a highly anticipated report looking into the Justice Department’s conduct during the 2016 election.
Trump says in a pair of tweets that now that he’s back from his summit with North Korea, “the thought process must sadly go back to the Witch Hunt.”
Trump is yet again insisting there was “No Collusion and No Obstruction of the fabricated No Crime” and is accusing Democrats of making up “a phony crime,” paying “a fortune to make the crime sound real,” and then “Collud(ing) to make this pile of garbage take on life in Fake News!”
The report by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog is being released Thursday afternoon and is expected to criticize the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
___
11:35 a.m.
Two Republican-led House committees say their own monthslong probe into the now-closed FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails has so far shown “questionable decision-making” by the agency.
A document listing preliminary conclusions was obtained by The Associated Press ahead of a separate report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog. That much-anticipated report is due to be released Thursday afternoon. It is expected to criticize the FBI’s handling of the investigation.
Republicans on the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees say they have “substantial questions about whether DOJ and FBI properly analyzed and interpreted the law surrounding mishandling of classified information.” They charge that the FBI did not follow legal precedent and treated the Clinton probe differently from other cases.
The Republicans allege bias against Donald Trump in his campaign against Clinton.
— Mary Clare Jalonick
___
1 a.m.
The Justice Department’s internal watchdog is releasing its much-anticipated report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The report being issued Thursday afternoon is the culmination of an 18-month review of one of the most consequential FBI investigations in recent history.
Its findings will revive debate about whether FBI actions affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and contributed to Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump.
Trump’s supporters have eagerly awaited the report in hopes that it would skewer the judgment of James Comey, who was fired as FBI director last year.
Among the actions scrutinized is Comey’s decision to publicly announce his recommendation against prosecuting Clinton, and his disclosure to Congress days before the election that the investigation was being revived because of newly discovered emails.
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Charles Kesler Introduces Angelo Codevilla
1. America’s Ruling Class
3. What’s Wrong with the CIA?
The Revolution of America’s Regime
Angelo Codevilla – Does America Have a Ruling Class?
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America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
ANGELO M. CODEVILLA
July 16, 2010, 10:09 am
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Reviewmagazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
The Political Divide
Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.
Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.
While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people’s realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers — easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.
Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America’s regime class — relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans — and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation’s unpredictable future. More on politics below.
The Ruling Class
Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?
The most widespread answers — by such as the Times‘s Thomas Friedman and David Brooks — are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg’s notion that America is now ruled by a “newocracy”: a “new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization — including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.” In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.
Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate — just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter’s grievances.
Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity — being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment’s parts.
If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about “global warming” to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.
Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France’s ruling class are bright people — certifiably. Not ours. But didn’t ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France’s ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.
The Faith
Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation’s paradigm that “all men are created equal”?
The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one’s self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it “the old serpent, you work I’ll eat.” But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.
It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by “science.” By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes’ deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx’s formulation, that ethical thought is “superstructural” to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called “all men are created equal” “a self-evident lie,” much of America’s educated class had already absorbed the “scientific” notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class’s religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.
Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked “can’t you let anything alone?” he answered with, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill.” Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world’s examples and the world’s reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to “teach [them] to elect good men.”
World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people’s eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans’ lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people’s backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.
The cultural divide between the “educated class” and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples’ ways and to build “the new man.” Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson’s benevolent genius.
Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America’s problems in technocratic terms. America’s problems would be fixed by a “brain trust” (picked by him). His New Deal’s solutions — the alphabet-soup “independent” agencies that have run America ever since — turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.
As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself “scientific,” this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in “scientific” terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno’s widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the “F scale” (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey’s Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers’s Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved “scientifically” that conservatives were maladjusted ne’er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled “Liberalism and Personality,” following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)
The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today’s bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are “epiphenomenal” products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people’s words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second — or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents’ clinging to “God and guns” as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said “what everybody knows is true.” Confident “knowledge” that “some of us, the ones who matter,” have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.
The Agenda: Power
Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.
Dependence Economics
By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency’s value for all.
Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.
By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing “alternative energy,” our ruling class created arguably the world’s biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a “green agenda,” because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in “climate change.” At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies — that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.
Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people’s energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith’s characterization of America as “private wealth amidst public squalor” (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest’s complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).
The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class’s economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its “system.” But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and “best practices” that constitute “the system” become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what “the system” offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run “guaranteed retirement accounts.” If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?
Who Depends on Whom?
In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country’s needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. (“Congress shall make no law…” says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of “responsible parties.” Hence the ruling class’s perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry’s elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government’s plans, and to craft a “living” Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to “positive rights” — meaning charters of government power.
Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison’s Federalist #10, “refine and enlarge the public’s view,” to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain’s electoral system — like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote — had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson’s time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.
In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard “one man, one vote” for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of “gerrymandering,” concentrating the opposition party’s voters into as few districts as possible while placing one’s own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today’s Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments — not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered “safe” for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.
To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s — elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing — government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society’s sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector’s true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.
Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of “the doctors” even though the vast majority of America’s 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA’s officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona’s enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police — whose officials depend on the administration for their salaries — issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics’ animosity. This reflected conversations with the administration rather than a vote of the nation’s police chiefs.
Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers’ secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent of the workers’ pay, which it recycles as contributions to the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union’s leadership is part of the ruling class’s beating heart.
The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today’s America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.
Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today’s administrative state — in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today’s legal-administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever “agency policy” they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any “agency policy” you will be informed that it was formulated with input from “the public.” But not from the likes of you.
Disregard for the text of laws — for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them — in favor of the decider’s discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as “interstate commerce” and “due process,” then transmuting others, e.g., “search and seizure,” into “privacy.” Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of “privacy” with a “penumbra” that it deemed “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution’s limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the “positive rights” they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.
By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today’s America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.
As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.
Disaggregating and Dispiriting
The ruling class is keener to reform the American people’s family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class’s self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest — often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.
Since marriage is the family’s fertile seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of “the family” — meaning married parents raising children — but rather of “families,” meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage — except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize “child care” for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration’s secretary of defense and the Republican Senate’s majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military’s practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is “contrary to societal norms.” Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party’s most faithful voters.
While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”
At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson’s words and explicit in our ruling class’s actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated “fathers,” of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension.
While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature’s laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.
That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability — a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made — to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.” The Washington Posteditorialized that the attorney general’s demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.
By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking — to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by “world standards.” Each day, the ruling class produces new “studies” that show that one or another of Americans’ habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.
Meddling and Apologies
America’s best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America’s Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson and Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully, today’s ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people’s insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and “isolationism.”
Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people’s perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world’s Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it — but not in its own eyes.
Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image — their private image. Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe’s peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans’ non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives’ private dream. In our time, this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama apologized to Europe because “the United States has fallen short of meeting its responsibilities” to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obama was not apologizing for anything that he or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do while glossing over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the reducing. Wilson redux.
Similarly, Obama “apologized” to Europeans because some Americans — not him and his friends — had shown “arrogance and been dismissive” toward them, and to the world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter — not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona’s law that directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, “Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him…” This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: “Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men…”
In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.
The Country Class
Describing America’s country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities — e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class’s coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members’ yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.
Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend.
Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union’s interests above those of parents who want to choose their children’s schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.
Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class’s rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance — including academic ones — should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ricci, upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may sometimes still trump political connections.
Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration” — an imputation of stupidity — while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?
The country class actually believes that America’s ways are superior to the rest of the world’s, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota’s factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to “world standards.” This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or “God Bless America” is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League’s plaintive renditions of the “Star Spangled Banner.”
Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God’s law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri — entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood’s — because since the 1970s most of Hollywood’s products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for “popular music” and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class’s hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class’s characteristic cultural venture — the homeschool movement — stresses the classics across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.
Congruent Agendas?
Each of the country class’s diverse parts has its own agenda, which flows from the peculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishments are accruing. Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams. The faithful to God sense persecution. All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and more realize that their own agenda’s advancement requires concerting resistance to the ruling class across the board.
Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must run your business, knowing that you will be required to pay more, work harder, and show deference for the privilege of making less money, is the independent businessman’s nightmare. But what to do about it? In our time the interpenetration of government and business — the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations — is so thick and deep, the people “at the table” receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business’s agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation — and through support of the Republican Party — usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: “The sum of good government,” said Thomas Jefferson, is not taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” For government to advantage some at others’ expense, said he, “is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association.” In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few realize how revolutionary that is.
As bureaucrats and teachers’ unions disempowered neighborhood school boards, while the governments of towns, counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling class reduced the number and importance of things that American communities could decide for themselves, America’s thirst for self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxes support them only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that they now work for public employees rather than the other way around. But how to reverse the roles? How can voters regain control of government? Restoring localities’ traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional “police” powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one’s self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.
America’s pro-family movement is a reaction to the ruling class’s challenges: emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children’s education. Americans reacted to these challenges primarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all marriages became rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and government authority over children and those who do not. The homeschool movement, for which the Internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contact among like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country class that is most concerned with family matters has taken on something of a biological identity. Few in this part of the country class have any illusion, however, that simply retreating into private associations will long save their families from societal influences made to order to discredit their ways. But stopping the ruling class’s intrusions would require discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong, as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That revolutionary task would involve far more than legislation.
The ruling class’s manifold efforts to discredit and drive worship of God out of public life — not even the Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done in response to Supreme Court rulings — convinced many among the vast majority of Americans who believe and pray that today’s regime is hostile to the most important things of all. Every December, they are reminded that the ruling class deems the very word “Christmas” to be offensive. Every time they try to manifest their religious identity in public affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being “American Taliban” trying to set up a “theocracy.” Let members of the country class object to anything the ruling class says or does, and likely as not their objection will be characterized as “religious,” that is to say irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par with the “science” of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter. Because aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual basis of the ruling class’s claim to rule, resistance to that rule, whether to the immorality of economic subsidies and privileges, or to the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to its seizure of children’s education, must deal with secularism’s intellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics as the term is commonly understood.
The Classes Clash
The ruling class’s appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side’s vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side — especially the ruling class — embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side’s view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.
In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century’s accretions of bad habits — taking care to preserve the good among them — is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.
Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle — and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan’s principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country “into the ditch” all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today’s Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.
The name of the party that will represent America’s country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats’ mirror image.
Yet to defend the country class, to break down the ruling class’s presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents’ legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class’s claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control “climate change,” and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class’s fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one’s own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.
Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most statehouses. What then would it do? Especially if its majority were slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats’ plan of 2009-2010, namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own “revolution from above” to reverse the ruling class’s previous “revolution from above,” it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class’s diversity as well as to the American Founders’ legacy.
Achieving the country class’s inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.
Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government’s role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.
The grandparents of today’s Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents’, today’s 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.
If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state’s agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens’ discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens’ understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court’s or an official’s unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.
How, for example, to remind America of, and to drive home to the ruling class, Lincoln’s lesson that trifling with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motives destroys its protections for all? What if a country class majority in both houses of Congress were to co-sponsor a “Bill of Attainder to deprive Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and other persons of liberty and property without further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto law…” and larded this constitutional monstrosity with an Article III Section 2 exemption from federal court review? When the affected members of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority to pass a bill every word of which is contrary to the Constitution, they would be confronted, publicly, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s answer to a question on the Congress’s constitutional authority to mandate individuals to purchase certain kinds of insurance: “Are you kidding? Are you kidding?” The point having been made, the Country Party could lead public discussions around the country on why even the noblest purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot be allowed to trump the Constitution.
How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class’s greatest difficulty — aside from being outnumbered — will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class’s greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.
Editor’s Note: This version corrects an error that appears the print edition of this article, which incorrectly lists Barack Obama as a research assistant to Laurence Tribe in 1984. He in fact was an assistant to Tribe in 1988-89.Update: The article has also been changed to correct a quote from Nancy Pelosi.
In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.
And, because the ruling class blurs the distinction between public and private business, connection to that class has become the principal way of getting rich in America. Not so long ago, the way to make it here was to start a business that satisfied customers’ needs better than before. Nowadays, more businesses die each year than are started. In this century, all net additions in employment have come from the country’s 1,500 largest corporations. Rent-seeking through influence on regulations is the path to wealth. In the professions, competitive exams were the key to entry and advancement not so long ago. Now, you have to make yourself acceptable to your superiors. More important, judicial decisions and administrative practice have divided Americans into “protected classes”—possessed of special privileges and immunities—and everybody else. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are memories. Co-option is the path to power. Ever wonder why the quality of our leaders has been declining with each successive generation?
Moreover, since the Kennedy reform of 1965, and with greater speed since 2009, the ruling class’s immigration policy has changed the regime by introducing some 60 million people—roughly a fifth of our population—from countries and traditions different from, if not hostile, to ours. Whereas earlier immigrants earned their way to prosperity, a disproportionate percentage of post-1965 arrivals have been encouraged to become dependents of the state. Equally important, the ruling class chose to reverse America’s historic practice of assimilating immigrants, emphasizing instead what divides them from other Americans. Whereas Lincoln spoke of binding immigrants by “the electric cord” of the founders’ principles, our ruling class treats these principles as hypocrisy. All this without votes or law; just power.
Foul is Fair and Fair is Foul
In short, precisely as the classics defined regime change, people and practices that had been at society’s margins have been brought to its center, while people and ideas that had been central have been marginalized.
Fifty years ago, prayer in the schools was near universal, but no one was punished for not praying. Nowadays, countless people are arrested or fired for praying on school property. West Point’s commanding general reprimanded the football coach for his team’s thanksgiving prayer. Fifty years ago, bringing sexually explicit stuff into schools was treated as a crime, as was “procuring abortion.” Nowadays, schools contract with Planned Parenthood to teach sex, and will not tell parents when they take girls to PP facilities for abortions. Back then, many schools worked with the National Rifle Association to teach gun handling and marksmanship. Now students are arrested and expelled merely for pointing their finger and saying “bang.” In those benighted times, boys who ventured into the girls’ bathroom were expelled as perverts. Now, girls are suspended for objecting to boys coming into the girls’ room under pretense of transgenderism. The mainstreaming of pornography, the invention of abortion as the most inalienable of human rights and, most recently, the designation of opposition to homosexual marriage as a culpable psychosis—none of which is dictated by law enacted by elected officials—is enforced as if it had been. No surprise that America has experienced a drastic drop in the formation of families, with the rise of rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites equal to the rates among blacks that was recognized as disastrous a half-century ago, the near-disappearance of two-parent families among blacks, and the social dislocations attendant to all that.
Ever since the middle of the 20th century our ruling class, pursuing hazy concepts of world order without declarations of war, has sacrificed American lives first in Korea, then in Vietnam, and now throughout the Muslim world. By denigrating Americans who call for peace, or for wars unto victory over America’s enemies; by excusing or glorifying those who take our enemies’ side or who disrespect the American flag; our rulers have drawn down the American regime’s credit and eroded the people’s patriotism.
As the ruling class destroyed its own authority, it wrecked the republic’s as well. This is no longer the “land where our fathers died,” nor even the country that won World War II. It would be surprising if any society, its identity altered and its most fundamental institutions diminished, had continued to function as before. Ours sure does not, and it is difficult to imagine how it can do so ever again. We can be sure only that the revolution underway among us, like all others, will run its unpredictable course.
All we know is the choice that faces us at this stage: either America continues in the same direction, but faster and without restraint, or there’s the hazy possibility of something else.
Imperial Alternatives
The consequences of empowering today’s Democratic Party are crystal clear. The Democratic Party—regardless of its standard bearer—would use its victory to drive the transformations that it has already wrought on America to quantitative and qualitative levels that not even its members can imagine. We can be sure of that because what it has done and is doing is rooted in a logic that has animated the ruling class for a century, and because that logic has shaped the minds and hearts of millions of this class’s members, supporters, and wannabes.
That logic’s essence, expressed variously by Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson, FDR’s brains trust, intellectuals of both the old and the new Left, choked back and blurted out by progressive politicians, is this: America’s constitutional republic had given the American people too much latitude to be who they are, that is: religiously and socially reactionary, ignorant, even pathological, barriers to Progress. Thankfully, an enlightened minority exists with the expertise and the duty to disperse the religious obscurantism, the hypocritical talk of piety, freedom, and equality, which excuses Americans’ racism, sexism, greed, and rape of the environment. As we progressives take up our proper responsibilities, Americans will no longer live politically according to their prejudices; they will be ruled administratively according to scientific knowledge.
