Chris Cuomo worried for family’s safety after targeted attack busted – New York Post
Chris Cuomo worried for family’s safety after targeted attack busted – New York Post

CNN’s Chris Cuomo said he fears for his family’s safety after his name was found on a list of Democratic politicians and journalists targeted by a US Coast Guard officer who allegedly wanted to carry out a mass attack.

“This is scary,” Cuomo, who’s married with three children, told “Anderson Cooper 360” Wednesday night. “This is something that the people who get named, we have to deal with, especially with our family because while we accept it as just the nature of the world we live in these days, my brother, this is very scary to the people and the little ones at home. So we’ve got to deal with that,” Cuomo said.

His comments came just after court documents revealed that Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson had compiled a list of high-profile Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and media figures who have been critical of President Trump.

Hasson, who lived in Silver Spring, Md., also amassed an arsenal of 15 firearms and a thousand rounds of ammunition at his home, police said.

He had searched the internet for the best place to see members of Congress in Washington, DC, and what happens if “Trump illegally impeached.”

Cuomo urged Trump, who has referred to the media as the “enemy of the people,” to mind his comments about news outlets.

“He knows his words have power. He knows he should choose them carefully,” Cuomo said. “He’s gotta be careful about what he says, but you gotta be careful about causation and correlation.”

Along with Cuomo, journalists on the list included CNN’s Don Lemon and Van Jones and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Chris Hayes and Ari Melber.

Source Article from https://nypost.com/2019/02/21/chris-cuomo-worried-for-familys-safety-after-targeted-attack-busted/

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Attorney General Barr should release the full Robert Mueller report when it’s finished – Washington Examiner
Attorney General Barr should release the full Robert Mueller report when it’s finished – Washington Examiner

When special counsel Robert Mueller concludes his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, it will be up to Attorney General William Barr to determine how much of the report to disclose to Congress and the public. He should release the full report.

Though CNN is reporting that as soon as next week Barr is going to announce that Mueller has concluded his report, we should take all such claims with a grain of salt, as predictions of the investigation’s end have proven premature many previous times.

That having been said, regardless of the actual timing, the rules governing the release will be the same.

Mueller will send a confidential report to the attorney general, who will then be required to send a summary to Congress. Such reports are described by the governing law as “brief notifications, with an outline of the actions and the reasons for them.”

But Barr could go further and release the full Mueller report, along with all of the transcripts of testimony and evidence supporting the various findings.

The reticence to release a full report in cases such as this come from an understandable place. Generally speaking, prosecutors should focus on providing evidence that backs up specific legal charges in court, whereas a full report may contain embarrassing information that is legal or references to potentially illegal behavior that could not be proven.

While this is an understandable concern, the reality is that if the full report and supporting materials are not released, we’re going to get portions of it leaked in dribs and drabs by anonymous sources with an agenda to push.

This has been the problem plaguing Russia reporting all along. The media has no direct knowledge about what is going on, so they’re relying on leaked information, even though some people have an interest in taking down Trump while others are interested in vindicating him.

Once the report hits, we’ll get anonymously sourced stories suggesting that Trump committed impeachable offenses and others claiming the report offers full vindication.

If the actual report is released, people who choose to read all the materials can judge for themselves whether the gathered evidence supports a given conclusion. And even if the average news consumer won’t actually be digging through potentially thousands of pages of Mueller’s documents, the fact that they are publicly available will act as a check on the proliferation of fake news through anonymous reports.

The demon of Trump collusion with Russia has cast a shadow over the administration since Day One. For over 2 years, the American people have been subjected to news stories suggesting that their president worked with a foreign adversary to win the election. If true, it carries with it the potential of removing from office a democratically elected president. If false, a lot of elected officials and members of the media have a lot of explaining to do.

Regardless of where anybody falls down on the Russia story or Trump in general, all sides should have an interest in full transparency in this case.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/attorney-general-barr-should-release-the-full-robert-mueller-report-when-its-finished

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Bernie Sanders Must Tell His Fans: It’s Not ‘Bernie or Bust’ – Daily Beast
Bernie Sanders Must Tell His Fans: It’s Not ‘Bernie or Bust’ – Daily Beast
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Gay Priests, Secret Rules and the Abuse of Nuns: Some of the Vatican Controversies as Bishops Meet – The New York Times
Gay Priests, Secret Rules and the Abuse of Nuns: Some of the Vatican Controversies as Bishops Meet – The New York Times

Pope Francis once famously signaled more openness to gay priests when he said, “Who am I to judge?” But since then he has seemed to reverse course. Last year, Francis called homosexuality “fashionable” and recommended that men with “this deep-seated tendency” not be accepted into the priesthood.

In the Netherlands this week, a group of gay priests made public a letter sent to Francis late last year calling out the church’s stance on homosexuality in the priesthood. It said Vatican leaders “tend to suggest that those priests who are openly gay are the ones responsible for the sexual abuse of children and minors,” and asked for a rethinking of the policies around gay priests.

The debate promises to make its way into the bishop meetings.

While Catholic priests make a commitment to a life of celibacy, the Vatican has an internal protocol for dealing with the children of those who violate that vow. The Times made it public this week.

The Vatican confirmed that its department overseeing Catholic priests globally has general guidelines for what to do when clerics father children.

Sometimes the children are born from relationships between priests and women in the community — or nuns. But other children are the consequence of rape.

The internal church document, which is from 2017, lays out guidelines for the “protection of the child,” a Vatican spokesman said.

And though it requests that priests leave the church if they father children, there is no requirement that they do so.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/world/europe/catholic-church-sex-abuse.html

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Senate investigators pursue Moscow-based former Trump associate – CNN
Senate investigators pursue Moscow-based former Trump associate – CNN

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By Nina dos Santos

Updated 8:15 AM ET, Thu February 21, 2019

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

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Steve Cohen (D-TN), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, talks to CNN’s Don Lemon about the possible release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation, which could come as early as next week, sources familiar with the plans say.”,”descriptionText”:”Rep. 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Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce its completion as early as next week, according to people familiar with the plans. “,”descriptionText”:”President Trump offered a muted response when asked about the potential end of the Mueller investigation. Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce its completion as early as next week, according to people familiar with the plans. “},{“title”:”Sources: WH privately looking into dismissing Dan Coats”,”duration”:”02:22″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/20/dan-coats-dismissal-denial-trump-white-house-brown-lead-dnt-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/20/dan-coats-dismissal-denial-trump-white-house-brown-lead-dnt-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190130110812-donald-trump-dan-coats-split-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/20/dan-coats-dismissal-denial-trump-white-house-brown-lead-dnt-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”White House officials have begun to have preliminary discussions about replacing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats amid concerns that President Donald Trump may soon dismiss him, two senior administration officials told CNN, despite the President’s public denial that he’s considering the move. 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CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/jake-tapper-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Jake Tapper\u003c/a> lays out the questions he hopes the report will answer.”,”descriptionText”:”After almost two years, CNN has learned the new Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce the completion of the long-awaited Mueller report, according to sources familiar with the plans. CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/jake-tapper-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Jake Tapper\u003c/a> lays out the questions he hopes the report will answer.”},{“title”:”Why we may not get all the answers from Mueller’s report”,”duration”:”02:23″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/20/mueller-report-barr-announcement-concern-doj-congress-sot-crn-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/20/mueller-report-barr-announcement-concern-doj-congress-sot-crn-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190212164541-robert-mueller-june-2017-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/20/mueller-report-barr-announcement-concern-doj-congress-sot-crn-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans.”,”descriptionText”:”Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans.”},{“title”:”Van Jones: I’ve never seen anything like Bernie Sanders”,”duration”:”02:14″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/20/bernie-sanders-presidential-run-interest-jones-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/20/bernie-sanders-presidential-run-interest-jones-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190220151859-bernie-sanders-presidential-run-interest-jones-nr-vpx-00004605-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/20/bernie-sanders-presidential-run-interest-jones-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”After Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders raised nearly $6 million in campaign funding over 24 hours, CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/van-jones\” target=\”_blank\”>Van Jones\u003c/a> discusses with \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/brooke-baldwin-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Brooke Baldwin\u003c/a> whether the money equates to real support for Sanders.”,”descriptionText”:”After Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders raised nearly $6 million in campaign funding over 24 hours, CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/van-jones\” target=\”_blank\”>Van Jones\u003c/a> discusses with \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/brooke-baldwin-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Brooke Baldwin\u003c/a> whether the money equates to real support for Sanders.”},{“title”:”Trump: McCabe is a ‘poor man’s J. Edgar Hoover'”,”duration”:”00:43″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/20/trump-poor-hoover-fbi-mccabe-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/20/trump-poor-hoover-fbi-mccabe-sot-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190220142309-trump-2-20-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/20/trump-poor-hoover-fbi-mccabe-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”President Trump responded to former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s public statements describing the early stages of the Trump presidency, saying McCabe has since \”made a fool of himself.\””,”descriptionText”:”President Trump responded to former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s public statements describing the early stages of the Trump presidency, saying McCabe has since \”made a fool of himself.\””},{“title”:”Cuomo explains his ‘lasagna of lies’ analogy to Lemon”,”duration”:”04:29″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/20/lasagna-of-lies-russia-mueller-probe-don-lemon-chris-cuomo-handoff-sot-ctn-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/20/lasagna-of-lies-russia-mueller-probe-don-lemon-chris-cuomo-handoff-sot-ctn-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190219224749-don-lemon-cuomo-handoff-2-19-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/20/lasagna-of-lies-russia-mueller-probe-don-lemon-chris-cuomo-handoff-sot-ctn-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/don-lemon-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Don Lemon\u003c/a> bursts into laughter at \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/chris-cuomo-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Chris Cuomo\u003c/a>’s food analogy to describe the Mueller probe.”,”descriptionText”:”CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/don-lemon-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Don Lemon\u003c/a> bursts into laughter at \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/chris-cuomo-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Chris Cuomo\u003c/a>’s food analogy to describe the Mueller probe.”},{“title”:”Bernie Sanders announces 2020 presidential run”,”duration”:”00:56″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/19/bernie-sanders-announces-2020-presidential-run-newday-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/19/bernie-sanders-announces-2020-presidential-run-newday-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190219113315-01-bernie-sanders-lead-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/19/bernie-sanders-announces-2020-presidential-run-newday-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he will make a second bid for the Democratic nomination for president.”,”descriptionText”:”Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he will make a second bid for the Democratic nomination for president.”},{“title”:”Trump denies NYT report, praises Matthew Whitaker”,”duration”:”01:00″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/19/trump-whitaker-investigation-sdny-oval-office-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/19/trump-whitaker-investigation-sdny-oval-office-sot-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190219145812-donald-trump-2-19-02-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/19/trump-whitaker-investigation-sdny-oval-office-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”President Donald Trump denied a report from the New York Times, saying he never asked Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to interfere with the SDNY’s investigation.”,”descriptionText”:”President Donald Trump denied a report from the New York Times, saying he never asked Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to interfere with the SDNY’s investigation.”},{“title”:”NYT: Trump asked Whitaker for new investigator on Cohen”,”duration”:”02:13″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/02/19/nyt-trump-matthew-whitaker-cohen-investigation-recusal-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/02/19/nyt-trump-matthew-whitaker-cohen-investigation-recusal-sot-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190201072123-whitaker-cohen-split-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/02/19/nyt-trump-matthew-whitaker-cohen-investigation-recusal-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”According to a New York Times report, President Donald Trump may have tried to interfere with the investigation of his former personal attorney Michael Cohen by asking Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to put a Trump ally in charge of the investigation, despite his recusal. CNN’s Brooke Baldwin speaks to New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti.”,”descriptionText”:”According to a New York Times report, President Donald Trump may have tried to interfere with the investigation of his former personal attorney Michael Cohen by asking Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to put a Trump ally in charge of the investigation, despite his recusal. CNN’s Brooke Baldwin speaks to New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti.”}],’js-video_headline-featured-ly8apj’,”,”js-video_source-featured-ly8apj”,true,true,’this-week-in-politics’);if (typeof configObj.context !== ‘string’ || configObj.context.length

