Month: March 2019

Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand signaled her openness to expanding the Supreme Court beyond nine seats if her party retakes the Senate and the White House in next year’s elections.

Gillibrand, a second-term senator from New York, appeared on left-wing podcast PodSaveAmerica on Tuesday, where she was asked about either placing term limits on Supreme Court justices or adding additional seats, in order to push the court in a liberal direction.

Gillibrand declined to rule out the drastic measures, which she described as “interesting ideas.”

“Well they’re interesting ideas that I would need to think more about,” she said. “But I do think what President Trump has done with the judiciary is, is shocking and is so destructive.”

Gillibrand added that both Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were “disqualified in my mind because of their records because of their previous statements because their belief that money is speech and that corporations have same free speech rights as you, and I think that’s outrageous.”

The Democratic Party’s left-wing base has increasingly pushed for extreme measures, including court-packing, in order to shift the ideological tilt of the nation’s highest court.

Multiple House Democrats have also floated the possibility of trying to impeach Justice Kavanaugh.

In a public rebuke to President Donald Trump, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the withdrawal of most of the National Guard troops currently deployed at the state’s southern border.

“We are not interested in participating in this political theatre. I think it is political theatre,” Gavin said Monday in Sacramento as he formally announced his decision, while blasting Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops along the U.S.-Mexico border. The governor went on to claim that border crossings are at record lows and argued that immigrants commit less crimes than native born citizens. “The whole thing is ludicrous,” he added of the president’s border security efforts.

A majority of the nearly 400 National Guard troops currently stationed at the California-Mexico border will be leaving, per the order from Newsom. Troops will be reassigned to other tasks, such as combating wildfires, gaining more intelligence on drug cartels, and growing California’s Drug Task Force. The California governor will only leave around 100 troops to remain at the border.

“The border ’emergency’ is a manufactured crisis,” Newsom is expected to say during his State of the State address on Tuesday, according to an excerpt from his prepared remarks. “And California will not be part of this political theater. Which is why I have given the National Guard a new mission.”

The move rescinds an April 2018 order by then-Gov. Jerry Brown — also a Democrat — with the Trump administration to add 400 troops to the border. The White House at the time had requested governors of border states to aid in security efforts by deploying their National Guard troops.

Newsom’s decision to rollback Brown’s troop deployment at the border does not come as a surprise. While on the campaign trail last year, Newsom had been very critical of the move. Upon his first full day in office, the new governor told the California National Guard Adjutant General David Baldwin to get ready for a “menu of options.”

Newsom is following in the footsteps of New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who earlier in February also ordered most of her state’s National Guard troops away from the southern border.

However, questions remain over how much of Newsom’s rhetoric will match with reality. The troop reassignment still needs approval from the U.S. Department of Defense. Additionally, while Newsom’s order requires National Guard troops to immediately begin withdrawing from the border, it still allows the option for them  to remain until the end of March — the original deadline set by Brown.

Nevertheless, the liberal governor’s order is a symbolic rebuke against the White House’s immigration agenda. Newsom — who has quickly positioned himself as the progressive adversary to Trump — argues that there is no “crisis” at the southern border, and wants to use National Guard troops for other missions.

• Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen will tell Congress on Wednesday that he saw no ‘direct evidence’ of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but that he did overhear a conversation in which Roger Stone told Donald Trump he spoke to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
• Cohen will testify that Stone told Trump that WikiLeaks planned to release emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
• Cohen will also say that Trump implicitly instructed him to lie to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen acknowledges that Trump did not ‘directly’ ask him to lie. 

Michael Cohen will make several bombshell allegations about President Trump during his testimony on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, including that he overheard political operative Roger Stone tell Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign that he had spoken to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about the release of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.

While Cohen will offer scathing testimony against his former boss, he also claims he has no “direct evidence” that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government. Cohen will also testify that, contrary to recent BuzzFeed News report, Trump did not directly instruct him to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Cohen, who will begin a three-year prison sentence on May 6, will also provide numerous anecdotes from his decade of working for Trump which he says shows the former real estate mogul to be “a racist…a conman…a cheat.”

Cohen’s 20-page opening statement was released Tuesday night ahead of his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Cohen testified earlier on Tuesday in a closed hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Cohen’s claims about Roger Stone are perhaps the biggest bombshell contained in the opening statement.

