President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats have been feuding, putting in question Congress’ ability to carry out its constitutional oversight. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
The White House and congressional investigators are hammering each other with legal action and charges of bad faith.
The showdown between the Trump White House and House Democrats reached a new level of hostility this week, as several investigative disputes veered toward federal court amid scathing rhetoric on both sides.
Three dramatic clashes between White House lawyers and congressional Democrats over the past 36 hours have created an atmosphere of total war between the president and Capitol Hill, suggesting that even modest compromise may be impossible and that protracted court fights likely are inevitable.
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House Democrats threatened Tuesday to hold in contempt a Trump official who oversaw security clearances after the White House instructed him not to cooperate with Congress. Later in the day, the Trump administration refused to turn over six years’ worth of President Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns by a 5 p.m. deadline, instead requesting more time to consult with the Justice Department. And later Tuesday, Trump said he was opposed to his current and former aides — most notably, former White House Counsel Don McGahn — testifying on Capitol Hill, escalating the showdown even further.
Those moves came a day after Trump took the dramatic step of suing the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee to block a subpoena for his financial records.
White House lawyers said they are guarding the executive branch’s prerogatives against what they call politically motivated congressional inquests. But Democrats see an unprecedented — and indefensible — degree of White House defiance.
“It’s a pretty extraordinary and outlandish situation right now,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Oversight panel, said in an interview. “It’s like a curtain has fallen down over the White House.”
Since House Democrats took power in January, White House officials have resorted to a range of aggressive tactics — refusing to turn over documents, declining to send witnesses to testify and even going to federal court to protect Trump’s financial records from congressional scrutiny.
“It’s putting forth a constitutional crisis about whether the Congress can effectively perform its oversight duties,” said Morton Rosenberg, who served as legal adviser to the House general counsel.
Trump’s White House and personal lawyers have repeatedly counterpunched Democrats, using harsh and hostile terms and painting a portrait of a frantic White House under siege from an opposition party out to destroy the president.
“The Democrat Party, with its newfound control of the U.S. House of Representatives, has declared all-out political war against President Donald J. Trump,” Trump’s personal attorneys wrote in a court filing challenging a subpoena for his financial records from an accounting firm. “Democrat Party” is a term often used by conservatives that Democrats consider intentionally disrespectful.
“Instead of working with the president to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans, House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the president politically,” added the attorneys, William Consovoy and Stefan Passantino.
Trump allies have echoed that partisan framing in their arguments that Democrats are making illegitimate requests.
“No one should be surprised that this White House is following a time-honored tradition of ignoring partisan subpoenas,” said a former Trump adviser who remains close to the White House.
In recent days, the White House has begun instructing current and former White House officials, including former White House personnel security director Carl Kline, to not cooperate with Congress. The White House will also try to block McGahn — who is emerging as a star witness for House Democrats — from testifying by asserting executive privilege, according to two people familiar with the plans.
Trump, for his part, told The Washington Post that the White House Counsel’s office had not made a “final, final decision.” But he indicated he had no intention of complying with House Democrats.
“There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan — obviously very partisan,” Trump said.
“I don’t want people testifying to a party, because that is what they’re doing if they do this,” he added.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) subpoenaed McGahn to appear before the panel May 21 as part of its obstruction of justice investigation into Trump. But lawmakers have raised questions about whether Trump is able to claim executive privilege on anything revealed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report because the report is now a public document. It includes detailed testimony from McGahn, they said, which is effectively an affirmative decision by Trump to waive the privilege.
“As such, the moment for the White House to assert some privilege to prevent this testimony from being heard has long since passed,” Nadler said in a statement Tuesday. “I suspect that President Trump and his attorneys know this to be true as a matter of law — and that this evening’s reports, if accurate, represent one more act of obstruction by an administration desperate to prevent the public from talking about the president’s behavior.”
Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said he would schedule a vote to hold Kline in contempt for refusing to comply with the committee’s subpoena for a deposition before the panel, which was scheduled for Tuesday.
Trump’s lawyers aren’t the only ones making their case in acerbic terms. Cummings released a scathing statement Tuesday ripping the Trump administration for routinely shivving congressional oversight requests.
“It appears that the president believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight,” Cummings said. “It also appears that the White House believes that it may dictate to Congress — an independent and co-equal branch of government — the scope of its investigations and even the rules by which it conducts them.”
Kline is accused of overriding career national security officials to approve security clearances for officials whose applications were initially denied. The allegations against him were revealed to the committee by Tricia Newbold, a whistleblower who told the Oversight Committee that Kline and others put national security at risk by granting security clearances to more than two dozen officials.
