House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to mock Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – without mentioning her name – over her reliance on Twitter for support.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attempted to present a united Democratic Party on Friday as lawmakers closed out a Washington-area retreat, despite suggestions that she is grappling with her own version of the “Tea Party” that roiled the Republican Party establishment during the Obama years.
Pelosi told reporters after the Democratic Caucus’ policy retreat in Virginia that it was a “very substantive, unifying, energizing” conference.
“This was an ‘alleluia,’ a cause for celebration for what it means in the lives of the American people,” she said.
But since reclaiming the gavel in January, the California Democrat has been forced to spend much of her time putting out fires from her party’s left flank as it pushes policies such as reparations for black Americans, ‘Medicare-for-all’ and the Green New Deal. She is currently facing another revolt against a bipartisan budget measure to increase spending for the Pentagon and domestic agencies, with critics on the left objecting to the increases for the military.
Amid a string of such confrontations, Melissa DeRosa, New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide, reportedly told a crowd on Thursday that a new Tea Party is forming on the left.
“We saw this play out in the Tea Party, and I feel like at the time the Democratic Party sort of stood on the other side and said, ‘They’re destroying themselves. How do they not see what they are doing? This is crazy! But fine, they can destroy themselves; it’s to our betterment,'” DeRosa said, according to Crain’s. “And I think a version of that is happening right now on the Democratic side.”
On the Republican side, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he sympathized with Pelosi.
“I was almost tempted to call up my friend the speaker and say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve got a Freedom Caucus on your hands,'” he told reporters Thursday, referring to the conservative faction aligned in part with the Tea Party movement.
For her part, Pelosi has dismissed the idea that Democrats are divided, scolding reporters on Thursday: “You guys have it all wrong.”
“We have such a unified caucus. But it serves your purpose to say we’re seething,” she said, according to Roll Call. “You’re on the wrong track. But you can waste your time on that while we go forward with what we’re going to do for the American people.”
But as she uttered those words, another controversy was brewing from the freshman class of the party as Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was criticized for describing 9/11 as “some people did something.” Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., rallied to Omar’s side as she faced fierce criticism from Republicans for the remarks.
On Friday, speaking at the end of the Democratic Caucus meeting, Pelosi indicated when asked about the controversy that she’d be speaking to Omar about the issue, saying her policy is to “call them in before I call them out.”
The 9/11 controversy comes a month after Omar suggested that supporters of Israel were pushing for U.S. politicians to declare “allegiance” to that nation. The comments resulted in a broad resolution against bigotry that did not mention Omar by name, leading to accusations that party leaders allowed the text to be watered down under pressure.
But Democrats have also had difficulty forming a message on hot-topic issues like immigration where, amid activists and some 2020 hopefuls calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), lawmakers have struggled to come up with a solution to the crisis at the border other than opposing President Trump’s controversial policies.
The Washington Post reported that at this week’s retreat, a “session on the issue organized by liberal members largely focused on how to reduce enforcement and detention.”
The Trump administration is reportedly considering releasing migrants detained at the southern border on the streets of so-called sanctuary cities. Not only is this a clear abuse of power, but it is an abuse that seemingly seeks to enact revenge on jurisdictions because of their commitment to enforcing basic constitutional rights.
As the Washington Post reported on Thursday, the idea was explicitly political. As one congressional investigator explained to the Post: “What happened here is that Stephen Miller called people at ICE, said if they’re going to cut funding, you’ve got to make sure you’re releasing people in Pelosi’s district and other congressional districts.”
Wielding law enforcement as a tool to secure political advantage by, for example, deliberately releasing detained migrants in heavily Democratic areas undermines the basic idea of rule of law by replacing a commitment to justice with bowing to the whims of a political leader for partisan ends. Not only does this undermine the most basic premise of justice, but it also presumes that law enforcement should be beholden to the president, regardless of the constraints of law.
But the proposal to simply drop migrants in so-called sanctuary cities around the country is a step more pernicious even than simply supporting an authoritarian-style abuse of power.
Sanctuary cities, despite their frequent characterization as simply safe havens for illegal immigrants, are more accurately jurisdictions that refuse to abridge civil liberties simply because ICE wants them to.
This is an important distinction. Outside of sanctuary cities, ICE can, without a warrant, request that individuals be detained and held or turned over to the agency. That process skirts constitutionally protected rights such as due process as well as prohibitions against government detention without cause. Moreover, the concern that collaboration with ICE would be abused and undermine civil liberties is not an abstract fear but one that has played out in reality even resulting in the unlawful detention of citizens.
That the Trump administration would actively suggest not only undermining the rule of law but do so with the explicit aim of targeting cities because of their commitment to defending civil liberties merits no defense. That the White House would float such an idea in the first place should be a concern to citizens of all political inclinations as it demonstrates clear contempt for legal limits on power and a casual willingness to disregard even the most basic laws and principles.
Thankfully, this time such a plan was flat-out rejected by the legal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and prompted whistleblowers to approach Congress. But as Trump looks to take immigration enforcement in a tougher direction, it seems to be just these sort of objections that he would like to circumvent.
Rep. Ilhan Omar is “off her rocker” and her fellow member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a “joke” who will be seen “ultimately as an asterisk” in history, according to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Omar, D-Minn. is facing fierce backlash after a speech at a Muslim rights group’s event in which she described the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as “some people did something.”
Speaking on the Brian Kilmeade Show on Fox News Radio, Christie, who initially thought his wife was in the Twin Towers on the day of the attacks, said: “As somebody who had my wife two blocks away from the World Trade Center that day, my brother on the floor of the New York Stock exchange, and a number of people in our local parish here who passed away, a murder occurred.
“Multiple murders occurred, 2,900 murders occurred on that day by radical Islamic terrorists and that’s the way it should always be spoken about to honor those victims and this woman is completely – let’s put aside her religion for the moment – as a public servant, she’s off her rocker to be describing it that way and it’s a disgrace, it’s a disgrace to anyone in her congressional district who voted for her.”
On fellow freshman Democrat Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who leapt to Omar’s defense, Christie dismissed her as nothing more than a flash in the pan.
“This is the problem with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They like to talk a lot, but they don’t want to be held responsible for anything they say, and the fact is that to diminish the attacks on 9/11, the greatest attack ever perpetrated on this country, on our soil from a terrorist organization, is to demean the lives that were lost that day, both among those who were in those buildings and on those planes, and those who lost their lives trying to save them.
“What she should do is apologize, and be done with it, because there’s no justifying it, and listen, part of it too Brian, is I’m so tired of hearing ‘AOC’ as she’s called, being given airtime in this country. She’s a joke.
“She got elected because a member of Congress [Joe Crowley] went to sleep and never went back to his district and was too busy running for speaker rather than running to keep his congressional seat and I think she will be seen ultimately as an asterisk in history because I can’t imagine she will stay all that long.
Omar told a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) fundraiser earlier this week: “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
CAIR was actually founded in 1994.
Her comments have drawn ire from the likes of Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and the New York Post, which published a dramatic front page Thursday with an infamous photo of New York City’s Twin Towers on fire on the day of the attacks.
The page read: “Here’s your something: 2,977 people dead by terrorism.”
Christie also offered his thoughts about Julian Assange, calling him a “villain”
“In the end, I think Assange is a criminal and I think that’s what’s going to be proven when he’s brought to an American courtroom,” he told Brian Kilmeade.
And on Bill Barr’s testimony earlier this week, and James Comey’s subsequent comments attempting to dismiss it, he said: “Jim has completely taken leave of his senses and to try to defend the indefensible, which goes all the way back to his conduct and what he said about Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016, the letter he wrote in the fall of 2016, Jim is still trying to defend the indefensible.
“How is electronic surveillance not spying? You’re in a covert way, gathering information from someone who doesn’t know you’re doing it. Sounds like spying to me. Now it may be legal, and may have been justified and AG may look at this and say, you know what, under all the circumstances I think opening the counter-intelligence investigation was legally justified.”
