The former special counsel Robert Mueller made a rare move on Saturday to publicly defend his two-year investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election – and to castigate US president Donald Trump’s decision to commute Roger Stone’s prison sentence.
“The work of the special counsel’s office – its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions – should speak for itself,” he wrote.
“But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office …
“Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
Trump commuted the sentence of Stone on Friday night, sparking outrage from Democrats and some senior Republicans.
Stone was a former campaign adviser to the president, convicted in November 2019 of seven crimes including obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering.
The 2017-19 Mueller investigation uncovered evidence of communications between Stone and WikiLeaks related to the release of hacked Democratic party emails during the 2016 election, discovered in a separate inquiry into Russian intelligence officers charged with hacking the emails and staging their release.
The partially released Mueller report in April 2019 described Russian efforts to tamper with the election andthe Trump campaign’s receptivity tocertain “Russian offers of assistance to the campaign”.
It outlined actions by Trump that may have amounted to obstruction of justice and concluded: “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Mueller also concluded he did not have the power to charge Trump even if he thought it was warranted.
Mueller wrote: “The special counsel’s office identified two principal operations directed at our election: hacking and dumping Clinton campaign emails, and an online social media campaign to disparage the Democratic candidate.
“We also identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel – Stone among them. We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government …
“The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. [And] that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Trump has repeatedly attempted to discredit Mueller and his investigations.
Mueller has kept his counsel since he testified in Congress in July last year. It was a muted affair, and many perceived Trump was emboldened in his efforts to seek assistance in his current election campaign from the Ukraine.
This led to the historic impeachment of the president, and Trump’s ultimate acquittal by the Senate earlier this year.
On Saturday Mueller wrote: “Russia’s actions were a threat to America’s democracy. It was critical that they be investigated and understood.”
President Donald Trump wore a mask in public for the first time during a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Saturday, a dramatic shift from the president’s past refusal to don a face covering publicly even as public health experts and the federal government recommend it to Americans.
President Donald Trump wears a face mask as he walks down a hallway during a visit to Walter Reed … [+] National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Saturday, July 11, 2020.
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
KEY FACTS
Though public health experts and the Centers For Disease Control say that masks are necessary to stem the spread of the coronavirus, Trump has thus far declined to wear one personally in front of reporters.
Trump did wear a mask privately in May during a visit to a Ford motor plant in Michigan, but it wasn’t in front of the press and it was only captured in a photo from someone at the factory.
CNN reported that White House aides and advisers have been begging the president to wear a face covering publicly for weeks in order to encourage those who are defiantly skeptical of mask wearing.
In recent days, Trump has offered stronger support for masks, saying during an interview with Fox Business earlier this month that he’s “all for” masks and even likes the way he looks in them—but he had still not worn one for a photo-op before Saturday.
Since Trump and those around him are frequently tested, his risk of actually transmitting the virus may be low, but critics say he should be setting a good example by wearing a mask anyway.
Key background
Masks have become a new culture war between those who see them as a sign of government overreach or a symbol of liberal overreaction to the pandemic and others who heed recommendations from public health experts. Scores of viral videos have shown non-mask wearers arguing with essential workers over the issue or passionately opposing mandatory mask orders at local city council meetings. Even Republican governors, including those in Texas and Arizona, who had initially been skeptical of mask rules have backtracked amid a resurgence of the disease.
News peg
Though 86% of Americans say they are wearing a mask in public, according to a July 6 Gallup poll, much of the audience at Trump’s recent rallies in Tulsa and South Dakota didn’t wear one. The Tulsa rally in particular has created a public relations fiasco for the president, especially after the city’s health director said it was “more than likely” that the rally contributed to a spike in cases in the city.
WASHINGTON – Joe Biden can look at the polls and smile.
Cautiously.
A double-digit advantage in numerous national surveys, solid leads in a number of key battlegrounds, and competitive showings in states Donald Trump carried handily in 2016 suggest the presumptive Democratic nominee is the favorite to win in November.
But the overwhelming majority of polls four years ago indicated Trump would lose as well. So why put much faith in the 2020 polls that show the former vice president consistently on top?
David Burgess of Kittery, Maine, said he stopped believing polls after the 2016 presidential election.
“They predicted Hillary Clinton would win, and she didn’t,” Burgess said while taking a stroll through downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with his miniature schnauzer, Taavi. “Voters are like an iceberg. (With polls), you just see the tip of the iceberg. You don’t see the rest of the iceberg. You don’t know who they’re going to vote for.”
As America heads into the final weeks of the presidential campaign, pollsters say they’ve learned lessons from 2016’s failings that they believewill make this campaign season’s polls more accurate. And while they sympathize with voters’ frustrations, they defend their work as needing minor tweaks, not a fundamental overhaul.
“The public understandably walked away from 2016 feeling like polls were broken. And there’s some truth to that,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center. “But it’s not the case that 2016 meant that polling writ large doesn’t work anymore.”
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, one of many that showed Clinton with a lead over Trump, said 2016 is “a reason to be very cautious.”
“It taught us the lesson that there really isn’t safety in numbers because it is possible for a systematic error or change in the last minute of the election to make everybody wrong and that’s what we saw in 2016,” he said.
What went wrong in 2016?
Actually, pollsters got it mostly right four years ago.