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London and Moscow (CNN)Senate investigators want to question a Moscow-based American businessman with longstanding ties to President Donald Trump after witnesses told them he could shed light on the President’s commercial and personal activities in Russia dating back to the 1990s, multiple sources have told CNN.

      CNN’s Nathan Hodge, Tim Lister, Kara Scannell and Evan Perez contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/21/politics/senate-trump-russia-david-geovanis-intl/index.html

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    China Offers to Buy $30 Billion More U.S. Agricultural Imports a Year – Bloomberg
    China Offers to Buy $30 Billion More U.S. Agricultural Imports a Year – Bloomberg

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    Source Article from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-21/china-said-to-propose-30-billion-more-u-s-agriculture-imports

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    ‘They hate white males’: A Norwegian mass murderer inspired the Coast Guard officer accused of plotting terror, feds say – The Washington Post
    ‘They hate white males’: A Norwegian mass murderer inspired the Coast Guard officer accused of plotting terror, feds say – The Washington Post

    Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian extremist who murdered 77 people in 2011, is serving 21 years in prison, the maximum in the Scandinavian country. (Lise Aaserud/AFP/Getty Images)

    Isaac Stanley-Becker

    February 21 at 6:31 AM

    When federal agents searched the Maryland home of the U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant accused of plotting to kill politicians and journalists in a quest for a “white homeland,” they didn’t find only guns and ammunition.

    Law enforcement agents said they also turned up a locked briefcase filled with more than 30 bottles of what appeared to be human growth hormone, a drug used by athletes and bodybuilders who think that it augments muscle mass and boosts speed. Neither the supplements nor the opioid pills, also seized by authorities, had been prescribed by doctors.

    According to court records, Christopher Paul Hasson found inspiration for beefing up elsewhere — in a 1,500-page manifesto prepared by Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people, many of them children, in a bomb-and-gun rampage in 2011 that he called his “martyrdom operation.”

    The deluded pursuit of a masculine ideal is just one of many ways in which prosecutors say Breivik, who received Norway’s maximum sentence of 21 years in prison when his trial ended in 2012, was a model for Hasson, an avowed white nationalist who wrote that he was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth,” according to court records filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland. For the 49-year-old resident of Silver Spring, those reportedly included CNN and MSNBC personalities as well as lawmakers such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whom Hasson identified as “poca warren,” borrowing President Trump’s epithet. Hasson was arrested Friday on weapons and drugs charges.

    [‘I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on earth’: A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says]

    The inspiration that he drew from Breivik, 40, illuminates the global exchange of extremist ideas binding apparently lone-wolf actors who portray themselves as martyrs for “Western civilization,” under siege, they claim, by immigrants and elite opinion makers espousing multiculturalism. The European allegedly emulated by the American extremist had quoted generously from American figures such as Robert Spencer, the director of the Jihad Watch website, and had modeled his act on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, whose perpetrator is now a hero to some on the far-right fringes. The recycling of fearmongering shows how a nationalist, anti-immigrant vision has become international, sometimes with fatal consequences.

    The far-right Norwegian terrorist was on a political mission — one that he hoped others would embrace. A report released Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, indicating that the number of hate groups operating in the United States reached a record high in 2018, suggests that his call has not gone unanswered.

    On a July afternoon eight years ago, Breivik detonated about 2,000 pounds of explosives in front of a 17-story government building in Oslo, killing eight. He then drove 19 miles to a youth summer camp run by the Norwegian Labour Party, killing 69 more people, mainly teenagers. His was the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II, the deadliest gun rampage by an individual anywhere in the world and the deadliest far-right onslaught in Europe since a railway bombing in Bologna, Italy, in 1980.

    The mass shooting was said to be unique in its day for converting hateful right-wing ideology into a civilizational crusade. Breivik wanted to cleanse the West of Muslims, but he also said he was inspired by al-Qaeda, calling the Islamic terrorism network, which also promoted a hypermasculine vision of adventure and self-sacrifice, “the most successful militant group in the world.”

    In 2012, a year after Breivik’s killing rampage, Czech police arrested a man stockpiling weapons, ammunition and police uniforms — and using the name of the Norwegian killer online. Three months later, a Polish admirer of Breivik was detained for allegedly plotting to detonate a bomb outside the Parliament building in Warsaw. In Britain, four people were arrested between January 2013 and June 2015 for reportedly planning to conduct strikes inspired by Breivik. In 2016, an 18-year-old man shot and killed nine people in Munich on the fifth anniversary of the Norway attacks. The gunman, apparently seeking revenge for being bullied by people of “Turkish and Arab” origin, had recently changed a profile picture on social media to one of Breivik.

    Breivik’s violence has not just inspired plots of similar ideological zeal. His example also has appeared to influence other types of mass killings, such as school shootings. Law enforcement officials told NBC News that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old shooter in the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn., wanted to outdo Breivik. Lanza, who killed himself as police arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School, apparently kept newspaper clippings about the slaughter carried out by Breivik.

    The Norwegian mass murderer, whose deeds were re-created in the 2018 film “22 July,” has remained unapologetic, giving Nazi salutes at court appearances.

    Breivik’s manifesto, called “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” was intended as a how-to manual for “patriots” who wished to join him in his crusade against virtually every folk devil of the far-right movement. Among its targets are “globalism” and feminism, as well as cultural Marxism, a specter invoked to argue that leftists have given up their pursuit of class warfare in favor of an assault on cultural values. “They hate Europe, America, they hate Western civilisation, they hate white males, and they hate rationality,” Breivik wrote.

    Ninety minutes before setting out on his 2011 rampage, Breivik emailed the document to about 1,000 recipients. He said his main reason for the attack was to promote his manifesto.

    He had his desired effect.

    In a court filing Tuesday, prosecutors detailed how the Coast Guard lieutenant had studied Breivik’s delusional, hate-filled rantings. Starting in 2017, he regularly examined the manifesto, which led him to websites advertising firearms and tactical equipment, authorities said.

    According to court filings, he identified targets according to Breivik’s classification system, which separated “cultural Marxist/multiculturalist traitors” into three categories. Category A included high-profile targets who might be concentrated in a given location, and therefore vulnerable to a single strike.

    “Obviously, focus on individuals who do not have armed body guards,” Breivik wrote. According to court records, Hasson conducted Web searches inquiring whether senators received Secret Service protection and whether Supreme Court justices had bodyguards. After viewing a headline describing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s judgment that the president was “the worst ever,” the Coast Guard lieutenant and former Marine sought information about where his show was filmed.

