Critically, in the case of the NG, Boeing had already developed the software fix well before the Turkish Airlines crash, including it on new planes starting in 2006 and offering it as an optional update on hundreds of other aircraft. But for some older jets, including the one that crashed near Amsterdam, the update wouldn’t work, and Boeing did not develop a compatible version until after the accident.
The Dutch investigators deemed it “remarkable” that Boeing left airlines without an option to obtain the safeguard for some older planes. But in reviewing the draft accident report, the Americans objected to the statement, according to the final version’s appendix, writing that a software modification had been unnecessary because “no unacceptable risk had been identified.” GE Aviation, which had bought the company that made the computers for the older jets, also suggested deleting or changing the sentence.
The Dutch board removed the statement, but did criticize Boeing for not doing more to alert pilots about the sensor problem.
Dr. Woods, who was Dr. Dekker’s Ph.D. adviser, said the decision to exclude or underplay the study’s principal findings enabled Boeing and its American regulators to carry out “the narrowest possible changes.”
The problem with the single sensor, he said, should have dissuaded Boeing from using a similar design in the Max. Instead, “the issue got buried.”
Boeing declined to address detailed questions from The Times. In a statement, the company pointed to differences between the 2009 accident and the Max crashes. “These accidents involved fundamentally different system inputs and phases of flight,” the company said.
Asked about its involvement with the Dutch accident report, Boeing said it was “typical and critical to successful investigations for Boeing and other manufacturers to work collaboratively with the investigating authorities.”
McClatchy White House correspondent Michael Wilner weighs in on which Democratic Senators running for president will be impacted the most.
How will this week’s Senate impeachment proceedings affect next month’s Iowa caucuses? By sending Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., back to Washington to serve as jurors in President Trump’s trial.
“Certainly all of them are equally affected in terms of their time,” McClatchy White House Correspondent Michael Wilner said on “Fox Report.” “You could argue that Amy Klobuchar is probably most affected by this. She had been rising in the polls.”
Wilner said Sanders and Warren were more prepared with their “surrogates” but Klobuchar could have used more time campaigning in person.
“Bernie and Elizabeth… have really met a lot of Iowans and Klobuchar would have liked to shake more hands at this point,” Wilner said.
The correspondent noted that the situation helped frontrunner Joe Biden, but the sitting senators have argued they were doing their duty.
“Joe Biden is already doing quite well there as it is,” Wilner said. “Of course, it should be said that these other candidates… have made the argument that they have a job to do and that it’s their constitutional duty to be in Washington. And so, you’ll be hearing that argument.”
Wilner said the candidates will still be visible due to the impeachment coverage.
“All of the reporters on Capitol Hill are going to be asking them what they think of the developments of the day, so they will have plenty of earned airtime,” he said.
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Firearms have been banned from the area around the Capitol building
Thousands of people are expected to descend on the US city of Richmond, in Virginia, on Monday for a pro-gun rally that authorities fear could turn violent.
State governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency ahead of the rally, banning firearms from the area around the Capitol building.
The Lobby Day rally is an annual event, but several gun-control bills passed in January by the Democrat-led Virginia legislature – in a state where gun rights have historically been permissive – have angered gun owners and activists.
The Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group which organised the rally, said it expected as many as 50,000 people. Many of the buses laid on from neighbouring states were sold out before the weekend.
Various groups including armed militia, right-wing extremists and local Antifa, or anti-fascist movement, are expected to attend.
Christian Yingling, who led the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia during the violent clashes in Charlottesville in 2017, told the BBC he was hoping for a big turnout.
“I’d like to see a lot of people, I really would. I know from chatter online that a lot of militia types are coming in from some distance… Texas, Illinois, elsewhere,” he said.
Image copyright Joel Gunter
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Christian Yingling of the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia said he hoped for a big turnout
He said he hoped the rally would pass peacefully but feared it would not. “I think there’s enormous potential for something to go wrong.”
Militia meeting
At a rural community hall about 20 miles south of Richmond, dozens of people from different militia groups gathered on Sunday night to talk about tactics for the following day and about the broader threat to gun rights they see in Virginia.
When Greg Trojan, one of the founders of the VCDL, asked how many people had travelled in from outside the state, more than half raised their hands. Many at the meeting said they hoped for a peaceful day tomorrow, some said they anticipated violence.
Image copyright Joel Gunter
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Militia groups gathered for a meeting ahead of Monday’s rally
“I’m dreading it. Because I was in Charlottesville, I was at the Boston free speech rally. I see what it can be and that’s what I dread,” said Tammy Lee, a militia organiser from Oklahoma.
“There’s a lot of angry people coming. There’s a lot of uneducated people coming. It’s going to be volatile. I pray I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.”
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg was a frequent target for his spending on gun control efforts. So was the state governor Mr Northam – “Don’t let the evil bastard win,” said Mr Trojan, rounding off a speech to the room.
