President Trump acknowledged Saturday a small contingent of U.S. troops will remain in Syria despite announcing last year his controversial decision to withdraw all American forces from the country.
“We’ll leave a small group of guys and gals, but we want to bring our people back home. We want to bring our people back home. It’s time,” Trump said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. “We were going to be in Syria for four months. We ended up five years just fighting. They just like to fight.”
In Syria, specifically, the president said that as early as today 100 percent of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq will be defeated by the U.S.-led coalition.
Trump in December ordered the 2,000 American service members in Syria to return home, saying on Twitter the Islamic State there had been defeated. But the president’s move was widely criticized by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who disagreed with the withdrawal of troops.
The White House has since backed away from its initial plan to remove all U.S. forces from Syria. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced last month a “small peacekeeping group of about 200 will remain in Syria for a period of time.”
Trump frequently promises to bring American troops home from foreign conflicts and has criticized President Barack Obama for “fighting in endless wars.”
JERUSALEM — The highway that critics dub “apartheid road” carves a path from the outskirts of Jerusalem north into the occupied West Bank. A fence tops the high concrete wall running down the middle of Route 4370, slicing the thoroughfare in two: The far lane is for Israeli-registered vehicles, the other for Palestinian traffic that is banned from entering Jerusalem.
“They say to themselves it is about security but it looks very bad,” activist Shabtay Bendet says as he perches on a nearby rocky hill, referring to Israeli officials’ reasoning for the segregated highway.
The road will hasten the growth of Jewish settlements on land Israel seized in the 1967 war with its Arab neighbors, concludes Bendet, 46, who sports jeans and small silver hoop earrings.
It wasn’t so long ago that he wore a bushy beard and the black garb favored by hardline ultra-Orthodox settlers. And in those days, he would most certainly have supported the highway. Now he plays cat-and-mouse with aspiring and established settlers for Peace Now, a decades-old group that advocates for a two-state solution.
Shabtay Bendet stands in front of a makeshift building in the West Bank settlement of Rechalim in 2002.Courtesy of Shabtay Bendet
Bendet’s dramatic transformation saw him cross a chasm dividing Israeli society: From fervent believer that God commands Jews to settle “Biblical Israel” to someone who sees settlements located beyond the borders set when the country was founded in 1948 as a threat to its existence as a democratic state.
Bendet turns away from the road and heads back toward his car where the baby seat belonging to his 9-month-old son, Carmel, nestles in the back seat. His child shares a name with Mount Carmel in northern Israel. Carmel is a word resonant in both Hebrew and Arabic, suggesting a freshly planted garden — an indication of Bendet’s hopes for the future.
‘I started understanding’
Bendet was a co-founder of Rehelim, one of the West Bank’s first illegal outposts.
He moved a growing family there — he eventually had six children with his then-wife — and helped sneak covert trailers into the settlement to lay claim to the hilltop near the Palestinian city of Nablus.
Then 15 years ago he began suffering a crisis of faith. By 2007, he stopped being religious.
“My belief and ideology were together; when I stopped believing, I started researching my ideology,” Bendet says as he drives his car on a tour of West Bank settlements — communities most governments deem illegal because they are built on occupied land.
The more he researched, the more he changed.
“I started understanding Palestinian people, started understanding what we were doing to them when we built an outpost,” Bendet says as he smokes one of many roll-ups.
A fence sits on the high concrete wall running down the middle of Route 4370, slicing the road in two: The far lane is for Israeli-registered vehicles, the other for Palestinian traffic and cannot enter Jerusalem.Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR / for NBC News
The Tel Aviv native says he questioned his most basic assumptions. Bendet later became a journalist covering the West Bank.
And now as the head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch division, he keeps track of communities like the ones he fought to set up.
Bendet believes that not only do settlements pose a threat to the existence of the state of Israel, they also help hold millions of Palestinians under occupation and without rights.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Some 25 years ago, hopes ran high that the Oslo Accord signed by Palestinian and Israeli leaders would lay a foundation for peace through two states living side by side. Since then, on-off peace talks have foundered and violence has flared.
In Israel, intermittent Palestinian terrorist attacks coupled with the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which was swiftly taken over by Hamas, have caused widespread disappointment and raised fears of a similar move in the West Bank.
And settlement activity is booming with roads dividing up the land making an independent Palestinian state an ever-fainter possibility — something Bendet feels is deeply unfair.
“We fought for a country for 70 years — a country for Jews,” he says. “I don’t understand why we don’t give Palestinians what we struggled for before.”
Dreams of independence
In February 2017, when he was still a journalist, Bendet visited Amona — another outpost being evacuated because Israel’s Supreme Court ruled it had been built on private Palestinian land.
While there, he confronted his two oldest children — a son and a daughter who are now in their early 20s — among hundreds protesting the eviction.
Eventually, the demonstration was broken up. As his son was carried away by soldiers, Bendet followed with the young man’s duffel bag.
Bendet’s change in life is not easy for some of his kids; after all, he raised them to be settlers. So he knows uprooting settlements — something essential to building a Palestinian state — will be deeply painful for some Jews.
“Nobody in my office is glad when we succeed in removing illegal houses,” he says.
With settlement activity reaching record levels in the last two years, the situation is now acute, Bendet believes.
The population of settlements is growing faster than the population of Israel as a whole.
Last month, a West Bank settler group reported the number of people living in the settlements grew by 3.3 percent last year. The country’s overall population growth rate was 1.9 percent.
.
A construction site in the Israeli settlement of Efrat, which is located in the West Bank.Baz Ratner / Reuters file
Bendet surveys Givat Eitam, a Jewish outpost south of Bethlehem that is a handful of buses, trailers and long tent sitting on a bare plot of earth.
“The view is so beautiful but when you start to understand what is going on here, you understand it is not beautiful at all,” Bendet says, adding that the development of the location would likely strike a blow to a contiguous and independent Palestinian state by cutting off communities from each other.
“All the Palestinians see the dream of building a state going away,” he adds.
Withered fruit trees
Ali Musa’s American-accented English is a legacy of old hopes of winning a degree in U.S. literature. Those plans were derailed in 1999 when Jewish settlers occupied his family’s farmland.
The beginning of his relatives’ fight coincided with the Second Intifada, or Palestinian Uprising, which left around 3,000 Palestinians and around 1,000 Israelis dead.