They had Clinton winning the popular vote by about 3 percentage points. She won by 2.1 points. And they were right about the outcome in most states. But their research did not capture the full picture of voter sentiment in the upper Midwest that provided Trump with the margin of victory in the Electoral College.
Polls in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showed Clinton winning consistently in the months leading up to Election Day.
Of 104 published polls that surveyed voters in those three states from August to the election, 101 had Clinton winning, two were tied, and one (in Pennsylvania) showed Trump with a slight lead. Many fell within the margin of error but 15 had Clinton up by double digits at some point.
Trump ended up winning all three states by whisker-thin margins: a combined 77,744 votes out of 13,940,912 cast, or about half a percentage point. The 46 electoral votes those three states provided Trump the winning margin, stunning those who predicted a Clinton victory. He won 306 electoral votes to Clinton’ 232.
Ronna McDaniel, who chairs the Republican National Committee, dismissed the 2020 polls given what happened four years ago.
“These polls right now are not even significant,” she told FOX Business channel recently. “One hundred and fifty polls were done between now and the election in 2016 that showed Donald Trump losing, and the ultimate poll is Election Day.”
How polls are changing
Both Kennedy and Franklin say two large factors complicated the accuracy of the 2016 polls: Many state surveys tended to over-sample college-educated voters (who favored Clinton) and many failed to capture the late-deciding voters (who generally swung to Trump).
Neither says those problems couldn’t recur this year but they’re hopeful 2020 polls will provide a better yardstick of voter opinions for several reasons:
Educational attainment: Pollsters have been encouraged to increase the sample of non-college graduates, who not only tend to favor Republicans over Democrats but who are also less likely to want to participate in polls.
Patrick Murray who runs the New Jersey-based Monmouth University Polling Institute, which had Clinton winning in its three Pennsylvania polls, said they’ve begun weighing educational attainment more in polls “and we’re already seeing that impact has helped a bit.”
Late deciders: This may be harder to capture since most polls don’t interview voters in the week before the election. But the number of voters unable to make up their minds until the last minute is expected to be considerably less in 2020 than four years ago, when the historic unpopularity of Trump and Clinton had many hemming and hawing up to the very end.
A Monmouth poll in June indicated that nearly nine in 10 voters had already made up their minds about which candidate they’ll back in November..
“That’s a suggestion that there’s not a lot of room for movement,” Murray said. “But of course the one reason why we want to be a little careful about taking what were seeing in the polls today and projecting it to November is that there are still certain states where it would take a very small amount of movement to change the outcome.”
Third party candidates: The lack of a prominent independent in the presidential race this year means fewer choices and clearer options.
Pollsters say the candidacy of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who polled at 10% as late as August 2016, probably contributed to the relatively large number of late-breaking deciders since a significant bloc of voters were seeking alternatives to Trump and Clinton. Johnson faded toward the end of the campaign, finishing with less than 3.3% of the vote.
Early voting: The coronavirus pandemic has injected uncertainty into the 2020 election as to who will vote and how. But it is expected to ratchet up the amount of early voting in many states.
If more respondents have cast their ballot when pollsters contact them in late October, it should be easier to gauge true voter sentiment since they will have already made their decision, pollsters say.
Likely voters: Pollsters are slowly but steadily moving to a model using public voter records to identify likely voters rather than a “random-digit dial” system that relies on respondents to report their voting participation patterns.
“People forget that large swaths of our fellow citizens don’t vote. But a lot of them still participate in polls,” said Kennedy, who led a review of the 2016 polling for the American Association for Public Opinion Research. “So there’s a big (gap) that even the best pollsters struggle to model away.”
While changes are in progress, Murray said it’s wise not to dramatically revamp polls that are already largely on target.
“There are some errors that we’ll never be able to account for because they happen idiosyncratically in each election. They’re different each time,” he said. “So you just want to be careful that you don’t over-correct for your last mistake because that’s not the one that’s going to happen this time around.”
The ‘protest vote’ in 2016
Despite the 2016 stumble, most polls in 2018 showing Democrats retaking the House and Republicans keeping the Senate proved accurate. Even so, pollsters caution that surveys are simply snapshots – not predictors – and that some are better than others at revealing voters’ deeper attitudes on issues and candidates.
Brian Schaffner, a Tufts University political science professor, studied how some Bernie Sanders voters in 2016 ended up casting a ballot for Trump. Those progressives might have thought Clinton would make a better president than Trump but they also believed she would win anyway and couldn’t stomach the thought of voting for her, he said.
“It felt OK to cast a protest vote or just not turn out,” Schaffner said. “Some people felt more at liberty to cast a vote that they think wasn’t going to matter.”
It recommends consumers look at who’s being polled (adults, registered voters, likely voters), check the track record of the pollsters, and pay close attention to the margin of error. A poll that shows Biden up by two points over Trump and has a four-point margin of error means Biden could be up as much as six points or be trailing Trump by two.
Keeping ‘their opinions to themselves’
Ellen Chaput, a nurse who lives in Portsmouth, said she hopes polls showing Biden with a lead over Trump are accurate. But she doesn’t believe them.
“They’ve got it wrong before,” she said. “I don’t pay any attention to them.”
Even if Biden is ahead right now, “things can change,” she said.
Helaine Dandrea, a pharmaceutical consultant from Staten Island, New York, said polls often reflect the biases of the people who conduct them.