Cory Kepner, who travelled down from Pennsylvania, said he would go the rally on Monday, armed with his handgun, but hoped it would be peaceful.
“I’m more of a thinker than a run into trouble type of guy,” he said.
Image copyright Joel Gunter
President Donald Trump risked ratcheting up tensions when he tweeted on Saturday: “Your 2nd Amendment is under very serious attack in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia. That’s what happens when you vote for Democrats, they will take your guns away.”
The ban on guns around the Richmond Capitol building was challenged by gun rights groups, but upheld by state Supreme Court over the weekend, and the organisers, the VCDL, called for “10,000 patriots” to hand their guns to someone else and enter the Capitol unarmed.
The arrests underscored the extent to which the Lobby Day rally had been seized upon by far-right extremists. Some of those groups, including The Base, explicitly state their aim as inciting a race war in the US.
Image copyright Reuters
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Fencing surrounds the front of the Virginia State House in Richmond
Megan Squires, an expert in online extremism from the University of North Carolina, said the open talk of inciting violence in extremist online chat groups had suddenly quietened down in the wake of the FBI arrests.
“In December, when this event was announced, those types of groups were very excited about this event – calling it the boogaloo and saying it was going to kick off the race war,” she said.
“But about 48 hours ago the tenor in those Telegram groups shifted considerably, and I think that’s because of the seven arrests.”
The event has been compared to the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where a 32-year-old counter protester was killed by a rally goer and violent clashes broke out around the city.
Media captionFootage captured the moment a car rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville in 2017
But the local Antifa chapter and other left-wing groups indicated they intended to march with the pro-gun protesters, rather than against them – seemingly reducing the likelihood of violent clashes.
The rally will take place on Martin Luther King Day – a public holiday in honour of the civil rights leader.
In Richmond, police set up chain-link barriers around the Capitol in anticipation of the crowds and roads were closed off. Anyone attempting to enter the area around the Capitol will have to pass through a metal detector.
Mr Yingling said he thought the sheer number of firearms present would act as a deterrent to anyone minded to act violently.
“When you have that many guns floating around, people tend to act respectful”, he said.
As they have for months, Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders remain the overall front-runners for the Democratic nomination, holding a consistent lead in national polls while maintaining strong financial support and expansive, experienced operations.
The editorial board found fault with both men. Mr. Sanders’s policy prescriptions are described as “overly rigid, untested and divisive.” In an observation likely to anger his supporters, the board compared the Vermont senator to Mr. Trump at one point.
“Three years into the Trump administration, we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another,” it writes.
Mr. Biden, meanwhile, is described as preferring “merely restoring the status quo,” with an agenda “that tinkers at the edges” and will not sufficiently advance the country, in the board’s view.
“What’s more, Mr. Biden is 77,” the board adds. “It is time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.”
Of Mr. Buttigieg, the board writes, “His showing in the lead-up to the primaries predicts a bright political future; we look forward to him working his way up.”
In the 2016 presidential primary race, the board endorsed Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination and wrote that John Kasich, then the governor of Ohio, was “the only plausible choice for Republicans.”
Two people are dead and five injured after a person opened fire “indiscriminately” at a San Antonio bar Sunday night.
San Antonio Police Department responded to a shooting at a bar called Ventura, steps from the San Antonio River, at 8 p.m. local time. An altercation appears to have broken out between customers when one person pulled out a gun and began shooting, Police Chief William McManus said at a press conference Sunday night.
In total, seven people were shot. A 21-year-old man died inside the club, while a second person in critical condition was later pronounced dead.
Five people are currently being treated at area hospitals. Their conditions are unclear at this moment, police said.
All of the victims appear to be patrons, McManus said. No employees of the bar were shot.
No one is in custody, he said.
“We’re working on that, I’m confident that we will identify the individual and have that person in custody sooner than later,” McManus said.
The concert, called Living the DREAM, featured a lineup of up-and-coming rappers popular on social media.
ABC News’ Matt Foster and Marilyn Heck contributed to this report.
At least two people are dead and 15 people have been injured in a shooting in Kansas City, according to the Kansas City Police.
Officers were dispatched to the 4800 block of Noland Road in the southeastern part of the city at about 11:30 p.m. when they received reports of a shooting. They arrived to a chaotic scene outside of a crowded bar where they say one adult female was shot and killed in the parking lot.
No shots were fired by any of the responding officers.
Up to 15 people self-transported to area hospitals and three of them are currently in critical condition.
According to police, a line had formed to get into the bar when the suspect started shooting into the line of people. Police say they do not know why the suspect did this and are currently investigating what started the incident.
The shooter is also dead after an armed security guard from the bar stopped the shooter.
Authorities confirmed that two people have died and that they believe the suspect is one of the two dead people at the scene.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
By sharply accelerating in recent months its trade adjustment with the U.S., China has finally done what it should have initiated more than two years ago.