“A lot of people have asked me about whether Mr. Trump knew about the release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of time. The answer is yes,” Cohen plans to testify.

“He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails.”

Cohen claims that in July 2016, just before the Democratic convention, he was in Trump’s office when Stone was patched through to Trump via speakerphone.

“Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Cohen’s testimony reads.

“Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great,’” he added.

Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, has long denied speaking with Assange or having advance knowledge of the release of DNC emails. He has also claimed he never spoke with Trump about WikiLeaks.

Stone was indicted on Jan. 24 in the special counsel’s investigation on seven charges related to his House Intelligence Committee testimony regarding his discussions about WikiLeaks. Those charges center largely on his communications after WikiLeaks released DNC emails. The special counsel has mostly focused on what Stone knew about WikiLeaks’ plans to release emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Stone was slapped with a gag order on Friday, meaning that he cannot speak publicly about his case.

No ‘direct evidence’ of collusion, but suspicions about Trump Tower meeting

Cohen says in his testimony that he has no firsthand knowledge that Trump or his campaign colluded with Russians to influence the election.

“Questions have been raised about whether I know of direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. I do not. I want to be clear. But, I have my suspicions,” Cohen will say.

The statement, if accurate, would undercut allegations made about Cohen in the infamous Steele dossier. The 35-page report, which was funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign, claimed that Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 in order to pay off Russian hackers who had stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails.

Cohen has denied the dossier’s allegations, most recently on Dec. 27, after McClatchy reported that Cohen’s cell phone pinged off of a tower near Prague around the time the dossier claims he was there.

The possible collusion that Cohen claims to have witnessed involves an infamous meeting held at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and a group of Russians in June 2016.

Trump Jr. hosted the meeting after an associate emailed him to say that a Russian attorney wanted to provide the campaign with derogatory information on Hillary Clinton.

“If it is what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. responded to the offer.

The meeting’s attendees, which included Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and the Russian delegation, have all claimed that the meeting was a waste of time. They’ve said that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, used the introduction to the campaign to discuss one of her pet issues: the Magnitsky Act. The attendees have claimed that no information about Clinton was exchanged and that there was no follow up to the meeting.

Cohen says that he believes, but does not know for certain, that Trump Jr. told his father about the meeting before it occurred, a claim which Trump Jr. denies.

Cohen says that he was in the room with Trump in early June 2016 when Trump Jr. walked behind his father’s desk, and said: “The meeting is all set.”

“Ok good…let me know,” Trump replied.

Cohen says that he concluded a year later that the Russian meeting must have been the topic because Trump Jr. “would never set up any meeting of any significance alone – and certainly not without checking with his father.”

BuzzFeed bomb or bombshell? 

Cohen also addresses allegations reported by BuzzFeed that Trump instructed him to lie to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Cohen pleaded guilty on Nov. 29 to lying to Congress by claiming that negotiations to build the skyscraper ended in January 2016. Cohen admitted that he worked through June 2016 to try to make the deal happen and that he spoke frequently with Trump about the project.

BuzzFeed News reported in January that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress, and that he has told the special counsel as much during his dozens of hours of meetings with prosecutors. BuzzFeed also reported that emails, text messages, and witnesses at the Trump Organization would corroborate Cohen’s testimony.

The report proved controversial after the special counsel’s office issued a statement saying that the story was inaccurate. BuzzFeed has stood by the story but not followed up with additional details to back up the original article.

Cohen will testify that Trump did not “directly” instruct him to lie to Congress.

“Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” the opening statement reads.

“In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing,” Cohen will say.

“In his way, he was telling me to lie.”

He also said that “[y]ou need to know that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it.”

The FBI released its list of those prohibited from gun purchases in 2018, with illegal aliens topping the list by a landslide.

A new report from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System breaks down the number of people blocked from buying guns in 2018. At 7,836,600, the “illegal/unlawful alien” category ranked at the top, beating the second category by nearly 2 million. The “adjudicated mental health” category came in second place with 7,836,600, and convicted criminals rounded the top three with 3,833,213.

The active records of those barred from gun purchases have increased over the years.

The numbers also highlight the escalating fight over illegal immigration. The federal government is currently under a “shutdown” because President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats are at odds over funding for a proposed wall on the country’s southern border with Mexico.

“We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with,” Trump tweeted Friday. “Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!”