Dandrea, who is backing Trump for re-election, said polls that show Biden with a solid lead could be underestimating the president’s strength. Some Trump supporters may be unwilling to tell pollsters they are backing the president because they don’t want to face the inevitable backlash from the other side, she said.
“People tend to be afraid because there’s a lot of aggression,” she said. “People tend to keep their opinions to themselves.”
Jim Menard, a retiree from Salisbury, Massachusetts, who backs Biden, said he can see why Trump voters might want to keep their preference to themselves.
“I imagine they are kind of embarrassed to say they support him,” Menard said.
Menard suspects polls showing Biden with a comfortable lead are correct because be believes pollsters changed their methodology to get more accurate results, he said.
“They’ve gotten better at these polls since the last time,” he said.
Important to focus on ‘where things stand today’
Franklin said it’s also important to look beyond the top-line numbers of who’s in front and examine the deeper data that explores why voters feel the way they do.
Marquette’s June poll, for example, shows Biden with an eight-poll lead in Wisconsin: 49%-41% with a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points. That’s up from the three-point lead Biden had in May due mainly to declining support for Trump and growing opposition from independents.
The June poll shows 50% of Badger State voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy (down from 54% in May), while 44% approve of his handling of the coronavirus crisis (the same as the previous month). But only 30% said they approved of his handling of protests over the death of George Floyd.
“If there’s a valuable lesson to learn from ’16, it’s to put less weight on what may happen in the unknown future and put more weight on where things stand today,” Franklin said.
Murray, whose Monmouth poll released earlier this month is one of nearly a dozen in June showing Biden with a double-digit lead nationally, said the polling today centers on how voters view Trump because many have yet to learn much about the former vice president. That could change by October as the public gets to know more about Biden, he said.
“I think the polls are telling us a story about what’s going on and how people are dug in,” he said. “It doesn’t tell us how the Electoral College is going to turn out right now so that’s why you should continue to take the polling with a grain of salt if you’re looking ahead to November.”
Just as they did in 2016, polls in 2020 once again show Trump losing in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The grain of salt? The same Marquette University Law School Poll that has Biden up by eight points in June showed Clinton up by nine four years ago.
Two McAllen police officers were shot and killed Saturday, Police Chief Victor Rodriguez said.
“We have lost two brave public servants who sought only to keep peace in our City,” Rodriguez said via text message Saturday.
The officers were reportedly ambushed while responding to a call in the vicinity of Queta Avenue and 34th Street.
According to Lt. Christopher Olivarez, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, the officers were shot in that area and were transported to an area hospital.
A suspect in the shooting has been shot, but that person’s condition is unclear.
DPS sent troopers to secure the scene because the McAllen Police Department asked for assistance, Olivarez said, adding that his agency received a call about the incident around 4:30 p.m.
The circumstances of the shooting also remain unclear.
“We just have very brief details right now,” Olivarez said.
Law enforcement and public safety sources believe the officers were responding to a disturbance call when the shooting occurred.
A man who lives near the area, and who would only identify himself as G. Lopez, said he was working in his yard when he saw the officers arrive around 4 p.m.
Shortly after, Lopez said he heard five to six gunshots.
“I have a couple of guns; that wasn’t fireworks,” he said.
According to Lopez, additional law enforcement arrived 10 or 15 minutes later.
“After that, everybody showed up and then I heard one shot,” he said. “When I heard that one shot everybody swarmed.”
Lopez said before the shooting it was an otherwise quiet day in the neighborhood.
Police are expected to release more details from the scene of the shooting this evening.
Their deaths occurred nearly one year after two other Rio Grande Valley law enforcement officers lost their lives for their work in the line of duty.
Cpl. Jose Luis Espericueta of the Mission Police Department was shot and killed on June 20, 2019, while responding to reports of an armed man.
DPS Trooper Moises Sanchez died in August 2019 after undergoing surgery for injuries sustained in an April 6 shooting that year, in which Sanchez responded to a motor vehicle accident in Edinburg.
In a statement, U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, called the news of the two deaths on Saturday “devastating.”
“This is devastating news to our community. My heart breaks for these fallen officers and their families,” Gonzalez said in the statement. “They served McAllen bravely and honorably and I will keep them in my prayers.”
Our prayers and full support are with the valiant men and women of the #CityofMcAllen PD this evening.
This office will provide any assistance requested in the days ahead. We are grateful for police in McAllen and around this great state.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted that his office will provide the McAllen Police Department with any assistance needed.
“Our prayers and full support are with the valiant men and women of the #CityofMcAllen PD this evening,” the tweet read. “We are grateful for police in McAllen and around this great state.”
Authorities went to Mark and Patricia McCloskey’s home Friday amid an ongoing investigation into the incident.
The couple went viral last month after arming themselves with a rifle and a handgun as they confronted a group protesting police brutality and recent actions by the city’s mayor.
Still images and video of the confrontation circulated throughout social media as Black Lives Matter protests took place across the country following the death of George Floyd.
In a video of the June 28 incident, Mark McCloskey is heard yelling: “Get the h— out of my neighborhood. Private property. Get out.”
The confrontation ended with no injuries or arrests.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement Saturday that detectives executed a search warrant at the home in the affluent St. Louis neighborhood of Central West End.
“Seized as evidence from the residence was a Colt, semi-automatic, .223 caliber rifle,” the statement said.