Ali Musa is a mechanic who lives in the shadow of Efrat, a large settlement near Bethlehem.Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR / for NBC News
The 52-year-old now works as a mechanic in the shadow of Efrat, a large settlement near Bethlehem.
The Musa family’s struggle, as they and activists tell it, features arbitrary detentions, police and settler violence, intimidation and close to $6,000 spent on legal bills.
“I sold many things to pay for my fight, including my wife’s gold,” Musa says as he sits beneath a leaky blue tarp that covers the car repair shop. Bendet sits nearby on a maroon sofa — a steady drip of water soaking the upholstery.
Bendet and Peace Now work with the Musas to help them reclaim land that is now the Jewish outpost of Netiv HaAvot, helping navigate what the group describes as a dizzyingly complicated process.
Over the years, Musa says he has seen fruit trees wither from neglect because his family could not reach the land to care for them. He’s also watched settlers’ trailers multiply and morph into buildings.
“I’ve hidden my feelings — like how I deprived my kids, giving all my money to the lawyers,” he says.
Palestinian farmland near Efrat settlement.Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR / for NBC News
In June, the Musas greeted what should have been a victory: Security forces began evicting settlers from 15 Netiv HaAvot buildings after a Supreme Court ruling that it had been built illegally on private Palestinian land.
The move drew hundreds of angry Jewish protesters who flew Israeli flags. Scuffles broke out. Some 20 houses on land not covered by the ruling were granted legal status and designated a neighborhood of an Israeli government-recognized settlement.
Now the case is still winding its way through the system, so there is still no closure for Musa and his family.
The day before NBC News visited Musa, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stopped in Netiv HaAvot to lend his support to settlers fearing they would be forcibly moved. He also called the court-ordered demolitions “a mishap.”
Netanyahu is a close ally of President Donald Trump, whose administration has been less critical of Israeli settlement policy than that of former President Barack Obama.
Bendet muses that many well-intentioned Israelis do not know how bad life is for many Palestinians in the West Bank.
“A lot of people think, ‘Wow, we give them work.’ They think, ‘They love us,’” he says. “But they don’t think about how a Palestinian needs to work to give food to his family because his house was taken from him.”
F. Brinley Bruton
F. Brinley Bruton is a London-based senior editor for NBC News Digital. She focuses on news from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar holds an event at Shift Cyclery & Coffee Bar in Eau Claire, Wis., on Feb. 16. Klobuchar is among the Democratic presidential hopefuls paying attention to Wisconsin in this election cycle.
Here’s something Democrats thought they knew during the last presidential campaign: Wisconsin was safe. It was a lock for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But when the votes were counted, it was a stunning upset for Republican Donald Trump.
In 2020, Democrats apparently aren’t taking the state for granted.
Even though the first nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire are some 11 months away, and with Wisconsin’s primary not until April 7 of next year, the campaign stops have already begun.
“I do not come from money,” the candidate began. “My mom was a teacher. My dad was a newspaperman. My grandpa was an iron ore miner, and those relatives in Wisconsin, during the Depression, my grandpa worked in a pie shop.”
Heading to Eau Claire was a practical choice — it’s not far from the Wisconsin border with Minnesota, Klobuchar’s home state. Iowa is right next door as well.
There was also symbolism in the form of the message it sent to Democrats everywhere that a traditionally blue battleground won’t be ignored this time.
Clinton’s missed opportunity
In the 2016 election, the Clinton campaign had a relaxed approach to Wisconsin. From the time she accepted the nomination in late July right up to Election Day, Clinton never campaigned in the state in person. She made zero visits to the state in those crucial final months, leaving that task to surrogates.
Wisconsin delegates are seen during Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July 2016, where Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party nomination for president.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The Democrats had pretty good reason to take that approach. After all, the last Republican to capture the state’s electoral votes was President Ronald Reagan in ’84 — and in 2016 the polls in the state pointed to that trend continuing.
“My poll and all 33 other polls in the state showed Clinton leading by an average of about 6 points,” says pollster Charles Franklin of Marquette University Law School.
Still, Trump’s campaign treated Wisconsin like a hotly contested battleground. He made repeated visits there in the final 100 days of the campaign. At a rally in the city Eau Claire in the western, more rural part of the state, he predicted, “In just one week we are going to win the great state of Wisconsin. And we are going to win back the White House. It’s going to happen, folks.”
Ultimately, Trump carried Wisconsin by just 22,177 votes — a winning margin of less than 1 percent. It was part of a trio of upsets in previously blue states that included Michigan and Pennsylvania — giving him the margin he needed to win the White House.
In December 2016, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker gave President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence Green Bay Packers jerseys in honor of winning their home state of Wisconsin.
Morry Gash/AP
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Morry Gash/AP
There are a lot of things factoring into that result, of course, but pollster Charles Franklin says two things happened. Trump did well in the rural western side of the state, a more Republican area, but one that Barack Obama had managed to carry. Plus, Franklin adds, turnout in the state’s largest urban area, the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, was significantly lower than expected. That resulted in fewer votes overall for Clinton in a big city where she needed to run up the score.
Upset victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania combined were key to Trump’s electoral college victory.
Talk to everybody, everywhere
Democrats have been taking notes. Klobuchar hardly has Wisconsin to herself this time around. Another potential Democratic presidential hopeful dropped in recently, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke. At a tour of the Milwaukee Area Technical College, he said it’s good that the state is getting attention. “Wisconsin — perhaps like other parts of the country, perhaps even including where I’m from in far west Texas — too often is overlooked,” he said. O’Rourke said he’s still deciding whether to enter the presidential race.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairperson Martha Laning says she’s been hearing from other candidates about early visits to the state as well.
“It sends a message to the whole nation,” Laning tells NPR. Of the candidates, she adds that it’s evident that after what happened in 2016, “they’re not going to take anything for granted and they’re stopping by Wisconsin right now.”
But Laning stresses that candidate visits are only part of it. Yes, there are lessons from Clinton’s absence last time, but she acknowledges that the Wisconsin Democrats need to be better at reaching voters in every part of the state — urban and rural, blue and red.
Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Martha Laning meets Wisconsin Assembly candidate Ann Groves Lloyd in April 2018 in Portage, Wis. Laning notes that the 2018 midterms were a positive sign for Democrats.
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She says the 2018 midterms were a good start, as it was a very strong Democratic year in Wisconsin. They easily re-elected Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, and they defeated Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who had been seeking a third term in office.
