“He lied! Additionally, he directly asked me for a pardon. I said NO. He lied again! He also badly wanted to work at the White House. He lied!” Trump tweeted.
What this is all about: Cohen said in his open testimony before the House that he “never” asked for a pardon.
“I have never asked for it, nor would I accept a pardon from President Trump,” Cohen said before the House Intelligence Committee.
The prospect of a pardon for Cohen was raised more than once between Cohen’s lawyer and attorneys representing the President, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The depth of those discussions — including whether a pardon was truly on the table in exchange for Cohen’s cooperation — is being disputed publicly among the different factions.
Cohen told Congress over the past week that his former attorney spoke separately with two attorneys for the President, Rudy Giuilani and Jay Sekulow, about the prospect of a pardon, the sources said. Cohen also testified to Congress that he spoke directly to Sekulow about pardons, according to the sources, which Sekulow denies.
That Michael Cohen is proudly declaring he doesn’t want a pardon from federal prison time doesn’t make him the hero he thinks it does.
The only reason anyone would say that, as Cohen did during his embarrassing testimony in front of Congress last week, is that he knew a pardon from President Trump was never in the cards. And that’s what the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Cohen’s current attorney, Lanny Davis, confirmed to the Journal that after Cohen’s New York office was raided by the FBI last spring, he directed his then-lawyer Stephen Ryan to consult Trump’s attorneys about a possible pardon, should he face charges.
The report contradicts Cohen’s congressional testimony, wherein he boasted that he “never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from Mr. Trump.”
It’s was a dramatic moment in American history only paralleled by George Washington as a child vowing that he could not tell a lie.
Cohen could have stopped at the “I never asked for” and it would have been sufficient, if not truthful. But he had to go the extra mile and express his dedication to imprisonment.
Cohen wanted a pardon and when it wasn’t offered, he decided he’d say on national television that he didn’t want it anyway. Davis, his lawyer, said as far back as mid-December in an interview on CBS that Cohen “wouldn’t take a pardon from Donald Trump if it was handed to him.” Here are other things Cohen will under no circumstance accept from Donald Trump: $1 billion dollars, a chest of diamonds, and a hug.
EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) – Huddled against a border fence on a bitterly cold morning in El Paso, Texas, a group of 60 Guatemalan migrants, around half toddlers and children, shouted for help: “We’re cold, we’re hungry, we need shelter.”
The group was trying to surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents and claim asylum, but the agents were too busy herding other groups along the fence that stands about 100 yards (91 m) inside U.S. territory.
The 18-foot-high (5.5 meters) steel barrier is meant to deter illegal immigration. But its position inside the border has turned it into a destination for human smugglers trafficking large groups of asylum seekers fleeing poverty and violence.
The smugglers in recent weeks have shifted routes to El Paso from the remote Antelope Wells area of New Mexico, Border Patrol supervisory agent Joe Romero said.
Once undocumented migrants are on U.S. soil, the Border Patrol is obliged to arrest them for entering illegally. But migrants can claim fear of returning to their countries, allowing them to remain in the United States legally until an asylum hearing, which can take months or years.
The smugglers’ strategy exploits a weakness in the very border wall President Donald Trump has touted as a means to protect the United States from undocumented immigrants and illicit drugs.
The crowds in El Paso illustrate changing immigration patterns. As recently as 2015, the majority of undocumented border crossers were adult men from Mexico looking to disappear into the country and find work. Now the Border Patrol says about 85 percent of migrants arriving in the El Paso sector are Central American families and children seeking asylum.
Gaspar Isom, 38, who was with his 16-year-old son Sebastian, said he chose El Paso for the relative safety of its sister Mexican border city, Ciudad Juarez.
“We were told other places were more dangerous to cross, they were controlled by the Zetas,” Isom said, referring to the Mexican cartel.
The pair were among close to 1,000 mostly Central American migrants who crossed into El Paso on Wednesday in the kind of surge the U.S. border has not seen in over a decade, Border Patrol data show.
El Paso is not alone in seeing an uptick. Over 268,000 undocumented migrants were arrested at the Southwest border from October through February, a near doubling over the same period a year earlier, to a 12-year high, according to government data released this week. Annual apprehensions remain well below the peak of 1.6 million in 2000.
Slideshow (20 Images)
Border Patrol officials say the El Paso fence, one of multiple sections of barrier built inside the border due to quirks of local topography, is successful in stopping migrants from scattering into El Paso.
But they acknowledge having a hard time keeping up with the numbers. El Paso sector Border Patrol stations reached capacity on Wednesday, and the group of 60 was finally picked up at 5 a.m. Thursday, after spending two nights sleeping by the fence, according to Dylan Corbett, who helps run a migrant shelter operated by El Paso’s Roman Catholic diocese.
Romero said the agency ran out of space to safely and securely transport migrants: “We have manpower shortages, our facilities are at capacity if not more.”
Reporting by Andrew Hay, Lucy Nicholson and Jane Ross; Editing by Scott Malone and Leslie Adler
That Michael Cohen is proudly declaring he doesn’t want a pardon from federal prison time doesn’t make him the hero he thinks it does.
The only reason anyone would say that, as Cohen did during his embarrassing testimony in front of Congress last week, is that he knew a pardon from President Trump was never in the cards. And that’s what the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Cohen’s current attorney, Lanny Davis, confirmed to the Journal that after Cohen’s New York office was raided by the FBI last spring, he directed his then-lawyer Stephen Ryan to consult Trump’s attorneys about a possible pardon, should he face charges.
The report contradicts Cohen’s congressional testimony, wherein he boasted that he “never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from Mr. Trump.”
It’s was a dramatic moment in American history only paralleled by George Washington as a child vowing that he could not tell a lie.
Cohen could have stopped at the “I never asked for” and it would have been sufficient, if not truthful. But he had to go the extra mile and express his dedication to imprisonment.
Cohen wanted a pardon and when it wasn’t offered, he decided he’d say on national television that he didn’t want it anyway. Davis, his lawyer, said as far back as mid-December in an interview on CBS that Cohen “wouldn’t take a pardon from Donald Trump if it was handed to him.” Here are other things Cohen will under no circumstance accept from Donald Trump: $1 billion dollars, a chest of diamonds, and a hug.
Paul Manafort was placed in solitary confinement leading up to his sentencing; Doug McKelway has the details.
With the release of the “Mueller Report” reportedly just around the corner, the sentencing Thursday of one-time Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort to 47 months in prison offers a timely reminder that the whole Russia collusion narrative was never more than a fantasy of the Democrats and the mainstream media.
As numerous investigations and witness testimonies have already demonstrated, there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to elect Donald Trump as president. The entire justification for the Mueller probe was a farce, invented by former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign manager Robby Mook and the rest of the Clinton brain trust to justify their humiliating defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
Even U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III acknowledged that Manafort’s convictions were completely unrelated to the Russia collusion, about which the judge had previously expressed skepticism in open court.
