“MURIENDO POR CRUZAR,” AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE INCREASING NUMBER OF IMMIGRANT DEATHS ALONG THE BORDER, THIS SUNDAY, AUGUST 3 AT 6 P.M./5 C
Carmen Dominicci and Neida Sandoval present the Telemundo and The Weather Channel co-production
Miami – July 31, 2014 –Telemundo presents “Muriendo por Cruzar”, a documentary that investigates why increasing numbers of immigrants are dying while trying to cross the US-Mexican border near the city of Falfurrias, Texas, this Sunday, August 3 at 6PM/5 C. The Telemundo and The Weather Channel co-production, presented by Noticias Telemundo journalists Carmen Dominicci and Neida Sandoval, reveals the obstacles immigrants face once they cross into US territory, including extreme weather conditions, as they try to evade the border patrol. “Muriendo por Cruzar” is part of Noticias Telemundo’s special coverage of the crisis on the border and immigration reform.
“‘Muriendo por Cruzar’” dares to ask questions that reveal the actual conditions undocumented immigrants face as they try to start a new life in the United States,” said Alina Falcón, Telemundo’s Executive Vice President for News and Alternative Programming. “Our collaboration with The Weather Channel was very productive. They have a unique expertise in covering the impact of weather on people’s lives, as we do in covering immigration reform and the border crisis. The result is a compelling documentary that exposes a harrowing reality.”
“Muriendo por Cruzar” is the first co-production by Telemundo and The Weather Channel. Both networks are part of NBCUniversal.
Some tech and green energy stocks could be particularly exposed to selling pressure if the Biden administration hikes capital gains taxes, according to Goldman Sachs.
President Joe Biden will reportedly propose moving the capital gains tax rate for high-income earners to 39.6%, which would be pushed above 40% when accounting for an existing surcharge to fund programs from the Affordable Care Act.
That could cause investors to take a closer look at whether to sell their biggest winners. Goldman Sachs researchers looked at four periods over the last decade to identify some of the stocks that might be most at risk.
U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue says this is a victory for the American and Mexican people along with anyone who has lost a loved one to the “black hole of addiction.” USA TODAY
It’s been described as a “high-tech version of hell” and it holds some of the nation’s most dangerous criminals – including, maybe soon, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
The federal government’s ADX “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, is “the prison of all prisons,” said Louisiana State Penitentiary maximum-security warden Burl Cain.
It makes sense that a drug lord who’s already escaped two high-security Mexican prisons would be sent there. In 2001, Guzman bribed his way out of prison in a laundry basket. In 2015, he escaped out of another penitentiary in a movie-style jailbreak: crawling into a hatch beneath his shower and hopping on a waiting motorcycle through a tunnel dug underground.
Federal authorities haven’t confirmed exactly where Guzman will be held, but U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said Thursday that Guzman faces “a sentence from which there is no escape and no return.”
Here’s what you should about his possible new home:
How secure is it?
The prison, also called the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” is surrounded by razor-wire fences, gun towers, heavily-armed patrols and attack dogs. Snipers guard the grounds in gun towers. No inmate has ever escaped the prison.
Inmates spend about 23 hours of every day in solitary confinement inside a 12-by-7-foot cell made of concrete with a small window. The room is designed so that inmates cannot have contact with others or much of the outside world.
“You’re designing it so the inmates can’t see the sky. Intentionally,” former Supermax prison warden Robert Hood told CNN. “You’re putting up wires so helicopters can’t land.”
Each cell contains a toilet, shower and bed (a concrete slab with a thin mattress). Meals are slid through openings in the doors.
“This place is not designed for humanity … It’s not designed for rehabilitation,” Hood told The New York Times.
An hour of outdoor time for inmates placed in restraints is allowed some days inside a cage slightly larger than the cells. Travis Dusenbury, who spent 10 years locked up in the prison, told Vice that that was the only contact he had with people, if his neighbor’s schedule lined up with his.
“The closest human contact you could get was what we called ‘finger handshakes’ through the fence,” Dusenbury said.
Notorious criminals who are there
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who is serving a life sentence for a series of mostly mail bombs that killed three people and injured 23 others over 17 years.