The department declined to provide further details.
Attorney Joel Schwartz, who has taken over the case for the couple from another lawyer, told NBC News in a phone interview Saturday that the McCloskey’s home was not searched by police and they voluntarily gave up the rifle.
The second weapon, believed to be a revolver, was turned over to the previous lawyer, Schwartz said.
Schwartz maintained his clients’ innocence and said they are “law-abiding citizens that were well within their rights.”
The attorney said the couple does regret their actions but said they did not break any laws. The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office said the matter remains under investigation.
In a June statement, police described the McCloskey’s as “victims” of trespassing and fourth-degree assault.
“The victims stated they were on their property when they heard a loud commotion coming from the street,” police said. “When the victims went to investigate the commotion, they observed a large group of subjects forcefully break an iron gate marked with ‘No Trespassing’ and ‘Private Street’ signs.”
Police said the McCloskeys told the group that they were on private property and needed to leave.
“The group began yelling obscenities and threats of harm to both victims. When the victims observed multiple subjects who were armed, they then armed themselves and contacted police,” the statement read.
Daniel Shular, a freelance photojournalist who was at the protest, previously told NBC News that he did not see anyone break the gate leading to the neighborhood and recalled seeing people simply walk through an open gate.
“I kind of turned around to take some pictures of people coming through the gate, then I turned back around and by then he had his long gun in his hand,” he said. “And the woman came out with a pistol and started pointing it with her finger on the trigger at everybody.”
Shular said he saw at least one armed protester but said it’s “not super out of the ordinary for the protests here.”
Albert Watkins, the previous attorney for the McCloskeys, said last month that his clients are supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement and became fearful because white protesters were acting aggressively.
It’s unclear why the McCloskeys switched attorneys.
The former special counsel Robert Mueller made a rare move on Saturday to publicly defend his two-year investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election – and to castigate US president Donald Trump’s decision to commute Roger Stone’s prison sentence.
“The work of the special counsel’s office – its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions – should speak for itself,” he wrote.
“But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office …
“Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
Trump commuted the sentence of Stone on Friday night, sparking outrage from Democrats and some senior Republicans.
Stone was a former campaign adviser to the president, convicted in November 2019 of seven crimes including obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering.
The 2017-19 Mueller investigation uncovered evidence of communications between Stone and WikiLeaks related to the release of hacked Democratic party emails during the 2016 election, discovered in a separate inquiry into Russian intelligence officers charged with hacking the emails and staging their release.
The partially released Mueller report in April 2019 described Russian efforts to tamper with the election andthe Trump campaign’s receptivity tocertain “Russian offers of assistance to the campaign”.
It outlined actions by Trump that may have amounted to obstruction of justice and concluded: “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Mueller also concluded he did not have the power to charge Trump even if he thought it was warranted.
Mueller wrote: “The special counsel’s office identified two principal operations directed at our election: hacking and dumping Clinton campaign emails, and an online social media campaign to disparage the Democratic candidate.
“We also identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel – Stone among them. We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government …
“The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. [And] that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Trump has repeatedly attempted to discredit Mueller and his investigations.
Mueller has kept his counsel since he testified in Congress in July last year. It was a muted affair, and many perceived Trump was emboldened in his efforts to seek assistance in his current election campaign from the Ukraine.
This led to the historic impeachment of the president, and Trump’s ultimate acquittal by the Senate earlier this year.
On Saturday Mueller wrote: “Russia’s actions were a threat to America’s democracy. It was critical that they be investigated and understood.”
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The newspaper found that the two personal injury lawyers have been in litigation with their gated neighborhood almost continually since they moved into their home in 1988, which they obtained after winning a lawsuit.
The McCloskeys filed suits over small neighborhood issues, such as accusing neighbors of breaking neighborhood rules by allowing an unmarried gay couple to live there. The McCloskeys appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court.
The couple also reportedly sued a synagogue near their home for setting up beehives on their property to harvest honey for Rosh Hashanah celebrations. Mark McCloskey allegedly smashed the beehives, and the next day the children in the synagogue cried, the congregation’s rabbi told the Post-Dispatch.
In 1996 the McCloskeys also filed two lawsuits in the same day — one against a neighborhood association, another against a dog breeder who allegedly sold them a German shepherd without documentation — saying in the deposition that he “saved gas” by only making one trip.
Over the span of two years, the McCloskeys reportedly evicted two tenants from a modular home they own. The first was a single woman with three children who they claimed had one rent check that bounced. The woman told the Post-Dispatch that she did not ever miss rent and when she showed up in court for the eviction hearing, Mark McCloskey allegedly told her she had no chance of winning, so she left.
The second tenant reportedly failed to pay rent in April and May and was served a $8,299 judgment. The Post-Dispatch noted that the same day that tenant left the rental, the McCloskeys had their encounter with protesters.
The couple made headlines after they pointed guns at a swath of Black Lives Matter demonstrators on June 28 who were en-route to Mayor Lyda Krewson‘s (D) home to call for her resignation because of comments she made during a livestreamed briefing.
On Friday, St. Louis authorities executed a search warrant of McCloskeys home, with a local news station reporting that law enforcement seized the rifle that Mark McCloskey was seen holding the day of the protests.
“My heart is full of sadness,” said San Gabriel resident Anita Chavez, 70, who calls herself a “lifetime parishioner.” “This church has been at the center of my family, my world and my faith.”
