EL PASO, Texas (AP) — About 50 asylum seekers stood this week in a circle near a bridge between the U.S. and Mexico to hear an American attorney explain what would happen to them when they entered U.S. custody.
The attorney, Jodi Goodwin, told them they would probably end up at one of the Border Patrol’s smaller stations, which migrants call “la hielera” — Spanish for icebox because of their cold temperatures.
Goodwin advised them to wear their heaviest clothing or borrow clothes from someone else, and to eat a hearty meal before crossing the bridge. In a carrying voice, she repeated in Spanish, “Eat well and dress well.”
The advice reflects reality on the border, where a lack of space means some immigrants must sleep on floors in Border Patrol stations, while others are held in military-style tents. One tent facility is next to an El Paso bridge, and the government will soon open two more.
The newest tent cities — in El Paso and in the Rio Grande Valley — will hold 1,000 parents and families, expanding the Border Patrol’s capacity to hold and process the surge of immigrants who have arrived in recent months and overwhelmed immigration authorities.
The tents will offer portable showers, recreation areas and sleeping quarters that are divided by gender and by families and children traveling alone. Detainees will sleep on mats.
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 27: (L-R) Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies Steven Camarota, President of the National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd, Director of the Remembrance Project Maria Espinoza, Agnes Gibboney, mother whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, and Seth Stodder, Secretary for Boarder of Immigration and Trade Policy, testify during a hearing before the Subcommittee on National Security of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee April 27, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The subcommittee held a hearing on ‘The Border Wall: Strengthening our National Security.’ (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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The tents are set to operate through the end of the year, at a cost of as much as $37 million. A contractor in Rome, New York, obtained the bid to build the tents, which the government calls “soft-sided” shelters.
The Border Patrol’s El Paso sector has become the epicenter of the influx of immigrant families from Central America.
On Tuesday alone, agents arrested around 1,100 migrants in the El Paso sector, including 424 who crossed in Sunland Park, New Mexico, according to Border Patrol spokesman Ramiro Cordero. In March alone, the agency apprehended more than 100,000 immigrants, including 53,000 family members.
The situation has drawn agents away from their traditional duties of patrolling the border and forced Immigration and Customs Enforcement to refuse to hold immigrants because it does not have enough detention space. ICE is dropping large groups of immigrants at bus stations and cities, including Phoenix, San Antonio, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But before the immigrants are handed over to ICE or released, the Border Patrol must process them, and the agency is struggling to keep up.
In recent weeks, immigrants have been forced to sleep in hastily constructed tents on top of gravel under a bridge in El Paso. Critics decried the conditions as inhumane and corroborated accounts of migrants who said that they were held too long and did not have access to bedding while sleeping in the cold.
“For far too long, El Paso – America’s new Ellis Island, has lacked adequate temporary processing facilities to address the increase in the number of asylum-seeking families arriving at our doorstep,” said El Paso Rep. Veronica Escobar, who took fellow Democrats on tours of the bridge setting.
To some critics, the new tents in El Paso and Donna, Texas, are an improvement.
Besides providing extra space, the tents also offer a better setting for agents to process immigrants. The data entry at Border Patrol processing centers can take one to two hours per migrant, as agents enter names, take fingerprints and run background checks. Agents also record the addresses where migrants will live in the U.S., and emergency medical technicians perform cursory health screenings.
In March, the Border Patrol closed down checkpoints around El Paso used for drug enforcement. Agents now bring migrants to Border Patrol offices near the checkpoints and use the computer terminals there to process migrants.
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In a statement, the Border Patrol said the tents were built “to support efforts to process, care for and transfer the unprecedented number of families and unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally each day in a humane way, consistent with our border security mission and our American values.”
The Border Patrol is supposed to keep people in custody for no more than three days, but migrants are sometimes detained for longer. Goodwin said she had spoken in the last week to a Guatemalan man who had been in a “hielera” for 12 days. The Border Patrol stations that house the “hieleras” will continue being used.
In some ways, the tents are better than the iceboxes, Goodwin said. “But that’s not saying much.”
Tent facilities previously used to detain migrants in Texas have often lacked adequate space or facilities, said Goodwin, a longtime attorney in Harlingen, Texas. A separate tent city near El Paso housed more than 2,700 migrant children before being shut down in early January amid security concerns.
It’s unlikely that the new tent facilities will allow the Border Patrol to reopen the checkpoints or to stop reliance on the “hieleras” or the more hastily constructed, smaller tents.
The new 500-person tent in El Paso will only help the Border Patrol keep up, Cordero said, and the checkpoints can only be reopened if the flow of migrants slows down.
Attorney General William Barr snubs of one of the most powerful Democrats on Capitol Hill; chief White House correspondent John Roberts reports.
The only thing uglier than an angry Washington is a fearful Washington. And fear is what’s driving this week’s blitzkrieg of Attorney General William Barr.
Mr. Barr tolerantly sat through hours of Democratic insults at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. His reward for his patience was to be labeled, in the space of a news cycle, a lawbreaking, dishonest, obstructing hack. Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly accused Mr. Barr of lying to Congress, which, she added, is “considered a crime.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said he will move to hold Mr. Barr in contempt unless the attorney general acquiesces to the unprecedented demand that he submit to cross-examination by committee staff attorneys. James Comey, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, lamented that Donald Trump had “eaten” Mr. Barr’s “soul.” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren demands the attorney general resign. California Rep. Eric Swalwell wants him impeached.
These attacks aren’t about special counsel Robert Mueller, his report or even the surreal debate over Mr. Barr’s first letter describing the report. The attorney general delivered the transparency Democrats demanded: He quickly released a lightly redacted report, which portrayed the president in a negative light. What do Democrats have to object to?
Some of this is frustration. Democrats foolishly invested two years of political capital in the idea that Mr. Mueller would prove President Trump had colluded with Russia, and Mr. Mueller left them empty-handed. Some of it is personal. Democrats resent that Mr. Barr won’t cower or apologize for doing his job. Some is bitterness that Mr. Barr is performing like a real attorney general, making the call against obstruction-of-justice charges rather than sitting back and letting Democrats have their fun with Mr. Mueller’s obstruction innuendo.
But most of it is likely fear. Mr. Barr made real news in that Senate hearing, and while the press didn’t notice, Democrats did. The attorney general said he’d already assigned people at the Justice Department to assist his investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. He said his review would be far-reaching – that he was obtaining details from congressional investigations, from the ongoing probe by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and even from Mr. Mueller’s work. Mr. Barr said the investigation wouldn’t focus only on the fall 2016 justifications for secret surveillance warrants against Trump team members but would go back months earlier.
He also said he’d focus on the infamous “dossier” concocted by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and British former spy Christopher Steele, on which the FBI relied so heavily in its probe. Mr. Barr acknowledged his concern that the dossier itself could be Russian disinformation, a possibility he described as not “entirely speculative.” He also revealed that the department has “multiple criminal leak investigations under way” into the disclosure of classified details about the Trump-Russia investigation.
President Donald Trump said Friday that the FBI’s decision to send an undercover investigator to meet with a Trump campaign aide overseas in 2016 — reported Thursday by The New York Times — amounted to a scandal “bigger than Watergate, but the reverse!”
“Finally, Mainstream Media is getting involved,” Trump tweeted, claiming the story was was now “too ‘hot’ to avoid.”