“He is not before the court for anything having to do with colluding with the Russian government,” Ellis said in court.
It’s near-universally assumed by now that Mueller’s final report, however much of it the public eventually sees, will fail to show any evidence of collusion. So the same talking heads who’ve spent nearly two years whipping half the country into a frenzy about Russian collusion have to cling to what they do have: Manafort.
Manafort, plain and simple, is going to prison for things completely outside the original scope of Mueller’s investigation. All of his convictions stem from the shady lobbying businesses he ran with his associate Rick Gates long before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.
The problem for them is that Manafort’s convictions illustrate just how empty Mueller’s net has come up after more than 21 months in this putrid fishing hole.
Paul Manafort was found guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, and failure to report a foreign bank account. In addition to the 47-month prison sentence that Ellis gave him Thursday, Manafort will serve even longer because the judge in his other criminal trial threw out his guilty plea after determining he lied to Mueller’s investigators.
This is all very serious — and all very irrelevant to Russian election interference.
Manafort, plain and simple, is going to prison for things completely outside the original scope of Mueller’s investigation. All of his convictions stem from the shady lobbying businesses he ran with his associate Rick Gates long before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.
The same could be said about any of the myriad other indictments Mueller has brought against Americans who were unfortunate enough to have ties to the Trump campaign. The only illegal conduct Mueller uncovered either predates the Trump campaign or involves “process crimes” directly linked to Mueller’s investigation, such as those of George Papadopoulos, the former Trump aide who got a whopping 14 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
The fact is that after nearly two years of work, we still have no indication that the Mueller probe found so much as a single instance of actual Trump-Russia collusion. Cases such as Manafort’s are typically relegated to no more than a moment’s mention on the nightly news, but not this time.
The fake collusion narrative is simply too important to the media. They’ve invested too much of their capital and credibility, so they have no choice but to present Manafort’s crimes as evidence not only of Donald Trump’s supposed culpability but of Mueller’s efficacy.
For their part, the president’s detractors on Capitol Hill, particularly Democratic committee chairmen Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, need the artificial stench of the Manafort sentencing to hang in the air as long as possible so that they can prepare to launch the second wave of their vile, politically motivated attack.
With the Mueller probe’s long reign as “The Resistance’s” best hope for overturning the 2016 presidential election quickly coming to a close, the Democrats hope to simply transition to their own witch hunts.
As Manafort’s sentencing on charges unrelated to the 2016 election reminds us, the coming congressional investigations will fare no better than Mueller did in the hunt for evidence of the collusion that never was.
A political crisis is brewing inside the halls of Congress. A few freshman Democrats have drawn the ire from both sides about their position on the U.S.’s relationship with Israel.
In the lead up to the 2018 midterm election, then-congressional candidates Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., — the first Muslim women to be elected to Congress — were criticized for a series of troubling remarks about Israel that were rooted in anti-Semitism. It all began with an escalation of violence in November 2012 initially provoked by Hamas militants. Omar, who was then active in Minnesota politics, tweeted, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
That tweet came back to haunt Omar during her 2018 congressional run, as it dredges out an old anti-Semitic trope that Jews are somehow conspiring to take over the world.
As members of Congress, both Tlaib and Omar have faced criticism for rolling out another anti-Semitic trope, the suggestion that Jewish Americans have dual loyalties. In January 2019, Tlaib, responding to a Senate bill that would combat the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel, tweeted, “They forgot what country they represent.”
In February 2019, Omar came under heavy criticism from her Democratic colleagues that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (better known as AIPAC) was paying members of Congress for their support of Jewish state, even tweeting, “It’s All About the Benjamins.” During an event later that month, Omar said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Supporters of Omar have argued that the congresswoman has been singled out for bringing up this point about American allegiance to Israel, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and a number of Democrats are debating a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism. But the progressive wing of the party, led by Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been quite vocal in its opposition.
Ocasio-Cortez has attempted to defend Omar by making a broader statement that nothing is done when other communities are supposedly slandered for dual loyalties saying, “One of the things that is hurtful about the extent to which reprimand is sought of Ilhan is that no one seeks this level of reprimand when members make statements about Latinx + other communities.”
However Democrats choose to respond to anti-Semitism going forward will say a lot about the direction of the party and where it’s heading. And if this issue persists in the national conversation, it could mean that Pelosi’s influence over her caucus is waning.
Image caption
Mr Sipila announced his government’s resignation in Helsinki on Friday
Finland’s entire government has resigned over its failure to achieve a key policy goal on social welfare and healthcare reform.
Prime Minister Juha Sipila said he was “hugely disappointed” in the outcome.
Finland’s extensive welfare systems are under financial pressure as the nation’s population ages, yet reform plans remain politically controversial.
Mr Sipila’s government is expected to stay on in a caretaker capacity until a planned election in April.
Some political opponents questioned the need for the high-profile resignation of the Centre Party government with just weeks to go until the election.
But Antti Kaikkonen, chair of the Centre Party, defended the decision, which was taken after it became clear the party could not achieve its goals.
“If anyone asks what political responsibility means, then I would say that this is an example,” he tweeted.
Mr Sipila, a former IT entrepreneur who made millions before entering politics, had previously said he would consider resigning if his primary reform policy failed.
The government had hoped its planned reforms would save up to €3bn (£2.6bn) over the next decade.
What is Finland‘s healthcare problem?
Like many developed nations, Finland has an ageing population that is putting financial pressure on its social welfare systems.
As an increasing number of people live longer in retirement, the cost of providing pension and healthcare benefits can rise. Those increased costs are paid for by taxes collected from of the working-age population – who make up a smaller percentage of the population than in decades past.
In 2018, those aged 65 or over made up 21.4% of Finland’s population, the fourth highest after Germany, Portugal, Greece, and Italy, according to Eurostat.
Finland’s welfare system is also generous in its provisions, making it relatively expensive. Attempts at reform have plagued Finnish governments for years.
Mr Sipila’s proposed solutions included creating regional authorities for health and welfare services, rather than the local municipalities that currently manage the system, and offering including private companies in the healthcare system to a greater extent to offer “freedom of choice”.
Mr Sipila’s government also famously experimented with a guaranteed minimum income scheme – giving €560 (£480) a month to 2,000 unemployed people as a basic income with no conditions attached.
Initial results suggested the pilot scheme left people happier, but still unemployed.
Mr Sipila’s Centre Party has been in a centre-right coalition government since 2015. Since a 2017 re-negotiation, the government has been formed of the Centre Party, the National Coalition, and Blue Reform.
The opposition Social Democrats have taken the lead in recent polls by several percentage points.
SportsPulse: Trysta Krick explains why we should be thanking Robert Kraft following his alleged involvement in the solicitation of prostitution. USA TODAY
STUART, Fla. – As families shopped around them, a steady stream of men wandered in and out of the Bridge Day Spa, a massage parlor in a strip mall anchored by a Publix Supermarket and a Sherwin-Williams Paint Store. Police say the men engaged in illicit sexual activity with Chinese masseuses in private massage rooms inside the spa, with two or three women reportedly exchanging sexual acts with up to 10 men a day.
