Noticias Do Dia

President Trump on Friday night slammed a BuzzFeed News report, which alleges the president has been implicated in a crime, saying its release marked a “very sad day for journalism” after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team released a rare statement claiming the outlet got its facts wrong.

Trump went to Twitter to remind his 57.5 million followers that BuzzFeed, an outlet he once called a “failing pile of garbage,” once also published the unverified and salacious dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele that was used to justify the FISA surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a former campaign adviser to then-candidate Trump.

BUZZFEED ROCKS MEDIA INDUSTRY AFTER MUELLER TEAM DISPUTES REPORT: ‘MEDIA ERRORS ARE ALWAYS ANTI-TRUMP’

“Remember it was Buzzfeed that released the totally discredited ‘Dossier,’ paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (as opposition research), on which the entire Russian probe is based!” he tweeted. “A very sad day for journalism, but a great day for our Country!”

Trump’s comments came after Mueller’s team detoured from its “no comment” media strategy and released a statement refuting the BuzzFeed story, which alleged that Trump instructed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about real estate deals in Russia.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement Friday.

But while the language of the denial was tepid, Mueller’s rare statement suggested that none of the assertions in the BuzzFeed story are correct, the Washington Post reported.

MUELLER TEAM DISPUTES BUZZFEED REPORT CLAIMING TRUMP TOLD COHEN TO LIE

The BuzzFeed report, based on two anonymous sources, claims that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress about a Trump Tower project in Moscow during the 2016 presidential election.

BuzzFeed also claims Mueller learned of the instructions to lie to Congress from “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.”

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, also issued a rare statement of praise of the Mueller team for refuting the story and suggested the Department of Justice should go after the leakers of the false information.

“Now the DOJ must reveal the leakers of this false BuzzFeed story which the press and Democrats gleefully embraced. And maybe House Dems should wait to investigate until the Mueller report is filed. 4 have started already. There may be nothing to legitimately investigate,” he wrote in a tweet.

“I commend Bob Mueller’s office for correcting the BuzzFeed false story that Pres. Trump encouraged Cohen to lie,” Giuliani added. “I ask the press to take heed that their hysterical desire to destroy this President has gone too far. They pursued this without critical analysis all day.”

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BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, issued a statement reiterating that the outlet stands “by our reporting and the sources who informed it” and urged the special counsel “to make clear what he’s disputing.”

Fox News’ Alex Pappas, Brooke Singman, Jake Gibson contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-blasts-buzzfeed-over-botched-report-alleging-he-told-cohen-to-lie

Officials warn of flight disruptions

Officials have warned of flight disruptions at airports, as well as possible changes in train schedules.

By Saturday morning, 1,135 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were canceled for Saturday, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.

Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport reported that airlines there canceled nearly 470 flights “due to overnight snow and strong winds expected throughout the day.” It advised travelers to get updates from airlines.

Amtrak canceled some trains Saturday from Chicago to Washington and New York and between New York and Boston and Pennsylvania on Sunday.

Chicago is forecast to receive as much as 8 inches by Saturday and wind gusts in the Chicago area are expected to reach 35 mph.

Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/winter-storm-haper-2019-state-emergency-snow-storm-warning-latest-weather-forecast-updates-today/

“I heard them saying ‘build that wall, build that wall,’” Phillips said while wiping away tears. “This is indigenous land, you’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did for a millennia. We never had a prison; we always took care of our elders, took care of our children, always provided for them, taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see that energy … put that energy to making this country really, really great.”

Source Article from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/maga-hat-wearing-teens-seeing-harassing-native-american-vietnam-veteran_us_5c435a09e4b0a8dbe171e2c6

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump will propose an immigration deal on Saturday in a bid to end a 29-day partial government shutdown, a source familiar with his plans said, but as details emerged Democrats were quick to dismiss it as inadequate.

The president has not budged on his demand that $5.7 billion to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall be part of any bill to fully reopen the government, an ultimatum Democrats oppose. But Trump is expected to try to pressure Democrats in other areas.

In a speech scheduled for 4 p.m. EST (2100 GMT), Trump will extend support for legislation to protect young undocumented immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” as well as holders of temporary protected status (TPS), the source said, confirming a report by Axios.

Vice President Mike Pence, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a White House aide, helped craft the offer, the source said.

A Democratic aide said Democrats were not consulted on the proposal and have previously rejected similar overtures.

“It’s clearly a non-serious product of negotiations amongst [White House] staff to try to clean up messes the president created in the first place,” the aide said. “He’s holding more people hostage for his wall.”

The source familiar with the speech said Trump does not plan to declare a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border, a step he threatened to take earlier in his struggle with Congress over the shutdown triggered by his wall-funding demand.

Declaring an emergency would be an attempt by Trump to circumvent Congress and its power over the federal purse strings to pay for his wall. Such a step would likely prompt a swift legal challenge over constitutional powers from Democrats.

As the shutdown passed the four-week mark, making it the longest in U.S. history, about 800,000 federal workers were still at home on furlough or working without pay, a situation that was threatening public services and the economy.

Polls showed Americans increasingly blaming Trump for the shutdown, the 19th to occur since the mid-1970s. Most past shutdowns have been brief. The current one has had no impact on three-quarters of the government, including the Department of Defense, which has secure funding.

“IT’S NOT PERSONAL”

Trump told reporters on the White House South Lawn on Saturday that he has no personal feud with House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top U.S. Democrat.