The murder of a California police officer on Wednesday by an undocumented immigrant also highlights the personal tragedy associated with illegal alien-related crime. Officer Ronil Singh, 33, was shot and killed at a traffic stop by an illegal alien. Singh leaves behind a wife and baby boy.

“He’ll never see his son walk. He doesn’t get to hold that little boy, hug his wife, say ‘good night’ anymore because a coward took his life,” Newman, California, Police Chief Randy Richardson, choking back tears, said to reporters Thursday.

TUCSON, Ariz. – A group of 306 Central Americans surrendered to Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents near the international border Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

Large group apprehended in Arizona.

On Wednesday, agents from the Ajo Border Patrol Station patrolling on the border 15 miles west of Lukeville found 242 migrants. On Thursday morning, agents from the Casa Grande Station patrolling the border on the Tohono O’odham Nation encountered a group of 64 migrants who gave themselves up.

Both groups were comprised of family units, to include juveniles and pregnant women, largely from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Border Patrol agents conducted an initial screening on site, which consisted of an interview and observation of the detainees to identify any health or safety issues requiring emergency evacuation. The initial screening identified one pregnant woman and four children requiring immediate care.

The five subjects were transported to a hospital in Goodyear, treated and released to Ajo Border Patrol Station agents for further processing. Subjects not requiring emergency medical attention were transported to Tucson for further processing and medical evaluation by Border Patrol paramedics.

In Tucson, an additional nine children, ages 1 to 13, were identified as having flu-like symptoms and were taken to a local hospital for further treatment.

Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, provided polling data to a close associate during the 2016 campaign with instructions to share the information with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, according to a new report.

Manafort’s legal team accidentally revealed in a court filing on Tuesday in the special counsel’s probe that the longtime GOP consultant provided the data to his associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign.

The New York Times followed up with more details of the hand-off, reporting that Manafort instructed Kilimnik to provide the information to Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate with close ties to Vladimir Putin.

According to The Times, Manafort and Rick Gates, his former business partner and campaign deputy, provided the information in Spring 2016, around the time that Trump clinched the GOP nomination. Most of the information was public, though some included internal polling data, a source told The Times.

What remains unknown is whether Trump or others on the campaign were aware that Manafort provided Kilimnik and Deripaska with polling data.

While many Democrats on Tuesday asserted that the new revelation was strong evidence of collusion, one possibility is that Manafort was attempting to settle a multi-million dollar business dispute with Deripaska. Manafort owed Deripaska nearly $20 million at the time from a failed business venture in Ukraine.

Manafort sent Kilimnik, a former Russian military intelligence official, an email in April 2016, shortly after joining the campaign, suggesting that he sought to use his new position as leverage with Deripaska.

“How do we use to get whole?” Manafort asked Kilimnik.

In a July 7, 2016 Manafort told Kilimnik that he was willing to brief Deripaska on the Trump campaign.

“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote.

Deripaska has been something of a puzzle in the Russia probe.

He reportedly has ties to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier alleging a vast conspiracy of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. Deripaska hired Steele’s London-based firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, in 2012 as part of a private business investigation.

Steele also sought to help Deripaska with problems he was having with the U.S. government related to his visa. The former MI6 officer lobbied Justice Department official Bruce Ohr to help alleviate Deripaska’s visa issues.

Deripaska has denied through intermediaries being a source for Steele, though he was spotted in June 2016 at an economic forum in St. Petersburg with Sergei Millian, an alleged source for the dossier.

Kamala Harris is running for president on a platform of raising taxes on the wealthy, implementing a Socialist healthcare system and reforming state cash bail systems in favor of poor inmates, The Washington Post reports.

The U.S. senator from California will compete with other Democrats for the chance to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020. Harris announced the start of her campaign Monday.

Harris intends to make taxes a focal point of her campaign, contrasting her tax package with the legislation Trump and Congressional Republicans passed in December 2017.

Harris’s tax plan, proposed Oct. 18, is a Robin Hood-type plan that would hike tax rates on wealthier Americans to cover the cost of tax credits, up to $3,000 for individuals and $6,000 for families, offered to people making under $100,000 a year. The tax credits would not be available for Americans who do not earn a paycheck.

Harris’s tax plan would overwhelmingly benefit poor and lower middle-class individuals and families, while increasing the tax burden of those over the $100,000 cutoff. It would reduce federal revenues by roughly $2.7 trillion over a decade.