Eleven miles away at the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, detectives huddled inside a conference room turned high-tech surveillance hub and followed the activity on color flat-screen monitors. Often, they radioed a team perched outside the spa, who would follow the unsuspecting johns and try to identify them, gathering IDs that would number in the hundreds.
That complex and painstaking – and, to some, controversial – teamwork was at the center of a four-county, seven-month sex trafficking investigation of massage parlors that included hidden cameras, billionaire johns, semen-stained napkins and a $20 million suspected network that stretched from China to New York to Florida.
The investigation, which ensnared nearly 300 suspected johns, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, has sparked a national conversation about human trafficking and renewed calls to strengthen anti-trafficking laws. Police say some of the female spa employees were locked inside the parlors for weeks at a time and made to engage in sexual acts with clients – some as many as 16 times a day.
Overall, hundreds of work hours and more than $400,000 worth of detective work went into the effort police hope will bring down the suspected underground network – and could be replicated in counties across the USA.
“This was a lot more widespread than any of us thought,” Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said. “I don’t think most police agencies or sheriffs know how widespread this is.”
More than 10 people connected to the spas have been charged with offenses ranging from racketeering and money laundering to profiting from prostitution. Only one woman, Lanyun Ma, 49, of Orlando, who ran the East Spa in downtown Vero Beach, has been accused by police of human trafficking, but prosecutors have not formally filed that charge and it’s unclear whether it will proceed.
Through a spokesman, Kraft, 77, who police say visited an illicit massage parlor in Jupiter in January, has denied engaging in any illegal activity. His attorney said Thursday that Kraft will not attend a court arraignment set for March 28, despite a court notice requiring him to appear in person.
Interviews and court documents show the investigation stretched across four Florida counties – Orange, Indian River, Martin and Palm Beach – and netted more than $2 million in seized assets. They also reveal the complexities and challenges of investigating sex trafficking rings, where victims and suspects are often one and the same.
Paul Petruzzi, a Miami-based attorney representing one of the arrested spa managers, said some of the police tactics – such as secretly installing surveillance cameras in private massage rooms – could face legal scrutiny later.
“It’s a very rare and unusual law enforcement tactic to be used,” he said, “and very rare for courts to authorize such a tactic.”
The investigation began on July 6 with a phone call to the Martin County Sheriff’s Office from Karen Herzog, a Florida Department of Health inspector. On a routine inspection of the Bridge Day Spa in Stuart, she noticed suitcases, slept-in massage tables and provocatively dressed masseuses in the strip mall parlor, according to court documents.
Working on Herzog’s tip, Snyder deployed lead detective Michael Felton to look into the spa. For more than two weeks, Felton observed a steady stream of customers, most of them male coming in and out of the parlor, questioned some johns leaving the spa and recovered physical evidence, such as semen-stained napkins from outside trash bins, according to Snyder and court documents.
Felton reported his findings to Snyder and top commanders in the department’s Criminal Investigations Division: There was prostitution and likely human trafficking occurring at the spa, he told them. Snyder said he then made a decision: Instead of raiding and shutting down the spa, as most law enforcement agencies would do given such evidence, he would launch a protracted investigation to try to root out any organized criminal rings operating there.
“We would actually see how far we could go in making a case for human trafficking or racketeering,” said Snyder, a former Republican state lawmaker who co-wrote one of the state’s human trafficking laws. “My sense was: These women don’t do this on their own.”
The department assigned up to 10 detectives to the case. They soon noticed that the women, who were all Asian, were often shuttled in expensive cars to other spas: the Cove Day and Florida Therapy spas in Stuart and the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, 17 miles south. Some would enter the spas and not emerge for weeks, he said. Others were driven north to spas in Orange County.
Snyder called the Jupiter Police Department. “I told them, ‘You got a racketeering case going on in your massage parlor,” he said. Police there jumped on the case, mirroring many of the tactics Martin County Sheriff detectives were using. Their focus: the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, a storefront spa in a strip mall in northeast Jupiter featuring a Publix supermarket and several pizzerias.
Snyder also sought help from Homeland Security Investigations, which provided Mandarin interpreters, money and other resources, he said. HSI agents began showing up regularly at the Martin County Sheriff’s Office.
Anthony Salisbury, special agent in charge of the Miami office of HSI, which helped in the case, said one of the challenges in expanding a case from prostitution to sex trafficking is getting the female employees to cooperate. Many suspects in cases he oversees who are alleged sex traffickers end up being charged with prostitution or money laundering instead, he said.
Even more challenging are cases involving Asian women, who tend to have a bigger language barrier and deeper distrust of law enforcement, Salisbury said.
“That is one of the communities that seems to be reluctant to come forward,” he said.
In September, Martin County Sheriff detectives obtained court approval – known as a “break-order warrant” – to install surveillance cameras inside area spas, Snyder said. Officials converted a conference room in the department’s headquarters into a high-tech surveillance hub. Four flat-screen monitors showed the inner workings of the spas, in color.
Three detectives – one of which was always a female officer – constantly monitored the screens during the spas’ business hours, from 9 a.m. to about 11 p.m., he said. They clicked off the monitors if a female client entered the massage rooms, focusing solely on male clients, who are more likely to engage in prostitution, Snyder said.
After an illicit act, the detectives would radio an undercover team perched outside the parlor and describe the male suspect as he left the spa. The undercover team would then follow and try to identify the unsuspecting john.
The detectives weren’t able to collar every suspected john, Snyder said. Some slipped away while the pursuit team was busy with another client. For every one suspect they identified, another five got away, he said.
“There’s hundreds of men in this county that go to massage parlors where sex trafficking – or at least prostitution – goes on,” Snyder said.
Meanwhile, investigators pored over bank and property records of the spa owners, untangling a web of ownership and money that stretched to China. More than $20 million was flowing between China and the Florida spas, Snyder said. The case was growing.
As police in Martin and Palm Beach counties gathered evidence in their case, Vero Beach Police were sending undercover agents into the East Spa in downtown Vero Beach in a separate – and coincidentally concurrent – investigation.
The Vero Beach query began in August after several tips flowed into the department, including an anonymous letter mailed to Chief David Currey detailing how men were streaming in and out of the East Spa, Currey said.
As in the Martin County investigation – and unbeknownst to detectives there – Currey sent undercover agents to monitor the spa, got a break-order warrant to install surveillance cameras inside and set up a room in the Vero Police Department to monitor activity inside massage rooms.
As women were tracked to other nearby spas, detectives from neighboring Sebastian Police Department and the Indian County Sheriff’s Office opened their own investigations, Currey said.
