On Sunday, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee threatened to subpoena Attorney General William P. Barr if he refuses to testify this week about the Mueller report. But a subpoena is unlikely to elicit Barr’s cooperation. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” says the President of the United States. In other words, there is to be no congressional oversight of this administration: No questioning the Attorney General about the Mueller Report. No questioning a Trump adviser about immigration policy. No questioning a former White House security director about issuances of security clearances. No questioning anyone about presidential tax returns. Such a blanket edict fits a dictator of a banana republic, not the president of a constitutional republic founded on separation of powers. If Congress cannot question the people who are making policy, or obtain critical documents, Congress cannot function as a coequal branch of government. If Congress cannot get information about the executive branch, there is no longer any separation of powers, as sanctified in the US constitution.
(CNN) - Attorney General William Barr is scheduled to testify Wednesday in the Senate and on Thursday in the House, though CNN reported he is balking at the format on the Democratic-controlled House side and threatening not to appear. (Apparently the threat of follow-up questioning by congressional aides is too much for the nation's top prosecutor to withstand.) When Barr testifies in Congress this week -- even if he boycotts the House and only appears in the Senate -- he finally will face a fair fight.
Attorney General William P. Barr has been under fire from former colleagues, legal experts, Democrats and anyone else who has taken the time to compare Barr’s initial letter about the Mueller report and his news conference against the actual report. He has been accused of misstating the reason that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not reach a prosecutorial decision on obstruction, of wrongfully inserting himself to make the call that Mueller would not and of refusing to put forth an unredacted version of the report. But that criticism is nothing compared with the derision that will rain down upon him should he refuse to show up, as he previously promised, to be questioned by the House Judiciary Committee.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post. At the time the letter was sent on March 27, Barr had announced that Mueller had not found a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Barr also said Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge. Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote a previously unknown private letter to the Justice Department, which revealed a degree of dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr objecting to his early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions that appeared to clear President Trump on possible obstruction of justice, according to the Justice Department and three people with direct knowledge of the communication between the two men. The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of the anger among the special counsel’s investigators about Mr. Barr’s characterization of their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to wrongly claim he had been vindicated. It was unclear what specific objections Mr. Mueller raised in his letter. Mr. Barr defended his descriptions of the investigation’s conclusions in conversations with Mr. Mueller over the days after he sent the letter, according to two people with knowledge of their discussions.
Special counsel Robert Mueller told Attorney General William Barr in a letter sent in late March that Barr's description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions did not "capture the context, nature, and substance" of his findings, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote in the letter, according to the Post. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.” Mueller’s letter was reportedly sent on March 27, just days after Barr released a four-page letter laying out what he described as Mueller’s principal conclusions. In it, Mueller reportedly requested that Barr release the introductions and executive summaries from his lengthy report on Russian interference and made suggestions of how the sections could be redacted to conceal sensitive material. “Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation,” Mueller wrote, according to the Post.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday said Attorney General William Barr "must answer" for reports that special counsel Robert Mueller objected to Barr's summarization of the conclusions in the investigation into Russian election interference. Nadler's comment comes after the Washington Post reported that Mueller sent Barr a letter in late March expressing concern that Barr did not "fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the special counsel's probe. "I have demanded the letter & Barr must answer for this. Mueller must be allowed to testify," Nadler tweeted shortly after the Post published its report, which comes a day before Barr is slated to testify before Congress.
Washington (CNN) The Mueller report documents at least 77 specific instances where President Donald Trump's campaign staff, administration officials and family members, Republican backers and his associates lied or made false assertions (sometimes unintentionally) to the public, Congress, or authorities, according to a new CNN analysis. The plurality of lies came from Trump himself, and most of them took place while he was president. The redacted version of the 448-page report released by the Justice Department earlier this month didn't find conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not decide whether Trump obstructed justice in violation of the law, though he investigated it thoroughly and found in several instances both potentially obstructive behavior and motive.
Tech challenges prevented special counsel from establishing full picture of what happened. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against individuals connected with President Donald Trump’s campaign for their ties to Russia, but he said the investigation faced numerous challenges, including technological ones, in establishing a full picture of what transpired in 2015 and 2016. “While the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges,” Mueller wrote in his report made public Thursday by the Justice Department. The special counsel’s office “learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated — including some associated with the Trump Campaign deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long term retention of data or communication records,” the report said. “In such cases the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with the other known facts.”
(Reuters) - Numerous investigations spun out of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe are still alive and kicking, presenting potential ongoing legal and political risk for President Donald Trump, some of his former advisers and others. Even though Trump avoided a knockout blow from the April 18 Mueller report, the special counsel disclosed more than a dozen active criminal inquiries that will play out for months to come, some possibly into the 2020 election campaign season. Details on most of these cases are unclear as they were redacted in the 448-page report. Only two were not blacked out: one case versus former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen; and one versus Greg Craig, a former White House counsel in the Obama administration.
The libertarian political network funded by billionaire Charles Koch on Tuesday is not happy with the $2 trillion infrastructure price tag agreed upon by President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate. In a statement first given to CNBC, Americans for Prosperity, one of the key groups in the influential Koch network, ripped the idea of spending that much on infrastructure and instead urged leaders to focus on cutting regulations. “If Congress wants to find money to modernize our roads and bridges, we encourage them to look to their own pockets – Americans have been filling them up for years,” Americans for Prosperity’s head of government affairs Brent Gardner said. “Instead of proposing a $2 trillion catch-all ‘infrastructure’ bill and asking hard-working Americans to fund it by paying more at the pump, Washington lawmakers should cut the red tape and stop wasting the tax dollars we give them.”
President Donald Trump often weaves his opposition to late-term abortion into his speeches at rallies around the country. His April 27 event in Green Bay, Wis., followed his pattern of twisting the actual practice and circumstances of a rare event. Trump said he was shocked that Wisconsin’s Democratic governor said he would veto a bill that would punish doctors who don’t try to preserve the life of an infant born alive after an attempted abortion. "The baby is born," Trump said. "The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby." This is a distortion. Cases of late-term abortions, which are uncommon, involve either a pregnancy that poses an immediate threat to the life of the mother, or infants with abnormalities so severe that they are unlikely to live more than a few days. In the even rarer situations when the baby emerges alive, parents would decide whether to ask their doctors to make any and all efforts to keep breathing.
(CNN) - House Democrats came into power this past winter divided on how to deal with an emerging groundswell of public support behind "Medicare for All" plans, and almost five months in, the answer, at least for some, is clear: Embrace it. At a first hearing Tuesday, they invited high-profile health care activist Ady Barkan, a 35-year-old father who is confined to a motorized wheelchair by ALS, to testify on the Medicare for All bill introduced recently by Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingell. Speaking through a voice synthesizer, Barkan challenged Democrats who support making incremental changes to Obamacare to back swift and drastic action instead. "Some people argue that although Medicare for All is a great idea, we need to move slowly to get there," he said. "But I needed Medicare for All yesterday. Millions of people need it today. The time to pass this law is now." "The ugly truth is this: Health care is not treated as a human right in the United States of America. This fact is outrageous. And it is far past time that we change it," Barkan told the committee, using software that tracks his eye movements and converts text into speech. Barkan's testimony was designed to cut through debate about the hefty price tag and political tradeoffs attached to creating a government-run health program.
Their hopes hang on whether or not the Supreme Court will ignore precedent. Here’s a pro tip for lawyers: if you are going to ask a court to fundamentally alter the balance of power between the legislative branch and the judiciary, it’s a good idea to accurately describe any Supreme Court cases you rely upon. It’s a bad idea to tell the court that a case that absolutely eviscerates your legal argument is the best thing you have going for you. Earlier this month, two House committees issued subpoenas asking two banks to turn over financial records concerning President Donald Trump, his businesses, and his immediate family that helps run those businesses. At least one of these banks, Deutsche Bank, says it will comply with these subpoenas on Monday unless a court orders them not to. So, of course, Trump sued, seeking just such a court order. The case is Trump v. Deutsche Bank.
President Trump has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to keep two banks from responding to congressional subpoenas, setting up a legal showdown with Democrats eager to investigate his finances. The president, his three oldest children and his business, The Trump Organization, say the investigations by the House intelligence and Financial Services committees are overbroad and serve no purpose beyond harassment. and Chairman Adam Schiff of the intelligence committee said the suit was "only designed to put off meaningful accountability as long as possible." "As a private businessman, Trump routinely used his well-known litigiousness and the threat of lawsuits to intimidate others, but he will find that Congress will not be deterred from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities," the statement said.