“It’s true with all of the committees — the White House is fighting each and every one,” said Ed Passman, Newbold’s lawyer. “This is just another example. It’s really disappointing because my client has come forward at great personal risk.”
In addition to Nadler and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Cummings has emerged as a leading persona non grata in Trumpworld. And now, he’s become the latest in a long line of defendants in a Trump lawsuit.
“Elijah Cummings is a gentlemen who treats everybody with decency and respect,” Raskin said. “And it seems pretty shocking to me that the president has injected this kind of negative personal tone into the whole thing.”
A contempt vote against Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, would be the first since Trump took office. That could lead Congress to ask a judge to force the administration to cooperate. It could also lead the U.S. attorney in Washington to press charges, though that’s unlikely to happen.
“This is as close to anarchy as I have seen,” said Charles Tiefer, former solicitor and deputy general counsel of the House who is now a professor at the University of Baltimore. “The administrations seems to think it has floated off into space and no longer subject to oversight.”
White House deputy counsel Michael Purpura sent a letter Monday asking Kline not to answer questions because it “unconstitutionally encroaches on fundamental executive branch interests.”
Kline’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, wrote a subsequent letter to the committee saying that Kline would not answer questions. “With two masters from two equal branches of government, we will follow the instructions of the one that employs him,” Driscoll wrote in the letter to the committee.
Democrats had hoped they would quickly receive documents and information about the Trump administration, but it has become clear that a long and frustrating fight with the president’s lawyers lies ahead. The fight could end up in court and could take several months, possibly stretching well into 2020 as the president runs for reelection.
Since 2007, Congress has held two officials in contempt — White House counsel Harriet Miers during George W. Bush’s tenure and Attorney General Eric Holder during Barack Obama’s presidency — but still failed to receive all the information it has requested.
A lawyer who worked in Obama’s White House said a White House requesting an official not cooperate is not unusual but it is unusual to do so without invoking executive privilege, which allows a president to shield certain communications from legislative and judicial branches. “It’s a very difficult situation unless they invoke executive privilege,” the lawyer said.
Nearly every House committee has launched investigations into the Trump administration, on everything from the easing of sanctions on businesses tied to a Russian oligarch to the federal government’s lease with the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
“When faced with choice of cooperation or confrontation, Chairman Cummings picked confrontation,” a spokesman for the Republican side of the Oversight panel said Tuesday, slamming Cummings for his “insatiable quest to sully the White House.”
In total, the administration has at least 30 times refused or delayed turning over documents to 12 House committees, according to House Democrats. A half dozen officials have refused to appear before five committees while two officials have refused to come in for interviews with two other committees, they say.
On Monday, Trump sued Cummings in an effort to block the Oversight Committee’s subpoena to accounting firm Mazars USA. The committee is seeking eight years of Trump’s financial records from the company.
The White House and Driscoll did not respond to a request for comment.
Kyle Cheney and Eliana Johnson contributed to this report.
Agents in South Texas found a three-year-old immigrant boy wandering alone in a cornfield near the border early Tuesday, according to Customs and Border Protection.
The toddler was crying and in need of attention when agents from the Rio Grande Valley Sector discovered him near Brownsville on Tuesday morning.
The only piece of information found on the boy was a phone number and name written on the bottom of one of his shoes.
The boy’s nationality is unknown, but he is believed to have been part of a larger group that illegally crossed into the U.S. from Mexico and got separated from a person in the group.
The child was taken to a Border Patrol station and will be transferred to the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied minor immigrants.
Agents have called the number on the boy’s shoe, but were not able to make contact as of Tuesday evening.
The Rio Grande Valley region has seen far more children arriving by themselves as well as families at the border since October than any of the other eight sectors. More than 15,000 unaccompanied children and 78,000 people traveling with family members have been apprehended since then, according to CBP data.
Former Rochester Drug Co-Operative CEO Laurence Doud III, facing criminal charges stemming from the opioid crisis, leaves the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Tuesday.
Kathy Willens/AP
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Former Rochester Drug Co-Operative CEO Laurence Doud III, facing criminal charges stemming from the opioid crisis, leaves the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Tuesday.
Kathy Willens/AP
A major pharmaceutical distribution company and two of its former executives are facing criminal charges for their roles in advancing the nation’s opioid crisis and profiting from it.
Rochester Drug Co-Operative Inc., one of the nation’s 10 largest pharmaceutical distributors in the U.S., its former CEO Laurence Doud III and former chief of compliance William Pietruszewski were charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled narcotics — oxycodone and fentanyl — for non-medical reasons and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
RDC and Pietruszewski are also charged with willfully failing to file suspicious order reports to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Between May 2012 and November 2016, the company received and filled over 1.5 million orders for controlled substances from its pharmacy customers. However, it reported only four suspicious orders to the DEA. According to the complaint, the company failed to report at least 2,000 suspicious orders.