For six months, Vero Beach Police dedicated two investigators, five general crime officers, two supervisors and other personnel to the case, racking up more than $100,000 worth of detective work, Currey said.
“I’ve been here almost 30 years, and we haven’t had an investigation like this in our city in our memory,” he said.
Vero Beach Police Detective Sgt. Phil Huddy would later enter one of the Vero Beach massage parlors. There were beds constructed from 2-by-4 planks and mattresses thrown atop, a refrigerator stuffed with food, a break room with a microwave where meals were prepared, and a makeshift shower or spigot coming out of a wall where the women apparently took showers.
“That’s the conditions these ladies were living in,” Huddy said.
Investigators in Martin and Indian River counties learned they were working on similar sex trafficking cases through county prosecutors on the cases, Currey said. They began coordinating efforts.
By February, investigators were ready to move in. On Feb. 19, they launched coordinated raids on the spas and held news conferences announcing the findings.
A major challenge remains getting some of the arrested women to cooperate with investigators.
That challenge came into sharp focus in the wake of the arrests. Snyder watched as one of the women, Lixia Zhu, 48, dissolved into sobs as she told detectives how she came from China to work at a nail salon in Chicago then was forced into sex trafficking. Her passports were locked up and her relatives in China were threatened, Snyder said.
Then, midway through the interview, a Mandarin-speaking attorney from New York showed up. He spoke to Zhu, who immediately stopped cooperating.
“It threw a chill over the entire investigative division,” Snyder said.
Still, there are signs of hope. One woman recounted how she has been shuttled to seven or eight other U.S cities to perform similar acts in massage parlors, showing the reach of the suspected ring, Snyder said. Vero Beach police said they have one cooperating witness who can help prosecutors present a trafficking case.
About a week after the arrests, Martin County Sheriff deputies also received some encouraging intel from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office: U-Haul trucks had been backed up to two massage parlors in their jurisdiction. They were packing up and leaving town.
Snyder said he hopes other law enforcement officials take note and replicate what he has started on the Treasure Coast.
“We found a way to do this,” he said. “If I had my way, we’d bring this methodology to a massage parlor near you.”
Contributing: TCPalm reporters Melissa Holsman, Will Greenlee and Mary Helen Moore.
A federal judge in Los Angeles on Thursday dismissed ex-porn star Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit seeking to void a nondisclosure agreement with President Trump about an alleged affair.
Both sides claimed victory after the ruling, but the Los Angeles Times reported that Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, may have to return a $130,000 payment from Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen.
Judge S. James Otero ruled in U.S. District Court that the suit was irrelevant after Daniels “received exactly what she wanted” when the president and his former personal lawyer agreed to rescind a nondisclosure agreement Daniels signed in exchange for a $130,000 payment, according to the Times.
“Combined with the attorneys’ fees and sanctions award in the president’s favor totaling $293,000, the president has achieved total victory,” Trump lawyer Charles Harder said, referring to Daniels’ defamation suit. That amount doesn’t include the $130,000 payment.
Michael Avenatti, Daniels’ lawyer, also claimed victory after the ruling.
“How people can claim this is a ‘loss’ after we forced Trump and Cohen to cave and Cohen has been convicted, etc. is a mystery,” he tweeted.
The suspect in a string of central Illinois burglaries was arrested Thursday after allegedly killing a sheriff’s deputy in Rockford and leading police on a multicounty chase that ended with a six-hour standoff near Lincoln.
Authorities say Floyd E. Brown, 39, opened fire Thursday morning as the U.S. Marshals Service tried to serve arrest warrants on him—including one from McLean County—at a Rockford hotel. McHenry County Sheriff’s Deputy Jacob Keltner, who was assigned to the U.S. Marshals, was shot and later died from his injuries, police said. A female acquaintance of Brown was also wounded by gunfire, apparently shot by Brown himself, police said. Her injuries were not life-threatening.
Illinois State Police say Brown, reportedly armed with an AK-47, fled south on Interstate 39 toward Bloomington-Normal. He displayed a rifle and was driving over 100 mph with officers in pursuit, police said.
Three Unit 5 schools (Normal West, Parkside Junior High, and Parkside Elementary) were briefly put on “lockout” for less than 5 minutes, the school district said. A lockout means people cannot go in and out of the buildings but students proceed with their day as scheduled.
“This was precautionary and had nothing to do with anything going on in the schools,” Unit 5 said on Facebook.
As Brown headed south on Interstate 55 near Lincoln, police bumped his vehicle and he went into the ditch, authorities said. He barricaded himself in the vehicle for six hours until being arrested without incident around 5 p.m., police said. Interstate 55 was closed down in both directions before re-opening around 7 p.m.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker sent a tweet expressing condolences to the deputy’s family members.
“All of Illinois grieves for the fallen,” Pritzker said at a Springfield press conference. “And our prayers are with the families of those who’ve been injured in the line of duty and the families of those that we’ve lost. We owe all of them a debt of gratitude.”
State Police Acting Director Brendan F. Kelly also offered his condolences to Keltner’s family.
“ISP’s SWAT team in particular showed incredible tactical restraint, bravery and boldness today,” Kelly said in a statement. “This dark day has come to an end, and this defendant can now be brought to justice.”
Bloomington Connection
Brown was wanted on warrants out of McLean, Sangamon, and Sangamon counties, authorities said. He was also wanted for alleged parole violation.
Bloomington Police have been looking for Brown since at least December, when he allegedly caused a high-speed crash while fleeing police on Veterans Parkway. Bloomington Police say he was a suspect in “numerous central Illinois burglaries in 2018,” including in Bloomington. He fled that December crash on foot and was never found—until Thursday.
At the time, police said Brown had “no known connections to Bloomington-Normal” and was likely trying to find a way back to his residence in Springfield.
“Chief (Clay) Wheeler and the rest of the Bloomington Police Department would like to give our sincerest thoughts and prayers to the wounded officer from McHenry County sheriff’s office,” BPD said in a statement. “We also would like to thank all of the jurisdictions who helped and are currently investigating this incident.”
A Bloomington Police spokesperson declined to say how many local burglaries Brown is suspected in.
People like you value experienced, knowledgeable and award-winning journalism that covers meaningful stories in Bloomington-Normal. To support more stories and interviews like this one, please consider making a contribution.
Paul Manafort was placed in solitary confinement leading up to his sentencing; Doug McKelway has the details.
With the release of the “Mueller Report” reportedly just around the corner, the sentencing Thursday of one-time Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort to 47 months in prison offers a timely reminder that the whole Russia collusion narrative was never more than a fantasy of the Democrats and the mainstream media.
As numerous investigations and witness testimonies have already demonstrated, there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to elect Donald Trump as president. The entire justification for the Mueller probe was a farce, invented by former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign manager Robby Mook and the rest of the Clinton brain trust to justify their humiliating defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
Even U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III acknowledged that Manafort’s convictions were completely unrelated to the Russia collusion, about which the judge had previously expressed skepticism in open court.