Beijing is on the way to seriously dismantling Washington’s economic and political leverage over China’s economy. During 11 months of last year, China stepped up the rate of decline of its trade surplus with the U.S. to 16.2%.
Feverish sinologists would call that “decoupling” — a misnomer for China’s belated exit from a position of an excessive and unsustainable trade surplus with the U.S.
Those sinologists don’t seem to notice that China is getting out of that self-imposed structural trap by aggressively slashing its U.S. purchases at an annual rate of 12% between January and November of last year.
Instead of worrying about “decoupling,” advocates of friendly U.S.-China ties should remind Beijing that it should be doing exactly the opposite — by drastically stepping up imports of American goods and services. If the Chinese did that, they would not have to abandon their U.S. markets by cutting exports at an annual rate of 15.2%, as they did for nearly all of last year.
So, the question is: Who is in a hurry to “decouple?”
Looking at trade flows and China’s declining holdings of U.S. debt, the Chinese have apparently concluded that a rapid narrowing of U.S. exposure was a matter of their national interest.
That conclusion has come after years of pleading for a “win-win cooperation,” while Washington kept trying to contain China’s growing global economic and political influence. Instead of cooperation, the U.S. defined its relationship with China as a strategic competition with a country seeking to destroy the Western (i.e., American) world order.
Cooperation made sense for China because it meant an open access to U.S. markets and technology transfers. The U.S., however, finally began to see things differently as it woke up from its evanescing dream that an increasingly prosperous China would shake off its communist rule and join the U.S.-led Western community.
What followed was a radical U.S. policy change Beijing apparently did not expect. China’s huge, and growing, American trade surpluses became an imminent strategic danger that had to be fought by tariffs, sanctions and strict limits to Chinese investments in the U.S. economy.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott on the impeachment trial opening arguments.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said Sunday that Democrats have been focused on impeachment because “they’re pretty concerned” due to the fact that “they believe the American people are now solidly behind President Donald Trump.”
Scott appeared on “Fox & Friends Weekend” one day after House impeachment managers filed their brief to the Senate, claiming the evidence against Trump “overwhelmingly” established abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Scott added that “the most important statement made about this entire impeachment process was made by [Texas] Congressman Al Green when he said if we don’t impeach him, he might win.”
The South Carolina senator also pointed out, “[House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi held the impeachment documents for nearly a month, which means there is no existential threat. There is no national-security threat.”
Former Florida attorney general, President Trump’s legal team member Pam Bondi on what to expect from the Senate impeachment trial.
Scott explained, “I believe the Democrat strategy is not to bring more illumination to the case, but to put a bull’s eye on the back of [Colorado Republican Sen.] Cory Gardner, [Iowa Republican Sen.] Joni Ernst, [Arizona Republican Sen.] Martha McSally, [North Carolina Republican Sen.] Thom Tillis. That is the strategy they’re using to try to win back the Senate,” Scott said, referring to Republican senators facing tough reelection campaigns.
“This is actually not about removing the president, this is about removing enough senators in the Republican Party in order to take control of the Senate and to rebuke the president for the next four years because they’re pretty concerned.”
In Saturday’s 111-page brief, the impeachment managers wrote, “President Trump’s conduct is the Framers’ worst nightmare.”
The brief was the Democrats’ opening salvo in the historic impeachment trial, with House managers arguing Trump used his official powers to pressure Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election for personal political gain, then tried to cover it up by obstructing Congress’s investigation into his alleged misconduct.
“The evidence overwhelmingly establishes that he is guilty. … The Senate must use that [impeachment] remedy now to safeguard the 2020 U.S. election, … protect our constitutional form of government and eliminate the threat that the President poses to America’s national security,” the brief stated.
Scott said Sunday that Democrats were reacting in such a way because their “greatest fears are coming true” due to Trump’s success.
“The fact is that this president has focused on bringing opportunities to the poorest communities in the nation,” Scott said. “This president has helped bring the minority unemployment rate to record lows for Asians, for African-Americans, for Hispanics.”
Scott noted the country’s 3.5-percent unemployment rate. “Our stock market is going through the ceiling. They are trembling in their boots, so the only thing they have focused on their minds today is not President Trump, it is removing senators from office so that they can have control of the United States Senate.”
He went on to say, “There’s no question that President Trump’s economic agenda has brought more prosperity into the African-American community than we’ve seen in my lifetime.”
“This president is producing the type of results that only say one thing to the African-American community,” Scott continued. “We believe that there is high-potential, incredible people who only needed opportunity and access to those opportunities. President Trump has brought so many of those to the community that I believe that we’re going to have a record turnout on behalf of the president [in November].”
Fox News’ Marisa Schultz contributed to this report.
Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who studies race and electoral politics, said black skepticism in government stretches back decades, citing Booker T. Washington and his early 19th century argument for black self-help, rather than a focus on systemic discrimination. Black voters are often described as “moderates,” but Mr. Johnson said the voting choices are more nuanced than straightforward ideological choices.
