Story 1: Senator Mitch McConnell Now Says Background Checks and Other Bills Infringing Your Second Amendment Rights Will Be Discussed in September — Vote Out Of Office Any Democrat or Republican The Votes For Limiting Your Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendment Rights — Videos
Is Senator Mitch McConnell Stalling For Time On Gun Reform? | Morning Joe | MSNBC
Mitch McConnell says senate will consider gun control legislation next month
Trump open to ‘meaningful’ background checks after shootings
“All the gun laws they’re proposing hurt the most vulnerable and minorities most.” – John Lott
John Lott on gun control: “The background check system itself is basically racist”
Part of John Lott’s Lecture of the Problems with Expanded Background Checks May 22, 2016
The NRA on universal background checks
What Do Gun Background Checks Actually Check?
McConnell wants to consider gun background checks in fall
PUBLISHED: 19:39 EDT, 8 August 2019 | UPDATED: 06:40 EDT, 9 August 2019
Shifting the gun violence debate, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he now wants to consider background checks and other bills, setting up a potentially pivotal moment when lawmakers return in the fall.
The Republican leader won’t be calling senators back to work early, as some are demanding. But he told a Kentucky radio station that President Donald Trump called him Thursday morning and they talked about several ideas. The president, he said, is “anxious to get an outcome, and so am I.”
Stakes are high for all sides, but particularly for Trump and his party. Republicans have long opposed expanding background checks – a bill passed by the Democratic-led House is stalled in the Senate – but they face enormous pressure to do something after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, that left 31 people dead. McConnell, who is facing protests outside his Louisville home, can shift attention back to Democrats by showing a willingness to engage ahead of the 2020 election.
“What we can’t do is fail to pass something,” McConnell said. “What I want to see here is an outcome.”
McConnell said he and Trump discussed various ideas on the call, including background checks and the so-called “red flag” laws that allow authorities to seize firearms from someone deemed a threat to themselves or others.
“Background checks and red flags will probably lead the discussion,” McConnell told Louisville’s WHAS-AM. He noted “there’s a lot of support” publicly for background checks. “Those are two items that for sure will be front and center as we see what we can come together on and pass.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., smiles after vote on a hard-won budget deal that would permit the government to resume borrowing to pay all of its obligations and would remove the prospect of a government shutdown in October, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Trump has been interested in federal background checks before – and tweeted Monday about them – only to drop the issue later, a turnaround similar to his reversal on gun proposals after the 2018 high school shooting at Parkland, Florida.
The powerful National Rifle Association and its allies on Capitol Hill have long wielded influence, but the gun lobby’s grip on Democrats started slipping some time ago, and it’s unclear how much sway the NRA and other gun groups still hold over Republicans in the Trump era.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump assured them in phone calls Thursday he will review the House-passed bill that expands federal background checks for firearm sales.
In a joint statement, they said Trump called them individually after Pelosi sent a letter asking the president to order the Senate back to Washington immediately to consider gun violence measures.
Schumer and Pelosi said they told Trump the best way to address gun violence is for the Senate to take up and pass the House bill. Trump, they said, “understood our interest in moving as quickly as possible to help save lives.”
The politics of gun control are shifting amid the frequency and toll of mass shootings. Spending to support candidates backing tougher gun control measures – mostly Democrats – surged in the 2018 midterms, even as campaign spending by the NRA declined.
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre said in rare public statement Thursday that some federal gun control proposals “would make millions of law-abiding Americans less safe and less able to defend themselves and their loved ones.”
The organization said proposals being discussed in Congress would not have prevented the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio that killed 31 people.
McConnell has been under pressure from Democrats, and others, to bring senators back to Washington after the back-to-back weekend shootings.
Earlier, more than 200 mayors, including those in Dayton and El Paso, urged the Senate to return to the Capitol. “Our nation can no longer wait,” they wrote.
McConnell on Thursday rejected the idea of reconvening the Senate, saying calling senators back now would just lead to people “scoring points and nothing would happen.”
Instead, the GOP leader wants to spend the August recess talking with Democratic and Republican senators to see what’s possible. Senators have been talking among themselves, and holding conference calls, to sort out strategy.
“If we do it prematurely it’ll just be another frustrating position for all of us and for the public,” he said.
The politics of gun violence are difficult for Republicans, including McConnell. He could risk losing support as he seeks reelection in Kentucky if he were to back restricting access to firearms and ammunition. Other Republicans, including those in Colorado, Maine and swing states, also would face difficult votes, despite the clamor for gun laws.
GOP senators are also considering changes to the existing federal background check system, modeled on a law signed last year that improved the National Instant Criminal Background Check system, as well as increased penalties for hate crimes.
While many of those proposals have bipartisan support, Democrats are unlikely to agree to them without consideration of the more substantive background checks bill.
“We Democrats are not going to settle for half-measures so Republicans can feel better and try to push the issue of gun violence off to the side,” Schumer said Wednesday.
Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who, along with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., is pushing a bill to expand background checks, said Trump’s support will be the determining factor in whatever gets done.
“At this point in time leadership comes from President Trump,” Manchin said.
___
Associated Press writer Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.
FILE – In this July 23, 2019, file photo, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. More than 200 mayors, including the mayors of El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, are urging Senate leaders to call senators back to the Capitol to act on bipartisan gun safety legislation. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Dayton, Ohio, Mayor Nan Whaley speaks to members of the media Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019, outside Ned Peppers bar in the Oregon District after a mass shooting that occurred early Sunday morning in Dayton. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
FILE – In this July 30, 2019, photo, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., takes questions from reporters at the Capitol in Washington. More than 200 mayors, including the mayors of El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, are urging Senate leaders to call senators back to the Capitol to act on bipartisan gun safety legislation. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
President Donald Trump is greeted by Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, after arriving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to meet with people affected by the mass shooting in Dayton, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump is greeted by Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, after arriving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to meet with people affected by the mass shooting in Dayton, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
Other reviews said that there were problems with Lott’s model. In the New England Journal of Medicine, David Hemenway argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption, and that therefore the model was flawed.[16]Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue, said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and systemic bias.[17] In the American Journal of Public Health, Daniel Webster et al. also raised concerns about other flaws in the study, such as misclassification of laws and endogeneity of predictor variables, which they said rendered the study’s conclusions “insupportable”.[18] Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry,[19] and others said that removing portions of the data set caused the results to still show statistically significant drops only in aggravated assaults and robbery when all counties with fewer than 100,000 people and Florida’s counties were both simultaneously dropped from the sample.[20] A 1998 study by Jens Ludwig that said it “more effectively control[ed] for unobserved variables that may vary over time” than the Lott and Mustard study concluded that “shall-issue laws have resulted, if anything, in an increase in adult homicide rates.”[21] A 2001 study in the Journal of Political Economy by University of Chicago economist Mark Duggan did robustness checks of Lott and Mustard’s study and found that the findings of the Lott and Mustard study were inaccurate.[22]
In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott’s work, and concluded “that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”[23] The NRC report studied over 100 different types of gun control proposal and it reached this same non-conclusion for all these regulations. For all these regulations, the NRC panel only called for more research.
Only right-to-carry laws had a dissent from this non-conclusion. The pre-eminent criminologist James Q. Wilson dissented from this non-conclusion.[24] Wilson pointed out that committee’s own findings showed “that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate”.[25]
Referring to the research done on the topic, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that “Mr. Lott’s research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime.”[26] As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out: “We conclude that Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile.”[17]
A 2008 article in Econ Journal Watch surveyed peer-reviewed empirical academic studies, and found that 10 supported the proposition that right-to-carry reduces crime, 8 supported no significant effect and none supported an increase.[27] The article was rebutted by Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue in the same journal in 2009.[28] By 2012, there were 18 peer-reviewed studies that supported right-to-carry reduces crime, 10 supported no significant effect and one supported an increase.[29] Other studies on the subject have been published in student-edited academic reviews or the commercial press.
In 2013, Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime. As of July 2015, he was also the organization’s president.[30]
Women’s suffrage and government growth
Using data from 1870 to 1940, Lott and Larry Kenny studied how state government expenditures and revenue changed in 48 state governments after women obtained the right to vote. Women were able to vote in 29 states before women’s suffrage and the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Lott stated that “women’s suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise.”[31]
Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that defensive gun use (DGU) is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police.”
Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, in the first edition of the book, published in May 1998, Lott wrote that “national surveys” suggested that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” In that same paragraph he also wrote that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police.” The higher the rate of defensive gun uses that do not end in the attacker being killed or wounded, the easier it is to explain why defensive gun uses are not covered by the media without reference to media bias. Lott cited the figure in op-eds in the Wall Street Journal[32] and the Los Angeles Times.[33]
In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in Public Opinion Quarterly said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.[34] According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz’s 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.[35]:8 Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.[36] The other surveys all asked people to recall events over the previous five years, while Lott had only asked people about events that had occurred during just the previous year. Lott used the higher estimate because it accounted for his claim of media bias. The survey questions have also been made available for years to anyone who would have liked to replicate the survey themselves.
Safe storage gun laws
In a 2001 study, Lott and John E. Whitley reported that safe-storage gun laws not only did not reduce juvenile suicides or accidental gun deaths, but that they also increased rates of violent and property crime.[37] The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association for using Tobit regression despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was “highly skewed and heteroskedastic“, and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home.[38] Webster and Carroll also wrote in Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law that the Lott and Whitley study’s findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.[39]
Environmental regulations
Together with John Karpoff and Eric Wehrly at the University of Washington, Lott has worked to show the importance of government regulations through both legal and regulatory penalties and the weaknesses of reputational penalties in reducing pollution.[40] Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed; and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty.
Affirmative action in police departments
Lott finds that when hiring standards are lowered in the process of recruiting more minority officers, the overall quality of all officers is reduced and crime rates are increased. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black populated cities. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when standards for hiring women are changed, and this raises questions about whether norming tests or altering their content to create equal pass rates is preferable. The paper examines how the changing composition of police departments affects such measures as the murder of and assaults against police officers.[41]
Abortion and crime
With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott has considered crime rates and the possible influence of laws which place abortion decisions with the pregnant person other than boards of physicians. They acknowledge the old 1960s argument that abortion may prevent the birth of “unwanted” children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, their research suggests that liberalizing abortion rules correlates with an increase in out-of-wedlock births and single parent families. In turn, they argue that this increase in single parent births implies the opposite effect on investments in human capital (i.e., average investment per child decreases under their argument). Using the correlation between children in poverty and in single parent homes with crime they build an argument that liberalization of abortion laws increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent.[42] In a review of the literature on the relationship between abortion and crime, Theodore Joyce, an economist at Baruch College and the National Bureau of Economic Research, praised Lott and Whitley for gathering additional data on abortion but criticized the methodology that they used.[43]
Lost Bush votes in the 2000 presidential election
In 2000, Lott argued, using a regression analysis, that George W. Bush lost at least 10,000 votes in Florida after the media incorrectly called the state for Al Gore while voting was still on-going in the more conservative parts of the state.[44] Lott’s argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook Rethinking Social Inquiry (edited by Henry Brady and David Collier) as an example of poor methodology, and showed how the number of lost Bush votes ranged from 28 to 56.[44]
Other areas
Lott claims that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending.[45] Lott also supports the conclusion that higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take longer to get confirmed.[46]
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit[48] for defamation against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers over the book Freakonomics and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott’s research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott’s work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott’s had been blocked from publication in that issue.[49]
A federal judge found that Levitt’s replication claim in Freakonomics was not defamation but found merit in Lott’s complaint over the email claims.[50]
Levitt settled the second defamation claim by admitting in a letter to John McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, that Lott had not engaged in bribery (paying for extra costs of printing and postage for a conference issue is customary), and that he knew that “scholars with varying opinions” (including Levitt himself) had been invited to participate.[51][52] The Chronicle of Higher Education characterized Levitt’s letter as offering “a doozy of a concession.”[53]
The dismissal of the first half of Lott’s suit was unanimously upheld by The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.[54]
Charges that gun makers or the NRA have paid for Lott’s research
In 1996 when Lott’s research first received media attention, Charles Schumer wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The Associated Press reports that Prof. Lott’s fellowship at the University of Chicago is funded by the Olin Foundation, which is ‘associated with the Olin Corporation,’ one of the nation’s largest gun manufacturers. Maybe that’s a coincidence, too. But it’s also a fact.”[55] Olin Foundation head William E. Simon strongly denied Schumer’s claims in a reply letter in which he stated that: Olin Foundation was funded by the personal estate of the late John M. Olin independently of Olin Corp. Like all candidates, Lott was selected to receive his Olin Fellowship by the faculty of the university, not by Olin Foundation and certainly not by Olin Corp.[56][57]
In a debate on Piers Morgan Tonight on July 23, 2012, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz claimed: “This is junk science at its worst. Paid for and financed by the National Rifle Association.” Lott countered: “The NRA hasn’t paid for my research.” Dershowitz continued: “Your conclusions are paid for and financed—The National Rifle Association—only funds research that will lead to these conclusions.”[58][59] Separately both Lott and the NRA have denied NRA funding of Lott’s research.[60]
Disputed survey
In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000,[61][62] Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.[62] However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,[63] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics alleged that the survey had never taken place,[64] but Lott defends the survey’s existence and accuracy, quoting on his website colleagues who lost data in the hard drive crash.[65]
Use of econometrics as proof of causation
In 2001, Rutgers University sociology professor Ted Goertzel[66] considered multiple regression to be not of much use in proving causal arguments in studies by Lott (and by Lott’s critics Levitt, Ayres and Donohue).[67]
The National Academy of Sciences panel that reported on several gun control issues in 2004 looked at Right-To-Carry laws in Chapter 6 and endorsed neither the Lott & Mustard (1997) level and trend models as definite proof nor the Ayres & Donohue (2003) hybrid model as definite refutation of Lott’s thesis: the majority of the panel concluded that econometrics could not decide the issue, suggesting instead alternate research, such as a survey of felons to determine if RTC changed their behavior.[68] The criminologist on the NAS panel, James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from the econometricians’ conclusion. Wilson noted in the report that all the panel’s estimates on murder rates supported Lott’s conclusion on the effect of RTC on murder.[69] The Committee responded that “[w]hile it is true that most of the reported estimates [of the policy on murder rates] are negative, several are positive and many are statistically insignificant.”[70] They further noted that the full committee, including Wilson, agreed that there was not convincing evidence that RTC policies affected other kinds of violent crime.
In a 2011 article for ALER, Donohue claimed the NRC panel results published from the hybrid model “could not be replicated on its data set”.[71] Lott replicated the NRC’s results using the NRC’s copy of the Ayres & Donohue model and data set, pointing out that the model used for the ALER article was different and introduced a truncation bias.[72]
Mary Rosh persona
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott created and used “Mary Rosh” as a sock puppet to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by blogger Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to use of the Mary Rosh persona.[64] Sanchez also pointed out that Lott, posing as Rosh, not only praised his own academic writing, but also called himself “the best professor I ever had”.
Many commentators and academics accused Lott of violating academic integrity, noting that he praised himself while posing as one of his former students[73][74] and that “Rosh” was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com. Lott has claimed that the “Rosh” review was written by his son and wife.[74]
“I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it—but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” Lott told The Washington Post in 2003.[74]
The Form 4473 contains name, address, date of birth, government-issued photo ID, National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) background check transaction number, and a short affidavit stating that the purchaser is eligible to purchase firearms under federal law. It contains make, model, or serial number on page three of the six page form. Lying on this form is a felony and can be punished by up to five years in prison[2] in addition to fines, even if the transaction is denied by the NICS. Prosecutions are rare in the absence of another felony committed with the gun purchased.[citation needed] Of 556,496 denied transactions between FY 2008 and FY 2015, federal prosecutors prosecuted an average of under 32 cases per year, including 24 in FY 2013, 15 in FY 2014 and 20 in FY 2015.[3][4]
The dealer also records all information from the Form 4473 into a required “bound-book” called an “Acquisition and Disposition Log.[5] A dealer must keep this on file at least 20 years, and is required to surrender the log to the ATF upon retirement from the firearms business. The ATF is allowed to inspect, as well as request a copy of, the Form 4473 from the dealer during the course of a criminal investigation. In addition, the sale of two or more handguns to a person in a five-day period must be reported to ATF on Form 3310.4.
If a person purchases a firearm from a private individual who is not a licensed dealer, the purchaser is not required in most states to complete a Form 4473. Some states (such as California and Colorado) require individual sellers to sell through dealers.
These forms are given the same status as a tax return under the Privacy Act of 1974 and cannot be disclosed by the government to private parties or other government officials except in accordance with the Privacy Act. Individual dealers possessing a copy of the form are not subject to the Privacy Act’s restrictions on disclosure. Dealers are required to maintain completed forms for 20 years in the case of completed sales, and for 5 years where the sale was disapproved as a result of the NICS check.
Contents
eForm 4473
In response to the Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA),[6] and based upon requests from the firearms industry, the ATF has developed the e-Form 4473 to assist in the proper completion of the Federal Firearms Transaction Record (ATF Form 4473). The ATF eForm 4473 is designed to help eliminate errors in completing Form 4473 for both the firearm purchaser and the licensed seller. The eForm 4473 is provided to the public, including major retailers, free of charge via the ATF eForm web site. ATF eForm 4473 is a downloadable application that runs locally on the seller’s computer and supports both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. (See “External links” section below.)
2016 revision
In 2016, ATF made several changes to the form, including adding a warning statement that the use of marijuana is illegal under federal law, regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where the transferee/buyer resides.[7][8]
In Popular Culture
Form 4473 was referenced in the 1984 film Red Dawn.[9]
References
^See generally subsection (g)(1)(A) of 18 U.S.C.§ 923 and subsection (a) of 27 C.F.R. sec. 478.124.
^See generally subsection (g)(2) of 18 U.S.C. section 923.
^Title XVII (sections 1701 through 1710) of Division C of Public Law No. 105-277, 112 Stat. 2681, at 2681-749 (Oct 21, 1998), amending subsection (a)(1)(B)(vi) of 44 U.S.C.§ 3504.