Laning says the lesson of 2016’s defeat is that you need to talk to voters everywhere, and if you pick up an unexpected vote here or a vote there, it can make the difference when there’s another election with a razor-thin margin.
Trump accused his opponents of moving away from a narrative of Russian collusion as Mueller prepares to file his report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He said that the report was being produced “by people who weren’t elected.”
“Unfortunately you put the wrong people in a couple of positions and they leave people for a long time that shouldn’t be there and all of a sudden they’re trying to take you out with bulls—,” he mused to the delighted crowd in Maryland, as he mocked “the collusion delusion.”
Trump’s remarks come just days after former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to a House committee, and appeared to partially shut down some of the claims surrounding theories about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Moscow — including denying that he traveled to Prague in 2016 and saying he has no knowledge of any compromising material Russia may have on Trump.
President Donald Trump hugs the American flag as he arrives to speak at Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2019, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Saturday, March 2, 2019. (AP)
In his speech, Trump pointed to alleged hypocrisy from Democrats who he said wanted to fire former FBI Director James Comey, only to change tune when Trump fired him in 2017. He singled out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and former Hillary Clinton campaign Chair John Podesta.
“Podesta, I believe that day, because he still hasn’t gotten over getting his a– kicked, I believe that day called for his resignation,” he said. “Podesta, the great genius of campaigns.”
He went on to say he told first lady Melania Trump that the move would be popular.
“And I fire a bad cop, I fire a dirty cop and all of sudden the Democrats say ‘How dare he fire him? How dare he do this?’” he said. “That’s where we are. In this swamp of Washington, D.C., but you know what? We are winning, and they’re not.”
The rip into the Russia probe marked only one aspect of a lengthy speech, where he regularly went off-script to josh and joke with the audience, as well as to wax lyrical on the issues of the day, on everything from media bias (“These people are sick”) to his “Never Trump” opponents within the GOP (“They’re on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”)
He saved some of his barbs for Democratic policies like the Green New Deal — a comprehensive overhaul of America’s economy and a shift to 100 percent renewable energy being pushed by left-wing Democrats and 2020 presidential hopefuls.
“When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric: ‘Darling, is the wind blowing? I’d like to watch television,” he quipped.
But he jokingly encouraged them to keep on pushing the Green New Deal, apparently sensing that the policy may be unpopular and lead to Trump’s re-election.
“I like the Green New Deal, I respect it greatly, it should be part of the dialogue of the next election,” he said to laughter from the audience.
He also used anecdotes to promote his policies at home and abroad, particularly pulling back troops from the Middle East. At length he talked about how he flew it into Iraq over Christmas and was told to kill the lights on Air Force One as it came into land.
“We spent $7 trillion and we can’t land a plane with the lights on,” he said.
As Trump spoke at length, the crowd appeared to eat up everything he had to say. Ahead of the speech, audience members stood on chairs, craning their necks to get a glimpse as the Rolling Stones’ “Time Is On My Side” blared through the speakers — indicating the president’s imminent arrival.
President Donald Trump said Saturday he would soon sign an executive order requiring American universities and colleges to maintain “free speech” on campuses.
“Today, I am proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research funds,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The announcement came after the president invited Hayden Williams, a conservative activist and student at the University of California Berkeley who was filmed being punched on campus, onstage before announcing the executive order.
“If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they’ve got to allow people like Hayden and many other great young people and old people to speak,” Trump said. “Free speech. If they don’t, it will be very costly.”
The White House did not immediately reply to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Trump previously tweeted about Williams’ case, referencing denying federal funds as retribution for schools allowing “violence on innocent people with a different point of view.”
(Reuters reporting by Katanga Johnson; editing by Diane Craft)
The Right is “obsessed” with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. At least, that’s what reporters keep telling me.
Slate asks, “Why the Right Is So Obsessed With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez[?]”
The Huffington Post declares in an eye-roller of a headline, “Conservative Men Are Obsessed With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Science Tells Us Why.”
“Conservatives can’t stop obsessing over Ocasio-Cortez. Their latest target: her boyfriend,” the Washington Post reports.
Members of the press are not wrong to say conservatives and Republicans are maybe a little too fixated on the 29-year-old freshman congresswoman. But let that criticism come from anywhere else but the news industry. After all, reporters and pundits are just as preoccupied with tracking every little thing the New York congresswoman says and does. The only difference is their obsession is loving — more Beatlemania than angry ex-boyfriend.
I mean, you want to talk about people who are captivated by Ocasio-Cortez? Let’s look at just a handful of headlines published in the last month.
On Feb. 6, after President Trump delivered his annual State of the Union address, Insider actually ran a headline that read, “People are obsessed with the white cape Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore to the State of the Union. Here’s where you can get a look-alike version.”
The Hill published a story on Feb. 21 titled, “Video of Ocasio-Cortez being lovingly attacked by a dog goes viral after #NationalLoveYourPetDay.”
“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is inspiration behind upcoming comic book,” read a Feb. 27 headline published by ABC News, which also dedicated actual airtime to covering the book.
NBC News went with this on Feb. 26: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ‘taking on the GOP’ in new comic book.” The story’s subhead read, “Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear white pantsuits.”
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will become a superhero in a new comic book,” reported CNN.
We got this same comic book PR pitch, by the way. It found my editor’s circular file.
On Feb. 27, Rolling Stone magazine revealed Ocasio-Cortez would be featured in an upcoming cover story titled “Women shaping the future: Nancy Pelosi and the new voices of the House,” along with other Democratic congresswomen, including anti-Semite Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Definitely not-obsessed news reporters followed up by offering fluffy, pro-Ocasio-Cortez coverage of Rolling Stone’s fluffy, pro-Ocasio-Cortez cover story.
“Rolling Stone Features Democratic ‘Women Shaping The Future’ As Cover Stars,” read one Huffington Post headline.
Boing Boing went with this particularly servile tribute: “AOC’s Rolling Stone interview: portrait of a principled, shrewd, brilliant activist/politician.”
And then there’s my personal favorite, which comes from Reuters’ devastatingly titled “ Top News” Twitter account:
These are not “news” stories by any stretch of the imagination. Not one of them. These are love letters written by starstruck fans who also happen to work for media organizations. Indeed, too many in the press act like Ocasio-Cortez’s personal acolytes, eager to update the faithful on the latest, greatest “slay queen” moments from the slayest of queens. There has been no shortage of these stories since she won her primary in 2018. The press keeps pumping these things out, one after the other, which is to say the Right alone is not responsible for why you hear the name “Ocasio-Cortez” nearly every day.