Racism “contributes to black people’s lack of support for mass federal programs,” Mr. Johnson said. “There’s a sense that, if you prefer federal programs, that can be an admission that you can’t make it without white people or government.”
In “Medicare for all,” free college and other signature progressive proposals, like the cancellation of student loan debt or housing equality, candidates are asking black voters to trust that government can correct the same systemic inequalities that government helped create. But there is often no plan to undo the cynicism that decades of governmental failure have created among older black voters in particular.
“No matter who is in office, the government has not been our best friend,” said Samuel Crisp, 73. He is part of the Piedmont Progressive Farmers Group, which focuses on egg production, and attended the Warren campaign event in Virginia.
“They all have programs that work against us,” he added. “And they don’t seem to understand that.”
There is some precedent for selling older black voters on the promise for structural change. In 2004, the populist campaign of Senator John Edwards of North Carolina won the South Carolina Democratic primary contest. The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 succeeded in bringing a message of systemic upheaval to black voters — winning 11 contests in 1988, including in Virginia and South Carolina. In an interview, Mr. Jackson urged the current crop of left-wing candidates like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren to get better at working to relate to and understand black communities.
“I earned the trust of the people. I worked with them on the ground. I wasn’t just an election candidate. I served with them,” Mr. Jackson said. “I was at their restaurants. I played football. I stayed in their homes.”
Mr. Jackson acknowledged that forming those connections is a different challenge for white candidates, who could risk appearing “pretentious and not genuine,” but he said he believed there were authentic and effective approaches.
HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) – Two police officers were fatally shot Sunday, a third was injured and at least four homes in an affluent Diamond Head neighborhood were destroyed by fire in a shocking series of events that all appears to have started with an attempted eviction.
A new section of the border wall is seen in November 2019 south of Donna, Texas. Trump’s 576-mile border wall is expected to cost nearly $20 million per mile, which is more expensive than any other wall under construction in the world.
Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR
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Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR
A new section of the border wall is seen in November 2019 south of Donna, Texas. Trump’s 576-mile border wall is expected to cost nearly $20 million per mile, which is more expensive than any other wall under construction in the world.
Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR
The pricetag for President Trump’s border wall has topped $11 billion — or nearly $20 million a mile — to become the most expensive wall of its kind anywhere in the world.
In a status report last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is overseeing wall construction, reported that $11 billion has been identified since Trump took office to construct 576 miles of a new “border wall system.”
And the Trump administration is on the hunt for funding to build even more. The Department of Homeland Security has asked the Defense Department to come up with money for 270 additional miles of border wall that DHS says is needed to block drug smuggling routes on federal land. The Pentagon is studying the request, which did not come with a dollar figure.
If the Trump administration completes all of the wall projects it has set in motion, three-quarters of the U.S. southern border would be walled off from Mexico. The government inherited about 650 miles of border structures erected under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“You’re going to have a wall like no other. It’s going to be a powerful, terrific wall,” President Trump said at a rally in Milwaukee last week. “A very big and very powerful border wall is going up at a record speed, and we are fully financed now, isn’t that nice?”
To get an idea why the government is spending so much on Trump’s border wall, look no further than the construction sites down in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
On one side of a caliche road, you can see the pedestrian fence that was erected more than a decade ago. At 18 feet, it looks downright puny. On the other side of the road are massive steel bollards topped with an “anti-climbing plate” that rise 30 feet above the cotton fields, surrounded by men in hardhats and heavy equipment.
Bush’s fence averaged $4 million a mile; Trump’s wall costs five times that—$20 million a mile. The overall cost of $11 billion is approaching the price of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
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Customs and Border Protection spokesman Christian Alvarez points out there’s a lot more to Trump’s barrier.
“The border wall system will include a 150-foot enforcement zone, lighting, cameras, other technology, and most importantly an all-weather access road making it easier to respond to (undocumented immigrant) traffic,” Alvarez said. “So it’s not just gonna be the barrier itself.”
There’s more steel — an expensive commodity — in a 30-foot structure. Also, there are powerful floodlights, and every mile will have conduit for electric power and fiber optics that connect the surveillance cameras. Electronic gates that allow passage through the wall cost up to $1 million a piece. And there’s a graded, graveled enforcement zone as wide as a six-lane highway.
“The border wall system will include a 150-foot enforcement zone, lighting, cameras, other technology, and most importantly an all-weather access road making it easier to respond to traffic,” Christian Alvarez, a Border Patrol spokesman, says.
Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR
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Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR
“The border wall system will include a 150-foot enforcement zone, lighting, cameras, other technology, and most importantly an all-weather access road making it easier to respond to traffic,” Christian Alvarez, a Border Patrol spokesman, says.
Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR
Trump’s border wall is now the tallest and most expensive in the world, said Reece Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaii who studies border walls.
“The cost of almost $20 million per mile cost is four times as much as the most expensive other walls being built,” Jones said.