ATF Form 4473 – Firearms Transaction Record Revisions
Important Notice to All Federal Firearms Licensees
ATF Form 4473, Firearms Transaction Record (Form 4473) has been revised. This page highlights the significant changes to the form. It is highly suggested that you review the entire revised form including all of the Notices, Instructions, and Definitions.
This form is effective January 16, 2017, you may no longer use the previous edition (April 2012) of the Form 4473 as it will be obsolete. The revised form is available to either download or order online.
Warning Statement: Clarifies that the form is to be completed at the licensed premises unless the transaction qualifies under 18 U.S.C. 922(c).
Section A
Question 1: Clarifies that transferee’s/buyer’s with a legal name that contains an initial only should record “IO” (including the quotation marks, i.e. John W. “IO” Smith). Also clarifies that transferee’s/buyer’s with a legal name that contains a suffix (e.g., Jr, Sr, II, III) should record the information with their last name.
Question 2: Incorporated State of Residence information from former Question 13.
Question 6: Changed “Gender” to “Sex”.
Questions 10.a. and 10.b: Clarifies that both questions must be answered.
Question 11.e: Added a warning statement regarding marijuana that has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where the transferee/buyer resides.
Questions 12.a – 12.d and 13: (Formerly Questions 11.k – 12 and 14 – 15): Regrouped and revised the citizenship and immigration status questions to make them easier to follow.
Transferee/Buyer Certification: Clarifies that the repetitive purchase of firearms for the purpose of resale for livelihood and profit without a Federal firearms license is violation of Federal law.
Section B
Question 18.b (Formerly Question 20.b): Changed to “Supplemental Government Issued Documentation (if identification document does not show current residence address)”
Question 18.c (Formerly Question 20.c): Changed to “Exception to the Nonimmigrant Alien Prohibition: If the transferee/buyer answered “YES” to 12.d.2. the transferor/seller must record the type of documentation showing the exception to the prohibition and attach a copy to this ATF Form 4473.”
Question 19.d (Formerly Question 21.d): Added a check box for “Overturned” transactions.
Question 19.g (Added to Form): “Name of FFL Employee Completing NICS check. (Optional)”.
Question 20 (Formerly Question 22): Clarifies that a NICS check is not required if the individual receiving the firearm was subject to a background check as part of the NFA approval process.
Section D
Header: Added instruction that the firearm information must be recorded even if the firearm(s) is/are not transferred.
Question 24 (Formerly Question 26): Changed to “Manufacturer and Importer (If any)” to reflect the language in 27 CFR 478.125(e).
Question 24 – 28 (Formerly Question 26 – 30): Removed line 5 and added line numbers.
Multiple Sale: Added “REMINDER – By the Close of Business” to the beginning of the sentence for clarification.
Question 29 (Formerly Question 30.a): Clarifies that “zero” should be recorded if no firearm(s) is/are transferred.
Question 30 (Formerly Question 30.b): Changed to a check box and added an instruction to record the line number(s) involved in the pawn redemption.
Question 32 (Added to Form): A check box to indicate that the transaction is to facilitate a private party transfer.
Question 33 (Formerly Questions 31 – 32): Combined the two questions.
Transferor Certification: Revised language to certify that the form was completed at the licensed business premises unless the transaction meets the requirements of 18 U.S.C. 922(c) and the transaction complies with State or local laws that are applicable to the firearms business. Clarifies that unless the transaction has been denied or cancelled the transferor/seller certifies that it is his/her belief that it is not unlawful for him/her to sell, deliver, transport, or otherwise dispose of the firearm(s) listed on this form to the person identified in Section A.
Notices, Instructions, and Definitions
Purpose of the Form – Paragraph 2 (Added to Form): “Generally, ATF Form 4473 must be completed at the licensed business premises when a firearm is transferred over-the-counter. Federal law, 18 U.S.C. 922(c), allows a licensed importer, manufacturer, or dealer to sell a firearm to a nonlicensee who does not appear in person at the licensee’s business premises only if the transferee/buyer meets certain requirements. These requirements are set forth in section 922(c), 27 CFR 478.96(b), and ATF Procedure 2013-2.”
Purpose of the Form – Over-the-Counter Transaction (Formerly Paragraph 4): Removed from form.
Purpose of the Form – State Laws and Published Ordinances (Formerly Paragraph 5): Removed from form. Information incorporated into Paragraph 1.
Purpose of the Form – Exportation of Firearms: Added “Warning: Any person who exports a firearm without proper authorization may be fined not more than $1,000,000 and/or imprisoned for not more than 20 years See 22 U.S.C. 2778(c).”
Instruction for Section A: Formerly instructions for Question 1.
Instruction for Question 2: Clarifies that a rural route (RR) may be accepted provided the transferee/buyer lives in a State or locality where it is considered a legal residence address. Also clarifies that the State of residence for members of the Armed Forces on active duty is the State in which his or her permanent duty station is located.
Instruction for Question 9: Clarifies that the licensee should provide the UPIN when conducting background checks through the NICS or the State POC.
Instruction for Questions 10.a. and 10.b: Added to form.
Instruction for Question 11.a: Clarifies when a gift is considered “bona fide” and provides examples.
Instruction for Questions 11.b – 12 (Formerly Questions 11.b – 11.l): Added a new paragraph between the 1st and 2nd paragraphs. “A member of the Armed Forces must answer “yes” to 11.b. or 11.c. if charged with an offense that was either referred to a General Court Martial, or at which the member was convicted. Discharged “under dishonorable conditions” means separation from the Armed Forces resulting from a dishonorable discharge or dismissal adjudged by a General Court-Martial. The term does not include any other discharge or separation from the Armed Forces.”
Instruction for Question 11.b: Removed from form. Information incorporated into Questions 11.b – 12.
EXCEPTION (Formerly EXCPTION to 11.c. and 11.i.): Clarifies that persons subject to this exception, or who receive relief from disabilities under 18 U.S.C. 925(c), should answer “no” to the applicable question.
Instruction for Question 11.d: Added to form. Provides the definition of “Fugitive from Justice”.
EXCEPTION (Formerly EXCEPTION to 11.f): Clarifies when a person is not prohibited under the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007. Language revised and additional information added.
Instruction for Question 12.d (Formerly Question 11.l.): Clarifies which aliens must answer “yes” to this question and provide the additional documentation required under Question 18.c.
Former Instruction for Question 11.l: Paragraph 2 removed from form. Information incorporated into Question 12.a.-12.d.
Former Instruction for Question 12: Removed from form. Information from Paragraph 1 incorporated into Question 18.c. Information from paragraph 2 incorporated into Questions 12.a.-12.d.
Former Instruction for Question 13: Removed from form. Information incorporated into Question 2.
New Instruction for Question 13: Added to form. Clarifies where U.S.-issued alien and admission numbers may be found. Also clarifies that U.S. citizens and U.S. nationals should leave the question left blank.
Instruction for Question 16 (Formerly Question 18): Clarifies that frames and receivers cannot be transferred to anyone who is not a resident of the State where the transfer is to take place.
Instruction for Question 17. (Formerly Question 19.): Added the definition of “Qualifying Gun Show or Event”.
Instruction for Question 18a (Formerly Question 20.a): Clarifies that licensees may accept electronic PCS orders to establish residency.
Instruction for Question 18.b. (Formerly Question 20.b.): Clarifies that a valid electronic document from a government website may be used as supplemental documentation provided it contains the transferee’s/buyer’s name and current residence address.
Instruction for Question 18c. (Formerly Question 20.c.): Clarifies the exceptions to the nonimmigrant alien prohibition and acceptable documentation.
Instruction for Question 19 (Formerly Question(s) 21, 22, 23): Clarifies for purposes of this form, contacts to NICS include State agencies designated as points-of-contact (“or POCs”) to conduct NICS checks for the Federal Government. Provides instructions for completing the form when a transaction was denied and later overturned.
Instruction for Questions 20 and 21 (Formerly EXCEPTIONS TO NICS CHECK): Clarifies that the exception includes transfers of National Firearms Act firearms to an individual who has undergone a background check during the NFA approval process. Also clarifies that a NICS check must be conducted if an NFA firearm has been approved for transfer to a trust, or to a legal entity such as a corporation, and no background check was conducted as part of the NFA approval process on the individual who will receive the firearm. Additionally clarifies that individuals who have undergone a background check during the NFA application process are listed on the approved NFA transfer form.
Instruction for Question(s) 24-28 (Formerly Question(s) 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30): Clarifies that these blocks must be completed with the firearms information. Also clarifies that all firearms manufactured after 1968 by Federal firearms licensees should be marked with a serial number.
Former Instruction for Question 32: Removed from form.
New Instruction for Question 32: Added to form. Provides instructions for completing the form when the transaction is to facilitate a private party transfer.
Former Instructions for Questions 33-35: Removed from form.
The revised form is available to either download or order. FFLs started to receive packets of 50 forms in late December 2016. Should you require additional forms, please contact the ATF Distribution Center by telephone at (703) 870-7526 or (703) 870-7528. Forms may also be ordered online or you may print the Form 4473 from ATF’s website and make copies as needed. Please note that all six pages of the Form 4473 must be printed and retained as a part of your permanent records.
Contact Information
If you have additional questions regarding the revised Form 4473, please contact your local ATF office. A listing may be found online.
Story 2: Creepy Sleepy Dopey Joey Biden Attacks Trump By Lying About Trump’s Comments Regarding Charlottesville — Joins Radical Extremist Democrat Socialists in Desperate Attempt To Save His Candidacy — A Real Abuse of Power –Clinton Obama Democrat Criminal Conspiracy — Videos
The Charlottesville Lie
President Donald Trump On Charlottesville: You Had Very Fine People, On Both Sides | CNBC
Biden: Trump ‘fanning flames of white supremacy’
President Trump tweets about Charlottesville, Va., violence
After facing two days of criticism for his response to the violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Trump condemned the attack in a statement from the White House.
Biden: ‘Everything the president says encourages white supremacists’
Joe Biden: President Donald Trump Fanned The Flames Of White Supremacy | The Last Word | MSNBC
Joe Biden stands by comments linking Trump to growth of white supremacy
Former Vice President Joe Biden Claims Trump’s Rhetoric Is About ‘The Abuse Of Power’ | MSNBC
Biden seeks to keep edge as 2020 Democrats flood Iowa
PUBLISHED: 19:30 EDT, 8 August 2019 | UPDATED: 19:30 EDT, 8 August 2019
By James Oliphant
Former Vice President Joe Biden said he was not taking his front-runner status for granted as he returned to Iowa on Thursday, ahead of a wave of rival Democratic presidential contenders who will in coming days visit the state that starts the party’s nominating contest.
Before the weekend is out, more than 20 contenders will attend the Iowa State Fair and speak at a state Democratic Party dinner, giving Iowans a full picture of the field.
Next February’s caucuses in Iowa will kick off the process of selecting the person to run against Republican President Donald Trump in the November 2020 general election.
Speaking to a sun-baked crowd at the fair, Biden said: “We must defeat this president to change the trajectory of this country.”
For Biden, the trip to Iowa gives him an opportunity to try and cement his lead in opinion polls over the rest of the field, one that appeared greatly endangered after he turned in an uninspiring performance at the first Democratic debate in Miami.
But Biden appeared to have held his own at last week´s debate in Detroit against attacks from others on the stage. And his numbers in public opinion polls have largely returned to where they were before the Miami debate.
At the state fair, Biden largely stuck to his campaign stump speech without mentioning the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio last weekend that shocked the United States.
In response to Democratic calls for action on gun control legislation, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell suggested he was open to bipartisan discussions on possible restrictions on assault gun sales and background checks. But he refused to call the Senate back early to consider new gun legislation.
After his appearance, Biden told reporters he believes Congress can pass a new ban on assault weapons.
“We can get it done, and we can get background checks done,” he said. “We can get it done because the public is finally at a point where they are sick of it. Sick of it.”
Biden suggested he understands that his front-runner position could be tenuous, and said he would continue to campaign in Iowa to amass support.
“It´s early,” Biden said. “It´s way early.”
An poll of Iowa Democrats released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed Biden with 28 percent of the vote, with progressive rival U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been building momentum in the state, second at 19 percent.
In his speech at the fair, Biden, 76, at times fumbled parts of his delivery, saying at one point that in comparison to Trump, Democrats “choose truth over facts.”
Sherry Leydens, 72, of Ankeny, Iowa said she had come to the fair to see Biden, who she said she will support in the caucuses. “He is the best person to take on Trump,” she said.
But Mickey Long, 47, of Burlington, Iowa said with others gaining, “it kind of made me rethink things.” Once a Biden supporter, she was now considering Warren, Long said.
MAKE OR BREAK EVENT
For Biden, a longtime senator and the vice president under President Barack Obama, the state fair holds particularly potent memories. It was here in 1987 when his first presidential campaign began to implode over allegations of plagiarism.
He ran for president again in 2008, but his campaign ended after he fared poorly in the Iowa caucuses.
The fair has also proved to be thorny for others. In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a heckler in the crowd that “corporations are people, my friend” – a line that haunted him during the rest of the 2012 presidential race.
That same year, a photo of Republican candidate Michele Bachmann eating a foot-long corndog sparked an online uproar.
There have also been made-for-TV moments that have bolstered campaigns. In 2015, Trump´s visit to the fair via helicopter stole the thunder from other Republicans and helped draw more attention to his insurgent candidacy.
The other candidate to appear at the fair on Thursday stood in marked contrast to Biden. Montana Governor Steve Bullock only entered the Democratic race in May and remains an unknown to many.
Bullock made light of his anonymity, telling the crowd that he wanted to move up from “35” to higher on their candidate lists.
For candidates such as Bullock, who are polling near the 1 percent mark, the weeks ahead before the next Democratic debate in September will be crucial to their continued viability.
On Friday, Democratic candidates such as former U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro and outsider candidates Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang will speak at the fair.
And later in the evening, virtually every member of the crowded field will attend the traditional “wing ding” dinner in Clear Lake, Iowa.
Noticeably absent is former U.S. Representative Beto O´Rourke, who canceled all of his Iowa events in the wake of the shootings in El Paso, his hometown.
The majority of the field will also participate in a gun-violence forum on Saturday sponsored by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control advocacy group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (Reporting by James Oliphant, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Grant McCool)
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Progressives worry about the strength of the 2020 Democratic field
The Angle: Kamala’s big con
Here are the candidates who qualified for the third Democratic debate — and those who might miss out
Andrew Yang became the ninth candidate to qualify.
Democrats aren’t letting just anyone onto their presidential debate stage anymore.
After two debates with lenient qualification standards that featured 20 candidates each, the DNC raised the bar for September’s third debate. The move has created some drama, as various lower-polling contenders are struggling to make the cut with less than three weeks before the final lineup is announced.
We’ll go into the fine print more below, but the gist is that candidates have to hit 2 percent in four recent polls from a specific list of organizations, and also get donations from 130,000 different people. By contrast, to get into the first debate, you had to hit 1 percent in three polls or get donations from 65,000 people — each threshold was lower, and you didn’t need to meet both of them.
Three more candidates — Julián Castro, Tom Steyer, and Tulsi Gabbard — have made some significant progress toward qualifying, though it’s not clear if they’ll make it. The rest of the field seems quite far away and the clock is ticking: The deadline to qualify is Wednesday, August 28.
However, candidates who narrowly fail to qualify for September’s third debate might get another chance in October. The DNC is using the same qualification rules for both events, but candidates will have an extra month or so to get more donations or show improvement in polls, as Politico’s Zach Montellaro reported.
The third debate is scheduled for September 12 and potentially also September 13, if enough candidates qualify to necessitate a two-night event. It’s co-sponsored by and will be aired on ABC and Univision.
How to qualify for the third Democratic debate
To make it onto the debate stage, a Democratic candidate has to meet both of these two thresholds.
1. The polling threshold: A candidate must hit 2 percent or more in at least four polls released between June 28 and August 28.
These can be either national polls or early state polls (of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, or South Carolina).
These polls must be conducted by one of these organizations: CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Associated Press, NPR, the Des Moines Register, Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University, the University of New Hampshire, or Winthrop University.
One catch is that a candidate cannot use multiple polls by the same organization covering the same geographic area. (For example, if there are two NBC national polls showing a candidate meeting the threshold, only one of them will count).
2. The donor threshold: A candidate must have received donations from 130,000 different people. Also, they must have at least 400 donors each in at least 20 different states.
The names of donors who give less than $200 don’t have to be publicly disclosed, so for the time being we’ve had to rely on the candidates’ own claims that they’ve met this donor threshold. (Eventually, they have to give corroborating information to the DNC, which will double-check.)
Javier Zarracina/Vox
Who’s qualified for the third Democratic debate?
So far, these candidates have met the polling threshold and have said they’ve met the donor threshold:
Joe Biden
Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Kamala Harris
Pete Buttigieg
Beto O’Rourke
Cory Booker
Amy Klobuchar
Andrew Yang
Currently, this list is small enough that it could mean all the candidates get to debate together on one night, rather than being split over two separate nights as was the case in both previous debates this year.
But the DNC has said that if a “large field” does end up qualifying, this third debate will again be a two-night event. They have not, however, said exactly how many qualifying candidates would necessitate a two-night debate.
So if, say, 11 or 12 candidates qualify — which seems totally plausible at the moment — it’s not yet clear whether they’d all be onstage together or whether they’d be split in two groups on separate nights.
Who hasn’t yet qualified for the third Democratic debate?
There are three candidates who have made significant progress toward qualifying but who haven’t yet sealed the deal.
Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro has three of four qualifying polls and says he has met the donor threshold. So he needs just one more poll to qualify.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) says she has met the donor threshold but she has just one of four qualifying polls. So she needs three more polls to qualify.
Billionaire Tom Steyer has three of four qualifying polls but he has not yet met the donor threshold. So he needs one more poll and a bunch more donors to quality.