She and other Democrats oppose Trump’s demand and the wall, calling it too expensive, ineffective and immoral.

“Whether it’s personal or not, it’s not personal for me,” Trump said, adding he was concerned about more immigrants moving north through Mexico toward the U.S. border.

“I’m disappointed that Mexico is not stopping them,” he said. “If we had a wall, we wouldn’t have a problem.”

The Dreamers, mostly young Latinos, are protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects certain people who illegally entered the United States as children. It provides about 700,000 immigrants with work permits, but no path to citizenship.

Former Democratic President Barack Obama put DACA in place in 2012 through an executive order. The Trump administration announced in September 2017 it would rescind DACA, but the policy remains in effect under a court order.

Axios reported that Trump would throw his support behind the BRIDGE Act, which would provide three years of temporary legal status and work authorization for the Dreamers. The act was first proposed in 2016 by Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican close to Trump, and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is given to nationals from designated countries affected by armed conflict, natural disaster, or other strife. TPS holders are permitted to work and live in the United States for limited times.

The Trump administration has shown a deep skepticism toward the TPS program and has moved to revoke the special status for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and other nations.

Reporting by Steve Holland and Jan Wolfe; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Leslie Adler

Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-shutdown-trump/trump-to-offer-shutdown-ending-immigration-deal-still-wants-wall-money-source-idUSKCN1PD0KF

President Trump on Friday night slammed a BuzzFeed News report, which alleges the president has been implicated in a crime, saying its release marked a “very sad day for journalism” after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team released a rare statement claiming the outlet got its facts wrong.

Trump went to Twitter to remind his 57.5 million followers that BuzzFeed, an outlet he once called a “failing pile of garbage,” once also published the unverified and salacious dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele that was used to justify the FISA surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a former campaign adviser to then-candidate Trump.

BUZZFEED ROCKS MEDIA INDUSTRY AFTER MUELLER TEAM DISPUTES REPORT: ‘MEDIA ERRORS ARE ALWAYS ANTI-TRUMP’

“Remember it was Buzzfeed that released the totally discredited ‘Dossier,’ paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (as opposition research), on which the entire Russian probe is based!” he tweeted. “A very sad day for journalism, but a great day for our Country!”

Trump’s comments came after Mueller’s team detoured from its “no comment” media strategy and released a statement refuting the BuzzFeed story, which alleged that Trump instructed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about real estate deals in Russia.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement Friday.

But while the language of the denial was tepid, Mueller’s rare statement suggested that none of the assertions in the BuzzFeed story are correct, the Washington Post reported.

MUELLER TEAM DISPUTES BUZZFEED REPORT CLAIMING TRUMP TOLD COHEN TO LIE

The BuzzFeed report, based on two anonymous sources, claims that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress about a Trump Tower project in Moscow during the 2016 presidential election.

BuzzFeed also claims Mueller learned of the instructions to lie to Congress from “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.”

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, also issued a rare statement of praise of the Mueller team for refuting the story and suggested the Department of Justice should go after the leakers of the false information.

“Now the DOJ must reveal the leakers of this false BuzzFeed story which the press and Democrats gleefully embraced. And maybe House Dems should wait to investigate until the Mueller report is filed. 4 have started already. There may be nothing to legitimately investigate,” he wrote in a tweet.

“I commend Bob Mueller’s office for correcting the BuzzFeed false story that Pres. Trump encouraged Cohen to lie,” Giuliani added. “I ask the press to take heed that their hysterical desire to destroy this President has gone too far. They pursued this without critical analysis all day.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, issued a statement reiterating that the outlet stands “by our reporting and the sources who informed it” and urged the special counsel “to make clear what he’s disputing.”

Fox News’ Alex Pappas, Brooke Singman, Jake Gibson contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-blasts-buzzfeed-over-botched-report-alleging-he-told-cohen-to-lie

In a rare statement, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has said BuzzFeed’s story is inaccurate, though the outlet is pushing for clarification from Mueller on the particulars.

Source Article from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-cohen-arm_us_5c42c648e4b0bfa693c3b8cb

U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said Friday he supports President Donald Trump‘s push for a border wall that has led to a government shutdown and questioned why Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t agree to “another few miles” of barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Romney also said he plans to keep working with other senators to find interim solutions, such as legislation that would make sure essential government employees still working get paid now.

The 2012 GOP presidential nominee and new Utah senator acknowledged that it “takes two to tango” but backed Trump’s position and chided Pelosi for hers. That’s noteworthy from Romney, who despite being a Republican like Trump, has frequently criticized the president.

“You (Pelosi) and your fellow Democrats have voted for over 600 miles of border fence in the past, why won’t you vote for another few miles now?” said Romney, speaking in the northern Utah city of Ogden after visiting with county commissioners about the shutdown’s impact on the community. “I don’t understand their position, I really don’t.”

He implored the two sides to “make a deal” and end the suffering of federal workers who aren’t getting paid, suggesting Pelosi should offer a certain amount of money for the border wall and make a proposal to the president about border security. He said Trump is willing to allow participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to stay in the country.

“On policy, it strikes me like there’s not a big gap but the politics have drawn people into different corners,” Romney said.

Romney said the country deserves border security, which includes more barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border. He said there is “humanitarian pain” being suffered by people entering the country illegally and being stopped at the border.

The backing for Trump in the shutdown dual illustrates Romney’s stated goal of calling the president out when he disagrees while supporting him when he feels he’s staking out the right position.