President Trump told then-Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan during a trip to the southern border last Friday that he would pardon the government official if he was convicted of violating immigration laws as a result of enforcing the White House’s agenda, according to a report published Friday evening.
Trump made the promise to McAleenan during their trip to Calexico, Calif., on April 5 in the same conversation in which he told Customs and Border Protection to block Central American asylum-seekers from entering the country.
Trump said he “would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying U.S. entry to migrants,” senior administration officials told CNN.
Two days after that conversation, Trump and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen parted ways, and he announced McAleenan would be taking over the 240,000-person department as acting secretary.
It’s not clear if the comment was meant seriously and Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A homeland security spokesman told CNN, “At no time has the President indicated, asked, directed or pressured the Acting Secretary to do anything illegal. Nor would the Acting Secretary take actions that are not in accordance with our responsibility to enforce the law.”
Is the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange justice against a man who broke the law, or is it a warning shot that journalism is under threat in the United States?
It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because it brings up a host of other related questions: Do you consider WikiLeaks a journalistic organization or not? Did Assange actively participate in criminal activity to obtain classified intel, as the US government alleges, or did he just disseminate information passed on to him and is therefore protected by the First Amendment? Does it matter that Assange and his organization seem to have developed at the very least an affinity to Russia? And is the single charge he faces in the United States the total of the government’s push for justice — or is it just the opening salvo in what will become a larger war to punish Assange (and anyone else who publishes classified information)?
These questions all came to a head on Thursday when, after months of speculation, Assangewas arrested in London by British police after being expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy there. He now faces likely extradition to the US. After his arrest, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment alleging that Assange conspired with former US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password on a Defense Department computer network in order to download classified records and transmit them to WikiLeaks in 2010.
That, however, isn’t all the US government is upset about. Starting in 2010, WikiLeaks published a video of an airstrike in Iraq that killed civilians, military documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and State Department cables in which diplomats gave candid assessments of foreign governments, all provided by Manning. The unprecedented leaks gained enormous attention and made Assange a sort of celebrity — and a target, as top US officials like Attorney General Eric Holder publicly mused about how they could charge him. Perhaps freshest in mind, however, is the “hacktivist” organization’s decision to publish Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta’s emails in the months before the 2016 election.
There has long been a debate about whether what WikiLeaks does counts as journalism. Some view Assange and WikiLeaks as a bastion of transparency and an ultimate example of forcing government accountability. Others see the work as dangerous and treacherous.
With Assange’s arrest and the unsealing of the Justice Department’s indictment, the dust around WikiLeaks has been kicked up again. Some groups dedicated to free speech and press have decried the incident as a foreshadowing of dark times to come for American journalism, while many observers have celebrated it as justice served.
“This case raises a number of really thorny questions about what it means to be a journalist, and who is entitled to the constitutional protections that do exist to ensure that the public gets the information it needs,” David Schulz, senior counsel at Ballard Spahr LLP and director of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, told me.
A lot of people are celebrating Assange’s arrest — but not everyone
At WikiLeaks, Assange has made a lot of enemies, and by many accounts, he’s a jerk. He’s also been hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid an investigation into a sexual assault allegation against him in Sweden.
Many in the national security space hold animosity toward him for compromising sensitive confidential information, including about US military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan and communications from State Department officials. Many Democrats also blame him, at least partially, for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election after WikiLeaks published Podesta’s emails and hacked information from the Democratic National Committee.
“Julian Assange got what he deserved,” author Michael Weiss wrote in the Atlantic.
“He’s our property, and we can get the facts and truth from him,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) told CNN.
Groups dedicated to free speech and press have had a different read.
Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy, and technology project, said in a statement that any prosecution of Assange for WikiLeaks’ publishing operation would be “unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations.”
“The potential implications for press freedom of this allegation of conspiracy between publisher and source are deeply troubling,” said Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, in a statement. He added that the US government could “set out broad legal arguments about journalists soliciting information or interacting with sources that could have chilling consequences for investigative reporting and the publication of information of public interest.”
Barry Pollack, an attorney for Assange, echoed the sentiment in an email to Yahoo News. “Journalists around the world should be deeply troubled by these unprecedented criminal charges,” he said.
This is a little like getting Al Capone on tax evasion
When reports surfaced last year that the US government had indicted Assange, there was a lot of speculation about what, specifically, he was being charged with. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop laid out at the time, the US government had already charged people they’d accused of leaking classified information, including Manning, but going after the publisher of that information was highly unusual. It’s one of the reasons President Barack Obama’s Justice Department hadn’t charged Assange years ago.
But after Assange’s arrest on Thursday, the Department of Justice unsealed the indictment, which is dated to March 2018. The charge: “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion,” related to Assange’s allegedattempt in 2010 to help Manning figure out a password she needed to access more classified documents and information. Per the indictment, it appears the attempt was unsuccessful.
Compared to what some observers thought the indictment might be — including much more serious charges under the Espionage Act — the charge against Assange is, frankly, a pretty small one. If he’s convicted, he could face up to five years in prison — less time than he spent hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK.
It’s a bit like gangster Al Capone being arrested on tax evasion charges: It’s probably not what the US government wanted to get him on, but it’s the way they could do it.
“This is not the thing they care about,” Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told me. “It’s the thing that they can win a court case over.”
For those who view Assange as a criminal as contemptible as Capone, that’s a win — take what you can get. But for civil liberties defenders, it’s a reprehensible overreach.
That the US government would go to such extreme lengths to go after Assange has caused some alarm, especially in light of how small the charge is against him, at least for now. “It would be pretty unusual for the government to go to this amount of effort to extradite someone if that was the only issue,” Sanchez said. “If their only contribution to the crime has been that they ran some software against a password hash and then failed to actually help, then that probably wouldn’t result in someone’s extradition.”
Journalists aren’t given a free pass to commit crimes in the pursuit of a story — but they also haven’t been punished for publishing info that came from one
That’s not to say that what the indictment alleges Assange did, if convicted, isn’t a crime.
And reporters don’t get to just commit any crime they want in the name of journalism. If I punch someone to get them to talk to me for a story or break into their house to steal documents, I can still be charged with assault or robbery.
“Journalists are not scot-free to do whatever they think they need to do in order to pursue an act of journalism,” said Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin.
Whether Assange committed a crime in his work with Manning is something that will ultimately be decided if he is indeed extradited and brought to trial. That’s when courts will determine whether he knowingly violated the law to gain access to information. What it could all hinge on:Did he just advise Manning on how to avoid detection, or was he conspiring with her to get information in an illegal way?
There are some prior cases that illustrate how this could play out, and where the line is. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled on a case called Bartnicki v. Vopper. In that case, a person intercepted and recorded a phone call between a union negotiator and union president and sent it to a radio station, which played a tape of the conversation. The court ruled that the First Amendment protected the broadcaster because it hadn’t participated in the illegal interception.
Other cases, however, have gone the other way. A Texas television station was implicated when a man made recordings of his neighbor’s cordless phone conversations discussing plans to interfere in the local school district’s insurance contract. (The station ultimately settled the related lawsuit.) A journalist was arrested for allegations that he aided and abetted a TWA pilot who stole evidence from the TWA Flight 800 crash in the 1990s.
“There is established in the law a pretty bright line,” Schulz said. “You cross it when you become a participant in illegal activity.”
This is a lot bigger than a password
The debate about Assange and WikiLeaks stretches far beyond helping Manning crack a password. It has reopened the ongoing discussion about whether what WikiLeaks does counts as journalism. It has also raised questions about the government’s intentions and whether this opens the door to prosecuting more journalists or not.
On the former point, people have different opinions of whether what WikiLeaks does — dumping troves of data indiscriminately — is really journalism.
“Is a data dump journalism? That’s an interesting question,” Gitlin said. “In the case of war crimes footage, I feel comfortable saying that by working with Manning on that, Assange was performing an act of journalism. But when you release terabytes of data indiscriminately, I don’t know what to call that, but it’s not self-evidently journalism.”