There’s no difference in the amount of attention the congresswoman gets from the nation’s leading newsrooms and the amount of attention she gets from the Right. The only difference is in tone. Conservatives and Republicans are highly critical of Ocasio-Cortez, while the average newsroom might as well be lining up for her autograph.
Yet only the Right is accused of being “obsessed.” Ironically enough, this accusation comes primarily from the only corner of the world that it is just as captivated by the New York congresswoman.
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Every turn of every investigation into Russia and the 2016 election has hit a dead end, and likewise, no one should expect a thrill ride when special counsel Robert Mueller finally turns in his report.
A new Time article by former prosecutor Renato Mariotti readies liberals and other critics of President Trump for that ultimately disappointing outcome to the yearslong special counsel investigation. True, that’s the likely end facing Trump’s opponents, but Mariotti is 100 percent wrong in arguing that it will be because of a “successful disinformation crusade” by Trump.
Mariotti wrote that Trump “worked to raise a nearly impossible and definitely illogical bar for Mueller to clear: proving ‘collusion’ and charging a grand criminal conspiracy involving the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”
No, no, no, no, no. Any raising of expectations for the special counsel was done exclusively by the Democratic Party and the national news media, both of which in 2017 demanded the creation of a special counsel with limitless legal authority to find the golden egg, proof that Trump’s campaign had worked in coordination with Russia to tip the election in his favor.
Yes, that demand came after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was probing former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s clandestine conversations with Russian officials. But it’s well worth a reminder that firing Comey was also something Democrats and liberals in the media wanted.
The hardest evidence that anything happened with Russia in the 2016 election are indictments of some Russians for “fraud and deceit.” The product of their mass conspiracy was a bunch of tweets and Facebook posts spread on the Internet with the intention of getting people angry about politics. In essence, Russians looked at what was already on America’s Facebook and Twitter and repeated it.
What an ingenious plan to snatch the election from Hillary Clinton!
The grand social media scheme wasn’t a heist. It was a mirror.
After Facebook took measures in 2017 to fight any “fake” political posts on the platform, one liberal organizer told the Washington Post: “Russians might have been there, but Russians are not creating and invoking these feelings. These are real feelings, not Internet-created feelings.”
The FBI, the House, the Senate, and the entire national news media have been investigating Russia and any ties to Trump since 2016. Here are some of their findings:
Michael Flynn contacted Russian officials during the presidential transition and asked that they not escalate tensions with the U.S. over sanctions enacted by the Obama administration. There was no crime here until Flynn lied to the FBI about it.
Well, into the 2016 election, it appears Trump was pursuing a business deal in Russia to construct a Trump Tower Moscow, a project he has reportedly fantasized about since the 1980s. There is no crime here.
Paul Manafort, who for a period served as one of Trump’s campaign managers, reportedly showed internal polling campaign data to a Russian, a crucial bit of information, no doubt, in Russia’s tweet strategy. There is no crime here.
The purpose of the Time article is to sink expectations lower than they already were, as every “revelation” of the never-ending Russia nightmare has failed to lead us to the holy grail.
There’s a lot of wreckage as a result of Mueller’s rampage into the past professional lives of Trump associates. That alone kneecapped Trump’s presidency, compromising any goodwill he might have had with congressional Democrats and depressing his political capital with the public.
Democrats almost certainly won’t get the final kill shot from Mueller’s report. But that’s not Trump’s fault. It’s theirs.
She brought up his history with domestic violence, and talked about the drugs found in his body after he was shot to death by police.
She raised the despair Stephon Clark was facing the weekend before he died, his fear of going back to jail and not seeing his children again and the intensely personal disputes with his girlfriend as he researched methods of suicide online.
In explaining Saturday why she was not filing criminal charges against the police officers who killed Clark last March, Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert tried to tiptoe around the edges of the couple’s troubles, but eventually acknowledged that they played into her final decision.
“You can see that there were many things weighing heavily on his mind,” Schubert said in a riveting 80-minute news conference. “It is clear that they had a very tumultuous relationship.”
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“We have done our best to exercise discretion,” Schubert added, noting that she felt compelled to explain the factors that went into her decision not to file charges, and that if she had filed charges, the information would quickly have become part of the officers’ defense.
“The truth is that a jury would be entitled to that information if we brought charges, and we have to consider that,” Schubert said. “So that’s why I kept saying all along this is very sensitive and it’s not comfortable, but it is relevant.”
That wasn’t good enough for Stephon Clark’s mother and others who blasted Schubert for bringing up personal information about Clark and Salena Manni, his girlfriend and mother of his two young sons.
“I don’t care if he was a criminal, none of that matters,” SeQuette Clark said. “Stop trying to justify (the shooting) by looking at a person’s character.”
She also said it was unfair to judge her son, who was 22 when he was killed.
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“Everybody should just stop and think about what they did at 22,” she said.
Tanya Faison of Black Lives Matter Sacramento agreed that Schubert went too far, saying, “I just didn’t expect her to vilify him so much.”
Rev. Shane Harris, head of the Los Angeles-based People’s Alliance for Justice and a spokesman for Manni, said the DA went out of her way to embarrass Manni and to “criminalize” her. Harris decried Schubert’s report on the case for publishing angry text messages the couple exchanged after she accused him of a domestic violence incident two days before he was shot by police.
“Its’ one thing to say we have to” look into the personal correspondence between Manni and Clark that weekend, Harris said. “It is another thing to rub it in someone’s face. She rubbed it in Salena’s face. She rubbed it in those two childrens’ faces.”
And at a gathering outside City Hall Saturday afternoon, the Rev. Kevin Kitrell Ross of Unity of Sacramento called for Schubert to be recalled and criticized her for sharing Clark’s toxicology results and the nature of text messages Clark sent in the days before his death.
“Where is the toxicology report for the officers who shot down Stephon Clark?” Ross asked as the crowd erupted in cheers. “Where are the cellphone records of the officers who shot 20 times on Stephon Clark?”
But while the family’s supporters seized upon Schubert’s statements as evidence the DA had gone too far, legal experts said she did exactly what she needed to in presenting her argument for why she would not charge the officers.