Border walls are much in vogue in the post-Cold War era, he said, and there are now at least 60 around the world. Israel’s wall on the West Bank ranks as the second most expensive — at a paltry $1 million to $5 million a mile.
Congress appropriated funds to build the wall in the Rio Grande Valley, but the government now says it needs more. CBP is dipping into $600 million of the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, which holds money seized in criminal investigations.
Some of the extra money will be used to build the wall higher and 10 miles longer. There have also been “increased project costs due to unforeseen site conditions” — to wit, serious seepage problems where the levee wall crosses a canal that empties into the Rio Grande.
These extra costs came to light in a recent deposition made by Loren Flossman, CBP’s wall chief. He also said the agency needs more money to cover the ballooning expense of acquiring the strips of private property under the wall.
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Taking private land through eminent domain involves multiple agencies, including the Department of Justice, and can lead to lawsuits. The process “significantly increases the hurdles that the government has to face,” said Scott Nicol, a longtime wall opponent with the Sierra Club in the Rio Grande Valley.
“Where you have private property and the government has to go through the courts to get that property, it takes a lot longer and it drives the cost up because you have to pay for that land,” Nicol said. “You have to send DOJ lawyers in to get that land.”
By mid-January, the government had constructed 101 miles of border wall. A hundred miles of this is replacement or secondary wall; only one mile has been built where no barriers previously existed.
Contrary to President Trump’s claims, the wall is not “going up at a record speed.” In fact, construction has fallen months behind schedule because of the complexities of acquiring private land in the South Texas.
The massive wall projects that are currently underway are fully financed, primarily because of the president’s willingness to sidestep a defiant Congress.
Over the last two budget cycles, a Democrat-controlled House authorized $2.75 billion for the wall — much less than Trump asked for. So Trump shut down the government, declared a state of emergency and diverted billions more from the Defense Department to pay for his wall.
Pro-immigrant groups promptly sued, and initially succeeded in getting federal injunctions to block military funding for the wall. But conservative majorities on both the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appeals court in New Orleans stayed the injunctions and let the administration proceed with construction.
“I mean, with all due respect to the president, he’s obsessed with this wall,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, Texas, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. “It’s a campaign promise, and what happened to that Mexico was going to pay for this?”
Democrats say they do want border security, but the way to do it is with manpower and technology, not steel and concrete.
“I live on the border. I don’t want to see chaos. I want to see law and order at the border,” Cuellar continued. “But I don’t want to just be spending billions of dollars to those federal contractors.”
The federal contractors are mostly giant construction companies with experience handling complex federal projects.
Then there’s Fisher Sand & Gravel. The North Dakota company snagged a $400 million wall contract after CEO Tommy Fisher went on Fox News — a channel Trump frequently watches — to boast how he could build the wall faster and cheaper out on the California border.
“So that current fence they’re building right now in Calexico, the government has been given basically 300 days to build two miles. With one crew, we can build 15 miles in one year,” Fisher told a Fox interviewer.
Now, the Pentagon inspector general is reviewing the contract. Auditors want to know if the White House steered it to Fisher, who maintains his bid was the best.
Two of President Donald Trump’s leading defenders said Sunday that the Senate will not vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment against him, though both argued the president committed no impeachable offense, outlining what is likely to be the heart of Trump’s defense in his trial.
“The idea of dismissing the case early on is not going to happen. We don’t have the votes for that,” Graham said, adding that the Senate impeachment trial will likely follow the format of the one for President Bill Clinton in 1999.
High-profile criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has been named to Trump’s legal team, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “a motion is not going to made” in the Senate to dismiss the case against the president as it was in the Clinton trial. But he made it clear he believes such a move would be warranted.
Trump is accused of leveraging military aid to pressure Ukraine into announcing a pair of investigations that stood to benefit the president ahead of his 2020 reelection bid. The House impeached Trump last month on two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Much of how the trial will proceed, including whether additional witness testimony or evidence will be allowed, has yet to be determined.
Dershowitz plans to argue on the Senate floor that “even if everything that is alleged by the House managers is proven or taken as true, they would not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.”
“If my argument succeeds, there’s no need for witnesses. Indeed, there’s no need for even arguments, any further arguments. If the House charges do not include impeachable offenses, that’s really the end of the matter, and the Senate should vote to acquit, or even to dismiss,” Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz said he “will be presenting a very strong argument” based on that made in 1868 by former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis in the impeachment trial against President Andrew Johnson.
Curtis’ argument, according to Dershowitz, was “that the framers intended for impeachable conduct only to be criminal-like conduct or conduct that is prohibited by the criminal law.” Dershowitz asserted that neither of the two articles of impeachment against Trump are charges of criminal behavior.
On Saturday, the Democratic House impeachment managers who will prosecute the case filed a lengthy brief that outlined their allegations against Trump, which said the president “used his official powers to pressure a foreign government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political gain, and then attempted to cover up his scheme by obstructing Congress’s investigation into his misconduct.”