President Donald Trump and leading Democratic lawmakers agreed a plan to overhaul U.S. infrastructure would need $2 trillion, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday. “We agreed on a number, which was very, very good,” Schumer said. Rebuilding the country’s aging infrastructure is one of the few bipartisan issues in American politics. Democrats and Republicans alike have stressed the importance of repairing and modernizing U.S. transportation, broadband, water and power projects, and both parties have submitted separate funding proposals to achieve those goals. Yet the issue has languished on Capitol Hill — and the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to refocus lawmakers through the label of “infrastructure week” have become a running joke in Congress.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that his panel would make a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding potential false testimony by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of the private military contractor Blackwater and an ally of President Trump.
“The evidence is so weighty that the Justice Department needs to consider this,” Schiff said during a Washington Post Live event.
Among other things, Schiff pointed to a meeting that took place nine days before Trump took office between Prince and a Russian financier close to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles islands.
President Donald Trump has proposed the introduction of a fee for migrants seeking asylum in the US, outlining the policy in a memorandum released Monday. The White House said the president issued the memorandum to the acting secretary of homeland security, Kevin McAleenan, to ensure that "legitimate asylum seekers can access asylum while more efficiently processing and removing illegal migrants who are not eligible and do not qualify." Among the series of new measures the president lays out in the memorandum is the imposition of "fees for asylum applications and work permit applications." Monday's memorandum did not outline how much migrants might be charged to claim asylum. Other proposals include setting a time limit of 180 days to process all asylum applications and barring migrants from working if they entered the US illegally. Officials have 90 days to shape the directives into workable regulations.
A U.S. Army veteran is being held without bail, accused of plotting an attack to avenge the killing of Muslims. Mark Domingo, 26, faces terrorism-related charges after his arrest in an FBI sting. Prosecutors say he planned to set off a bomb in Long Beach, California, on Sunday. Authorities say the infantryman who served a combat stint in Afghanistan recently converted to Islam and was quickly radicalized, reports CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti. The investigation began after the FBI saw an apparent online post from Domingo, saying: "America needs another Vegas event" to give "a taste of the terror they gladly spread all over the world" – referring to the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people. He also allegedly sought "retribution" for last month's mosque killings in New Zealand.
The mayor was briefly accused of assaulting a young man. A GOP source says right-wing operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman approached him to make similarly untrue accusations. A pair of right-wing provocateurs are being accused of attempting to recruit young Republican men to level false allegations of sexual assault against Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. The details of the operatives’ attempt emerged as one man suddenly surfaced with a vague and uncorroborated allegation that Buttigieg had assaulted him. The claim was retracted hours later on a Facebook page appearing to belong to the man. A Republican source told The Daily Beast that lobbyist Jack Burkman and internet troll Jacob Wohl approached him last week to try to convince him to falsely accuse Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, of engaging him sexually while he was too drunk to consent.
POWAY, California - The 19-year-old was the son of a devout church elder, a high school overachiever, and a piano player who went on to shoot up a suburban San Diego synagogue. Nineteen-year-old nursing student John T. Earnest, who was charged with murder Sunday as the lone gunman in the deadly Poway Synagogue shooting, played piano for hours a day and earned a 4.31 grade point average. His father was a church elder whom neighbors called “the sweetest man.” But somewhere on his path, Earnest took a terrible turn, claiming Adolf Hitler as an idol and writing what appears to be his own rambling manifesto that Jews “deserved nothing but hell.” He wanted to be the one to, as he put it, “Send. Them. There.” Police say someone purporting to be him posted the anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, white supremacist “manifesto”—which eerily mirrored the Q&A style that Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant used in his own pre-massacre diatribe—about 20 minutes before he walked into the Poway synagogue with an AR-15 style assault rifle and started shooting—killing one woman and injuring three others—before the gun malfunctioned and he was chased out by an armed security guard.
Rosenstein resigns effective May 11, ending tumultuous run as Justice Department’s second-in-command
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein — whose tumultuous two years as the No. 2 Justice Department official were marked by battles over the special-counsel probe of President Trump — submitted a resignation letter Monday indicating he will leave the job in two weeks. Rosenstein’s departure had been expected since the beginning of the year, but the date was repeatedly pushed back as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wound down his investigation and compiled a report detailing his findings. Since his first days on the job, Rosenstein’s role in the Trump administration was controversial, from the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017 to the conclusion by Rosenstein and Attorney General William P. Barr that there was not sufficient evidence for an obstruction-of-justice case against the president.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. (FOX 11) - Federal and local authorities have arrested a suspect in connection with an alleged domestic terror plot aimed at "multiple targets'' in Southern California, officials announced Monday. Mark Steven Domingo, 26, of Reseda, a former U.S. Army infantryman who served in Afghanistan, was arrested Friday after he received what he thought was a bomb, but was actually an inert device supplied to him by an undercover law enforcement officer, federal officials said. In a criminal complaint filed Saturday by federal prosecutors and unsealed earlier today, Domingo was charged with providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists. Domingo, who has been in federal custody since his arrest, is expected to make his initial appearance Monday afternoon in United States District Court. According to a 30-page affidavit in support of the complaint, since early March, Domingo “planned and took steps to manufacture and use a weapon of mass destruction in order to commit mass murder.”
John Earnest allegedly murdered a woman during Passover services after posting anti-Semitic screed online. POWAY, California—The parents of John Earnest, who allegedly opened fire on a synagogue Saturday, called their son evil on Monday. “We are shocked and deeply saddened by the terrible attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue,” the family said in a statement released through an attorney. “But our sadness pales in comparison to the grief and anguish our son has caused for so many innocent people. He has killed and injured the faithful who were gathered in a sacred place on a sacred day. To our great shame, he is now part of the history of evil that has been perpetrated on Jewish people for centuries.”
Long known as a law-and-order prosecutor, Atty. Gen. William Barr is under fire from critics who say he acted more as a partisan advocate for President Trump than an impartial law enforcement officer when he released the special counsel report into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. In scheduled back-to-back congressional hearings this week, Democrats will have their first chance to grill Barr since he stood at the Justice Department podium on April 18 and repeatedly declared that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had found no “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin-backed operation. Trump has relentlessly made that claim in tweets and speeches, although Mueller’s report avoided using the term “collusion,” explaining that it is not a crime or even a term recognized in federal law. Two weeks earlier, Barr also went further than Mueller in a letter to Congress by saying Trump hadn’t obstructed justice by attempting to interfere with the investigation. In fact, Mueller did not make a recommendation on the issue, saying it was up to Congress to act or for prosecutors to consider after Trump leaves office.
Washington (CNN) - President Donald Trump on Monday accused the New York attorney general's office of illegally investigating the National Rifle Association and called on the group, which has been roiled by a leadership fight, to "get its act together quickly." "The NRA is under siege by (New York Gov. Andrew) Cuomo and the New York State A.G., who are illegally using the State's legal apparatus to take down and destroy this very important organization, & others," Trump wrote in a tweet. "It must get its act together quickly, stop the internal fighting, & get back to GREATNESS - FAST!" On Saturday, New York Attorney General Letitia James' office announced in a statement it had launched an investigation into the NRA and had issued subpoenas to the organization, but did not confirm what the probe was in regard to. The investigation comes after a dispute between the group's president, Oliver North, and chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, in which North accused LaPierre of financial misconduct, including the improper use of $200,000 of NRA funds to purchase clothing from an NRA vendor, according to the Wall Street Journal. - Sorry Donnie you are wrong once again, it is the job of the attorney general to investigate criminal activity.
In the video captured by a member of the Dream Defenders, a woman we shall call “Toe-ler Swift” pushes one of the young men she claims ran over her pink toes. The footage (see what I did there?) shows that the boys do not touch the woman as she angrily berates them, calling them a “bunch of thugs” [sic]. Halfway through the clip, a man carrying what appears to be a firearm emerges from an SUV. As he wields the weapon, the woman informs Captain Save-a-Toe that one of the boys ran over her foot, pointing him out to the gunman. The boys scatter while the man yells at them, calling them “dumb-ass fucking niggers” and “stupid niggers” while carrying what police later described as a Springfield XT9 automatic pistol.