Indiscriminate data dumps such as those WikiLeaks engages in can have dangerous consequences. For example, human rights advocates have complained that WikiLeaks’ activities have endangered activists in China, and the platform has released information on government sources that the US has gone to great lengths to protect.
Making the matter even more complicated is the evolution of WikiLeaks itself. Back in 2010, it gave the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian troves of information. In 2016, it was clearly rooting for Trump and trying to undermine Clinton. And as Foreign Policy points out, Assange was at the same time declining to publish damaging information on the Russian government. Members of Trump’s administration have even gone so far as to denounce WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service.” (To be sure, a lot of journalism is far from unbiased.)
More specifically to Assange and the charge against him right now, there are concerns that there could be more charges brought against him in the future. That’s one of the concerns Wizner, from the ACLU, raised in his statement. “We have no assurance that these are the only charges the government plans to bring against Mr. Assange,” he said.
The New York Times noted that if the Justice Department does intend to charge Assange with additional offenses, it would likely need to do it before the UK decides whether to send him to the US. The extradition process could take months or even years, so there’s a non-zero chance more charges could be added — and press advocates worry that any broader charges related to WikiLeaks’ work could have a chilling effect on more traditional media outlets that are considering publishing leaked information.
“Never in the history of this country has a publisher been prosecuted for presenting truthful information to the public,” Wizner told CNN in 2017. “Any prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing government secrets would set a dangerous precedent that the Trump administration would surely use to target other news organizations.”
Adding another layer of anxiety is the Trump administration and its contentious relationship with the press. The president has openly discussed an interest in loosening up libel laws and frequently derides the media.
The controversy over WikiLeaks’ place in the journalistic sphere and what Assange’s arrest means for reporting isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It may very well be that Assange did commit a crime — but his arrest might not be something we should cheer, at least not without some reflection.
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The judges also wrote that the prosecutor submitted material that appeared to catalog violations of international law by the C.I.A., including inflicting “extremely cruel, brutal and gruesome” physical and mental pain on its captives; refusing to let captives sleep, eat, drink and pray; as well as shaming captives through “acts of a sexual nature.”
Although the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, established nearly two decades ago, American governments have cooperated, or at least not interfered, with the court on some of its work in other investigations.
Americans suspected of having committed crimes in countries that are members of the court are potentially subject to prosecution. Afghanistan, Poland, Lithuania and Romania are all members.
Param-Preet Singh, associate director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch, called the court’s decision a “devastating blow” to victims.
“The judges’ logic effectively allows states to opt out on their obligation to cooperate with the court’s investigation,” she said. “This sends a dangerous message to perpetrators that they can put themselves beyond the reach of the law just by being uncooperative.”
Guenael Metraux, a Swiss scholar who has also appeared before international tribunals in The Hague, said the court’s decision was self-destructive to its own authority.
“Judicially, this is the closest thing to a suicide,” he said. “It’s a catastrophically misguided surrender of responsibilities that will be painted by the U.S. administration as a resounding victory and perceived by others as a model on how to resist the court.”
The Secret Service detained a man outside the White House on Friday afternoon after he apparently attempted to light himself on fire.
A Secret Service spokeswoman confirmed the man had tried to set his jacket on fire, and the D.C. Fire Department responded to administer first aid. No information about the man’s condition or reason for setting himself on fire was immediately available.
The identity of the man was not released. It appears only one person was involved in the incident.
Authorities removed reporters, who were gathered on the driveway, from the area following the incident. Most were guided back into the West Wing.
White House reporters were just sternly ordered away from Pennsylvania Ave. fence, including out of TV tents
There’s a major incident response here now. Talk is someone set themselves on fire, but I did not see it pic.twitter.com/YOdMAeZ6ei
Authorities lifted the lockdown on the White House late Friday afternoon. The Associated Press reported President Trump was at the White House at the time.
It is unclear if the man will be arrested or face charges. He is being described by multiple media outlets as a likely protester.
The Secret Service said they are still investigating.
White House scene just before Secret Service forced reporters indoors
Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if Chinese cybertheft had been openly addressed earlier.
Bill Hinton Photography/Getty Images
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Bill Hinton Photography/Getty Images
Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if Chinese cybertheft had been openly addressed earlier.
Bill Hinton Photography/Getty Images
Technology theft and other unfair business practices originating from China are costing the American economy more than $57 billion a year, White House officials believe, and they expect that figure to grow.
Yet an investigation by NPR and the PBS television show Frontline into why three successive administrations failed to stop cyberhacking from China found an unlikely obstacle for the government — the victims themselves.
About This Story
This story is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline, which includes an upcoming documentary, Trump’s Trade War, scheduled to air May 7, 2019, on PBS.
In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and theft were an open secret for almost two decades, allowed to quietly continue because U.S. companies had too much money at stake to make waves.
Wendy Cutler, who was a veteran negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, says it wasn’t just that U.S. businesses were hesitant to come forward in specific cases. She says businesses didn’t want the trade office to take “any strong action.”
“We are not as effective if we don’t have the U.S. business community supporting us,” she says. “Looking back on it, in retrospect, I think we probably should have been more active and more responsive. We kind of lost the big picture of what was really happening.”
None of the dozens of companies or organizations that NPR reached out to that have been victims of theft or corporate espionage originating from China would go on the record.
And for its part, the Chinese government officially denied to NPR and Frontline that it has been involved in such practices.
Wendy Cutler, a former diplomat and negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, delivers a 2015 speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong. Cutler told NPR that U.S. businesses wouldn’t let the trade office take direct action on their behalf in Chinese cybertheft cases.
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Bruce Yan/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Wendy Cutler, a former diplomat and negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, delivers a 2015 speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong. Cutler told NPR that U.S. businesses wouldn’t let the trade office take direct action on their behalf in Chinese cybertheft cases.
Bruce Yan/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
But that’s not what former U.S. Attorney David Hickton found. When he took over in the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2010, he says, he was inundated with calls from companies saying they suspected China might be inside their computer systems.
“I literally received an avalanche of concern and complaints from companies and organizations who said, ‘We are losing our technology — drip, drip, drip,’ ” he says.
Hickton opened an investigation and quickly set his sights on a special unit of the Chinese military — a secretive group known as Unit 61398. Investigators were able to watch as the unit’s officers, sitting in an office building in Shanghai, broke into the computer systems of American companies at night, stopped for an hour break at China’s lunchtime and then continued in the Chinese afternoon.
“They were really using a large rake — think of a rake [like] you rake leaves in the fall,” he says. “They were taking everything … personal information, strategic plans, organizational charts. Then they just figured out later how they were going to use it.”
But when Hickton went to the companies, eager for them to become plaintiffs, he ran into a problem. None of the companies wanted any part of it. Hickton says they had too much money on the line in China.
“What we were tone-deaf to is [that] we seemed to think we could just walk in and wave the flag of the USA,” Hickton says, “and it just didn’t work.”
Even today, five years later, Hickton still won’t name most of the companies involved — and they have never come forward.
Eventually he was able to convince five largely local companies and the steelworkers union to come forward, mostly, he says, because he grew up in Pittsburgh and went to school with a lot of the managers.
David Hickton, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, speaks during a 2014 announcement of indictments against Chinese military hackers, with former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin.
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David Hickton, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, speaks during a 2014 announcement of indictments against Chinese military hackers, with former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
“I knew these people,” Hickton says. “They trusted me. … We couldn’t ask them to be patriotic at the expense of engendering a shareholder case.”
But, he says, he could have included hundreds — or even thousands — more.
“We’ve made a terrible mistake by being so secretive about our cyberwork,” he says. “We have not fairly told the people we represent what the threats are.”
Government and business leaders interviewed by NPR and Frontline said individual companies were making millions of dollars in China over the past decade and a half and didn’t want to hurt short-term profits by coming forward. They demanded secrecy, even in the face of outright theft.
But now the impact of that secrecy is coming to light, they say. Companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in future losses from the theft, and U.S. officials say they are years behind trying to tackle the problem.