Everybody else in the race faces an uphill climb to qualify, with most having zero of the necessary four polls so far and not having met the donor threshold, either. They are:
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (has one poll)
Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado (has one poll)
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington
Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana
Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado
Author Marianne Williamson
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio
Former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland
Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio
Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts
Mayor Wayne Messam of Miramar, Florida
Former Rep. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania
But candidates will get another chance at qualifying for the fourth debate
There’s an interesting twist about qualifying for the fourth Democratic debate in October, though: It will actually be easier.
That’s because the qualification rules are exactly the same as for the third debate — except that there will be more time for campaigns to make it happen.
For the polling threshold in particular, the third debate requires polls released between June 28 and August 28 be used. But for the fourth debate, that window goes from that same starting point (June 28) up until two weeks before the October debate (which doesn’t yet have a specific announced date).
The gist, as Politico points out, is that any candidates who qualify for the third debate automatically make it into the fourth debate — and on top of that roster, the rest of the field will have another month to try and get the rest of what they need as well.
So what could oddly ensue is a significantly smaller field for September’s third debate that then gets a bit bigger for October’s fourth debate.
PUBLISHED: 19:50 EDT, 8 August 2019 | UPDATED: 23:40 EDT, 8 August 2019
The governments of Guatemala and Mexico said on Thursday that between them, almost 300 of their citizens had been detained in the southern U.S. state of Mississippi as part of sweeping U.S. immigration operations.
U.S. immigration authorities arrested nearly 700 people at seven agricultural processing plants across the state on Wednesday in what federal officials said could be the largest worksite enforcement operation in a single state.
On Twitter, the Mexican foreign ministry said 122 Mexican nationals had been detained, of whom 34 had been released and notified of dates for hearings with migration authorities.
Guatemala’s foreign ministry said in a statement that 176 of its citizens had been arrested in the raids in Mississippi, 142 of them men and 34 women.
Separately, the Honduran foreign ministry said that two Hondurans so far had been confirmed among those detained.
U.S. President Donald Trump has made cracking down on illegal immigration, especially from Central America and Mexico, one of the signature policies of his administration. (Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz; Writing by Julia Love; Additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa and Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel, Sandra Maler and Tom Hogue)
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MARATHON TRUMP: President Trump Talks To Media Before Vacation
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The Ingraham Angle 8/8/19 FULL | Laura Ingraham Fox News August 8, 2019
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Watch Democratic Debate Highlights In Detroit 2019 Night 2 | Second Half
Democratic Presidential Debate Round 2 Day 1 Highlights | NBC New York
Watch the 9 minutes that has America searching Tulsi Gabbard
Tulsi Gabbard rips Kamala Harris’ record on criminal prosecutions
Cory Booker to Biden: You’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and don’t even know the flavor
Ari Fleischer: Democrat debates have been a display of losing ideas
Candidates will need to have 130,000 unique donors and register at least 2 percent support in four polls. They have until Aug. 28 to reach those benchmarks.
These criteria could easily halve the field: The first two sets of debates included 20 of the 24 candidates, but a New York Times analysis of polls and donor numbers shows that only 10 to 12 candidates are likely to make the third round.
Seven candidates have already met both qualification thresholds and are guaranteed a spot on stage. They are:
■ Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
■ Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey
■ Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.
■ Senator Kamala Harris of California
■ Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas
■ Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
■ Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
Three other candidates are very close: The former housing secretary Julián Castro and the entrepreneur Andrew Yang have surpassed 130,000 donations and each have three of the four qualifying polls they need, while Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has met the polling threshold and has about 120,000 donors.
Beyond them, only three candidates have even a single qualifying poll to their name: the impeachment activist Tom Steyer (2 polls), Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii (1) and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado (1).
We asked all three of their campaigns to provide donor numbers so we could assess where they stood. Ms. Gabbard had just under 114,000 donors as of Wednesday night. A spokesman for Mr. Steyer said he was “on track to collect the required number of donors to make the September debate stage” but did not give a number. Mr. Hickenlooper’s campaign did not respond, but Politico reported a month ago that he had only 13,000 donors.
The other 11 candidates in the race have no qualifying polls to their name, and they all went into this week’s debates seeking a viral moment that would attract new donors and lift them, even briefly, in the polls.
The qualification rules do not require enduring support. Even a small post-debate surge could push a 1 percent candidate up to 2 percent in the small handful of polls he or she needs.
But for those who have not qualified, the Aug. 28 deadline is an existential threat. Candidates like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York or Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington could be washed out of the race if they don’t get momentum from this week’s debates. And if you’re wondering whether they’re anxious, the answer is yes.
Ms. Gabbard’s campaign calculated at one point that she needed a new donor every minute to reach 130,000 by the Aug. 28 deadline, so if you go to her website, a timer next to the donation button begins counting down 60 seconds. Then the text changes.
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Trump comments on US-China tensions, upcoming Ohio rally
Student 3: Federal Reserve As Expected Reduces Federal Funds Rate By 25 Basis Points to 2.00%-2.25% As Economic Growth Slows Down – -Videos
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell holds news conference on interest rates | USA TODAY
Federal Reserve Lowers Interest Rates
Federal Reserve lowers interest rates
The Federal Reserve cuts rates by a quarter point
What the Fed interest rate cut means for your wallet
Fed cuts interest rates for first time since financial crisis
Trump tariffs torpedo stock market
Donald Trump rages against the Federal Reserve as it cuts interests rates by 0.25% but signals it WON’T slash them more as he has demanded – in move which sends shares plunging
Key interest set by the Federal Reserve is cut by 0.25 per cent for the first time since 2008, the year of the financial crisis
The central bank moved the target range for the federal funds rate to 2 to 2-1/4 percent, from 2 1/5 to 2 3/4
Move is a departure from its previous policy and comes after Trump heaped pressure on its chairman Jerome Powell to reduce cost of borrowing
But reserve’s committee said in statement it was acting over fears of a worldwide slowdown
PUBLISHED: 14:13 EDT, 31 July 2019 | UPDATED: 19:56 EDT, 31 July 2019
Donald Trump unleashed on the Federal Reserve Wednesday afternoon after it made its first interest rate cut in more than a decade saying it was not ‘much help’ after the bank’s chairman signaled the move was a one-off reduction.
Jerome Powell sent share prices plunging as he called the 0.25 per cent cut in the key interest rate a ‘mid-cycle adjustment’ and talked down the chances of more cuts following.
The Dow Jones fell by 400 points as Powell signaled at a press conference in Washington D.C. that the cut was a one-off.
The Dow closed down 333 points and both the NASDAQ and S&P 500 lost 1% of their value.
Donald Trump unleashed on the Federal Reserve Wednesday afternoon after it made its first interest rate cut in more than a decade saying it was not ‘much help’ after the bank’s chairman signaled the move was a one-off reduction.
Jerome Powell sent share prices plunging as he called the 0.25 per cent cut in the key interest rate a ‘mid-cycle adjustment’ and talked down the chances of more cuts following.
The Dow Jones fell by 400 points as Powell signaled at a press conference in Washington D.C. that the cut was a one-off.
The Dow closed down 333 points and both the NASDAQ and S&P 500 lost 1% of their value.
Donald Trump unleashed on the Federal Reserve Wednesday afternoon after it made its first interest rate cut in more than a decade saying it was not ‘much help’ after the bank’s chairman signaled the move was a one-off reduction.
Jerome Powell sent share prices plunging as he called the 0.25 per cent cut in the key interest rate a ‘mid-cycle adjustment’ and talked down the chances of more cuts following.
The Dow Jones fell by 400 points as Powell signaled at a press conference in Washington D.C. that the cut was a one-off.
The Dow closed down 333 points and both the NASDAQ and S&P 500 lost 1% of their value.
Trump used the market fall to make his case that Powell and his board should have started an ‘agressive’ series of rate cuts.
‘What the Market wanted to hear from Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve was that this was the beginning of a lengthy and aggressive rate-cutting cycle which would keep pace with China, The European Union and other countries around the world.
‘As usual, Powell let us down, but at least he is ending quantitative tightening, which shouldn’t have started in the first place – no inflation. We are winning anyway, but I am certainly not getting much help from the Federal Reserve!’
Trump had gone all-in on a call for a 0.5 per cent reduction to stimulate the U.S. economy. ‘The Fed has made all of the wrong moves. A small rate cut is not enough, but we will win anyway!’ he had tweeted on Monday.
Explanation time: Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, outlined why it had cut interest rates – as the markets reacted in real time with a sell-off which reached as much as 400 points wiped off the Dow in the course of his press conference
How markets reacted: The Dow Jones closed 333 points down in a sign of concern that the rate cut was effectively a one-off – not the stimulus Trump has demanded
President Donald Trump had all but demanded a rate-slashing, but predicted that the Fed wouldn’t do ‘enough’ to stimulate the U.S. economy. He had heaped pressure on Jerome Powell, his own appointment as chairman, to cut the cost of borrowing.
Powell and the reserve, however, defied him.
It voted that the new benchmark interest rate will fall between 2 per cent and 2.25 per cent. The Fed’s board had voted nine times since 2015 to increase it.
Eight of the Fed’s 10 board members voted to trim the short-term benchmark rate. The other two argued for leaving it as-is.
Powell, speaking in a news conference after the release of the Fed statement, characterized the rate cut as ‘a mid-cycle adjustment to policy,’ comments that do not imply sharp further cuts are on the way.
Among his messages at the press conference in Washington D.C. were that job growth was slowing and that trade tensions were bad for the economy’s outlook – but he repeatedly talked up the strength of the economy.
Explaining the cut, Powell cited global weakness and a desire to boost too-low inflation in explaining the central bank’s decision to lower borrowing costs for the first time since 2008 and move up plans to stop winnowing its massive bond holdings.
Financial markets had widely expected the Fed to reduce its key overnight lending rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a target range of 2.00% to 2.25%, but many traders expected a clearer confirmation of forthcoming rate cuts.
Instead Powell’s message was taken to mean that rates will stay where they are, prompting shares to fall.
And the value of the dollar up against other currencies, which will further anger Trump who had wanted it to fall to boost exports.
The rate cut means that consumers will find in the coming months that interest rates will fall for long-term fixed mortgages, auto loans and credit cards.
That can mean significant household savings, which Americans typically pour back into the U.S. economy through higher spending.
For those few who save their winnings in the periodic Fed lottery, however, interest rates for bank savings accounts will also likely fall.
Mortgage rates were already sliding downward before the Fed met, due to other economic factors.
Even with Wednesday’s cut, the Fed’s principal interest rate is the highest in years. But by historical standards it’s still low.
A policy statement appeared to leave the door open for the Fed to cut rates again in September as it ‘contemplates the future path of the target range for the federal funds rate.’
‘In light of the implications of global developments for the economic outlook as well as muted inflation pressures, the committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate,’ the U.S. central bank said.
But Powell’s lengthy press conference appeared to close the door on that.
Wednesday’s cut is seen as an early bid to prevent a downturn in the U.S. economy that forecasters say will result from Trump’s trade war with China.
Economic indicators: Interest rates remain at historically low levels, while unemployment is at the lowest point since Nixon was president.
Uncertainties in global markets have paralyzed some businesses, starting what could soon be a global slowdown.
The Fed’s statement said that the U.S. labor market ‘remains strong,’ and that the domestic economy is continuing to grow ‘at a moderate rate.’ Overall inflation is running below 2 per cent.
Trump griped on July 22 that the federal funds rate, which determines how much banks – and, by extension, consumers – pay to borrow money, continued to be too high.
‘With almost no inflation, our Country is needlessly being forced to pay a MUCH higher interest rate than other countries only because of a very misguided Federal Reserve,’ he wrote then in a tweet.
On Monday he added that the Fed had previously hiked rates ‘way too early and way too much.’
Trump believes that other countries are more adept at managing the money supplies that move in and out of their financial systems, and in keeping the interest rates that drive borrowing and bond trading flexible.
He has grown increasingly impatient with Fed chairman Jerome Powell, who he believes he can replace at will.
‘I have the right to demote him. I have the right to fire him,’ the president said last month, cautioning that he had ‘never suggested’ doing so.
Any move to oust Powell would likely touch off a legal fight with major repercussions in financial markets as greater uncertainties spook traders.
U.S. economic data continues to be mixed, despite Trump’s frequent claims that he presides over a miraculous resurgence.
The unemployment rate is nearing a low point not seen in America since Richard Nixon was president and stock markets have hit repeated new records
Markets watching: Traders had largely expected a reduction in the key interest rate by the Federal Reserve; the Dow was down slightly immediately after it was announced
But the nation’s manufacturing economy, which Trump promised to revitalize, has stalled in the past two quarters, and the growth of America’s economy is growing at 2.1 per cent per year – slower than the president has predicted.
The move is seen as an early bid to prevent a downturn in the U.S. economy that forecasters say will result from Trump’s trade war with China.
Uncertainties in global markets have paralyzed some businesses, starting what could soon be a global slowdown.
The Fed’s statement said that the U.S. labor market ‘remains strong,’ and that the domestic economy is continuing to grow ‘at a moderate rate.’ Overall inflation is running below 2 per cent.
Trump griped on July 22 that the federal funds rate, which determines how much banks – and, by extension, consumers – pay to borrow money, continued to be too high.
‘With almost no inflation, our Country is needlessly being forced to pay a MUCH higher interest rate than other countries only because of a very misguided Federal Reserve,’ he wrote then in a tweet.
On Monday he added that the Fed had previously hiked rates ‘way too early and way too much.’
Trump believes that other countries are more adept at managing the money supplies that move in and out of their financial systems, and in keeping the interest rates that drive borrowing and bond trading flexible.
He has grown increasingly impatient with Fed chairman Powell, who he believes he can replace at will.
‘I have the right to demote him. I have the right to fire him,’ the president said last month, cautioning that he had ‘never suggested’ doing so.
Any move to oust Powell would likely touch off a legal fight with major repercussions in financial markets as greater uncertainties spook traders.
WHY WE CUT INTEREST RATES FOR FIRST TIME IN A DECADE: WHAT THE FED SAID IN FULL TO EXPLAIN ITS MOVE
Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that the labor market remains strong and that economic activity has been rising at a moderate rate.
Job gains have been solid, on average, in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low.
Although growth of household spending has picked up from earlier in the year, growth of business fixed investment has been soft.
On a 12-month basis, overall inflation and inflation for items other than food and energy are running below 2 percent.
Market-based measures of inflation compensation remain low; survey-based measures of longer-term inflation expectations are little changed.
Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability.
In light of the implications of global developments for the economic outlook as well as muted inflation pressures, the Committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate to 2 to 2-1/4 percent.
This action supports the Committee’s view that sustained expansion of economic activity, strong labor market conditions, and inflation near the Committee’s symmetric 2 percent objective are the most likely outcomes, but uncertainties about this outlook remain.
As the Committee contemplates the future path of the target range for the federal funds rate, it will continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook and will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion, with a strong labor market and inflation near its symmetric 2 percent objective.
In determining the timing and size of future adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will assess realized and expected economic conditions relative to its maximum employment objective and its symmetric 2 percent inflation objective.
This assessment will take into account a wide range of information, including measures of labor market conditions, indicators of inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and readings on financial and international developments.
The Committee will conclude the reduction of its aggregate securities holdings in the System Open Market Account in August, two months earlier than previously indicated.
Voting for the monetary policy action were Jerome H. Powell, Chair; John C. Williams, Vice Chair; Michelle W. Bowman; Lael Brainard; James Bullard; Richard H. Clarida; Charles L. Evans; and Randal K. Quarles.
Voting against the action were Esther L. George and Eric S. Rosengren, who preferred at this meeting to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 2-1/4 to 2-1/2 percent.
The term “monetary policy” refers to the actions undertaken by a central bank, such as the Federal Reserve, to influence the availability and cost of money and credit to help promote national economic goals. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave the Federal Reserve responsibility for setting monetary policy.
The Federal Reserve controls the three tools of monetary policy–open market operations, the discount rate, and reserve requirements. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is responsible for the discount rate and reserve requirements, and the Federal Open Market Committee is responsible for open market operations. Using the three tools, the Federal Reserve influences the demand for, and supply of, balances that depository institutions hold at Federal Reserve Banks and in this way alters the federal funds rate. The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other depository institutions overnight.
Changes in the federal funds rate trigger a chain of events that affect other short-term interest rates, foreign exchange rates, long-term interest rates, the amount of money and credit, and, ultimately, a range of economic variables, including employment, output, and prices of goods and services.
Structure of the FOMC
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) consists of twelve members–the seven members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; and four of the remaining eleven Reserve Bank presidents, who serve one-year terms on a rotating basis. The rotating seats are filled from the following four groups of Banks, one Bank president from each group: Boston, Philadelphia, and Richmond; Cleveland and Chicago; Atlanta, St. Louis, and Dallas; and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and San Francisco. Nonvoting Reserve Bank presidents attend the meetings of the Committee, participate in the discussions, and contribute to the Committee’s assessment of the economy and policy options.
The FOMC holds eight regularly scheduled meetings per year. At these meetings, the Committee reviews economic and financial conditions, determines the appropriate stance of monetary policy, and assesses the risks to its long-run goals of price stability and sustainable economic growth.
The FOMC holds eight regularly scheduled meetings during the year and other meetings as needed. Links to policy statements and minutes are in the calendars below. The minutes of regularly scheduled meetings are released three weeks after the date of the policy decision. Committee membership changes at the first regularly scheduled meeting of the year.
FOIA
The FOMC makes an annual report pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. The FOMC FOIA Service Center provides information about the status of FOIA requests and the FOIA process.
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‘Disoriented’ Mueller’s stumbling responses to questions during blockbuster hearing leave social media concerned the special counsel seems a ‘confused old man’ but some think it is all a strategy to frustrate the committee members
Mueller faced members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday morning at a highly-anticipated hearing on the Russia investigation
Viewers reacting on social media noticed Mueller stumbled at several points
‘Mueller is acting like he doesn’t know what’s going on,’ one viewer wrote on Twitter. ‘He’s acting like a confused old man’
Some viewers have said Mueller’s shaky demeanor calls his report into question
Others think the 74-year-old veteran prosecutor sounds uncertain because he is being overly-cautious about coming off as impartial
When it came to questions at the core of the report, Mueller has delivered firm answers without hesitation
Another theory suggests the wobbly performance is a delaying tactic to frustrate Republican committee members determined to discredit the report
Viewers also noted that Mueller is hindered by the mammoth task of manually searching through 397 pages to effectively answer questions about the report
PUBLISHED: 10:11 EDT, 24 July 2019 | UPDATED: 16:45 EDT, 24 July 2019
Perplexed viewers are questioning Robert Mueller’s ‘confused’ demeanor as he testifies in front of Congress.