His most recent critique of the Trump came two days before he took office in an op-ed for The Washington Post in which he said Trump’s conduct in his first two years in office had “not risen to the mantle of the office.”

Romney said he backs an idea by Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin that would enssure essential government workers who are still working, but without pay, get paid. He said the goal is to get legislation before the president.

“It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me that we ask people to work, we insist that they work, we tell them that if they don’t work they may lose their pension and may lose they their job, so they show up, but we aren’t paying them,” Romney said. “Somehow that just doesn’t seem right.”

Romney met Friday with Weber County Commissioners about the impact on the city of Ogden, home to about 5,000 federal employers who work for the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Forest Service.

About 3,750 workers IRS workers in Ogden were on furlough, though about 1,000 were called back this week to prepare for tax-filing season.

The city of 87,000 residents is about 35 miles north of Salt Lake City.

After meeting with Romney, Weber County Commissioner James H. Harvey called it a “desperate time” for federal workers and their families.

“We want those messages heard so that there will be some action,” Harvey said.

Source Article from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/romney-backs-trump-shutdown-showdown-questions-pelosi-60481920

After Canadian air traffic controllers sent their U.S. colleagues pizza amid the U.S. government shutdown last week, former President George W. Bush followed suit by hand delivering pizza for his unpaid Secret Service agents on Friday.

Bush uploaded an Instagram photo showing him greeting his employees with a handful of stacked pizza boxes.

“@LauraWBush and I are grateful to our Secret Service personnel and the thousands of Federal employees who are working hard for our country without a paycheck,” he wrote in the caption. “And we thank our fellow citizens who are supporting them.”

Bush ended his post with a call for bipartisanship. “It’s time for leaders on both sides to put politics aside, come together, and end this shutdown.”

As the shutdown enters its 29th day, some 6,000 Secret Service employees are among the 800,000 federal workers not receiving paychecks, reports The Washington Post.

Source Article from http://fortune.com/2019/01/19/bush-government-shutdown-pizza/

Like a bad movie or a Chicago winter, the horrors of our criminal justice system seem never-ending. The latest headlines prompt the question of why, after a jury found officer Jason Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery in the killing of Laquan McDonald, three of his police colleagues were found innocent yesterday of charges that they conspired to cover up his misdeeds.

Like most of you, I wasn’t in the courtroom and didn’t follow the cover-up case blow by blow.  Maybe there’s some detail or nuance I’m missing.

But from my vantage, it looks like both the jury in the Van Dyke case and Cook County Circuit Court Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson reached utterly different conclusions about what to believe, even though both reviewed basically the same evidence. So, why? Did the jury get bamboozled? Or is it that Judge Stephenson, a former prosecutor, viewed everything through the lens of a tough-on-crime cop?

I’d like to think it’s not the latter. But it sure looks like the judge, who didn’t return my phone call, essentially bought the line that any policeman anywhere can shoot you dead and ask questions later if you don’t instantly follow orders and throw yourself to the ground. After all, that cellphone in your hand could be a revolver, especially if you’re not an old white guy like me but a black guy in dreads or a Latino with tattoos.

Actually, in this case, it goes further than that. According to mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor who later headed the city’s Police Board, Stephenson and the key defense attorney in the cover-up case worked closely with each other in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office earlier in their careers, a fact that was not known to prosecutors until just before the case went to trial.

Had they known earlier, the special prosecutors handling the case could have asked the judge to recuse herself, Lightfoot says. Or the judge could have come to that realization herself. But it didn’t happen. It’s the latest in a series of high-stakes trials in recent years in which judges, who perhaps don’t want to rile politically powerful police unions, tend to let police off the hook, however strong the evidence.

There’s been lots of contentious debate lately about what’s needed to finally fix our criminal justice system. And some good things are happening, so don’t lose hope. The terms of a federal court consent decree laying out specific improvements are all but hammered out. More time, effort and money are going into better training police. Steps are being taken to extend special help to officers, who literally put their lives on the line, in the event the job becomes too much.

But almost nothing has been said about fixing the broken system in which we select the final arbiters of justice: judges. Instead, we stick with a ridiculous election system in which we all troop to the polls every couple of years to elect or retain dozens of officials whose performance we’re in no position to evaluate. We have no firsthand knowledge of who we’re voting for, so we rely on others to make the choice, and that almost always results in political insiders controlling the outcome—insiders such as Ald. Edward Burke. In case you’ve forgotten, he’s in charge of Democratic organization slating for judges, and those candidates almost always win.

The current system “is a total joke,” says Lightfoot, and she’s absolutely right. Stephenson hasn’t yet faced voters, since she was appointed by other judges to fill a vacancy—a process that’s is even less transparent than meaningless elections.

So, amid this mayoral race, let’s have some renewed discussion about “merit selection” of judges, with appointments made based on recommendations by panels of experts who are far more qualified to make a choice than a voter buttonholed by a precinct captain. 

Will that be perfect?  No, but that’s the way it works in most states.   

Is there a risk big law firms will dominate the process and leave out minorities? Absolutely. But tell me you have any faith at all in the current system.

For Chicago’s policing system to work, we need police to be accountable and held to the highest standards, and we need a civilian population that trusts and works with them to fight crime. We also need judges who know what they’re doing and are held to equally high standards of accountability.

Let’s have that conversation.

Source Article from https://www.chicagobusiness.com/greg-hinz-politics/its-time-talk-about-way-we-choose-judges

Margaret Hoover asked members of the Women’s March leadership the question that no journalist dared ask them for more than two years now: Does Israel have a right to exist?

Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory, fresh off an appearance on “The View” in which she refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism spewed by Louis Farrakhan, joined the “Firing Line” host on Thursday night. Naturally, the conversation turned to the scandal that has engulfed the Women’s March in recent weeks.

Hoover asked Mallory if Jews, who have had a presence in Israel for the past 3,000 years, are native to the region.

“I understand the history that there are people who have a number of sort of ideologies around why the Jewish people feel this should be their land,” Mallory said. “I’m not Jewish. So, for me to speak to that is not fair.”

The rest of the exchange is worth reading in full.

HOOVER: If you’re willing to say that the Palestinians are native but not the Jews are native, I mean you’re not Palestinian either.

MALLORY: Because I’m speaking of the people who we know are being brutally oppressed in this moment. That’s just the reality.

HOOVER: Is it your view that Israel has a right to exist as a nation?

MALLORY: I have said many times that I feel everyone has a right to exist. I feel everyone has a right to exist. I just don’t feel that anyone has a right to exist at the disposal of another group.

HOOVER: In your view, does that include Israelies in Israel?

MALLORY: I believe that all people have the right to exist. And that the Palestinians are also suffering with a great crisis. And that there are other Jewish scholars who will sit here and say the same. I’m done talking about this. You can move on.

Every single reporter in the county ought to study this exchange and take note. This is journalistic bravery — running into a burning building to salvage the truth and bring it to light, so to speak. Just as reporters have nailed Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, with specific questions to prove his belief in white supremacy, journalists must use their power to expose anti-Semitism veiled under intersectionality. And that starts with the question of Israel’s existence.

To be clear, criticizing the policies, actions, or methods of the Israeli government is not racist or anti-Semitic. Supporting a two-state solution is not racist. Advocating for the humanity of Palestinians is not racist.

But the logical conclusion of a call for the eradication of Israel, the sole and historic state of nearly half of the world’s Jewish people, necessarily implies the genocide or ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews. Especially as Jews have been forced to flee the increasingly anti-Semitic Western world for their ancestral homeland, calls to eradicate Israel are a call to arms against its people.

Mallory’s devotions of Farrakhan and Jew-killing terrorist Rasmea Odeh were red flags enough, just as King’s continued dog-whistling toward neo-Confederates and white nationalists should have led to more conservative concern over the obvious. But with Hoover’s line of questioning, Mallory just lost whatever scraps of plausible deniability that remained.

Consider this: A sitting member of Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., is now openly embracing the eradication of Israel, while progressives tout her as the next best thing since Beto O’Rourke. In this context, it is incumbent upon journalists to ask an increasingly anti-Semitic faction of the progressive Left these sorts of questions.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., took to USA Today to excoriate the Women’s March, emphatically denouncing its leadership as “peddlers of hate.” It was the bold sort of declaration that should have accompanied the Democratic National Committee’s decision to withdraw from the March, and one that all Democrats who still claim to be liberal and stand up for Jews must emulate.

When Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., claimed total ignorance this week as to why Jewish-Americans would be offended by her classic anti-Semitic tropes, she faced zero pushback from reporters Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto. They should have followed Hoover’s lead to get the real story.

Furthermore, it’s telling that outside of a handful of reporters such as CNN’s Jake Tapper who have asked Women’s March leaders about their unsavory associations, the figures driving the push against this racism masked as progressivism haven’t been reporters at all. Why is Meghan McCain among the first to hold these haters accountable, when the reporters covering them have ample opportunity to ask questions?

For all that President Trump enjoys dunking on media coverage that he doesn’t like as “fake news,” the Fourth Estate is a vital organ in the body of democracy. The refusal to ask tough questions and bring bigotry into the national spotlight is an abdication of that responsibility, and one that should be condemned.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/follow-margaret-hoover-and-meghan-mccain-start-asking-real-questions-about-womens-march-anti-semitism

January 19 at 10:13 AM

President Trump is preparing to make a new offer to Democrats that could end the record-breaking government shutdown in a rare Saturday address from the White House, while stopping short of declaring a national emergency on the southern border.

With the shutdown in its 29th day, Trump was expected to propose items he believes Democrats favor as part of a broader border-security package, according to two people familiar with White House planning. The hope is the proposal would revive negotiations with congressional Democrats, which have been nonexistent for days.

Although the president has threatened for more than a week to declare a national emergency, such a drastic step was unlikely to occur in Saturday’s address.

The individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, stressed late Friday that the planning remained very fluid and that nothing is firm until Trump makes his announcement.

Trump is scheduled to speak at 3 p.m.

Aides to the top Democrats in Congress — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — said late Friday that they had received no new offer from the White House.

The ongoing shutdown of some 25 percent of the federal government was triggered by Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion to build more than 200 miles of new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Pelosi calls the wall “immoral,” and Democrats are refusing to offer more than $1.3 billion to extend existing funding levels for border barriers and fences. Democrats also frequently point out that Trump long claimed Mexico would pay for the wall.

Absent negotiations, the impasse has devolved into bickering between Trump and Pelosi, offering little comfort to the 800,000 federal workers who have gone without pay since Dec. 22 and have been forced to rely on food banks or other jobs.

A proxy battle — a political clash like few others — emerged over the past week between the leaders of two of the nation’s three branches of government as they leveraged the powers of their offices against one another, all the while trying to shape public sentiment.