Michael Wessel, commissioner on the U.S. government’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, says it wasn’t supposed to be this way. U.S. officials had high hopes when China officially joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
“There was a honeymoon period in the first six or seven years, a desire to try [to] make things work,” Wessel says.
But, he says, starting around 2006, businesses began coming to him saying that China had stolen their designs or ideas or had pressured them into partnerships and taken their technology.
Just like with Hickton, Wessel says, they wouldn’t come forward publicly.
“The business community wanted the administration to come in hard without anyone’s fingerprints being on the reasoning behind it,” he says. “They wanted the profits, but they also didn’t want the possible retribution.”
Wessel says that was never going to work. While nothing in the original trade agreements specifically mentions cybertheft, the U.S. could have brought criminal cases forward, enacted sanctions or opened investigations under rules set up by the World Trade Organization — if a company would let it.
Court cases and documents from recent years offer a clue into what experts believe has really been going on. The Chinese government has been accused of stealing everything from vacuum cleaner designs to solar panel technology to the blueprints of Boeing’s C-17 aircraft.
Hackers from China, often with ties to the government, have been accused of breaking into gas companies, steel companies and chemical companies. Not long ago, Chinese government companies were indicted for stealing the secret chemical makeup of the color white from DuPont. China developed its J-20 fighter plane, a plane similar to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor, shortly after a Chinese national was indicted for stealing technical data from Lockheed Martin, including the plans for the Raptor.
Chinese hacking made occasional headlines, but none really grabbed Americans’ attention. There was one exception.
In 2010, Google went public in announcing that it had been hacked by the Chinese government. Thirty-four other American companies that were also part of the hack stayed silent. Most have kept it a secret to this day.
A man places flowers outside Google’s Chinese headquarters in Beijing, on Jan. 15, 2010. The tech giant’s accusation that year that it had been hacked by China cast light on a problem few companies discuss: the pervasive threat from China-based cybertheft.
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A man places flowers outside Google’s Chinese headquarters in Beijing, on Jan. 15, 2010. The tech giant’s accusation that year that it had been hacked by China cast light on a problem few companies discuss: the pervasive threat from China-based cybertheft.
Vincent Thian/AP
NPR tracked down 11 of the total 35 companies. All of them either did not respond to NPR’s request or declined to comment.
A former top Google official who was closely involved in managing the hack told NPR that Google was “infuriated” that no other company would come forward, leaving Google to challenge China alone.
“[We] wanted to out all of the companies by name,” said the official, who spoke on the condition their name not be used because they did not have permission from Google to speak about the incident. “One of the companies we called, said ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve been tracking this for months.’ It was unbelievable. The legal department talked us out of it.”
“We felt like we stood up and did the right thing,” the former official said. “It felt like Helm’s Deep, the battle from The Lord of the Rings in which you’re impossibly surrounded and severely outnumbered.”
James McGregor, a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who was there at the time, says the companies kept even business organizations like his from speaking out.
“What they should have done is held a press conference and say, ‘We 35 businesses have been hacked,’ and you would have put it right back on China,” says McGregor. “Instead, they just all hid under a rock and pretended it didn’t happen.”
McGregor says their silence left little room for punishment, and worse, he says, it hid the extent of the problem.
Across the ocean, cybersleuth Dmitri Alperovitch was sitting at his desk at a security company in Atlanta when Google called looking for backup. He says when he took a look, he was stunned.
“I knew pretty much right away this is something very different,” says Alperovitch, who is co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “For the first time we were facing a nation-state and intelligence service that was breaking into companies — not governments, not militaries, but private sector organizations.”
But, he says, U.S. government officials were nowhere to be seen.
“They did not even publicly concur with the attributions that Google had made at the time,” he says.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in California on May 1, 2017. Alperovitch said he was stunned after Google announced it was hacked by China.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in California on May 1, 2017. Alperovitch said he was stunned after Google announced it was hacked by China.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Obama administration officials say they did not turn a blind eye to the Google hack or cybertheft from China.
The administration was struggling with other important priorities, such as North Korea, Iran, the economy and climate change, says Evan Medeiros, Obama’s top China specialist and then a staffer at the National Security Council.
“Direct confrontation with China does not usually result in lasting solutions,” Medeiros says, noting that President Obama secured an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to halt the attacks and put together a regional trade agreement — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — to add pressure.
But neither measure lasted.
“Hindsight is always 20/20,” he says. “I wish that we had spent more time … finding creative ways to punish them for creating a nonlevel playing field.”
Without those punishments, the attacks continued.
In the year after the Google hack, Alperovitch uncovered two more serious intrusions that, he says, involved thousands of American companies.
In the fall of 2011, he went to the White House to warn officials about what he had found. He sat down in the Situation Room with a half-dozen top administration leaders.
“The most surprising thing to me was the lack of surprise,” Alperovitch says. “I got the distinct impression that none of this was news. When I pressed them on why they were not taking stronger action against China, their response was, ‘We have a multifaceted relationship with China.’ ”
Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama following a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, 2015. During the visit, the two leaders announced an agreement to halt cyberattacks.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama following a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, 2015. During the visit, the two leaders announced an agreement to halt cyberattacks.
Pete Marovich/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Alperovitch says White House officials told him that some of the same companies that were being victimized by China also wanted to continue doing business in China.
“They didn’t want to take any action that would jeopardize that billions of dollars of trade we were doing at the time,” he says.
Ask McGregor, the American business representative, how companies can complain about China’s behavior to the U.S. government while simultaneously preventing the government from taking strong action, and his answer is blunt.
“Companies were afraid of China,” he says. “American business companies’ incentives are to make money.”
McGregor today advises dozens of American companies in China, and he says they are confronting a new reality. China is no longer an up-and-comer — it’s a true competitor and quickly closing in on America’s high-tech sector. McGregor says company leaders are beginning to ask whether years of theft and hacking have given China an edge that the United States will no longer be able to stay in front of.
And U.S. government officials are asking whether federal agencies will be able to catch up on enforcement.
Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if the theft had been openly addressed.
Even at the Defense Department, as late as 2014, cybertheft from China was not one of the Pentagon’s top priorities.
“Our intelligence agencies were looking at the Middle East, at the Russians,” says Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, a China expert who worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council.
He says he had never given the issue of Chinese cybertheft much thought. But then, in the fall of 2014, he loaded a confidential briefing into his computer. It was case after case in which the Chinese government had stolen the product designs from almost a dozen high-tech American companies, in a couple of cases almost putting them out of business.
“It immediately changed my conception, my view of the world,” he says. “I realized I did not know how the world worked.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave an event in Beijing on November 9, 2017. The Trump administration, and the Obama administration before that, have brought concerns regarding cybertheft to the Chinese directly.
Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images
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U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave an event in Beijing on November 9, 2017. The Trump administration, and the Obama administration before that, have brought concerns regarding cybertheft to the Chinese directly.
Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images
Spalding says he made it his mission to get the word out to other government agencies. But even in 2015, he says, he was met mostly with a shrug.
He says he went to the departments of Commerce and the Treasury, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. State Department.
“The two responses we got were, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really bad.’ And the second one is, ‘That’s not my job,'” Spalding says. “That was almost the universal answer we got every time we went to a senior leader. Bad problem but not my problem.”
Spalding, who retired from the Air Force last year, says in the final years under Obama and now under President Trump, agencies are finally starting to take some action. The Justice Department is bringing criminal cases, the trade representative’s office is investigating China’s dealings and both administrations have brought concerns to the Chinese directly.
But, Spalding says, it may have come 10 years too late.
“We all missed it,” he says. “We have to understand the problem and get to work on it.”
This week, Lucasfilm will hold its annual Star Wars Celebration, the official convention for the franchise. The company skipped holding a convention last year. It was last held in Orlando, Florida, in 2017. This year, it’ll be held in Chicago’s McCormick Place from April 11th–15th.