What should have been the best weekend in one college football player’s life turned into tragedy when he was injured and his college teammate killed in a shooting early Sunday morning at a party in Topeka, Kan. Corey Ballentine, a 23-year-old senior cornerback at Washburn University in Topeka, was the 180th pick in the NFL draft after being selected by the New York Giants. According to ESPN, he was the 2018 Cliff Harris Award winner as the small college defensive player of the year and was one of three Division II players selected to the Senior Bowl.
After an apparent celebration kicking off the return to 11 White History Months in a row, administrators at an exclusive private school in New York are scrambling to explain reports that a teacher held a series of mock slave auctions in which white students bid on their black classmates. According to WPIX, Rebecca Antinozzi, a white fifth-grade social studies teacher at Chapel School in Bronxville, N.Y., reportedly organized a mock slave auction where the teacher took the black students into the hall, put “imaginary chains” on their necks and wrists and shackled their ankles before parading them in front of their white classmates who posed as wealthy slave owners playing the original version of The Price Is Right’s showcase showdown.
A high school teacher resigned from an Illinois high school after he was exposed by anti-racism activists as a cyber-racist, which is like regular racism but for white cowards who can only espouse their hate when they are far from negroes and have a good wi-fi connection. Online sleuths found a number of posts reportedly penned by the educator bragging about indoctrinating students with white nationalist ideology, finally answering the burning question: “What do racists put on their W-2s?” Kevin Pummill was a mild-mannered, unassuming teacher at Pekin Community High School in Pekin, Ill. But according to Identify Evropa, a website dedicated to outing white supremacists online, he was allegedly known as “Undercover Academic,” a pro-white social studies teacher who informed students at his lily-white school about the dangers of race mixing, Mexicans and—of course—the Jews. He also boasted about bringing his wife into the fold of white supremacy and lamented the number of non-white kids trick or treating in his neighborhood.
In his everyday life, Stephen Arnquist was a typical high school teacher. Since 2018, he has worked at Skyline High School in Dallas, Texas, whose student body is 99 percent non-white. Like many white men, he enjoyed activities such as balancing his sunglasses on the bill of his baseball cap, standing for the national anthem, wondering about Chicago and boasting about his Caucasian heritage. But Stephen Arnquist is also allegedly a white supremacist. To most people, Arnquist’s public persona came across like a store-brand white man. But online, it was as if the 33-year-old Japanese teacher had transformed himself from Dollar Tree Clark Kent into a super racist. Luckily, the instructor’s internet antics had been carefully concealed until an online group exposed Arnquist’s alleged white supremacist identity with the one element that could piece his cyber-Nazi armor. On Tuesday, Eugene Antifa, an anti-fascist group dedicated to outing white supremacists, published information connecting Arnquist to multiple hate groups and neo-Nazi websites, including Identity Evropa, Stormfront and American Renaissance. However, the post did not indicate if Arnquist was tied to the granddaddy of all extremist sites—Facebook.
One difficulty about a career in politics is that the longer you’re in the business, the longer a track record of quotes and video your opponents can scour to undercut you. It’s something former vice president Joe Biden is contending with as he enters the Democratic primary, and it’s an obstacle his old Senate colleague Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has run into in the wake of the Mueller report.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina continued his stalwart defense of President Trump's conduct, saying the president, unlike former President Bill Clinton, did "nothing wrong" that would warrant his impeachment and removal from office. "What President Clinton did was interfere in a lawsuit against him by Paula Jones and others, hide the evidence, encouraged people to lie. So, to me, he took the legal system and turned it upside down. But it doesn't have to technically be a crime," Graham said on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "What President Trump did here was completely cooperate in an investigation, a million documents, let everybody that the special counsel wanted to talk to be interviewed." "I believe the president did nothing wrong. Whether you like him or not, I'll leave that up to you," he added. Graham, who has become one of the White House's strongest allies in Congress, was one of the leading Republican lawmakers advocating for Clinton's impeachment and conviction in the wake of independent counsel Ken Starr's report, which said the president lied during a sworn deposition about an extramarital affair he had with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. - Sorry Lindsey Graham you are wrong 10 cases of obstruction of justice are 10 reasons to impeach Trump.
Southwest Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials who monitor the carrier were unaware that a standard safety feature, designed to warn pilots about malfunctioning sensors, on Boeing 737 Max jets was turned off when Southwest began flying the model in 2017, reported Andy Pastzor of the Wall Street Journal. In earlier 737 models, the safety feature alerted pilots when a sensor called the "angle-of-attack vane" incorrectly conveyed the pitch of the plane's nose, according to Pastzor. In the Max, it functions as such while also signaling when the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — a new automated system linked to both October's Lion Air crash and March's Ethiopian Airlines crash — could misfire; but these alerts were only enabled if carriers purchased additional safety features, Pastzor wrote.
In late March, an arsonist set fire to an Escondido mosque and left a note referencing a shooting rampage at two New Zealand mosques in which dozens were killed. On Saturday, a gunman opened fire at a Poway synagogue, killing one and injuring three others. Authorities now are investigating whether both acts of hate were committed by the same man: John T. Earnest. The 19-year-old was arrested Saturday after the synagogue shooting. The manifesto Earnest allegedly wrote speaks at length of anti-Semitism. “I scorched a mosque in Escondido,” the manifesto says. Authorities say they are now probing the manifesto as part of the larger investigation. Who is the Poway shooting suspect? Earnest, a Rancho Peñasquitos resident, is enrolled at Cal State San Marcos. President Karen Haynes confirmed his attendance and said in a statement that the school was cooperating with authorities.
Heading into the weekend it was a foregone conclusion that Avengers: Endgame would deliver the largest opening weekend of all-time, both domestically and globally, but to deliver a three-day domestic gross totaling an estimated $350 million and a global weekend over $1 billion was almost inconceivable. Today that figure has become a reality as Endgame not only delivered an estimated $350 million over the course of its first three days in domestic release, but a massive $1.2 billion at the global box office in just its first five days in release.
Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said Sunday that President Trump likely would be indicted on obstruction of justice if he were not president. "I’ve been a prosecutor for nearly 30 years, and I can tell you I’ve personally prosecuted obstruction cases on far, far less evidence than this," Yates, whom Trump fired after she refused to defend his travel ban targeting several majority-Muslim countries, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I believe if he were not the president of the United States, he would likely be indicted on obstruction," she added. Yates's comments come after special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report on the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election was released to the public. The probe did not uncover evidence of coordination between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin. Mueller and his team did not come to a conclusion on the issue of obstruction of justice, instead detailing 10 potential instances and deferring on a judgment.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) fired back Sunday at Attorney General William Barr after the attorney general warned he may not appear at a scheduled committee hearing this week. "The witness is not going to tell the committee how to conduct its hearing, period," Nadler said Sunday, according to CNN. Nadler also threatened to issue a subpoena if President Trump's attorney general refuses to attend the hearing. "Then we will have to subpoena him, and we will have to use whatever means we can to enforce the subpoena," Nadler said. Barr previously told House Democrats that they need to change the proposed format for the hearing, scheduled for Thursday, before he agrees to attend. In addition to five minutes of questioning for each member of the committee, Nadler has proposed an additional round that would allow for each side to question Barr for 30 minutes, a source said earlier Sunday. That round of questioning would allow the committee counsels for both parties to question Barr.
State legislature gets Aug. 1 deadline to enact new maps for 2020. A three-judge panel on Thursday ruled that Michigan must use new congressional and legislative maps in 2020, potentially setting up a more favorable battlefield for House Democrats, who flipped two seats in the state last fall. The federal court invalidated portions of the existing maps, drawn by the GOP-controlled legislature in 2011, pointing to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of voters. The League of Women Voters and some Democrats had challenged the state’s 162 legislative and congressional districts, but the final suit only targeted 34 of those districts. Michigan has 14 congressional districts. The plaintiffs challenged the 1st, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th congressional districts. After the 2018 midterms, Democrats now hold five of those nine seats, and the full delegation is evenly split between the two parties, 7-7. The court found that all nine of the challenged congressional districts are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders “because they dilute the views of Democratic voters.” The court reached the same conclusion for seven state Senate districts and 11 state House districts.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham on Sunday pushed back against White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s recent downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election, calling Moscow’s actions a “big deal” deserving of new sanctions immediately. Still, the South Carolina Republican insisted President Trump had done nothing wrong, citing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s refusal to charge Trump with either conspiracy or obstruction of justice in the Russia probe. “I think the idea that this president obstructed justice is absurd,” Graham, a fierce Trump ally, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “I can’t think of one thing that President Trump did to stop Mueller from doing his job. . . . I’ve heard all I need to really know.” During the interview, however, Graham challenged the assertion by Trump’s son-in-law in a Time magazine interview on Tuesday that Russia’s bid to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor amounted to a “couple of Facebook ads” — and that Mueller’s investigation was more damaging to the country than the Russian effort.
Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday said he doesn't care if President Donald Trump told then-White House counsel Don McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller — the Mueller investigation is over. "It's all theater — it doesn't matter," the South Carolina Republican told "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan. "I don't care what he said to Don McGahn — it's what he did. The president never obstructed." "It doesn't matter to you that the president is changing a version of events and some would say lying?" Brennan asked. In a redacted version of Mueller's report, McGahn is reported to have said he refused to fire Mueller when ordered to do so by Trump. The president has denied he told anyone to fire McGahn, tweeting that if he had wanted to fire Mueller, he could have done it himself.
POWAY, California – Authorities increased security Sunday at houses of worship one day after a teen gunman killed one woman and injured a rabbi, a child and another man during Passover celebrations at a San Diego-area synagogue. “We don’t condone threats and acts of violence against places of worship. We are a county that is welcoming of all faiths,” San Diego County Sheriff William Gore said after the shooting Saturday evening. President Donald Trump called the attack a hate crime and promised full federal cooperation. Lori Kaye, 60, was killed in the shooting. Authorities said a 34-year-old man and a young girl were also hit by shrapnel. Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who suffered defensive wounds to his hands, on Sunday recalled the moment of terror when the shooter confronted him. Goldstein was in the middle of his Saturday sermon at the Chabad of Poway when he heard loud noises and became “face-to-face with this murderer, this terrorist” when he turned around, he said during a phone interview Sunday on “Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist.” Goldstein said he put his hands up to protect himself and lost one of his fingers in the shooting. “As soon as he saw me, he started to shoot towards me and that's when I put my hands up and my fingers got blown away," he said on TODAY. "Then he continued on and killed Lori Kaye right there on the spot." Witnesses said the gunman's AR-style rifle apparently jammed and he fled back out while being shot at by an off-duty Border Patrol agent attending services. Goldstein said his synagogue, like many others, can't afford a fulltime armed guard, and that he'd previously welcomed the armed agent's presence during important services.
“I can absolutely make a big traffic problem all over the world,” the hacker said. A hacker broke into thousands of accounts belonging to users of two GPS tracker apps, giving him the ability to monitor the locations of tens of thousands of vehicles and even turn off the engines for some of them while they were in motion, Motherboard has learned. The hacker, who goes by the name L&M, told Motherboard he hacked into more than 7,000 iTrack accounts and more than 20,000 ProTrack accounts, two apps that companies use to monitor and manage fleets of vehicles through GPS tracking devices. The hacker was able to track vehicles in a handful of countries around the world, including South Africa, Morocco, India, and the Philippines. On some cars, the software has the capability of remotely turning off the engines of vehicles that are stopped or are traveling 12 miles per hour or slower, according to the manufacturer of certain GPS tracking devices. By reverse engineering ProTrack and iTrack’s Android apps, L&M said he realized that all customers are given a default password of 123456 when they sign up. At that point, the hacker said he brute-forced “millions of usernames” via the apps’ API. Then, he said he wrote a script to attempt to login using those usernames and the default password.
The woman killed during Saturday’s San Diego synagogue shooting stepped in front of the bullets aimed at her longtime friend and rabbi as he raced to evacuate children, according to her friends and authorities. Authorities said Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, was killed at Chabad of Poway when a nursing student opened fire with an AR-style rifle. Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein suffered defensive wounds to his hands but survived the attack and then gave a sermon to the huddled congregation before going to the hospital, Audrey Jacobs, a friend, said in a Facebook post. Kaye leaves behind a husband and adult daughter. "Your final good deed was taking the bullets for Rabbi Mendel Goldstein to save his life," Jacobs wrote in a post she said had been approved by the other victims and their families. "Tragically the rabbi was still shot in the hand and he gave a sermon telling everyone to stay strong."
The ‘Full Frontal’ host’s alternative to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner aired Saturday night on TBS. Plus, watch an exclusive clip from the event. Following an amusing cold-open parody of Aliens featuring Sigourney Weaver (!) as Ripley delivering an inspirational speech to Samantha Bee’s disheveled Newt, the second annual Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was underway. Presented by Full Frontal and hosted by Bee, the event, which dedicated all its proceeds to the Committee to Protect Journalists, was taped on Friday night but aired on Saturday to compete with the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which President Trump once again refused to attend, and whose organisers caved to the thin-skinned ex-reality show host’s demands by not having a comic this year following last year's appearance by Michelle Wolf. “If Trump really wanted to ruin journalism, he’d put his name on it,” cracked Bee at the top of her opening monologue, before getting serious: “Thank you for holding the president—and all of us—accountable.”
Researchers attempt to measure how often people oversell themselves in society. Researchers embarked on a novel study intent on measuring what a Princeton philosophy professor contends is one of the most salient features of our culture — the ability to play the expert without being one. Or, as the social scientists put it, to BS. Research by John Jerram and Nikki Shure of the University College of London, and Phil Parker of Australian Catholic University attempted to measure the pervasiveness of this trait in society and identify its most ardent practitioners. Study participants were asked to assess their knowledge of 16 math topics on a five-point scale ranging from “never heard of it” to “know it well, understand the concept.” Crucially, three of those topics were complete fabrications: “proper numbers,” “subjunctive scaling” and “declarative fractions.” Those who said they were knowledgeable about the fictitious topics were categorized as BSers.
Amid the ouster of Lt. Col. Oliver North and a New York Attorney General investigation, NRA members say the organization has lost focus on its original mission. Thirty-three-year-old Allan Scott and his 66-year-old father Jim made the six-hour drive from Pittsburgh to the 148th annual National Rifle Association convention here this week hoping to explore “15 acres of guns and gear.” Both dedicated supporters of President Donald Trump, who roused more than 15,000 members here with Vice President Mike Pence and a slate of other conservative grandees Friday, the Scotts didn’t come for the political red meat and dystopic messaging tossed from inside Lucas Oil Stadium at the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action Leadership Forum. There was Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, talking about the fight to uphold “Judeo-Christian values.” There was Pence, who talked about the Green New Deal. There was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), comparing the Democratic primary to a Saturday Night Live sketch, mocking former Vice President Joe Biden (“Joe will be offering backrubs for anyone that would like it,” he said). And of course there was Trump, whose biggest applause line came when he talked about “building the wall” and the 400 miles that would supposedly be built “by the end of next year.”
The gun rights group usually goes after enemies on the left. Now the NRA’s lawyers are zeroing in on one of their own: Ollie North. The National Rifle Association took a shot at its own president just days before the kick-off of its huge national meeting. An updated version of a civil complaint, entered in Virginia state court on April 24, make new claims about Col. Oliver North’s relationship with the company that runs NRATV, the video network linked to the gun rights group. The filings are part of an eye-popping lawsuit the organization filed against its long-time ad agency, which built and runs the network. The suit gives a rare narrative of the tension within the organization. And the updates to the litigation, which have not been previously reported, indicate that friction in the organization is so hot that the NRA is willing to zero in on its own president. The initial complaint, filed on April 12, discussed North’s contract with Ackerman McQueen, the advertising firm it has worked with for upwards of 30 years. But it didn’t provide much detail on North’s relationship with the ad agency beyond that he would help it produce a documentary series for NRATV.