“When the DA makes a decision on filing a case, she has to consider whether a jury will convict,” former Sacramento and federal prosecutor William Portanova said. “The defense attorneys for the cops would have been given this evidence and the defense attorneys would have used it in front of a jury to argue in favor of the defense.
Tanya Faison, founder of Black Lives Matter Sacramento, responded to the District Attorney’s decision not to charge the officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark.
“Anne Marie Schubert did the right thing in explaining all of the evidence she had to consider in deciding whether or not she had a winnable case. If the officers were charged, their attorneys no doubt would have argued that Stephon Clark played a role in his own death. That would have been part of the available evidence.”
In fact, Schubert’s report on the case virtually suggested Clark’s despair and suicidal thoughts – and the evidence that he took a shooting position toward officers while holding only a cell phone – spurred him toward “suicide by cop.”
Schubert wouldn’t say that was the intent of her presentation.
“I’m not suggesting that, but I think it’s quite clear that Mr. Clark was in a state of despair and he was impaired and it’s very sad, because no human being should be in that position,” she said.
But former Sacramento Sheriff John McGinness said the evidence clearly showed Clark was trying to get the officers to shoot him.
“I believe that’s exactly what it was,” McGinness said. “It’s a sad story, but this is not a close one, in my opinion. His conduct and behavior was bizarre.”
McGinness also noted that the evidence Schubert was presenting still could end up before a jury evaluating the $20 million federal civil rights lawsuit Clark’s family has filed against the city, and that Schubert was under tremendous pressure to explain whatever decision she made.
“The public was demanding to have answers as to all of the factors that went into the decision,” McGinness said. “It’s the same information that would go before a jury.”
The Right is “obsessed” with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. At least, that’s what reporters keep telling me.
Slate asks, “Why the Right Is So Obsessed With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez[?]”
The Huffington Post declares in an eye-roller of a headline, “Conservative Men Are Obsessed With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Science Tells Us Why.”
“Conservatives can’t stop obsessing over Ocasio-Cortez. Their latest target: her boyfriend,” the Washington Post reports.
Members of the press are not wrong to say conservatives and Republicans are maybe a little too fixated on the 29-year-old freshman congresswoman. But let that criticism come from anywhere else but the news industry. After all, reporters and pundits are just as preoccupied with tracking every little thing the New York congresswoman says and does. The only difference is their obsession is loving — more Beatlemania than angry ex-boyfriend.
I mean, you want to talk about people who are captivated by Ocasio-Cortez? Let’s look at just a handful of headlines published in the last month.
On Feb. 6, after President Trump delivered his annual State of the Union address, Insider actually ran a headline that read, “People are obsessed with the white cape Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore to the State of the Union. Here’s where you can get a look-alike version.”
The Hill published a story on Feb. 21 titled, “Video of Ocasio-Cortez being lovingly attacked by a dog goes viral after #NationalLoveYourPetDay.”
“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is inspiration behind upcoming comic book,” read a Feb. 27 headline published by ABC News, which also dedicated actual airtime to covering the book.
NBC News went with this on Feb. 26: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ‘taking on the GOP’ in new comic book.” The story’s subhead read, “Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear white pantsuits.”
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will become a superhero in a new comic book,” reported CNN.
We got this same comic book PR pitch, by the way. It found my editor’s circular file.
On Feb. 27, Rolling Stone magazine revealed Ocasio-Cortez would be featured in an upcoming cover story titled “Women shaping the future: Nancy Pelosi and the new voices of the House,” along with other Democratic congresswomen, including anti-Semite Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Definitely not-obsessed news reporters followed up by offering fluffy, pro-Ocasio-Cortez coverage of Rolling Stone’s fluffy, pro-Ocasio-Cortez cover story.
“Rolling Stone Features Democratic ‘Women Shaping The Future’ As Cover Stars,” read one Huffington Post headline.
Boing Boing went with this particularly servile tribute: “AOC’s Rolling Stone interview: portrait of a principled, shrewd, brilliant activist/politician.”
And then there’s my personal favorite, which comes from Reuters’ devastatingly titled “ Top News” Twitter account:
These are not “news” stories by any stretch of the imagination. Not one of them. These are love letters written by starstruck fans who also happen to work for media organizations. Indeed, too many in the press act like Ocasio-Cortez’s personal acolytes, eager to update the faithful on the latest, greatest “slay queen” moments from the slayest of queens. There has been no shortage of these stories since she won her primary in 2018. The press keeps pumping these things out, one after the other, which is to say the Right alone is not responsible for why you hear the name “Ocasio-Cortez” nearly every day.
There’s no difference in the amount of attention the congresswoman gets from the nation’s leading newsrooms and the amount of attention she gets from the Right. The only difference is in tone. Conservatives and Republicans are highly critical of Ocasio-Cortez, while the average newsroom might as well be lining up for her autograph.
Yet only the Right is accused of being “obsessed.” Ironically enough, this accusation comes primarily from the only corner of the world that it is just as captivated by the New York congresswoman.
Seoul, South Korea — South Korea and the U.S. are ending their massive springtime military drills as part of efforts to support diplomacy aimed at resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis. The Pentagon said in a release the U.S. and South Korean defense chiefs decided to conclude the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle series of exercises.
The decision will likely raise worries about how the allies will maintain their readiness in the event that military tensions erupt again in the wake of the recently failed summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The release said the allies agreed to maintain firm military readiness through newly designed command post exercises and revised field training programs.
Smaller-scale drills will continue, but major planned war games will no longer go ahead, BBC News reported. North Korea, which views its nuclear weapons as key to its survival, has always regarded the games as preparation for a military invasion by the two countries.
Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan and South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo “made clear that the alliance decision to adapt our training program reflected our desire to reduce tension and support our diplomatic efforts to achieve complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a final, fully verified manner,” the statement said.
Seoul’s Defense Ministry released a similar statement.
Following his first summit Kim in Singapore last June, Mr. Trump also suspended the allies’ summertime military drills, calling them “very provocative” and “massively expensive.” The U.S and South Korea also have suspended a few other smaller joint drills.
The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 American soldiers are deployed in South Korea to deter potential aggression from North Korea.
Every turn of every investigation into Russia and the 2016 election has hit a dead end, and likewise, no one should expect a thrill ride when special counsel Robert Mueller finally turns in his report.