We’re expecting to see quite a bit of Star Wars news come out of the convention this year, including a trailer for the upcoming Episode IX (and, presumably, something to call it other than “Episode IX”), a first look at The Mandalorian, a retrospective on Episode I: The Phantom Menace, the return of The Clone Wars on Disney+, and quite a bit more.
If you aren’t in Chicago, you’ll still be able to follow along online: Lucasfilm will be streaming panels and hosting interviews throughout the weekend. You can check out the entire schedule here, but here are some of the highlights:
Friday, April 12th
Star Wars: Episode IX: 11AM CT (12PM ET)
Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series: 1:30PM–2:30PM CT (2:30PM–3:30PM ET)
Saturday, April 13th
Bringing Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge to Life at Disney Parks, 11AM-12:30PM CT (12PM-1:30PM ET)
Premiere of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: 1:13PM–2:30PM CT (2:13PM–3:30PM ET)
Sunday, April 14th
The Mandalorian: 11AM-12PM CT (12PM-1PM ET)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: 3:30PM–4:30PM CT (4:30PM–5:30PM ET)
Monday, April 15th
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace 20th Anniversary: 11AM–12PM CT (12PM–1PM ET)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would consider it punishment were her city saddled with more undocumented migrants while they await their court hearings.
The thrust of a Washington Post report on Friday, citing anonymous Department of Homeland Security “officials,” was that the White House had asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement about unloading illegal immigrants detained at the border in places proudly known as “sanctuary cities.”
Pelosi’s office said the suggestion exposed the administration’s “cynicism and cruelty” in “using human beings … as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants…”
The whole point of sanctuary cities, from the standpoint of their lawmakers, is that illegal immigrants need a safe place to evade deportation. Illegal entrants and asylum seekers, after all, are only here to pursue a better life for themselves and their families (and all the better if Democrats can load them up on welfare).
Why, then, would a city like San Francisco, which lies in Pelosi’s district, not leap at the chance to bring in more of their well-meaning friends?
Outside of providing more beds, free healthcare, and free child services, courtesy of the American taxpayer, Democrats in Congress have shown no interest in doing anything about the hundreds of thousands of migrants making their way to the U.S. from Central America.
Wouldn’t these well-meaning foreigners be best served in cities like New York, Boston, and Seattle, where local authorities refuse to comply with federal agents in deporting illegal aliens?
The Post’s story never really demonstrates that the intent of the White House was to “retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries,” as the article puts it. It cites unnamed sources who claim that was the purpose but, even though the story’s authors, Rachel Bade and Nick Miroff, said they reviewed “email messages,” the one email by a White House official in the report is completely innocuous.
“The idea has been raised by 1-2 principals that, if we are unable to build sufficient temporary housing, that caravan members be bussed to small- and mid-sized sanctuary cities,” White House deputy policy coordinator May Davis said in an email dated Nov. 16, according to the report. “There is NOT a White House decision on this.”
That’s it. That’s the one supposedly damning email sent by someone from the White House included in the Post’s story.
Acting Deputy Director of ICE Matthew Albence replied to the email, suggesting that transporting aliens long distances from the border would be yet another strain on the agency and that there were liability concerns if anyone were hurt during the trip. In a statement to the Post, Albence denied that he was ever “pressured by anyone at the White House on the issue” and that he was merely “asked my opinion” and that his advice was heeded. A statement from the White House said effectively the same thing.
Yet, even if the proposal was crafted as a politically cynical move, it doesn’t explain why Democrats wouldn’t eagerly invite more illegals or undocumented asylum seekers into the districts and cities that are supposed to be the most welcoming. Pelosi had said herself Thursday, “Of course there’s room and there’s a need” for more immigrants showing up at the border.
President Donald Trump sure has changed his tune on WikiLeaks — and his vice president is doing his best to make sure everyone forgets that one of his main campaign-closing messages was relentlessly promoting and praising an organization whose founder his administration now wants to extradite back to the US to face criminal charges.
It’s worth backing up and looking at that supposed non-endorsement: In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks roughly five times a day. He repeatedly praised the organization for the work it was doing publishing emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign, saying things like, “I love WikiLeaks!” and “we’ve learned so much from WikiLeaks.”
Trump’s praise of WikiLeaks raised eyebrows at the time. The organization had a long history of publishing classified information, and the US intelligence community had already traced the emails WikiLeaks published during the 2016 campaign to Russian hackers. Unsurprisingly, after winning the election, Trump and his administration wasted little time pretending as though his campaign’s public embrace of WikiLeaks never happened.
Now, in the aftermath of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s arrest in London on Thursday and possible extradition to the US to face a charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, Pence is going to extreme lengths to downplay Trump’s compliments.
During an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Pence was asked if Trump’s views on WikiLeaks have “changed.” Pence replied by falsifying history.
“Well, I think the president always — as you in the media do — always welcomes information, but that in no way an endorsement of an organization that we now know was involved in disseminating classified information,” Pence said.
But Trump’s comments about WikiLeaks during the campaign were basically the textbook definition of “endorsement.” How else are we to interpret someone saying they “love” something, have “learned so much” from it, and regard it as “unbelievable”? If words have meaning, then there’s no escaping the reality that Trump was WikiLeaks’ biggest fan — right up until the moment Assange was no longer useful for him.
Secondly, Pence’s suggestion that it wasn’t well understood in 2016 that WikiLeaks was in the business of “disseminating classified information” is simply not true. In 2010, WikiLeaks published video of US military forces launching an air strike in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists. Later that year, it partnered with a number of news organizations to publish diplomatic cables. WikiLeaks’ history of publishing classified documents in fact goes back to the George W. Bush administration.
But as full of holes as Pence’s defense was, he at least acknowledged Trump’s history of touting WikiLeaks. Contrast that with the president, who on Thursday pretended as though he’d never even heard of Assange.
“I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” Trump said, in response to a reporter asking if he still loved WikiLeaks. “It’s not my thing.”
(CNN)A homeless Philadelphia man who was found guilty of helping to scam GoFundMe donors out of nearly $400,000 was sentenced for conspiracy to commit theft by deception in New Jersey on Friday.