Progressivism’s programs have changed over time. But its disdain for how other Americans live and think has remained fundamental. More than any commitment to principles, programs, or way of life, this is its paramount feature. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that “half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’” as if these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these are unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial creed.
The pseudo-intellectual argument for why these “deplorables” have no right to their opinions is that giving equal consideration to people and positions that stand in the way of Progress is “false equivalence,” as President Obama has put it. But the same idea has been expressed most recently and fully by New York TimesCEO Mark Thompson, as well as Times columnists Jim Rutenberg, Timothy Egan, and William Davies. In short, devotion to truth means not reporting on Donald Trump and people like him as if they or anything they say might be of value.
If trying to persuade irredeemable socio-political inferiors is no more appropriate than arguing with animals, why not just write them off by sticking dismissive names on them? Doing so is less challenging, and makes you feel superior. Why wrestle with the statistical questions implicit in Darwin when you can just dismiss Christians as Bible-thumpers? Why bother arguing for Progressivism’s superiority when you can construct “scientific” studies like Theodor Adorno’s, proving that your opponents suffer from degrees of “fascism” and other pathologies? This is a well-trod path. Why, to take an older example, should General Omar Bradley have bothered trying to refute Douglas MacArthur’s statement that in war there is no substitute for victory when calling MacArthur and his supporters “primitives” did the trick? Why wrestle with our climate’s complexities when you can make up your own “models,” being sure that your class will treat them as truth?
What priorities will the ruling class’s notion of scientific truth dictate to the next Democratic administration? Because rejecting that true and false, right and wrong are objectively ascertainable is part of this class’s DNA, no corpus of fact or canon of reason restrains it or defines its end-point. Its definition of “science” is neither more nor less than what “scientists say” at any given time. In practice, that means “Science R-Us,” now and always, exclusively. Thus has come to pass what President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1960 Farewell address: “A steadily increasing share [of science] is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.… [T]he free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution…a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” Hence, said Ike, “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.” The result has been that academics rise through government grants while the government exercises power by claiming to act on science’s behalf. If you don’t bow to the authority of the power that says what is and is not so, you are an obscurantist or worse.
Under our ruling class, “truth” has morphed from the reflection of objective reality to whatever has “normative pull”—i.e., to what furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given time. That is the meaning of the term “political correctness,” as opposed to factual correctness.
It’s the Contempt, Stupid!
Who, a generation ago, could have guessed that careers and social standing could be ruined by stating the fact that the paramount influence on the earth’s climate is the sun, that its output of energy varies and with it the climate? Who, a decade ago, could have predicted that stating that marriage is the union of a man and a woman would be treated as a culpable sociopathy, or just yesterday that refusing to let certifiably biological men into women’s bathrooms would disqualify you from mainstream society? Or that saying that the lives of white people “matter” as much as those of blacks is evidence of racism? These strictures came about quite simply because some sectors of the ruling class felt like inflicting them on the rest of America. Insulting presumed inferiors proved to be even more important to the ruling class than the inflictions’ substance.
How far will our rulers go? Because their network is mutually supporting, they will go as far as they want. Already, there is pressure from ruling class constituencies, as well as academic arguments, for morphing the concept of “hate crime” into the criminalization of “hate speech”—which means whatever these loving folks hate. Of course this is contrary to the First Amendment, and a wholesale negation of freedom. But it is no more so than the negation of freedom of association that is already eclipsing religious freedom in the name of anti-discrimination. It is difficult to imagine a Democratic president, Congress, and Supreme Court standing in the way.
Above all, these inflictions, as well as the ruling class’s acceptance of its own members’ misbehavior, came about because millions of its supporters were happy, or happy enough, to support them in the interest of maintaining their own status in a ruling coalition while discomfiting their socio-political opponents. Consider, for example, how republic-killing an event was the ruling class’s support of President Bill Clinton in the wake of his nationally televised perjury. Subsequently, as constituencies of supporters have effectively condoned officials’ abusive, self-serving, and even outright illegal behavior, they have encouraged more and more of it while inuring themselves to it. That is how republics turn into empires from the roots up.
But it is also true, as Mao Tse-Tung used to say, “a fish begins to rot at the head.” If you want to understand why any and all future Democratic Party administrations can only be empires dedicated to injuring and insulting their subjects, look first at their intellectual leaders’ rejection of the American republic’s most fundamental principles.
The Declaration of Independence says that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These rights—codified in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights—are not civil rights that governments may define. The free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and assembly, keeping and bearing arms, freedom from warrantless searches, protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, trial by jury of one’s peers, etc., are natural rights that pertain to human beings as such. Securing them for Americans is what the United States is all about. But today’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission advocates truncating the foremost of these rights because, as it stated in a recent report, “Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon those civil rights.” The report explains why the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights should not be permissible: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.”
Hillary Clinton’s attack on Trump supporters merely matched the ruling class’s current common sense. Why should government workers and all who wield the administrative state’s unaccountable powers not follow their leaders’ judgment, backed by the prestige press, about who are to be treated as citizens and who is to be handled as deplorable refuse? Hillary Clinton underlined once again how the ruling class regards us, and about what it has in store for us.
Electing Donald Trump would result in an administration far less predictable than any Democratic one. In fact, what Trump would or would not do, could or could not do, pales into insignificance next to the certainty of what any Democrat would do. That is what might elect Trump.
The character of an eventual Trump Administration is unpredictable because speculating about Trump’s mind is futile. It is equally futile to guess how he might react to the mixture of flattery and threats sure to be leveled against him. The entire ruling class—Democrats and Republicans, the bulk of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the press—would do everything possible to thwart him; and the constituencies that chose him as their candidate, and that might elect him, are surely not united and are by no means clear about the demands they would press. Moreover, it is anyone’s guess whom he would appoint and how he would balance his constituencies’ pressures against those of the ruling class.
Never before has such a large percentage of Americans expressed alienation from their leaders, resentment, even fear. Some two-thirds of Americans believe that elected and appointed officials—plus the courts, the justice system, business leaders, educators—are leading the country in the wrong direction: that they are corrupt, do more harm than good, make us poorer, get us into wars and lose them. Because this majority sees no one in the political mainstream who shares their concerns, because it lacks confidence that the system can be fixed, it is eager to empower whoever might flush the system and its denizens with something like an ungentle enema.
Yet the persons who express such revolutionary sentiments are not a majority ready to support a coherent imperial program to reverse the course of America’s past half-century. Temperamentally conservative, these constituencies had been most attached to the Constitution and been counted as the bedrock of stability. They are not yet wholly convinced that there is little left to conserve. What they want, beyond an end to the ruling class’s outrages, has never been clear. This is not surprising, given that the candidates who appeal to their concerns do so with mere sound bites. Hence they chose as the presidential candidate of the nominal opposition party the man who combined the most provocative anti-establishment sounds with reassurance that it won’t take much to bring back good old America: Donald Trump. But bringing back good old America would take an awful lot. What could he do to satisfy them?
Trump’s propensity for treating pronouncements on policy as flags to be run up and down the flagpole as he measures the volume of the applause does not deprive them of all significance—especially the ones that confirm his anti-establishment bona fides. These few policy items happen to be the ones by which he gained his anti-establishment reputation in the first place: 1) opposition to illegal immigration, especially the importation of Muslims whom Americans reasonably perceive as hostile to us; 2) law and order: stop excusing rioters and coddling criminals; 3) build a wall, throw out the illegals, let in only people who are vetted and certified as supporters of our way of life (that’s the way it was when I got my immigrant visa in 1955), and keep out anybody we can’t be sure isn’t a terrorist. Trump’s tentative, partial retreat from a bit of the latter nearly caused his political standing to implode, prompting the observation that doing something similar regarding abortion would end his political career. That is noteworthy because, although Trump’s support of the pro-life cause is lukewarm at best, it is the defining commitment for much of his constituency. The point here is that, regardless of his own sentiments, Trump cannot wholly discount his constituencies’ demands for a forceful turn away from the country’s current direction.
Trump’s slogan—“make America great again”—is the broadest, most unspecific, common denominator of non-ruling-class Americans’ diverse dissatisfaction with what has happened to the country. He talks about reasserting America’s identity, at least by controlling the borders; governing in America’s own interest rather than in pursuit of objectives of which the American people have not approved; stopping the export of jobs and removing barriers to business; and banishing political correctness’s insults and injuries. But all that together does not amount to making America great again. Nor does Trump begin to explain what it was that had made this country great to millions who have known only an America much diminished.
In fact, the United States of America was great because of a whole bunch of things that now are gone. Yes, the ruling class led the way in personal corruption, cheating on tests, lowering of professional standards, abandoning churches and synagogues for the Playboy Philosophy and lifestyle, disregarding law, basing economic life on gaming the administrative state, basing politics on conflicting identities, and much more. But much of the rest of the country followed. What would it take to make America great again—or indeed to make any of the changes that Trump’s voters demand? Replacing the current ruling class would be only the beginning.
Because it is difficult to imagine a Trump presidency even thinking about something so monumental as replacing an entire ruling elite, much less leading his constituency to accomplishing it, electing Trump is unlikely to result in a forceful turn away from the country’s current direction. Continuing pretty much on the current trajectory under the same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments in the land all by itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them.
We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation.
According to the Office of Personnel Management, the SES was designed to be a corps of executives selected for their leadership qualifications, serving in key positions just below the top Presidential appointees as a link between them and the rest of the Federal (civil service) workforce. SES positions are considered to be above the GS-15 level of the General Schedule, and below Level III of the Executive Schedule. Career members of the SES ranks are eligible for the Presidential Rank Awards program.
Up to 10% of SES positions can be filled as political appointments rather than by career employees.[1] About half of the SES is designated “Career Reserved”, which can only be filled by career employees. The other half is designated “General”, which can be filled by either career employees or political appointments as desired by the administration. Due to the 10% limitation, most General positions are still filled by career appointees.[2]
(Effective on the first day of the first applicable pay period beginning on or after January 1, 2015)[3]
Minimum
Maximum
Agencies with a Certified SES Performance Appraisal System
$121,956
$183,300
Agencies without a Certified SES Performance Appraisal System
$121,956
$168,700
Unlike the General Schedule (GS) grades, SES pay is determined at agency discretion within certain parameters, and there is no locality pay adjustment.
The minimum pay level for the SES is set at 120 percent of the basic pay for GS-15 Step 1 employees ($121,956 for 2015). The maximum pay level depends on whether or not the employing agency has a “certified” SES performance appraisal system:[4]
If the agency has a certified system, the maximum pay is set at Level II of the Executive Schedule ($183,300 for 2015).
If the agency does not have a certified system, the maximum pay is set at Level III of the Executive Schedule ($168,700 for 2015).
House conservatives introduced a resolution on Tuesday calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate possible misconduct by the Department of Justice and the FBI during the 2016 presidential race.
“The Justice Department cannot be expected to investigate itself,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), flanked by 11 other Republican lawmakers, said at a press conference announcing the measure.
Zeldin said Attorney General Jeff Sessions should tap an independent investigator to examine whether FBI and Justice Department officials obtained surveillance warrants with insufficient evidence.
The Republicans also want a probe to look into the government’s decision to end the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s use of a private email server and the reasoning behind the government’s decision to launch a probe into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The press conference came a day after an unusual meeting at the White House between President Trump and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.
Rosenstein has agreed to have the Department of Justice inspector general review whether the FBI has done anything inappropriate in its investigation of the Trump campaign, which predated Mueller’s probe. Trump demanded action after reports that an FBI informant talked to three members of the Trump campaign team.
Sessions has declined requests for an additional special counsel but did tap John Huber, a federal prosecutor in Utah, to look into allegations last month.
The 12-page resolution lists a series of points that the lawmakers say warrant an investigation.
The document questions whether top FBI and Justice Department officials acted in a politically motivated way during the election, including how “insufficient intelligence and biased motivations” may have launched the counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference.
The resolution alleges that “deeply flawed and questionable” Foreign Surveillance Act warrant applications were obtained during the election by government officials to surveil Trump campaign aides. It says the warrants were obtained on the basis of “illicit sources and politically biased intelligence.”
Democrats have blasted the GOP calls for a second special counsel as an attempt to distract or even undermine Mueller’s investigation in order to shield Trump.
The lawmakers attending the press conference, when asked, said the president has not encouraged them to pursue this resolution.
Demand Grows for Second Special Counsel from Senate
IG does not have the tools of a prosecutor, Senators say
Sara Carter March 17, 2018
Ranking Republican senators are calling on the Department of Justice to appoint a second special counsel to investigate potential abuses by FBI and Justice Department employees connected to their role in the investigation into President Trump.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-SC, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas and Sen. Thom Tillis, R- N.C. officially joined other Congressional members in their call for a special counsel to work alongside DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Horowitz has been conducting an investigation into the matter for more than a year. Graham and Grassley joined Fox News Bret Baier on Thursday’s Special Report and stressed the urgency of getting a special counsel to investigate along side the Inspector General.
Graham told this reporter on Thursday that he believes a special counsel will be appointed to work along side Horowitz.
“It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility,” the criminal referral states.
In the document, Grassley and Graham noted that “there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility.”
The pair of lawmakers also allege that Steele was compiling information on Trump and his campaign before being hired by now embattled research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign for his work.
“Pursuant to that business arrangement, Mr. Steele prepared a series of documents styled as intelligence reports, some of which were later compiled into a ‘dossier’ and published by Buzzfeed in January 2017,” the referral states. “On the face of the dossier, it appears that Mr. Steele gathered much of his information from Russian government sources inside Russia.”
The two senators had written to the Inspector General’s office in February, “requesting a broad review of more than 30 classified and unclassified questions related to the Trump-Russia probe” but were not able to obtain the information.
“…because the Inspector General lacks access to grand jury process and other prosecutorial tools, a special counsel with such authority may be necessary to compel the production of testimony and information that would otherwise be unobtainable,” a press release from Grassley and Graham issued Thursday stated.
The letter to Sessions and Rosenstein outlines the importance of appointing a special counsel to support Horowitz’s independent investigation.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
The senators state that the appointment “should occur under the specific Justice Department regulations that govern special counsels and limit the scope of their authority. The senators further request that if the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General determines a special counsel is not appropriate or necessary, then the Department designate a U.S. Attorney’s office or another prosecutor with no real or apparent conflict to work” with Horowitz on the case.
Earlier this month House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-VA, and House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-SC, sent a letter to Rosenstein and Sessions also urging them to appoint a special counsel to investigate the accumulation of evidence uncovered by the congressional committees and Inspector General.
Goodlatte and Gowdy sent a letter addressing evidence uncovered by the House Intelligence Committee that accused the FBI and Justice Department of failing to disclose to the secret FISA court that the Hillary Clinton Campaign and Democratic National Committee financed the dossier put together by former British spy Christopher Steele at the behest of embattled security firm Fusion GPS
The Case For and Against a Special Counsel Investigation of DOJ and FBI
Increasingly more Republicans are calling for special counsel, while DOJ argues for IG investigation
March 6, 2018
Arguments Against a Special Counsel per DOJ:
Like a federal prosecutor, a special counsel in the Department of Justice can’t bring a case before a court unless its investigators find evidence of a crime.
Special counsel investigators are usually FBI. If the special counsel agrees that there is a conflict of interest in bringing FBI investigators into the fold it would have to select a different team of investigators to aide in the case.
The special counsel could use the Post Master General or the DEA but those investigators would be far behind the DOJ’s Inspector General investigators, who have already been working on the cases.
Federal prosecutors, special counsels, and those attorneys working with them do not “conduct” investigations. DOJ officials told me that the process is much like the TV show law and order where law enforcement brings evidence of a crime and then the prosecutor puts together a case to be brought before the court.
The DOJ Inspector General is an independent office that investigates possible violations of criminal and civil law by employees of the FBI and its own department.
The Inspector General reports to the Attorney General and to Congress.
The IG’s Investigations Division Special Agents develop cases for criminal prosecution, civil or administrative action.
Inspector General’s office acts similar to the FBI in that it has the authority to investigate wrongdoing and collect evidence.
The Inspector General has the power to subpoena and present cases for criminal prosecution to the Attorney General.
Arguments For a Special Counsel, per Congressional Members:
An independent arbiter because the FBI and DOJ cannot investigate themselves.