Trump’s legal team responded with a brief that called the impeachment a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere in the 2020 election.” Like Dershowitz, the brief said articles “fail to allege any crime or violation of law whatsoever.” But it also said that the president had done nothing wrong and that Trump’s actions on Ukraine were “constitutional, perfectly legal, completely appropriate, and taken in furtherance of our national interest.”
“I didn’t sign that brief. I didn’t even see the brief until after it was filed,” Dershowitz said on ABC News “This Week” when asked if he agreed the president had done nothing wrong. He said it didn’t matter whether he thought what Trump did was acceptable, only if it was impeachable.
“My mandate is to determine what is a constitutionally authorized criteria for impeachment,” he said. And abuse of power did not meet the criteria, he argued, because it “is so open-ended.”
“Half of American presidents in history, from Adams to Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt, have been accused by their political enemies of abusing their power,” he said. “The framers didn’t want to have that kind of criteria in the Constitution because it weaponizes impeachment for partisan purposes.”
It should be up to the voters to determine if Trump abused it his power or acted inappropriately, Dershowitz said.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the lead impeachment manager, called Dershowitz’s argument that abuse of power is not impeachable “absurdist.”
“That’s the argument I suppose you have to make if the facts are so dead set against you,” Schiff said on “This Week.”
“You have to rely on an argument that even if he abused his office in this horrendous way, that it’s not impeachable,” Schiff said. “You had to go so far out of the mainstream to find someone to make that argument, you had to leave the realm of constitutional law scholars and go to criminal defense lawyers.”
Schiff said “the mere idea” of Dershowitz’s argument would have “appalled the founders,” who were very concerned about foreign election interference. He argued that such action goes to “the very heart of what the framers intended to be impeachable.”
“The logic of that absurdist position that’s being now adopted by the president is he could give away the state of Alaska,” Schiff said. “He could withhold execution of sanctions on Russia for interfering in the last election, to induce or coerce Russia to interfere in the next one.”
As to the charge of obstruction of Congress, Graham said it was an attempt to “put Trump below the law” by impeaching him for attempting to claim his right to executive privilege. He said rushing the process and not giving the court’s time to rule on what is protected by privilege posed a threat to the power of the executive branch of government.
“You impeach a president. You don’t let him to exert executive privilege in the House. You deny him or her their day in court,” Graham said. “You’ve destroyed executive privilege through the impeachment process. That would really make the presidency far less effective and would hurt the constitutional balance of power.”
Democrats have argued that waiting for the courts to force every witness to testify would effectively take the teeth out of Congress’ power to remove the president.
“If you argue that, well, the House needed to go through endless months or even years of litigation before bringing about an impeachment, you effectively nullify the impeachment clause,” Schiff said. “The framers gave the House the sole power of impeachment. It didn’t say that was given to judges who at their leisure may or may not decide cases and allow the House to proceed.
“The reality is, because what the president is threatening to do is cheat in the next election, you cannot wait months and years to be able to remove that threat from office.”
Mr. Zelensky, along with his top aides and cabinet members, stood silently as the coffins passed. Later, the procession continued through a crowd of Ukraine International Airlines employees. Pilots in flight uniforms doffed their hats and knelt, while flight attendants held bouquets of flowers.
The first coffins carried out were those of the three Ukrainian pilots — Aleksei Naumkin, Vladimir Gaponenko and Sergei Khomenko — who died along with their passengers.
After Tehran initially hinted, without providing any evidence, that the pilots had flown erratically and therefore contributed to the crash by alarming air defense forces, Ukraine’s government pressed Iran to admit that the claim was false.
The pilots, in fact, had flown the usual departure route for Tehran’s airport.
The Sonangol account was with the Portuguese arm of Banco BIC, where she was the biggest shareholder. Shunned by global banks, the couple increasingly relied on the Angolan lender, which has a big office in Lisbon steps from her apartment. In 2015, Portuguese regulators said the bank had failed to monitor money flowing from Angola to European companies linked to her and her associates, concluding that the lender lacked internal controls.
“Paying huge and dubious consulting fees to anonymous companies in secrecy jurisdictions is a standard trick that should sound all alarm bells,” said Christoph Trautvetter, a forensic accountant based in Berlin who worked as an investigator for KPMG, a global business advisory firm.
Days before the invoices were issued, the Sonangol executive who would have approved them was fired, replaced by a relative of Ms. dos Santos, the documents show. The managing director of the Dubai company, Matter Business Solutions DMCC, was her frequent associate Mr. da Silva.
Months later, Carlos Saturnino, Ms. dos Santos’s successor as Sonangol’s head, publicly accused her of mismanagement, saying her tenure was marked by conflicts of interest, tax avoidance and excessive reliance on consultants. He also said she had approved $135 million in consulting fees, with most of that going to the Dubai shell company.
“We have there some situations of money laundering, some of them of doing business with herself,” Hélder Pitta Grós, Angola’s attorney general, said in an interview with I.C.I.J. partners.