Harris publicly backed the Medicare-for-all plan of self-proclaimed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders in August 2017, arguing that “It’s not just about what is morally and ethically right, it also makes sense just from a fiscal standpoint.”

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, estimated that a Medicare-for-all plan could cost as much as $42 trillion over a decade and more than five-times that amount over the course of 30 years.

Proponents of the plan say the immense cost would be offset by freeing Americans from paying for health plans and premiums, but skeptics and critics say that argument is not backed by any sort of data. Massive tax hikes and spending cuts in other programs would have to come with the single-payer system to make it financially feasible, according to the Manhattan Institute.

Harris also plans to push reforms to cash bail systems to favor poor Americans. Harris, along with Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, introduced a bill in July 2017 that would offer a three-year, $10 million grant to states that reform or abolish their cash bail systems.

The push may stave off criticism coming from fellow Democrats over Harris’s career as a federal prosecutor for actions such as criminalizing truancy, which disproportionately affected poor families.

Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’s signature is all that remains to include Colorado among the ranks of states prepared to abandon the Electoral College system in favor of nationwide popular voting for the next presidential election.

Colorado would bring the number of states who have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) to 12, plus the District of Columbia. The NPVIC represents a coalition of states who have agreed to pool their Presidential electoral votes for the majority candidate, regardless of individual state outcomes.

Under the Constitution, states have the power to determine how they award their electoral votes in national elections, with many states currently being winner-take-all. If states with at least 270 electoral votes (or the number needed to elect a president) agree to award their votes to the majority-vote holder, it would effectively convert the presidential election to popular vote.

Colorado brings the total electoral votes represented by NPVIC states to 181. To reach the required 270, they need a dozen or so more states to pass legislation. So far, no red states have embraced the movement.

Eric Holder weighed in on the issue Tuesday by Twitter, supporting the reform measure and linking to a story from The Hill about Colorado’s pending inclusion.

New Mexico is poised to join next, with legislation having passed State House and currently pending with the Democrat-controlled Senate.

The liberal Facebook page Really American, which has nearly 1 million followers, posted a meme claiming that House Speaker Paul Ryan had proposed a plan to increase the retirement age to 70.

“Hypocrisy of the GOP,” reads the Dec. 9 meme. “Paul Ryan proposed raising the retirement age to 70 but retired at 48 with a full government pension.”

Verdict: True

Ryan released a proposal in 2010 that would have gradually increased the retirement age for Social Security to 70 for those retiring around the year 2100.

Fact Check:

The retirement age refers to when a person can begin collecting benefits from government programs like Social Security, which provides monthly payments to those who have paid into the program for at least 10 years.

For people born in 1937 or earlier, the retirement age for full Social Security benefits is 65. The retirement age gets gradually higher for each birth year thereafter and is capped at age 67 for those born in 1960 or later, according to the Social Security Administration (SSA). At the age of 62, people have the option to retire early, but will only receive a percentage of their total retirement benefits if they do so.

As of October, there were nearly 60 million beneficiaries on Social Security. Payments from the program account for the majority of income for half of all seniors, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Ryan, now serving his tenth term in the House, released a plan back in 2010 called “A Roadmap For America’s Future” that proposed raising the retirement age for Social Security gradually by one month every two years “until it reaches 70 in the next century.” It appears the retirement age for those retiring in 2026 would have been 67 and then reached 70 for those retiring around 2100.

As one of several changes proposed to keep Social Security solvent, the plan cited the continued growth of life expectancy at the time as justification for the move. It’s currently projected that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2034.

The plan, which also proposed a number of tax and Medicare reforms, was introduced as legislation in Congress, but ultimately not enacted.

In more recent years, Ryan suggested that, as house speaker, any Republican plan to raise the retirement age for Social Security wasn’t set in stone. “We haven’t as a caucus decided this issue yet,” Ryan told CBS News in 2015, shortly after he assumed the position. “So as speaker of the House, I help manage and bring to a consensus, I’m not dictator of the House. But I have always believed, and I’ve been public about this for many years, for younger people, when they age, we should change the retirement age to reflect longevity.”

Other conservatives, such as Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, Mike Lee and Rand Paul, have all supported the idea of raising the retirement age.

“Bumping up the Social Security retirement age is fair and reasonable. It can help shore up the program’s shaky solvency without saddling younger generations with excessive payroll taxes,” writes Romina Boccia, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation.