The special counsel faced members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday morning at a highly-anticipated hearing on the Russiainvestigation.
Viewers reacting on social media have noticed that Mueller appeared to stumble at multiple points.
‘Robert Mueller comes across as a doddering old fool with a questionable moral compass based on situational ethics who should never have been appointed in the first place based on reduced mental capacity,’ one person tweeted.
‘Mueller is acting like he doesn’t know what’s going on,’ another wrote. ‘He’s acting like a confused old man.’
Some are saying the wobbly performance is a delaying tactic on the part of the special counsel to frustrate Republican committee members determined to discredit findings that are damaging to President Donald Trump.
When it came to questions at the core of the report, Mueller has delivered firm answers without hesitation.
Asked whether Trump had been exonerated or if he could be charged with obstruction of justice when he leaves office, Mueller replied: ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ respectively.
‘Lots of twitter folks are dogging Mueller out for looking old and feeble,’ MSNBC’s Joy Reid tweeted. ‘But optically, that just makes the Republicans yelling at him look more absurd. Mueller is quite definitive in his one word answers, which only Dems are eliciting from him so far.’
Perplexed viewers are questioning Robert Mueller’s ‘confused’ demeanor as he testifies in front of members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday morning
Viewers reacting on social media noticed that Mueller appeared to stumble at multiple points
Several Twitter users expressed the opinion that the 74-year-old veteran prosecutor’s shaky demeanor calls his entire report into question.
‘Listening too Mueller the cracking in his voice shows clearly that he is a conflicted Skunk and lying ! And I think he is senile !’
‘As I said when Mueller gave speech in May, he is feeble,’ radio personality Mark Levin tweeted. ‘I say that not as a personal attack but as a rational observation. It’s on display today during this hearing.
‘This underscores that the person who influenced this investigation most was Andrew Weissman, his top lieutenant.’
Replying to Levin’s tweet, one man wrote: ‘Agreed, Mueller looks geriatric and lost…. find that man a time machine.’
‘It’s quite entertaining. Mueller can’t make a coherent statement. Looks like the circus made a stop in DC,’ a woman tweeted.
‘I’d say Democrats right now regretting they ever subpoenaed Mueller. He looks confused,’ a man wrote.
Some viewers have said Mueller’s shaky demeanor calls his report into question
Others think Mueller sounds uncertain because he is being overly-cautious about coming off as impartial.
‘I’m concerned that Mueller is so concerned with not appearing political that he is really under-performing at times by failing to clarify things that need clarification,’ one woman wrote.
‘To let crazy GOP statements stand without clarification could be interpreted as agreement.’
Some noted that Mueller is being hindered by the mammoth task of manually searching through 397 pages to effectively answer questions about the report his team took two years to compile.
He repeatedly had to ask committee members for page numbers when asked to comment on specific sections.
One woman tweeted that Mueller would have a much easier time referring to the report if he had searchable copy on a computer.
‘Give Robert Mueller a computer, he desperately needs CTRL + F,’ Vice Media VP Katie Drummond wrote.
Ironically, the copy of the report released by the Justice Department was a scanned printout and thus couldn’t be searched. Several searchable versions have cropped up in the months since then.
Unfortunately for Mueller, witnesses are not allowed to use computers during hearings.
Mueller frequently had to pause and manually search through the 397-page report to effectively answer questions from lawmakers
Throughout the hearing, Democrats, who hold the majority on both committees present, worked to elicit short, definitive answers from Mueller.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerold Nadler asked him: ‘Director Mueller, the president has repeatedly claimed that your report found there was no obstruction and that it completely and totally exonerated him. But that is not what your report said, is it?
‘That is correct. That is not what the report said,’ Mueller responding.
‘Does that say there was no obstruction?’ Nadler followed up later.
‘No,’ the former special counsel said.
‘In fact, your report expressly states that it does not exonerate the president,’ Nadler told him.
‘Yes it does,’ Mueller replied.
Most of Mueller’s fumbles came in response to Republicans trying to get him to stray from his typical dry, technical explanations.
‘Where are you reading from?’ he asked one member, Rep James Sensenbrenner. ‘I am reading from my question,’ the Wisconsin Republican lawmaker told him.
Under questioning by Republican Rep Steve Chabot, Mueller didn’t show immediate familiarity with political intelligence firm Fusion GPS, a key player in the trail of the Steele Dossier, and a fixture of attention of President Trump and GOP critics of the Mueller probe.
‘When you talk about the firm that produced the Steele reporting, the name of the firm was Fusion GPS, is that correct?’
‘I’m not familiar with that,’ said Mueller.
‘That’s not a trick question. It’s Fusion GPS.’
Most of Mueller’s fumbles came in response to Republicans trying to get him to stray from his typical dry, technical explanations
Ohio Republican Rep Jim Jordan sought to draw Mueller out on the surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, whose trips to Russia drew attention of investigators.
‘Director Mueller, the third FISA renewal happens a month after you’re named special counsel. What role did your office play in the third FISA renewal of Carter Page?’ Jordan asked.
‘I’m not going to talk to that,’ said Mueller.
In his prepared statement, Mueller began by defending his probe following an onslaught of attacks, and spelling out questions he will and will not answer.
He said he told his team at the start of the Russia probe to ‘work quietly, thoroughly and with integrity so that the public would have full confidence in the outcome.
‘We needed to do our work as thoroughly as possible and as expeditiously as possible. It was in the public interest for our investigation to be complete and not to last a day longer than necessary,’ Mueller said.
He said his team of lawyers and agents worked ‘fairly and with absolute integrity’ – minutes after President Trump once again attacked it as a ‘witch hunt’.
‘Our team would not leak or take other actions that would compromise the integrity of our work,’ said Mueller. ‘All decisions were made based on the facts and the law.’
Ohio Republican Rep Jim Jordan sought to draw Mueller out on the surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, whose Russia trips drew investigators’ attention
Rep Doug Collins tried to get Mueller to contradict his report by asking him whether ‘collusion’ and ‘conspiracy’ are the same thing after Mueller testified that they weren’t.
Collins cited a portion of the report that states: ‘Collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the U.S. Code; nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. To the contrary, even as defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute.’
Mueller critics declared that the special counsel had been bested by Collins, while experts explained that Collins’ citation was taken out of context.
The part of the report in question was about collusion in the sense of corporate collusion – when companies conspire in an illegal fashion to help each other at consumers’ expense.
Corporate collusion is unrelated to ‘collusion with Russia’, the colloquial term adopted in the debate about potential cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Both sides sought to get Mueller on record on the question of whether he had any potential conflict that would prevent him from overseeing the probe.
Georgia Democrat Rep Hank Johnson asked Mueller if he had any conflicts of interest that prevented him from being special counsel. Mueller said he did not. Trump has repeatedly said Mueller was ‘highly conflicted,’ saying he had interviewed to be his FBI director and that the two men had a nasty business dispute.
Some people on social media lambasted Republican committee members for trying to damage Mueller’s credibility.
‘No matter your political party, it’s absolutely disgusting to see those attacking Mueller’s integrity,’ one man tweeted.
‘The way the @JudiciaryGOP members talked and yelled at Robert Mueller is beyond awful. They’ve all lost their souls,’ another wrote.
‘Republicans can’t argue the facts, so they attack the investigation and the investigators,’ another said.
‘Remember this slander of Mueller the next time you hear republicans going on about their love & respect for veterans. They will throw anyone under the bus who doesn’t toe the party line.’
Some people on social media lambasted Republican committee members for trying to damage Mueller’s credibility
TOP 10 MUELLER TAKEAWAYS
Below are the 10 most important takeaways gleaned from Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday.
Mueller said all he wanted to say in his report
When Mueller finally agreed to testify before Congress – after more than two years of silence about the Russia investigation – the special counsel said he ‘would not provide information beyond that which is already public’ in the report published in April.
He stuck to that promise throughout Wednesday’s hearing, declining or deferring nearly 200 questions from committee members.
Mueller’s reasons for not answering included not wanting to speculate, being unable to detail internal Justice Department deliberations and being under orders not to broach specific topics.
Trump was paying attention
After saying that he couldn’t be bothered to watch Mueller’s testimony, President Trump made it clear that he was tuned in as he tweeted multiple reactions to the proceedings on Wednesday.
‘I’m not going to be watching Mueller because you can’t take all those bites out of the apple,’ Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. ‘We had no collusion, no obstruction.’
Before the hearing even kicked off Trump had posted seven tweets about the hearing, echoing his go-to attacks on ‘Mueller & his band of 18 Angry Democrats’.
Over the next eight hours tweeted and retweeted 14 posts about Mueller’s testimony, including multiple videos of Republican lawmakers grilling the special counsel.
‘TRUTH IS A FORCE OF NATURE!’ he declared just after 2.30pm.
Mueller didn’t subpoena Trump to avoid a lengthy court battle
The special counsel addressed why Trump wasn’t interviewed during the two-year-long investigation when New York Democratic Rep Sean Maloney asked him: ‘Why didn’t you subpoena the president?’
Trump’s legal team had refused to have him be interviewed in the probe because they felt such a meeting would amount to a ‘perjury trap’.
Before Congress Mueller stated that his team had ‘little success’ when pushing for an interview for over a year and decided that they didn’t want to delay the investigation with a lengthy court battle.
‘We did not want to exercise the subpoena power because of the necessity of expediting the end of the investigation,’ he said, adding that no one at the Justice Department pressured him to finish the probe.
Mueller acknowledged that Trump’s written answers to questions about possible conspiracy with Russia were ‘not as useful as the interview would be’.
Trump was not exonerated by the Russia investigation
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, kicked off Wednesday’s proceedings by asking Mueller directly if the Russia investigation exonerated President Trump.
‘No,’ Mueller stated without hesitation.
That goes against the president’s repeated claims that the probe proved there was ‘no obstruction, no collusion’.
Mueller’s team never determined whether Trump committed a crime
While the majority of his answers were straightforward and technical, Mueller struggled when questioned about why he did not indict the president.
During an exchanged with California Democratic Rep Ted Lieu, Mueller stated that the reason he did not even consider indicting Trump on obstruction charges was because of guidance from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
That goes against assertions by Attorney General William Barr, who has repeatedly said the OLC’s opinion was not the only reason Mueller did not indict Trump.
Arizona Republican Rep Debbie Lesko asked Mueller to clarify that contradiction, at which point he said he ‘would have to look closer at it’.
He later conceded that he had misspoken when he characterized the OLC’s guidance to Lieu.
‘We did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime,’ he said.
‘Based on Justice Department policy and principles of fairness, we decided we would not make a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.’
Mueller was much less steady than in previous hearings
At times, Mueller, 74, stumbled during answers, asking fast-talking lawmakers to repeat page citations and repeat their questions. He sometimes had to scan the hearing room to locate questioners.
Although his stock answer was to say issues were beyond the purview of his mandate, he also appeared not to recall specific information at times.
‘Where are you reading from?’ he asked one member, Rep. James Sensenbrenner. ‘I am reading from my question,’ the Wisconsin Republican lawmaker told him.
Under questioning by Republican Rep Steve Chabot, Mueller didn’t show immediate familiarity with political intelligence firm Fusion GPS, a key player in the trail of the Steele Dossier, and a fixture of attention of President Trump and GOP critics of the Mueller probe.
Viewers reacting on social media called out Mueller’s unsteadiness early on, remarking that he was acting ‘like a confused old man’.
Some said the wobbly performance could be a delaying tactic on the part of the special counsel to frustrate Republican committee members determined to discredit findings that are damaging to Trump.
Mueller and Trump have opposing accounts of what led up to special counsel appointment
Republicans probed Mueller’s professional links with Trump in an attempt to show he may have had a reason to be biased against the president – specifically questioning whether he was turned down for the FBI director position the day before being tapped to lead the Russia investigation.
Trump gave his version of events on Wednesday morning, tweeting: ‘It has been reported that Robert Mueller is saying that he did not apply and interview for the job of FBI Director (and get turned down) the day before he was wrongfully appointed Special Counsel.
‘Hope he doesn’t say that under oath in that we have numerous witnesses to the interview, including the Vice President of the United States!’
Mueller contradicted Trump’s account when Texas Republican Rep Louie Gohmert seized on his alleged conflicts of interest.
Gohmert asked Mueller about a meeting he had with Trump the day before the special counsel appointment and contended that it was a job interview for the FBI director slot.
Mueller stated that he was not interviewed ‘as a candidate’ for the position.
Mueller fiercely defended his team’s impartiality
The special counsel was calm and composed throughout the proceedings, save for one moment when Florida Republican Rep Greg Steube decried the political affiliations of the lawyers on his team.
Mueller said never in his 25 years in his position had he felt the need to ask the people he works with about their political affiliation.
Rep Gohmert also called Mueller’s hiring practices into question, particularly his appointment of FBI agent Peter Strzok – who was later removed from the probe after he was found to have sent anti-Trump text messages to a woman he was involved with.
Mueller said he did not know of Strzok’s disdain for Trump before the probe started and learned about it in the summer of 2017, several months into the investigation.
Republicans tried to collect evidence for a probe into Mueller’s investigation
Republicans committee members tried both the blast the origins of the Russia probe and potentially establish a record that might play out in an ongoing investigation overseen by Attorney General William Barr.
‘Before you arrested [Trump campaign foreign policy aide] George Papadopoulos in July of 2017, he was given $10,000 in ash in Israel. Do you know who gave him that cash?’ California Rep Devin Nunes asked Mueller.
‘Again, that’s outside our … questions such as that should go to the FBI or the department,’ said Mueller.
‘But it involved your investigation,’ said Nunes.
‘It involved persons involved in my investigation,’ said Mueller.
Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow released a statement saying: ‘This morning’s testimony exposed the troubling deficiencies of the Special Counsel’s investigation. The testimony revealed that this probe was conducted by a small group of politically-biased prosecutors who, as hard as they tried, were unable to establish either obstruction, conspiracy, or collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It is also clear that the Special Counsel conducted his two-year investigation unimpeded. The American people understand that this issue is over. They also understand that the case is closed.’
Democrats tried to breathe life into a dense, technical report
The Democrats, who hold a majority on both committees, made a concerted effort to present the investigation’s findings in a more provocative and damning light than they had been in the dense, 337-page report.
‘Your investigation determined that the Trump campaign — including Trump himself — knew that a foreign power was intervening in our election and welcomed it, built Russian meddling into their strategy, and used it,’ California Rep Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chair, said when the afternoon portion began.
‘Disloyalty to country. Those are strong words, but how else are we to describe a presidential campaign which did not inform the authorities of a foreign offer of dirt on their opponent, which did not publicly shun it, or turn it away, but which instead invited it, encouraged it, and made full use of it?’ Schiff continued.
‘That disloyalty may not have been criminal. Constrained by uncooperative witnesses, the destruction of documents and the use of encrypted communications, your team was not able to establish each of the elements of the crime of conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt, so not a provable crime, in any event’, he added.
However, a levelheaded Mueller didn’t play along, making for a rather mundane hearing.
In a moment that quickly made the rounds on conservative media on Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan sharply questioned Robert Mueller on the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
The Ohio Republican pressed the former special counsel to detail who told George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy aide on the Trump campaign, that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. When Mueller said he would not go into it, Jordan became heated.
“Yes you can, because you wrote about it – you gave us the answer!” Jordan said. “Joseph Mifsud.”
The name of the shadowy Maltese academic kept coming up on Wednesday as Republicans accused Mueller of covering up how the FBI came to investigate the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, a popular talking point for Trump allies. At the House Intelligence Committee hearing, Rep. Devin Nunes pointed to a large photo of Mifsud with then-U.K. foreign secretary Boris Johnson as evidence that he “has extensive contacts with Western governments and the FBI”.
Boris Johnson makes an appearance at this hearing — Nunes is trying to prove that the investigation was started wrongly, shows a photo of him with Joseph Mifsud
Mifsud’s name would have been familiar for regular consumers of Fox News and conservative outlets that have spent two years dissecting what they believe was a “deep state” attempt to take down the Trump campaign. The London-based professor at the center of the Trump-Russia probe has not been seen in public since October 2017, just days after Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with him. One of those was a key conversation in London in April 2016, in which Mifsud told him the Russians had damaging information on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” Mifsud also introduced him to a Russian graduate student that Papadopoulos believed to be Putin’s niece, and connected him with an official with ties to the Russian foreign ministry who said he could set up a meeting with the country’s ambassador, according to Mueller’s report. Papadopoulos later relayed that information to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, who passed it on to U.S. government officials, setting into motion the FBI investigation into Russian contacts with the Trump campaign.
Papadopoulos’ interactions with Mifsud, and his allegation that the Maltese professor was an FBI plant, has been at the center of some Republicans’ efforts to discredit Mueller’s probe. Papadopoulos told TIME in May that he believes he was part of an elaborate set-up by U.S. intelligence to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign. Since serving a short sentence for lying to the FBI, Papadopoulos has continued to make the rounds alleging that Mifsud was a “Western intelligence operative” who tried to use him to entrap the Trump campaign.
“People are very fascinated about what I have to say, people are just like — their mouths are dropping,” he told TIME on April 17. “They’ve never heard this information because Mueller and the FBI wanted to keep me silenced.”
Perhaps anticipating this line of questioning, Mueller made it clear in his opening statement that he would be “unable to address questions about the opening of the FBI’s Russia investigation” because it is the subject of an ongoing review by the Justice Department.
That did not stop Jordan and Nunes, both vocal Trump supporters, from trying.