“He is not before the court for anything having to do with colluding with the Russian government,” Ellis said in court.
It’s near-universally assumed by now that Mueller’s final report, however much of it the public eventually sees, will fail to show any evidence of collusion. So the same talking heads who’ve spent nearly two years whipping half the country into a frenzy about Russian collusion have to cling to what they do have: Manafort.
Manafort, plain and simple, is going to prison for things completely outside the original scope of Mueller’s investigation. All of his convictions stem from the shady lobbying businesses he ran with his associate Rick Gates long before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.
The problem for them is that Manafort’s convictions illustrate just how empty Mueller’s net has come up after more than 21 months in this putrid fishing hole.
Paul Manafort was found guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, and failure to report a foreign bank account. In addition to the 47-month prison sentence that Ellis gave him Thursday, Manafort will serve even longer because the judge in his other criminal trial threw out his guilty plea after determining he lied to Mueller’s investigators.
This is all very serious — and all very irrelevant to Russian election interference.
Manafort, plain and simple, is going to prison for things completely outside the original scope of Mueller’s investigation. All of his convictions stem from the shady lobbying businesses he ran with his associate Rick Gates long before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.
The same could be said about any of the myriad other indictments Mueller has brought against Americans who were unfortunate enough to have ties to the Trump campaign. The only illegal conduct Mueller uncovered either predates the Trump campaign or involves “process crimes” directly linked to Mueller’s investigation, such as those of George Papadopoulos, the former Trump aide who got a whopping 14 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
The fact is that after nearly two years of work, we still have no indication that the Mueller probe found so much as a single instance of actual Trump-Russia collusion. Cases such as Manafort’s are typically relegated to no more than a moment’s mention on the nightly news, but not this time.
The fake collusion narrative is simply too important to the media. They’ve invested too much of their capital and credibility, so they have no choice but to present Manafort’s crimes as evidence not only of Donald Trump’s supposed culpability but of Mueller’s efficacy.
For their part, the president’s detractors on Capitol Hill, particularly Democratic committee chairmen Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, need the artificial stench of the Manafort sentencing to hang in the air as long as possible so that they can prepare to launch the second wave of their vile, politically motivated attack.
With the Mueller probe’s long reign as “The Resistance’s” best hope for overturning the 2016 presidential election quickly coming to a close, the Democrats hope to simply transition to their own witch hunts.
As Manafort’s sentencing on charges unrelated to the 2016 election reminds us, the coming congressional investigations will fare no better than Mueller did in the hunt for evidence of the collusion that never was.
A political crisis is brewing inside the halls of Congress. A few freshman Democrats have drawn the ire from both sides about their position on the U.S.’s relationship with Israel.
In the lead up to the 2018 midterm election, then-congressional candidates Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., — the first Muslim women to be elected to Congress — were criticized for a series of troubling remarks about Israel that were rooted in anti-Semitism. It all began with an escalation of violence in November 2012 initially provoked by Hamas militants. Omar, who was then active in Minnesota politics, tweeted, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
That tweet came back to haunt Omar during her 2018 congressional run, as it dredges out an old anti-Semitic trope that Jews are somehow conspiring to take over the world.
As members of Congress, both Tlaib and Omar have faced criticism for rolling out another anti-Semitic trope, the suggestion that Jewish Americans have dual loyalties. In January 2019, Tlaib, responding to a Senate bill that would combat the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel, tweeted, “They forgot what country they represent.”
In February 2019, Omar came under heavy criticism from her Democratic colleagues that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (better known as AIPAC) was paying members of Congress for their support of Jewish state, even tweeting, “It’s All About the Benjamins.” During an event later that month, Omar said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Supporters of Omar have argued that the congresswoman has been singled out for bringing up this point about American allegiance to Israel, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and a number of Democrats are debating a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism. But the progressive wing of the party, led by Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been quite vocal in its opposition.
Ocasio-Cortez has attempted to defend Omar by making a broader statement that nothing is done when other communities are supposedly slandered for dual loyalties saying, “One of the things that is hurtful about the extent to which reprimand is sought of Ilhan is that no one seeks this level of reprimand when members make statements about Latinx + other communities.”
However Democrats choose to respond to anti-Semitism going forward will say a lot about the direction of the party and where it’s heading. And if this issue persists in the national conversation, it could mean that Pelosi’s influence over her caucus is waning.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, some conservative opponents adopted a slogan that on its face was fairly innocuous: All Lives Matter.
In a vacuum, the statement is obviously true, but it was designed to ignore and downplay the fact that it was black lives, not other people’s lives, that were being disproportionately ended in police confrontations under often dubious circumstances. Activists insisted on the phrase “Black Lives Matter” because Black Americans in particular felt disproportionately targeted by police violence and discrimination. The argument against the phrase “All Lives Matter” was not that it was untrue, but that it selfishly distracted from the specific group people under fire.
Half a decade later, Democrats have now embraced the “All Lives Matter” idea in their effort to sugarcoat the virulent anti-Semitism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
Omar’s list of greatest anti-Semitic hits prompted the cooler heads in the Democratic Party to demand that the House pass a resolution condemning her racism. But in the time since, a number of congressional Democrats, including presidential candidates, have gone soft on anti-Semitism, rushing to Omar’s defense. And as a result, the party has now reached an uneasy position of trying to dilute the resolution it already proposed.
The latest iteration begins with a condemnation of both anti-Semitism and “anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry.” The preamble name-drops an assortment of genuine horribles — the alt-Right marchers of Charlottesville, the Charleston church shooter, “anti-Muslim” bigotry, and mosque bombing — but in context, this does little but clutter the resolution sufficiently that one might not realize this is all about Omar’s anti-Semitism. She is the sole reason this resolution is being proposed and voted on in the first place, yet her anti-Semitism now appears to play a secondary role in it.
At least the resolution mentions the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, and it still lists as a problem “accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel” than to the United States. It mentions “Israel” by name just once, rejecting “the perpetuation of anti-Semitic stereotypes … especially in the context of support for the United States-Israel alliance.”
Of the nine total points in the resolution, only three are solely about discrimination faced by Jews. As before, Omar is not mentioned by name.
No one is saying that Muslim lives don’t matter or that Islamophobia isn’t disgusting and intolerable. But this resolution was meant to rebuke a sitting member of the United States Congress and the Democratic caucus from invoking centuries-old anti-Semitic slurs and unabashedly attacking American supporters of Israel as traitors.
The solidarity shown by Jewish allies both in the Democratic Congress as well as powerful rebukes by progressives like Rahm Emanuel have been both heartening and courageous. But in the Democratic Party, the virulently anti-Semitic tail seems to wag the dog. This sham of a resolution proves it.
She had sued the US president after he mocked her claim that a stranger had threatened her to keep quiet.
Ms Daniels said the latest ruling amounted to the end of the non-disclosure agreement.