The Mueller Report contains a case against the president as strong as many we saw working as federal prosecutors. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is 448 pages long, full of shocking conduct and detail that has prompted non-stop discussion since it was released last week. But one thing seems indisputable from our perspective as former federal prosecutors looking at the evidence laid out by the report: If Donald Trump were not now president he would have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice. And that case would be as strong, if not stronger, than many we saw working in New York and Chicago, respectively. Justice Department policy prohibits the prosecution of a president while in office, but nothing forbids one from being charged after leaving the White House. The Mueller Report even noted one reason to investigate the president was to preserve evidence for possible future use even though Trump can’t be charged now. And Mueller collected a stunning array of evidence that clearly shows that from 2017 until 2019, Trump engaged in a persistent pattern to try to end, or at least limit the scope of, investigations surrounding him and his family.
Attorney General William Barr has warned House Democrats that he might not appear as scheduled this week in front of the Judiciary Committee, The Hill has confirmed. Barr has told Democrats they need to change the proposed format for the hearing, CNN first reported Sunday, citing an unidentified source. In addition to five minutes of questioning for each member of the committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the committee, has proposed an additional round that would allow for each side to question Barr for 30 minutes, a source said. That round of questioning also would allow the committee counsels for both parties to question Barr. Nadler also has proposed having the committee enter a closed session to discuss redacted sections of special counsel Robert Mueller's report, the source added. Barr has rejected the additional rounds of questioning, but it's possible he and Democrats could reach a deal before Thursday, when the hearing is scheduled. The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment. Lawmakers are expected to grill Barr on the Mueller report, which was made public earlier this month.
Several businesses affiliated with the gun rights group also reportedly received subpoenas. New York Attorney General Letitia James has launched an investigation into the National Rifle Association after reports surfaced of financial improprieties within the organization. “The Office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James has launched an investigation related to the National Rifle Association (NRA). As part of this investigation, the Attorney General has issued subpoenas,” a spokesperson for the attorney general's office told NPR. According to NPR, the group received a document preservation notice in connection with the AG's investigation, and The New York Times reports that several businesses connected with the gun rights group also received subpoenas. The announcement comes just hours after and the pro-gun group's president, Oliver North, announced that he has been ousted, and The Daily Beast exclusively reported that longtime NRA lawyer, Steve Hart, has been suspended.
In his first tweet on Saturday morning, President Donald Trump ignored the first player picked in the NFL draft, Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray, who is black, to praise the number two pick -- a white player with a history of racist tweets. In his tweet, Trump skipped over the Heisman Trophy winner to celebrate Ohio State's Nick Bosa -- who missed most of the 2018 season -- for being picked second. "Congratulations to Nick Bosa on being picked number two in the NFL Draft. You will be a great player for years to come, maybe one of the best. Big Talent! San Francisco will embrace you but most importantly, always stay true to yourself. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" he tweeted. According to to the San Franciso Chronicle,"Bosa recently deleted tweets in which he called Colin Kaepernick a 'clown,' referred to Beyonce’s music as 'complete trash' and called 'Black Panther' the worst Marvel movie. On Thursday, the website Blacksportsonline posted threads showing Bosa following and liking accounts that feature white nationalist posts. The twitter feed @rzstprogramming showed Bosa retweeted a tweet referring to 'crappernick.'"
The Trump administration has agreed to allow a former White House personnel security director, who House Democrats threatened with contempt, to testify on May 1 — a de-escalation move after President Trump said he would ignore “all the subpoenas.” White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone sent a letter Friday to Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, saying that Carl Kline, the former White House personnel security director, would answer questions for the panel’s investigation of security clearance issues in an on-the-record interview next week. The White House had blocked Kline from showing up for a subpoenaed deposition earlier this week, leading Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) to announce that he’d hold Kline in contempt for ignoring a compulsory Hill summons.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said in a New York Times article published Friday that Russian hackers had infiltrated Florida's county-level election systems in 2016. Rubio detailed the attack to the Times, which included malicious viruses sent by the GRU, a Russian military intelligence unit, to government officials who were handling 2016 county elections. Though the hackers "were in a position" to alter voter roll data, Rubio said, they didn't appear to do so. The Republican senator's comments come after special counsel Robert Mueller's report said the FBI believed the GRU had successfully gained access to the "network of at least one Florida county government." Florida has been at the center of Russian hacking concerns for years, but Mueller's report furthered official conclusions on the hacking. The Tampa Bay Times reported last week that the agency would meet with state officials weeks after the election hacking report. This is the latest development in the state's concerns over hacking since tensions boiled over during the race for November's midterms last year.
INDIANAPOLIS — The president of the National Rifle Association, Oliver L. North, announced on Saturday that he would not serve a second term as the gun rights group faces some of its worst turmoil in years and grapples with an internal battle for its future. Mr. North said he would not be renominated in a letter that was read on his behalf at the group’s annual convention, where he and insurgents in the organization had sought to oust Wayne LaPierre, the group’s longtime chief executive. The power struggle was likely to be resolved at the group’s board meeting on Monday. Behind it is a widening crisis involving a legal battle between the N.R.A. and its most influential contractor, Ackerman McQueen, amid renewed threats from regulators in New York, where the N.R.A. is chartered, to investigate the group’s tax-exempt status. With contributions lagging, the N.R.A. is also facing an increasingly well-financed gun control movement, motivated by a string of mass shootings. In the statement that was read to group members, Mr. North said he believed a committee should be created to review the N.R.A.’s finances.
SAN FRANCISCO — David Dancer is a 48-year-old marketing executive who has worked for big brands like Charles Schwab and Teleflora. A year ago, he got a call from a recruiter for a different kind of company: MedMen, a cannabis retailer that has been called “the Apple Store of weed.” The opening was for a chief marketing officer. He took it. One of Mr. Dancer’s early projects was a slick two-minute video by the director Spike Jonze that begins with an anecdote about George Washington as a hemp grower, a staple of dorm-room conversation. It concludes with a suburban couple coming home with a bright red bag of legally purchased pot, symbolizing “the new normal” — an ending that, like his own career twist, seemed improbable not long ago.
“It can and should be a part of anyone’s everyday life,” Mr. Dancer said in a recent interview, sounding very much like a man who has been hired to do marketing. Although cannabis remains illegal on the federal level, 33 states now allow its sale at least for medical purposes. Ten of them, including California, have legalized recreational use. And as new markets open and capital continues to flood in, the cannabis industry has become, by some measures, one of the country’s fastest-growing job sectors.
One of the nation's top law enforcement officials said Moscow's meddling in the past has been a 'dress rehearsal' for the 2020 presidential contest. Russian efforts to influence American public opinion are not confined only to periods around elections, FBI Director Chris Wray said Friday. "It's pretty much a 365-days-a-year threat. And that has absolutely continued," Wray said. The FBI chief said it consists of constant use of social media, with "fake news, propaganda, false personas, et cetera, to spin us up, pit us against each other, sow divisiveness and discord, and undermine Americans' faith in democracy." That effort "was at full speed" during the 2018 midterm elections, he said. But the U.S. did not detect any material interference from Moscow during the midterms with either the election or the campaign infrastructure. In an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Wray said social media companies "have made enormous strides" in identifying and shutting down Russia's social media efforts. "But we recognize our adversaries will keep upping their game. 2018 was just a dress rehearsal for 2020," he said.
Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color. If only more people had paid attention. Shafiqah Hudson remembers the moment she realized something was off. She saw a tweet from an account she had never seen before: “#EndFathersDay because I’m tired of all these white women stealing our good black mens.” Something about the grammar—not to mention the idea that black women wanted to abolish Father’s Day because of interracial dating—just felt too cartoonish to be real. That day, Hudson, who tweets as @sassycrass, had a job interview. It was June of 2014, the Friday before Father’s Day. As she typed out her follow-up thank-you note and went through what she calls “the unemployment shuffle,” toggling between social media and email and playing with her cat, she spotted some reactions from people she followed to other suspiciously inflammatory tweets posted by a handful of new Twitter accounts claiming to be black feminists. “#EndFathersDay,” read one. “We’ll bring it back when men stop raping and killing us.”
“Trump’s opacity is moving some members into the impeachment camp,” one Democratic lawmaker tells The Daily Beast. “Translation: it’s always the cover-up that gets ‘em.” Donald Trump’s declaration this week that his administration will stonewall “all the subpoenas” from Congress has pushed House Democrats to rethink their impeachment calculus. Top Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have said the party will consider impeachment only after doing due diligence—like hearing from key figures like Special Counsel Robert Mueller, obtaining the documents he used in his investigation, and more. But the White House’s plans to indefinitely stiff-arm their requests for documents and testimony, combined with the instances of alleged obstruction already laid out in Mueller’s report, is complicating that plan— and may drag House Democrats toward impeachment as an appropriately forceful way to respond to the administration’s conduct. “I think the combination of the chilling depictions in the Mueller Report and Trump’s opacity is moving some members into the impeachment camp,” said one Democratic lawmaker. “Translation: it’s always the cover-up that gets ‘em.”