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who faces a death sentence after setting off bombs near Boston Marathon’s finish line in 2013, where three people died and more than 250 people were injured. He has been convicted of 30 charges, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction.
Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is serving a life sentence for conspiring with hijackers to kill Americans.
Shoe bomber Richard Reid, who is serving a life sentence for charges including use of a weapon of mass destruction, attempted murder of aircraft passengers and attempted homicide of U.S. nationals overseas.
Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols is serving a life sentence for planting a bomb that killed 168 people in an Oklahoma City federal building.
Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, who is serving life sentences for a series of bombings including one at the 1996 Olympic Summer Games in Atlanta that killed two people and injured more than 100.
Contributing: Marina Pitofsky and The Associated Press.Follow Ashley May on Twitter: @AshleyMayTweets
MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – A well-known businessman and television personality is offering a massive reward for information leading to an arrest following Sunday morning’s mass shooting in Miami-Dade County.
Marcus Lemonis, CEO of Camping World and host of The Profit on CNBC, has offered a reward of $100,000 “to help authorities in my hometown…arrest and convict the suspect/suspects.”
With coronavirus cases surging once again, frustrated Americans are struggling to get tested days before Christmas as long lines and increased demand overwhelm some facilities across the country.
The catalyst has been the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, which has become the dominant strain in the US in a matter of weeks and has led to a slew of new measures to combat the spread.
With millions traveling or planning to join large family gatherings, there is a rush to get tested — and many people are running out of luck, either with getting tests at clinics or with buying at-home test kits.
Long lines were seen this week in New York City, Boston and Miami, as well as Ohio and Minnesota.
At the same time, CVS Health and Walgreens — the two largest pharmaceutical chain stores in the US — are limiting the number of at-home Covid kits customers can buy due to significant demand, they announced.
The demand is only going to grow, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
A former assistant secretary of the US Health and Human Services Department is concerned the co pledge on tests will not meet the demand, he said.
“Unless we have a billion or 2 billion a month, I think we’re still going to have to be selective to make sure that we keep people who can die from the disease from dying from the disease,” Adm. Dr. Brett Giroir told CNN.
A University of Iowa student has died after being found unresponsive on campus grounds early Wednesday as a polar vortex gripped the Midwest in arctic temperatures that have been linked to at least seven other deaths.
Gerald Belz, 18, was found behind an academic building on the Iowa City campus just before 3 a.m. by campus police, KCRG-TV reported. The pre-med student was rushed to a hospital, where he later died.
Police haven’t released a cause of death, but believed the frigid temperatures played a role, FOX28 Cedar Rapids reported. With wind chill, the temperature at the time police found Belz was negative 51 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Foul play isn’t suspected and zero alcohol was found in Belz’s system, police said.
Belz’s father, Michael, described his son to KCRG as “a momma’s boy with a tough exterior.”
Ice covers the Chicago River Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019, in Chicago as a deadly arctic deep freeze enveloped the Midwest with record-breaking temperatures. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford)
Meanwhile, an 82-year-old Illinois man was found outside several hours after he fell trying to get into his home, the Peoria Journal Star reported. His cause of death was recorded as related to cold exposure. His identity was withheld until his family can be notified.
In Indiana, a 22-year-old police officer and his wife were killed in a crash on an icy road, South Bend station WBND reported. Ligonier Police Officer Ethan Kiser’s SUV spun into the path of another SUV, killing the couple and the driver of the other vehicle, 21-year-old Shawna Kiser, officials told the station.
Other deaths included a man struck and killed by a snow plow in the Chicago area and a Milwaukee man found frozen to death in a garage while out shoveling snow.
While the deadly cold weather system that put much of the Midwest into a historic deep freeze was expected to ease Thursday, temperatures could still tumble to record lows in some places before the region begins to thaw out.
Before the worst of the cold begins to lift, the National Weather Service said Chicago could hit lows early Thursday that break the city’s record of minus 27 degrees set on Jan. 20, 1985.
Fox News’ Nicole Darrah and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
The race is closer in Iowa, with the RealClearPolitics average showing Biden up 4 points on Sanders and 12 points on third-place Buttigieg. In New Hampshire, he has a 13-point lead on Sanders and an 18-point lead on Buttigieg.