Pelosi suggested this past week that Trump reschedule his Jan. 29 State of the Union address on Capitol Hill due to security concerns stemming from the nearly month-long partial government shutdown. He retaliated with a last-minute cancellation of her trip with other House members to Afghanistan using a military aircraft.

The fight escalated on Friday as Pelosi accused Trump of putting herself and fellow lawmakers in danger by publicizing their plans to travel to Afghanistan, forcing them to abandon the trip. Pelosi said the State Department had determined that the trip, even using commercial aircraft, could no longer be made without endangering the safety of lawmakers, as well as of troops and support personnel due to the president’s actions.

“You never give advance notice of going into a battle area — you just never do it,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters at the Capitol. “Perhaps the president’s inexperience didn’t have him understand that protocol. The people around him, though, should have known that, because that’s very dangerous.”

The White House has forcefully denied Pelosi’s claims.

Meanwhile, the furloughed workers and those forced to work without pay will soon miss another paycheck unless the shutdown is somehow resolved, a fact that White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday made it imperative for Pelosi to stay in the country this weekend.

“That’s one of the key reasons that the president did not want Speaker Pelosi to leave the country, is because if she did it would all but guarantee the fact that negotiations couldn’t take place over the weekend,” Sanders told reporters at the White House.

But Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, said the White House had not sought to schedule negotiations with the speaker for this weekend.

The impacts from the shutdown have spiraled in various directions despite efforts by the administration to limit them by calling workers at agencies including the IRS and State Department back to work, in most cases without pay.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams on Friday said the shutdown had created “head winds” to economic growth, and a key measurement of consumer confidence — released by the University of Michigan — has fallen to its lowest level of Trump’s presidency.

The administration moved forward Friday with a broader crackdown on congressional travel: Acting White House Budget Director Russell T. Vought said in a memo, “Under no circumstances during a government shutdown will any government owned, rented, leased, or chartered aircraft support any congressional delegation, without the express written approval of the White House Chief of Staff.”

The White House and Democrats are in agreement on the need for border security generally and even on some specifics of what that would entail — just not on the wall.

Next week the House will take up another batch of spending bills aimed at reopening the government without funding the wall that will include some spending directed to the border. One bill will include $563 million for immigration judges, the same figure Trump has requested; another will include $524 million to expand facilities at ports of entry along the border.

Philip Rucker, Paul Kane, Damian Paletta and Erica Werner contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/trump-to-make-new-offer-to-democrats-as-government-shutdown-drags-on/2019/01/19/2cde029e-1bf3-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office on Friday issued an extraordinary statement disputing a bombshell news report that claimed President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie about the timing of discussions over a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office, said.

TRUMP ATTORNEY DISMISSES REPORT ALLEGING PRESIDENT TOLD COHEN TO LIE TO CONGRESS

The statement is remarkable in that Mueller’s team rarely issues statements in response to news stories. But BuzzFeed’s story sparked immense interest from Democrats, who called for renewed investigations and even suggested the allegations could be a basis for impeachment proceedings.

Buzzfeed’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith tweeted after the release of the statement Friday: “In response to the statement tonight from the Special Counsel’s spokesman: We stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the Special Counsel to make clear what he’s disputing.”

The statement reiterated an earlier tweet from the Buzzfeed PR Twitter account, which said the publication “stands by this story 100%.”

“Remember it was Buzzfeed that released the totally discredited ‘Dossier,’ paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (as opposition research), on which the entire Russian probe is based,” Trump late Friday night. “A very sad day for journalism, but a great day for our Country!”

In a story published Thursday, BuzzFeed cited two unnamed federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation on the matter who said Cohen acknowledged to Mueller’s office that he was instructed by Trump in 2017 to lie to Congress about the now-abandoned real estate deal to build a Trump Tower in Russia.

The report said Mueller’s office first learned of the directive from interviews with witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company email, text messages and documents.

The report, which was not been confirmed by Fox News, was immediately dismissed by President Trump’s legal team.

“Any suggestion – from any source – that the president counseled Michael Cohen to lie is categorically false. Michael Cohen is a convicted criminal and a liar,” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said. “… Today’s claims are just more made-up lies born of Michael Cohen’s malice and desperation, in an effort to reduce his sentence.”

After the special counsel’s statement on Friday, Giuliani praised Mueller’s team “for correcting the BuzzFeed false story.”

“I ask the press to take heed that their hysterical desire to destroy this President has gone too far,” he wrote in a tweet. “They pursued this without critical analysis all day.”

Earlier Friday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., whose committee is already investigating the president and his ties to Russia, called the allegations in the report “the most serious to date.”

“The allegation that the president of the United States may have suborned perjury before our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings with Russia is among the most serious to date,” Schiff said in a statement. “We will do what’s necessary to find out if it’s true.”

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said the House should begin to “establish a record” of whether Trump “committed high crimes,” repeatedly hinting on Twitter at the potential for impeachment proceedings.

“Based on the Buzzfeed report and numerous other articles showing @realDonaldTrump committed Obstruction of Justice and other possible felonies, it is time for the House Judiciary Committee to start holding hearings to establish a record of whether @POTUS committed high crimes,” Lieu tweeted.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, called for Trump to leave office or face impeachment if the report is accurate.

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“If the @BuzzFeed story is true, President Trump must resign or be impeached,” he said.

The BuzzFeed report claimed Trump directed Cohen to lie in his congressional testimony, though according to court documents and the statements Cohen made publicly, he has acknowledged that his actions were taken out of “loyalty” to the president.