    Heeding Breivik’s warning that conducting attacks would be physically grueling, Hasson stockpiled performance-enhancing drugs, as well as opioid pain medication. As far back as October 2016, the Maryland resident was acquiring Tramadol pills through overnight delivery “from an individual likely located in Mexico,” according to the court filing. He also appeared to have purchased synthetic urine to prepare for possible drug tests at work, prosecutors said.

    It wasn’t clear whether authorities knew when he was planning to set out on his reported campaign of “focused violence,” or whether he even had a detailed plan.

    The rule book he observed, however, recommended a six-week steroid cycle as part of preparations for an attack. At the beginning of this year, Hasson searched the word “steroids” in the 1,500-page manifesto, which brought him to a diary entry by the Norwegian terrorist in which he mused about the possibility of acquiring pills that would turn him into a “superhuman one-man-army for 2 hours.”

    More from Morning Mix:

    ‘I meant it with total sincerity’: Tucker Carlson explains viral profanity-laced clash with Dutch historian

    ‘Jerk punks’ torched a statue of General Lee. It honors a WWII veteran, not the Confederate leader.

    A suspect in New Hampshire’s oldest cold case killed himself. Now police say it’s evidence he’s guilty.

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/21/they-hate-white-males-norwegian-mass-murderer-inspired-coast-guard-officer-plotting-terror-feds-say/

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    North Carolina election fraud scandal: Mark Harris to testify to board – Vox.com
    North Carolina election fraud scandal: Mark Harris to testify to board – Vox.com

    At a North Carolina hearing, investigators have laid out in detail an “unlawful,” “coordinated,” and well-funded plot to tamper with absentee ballots in a US House election that remains uncalled more than three months after Election Day — finally bringing clarity to one of the most bizarre election scandals in recent memory.

    State investigators established on Monday their theory of the case — that a Republican-hired local operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, directed a coordinated scheme to unlawfully collect, falsely witness, and otherwise tamper with absentee ballots — and workers who say they had assisted him in the scheme delivered damning testimony over several hours.

    Monday’s session ended with Dowless, under the advice of his attorney, refusing to testify before the election board. They met again the next two days to continue the hearing and the proceedings extended into Thursday, with Republican candidate Mark Harris expected to take the stand.

    But as Thursday’s hearing began, the board revealed that Harris’s campaign had produced new evidence the night before Harris was to testify: previously undisclosed contacts between the candidate and Dowless. Harris’s attorneys said they had misunderstood the extent of the investigation’s request. Democratic attorney Marc Elias referred to the documents as “explosively important.” He asked the court to consider the way in which the evidence was released as “adverse interference” by the Harris team.

    Over Tuesday and Wednesday, a top political consultant for Harris’s campaign and the candidate’s own son had given remarkable testimony about the decision to hire Dowless. The consultant, Andy Yates, and John Harris both insisted Harris did not know what Dowless was doing and proved too trusting about the operative’s claims. Yet John Harris did say he warned his father that Dowless’s prior work on absentee ballots seemed like it could be illegal, a warning that went unheeded by the candidate. As his son closed his testimony with a few kind remarks about his parents, Mark Harris was in tears.

    The election board — made up of three Democrats and two Republicans — has finally reconvened after Gov. Roy Cooper named new members amid an unrelated legal dispute. They are reviewing the evidence in the case and then they are expected to decide what course to take at the end of the hearing. Harris’s campaign urged the elections board to certify his win; Democrat Dan McCready’s campaign is asking the board to call for a new election.

    “They have two options at the end of the hearing. One is to certify Mark Harris’s win. Second is to call for a new election,” says Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College who has been following the controversy.

    A prior iteration of the North Carolina election board refused to certify Harris’s apparent victory over McCready because of the evidence that absentee ballots were tampered with. Now more than a month into the new Congress, there is still no United States representative from North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District.

    Under state law, the board can call a new election if the basic fairness of the election is tainted. It does not appear to matter whether the number of votes in dispute would have been enough to swing the outcome. Election board chair Bob Cordle, a Democrat, noted in a recent interview that in prior races in which a new election was called, the margin did not make a difference.

    “They did not have to decide that the outcome would have been overturned,” Cordle told WFAE’s Inside Politics. “We obviously want to have a fair election.”

    What we’ve learned about the alleged ballot tampering at the state hearing

    It’s important to remember two things about absentee ballots in North Carolina: Anybody can request one, and at the end of every day before the election, state officials publish a file of which voters requested an absentee ballot by mail and whether they have returned it to be counted.

    A campaign could check that file every morning to know how many registered Republican, Democratic, and unaffiliated voters had requested and returned a mail-in ballot.

    “From a mechanics point of view, this is a gold mine of information for candidates and their campaign,” Bitzer told me previously.

    That treasure trove of data would have given Dowless and the people he worked with a detailed picture of how many absentee ballots were coming in every day from Republican, Democratic, and unaffiliated voters — and, by extension, how many absentee ballots they needed from their voters to keep pace with the Democrats.

    Indeed, some of the workers who testified before the board Monday described Dowless discussing with other operatives how the state of the absentee ballot count. Harris even allegedly asked Dowless at one point about his apparent confidence in the state of play in the election.

    Investigators working on behalf of the North Carolina election board started Monday’s hearing by laying out the contours of the ballot tampering scheme, which they say was led by Dowless, and then questioned Lisa Britt and several other women who worked for him.

    Britt, who was Dowless’s stepdaughter for a time and said she remained close to him, said she believed that she and Dowless had done something wrong. But she insisted more than once that the GOP candidate, Harris, had not been privy to the plot.

    Between the opening statement from investigators, Britt’s testimony and corroborating testimony from other witnesses, here is what we learned about the alleged ballot tampering scheme:

    • State investigators said Dowless had used absentee ballot request forms for prior elections to “pre-fill” forms for the 2018 election and sent out workers to find the voters so they could sign the forms and request a ballot — they described this as “Phase One.”
    • The workers allegedly presented the forms to Dowless and received a payment from him, based on how many they brought in, and then sent the forms to the board of elections.
    • At least 780 absentee request forms were allegedly submitted by Dowless or one of his workers.
    • For “Phase Two” of the operation, investigators said, Dowless sent out workers to collect the absentee ballots from voters.
    • Some of the ballots the workers collected had not been signed by witnesses or had not been sealed and the workers again took those ballots to Dowless and received payment in return.
    • Dowless held on to the returned ballots and instructed workers to falsely sign as witnesses for some of the ballots he collected, according to investigators.
    • To avoid raising the suspicions of state officials, the ballots were mailed in small batches, from post offices near the voters’ homes, and the workers made sure that the dates of their signatures and even the ink they used matched that of the voters.
    • Britt affirmed much of the investigators’ case in her testimony, testifying that she had collected ballots, that Dowless had instructed people to sign ballots they had actually not been there to witness, and that she had signed her mother’s name on some ballots so they would not raise suspicion from the state board.
    • Britt testified that if the ballots were left unsealed and there were elections left blank, she would fill in some of the empty offices — again, this was done to avoid arousing suspicion from state election officials. (She did say she had never filled in Harris’s name on a ballot, because voters would usually fill in at least the congressional race and a few others.)
    • Britt also testified that Dowless had reached out to her shortly before Monday’s hearing and provided her with a statement so she could plead the Fifth during her testimony.

    Collecting an absentee ballot for another person and falsely witnessing a ballot — two of the allegations made in the witnesses’ testimony — are violations of state law, according to state investigators.

    Britt, Andy Yates and John Harris have been emphatic that Harris was not aware of the plan. Investigators and Democratic lawyers still grilled Yates about his failure to identify Dowless’s prior criminal history while he was working for Yates’s firm on Harris’s campaign. John Harris also told the board that he had warned his father that Dowless might have conducted illegal electioneering in previous elections — but his father hired Dowless anyway.

    State investigators also said they had not been able to conclude whether early voting numbers were improperly shared with third parties, one of the other allegations that had been made in the sworn affidavits that jump-started the fraud scandal.

    The number of not-returned absentee ballots in the Ninth was unusually high

    Most of the attention has focused on two counties in the Ninth: Bladen and Robeson, in the southeast corner of the state near the South Carolina border. Notably, each of the affidavits provided by Democratic attorneys involved voters in Bladen County, and one man said that Dowless himself had stated he was working on absentee ballots for Harris in the county.

    Bitzer documented the unusual trend in those counties: They had a much higher rate of mail-in absentee ballots that were requested but not returned, compared to other counties in the Ninth District.


    Michael Bitzer/Old North State Politics

    And at the district level, according to Bitzer’s calculations, the Ninth had a much higher rate of unreturned absentee ballots than any other district in North Carolina.


    Michael Bitzer/Old North State Politics

    Bitzer also found that the share of votes Harris received from mail-in absentee ballots in Bladen was remarkably high. It was the only county where the Republican won the mail-in absentee vote, earning 61 percent to McCready’s 38 percent.

    Strangely, though, based on the partisan breakdown of absentee ballots accepted in the county, Harris would have needed to win not only all the Republican ballots but also almost every single ballot from voters not registered with either party and a substantial number of Democratic ballots as well.