Chavez’s daughter called to tell her about the fire, and she arrived at the church’s parking lot to confirm what she feared.
Though she stood about 100 feet away, Chavez became emotional when she saw the damage and smelled the embers.
Chavez held funerals for her son Martin Jr., husband Martin Sr. and parents Virginia Quintanar and Jose Quintanar in 2011, 1992, 1999 and 1984, respectively, all at the mission.
Chavez was far from alone as parishioners, Catholic Church leaders and others came to survey the damage to the building, which is 249 years old.
Authorities received a call at 4:24 a.m. reporting that the mission’s fire alarm had gone off. When an engine arrived to investigate, firefighters saw flames and smoke coming from the corner of the mission. The cause was under investigation.
The Quintanars are buried in the nearby public San Gabriel Cemetery, adjacent to the mission chapel, along with Chavez’s grandparents.
Chavez worked as a special education assistant with the San Gabriel Unified School District and was proud to be part of a fundraising drive to help refurbish many of the now battered and destroyed pews.
“A part of the mission is gone and it will, God-willing, be replaced and new, but it will also never be the same,” she said.
Founded by Franciscan Father Junipero Serra in 1771, the San Gabriel Mission has long been seen as an essential link to California’s past, as well as to the brutality and racism on which the state was founded.
The mission system destroyed the lives of Native Californians and in recent decades has deeply tarnished the image of Serra, the architect of the system who has long been considered one of California’s founding fathers. Serra was made a saint by the Catholic Church in 2015, fueling outrage from Native American activists and others.
Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez toured the damage around 10:25 a.m., while San Gabriel Valley regional auxiliary bishop David G. O’Connell met and spoke with distressed parishioners and visitors.
“We’re all brokenhearted by this, and this adds another trauma onto the present trauma of the coronavirus and everything else that’s happening,” O’Connell said. “People love the mission, and many of these families have connections going back generations.”
Junipero Serra was declared a saint in 2015. But his role in California’s colonization via the mission system makes him a target for statue toppling.
O’Connell mentioned that on Friday mission staff had “just finished redoing all the pews and had finished redoing the walls, getting them up to their original quality.”
He was thankful that because of the refurbishment, some of the mission’s statues and artwork had been removed.
A baptismal font consisting of a hammered copper basin and silver pieces donated by Spanish King Charles III in the late 18th century also survived, according to San Gabriel Mission spokeswoman Terri Huerta.
The altar and wooden statues inside the mission also came through unscathed.
O’Connell said that despite Saturday’s fire, normal Sunday Mass will continue at the mission’s chapel, with social distancing and COVID-19 limits holding attendance to 100 people. One of the more visible groups to arrive was a branch of the Knights on Bikes, a motorcycle group affiliated with the Knights of Columbus, a self-described fraternity of “Catholic men of faith and charitable action.”
Paul Padilla, 50, came from Fontana with four other black-vested, blue-jeaned masked members.
They assessed the situation, took photos, spoke with relatives, then pulled out rosaries and prayed.
“We saw the reports on TV and had to stop by,” Padilla said. “I grew up closer to the San Fernando Mission, but I had to come out and stand with the mission today and support my Catholic faith. This place is a part of our history.”
Fellow member David Sanchez, 59, grew up in East Los Angeles and remembered field trips to the mission as a young student, while Enrique Bonilla, 39, a Pasadena resident, said he had attended many mission services.
“It’s sad this happened,” Sanchez said. “This was a place of peace for so many people.”
Times staff writers Alexandra Wigglesworth and Sonali Kohli contributed to this story.
The former special counsel Robert Mueller made a rare move on Saturday to publicly defend his two-year investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election – and to castigate US president Donald Trump’s decision to commute Roger Stone’s prison sentence.
Mueller wrote an opinion article for the Washington Post published under the headline “Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence is an unforgivable betrayal of his office”.
“The work of the special counsel’s office – its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions – should speak for itself,” he wrote.
“But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office …
“Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
Trump commuted the sentence of Stone on Friday night, sparking outrage from Democrats and some senior Republicans.
Stone was a former campaign adviser to the president, convicted in November 2019 of seven crimes including obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering.
The 2017-19 Mueller investigation uncovered evidence of communications between Stone and WikiLeaks related to the release of hacked Democratic party emails during the 2016 election, discovered in a separate inquiry into Russian intelligence officers charged with hacking the emails and staging their release.
The partially released Mueller report in April 2019 described Russian efforts to tamper with the election andthe Trump campaign’s receptivity tocertain “Russian offers of assistance to the campaign”.
It outlined actions by Trump that may have amounted to obstruction of justice and concluded: “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Mueller also concluded he did not have the power to charge Trump even if he thought it was warranted.
Mueller wrote: “The special counsel’s office identified two principal operations directed at our election: hacking and dumping Clinton campaign emails, and an online social media campaign to disparage the Democratic candidate.
“We also identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel – Stone among them. We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government …
“The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. [And] that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Trump has repeatedly attempted to discredit Mueller and his investigations.
Mueller has kept his counsel since he testified in Congress in July last year. It was a muted affair, and many perceived Trump was emboldened in his efforts to seek assistance in his current election campaign from the Ukraine.
This led to the historic impeachment of the president, and Trump’s ultimate acquittal by the Senate earlier this year.