In November, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump real estate project in Russia as part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates in the 2016 presidential election.

Cohen entered into a plea deal with the special counsel to cooperate on “any and all matters” deemed relevant. The maximum prison sentence for Cohen is five years, plus fines of up to $250,000.

In court in November, after entering his plea, Cohen acknowledged his work for Trump as counsel and adviser.

In a separate case brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws by helping orchestrate payments to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film star Stormy Daniels in exchange for their silence about alleged sexual encounters with the president years before he took office. Prosecutors and Cohen himself said the former Trump fixer orchestrated those payments at Trump’s direction.

Cohen is slated to appear for public testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 7.

Fox News’ Jake Gibson and Elizabeth Zwirz contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mueller-team-disputes-buzzfeed-report-claiming-trump-told-cohen-to-lie

As soon as I read the explosive BuzzFeed News report alleging there was evidence that President Trump had directed his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, I was very suspicious.

Even before the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a statement Friday night saying that the BuzzFeed account was “not accurate,” I wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News raising questions about whether there was actually credible evidence that Trump suborned perjury or obstructed justice by telling Cohen to lie to lawmakers.

It seemed obvious that there were no smoking gun emails containing any such direction from the president. Nor would there be eyewitnesses to any such alleged conversation.

BUZZFEED ROCKS MEDIA INDUSTRY AFTER MUELLER TEAM DISPUTES REPORT: ‘MEDIA ERRORS ARE ALWAYS ANTI-TRUMP

Unlike the obstruction of justice case that led to articles of impeachment being drafted against President Nixon and his resignation – where tape recordings proved criminal conduct by Nixon – the accusations against President Trump would have to rely on the credibility of Cohen, who has a long history of lying and little if any credibility.

In fact, Cohen was sentenced in federal court in December to three years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to Congress, campaign finance violations and financial crimes.

President Trump’s spokeswoman and his lawyers strongly disputed the BuzzFeed report, which was published Thursday, even before the statement from Mueller’s spokesman knocking down the story.

“Two words sum it up better than anything anybody else can say, and that is ‘categorically false,’” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday.

The anti-Trump pundits have been wrong so often that the only people who persist in believing them are Trump opponents who dream of seeing him forced out of office and maybe even winding up in prison.

That was followed by the Friday night statement of Mueller spokesman Peter Carr, who said: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”

But despite the obvious weakness of the BuzzFeed report, many members of the “get Trump at any cost” brigade were busy digging Trump’s political grave and getting ready to dance on it soon after the BuzzFeed report became the focus of massive news coverage.

Prominent congressional Democrats speculated about impeaching President Trump or calling for his resignation – and made plenty of false analogies to the articles of impeachment that had been drafted in the Nixon case.

As is typical of the “get Trump” media, wishful thinking took the place of thoughtful analysis and journalistic skepticism.

The anti-Trump pundits have been wrong so often that the only people who persist in believing them are Trump opponents who dream of seeing him forced out of office and maybe even winding up in prison.

By any objective standard, these self-appointed media “experts” have lost all credibility.

I wish the media would go back and show the categorical statements and confident predictions of their paid commentators who have been proven wrong so many times. Their record of accurate predictions is nothing to brag about.

In fact, BuzzFeed itself has repeatedly misreported allegations against President Trump. Even after Mueller’s office made the rare public statement Friday night to say that the BuzzFeed reporting was not accurate, BuzzFeed defended its accusation that President Trump had told Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations by the Trump Organization to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

BuzzFeed Editor Ben Smith tweeted Friday night: “We stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the Special Counsel to make clear what he’s disputing.”

Cohen had testified before Congress that negotiations on the Trump Tower deal – which never was finalized – ended in January 2016, before the beginning of presidential primaries. But prosecutors said later that the negotiations continued as late as June 2016, after Trump was clearly going to become the Republican presidential candidates.

Now that Mueller’s office has stated the BuzzFeed report that Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress about the negotiations was not accurate, how can the BuzzFeed possibly say the special counsel’s office is wrong?

Do the journalists at BuzzFeed know something the special counsel and his team of prosecutors and investigators don’t know? Do these reporters and editors think the special counsel is not being accurate? Or are they doubling down to avoid the embarrassment of admitting they were wrong?

The American people are the real victims of “wishful thinking” journalism – the reporting of items journalists wish were true rather than items that pass journalistic standards.

The public has no way of discerning good reporting from wishful reporting, particularly when the reporting is based on unidentified sources.

The worst offenders are the so-called expert commentators who pollute the media with unfounded and biased speculation based on partisan agendas rather than real expertise and experience.

The media should have standards – based on proven track records of accuracy – that their commentators must satisfy before they can opine or predict.

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I must admit that my hope for more accurate reporting and less partisan commenting is itself wishful thinking, but there is a place for such thinking. That place is not in reporting facts or predicting outcomes.

The job of the media is to report the facts – not to engage in endless speculation without a factual basis.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY ALAN DERSHOWITZ

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-buzzfeed-report-and-mueller-rebuke-a-vivid-example-of-get-trump-medias-mindset

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(CNN)President Donald Trump plans to offer Democrats another proposal to end the shutdown when he addresses the nation from the White House on Saturday afternoon — what officials are describing as his third offer to end the shutdown, according to a senior administration official.