“Pulitzer Prize anyone?” Trump continued, adding that “This is bigger than WATERGATE, but the reverse!”
The Times article, published online Thursday and on the front page of Friday’s print edition, revealed a previously unknown detail about the September 2016 meeting at a London bar between former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, an FBI informant.
Also present for the meeting was a woman whom The Times reported was posing as Halper’s assistant but was actually an FBI investigator the agency had sent to help with the counterintelligence inquiry that had been opened the previous summer into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.
According to The Times, the decision to dispatch the woman, who identified herself as Azra Turk, signaled that the FBI wanted another pair of eyes present at the meeting for oversight and to have in place a possible witness if any prosecution arose in the case.
In a tweet Thursday, Papadopoulos said he agreed “with everything” in the article, but said the woman identified as Turk “clearly was not FBI.” Papadopoulos claimed she “was CIA” with ties to “Turkish intel.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies spied on his presidential campaign — a narrative his latest tweets indicate he feels was advanced by The Times article.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and one of the president’s closest allies in Congress, also commented on the report Friday.
“The FBI sent a secret informant, posing as a professor’s assistant, to covertly gather information on a Trump associate: George Papadopoulos,” Meadows tweeted.
“But don’t worry. Washington Democrats and media pundits will twist themselves into pretzels to avoid calling this what it is: spying,” he added.
The FBI sent a secret informant, posing as a professor’s assistant, to covertly gather information on a Trump associate: George Papadopoulos.
But don’t worry. Washington Democrats and media pundits will twist themselves into pretzels to avoid calling this what it is: spying.
Prosecutors say Papadopoulos was solicited by a professor with ties to Russian intelligence, Joseph Mifsud, who told the young Trump aide that the Russians possessed incriminating information about Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails” — before it was widely and publicly known that Russia had stolen Democratic emails.
Prosecutors say Mifsud arranged a meeting in a London cafe between Papadopoulos and a young woman he falsely described as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s niece.
Papadopoulos relayed the talk of Democratic emails to an Australian diplomat during what The Times has described as a night of heavy drinking at another London bar in May 2016. The diplomat reported the conversation to his American counterparts, which prompted the opening of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s election interference operation — an investigation that was taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017.
Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia-connected individuals, including giving a false account of the timing of his interactions with Mifsud. He initially told the FBI those meetings happened before he started working for Trump, while actually it was afterward.
Adam Edelman is a political reporter for NBC News.
Former assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles says the 2020 presidential hopeful has a history of poor judgement on foreign policy.
A former assistant secretary of state for President George W. Bush slammed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for dismissing the threat of China, saying the former vice president has been on the wrong side of foreign policy issues for the last four decades.
“On a personal level is he a friendly guy, but he has empirically had poor judgment particularly on foreign policy … the examples are numerous,” Robert Charles said Friday on “Fox and Friends.”
“Interestingly, Robert Gates in his book who criticizes almost nobody … noted that ‘Joe Biden has been wrong on almost every foreign policy and national security issue for the last four decades.’”
“Interestingly, Robert Gates in his book who criticizes almost nobody … noted that ‘Joe Biden has been wrong on almost every foreign policy and national security issue for the last four decades.’”
Biden drew bipartisan fury after expressing lack of concern over China as a global competitor to the U.S. and mocked those taking the Chinese threat seriously at a rally on Wednesday.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man!” Biden exclaimed. “The fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the East — I mean in the West. They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. They’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”
Reacting to those remarks, Trump said Biden was among many politicians “naïve” over China. “For somebody to be so naive, and say China’s not a problem – if Biden actually said that, that’s a very dumb statement.”
Charles went on to list Biden’s foreign policy failures, ranging from opposition to military programs that brought down the Soviet Union to opposing the Usama Bin Laden raid.
“If you go back in time this is a guy who wanted to divide up Iraq. He opposed the Bin Laden raid. In favor of the phony Iran deal and sending cash to them,” the former assistant secretary of state said.
“Back in 1979, this is a guy who celebrated the Ayatollahs coming to power because he thought that was going to bring human rights. This is a guy that opposed the defense buildup of Ronald Reagan. He opposed the B-1. He opposed the B-2 that brought down … that policy direction brought down the Soviet Union. He opposed the MX missiles.”
“This is a country that right now kills about 13 million children through infanticide or abortion a year on their one child policy. They have about a million peaceful Muslims in prison camps up in the northwest for reeducation as good communists. They execute about 2400 of their people annually, a lot of them for dissidence.”
— Robert Charles
He went on to say that China, contrary to Biden, is “truly our number one potential adversary and our number one competitor in the world” and thinking otherwise is “beyond naïve.”
“This is a country that right now kills about 13 million children through infanticide or abortion a year on their one-child policy. They have about a million peaceful Muslims in prison camps up in the northwest for reeducation as good communists. They execute about 2400 of their people annually, a lot of them for dissidence,” Charles said.
“They have islands in the South China Sea that they built for disruption of international trade. They are pushing the limits on super computing to hack us. They have space weapons that they have tested.”
The founder of Insys Therapeutics John Kapoor has become the first pharmaceutical boss to be convicted in a case linked to the US opioid crisis.
A Boston jury found Kapoor and four colleagues conspired to bribe doctors to prescribe addictive painkillers, often to patients who didn’t need them.
The former billionaire was found guilty of racketeering conspiracy for his role in a scheme which also misled insurers.
Tens of thousands of deaths have been caused by opioid overdoses in the US.
Indian-born Kapoor founded drugmaker Insys Therapeutics in 1990 and built it into a multi-billion dollar company.
The jury found Kapoor had also misled medical insurance companies about patients’ need for the painkillers in order to boost sales of the firm’s fentanyl spray, Subsys.
During the 10-week trial, jurors were also shown a rap video made by Insys for its employees on ways to boost sales of Subsys.
Kapoor and his co-defendants – Michael Gurry, Richard Simon, Sunrise Lee and Joseph Rowan – face up to 20 years in prison.
A statement from Kapoor’s lawyer said he was “disappointed” with the verdict. The men had denied the charges and have indicated that they plan to appeal.
Forbes listed Kapoor’s net worth as $1.8bn (£1.4bn) in 2018, before dropping off the publication’s billionaire rankings this year.
His conviction marks a victory for US government efforts to target companies seen to have accelerated the opioid crisis.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has said that opioids – a class of drug which includes everything from heroin to legal painkillers – were involved in almost 48,000 deaths in 2017.
The epidemic started with legally prescribed painkillers, including Percocet and OxyContin. It intensified as these were diverted to the black market.
There has also been a sharp rise in the use of illegal opioids including heroin, while many street drugs are laced with powerful opioids such as Fentanyl, increasing the risk of an overdose.
The Department of Homeland Security is racing to implement a plan that would give federal law enforcement on the border the authority to conduct interviews with asylum seekers who fear returning to their home countries, according to two sources with firsthand knowledge of the plan.
Under the pending procedural change, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers would train Border Patrol agents on the southern border how to conduct “credible fear interviews,” which immigrants must pass to go on to claim asylum. Agents would conduct the interviews shortly after apprehending people who have illegally crossed from Mexico to the U.S.
The Trump administration is pushing to start agent training “ASAP,” according to one official.
The proposal has some downsides. For instance, there likely would be fewer Border Patrol agents performing law enforcement duties while undergoing training. But that would be offset by an overall decline of undocumented immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S.