“More than a year ago when I was being threatened with a 20 million lawsuit, I asked a judge to toss out this illegal NDA. Glad I stood my ground and kept fighting,” she said on Twitter.
Her lawyer Michael Avenatti also insisted the result was a win for his client.
Yet again, lots of misreporting going on. Be clear: The Court specifically found that Stormy received everything she asked for in the lawsuit – she won. How people can claim this is a “loss” after we forced Trump and Cohen to cave and Cohen has been convicted, etc. is a mystery.
A U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces fighter drives past destroyed homes and vehicles in Susah, a Syrian village that was recently retaken from Islamic State militants. (Felipe Dana/Associated Press)
DEIR AL-ZOUR, Syria — The road to the final scrap of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in eastern Syria is quiet for the most part. U.S.-backed forces cruise past fields of flowers in their armored vehicles. Locals forage for truffles, and dogs roam barren patches of earth, too, digging up bodies from the battles that were fought here.
But when the vehicles reach al-Suwar, a nondescript town on the road to the jihadists’ last stronghold, the passengers spring into high alert. Guns are cocked, and drivers hit the gas. Then they belt down the road. “It’s not safe here,” one young fighter said on a recent drive. “We know there are sleeper cells, and we know they are watching us.”
As Islamic State cadres mount a final stand in what remains of their proto-state, the group is already switching gears, returning to its insurgent roots by seeding sleeper cells across parts of Syria and Iraq it once controlled. The U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fear to linger in the villages they technically hold on the road to Baghouz, the Islamic State’s final redoubt. Assassinations are mounting, locals say. Jihadists set up checkpoints by night, then melt away with the dawn.
The Islamic State’s unprecedented rise across territory the size of Britain was enabled by the chaos of Syria’s civil war and the near-total collapse of Iraq’s security forces across the border.
With its remaining members scattered across the desert hinterlands of both countries, there is no suggestion the Islamic State will regain significant territory anytime soon. But experts warn that the coming months could determine whether the group will be able to destabilize the still-fragile security situation and set the stage for fresh violence.
Conditions in Deir al-Zour province, where the Islamic State is mounting its final stand, remain unusually fertile for the militants. Clandestine cells are active in several areas, where shattered villages and vast tracts of desert are difficult to police, experts say.
Across the porous border in Iraq, the central government has regained control over areas once occupied by the militants. But corruption and sectarian discrimination remain a problem, and the long-standing mistrust between residents and state security forces — which fueled local support for the Islamic State in the past — has not gone away.
“One of the main vulnerabilities here is trust: whether those forces are here to help you or police you, whether they are there to govern your areas properly or exploit them,” said Hassan Hassan, a research director at the Washington-based Center for Global Policy.
The U.S.-backed SDF was born as a Syrian Kurdish force, but it recruited locally as it pushed deeper into Arab-dominated areas of eastern Syria to roll back the Islamic State. SDF members and the DeirEzzor 24 monitoring group now say that scores of Arab fighters who were previously linked to the Islamic State have become part of the U.S.-backed force.
Local fighters believe that civilians and some newer SDF recruits have leaked information allowing Islamic State sleeper cells to target commanders along the road from Busayrah. Driving at full tilt on a recent day, U.S.-backed troops watched motorcyclists like hawks. The asphalt was still charred in one spot, after a blast targeted western and Kurdish soldiers there earlier this year.
SDF fighters don’t stop in some of the villages recently retaken from the Islamic State, such as in Hajin, for fear of being targeted by sleeper cells. (Felipe Dana/AP)
A man selling chicken sits in an area recently retaken by SDF fighters from Islamic State militants in Hajin last month. (Felipe Dana/AP)
Hundreds of militants are believed to have escaped Baghouz in recent weeks, with many paying large sums to smugglers in return for safe passage across the Iraqi border or to areas controlled by the Syrian government, according to SDF fighters and western diplomats.
The SDF said Monday that it had released 283 Syrians who had worked with the Islamic State, saying they had no “blood on their hands” and describing the gesture as one of “cooperation, fraternity and clemency.”
But one Syrian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deal, described it as a sop to influential local tribes who had requested their relatives’ freedom. “No one knows how these deals are going to play out in the future, and it’s making a lot of people uncomfortable,” he said.
Some local residents, for their part, say they feel under suspicion from elements of the SDF. One man, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, this time out of concern for his safety, said he had been arrested and tortured months earlier by the U.S.-backed force after someone informed authorities that he had been using his phone in the vicinity of a bombing.
“There were four interrogators, and they kept asking about my sleeper cell,” the man recalled. “I knew I was in big trouble, but what could I tell them? I told them that I swore to God I was just a regular civilian, and they told me not to invoke his name, because God would not be here for me in this room.”
A SDF fighter stands atop a building used as a temporary base near the last land still held by Islamic State militants in Baghouz. (Felipe Dana/AP)
The province’s future will be shaped, in part, by if and how the United States completes its planned military withdrawal from the area. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government already controls half the province, and has vowed to regain the rest, by force if necessary.
“Someone has to ensure that forces on the ground can handle themselves when another [insurgency] scenario arises,” Hassan said. In Syria, he projected that the security forces and local authorities have one to two years to get trained and improve local services before a new insurgency emerges.
“This is where the momentum fades away and complacency creeps in. It’s also when jihadists learn the routines of security forces in the way needed for them to mount sustained insurgencies,” he said.
The challenges for Iraq’s government are greater still. Hundreds of Islamic State militants have crossed the border from eastern Syria in recent weeks, despite a beefed-up Iraqi military presence there, and several thousand more are thought to be hiding out in remote areas.
“We have launched an operation to clear that desert, but it’s a complicated area,” said Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasoul, spokesman for Iraq’s joint operations command, rejecting claims that any militants had breached the border. “Their ability to do any damage is limited, and it’s only a matter of time until the whole of Iraq is cleared,” he said.
Yet in several northern Iraqi provinces, sleeper cells have kidnapped, killed and ambushed residents associated with the government or security services, and the group’s extortion rackets have also cranked back into action. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project is now recording an average of more than 60 violent incidents by the group each month.
Human rights groups also warn that many Sunni Muslims who suffered under Islamic State rule are now being targeted for revenge by police and military, as well as members of their community, reflecting a widespread belief that the survival of these Sunnis suggests they were collaborators.
Many civilians continue to leave the Islamic State’s embattled holdout of Baghouz. But each one has to be screened by the SDF before being allowed to enter a refugee camp. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)
Researchers fear that long-standing grievances — combined with new ones resulting from the perceived collective punishment of Sunni-majority areas once controlled by the Islamic State — could revive the group’s appeal.
“Civilians have many reasons to be afraid of the police based on past experiences with repression, but police also have legitimate reasons to be afraid of civilians who are sometimes difficult to distinguish from insurgents in asymmetric conflicts, so this is mutual distrust, a difficult problem to solve,” said Mara Revkin, who is partnering with the International Organization for Migration’s Iraq Mission and Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges to study whether community-oriented policing methods can help close this trust gap.