    Michael Bitzer/Old North State Politics

    In other words, according to the data, Harris seems to have benefited from an oddly high share of votes in these two counties, where an operative of his was allegedly working. Now substantial evidence of ballot tampering has been presented at a state hearing that could, at its conclusion, lead to a new election being called in the North Carolina Ninth.

    Source Article from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/18/18229711/north-carolina-election-fraud-board-hearing-mark-harris

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    Attorney General Barr should release the full Robert Mueller report when it’s finished – Washington Examiner
    Attorney General Barr should release the full Robert Mueller report when it’s finished – Washington Examiner

    When special counsel Robert Mueller concludes his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, it will be up to Attorney General William Barr to determine how much of the report to disclose to Congress and the public. He should release the full report.

    Though CNN is reporting that as soon as next week Barr is going to announce that Mueller has concluded his report, we should take all such claims with a grain of salt, as predictions of the investigation’s end have proven premature many previous times.

    That having been said, regardless of the actual timing, the rules governing the release will be the same.

    Mueller will send a confidential report to the attorney general, who will then be required to send a summary to Congress. Such reports are described by the governing law as “brief notifications, with an outline of the actions and the reasons for them.”

    But Barr could go further and release the full Mueller report, along with all of the transcripts of testimony and evidence supporting the various findings.

    The reticence to release a full report in cases such as this come from an understandable place. Generally speaking, prosecutors should focus on providing evidence that backs up specific legal charges in court, whereas a full report may contain embarrassing information that is legal or references to potentially illegal behavior that could not be proven.

    While this is an understandable concern, the reality is that if the full report and supporting materials are not released, we’re going to get portions of it leaked in dribs and drabs by anonymous sources with an agenda to push.

    This has been the problem plaguing Russia reporting all along. The media has no direct knowledge about what is going on, so they’re relying on leaked information, even though some people have an interest in taking down Trump while others are interested in vindicating him.

    Once the report hits, we’ll get anonymously sourced stories suggesting that Trump committed impeachable offenses and others claiming the report offers full vindication.

    If the actual report is released, people who choose to read all the materials can judge for themselves whether the gathered evidence supports a given conclusion. And even if the average news consumer won’t actually be digging through potentially thousands of pages of Mueller’s documents, the fact that they are publicly available will act as a check on the proliferation of fake news through anonymous reports.

    The demon of Trump collusion with Russia has cast a shadow over the administration since Day One. For over 2 years, the American people have been subjected to news stories suggesting that their president worked with a foreign adversary to win the election. If true, it carries with it the potential of removing from office a democratically elected president. If false, a lot of elected officials and members of the media have a lot of explaining to do.

    Regardless of where anybody falls down on the Russia story or Trump in general, all sides should have an interest in full transparency in this case.

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/attorney-general-barr-should-release-the-full-robert-mueller-report-when-its-finished

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    ‘Gay priests are in the crosshairs:’ As Vatican abuse summit begins, debate over homosexuality is divisive undercurrent – The Washington Post
    ‘Gay priests are in the crosshairs:’ As Vatican abuse summit begins, debate over homosexuality is divisive undercurrent – The Washington Post

    Chico Harlan

    February 20 at 6:16 PM

    VATICAN CITY — This week, one arch-conservative Catholic website published a commentary saying that gay clerics needed to leave the priesthood “permanently.” Two traditionalist cardinals wrote an open letter decrying the “homosexual agenda” that they said was spreading throughout the church. And a gossipy 550-page book was set for release purporting to lift the veil on the double lives inside the Vatican, “one of the biggest gay communities in the world.”

    The prevalence of mostly closeted gay priests has recently been portrayed in all manners, from the work of the devil to something the church should learn to embrace.

    But church figures in Rome and beyond say one thing is clear: As Pope Francis opens a landmark conference at the Vatican on sexual abuse Thursday, the debate over gay priests is becoming a divisive undercurrent of the summit itself.

    “Gay priests are in the cross hairs,” said Father James Martin, an American Jesuit who has advocated for the church to welcome LGBT members with more compassion.

    The topic hints at the challenges for the Roman Catholic Church as it begins the most direct attempt in its history to address the problem of sexual abuse. Though abuse and sexuality have been found to have no correlation, according to widely accepted research, they have become intertwined on the ideological battlefield of the church — and Catholics of all stripes have descended on Rome this week, with some arguing that Pope Francis is overlooking homosexuality in diagnosing the root reasons for abuse.

    “The church seems to have agreed, with a complicit silence, on a trivialization of homosexuality,” Jean-Pierre Maugendre, president of a French Catholic group, said at a news conference this week.

    Among the nine speeches scheduled throughout the four-day summit, none appears dedicated to the topic of homosexuality. Francis — and his allies organizing the bishops’ meeting — tend to say abuse stems from “clericalism,” or the corrupted power of those who think they are on a pedestal. But some traditionalist prelates in the Vatican say the pope is risking a summit without credibility. They say the central problem is gay priests who break their celibacy and act on their attractions with other adults or with male teenagers.

    “We turn to you with deep distress!” began an open letter to summit participants released this week by American Cardinal Raymond Burke and German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller — two of Francis’s highest-profile critics.

    “Sexual abuse is blamed on clericalism,” they wrote, referencing Francis without naming him. “But the first and primary fault of the clergy does not rest in the abuse of power but in having gone away from the truth of the Gospel.”

    For church figures who view abuse through the prism of homosexuality, a former Vatican ambassador, Carlo Maria Viganò, has become the flag-bearer. Viganò last year wrote a scathing letter describing “homosexual networks” in the church and the widespread coverup of the behavior of a former cardinal, Theodore McCarrick. On Saturday, McCar­rick was defrocked over alleged abuse of minors and adult seminarians.

    Traditionalists sometimes point to a multiyear John Jay College of Criminal Justice study, which found that in more than three-quarters of American cases in which clerics abused minors, “same-sex acts” were involved, mostly with victims 11 and older. But the researchers also said that data did not show gay men to be more or less likely to abuse minors than heterosexual men. More recently, a German study analyzing seven decades of church abuse cases in the country found that the majority of victims were 13 or younger when first abused.

    “Anyone who tries to make the argument that homosexuality is a root cause does so against all the research that has been out there,” Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, one of the summit organizers and a close Francis ally, said in an interview.

    Separately, in a Vatican news conference this week, Cupich pointed to the United States, where data shows a drop in abuse cases — not because of a crackdown on homosexuality, but because of better training in seminaries, stronger church guidelines and cooperation with criminal authorities.

    In perhaps the most famous remark of his six-year papacy, Francis said about gay people, “Who am I to judge?” His remark was a stylistic departure from earlier pontiffs, under whom “homosexual tendencies” were labeled an “intrinsic moral evil.”

    But Francis has not altered official church teaching on homosexuality and has reaffirmed the official ban on gay priests. There have been several recent portrayals, sensitive and otherwise, about the priestly life in those shadows. A detailed January New York Magazine article by Andrew Sullivan estimated that 30 to 40 percent of U.S. parish priests were gay, implying a profound contradiction given the institution’s teachings. Sullivan described the lives of these closeted men and theorized that widespread homosexuality in the priesthood had fed, unintentionally, a “poisonous” omertà, or code of silence: Gay priests who slipped up and had consensual relationships were vulnerable and therefore liable not to speak up if they learned about abuse.

    “Mundane failings — like a brief affair — can become easily blurred with profound evils like child abuse,” according to the article. “If you expose a child molester to his superior, for example, he might expose your own homosexuality and destroy your career.”

    In a much different exploration of the church’s gay culture, a book set to publish Thursday, “In the Closet of the Vatican,” explores the supposed hypocrisy inside the city-state’s ancient walls, portraying an institution that is outwardly chaste and sometimes anti-gay, but inwardly anything but. The book’s author, French journalist Frédéric Martel, says he interviewed almost 1,500 people — and 41 cardinals — for the book. But early critics have pointed out that it relies heavily on innuendo and stereotypes.

    Martel writes that the more outwardly anti-gay a Vatican figure is, the likelier he “conceals” something. He devotes a lengthy passage to Burke, saying his bathroom is worthy of a “deluxe spa resort” and his outfits akin to those of a “Viking bride.” He quotes somebody saying Burke’s style is “typical of drag-queen codes.”

    Burke did not respond to a request for comment.

    Martin, the Jesuit priest, who read an advance copy of the book, said the portrayals won’t help bring about acceptance of gay priests.

    “Entirely absent in the book is the faithful gay priest,” Martin said. “One thing the Vatican could do is admit the possibility of good, healthy celibate gay priests. Just a word from Vatican officials admitting that would be a good step forward.”

    Stefano Pitrelli contributed to this report.

    Read more

    Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

    Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/gay-priests-are-in-the-crosshairs-as-vatican-summit-on-abuse-begins-debate-over-homosexuality-is-divisive-undercurrent/2019/02/20/70635f76-3469-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html

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    Arrested Coast Guard Officer Planned Mass Terrorist Attack ‘On A Scale Rarely Seen’ – NPR
    Arrested Coast Guard Officer Planned Mass Terrorist Attack ‘On A Scale Rarely Seen’ – NPR

    Federal prosecutors say Christopher Paul Hasson had acquired a cache of weapons and ammunition in an attempt to launch a domestic terrorist attack. Over the years, Hasson honed a hit list that included prominent Democrats and media figures.