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/18/politics/trump-saturday-speech-shutdown/index.html

Former President George W. Bush on Friday called on President Trump and congressional leaders to “put politics aside” and end the partial government shutdown, which is about to enter its fifth week.

“Laura W. Bush and I are grateful to our Secret Service personnel and the thousands of Federal employees who are working hard for our country without a paycheck,” Bush said in a social media post showing him delivering pizza to federal workers. “And we thank our fellow citizens who are supporting them.”

“It’s time for leaders on both sides to put politics aside, come together, and end this shutdown,” he added.

As of Friday, there was no sign the shutdown was about to end. Trump canceled a congressional overseas trip that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other House members were scheduled for over the next week. That trip included stops in Brussels and Afghanistan.

Trump’s move came shortly after Pelosi called for a delay in the president’s State of the Union address, which is slated for Jan. 29, due to security concerns as the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security are unfunded due to the shutdown. Republicans rejected Pelosi’s move as a political stunt and said the Secret Service was able to handle the event.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/congress/bush-calls-on-trump-democrats-to-put-politics-aside-and-end-the-shutdown

BuzzFeed’s extraordinary report last night suggests that President Trump conspired to induce perjury and obstruct justice. It has excited many Democrats. But even if BuzzFeed is correct in its central assertion — that two federal law enforcement sources say Trump told his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress — I’m not convinced it’s a major problem for the president. Unless, that is, law enforcement has audio recordings of Trump or his most inner circle speaking to that effect.

The key here is the burden of proof. According to BuzzFeed, he “personally instructed [Cohen] to lie” to Congress about when the Trump organization ended its effort to build a hotel in Moscow. If this is true, Trump would appear to be guilty of at least three federal criminal offenses: obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy.

But it’s not enough for prosecutors to believe this to be true; they must be able to prove it. And from BuzzFeed’s report at least, it’s not at all clear if they have the means of doing so.

BuzzFeed claims that emails and interviews from Trump organization staffers have corroborated investigators’ belief in Trump’s guilt, but that’s unlikely to be enough to prosecute. What investigators need is a forensic, unimpeachable link that ties Trump to an unlawful conspiracy.

I sincerely doubt that emails or other notes would be enough because Trump’s defense team could allege someone else sent those notes without Trump’s knowledge or without his approval. But the biggest weakness here is Cohen himself. Whether you believe Cohen’s cooperation with the government is an act of contrition or an act to save himself from even more prison time, Cohen is ultimately a weak prosecution witness. He is a proven liar with an obvious conflict of interest. Any defense team would have a field day with Cohen. They would suggest that everything he says is about saving himself by offering up a bigger fish.

A winning prosecution would need forensic evidence that someone very close to the president, such as his son-in-law Jared Kushner or son Donald Trump Jr., was engaged in a conspiracy on the president’s behalf. Indeed, prosecutors would likely decline the case on the basis that the presumptive harm to the nation would outweigh the low likelihood of conviction.

This is not to say that Trump is out of the woods. He may face significantly more damaging revelations in relation to Russia in the months ahead.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/buzzfeeds-story-depends-on-trump-being-heard-on-tape

On Friday, markets jumped in response to news of a potential deal to end the ongoing trade war between the United States and China. Naturally, investors are happy just to hear that. But China’s proposal, to boost imports of U.S. goods and cut back on America’s trade deficit with China, won’t solve any of the core issues that sparked the trade war in the first place.

Does China cheat on trade? Definitely — and unfortunately, this proposal won’t stop Beijing from doing so. It merely indulges President Trump’s obsession with the trade deficit.

But trade deficits are not an economic problem. They reflect the fact that that U.S. consumers, with more buying power than their Chinese counterparts, purchase more goods. When Chinese companies profit from that spending, they look for profitable ways to invest that money. That means that they often look to the United States with its strong economy and currency, investing in companies, real estate, and industry. That investment is a good thing for the economy.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real problems with Chinese trade.

As Trump has pointed out, Chinese companies have repeatedly engaged in forced technology transfer, the practice of compelling U.S. companies to hand over intellectual property to Chinese counterparts in exchange for market access. Chinese firms have also flat-out stolen technology for U.S. and other foreign companies. In addition, China confers unfair legal advantages on its own companies with state support. They exclude foreign competitors almost entirely from certain markets, such as the Internet, and they fail to uphold intellectual property protections.

Perhaps most worryingly, China has also used interactions with foreign companies for military and state security gains. Companies that obtain foreign technology have been implicated in sharing that technology with the Chinese military and government. Huawei, for example, has recently been accused of violating international sanctions, supporting rogue states such as Iran as well as acting as a state-sponsored espionage threat as it partners with countries to roll out 5G networks.

Those are very real and serious concerns, and none of them are addressed in the current proposal.

Investors, however, seem pleased that there’s a chance to end the trade war that is costing the economy at least $1.4 billion each month. But this deal, far from being an economic cure-all, might actually exacerbate some of the real problems. Indeed, the U.S. has already moved to limit what types of goods can be exported to China for fear of their use in military operations.

Even if the U.S. goes for the current deal and ends the tariffs, Washington will still eventually have to deal with real trade issues presented by China. With this proposed deal, China is playing Trump at his own game: talking up his misguided understanding of trade deficits while pitching a “fix” that solves none of the real trade problems.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/chinas-proposed-trade-deal-is-a-con-job-designed-specifically-for-trump

The president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have made it abundantly clear that this is all a performance to them.