Warren has seen her numbers inch upward in recent weeks, but she’s still well behind Biden.
Still, the Iowa caucuses, when the first balloting of the 2020 primary season begins, are still nine months away. And many candidates are quick to note that they are very much in the early phases of their campaigns, insisting that they are more focused on introducing themselves to voters and mapping out coherent policy proposals than jockeying for front-runner status in opinion polls.
But at the same time, the White House hopefuls are betting on standout performances in the first Democratic primary debates next month to bolster their campaigns and pitch their visions before a national audience.
Their shifting strategies underscore a political reality: With more than 20 people vying for the party’s nomination, candidates are under more pressure than ever to compete for the votes, donations and media attention necessary to power a prolonged national campaign.
“In this business there are winds that blow, and seasons tend to change quickly,” said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina–based Democratic strategist. “I think people are recalibrating. They’re making adjustments and they’re trying to figure out how to stay on the tops of the hearts and minds of voters.”
O’Rourke conceded earlier this month that he needed to “do a better job” reaching national audiences after largely avoiding high-profile television appearances for most of his presidential campaign so far.
That remark, made during an appearance on MSNBC, was followed the next day by an appearance on ABC’s “The View” and later by a well-received televised town hall on CNN.
“The CNN town hall was a big success for him, the kind of national TV that I think people had been asking for,” one aide to O’Rourke told The Hill. “I think they got to see on stage that he hasn’t forgotten how to play ball. He’s getting better.”
O’Rourke has focused on expanding his national team — bringing on Jeff Berman, who ran former President Obama’s delegate operation, as his senior adviser on delegate strategy — and building out his top aides in New Hampshire.
While his presidential announcement in March was met with fanfare by supporters, he has seen his poll numbers drop into the low single digits in recent weeks and has faced criticism for lacking policy specifics.
O’Rourke’s aides and allies argue that the fundamentals of his campaign — he has said he prefers face-to-face interactions to TV appearances and large campaign rallies — remain the same.
But his reemergence on national TV underscores how much of the 2020 presidential contest has been driven by viral moments and media exposure.
That line of questioning was reflective of a shift in strategy for Harris after struggling for months to hone her campaign message.
She has sought to court the Democratic Party’s liberal base by taking more progressive positions on issues like health care and voting rights. But some strategists say that in doing so, Harris has risked alienating more moderate voters.
Harris in recent weeks has more aggressively positioned herself as the candidate willing to take on Trump, a nod to the overwhelming desire among Democratic primary voters to pick a nominee who is capable of defeating the president in 2020.
“We cannot abandon our democracy for the sake of appeasing somebody who is completely focused on his interests only,” Harris said.
Harris’s more aggressive posturing against Trump, as well as her questioning of Barr, may be paying off. A Monmouth University poll released Thursday showed her tied with for second place with Sanders, at 14 percent, among early primary and caucus voters.
For Buttigieg, who saw his political stock rise quickly after entering the presidential contest as a relative unknown, the shift in campaign tactics is in part a response to criticism that he has drawn mostly white audiences on the trail.
He met earlier this month with civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton in Harlem and has said he plans to spend more time in South Carolina, the first state to vote in the primaries where a majority of the Democratic electorate is made up of black voters.
Adding even more weight to the vote in South Carolina is the fact that the Palmetto State is the last state to vote before Super Tuesday, when delegates from 13 states will be up for grabs.
Biden has built up a sizable lead in South Carolina. A poll released earlier this month by Change Research and The Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston showed the former vice president with 46 percent support among likely Democratic primary voters in the state. Sanders came in second, with 15 percent, followed by Buttigieg, with 8 percent.
Seawright, the Democratic strategist, said that carrying the support of African American voters in South Carolina will be crucial not just to winning that primary, but to taking the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Black people will decide who our nominee will be. Anything other than making our community a priority is not smart political thinking,” Seawright said. “The ballgame is going to be in South Carolina. If you’re not making serious investments here, you may as well not even participate.”
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A search effort for a missingNew York woman is underway in Wyoming – while her fiancé, whom she was traveling across the country with, is back in Florida at his parents’ house.
Gabby Petito, 22, was last seen in late August at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, according to police, and she was reported missing over the weekend after her parents hadn’t heard from her in a week.