A handful of Democrats have, at times, supported raising the retirement age in recent years, but most remained opposed. The 2016 Democratic Party platform vowed to fight any attempts to raise the retirement age for Social Security.

Critics of raising the retirement age suggest that it may adversely affect the poor.

“People who are shorter-lived tend to make less, which means that if you raise the retirement age, low-income populations would be subsidizing the lives of higher-income people,” Maya Rockeymoore, president and chief executive of Global Policy Solutions, told The Washington Post. “Whenever I hear a policymaker say people are living longer as a justification for raising the retirement age, I immediately think they don’t understand the research or, worse, they are willfully ignoring what the data say.”

Ryan announced earlier this year that he will be retiring from Congress once his term is complete. He will receive an annual pension of about $85,000, according to Business Insider. Republican Bryan Steil was elected in November to fill Ryan’s seat in Wisconsin’s first congressional district for the 116th Congress.

Ryan told CBS’s John Dickerson on “Face The Nation” that he plans to use his retirement to “hunt, fish, mountain climb and ski” with his family and hinted that he may remain active in political advocacy.

• Documents released by the special counsel’s office on Friday show that a top Justice Department official was upset with the FBI for interviewing Michael Flynn at the White House just days after he took office.
• Sally Yates “was not happy” with the bureau, according to Peter Strzok, who was one of the agents who interviewed Flynn.
• It is unclear why Yates was upset over the White House interview.

Sally Yates, the former deputy attorney general, was upset the FBI for interviewing Michael Flynn at the White House just days after he took office as national security advisor, according to a document released Friday by the special counsel’s office.

Yates, who was fired by President Trump on Jan. 30, 2017, “was not happy” about the FBI’s decision to interview Flynn, according to Peter Strzok, one of the two FBI agents who met with Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017.

Strzok relayed that detail to the FBI in a July 19, 2017 interview. The special counsel released a summary of that interview on orders from Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing the Flynn case.

Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to Strzok and another FBI agent in that interview about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016.

On Tuesday, Flynn’s lawyers submitted a court filing in which they questioned the FBI’s tactics in arranging and conducting the interview with Flynn. They suggested that Flynn was pressured to meet with the FBI without White House lawyers present. They also noted that Flynn was not warned of penalties for lying to the FBI.

Flynn was fired as national security advisor on Feb. 13, 2017. The White House claims he was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the details of his conversations with Kislyak.

According to Strzok, then-FBI Director James Comey “was going to tell Yates right before the interview, but she called him first for another reason before he had a chance to call.”

“When he told her the FBI was interviewing Flynn she was not happy,” reads the summary of the Strzok interview.

Strzok also referred to an argument between unidentified officials “about the FBI’s decision to interview Flynn.”

Passage from Peter Strzok’s July 19, 2017 interview with the FBI

Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, ordered Flynn’s defense team and the special counsel to turn over any documents related to Flynn’s White House interview.

In addition to the Strzok interview, Flynn’s lawyers cited a memo that then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe wrote on following his conversation with Flynn to set up the White House meeting.

Mueller’s team pushed back on Flynn’s complaints about how his interview was arranged.

“Nothing about the way the interview was arranged or conducted caused the defendant to make false statements to the FBI on January 24,” prosecutors asserted.

They said that Flynn “chose to make false statements” about his communications with Kislyak weeks before his FBI encounter.

“He lied about that topic to the media, the incoming Vice President, and other members of the Presidential Transition Team,” Mueller’s team asserts.

The new filings raise numerous questions about the investigation of Flynn, including when and how the FBI determined that he gave false statements about Kislyak.

Strzok told his FBI colleagues that Flynn “did not give any indicators of deception” during the interview. Strzok and the other agent in the interview “had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying.”

According to McCabe’s memo, Flynn knew going into the White House interview that his conversations with Kislyak would be a topic of conversation. Flynn also suspected that McCabe “probably knew what was said” in his calls with Kislyak.

McCabe also noted that Flynn questioned whether information about his phone calls with Kislyak had been leaked.

“I replied that we were quite concerned about what we perceived as significant leaks,” wrote McCabe. His additional thoughts are redacted from the memo.

McCabe was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018, after the Justice Department’s inspector general determined that he lacked candor in four interviews with FBI and DOJ investigators regarding his authorization of media contacts in October 2016.