Any criminal referral from the Inspector General will go to Attorney General Jeff Sessions for prosecution and he has not made clear the scope of his involvement in the cases.
Republicans and some senior government officials say there is no rational argument for letting current Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was the former head of the FBI, expand his special counsel investigation. It won’t work because of Mueller, as the former director of the FBI, is conflicted out.
Robert Mueller’s investigation crosses into the territory of the unsubstantiated and salacious dossier, he is after all supposed to be investigating alleged collusion between Russia and President Trump. And he’s reportedly using the unverified dossier crafted by former British spy Christopher Steele in his investigation. A dossier, which Steele, told the British courts is not verified.
Mueller has close previous working relationships with many of the same players he would be investigating. For example, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI Director James Comey, to name two.
The American public won’t buy into an investigation by Mueller, the DOJ or FBI.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has never clearly stated where his recusal begins and ends.
A second special counsel needs to come from outside Washington D.C. with its own team of impartial, hand selected investigators.
Asecond special counsel might investigate any or all of the following: possible criminal violations by senior FBI and DOJ officials in obtaining a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign volunteer, the bureau’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to send classified information and whether senior Obama administration officials, including the president, were aware of the use of the unverified dossier to open an investigation into the Trump campaign and possible Russian collusion.
“You need an independent arbiter, and the Department of Justice cannot investigate itself”
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC)
The investigations could also be conducted by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is expected to conclude his much-anticipated report into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton server investigation in the next several weeks and who Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked to investigate possible FISA warrant abuse against Carter Page, who briefly volunteered for the Trump campaign in 2016.
Republicans, however, are not satisfied and are now pushing Sessions, who is recused from the Russia investigation, to appoint a special counsel. DOJ officials are arguing against it, telling this reporter that Horowitz and his team can conduct the unbiased investigation and refer potential people to the DOJ for criminal prosecution.
The situation can be confusing to anyone outside Washington D.C. One Republican congressional member, who spoke on background, questioned, “how long will it take for Horowitz to investigate and if he does make a criminal referral for prosecution, it will have to go back to Sessions, who apparently has recused himself from all matters Russia and apparently everything else. I don’t see how we have any choice but to get a second special counsel.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R- Ohio, who has proposed the idea for a special counsel since last year, said although he “wishes there was another way around it, there appears to be no other course of action.”
“I think Sessions needs to appoint a second special counsel and they need to be somebody from outside the swamp, like a retired judge, someone that can select his or her own team of investigators,” said Jordan. “I don’t see any other course of action that would be acceptable to anybody involved, including Republicans, Democrats and the American people.”
Five days ago, President Trump called out Sessions for his decision to turn over the investigation into possible abuse by the FBI when it sought a warrant to spy on Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the most secretive court in the United States with the authority to grant warrants to surveil Americans.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse. Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!
Sessions stated in a response to Trump, “we have initiated the appropriate process that will ensure complaints against this Department will be fully and fairly acted upon if necessary. As long as I am the Attorney General, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this Department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution.
And it may be that there are already investigations ongoing inside the DOJ that the public is unaware of. Several
“The IG can only really investigate the people who are there (under his authority) but not the people who have left”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)
government officials who have defended Sessions said that any ongoing investigations requested by Congress if they exist, would not be leaked or discussed publicly.
However, there may be clues. In a Nov. 13, 2017 letter to House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-VA, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told congressional members that the DOJ had appointed senior prosecutors who would report “directly to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation, require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”
DOJ officials could not comment on whether or not these prosecutors assigned by Sessions last year have uncovered any wrongdoing or what specifically the prosecutors were currently investigating. Boyd’s letter did stress that all congressional requests from the approval to grant Russia the sale of the Canadian firm Uranium One, which at the time had access to 20 percent of American mining rights, and requests for investigations into FISA abuse were being looked into.
But for Jordan and many other Republicans, the deafening silence out of DOJ is difficult to understand. And now many lawmakers are asking Sessions to do what he is apparently fighting against and appoint a new special counsel.
For the first time, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-SC, told Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo, “you need an independent arbiter, and the Department of Justice cannot investigate itself.”
“Horowitz is a fair guy, but when there are two dozen witnesses that have left the department or worked for another agency, someone else has to do it and I am reluctant to call for special counsel, but I think it may be unavoidable in this fact pattern,” Gowdy said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, is also calling for a second special counsel and echoed Gowdy in a call with this reporter Monday, saying “the IG can only really investigate the people who are there (under his authority) but not the people who have left.”
So far, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, R-CA, has not weighed in on whether or not he believes the appointment of a special counsel is necessary to investigate many of the same issues his committee is looking into. Some congressional members, who spoke to this reporter, say it’s only a matter of time before Nunes joins the chorus of Republicans demanding the investigation.
PUBLISHED: 15:44 EDT, 14 June 2018 | UPDATED: 17:23 EDT, 14 June 2018
Ivanka and Eric Trump have lead the tributes to President Donald Trump on his 72nd birthday by posting throwback photos from their childhood.
The President’s eldest daughter and senior adviser Ivanka took to social media on Thursday, saying ‘I love you very much. Wishing you your best year yet!!!’
Her birthday message included a series of photos of her as a small girl smiling with her father.
The President’s eldest daughter and senior adviser Ivanka took to social media on Thursday, saying ‘I love you very much’ alongside a photo of her as a small girl
Trump’s son Eric also shared this childhood photo with his father, saying ‘it is amazing how far we have all come!’
Trump’s son Eric also shared two childhood photos with his father, as well as one of him walking at the White House and another of the President posing with his newest grandson Luke.
‘Happy Birthday Dad! It is amazing how far we have all come! We are very proud of you and everything you have accomplished!’ Eric posted alongside the photos.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, also celebrated the occasion on social media.
On Instagram, he posted a screenshot of a Drudge Report headline declaring, ‘TRUMP’S BEST BIRTHDAY!’ and citing the economy, North Korea, the World Cup and the jobless rate.
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Ivanka’s birthday message included a series of photos of her as a small girl smiling with her father
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Ivanka also posted this photo of her and her brothers Eric and Don Jr posing with their father
‘It is amazing how far we have all come!’: Eric Trump praised his father’s accomplishments in his birthday message that included a photo with Ivanka
His daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is married to Eric, also shared photos on social media of the President holding the couple’s baby.
‘Happy Birthday Mr. President/Grandpa! We love you and are so proud of you!’ she wrote.
First Lady Melania and Trump’s youngest daughter Tiffany are yet to post anything publicly for his birthday.
Trump is the oldest President to be sworn in for a first term. Prior to Trump, Ronald Reagan was the oldest to become Commander in Chief at age 69.
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Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, also celebrated the occasion on social media
His daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is married to Eric, also shared photos on social media of the President holding the couple’s baby.
The possibility that Special Counsel Robert Mueller might issue a subpoena to President Trump to compel him to testify before a federal grand jury has, understandably, provoked questions: Can the President be forced to testify if he refuses to give Mueller an interview voluntarily? What has the Supreme Court said on the subject? And if the staring match between Team Trump and Team Mueller becomes litigation, who is likely to win?
The bottom line, in our view, is that Mueller would probably prevail if and when a battle over a grand-jury subpoena makes its way into court. But it is not a sure thing, and the president has plausible arguments available to him that a court would have to work through before enforcing a subpoena for his testimony.
By far the most important precedent here is United States v. Nixon—the landmark 1974 Supreme Court decision in which an 8-0 court held that President Nixon could be forced to comply with a subpoena to produce some of the previously undisclosed “Watergate tapes” to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Jaworksi sought to use the tapes as evidence in the criminal case against the so-called “Watergate seven” (a case in which Nixon himself was an unindicted co-conspirator). Nixon has some caveats (more on these below), but its analytical framework is the starting point for any discussion of a subpoena to the president.
That analytical framework treats the validity of the subpoena on its face as a separate question from whether the president might have a case-specific reason to seek to quash it. Thus, Part III of Chief Justice Warren Burger’s opinion for the court focused solely on whether the subpoena was facially valid—an analysis that turned on the three requirements of Rule 17(c) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, i.e., that the subpoena seek specific, relevant, and admissible evidence from the recipient. As the court explained, “where a subpoena is directed to a President of the United States,” courts, “in deference to a coordinate branch of Government, should be particularly meticulous to ensure that the standards of Rule 17(c) have been correctly applied.” But if those standards were met, the fact that the recipient was the President of the United States was not, on its face, a reason to quash the subpoena.
Instead, in Part IV of the opinion, the court turned to whether the president could invoke a specific defense against enforcement. And although the court agreed with President Nixon that the Constitution recognizes an “executive privilege” against disclosure of confidential, internal executive branch communications, it nevertheless held that such a privilege was not absolute. Instead, the court famously concluded that the privilege was overcome in Nixon’s case by “the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice. The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.” Given that the party requesting the evidence in Nixon was the prosecutor, not the defendant, this holding necessarily took a rather dim view of the strength of an executive privilege claim in the face of a valid subpoena.
The rest, of course, was history. President Nixon ended up complying with the subpoena and turning over the tapes—which sealed his political fate. Just over two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled, Nixon resigned to ward off his near-certain impeachment and removal.
The subpoena Mueller would issue here differs in a potentially important respects from the one at issue in Nixon. The most important difference is that a Mueller subpoena would demand not material like the tapes or documents for use at a trial, but testimony from the president before a grand jury. That is, it would be a subpoena for the president to personally appear and give testimony, as opposed to produce documentary evidence. And it would be testimony at an earlier stage in the proceedings—before the grand jury, rather than subsequent to the return of a grand jury indictment.
Would either of these likely lead the federal courts today to reach a different conclusion? It’s certainly possible, but count us skeptical.
The forum question seems like an easy one. It is certainly true that a grand jury subpoena is different from a subpoena in conjunction with a criminal trial. But it’s not clear at all that those differences militate in favor of the recipient of the grand jury subpoena; the courts have, in fact, suggested the opposite. As the Supreme Court explained in United States v. R Enterprises in 1991, “The multifactor test announced in Nixon would invite procedural delays and detours while courts evaluate the relevancy and admissibility of documents sought by a particular subpoena. We have expressly stated that grand jury proceedings should be free of such delays,” and so “the Nixon standard does not apply in the context of grand jury proceedings.” Instead, under R Enterprises, “the motion to quash must be denied unless the district court determines that there is no reasonable possibility that the category of materials the Government seeks will produce information relevant to the general subject of the grand jury’s investigation.”
The stronger argument on behalf on Trump, in our view, would be that demanding testimony in person is meaningfully distinct from demanding the production of requested documents. But it’s not clear that the legal distinction would favor a sitting president. For starters, whereas a subpoena for specific documents could be met by a litigation-inducing claim of executive (or state secrets) privilege, a subpoena for testimony cannot be, because it won’t be the case that the answer to every conceivable question is protected by the privilege. Among other things, executive privilege doesn’t apply to conduct predating the president’s time in office, and it also could not be used to decline to answer questions about matters on the public record. At most executive privilege could be used to decline to answer specific questions, not to refuse to testify at all.
Of course, the president, like any witness, is entitled to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. But leaving aside the (monumental) political implications of such a move, it is also not an absolute bar to being called to testify—though it often functions that way in practice. At least theoretically, the Fifth Amendment does not preclude a subject from appearing before a grand jury. It merely provides a basis to decline to answer specific questions—a right to remain silent. In any event, the special counsel, like any prosecutor, can overcome an invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege by providing the president with “use and derivative use immunity”—that is, by immunizing him against the use of his testimony and any evidence derived from it to prosecute him.
The president could plausibly rely upon a new argument as well—that having to take time from his duties to sit before a grand jury (as opposed to producing physical evidence in his custody) would interfere with his Article II authority on a more general basis. Indeed, an 1818 opinion by Attorney General William Wirt (quoted in a 2000 OLC opinion) suggested that, “[a] subpoena ad testificandum may I think be properly awarded to the President of the U.S. But if the presence of the chief magistrate be required at the seat of government by his official duties, I think those duties paramount to any claim which an individual can have upon him, and that his personal attendance on the court from which the summons proceeds ought to be, and must, of necessity, be dispensed with.” Modern travel aside, those concerns seem far less serious to us when the subpoena asks the president to testify in “the seat of government.”
The more serious problem with this argument is that it is suspiciously like the one the court rejected unanimously in Clinton v. Jones, in which the court concluded that a sitting president is not absolutely immune from civil litigation for conduct that took place before he became president. Bill Clinton, in that case, argued that forcing a sitting president to answer a civil complaint would unduly distract him from his duties as president. In the course of reviewing the relevant precedents, Justice John Paul Stevens offered the following observations:
it is … settled that the President is subject to judicial process in appropriate circumstances. Although Thomas Jefferson apparently thought otherwise, Chief Justice Marshall, when presiding in the treason trial of Aaron Burr, ruled that a subpoena duces tecum could be directed the President. We unequivocally and emphatically endorsed Marshall’s position when we held that President Nixon was obligated to comply with a subpoena commanding him to produce certain tape recordings of his conversations with his aides. . . .
Sitting Presidents have responded to court orders to provide testimony and other information with sufficient frequency that such interactions between the Judicial and Executive Branches can scarcely be thought a novelty. President Monroe responded to written interrogatories, President Nixon—as noted above—produced tapes in response to a subpoena duces tecum, President Ford complied with an order to give a deposition in a criminal trial, and President Clinton has twice given videotaped testimony in criminal proceedings. Moreover, sitting Presidents have also voluntarily complied with judicial requests for testimony. President Grant gave a lengthy deposition in a criminal case under such circumstances, and President Carter similarly gave videotaped testimony for use at a criminal trial.
In the end, Justice Stevens concluded that the burden on the presidency of having to answer a civil complaint from a mere individual citizen was not so great as to require immunity:
Although scheduling problems may arise, there is no reason to assume that the district courts will be either unable to accommodate the President’s needs or unfaithful to the tradition—especially in matters involving national security—of giving “the utmost deference to Presidential responsibilities.” Several Presidents, including [Clinton], have given testimony without jeopardizing the Nation’s security. In short, we have confidence in the ability of our federal judges to deal with … these concerns.
The “interference” arising from a specific grand jury demand for testimony is arguably less serious than the interference of being generally subject to civil litigation from anyone who serves the president with a complaint. Moreover, the interests of the grand jury are generally regarded as far weightier than the interests of any private civil litigant. It’s hard to see how the courts could contend that the President must answer a civil complaint from Paula Jones but then contend that he need not answer a criminal investigative subpoena from a grand jury issued at the behest of the United States Department of Justice.
It’s possible, of course, that new concerns might arise that haven’t been addressed by these decisions. It is also possible that the current Supreme Court, which includes only four of the justices who heard Clinton, would see matters differently. But based on the law as it stands today, we think it unlikely that the the president could successfully oppose a facially valid subpoena for grand jury testimony.
The president, of course, could refuse to comply with a subpoena even after it has been upheld by the Supreme Court. As the story goes, President Nixon seriously contemplated such a course after the Supreme Court ruled against him in July 1974. In such a circumstance, the ultimate question would not be up to the courts, but rather to Congress. Nixon eventually concluded that defying the Supreme Court would only hasten his impeachment. Whatever else may be said about the law and politics of such a confrontation, we hope we never have to find out whether the current president would see things the same way.
Story 1: Commander in Chief Trump Orders National Guard To Secure The Mexican/United States Border in 2018 As Bush Did In 2006 and Obama in 2010 — Election Year Politics? — Enforce Immigration Law By Deporting All 30-60 Million Illegal Aliens in U.S. — Videos —
Where’s the Fence
Bush on border security
Obama Sends Troops to the Border
Texas Border Security
DHS Secretary Nielsen On Deploying National Guard To Mexico Border – Full Q & A
Kirstjen Nielsen is TOO SMART For White House Reporters
Trump ramps up illegal immigration fight
President Donald Trump To Send National Guard To U.S.-Mexico Border | NBC Nightly News
Analysis: Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops to secure the southern border
President Trump signed a proclamation Wednesday night to send the National Guard to the southern border immediately, a senior White House official told Fox News, in response to what the administration described as an “unacceptable” flow of drugs, criminal activity and illegal immigrants.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at the White House press briefing that the signing would be done in conjunction with governors and that the administration hoped the deployment would begin “immediately.”
“Despite a number of steps this administration has taken…we continue to see unacceptable levels of illegal drugs, dangerous gang activity transnational criminal organizations and illegal immigration flow across our border,” she said.