“If that gets rolled out and we actually start deporting people within a timely manner, you’re going to see the numbers drop exponentially,” the official said.
Homeland Security, under acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan, would essentially deputize law enforcement to carry out citizenship officers’ jobs in order to initially reduce the number of people who have passed that stage and are waiting on asylum decisions. Those calls usually take two to five years due to the current 900,000 cases waiting to be decided by fewer than 500 immigration judges nationwide.
DHS is not planning to get congressional approval before implementing the change. Department officials believe they are within the law because an asylum officer must be an immigration official, which Border Patrol agents are considered to be. As long as agents get training on how to carry out those interviews and make those decisions, the department believes the plan is sound, a second official, who spoke on background in order to speak freely, explained.
Currently, immigrant families who surrender to Border Patrol agents are taken to a station and interviewed there about their background. Those in custody are not to be held longer than 72 hours. While in Border Patrol custody, an immigrant can claim a “credible fear” of returning to his or her home country during the general interview with an agent.
The agent would then notify U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of the claim and a representative would hear and decide a person’s claim, likely after the person in custody has been transferred from Border Patrol to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. Families who have been found by a USCIS officer to have a credible fear of return cannot be held by ICE more than 20 days and will be released into the U.S. and told to show up for their asylum verdict years down the road.
The second official said immigrants whose credible fear claims are denied would then have the ability to appeal the decision but would only have 10 days to have his or her case heard.
“Theoretically, we could end up deporting them in two weeks, rather than two to five years,” the source said. The move is likely to be challenged in the courts.
Emissions rise from three large smokestacks at a coal-fired power plant in Castle Dale, Utah, in 2017. Democratic presidential candidates are releasing plans to reduce U.S. emissions in order to head off the most dangerous consequences of global warming.
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Emissions rise from three large smokestacks at a coal-fired power plant in Castle Dale, Utah, in 2017. Democratic presidential candidates are releasing plans to reduce U.S. emissions in order to head off the most dangerous consequences of global warming.
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The past few presidential campaigns, environmental activists have “been left begging for there to be a single question at a campaign debate about climate change,” longtime climate change activist and author Bill McKibben recently told NPR.
“This time around I’m not worried in the least. I think it’s going to be one of the central topics in the primary,” McKibben said, “and then I think whoever wins the Democratic nomination is going to try and ram the issue straight down Trump’s throat.”
Indeed, Democratic voters told a CNN poll this week that aggressively addressing climate change is more important than any other policy position.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee talks about climate change more than any other candidate in the race. It’s essentially the entire focus of his presidential campaign. But until now, Inslee has been a bit vague about how he’d tackle lowering greenhouse gas emissions, arguing the focus itself was what mattered.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced his presidential bid at A&R Solar on March 1 in Seattle. Inslee has made fighting global warming his top policy issue, and he released a major policy proposal on the issue on Friday.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced his presidential bid at A&R Solar on March 1 in Seattle. Inslee has made fighting global warming his top policy issue, and he released a major policy proposal on the issue on Friday.
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“Defeating climate change has to be the No. 1 priority of the United States,” Inslee told New Hampshire Public Radio. “If it is not job one, it won’t get done. And we need to make it the first and foremost priority of the next president.”
Inslee’s campaign is now filling in the details on how he’d transition the United States to a carbon-free economy. An Inslee administration would set new regulations mandating zero greenhouse gas emissions in new cars, trucks and buses; and push states toward new construction codes to zero out emissions from new buildings.
The centerpiece of the plan: urging Congress to pass a major law steering the United States to “all clean, renewable and zero-emission energy in electricity generation by 2035.” That would require a major overhaul of the current electricity grid. Right now fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas account for about 60 percent of American electricity.
The aggressive approach is modeled on a Washington bill Inslee recently signed into law. It’s as economically, politically and technologically challenging as the proposed Green New Deal that has dominated the climate change debate on the 2020 presidential campaign so far. Most Democratic candidates have backed the broad goals, first put forward by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“The 100 % Clean Energy For America Plan will require a massive, full-scale mobilization of our federal government that will spur major innovation and deployment of clean energy,” the Inslee campaign argues in the policy paper released Friday, noting the proposal would shutter every coal-fired power plant.
Other candidates also weighing in on climate change
Inslee is the second presidential candidate to unveil an ambitious climate change proposal this week. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke rolled out his plan during a visit to Yosemite National Park.
O’Rourke wants to zero out national net carbon emissions by 2050, and do that by spending $5 trillion on new clean energy technology and other infrastructure investments. He’d also push Congress to pass a law shifting electricity production toward clean and renewable energy – something an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress wasn’t able to accomplish in 2009 and 2010.
It’s not just Inslee and O’Rourke. As part of a recent policy proposal for public lands, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren suggested banning drilling on federally owned lands and then building enough new wind and solar projects on them to produce 10 percent of the country’s electricity. Every Democrat running for president would rejoin the Paris climate accord, the international pledge to lower carbon emissions that President Trump took the United States out of.
A parade of government and United Nations reports have laid out increasingly dire warnings about the coming decades if the world doesn’t begin drastically reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Increased flooding, fires, droughts and refugee crises are just some of the consequences of rising global temperatures, according to experts.
Still, up until now climate change has remained a lower-level concern for voters more worried about immediate economic concerns. “It doesn’t rise to the top tier of issues like health care or the economy,” said Mulhenberg College professor Christopher Borick, who’s been polling on climate change questions for more than a decade.
But those attitudes are slowly beginning to change.
“I think that is in part driven by individual experiences with climate change,” Borick said. “As they see it in their daily lives it’s starting to become a bigger priority, in terms of their voting strategies.”
And as the early months of the 2020 presidential campaign indicate, voters are now hearing much more about it from political candidates – at least on the Democratic side of the aisle.
The Trump administration has weakened offshore drilling safeguards put in place after a 2010 explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil platform killed 11 workers and triggered the largest ocean spill in U.S. history.
Administration officials said the revised Well Control Rule announced Thursday in Louisiana, not far from the site of the spill, reflects President Trump’s stance on “facilitating energy dominance” by increasing domestic oil and gas production and reducing burdens on the fossil fuel industry.
“Today’s final rule puts safety first, both public and environmental safety, in a common sense way,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement. “Incorporating the best available science, best practices and technological innovations of the past decade, the rule eliminates unnecessary regulatory burdens while maintaining safety and environmental protection offshore.”
Officials at the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, a division of the Interior Department that promulgated the rule, said the changes also will save the offshore oil and gas industry nearly a billion dollars over 10 years.
Politicians and conservationists who oppose the rule change are worried about its potential cost to the environment. The Deepwater Horizon disaster poured 4 million barrels of oil — about 200 million gallons — into the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana.
Around the time that the Obama administration finalized the rule in 2016 to guard against another catastrophic spill, BP announced that the accident had cost the company $61.6 billion, more than the value of Ford, Honda or General Motors.
The gulf fishing industry lost nearly $95 million in 2010 alone. According to the National Audubon Society, a million seabirds died.
More than 150 whales and dolphins were found dead during the response to the spill, while surviving dolphins suffered lung defects and hormone abnormalities, according to NOAA Fisheries.
When the spill was at its worst in May 2010, a month after it started, bluefin tuna were feeding and spawning as oil polluted their habitat. The wider effect on the animals is largely unknown.