A new Time article by former prosecutor Renato Mariotti readies liberals and other critics of President Trump for that ultimately disappointing outcome to the yearslong special counsel investigation. True, that’s the likely end facing Trump’s opponents, but Mariotti is 100 percent wrong in arguing that it will be because of a “successful disinformation crusade” by Trump.
Mariotti wrote that Trump “worked to raise a nearly impossible and definitely illogical bar for Mueller to clear: proving ‘collusion’ and charging a grand criminal conspiracy involving the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”
No, no, no, no, no. Any raising of expectations for the special counsel was done exclusively by the Democratic Party and the national news media, both of which in 2017 demanded the creation of a special counsel with limitless legal authority to find the golden egg, proof that Trump’s campaign had worked in coordination with Russia to tip the election in his favor.
Yes, that demand came after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was probing former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s clandestine conversations with Russian officials. But it’s well worth a reminder that firing Comey was also something Democrats and liberals in the media wanted.
The hardest evidence that anything happened with Russia in the 2016 election are indictments of some Russians for “fraud and deceit.” The product of their mass conspiracy was a bunch of tweets and Facebook posts spread on the Internet with the intention of getting people angry about politics. In essence, Russians looked at what was already on America’s Facebook and Twitter and repeated it.
What an ingenious plan to snatch the election from Hillary Clinton!
The grand social media scheme wasn’t a heist. It was a mirror.
After Facebook took measures in 2017 to fight any “fake” political posts on the platform, one liberal organizer told the Washington Post: “Russians might have been there, but Russians are not creating and invoking these feelings. These are real feelings, not Internet-created feelings.”
The FBI, the House, the Senate, and the entire national news media have been investigating Russia and any ties to Trump since 2016. Here are some of their findings:
Michael Flynn contacted Russian officials during the presidential transition and asked that they not escalate tensions with the U.S. over sanctions enacted by the Obama administration. There was no crime here until Flynn lied to the FBI about it.
Well, into the 2016 election, it appears Trump was pursuing a business deal in Russia to construct a Trump Tower Moscow, a project he has reportedly fantasized about since the 1980s. There is no crime here.
Paul Manafort, who for a period served as one of Trump’s campaign managers, reportedly showed internal polling campaign data to a Russian, a crucial bit of information, no doubt, in Russia’s tweet strategy. There is no crime here.
The purpose of the Time article is to sink expectations lower than they already were, as every “revelation” of the never-ending Russia nightmare has failed to lead us to the holy grail.
There’s a lot of wreckage as a result of Mueller’s rampage into the past professional lives of Trump associates. That alone kneecapped Trump’s presidency, compromising any goodwill he might have had with congressional Democrats and depressing his political capital with the public.
Democrats almost certainly won’t get the final kill shot from Mueller’s report. But that’s not Trump’s fault. It’s theirs.
Two Sacramento police officers won’t be charged in deadly shooting of Stephon Clark.
Prosecutors in California have decided not to charge two police officers who fatally shot an unarmed black man last year, saying the “shooting was lawful.”
Sacramento County District Attorney Marie Schubert announced on Saturday that Officers Terrance Mercadal and Jared Robinet would not face criminal charges in the March 18 death of Stephon Clark after an independent review of the case found that the pair used lethal force lawfully.
The 61-page review conducted by the prosecutor’s office stated that Mercadal and Robinet “had honest and reasonable belief that they were in imminent danger of death or great bodily injury.”
Schubert said the decision “does not diminish in any way the tragedy, the anger and the frustration that we heard since the time of his death.”
She added: “We cannot ignore that there is rage within our community.”
Reaction to the decision came swiftly on Saturday. Among the first to weigh in was Clark’s mother, Sequette, who refused to accept prosecutors’ judgment. “They executed my son,” she said, according to The Associated Press. “It’s not right.”
Also on Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom and civil rights activists called for criminal justice reforms concerning use of deadly force. Newsom called it a hard truth that “our criminal justice system treats young black and Latino men and women differently than their white counterparts. That must change.”
How the community at large will react to prosecutors’ decision remained an open question early Saturday evening, though Sacramento has been bracing for protests; business owners were warned by a business association and state government workers told by legislative officials in recent days to stay away from downtown at least through the weekend.
Clark was shot and killed March 18; the two officers were responding to a report of somebody breaking car windows. Police said they believed Clark was the suspect, and that he ran when a police helicopter responded and failed to obey officers’ orders.
Police said they thought Clark was holding a gun when he moved toward them with his arms extended and an object in his hands. He was later found to only have a cellphone on him.
Police video of the shooting does not clearly capture all that happened after Clark ran into his grandmother’s backyard.
It showed him initially moving toward the officers, who were peeking out from behind a corner of the house, but it’s not clear whether he was facing them or that he knew the officers were there when they opened fire after shouting “gun, gun, gun.” The video showed Clark staggering sideways and falling on his stomach as the officers continued shooting.
“We must recognize that they are often forced to make split-second decisions and we must recognize that they are under tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving circumstances,” Schubert said on Saturday.
A review of the district attorney’s findings stated that “the law recognizes an inherent right to use deadly force to protect oneself or others from death or great bodily harm.”
It continued: “This fundamental legal principle is known as the right of ‘self-defense.’ A police officer does not lose his fundamental right by virtue of becoming a police officer.”
Claudia Cowan reports from California, where protesters are calling on prosecutors to file criminal charges against officers involved in the fatal shooting of Stephon Clark.
Clark’s family, including his two sons, his parents and his grandparents, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in January seeking more than $20 million from the city, Mercadal and Robinet. The suit alleges that the use of force was excessive, and that Clark was a victim of racial profiling.
One of the officers who shot Clark is black and the other is white, police said.
The second day of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference is officially underway at Oxon Hill, Md.
Going on from Feb. 27 to March 2, CPAC is one of the most prominent gatherings of conservatives in the country held every year and features speakers from all over the right side of American politics, from pundits, to members of Congress, and even President Trump himself.
Trump, who is scheduled to speak at 11:30 a.m. EST on Saturday, is a regular attendee of the event since 2011, when he again began considering the possibility of running for president.
Since then, Trump has only missed a single year, 2016, when he chose to campaign in key states ahead of the 2016 election. As president, Trump spoke in 2017 and 2018 at CPAC. Vice President Mike Pence is set to speak on Friday.
On the first full day of speeches, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he plans to process as many conservative judges as possible as Judiciary chairman.
Sebastian Gorka, meanwhile, pointed to the “Green New Deal” in warning conservatives they are on the “frontlines of war” against communism.