“The president has directed that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security work together with our governors to deploy our National Guard to our southwest border to assist the border patrol,” she said. “The president will be signing a proclamation to that effect today.”
Details about what the National Guard would do and how many would be deployed and for how long were not immediately disclosed.
Under the George W. Bush administration, deploying the National Guard to the border cost $415 million dollars.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Our Border Laws are very weak while those of Mexico & Canada are very strong. Congress must change these Obama era, and other, laws NOW! The Democrats stand in our way – they want people to pour into our country unchecked….CRIME! We will be taking strong action today.
Nielsen pointed to what she described as increasing fraud and exploited loopholes among arrivals on the southern border, saying traffickers have been advertising that if migrants have children with them, then they are more likely to be released into the U.S. She also said that almost 50 percent of arriving aliens are from Central America.
“Traffickers and smugglers know that these individuals cannot under U.S. law be easily removed in an expeditious way back to their country of origin and so they exploit the loophole,” she said, adding that the ability to game the system acts as a magnet for more migrants.
She said that the administration has drafted legislation and will ask Congress to provide legal authority and resources to address the problem.
“We will not allow illegal immigration levels to become the norm,” she said. “More than 1,000 people a day, 300,000 a year violating our sovereignty as a nation will never be acceptable to this president.”
Trump had tweeted earlier Wednesday that he would “be taking strong action today” on the Mexico border, a day after he said that he wants to send the military to secure it until a wall is built.
Arguing that the U.S. border laws “are very weak” compared to Mexico and Canada, he accused Democrats of wanting immigrants “to pour into our country unchecked.”
Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had deployed the National Guard to the border in response to security issues.
The Associated Press reported that the White House was considering a model similar to a Bush-era operation, where in 2006 6,000 National Guard troops were sent to assist the border patrol with non-law enforcement duties while additional border agents were hired and trained.
Trump’s recent focus on illegal immigration appeared to have been partly motivated by a caravan of more than 1,000 Central American migrants heading toward the U.S. border.
Trump had threatened to end the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and to cut foreign aid to countries such as Honduras, from where many of the migrants originate, if the caravan was not stopped.
Trump said Tuesday that he believes the caravan is being broken up after he had a conversation with Mexican officials.
Nielsen said on Tuesday that she had been advised by Mexican officials that “the caravan is dissipating” and that several hundred migrants had been repatriated.
“We will not accept the lawlessness of these types of efforts and those who choose to violate our laws, and those who conspire to assist others to violate our laws, will face criminal prosecution,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. “The Department of Justice fully supports the efforts of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security announced today to secure our border. I will soon be announcing additional Department of Justice initiatives to restore legality to the southern border.”
Fox News’ Brooke Singman, Serafin Gomez, Jennifer Griffin, Jake Gibson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Congress should make sure our border patrol has the manpower, equipment, funds, and authority to do what is needed.
(AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
About 1,100 Central Americans are marching toward the U.S.-Mexico border. Word from this “caravan,” organized by a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which translates as “peoples without borders,”* is that these migrants plan to turn themselves over to U.S. immigration officers and apply for asylum.
(Note, Pueblos sin Fronteras is not connected to a U.S. nonprofit named “People without Borders.”)
It’s worth noting some interesting math, among other things. If the caravan tried to evade the U.S. Border Patrol but was caught, it would be about equal to the number of illegal entrants caught every day at the southern border.
The border patrol caught 310,531 in fiscal 2017. In the first five months of fiscal 2018, apprehensions are up a bit, to about 900 a day. These are people caught trying to sneak into the U.S. between checkpoints.
It’s a huge problem.
At least 10 million people are in here illegally. Many snuck in. Many others overstayed visas. Nearly 1,000 more are caught every day trying to cross. And another 2,000 a day overstay their visas.
We aren’t a “people without borders,” and we never should be. President Trump has ramped up border enforcement, but there is more work to do, and Congress should make sure our border patrol has the manpower, equipment, funds, and authority to do what is needed.
Border enforcement isn’t any old aspect of law enforcement. Democratic self-determination and the rule of law hinge on it.
A country without borders, Trump says repeatedly, is no country at all. This is true, and it’s important. National democracy is the biggest form that democracy takes in today’s world. In a democratic nation, self-determination includes determining who is part of the nation.
If we really believe in the ideas of the Enlightenment, then we have to believe in self-determining, democratic nations. That means we have to believe in immigration control.
How much immigration to have, and of what sort, is a live debate. We support something more open than Trump’s rhetoric would prescribe. We don’t favor cuts in the level of legal immigration, but we agree with the president’s tilt toward high-skilled newcomers.
If we have laws and don’t enforce them, while so many of our business and political elites cheer the lax enforcement, we are trading democracy for oligarchy.
Illegal immigration corrodes the rule of law more than most lawbreaking. It creates subcultures and neighborhoods where families and communities live in the shadows. This means they’re less likely to call the police or operate above board, leaving their families vulnerable to the worst among them.
Trump’s critics blame this on aggressive deportation efforts. That can be debated, but we should all agree that the best place to enforce immigration law is at the border.
The Pueblo Sin Fronteras people want asylum status. This country has always welcomed genuine refugees, which is to say, people who have a well-founded fear of persecution in their own country. But migrants are not the same thing as asylum seekers. And anyway, why is the U.S. responsible for people from Guatemala tramping across a huge country such as Mexico, simply because this is where they would prefer to live? Asylum seekers, properly defined, are fleeing for their lives. They have the right to safety, not to residence in the land of milk of honey.
Imagine there’s no countries. It may sound nice in a John Lennon song, but it is facile and ill-considered. In reality, a land without a border is inhabited by a people without the rule of law or democracy.
—-
* UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: The original version of this editorial apparently left many readers believing that the caravan group, Pueblos Sin Fronteras was the same as a U.S.-based nonprofit with the name “People Without Borders.” They are not connected in any way.
Can President Trump breathe easy? The Washington Post reported Tuesday night that Trump is a subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, but not a target of the investigation.
There’s something there for both sides—Trump supporters can argue that the president isn’t a target, and his critics can point out that the president remains under investigation. Trump is not in the clear, but neither are criminal charges necessarily imminent. Trump might never become a target of the investigation, or he could change from subject to target at any time.
“It’s not comforting to be a ‘subject’ of an investigation. Most white-collar criminal defendants started out as subjects of a grand jury investigation,” said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Fordham. “Calling President Trump a ‘subject’ rather than a mere ‘witness’ generally means that his conduct is still being investigated, he is still suspected of having acted criminally, but no conclusion has yet been reached that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The media’s Mueller speculation has reached a new level of lunacy
MatthewWalther
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
April 5, 2018
Did you hear the news? On Wednesday an obscure Dutch lawyer who is “tied” — one of my favorite journalistic weasel words, along with “linked” and “blasted” — to the deputy chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has been sentenced to 30 days in jail for initially failing to forward all of his emails to Bob Mueller. I have heard of stiffer sentences for jaywalking in Manhattan and failing to register a cocker spaniel, but I’m sure it’s a very big deal.
It has to be because the sentencing of Alex van der Zwaan immediately inspired another round of lunatic speculation about the state of the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The sentence was announced the day after TheWashington Postreported that Trump is currently not a “target” of the investigation.
Cue the takes! “Mueller told Trump he’s not a criminal target in the Russia probe. That may not mean what you think,” one of the approximately 1,700 persons employed full-time by the Post to produce algorithmically generated electronic high-pitched noise sounding not unlike the president’s last name insisted. “Mueller’s assurances that Trump is not a ‘target’ don’t mean much,” Politicoyodeled. “The report that Trump is not a target of the Mueller probe is actually terrible news for the president,” saidSlate, which still maintains its idiotic Trump Impeach-o-Meter, something I wish I had thought of when I was working at a right-wing magazine during Obama’s second term. I spent Wednesday morning reading dozens, possibly as many as a hundred, of these pieces without learning anything.
Here is what it all really means: nothing.
Nothing at all except that among a certain segment of our supposedly educated upper-middle-class there is apparently an endless appetite for therapy-tainment. The Mueller investigation has seemingly nothing to do with collusion between Trump and Moscow, of which there is still as much evidence as there was in January 2017, i.e., none. It’s Bircherism for people who know what “green juice” is, a way to explain how the wealthiest political campaign in history lost to a quasi-literate lowbrow TV star and cope with this ongoing reality. This is why some recent takes don’t even make a pretense of mentioning Russia. Long ago the whole thing morphed from being an investigation of treasonous election meddling to one of supposed obstruction of an investigation into the aforementioned non-event. People are still clicking.
Trump is not safe from Mueller. Not by a long shot.
It is easy to understand why journalists cater to their readers’ appetite for this stuff. When there is news, even news that makes the whole thing seem stupid and pointless, it’s bad news for Trump; when there isn’t news, the absence of news is also bad news for Trump. If a rando volunteer on the campaign admits that he lied about once emailing another rando overseas, it’s the second gunman on the grassy knoll. If Mueller shows no sign of being even remotely interested in a conspiracy theory about Trump, Russia, and the release of emails that showed irrefutable evidence of actual collusion between the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it’s actually proof that this is probably what is going to bring down the administration sooner or later. For people who have convinced themselves that all of this is hugely significant anything can be evidence of everything — even nothing.Let’s summarize the things we actually know. Paul Manafort worked for the Ukrainian government from before the release of Star Wars on DVD until roughly the day that Beyoncé won a Grammy for “Single Ladies.” He also lied about it and about some or perhaps nearly all of his earnings. Several other people, including the president’s former national security advisor, have told lies about, among other things, an utterly unremarkable post-election conversation with a Russian ambassador. Thirteen technically real Russian people also LARPed as Tea Party types on Facebook. I mean, really. What bank did Putin use to cash the golf-style novelty oversized check from Trump and how many digital copies of the pee tape are on Mueller’s MacBook Pro?
In the spirit of paschal charity I would like to offer up my very first contribution to the vast literature of Mueller “what’s next” takes. In two or six or eight months, President Trump, as tired as the rest of us of hearing about this non-story, will finally agree to sit down with our very special prosecutor to clear his name. Because Trump is a hyperbolic charlatan, he will proffer some ridiculous falsehoods — “I have never met a Russian, okay? I don’t — does anybody, does anybody even know where Russia is?” — under oath. Bingo, Mueller will say, you lied. You’re done.
And maybe he will be. No one whose habit or job it is to read the news on a daily basis would disagree at this point that it would be worth having President Michael Pence in exchange for the drawing of a curtain over these tedious revels. I would go a great deal further than that: I would rather see Hillary Clinton cackling from the Oval Office than read another spodomantic opinion column about the former star of The Apprentice and the largest sovereign republic in Eurasia.
Story 1: Attorney General Session To Sanctuary State California — Aiding and Abetting The Illegal Alien Invasion of United States — Obey The Law or Else — Videos ––
Watch U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions take on California’s immigration policies
Sessions calls out California on immigration after announcing DOJ lawsuit
Tucker: Democrats have become the anti-border party
DOJ takes on California over sanctuary status
Hannity: California officials willing to risk American lives
Gov. Jerry Brown: Sessions ‘sowing discord’ instead of proposing immigration reform
California governor calls DOJ lawsuit a ‘political stunt’
1995: Barbara Jordan on “Immigration Reform”
President Trump says he shares immigration views with Barbara Jordan
WATCH: Atty. Gen. Sessions discusses sanctuary cities in Sacramento, CA
America’s Sources of Immigration (1850-Today)
Immigration by the Numbers — Off the Charts
How Many Illegal Aliens Are in the US? – Walsh – 1
How Many Illegal Aliens Are in the US? – Walsh – 2
President Trump’s ‘four pillars’ of new immigration plan
President Trump statement on immigration, green card reform with Sen Tom Cotton, Sen David Perdue
Trump Endorses Bill to Limit Green Card Immigration
Donald Trump explains his immigration plan
Trump: I want an immigration policy that benefits Americans
Trump on immigration: ‘We either have a country or we don’t’
2016 GOP contenders take different stances on immigration
Obama’s Amnesty & How Illegal Immigration Affects Us
President Obama’s Speech on Amnesty For Illegal Immigrants
The 2020 Census is at risk. Here are the major consequences
California leaders rebuke Sessions as ‘going to war’ over state immigration policy
He arrived a day after suing California over its laws to shield immigrants living in the state illegally
A long-simmering battle between the Trump administration and California over immigration boiled over Wednesday, with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions deriding the state’s “irrational, unfair and unconstitutional policies” and Gov. Jerry Brown accusing the federal government of launching “a reign of terror.”
“This is basically going to war against the state of California,” Brown declared.
As the Justice Department formally filed a legal challenge to state immigration laws, Sessions told a gathering of law enforcement officers in Sacramento that California was attempting to keep federal immigration officials from doing their jobs, and he charged Democrats with advancing the political agendas of “radical extremists.”
He took particular aim at Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who had warned immigrant communities about recent federal raids in the Bay Area, and at Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, for praising her actions.
“So here’s my message to Mayor Schaaf: How dare you?” Sessions said of the Brown protege. “Contrary to what you may hear from open-borders radicals, we are not asking California, Oakland or anyone else to actively, effectively enforce immigration laws.”
The remarks drew protests and sharp rebukes from state leaders, underscoring huge rifts over the role of law enforcement in federal immigration policy.
President Trump has made restricting immigration a central focus of his agenda and has frequently criticized California for resistance to his calls to increase deportations. On Wednesday, the White House confirmed that Trump would make his first visit to California since becoming president next week, to assess prototypes for the border wall he wants built between California and Mexico and to attend a GOP fundraiser.
California Democratic leaders and the state’s top law enforcement officer responded with war talk of their own, describing Sessions’ actions as unprecedented. In fiery tweets, speeches and at a news conference at the Capitol, the Democrats said the Justice Department lawsuit is based on lies and challenges California’s sovereignty.
The governor called Sessions’ actions a political stunt, aimed at distracting the public from guilty pleas made by Trump’s advisors in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“Let’s face it, the Trump White House is under siege,” Brown said. “Obviously, the attorney general has found it hard just to be a normal attorney general. He’s been caught up in the whirlwind of Trumpism … [and is] initiating a reign of terror.”
State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), author of one of the laws targeted by the legal challenge, accused Sessions of having ideology based on “white supremacy and white nationalism.”
De León said he is directing former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., under contract to provide legal advice to the state Senate, to help formulate a response to submit in court. On a conference call with reporters, Holder said legal precedent makes clear that the federal government cannot insist that a state use its resources to enforce federal immigration law.
“From my perspective, the Trump administration’s lawsuit is really a political and unconstitutional attack on the state of California’s well-established rights under our system of government,” Holder said.
Administration officials allege the laws, passed by the Legislature last year and signed by Brown, blatantly obstruct federal immigration law and thus violate the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which gives federal law precedence over state enactments.
State Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra has pledged to defend the measures in court, saying they work in concert with federal laws. “Our teams work together to go after drug dealers, to combat gang violence, to take down sex-trafficking rings, and we have no intention of changing that,” he said Wednesday.
In his speech to more than 100 police chiefs, sheriffs and other law enforcement officers, Sessions argued that the Trump administration did not reject immigration, but said the U.S. should not reward those who unlawfully enter the country with benefits, such as legal status, food stamps and work permits.
He said the federal government sued California to invalidate and immediately freeze what he called unjust laws.
“We are going to fight these irrational, unfair and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed on you and our federal officers,” Sessions said as he finished his speech to the California Peace Officers Assn., and some officers stood in ovation. “You can be certain about this: We have your back, and you have our thanks.”
As the group welcomed Sessions with applause, a statewide coalition of immigrant rights groups gathered outside to protest his arrival.
The event is usually a time for law enforcement officers to mingle with lawmakers, lobby for legislation and receive guidance from leaders on law enforcement priorities across the state. But Sessions’ appearance swept the attention away.
Police officers said the state’s immigration laws had not impeded their jobs so far, but the constant battles between state and federal leaders were affecting their relationships with federal partners.
Fairfield Police Chief Randy Fenn said the lawsuit raised concerns about whether law enforcement agencies would be caught in the middle of a larger immigration battle.
“We are waiting to see how this shakes out,” Fenn said.
Neil Gallucci, second vice president of the state peace officers group, said Sessions’ opinion was important to understand as the federal lawsuit had the potential to change California laws.