“He’s the guy who starts it all, and when the FBI interviews him, he lies three times and yet you don’t charge him with a crime,” Jordan exclaimed, angrily listing others charged by Mueller, including Michael Flynn and “13 Russians no one’s ever heard of.”
“But the guy who puts the country through this whole saga, starts it off, for three years we have lived this now, he lies and you guys don’t charge him,” he said.
“I’m not sure I agree with your characterization,” Mueller tersely responded, but Jordan’s performance was already going viral in conservative corners of the internet with headlines like “WATCH: Jim Jordan Steals the Show, Calls into Question Entire Basis of Probe!” and “‘BRUTAL’: Jim Jordan grills Mueller about why ‘guy who put this whole story in motion’ lied but wasn’t held accountable.” On Wednesday afternoon, Trump himself retweeted a clip of the exchange, indicating that Mifsud is unlikely to fade from the debate over the Russia investigation.
Rep. Jim Jordan
✔@Jim_Jordan
Why didn’t Mueller charge Joseph Mifsud for lying to the FBI?
Joseph Mifsud (born 1960)[1] is a Maltese academic, with reportedly high level connections to the Russian government.[2] In 2016, he became involved with George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and was later accused of being a link between that campaign and Russia. In 2018, he was described as missing, and an Italian court listed his location as “residence unknown”.[3] According to media reports he was in Rome as of April 2019.[4]
Contents
Education
Mifsud holds a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Malta (1982) and a master’s degree in education from the University of Padua (1989).[1] He was awarded a PhD in 1995 from Queen’s University Belfast; his thesis was titled “Managing educational reform: a comparative approach from Malta (and Northern Ireland); a headteachers’ perspective”.[5]
Career
From 2006 to 2008, Mifsud served as the chef de cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Malta.[1] He later became a principal in the London Centre of International Law Practice. In 2008, he was named President of the Euro-Mediterranean University of Slovenia(EMUNI).[1][6] At least as early as 2010, he began making numerous trips to Russia.[7] He was a professorial teaching fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland,[8] as well as director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, where he served as director from 2012 until it closed in 2016. The academy was partnered with the University of Stirling.[9][10][11] He has also served as president of the University Consortium of the Province of Agrigento in Sicily; in September 2018, an Italian court ordered him to repay the Consortium 49,000 euros ($56,700) in overpayments.[3]
In a 2017 interview, he claimed to be a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR),[12] although the ECFR website in 2018 did not list him as a member.[13] He regularly attended meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Russia, backed by the Kremlin and attended by Vladimir Putin.[14] According to a BBC report, Mifsud was in Moscow in April 2016 to speak on a panel run by the Valdai Club alongside Dr. Stephan Roh, a German multimillionaire lawyer and investor described as a “wheeler-dealer” by the BBC Newsnight program.[15] Roh, Mifsud’s former employer,[16] could not be reached for comment by the BBC and has since attempted to erase links between the two men on his company website. Another speaker at the Valdai Club was Ivan Timofeev, who works for a think tank close to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whom Mifsud subsequently introduced to Papadopoulos via email.[15] Mifsud reportedly claimed to his former girlfriend that he was friends with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.[17]Mifsud himself denied having any contact with the Russian government, saying “I am an academic, I do not even speak Russian.”[8] The Mueller Report, released in 2019, said that Mifsud “maintained various Russian contacts while living in London”, including an unnamed person (name redacted), who was a former staff member of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm based in Saint Petersburg.[18]
Connection to George Papadopoulos
In March 2016, shortly after Papadopoulos was named as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, Mifsud met Papadopoulos in Rome. They later met again in London, where Mifsud allegedly introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian woman that he falsely claimed was Putin’s niece; Mifsud has denied the report.[8][14] At a meeting in April, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had learned that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos allegedly repeated the information to the Australian High Commissioner in London, Alexander Downer, who later reported to American authorities that Papadopoulos had apparently known about Russia’s theft of emails from Democratic sources before it was publicly reported. Papadopoulos has since publicly declared that he did tell Downer about the fact that he was offered “dirt” on Clinton but he has denied any recollection of communicating this theft of emails with Downer. The FBI then launched an investigation into possible connections between Russia and the Trump campaign.[19]
Volume 1 of the Mueller Report[20] states that Mifsud travelled to Moscow in April 2016, and upon his return told Papadopoulos that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.[18] It also mentions that Papadopoulos “suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton”. This would appear to corroborate the contact with Downer.
According to Mifsud, he was interviewed by the FBI in February 2017 while visiting the United States to speak at a conference.[21][22] The FBI has not confirmed that they interviewed him, but he is listed as a featured speaker at the February 2017 national meeting of Global Ties, an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.[23] Mifsud left the United States on 11 February 2017. Prosecutors with the investigation into Russian interference in the election suggested, in a 17 August 2018 sentencing memorandum for Papadopoulos, that they might have wanted to challenge, detain, or arrest Mifsud if Papadopoulos had told the truth about their interactions.[24]
Connection to Stephan Roh
Stephan Roh, a Russian-speaking[25] German lawyer and multimillionaire with close ties to Russia, has worked alongside Mifsud for years. Papadopoulos’s wife, who briefly worked for Mifsud, has described Roh as Mifsud’s lawyer, best friend, and funder. Roh owns multiple businesses, many headquartered in Moscow or Cyprus; he also co-owns Link Campus University, a university also known for its diplomatic, intelligence and analytical studies, such as the School of Analysis – Security and Intelligence section, and the place where Mifsud taught.[citation needed] The fact that Mifsud taught at the Link Campus University has been denied by the current president of this university, Vincenzo Scotti.[26] Roh was detained and questioned by investigators on Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team in October 2017.[27]
Missing report
According to a filing in a U.S. federal court in the case Democratic National Committee v. Russian Federation in September 2018, Mifsud “is missing and may be deceased”. Mifsud’s whereabouts were unknown and he could not be served with the complaint.[28] He spoke to his girlfriend on 31 October 2017. The next day an Italian newspaper revealed that the “professor” referred to in news reports about Papadopoulos was Mifsud, and she has not heard from him since then.[29] According to CNN, he has “gone to ground” and was last seen on 6 November 2017 at Link University, a private university in Rome where he was teaching at the time.[21] In September 2018, an Italian court described his location as “residence unknown”.[3]
In September 2018, a few days after the DNC filing, his associate Stephan Roh told The Daily Caller that he had gotten an indirect message from “really good sources” indicating that Mifsud is alive and living under a new identity.[30] According to media reports he was in Rome as of April 2019.[4]
Mueller was born on August 7, 1944 at Doctors Hospital in the New York City borough of Manhattan,[11][12] the first child of Alice C. Truesdale (1920–2007) and Robert Swan Mueller, Jr. (1916–2007). He has four younger sisters: Susan, Sandra, Joan, and Patricia.[13] His father was an executive with DuPont who had served as a Navy officer in the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters during World War II.[13] His father majored in psychology at Princeton University and played varsity lacrosse, both of which he followed (see below).[13]
Mueller is of German, English and Scottish descent. His paternal great-grandfather, Gustave A. Mueller, was a prominent doctor in Pittsburgh, whose own father August C. E. Müller had immigrated to the United States in 1855 from the Province of Pomerania in the Kingdom of Prussia (a historical territory whose area included land now part of Poland and north-eastern edge of Germany).[14] On his mother’s side, he is a great-grandson of the railroad executive William Truesdale.[15]
Mueller has cited his teammate David Spencer Hackett’s death in the Vietnam War as an influence on his decision to pursue military service.[21] Of his classmate, Mueller has said, “One of the reasons I went into the Marine Corps was because we lost a very good friend, a Marine in Vietnam, who was a year ahead of me at Princeton. There were a number of us who felt we should follow his example and at least go into the service. And it flows from there.”[22] Hackett was a Marine Corps first lieutenant in the infantry and was killed in 1967 in Quảng Trị Province by small arms fire.[23]
After waiting a year so a knee injury could heal, Mueller was accepted for officer training in the United States Marine Corps in 1968, attending training at Parris Island, Officer Candidate School, Army Ranger School, and Army jump school. Of these, he said later that he considered Ranger School the most valuable because he felt “more than anything teaches you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to eat.”[24][25]
After recuperating at a field hospital near Da Hong, Mueller became aide-de-camp to 3rd Marine Division’s commanding general, then–Major General William K. Jones, where he “significantly contributed to the rapport” Jones had with other officers, according to one report.[24][31] Mueller had originally considered making the Marines his career, but he explained later that he found non-combat life in the Corps to be unexciting.[25]
Reflecting on his service in the Vietnam War, Mueller said, “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam. There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”[32] In 2009, he told a writer that despite his other accomplishments he was still “most proud the Marine Corps deemed me worthy of leading other Marines.”[25]
After returning from Vietnam, Mueller was briefly stationed at Henderson Hall, before leaving active-duty service in August 1970 [31] at the rank of captain.[31]
After serving as a partner at the Boston law firm of Hill and Barlow, Mueller returned to government service. In 1989, he served in the United States Department of Justice as an assistant to Attorney General Dick Thornburghand as acting Deputy Attorney General. James Baker, with whom he worked on national security matters, said he had “an appreciation for the Constitution and the rule of law”.[34]:33–34
In 1993, Mueller became a partner at Boston’s Hale and Dorr, specializing in white-collar crime litigation.[24] He returned to public service in 1995 as senior litigator in the homicide section of the District of Columbia United States Attorney’s Office. In 1998, Mueller was named U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California and held that position until 2001.[12]
Federal Bureau of Investigation
PresidentGeorge W. Bush nominated Mueller for the position of FBI director on July 5, 2001.[37] He and two other candidates, Washington lawyer George J. Terwilliger III and veteran Chicago prosecutor and white-collar crime defense lawyer Dan Webb, were up for the job, but Mueller, described at the time as a conservative Republican,[38][39] was always considered the front-runner.[40] Terwilliger and Webb both pulled out from consideration around mid-June, while confirmation hearings for Mueller before the Senate Judiciary Committee were quickly set for July 30, only three days before his prostate cancer surgery.[41][42]
Official portrait, circa 2001
The Senate unanimously confirmed Mueller as FBI director on August 2, 2001, voting 98–0 in favor of his appointment.[43] He had previously served as acting deputy attorney general of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) for several months before officially becoming the FBI director on September 4, 2001, just one week before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.[12]
On February 11, 2003, one month before the U.S.-ledinvasion of Iraq, Mueller gave testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mueller informed the American public that “[s]even countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea—remain active in the United States and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans. As Director Tenet has pointed out, Secretary Powellpresented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material.”[44][45]Highlighting this worry in February 2003, FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley wrote an open letter to Mueller in which she warned that “the bureau will [not] be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq”[46][47] and encouraged Mueller to “share [her concerns] with the President and Attorney General.”[47]
On March 10, 2004, while United States Attorney GeneralJohn Ashcroft was at the George Washington University Hospital for gallbladder surgery,[48]James Comey, the then deputy attorney general, received a call from Ashcroft’s wife informing him that White House Chief of StaffAndrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales were about to visit Ashcroft to convince him to renew a program of warrantless wiretapping under the Terrorist Surveillance Program which the DOJ ruled unconstitutional.[48] Ashcroft refused to sign, as he had previously agreed, but the following day the White House renewed the program anyway.[48] Mueller and Comey then threatened to resign.[49] On March 12, 2004, after private, individual meetings with Mueller and Comey at the White House, the president supported changing the program to satisfy the concerns of Mueller, Ashcroft, and Comey.[34]:289–290[49]
President Bush is presented with an honorary FBI Special Agent credential, 2008
He was inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame in 2004.[31][50]
As director, Mueller also barred FBI personnel from participating in enhanced interrogations with the CIA.[51][52] At a dinner, Mueller defended an attorney (Thomas Wilner) who had been attacked for his role in defending Kuwaiti detainees. Mueller stood up, raised his glass, and said, “I toast Tom Wilner. He’s doing what an American should.” However, the White House pushed back, encouraging more vigorous methods of pursuing and interrogating terror suspects. When Bush confronted Mueller to ask him to round up more terrorists in the U.S., Mueller responded, saying, “If they [suspects] don’t commit a crime, it would be difficult to identify and isolate” them. Vice President Dick Cheney objected, by saying, “That’s just not good enough. We’re hearing this too much from the FBI.”[34]:157, 205, 270
In May 2011, President Barack Obama asked Mueller to continue at the helm of the FBI for two additional years beyond his normal 10-year term, which would have expired on September 4, 2011.[53] The Senate approved this request 100–0 on July 27, 2011.[54][55] On September 4, 2013, Mueller was replaced by James Comey.[56]
In June 2013, Mueller defended NSAsurveillance programs in testimony before a House Judiciary Committee hearing.[57] He said that surveillance programs could have “derailed” the September 11 attacks.[58][59] Congressman John Conyers disagreed: “I am not persuaded that that makes it OK to collect every call.”[59] Mueller also testified that the government’s surveillance programs complied “in full with U.S. law and with basic rights guaranteed under the Constitution”.[60] He said that “We are taking all necessary steps to hold Edward Snowden responsible for these disclosures.”[61]
On June 19, 2017, in the case of Arar v. Ashcroft, Mueller, along with Ashcroft and former Immigration and Naturalization Services Commissioner James W. Ziglar and others, was shielded from civil liability by the Supreme Court for post-9/11 detention of Muslims under policies then brought into place.[62]
Return to private sector
Mueller at the White House in April 2013, discussing the Boston Marathon bombing, with (from left) President Obama, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Attorney General Eric Holder, Director of CIA John O. Brennan, and Lisa Monaco, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism
After leaving the FBI in 2013, Mueller served a one-year term as consulting professor and the Arthur and Frank Payne distinguished lecturer at Stanford University, where he focused on issues related to cybersecurity.[63]
In addition to his speaking and teaching roles, Mueller also joined the law firm WilmerHale as a partner in its Washington office in 2014.[64] Among other roles at the firm, he oversaw the independent investigation into the NFL‘s conduct surrounding the video that appeared to show NFL player Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée.[65] In January 2016, he was appointed as Settlement Master in the U.S. consumer litigation over the Volkswagen emissions scandal; as of May 11, 2017, the scandal has resulted in $11.2 billion in customer settlements.[66]
On October 19, 2016, Mueller began an external review of “security, personnel, and management processes and practices” at government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton after Harold T. Martin III was indicted for massive data theft from the National Security Agency.[67] On April 6, 2017, he was appointed as Special Master for disbursement of $850 million and $125 million for automakers and consumers, respectively, affected by rupture-prone Takata airbags.[68]
“Appointment of Special Counsel to Investigate Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Election and Related Matters”, by then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
On May 16, 2017, Mueller met with President Trump as a courtesy to provide perspectives on the FBI and input on considerations for hiring a new FBI Director.[71] This meeting was initially widely reported to have been an interview to serve again as the FBI Director.[72] President Trump broached resuming the position in their meeting; however, Mueller was ineligible to return as FBI Director due to statutory term limits, nor did Mueller have interest in resuming the position.[71]
The next day, Deputy Attorney GeneralRod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to serve as special counsel for the United States Department of Justice. In this capacity, Mueller oversaw the investigation into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”.[73]
Mueller’s appointment to oversee the investigation immediately garnered widespread support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.[74][75]Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives and prominent conservative political commentator, stated via Twitter that “Robert Mueller is a superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity.”[76] Senator Charles Schumer (D–NY) said, “Former Director Mueller is exactly the right kind of individual for this job. I now have significantly greater confidence that the investigation will follow the facts wherever they lead.” Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) stated, “former FBI dir. Mueller is well qualified to oversee this probe”.[74] Some, however, pointed out an alleged conflict of interest. “The federal code could not be clearer—Mueller is compromised by his apparent conflict of interest in being close with James Comey,” Rep. Trent Franks (R–AZ), who first called for Mueller to step down over the summer, said in a statement to Fox News. “The appearance of a conflict is enough to put Mueller in violation of the code. … All of the revelations in recent weeks make the case stronger.”[77]
Upon his appointment as special counsel, Mueller and two colleagues (former FBI agent Aaron Zebley[78] and former assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution ForceJames L. Quarles III) resigned from WilmerHale.[79] On May 23, 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice ethics experts announced they had declared Mueller ethically able to function as special counsel.[80] The spokesperson for the special counsel, Peter Carr, told NBC Newsthat Mueller has taken an active role in managing the inquiry.[81] In an interview with the Associated Press, Rosenstein said he would recuse himself from supervision of Mueller if he were to become a subject in the investigation due to his role in the dismissal of James Comey.[82]
On June 14, 2017, the Washington Post reported that Mueller’s office is also investigating Trump personally for possible obstruction of justice, in reference to the Russian probe.[83] The report was questioned by Trump’s legal team attorney Jay Sekulow, who said on June 18 on NBC‘s Meet the Press, “The President is not and has not been under investigation for obstruction, period.”[84] Due to the central role of the Trump family in the campaign, the transition, and the White House, the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was also reportedly under scrutiny by Mueller.[85] Also in June, Trump allegedly ordered the firing of Robert Mueller, but backed down when then-White House Counsel Don McGahnthreatened to quit.[86]
During a discussion about national security at the Aspen security conference on July 21, 2017, former CIA directorJohn Brennan reaffirmed his support for Mueller and called for members of Congress to resist if Trump fires Mueller. He also said it was “the obligation of some executive-branch officials to refuse to carry out some of these orders that, again, are inconsistent with what this country is all about”.[87] After Peter Strzok, an investigator for Mueller, was removed from the investigation for alleged partiality, Senator Mark Warner, the Ranking Member of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a speech on December 20, 2017, before the Senate warned of a constitutional crisis if the President fired Mueller.[88] On June 22, 2018, Warner hosted a fundraising party for 100 guests and was quoted there saying, “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”[89]
On October 30, 2017, Mueller filed charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and campaign co-chairman Rick Gates. The 12 charges include conspiracy to launder money, violations of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading FARA statements, and conspiracy against the United States.[90]
On December 1, 2017, Mueller reached a plea agreement with former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to giving false testimony to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.[91]As part of Flynn’s negotiations, his son, Michael G. Flynn, was not expected to be charged, and Flynn was prepared to testify that high-level officials on Trump’s team directed him to make contact with the Russians.[92][93][94] On February 16, 2018, Mueller indicted 13 Russian individuals and 3 Russian companies for attempting to trick Americans into consuming Russian propaganda that targeted Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton[95] and later President-elect Donald Trump.[96]
On February 20, 2018, Mueller charged attorney Alex van der Zwaan with making false statements in the Russia probe.[97][98][99]
On May 20, 2018, Trump criticized Mueller, tweeting “the World’s most expensive Witch Hunt has found nothing on Russia & me so now they are looking at the rest of the World!”[100] Mueller started investigating the August 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and an emissary for the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The emissary offered help to the Trump presidential campaign.[101][100] Mueller is also investigating the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Turkey, Qatar, Israel, and China.[102]
On December 18, 2018, the Washington Post published an article concerning a report prepared for the U.S. Senate which stated that Russian disinformation teams had targeted Mueller.[103]
On March 22, 2019, Mueller concluded his investigation and submitted the Special Counsel’s final report to Attorney General William Barr.[104] A senior Department of Justice official said that the report did not recommend any new indictments.[8] On March 24, Attorney General Barr submitted a summary of findings to the United States Congress. He stated in his letter, “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russian in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Mueller’s report also reportedly did not take a stance on whether or not Trump committed obstruction of justice; Barr quoted Mueller as saying “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”[105]
On May 29, 2019, Mueller announced that he was retiring as special counsel and that the office would be shut down, and he spoke publicly about the report for the first time.[106] Saying “The report is my testimony,” he indicated he would have nothing to say that wasn’t already in the report. On the subject of obstruction of justice, he said “under long-standing Department [of Justice] policy, a president cannot be charged with a crime while he is in office.”[107]He repeated his official conclusion that the report neither accused nor exonerated the president, while adding that any potential wrongdoing by a president must be addressed by a “process other than the criminal justice system”.[108] Mueller reasserted the involvement of Russian operatives in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak and their parallel efforts to influence American public opinion using social media.[107] Referring to those actions, he declared that “there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. That allegation deserves the attention of every American.”[109]
Robert Mueller was initially scheduled to publicly testify before two House committees on July 17, 2019, with two hours for lawmakers to ask questions, but the hearing was postponed to July 24 with a third hour added for questions.[110] His verbal testimony is expected to help inform the public—Democrats believe most Americans have not read the report—and to help Democratic leadership finally decide whether or not to impeach the President.[111]In particular, the Democrats aim to highlight what they consider to be the worst examples of Trump’s conduct. Representative Jamie Raskin from Maryland said he would use visual aids, such as posters, to help people understand the implications of the Mueller report.[112] Republicans, on the other hand, plan to question Mueller on the origins of this investigation.[113]
In 2001, Mueller’s Senate confirmation hearings to head the FBI were delayed several months while he underwent treatment for prostate cancer.[120] He was diagnosed in the fall of 2000, postponing being sworn in as FBI director until he received a good prognosis from his physician.[121]
Mueller and William Barr—the attorney general who supervised the late stage of Mueller’s special counsel investigation—have known each other since the 1980s and have been described as good friends. Mueller attended the weddings of two of Barr’s daughters, and their wives attend Bible study together.[123]
Military awards
Mueller received the following military awards and decorations:[30]
Events in the 2016 elections were unprecedented. Top FBI officials knowingly used information paid for by the campaign of Hillary Clinton to obtain a #FISA#spy warrant on a member of the #TrumpCampaign. Meanwhile, top Obama administration officials also spied on the campaign, using so-called unmasking requests. Those same FBI agents, however, chose to look the other way when it came to the risks posed by Clinton’s use of a private email server. We now know that emails she send as Secretary of State through that server were automatically copied to an unknown foreign entity. Looking ahead of the 2020 elections, the question is whether the FBI has been reformed enough to make sure political bias don’t influence investigations. Today we sit down with Tony Shaffer, acting president of the London Center for Policy Research. He served as a Lieutenant Colonel in U.S. Army, where he was a senior intelligence officer. Today he’s also an advising producer for National Geographic and a member of the Trump 2020 advisory board.