    AP


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    AP

    Federal prosecutors say Christopher Paul Hasson had acquired a cache of weapons and ammunition in an attempt to launch a domestic terrorist attack. Over the years, Hasson honed a hit list that included prominent Democrats and media figures.

    AP

    Editor’s note: This story contains offensive language.

    A 49-year-old Coast Guard lieutenant is in custody and faces domestic terrorism charges for allegedly planning “to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country,” according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Tuesday.

    Federal prosecutors say Christopher Paul Hasson, a self-described white nationalist living in Silver Spring, Md., amassed a stockpile of weapons since at least 2017, while cultivating plans to launch a widespread attack on prominent Democratic lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and several high-profile journalists from MSNBC and CNN.

    Court documents indicate Hasson espoused extremist and white supremacist views for years — aspiring to establish a “white homeland” — and say he is a “domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect government conduct.”

    “I am dreaming of a way to kill every last person on earth,” Hasson wrote in a draft email dated June 2, 2017, that was uncovered by investigators, according to the court records.

    Throughout the email, addressed to “friends … acquaintances more likely,” he contemplates the most effective methods to “cause complete destruction” by unleashing a biological attack on the public, followed by contamination of food supplies.

    “Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch. … They will die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise,” he wrote disdainfully.

    The rambling and inchoate letter also includes a to-do list for the next four years, revealing Hasson’s desire to “Get out of debt!!! Buy van to convert, diesel, Buy land for family out west or possibly NC mtns.” He also adds that he needs to “come off” Tramadol, a highly addictive narcotic. “Clear my head,” he says.

    Officials arrested Hasson on Friday on charges of illegal possession of a firearm as well as possession of a controlled substance. But the government called those charges the “proverbial tip of the iceberg,” and subsequently filed the motion on Tuesday asking the court to detain Hasson, who has a detention hearing on Feb. 21.

    In recent years, the government contends, Hasson has been on a weapons buying spree, collecting 15 firearms and more than 1,000 rounds of mixed ammunition — all of which were confiscated from Hasson’s basement apartment last week.

    During the raid officials also discovered Hasson’s computer, containing a spreadsheet that reportedly is a hit list of possible targets — high-ranking current and former Democratic politicians, activists, political organizations and media personalities.

    In addition to Pelosi, Hasson was allegedly considering some type of violent assault on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Richard Blumenthal, along with U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, and former house member, Beto O’Rourke. The spreadsheet list also included MSNBC hosts Chris Hayes and Joe Scarborough, as well as Don Lemon and Van Jones from CNN.

    The court filings paint a picture of an angry and drugged man who has been seeking answers in neo-fascist and neo-Nazi literature for decades, and who is desperate to make a “lasting impression on this world.”

    Apparently, Hasson frequently sought instruction from a manifesto written by Anders Breivik, a far-right, anti-Muslim Norwegian nationalist who was convicted in 2011 of two terror attacks that killed 77 people. According to officials, Hasson used Breivik’s methods to hone his list of potential victims, conducting Internet searches for “most liberal senators;” “where do most senators live in dc;” and “are supreme court justices protected.”

    Hasson’s drug use also appears to stem from directions in Breivik’s manifesto, “taking narcotics in order to increase his ability to conduct attacks.”

    The documents state that when agents searched his apartment, they found documentation indicating Hasson ordered “at least 4,200 Tramadol 100 mg pills” since 2016. In searching his work space, officials said they discovered at least 100 pills of the synthetic opioid and a locked container, filled with more than 30 bottles labeled as human growth hormone, prosecutors wrote.

    Hasson has been working at the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., since 2016. He was an active duty member at the time he was arrested. Prior to that he served in the U.S. Marine Corps. from 1988 to 1993 after which he joined the Army National Guard for about two years.

    “An active duty Coast Guard member, stationed at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, DC, was arrested last week on illegal weapons and drug charges as a result of an ongoing investigation led by the Coast Guard Investigative Service, in cooperation with the FBI and Department of Justice,” Coast Guard spokesman Barry Lane told NPR in an emailed statement.

    Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guard-officer-planned-mass-terrorist-attack-on-a-scale-rarely-see

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    U.S., China Are Working on Multiple Memorandums for Trade Deal – Bloomberg
    U.S., China Are Working on Multiple Memorandums for Trade Deal – Bloomberg

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    To continue, please click the box below to let us know you’re not a robot.

    Source Article from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-21/u-s-china-said-to-work-on-multiple-memorandums-for-trade-deal

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    Mark Harris’ son warned him about operative in North Carolina scandal – POLITICO
    Mark Harris’ son warned him about operative in North Carolina scandal – POLITICO

    Mark Harris, GOP candidate in North Carolina’s 9th District Congressional race, fights back tears at the conclusion of his son John’s testimony during the third day of a public hearing on voting irregularities in Raleigh. | Travis Long/The News & Observer via AP, Pool

    Elections

    In emotional testimony Wednesday, the son of North Carolina Republican Mark Harris said he warned his father about the absentee ballot strategy used by Leslie McCrae Dowless, the political operative now at the center of an election fraud scandal in the state’s 9th Congressional District.

    John Harris testified before the North Carolina State Election Board Wednesday about allegations of election fraud. Though Mark Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in the unofficial ballot count on election night in November 2018, the election board refused to certify a winner, pointing to the accusations of fraud.

    Story Continued Below

    John Harris, an attorney himself, said early on he was suspicious of Dowless’ operation and shared his thoughts with his father and mother. John’s testimony appears to refute comments made by his father that he was never warned about Dowless, who held prior felony convictions of fraud and perjury.

    After Mark met with Dowless, John sent his father an email on April 7, 2017, that included text of the law on the illegality of collecting a person’s absentee ballot.

    “Good test is if you’re comfortable with the full process he uses being broadcast on the news,” John emailed his father as Mark Harris contemplated hiring Dowless.

    John said he believed his father’s mind was already made up despite his warnings.

    John added that there’s no reason for him to believe his father, mother or anyone else within the Harris campaign knew what Dowless was doing.

    “I raised red flags at the time the decision was made to hire Mr. Dowless,” said John, whose testimony dominated the third day of the hearing.

    “I love my dad and I love my mom. I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle,” John said, holding back tears. “I think that they made mistakes in this process and they certainly did things differently than I would have done them.”

    After investigating the fraud allegations, the board began its evidentiary hearing this week. A state election board official kicked off the proceedings Monday by presenting evidence that implicated Dowless in an illegal absentee ballot collection “scheme.” State officials and individuals employed by Dowless testified that Dowless illegally paid people to collect and manipulate ballots.

    Mark Harris is set to start the fourth day of testimony on Thursday. It is unclear if the board will conclude its proceedings Thursday or stretch into a fifth day. Upon conclusion of the hearing, the board is expected to either vote for a new election, certify a winner or potentially reach an impasse.

    Source Article from https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/20/mark-harris-north-carolina-election-fraud-1192738

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    Girl, 11, Was Abducted and Killed in 1973 on Walk Home From School — and DNA Leads to Arrest – Yahoo News
    Girl, 11, Was Abducted and Killed in 1973 on Walk Home From School — and DNA Leads to Arrest – Yahoo News

    On July 6, 1973, 11-year-old Linda O’Keefe disappeared while walking home from summer school in the southern California beachside town of Corona del Mar.

    To her family’s horror, her dead body was found the next day in a ditch, still wearing the dress her mother had made for her. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted.

    On Tuesday, 45 years after Linda’s brutal murder, authorities arrested the man that DNA evidence from a genealogy site allegedly points to as her killer: James Alan Neal, 72, of Monument, Colorado, officials announced at a press conference Wednesday.

    Detectives from Newport Beach arrested Neal at 6:29 a.m. in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Newport Beach Police Chief Jon Lewis said at the press conference.

    Neal is charged with murder, kidnapping during the commission of murder and lewd and lascivious acts upon a child under 14 in the beachside town of Corona del Mar, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said.

    Neal is being held in the El Paso County Jail in Colorado. He could be brought to California sometime this week if he waives extradition, Spitzer said.

    It is unclear whether he has retained a lawyer who can speak on his behalf.

    • Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

    Although Linda died almost half a century ago, her family, the community and members of law enforcement never stopped thinking of her or hoping her killer would be brought to justice, Spitzer said.

    “People in the city of Newport Beach have been following this case for literally 45 years,” Spitzer said.

    “Yet for 45 years the Newport Beach Police Department never gave up. The detectives dogged this case. The community made sure that justice would be secured,” he said.

    Shortly after Linda’s murder, investigators recovered DNA evidence from her remains, Spitzer said.

    The DNA sample from her dress was entered into the CODIS system in 2001 but came up empty, he said.

    Detectives from the Newport Beach Police Department kept investigating.

    Taking advantage of the latest in crime-solving techniques, in January, Spitzer said, “they received a pointer indication through genealogical DNA.”

    Combining the “latest” in DNA technology with “old-fashioned” detective work led investigators to Neal, Lewis said.

    Suspect Changed His Name After Linda’s Death

    Neal currently lives in Colorado, but investigators were able to confirm that he lived in California in the 1970s, when Linda was murdered, Spitzer said.

    “He had a connection to southern California, which has been corroborated,” he said.