CNN’s Lauren del Valle and Alanne Orjoux contributed to this report
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what he has done.\””},{“title”:”Pence: Trump is expressing frustration of Americans”,”duration”:”02:02″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/04/12/mike-pence-us-mexico-border-immigration-bash-intv-sot-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/04/12/mike-pence-us-mexico-border-immigration-bash-intv-sot-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/190411210456-mike-pence-dana-bash-intv-4-11-2019-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/04/12/mike-pence-us-mexico-border-immigration-bash-intv-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”CNN’s Dana Bash traveled to the US-Mexico border with Vice President Mike Pence, where she asked Pence about President Trump’s use of the word \”treasonous\” to describe his political opponents.”,”descriptionText”:”CNN’s Dana Bash traveled to the US-Mexico border with Vice President Mike Pence, where she asked Pence about President Trump’s use of the word \”treasonous\” to describe his political opponents.”},{“title”:”Moore defends his qualifications for Fed nomination”,”duration”:”02:46″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/04/11/stephen-moore-federal-reserve-qualifications-trump-ebof-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/04/11/stephen-moore-federal-reserve-qualifications-trump-ebof-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/190411195708-stephen-moore-ebof-04112019-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/04/11/stephen-moore-federal-reserve-qualifications-trump-ebof-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”President Donald Trump’s pick for the Federal Reserve Stephen Moore defended his qualifications in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.”,”descriptionText”:”President Donald Trump’s pick for the Federal Reserve Stephen Moore defended his qualifications in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.”},{“title”:”Kasich: This Democrat should concern Trump team the most”,”duration”:”02:08″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/04/12/john-kasich-democrat-2020-poll-buttigieg-biden-cpt-sot-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/04/12/john-kasich-democrat-2020-poll-buttigieg-biden-cpt-sot-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/190411233226-john-kasich-cuomo-04112019-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/04/12/john-kasich-democrat-2020-poll-buttigieg-biden-cpt-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich tells CNN’s Chris Cuomo which Democratic presidential candidate he thinks poses the greatest challenge to President Donald Trump in 2020.”,”descriptionText”:”Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich tells CNN’s Chris Cuomo which Democratic presidential candidate he thinks poses the greatest challenge to President Donald Trump in 2020.”},{“title”:”Attorney General William Barr’s history of controversy “,”duration”:”02:38″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/04/12/william-barr-history-of-controversy-randi-kaye-dnt-kth-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/04/12/william-barr-history-of-controversy-randi-kaye-dnt-kth-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/190411130827-01-bill-barr-lead-image-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/04/12/william-barr-history-of-controversy-randi-kaye-dnt-kth-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/randi-kaye-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Randi Kaye\u003c/a> takes a look at Attorney General William Barr’s history of controversy, going back to his first stint serving as attorney general under former President George H.W. Bush. “,”descriptionText”:”CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/randi-kaye-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Randi Kaye\u003c/a> takes a look at Attorney General William Barr’s history of controversy, going back to his first stint serving as attorney general under former President George H.W. Bush. “},{“title”:”Cindy McCain on why she still loves Lindsey Graham”,”duration”:”01:53″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/04/11/cindy-mccain-love-lindsay-graham-despite-silence-intv-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/04/11/cindy-mccain-love-lindsay-graham-despite-silence-intv-sot-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/190411175947-cindy-mccain-lindsey-graham-split-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/04/11/cindy-mccain-love-lindsay-graham-despite-silence-intv-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”Cindy McCain told PBS that despite Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) silence on President Trump’s attacks on her late husband Sen. John McCain, she doesn’t dislike Graham for any of it.”,”descriptionText”:”Cindy McCain told PBS that despite Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) silence on President Trump’s attacks on her late husband Sen. John McCain, she doesn’t dislike Graham for any of it.”},{“title”:”Trump says campaign was spied on but gives no proof”,”duration”:”01:46″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/04/11/trump-barr-campaign-spying-comments-phillip-dnt-lead-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/04/11/trump-barr-campaign-spying-comments-phillip-dnt-lead-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/190411130640-11-donald-trump-lead-image-large-169.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/04/11/trump-barr-campaign-spying-comments-phillip-dnt-lead-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”After Attorney General William Barr told Congress that he believed \”spying\” occurred on President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeated the unfounded claim and called it \”illegal spying.\” CNN’s Abby Phillip reports.”,”descriptionText”:”After Attorney General William Barr told Congress that he believed \”spying\” occurred on President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeated the unfounded claim and called it \”illegal spying.\” CNN’s Abby Phillip reports.”}],’js-video_headline-featured-vb4osb’,”,”js-video_source-featured-vb4osb”,true,true,’this-week-in-politics’);if (typeof configObj.context !== ‘string’ || configObj.context.length
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(CNN)With Herman Cain’s nomination for the Fed, uh, flagging and Stephen Moore’s nomination for the Fed in only slightly better shape, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent a very clear message to President Donald Trump on Thursday: Stop picking problematic nominees and asking us to confirm them.
“#BlackMenForBernie Leader Switches to Trump! I will Never Vote for Hillary, Welcome aboard the Trump Train,” read one tweet sent by a Russian account pretending to be a “Southern., Conservative Pro God, Anti Racism” Twitter user from Texas.
“Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” read another account known as “Red Louisiana News” that was actually operated by Russians.
It’s not clear how successful or effective the efforts were.
Still, the number of Sanders voters who supported Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states considered key to Trump’s victory — was higher than Trump’s margin of victory in those states.
“I think there is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy,” Darren Linvill, one of the two Clemson researchers behind the study, told the Post. “He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton.”
A spokesman for Clinton said that it was imperative that Democrats work together in 2020 to stop Russian disinformation efforts aiding the president and to defeat Trump.
It’s important for “everyone else, especially Democratic candidates, to work together and support each other to defend against these threats,” Nick Merrill told the Post.
The Hill has reached out to the Sanders campaign for comment.
WikiLeaks has made multiple disclosures over the past decade, including one in March 2017 when the group released what it said were CIA technical documents on a range of spying techniques.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
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Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
WikiLeaks has made multiple disclosures over the past decade, including one in March 2017 when the group released what it said were CIA technical documents on a range of spying techniques.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
To its supporters, the WikiLeaks disclosures have revealed a wealth of important information that the U.S. government wanted to keep hidden, particularly in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This included abuses by the military and a video that showed a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq on suspected militants. Those killed turned out to be unarmed civilians and journalists.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, now under arrest in Britain, has often argued that no one has been harmed by the WikiLeaks disclosures.
But many in the national security community say the leaks were harmful to a broad range of people. However, they generally say the damage was limited and has faded since the first big WikiLeaks dump in 2010, which included hundreds of thousands of classified documents from the U.S. military and the State Department.
Chelsea Manning, a former Army private, spent seven years in prison for leaking the documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. Manning, who was freed two years ago, was taken back into custody last month when she refused to testify before a grand jury in a case involving WikiLeaks and Assange.
P.J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman when the WikiLeaks story erupted in 2010, said those most at risk were civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq who were secretly passing information to the U.S. military.
“A number of people went into hiding, a number of people had to move, particularly those civilians in war zones who had told U.S. soldiers about movements of the Taliban and al-Qaida,” he said. “No doubt some of those people were harmed when their identities were compromised.”
WikiLeaks has made multiple disclosures over the past decade, including one in March 2017 when the group released what it said were CIA technical documents on a range of spying techniques.
This revealed ways that a state-of-the art television could serve as a listening device even when it was turned off.
Larry Pfeiffer, the CIA chief of staff from 2006 to 2009, said these kinds of breaches can impose long-term costs, though they can be difficult to quantify.
“It informs the potential enemies of a technique we use, that they can now develop countermeasures against,” Pfeiffer said.
This also forces the spy agency to go back to the drawing board, he added.
“Once invalidated, it now creates situations where the U.S. intelligence community is going to have to expend resources and going to have to spend both dollars and people to develop new methods,” said Pfeiffer, who now heads the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence at George Mason University.
On the diplomatic front, WikiLeaks shared many examples of U.S. diplomats writing in unflattering terms about foreign leaders, causing the U.S. embarrassment.
But more importantly, said Scott Anderson, a former State Department lawyer who served in Iraq in 2012 and 2013, some of these countries have vulnerable opposition leaders and human rights activists who were quietly in contact with U.S. diplomats. These private, sensitive discussions suddenly became public with the WikiLeaks dumps.
“That can really chill the ability of those American personnel to build those sorts of relationships and have frank conversations with their contacts,” said Anderson, now at the Brookings Institution.
Anderson notes that the U.S. still has a program to issue visas to Afghans and Iraqis to the U.S. in return for the help they provided — and in recognition of the danger they face.
Crowley pointed to the impact of leaks that upset former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
“We had an ambassador in Libya, and we had to remove him from his post because he was directly threatened by Moammar Gadhafi’s thugs,” Crowley said.
Some countries, Crowley added, took a much more relaxed approach to the disclosures, even when they were criticized in the documents.
“One foreign minister told the U.S. secretary of state, ‘You know, don’t worry about it. You should see what we report about you,’ ” Crowley recalled.
Many of the assessments today are similar to the one offered nine years ago by Bob Gates, who served as defense secretary when the WikiLeaks disclosures took place.
“The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest. Not because they like us, not because they trust us and not because they believe we can keep secrets,” Gates said. “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.”
Greg Myre is a national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1.
LONDON — The plush neighborhood of Knightsbridge, a high-rent hub of deluxe retail and discreet diplomats, awoke Friday with one international curiosity fewer in its midst.
Julian Assange, the Australian bad boy and founder of WikiLeaks, had been dragged Thursday from the Ecuadoran Embassy, where he had entertained the likes of Lady Gaga and Pamela Anderson in the Victorian red-brick building a stone’s throw from Harrods, the luxury department store. He was arrested to face a hacking charge in the United States.