“Atty. Gen. Sessions is the top law enforcement officer in the United States of America,” Gallucci said. “It would be foolish for us not to listen to where we may be headed and to understand what all the issues are. That is what this forum is for.”
Though the state government’s foray into immigration issues has drawn criticism outside California in recent months, it has broad support within the state. A January poll by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found 58% of likely voters wanted state and local immigration action. Among all adults, support rose to 65% of those surveyed.
Law enforcement officials have been divided on the issue. The most contested of the statutes — the so-called sanctuary state law — limits state and local law enforcement agencies from using any resources to hold, question or share information about people with federal immigration agents, unless they have violent or serious criminal convictions.
For many officers across the state, that won’t change much of their daily work. Some police and sheriff’s agencies already have developed similar restrictions on working with immigration agents, either through their own policies or under local “sanctuary city” rules.
The California Police Chiefs Assn. moved its official position from opposed to neutral after final changes to the bill, but the California State Sheriffs’ Assn. remained opposed.
Outside Sessions’ speech Wednesday, a few hundred people gathered to protest. Right before the speech began, protesters spilled out onto a major street, blocking traffic, and then marched around the building.
Maria Isabel Serrano, 46, from Imperial County, said the attorney general should focus on violent crimes, not immigration.
“This is the only place where we have a sanctuary,” Serrano said in Spanish. “This lawsuit is uncalled for.”
On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is visiting California to sue it.
The Department of Justice has just filed a lawsuit against the state over three laws it passed in 2017 that limit government officials’ and employers’ ability to help federal immigration agents, and that give California the power to review conditions in facilities where immigrants are being detained by the feds. Sessions, in a Wednesday speech to the California Peace Officers’ Association, a law enforcement union, is giving the message in person.
It’s a huge escalation of the Trump administration’s fight against “sanctuary cities” that limit local-federal cooperation on immigration enforcement. After a year of slow-moving or unsuccessful attempts to block “sanctuary” jurisdictions from getting federal grants, Sessions is moving to stop them from passing laws that limit cooperation to begin with. And he’s starting with a shot across the bow: targeting the bluest state in the union, whose 2017 bills represented a model for progressives to use federalism against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
California, like any other “sanctuary” jurisdiction, isn’t stopping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from being able to arrest, detain, or deport immigrants. In fact, ICE has already responded to the 2017 laws in its own way — by escalating raids in California and claiming that the state’s sanctuary laws force ICE to get more aggressive in its tactics.
Sessions’s lawsuit, legally speaking, is about ensuring that the feds can use any tool in the toolbox of federal immigration enforcement policy, without any restrictions from progressive cities and states. Politically speaking, it’s the next phase in a battle the Trump administration and California are equally enthusiastic about having: an ongoing culture war between progressive politicians who feel a duty to make their immigrant residents feel as safe as possible, and an administration (and its backers) whose stated policy is that no unauthorized immigrant should feel safe.
The lawsuit is mostly a fight to let government employees and business owners cooperate with ICE if they want
The administration’s new lawsuit doesn’t address all of California’s restrictions on cooperation — including some of the “sanctuary” policies that Sessions and other Trump administration officials have complained the most about (like limits on when local jail officials can agree to hold unauthorized immigrants for 48 hours after they’d otherwise be released so federal agents can pick them up).
Instead, it aims at pieces of three different laws California passed last year: one that strictly limits law enforcement cooperation with ICE, one restricting what employers can do when ICE engages in workplace raids, and one about reviews of immigration detention facilities.
Here’s the rundown:
SB 54 (California Values Act): the “sanctuary” law. The Trump administration is suing to allow local law enforcement officials in California to do two things that SB 54 now prevents them from doing: 1) tell federal agents when an immigrant will be released from jail or prison, or give them other “nonpublic” personal information other than the immigrant’s immigration status; and 2) transfer immigrants directly into federal custody from local jails without a warrant from a judge for their arrest (though local officials are allowed to do this if an immigrant has committed certain serious crimes).
The Trump administration argues that the restrictions on what local officials can tell federal ones about a detained immigrant violate federal law — specifically, a provision that bars local and state governments from telling their officials not to share information about “the immigration status … of any individual.” This is the same provision the Trump administration has been using in its attempts to block “sanctuary” jurisdictions from getting federal grants.
California argues that sharing information about when someone will be released from jail or prison is different from sharing information about their “immigration status” itself, so it’s legal for the state to put restrictions on the former. That argument has been upheld by a federal judge in the state — though, notably, not in the same district where the Justice Department is suing.
(Ironically, the ruling that refusing to share release dates didn’t violate federal law came in a civil lawsuit filed against the city of San Francisco by the parents of Kate Steinle, whose murder has become a cause célèbre for immigration hawks including President Trump himself.)
The Justice Department is also arguing that California is restricting federal immigration enforcement by requiring a warrant from a judge to take an immigrant into custody, claiming that federal immigration law was designed to use civil “warrants” from the executive branch (since being in the US without papers is a civil offense, and deportation is technically a civil punishment, rather than criminal).
AB 103: the detentionreview law. The DOJ is suing to strike down a law that requires the California attorney general to review any facility where immigrants are being detained by federal agents while waiting for an immigration court date or their deportation (or where unaccompanied minors are being held while waiting to be placed with a relative).
The lawsuit argues that where immigrants are detained is a “law-enforcement decision” and California is improperly interfering with it; it also complains that California isn’t placing these restrictions on any other local or federal agency and is targeting immigration enforcement.
AB 450: the workplace-raid law. Just like the DOJ is suing to let law enforcement cooperate more broadly with federal agents with its challenge to SB 54, it’s suing to let employers cooperate with federal agents during workplace raids or audits. The feds are suing to strike down provisions that prevent employers from letting ICE agents access “nonpublic areas” of the workplace during raids or giving ICE agents access to employee records without a judicial warrant. (Though ICE agents would still be allowed to look over an employer’s I-9 files, the form to verify an employee’s ability to work in the US legally.)
And it’s suing to stop employers from having to notify their employees within 72 hours of getting a notice of inspection of I-9 files from ICE and notify them again within 72 hours of getting the results if the employee has been flagged in the system as working illegally.
The DOJ argues that these restrictions “have the purpose and effect of interfering with the enforcement of the [federal] prohibition on working without authorization.”
This is basically the heart of the lawsuit: that California passed laws that are designed to stop the federal government from enforcing its laws, and that’s not permissible under the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution. (In a subplot, the lawsuit cites the Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. US in 2012, which struck down parts of a state immigration enforcement law passed by Republicans who thought the Obama administration was shirking its duty on immigration.)
In the federal government’s view, “California has no lawful interest in assisting removable aliens to evade federal law enforcement.” But California, of course, argues it does: that protecting the safety and well-being of California residents means forcing ICE to meet higher standards of due process before engaging in actions that can affect not only unauthorized immigrants but legal immigrants and US citizens. And this is where the real divide lies.
California’s laws haven’t kept out ICE. They’ve just made ICE officials angrier.
The term “sanctuary” gives the totally misleading impression that cities and states can stop ICE from entering, or from arresting immigrants. They can’t. The laws that immigration hawks have traditionally labeled “sanctuary” policies — a label that, in the wake of the 2016 election, some progressives and Democrats have embraced — are designed to make it harder for the federal government to use local governments as leverage in immigration enforcement.
So when those laws pass, ICE has to do things the hard way: tracking down immigrants after they’re released from jail, for example, instead of just picking them up directly.
That sort of ICE activity is more visible — and often more disruptive to immigrants’ daily lives. When the Trump administration has been criticized for its aggressive immigration tactics, like arresting immigrants in courthouses or in their driveways, it has blamed “sanctuary cities” for forcing them to.
But the Trump administration has also made a point to hype enforcement in “sanctuary” jurisdictions as a way to send a message that immigrants are not safe there. So even as the Justice Department sues California for making it too hard to enforce immigration law, ICE is as visible in the state as ever.
The Trump administration has vocally criticized California officials for trying to impede ICE — it was furious with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for alerting the public that the February sweep was coming, for example. But it’s important to understand that the lawsuit isn’t really about ICE’s abilities, but rather about making it easier for the agency to do its job — or, to put it another way, it’s about how many tools ICE has in its immigration enforcement toolbox.
And it’s also, just like the stepped-up raids, another way to remind immigrants that no matter who calls California a “sanctuary,” it can’t really protect immigrants from deportation.
This is a fight both sides are eager to have
Sessions isn’t just going to Sacramento at random. He’s announcing the lawsuit at the convention of the California Peace Officers’ Association — which lobbied against SB 54 and which, according to its executive director, invited Sessions to provide some “clarity” about how local police could work with federal agents in general in the wake of the law.
What Sessions is giving them instead is a promise to fight for them against the local and state politicians who are trying to keep them from doing their jobs: “The Department of Justice and the Trump administration are going to fight these unjust, unfair, and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed on you,” he’s expected to say Wednesday. “I believe that we are going to win.”
In reality, law enforcement agents and officials in California (like the rest of America) have been divided on local cooperation with immigration enforcement: Some of them oppose laws like California’s because they hinder officers’ power to decide how to do their jobs, while others want to make sure immigrants aren’t scared out of reporting crimes by worrying local police will turn them over to ICE.
But picking a fight with Democratic politicians — especially in liberal-caricature California — on behalf of cops is the best possible frame for the Trump administration politically. Ever since the presidential primary, Trump has gotten leverage out of attacking “sanctuary cities” for harboring criminals. It’s allowed him to use his favorite theme — that immigrants are criminal and dangerous — while attacking his political opponents.
The legal prospects of the new lawsuit aren’t very good in the short term. Even if the DOJ prevails in the district court, it’ll have to go through the liberal (and presidentially antagonized) Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Politically, though, it’s less important that the Trump administration wins this fight than that it’s picking it at all — it’s reminding its base who the good guys and bad guys are.
Of course, that’s also true for the California government — it’s just that the “good guy” and “bad guy” labels are reversed. California has all but courted a lawsuit from the Trump administration. Attorney General Xavier Becerra left a promising career in the House of Representatives to lead the legal resistance on the West Coast.
Officials have barely bothered to conceal their glee at the news that they’re being sued. “BRING IT ON!” wrote Kevin de León (the state legislator who wrote SB 54) in a Facebook post. Gov. Jerry Brown tweeted at the attorney general: “Jeff, these political stunts may be the norm in Washington, but they don’t work here. SAD!!!”
This isn’t just about the electoral optics for California Democrats in a majority-minority state, in a midterm that could finally push out some of the state’s remaining congressional Republicans. It’s also about the message being sent to immigrants — for Democrats and the administration alike.
The fight over “sanctuary” policies is ultimately a fight over whether fear is a useful tool in immigration enforcement or an evil that can poison whole communities. The official position of the Trump administration is that any unauthorized immigrant in the US should be “looking over [her] shoulder” and worried that ICE will come after her at any time. The biggest change to policy under Trump hasn’t been the scope of deportations or even of arrests — it’s been the aggressive messaging that anyone could be next.
Local and state officials who see unauthorized immigrants as part of their own communities, and who are concerned about the effects that targeting unauthorized immigrants will have on their legal immigrant neighbors and US citizen children, are trying to combat that fear. Laws that force ICE to put more effort into arresting and detaining immigrants are one way to do that. Simply sending the message that some politicians are looking out for immigrants and fighting for them is another — probably not as effective, but something nonetheless.
Fighting in court over California’s laws allows both sides to send the message they want. But in the meantime, ICE will keep working to make sure that its presence is felt in the state, “sanctuary” or no.
Story 2: Do The Right Thing — Restore The American’s People Confidence in The FBI and Department of Justice By Appointing A Second Special Counsel To Investigate and Prosecute The Crimes Committed By The Clinton Obama Democrat Conspiracy To Spy On American People — Videos —
Congressman Biggs Renews His Call for a Second Special Counsel
Gowdy: Special counsel necessary to investigate FBI process
Judge Napolitano On Gowdy And Goodlatte ‘s Call For Second Special Counsel
GOP lawmakers call for second special counsel over FISA abuse claims
Hannity 03/06/18 9PM | March 06, 2018 Breaking News
Republicans push for Jeff Sessions to appoint second special counsel
Problems GOP may face with starting second special counsel
Gowdy, Goodlatte make case for second independent counsel
Story 1: No Crime, No Evidence, No Case, No Indictments of Russian/Trump Collusion — Delusional Democratic Clinton Conspiracy Theory — Plenty of Evidence of Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton Crimes — American People Demanding Prosecution — Waiting For Dominoes To Fall — Manafort Indictment Is Money Laundering and Tax Evasion Case From 2006-2015 — Videos —
Tucker Carlson Tonight 10/30/17 – Tucker Carlson Tonight October 30, 2017 Fox News – PAUL MANAFORT
The Latest on Today’s Top Story. Manafort Charges.
Manafort Turns Himself in! Dershowitz Explains!
“This has nothing to do with Trump” Judge Napolitano REACTS to Paul Manafort’s indictment
Judge Nap Breaks Down Charges Against Manafort!
Inside Judicial Watch News Brief: The Manafort Indictment
Manafort and Gates plead not guilty in special counsel probe
Mueller is FOOLING himself! Ann Coulter REACTS to Paul Manafort’s ARREST
Why Paul Manafort’s Indictment Has Absolutely Nothing to Do With Trump
“Manafort indictments a nothing burger” Ben Shapiro REACTS to Robert Mueller charges
Paul Manafort’s lawyer comes out fighting, THROWS Mueller’s charges to the TRASH
White House press briefing after Paul Manafort, Rick Gates indicted by federal grand jury
How Trump’s tune on Manafort changed as investigators closed in
Three Trump Associates Charged in Russia Collusion Probe
By David Voreacos, Stephanie Baker, and Shannon Pettypiece
Updated on
The federal investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia took a major turn Monday as authorities charged three people — a former campaign chief, his associate and an ex-foreign policy adviser — with crimes including money laundering, lying to the FBI and conspiracy.
Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, and onetime business partner Rick Gates surrendered and later pleaded not guilty in Washington federal court. Separately, authorities disclosed that George Papadopoulos, the adviser, secretly pleaded guilty weeks ago and has been cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Manafort, left, exits court in Washington on Oct. 30.
The accusations arrive after a months-long probe into possible crimes including obstruction of justice by Trump and other crimes by his associates. The general shape of the investigation into Manafort’s activities has been known for months. The charges against Papadopoulos were a revelation and indicate prosecutors are moving on multiple tracks. They are the most direct indication of coordination between the campaign and Russian officials.
Investigators are likely to pressure Manafort and Gates to cooperate with prosecutors in a bid for leniency and to disclose everything that they know about Trump’s campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos, who worked for the campaign from March 2016 to January, was in frequent communication with a “campaign supervisor” and “a high-ranking official” of the effort, according to court papers unsealed on Monday.
Papadopoulos made contacts with Russians who said they could supply “dirt” on Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Papadopoulos then told Trump officials they should arrange a meeting with Russians to discuss “U.S.-Russia ties,” according to the papers.
The adviser later broached the prospect of Trump’s getting together with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the court papers said. Papadopoulos was also in email contact with a Russian who said he represented the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who thanked him “for an extensive talk.”
Such meetings never occurred, said Trump spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and the charges “have nothing to do with the president.”
Papadopoulos lied to federal agents about the timing of his contacts, saying they happened before he joined the campaign, prosecutors said. After his arrest in July at Dulles International Airport near Washington, Papadopoulos met with authorities on “numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions,” according to the court documents.
Papadopoulos, a 30-year-old DePaul University graduate from Chicago, worked at the London Centre of International Law Practice at the time in question, from February 2016 to April 2016, according to his LinkedIn page. After getting a master’s degree in security studies from University College London, he was associated with Washington’s Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015. The institute said Papadopoulos was an unpaid intern and later a contract researcher for one of its fellows.
As for Manafort, the 12-count indictment painted a picture of a high-flying operation, in which more than $75 million passed through offshore accounts. Prosecutors said he laundered more than $18 million to support a “lavish lifestyle” that included buying homes, cars and clothing, and accused him of defrauding institutions that loaned him money.
He and Gates, his longtime deputy, hid foreign accounts from the U.S., failed to disclose work for a foreign government and misrepresented their activities to authorities as recently as 2017, according to the indictment.
In court Monday afternoon, prosecutors said their foreign ties made the men flight risks and put them under house arrest ahead of a trial. Manafort posted a $10 million bond, while Gates put up a $5 million bond to be released. They also surrendered their passports.