“On behalf of the Laundrie family, it is our hope that the search for Miss Petito is successful and that Miss Petito is reunited with her family,” Steven Bertolino, the attorney for Petito’s fiance Brian Laundrie, said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
Petito and Laundrie were road tripping across the U.S. in a white Ford Transit van, which police have recovered as part of their investigation into her disappearance.
Laundrie has not been charged with a crime, but police in North Port, Fla., told the New York Post that his parents declined to make him available to speak with investigators.
Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie began a cross-country road trip in early July, but Petito has been missing since late August. (Joey Petito) (Joey Petito)
“On the advice of counsel, the Laundrie family is remaining in the background at this juncture and will have no further comment,” Bertolino said.
Petito, of Blue Point, N.Y., had been living in Florida with Laundrie. Police described the missing woman as White and about 5 feet, 5 inches tall, weighing around 110 pounds. She has blonde hair and blue eyes, and several tattoos, including one on her finger and one on her forearm that reads “let it be.”
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto faced fresh questions on Wednesday about his dealings with a company at the center of a conflict-of-interest scandal, after it emerged that he enjoyed rent-free use of a house belonging to the firm as a campaign office.
Already under pressure over the government’s handling of the presumed massacre of 43 students abducted by corrupt police in southwestern Mexico in September, Pena Nieto is facing his most difficult period since taking office two years ago.
On Nov. 3, the government announced a Chinese-led consortium had won a no bid contract to build a $3.75 billion high-speed rail link in central Mexico.
Three days later, the government abruptly canceled the deal, just before a report by news site Aristegui Noticias showed that a subsidiary of Grupo Higa, a company that formed part of the consortium and had won various previous contracts, owned the luxury house of first lady Angelica Rivera.
Under public pressure, Rivera said she would give up the house. But neither she nor Pena Nieto have addressed the apparent conflict of interest stemming from the government’s business with Grupo Higa.
On Wednesday, Aristegui Noticias published a new story that said Pena Nieto used a different property belonging to another Grupo Higa subsidiary as an office when he was president-elect in 2012.
Eduardo Sanchez, the president’s spokesman, said Pena Nieto unwittingly used the property. Sanchez said it was leased from the Grupo Higa firm by Humberto Castillejos, the president’s legal adviser, who lent it rent-free to Pena Nieto’s team.
“If I invite you to my house, do you come to my house and ask me under whose name it is? Neither does the president,” Sanchez said, denying there were conflicts of interest.
The spokesman also said there were no more properties Pena Nieto or his team had used belonging to Grupo Higa.
“No, there is no other house that was used in a professional capacity,” Sanchez said.
Castillejos could not immediately be reached for comment.
Jorge Luis Lavalle, a senator with the opposition conservative National Action Party, said the public saw a clear conflict of interest in the dealings of Pena Nieto and his government with Grupo Higa.
“It needs to be investigated. All these doubts need to be dispelled fully and clearly,” he said. “We now have another case with no explanation.”
CHICAGO — Thousands of Chicago’s public-school teachers will return to classrooms on Friday, ending a strike that left more than 300,000 students out of school for 11 days, the city’s mayor announced on Thursday.
A tentative contract deal between city officials and teachers in the nation’s third-largest school district resolved a tense standoff that had upended the lives of families all over the city and represented the biggest test to date of Chicago’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot.
The walkout by the Chicago Teachers Union, which lasted longer than any schools strike in this city since 1987, was over an array of issues, beyond traditional questions over pay. The teachers called for more social workers, librarians and nurses in schools, smaller class sizes and protections for immigrant children. Over the last few weeks, teachers marched near schools and through the city’s downtown business district, as negotiations went on with city leaders.
In the end, the city said it had agreed to $35 million to reduce class sizes and hundreds of additional staff members by 2023. The city’s offer included a 16 percent salary increase over five years.
Former Merchant Mariner Sal Mercogliano said Thursday he sees new and ominous signs that the 220,000-ton mega ship blocking Egypt’s Suez Canal may take a lot longer to remove than initially thought.