The comedian mocked the president and journalists alike in her second counter-event in Washington on Friday night. WASHINGTON — DC stands for “Death of Comedy,” so the old beltway joke goes. Comedian Samantha Bee sought to change that on Friday night. The late-night host of TBS' “Full Frontal” visited Washington for the second year to roast President Donald Trump at the “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Bee’s alternative to the annual black-tie White House Correspondents’ Association gala.
Maine on Friday became the latest state to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples' Day when Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill making the change official. Other states that have made the change include neighboring Vermont, Alaska and South Dakota "Our history is by no means perfect. But, for too long, it has been written and presented in a way that fails to acknowledge our shortcomings," Mills said in a statement. The October holiday is often criticized for celebrating the atrocities brought upon by colonization.
President Trump on Friday responded to a report that he approved a $2 million bill presented by North Korea to cover the medical costs for Otto Warmbier, an American college student who fell into a coma in North Korean custody and died shortly after being returned home after spending 17 months in a Pyongyang prison. “No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else,” Trump tweeted. “This is not the Obama Administration that paid 1.8 Billion Dollars for four hostages, or gave five terroist hostages plus, who soon went back to battle, for traitor Sgt. Bergdahl!” On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that a $2 million invoice was presented to U.S. State Department envoy Joseph Yun hours before Warmbier was flown out of Pyongyang in a coma on June 13, 2017. The 22-year-old died six days later near his parents’ home in Ohio.
BEIJING — North Korea issued a $2 million bill for the hospital care of comatose American Otto Warmbier, insisting that a U.S. official sign a pledge to pay it before being allowed to fly the University of Virginia student home from Pyongyang in 2017. The presentation of the invoice — not previously disclosed by U.S. or North Korean officials — was extraordinarily brazen even for a regime known for its aggressive tactics. But the main U.S. envoy sent to retrieve Warmbier signed an agreement to pay the medical bill on instructions passed down from President Trump, according to two people familiar with the situation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The bill went to the Treasury Department, where it remained — unpaid — throughout 2017, the people said. However, it is unclear whether the Trump administration later paid the bill, or whether it came up during preparations for Trump’s two summits with Kim Jong Un.
"The idea that the acts laid out by Mueller didn’t add up to a ‘prosecutable case’ is ridiculous" Attorney General Bill Barr has still not explained why he concluded that there was not enough evidence to conclude President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice, despite extensive evidence for the crime on multiple occasions in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Barr seems to be worried about his own lack of an explanation, however, as signaled by a new Washington Post report citing an anonymous “senior Justice Department official” offering a defense of the attorney general’s conclusion. In particular, the report discusses the 2017 incident in which Trump ordered his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to curtail the special counsel’s investigation to stop probing the 2016 election and his own actions. Lewandowski never carried out this order, but Mueller argued that the attempt met all the criteria for obstruction of justice (though he declined to make a final prosecutorial decision). Barr effectively disagreed with the case Mueller made.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of President Donald Trump’s, once said that a president's refusal to comply with congressional oversight was an impeachable offense. In a video unearthed from December 1998 circulating on Twitter on Friday, the South Carolina legislator passionately states that Richard Nixon could have been impeached for failing to comply with subpoenas from Congress. "The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury," Graham said two decades ago. At the time, then-Representative Graham was a member of the House Judiciary Committee, and subsequently served as a manager in the unsuccessful impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. President Trump said earlier this week that he would not comply with Congressional attempts to question administration officials. "We’re fighting all the subpoenas," Trump told reporters on Wednesday. "These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020."
President Trump was furious. He had just learned that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation went beyond Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign and into the White House — and that Trump himself was now under scrutiny for his actions in office. The next day, he attempted to oust Mueller, only to be thwarted by his White House counsel, according to the special counsel’s report. So Trump turned to the one person he could long count on to do his bidding: Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, described by senior White House advisers to investigators as a Trump “devotee.” In a private Oval Office meeting, the president dictated a message he wanted delivered to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions: that he needed to give a speech announcing he was limiting the scope of the investigation.
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director warned anew on Friday about Russia’s continued meddling in American elections, calling it a “significant counterintelligence threat.” The bureau has shifted additional agents and analysts to shore up defenses against foreign interference, according to a senior F.B.I. official. The Trump administration has come to see that Russia’s influence operations have morphed into a persistent threat. The F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have made permanent the task forces they created to confront 2018 midterm election interference, senior American national security officials said. “We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game,” Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said Friday in a speech in Washington, citing the presence of Russian intelligence officers in the United States and the Kremlin’s record of malign influence operations. “So we are very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020,” he said.
President Donald Trump on Friday called Robert E. Lee a “great general” as he defended his comments about a deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, one day after former Vice President Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign by citing Trump’s response to the events.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Friday, Trump was asked if he still believed that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Aug. 11-12 rallies and counterprotests, during which civil rights activist Heather Heyer was killed by a Nazi sympathizer who drove his car into a crowd. The perpetrator, James Alex Fields Jr., was found guilty of first degree murder and several other crimes in December.
“I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general,” Trump told reporters Friday.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has been criticized for his role in the very pro-Trump tilt the Department of Justice has given the Mueller Report, once vowed to Trump that he was “on his team” and could guarantee Mueller treated him “fairly,” the Washington Post reported Friday. “I give the investigation credibility,” Rosenstein reportedly said, according to one official familiar with the conversation who talked to the Post. “I can land the plane.”
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday teed off on the Obama administration’s handling of Russian election interference and hit back at critics of the Russia probe in his first public remarks since special counsel Robert Mueller’s report dropped last week. - I guess Rod Rosenstein forget McConnell Refused To Sign Bipartisan Statement On Russian Interference
Harvey Weinstein is now scheduled to stand trial for rape and sexual assault in September, three months later than initially planned. The judge set a new date of Sept. 9 for a trial that attorneys said is expected to last about a month. Jury selection is expected to last two weeks.
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- The Harris County District Attorney's Office announced Friday that 27 cases related to former Houston police officer Gerald Goines are pending dismissal. "Truthfulness is essential in a case that must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. We can't vouch for these officers' credibility," said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. This is the largest group of cases that has been dismissed since the "no-knock" raid on Harding Street dramatically altered how the Houston Police Department's undercover narcotics division operates. One of the cases involves 72-year-old Willie Gray. The cancer patient has so many health problems, he has been living with a relative for the past two years, far away from where he allegedly sold pot. On Friday, he was relieved to learn charges against him had been dismissed.
On Jan. 25, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley issued a shocking advisory alleging that 95,000 noncitizens were on the state’s voter rolls, 58,000 of whom had cast at least one ballot. Whitley, a Republican, directed county registrars to commence an immediate purge of these noncitizens using lists he would provide. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, also a Republican, promptly tweeted a “VOTER FRAUD ALERT” summarizing Whitley’s findings, and President Donald Trump repeated Whitley’s claims two days later. By that point, counties had already begun notifying targeted voters that they would be purged from the rolls. On Friday, Whitley quietly promised to rescind his January advisory and halt Texas’ voter purge as part of a settlement with multiple voting rights groups. The factual basis of Paxton and Trump’s tweets has been not just undermined, but fully revoked. Friday’s settlement is a good reminder to be incredibly skeptical of government officials who make eye-popping claims of voter fraud and whose partisan interests are at stake. Over and over and over again, these claims are later proved to be extremely dubious—if not outright false.
It took Attorney General William Barr only one week from the release of the Mueller report to bring obstruction of justice charges against two governmental officials for interfering in a federal investigation. But the charges have nothing to do with the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the election or the possible obstruction of that investigation. Although the obstruction charges DOJ filed are not related to the Mueller report, they underscore just how far the attorney general bent over backward to spin the report in the president’s favor and how partisan the Department of Justice has become. The disparities between the two cases highlight how the Department of Justice, under Barr’s leadership, has become nothing more than a political arm of the Trump administration, particularly in its handling of possible obstruction charges stemming from the Mueller report.