Trump had two years of Republican control of the House and Senate and failed to prioritize his premier campaign promise: increased border security. A GOP-controlled Congress didn’t pass so much as an e-verify expansion bill, let alone secure funding for his wall. He waited until the eleventh hour before he lost control of the House to stamp his foot and demand last-minute funding for the wall. He then shut down the government and declared it an act of bravery.

In theory, Trump handed a blank check to Pelosi. Trump owns the shutdown, and he needs to end it. For $5.7 billion in wall funding, Pelosi can ask for almost anything she wants.

But she hasn’t. Rather than secure the fates of 700,000 Dreamers and demand that the president grant them amnesty in order to achieve his beloved wall, she’s simply sneered in his face, glowing in the approval of the #Resistance for hurting Drumpf’s feelings and refusing to give him what he wants. You want your wall? Well you can’t have it, loser! Take that, President Cheeto!

Think about it. Pelosi has a blank check that costs a mere $5.7B, a drop in our multi-trillion dollar budget. Yet she’d rather spite Trump and leave hundreds of thousands of government workers without paychecks than actually cash in her potential prize.

The generous conclusion here is that we’re being ruled by children. The honest one is that we’re ruled by tyrants.

Our corrupt ruling class would rather posture to their bases than actually win anything for them. The shutdown’s economic costs aren’t just threatening our gross domestic product and stock markets. There are actual lives in financial and physical danger.

The shutdown will put the safety of the border, the very entity the president shut down the government to protect, in real jeopardy if it continues. The shutdown has effectively halted all Border Patrol training, and because most Department of Homeland Security recruiters are furloughed, the department is hemorrhaging staffers without hiring new ones.

If the shutdown continues for another week, federal district courts will run out of funds, halting civil proceedings. Federal workers will go a second pay cycle without a check.

States are clamoring to issue February food stamp funds to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients early, as the program has no proper funding past January. By March, the 38 million SNAP recipients — the majority of whom are children, elderly, or disabled — will likely receive no funding for food.

All of this ignores the businesses, from Walmart to local grocers, who rely on SNAP spending and customers who are federal employees without pay for their revenue.

And according to congressional staffers talking to McKay Coppins at the Atlantic, the politicians orchestrating the whole charade couldn’t care less. Coppins reports:

I spoke to one congressional staffer who wondered aloud whether it might take a stressed-out air-traffic controller causing a plane crash to bring an end to the shutdown. And several aides worried that some kind of terrorist incident would end up serving as the catalyst to get the government up and running again …

Even if some of their worst-case shutdown scenarios remain unlikely — there are still plenty of paths forward that don’t include body counts — the defeatism on display is revealing. It exposes the extent to which the latter-day crisis of faith in America’s core political institutions has infected even the members of the institutions themselves.

On Wednesday night, I spoke with a Democratic House aide who confessed that she was ambivalent about the shutdown. The battle had unified her party, with Democrats linking arms in defense of their ideals and in defiance of Trump. Polls suggested that a majority of Americans were with them, and that the ‘optics’ of the fight were good. ‘While it may be horrible for the country,’ she said of the shutdown, ‘it’s fine for the party.’

I’ve already made the case that the government is an unreliable employer, and the shutdown demonstrates the number of agencies, from the Transportation Security Administration to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, that must be privatized, downsized, or abolished completely. But those should be thoughtful, intentional decisions, not based on political posturing that punishes and blindsides millions of average Americans as collateral damage so our wealthy overlords can pander to their fans.

Trump needs to sit the speaker down and offer to fill that blank check with something significant enough that she can call it a win. Pelosi needs to accept the political opportunity of strong-arming Trump into a valuable concession that could help, say, 700,000 people in legal jeopardy who have already assimilated with our culture and contributed, as well as the moral cost of continuing this shutdown, all to keep a few billion bucks from the president’s hands.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/nancy-pelosi-has-a-blank-check-and-shed-rather-spite-trump-than-cash-it

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump shake hands prior to their meeting in Singapore in June 2018.

Evan Vucci/AP


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Evan Vucci/AP

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump shake hands prior to their meeting in Singapore in June 2018.

Evan Vucci/AP

Updated at 3:53 p.m. ET

President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have agreed to a second meeting following their initial summit last year.

“President Donald J. Trump met with Kim Yong Chol for an hour and half, to discuss denuclearization and a second summit, which will take place near the end of February. The President looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim at a place to be announced at a later date,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced after Trump met Friday in the Oval Office with the North Korean envoy.

Trump first met with Kim in June 2018 in Singapore, and the two appeared to form an unlikely bond after Trump had previously criticized Kim on Twitter, slamming him as “Little Rocket Man.”

But at the summit, Trump touted securing a commitment from Kim for North Korea to move toward denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula. However, reports since then have suggested the country has continued to develop nuclear weapons and missile technology.

Sanders told reporters after the 90-minute meeting, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also attended, that sanctions would remain on North Korea until the White House sees the country achieve full denuclearization. However, she said the administration had seen “good steps and good faith moves” from North Korea, including releasing three American hostages just before the first summit.

The prospect of a second summit has long been talked about. South Korean President Moon Jae-in returned from a meeting last fall with Kim saying the North Korean leader wanted to meet with Trump again.

Kim reiterated his wish for another meeting with Trump during a New Year’s address, however he also warned he might ramp up the country’s nuclear weapons production if the U.S. does not end its economic sanctions against North Korea.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/01/18/686645247/president-trump-north-korean-leader-kim-agree-to-second-meeting-next-month

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