“One of the most ominous things we are seeing, right now, is the parent company, Evergreen, has started to route two of their vessels around Africa,” Mercogliano said. “That’s telling us this may take a lot longer than they were initially expecting.”
Rescue crews have said that it might take weeks to set the behemoth Ever Given vessel free. Officials say strong winds and a sandstorm knocked the ship off course. Shipping experts say the containers on deck can act like giant sails during windy conditions.
Mercogliano CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that the blockage of the Suez Canal has put the global supply chain “in a state of flux.” According to reporting from NBC, $3 billion worth of goods typically traverse the canal every day, with more than 150 ships now in a holding pattern on either side of the waterway.
“Most importantly right now, the ports that were expecting to receive these vessels are not receiving these vessels, and you’re going to have a situation very similar to what we’re seeing in the U.S. right now with ships lined up off our ports, because demand was pent up, in this case, supply is being held back,” said Mercogliano, a Campbell University professor, during the Thursday evening interview.
The man-made Suez is a key transit point connecting East to West and is 120 miles long. Ships will have to shift to entirely different routes due to the blockage and sail around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa.
Mercogliano explained with that extended route, “you’re talking about adding 3,500 miles on a route from Singapore to Rotterdam, you’re talking about 12 to 14 days.”
The maritime historian added that while the Ever Given’s misfortune has already impacted oil prices, factories might be next.
“There may be production plants, automobile factories, for example, will have to shut down, waiting to get parts,” he said. “We don’t live in a society today where we store a lot of parts.”
The man who died in the nightclub shooting has not been named, but local media report he is a 37-year-old security guard.
Police say the other men who were shot are aged 28, 29 and 50. The youngest is in a critical condition.
Victoria Detective Inspector Andrew Stamper described the injuries they sustained as “horrific”.
“This is just a horrendous act. It’s a busy nightclub, one of the main nightclubs in Melbourne in one of the main entertainment precincts in Melbourne,” he told a news conference.
No arrests have yet been made, and police have appealed for witnesses to come forward.
NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday blamed an organized group of anarchists for inciting violence and vandalism amid protests over the killing of George Floyd, but conceded some were from the city and the neighborhoods where demonstrations were happening — a shift from his message Saturday night.
“Some come from outside the city. Some are from inside the city,” he said. “Some are from the neighborhoods where the protests take place, some are not. But what we do know is there is an explicit agenda of violence and it does not conform with the history of this city in which we have always honored non-violent protests.”
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Only hours before, on Saturday night, the mayor insisted the threat of violence was coming from “out of town” demonstrators, many of whom are “not from communities of color” and have a “warped ideology” that leads them to “harming working people who are police officers.”
De Blasio, who first came to office with a promise of police reform, has ardently defended the NYPD during the recent protests and insisted officers were exercising great restraint in the face of threats from demonstrators bent on attacking cops. He’s faced fierce backlash from criminal justice advocates and members of his own party.
“@NYCMayor your comments tonight were unacceptable,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Corteztweeted early Sunday morning. “Defending and making excuses for NYPD running SUVs into crowds was wrong. Make it right. De-escalate.”
Police officers drove through a barricade into throngs of protesters in Brooklyn Saturday evening. Video of the incident, which quickly went viral, shows demonstrators throwing cones, garbage bags and water bottles at the NYPD vehicles before they plowed into the crowds.
The mayor insisted again Sunday the officers were reacting to a dangerous situation caused by threats of violence.
“We’re going to fully investigate that incident,” the mayor said Sunday. “I don’t ever want to see a police officer do that. … But I also know that it was an extremely dangerous situation and the one thing [police] couldn’t do was stay there.”
“There are protests, and there are mobs,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea added later in the conference. “A protest does not involve surrounding and ambushing a marked police car.”
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, speaking in a separate press conference that morning, criticized the mayor’s earlier remarks to the incident as “a terrible response.”
“We can’t have police officers who haven’t been trained on how to handle a panicked situation and are handling it through plowing protesters,” he said. “That’s not something we can accept.”
The mayor announced he was appointing his corporation counsel, Jim Johnson, and Department of Investigation Commissioner Margaret Garnett to conduct a full investigation into the police response to protests which began late last week and will continue Sunday night.