The rule change comes at a time when the administration is considering expanding offshore drilling leases to 90 percent of the United States’ outer continental shelf, including the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, an unprecedented proposal.
Before the proposal was announced by the Interior Department last year in January as part of the National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program, the agency suspended a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to determine whether oil rigs can operate more safely. The study is still on hold.
Last week, the agency confirmed a decision to delay finalization of its five-year offshore oil exploration plan after a federal judge ruled that only Congress, not the White House, has the power to sweep aside Arctic and Atlantic drilling bans set by President Barack Obama.
Diane Hoskins, campaign director for the conservation group Oceana, said: “Gutting the far too few offshore drilling safeguards that were established in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is reckless and wrong. The Trump administration is putting industry cost savings ahead of safety just weeks after the anniversary of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.”
Administration officials heeded the concerns of the industry, particularly the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies on its behalf.
The institute said in a statement that it expects “opponents of natural gas and oil development anywhere to attack the updated rule.”
“Offshore energy development is safer than ever,” said Erik Milito, a vice president with the group. “Technological advances, as well as collaborative efforts by the industry and regulators, have helped to continuously advance safety systems and standards.”
Industry representatives had complained that the Obama rules were overly burdensome and did not necessarily make offshore oil rigs and platforms safer. They said the rules did not recognize technological improvements since the BP spill.
In its rule proposal last May, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said it understood the concerns and identified areas where the rules could be “amended or removed to reduce significant burdens on oil and natural gas operators . . . while ensuring safety and environmental protection.”
The new rules responded to those concerns by eliminating a requirement that safety and pollution prevention equipment be inspected by independent auditors certified by the bureau. A bipartisan presidential commission established after the BP disaster recommended such inspections.
Now oil companies can use “recommended practices” set by the oil industry for ensuring that safety equipment works, returning to a standard that existed before the gulf oil spill.
The industry’s recommended practices “are simply that — they make recommendations but don’t require anything,” Nancy Leveson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served as a senior adviser to the presidential commission, said when the rules were proposed.
“The documents are filled with ‘should’ instead of ‘must,’ ” she said.
The National Ocean Industries Association applauded the bureau “for acknowledging that the 2016 Well Control Rule, while well intentioned, was flawed with technical problems that actually detracted from the goal of safe operations,” said the group’s president, Randall Luthi. “BSEE’s final revisions, which leave the original rule largely intact, further manage risks and better protect workers and the environment, making drilling safer.”
A conservation organization that successfully sued the administration over its plans to open the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to leasing despite earlier bans on drilling there vowed to fight the administration’s weakened rules.
“These rollbacks are a handout to oil company [chief executives] at the cost of endangering the lives of their workers and heightening the risk for another environmental catastrophe off America’s coastlines,” said Chris Eaton, an attorney for Earthjustice. “We will use every tool we have to prevent these rollbacks.”
Eric Trump weighs in on his father’s success with boosting the U.S. economy and the left’s and media’s assault on the Trump administration
Eric Trump appeared on “Hannity” Thursday and called Democrats attacking his father “deranged” and dismissed the 2020 Democratic presidential field as “weak.”
“They don’t have any leaders out there. These candidates all look very weak to me, I welcome running against, quite frankly, any of them and helping my father in every way we can,” Trump told Sean Hannity.
Trump said the Democrats “won’t let it go” with their continuous allegations against President Trump and their call for more inquiries into the Russia investigation, and that will lead his father to win in 2020.
“They are failing, Sean. They don’t have a message, they don’t have proper leadership, and I am telling you, he’s going to win this thing again. He’s going to win this thing in 2020 because they are incredibly deranged,” Trump said
The Trump Organization executive vice-president also lashed out at Congress saying they were not doing their jobs and that the American people are “sick and tired” of it.
“This is what you get out of these people. They don’t want to work for the American people, they don’t want to do their jobs in congress. I say this as a civilian, people are sick and tired of this nonsense,” Trump said.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., vowed a “reckoning” Thursday after Attorney General Bill Barr boycotted a scheduled hearing, likening President Trump to a dictator and threatening the Justice Department leader with contempt.
Instead of Barr testifying on his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report Thursday the session became bizarre, one Democrat placed a prop chicken near an empty seat meant for Barr, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., ate a bucket of fried chicken while Democrats voiced their displeasure with Barr and the president.
“They want their legislators to actually work and do their jobs. That is why you see the approval rating of Congress is terrible. These people are incompetent,” Trump said.
Rep. Mark Meadows says it is “no coincidence” the New York Times reported on Thursday the FBI sent an undercover investigator to meet with a Trump campaign adviser during the 2016 election.
These “leaks” show the FBI feels threatened by an investigation by Attorney General William Barr into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, the North Carolina Republican said in a tweet.
“Incredible. Now confirmed: ‘FBI Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016,'” Meadows said, quoting the headline of the Times report.
“It’s absolutely not a coincidence that these leaks are coming out now. The FBI knows Bill Barr is investigating. The IG report is coming. They’re worried. We’re getting closer,” he added.
Incredible. Now confirmed: “FBI Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016”
It’s absolutely not a coincidence that these leaks are coming out now. The FBI knows Bill Barr is investigating. The IG report is coming. They’re worried. We’re getting closer. https://t.co/dKfkkNzUap
Meadows, a member of the House Oversight Committee, has been a leading GOP investigator examining alleged bias within the upper levels of the Justice Department and FBI. Last month he predicted a wave of criminal referrals to be sent to the Justice Department based on Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse investigation, which is expected to wrap up in the coming weeks.
The Times report revealed that a woman who said her name was Azra Turk posed as an assistant to Stefan Halper, an American professor at Cambridge University and informant for the FBI looking into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Turk asked Papadopoulos point blank if Trump’s campaign was working with the Russians at a bar in London in September 2016.
In reaction to the article by the Times, Papadopoulos insisted that Turk was not working for the FBI. “I agree with everything in this superb article except ‘Azra Turk’ clearly was not FBI. She was CIA and affiliated with Turkish intel. She could hardly speak English and was tasked to meet me about my work in the energy sector offshore Israel/Cyprus which Turkey was competing with,” he wrote in a tweet.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Russians and served 12 days in prison late last year. He agreed to cooperate with the Russia investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller, who recently wrapped up and found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Responding to Meadows’ tweet on Thursday another Republican, Rep. Jody Hice, chastised the Democrats for their efforts to impugn Barr.
“And the Left thought Bill Barr was crazy for using the word ‘spying.’ Looks like he hit the nail right on the head,” the Georgia congressman said. “Can’t wait to hear Adam Schiff & his circus try to explain this. Or the IG report. Or what Barr’s investigation exposes. The truth is finally coming out.”
When reports of a shooter spread on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte on Tuesday, the university’s emergency officials blasted out a stark, but increasingly familiar message: “Run, hide, fight.”
Some students reported doing just that. One student, in a study hall at a library, said she and others barricaded the door with a table and stayed quiet, waiting for police. Another hid in a men’s restroom, and a student who was in the classroom where the shooting broke out followed others who fled.
Student Riley Howell, without the option of running or hiding, confronted the suspected gunman, Trystan Andrew Terrell, 22, and “took the assailant off his feet,” the Charlotte police chief said. That act saved lives, the chief said, but Howell was killed. In total, two people were killed and four others were wounded in the attack and police have yet to release a motive for the shooting.