Trump tells gun lobby he intends to revoke status of US as a signatory of the treaty, which wasn't ratified by Senate. US President Donald Trump announced on Friday at the National Rifle Association's (NRA) annual meeting that the United States will drop out of an international arms treaty signed in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama but opposed by the NRA and other conservative groups. Trump told members of the gun lobby that he intends to revoke the status of the US as a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, which was never ratified by the US Senate. "We're taking our signature back," Trump said to thousands of cheering attendees, many wearing red hats emblazoned with the Republican president's "Make America Great Again" slogan. The NRA has long opposed the treaty which regulates the $70bn business in conventional arms and seeks to keep weapons out of the hands of human rights abusers. The lobbying group argues it would undermine domestic gun rights, a view the Obama administration rejected.
Washington (CNN) - A federal judge sentenced Russia national Maria Butina to 18 months in prison on Friday, after she pleaded guilty to trying to infiltrate conservative political circles and promote Russian interests before and after the 2016 presidential election. She is the first Russian citizen convicted of crimes relating to the 2016 election, though her efforts to infiltrate Republican circles appeared to be separate from the Kremlin's sweeping election-meddling campaign detailed in special counsel Robert Mueller's report.
Washington (CNN) - President Donald Trump weighed in on the recent measles outbreak in the United States, appearing to do an about-face on his previous claims linking child vaccinations to autism. "They have to get the shots. The vaccinations are so important. This is really going around now. They have to get their shots," Trump told CNN's Joe Johns on Friday when asked what his message is for parents. Measles cases in the United States have surpassed the highest number on record since the disease was declared eliminated nationwide in 2000.
It may be risky politically, but Congress has a responsibility to act. The decision facing the House Democrats over whether to proceed with an impeachment of President Trump is both more difficult and more consequential than the discussion of it suggests. The arguments offered by House leaders, in particular Speaker Nancy Pelosi, against it are understandable, including that impeachment could invite a wrenching partisan fight; render the party vulnerable to the charge that it’s obsessed with scoring points against Mr. Trump; and distract Democrats from focusing on legislation of more interest to voters. But the Democrats would also run enormous risks if they didn’t hold to account a president who has clearly abused power and the Constitution, who has not honored the oath of office and who has had a wave of campaign and White House aides plead guilty to or be convicted of crimes. The argument that the Democratic House wouldn’t be able to focus on substantive legislation is the flimsiest rationale. It did so in 1974 while the House Judiciary Committee was considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon. It seems clear that what the Democratic leaders are actually worried about is public relations. The press no doubt would focus on that sexier subject.
A highway crash killed "multiple" people and started a large fire on Interstate 70 along the western edge of Denver on Thursday, in a disaster that police say was triggered by a semitruck that slammed into a group of cars that were stopped in traffic. The exact number of fatalities is still unknown.
American Airlines stock fell nearly 3% Friday after the carrier lowered its earnings forecast for the year, citing a major financial hit from the grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max jets and higher fuel prices. The carrier expects a hit to pretax earnings of $350 million after grounding its Max fleet and canceling thousands of flights through August. American also expects 2019 adjusted profit to be between $4 and $6 per share.
WASHINGTON – Michael Cohen, the president's former lawyer and soon-to-be prison inmate, was secretly recorded by actor and comedian Tom Arnold discussing the crimes he's pleaded guilty to and how his life has been turned upside down over the last year. Throughout the call, which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Cohen said he was innocent of several of the crimes he's admitted to, calling the three-year sentence he was given a surprise. Cohen also talked about his family, his former boss, President Donald Trump, and his legal nemesis, Michael Avenatti, dubbing Avenatti's current legal trouble a "karma boomerang."
Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said Thursday Congress can impeach anyone they want “for the reasons set forth in the Constitution and the courts have no say in it," responding to President Trump's pledge that he would go all the way to the Supreme Court if the “partisan” Democrats try to impeach him. Napolitano made the statement on “Fox & Friends” Thursday, the morning after President Trump vowed to go all the way to the Supreme Court, asserting there are “no crimes by me at all” following the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Napolitano weighed in on Thursday, saying: “The bottom line is, there’s nothing he can do about it because impeachment is political. There has to be a legal basis for it. Treason, bribery, and then there’s that fudgy phrase, other high crimes, and misdemeanors.” “When Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were the subject of articles of impeachment the high crimes and misdemeanors included obstruction of justice. So we know historically obstruction of justice can be a basis for impeachment but the courts won't get involved.”
Opponents say the bill is a blow to the state’s effort to restore voting rights for up to 1.4 million people with felony convictions. The Florida House approved legislation along party lines Wednesday to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions, which opponents say is a blow to the state’s effort to enfranchise more than a million people. In November, Florida approved a constitutional amendment by referendum to restore voting rights to convicted felons, except murderers and felony sex offenders, which could grant up to 1.4 million people the right to vote. But the Republican-dominated House voted 71-45 Wednesday for a bill that critics say sets up unnecessary hurdles for people who completed their felony sentence, requiring them to pay all their criminal fines and fees before they can get their voting rights restored.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report concluded that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” — contrary to Jared Kushner’s claim that Russia’s effort amounted to little more than “a couple Facebook ads.” The report details how the Russians “carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” and “conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents” to damage the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign. It also lays out how eager the Trump campaign was to use the stolen material to its political advantage, even after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint public statement on Oct. 7, 2016, “that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”
Ending months of speculation, former Vice President Joe Biden announced Thursday he is launching his third presidential campaign. Instantly joining the race as an early frontrunner, the former vice president and more than a dozen major Democratic candidates seek to deny President Trump a second term.
Washington (CNN)The FBI and criminal investigators from the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday executed court-authorized search warrants at the home of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh and Baltimore City Hall, FBI spokesman Dave Fitz said. Investigators are also searching a second residence belonging to the Democratic mayor -- who has taken a leave of absence amid a scandal over the sale of a children's book she authored -- as well as the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a non-profit the mayor has worked with, Fitz said. The home of Gary Brown, a former Pugh aide, is also being searched. The FBI said they have made no arrests at this time in connection with the raids. Pugh was home when authorities arrived at her house shortly before 7 a.m. ET, a law enforcement official said.
While Pugh was a board member of the University of Maryland Medical System, the medical system spent $500,000 to fund the purchase of some 100,000 books from Pugh's company Healthy Holly LLC, a spokesman for the medical system has confirmed.
Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs. On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise. Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal. This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing. “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” the late senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain lamented last summer. “The president has not risen to the mantle of the office,” the GOP’s other recent nominee, the former governor and now senator Mitt Romney, wrote in January. The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency. He has failed to disclose or divest himself from his extensive financial interests, instead using the platform of the presidency to promote them. This has encouraged a wide array of actors, domestic and foreign, to seek to influence his decisions by funneling cash to properties such as Mar-a-Lago (the “Winter White House,” as Trump has branded it) and his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Courts are now considering whether some of those payments violate the Constitution.
Washington (CNN) - Attempted Russian interference in US public affairs has continued as Department of Homeland Security officials and senior leaders have alerted the White House about the risks ahead of the 2020 presidential election -- but it was "like pulling teeth" to get the White House to pay attention, a US government official told CNN Wednesday. Officials have "spent months and months trying to sound alarm at the White House about the need to take foreign interference more seriously and elevate the issue," the official said, adding that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats shared those views and feels the administration "was not being forward-leaning enough in notifying Congress and the American people." Other than one or two principals' meetings before the midterm elections -- and one press conference in which national security adviser John Bolton, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, FBI Director Christopher Wray and National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone warned the public of election interference -- "in general, senior White House staff felt it wasn't a good idea to bring up issues related to Russia in front of the President," the government official said.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Wednesday he doesn't recall instructing aides to keep discussions about election security off President Donald Trump’s radar, after The New York Times reported Mulvaney had said the topic "should be kept below his level.” The Times reported that the subject of Russian election meddling was such a sensitive subject for the president that in one meeting the acting chief “made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory.” A senior administration official told the Times that Mulvaney said discussing efforts to secure the 2020 presidential election with Trump “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.” "I don't recall anything along those lines happening in any meeting," Mulvaney said in a statement Wednesday, and he said the White House is working to ensure neither Russia nor any other foreign adversary interferes in the 2020 vote.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump threatened Wednesday to involve the Supreme Court if Democrats try to impeach him over special counsel Robert Mueller's findings in the Russia investigation. But he did not explain how he might do that. Democrats said Trump is fearful of what Congress might find out about his conduct. Attorneys noted that impeachment is a political process in the domain of Congress, and the courts probably would not entertain a challenge to it. "The Mueller report paints a picture of Trump constantly told by aides, lawyers, and other officials that much of what he did was wrong," tweeted Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor. "As this tweet makes clear, he has learned nothing." - Is Donald J. trump that dumb congress has to the right to investigate and to impeach.