Mueller wrote: “Russia’s actions were a threat to America’s democracy. It was critical that they be investigated and understood.”
“I think when you’re in a hospital, especially in that particular setting where you’re talking to a lot of soldiers and people that in some cases just got off the operating table, I think it’s a great thing to wear a mask,” Trump said. “I’ve never been against masks but I do believe they have a time and a place.”
Trump has resisted wearing a mask in the past. During a May visit to a Ford plant in Michigan, the president was seen on the factory floor without a mask despite state law and company policy requiring a face covering. Ford issued a statement saying Trump wore a mask during a private meeting at the plant but later took it off.
The Trump administration has resisted calls for the federal government to require Americans to wear masks during the pandemic. Vice President Mike Pence told CNBC he doesn’t believe there’s a need for a national mandate, despite the surge of coronavirus cases across the American South and West. Pence said in some parts of the country people can maintain a safe social distance.
President Trump on Friday pledged to sign an executive order creating a “road to citizenship” for “Dreamer” immigrants — although a press secretary later backpedaled on the plan and some experts say he’s not authorized to do so.
Trump told Telemundo anchor Jose Diaz-Balart that the order would lead to citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients.
“One of the aspects of the [order] is going to be DACA. We are going to have a road to citizenship,” Trump said.
But immigration experts and his fellow Republicans said Trump would have to go through Congress for such a sweeping immigration policy.
“There is ZERO constitutional authority for a President to create a ‘road to citizenship’ by executive fiat,” tweeted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
“It was unconstitutional when Obama issued executive amnesty, and it would be a HUGE mistake if Trump tries to illegally expand amnesty.”
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere later released a statement saying “As the President announced today, he is working on an executive order to establish a merit-based immigration system to further protect U.S. workers.”
The statement, added, “Furthermore, the President has long said he is willing to work with Congress on a negotiated legislative solution to DACA, one that could include citizenship, along with strong border security and permanent merit-based reforms.
Nearly 135,000 people have died in the U.S. since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins data.
The surge in coronavirus cases is straining hospitals in Florida, Texas and Arizona, where ICU beds in some areas are reaching capacity. In Houston, the Texas Tribune reported some hospitals are turning away emergency responders as beds fill up with coronavirus patients.
California, Texas and Florida have reimposed some restrictions on bars and indoor dining as cases surged in recent weeks, though governors have stopped short of ordering new stay-at-home orders introduced earlier in the pandemic.
Florida’s Walt Disney World reopened its parks this week despite concerns from staff and health experts. The Sunshine State is also pressing on with its plan to host the GOP convention in Jacksonville, though Gov. Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally, on Tuesday refused to say whether he would lift restrictions on indoor gatherings. The Washington Post reported Thursday that Republicans are considering holding the event outdoors. Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to meet with RNC officials in Jacksonville on Saturday.
The nationwide coronavirus spike has sparked a battle over plans to reopen schools this fall. President Donald Trump is pushing for full reopenings, threatening to withhold federal government funding from schools that don’t completely reopen.
WASHINGTON – Weeks before President Donald Trump accepts his party’s nomination, cracks are deepening within the party as a host of GOP lawmakers distance themselves from the Republican standard bearer as they weigh their election chances in November.
It’s a rare moment in the president’s three-and-a-half-year tenure, during which Trump otherwise relished inparty unity on issues such as his impeachment and former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“There’s a real disagreement between the president and his party in this election,” said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist and former aide to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “I think a lot of Republicans are really fed up with the president’s divisive strategy. People are just throwing up their hands with some of the rhetoric that’s coming out of the president. It’s really unhelpful not just to his own re-election, but also to keeping the Senate.”
Earlier this week, several GOP lawmakers said they plan to skip the party’s national convention in Jacksonville, Florida, where coronavirus cases have surged, leaving supporters, politicians and officials who plan to attend with the hard choice of risking their personal health or facing potential retaliation from the president.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the oldest GOP senator at age 86, said Monday he would avoid the convention “because of the virus situation,” while Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, also cited coronavirus concerns as the reason they won’t attend.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the convention a “challenging situation” when asked whether he plans to attend.
“We’ll have to wait and see how things look in late August to determine whether or not we can safely convene with that many people,” he said Thursday.
The Trump campaign had hoped to test those waters this weekend with a campaign rally at a New Hampshire airport hangar, but the campaign announced it would postpone the rally over the approaching Tropical Storm Fay, according to White House officials. The campaign snag comes after turnout at a June rally held inside an Oklahoma arena fell short of expectations amid an increase in COVID-19 cases across the state. Tulsa health officials said Wednesday that the rally and surrounding protests likely contributed to the city’s recent surge in cases.
New Hampshire’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu is another GOP politician who has been willing to break with the president over his pandemic messaging when it collides with his state’s interests. Sununu has had to walk a careful line in defending the president’s rally while enforcing his own reopening guidelines. The Republican governor had planned to greet Trump in New Hampshire, but skip the rally over coronavirus fears.
The Republican party moved its convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, last month after state and local officials refused to commit to the president’s desire to hold a full convention, packed with thousands of supporters, over health concerns amid the ongoing pandemic.
But aside from coronavirus concerns, the Republican convention may have lost its luster for some lawmakers, according to GOP strategist Matt Gorman.