In the packed courtroom, Manafort spent most of his time staring impassively, sometimes just looking down. Gates, too, sat quietly. As their not-guilty pleas were entered by their attorneys, neither man addressed the court except in response to directions to swear that whatever they said would be the truth, and to affirm that they understood the terms of their release and the consequences of their failure to comply.
Afterwards, Kevin Downing, Manafort’s lawyer, told reporters that the charges have nothing to do with the Trump campaign, and called them ridiculous.
Gates was fired Monday by real-estate company Colony NorthStar Inc., where he had been a consultant to Executive Chairman Tom Barrack, a wealthy Los Angeles investor and Trump confidant. Gates looks forward to defending himself in court, according to a statement from Glenn Selig, a spokesman.
“This fight is just beginning,” Selig said.
Lawyers for Papadopoulos declined to comment, saying they would do so in court.
The president took to Twitter to say that any wrongdoing by Manafort predated their relationship.
“Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign,” Trump wrote. “But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????”
Manafort, 68, has been targeted by Mueller for months. A top Republican strategist who also worked extensively for foreign politicians, he left Trump’s campaign after only a few months in 2016. He departed after information surfaced about his work in Ukraine for a pro-Russian party, which intensified scrutiny of his business dealings.
Gates worked with Manafort on Trump’s campaign and in Ukrainian politics. After Manafort left the campaign, Gates remained, later joining the president-elect’s inaugural committee.
He attended meetings at the White House after Trump became president, according to one former staff member. Trump sought to distance himself from Gates and grew angry after he learned that Gates was still visiting the White House, two people familiar with the matter said.
Virginia Home
As campaign chairman, Manafort attended a June 2016 meeting with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian lawyer that was arranged to offer incriminating information about Clinton.
In July 2017, FBI agents picked the lock of Manafort’s northern Virginia home, frisking his wife and copying data from electronic devices, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Manafort has said he cooperated with congressional inquiries about the campaign even as Mueller’s prosecutors combed through his taxes and finances.
Manafort, a lawyer whose father was mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, made his name working for Republican presidential candidates, including Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.
He started lobbying and political-consulting firms that upended the way the Washington influence game worked by helping politicians win and then cashing in on the success, what one critic called an “institutionalized conflict of interest.”
Foreign Leaders
He advised foreign leaders, some with unsavory reputations, on how to make themselves palatable to Washington. His roster included Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi and deposed Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Putin.
Yanukovych’s Party of Regions hired Manafort in 2006 to recast its image, which had been marred by election-fraud allegations.
He helped teach Yanukovych to look and speak like an American politician, shepherding him to the presidency in 2010. Manafort also helped him defend the imprisonment of his rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, an act widely condemned in the West.
Yanukovych left office in a 2014 uprising and now lives in exile in Russia. A handwritten ledger found in a party office said Manafort was paid at least $12.7 million from 2007 to 2012. In June, Manafort retroactively filed a foreign-agent registration that said the Party of Regions paid him $17.1 million in 2012 and 2013.
The Manafort Indictment: Not Much There, and a Boon for Trump
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY October 30, 2017 2:20 PM
The Paul Manafort indictment is much ado about nothing . . . except as a vehicle to squeeze Manafort, which is special counsel Robert Mueller’s objective — as we have been arguing for three months (see here, here, and here).
Do not be fooled by the “Conspiracy against the United States” heading on Count One (page 23 of the indictment). This case has nothing to do with what Democrats and the media call “the attack on our democracy” (i.e., the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election, supposedly in “collusion” with the Trump campaign). Essentially, Manafort and his associate, Richard W. Gates, are charged with (a) conspiring to conceal from the U.S. government about $75 million they made as unregistered foreign agents for Ukraine, years before the 2016 election (mainly, from 2006 through 2014), and (b) a money-laundering conspiracy.
There are twelve counts in all, but those are the two major allegations.
The so-called conspiracy against the United States mainly involves Manafort’s and Gates’s alleged failure to file Treasury Department forms required by the Bank Secrecy Act. Specifically, Americans who hold a stake in foreign bank accounts must file what’s known as an “FBAR” (foreign bank account report) in any year in which, at any point, the balance in the account exceeds $10,000. Federal law also requires disclosure of foreign accounts on annual income-tax returns. Manafort and Gates are said to have controlled foreign accounts through which their Ukrainian political-consulting income sluiced, and to have failed to file accurate FBARs and tax returns. In addition, they allegedly failed to register as foreign agents from 2008 through 2014 and made false statements when they belatedly registered.
In the money-laundering conspiracy, they are alleged to have moved money in and out of the United States with the intent to promote “specified unlawful activity.” That activity is said to have been their acting as unregistered foreign agents.
On first glance, Mueller’s case, at least in part, seems shaky and overcharged.
Even though the Ukrainian money goes back to 2006, the counts involving failure to file FBARs (Counts Three through Nine) go back only to 2012. This is likely because the five-year statute of limitations bars prosecution for anything before then. Obviously, one purpose of the conspiracy count (Count One) is to enable prosecutors, under the guise of establishing the full scope of the scheme, to prove law violations that would otherwise be time-barred.
The offense of failing to register as a foreign agent (Count Ten) may be a slam-dunk, but it is a violation that the Justice Department rarely prosecutes criminally. There is often ambiguity about whether the person’s actions trigger the registration requirement, so the Justice Department’s practice is to encourage people to register, not indict them for failing to do so.
It may well be that Manafort and Gates made false statements when they belatedly registered as foreign agents, but it appears that Mueller’s office has turned one offense into two, an abusive prosecutorial tactic that flouts congressional intent.
Specifically, Congress considers false statements in the specific context of foreign-agent registration to be a misdemeanor calling for zero to six months’ imprisonment. (See Section 622(a)(2) of Title 22, U.S. Code.) That is the offense Mueller charges in Count Eleven. But then, for good measure, Mueller adds a second false-statement count (Count Twelve) for the same conduct — charged under the penal-code section (Section 1001 of Title 18, U.S. Code) that makes any falsity or material omission in a statement to government officials a felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.
Obviously, one cannot make a false statement on the foreign-agent registration form without also making a false statement to the government. Consequently, expect Manafort to argue that Mueller has violated double-jeopardy principles by charging the same exact offense in two separate counts, and that the special counsel is undermining Congress’s intent that the offense of providing false information on a foreign-agent registration form be considered merely a misdemeanor.
Finally, the money-laundering conspiracy allegation (Count Two) seems far from slam-dunk. For someone to be guilty of laundering, the money involved has to be the proceeds of criminal activity before the accused starts concealing it by (a) moving it through accounts or changing its form by buying assets, etc., or (b) dodging a reporting requirement under federal law.
Now, it is surely a terrible thing to take money, under the guise of “political consulting,” from an unsavory Ukranian political faction that is doing the Kremlin’s bidding. But it is not a violation of American law to do so. The violations occur when, as outlined above, there is a lack of compliance with various disclosure requirements. Mueller seems to acknowledge this: The money-laundering count does not allege that it was illegal for Manafort and Gates to be paid by the Ukrainian faction. It is alleged, rather, that they moved the money around to promote a scheme to function as unregistered foreign agents, and specifically to avoid the registration requirement.
That seems like a stretch. To be sure, the relevant money-laundering statute includes in its definition of “specified unlawful activity” “any violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938.” (See Section 1956(c)(2)(7)(D) of Title 18, U.S. Code.) But the prosecution still has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the money was the proceeds of unlawful activity in the first place. Moreover, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that
Even from Paul Manafort’s perspective, there may be less to this indictment than meets the eye. Manafort and Gates (a) knew the money was the proceeds of illegal activity and (b) transported the money the way they did with the specific intent of avoiding having to register as foreign agents. This count will thus fail if there is any doubt that the Ukrainian money was illegal under American law, that Manafort and Gates knew it was illegal, that they knew the work they were doing required them to register as foreign agents, or that it was their intention to promote a failure-to-register violation.
From President Trump’s perspective, the indictment is a boon from which he can claim that the special counsel has no actionable collusion case. It appears to reaffirm former FBI director James Comey’s multiple assurances that Trump is not a suspect. And, to the extent it looks like an attempt to play prosecutorial hardball with Manafort, the president can continue to portray himself as the victim of a witch hunt.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a
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Tony Podesta Steps Down from Podesta Group due to Mueller Probe.
Rpt: Mueller Investigating Tony Podesta – Uranium One Scandal – Hannity
TUCKER CARLSON MANAFORT WORKED WITH PODESTA Tucker investigates podesta group
The Coming Russia Bombshells – WSJ To Mueller After Dossier Expose: Resign – Fox & Friends
Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta now being investigated by Mueller
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Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure.
Story 3: Real Russian Collusion — Obama Administration — Uranium One — Clinton Foundation — Videos
Hillary Is SCARED! Sessions Must Appoint Special Counsel to Investigate Uranium One Deal
James Comey’s decision-making on the Clinton probe
Judicial Watch on Hannity: FBI Recovered 72,000 Pages of Clinton Records
FBI Informant Can Testify On Uranium One Deal – Fox & Friends
Obama-era Uranium One deal strongest evidence of Russian collusion: Rep. DeSantis
This Democrat Senator Just Flipped On Live TV And Unveiled Hillary Clinton’s TREASONOUS Secret
Yes, The Russia Scandal Is Real — And It Involves Hillary Clinton
10/17/2017
Clinton Scandals: For well over a year now, the progressive left in the Democratic Party have tried hard to sell the idea that, a) Russia meddled in our election, and, b) that it was to the detriment of Hillary Clinton. After nearly a year and a half of investigating, neither appears true. What is true, and now documented, is that Hillary Clinton and her family foundation both benefited handsomely from Russian corruption.
Citing federal officials and government documents, The Hill details the Russians’ nuclear-industry corruption here in the U.S., citing extensive evidence that “Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business” in the U.S.
But that’s just the beginning. Based on both an eyewitness account and documents, The Hill report goes on to say that federal agents found evidence “indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow.”
Isn’t that called bribery?
Strangely, the Department of Justice first discovered the Russian racketeering scheme and the links to Clinton in 2009. But it failed to bring charges, and dragged its investigation out for four years with no substantive action.
Meanwhile, in October of 2010, the State Department and the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) curiously — and unanimously — approved the sale of part of Uranium One, a Canadian-based company with uranium interests in the U.S., to Rosatom, a Russian state holding company.
Why is this significant? That sale gave Russia, a potential nuclear foe, defacto control over 20% of the U.S.’ uranium supply. Let that sink in for a minute.
Then there’s this: The CFIUS that approved the Rosatom deal had two key members: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who in a clear conflict of interest materially benefited from the deal, and Attorney General Eric Holder, the man responsible for slow-walking the investigation into Russian nuclear racketeering.
So the Obama administration knew of the Russian racketeering, extortion, money laundering, and the rest, as Vladimir Putin’s minions elbowed their way into the U.S. nuclear market. The Obama administration did nothing. The administration knew, too, that Hillary was selling access and influence in the State Department via donations to the family charity. But, again, it did nothing.
And these donations weren’t just peanuts.
The Clintons and their foundation raked in a cool $145 million in donations and “speaking fees” just from Uranium One- and Rosatom-affiliated donors while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was supposedly keeping all Clinton Foundation business at “arm’s-length.” As we reported in July, Clinton official emails show extensive connections between Hillary, the Clinton Foundation and donors during her time as secretary of state, a kind of criminal conga-line of people asking for favors from Hillary and donating to the foundation.
Peter Schwiezer, the author of “Clinton Cash,” questioned this “spontaneous outbreak of philanthropy among eight shareholders in Uranium One” who “decide now would be a great time to donate tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.”
Nor was this just a Russian thing. It was a much-broader pay-for-play scheme by Hillary Clinton. Consider this: Of the 154 private interests that were given official access to Hillary Clinton during her tenure at the State Department, at least 85 donated to the Clinton Foundation or a program affiliated with it. The secretary of state’s office in Foggy Bottom might as well have had “For Sale” painted on it.
That the Clintons and their eponymous foundation got away with their corrupt arrangement for so many years without interference or censure speaks to a deep political corruption in the Obama administration. It’s strange that an investigation continues into the inconsequential ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian officials, while solid evidence of bribery of the Clinton family by the Russians and many others is completely ignored.
FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow
BY JOHN SOLOMON AND ALISON SPANN – 10/17/17 06:00 AM EDT
Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.
Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.
They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.
The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.
Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.The first decision occurred in October 2010, when the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.
When this sale was used by Trump on the campaign trail last year, Hillary Clinton’s spokesman said she was not involved in the committee review and noted the State Department official who handled it said she “never intervened … on any [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] matter.”
In 2011, the administration gave approval for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants in a partnership with the United States Enrichment Corp. Before then, Tenex had been limited to selling U.S. nuclear power plants reprocessed uranium recovered from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons under the 1990s Megatons to Megawatts peace program.
“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a person who worked on the case told The Hill, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by U.S. or Russian officials.
The Obama administration’s decision to approve Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One has been a source of political controversy since 2015.
That’s when conservative author Peter Schweitzer and The New York Times documented how Bill Clinton collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in Russian speaking fees and his charitable foundation collected millions in donations from parties interested in the deal while Hillary Clinton presided on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
The Obama administration and the Clintons defended their actions at the time, insisting there was no evidence that any Russians or donors engaged in wrongdoing and there was no national security reason for any member of the committee to oppose the Uranium One deal.
But FBI, Energy Department and court documents reviewed by The Hill show the FBI in fact had gathered substantial evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the main Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the United States — was engaged in wrongdoing starting in 2009.
Then-Attorney General Eric Holder was among the Obama administration officials joining Hillary Clinton on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States at the time the Uranium One deal was approved. Multiple current and former government officials told The Hill they did not know whether the FBI or DOJ ever alerted committee members to the criminal activity they uncovered.
Spokesmen for Holder and Clinton did not return calls seeking comment. The Justice Department also didn’t comment.
Mikerin was a director of Rosatom’s Tenex in Moscow since the early 2000s, where he oversaw Rosatom’s nuclear collaboration with the United States under the Megatons to Megwatts program and its commercial uranium sales to other countries. In 2010, Mikerin was dispatched to the U.S. on a work visa approved by the Obama administration to open Rosatom’s new American arm called Tenam.
Between 2009 and January 2012, Mikerin “did knowingly and willfully combine, conspire confederate and agree with other persons … to obstruct, delay and affect commerce and the movement of an article and commodity (enriched uranium) in commerce by extortion,” a November 2014 indictment stated.
His illegal conduct was captured with the help of a confidential witness, an American businessman, who began making kickback payments at Mikerin’s direction and with the permission of the FBI. The first kickback payment recorded by the FBI through its informant was dated Nov. 27, 2009, the records show.
In evidentiary affidavits signed in 2014and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to assist the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money laundering and kickbacks that were both directed by and provided benefit to more senior officials back in Russia.
“As part of the scheme, Mikerin, with the consent of higher level officials at TENEX and Rosatom (both Russian state-owned entities) would offer no-bid contracts to US businesses in exchange for kickbacks in the form of money payments made to some offshore banks accounts,” Agent David Gadren testified.
“Mikerin apparently then shared the proceeds with other co-conspirators associated with TENEX in Russia and elsewhere,” the agent added.
The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.
Both men now play a key role in the current investigation into possible, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. McCabe is under congressional and Justice Department inspector general investigation in connection with money his wife’s Virginia state Senate campaign accepted in 2015 from now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe at a time when McAuliffe was reportedly under investigation by the FBI. The probe is not focused on McAuliffe’s conduct but rather on whether McCabe’s attendance violated the Hatch Act or other FBI conflict rules.
The connections to the current Russia case are many. The Mikerin probe began in 2009 when Robert Mueller, now the special counsel in charge of the Trump case, was still FBI director. And it ended in late 2015 under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired earlier this year.
Its many twist and turns aside, the FBI nuclear industry case proved a gold mine, in part because it uncovered a new Russian money laundering apparatus that routed bribe and kickback payments through financial instruments in Cyprus, Latvia and Seychelles. A Russian financier in New Jersey was among those arrested for the money laundering, court records show.
The case also exposed a serious national security breach: Mikerin had given a contract to an American trucking firm called Transport Logistics International that held the sensitive job of transporting Russia’s uranium around the United States in return for more than $2 million in kickbacks from some of its executives, court records show.
One of Mikerin’s former employees told the FBI that Tenex officials in Russia specifically directed the scheme to “allow for padded pricing to include kickbacks,” agents testified in one court filing.