Rep. Matt Gaetz on Spygate, Barr Hearings, and the Attempted Coup Against Trump
Sara Carter: Fusion GPS testimony backfired on the Democrats
Andrew Weissmann (born c. 1958) is an American attorney. Since 2015 he has been the chief of the criminal fraud section of the U.S. Department of Justice. In June 2017 he was appointed to a management role on the 2017 special counsel team headed by Robert Mueller. To assume that position, Weissmann took a leave from his DOJ post.[1]
From 2002 to 2005, Weissmann was deputy director and then director of the task force investigating the Enron scandal.[1] His work resulted in the prosecution of more than 30 people for crimes including perjury, fraud, and obstruction including three of Enron’s top executives, Andrew Fastow, Kenneth Lay. and Jeffrey Skilling. In a follow-up case in U.S. District Court, Weissmann also was successful at arguing that auditing firm Arthur Andersen LLP had covered up for Enron. In that case, which resulted in the destruction of Andersen, he convinced the district judge to instruct the jury that they could convict the firm regardless of whether its employees knew they were violating the law.[3] That ruling was later unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States, in which the court held that “the jury instructions failed to convey the requisite consciousness of wrongdoing.”[3]
On June 19, 2017, Weissmann joined Special Counsel Mueller’s team to run and investigate Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[5][6] He was said to be “the architect of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.” A news report in March 2019 said he would soon leave the Justice Department and become a faculty member at New York University and to work on public service projects.[7]
Story 1: Black Swan Song — Pathetic Incompetent Corrupt Swamp Swan Figurehead Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III Exposed As Fraud — “A Man’s Got to Know His Limitations” — Corrupt Democrat Punks — “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk? — “Go Ahead Make My Day” — Impeach Trump — Big Lie Media and Lying Lunatic Leftist Losers Exposed — No Credibility and No Longer Trusted — No Evidence or Basis For Impeachment — Mueller “Outside My Purview”: Clinton Obama Democrat Criminal Conspiracy — American People Will Reelect Trump for Second Term in A Landslide Victory — Videos
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‘Disoriented’ Mueller’s stumbling responses to questions during blockbuster hearing leave social media concerned the special counsel seems a ‘confused old man’ but some think it is all a strategy to frustrate the committee members
Mueller faced members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday morning at a highly-anticipated hearing on the Russia investigation
Viewers reacting on social media noticed Mueller stumbled at several points
‘Mueller is acting like he doesn’t know what’s going on,’ one viewer wrote on Twitter. ‘He’s acting like a confused old man’
Some viewers have said Mueller’s shaky demeanor calls his report into question
Others think the 74-year-old veteran prosecutor sounds uncertain because he is being overly-cautious about coming off as impartial
When it came to questions at the core of the report, Mueller has delivered firm answers without hesitation
Another theory suggests the wobbly performance is a delaying tactic to frustrate Republican committee members determined to discredit the report
Viewers also noted that Mueller is hindered by the mammoth task of manually searching through 397 pages to effectively answer questions about the report
PUBLISHED: 10:11 EDT, 24 July 2019 | UPDATED: 16:45 EDT, 24 July 2019
Perplexed viewers are questioning Robert Mueller’s ‘confused’ demeanor as he testifies in front of Congress.
The special counsel faced members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday morning at a highly-anticipated hearing on the Russiainvestigation.
Viewers reacting on social media have noticed that Mueller appeared to stumble at multiple points.
‘Robert Mueller comes across as a doddering old fool with a questionable moral compass based on situational ethics who should never have been appointed in the first place based on reduced mental capacity,’ one person tweeted.
‘Mueller is acting like he doesn’t know what’s going on,’ another wrote. ‘He’s acting like a confused old man.’
Some are saying the wobbly performance is a delaying tactic on the part of the special counsel to frustrate Republican committee members determined to discredit findings that are damaging to President Donald Trump.
When it came to questions at the core of the report, Mueller has delivered firm answers without hesitation.
Asked whether Trump had been exonerated or if he could be charged with obstruction of justice when he leaves office, Mueller replied: ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ respectively.
‘Lots of twitter folks are dogging Mueller out for looking old and feeble,’ MSNBC’s Joy Reid tweeted. ‘But optically, that just makes the Republicans yelling at him look more absurd. Mueller is quite definitive in his one word answers, which only Dems are eliciting from him so far.’
Perplexed viewers are questioning Robert Mueller’s ‘confused’ demeanor as he testifies in front of members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday morning
Viewers reacting on social media noticed that Mueller appeared to stumble at multiple points
Several Twitter users expressed the opinion that the 74-year-old veteran prosecutor’s shaky demeanor calls his entire report into question.
‘Listening too Mueller the cracking in his voice shows clearly that he is a conflicted Skunk and lying ! And I think he is senile !’
‘As I said when Mueller gave speech in May, he is feeble,’ radio personality Mark Levin tweeted. ‘I say that not as a personal attack but as a rational observation. It’s on display today during this hearing.
‘This underscores that the person who influenced this investigation most was Andrew Weissman, his top lieutenant.’
Replying to Levin’s tweet, one man wrote: ‘Agreed, Mueller looks geriatric and lost…. find that man a time machine.’
‘It’s quite entertaining. Mueller can’t make a coherent statement. Looks like the circus made a stop in DC,’ a woman tweeted.
‘I’d say Democrats right now regretting they ever subpoenaed Mueller. He looks confused,’ a man wrote.
Some viewers have said Mueller’s shaky demeanor calls his report into question
Others think Mueller sounds uncertain because he is being overly-cautious about coming off as impartial.
‘I’m concerned that Mueller is so concerned with not appearing political that he is really under-performing at times by failing to clarify things that need clarification,’ one woman wrote.
‘To let crazy GOP statements stand without clarification could be interpreted as agreement.’
Some noted that Mueller is being hindered by the mammoth task of manually searching through 397 pages to effectively answer questions about the report his team took two years to compile.
He repeatedly had to ask committee members for page numbers when asked to comment on specific sections.
One woman tweeted that Mueller would have a much easier time referring to the report if he had searchable copy on a computer.
‘Give Robert Mueller a computer, he desperately needs CTRL + F,’ Vice Media VP Katie Drummond wrote.
Ironically, the copy of the report released by the Justice Department was a scanned printout and thus couldn’t be searched. Several searchable versions have cropped up in the months since then.
Unfortunately for Mueller, witnesses are not allowed to use computers during hearings.
Mueller frequently had to pause and manually search through the 397-page report to effectively answer questions from lawmakers
Throughout the hearing, Democrats, who hold the majority on both committees present, worked to elicit short, definitive answers from Mueller.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerold Nadler asked him: ‘Director Mueller, the president has repeatedly claimed that your report found there was no obstruction and that it completely and totally exonerated him. But that is not what your report said, is it?
‘That is correct. That is not what the report said,’ Mueller responding.
‘Does that say there was no obstruction?’ Nadler followed up later.
‘No,’ the former special counsel said.
‘In fact, your report expressly states that it does not exonerate the president,’ Nadler told him.
‘Yes it does,’ Mueller replied.
Most of Mueller’s fumbles came in response to Republicans trying to get him to stray from his typical dry, technical explanations.
‘Where are you reading from?’ he asked one member, Rep James Sensenbrenner. ‘I am reading from my question,’ the Wisconsin Republican lawmaker told him.
Under questioning by Republican Rep Steve Chabot, Mueller didn’t show immediate familiarity with political intelligence firm Fusion GPS, a key player in the trail of the Steele Dossier, and a fixture of attention of President Trump and GOP critics of the Mueller probe.
‘When you talk about the firm that produced the Steele reporting, the name of the firm was Fusion GPS, is that correct?’
‘I’m not familiar with that,’ said Mueller.
‘That’s not a trick question. It’s Fusion GPS.’
Most of Mueller’s fumbles came in response to Republicans trying to get him to stray from his typical dry, technical explanations
Ohio Republican Rep Jim Jordan sought to draw Mueller out on the surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, whose trips to Russia drew attention of investigators.
‘Director Mueller, the third FISA renewal happens a month after you’re named special counsel. What role did your office play in the third FISA renewal of Carter Page?’ Jordan asked.
‘I’m not going to talk to that,’ said Mueller.
In his prepared statement, Mueller began by defending his probe following an onslaught of attacks, and spelling out questions he will and will not answer.
He said he told his team at the start of the Russia probe to ‘work quietly, thoroughly and with integrity so that the public would have full confidence in the outcome.
‘We needed to do our work as thoroughly as possible and as expeditiously as possible. It was in the public interest for our investigation to be complete and not to last a day longer than necessary,’ Mueller said.
He said his team of lawyers and agents worked ‘fairly and with absolute integrity’ – minutes after President Trump once again attacked it as a ‘witch hunt’.
‘Our team would not leak or take other actions that would compromise the integrity of our work,’ said Mueller. ‘All decisions were made based on the facts and the law.’
Ohio Republican Rep Jim Jordan sought to draw Mueller out on the surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, whose Russia trips drew investigators’ attention
Rep Doug Collins tried to get Mueller to contradict his report by asking him whether ‘collusion’ and ‘conspiracy’ are the same thing after Mueller testified that they weren’t.
Collins cited a portion of the report that states: ‘Collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the U.S. Code; nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. To the contrary, even as defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute.’
Mueller critics declared that the special counsel had been bested by Collins, while experts explained that Collins’ citation was taken out of context.
The part of the report in question was about collusion in the sense of corporate collusion – when companies conspire in an illegal fashion to help each other at consumers’ expense.
Corporate collusion is unrelated to ‘collusion with Russia’, the colloquial term adopted in the debate about potential cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Both sides sought to get Mueller on record on the question of whether he had any potential conflict that would prevent him from overseeing the probe.
Georgia Democrat Rep Hank Johnson asked Mueller if he had any conflicts of interest that prevented him from being special counsel. Mueller said he did not. Trump has repeatedly said Mueller was ‘highly conflicted,’ saying he had interviewed to be his FBI director and that the two men had a nasty business dispute.
Some people on social media lambasted Republican committee members for trying to damage Mueller’s credibility.
‘No matter your political party, it’s absolutely disgusting to see those attacking Mueller’s integrity,’ one man tweeted.
‘The way the @JudiciaryGOP members talked and yelled at Robert Mueller is beyond awful. They’ve all lost their souls,’ another wrote.
‘Republicans can’t argue the facts, so they attack the investigation and the investigators,’ another said.
‘Remember this slander of Mueller the next time you hear republicans going on about their love & respect for veterans. They will throw anyone under the bus who doesn’t toe the party line.’
Some people on social media lambasted Republican committee members for trying to damage Mueller’s credibility
TOP 10 MUELLER TAKEAWAYS
Below are the 10 most important takeaways gleaned from Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday.
Mueller said all he wanted to say in his report
When Mueller finally agreed to testify before Congress – after more than two years of silence about the Russia investigation – the special counsel said he ‘would not provide information beyond that which is already public’ in the report published in April.
He stuck to that promise throughout Wednesday’s hearing, declining or deferring nearly 200 questions from committee members.
Mueller’s reasons for not answering included not wanting to speculate, being unable to detail internal Justice Department deliberations and being under orders not to broach specific topics.
Trump was paying attention
After saying that he couldn’t be bothered to watch Mueller’s testimony, President Trump made it clear that he was tuned in as he tweeted multiple reactions to the proceedings on Wednesday.
‘I’m not going to be watching Mueller because you can’t take all those bites out of the apple,’ Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. ‘We had no collusion, no obstruction.’
Before the hearing even kicked off Trump had posted seven tweets about the hearing, echoing his go-to attacks on ‘Mueller & his band of 18 Angry Democrats’.
Over the next eight hours tweeted and retweeted 14 posts about Mueller’s testimony, including multiple videos of Republican lawmakers grilling the special counsel.
‘TRUTH IS A FORCE OF NATURE!’ he declared just after 2.30pm.
Mueller didn’t subpoena Trump to avoid a lengthy court battle
The special counsel addressed why Trump wasn’t interviewed during the two-year-long investigation when New York Democratic Rep Sean Maloney asked him: ‘Why didn’t you subpoena the president?’
Trump’s legal team had refused to have him be interviewed in the probe because they felt such a meeting would amount to a ‘perjury trap’.
Before Congress Mueller stated that his team had ‘little success’ when pushing for an interview for over a year and decided that they didn’t want to delay the investigation with a lengthy court battle.
‘We did not want to exercise the subpoena power because of the necessity of expediting the end of the investigation,’ he said, adding that no one at the Justice Department pressured him to finish the probe.
Mueller acknowledged that Trump’s written answers to questions about possible conspiracy with Russia were ‘not as useful as the interview would be’.
Trump was not exonerated by the Russia investigation
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, kicked off Wednesday’s proceedings by asking Mueller directly if the Russia investigation exonerated President Trump.
‘No,’ Mueller stated without hesitation.
That goes against the president’s repeated claims that the probe proved there was ‘no obstruction, no collusion’.
Mueller’s team never determined whether Trump committed a crime
While the majority of his answers were straightforward and technical, Mueller struggled when questioned about why he did not indict the president.
During an exchanged with California Democratic Rep Ted Lieu, Mueller stated that the reason he did not even consider indicting Trump on obstruction charges was because of guidance from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
That goes against assertions by Attorney General William Barr, who has repeatedly said the OLC’s opinion was not the only reason Mueller did not indict Trump.
Arizona Republican Rep Debbie Lesko asked Mueller to clarify that contradiction, at which point he said he ‘would have to look closer at it’.
He later conceded that he had misspoken when he characterized the OLC’s guidance to Lieu.
‘We did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime,’ he said.
‘Based on Justice Department policy and principles of fairness, we decided we would not make a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.’
Mueller was much less steady than in previous hearings
At times, Mueller, 74, stumbled during answers, asking fast-talking lawmakers to repeat page citations and repeat their questions. He sometimes had to scan the hearing room to locate questioners.
Although his stock answer was to say issues were beyond the purview of his mandate, he also appeared not to recall specific information at times.