“This convergence of destabilizing factors is very concerning.”
Mahmoud Shikh Ibrahim in Deir al-Zour province, Mustafa Salim in Baghdad and Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul contributed to this report.
Doug Collins Rips Jerrold Nadler for Trump Fishing Expedition
The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee unloaded on the panel’s chairman, Jerry Nadler, in a fiery letter on Thursday, accusing the New York Democrat of conducting an unconstitutional “inquisition” into President Trump and his associates “reminiscent of Eastern regimes during the Cold War.”
Nadler, who would oversee any impeachment proceedings against President Trump, this week announced dozens of document requests — including to the National Rifle Association (NRA), WikiLeaks and key figures in the Trump Organization — in a barrage that Nadler called the opening salvo in new and wide-ranging investigations into the White House.
Georgia Republican Rep. Doug Collins, the ranking member on the committee, charged that Nadler’s investigation runs “afoul of nearly 150 years of Supreme Court precedent and over 200 years of oversight conducted by this committee.”
Collins previously told Nadler to “come back to reality” following his sweeping document requests — and, in his letter on Thursday, he told Nadler to pay more attention to the Constitution.
Specifically, Collins wrote, “Congress can only exercise its oversight power with a valid legislative purpose in sight. Congress should not—and, according to the Supreme Court, cannot—conduct oversight for the sake of exposure alone. Absent a formal impeachment inquiry — which you have been clear your nascent investigation is not — oversight for the sake of exposure is exactly what your investigation appears to be doing.”
Collins cited Watkins v. United States, a 1957 Supreme Court case that held “there is no general authority to expose the private affairs of individuals without justification in terms of the functions of the Congress.”
The Watkins Court, Collins added, also wrote a congressional inquiry “must be related to, and in furtherance of, a legitimate task of Congress.”
“Your 81 letters appear to be little more than a deep-sea fishing expedition with the purpose of exposing private matters and airing alleged dirty laundry rather than legislating,” Collins told Nadler.
Nadler, who has said in televised interviews that he has already personally concluded that Trump “obstructed justice,” initiated the requests on the heels of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s dramatic House testimony late last month.
During a public hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen raised questions about the president’s personal finances, his charity and more even as he testified he had no evidence of collusion with Russia.
Georgia Republican Rep. Doug Collins says the Democratic Party has been hijacked by ‘impeach-Trump forces’.
“Because they serve no valid legislative purpose, these requests infringe on both the recipients’ protected speech rights and right to associate,” Collins wrote to Nadler. “Instead, your requests are part of a concerted effort to target and punish associates of the president. This effort to intimidate those who choose to associate with the president ‘through actual or threatened imposition of government power or sanction’ violates the First Amendment.”
According to Collins, both the “depth and breadth” of Nader’s inital investigative forays were “astounding” and “alarming.”
“Were Congress to usurp the executive function of prosecuting crimes, this government would be on the cusp of a constitutional crisis,” Collins concluded. “The provenance of your investigation, launched on the eve of the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work and your request for documents already submitted to multiple prosecutorial bodies threatens to place this Committee in the untenable position of conducting public show trials for individuals not prosecuted by the special counsel’s office.”
In a similar letter last month, Collins asked Nadler why the panel’s Democratic leadership made what he called the “costly” and “unusual” decision this week to hire two prominent anti-Trump consultants to conduct a purportedly impartial investigation of the White House.
Fox News’ Mike Emanuel contributed to this report.
That Michael Cohen is proudly declaring he doesn’t want a pardon from federal prison time doesn’t make him the hero he thinks it does.
The only reason anyone would say that, as Cohen did during his embarrassing testimony in front of Congress last week, is that he knew a pardon from President Trump was never in the cards. And that’s what the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Cohen’s current attorney, Lanny Davis, confirmed to the Journal that after Cohen’s New York office was raided by the FBI last spring, he directed his then-lawyer Stephen Ryan to consult Trump’s attorneys about a possible pardon, should he face charges.
The report contradicts Cohen’s congressional testimony, wherein he boasted that he “never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from Mr. Trump.”
It’s was a dramatic moment in American history only paralleled by George Washington as a child vowing that he could not tell a lie.
Cohen could have stopped at the “I never asked for” and it would have been sufficient, if not truthful. But he had to go the extra mile and express his dedication to imprisonment.
Cohen wanted a pardon and when it wasn’t offered, he decided he’d say on national television that he didn’t want it anyway. Davis, his lawyer, said as far back as mid-December in an interview on CBS that Cohen “wouldn’t take a pardon from Donald Trump if it was handed to him.” Here are other things Cohen will under no circumstance accept from Donald Trump: $1 billion dollars, a chest of diamonds, and a hug.
ROCKFORD, Ill. (WLS) — A man who allegedly shot and killed a local officer assigned to the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force at a hotel in Rockford was taken into custody without incident around 5 p.m. Thursday.
McHenry County sheriff’s officers were assisting the U.S. Marshals Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force to serve an arrest warrant on 39-year-old Floyd E. Brown of Springfield at the Extended Stay America at 747 North Bell School Road around 9:15 a.m. Thursday.
Brown was wanted on a number of warrants, including for burglary in McLean and Champaign counties, a failure to appear warrant in Sangamon County, and a parole violation warrant issued by the Illinois Department of Corrections, Rockford police said.
Brown opened fire on them with a rifle from inside a room on the third floor. He fired on them again outside the building, after jumping out of a window, Rockford police said Thursday afternoon.
“Based on what we know there were shots fired in the hotel room and also outside in the parking lot,” said Lieutenant Kurt Whisenand, Rockford Police Department. “And we believe the marshal was shot outside.”
The McHenry County Sheriff’s Office said Deputy Jacob Keltner was rushed to a Javon Bea Hospital Riverside in critical condition, where he died shortly after 3:30 p.m.
“Jake was a great guy,” said McHenry County Sheriff Bill Prim. “He was hard working. He volunteered for the position that he served in.”
Keltner had served as a deputy for almost 13 years, and had served on the fugitive task force for five years.
Keltner lived in a quiet Crystal Lake subdivision. He was married with two young children, and was a graduate of Western Illinois University. He also came from a family of officers; his father and brother both work in DuPage County law enforcement.
“He would do anything for you. When I would go out of town, I’d just let him know and he’d keep an eye on the house,” said neighbor Dale Schmidt.
“I know I see them outside on the weekends. He plays with the boys, little guys. I can’t believe it. I cannot believe it,” said neighbor Debra Delaney.
The processional that followed his body from the hospital to the coroner’s office stretched for two miles.
“He’s a dedicated guy. He’s a dedicated family man, and he’s just truly going to be missed,” said Prim.
Brown got away by jumping out of a third floor window and then fled the scene in a Mercury Grand Marquis. He was later spotted traveling over 100 miles per hour southbound on I-55 while pointing a weapon out of his window at the police in pursuit.