Bringing down a major Russian nuclear corruption scheme that had both compromised a sensitive uranium transportation asset inside the U.S. and facilitated international money laundering would seem a major feather in any law enforcement agency’s cap.
But the Justice Department and FBI took little credit in 2014 when Mikerin, the Russian financier and the trucking firm executives were arrested and charged.
The only public statement occurred a year later when the Justice Department put out a little-noticed press release in August 2015, just days before Labor Day. The release noted that the various defendants had reached plea deals.
By that time, the criminal cases against Mikerin had been narrowed to a single charge of money laundering for a scheme that officials admitted stretched from 2004 to 2014. And though agents had evidence of criminal wrongdoing they collected since at least 2009, federal prosecutors only cited in the plea agreement a handful of transactions that occurred in 2011 and 2012, well after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States’s approval.
The final court case also made no mention of any connection to the influence peddling conversations the FBI undercover informant witnessed about the Russian nuclear officials trying to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons even though agents had gathered documents showing the transmission of millions of dollars from Russia’s nuclear industry to an American entity that had provided assistance to Bill Clinton’s foundation, sources confirmed to The Hill.
The lack of fanfare left many key players in Washington with no inkling that a major Russian nuclear corruption scheme with serious national security implications had been uncovered.
On Dec. 15, 2015, the Justice Department put out a release stating that Mikerin, “a former Russian official residing in Maryland was sentenced today to 48 months in prison” and ordered to forfeit more than $2.1 million.
Ronald Hosko, who served as the assistant FBI director in charge of criminal cases when the investigation was underway, told The Hill he did not recall ever being briefed about Mikerin’s case by the counterintelligence side of the bureau despite the criminal charges that were being lodged.
“I had no idea this case was being conducted,” a surprised Hosko said in an interview.
Likewise, major congressional figures were also kept in the dark.
Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who chaired the House Intelligence Committee during the time the FBI probe was being conducted, told The Hill that he had never been told anything about the Russian nuclear corruption case even though many fellow lawmakers had serious concerns about the Obama administration’s approval of the Uranium One deal.
“Not providing information on a corruption scheme before the Russian uranium deal was approved by U.S. regulators and engage appropriate congressional committees has served to undermine U.S. national security interests by the very people charged with protecting them,” he said. “The Russian efforts to manipulate our American political enterprise is breathtaking.”
Two House committees have said that they will investigate the Obama administration’s approval of a deal that gave Russia a financial interest in U.S. uranium production.
The 2010 deal allowed Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency, to acquire a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian-based company with mining stakes in the Western United States.
We covered it during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump falsely accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving away U.S. uranium rights to the Russians and claimed — without evidence — that it was done in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.
Now, the issue is back in the news, and numerous readers have asked us about it again. So we will recap here what we know — and don’t know — about the 2010 deal.
The Deal
On June 8, 2010, Uranium One announced it had signed an agreement that would give “not less than 51%” of the company to JSC Atomredmetzoloto, or ARMZ, the mining arm of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency.
Uranium One has two licensed mining operations in Wyoming that amount to about “20 percent of the currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S.,” according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In-situ recovery is the extraction method used by 10 of the 11 licensed U.S. uranium producers.
The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States
The Committee on Foreign Investments has nine members, including the secretaries of the treasury, state, defense, homeland security, commerce and energy; the attorney general; and representatives from two White House offices (the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy).
The committee can’t actually stop a sale from going through — it can only approve a sale. The president is the only one who can stop a sale, if the committee or any one member “recommends suspension or prohibition of the transaction,” according to guidelines issued by the Treasury Department in December 2008 after the department adopted its final rule a month earlier.
For this and other reasons, we have written that Trump is wrong to claim that Clinton “gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States” to Russia. Clinton could have objected — as could the eight other voting members — but that objection alone wouldn’t have stopped the sale of the stake of Uranium One to Rosatom.
“Only the President has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction,” the federal guidelines say.
We don’t know much about the committee’s deliberations because there are “strong confidentiality requirements” prohibiting disclosure of information filed with the committee, the Treasury Department says on its website. Some information would have become available if the committee or any one of its members objected to the sale. But none of the nine members objected.
“When a transaction is referred to the President, however, the decision of the President is announced publicly,” Treasury says.
We don’t even know if Clinton was involved in the committee’s review and approval of the uranium deal. Jose Fernandez, a former assistant secretary of state, told the New York Timesthat he represented the department on the committee. “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter,” he told the Times, referring to the committee by its acronym.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
It is also important to note that other federal approvals were needed to complete the deal, and even still more approvals would be needed to export the uranium.
First, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to approve the transfer of two uranium recovery licenses in Wyoming from Uranium One to the Russian company. The NRC announced it approved the transfer on Nov. 24, 2010. But, as the NRC explained at the time, “no uranium produced at either facility may be exported.”
As NRC explained in a March 2011 letter to Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the Russian company would have to apply for and obtain an export license and “commit to use the material only for peaceful purposes” in accordance with “the U.S.-Russia Atomic Energy Act Section 123 agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation.”
In a June 2015 letter to Rep. Peter Visclosky, the NRC said it granted RSB Logistics Services an amendment to its export license in 2012 to allow the Kentucky shipping company to export uranium to Canada from various sources — including from a Uranium One site in Wyoming. The NRC said that the export license allowed RSB to ship uranium to a conversion plant in Canada and then back to the United States for further processing.
Canada must obtain U.S. approval to transfer any U.S. uranium to any country other than the United States, the letter says.
“Please be assured that no Uranium One, Inc.-produced uranium has been shipped directly to Russia and the U.S. Government has not authorized any country to re-transfer U.S. uranium to Russia,” the 2015 letter said.
“That 2015 statement remains true today,” David McIntyre, a spokesman for the NRC, told us in an email.
RSB Logistics’ current export license, which expires in December, still lists Uranium One as one of its suppliers of uranium.
Uranium One, which is now wholly-owned subsidiary of Rosatom, sells uranium to civilian power reactors in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration. But U.S. owners and operators of commercial nuclear reactors purchase the vast majority of their uranium from foreign sources. Only 11 percent of the 50.6 million pounds purchased in 2016 came from U.S. domestic producers, according to the EIA.
Although Uranium One holds 20 percent of currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S., the company was responsible for only about 11 percent of U.S. uranium production in 2014, according to 2015 congressional testimony by a Department of Energy contractor.
Clinton Foundation Donations and Bill Clinton Speaking Fee
Clinton’s role in the Uranium One sale, and the link to the Clinton Foundation, first became an issue in 2015, when news organizations received advance copies of the book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at a conservative think tank.
On April 23, 2015, the New York Timeswrote about the uranium issue, saying the paper had “built upon” Schweizer’s information.
The Times detailed how the Clinton Foundation had received millions in donations from investors in Uranium One.
The donations from those with ties to Uranium One weren’t publicly disclosed by the Clinton Foundation, even though Hillary Clinton had an agreement with the White House that the foundation would disclose all contributors. Days after the Times story, the foundation acknowledged that it “made mistakes,” saying it had disclosed donations from a Canadian charity, for instance, but not the donors to that charity who were associated with the uranium company.
The Times also wrote that Bill Clinton spoke at a conference in Moscow on June 29, 2010 — which was after the Rosatom-Uranium One merger was announced in June 2010, but before it was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States in October 2010. The Russian-based Renaissance Capital Group organized the conference and paid Clinton $500,000.
Renaissance Capital has “ties to the Kremlin” and its analysts “talked up Uranium One’s stock, assigning it a ‘buy’ rating and saying in a July 2010 research report that it was ‘the best play’ in the uranium markets,” the Times wrote.
But there is no evidence that the donations or the speaking fee had any influence on the approvals granted by the NRC or the Committee on Foreign Investments.
Back in the News
This arcane bit of campaign trivia resurfaced in the news after The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, reported that a Russian spy sought to gain access to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state.
Lydia Guryev, who used the name “Cynthia Murphy” while living in the United States, pleaded guilty to espionage charges in July 2010 and was forced to leave the U.S. Her guilty plea came after the Rosatom-Uranium One merger was announced and before the Committee on Foreign Investments approved it. But there was nothing about the merger in the federal criminal complaint or the press release announcing her guilty plea.
The criminal complaint said that Guryev had been working as a spy in the United States since the 1990s and took orders from the foreign intelligence organ of the Russian Federation in Moscow.
For example, Guryev was ordered in the spring of 2009, in advance of Obama’s upcoming trip to Russia, to get information on “Obama’s goals which he expects to achieve during the summit [with Russia] in July,” the complaint said.
The only reference in the criminal complaint to Clinton was a veiled one. Federal agents said Guryev sought to get close with “a personal friend of [a current Cabinet official, name omitted].” The Hill identified the cabinet official as Clinton.
The Hill story also rehashed an FBI investigation that resulted in “charges against the Russian nuclear industry’s point man in the United States, TENEX director Vadim Mikerin, as well as a Russian financier and an American trucking executive whose company moved Russian uranium around the United States.”
In 2015, Mikerin was sentenced to 48 months and required to pay more than $2 million in restitution for conspiring to commit money laundering, according to the Justice Department.
The Hill quoted the attorney for a former FBI informant in the TENEX case as saying her client “witnessed numerous, detailed conversations in which Russian actors described their efforts to lobby, influence or ingratiate themselves with the Clintons in hopes of winning favorable uranium decisions from the Obama administration.”
The convictions of Guryev and Mikerin are not new, and there’s no evidence that either case has any connection to the Rosatom-Uranium One merger. Nevertheless, the article has prompted the Republican chairmen of the House intelligence and oversight committees to announce a joint investigation of the merger.
On Fox News, Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, said that “we’ve been communicating back and forth through different channels” with the FBI informant in the TENEX case.
“You are talking about major decisions that were made at a time when we were resetting relations with Russia that actually happened to benefit, you know, the Clinton Foundation, perhaps other avenues, we don’t know yet,” Nunes said in an Oct. 24 interview with Bret Baier.
It may be that individuals and companies sought to curry favor with Hillary Clinton and even influence her department’s decision on the Uranium One sale. But, as we’ve written before, there is no evidence that donations to the Clinton Foundation from people with ties to Uranium One or Bill Clinton’s speaking fee influenced Hillary Clinton’s official actions. That’s still the case. We will update this article with any major developments.
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The Pronk Pops Show 1398, February 13, 2020, Story 1: Hope Returns To The White House — White Lies Resume — Videos — Story 2: Attorney General Bill Barr Will Do The Right Thing — Stone Should Get A New Trial Due To Juror Foreperson Bias– Total Miscarriage of Justice In Political Prosecution of Stone to Silence Telling Truth To Power By A Great Public Speaker — Long List of Liars To Congress Not Prosecuted — Double Standard Justice — Revenge Recommendation of 9 Years For Lying To Congress! — Vacate Stone’s Conviction — Videos — Story 3: Massive Federal Spending and Taxes of The Two Party Tyranny Sets New Records — Videos
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Story 1: Hope Returns To The White House — White Lies Resume — Videos
Hope Hicks returning to Trump White House as senior adviser
A Trump favorite is making a return after departing for the Fox Corporation.
Since her departure, she has served as the head of communications for the Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, among other entities owned by Rupert Murdoch.
News of her resignation came the day after Hicks testified before the House Intelligence Committee that she had occasionally told white lies on Trump’s behalf, according to a source familiar with the interview. Then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders denied that her departure was related to her testimony.
Hicks met with Mueller’s teams for multiple interviews as part of the probe into Russian interference and obstruction of justice by the president.
Since her departure, Hicks appeared before the House Judiciary committee. During the closed-door hearing, Hicks answered questions related to her time working on Trump’s 2016 campaign, but declined to comment on her work in the White House.
The White House also blocked Hicks from turning over documents subpoenaed by the committee.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hope-hicks-returning-trump-white-house-senior-adviser/story?id=68961123
Story 2: Attorney General Bill Barr Will Do The Right Thing — Stone Should Get A New Trial Due To Juror Foreperson Bias– Total Miscarriage of Justice In Political Prosecution of Stone to Silence Telling Truth To Power By A Great Public Speaker — Long List of Liars To Congress Not Prosecuted — Double Standard Justice — Revenge Recommendation of 9 Years For Lying To Congress! — Vacate Stone’s Conviction — Videos
Kevin McCarthy on Democrats’ unequal standard of justice exposed
Tucker: Fairness is the most important American idea
Tucker Carlson Tonight 2/13/20 | Fox News February 13, 2020
Attorney General William Barr speaks to ABC News’ Pierre Thomas (Full)
McConnell on Trump’s tweets: He should listen to Barr
Whitaker weighs in on Barr seeking a lighter sentence for Roger Stone
The ‘remarkable’ DOJ controversy over Roger Stone’s sentencing
Napolitano explains why Roger Stone is ‘absolutely entitled’ to a new trial
DOJ likely to lessen Roger Stone’s ‘extreme’ sentencing recommendation
Roger Stone jury foreperson’s anti-Trump social media posts surface
Tucker Carlson Calls For Roger Stone Pardon, Rips Media For Wanting Longer Term Than For Rapists
Trump weighs in on DOJ’s decision to reverse recommended prison sentence for Roger Stone
The ‘remarkable’ DOJ controversy over Roger Stone’s sentencing
Trump congratulates Barr for taking control of Roger Stone case
Trump lashes out at former Roger Stone prosecutors
Gowdy on Roger Stone: Nine years is a long sentence for lying to Congress
AG Barr: I’m not going to be bullied by the President
The Five’ reacts to DOJ overruling Roger Stone’s suggested sentence
Gingrich: By Super Tuesday you’ll realize how big a threat Bloomberg is
Alex Jones Comments on Roger Stone Verdict
Roger Stone found guilty on all counts in federal trial
Roger Stone, Dinesh D’Souza react to DOJ IG’s report
Roger Stone to Hannity: They want to silence me
Gowdy on Roger Stone charges, Dems’ progressive push in 2020
Christie: No reason for Stone raid except to intimidate
Alan Dershowitz reacts to Roger Stone’s indictment
Roger Stone Addresses Mueller Indictment Live | NowThis
Roger Stone | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union
Feb 13, 2018
Roger Stone – BBC HARDtalk 5th February 2018
Roger Stone: Inside the World of a Political Hitman
Roger Stone jury foreperson comes forward to defend prosecutors – but social media history of the failed Democrat candidate reveals she mocked his arrest, labeled Trump supporters racist and posed with ex-DNC chair Donna Brazil
By KEITH GRIFFITH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:
The foreperson on the jury that convicted Roger Stone has come forward, and is revealed to be a failed Democrat candidate for Congress and activist vehemently opposed to President Donald Trump.
Tomeka Hart, a former Memphis City Schools Board President, came forward as the Stone jury foreperson in a Facebook post on Wednesday, voicing support for prosecutors in the case.
Hart confirmed to The Daily Memphian that she wrote the Facebook post, but she declined an interview with the newspaper.
It’s unclear whether Stone’s political views and social media history were disclosed during jury selection, potentially raising questions about fairness that could impact the verdict on appeal.
Hart (left) is seen with former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile
Hart retweeted a post about Stone’s arrest in January 2019, months before the trial
Hart came forward amid controversy over Stone’s sentencing, after the four prosecutors on the case withdrew in response to Trump criticizing the government’s recommendation that Stone be sentenced to nine years in prison.
Trump has said that the prosecution of his former campaign advisor Stone prosecution for obstruction, false statements, and witness tampering was handled in a manner that was ‘ridiculous’ and an ‘insult to our country.’
‘I have kept my silence for months. Initially, it was for my safety. Then, I decided to remain silent out of fear of politicizing the matter,’ Hart said in her Facebook post on Wednesday.
‘But I can’t keep quiet any longer. I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis – the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial,’ Hart wrote, referring to the prosecutors who resigned in protest.
‘It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice. For that, I wanted to speak up for them and ask you to join me in thanking them for their service,’ she said.
Hart unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012, and is an activist who has participated in anti-Trump rallies and protests.
Immediately, journalists and Trump supporters began scouring Hart’s social media history, finding a trove of anti-Trump sentiment.
Independent journalist Mike Cernovich was the first to report on Hart’s extensive history of anti-Trump social media posts.
In January 2019, Hart also re-tweeted a post by pundit Bakari Sellers mocking Stone’s arrest, and suggesting that racism was the reason conservatives were upset about the use of force in the FBI’s armed pre-dawn raid on his home.