Friday’s speakers include White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
You can read all of the Washington Examiner‘s coverage for CPAC 2019 here.
NEW YORK (AP) — Bernie Sanders kicked off his presidential campaign Saturday miles from the rent-controlled apartment where he grew up in Brooklyn and forcefully made the case that he is nothing like fellow New Yorker Donald Trump, proclaiming himself the Democrat best prepared to beat the incumbent in 2020.
“My experience as a child, living in a family that struggled economically, powerfully influenced my life and my values. I know where I came from,” Sanders boomed in his unmistakable Brooklyn accent. “And that is something I will never forget.”
The Democrats in the 2020 race have taken varied approaches to Trump, with some avoiding saying his name entirely, while others make implicit critiques of his presidency. Sanders has never shied from jabbing Trump in stark terms, and during his speech at Brooklyn College, he called Trump “the most dangerous president in modern American history” and said the president wants to “divide us up.”
The Vermont senator positioned himself in opposition to Trump administration policies from immigration to climate change. Beyond the issues themselves, Sanders, who grew up in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush in a middle-class family, drew a stark contrast between himself and the billionaire in the White House who hails from Queens.
“I did not have a father who gave me millions of dollars to build luxury skyscrapers, casinos and country clubs,” said Sanders, who has lived in Vermont for decades. He pegged his allowance as a kid at 25 cents a week.
Sanders also said he “did not come from a family of privilege that prepared me to entertain people on television by telling workers, ‘You’re fired.'”
“I came from a family who knew all too well the frightening power employers can have over every day workers,” he added.
More than 200 miles away in suburban Washington, Trump reveled in his 2016 victory and said Republicans “need to verify it in 2020 with an even bigger victory.”
While Trump didn’t mention Sanders explicitly in a two-hour speech, he railed against the policies of “socialism” in a continued attempt to portray Democrats as out of touch with ordinary Americans. Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist.
“Socialism is not about the environment, it is not about justice, it is not about virtue. It is only about one thing – it is called power for the ruling class,” Trump said. “We know the future does not belong to those who believe in socialism”
Speaking at the same conference Friday, Vice President Mike Pence called Sanders an “avowed socialist.”
Sanders enters the race at a moment that bears little resemblance to when he waged his long-shot bid in 2016. Democrats have been mobilized by the election of Trump and are seeking a standard-bearer who can oust him from office. Many of Sanders’ populist ideas have been embraced by the mainstream of the Democratic party. The field of Democrats that he joins includes a number of liberal candidates, most notably Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who share similar sensibilities.
As Sanders launched his campaign in Brooklyn, Warren was campaigning in Waterloo, Iowa and was questioned repeatedly about Sanders. Though the two have been friends since before they came to the Senate, Warren did not endorse Sanders in 2016, a decision that angered his supporters.
“I’m going to be blunt – we can’t go back and relitigate 2016,” she told a voter who asked why she declined to back Sanders. “We’ve gotta keep our focus on how we’re going to win in 2020.”
Later asked by reporters how she’ll distinguish herself from Sanders, she said she would focus on issues, and emphasized the need for the Democratic field to stick together.
“The way I see it, I got plenty to talk about as it is — about the structural change we need in this country and laying out how we can do this. This is hopeful. People come and they hear what’s broken, that we can fix it and that we do it together.”
Sanders’ rally was his first campaign event since announcing a week ago that he would run against Trump for the White House. Sanders will make his first trip to the leadoff caucus state of Iowa next week, with plans to campaign in Council Bluffs, Iowa City and Des Moines. He is headed to the early state of Iowa
Hours before his speech in Brooklyn College’s East Quad, a line of supporters snaked down the snowy streets.
A reggae band played before Sanders spoke, and he was introduced by a number of supporters including Nina Turner, the former Ohio state senator who is a co-chair of Sanders’ campaign this year, and Shaun King, the writer and civil rights activist.
King cited Sanders’ participation in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when he was a student at the University of Chicago.
“This is the origin story of an American revolutionary,” King said of Sanders, who will return to Chicago on Sunday evening for a second campaign rally, where he’s expected to further highlight his own activism.
Paul Crewdson, 37, of Brooklyn, came to the rally carrying a hand-drawn cardboard sign that read, “Win Michigan, Win Ohio, Win Wisconsin.”
“I think this was the reason that Democrats lost in 2016,” he said.
As he began his speech, Sanders himself hinted at how he sees the race, a campaign that runs beyond the battlegrounds. “This is a 50-state campaign,” he said. “We will not concede a single state to Donald Trump.”
This version of the story is corrected to say that Pence spoke Friday at the conservative conference, not Thursday.
Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe in Waterloo, Iowa, and Kevin Freking and Zeke Miller in Oxon Hill, Maryland, contributed to this report.
Image caption
Tens of thousands of US military personnel are based in South Korea
The US and South Korea have confirmed plans to end large-scale joint military exercises amid efforts to thaw relations.
Smaller-scale drills will continue, but major planned war games will now not go ahead.
A number of exercises were suspended last year after US President Donald Trump met North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
North Korea has always regarded the games as preparation for a military invasion by the two countries.
A Pentagon statement said the defence ministers from the two countries had agreed to end the Foal Eagle and Key Resolve exercises in a phone call on Saturday. It is unclear if the suspension is permanent.
Critics have said cancelling the drills could undermine US and South Korean military defences against the North, but others say those concerns are unjustified.
President Trump has previously complained of the cost of such exercises, although he has ruled out withdrawing US troops from the peninsula.
The country has about 30,000 US troops in South Korea.
President Trump intends to sign an executive order that would put at risk federal research funding to colleges and universities that fail to protect free speech on campus, he announced Saturday.
“Today I am proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars,” the president said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.
“If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they’ve got to allow people like Hayden and many other great young people and old people, to speak, free speech,” said Trump. “If they don’t, it will be very costly. That will be signed very soon.”
The specific details of Trump’s executive order are unknown.
The president’s announcement came after he brought on stage Hayden Williams, a conservative activist with Turning Point USA who was punched in the face Feb. 19 at the University of California, Berkeley.
Campus police on Saturday arrested Zachary Greenberg, who allegedly was behind the attack on Williams. Bail for Greenberg, 28, was set at $30,000.
Trump joked that Williams “could take a punch” and urged him to sue not only Greenberg “forever,” but also the University of California, Berkeley.