The guidance to respond to active shooter situations by fleeing, hiding, or in a last resort taking action against a gunman began being used after the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, in which a gunman killed 32 people before killing himself, and it has become standard advice, experts said.
In 2012, the city of Houston released a training video titled “Run. Hide. Fight.” funded through a Department of Homeland Security grant and that has been adopted by it and other federal agencies.
“It’s simple, it’s easy to repeat, it resonates,” said Randy Burba, chief of public safety at Chapman University in Orange, California, and past president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. He likened it to the instructions given on airplanes about what to do if there is a loss of cabin pressure and the oxygen masks drop.
“We don’t want you to walk around worrying about a shooting,” Burba said. “… But if it happens, a little bit of training and muscle memory is useful.”
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said Wednesday that Howell, a 21-year-old environmental studies major, was a hero who “did exactly what we train people to do” and that he “took the assailant off his feet.”
“You’re either going to run, you’re going to hide and shield, or you’re going to take the fight to the assailant,” Putney said at a news conference. “Having no place to run and hide, he did the last. But for his work, the assailant may not have been disarmed. Unfortunately, he gave his life in the process, but his sacrifice saved lives.”
Fighting an assailant is a last resort, Burba said. People in active shooter situations are urged to run from the danger but if they are unable to do that, they are told to hide. That can involve locking the door to rooms, turning off the lights to make it appear as though no one is inside, and using furniture to barricade doors, he said.
Even if the door opens out, stacking furniture can create impediments to a shooter. “Even if they get the door open, now they’ve got all these obstacles,” Burba said.
The UNC Charlotte campus went on lockdown during the shooting, and students studying in the library described hearing an announcement on the intercom and people coming into the building yelling about a shooter.
One student who was in a library study room told NBC affiliate WCNC of Charlotte on Tuesday that they barricaded themselves in the room by putting a table against the door.
Eventually, a police officer entered the library and told students inside to leave “and we all grabbed our stuff and ran out,” she said.
Another student, Jordan Pearce, 19, was also in the library and grabbed another girl, and the two hid in a men’s restroom until police arrived and escorted them out.
Students lay candles and flowers at the steps of Kennedy Hall to honor the victims of a shooting the day earlier on the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, North Carolina on May 1, 2019.Logan Cyrus / AFP – Getty Images
Some students as young as Pearce are not strangers to active shooter training; they grew up participating in active shooter drills. She said Wednesday that she had training in high school, and UNC Charlotte had also talked to students about it, telling them to run, hide or fight and to stay away from windows.
But she said her reaction “was also a gut instinct.”
Randy Spivey, founder of the Center for Personal Protection and Safety, which licenses training videos to schools, including the UNC system, said the instruction is designed to make people aware of their options.
The company produced the video “Shots Fired, When Lightning Strikes” in 2007 after the Virginia Tech shooting which uses the terms “get out, hide out, take out.” That video was used as a reference by the DHS in the active shooter guidance it published in 2008.
“What we don’t want is them to be frozen in fear with no options because they have no training,” he said.
“Before first responders arrive, those students or your children are immediate responders, and they are in what we call that extreme danger gap,” before police or other law enforcement arrive, Spivey said. “Many times, it’s what they do between the 2, 5, 10-minute window that determines the outcome.”
People also need to learn the “red flags” that can offer clues that someone could become violent against others or themselves, Spivey said.
He said that training in recognizing signs of behavior that can precede violence is especially needed in K-12 schools, and his company has produced a video it will make available to schools free of charge.
“It’s not just school shooters, but also some of those same indicators that someone is progressing towards violence, they’re also for suicide,” Spivey said.
Students pray together during a vigil at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte in Charlotte, N.C., on May 1, 2019.Chuck Burton / AP
Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, which deals with school security and training for pre-K-12 schools only, says that anecdotally there has been an increase in some of those districts adopting “run, hide, fight” or other options-based training, but “the vast majority in our experience are still not doing that.”
“You’re looking at asking kids to make life-and-death decisions and they’re not emotionally, behaviorally and mentally developed to do that,” he said, adding “we know the traditional lockdowns work.”
The non-profit group Safe Havens International has studied options-based active shooter training in K-12 schools and in simulations at a southwestern U.S. school district, staff members who completed a five-hour training program based on “Run. Hide. Fight.” were more likely to opt for force in a scenario involving a student with a handgun to his head.
In one out of four incidents, staff members who had the options-based training would opt to throw objects at or attack that student, and staff members who had not received formal training would begin talking to the student and encouraging him to put the gun down, the group’s CEO wrote in a January 2018 article in the trade magazine Security Management.
“Colleges and higher ed have a lot more applicability in that concept [run, hide or fight] because there may be fewer areas accessible to lockdowns,” and more open areas, Chris Dorn, senior analyst for the group, said Thursday.
Terrell was arrested and is charged with two counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder for the UNC Charlotte shooting. Officials told WCNC that Terrell was a history major at the school but had dropped out this semester.
A motive for the shooting, which occurred on the last day of classes, has not been released by police. A police report says that investigators do not believe Terrell knew the people killed in the attack.
In addition to Howell, student Ellis Parlier, 19, was also killed in the shooting. Four other students were wounded, but all are expected to survive, UNC Charlotte Chancellor Philip Dubois said.
The university issues the “run, hide, fight” guidance on its police website, and sent out alerts as the situation was unfolding for people to do just that.
Tristan Field, 19, who was inside the classroom when the gunman opened fire and followed a professor and others who fled, said in a message Wednesday over Twitter that they did what came naturally.
“We all just did what came naturally which was to run,” Field said. “I just followed others. We didn’t have a plan.”
The administration’s long-standing vetting problems have contributed to a surge in doomed picks.
Hours after withdrawing as a candidate to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Moore expressed shock that his critics had pored over his divorce records and decades-old columns.
“If I had any sense that this would happen — people would be looking at my writings from 20, 25 years ago — I would have told the president, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t do a Senate confirmation,’” Moore told Fox Business Network on Thursday.
Story Continued Below
But the White House probably should have seen it coming.
Past administrations have historically spent weeks or even months trying to identify potentially damaging information about candidates for administration jobs — long before their nominations are announced. Yet Trump’s White House again appeared to neglect the basic vetting that has for decades been the cornerstone of the nomination process.
“What went wrong here was the vetting process,” Moore acknowledged during Thursday’s interview.
Indeed, many in the administration were unaware of some of Moore’s past writings, according to a person familiar with the matter.
And Trump’s team appeared to be slow to react to Moore’s mounting problems. The White House, which did not respond to a request for comment on this article, announced this week that it was reviewing Moore’s writings, long after Moore had started facing heavy criticism for his outlandish past statements about women. And as of Thursday morning, Moore was telling journalists that the White House still backed his nomination.
“It’s just sloppy,” said one veteran lawyer who helps guide clients through the confirmation process.
The Trump administration’s long-standing vetting problems have contributed to a surge in doomed nominees.
In total, Trump has withdrawn 62 nominees since taking office, according to data provided to POLITICO by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that tracks federal vacancies. At this point in his presidency, Barack Obama had withdrawn 30 nominees. The figures include only people who were formally nominated, so Moore and others who took themselves out of consideration before their official paperwork was sent to the Senate aren’t counted.