“For a lot of these elected officials, it’s a chance to go there for fundraising and press attention,” he said. “And if a lot of media folks are not planning to go and a lot of donors choose not to go because in-person fundraising is a bit less prevalent, then there’s not much incentive to show up.”
Gorman said he doesn’t think the list of senators avoiding the convention will draw the president’s ire, noting that several lawmakers skipped the event in 2016 in protest – including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., now a key Trump ally.
The president has since softened his tone about holding a traditional convention, telling television host Greta Van Susteren this week that “it really depends on timing.”
“We can do a lot of things, but we’re very flexible,” he said of convention plans.
Jacksonville has emerged as one of the nation’s biggest hotspots for the coronavirus. The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday Jacksonville would be one of three cities designated for a testing “surge” to make more tests available in the hardest hit areas.
The administration’s mounting controversies have pushed even Republicans who previously refused to break ranks with Trump to begin speaking out – most notably as it relates to the dramatic uptick in coronavirus cases in the U.S.
They have been vocal in their opposition to his refusal to wear a mask, pressuring the administration for increased testing and, most recently, some have criticized Trump for pulling out of the World Health Organization as the pandemic continues to ravage the country.
“I disagree with the president’s decision,” Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, said after the president pulled the U.S. from WHO, noting that while mistakes of the WHO should be examined, “the time to do that is after the crisis has been dealt with, not in the middle of it. Withdrawing U.S. membership could, among other things, interfere with clinical trials that are essential to the development of vaccines.”
Even some of the president’s closest allies on Capitol Hill in recent weeks have been critical as Trump’s poll numbers, already hit by the pandemic, continue to plummet amid a national reckoning over policing, race and America’s Confederate history.
Aides and allies have urged the president to change his tone as the nation both grieves the death of George Floyd after he was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, and protesters call for change to racially fraught policies. The president has instead stoked division, threatening to use the military against demonstrators and using Independence Day speeches to defend Confederate monuments and dismiss protesters as “Marxists.”
“The country is looking for healing and calm. And I think the president needs to project that in his tone,” said Sen. John Thune, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican. “He masters that sometimes, and that’s the tone he needs to strike right now.”
Trump’s handling of the protests even led to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, leaving the door open to voting against the president in November. “I am struggling with it,” she said when asked by reporters whether she would continue to support Trump. “I have struggled with it for a long time.”
Trump has drawn the ire of even of his most ardent supporters with his some of his racially polarizing comments.
Most recently, after Trump criticized NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag and called for Bubba Wallace, one of the sport’s only Black drivers, to apologize after the FBI said a noose found in his garage wasn’t targeting the driver, Graham, a fierce defender of the president, pushed back.
“I don’t think Bubba Wallace has anything to apologize for,” Graham told Fox News Radio. “I’ve lived in South Carolina all my life and if you’re in business, the Confederate flag is not a good way to grow your business.”
Senate Republicans have largely ignored the president’s threat to veto a defense spending bill over an amendment to rename Army bases named for Confederate figures. The proposal, sponsored by former 2020 Democratic contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has gained a groundswell of support from prominent Republicans, including Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who warned earlier this week that Congress would “probably override” Trump’s veto.
While the president has drawn a line on removing memorials honoring Confederate leaders and controversial historical figures, Republican attitudes appeared to have shifted since protests over racial inequality first unfolded in May.
McConnell said last month he’d be “OK” with changing the names of military bases while Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican facing a tough re-election in November, supported the amendment in a U.S. Armed Services Committee vote last month.
“There shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction to renaming bases,” Grassley said Monday. “And I imagine that in my lifetime, there’s been a lot of bases that have had their names changed. I’m not aware of it. But the extent to which it’s a thoughtful process and not a knee-jerk reaction, I wouldn’t have any objection to it.”
Trump has issued eight vetoes during his presidency, and none have been overridden by Congress.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy., has made a habit of marking her differences with the president over his term, especially when it comes to foreign policy, and has continued to speak up throughout the latest controversies. After the president refused to wear a face mask in public, Cheney tweeted a photo of her father Dick Cheney in a mask with the hashtag #realmenwearmasks.
Republicans like Cheney know the risks of speaking out and the potential for a lashing from the president’s Twitter account. But history has shown the president is less likely to go after loyal lawmakers who disagree with him on occasion, as he typically targets those who attack him personally or could imperil his re-election chances, such as those who have voiced openness to voting against him or weren’t unilaterally behind him during his impeachment.
“My sense is that Trump is fine with Republicans criticizing his policy, even his tweets, but he’s not OK with them attacking him,” said Conant.
Congressional Republicans say the critiques of the president aren’t part of a trend but more of a reaction to specific instances worthy of criticism, rejecting the notion that it’s a showing of division within the party but rather an attempt to get the president back on track and on message. Though privately, many wonder whether public criticisms will alter the president’s conduct.
Trump’s propensity for fiery Twitter missives has been notably absent amid the wave of GOP criticism. Part of that calculation may be focusing attacks on Democrats with just four months until Election Day, Gorman said.
“I think not just him, but also his team, know that the people we need to be going after right now are Democrats and he has been pretty consistent with that,” he said. “So I think there is a calculation that Republicans doing well down ballot helps him and vice versa.”
Republicans keeping Trump at an arm’s distance must also reckon with his dwindling poll numbers as November approaches.