Shea said multiple officers were injured in skirmishes over the weekend and close to 350 arrests were made — but aside from property damage, police said no serious injuries or fatalities have occurred.
De Blasio praised Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s remarks from Saturday morning, in which he said he would sign legislation updating New York’s 50-a law, criticized by criminal justice advocates who say it shields too much information relating to police disciplinary records.
The de Blasio administration had previously cited the law when groups and officials across New York City pushed for the records of former officer Daniel Pantaleo, who fatally placed Staten Islander Eric Garner into a chokehold in 2014.
“I have said we need to repeal and replace, I want to be abundantly clear,” de Blasio said Sunday. “There must be some provision in the law to protect the personal information, the home address, the type of information about an individual police officer that is about their safety and security.”
De Blasio said Sunday he hoped Cuomo would sign such legislation in June.
Footage from Minneapolis of Floyd’s death, whose final words were “I can’t breathe” as a police officer knelt on his neck, has drawn parallels to Garner’s death in Staten Island as he gasped the same words.
“I think that when you look at something as terrible as that incident, what could come out of it?” said Shea of footage of Floyd, who was apprehended while unarmed for allegedly using counterfeit money to buy cigarettes. “Hopefully something does come out of it.”
“Whether it’s law enforcement or not, there is universal condemnation … to what we saw in that video,” he said.
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It’s just three weeks since House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler subpoenaed the report without redactions, and all its underlying evidence, from special counsel Robert Mueller relating to his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Despite this, Nadler, D-N.Y., and fellow panel Democrats voted 24-16 Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for failing to comply in the blink of an eye with their demand. Never mind that it would have been illegal for Barr to do so. It will be for the full House to decide whether to support the contempt vote, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said she’ll follow the committee’s lead.
Democrats took turns grandstanding at the hearing, and simply ignored the fact that it would be against the law for Barr to disseminate some redacted material in Mueller’s report. Nor did they acknowledge the mammoth amount of work that would be required to organize and hand over Mueller’s mountains of evidence.
It’s, of course, not surprising that no Democrat objected to Nadler’s precipitous actions for, in 2019, congressional oversight consisting of forming up on one side of the committee room and barking at the other side.
Congress invokes official contempt charges rarely, indeed only three times in the past 35 years. It is meant to be a last resort. But in 2012, the last time it was used, Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt for refusing to provide Congress with subpoenaed material, and Holder was a Democrat. So this is payback. But it should be noted that Holder had by then defied Congress for 203 days before House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., first formally threatened him with contempt charges. Even then, Issa gave Holder an additional 48 days before his committee actually held a vote. And Issa was demanding answers about a Justice Department scandal that had actually resulted in the murder of at least one government official.
In shockingly sharp contrast, Nadler went from subpoena to contempt vote in 19 days, without evincing any desire to negotiate with the Justice Department over what could properly be shared by the committee. Nadler isn’t approaching this as one in which he should work out an agreement between two co-equal branches of government, which would be perfectly possible in this case if both sides were willing to be reasonable. Instead, he’s running a show trial to gin up enthusiasm among angry Democratic donors, both small and large.
What’s more, and worse, is that Nadler’s show trial is in pursuit of an end that is manifestly wrong. Barr’s efforts to protect privileged grand jury materials are not only justifiable but specifically mandated by law. Nadler has not a leg to stand on. Every single House Democrat on that committee knows and understands this. Yet not one objected to the circus in which they played the role of sundry clowns.
Contrast this again with Republican treatment of Holder. Unlike Barr, who is legally required to protect grand jury material, Holder was merely asserting an amorphous and constitutionally dubious privilege over internal Justice Department deliberations.
Nadler should explain why he is in such a rush. His timetable has nothing to do with justice or good government, and everything to do with the 2020 election calendar. Mueller couldn’t find any evidence of collusion by Trump’s campaign or any other American with Russia and its malefactors. So the clock is ticking for Democrats to use the fruits of Mueller’s investigation, which he so helpfully gave them, in defiance of precedent, to raise money and talking points for use in the Democrats’ pursuit of power.
Congress has a duty to sift through Mueller’s evidence. It has a duty to exercise oversight and provide checks on executive power, in the interest of justice and the good of the country. Nadler’s show trial has nothing to do with any of that.
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