The Trump administration has struggled for years to adequately vet nominees, dating back to the presidential transition, when Trump filled his Cabinet with friends and associates with little regard for the rigor of the traditional government hiring process, according to transition officials.
Less than one month after Trump took office, his first nominee for labor secretary, Andy Puzder, pulled out after facing a series of damaging revelations, including that he hired an undocumented household staffer and was once accused of abuse by his ex-wife. Later, his nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, Ronny Jackson, withdrew amid questions about Jackson’s behavior as a physician at the White House.
In the past three months alone, two high-profile candidates for top administration jobs have pulled themselves out of consideration, in addition to Moore. Trump announced last month that he would not nominate Herman Cain, a former pizza executive, to the Fed amid opposition from some Senate Republicans. And in February, Heather Nauert removed herself from consideration to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations after learning that she had employed a nanny without the correct work authorization.
Current and former administration officials insist that they’ve made strides in professionalizing the White House’s internal vetting operation. But they say the president himself sometimes undermines that process by making major staffing decisions on his own, with little consultation and with little notice.
“He’s impatient and impulsive,” a former senior White House official said. “When he makes a decision, he wants to move forward. There aren’t any people around him urging caution.”
More than two years into his presidency, Trump is surrounded by fewer senior White House aides who are willing to discourage his inclinations. These days, the White House is permeated by a “let Trump be Trump” mindset, an approach spearheaded by acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
“It’s been a steady march toward an unrestrained president,” the former official said. “We’ve now reached the complete extreme of the spectrum in which the president is deciding something in private based on the recommendations of one or two people.”
Bradley Moss, a lawyer who has represented clients seeking employment in the federal government, said the chronic problems getting high-profile nominees confirmed are “the result of nothing less than the president’s own personal disdain for vetting and his personal preference for gut intuition.”
The news of Cain and Moore’s pending nominations to the Fed caught many Senate Republicans by surprise. Trump announced his plans to tap Cain during a question-and-answer session with reporters following an event in the Oval Office, and he revealed Moore’s candidacy in response to a shouted question on the tarmac at Palm Beach International Airport. The unexpected announcements left White House officials with no time to brief lawmakers and get their feedback.
White House officials have instead often assumed that Trump’s nominees will easily win the necessary support from Senate Republicans, especially since they require only a simple majority vote in the chamber. But Senate Republicans have shown in recent weeks that they’re unwilling to simply green-light all of Trump’s nominees.
In the meantime, the president is increasingly relying on acting officials to fill senior roles across the government. Trump has said in private and in public that he likes acting officials because they give him more flexibility and they don’t need to go through the Senate confirmation process. Both the Homeland Security and Defense secretaries — two crucial positions tasked with protecting the country — are serving in an acting capacity.
Watchdog groups also remain alarmed by the sheer number of positions for which Trump has neglected to nominate anybody. At the State Department, more than 30 senior positions are vacant. There are more than a dozen senior-level vacancies at the Justice and Defense departments.
“Our government is still not fully and effectively staffed at the most senior levels,” said Max Stier, who leads the Partnership for Public Service, which advised the Trump transition team as it started staffing up the government.
Lawyers who represent potential nominees say the number of well-qualified individuals interested in joining the administration has slowed. And for those who are interested, the vetting process can sometimes be confusing and unorganized, the lawyers said.
“We had a client who thought he was all set and then at the last minute, they said, ‘No, we’re going to hold things up,’” one of the lawyers said. “We had no idea even who to call to find out what the holdup was.”
But people close to the White House said the president is facing bigger problems than sloppy vetting, adding that many in the West Wing are unbothered by the recent string of withdrawals.
“Compared to all of the stuff Trump is dealing with, this stuff barely registers,” a former administration official said. “Is anybody going to remember Steve Moore in three months?”
Media captionWhy no charge of obstruction of justice? A law professor breaks down the legal questions.
The US attorney general spent five acrimonious hours in front of a congressional committee explaining his handling of the Mueller report. The intensity of some of the exchanges suggests multiple legal and battles lie ahead between the Democrats in Congress and President Donald Trump.
A day after Attorney General William Barr traded blows with senators, the stakes ramped up considerably as he refused to testify to another committee and the Democratic leadership accused him of lying under oath.
Here’s a look at five areas where the fighting could be the most heated – and where they could be headed.
Waiting for Mueller
Mr Barr’s Senate testimony on Wednesday may have prompted as many questions as it answered, raising to a fevered pitch Democratic calls to hear from Robert Mueller himself.
They want to ask him why he failed to reach a conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice, and what he thinks about the attorney general’s handling of his report.
They’ll also want to question him about the contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russians – and how close they may have come to being a criminal conspiracy.
Although Republican Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham says he has no interest in calling Mr Mueller before his committee – insisting that the matter is closed – House Democrats have other ideas.
Media captionThe Mueller report – in 60 seconds
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, said negotiations are continuing over finding a date, perhaps in May, when the special counsel can testify before his committee.
Mr Barr has said he has no objection to Mr Mueller making such an appearance and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway also said that Mr Mueller – who is still, technically, a Justice Department employee – can testify.
But increasing conflict between the White House and Congress could change this calculus.
Outlook: Mueller spent most of his time as special counsel shrouded in secrecy and silence. It seems unlikely, however, that he will be able to quietly disappear from the national stage.
In a press conference on Thursday morning, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi straight-up accused William Barr of committing a crime.
She was specifically referring to the attorney general’s claims, during congressional testimony in early April, that he was unaware of reports of dissatisfaction with his handling of the Mueller report expressed by members of the special counsel’s office.
Democrats now believe this was a lie – based on a recent revealed letter from Mr Mueller to Mr Barr complaining that the attorney general’s four-page summary did not “fully capture the context, nature and substance” of his work.
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Attorney General Barr wrote a summary of the Russia report before the full version was released
Mr Barr countered that his communications were with Mr Muller himself, not his team, and the dissatisfaction had to do with the media coverage of his letter, not how he relayed Mr Mueller’s findings.
Then there are other reasons Democrats are angry at Mr Barr – such as his refusal to testify before the House Judiciary Committee and his decision to ignore congressional document subpoenas.
What are Democrats going to do about it? Mrs Pelosi only made vague references to a “process”, but they have several options if they want to punish the attorney general.
They could make a criminal referral for lying to Congress, which would be forwarded to a US attorney in Mr Barr’s Justice Department. They could hold Mr Barr in contempt of Congress, which would have to be enforced by US attorneys in the Trump administration.
Image copyright Getty Images
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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says Mr Barr committed a crime
The House of Representatives could also vote to formally censure the attorney general, putting a black mark on his record but not much more.
Finally, they could try to impeach the attorney general and have him removed from office. The process would be similar to that for removing a US president – a majority vote in the House of Representatives followed by a trial in the US Senate requiring a two-thirds vote to “convict”.
Only one White House cabinet official has ever been impeached – Ulysses S Grant’s Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 – and he was ultimately acquitted of corruption charges by the Senate.
Outlook: Legal proceedings seem unlikely. Censorship appears pointless. Impeachment would be an uphill fight, but it could also serve as proxy battle for the impeaching Mr Trump himself, venting frustration for Democrats who are itching for a fight but wary of taking on the president directly.