‘Where are you reading from?’ he asked one member, Rep. James Sensenbrenner. ‘I am reading from my question,’ the Wisconsin Republican lawmaker told him.
Under questioning by Republican Rep Steve Chabot, Mueller didn’t show immediate familiarity with political intelligence firm Fusion GPS, a key player in the trail of the Steele Dossier, and a fixture of attention of President Trump and GOP critics of the Mueller probe.
Viewers reacting on social media called out Mueller’s unsteadiness early on, remarking that he was acting ‘like a confused old man’.
Some said the wobbly performance could be a delaying tactic on the part of the special counsel to frustrate Republican committee members determined to discredit findings that are damaging to Trump.
Mueller and Trump have opposing accounts of what led up to special counsel appointment
Republicans probed Mueller’s professional links with Trump in an attempt to show he may have had a reason to be biased against the president – specifically questioning whether he was turned down for the FBI director position the day before being tapped to lead the Russia investigation.
Trump gave his version of events on Wednesday morning, tweeting: ‘It has been reported that Robert Mueller is saying that he did not apply and interview for the job of FBI Director (and get turned down) the day before he was wrongfully appointed Special Counsel.
‘Hope he doesn’t say that under oath in that we have numerous witnesses to the interview, including the Vice President of the United States!’
Mueller contradicted Trump’s account when Texas Republican Rep Louie Gohmert seized on his alleged conflicts of interest.
Gohmert asked Mueller about a meeting he had with Trump the day before the special counsel appointment and contended that it was a job interview for the FBI director slot.
Mueller stated that he was not interviewed ‘as a candidate’ for the position.
Mueller fiercely defended his team’s impartiality
The special counsel was calm and composed throughout the proceedings, save for one moment when Florida Republican Rep Greg Steube decried the political affiliations of the lawyers on his team.
Mueller said never in his 25 years in his position had he felt the need to ask the people he works with about their political affiliation.
Rep Gohmert also called Mueller’s hiring practices into question, particularly his appointment of FBI agent Peter Strzok – who was later removed from the probe after he was found to have sent anti-Trump text messages to a woman he was involved with.
Mueller said he did not know of Strzok’s disdain for Trump before the probe started and learned about it in the summer of 2017, several months into the investigation.
Republicans tried to collect evidence for a probe into Mueller’s investigation
Republicans committee members tried both the blast the origins of the Russia probe and potentially establish a record that might play out in an ongoing investigation overseen by Attorney General William Barr.
‘Before you arrested [Trump campaign foreign policy aide] George Papadopoulos in July of 2017, he was given $10,000 in ash in Israel. Do you know who gave him that cash?’ California Rep Devin Nunes asked Mueller.
‘Again, that’s outside our … questions such as that should go to the FBI or the department,’ said Mueller.
‘But it involved your investigation,’ said Nunes.
‘It involved persons involved in my investigation,’ said Mueller.
Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow released a statement saying: ‘This morning’s testimony exposed the troubling deficiencies of the Special Counsel’s investigation. The testimony revealed that this probe was conducted by a small group of politically-biased prosecutors who, as hard as they tried, were unable to establish either obstruction, conspiracy, or collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It is also clear that the Special Counsel conducted his two-year investigation unimpeded. The American people understand that this issue is over. They also understand that the case is closed.’
Democrats tried to breathe life into a dense, technical report
The Democrats, who hold a majority on both committees, made a concerted effort to present the investigation’s findings in a more provocative and damning light than they had been in the dense, 337-page report.
‘Your investigation determined that the Trump campaign — including Trump himself — knew that a foreign power was intervening in our election and welcomed it, built Russian meddling into their strategy, and used it,’ California Rep Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chair, said when the afternoon portion began.
‘Disloyalty to country. Those are strong words, but how else are we to describe a presidential campaign which did not inform the authorities of a foreign offer of dirt on their opponent, which did not publicly shun it, or turn it away, but which instead invited it, encouraged it, and made full use of it?’ Schiff continued.
‘That disloyalty may not have been criminal. Constrained by uncooperative witnesses, the destruction of documents and the use of encrypted communications, your team was not able to establish each of the elements of the crime of conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt, so not a provable crime, in any event’, he added.
However, a levelheaded Mueller didn’t play along, making for a rather mundane hearing.
In a moment that quickly made the rounds on conservative media on Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan sharply questioned Robert Mueller on the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
The Ohio Republican pressed the former special counsel to detail who told George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy aide on the Trump campaign, that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. When Mueller said he would not go into it, Jordan
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Story 1: Senator Mitch McConnell Now Says Background Checks and Other Bills Infringing Your Second Amendment Rights Will Be Discussed in September — Vote Out Of Office Any Democrat or Republican The Votes For Limiting Your Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendment Rights — Videos
Is Senator Mitch McConnell Stalling For Time On Gun Reform? | Morning Joe | MSNBC
Mitch McConnell says senate will consider gun control legislation next month
Trump open to ‘meaningful’ background checks after shootings
“All the gun laws they’re proposing hurt the most vulnerable and minorities most.” – John Lott
John Lott on gun control: “The background check system itself is basically racist”
Part of John Lott’s Lecture of the Problems with Expanded Background Checks May 22, 2016
The NRA on universal background checks
What Do Gun Background Checks Actually Check?
McConnell wants to consider gun background checks in fall
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED: 19:39 EDT, 8 August 2019 | UPDATED: 06:40 EDT, 9 August 2019
Shifting the gun violence debate, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he now wants to consider background checks and other bills, setting up a potentially pivotal moment when lawmakers return in the fall.
The Republican leader won’t be calling senators back to work early, as some are demanding. But he told a Kentucky radio station that President Donald Trump called him Thursday morning and they talked about several ideas. The president, he said, is “anxious to get an outcome, and so am I.”
Stakes are high for all sides, but particularly for Trump and his party. Republicans have long opposed expanding background checks – a bill passed by the Democratic-led House is stalled in the Senate – but they face enormous pressure to do something after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, that left 31 people dead. McConnell, who is facing protests outside his Louisville home, can shift attention back to Democrats by showing a willingness to engage ahead of the 2020 election.
“What we can’t do is fail to pass something,” McConnell said. “What I want to see here is an outcome.”
McConnell said he and Trump discussed various ideas on the call, including background checks and the so-called “red flag” laws that allow authorities to seize firearms from someone deemed a threat to themselves or others.
“Background checks and red flags will probably lead the discussion,” McConnell told Louisville’s WHAS-AM. He noted “there’s a lot of support” publicly for background checks. “Those are two items that for sure will be front and center as we see what we can come together on and pass.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., smiles after vote on a hard-won budget deal that would permit the government to resume borrowing to pay all of its obligations and would remove the prospect of a government shutdown in October, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Trump has been interested in federal background checks before – and tweeted Monday about them – only to drop the issue later, a turnaround similar to his reversal on gun proposals after the 2018 high school shooting at Parkland, Florida.
The powerful National Rifle Association and its allies on Capitol Hill have long wielded influence, but the gun lobby’s grip on Democrats started slipping some time ago, and it’s unclear how much sway the NRA and other gun groups still hold over Republicans in the Trump era.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump assured them in phone calls Thursday he will review the House-passed bill that expands federal background checks for firearm sales.
In a joint statement, they said Trump called them individually after Pelosi sent a letter asking the president to order the Senate back to Washington immediately to consider gun violence measures.
Schumer and Pelosi said they told Trump the best way to address gun violence is for the Senate to take up and pass the House bill. Trump, they said, “understood our interest in moving as quickly as possible to help save lives.”
The politics of gun control are shifting amid the frequency and toll of mass shootings. Spending to support candidates backing tougher gun control measures – mostly Democrats – surged in the 2018 midterms, even as campaign spending by the NRA declined.
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre said in rare public statement Thursday that some federal gun control proposals “would make millions of law-abiding Americans less safe and less able to defend themselves and their loved ones.”
The organization said proposals being discussed in Congress would not have prevented the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio that killed 31 people.
McConnell has been under pressure from Democrats, and others, to bring senators back to Washington after the back-to-back weekend shootings.
Earlier, more than 200 mayors, including those in Dayton and El Paso, urged the Senate to return to the Capitol. “Our nation can no longer wait,” they wrote.
McConnell on Thursday rejected the idea of reconvening the Senate, saying calling senators back now would just lead to people “scoring points and nothing would happen.”
Instead, the GOP leader wants to spend the August recess talking with Democratic and Republican senators to see what’s possible. Senators have been talking among themselves, and holding conference calls, to sort out strategy.
“If we do it prematurely it’ll just be another frustrating position for all of us and for the public,” he said.
The politics of gun violence are difficult for Republicans, including McConnell. He could risk losing support as he seeks reelection in Kentucky if he were to back restricting access to firearms and ammunition. Other Republicans, including those in Colorado, Maine and swing states, also would face difficult votes, despite the clamor for gun laws.
GOP senators are also considering changes to the existing federal background check system, modeled on a law signed last year that improved the National Instant Criminal Background Check system, as well as increased penalties for hate crimes.
While many of those proposals have bipartisan support, Democrats are unlikely to agree to them without consideration of the more substantive background checks bill.
“We Democrats are not going to settle for half-measures so Republicans can feel better and try to push the issue of gun violence off to the side,” Schumer said Wednesday.
Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who, along with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., is pushing a bill to expand background checks, said Trump’s support will be the determining factor in whatever gets done.
“At this point in time leadership comes from President Trump,” Manchin said.
___
Associated Press writer Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.
FILE – In this July 23, 2019, file photo, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. More than 200 mayors, including the mayors of El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, are urging Senate leaders to call senators back to the Capitol to act on bipartisan gun safety legislation. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
FILE – In this July 30, 2019, photo, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., takes questions from reporters at the Capitol in Washington. More than 200 mayors, including the mayors of El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, are urging Senate leaders to call senators back to the Capitol to act on bipartisan gun safety legislation. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
President Donald Trump is greeted by Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, after arriving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to meet with people affected by the mass shooting in Dayton, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump is greeted by Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, after arriving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to meet with people affected by the mass shooting in Dayton, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-7339487/McConnell-wants-consider-gun-background-checks-fall.html
Sen.
Mitch McConnell
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F
34%
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34.0%
66.0%
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Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
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Rand Paul
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A
92%
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92.0%
8.0%
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Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
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Sen.
John Cornyn
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F
33%
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33.0%
67.0%
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Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
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Ted Cruz
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B
80%
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80.0%
20.0%
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Conservative Review’s Liberty Score® grades members of Congress on the top 50 votes over a rolling six-year term. A letter grade is assigned to each member to help you quickly determine whether a lawmaker is supporting conservative principles. The Liberty Score® helps evaluate your representatives and senators, providing the tools necessary to separate rhetoric from reality. We don’t expect any elected officials to be perfect, but we do expect them to keep promises.
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John Lott
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John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, College Park, and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. As of 2017, he is a contributor for FoxNews.com, the Hill, and the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.
He has written for both academic and popular publications. He has authored books such as More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics. He is best known as an advocate[1][2][3] in the gun rights debate, particularly his arguments against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. Newsweek referred to Lott as “The Gun Crowd’s Guru.”[4]
Contents
Academic career
John Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. Lott has held positions in law and economics at several institutions, including the Yale Law School, the Hoover Institution, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, Texas A&M University, and Rice University. Lott was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission[5] (1988–1989). He spent five years as a visiting professor (1994–95) and as a fellow (1995–99) at the University of Chicago. Lott was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (2001–2006). He left AEI for SUNY Binghamton.[6] From July 2007 to 2010, Lott was a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Foundation at the University of Maryland, College Park and lectured on law and economics.[7][8]
Popular press and electronic media
Op-eds by Lott have appeared in such places as the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune. Since 2008, he has been a columnist for Fox News, initially weekly.[9][5]
Concealed weapons and crime rate
In a 1997 article written with David B. Mustard[10] and Lott’s subsequent books More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, Lott argued that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons significantly reduces crime in America.
The work was immediately controversial, drawing both support and opposition. Several academics praised Lott’s methodology, including Florida State University economist Bruce Benson,[11] Cardozo School of Law professor John O. McGinnis,[12] College of William and Mary professor Carlisle Moody,[13] University of Mississippi professor William F. Shughart,[14] and SUNY economist Florenz Plassmann and University of Adelaide economist John Whitley.[15]
Other reviews said that there were problems with Lott’s model. In the New England Journal of Medicine, David Hemenway argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption, and that therefore the model was flawed.[16] Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue, said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and systemic bias.[17] In the American Journal of Public Health, Daniel Webster et al. also raised concerns about other flaws in the study, such as misclassification of laws and endogeneity of predictor variables, which they said rendered the study’s conclusions “insupportable”.[18] Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry,[19] and others said that removing portions of the data set caused the results to still show statistically significant drops only in aggravated assaults and robbery when all counties with fewer than 100,000 people and Florida’s counties were both simultaneously dropped from the sample.[20] A 1998 study by Jens Ludwig that said it “more effectively control[ed] for unobserved variables that may vary over time” than the Lott and Mustard study concluded that “shall-issue laws have resulted, if anything, in an increase in adult homicide rates.”[21] A 2001 study in the Journal of Political Economy by University of Chicago economist Mark Duggan did robustness checks of Lott and Mustard’s study and found that the findings of the Lott and Mustard study were inaccurate.[22]
In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott’s work, and concluded “that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”[23] The NRC report studied over 100 different types of gun control proposal and it reached this same non-conclusion for all these regulations. For all these regulations, the NRC panel only called for more research.
Only right-to-carry laws had a dissent from this non-conclusion. The pre-eminent criminologist James Q. Wilson dissented from this non-conclusion.[24] Wilson pointed out that committee’s own findings showed “that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate”.[25]
Referring to the research done on the topic, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that “Mr. Lott’s research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime.”[26] As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out: “We conclude that Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile.”[17]
A 2008 article in Econ Journal Watch surveyed peer-reviewed empirical academic studies, and found that 10 supported the proposition that right-to-carry reduces crime, 8 supported no significant effect and none supported an increase.[27] The article was rebutted by Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue in the same journal in 2009.[28] By 2012, there were 18 peer-reviewed studies that supported right-to-carry reduces crime, 10 supported no significant effect and one supported an increase.[29] Other studies on the subject have been published in student-edited academic reviews or the commercial press.
In 2013, Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime. As of July 2015, he was also the organization’s president.[30]
Women’s suffrage and government growth
Using data from 1870 to 1940, Lott and Larry Kenny studied how state government expenditures and revenue changed in 48 state governments after women obtained the right to vote. Women were able to vote in 29 states before women’s suffrage and the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Lott stated that “women’s suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise.”[31]
Defensive gun use
Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that defensive gun use (DGU) is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police.”
Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, in the first edition of the book, published in May 1998, Lott wrote that “national surveys” suggested that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” In that same paragraph he also wrote that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police.” The higher the rate of defensive gun uses that do not end in the attacker being killed or wounded, the easier it is to explain why defensive gun uses are not covered by the media without reference to media bias. Lott cited the figure in op-eds in the Wall Street Journal[32] and the Los Angeles Times.[33]
In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in Public Opinion Quarterly said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.[34] According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz’s 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.[35]:8 Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.[36] The other surveys all asked people to recall events over the previous five years, while Lott had only asked people about events that had occurred during just the previous year. Lott used the higher estimate because it accounted for his claim of media bias. The survey questions have also been made available for years to anyone who would have liked to replicate the survey themselves.
Safe storage gun laws
In a 2001 study, Lott and John E. Whitley reported that safe-storage gun laws not only did not reduce juvenile suicides or accidental gun deaths, but that they also increased rates of violent and property crime.[37] The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association for using Tobit regression despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was “highly skewed and heteroskedastic“, and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home.[38] Webster and Carroll also wrote in Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law that the Lott and Whitley study’s findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.[39]
Environmental regulations
Together with John Karpoff and Eric Wehrly at the University of Washington, Lott has worked to show the importance of government regulations through both legal and regulatory penalties and the weaknesses of reputational penalties in reducing pollution.[40] Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed; and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty.