A recent USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll found that opposition to Trump is by far the biggest factor propelling Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to the White House. Biden leads Trump by 12 percentage points, 53%-41%, the nationwide survey shows.
Polls have similarly not been good for Senate Republicans, who hold a three-seat majority and are fending off serious challenges in more than five states. A slew of recent polls show Democrats leading in Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado and Montana, which has left incumbents in an uncomfortable position as they wrestle with the barrage of controversies surrounding the president.
Incumbents have employed varying strategies, some tying their fate to Trump while others distance themselves from the president – a heavy feat as he sits atop the ticket.
Several have attempted to steer clear of weighing in on the president’s conduct while others, such as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, have repeatedly criticized the president in recent weeks, including Trump’s clearing of protesters outside the White House in early June.
Still, some Republicans acknowledge that Trump is a political unicorn and while his tactics are far from traditional and frequently attract fierce criticism, he has weathered many storms – a trend that could continue as November nears.
“Every time I think that he’s miscalculated, he comes out on the winning side of it,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., told the Wall Street Journal when asked about the president’s rhetoric on Confederate history. “The thing the president is credited with, appropriately, is really good instincts.”
“My heart is full of sadness,” said San Gabriel resident Anita Chavez, 70, who calls herself a “lifetime parishioner.” “This church has been at the center of my family, my world and my faith.”
Chavez’s daughter called to tell her about the fire, and she arrived at the church’s parking lot to confirm what she feared.
Though she stood about 100 feet away, Chavez became emotional when she saw the damage and smelled the embers.
Chavez held funerals for her son Martin Jr., her husband Martin Sr., parents Virginia Quintanar and Jose Quintanar in 2011, 1992, 1999 and 1984, respectively, all at the mission.
Chavez was far from alone as parishioners, Catholic Church leaders and others came to survey the damage to the 215-year-old building. Authorities received a call at 4:24 a.m. reporting that the mission’s fire alarm had gone off. When an engine arrived to investigate, firefighters saw flames and smoke coming from the corner of the mission. The cause was under investigation.
The Quintanars are buried in the nearby public San Gabriel Cemetery, adjacent to the mission chapel, along with Chavez’s grandparents.
Chavez worked as a special education assistant with the San Gabriel Unified School District and was proud to be part of a fundraising drive to help refurbish many of the now battered and destroyed pews.
“A part of the mission is gone and it will, God-willing, be replaced and new, but it will also never be the same,” she said.
Founded by Franciscan Father Junipero Serra in 1771, the San Gabriel Mission has long been seen as an essential link to California’s past, as well as to the brutality and racism on which the state was founded.
The mission system destroyed the lives of Native Californians and in recent decades has deeply tarnished the image of Serra, the architect of the system who has long been considered one of California’s founding fathers. Serra was made a saint by the Catholic Church in 2015, fueling outrage from many Native American activists and others.
Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez toured the damage around 10:25 a.m., while San Gabriel Valley regional auxiliary bishop David G. O’Connell met and spoke with distressed parishioners and visitors.
“We’re all brokenhearted by this, and this adds another trauma onto the present trauma of the coronavirus and everything else that’s happening,” O’Connell said. “People love the mission and many of these families have connections going back generations.”
O’Connell mentioned that on Friday mission staff had “just finished redoing all the pews and had finished redoing the walls, getting them up to their original quality.”
He was thankful that because of the refurbishment, some of the mission’s statues and artwork had been removed.
A baptismal font consisting of a hammered copper basin and silver pieces donated by Spanish King Charles III in the late 18th century also survived, according to San Gabriel Mission spokeswoman Terri Huerta.
The altar and wooden statues inside the mission also came through unscathed.
O’Connell said that despite Saturday’s fire, normal Sunday Mass will continue at the mission’s chapel, with social distancing and COVID-19 limits holding attendance to 100 people. One of the more visible groups to arrive was a branch of the Knights on Bikes, a motorcycle group affiliated with the Knights of Columbus, a self-described fraternity of “Catholic men of faith and charitable action.”
Paul Padilla, 50, came from Fontana with four other black-vested, blue-jeaned masked members.
They assessed the situation, took photos, spoke with relatives, then pulled out rosaries and prayed.
“We saw the reports on TV and had to stop by,” Padilla said. “I grew up closer to the San Fernando Mission, but I had to come out and stand with the mission today and support my Catholic faith. This place is a part of our history.”
Fellow member David Sanchez, 59, grew up in East Los Angeles and remembered field trips to the mission as a young student, while Enrique Bonilla, 39, a Pasadena resident, said he had attended many mission services.
“It’s sad this happened,” Sanchez said. “This was a place of peace for so many people.”
Times staff writers Alexandra Wigglesworth and Sonali Kohli contributed to this story.
A nearly 250-year-old mission that has was the inspiration for some early movie projects has been extensively damaged in an early morning fire on Saturday.
The Mission San Gabriel, which was founded in 1771 and contained artifacts dating to that era, caught fire for unknown reasons. Its roof was demolished and interior damage was seen in photos No injuries were reported.
Built with stone, brick and mortar, it’s considered one of the best preserved Missions in California. However, its founder, Franciscan priest Junipero Serra, has come under criticism for his mistreatment of Native Americans. Statues of him were among those toppled during recent protests for social justice.
The mission was the scene of many documentary films over the years and appeared in several early silent films.
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