Months later, Hart was impaneled on Stone’s jury. On the day the jury convicted him, she posted emojis of hearts and fist pumps.
Meanwhile, it emerged that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had denied a defense request to strike a potential juror on the case, who was an Obama-era press official with admitted anti-Trump views.
That juror’s husband worked at the same Justice Department division that handled the probe leading to Stone’s prosecution.
Another Stone juror, Seth Cousins, donated to former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke and other progressive causes, federal election records reviewed by Fox News show.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7998815/Tomeka-Hart-Roger-Stone-jury-foreperson-revealed-anti-Trump-activist.html
Barr blasts Trump’s tweets on Stone case: ‘Impossible for me to do my job’: ABC News Exclusive
The AG spoke with ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
When asked if he was prepared for the consequences of criticizing the president – his boss – Barr said “of course” because his job is to run the Justice Department and make decisions on “what I think is the right thing to do.”
In a stunning reversal, the Justice Department overruled a recommendation by its own prosecution team that Stone spend seven to nine years in jail and told a judge that such a punishment – which was in line with sentencing guidelines – “would not be appropriate.”
The about-face raised serious questions about whether Barr had intervened on behalf of the president’s friend. It also raised questions about whether Trump personally pressured the Justice Department, either directly or indirectly.
In the interview with ABC News, Barr fiercely defended his actions and said it had nothing to do with the president. He said he was supportive of Stone’s convictions but thought the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years was excessive. When news outlets reported the seven to nine year sentencing recommendation last Monday, Barr said he thought it was spin.
Barr said he told his staff that night that the Justice Department has to amend its recommendation. Hours later, the president tweeted that it was “horrible and very unfair” and that “the real crimes were on the other side.”
“Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Trump tweeted.
The blowback from such an unprecedented move by the Justice Department leadership was immediate, both internally among the rank-and-file and in Congress. The entire four-man DOJ prosecution team withdrew from the case, and one prosecutor resigned from the Justice Department entirely. Sen. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Judiciary Committee that oversees the Justice Department and one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, said the president should not have tweeted about an ongoing case.
The Justice Department, while led by a president appointee and Cabinet member, is tasked with enforcing the law and defending the interests of the U.S. without political influence.
Barr said Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet put him in a bad position. He insists he had already discussed with staff that the sentencing recommendation was too long.
“Do you go forward with what you think is the right decision or do you pull back because of the tweet? And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be,” he said.
Barr also told ABC News he was “a little surprised” that the prosecution team withdrew from the case and said he hadn’t spoken to the team.
He said it was “preposterous” to suggest that he “intervened” in the case as much as he acted to resolve a dispute within the department on a sentencing recommendation.
Trump has been pleased with Barr’s actions on Stone, praising him on Twitter. Trump on Wednesday said he was “not concerned about anything” about the resignations at the Justice Department and suggested the prosecutors “should go back to school and learn.”
“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” Trump tweeted this week, after all prosecutors assigned to the case quit.
Trump has repeatedly come under fire for trying to influence the Justice Department, including forcing out his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in 2018 after Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. Early in his presidency, Trump also encouraged then-FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe into Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, according to a memo Comey wrote at the time.
When asked earlier this week if he would pardon Stone, Trump said: “I don’t want to talk about that now.”
“If (Trump) were to say, ‘Go investigate somebody because’—and you sense it’s because they’re a political opponent, then the attorney general shouldn’t carry that out, wouldn’t carry that out,” Barr said.
When asked if he expects the president to react to his criticism of the tweets, Barr said: “I hope he will react.”
“And respect it?” ABC’s Thomas asked.
“Yes,” Barr said.
Senior level White House sources insisted to ABC News that the president and top aides were unaware of Barr’s intentions in the interview and were informed of the content only just before it aired.
The White House had no immediate comment.
ABC News’ Jack Date, Alexander Mallin, John Santucci, Katherine Faulders, Justin Fishel, Liz Alesse and Jordyn Phelps contributed to this report.
Donald Trump goes after Obama-appointed judge who will sentence Roger Stone claiming she ‘put Paul Manafort in solitary’ after denying overruling prosecutors’ demand to jail dirty trickster for nine years
By GEOFF EARLE, DEPUTY US POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday attacked the federal judge who will sentence Roger Stone – after an extraordinary 24 hours saw the entire prosecution quit after their call to jail the dirty trickster for nine years was overruled.
Trump went after U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson accusing her of ‘putting Paul Manafort in solitary confinement something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure.’
In fact Manafort’s prison conditions were set by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is ultimately overseen by Bill Barr, the attorney general; Berman Jackson remanded him in custody for breaching bail conditions and was one of two judges to sentence him to prison time.
Berman Jackson has scheduled a sentencing hearing for Stone on February 20, when she will decide his punishment for lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering.
First Trump tweeted just after midnight on Tuesday that the nine years demand was a ‘miscarriage of justice,’ then just before midday the Department of Justice overruled the prosecutors and said senior leaders found nine years ‘excessive.’
Trump rant: The president tweeted a series of claims about the investigation into Roger Stone, including a false suggestion that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had put Paul Manafort in solitary confinement, and that John Podesta’s brother Tony had escaped prosecution; the Department of Justice had edned an investigation into Podesta in September
Within hours the four career prosecutors quit the case one by one, and Trump was questioned in the Oval Office on whether he ordered them to be overruled.
He denied it but said he had the power to do so if he had wanted to, called the recommendation ‘ridiculous,’ said the prosecutors should be ‘ashamed’ for a case he called a ‘disgrace.’
Attacking Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, now puts Trump on a collision course with John Roberts, the Chief Justice, who presided over his impeachment acquittal last week.
Roberts had hit Trump hard in November 2018 when the president had lashed out at a judge for ruling against an immigrant measure calling him an ‘Obama judge.’
In response Roberts said: ‘We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.
‘What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.
‘That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.’
Trump also tweeted that ‘a swamp creature with “pull” was just sentenced to two months in jail for a similar thing that they want Stone to serve 9 years for.’
That was an apparent reference to James Wolfe, a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer who was jailed for two months in December – by a different federal judge – for lying to the FBI.
Wolfe had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with the media while they investigated a leak of classified material. Trump had gleefully tweeted that the FBI ‘caught a leaker,’ something with which Wolfe was not charged.
Trump’s widening attacks came after he denied asking his attorney general to roll back prosecutors’ recommendation that longtime advisor Stone face serious jail time.
The Department of Justice dramatically reversed its demand to jail Stone for up to nine years in a move announced Tuesday – hours after Donald Trump slammed it on Twitter as a ‘miscarriage of justice.’
The reversal prompted the extraordinary decision by three experienced federal prosecutors to remove themselves from the case – with one resigning his position with the government entirely.
Trump stood by his decision Tuesday afternoon, calling the original recommendation a ‘disgrace,’ and terming the proposed sentence ‘ridiculous.’
‘No I didn’t speak to the Jus – I’d be able to do it if I wanted. I have the absolute right to do it. I stay out of things to a degree that people wouldn’t believe.
But I didn’t speak to them. I thought the (original) recommendation was ridiculous, I thought the whole prosecution was ridiculous,’ Trump vented. ‘I look at others that haven’t been prosecutors.’
He said he considered it an ‘insult to our country.’ He called them ‘the same Mueller people that put everybody through hell.’
But he also maintained: ‘I have not been involved.’
‘I think it’s a disgrace. See what happens.’
Trump declined to say whether he was considering commuting Stone’s sentence, whatever it turns out to be. But he did suggest another man he considers a political enemy, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, might face a military investigation.
‘We sent him on his way to a much different location, and the military can handle him any way they want. General Milley has him now. I congratulate General Milley,’ Trump said, referencing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley. ‘He can have him. And his brother also,’ Trump said. ‘We’ll find out,’ he added, without explanation.
According to its updated filing, which came after Trump’s overnight tweets: ‘The defendant committed serious offenses and deserves a sentence of incarceration that is ‘sufficient, but not greater than necessary’ to satisfy the factors set forth in’ sentencing guidelines.
‘Based on the facts known to the government, a sentence of between 87 to 108 months’ imprisonment, however, could be considered excessive and unwarranted … Ultimately, the government defers to the Court as to what specific sentence is appropriate under the facts and circumstances of this case,’ the updated memo said.
A senior Justice Department official told ABC News “it does appear” the the prosecutors asked to be taken off the case as a form of protest. But the official denied Trump’s nearly 2 am tweet played a role in the turnaround, calling it an ‘inconvenient coincidence.’
Stone has been a Trump confidant for decades, and served as an informal advisor during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s denial came after prosecutors filed a new memo in the Stone case leaving it to the judge to recommend the appropriate sentence.
Leaders at the department, which is headed by Attorney General Bill Barr, found it extreme and excessive, and disproportionate to Stone’s offenses, one official said.
Shortly after the announcement, the lead prosecutor in the case, Aaron Zelinsky, used a court filing to announce that he had resigned ‘effective immediately’ as a special assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He retains a federal post in Maryland. A second, Jonathan Kravis, followed him shortly afterwards, resigning from government service as an assistant U.S. attorney.
A third federal prosecutor, Adam Jed, also withdrew as counsel to the government in the case. Later Tuesday, it was revealed that prosecutor Michael Marando withdrew from the case.
Kravis served in the public integrity of the Justice Department, served in the White House counsel’s office under Barack Obama, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Jed clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
All four used court filings to announce their departures, apparently to the surprise of their own colleagues – in an unmistakable sign of protest.
Zelinsky was a member of Mueller’s team, but remained after Mueller departed to work on the Stone case.
Trump had tweeted in the early hours of Tuesday morning: ‘This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!’
Just before midday, the DOJ announced its walk back but one official told Fox News the decision had been made before Trump’s Twitter rant.
All three were seasoned prosecutors who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
The official did not explain why the reversal had not been announced until after the tweet. The DOJ has not said what sentence it will now seek.
The move prompted immediate anger and derision from Democrats with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying: ‘They’ll probably recommend the presidential medal of freedom!’
He said he was asking the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate whether Bill Barr had directed the reversal.
Veteran ‘dirty trickster’ Stone is due to face sentencing by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson on February 20, after a jury in November found him guilty on seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering.
Attack: Democratic congressman Bill Pascrell likened Trump and the DOJ’s move to a banana republic
Trump tweeted Monday night: ”This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!’ (pictured: at a campaign rally in Manchester last night)
‘We look forward to reviewing the government’s supplemental filing,’ Stone’s lawyer, Grant Smith, said in an email to Reuters.
It is extremely rare for Justice Department leaders to reverse the decision of its own prosecutors on a sentencing recommendation, particularly after that recommendation has been submitted to the court. Normally, United States attorneys have wide latitude to recommend sentences on cases that they prosecuted.
Sentencing decisions are ultimately up to the judge, who in this case may side with the original Justice Department recommendation.
Long-time consigliere: Roger Stone has been advising Donald Trump on politics for more than 20 years, including in 1999 during his first putative White House run
Jackson, the judge, has repeatedly scolded Stone for his out-of-court behavior, which included a social media post he made of the judge with what appeared to be crosshairs of a gun.
The judge barred Stone from social media last July after concluding that she repeatedly flouted his gag order.
Besides, judges invariably frown upon crimes that they see as perverting the functions of the criminal justice system, such as making false statements or obstructing an investigation.
The Justice Department plans to refile the recommendation later Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors also recently softened their sentencing position onFlynn, saying that they would not oppose a probation of punishment after initially saying that he deserved up to six months in prison for lying to the FBI. The Flynn prosecution is also being handled by the U.S. Attorney´s office in Washington.
The White House referred questions about the decision to the Justice Department.
Stone is one of several people close to Trump who faced charges stemming from then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump has the power to pardon people for federal crimes, although he has yet to use it in the cases of other former aides convicted in the wake of the Mueller investigations.
His tweet hunted he could use that power, or his power to commute sentences if Stone were to get the level of custody demanded by prosecutors.
Stone’s own defense had asked for probation.
Senior Democratic lawmakers expressed amazement at the move but Trump loyalists said they now hoped Mike Flynn – the disgraced former national security advisor who is currently trying to get out of his guilty plea to lying to the FBI – would also get ‘clemency.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7993827/Donald-Trump-goes-Obama-appointed-judge-sentence-Roger-Stone.html
As sentencing approaches, Roger Stone turns to former mob lawyer for help
Roger Stone is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 20.
“Roger has an excellent team of attorneys and I’m very pleased he’s asked me to assist them,” Ginsberg told ABC News on Thursday. Ginsberg added that he was brought on to help Stone’s legal team with their sentencing strategy.
Ginsberg has had a colorful career inside and outside the courthouse. At one point, in 2010, he was banned from a Manhattan federal detention center after he was caught walking in with marijuana in his bag while on his way to visit an alleged associate of the Gambino crime family.
He also previously represented an alleged member of the Luchese crime family.
Last November, Stone — President Donald Trump‘s longtime friend and former campaign adviser — was tried and found guilty of all charges in the seven-count indictment brought against him by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Stone, who pleaded not guilty to all charges, has maintained his innocence since his initial arrest during a pre-dawn FBI raid on his home Jan. 25, 2019, was found guilty of obstructing a congressional inquiry, witness tampering, and five counts of lying to Congress.
The move comes after Stone’s case unexpectedly touched off a major firestorm in Washington this week.
When prosecutors filed a memo recommending a sentencing guideline of seven to nine years in prison for Stone on Monday evening, it prompted Trump to tweet overnight that the recommendation reflected a “miscarriage of justice” and was a “horrible and very unfair situation.”
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice made a highly scrutinized decision to overrule the sentencing recommendation made by the federal prosecutors who successfully convicted Stone of all counts brought against him by Mueller’s team. The reversal prompted all four line prosecutors on the case to withdraw from the case, and one of the four to leave DOJ entirely.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News on Thursday, Attorney General Bill Barr told fiercely defended his actions in the case and said the Justice Department’s reversal on Stone’s sentencing recommendation had nothing to do with the president. He said he was supportive of Stone’s convictions but thought the initial sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years was excessive.
Judge Jackson is scheduled to sentence Stone on Feb. 20.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sentencing-approaches-roger-stone-turns-mob-lawyer/story?id=68973648
Story 3: Massive Federal Spending and Taxes of The Two Party Tyranny Sets New Records — Videos
The High Cost of Good Intentions Featuring John Cogan
The 2018 Hayek Lecture: John Cogan on “The High Cost of Good Intentions”
The President Trump’s 2021 budget request will kick off the annual spending roulette
Romina Boccia: Out of Control Spending A Bipartisan Problem
Blueprint for Balance: A Federal Budget for FY 2019
What Will Balance the Budget?
Coffee with Scott Adams #4 — How to balance the federal budget
What Can We Cut to Balance the Budget
Oct 16, 2012
Federal Taxes and Spending Set Records Through January
(CNSNews.com) – The federal government set records for both the amount of taxes it collected and the amount of money it spent in the first four months of fiscal 2020 (October through January), according to data released today in the Monthly Treasury Statement.
So far in fiscal 2020, the federal government has collected $1,178,800,000,000 in total taxes.
The previous high for total federal taxes collected in the first four months of the fiscal year came in fiscal 2018, when the Treasury collected $1,172,088,080,000 in constant December 2019 dollars.
While the federal government was collecting that record $1,178,800,000 in federal taxes in October through January of this fiscal year, it was spending a record total of $1,567,985,000,000.
That was up $116,800,410,000 from the $1,451,184,590,000 (in constant December 2019 dollars) that the federal government spent in the first four months of fiscal 2019.
Before fiscal 2019, the record for federal spending in the first four months of the fiscal year had been set in fiscal 2009. That year in October through January, the federal government spent $1,423,253,530,000 (in constant December 2019 dollars). Part of the spending at the beginning of that fiscal year was driven by the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which President George W. Bush signed into law at the beginning of October 2008 to bail out insolvent banks.
In the first four months of this fiscal year—while collecting a record $1,178,800,000,000 and spending a record $1,567,985,000,000—the federal government ran a deficit of $389,185,000,000.
The Department of Health and Human Services led all federal agencies in spending in the first four months of fiscal 2020 with outlays of $443,759,000,000. The Social Security Administration was second with $380,623,000,000 in spending. The Defense Department and Military Programs was third with $237,702,000,000.
(The dollar figures in this story and in the charts were adjusted into constant December 2019 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.)
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