Ms. dos Santos, speaking with the BBC, said the Dubai company supervised work for Sonangol by Boston Consulting, McKinsey, PwC and several other Western firms. When asked about the invoices, she said she was unfamiliar with them but insisted the expenses were legitimate, charged at “the standard rate” under a contract approved by Sonangol’s board.
“This work was extraordinarily important,” she added, saying that Sonangol cut its costs by 40 percent.
GILLETTE, Wyoming — From behind the counter of his brother’s auto-parts store, Bubba Miller looks out at the 2020 presidential race and worries about what will happen to his hometown if a Democrat wins. Not just a Democrat, but, based on the current frontrunners, a liberal Democrat. Or a Progressive. Or an avowed Socialist.
“I wish we could build a wall around Wyoming,” he says with a laugh. “I think there’s just something wrong in their heads to think you can get everything for free.”
Shifting the wad of tobacco tucked in his lip, Miller, 24, lays out the case for re-electing President Donald Trump, from this coal town’s booming economy to the president’s protection of gun rights, to his tough border policies and efforts to reduce the size of the federal government. As far as Miller is concerned, Trump can do no wrong.
He’s not alone. In 2016, then-candidate Trump won 86% of the vote here as he swept every Wyoming county but one, the wealthy liberal enclave of Teton County, home to Jackson Hole. Only once since 1952 has the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, and in 2016 Trump beat Hillary Clinton here by the widest margin of any state. And ahead of the November presidential election, none of the 2020 Democratic candidates are making any inroads with these most conservative of voters.
“I’ve very concerned about the direction of the Democratic Party,” says Robin Clover, a 20-year Wyoming resident and registered Republican who’s voted for Democrats at the local level. “They’re either past their prime or far too progressive.”
Here in Wyoming, where every other car is a pickup, and cowboy hats and boots are a working man’s uniform, the 2020 election worries voters, who fear the election of a Democrat will upend their way of life, force the coal mines to close and the oil wells to stop pumping. Force them to pay higher taxes, force them to give up their AR-15 rifles and high-capacity magazines. Force them to subsidize the health care of immigrants. Force them to pay for college loans for city kids. Force. Force. Force.
“That’s the problem,” Miller says. “I’m an adult. You can’t make me. It’s just taking away from letting people grow up.”
Like his neighbors, Miller says he wishes Trump could lead the country the way he was elected to, without being second-guessed or attacked by what he considers a “corrupt” class of politicians and bureaucrats. The way Miller sees it, the fact that Trump is being so forcefully opposed perfectly demonstrates that the president is on the right track in draining the swamp in Washington, D.C.
The state Republican Party officially endorses a slew of other conservative positions, from disarming forest rangers, to returning to a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for the military and banning birthright citizenship. The party has also called for banning the acceptance of any international refugees unless they are vetted Christians, defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, abolishing the EPA and the U.S. Department of Education, and strictly enforcing all immigration laws.
But for most voters here, coal and the jobs it provides are the biggest drivers of decisions. And that means Trump is their guy.
Because Wyoming has only three Electoral College votes, there’s little chance a Democrat will even bother campaigning here, and even Trump is considered unlikely to visit, since most voters across the state will back him regardless if they see him in person shaking hands and holding babies. That leaves Wyoming’s voters in a uniquely powerless situation: Ignored by both parties, they are effectively sidelined despite the critical role federal policy plays in their future. And they’re facing Democratic candidates who all see a bigger federal government as a solution to the nation’s problems.
Polls suggest their worst nightmare could come true in November. Former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg are all narrowly leading or in a close tie with Trump in recent polls. The president’s supporters in Wyoming, however, point out that polls showed Clinton winning the presidency in 2016, so they don’t put much stock in them.
Wyoming’s approximately 578,000 residents, most of them white and living on land seized from Native Americans, have long prided themselves on a frontier spirit of rugged individualism and independence. They also see themselves as a world apart from the nation’s big coastal states, all of which tend to vote Democrat. For generations, they’ve voted Republican and argued that big-city liberals can’t possibly understand what life is like where there’s just six people per square mile. New York City, by contrast, has 27,000 people per square mile.
But the outside world is increasingly moving in a different direction, where global warming is settled science, inclusivity, diversity and tolerance are honored, and access to health care is seen as a fundamental human right. The United Nations even has set a 2030 goal for achieving universal health coverage internationally. That’s setting up an increasingly stark contrast for Wyomingites who see a Trump victory as essential to preserving their freedoms and independence.
“Our way of life here is threatened by a Democratic administration,” said state Rep. Dan Zwonitzer, a Republican who represents a portion of the largest city, Cheyenne, where Trump won 60% of the vote in 2016. “Every Republican in Wyoming you’ll talk to would agree that Wyoming is better off under a Republican administration. No one liked Hillary. They just knew that she was the enemy. And whether it’s Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders, I don’t think the vote totals would change by 5%. There’s just this attitude that you have to maintain control of the presidency at all costs.”