    After Linda’s death, Neal moved to Florida, where he changed his name to James Alan George Leyton, Spitzer said. Later he moved to Colorado, where he was living when he was arrested, he said.

    On the day Linda disappeared, she was last seen talking to a stranger in a van, Lewis said.

    “Linda never made it home that afternoon,” he said.

    Her parents checked with friends and searched the neighborhood and the path she took home “to no avail,” Lewis said.

    “Then her mother made that call that every parent dreads” and told police her daughter was missing, he said.

    As part of an effort to renew interest in the case, the Newport Beach Police Department used their Twitter account to recount the story of Linda’s life, mysterious disappearance and death.

    “Generations of investigators worked on her case,” said Lewis. “We never gave up.”

    Anyone who may have any information on this unsolved crime is asked to call the Newport Beach Police Cold Case Tip Line at 949-644-3669.

    Source Article from https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/girl-11-abducted-killed-1973-225025960.html

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    Migrant families still being separated at the border, report from Texas group says – NBCNews.com
    Migrant families still being separated at the border, report from Texas group says – NBCNews.com

    Migrant families are still being separated by the Trump administration, sometimes over “uncorroborated allegations” of crimes, according to a report published Thursday by a Texas civil rights group.

    “Family separations are still very much happening in the southern border, they’re still being torn apart by the U.S. government,” Efrén Olivares, director of racial and economic justice at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told NBC News.

    While the separations were not happening at the same scale as when the Trump administration announced the “zero tolerance” policy last spring, some occurred under troubling circumstances, Olivares said. The report, which looked at cases between June 22 through Dec. 17 in McAllen, Texas, comes roughly eight months since the government formally ended the policy.

    The report said it found 38 cases of parents and legal guardians separated from their children.

    One of those cases involved Mr. Perez-Domingo, an indigenous migrant father from Guatemala whose primary language is Mam, according to the report. Perez-Domingo was separated from his 2-year-old daughter in July after being accused by Customs and Border Protection of not being the girl’s biological father and providing a fraudulent birth certificate, according to the report. He was not given an interpreter during his interview.

    The civil rights group said it investigated the incident and discovered the birth certificate was authentic and a DNA test determined Perez-Domingo was the child’s father. They were reunited in August.

    “The lack of assistance of translators, in combination with aggressive questioning by the CBP agent, resulted in severe discrimination and traumatic consequences for this indigenous family,” the report says, adding, had the group “not interviewed this father early in the process, it is highly likely that Mr. Perez-Domingo would have been deported without his daughter, and his child unlawfully orphaned in the United States.”

    The report lists another migrant father, identified as Mr. A, whose 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son were taken from him over “uncorroborated allegations of gang affiliation.” The civil rights group claimed that an investigation into the man’s background did not find evidence of known criminal convictions in the U.S. or in his home country of El Salvador or proof of any gang affiliation.

    After the end of “zero tolerance,” administration officials have said immigration authorities are separating families only if the adult is not the parent or legal guardian of the child, if the safety of the child is at risk or because of “serious criminal activity” by the adult.

    Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the the Texas Civil Rights Project had “published a flawed report without asking for or including input” from the federal agency. It also claimed the civil rights group used flawed data including “all types of familial relationships without regard to the statutory definition” of an unaccompanied migrant child.

    Based on that definition, Customs and Border Protection acknowledged a total of 38 family separations in McAllen.

    The Texas Civil Rights Project said it screened an estimated 9,800 adult migrants who were prosecuted for illegal entry into the U.S. and 492 adults prosecute for illegal reentry, most of whom were from Central America. The families were interviewed prior to their hearings at a federal courthouse in McAllen.

    Of those cases, it found 272 instances of families being separated, among them 34 parent and child family separations, 107 cases of siblings being separated, 62 cases where children were separated from aunts or uncles and other cases involving separations from cousins, grandparents, legal guardians, stepparents or other caretakers. The youngest child was 8½ months old at the time she was separated from her mother.

    In December, the Department of Homeland Security said from June 21 to Nov. 30, 81 children and 76 adults had been separated.

    Under the “zero tolerance” policy last spring and early summer, migrants were prosecuted for crossing the border illegally, a misdemeanor for the first offense. Parents then ended up in federal custody and their children were separated from them.

    After a swell of criticism from both parties and growing protests across the country, President Donald Trump announced an end to the policy in June. Later that month, a federal judge also ordered that the government reunify many of the separated families.

    The government had identified more than 2,700 children who were separated under the policy. But it’s estimated that many more may have been separated since the summer of 2017, according a report by the HHS inspector general.

    On Thursday afternoon, the American Civil Liberties Union will argue in federal court that families separated before the June 2018 ruling should be covered under the reunification lawsuit.

    Daniella Silva is a reporter for NBC News, specializing in immigration and inclusion issues.

    Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/migrant-families-still-being-separated-border-report-texas-group-says-n973766

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    Trump says it’s up to attorney general to release pending Mueller report – AOL
    Trump says it’s up to attorney general to release pending Mueller report – AOL

    President Donald Trump said Wednesday it will be up to newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr to release special counsel Robert Muller’s report on the Russia investigation.

    “That’ll be totally up to the new attorney general,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked if the report should be released while the president is in Vietnam next week. “He’s a tremendous man, a tremendous person who really respects this country and respects the Justice Department,” Trump said of Barr.

    Trump is going to Vietnam for a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.




    NBC News previously reported that Mueller is nearing the end of his sprawling investigation into Russian election interference and possible links between Trump campaign associates and the Russian government, which began more than two years ago.

    Mueller was expected to submit a confidential report to the attorney general as early as the middle of this month, NBC News previously reported.

    Mueller is also examining whether the president obstructed justice during the probe and is expected to address that matter in his report. Whether the special counsel will accuse Trump of wrongdoing on that score is unclear.

    Mueller has not made public any evidence proving such a conspiracy, although he has rebutted in court filings the president’s assertion that neither he nor any of his top aides had met or talked with Russians during the 2016 race. They did, according to Mueller; and, in the case of his lawyer’s negotiations over a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow, Trump knew about it, court filings say.

    Barr suggested during his confirmation hearing last month that the report might not become public in the way many have been expecting.

    Barr repeatedly told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he is committed to making as much information public as he can about Mueller’s probe, but the material that’s eventually released publicly might be a report from the attorney general on what Mueller has concluded.

    The rules on the release of the report require Mueller to submit a confidential report to the attorney general explaining prosecution decisions. The attorney general has to notify Congress about the special counsel’s findings, but those reports must be “brief notifications, with an outline of the actions and the reasons for them,” the rules say.

     

    More from NBC News:

    Ex-FBI official McCabe responds to ‘lying’ Trump attacks, calls them ‘horrific’

    Judge: Manafort gave false statements to protect Russian

    Trump installs state-of-the-art golf simulator in the White House

    Source Article from https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/02/20/trump-says-its-up-to-attorney-general-to-release-pending-mueller-report/23674369/

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    US and China are said to be outlining deal to end trade war – CNBC
    US and China are said to be outlining deal to end trade war – CNBC

    <!– –>

    ×

    Trade

    The United States and China have started to outline commitments in principle on the stickiest issues in their trade dispute, marking the most significant progress yet toward ending a seven-month trade war, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

    The world’s two largest economies have slapped tit-for-tat tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods, slowing global economic growth, skewing supply chains and disrupting manufacturing.

    As officials hold high level talks on Thursday and Friday in Washington, they remain far apart on demands made by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration for structural changes to China’s economy.

    But the broad outline of what could make up a deal is beginning to emerge from the talks, the sources said, as the two sides push for an agreement by March 1. That marks the end of a 90-day truce that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to when they met in Argentina late last year.

    Negotiators are drawing up six memorandums of understanding on structural issues: forced technology transfer and cyber theft, intellectual property rights, services, currency, agriculture and non-tariff barriers to trade, according to two sources familiar with the progress of the talks.

    At meetings between U.S. and Chinese officials last week in Beijing the two sides traded texts and worked on outlining obligations on paper, according to one of the sources.

    The process has become a real trade negotiation, the source said, so much so that at the end of the week the participants considered staying in Beijing to keep working. Instead they agreed to take a few days off and reconvene in Washington.

    The sources requested anonymity to speak candidly about the talks.

    Getting commitments in writing

    The MOUs cover the most complex issues affecting the trading relationship between the two countries and are meant, from the U.S. perspective, to end the practices that led Trump to start levying duties on Chinese imports in the first place.

    One source cautioned that the talks could still end in failure. But the work on the MOUs was a significant step in getting China to sign up both to broad principles and to specific commitments on key issues, he said.

    The United States has accused Beijing of forcing U.S. companies doing business in China to share their technology with local partners and hand over intellectual property secrets. China denies it engages in such practices.

    Trump administration officials also object to non-tariff barriers in China, including industrial subsidies, regulations, business licensing procedures, product standards reviews and other practices that they say keep U.S. goods out of China or give an unfair advantage to domestic firms.

    U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has pushed for China to open its financial services markets to more foreign firms, including credit card giants Visa and MasterCard, which have waited years for China to make good on promises to allow them to operate there.

    On currency, U.S. officials including Mnuchin have warned China against devaluing its yuan to gain a competitive advantage after the Chinese currency weakened significantly against the dollar last year, partly counteracting Trump’s tariffs.