The McGahn subpoena
While Mr Mueller’s appearance before the US Congress would be a blockbuster occasion, he’s not the only individual Democrats want to question in open testimony. The special counsel’s report detailed how former White House Counsel Don McGahn felt the president pressured him to fire Mr Mueller and, later, write a memo saying that Mr Trump issued no such directive.
When Mr Barr was questioned about the matter by Senate Democrats, he said the president only suggested Mr Mueller be “replaced” because of a perceived conflict of interest – and then instructed Mr McGahn to write a memo to correct inaccurate media reports.
Democrats, needless to say, aren’t buying this, viewing the episode as one of the most obvious instances of possible obstruction of justice. Mr Nadler has issued a subpoena calling on Mr McGahn to testify before his committee on 21 May so his committee can get the former Trump aide’s account directly.
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Doug McGahn left the White House, but Democrats still want to hear from him
That’s not the end of the matter, of course. Mr Trump has said he plans to fight all the congressional subpoenas his administration is receiving, with Mr McGahn’s probably high on the list.
The White House could claim “executive privilege”, a legal principle that protects the confidentiality of advice a president receives from his aides. Although that privilege was waived when Mr McGahn spoke with Mr Mueller’s office, a recently revealed letter from White House lawyer Emmet Flood to Mr Barr indicates the president intends to preserve those protections going forward.
If both sides dig in, Mr McGahn’s freedom to talk to Congress could end up a matter for the courts to decide.
Outlook: Executive privilege is a controversial legal principle, but there are plenty of judges – and Supreme Court justices – who could be eager to see these presidential protections strengthened. Mr McGahn would be a blockbuster witness – but the Mueller report may end up being his only public account.
While most of the Mueller report was made public in mid-April, there are still roughly 36 pages that the Justice Department has redacted – because of sensitive intelligence data, grand jury information, material relevant to ongoing investigations or matters concerning “peripheral third parties”.
Democrats in Congress want to see the entire report and have issued a subpoena – again courtesy of House Judiciary Chair Nadler – to force the Justice Department to hand it over.
Image copyright Getty Images
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Congressman Nadler is leading the Democratic charge in Congress
The White House has said the report was produced by the special counsel for the attorney general, and Congress has no right to see it in its entirety. There’s an unstated concern that if the report receives wider distribution, its sensitive contests will leak to the public.
Attorney General Barr said in his Senate testimony, however, that there were no significant areas of disagreement between Mr Mueller and himself over what to redact. There’s no guarantee that the blacked-out portions of the report contain any new, explosive information.
Still, it could very well end up another battle between two branches of government, the executive and legislative, that will have to be decided by the third, the judiciary.
Outlook: This could end up being a fierce battle over a hill that doesn’t matter in the larger war.
Trump’s tax returns and other documents
There are two separate legal battles brewing over congressional requests for Donald Trump’s business records and – that holy grail for many on the left – his tax returns.
A month ago, Richard Neal, the Democrat in charge of the House Ways and Means Committee, formally requested that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) provide him with copies of the president’s tax returns for six years, citing a seldom-used 1924 law as authority.
So far Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, whose department oversees the IRS, has only said he’s reviewing the matter.
Image copyright Getty Images
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Steven Mnuchin says the treasury department is reviewing the tax request
The president and his lawyers, on the other hand, have called the request improper and insisted that the IRS not comply.
“The Democrats are demanding that the IRS turn over the documents, and that is not going to happen and they know it,” acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said a few days after the first committee request was filed.
If the Treasury Department continues to drag its feet, the Democrats could start court proceedings that eventually determine the constitutionality of that old federal law and the legality of the Democratic action.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s personal lawyers have filed a flurry of lawsuits to prevent an accounting firm and two banks used by Mr Trump’s businesses – Deutsche Bank and Capital One – from complying with requests by several Democratic-controlled House committees for Trump organisation financial records.
Courts have previously given Congress broad subpoena powers as part of their legislative and investigatory responsibilities, but Mr Trump’s lawyers are painting the move as a partisan fishing expedition that intrudes on the privacy of the president and his family.
Democrats counter that a thorough inspection of Trump businesses is the only way to ensure that he doesn’t have financial involvements that are illegal or make him susceptible to foreign influence.
Outlook: This appears set for another long, drawn-out legal battle. Democrats could find a way to circumvent the federal government, however, if New York state – which possesses the president’s state tax returns and oversees many big financial institutions – hands over what they have to Congress.
U.S. Border Patrol cars are seen from the bridge connecting Eagle Pass, Texas, with Piedras Negras, Mexico, near the banks of the Rio Grande in February.
Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters
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U.S. Border Patrol cars are seen from the bridge connecting Eagle Pass, Texas, with Piedras Negras, Mexico, near the banks of the Rio Grande in February.
Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters
U.S. border authorities have recovered the body of a 10-month-old child and continue searching for two other children and an adult whose raft overturned in the Rio Grande as they were attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border Wednesday night near Del Rio, Texas, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“What we’re dealing with now is senseless tragedy,” said Del Rio Sector Chief Patrol Agent Raul L. Ortiz in a statement released Thursday. “The men and women of the U.S. Border Patrol have been doing everything in their power to prevent incidents like this. And yet, callous smugglers continue to imperil the lives of migrants for financial gain.”
Border agents on patrol encountered a 27-year-old Honduran male who reported that he was one of nine people on a rubber raft that had overturned in what was described as cold and fast-flowing waters. The man said that his wife, two sons who were 10 months old and 6 years old, and a 7-year-old nephew were swept away. Two other families were also on the raft, a CBP official told NPR.
A border agent later found the wife and 6-year-old son of the man who made the initial report. The boy was rushed to a local hospital.
An adult male and two children – the 7-year-old boy and a girl whose age was not immediately known – have not been located, the official said.
Government data show that 103,492 people were apprehended at the southwest border in March, the highest monthly level in more than a decade. The spring runoff has made crossing the Rio Grande a potentially treacherous journey.
The reports of the missing migrants come a day after a 16-year-old migrant boy from Guatemala died in U.S. custody in Texas on Tuesday. He is the third migrant minor to die since early December after being detained.
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A man visiting Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano this week was left “seriously injured” after falling from a cliff into the volcano’s caldera, officials said Wednesday.
Responders from the Hawai‘i County Fire Department and Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park rangers were ultimately able to rescue the unidentified individual, who witnesses said had “lost his footing and fell from a 300 foot cliff at Kīlauea caldera” around 6:30 p.m., according to a news release from Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
“The man had just climbed over a permanent metal railing at the Steaming Bluff overlook to get closer to the cliff edge,” park officials said.
A search for the fallen man ensued and resulted in his rescue more than two hours later, according to the news release. He was found “on a narrow ledge about 70 feet down from the cliff edge,” officials said. He was airlifted to receive medical treatment.
The man was airlifted to Hilo Medical Center for treatment, the news release said. (Getty/File)
Officials issued a stern warning about the hazards of bypassing safety barriers, saying the results could be fatal.
“Visitors should never cross safety barriers, especially around dangerous and destabilized cliff edges,” Chief Ranger John Broward said. “Crossing safety barriers and entering closed areas can result in serious injuries and death.”
The United States Geological Survey defines a caldera on their website as “a large basin-shaped volcanic depression” that is “commonly formed when magma is withdrawn or erupted from a shallow underground magma reservoir.”
“This could be the tip of the iceberg as far as drug company misconduct is concerned,” he said.