Affirmative action in police departments
Lott finds that when hiring standards are lowered in the process of recruiting more minority officers, the overall quality of all officers is reduced and crime rates are increased. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black populated cities. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when standards for hiring women are changed, and this raises questions about whether norming tests or altering their content to create equal pass rates is preferable. The paper examines how the changing composition of police departments affects such measures as the murder of and assaults against police officers.[41]
Abortion and crime
With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott has considered crime rates and the possible influence of laws which place abortion decisions with the pregnant person other than boards of physicians. They acknowledge the old 1960s argument that abortion may prevent the birth of “unwanted” children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, their research suggests that liberalizing abortion rules correlates with an increase in out-of-wedlock births and single parent families. In turn, they argue that this increase in single parent births implies the opposite effect on investments in human capital (i.e., average investment per child decreases under their argument). Using the correlation between children in poverty and in single parent homes with crime they build an argument that liberalization of abortion laws increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent.[42] In a review of the literature on the relationship between abortion and crime, Theodore Joyce, an economist at Baruch College and the National Bureau of Economic Research, praised Lott and Whitley for gathering additional data on abortion but criticized the methodology that they used.[43]
Lost Bush votes in the 2000 presidential election
In 2000, Lott argued, using a regression analysis, that George W. Bush lost at least 10,000 votes in Florida after the media incorrectly called the state for Al Gore while voting was still on-going in the more conservative parts of the state.[44] Lott’s argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook Rethinking Social Inquiry (edited by Henry Brady and David Collier) as an example of poor methodology, and showed how the number of lost Bush votes ranged from 28 to 56.[44]
Other areas
Lott claims that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending.[45] Lott also supports the conclusion that higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take longer to get confirmed.[46]
Lott has advocated government deregulation of various areas, and has also been published in the popular press taking positions in support of the U.S. Republican Party and President George W. Bush on topics such as the validity of the 2000 Presidential Election results in Florida.[47]
Controversy
Defamation suit
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit[48] for defamation against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers over the book Freakonomics and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott’s research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott’s work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott’s had been blocked from publication in that issue.[49]
A federal judge found that Levitt’s replication claim in Freakonomics was not defamation but found merit in Lott’s complaint over the email claims.[50]
Levitt settled the second defamation claim by admitting in a letter to John McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, that Lott had not engaged in bribery (paying for extra costs of printing and postage for a conference issue is customary), and that he knew that “scholars with varying opinions” (including Levitt himself) had been invited to participate.[51][52] The Chronicle of Higher Education characterized Levitt’s letter as offering “a doozy of a concession.”[53]
The dismissal of the first half of Lott’s suit was unanimously upheld by The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.[54]
Charges that gun makers or the NRA have paid for Lott’s research
In 1996 when Lott’s research first received media attention, Charles Schumer wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The Associated Press reports that Prof. Lott’s fellowship at the University of Chicago is funded by the Olin Foundation, which is ‘associated with the Olin Corporation,’ one of the nation’s largest gun manufacturers. Maybe that’s a coincidence, too. But it’s also a fact.”[55] Olin Foundation head William E. Simon strongly denied Schumer’s claims in a reply letter in which he stated that: Olin Foundation was funded by the personal estate of the late John M. Olin independently of Olin Corp. Like all candidates, Lott was selected to receive his Olin Fellowship by the faculty of the university, not by Olin Foundation and certainly not by Olin Corp.[56][57]
In a debate on Piers Morgan Tonight on July 23, 2012, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz claimed: “This is junk science at its worst. Paid for and financed by the National Rifle Association.” Lott countered: “The NRA hasn’t paid for my research.” Dershowitz continued: “Your conclusions are paid for and financed—The National Rifle Association—only funds research that will lead to these conclusions.”[58][59] Separately both Lott and the NRA have denied NRA funding of Lott’s research.[60]
Disputed survey
In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000,[61][62] Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.[62] However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,[63] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics alleged that the survey had never taken place,[64] but Lott defends the survey’s existence and accuracy, quoting on his website colleagues who lost data in the hard drive crash.[65]
Use of econometrics as proof of causation
In 2001, Rutgers University sociology professor Ted Goertzel[66] considered multiple regression to be not of much use in proving causal arguments in studies by Lott (and by Lott’s critics Levitt, Ayres and Donohue).[67]
The National Academy of Sciences panel that reported on several gun control issues in 2004 looked at Right-To-Carry laws in Chapter 6 and endorsed neither the Lott & Mustard (1997) level and trend models as definite proof nor the Ayres & Donohue (2003) hybrid model as definite refutation of Lott’s thesis: the majority of the panel concluded that econometrics could not decide the issue, suggesting instead alternate research, such as a survey of felons to determine if RTC changed their behavior.[68] The criminologist on the NAS panel, James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from the econometricians’ conclusion. Wilson noted in the report that all the panel’s estimates on murder rates supported Lott’s conclusion on the effect of RTC on murder.[69] The Committee responded that “[w]hile it is true that most of the reported estimates [of the policy on murder rates] are negative, several are positive and many are statistically insignificant.”[70] They further noted that the full committee, including Wilson, agreed that there was not convincing evidence that RTC policies affected other kinds of violent crime.
In a 2011 article for ALER, Donohue claimed the NRC panel results published from the hybrid model “could not be replicated on its data set”.[71] Lott replicated the NRC’s results using the NRC’s copy of the Ayres & Donohue model and data set, pointing out that the model used for the ALER article was different and introduced a truncation bias.[72]
Mary Rosh persona
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott created and used “Mary Rosh” as a sock puppet to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by blogger Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to use of the Mary Rosh persona.[64] Sanchez also pointed out that Lott, posing as Rosh, not only praised his own academic writing, but also called himself “the best professor I ever had”.
Many commentators and academics accused Lott of violating academic integrity, noting that he praised himself while posing as one of his former students[73][74] and that “Rosh” was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com. Lott has claimed that the “Rosh” review was written by his son and wife.[74]
“I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it—but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” Lott told The Washington Post in 2003.[74]
Bibliography
See also
References …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott
Form 4473
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ATF Form 4473, October 2016 revision
A Firearms Transaction Record, or Form 4473, is a form promulgated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in the United States Department of Justice that is filled out when a person purchases a firearm from a Federal Firearms License (FFL) holder (such as a gun shop).[1]
The Form 4473 contains name, address, date of birth, government-issued photo ID, National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) background check transaction number, and a short affidavit stating that the purchaser is eligible to purchase firearms under federal law. It contains make, model, or serial number on page three of the six page form. Lying on this form is a felony and can be punished by up to five years in prison[2] in addition to fines, even if the transaction is denied by the NICS. Prosecutions are rare in the absence of another felony committed with the gun purchased.[citation needed] Of 556,496 denied transactions between FY 2008 and FY 2015, federal prosecutors prosecuted an average of under 32 cases per year, including 24 in FY 2013, 15 in FY 2014 and 20 in FY 2015.[3][4]
The dealer also records all information from the Form 4473 into a required “bound-book” called an “Acquisition and Disposition Log.[5] A dealer must keep this on file at least 20 years, and is required to surrender the log to the ATF upon retirement from the firearms business. The ATF is allowed to inspect, as well as request a copy of, the Form 4473 from the dealer during the course of a criminal investigation. In addition, the sale of two or more handguns to a person in a five-day period must be reported to ATF on Form 3310.4.
If a person purchases a firearm from a private individual who is not a licensed dealer, the purchaser is not required in most states to complete a Form 4473. Some states (such as California and Colorado) require individual sellers to sell through dealers.
These forms are given the same status as a tax return under the Privacy Act of 1974 and cannot be disclosed by the government to private parties or other government officials except in accordance with the Privacy Act. Individual dealers possessing a copy of the form are not subject to the Privacy Act’s restrictions on disclosure. Dealers are required to maintain completed forms for 20 years in the case of completed sales, and for 5 years where the sale was disapproved as a result of the NICS check.
Contents
eForm 4473
In response to the Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA),[6] and based upon requests from the firearms industry, the ATF has developed the e-Form 4473 to assist in the proper completion of the Federal Firearms Transaction Record (ATF Form 4473). The ATF eForm 4473 is designed to help eliminate errors in completing Form 4473 for both the firearm purchaser and the licensed seller. The eForm 4473 is provided to the public, including major retailers, free of charge via the ATF eForm web site. ATF eForm 4473 is a downloadable application that runs locally on the seller’s computer and supports both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. (See “External links” section below.)
2016 revision
In 2016, ATF made several changes to the form, including adding a warning statement that the use of marijuana is illegal under federal law, regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where the transferee/buyer resides.[7][8]
In Popular Culture
Form 4473 was referenced in the 1984 film Red Dawn.[9]
References
External links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_4473
ATF Form 4473 – Firearms Transaction Record Revisions
Important Notice to All Federal Firearms Licensees
ATF Form 4473, Firearms Transaction Record (Form 4473) has been revised. This page highlights the significant changes to the form. It is highly suggested that you review the entire revised form including all of the Notices, Instructions, and Definitions.
This form is effective January 16, 2017, you may no longer use the previous edition (April 2012) of the Form 4473 as it will be obsolete. The revised form is available to either download or order online.
The significant changes to Form 4473 include:
General
Section A
Section B
Section D
Notice, Instructions, and Definitions
Related Resources
Related Research and Background Information
Ordering Forms
Contact Information
General
Section A
Section B
Section D
Notices, Instructions, and Definitions
Related Resources
Related Research and Background Information
Ordering Forms
The revised form is available to either download or order. FFLs started to receive packets of 50 forms in late December 2016. Should you require additional forms, please contact the ATF Distribution Center by telephone at (703) 870-7526 or (703) 870-7528. Forms may also be ordered online or you may print the Form 4473 from ATF’s website and make copies as needed. Please note that all six pages of the Form 4473 must be printed and retained as a part of your permanent records.
Contact Information
If you have additional questions regarding the revised Form 4473, please contact your local ATF office. A listing may be found online.
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/atf-form-4473-firearms-transaction-record-revisions
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Biden seeks to keep edge as 2020 Democrats flood Iowa
By REUTERS
PUBLISHED: 19:30 EDT, 8 August 2019 | UPDATED: 19:30 EDT, 8 August 2019
By James Oliphant
Former Vice President Joe Biden said he was not taking his front-runner status for granted as he returned to Iowa on Thursday, ahead of a wave of rival Democratic presidential contenders who will in coming days visit the state that starts the party’s nominating contest.
Before the weekend is out, more than 20 contenders will attend the Iowa State Fair and speak at a state Democratic Party dinner, giving Iowans a full picture of the field.
Next February’s caucuses in Iowa will kick off the process of selecting the person to run against Republican President Donald Trump in the November 2020 general election.
Speaking to a sun-baked crowd at the fair, Biden said: “We must defeat this president to change the trajectory of this country.”
For Biden, the trip to Iowa gives him an opportunity to try and cement his lead in opinion polls over the rest of the field, one that appeared greatly endangered after he turned in an uninspiring performance at the first Democratic debate in Miami.
But Biden appeared to have held his own at last week´s debate in Detroit against attacks from others on the stage. And his numbers in public opinion polls have largely returned to where they were before the Miami debate.
At the state fair, Biden largely stuck to his campaign stump speech without mentioning the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio last weekend that shocked the United States.
In response to Democratic calls for action on gun control legislation, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell suggested he was open to bipartisan discussions on possible restrictions on assault gun sales and background checks. But he refused to call the Senate back early to consider new gun legislation.
After his appearance, Biden told reporters he believes Congress can pass a new ban on assault weapons.
“We can get it done, and we can get background checks done,” he said. “We can get it done because the public is finally at a point where they are sick of it. Sick of it.”
Biden suggested he understands that his front-runner position could be tenuous, and said he would continue to campaign in Iowa to amass support.
“It´s early,” Biden said. “It´s way early.”
An poll of Iowa Democrats released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed Biden with 28 percent of the vote, with progressive rival U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been building momentum in the state, second at 19 percent.
In his speech at the fair, Biden, 76, at times fumbled parts of his delivery, saying at one point that in comparison to Trump, Democrats “choose truth over facts.”
Sherry Leydens, 72, of Ankeny, Iowa said she had come to the fair to see Biden, who she said she will support in the caucuses. “He is the best person to take on Trump,” she said.
But Mickey Long, 47, of Burlington, Iowa said with others gaining, “it kind of made me rethink things.” Once a Biden supporter, she was now considering Warren, Long said.
MAKE OR BREAK EVENT
For Biden, a longtime senator and the vice president under President Barack Obama, the state fair holds particularly potent memories. It was here in 1987 when his first presidential campaign began to implode over allegations of plagiarism.
He ran for president again in 2008, but his campaign ended after he fared poorly in the Iowa caucuses.
The fair has also proved to be thorny for others. In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a heckler in the crowd that “corporations are people, my friend” – a line that haunted him during the rest of the 2012 presidential race.
That same year, a photo of Republican candidate Michele Bachmann eating a foot-long corndog sparked an online uproar.
There have also been made-for-TV moments that have bolstered campaigns. In 2015, Trump´s visit to the fair via helicopter stole the thunder from other Republicans and helped draw more attention to his insurgent candidacy.
The other candidate to appear at the fair on Thursday stood in marked contrast to Biden. Montana Governor Steve Bullock only entered the Democratic race in May and remains an unknown to many.
Bullock made light of his anonymity, telling the crowd that he wanted to move up from “35” to higher on their candidate lists.
For candidates such as Bullock, who are polling near the 1 percent mark, the weeks ahead before the next Democratic debate in September will be crucial to their continued viability.
On Friday, Democratic candidates such as former U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro and outsider candidates Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang will speak at the fair.
And later in the evening, virtually every member of the crowded field will attend the traditional “wing ding” dinner in Clear Lake, Iowa.
Noticeably absent is former U.S. Representative Beto O´Rourke, who canceled all of his Iowa events in the wake of the shootings in El Paso, his hometown.
The majority of the field will also participate in a gun-violence forum on Saturday sponsored by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control advocacy group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (Reporting by James Oliphant, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Grant McCool)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-7339463/Biden-seeks-edge-2020-Democrats-flood-Iowa.html
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Here are the candidates who qualified for the third Democratic debate — and those who might miss out
Andrew Yang became the ninth candidate to qualify.
Democrats aren’t letting just anyone onto their presidential debate stage anymore.
After two debates with lenient qualification standards that featured 20 candidates each, the DNC raised the bar for September’s third debate. The move has created some drama, as various lower-polling contenders are struggling to make the cut with less than three weeks before the final lineup is announced.
We’ll go into the fine print more below, but the gist is that candidates have to hit 2 percent in four recent polls from a specific list of organizations, and also get donations from 130,000 different people. By contrast, to get into the first debate, you had to hit 1 percent in three polls or get donations from 65,000 people — each threshold was lower, and you didn’t need to meet both of them.
Currently, nine candidateshavequalified for debate No. 3: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang.
Three more candidates — Julián Castro, Tom Steyer, and Tulsi Gabbard — have made some significant progress toward qualifying, though it’s not clear if they’ll make it. The rest of the field seems quite far away and the clock is ticking: The deadline to qualify is Wednesday, August 28.
However, candidates who narrowly fail to qualify for September’s third debate might get another chance in October. The DNC is using the same qualification rules for both events, but candidates will have an extra month or so to get more donations or show improvement in polls, as Politico’s Zach Montellaro reported.
The third debate is scheduled for September 12 and potentially also September 13, if enough candidates qualify to necessitate a two-night event. It’s co-sponsored by and will be aired on ABC and Univision.
How to qualify for the third Democratic debate
To make it onto the debate stage, a Democratic candidate has to meet both of these two thresholds.
1. The polling threshold: A candidate must hit 2 percent or more in at least four polls released between June 28 and August 28.
2. The donor threshold: A candidate must have received donations from 130,000 different people. Also, they must have at least 400 donors each in at least 20 different states.
The names of donors who give less than $200 don’t have to be publicly disclosed, so for the time being we’ve had to rely on the candidates’ own claims that they’ve met this donor threshold. (Eventually, they have to give corroborating information to the DNC, which will double-check.)
Who’s qualified for the third Democratic debate?
So far, these candidates have met the polling threshold and have said they’ve met the donor threshold:
Currently, this list is small enough that it could mean all the candidates get to debate together on one night, rather than being split over two separate nights as was the case in both previous debates this year.
But the DNC has said that if a “large field” does end up qualifying, this third debate will again be a two-night event. They have not, however, said exactly how many qualifying candidates would necessitate a two-night debate.
So if, say, 11 or 12 candidates qualify — which seems totally plausible at the moment — it’s not yet clear whether they’d all be onstage together or whether they’d be split in two groups on separate nights.
Who hasn’t yet qualified for the third Democratic debate?
There are three candidates who have made significant progress toward qualifying but who haven’t yet sealed the deal.
Everybody else in the race faces an uphill climb to qualify, with most having zero of the necessary four polls so far and not having met the donor threshold, either. They are:
But candidates will get another chance at qualifying for the fourth debate
There’s an interesting twist about qualifying for the fourth Democratic debate in October, though: It will actually be easier.
That’s because the qualification rules are exactly the same as for the third debate — except that there will be more time for campaigns to make it happen.
For the polling threshold in particular, the third debate requires polls released between June 28 and August 28 be used. But for the fourth debate, that window goes from that same starting point (June 28) up until two weeks before the October debate (which doesn’t yet have a specific announced date).
The gist, as Politico points out, is that any candidates who qualify for the third debate automatically make it into the fourth debate — and on top of that roster, the rest of the field will have another month to try and get the rest of what they need as well.
So what could oddly ensue is a significantly smaller field for September’s third debate that then gets a bit bigger for October’s fourth debate.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758519/democratic-debate-qualification-polls-candidates-yang-gabbard
Story 4: Nearly 700 Illegal Aliens Detained In Massive Raids In Mississippi Food Processing Plants — End Catch and Release — Videos —
ICE releases almost half of the 680 people arrested during Mississippi raids
Massive immigration raids at agricultural processing plants in Mississippi
News Wrap: ICE arrests 680 undocumented workers in Mississippi
Scores from Mexico, Guatemala detained in Mississippi raids
By REUTERS
PUBLISHED: 19:50 EDT, 8 August 2019 | UPDATED: 23:40 EDT, 8 August 2019
The governments of Guatemala and Mexico said on Thursday that between them, almost 300 of their citizens had been detained in the southern U.S. state of Mississippi as part of sweeping U.S. immigration operations.
U.S. immigration authorities arrested nearly 700 people at seven agricultural processing plants across the state on Wednesday in what federal officials said could be the largest worksite enforcement operation in a single state.
On Twitter, the Mexican foreign ministry said 122 Mexican nationals had been detained, of whom 34 had been released and notified of dates for hearings with migration authorities.
Guatemala’s foreign ministry said in a statement that 176 of its citizens had been arrested in the raids in Mississippi, 142 of them men and 34 women.
Separately, the Honduran foreign ministry said that two Hondurans so far had been confirmed among those detained.
U.S. President Donald Trump has made cracking down on illegal immigration, especially from Central America and Mexico, one of the signature policies of his administration. (Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz; Writing by Julia Love; Additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa and Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel, Sandra Maler and Tom Hogue)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-7339509/Mexico-minister-says-107-Mexicans-detained-Mississippi-operations.html
Story 5: A Confident President Trump Comments To The Big Lie Media Before Taking 10 Day Vacation — Winning The Hearts and Minds of American People With A Resonating Message — Meaningful Background Checks — Yes, Red Flags — No Videos
MARATHON TRUMP: President Trump Talks To Media Before Vacation
Story 6: Numerous Two Second or A Few Seconds Videos on Youtube For Fox Commentators Including Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Fox and Friends, The Five, and Many More — Either YouTube is Doing This or YouTube Is Failing To Stop Whoever Is Doing This — Videos
The Ingraham Angle 8/8/19 FULL | Laura Ingraham Fox News August 8, 2019
The Ingraham Angle 8/9/19 FULL | Laura Ingraham Fox News August 9, 2019
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