“We heard the helicopter overhead,” said James Smith, a local realtor. The scene outside the embassy was the dramatic climax of a seven-year diplomatic stalemate, as Ecuador revoked the anti-secrecy crusader’s asylum and turned him over to British authorities.
Gone now are the demonstrators with “Free Assange” banners. But life goes on in Knightsbridge, Smith said. It’s not as if residents saw their notorious neighbor, holed up in the embassy since 2012. From his corner room, where he lived with his cat, an Internet star, and used a treadmill to stay in shape, Assange had become a fading fascination.
But his coming legal battle puts him back in the spotlight.
Half of Britons had no opinion on Ecuador’s decision to get rid of him, according to a YouGov poll. More than a third supported the move, and only one in seven wanted him to stay.
Now that Assange has lost his bolt-hole in Knightsbridge, the 47-year-old will battle extradition from a British jail. Shortly after his arrest, he was swiftly convicted Thursday of skipping bail in 2012, and he faces up to a year in prison for that offense.
American prosecutors seek his extradition to face a federal charge of conspiring to hack into a Defense Department computer network in 2010. His attorney, Jennifer Robinson, warned that his arrest sets a “dangerous precedent” for press freedoms.
There are many questions. How long will the extradition process take? Likely years. Will Assange remain in prison as his case proceeds? Almost certainly. He will first be sentenced — probably six months to one year — for jumping bail. Finally, what about the cat? The Ecuadoran Embassy has not revealed what happened to the pet. An Italian newspaper suggested it was given to a friend months ago.
The issue of Assange’s extradition instantly exposed divisions within British politics, already riven by the deep divides over the country’s exit from the European Union, known as Brexit.
Prime Minister Theresa May said his arrest showed that “no one is above the law,” while Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition Labour Party, said the government should oppose Assange’s extradition. The left-wing leader said Assange was being targeted “for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange rally outside the Victorian State Library in Melbourne, Australia, April 12, 2019. (James Ross/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Labour’s spokeswoman for domestic affairs, Diane Abbott, said the request should be blocked on human rights grounds. She told the BBC that the U.S. government’s true motivation for prosecuting Assange was its “embarrassment of the things he’s revealed about the American military and security services.”
Right-wing politician Nigel Farage, an ideological ally of President Trump, told the broadcaster on Friday that he had visited Assange once in the embassy, swatting away the suggestion that he was a conduit between Trump and WikiLeaks. The American president, who once said he loved WikiLeaks, professed Thursday to know nothing about the group. “He’s going to be extradited, and that’s the end of it,” Farage said.
Assange’s fight against extradition could keep him jailed in Britain for years, as the case winds its way through legal challenges in multiple courts, experts said.
Because of the seriousness of the charge and the fact that Assange has already skipped bail once — when Sweden sought his extradition to answer allegations of sex crimes during a visit there — he will likely do battle from a prison cell.
His new life will not be as comfortable as the previous years in the Ecuadoran Embassy, where was free to drink wine, skateboard down the halls and receive guests. Until his exasperated hosts cut off his Internet, Assange was all over social media. In British prisons, mobile phones are prohibited and Internet access highly restricted.
Assange’s lawyers vow they will fight the extradition order, from the Magistrates’ Court to the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court — and possibly to the European Court of Human Rights.
Even if the United Kingdom manages to leave the European Union, the exit will almost certainly include a lengthy transition period, which could put Assange in front of E.U. judges.
“It will be some years before a final decision is reached — at least a year and probably longer,” said Amy Jeffress, a former Justice Department legal attache in London. “My over and under would be three years.”
She said, “These cases can become very political in the U.K.”
One high-profile terrorism case dragged on for 13 years before the defendant was finally extradited to the United States. Assange’s previous battle against extradition to Sweden took 18 months.
Daniel Sternberg, a barrister specializing in extradition law at Temple Gardens Chambers in London, said he expects Assange to mount a vigorous challenge, pressing “every conceivable point.”
He said the most relevant arguments would contest the forum of prosecution — reasoning that Assange’s physical location when he engaged in the conduct of which he stands accused is more relevant than the country targeted by his activities.
Sternberg also said Assange’s legal team will likely rise fears of human rights violations, should the WikiLeaks founder be destined for a federal “supermax” prison, where some inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in a 7-by-12-foot concrete cell.
“Although this indictment is relatively limited, his lawyers might argue that there could be other charges waiting in the wings,” Sternberg said.
Even if defense lawyers do not thwart American efforts to prosecute him, he said, they could significantly slow the proceedings. Before the extradition order can move forward, Assange must first serve the sentence he was handed for failing to surrender to British authorities.
From his British prison cell, Assange would have limited use of a landline telephone, on which he would be able to call previously approved numbers, Sternberg said. If he were given access to the Internet, it would be highly supervised, he said.
“The world will have to get used to hearing less of Assange, filtered by people who see him in prison or his lawyers,” Sternberg said.
Opponents of extradition point to a decision in 2012 by May, who was home secretary at the time, to refuse to hand over Scottish computer hacker Gary McKinnon to the American criminal justice system. May cited medical reports indicating that McKinnon risked becoming a danger to himself if he stood trial in the United States.
But the man who now holds that post in the government, Sajid Javid, suggested that his thinking about Assange’s case was different. In the House of Commons on Thursday, he excoriated the Labour Party for defending Assange and echoed the prime minister’s judgment. “There’s no one in this country that is above the law,” he said.
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Sweden said Thursday that they have received a request to reopen an investigation into Assange’s conduct from an attorney for a woman who accuses him of rape. The investigation was closed in 2017 but can be renewed at any time before August 2020.
Prosecutors said they had not been alerted to Assange’s arrest and learned of the developments in his case from media reports.
When Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny, closed the probe two years ago, saying she could not proceed while Assange enjoyed safe haven in the Ecuadoran Embassy, she noted that it would be possible to resume the process if he were expelled.
The investigation involves a 2010 complaint from a woman who says she met Assange at a WikiLeaks conference in Stockholm. She alleges that he engaged in nonconsensual unprotected sex with her — accusations that he denies.
If Sweden asks for Assange’s extradition, it will be up to Britain to decide in which order it heeds the requests, if at all, from the United States and Sweden.
Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — When some of President Donald Trump’s top national security advisers gathered at the White House Tuesday night to talk about the surge of immigrants across the southern border, they discussed increasing the U.S. military’s involvement in the border mission, including whether the military could be used to build tent city detention camps for migrants, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the conversations.
During the meeting, the officials also discussed whether the U.S. military could legally run the camps once the migrants are housed there, a move the three officials said was very unlikely since U.S. law prohibits the military from directly interacting with migrants. The law has been a major limitation for Trump, who wants to engage troops in his mission to get tougher on immigration.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan was at the White House meeting Tuesday night and was open to sending more U.S. troops to support the border mission, so long as their assigned mission is within the law, according to the three U.S. officials.
Thousands of troops are currently deployed along the southern border, and are mainly used for reinforcing existing fencing with barbed wire.
Potential new projects for the troops that were mentioned Tuesday, according to the three officials — two from the Pentagon and one from Homeland Security — also included conducting assessments of the land before the construction of new tent cities in El Paso and Donna, Texas. They would also be used in assessments before construction of a new central processing center for migrants in El Paso, said the DHS official.
The creation of the processing center was announced last month. It is being designed to temporarily detain arriving immigrants, many of whom are being released in El Paso due to the lack of detention space.
The processing center will be similar to one currently used in McAllen, Texas, where children were kept in chain-link areas, which some called “cages,” while the Trump administration’s family separation policy was in effect last summer, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials.
The tent cities would hold immigrants while Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities continue to be at capacity. The Obama administration also used tents to hold immigrants in Donna, Texas, in 2016.
The idea has trickled down into planning meetings held this week at DHS, one of the officials said.
Discussions this week, at the White House meeting and afterward, have included the suggestion that troops may be needed to run the tent city detention camps once immigrants are being housed there, according to the U.S. officials familiar with the conversations.