During the 10-week trial, federal prosecutors had detailed Insys’s audacious marketing plan — which included paying doctors for sham educational talks and luring others with lap dances — to spur sales of Subsys, an under-the-tongue spray approved to treat patients with cancer.
Company executives were accused of paying doctors to write prescriptions for a much wider pool of patients than the drug was approved for, and of misleading insurance companies so they would cover the potent and pricey medication. With the drug’s sales soaring, Insys became a darling of Wall Street, generating annual sales at one point of more than $300 million.
In addition to Mr. Kapoor, the other executives found guilty were Richard M. Simon, the former national director of sales; Sunrise Lee and Joseph A. Rowan, both former regional sales directors; and Michael J. Gurry, former vice president of managed markets. Lawyers for the defendants either did not comment or said they planned to appeal.
Beth Wilkinson, a lawyer for Dr. Kapoor, said she and her client were disappointed in the verdict. “Four weeks of jury deliberations confirm that this was far from an open-and-shut case,” she said in a statement. “We will continue the fight to clear Dr. Kapoor’s name.”
Attorney General William Barr three times now has tread on the dangerous ground of asserting that the president can assess his own guilt or innocence and, by extension, of the culpability of underlings as well.
Barr’s claims are meretricious nonsense.
The first assertion came by implication, but not fully stated, in Barr’s April 18 press conference before he released the Mueller report on Russian malfeasance. The next two, from his May 1 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, were quite explicit.
Barr’s prepared press conference remarks ascribed “non-corrupt motives” to President Trump’s consideration of impeding Mueller’s probe, on the theory that Trump “was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” even though “there was in fact no collusion.”
Yet frustration and anger provide no legal excuse for impeding a lawful investigation, and Barr has acknowledged the investigation was lawful. So how does this provide Trump any excuse?
In his May 1 testimony, Barr was more specific on two separate occasions. “If the president is being falsely accused … and he knew [the accusations against him] were false, and he felt this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents, and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for [exercising constitutional authority] for replacing an independent counsel.”
In later testimony, Barr said: “With the president, who has a constitutional authority to supervise proceedings, if in fact a proceeding … was based on false allegations, the president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate that proceeding and it would not be corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused, and he would be worried about the impact on his administration.”
Richard Nixon surely thought the Watergate investigation was a witch hunt. Yet when he wanted to fire the special prosecutor conducting it, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy both resigned. Then Congress immediately began impeachment proceedings.
Barr is a different sort of attorney general. His assertions are wrongheaded and possibly dangerous on multiple levels. The first is on principle alone: No man, not even the president, should be allowed to adjudge his own case. Otherwise, he’s a tyrant. The very notion of such power runs counter to the entire basis of America’s constitutionally limited government and its history of fighting a revolution to jettison a king.
Second, to the extent Barr is making more limited claims that a president has constitutional power to fire a constitutionally inferior officer (rather than to stop an entire investigation), he ignores the reality that even the powers granted by the Constitution are limited in both law and custom. Furthermore, any “intent” to impede an otherwise lawfully operating investigation on the basis of one’s own supposed innocence is to violate the first principle above. To violate a constitutional-historical principle as important as that one is inherentlycorrupt.
Third, Barr’s statements produce an absurd logical consequence. In practice, even if Trump knew with God-like omniscience that he was personally guilty of no legal offense, and is thus justified in Barr’s mind to stop the investigation, he might also be killing an investigation into others — say, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, and more than a dozen Russian spies or other alleged criminals who worked illegally to undermine a U.S. election. Is Barr maintaining that this is also acceptable?
Remember, the Mueller investigation was only ever secondarily about Trump (or even Trump’s aides and relatives). The first official instruction given to Mueller was to “ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.” If Trump killed that proceeding even to keep it from “hampering his ability to govern,” he would be undermining the entire nation’s ability to protect itself from illegal Russian meddling.
In the end, there can be no innocent motive for, or innocent effect from, an attempt to halt a duly constituted investigation operating under proper constitutional safeguards. This is so even if a president’s political opponents are misusing the existence of the investigation for their own illegitimate purposes.
If William Barr really thinks otherwise, he should not be attorney general.
Although the move brought plenty of criticism, including from Donald Trump Jr., Facebook is a private company, and as such it can absolutely enforce its terms of service by banning people. That’s a right that self-described freedom advocates should support rather than attack.
For Facebook and other social media platforms, there are plenty of reasons to ban certain content — even if it has a reputational cost to claims of neutrality or upholding freedom of expression.
The proliferation of violent and distasteful content likely does even more damage to their reputation while also driving users away and raising serious ethical issues for advertisers. In the aftermath of the livestreamed mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, for example, Facebook faced criticism for not doing enough to quickly take down the video and pledged to do a better job of monitoring content.
Although that decision and the subsequent bans have clearly set off free speech alarm bells for some, those who might applaud government intervention should consider the alternative. Indeed, calls for government controls to regulate who should be allowed to post on a private-sector controlled platform are likely to be just as pernicious as those that try to restrict how a company manages its own platforms and enforces user agreements.
Facebook, wary of regulations of both types, is trying to navigate the fine line between the government on one side and its users and its shareholders on the other. For now that means a ban for some of the most egregious violators of the standards set by the company. That’s not a perfect solution, but it is a decent compromise. Facebook, after all, is different from the traditional public square, even if it has become the centerpiece of the currently smoldering debate on free speech and social media.
One of the victims in the mass shooting on Tuesday at the University of North Carolina’s Charlotte campus is being praised as a hero who saved lives by charging and tackling the shooter, according to local police.
Riley Howell, 21, who was killed in the shooting, “took the suspect off his feet,” said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney in a news conference. “Absolutely, Mr. Howell saved lives.”
Howell “did exactly what we train people to do — you’re either going to run, you’re going to hide and shield, or you’re going to take the fight to the assailant. Having no place to run and hide, he did the last,” said Putney.
“But for his work, the assailant may not have been disarmed. Unfortunately, he gave his life in the process. But his sacrifice saved lives,” added the chief.
Kevin Westmoreland, the father of Howell’s longtime girlfriend, described him as someone who “would step in front of a train for her if he had to.”
Putney said Howell, of Waynesville, N.C., was probably the second fatality in the incident.
The other fatality was 19-year-old Ellis Parlier of Midland, N.C.
Howell, Parlier and the four injured victims were all students.
The four injured were identified by the university as Sean DeHart, 20, and Drew Pescaro, 19, both of Apex, N.C.; Emily Houpt, 23, of Charlotte; and Rami Alramadhan, 20, of Saihat, Saudi Arabia.
Students attend a vigil at the University of North Carolina’s Charlotte campus to honor the victims of Tuesday’s shooting. (Chuck Burton/AP)
Police have identified the alleged shooter as Trystan Andrew Terrell, 22, a former student at UNC Charlotte. He has no prior criminal record, and campus police chief Jeff Baker described Terrell as “not somebody on our radar.”
Terrell is charged with two counts of murder, four counts of attempted first-degree murder, four counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, discharging a firearm on educational property and possession of a gun on educational property, according to jail records cited by the Charlotte Observer.
Putney said that the handgun Terrell allegedly used in the attack was legally purchased and that he had a “lot of ammo.” Police have not determined a motive for the shooting or the choice of Kennedy Hall, the campus administration building, to launch the attack.
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