The organization has identified 7,819 scoutmasters who allegedly molested boys. The Boy Scouts of America has locked away in its "perversion files" the names of 7,819 scout leaders who allegedly preyed on boys, a lawyer who is representing the sexual abuse victims claimed Tuesday. The files, which go back to 1944, also include the names of 12,254 victims, said the lawyer, Jeff Anderson. "Those are numbers that were not known before today or ever revealed by the Boy Scouts of America," Anderson told NBC News. "The scope of what was contained in the perversion files has dramatically expanded beyond what was known."
Academy will keep existing eligibility rule requiring one week in LA theater. Netflix and other streaming platforms won't be banned from the Oscars as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has rejected calls from Steven Spielberg and others to restrict eligibility for the annual awards. The Academy's Board of Governors approved rules for the February 2020 Oscars and left the eligibility requirement unchanged. Just as before, feature-length films must be shown for at least one week in a Los Angeles County theater to be eligible, a requirement Netflix-backed movies such as Roma met on their way to winning awards. Proposals to require theater runs of at least four weeks were rejected.
He says it was just “a couple Facebook ads.” He’s not telling the truth. To hear White House adviser Jared Kushner tell it, Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election didn’t amount to more than a couple of ads on Facebook, and anyway, as another Trump administration official said, President Donald Trump repeatedly denounced it. But neither of those claims is true. Kushner downplayed Russia’s interference campaign during his first public comments since the Mueller report was released last Thursday — an interview with Time magazine during the Time 100 Summit in New York City. He went as far as to claim that the investigations into Russian interference have been more harmful to the country than Russia’s attack on American democracy. Despite what Kushner said on Tuesday, it is not the case that Russian interference didn’t go beyond a handful of Facebook ads. According to information released by the House Intelligence Committee last year, Russian agents actually purchased about 3,500 Facebook ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, spending more than $1 million a month to reach about 10 million users. Meanwhile, Russian agents also purchased ads on Instagram and created thousands of bot accounts on Twitter that almost exclusively spread propaganda aimed at helping Trump by damaging Hillary Clinton. Beyond that, Kushner’s comments on Tuesday completely ignore the Kremlin-orchestrated hacking campaign against Democratic targets — hacks that resulted in WikiLeaks publishing tranches of emails online during key stretches of the 2016 campaign. Trump mentioned WikiLeaks about five times a day during the closing weeks of the campaign, but recently claimed he “know[s] nothing about WikiLeaks ... it’s not my thing.”
(CNN) On Tuesday, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner was asked about the now-concluded investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and his own ties to the foreign power. Here's his response: "You look at what Russia did, you know, buying some Facebook ads to try and sow dissent and do it, it's a terrible thing. But I think the investigations and all of the speculation that's happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple Facebook ads." Here's just a few facts about the depth and breadth of the Russia interference effort, courtesy of the Mueller report (and CNN's Russia expert Marshall Cohen): * Facebook estimated that the Russian online interference campaign reached 126 million Facebook users via more than 80,000 posts made between 2015 and 2017. * "Individual IRA social media accounts attracted hundreds of thousands of followers," the Mueller report said. "For example, at the time they were deactivated by Facebook in mid-2017, the IRA's 'United Muslims of America' Facebook group had over 300,000 followers, the 'Don't Shoot Us' Facebook group had over 250,000 followers, the 'Being Patriotic' Facebook group had over 200,000 followers, and the 'Secured Borders' Facebook group had over 130,000 followers." * Through its online presence, Russia helped organized real-world protests in America as early as 2015. Read this on that. So on their face, Kushner claims are totally and completely ridiculous. This wasn't some 400-pound guy sitting on his parents' bed -- to borrow a phrase -- posting a few random things on Facebook. This was a well-organized and well-funded effort to influence the 2016 election by a foreign power.
WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin again delayed a decision on whether to turn over President Trump’s tax returns to Congress, telling House lawmakers late Tuesday that the Treasury and Justice Departments needed until May 6 to assess the legality of the “unprecedented” request.
The president, angry at the political media, throws a wrench into its annual gala. President Donald Trump escalated his feud with the media by another degree on Tuesday, ordering officials in his administration to boycott Saturday’s annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner.
Attorney General William Barr has received a waiver to participate in the investigation of 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a Malaysian development company that has come under investigation by the FBI and DOJ for alleged money laundering. The waiver, dated April 16, allows Barr to participate in “the investigation and litigation of the 1MDB matter in which his former law firm represents an entity involved in the matter.”
Focusing on asylum seekers who cross land borders ignores the real problem: people who overstay their visas. If curbing illegal immigration is the goal, as politicians in the United States and Europe argue, then no wall or border fence will stop the West’s largest source of such immigrants. They are not the subject of televised debates or of long stories highlighting their plight. Many are invisible, making them hard to count, and little attention is paid to them. Yet focusing on them might yield better results than focusing on those fleeing violence and persecution. The group in question? Visa overstays.
The president has denied wrongdoing, played the victim, and refrained from criticizing Russia’s role in the election. President Donald Trump had plenty to say on Twitter in the run-up to Attorney General William Barr’s news conference, and then after the publication of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Thursday. He reiterated what he’s said from the start: “No Collusion - No Obstruction!” One thing he didn’t do? Acknowledge what his intelligence agencies, as well as their counterparts in Britain and Germany, congressional investigations, and even Barr himself, have said—that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s reaction to Mueller’s investigation has been consistent since the special counsel began his inquiry nearly two years ago. The president has denied wrongdoing, played the victim, and refrained from criticizing Russia’s role in the election.
Washington (CNN)Supreme Court justices were deeply divided Tuesday over whether the Trump administration can add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, with the conservative justices showing signs that they were inclined to vote in favor of allowing the question. After more than an hour and a half of arguments where the justices repeatedly interrupted each other and counsel, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch suggested that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was within his right to add the question. Chief Justice John Roberts asked questions that seemed at times favorable to the administration, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh stressed that Ross has discretion in the area and that other countries ask a similar question. He called it a "common question" internationally. The four liberal justices pounced on the administration's argument however, asking whether the addition of the question would reduce the number of respondents to the census. Justice Stephen Breyer asked why Ross overruled census officials in making his decision.
A growing number of Democrats running for president in 2020 say the House of Representatives should begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump. The latest is Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who declared his candidacy on Monday and who, in an interview on NPR's Morning Edition, said, "We absolutely should be having this debate." Moulton said he was ready to begin impeachment proceedings last year. "Don't tell me there's not enough to debate impeaching the president," Moulton said, accusing Trump of obstructing justice, violating campaign finance laws and profiting from his office, in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Emoluments Clause. "He is subject to the same laws as the rest of us are, and that's why we should move forward with this debate."
Laurence Doud III, the former CEO of Rochester Drug Co-Operative, was indicted Tuesday for narcotics conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud the Drug Enforcement Administration. In a first in the fight against the opioid crisis, a major drug distribution company and its former CEO are facing criminal charges. Rochester Drug Co-operative was charged Tuesday with narcotics conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Laurence Doud III, the former CEO of the company, was charged with narcotics conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud the Drug Enforcement Administration. He is accused of distributing tens of millions of oxycodone, fentanyl, and other opioids that Rochester's own compliance department allegedly found had no legitimate need for them.
(CNN) - Bernie Sanders didn't build his political career on pragmatism. But on Monday night at a CNN-sponsored town hall, he showed that his presidential candidacy will be about more than simply tilting at windmills -- delivering a practical (and nuanced) response to whether his party should push to impeach President Donald Trump in the wake of the release of the Mueller report.
I was a Trump transition staffer, and I’ve seen enough. It’s time for impeachment.
Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations. If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.