    The two sides were discussing an enforcement mechanism for the deal, the source said. Reuters reported last month that the United States was pushing for regular reviews of China’s progress on pledged trade reforms and could reinstate tariffs if it deems Beijing has violated the agreement.

    The parties also were looking at a 10-item list of ways that China could reduce its trade surplus with the United States, including by buying agricultural produce, energy and goods such as semiconductors, according to two other sources familiar with the talks.

    Clock is ticking

    Time is running short ahead of the March 1 deadline to resolve the dispute or see U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods rise from 10 percent to 25 percent. Trump said on Tuesday he thought China had an incentive to move swiftly.

    “I think they’re trying to move fast so that doesn’t happen,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, while not ruling out the possibility of extending the deadline.

    Lower-level officials held a round of talks in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday. They will be joined on Thursday by the top level negotiators, led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He.

    Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/us-china-outline-of-deal-to-end-trade-war-reuters.html

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    Arrested Coast Guard Officer Planned Mass Terrorist Attack ‘On A Scale Rarely Seen’ – NPR
    Arrested Coast Guard Officer Planned Mass Terrorist Attack ‘On A Scale Rarely Seen’ – NPR

    Federal prosecutors say Christopher Paul Hasson had acquired a cache of weapons and ammunition in an attempt to launch a domestic terrorist attack. Over the years, Hasson honed a hit list that included prominent Democrats and media figures.

    AP


    hide caption

    toggle caption

    AP

    Federal prosecutors say Christopher Paul Hasson had acquired a cache of weapons and ammunition in an attempt to launch a domestic terrorist attack. Over the years, Hasson honed a hit list that included prominent Democrats and media figures.

    AP

    Editor’s note: This story contains offensive language.

    A 49-year-old Coast Guard lieutenant is in custody and faces domestic terrorism charges for allegedly planning “to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country,” according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Tuesday.

    Federal prosecutors say Christopher Paul Hasson, a self-described white nationalist living in Silver Spring, Md., amassed a stockpile of weapons since at least 2017, while cultivating plans to launch a widespread attack on prominent Democratic lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and several high-profile journalists from MSNBC and CNN.

    Court documents indicate Hasson espoused extremist and white supremacist views for years — aspiring to establish a “white homeland” — and say he is a “domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect government conduct.”

    “I am dreaming of a way to kill every last person on earth,” Hasson wrote in a draft email dated June 2, 2017, that was uncovered by investigators, according to the court records.

    Throughout the email, addressed to “friends … acquaintances more likely,” he contemplates the most effective methods to “cause complete destruction” by unleashing a biological attack on the public, followed by contamination of food supplies.

    “Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch. … They will die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise,” he wrote disdainfully.

    The rambling and inchoate letter also includes a to-do list for the next four years, revealing Hasson’s desire to “Get out of debt!!! Buy van to convert, diesel, Buy land for family out west or possibly NC mtns.” He also adds that he needs to “come off” Tramadol, a highly addictive narcotic. “Clear my head,” he says.

    Officials arrested Hasson on Friday on charges of illegal possession of a firearm as well as possession of a controlled substance. But the government called those charges the “proverbial tip of the iceberg,” and subsequently filed the motion on Tuesday asking the court to detain Hasson, who has a detention hearing on Feb. 21.

    In recent years, the government contends, Hasson has been on a weapons buying spree, collecting 15 firearms and more than 1,000 rounds of mixed ammunition — all of which were confiscated from Hasson’s basement apartment last week.

    During the raid officials also discovered Hasson’s computer, containing a spreadsheet that reportedly is a hit list of possible targets — high-ranking current and former Democratic politicians, activists, political organizations and media personalities.

    In addition to Pelosi, Hasson was allegedly considering some type of violent assault on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Richard Blumenthal, along with U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, and former house member, Beto O’Rourke. The spreadsheet list also included MSNBC hosts Chris Hayes and Joe Scarborough, as well as Don Lemon and Van Jones from CNN.

    The court filings paint a picture of an angry and drugged man who has been seeking answers in neo-fascist and neo-Nazi literature for decades, and who is desperate to make a “lasting impression on this world.”

    Apparently, Hasson frequently sought instruction from a manifesto written by Anders Breivik, a far-right, anti-Muslim Norwegian nationalist who was convicted in 2011 of two terror attacks that killed 77 people. According to officials, Hasson used Breivik’s methods to hone his list of potential victims, conducting Internet searches for “most liberal senators;” “where do most senators live in dc;” and “are supreme court justices protected.”

    Hasson’s drug use also appears to stem from directions in Breivik’s manifesto, “taking narcotics in order to increase his ability to conduct attacks.”

    The documents state that when agents searched his apartment, they found documentation indicating Hasson ordered “at least 4,200 Tramadol 100 mg pills” since 2016. In searching his work space, officials said they discovered at least 100 pills of the synthetic opioid and a locked container, filled with more than 30 bottles labeled as human growth hormone, prosecutors wrote.

    Hasson has been working at the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., since 2016. He was an active duty member at the time he was arrested. Prior to that he served in the U.S. Marine Corps. from 1988 to 1993 after which he joined the Army National Guard for about two years.

    “An active duty Coast Guard member, stationed at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, DC, was arrested last week on illegal weapons and drug charges as a result of an ongoing investigation led by the Coast Guard Investigative Service, in cooperation with the FBI and Department of Justice,” Coast Guard spokesman Barry Lane told NPR in an emailed statement.

    Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guard-officer-planned-mass-terrorist-attack-on-a-scale-rarely-see

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    Police revived a 1973 murder case by live-tweeting a girl’s last day. Now, a DNA match has led to an arrest. – The Washington Post
    Police revived a 1973 murder case by live-tweeting a girl’s last day. Now, a DNA match has led to an arrest. – The Washington Post

    Amy B Wang

    February 20 at 4:51 PM

    On the day Linda Ann O’Keefe died, it was a cooler-than-normal July morning in Newport Beach, Calif. The brown-haired, blue-eyed 11-year-old got a ride to summer school — about half a mile away — but had to walk home in the afternoon.

    It was July 6, 1973, a Friday. When O’Keefe didn’t return home right away, there was little concern at first. But when night fell and her whereabouts were still unknown, her parents called police and desperately combed the neighborhood, to no avail.

    Investigators would later learn the girl had last been seen at an intersection talking to a stranger in a turquoise van. The following morning, O’Keefe’s body was found in a ditch. She had been strangled and was still wearing a blue-and-white floral print dress that her mother had sewn for her.

    Her death would go unsolved for more than four decades.

    On Tuesday, nearly 46 years after O’Keefe’s life ended, authorities arrested a man they say is suspected of being her killer: a 72-year-old living in Colorado named James Neal.

    Police were tight-lipped about exactly how they solved the case but said they received a lead in January that prompted them to begin investigating Neal, who had been living in Orange County at the time of O’Keefe’s murder but had since moved to Colorado.

    Through surveillance, a sample of Neal’s DNA was obtained — one that ultimately matched a sample taken from O’Keefe’s body in 1973. Neal was arrested Tuesday “without incident” in Colorado Springs, Newport Beach Police Chief Jon Lewis said at a news conference Wednesday.

    The arrest seemed to signal an end to an infamous cold case that had both haunted and motivated “generations of investigators” at the Newport Beach Police Department, Lewis said.

    “Linda’s face and her memory has been with us since the day this happened,” he said. “Her picture hangs in our detective division, where our folks see it every day as a reminder of her and why we continue to pursue these cases.”

    Both of O’Keefe’s parents have since died, but the girl was survived by two sisters, whom police had contacted with updates about Neal’s arrest.

    “As you can imagine, this was difficult news to receive,” Lewis said. “It is bittersweet to hear that, yes, this case has been resolved. But again, it’s a reminder of what happened. It was a difficult conversation … for me personally. On one hand, we were grateful that we could have that conversation and provide some closure.”

    Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer also called the arrest “bittersweet,” noting he had been 12 years old when the 11-year-old was killed. But he praised Newport Beach police for persisting through the decades.

    Spitzer said a DNA sample was recovered from O’Keefe after her body was found and uploaded to a database, where it never matched others.

    “That sample remained in the system for a long period of time,” Spitzer said.

    Spitzer refused to elaborate on how they were able to track down Neal and identify him as a suspect after 45 years, but he said police had received a “pointer notification through genealogical DNA” — suggesting perhaps that authorities had come upon DNA from someone related to Neal that would have implicated him as a possible match.

    That DNA “hit” came in January, Spitzer said. After following and obtaining a DNA sample from Neal himself, police were confident enough to make an arrest, he added.

    Spitzer also refused to confirm whether Neal had family members or children, saying the matter was under investigation.

    “My office will never forget about cold cases,” Spitzer said in a statement. “Our hearts go out to the victim and the victim’s family in this case, having to endure decades without answers. We will make sure that the defendant is fairly and justly held accountable in a court of law.”

    [‘My killer was never found’: Police live tweet a murdered girl’s last day alive in 1973]

    In July, on the 45th anniversary of O’Keefe’s death, the Newport Beach Police Department “live-tweeted” Linda’s story — in her voice, from the perspective of her last day — in the hope of raising awareness about her cold case and shaking forth any new clues about her killer.