“He took a hard punch in the face for all of us, remember that,” Trump said. “He took a punch for all of us, and we can never allow that to happen. And in closing with Hayden, here is the good news: He is going to be a very wealthy young man.”
A controversial poster showing a photo of Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar underneath an image of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack led to a partisan confrontation at the West Virginia statehouse Friday.
According to NBC News, one person was injured during the melee and another staffer resigned after allegedly accusing Muslims of being terrorists.
The incident occurred during a state Republican-sponsored event called WVGOP Day held in the West Virginia Capitol building.
The Washington Post reports, though the person or group behind the poster has not yet been identified, it appears to have been positioned next to a sign for the group ACT For America, which has been accused of being anti-Muslim.
The poster’s text was also inflammatory. Placed over the World Trade Center image were the words, “‘Never forget’ — You said.”
Related: Minnesota Rep IIhan Omar
FILE – In this Jan. 5, 2017, file photo, new State Rep. Ilhan Omar is interviewed in her office two days after the 2017 Legislature convened in St. Paul, Minn. Omar, already the first Somali-American to be elected to a state legislature, is jumping into a crowded race for a Minnesota congressional seat. Omar filed Tuesday, June 5, 2018, for the Minneapolis-area seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison. (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)
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And below the Congresswoman’s photo were the words, “I am the proof you have forgotten.”
State Democrats objected to the poster, with one member declaring that it was “hateful.”
Omar herself has since blasted Republicans over the incident, tweeting: “No wonder why I am on the ‘Hitlist’ of a domestic terrorist and ‘Assassinate Ilhan Omar’ is written on my local gas stations. Look no further, the GOP’s anti-Muslim display likening me to a terrorist rocks in state capitols and no one is condemning them!”
Every turn of every investigation into Russia and the 2016 election has hit a dead end, and likewise, no one should expect a thrill ride when special counsel Robert Mueller finally turns in his report.
A new Time article by former prosecutor Renato Mariotti readies liberals and other critics of President Trump for that ultimately disappointing outcome to the yearslong special counsel investigation. True, that’s the likely end facing Trump’s opponents, but Mariotti is 100 percent wrong in arguing that it will be because of a “successful disinformation crusade” by Trump.
Mariotti wrote that Trump “worked to raise a nearly impossible and definitely illogical bar for Mueller to clear: proving ‘collusion’ and charging a grand criminal conspiracy involving the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”
No, no, no, no, no. Any raising of expectations for the special counsel was done exclusively by the Democratic Party and the national news media, both of which in 2017 demanded the creation of a special counsel with limitless legal authority to find the golden egg, proof that Trump’s campaign had worked in coordination with Russia to tip the election in his favor.
Yes, that demand came after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was probing former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s clandestine conversations with Russian officials. But it’s well worth a reminder that firing Comey was also something Democrats and liberals in the media wanted.
The hardest evidence that anything happened with Russia in the 2016 election are indictments of some Russians for “fraud and deceit.” The product of their mass conspiracy was a bunch of tweets and Facebook posts spread on the Internet with the intention of getting people angry about politics. In essence, Russians looked at what was already on America’s Facebook and Twitter and repeated it.
What an ingenious plan to snatch the election from Hillary Clinton!
The grand social media scheme wasn’t a heist. It was a mirror.
After Facebook took measures in 2017 to fight any “fake” political posts on the platform, one liberal organizer told the Washington Post: “Russians might have been there, but Russians are not creating and invoking these feelings. These are real feelings, not Internet-created feelings.”
The FBI, the House, the Senate, and the entire national news media have been investigating Russia and any ties to Trump since 2016. Here are some of their findings:
Michael Flynn contacted Russian officials during the presidential transition and asked that they not escalate tensions with the U.S. over sanctions enacted by the Obama administration. There was no crime here until Flynn lied to the FBI about it.
Well, into the 2016 election, it appears Trump was pursuing a business deal in Russia to construct a Trump Tower Moscow, a project he has reportedly fantasized about since the 1980s. There is no crime here.
Paul Manafort, who for a period served as one of Trump’s campaign managers, reportedly showed internal polling campaign data to a Russian, a crucial bit of information, no doubt, in Russia’s tweet strategy. There is no crime here.
The purpose of the Time article is to sink expectations lower than they already were, as every “revelation” of the never-ending Russia nightmare has failed to lead us to the holy grail.
There’s a lot of wreckage as a result of Mueller’s rampage into the past professional lives of Trump associates. That alone kneecapped Trump’s presidency, compromising any goodwill he might have had with congressional Democrats and depressing his political capital with the public.
Democrats almost certainly won’t get the final kill shot from Mueller’s report. But that’s not Trump’s fault. It’s theirs.
“This president has made a mockery of political discourse, decency and truth-telling, and you know it,” Cuomo told Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union that hosts CPAC, in an interview on “Cuomo Prime Time.”
“I don’t know that,” Schlapp responded.
The pair sparred throughout the segment, with Cuomo repeatedly saying that the president “lies all the time” and calling him “a liar.”
“You’re missing the forest for some little saplings and that’s a mistake.” – CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp argues that people are too “obsessed” with President Trump’s “inaccuracies” pic.twitter.com/9rapt8jDRI
“The president was very clear with the American voter about what he intended to do,” Schlapp said. “What he has done is to put into place what he said he would do. What you all are obsessed with is the inaccuracies that some people say exist along the way.”
Schlapp, whose wife Mercedes Schlapp serves in a top communications role in the Trump White House, argued that the host was focused on small details and not broader issues.
“Talk about the forest,” he said. “You’re missing the forest for some little saplings.”
“I don’t see them as saplings,” Cuomo responded.
Cuomo ended the segment by telling Schlapp he was always welcome on his show, but added, “I just get a little touchy when we ignore the obvious.”
The interview was broadcast in the main auditorium at CPAC on Saturday as the audience awaited Trump’s speech there.
CPAC is an annual conservative conference that features prominent right-leaning speakers. The conference, largely attended by university students, was set to wrap up later Saturday.
Two police officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man in his grandmother’s backyard, will face “no criminal liability,” said Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert on Saturday.
Quick take: The night of March 18, 2018, Clark damaged 3 cars and broke a backyard glass door belonging to an 89-year-old man, during which the officers, both of whom were wearing body cameras, chased Clark, ultimately shooting him 8 times. The officers claimed that Clark had pointed a gun at them.
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