The vehicle spun out near mile marker 133, between Bloomington and Springfield. Brown spent several hours barricaded inside his vehicle on I-55 before police set off flash-bangs near his car. He then surrendered to Illinois State Police.
He was taken to a hospital to be treated for non-life threatening injuries.
The Winnebago State’s Attorney’s Office has filed first degree murder charges against Brown, and asked that he be given no bond.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern Illinois district earlier issued an arrest warrant for federal attempted murder and said those charges will upgraded to federal murder.
Officials are now waiting for Brown to be transferred back to Winnebago County.
A woman was found shot in the hotel room after Brown fled. Police said she was being treated and released at a local hospital for non-life threatening injuries. Authorities said Thursday afternoon she was not shot by law enforcement, but by Brown.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker expressed his condolences to the officer’s family in a tweet Thursday afternoon, saying, “The people of Illinois join the family of the fallen officer in mourning his loss, and with our deepest gratitude for his courageous service.”
I-TEAM: ROCKFORD SHOOTING SUSPECT HAS LONG CRIMINAL HISTORY
Brown is wanted on several warrants out of several counties, including Sangamon County, Champaign County and McLean County and the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Court records obtained by the I-Team show Brown has a lengthy criminal history, dating back to at least 1995. Nine orders of protection were filed against him by six different people in Sangamon County since 1998. The most recent order of protection was filed in June 2018.
In the order of protection filing from last June, the mother of Brown’s child described how he had rammed her car, writing, “I honestly feel that Floyd will act on his threat to harm my life.”
Brown’s personal rogue’s gallery of mugshots offered a time-lapse glimpse of his life since 1995. In Sangamon County alone there are 14 booking photos for a variety of crimes.
Floyd Brown’s Mugshots Through The Years
IDOC records show Brown has been convicted in felony cases in three different counties. He’s been charged in other cases as well, but some of those were dismissed or pled down to lesser charges.
The parole violation warrant IDOC issued is connected to his 2018 parole for a 2011 downstate residential burglary. In 2001 he was convincted of being a felon in possession of a gun.
The McLean County Sheriff’s Department said there is a warrant for Brown for armed robbery in Bloomington. The I-Team learned Brown was allegedly involved in burglaries before Christmas last year. When he was located by authorities at that time, he got into a vehicle and led police on a chase through several backyards without his headlights on and caused a crash involving several vehicles. He then allegedly fled on foot and was believed to be heading to his home in the Springfield area.
Thursday morning there would have been as many as a dozen or more deputy marshals, federal agents and locally assigned officers, according to law enforcement sources, who usually carry ballistic shields, wear body armor and helmets, and are armed with automatic weapons.
Since 2015, US Marshals Service Fugitive Task Force teams have arrested nearly 100,000 people on the lam across the country. Shootings like the one Thursday morning don’t happen often, though there have been a small number of deputies and officers killed in similar circumstances, including at least two last year.
Arresting fugitives is one of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcement.
Earlier Thursday morning, a man who works at Rock Valley Garden Center, which is next door to Extended Stay America, said he saw 50-60 police officers surround the building.
An employee at the nearby Sleep Inn told the I-Team when she was taking out the garbage earlier, she heard, “Pow, pow, pow!”
She wasn’t sure if it was gunfire, but a police car came roaring up. A short time later, a state trooper came into the motel to let guests know they had an ongoing active shooter situation.
Manafort’s conviction in August made him the first campaign associate of President Trump found guilty by a jury as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’sprobe. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis emphasized ahead of sentencing that the Manafort case was not about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Ellis said that the guidelines of sentencing Manafort to between 19 and 24 years in prison were “excessive for this case.” Manafort will receive credit for the nine months he’s already served. Manafort was also hit with a $50,000 fine.
Manafort, who has been dealing with health issues, looked unwell as he entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. He told Ellis the last two years have been the most difficult he and his family have ever experienced and appeared to choke up a bit as he told the judge he appreciated the way the trial was conducted.
Prosecutors said Manafort, 69, hid income earned from political work overseas from the IRS while fraudulently obtaining millions in bank loans. Manafort had pleaded not guilty to all 18 counts in the case.
“I was surprised I did not hear you express regret,” Ellis told Manafort during the sentencing Thursday night. He added that he believes “the importance of this case is to serve as a beacon to warn others.”
After he heard his sentence, Manafort looked red-faced and emotional, while his wife appeared stone-faced. Manafort’s lawyers appeared to be happy with the sentence, but a source close to the team said they remain concerned about his sentencing next week.
He is still facing additional years in prison from another case: After his conviction in Virginia, Manafort pleaded guilty in Washington to foreign lobbying violations and witness tampering as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. He has not yet been sentenced in that case, and Mueller’s team recently asked a federal judge to sentence him to 24 years in prison and order him to pay as much as a $24 million fine.
But his hopes for a reduced sentence in the Washington case may be in jeopardy after a federal judge recently found that he lied to Mueller’s team in response to some, but not all, of their inquiries. The ruling voids his plea deal and exposes Manafort, at a minimum, to a harsher sentence.
There’s been speculation that the president, who has expressed sympathy for Manafort, could pardon his former campaign chairman. “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort,” Trump said in August.
Defense attorneys for Manafort have suggested that Mueller’s team had improperly ensnared their client in its probe, as the case did not have anything to do with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
The prosecution’s star witness, Rick Gates — Manafort’s former business partner who struck a plea deal to cooperate with the government — testified during the trial that he and Manafort committed bank and tax fraud together.
Fox News’ Jake Gibson and Meghan Welsh contributed to this report.
That Michael Cohen is proudly declaring he doesn’t want a pardon from federal prison time doesn’t make him the hero he thinks it does.
The only reason anyone would say that, as Cohen did during his embarrassing testimony in front of Congress last week, is that he knew a pardon from President Trump was never in the cards. And that’s what the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Cohen’s current attorney, Lanny Davis, confirmed to the Journal that after Cohen’s New York office was raided by the FBI last spring, he directed his then-lawyer Stephen Ryan to consult Trump’s attorneys about a possible pardon, should he face charges.
The report contradicts Cohen’s congressional testimony, wherein he boasted that he “never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from Mr. Trump.”
It’s was a dramatic moment in American history only paralleled by George Washington as a child vowing that he could not tell a lie.
Cohen could have stopped at the “I never asked for” and it would have been sufficient, if not truthful. But he had to go the extra mile and express his dedication to imprisonment.
Cohen wanted a pardon and when it wasn’t offered, he decided he’d say on national television that he didn’t want it anyway. Davis, his lawyer, said as far back as mid-December in an interview on CBS that Cohen “wouldn’t take a pardon from Donald Trump if it was handed to him.” Here are other things Cohen will under no circumstance accept from Donald Trump: $1 billion dollars, a chest of diamonds, and a hug.
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