The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement inside the U.S. This prevents them from direct interaction with immigrants crossing into the country. One U.S. official said recent meetings have included discussions about whether using active duty troops to run a detention camp would be a violation of Posse Comitatus.
While there has been discussion of an increase in troops, no specific numbers have been mentioned, and officials do not expect a large number of additional troops to be needed for any new mission.
A U.S. border patrol official speaking on the condition of anonymity said the military allows for faster construction than private contractors, who can protest decisions and slow down the process.
“The importance of DOD is that they are able to mobilize quickly because we face an immediate crisis now,” said the border patrol official.
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As an example of the crisis, the border patrol official said on Tuesday, 253 Central Americans, mainly families were stopped in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Large groups present a challenge for border agents who must process, shelter and often find medical care for immigrants.
The border patrol official said he is not aware of plans to use troops to run detention facilities for migrants and noted it would be in violation of U.S. law.
The White House meeting came just two days after Trump tweeted that his secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, was leaving and that Kevin McAleenan, the CBP commissioner, would replace her as acting secretary. DHS Acting Deputy Secretary Claire Grady has also resigned.
On Wednesday, during a visit to Texas, Trump spoke about increasing the number of U.S. troops assigned to the border mission and alluded to the limitations to using active duty troops there.
“I’m going to have to call up more military. Our military, don’t forget, can’t act like a military would act. Because if they got a little rough, everybody would go crazy. … Our military can’t act like they would normally act. … They have all these horrible laws that the Democrats won’t change. They will not change them.”
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Defense Department spokesperson Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, said: “As we said last year when we were looking at possible facilities at Fort Bliss and Goodfellow Air Force Base, DOD could be involved in the possible construction of facilities to house immigrants. There are currently no new requests for assistance.”
Courtney Kube
Courtney Kube is a national security and military reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Julia Ainsley
Julia Ainsley is a national security reporter for NBC News.
Vice President Mike Pence accused Democratic White House hopeful Pete Buttigieg of attacking his Christian faith, as the two men spent the week trading increasingly personal barbs.
“I hope that Pete will offer more to the American people than attacks on my Christian faith or attacks on the president as he seeks the highest office in the land,” Pence said in an interview on CNN. “He’d do well to reflect on the importance of respecting the freedom of religion of every American.”
Pence, who was Indiana governor from 2013 to 2017, said he and Buttigieg, mayor of the state’s fourth-largest city, South Bend, “worked very closely together when I was governor, and I considered him a friend. And he knows I don’t have a problem with him.”
Pence was referring to comments Buttigieg made about his homosexuality in which he called out the vice president.
“If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade,” Buttigieg said Sunday. “And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand. That if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
Buttigieg added that marrying his husband “has made me a better man, and yes, Mr. Vice President, it has moved me closer to God.” He also accused Pence of being “the cheerleader of the porn star presidency” and “at best complicit” in the rise of white nationalism.
When asked to respond to Buttigieg’s remarks, Pence told CNN that “all of us have our own religious convictions. Pete has his convictions, I have mine.” He continued, “I think Pete’s quarrel is with the First Amendment. All of us in this country have the right to our religious beliefs. I’m a Bible-believing Christian.”
“I’m not interested in feuding with the vice president, but if he wanted to clear this up, he could come out today and say he’s changed his mind, that it shouldn’t be legal to discriminate against anybody in this country for who they are. That’s all,” Buttigieg said on Friday’s episode of “The Ellen Show.”
“I’m not critical of his faith; I’m critical of bad policies,” said Buttigieg, who came out as gay in 2015. “I don’t have a problem with religion. I’m religious too. I have a problem with religion being used as a justification to harm people and especially in the LGBTQ community.”
“He’s being as forthcoming as he can, and so this notion that he’s trying to mislead people, I think, is just completely bizarre,” Rosenstein told The Wall Street Journal.
Barr said investigators did not find that there was collusion and that Mueller’s team did not make a decision on whether Trump obstructed justice, but that he and Rosenstein decline to pursue those charges. He has also said he planned to release a redacted version of the report by mid-April.
“It would be one thing if you put out a letter and said, ‘I’m not going to give you the report,’” Rosenstein told the Journal. “What he said is, ‘Look, it’s going to take a while to process the report. In the meantime, people really want to know what’s in it. I’m going to give you the top-line conclusions.’ That’s all he was trying to do.”
He added that the public should have “tremendous confidence” in Barr.
Democrats have demanded the release of the full report. Barr also faced sharp criticism from Democrats after he suggested Wednesday that there was “spying” on the Trump campaign. He later walked back his remarks, saying that he was merely concerned that there may have been “improper surveillance” and that he was “looking into it.”
Rosenstein, who has worked at the Justice Department for almost 30 years, is expected to leave the department soon.
New York Assembly Democrats vote 15-11 to block a bill that proposed expanding college tuition aid for children of deceased and disabled military veterans in the wake of approving a state budget that set aside $27 million in college tuition aid for undocumented immigrants.
New York Assembly Democrats on Tuesday blocked a bill that proposed expanding college tuition aid for children of deceased and disabled military veterans after– having a week earlier– approved a state budget that set aside $27 million in college tuition aid for illegal immigrants.
The Assembly’s Higher Education Committee voted 15 to 11 on Tuesday to shelve the bill, effectively quashing its chances of going to the floor, the Post-Standard reported.
The decision came after committee chair Deborah Glick, D-Manhattan, and Speaker Carl Heastie said $27 million from the state’s budget would go towards supporting the Jose Peralta New York State DREAM Act, which allows illegal immigrants to qualify for state aid for higher education, Newsweek reported.
Glick said any expansion of college tuition aid to Gold Star families was not within the state’s budget and pointed to an already-existing program that provides $2.7 million to 145 students who are dependents of vets who served in combat zones, the New York Post reported.
“Assemblywoman Glick should be ashamed of herself,” said State Sen. Robert Ortt, R-Niagara. “We set aside $27 million dollars for college for people that are here illegally… Apparently, $2.7 million is all that the families of soldiers who are killed, get. If you’re a child of a fallen soldier, you do not rank as high and you know that by the money.”
Mike Whyland, a spokesman for Assembly Democrats, said the Republican-led bill “would have expanded the eligibility beyond the scope and should be considered within the context of the budget.”
When asked about objections by GOP lawmakers, he said: “It’s purely political and it’s unfortunate that they are using children as pawns.”
Assemblyman Will Barclay, R-Pulaski, surmised that the Democrats’ refusal had less to do with budget restraints and more to do with the bill’s author: a Republican, Steve Hawley, R-Batavia.
“We get so caught up in majority and minority issues here, we can’t see the forest through the trees,” Barclay said. “I don’t know how they don’t justify this.”
Herman Cain is expected to remove his name from consideration for appointment to the Federal Reserve, according to a report Friday.
The former Republican presidential contender and Godfather’s Pizza CEO has come under repeated fire since President Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Cain as a central bank governor. In recent days, at least four GOP senators said they would not support the move, seeming to torpedo the effort before it even become official.
ABC news reported that Cain will pull his name before it even gets that far. The network said it confirmed the withdrawal with multiple sources, including an administration official and a person close to the matter.
A White House official declined comment. CNBC also has reached out to Cain for comment.
Greg Valliere, chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF, said in a note Friday that he is “betting on this afternoon” for when Cain withdraws.
The potential nomination drew quick criticism from multiple corners.
Cain briefly was among the leaders in the race for the 2012 Republican primary before fading and giving way to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who later lost to Barack Obama. Romney, now a senator from Utah, was among top Republicans who said they would not support Cain if his name came to the floor.
Among other issues, Cain likely would have faced questioning over sexual misconduct accusations from two women relating to his time as CEO of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s.
Trump also has announced his intention to nominate economic commentator Stephen Moore to the Fed board. That move, too, has come under fire from congressional leaders who have questioned Moore’s credentials, and as revelations have come up relating to delinquent taxes and child support payments.
However, Washington observers have indicated that Moore would likely have an easier time in the confirmation process than Cain.
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