To understand Wyoming, you have to understand a little bit about coal, the state’s backbone, both physically and financially. In Gillette, which calls itself the “Energy Capital of the Nation,” coal is inextricable from daily life. The mines outside of town set the pace, explosives blasting the windswept ground to free the coal. Many of the workers are no longer fulltime employees but work as contractors, missing out on the benefits but still keeping the same 12-hour shifts they used to before repeated bankruptcies prompted many mine operators to restructure.
In town, restaurants proudly display “coal keeps the lights on” and “friends of coal” stickers, and the diesel-equipment repair shops and heavy machinery repair yards line the approaches to the historic downtown, where the Gillette Brewing Company’s bar is supported by pieces of drilling rigs.
Taxes levied on the vast trainloads of coal hauled to power plants across the West means the state has never had an income tax, and its sales taxes are among the nation’s lowest. While Eastern coal states like Kentucky and West Virginia get the president’s attention, Wyoming leads the nation in coal production, with its approximately 5,500 miners digging more than the next six states combined.
Virtually all of that coal is mined from land owned by the federal government, which leases the property to conglomerates to mine and then burn the coal for electricity. That quirk of geology has long helped Wyoming maintain its financial independence, but even coal’s strongest backers worry that times are changing. The federal government plays a key role because slowing down new coal leases or restricting coal-powered generating plants almost immediately impacts the miners themselves.
During the 2016 election, Clinton declared “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” a statement that infuriated Wyoming residents who already disliked her for reasons ranging from Benghazi to her work with the Clinton Foundation. While Clinton then went on to explain that she planned to offer job retraining to coal workers, Wyoming’s voters — who weren’t going to support her anyway — hardened their opposition further.
They say there’s still life in coal, and that Clinton would have harmed an already struggling industry. And they say the Democrats running for president in 2020 have a similar playbook.
“I think Hillary would have killed our economy. And I think any of the people running on the Democrat side would absolutely eviscerate our economy. The Democrats seem to do everything they can to squash business,” says Vicki Million Hughes, a Cheyenne real estate agent whose grandparents moved to Wyoming in 1920.
Hughes says she’s 100% behind the president, aside from offensive tweets attacking specific people, because his focus has been creating a strong economy, growing industry and “jobs, jobs, jobs.”
The strength of the national and local economy is a major factor for Trump’s ongoing support in Wyoming, even though coal mining jobs have been on the decline for decades. Voters here believe four more years of his administration will keep the economy humming and extend the life of the coal mines for the foreseeable future.
“If God is good enough to give us a natural resource, we should use that resource wisely,” says Hughes, who like many Wyoming voters, says she believes the planet naturally warms and cools, and that humans have little to do with it. “Why waste what God has given us?”
About 70% of Americans say climate change is occurring, and a majority — 55% — say it’s mostly human-caused, according to an April 2019 study by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, scientists. In Wyoming, voters like Hughes and Miller say they have the right to disagree and worry that their voices will be shouted down by the modern-day shaming mobs populating social media.
“I have lots of friends who live on the coasts and they tell me it’s time to evolve, that Wyoming needs to get past fossil fuels. But we make our living and livelihood off oil and gas and coal,” said Zwonitzer. “You’ve got people who have been involved in these industries for generations.”
That singular focus on coal and federal land management means Wyoming’s voters spend little time worrying about the nuances of immigration or health care reform, although many shake their heads at what they see as the entitlement culture of the Democratic candidates and their supporters.
Wyomingites pride themselves on their low-tax, work-focused culture, and the idea of erasing student loans or giving everyone government-run health insurance runs counter to their deeply held ideology of taking care of their own problems and being responsible for their own decisions.
Miller, for instance, is paying off medical debt accumulated when he crashed his dirtbike and blew out his knee. He didn’t have health insurance at the time, and instead paid the Obamacare tax because it was cheaper than paying for health insurance. While having to pay the bills “sucks,” Miller says, he accepts that it was his decision to forgo insurance.
“Everybody in Wyoming would love to have the best college education, the best health care, and for it all to be done for free. And that’s just impossible,” said Carl “Bunky” Loucks, a Republican state representative from Casper. “I just don’t understand the mentality that you can get everything for free.”
Loucks, 52, said he and many other Wyoming residents support both an audit of the federal government and a balanced budget amendment that would limit government spending to what it can actually afford, instead of adding to the ballooning national deficit. Loucks said he’s frustrated the national debt has increased under Trump but says it would have been worse under a Democrat. Trump won Louck’s county with 70% of the vote.
Miller says Wyoming has flourished under Trump, and none of his neighbors regret their 2016 votes. If anything, he says, Trump’s support has increased.
“How can you hate someone who is so good for the United States?” Miller says. “I think his mouth gets him in trouble, but sometimes what he says is well-needed.”
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