    Police hoped that retelling the girl’s story through the modern-day medium would help people from a different generation form an emotional attachment to the case. Using details from the investigator’s decades-old case files, police relayed O’Keefe’s last hours, as well as her family’s frantic search for her, as if they were unfolding in real time, as The Washington Post’s Meagan Flynn reported:

    At 6:42 p.m., six hours since her mother had last heard from her, O’Keefe’s parents reported her missing to the Newport Beach Police Department, convinced by then O’Keefe was not simply running off with friends to retaliate for not getting a ride. Helicopters, police Jeeps and search parties scoured the area looking for signs of O’Keefe. Only one person, a woman who did not know anything about a missing girl, was close enough to hear her, and by then it was too late.

    Just before midnight, “a lady in the bluffs above Back Bay hears a female voice outside, screaming ‘Stop, you’re hurting me,’” the police tweeted in O’Keefe’s name. “She listens, but hears nothing more. She doesn’t know that I’m missing. That I’ll be dead by morning. That I’ll be found a couple hundred yards from her home.”

    As “Linda” noted in the tweets in July, her case would generate numerous theories and a sketch of a “person of interest” but ultimately grow cold.

    Until 46 years later.

    “Technology has caught up with the law,” Spitzer said Wednesday.

    Spitzer noted that the DNA lead police had obtained was wholly unrelated to the department’s live-tweeting of O’Keefe’s last day but said the exercise had served to revive the case in the public’s mind.

    “It didn’t necessarily lead to the identification [of the suspect],” he said. “But it created an awareness … and opened doors for us to have this case pursued with renewed effort.”

    Read more:

    A suspected killer eluded capture for 25 years. Then investigators got his aunt’s DNA.

    She swiped her co-worker’s Coke can. Police say it cracked a 28-year-old murder case.

    Police use DNA to solve 1976 murder of Karen Klaas, ex-wife of Righteous Brothers singer

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/02/20/police-revived-murder-case-by-live-tweeting-girls-last-day-now-they-have-an-arrest/

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    Why Trump’s border wall national emergency is constitutional – Washington Examiner
    Why Trump’s border wall national emergency is constitutional – Washington Examiner

    Democratic congressional leaders claim President Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency to spend additional money on a border wall is unlawful, with some even saying this maneuver looks more like a dictatorship than a democracy. On this matter, the Democrats are wrong. It was Congress that gave the president this power.

    The Military Construction Codification Act of 1982 provides that the president can reallocate funds for military construction projects when he declares a national emergency “that requires use of the armed forces.”

    One could argue a border wall isn’t a real emergency and that judges should stop the president. The problem is that judges historically have tried to not second-guess the president’s national security judgment for declaring a national emergency. Congress holds the real power here. If lawmakers believe a border wall is a “fake” emergency, they can vote to undo the decision. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 says that Congress can pass a joint resolution of termination to end such an emergency declaration.

    A stronger argument against Trump’s declaration is that it does not require use of the armed forces. The president is likely to argue that he must use armed forces or else the problems he seeks to resolve with his declaration will continue, and so the use of military personnel is required. This question is likely to be a close call legally, and it’s hard to predict how judges will respond.

    Other critics claim the Military Construction Codification Act violates the Constitution’s nondelegation doctrine, which prohibits Congress from delegating away its legislative power to the president. I strongly support the nondelegation doctrine, see my amicus brief in the pending Supreme Court case Gundy v. United States, but the statute invoked by the president does not violate that doctrine because the nondelegation doctrine only applies to rules of private conduct. As Justice Clarence Thomas, the strongest supporter of the nondelegation doctrine on the court, recognized in DOT v. Association of American Railroads (2014), “The core of the legislative power that the Framers sought to protect from consolidation with the executive is the power to make ‘law’ in the Blackstonian sense of generally applicable rules of private conduct.”

    Discretion given to the president over how the executive branch is run, or how appropriated money is spent, is merely allowing the head of the executive to exercise his default control over his subordinates. The very first appropriations bill put almost no limits on how the money would be spent outside of the department it was assigned to, and likewise this authorization by Congress is constitutional.

    Another concern the president should be aware of concerns the use of eminent domain, the power of the government to seize property for a public use. Only Congress can authorize the president to seize property, and it certainly has not done so in this case. Two-thirds of the land along the border is owned by private individuals who may not want a border wall on their property. The president does not have the power, under the authority he has invoked so far, to take their land. He can, however, negotiate to buy their land with the newly available funds.

    Aside from the present border wall dispute, people in both political parties have expressed fear that a future president could willy-nilly declare a national emergency on other priorities for which he can’t gain approval from the legislature, like guns or climate change. No doubt a president could declare such a national emergency, but the additional powers given to the president by declaring a national emergency are limited. Even with a national emergency declaration, there is no statute giving the president the power to seize guns or other private property. Even if there were a statute that said that, it would violate other constitutional provisions, such as the Due Process Clause or the Takings Clause.

    Contrary to Democrats’ claims, this national emergency declaration does appear to be lawful. That doesn’t mean it’s good public policy, good precedent, or that it stands in the way of Congress simply reversing the national security declaration, as it has the power to do. But Democrats should think twice about hastily declaring the president’s action unlawful or unconstitutional. Doing so risks misinforming Americans about critical decisions made by their representatives and further eroding their trust in our system.

    Devin Watkins is an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of a brief to the Supreme Court advocating a strong nondelegation doctrine.

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-trumps-border-wall-national-emergency-is-constitutional

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    Republican candidate’s son shakes up North Carolina hearing with surprise testimony – NBC News
    Republican candidate’s son shakes up North Carolina hearing with surprise testimony – NBC News

    RALEIGH, N.C. – The son of Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris testified before the North Carolina State Board of Elections on Wednesday, saying that he warned his father about the illegal tactics of a political operative that Harris hired and casting doubt on Harris’ insistence that he had no knowledge of fraudulent election activity in last year’s election

    In a dramatic surprise appearance that culminated with an emotional plea to fix the political process, John Harris, an assistant U.S. attorney in North Carolina, testified that he told his father he had become concerned about McCrae Dowless’ practices after studying the 2016 congressional primary in the same 9th district,

    In that race, Dowless’ candidate, Todd Johnson, came in third place in the election even though he won all but four of the 218 absentee ballots cast in Bladen County. Harris was a candidate in that election as well.

    Harris testified that his father decided to hire Dowless despite his concerns.

    “Do I agree with their ultimate assessment? No, I thought what he was doing was illegal, and I was right,” John Harris said on the stand. “If he had lost repeatedly I don’t think that they would have decided to go with him, but you know, the fact that he had a demonstrated record of success and other people were endorsing his program, I think that weighed heavily for them.”

    Earlier this week, the board heard testimony about what state investigators described as a “coordinated, unlawful” mail-in ballot “scheme” in Bladen County run by Dowless that included the collection of absentee ballots, which isillegal in North Carolina.

    The step-daughter of Dowless, Lisa Britt, testified that she would sometimes fill out incomplete ballots for the Republican candidates. She said, however, that she did not fill out ballots for Harris.

    John Harris provided email exchanges with his father about Dowless’ apparent practices in the 2016 race, including an email in April of 2017, just prior to Harris’ hiring of Dowless, where he told his father that it is a felony to mail someone else’s ballot and that it is “a legal gray area” even if Dowless put the ballot in a voters’ own mailbox.

    “I can tell you that my view is that they heard my concerns, that other people that were a lot closer to the situation and Mr. Dowless endorsed his activity, and Mr. Dowless lied to them repeatedly,” he said.

    His testimony could have a decisive impact as the five-member board weighs whether to certify the results of last November’s results or call for a new election. Mark Harris is the unofficial leader of the race by just 905 votes over Democrat Dan McCready, but allegations of absentee ballot irregularities in two rural counties — Bladen and Robeson — have delayed the certification of the race.

    John Harris was called to the stand by state investigators and neither the Harris nor McCready teams knew he was going to testify.

    Mark Harris will take the stand Thursday morning, the fourth day of the hearing.

    Mark Harris, Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional race, fights back tears at the conclusion of his son John Harris’s testimony during the third day of a public evidentiary hearing on the 9th Congressional District voting irregularities investigation Won Feb. 20, 2019.Travis Long / The News and Observer via AP, Pool

    John Harris also said that his father told him that he was going to hire Dowless as a contractor through the Red Dome consulting group in order to add a layer of separation from the campaign.

    Harris’ attorneys have attempted to separate Harris from Dowless throughout the hearing, but Wednesday’s testimony damaged that argument.

    Choking back tears, John Harris said he thought more about his children than his parents when considering his decision to testify.

    “I love my dad, I love my mom, O.K.? I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle, O.K.? I think they made mistakes in this process and they certainly did things differently than I would have done,” Harris said while his father looked on wiping back tears.

    “We have got to come up with a way to transcend our partisan politics, and the exploitation of processes like this for political gain. That goes for both parties, Democrats and Republicans. And Libertarians,” he said.

    “I’m just left thinking that we can all do a lot better than this.”

    Leigh Ann Caldwell

    Leigh Ann Caldwell is a political reporter for NBC News who covers Capitol Hill and elections. 

    Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/republican-candidate-s-son-shakes-north-carolina-hearing-surprise-testimony-n973836

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