“This prosecution is the first of its kind: executives of a pharmaceutical distributor and the distributor itself have been charged with drug trafficking, trafficking the same drugs that are fueling the opioid epidemic that is ravaging this country,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said in a statement. “Our Office will do everything in its power to combat this epidemic, from street-level dealers to the executives who illegally distribute drugs from their boardrooms.”
Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaking at a news conference announcing charges against Rochester Drug Co-Operative Inc.
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Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaking at a news conference announcing charges against Rochester Drug Co-Operative Inc.
Mary Altaffer/AP
Pietruszewski, 53, pleaded guilty last week. Doud, 75, surrendered to authorities and pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday.
Both executives face maximum sentences of life in prison and a mandatory minimum prison term of 10 years on the drug trafficking charges. They face a maximum five years in prison on the charge of defrauding the government.
The Rochester, N.Y.,-based company is a middleman between drug manufacturers and local independent pharmacies. It supplied more than 1,300 pharmacies and earned $1 billion per year during the relevant time period.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s statement:
“From 2012 to 2016, RDC’s sales of oxycodone tablets grew from 4.7 million to 42.2 million — an increase of approximately 800 percent — and during the same period RDC’s fentanyl sales grew from approximately 63,000 dosages in 2012 to over 1.3 million in 2016 — an increase of approximately 2,000 percent. During that same time period, Doud’s compensation increased by over 125 percent, growing to over $1.5 million in 2016.”
The company has agreed to pay a $20 million fine and submitted to three years of independent compliance monitoring.
“Today’s charges should send shock waves throughout the pharmaceutical industry reminding them of their role as gatekeepers of prescription medication,” said DEA Special Agent in Charge Ray Donovan.
“We made mistakes,” company spokesman Jeff Eller said in a statement. “RDC understands that these mistakes, directed by former management, have serious consequences. We accept responsibility for those mistakes. We can do better, we are doing better, and we will do better.”
Twitter executives met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday to discuss the health of conversation on the platform ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump shared a picture on Twitter of the meeting that showed CEO Jack Dorsey and a number of other Twitter executives in the Oval Office.
During the meeting, Trump and Twitter execs discussed the social platform’s “commitment to protecting the health of the public conversation ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections,” a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider.
In an internal email circulated among Twitter employees that was leaked to Motherboard, Dorsey said he believed such conversation with Trump “bridges gaps and drives towards solutions.”
“I have met with every world leader who has extended an invitation to me, and I believe the discussions have been productive, and the outcomes meaningful,” Dorsey wrote in the email. “Some of you will be very supportive of our meeting [with] the president, and some of you might feel we shouldn’t take this meeting at all. In the end, I believe it’s important to meet heads of state in order to listen, share our principles and our ideas.”
The Tuesday meeting with Twitter executives came hours after Trump took to his personal Twitter account to blast the social-media platform for what he called “very discriminatory” behavior against him, which he said included lowering his follower count. He also said Twitter was playing “political games” and that he’d heard “big complaints from many people.”
Trump has a history of leveling accusations of political bias at big tech companies, such as Facebook and Google. However, he’s called out Twitter in particular. In November, Trump tweeted that the social-media platform was removing followers of his Twitter account.
But big names have seen their follower counts decrease in the past as Twitter clamps down on bots and inactive accounts. In July 2018, for example, Twitter removed inactive accounts that may have been taken over by bots, and Dorsey himself lost 200,000 followers.
Twitter is often criticized by both liberals and conservatives. Some critics say that the social-media company hasn’t done enough to monitor Trump’s presence on the platform. Some have criticized Twitter for letting Trump stay on the platform even after his actions and tweets have appeared to violate Twitter’s rules.
However, Twitter has said that blocking a “world leader” such as Trump from the platform would “hide important information people should be able to see and debate.”
During Tuesday’s meeting, Trump and Twitter executives also discussed “efforts underway to respond to the opioid crisis,” the Twitter spokesperson said.
A new post on Twitter’s blog details the platform’s efforts to “help prevent drug misuse, curb illegal online drug sales, and promote public health information.” This includes reviving an awareness campaign on Twitter in partnership with the US government to encourage people to bring their leftover prescription-drug bottles to designated drop-off locations to prevent drug misuse.
“It’s already been litigated in the court of public opinion and in the election,” Gidley said in an interview on Fox News when asked if the administration would meet the 5 p.m. deadline. “Once he’s out of audit he’ll think about doing it, but he is not inclined to do so at this time.”
The deadline is the second set by House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., for the IRS to cooperate with his inquiry into Trump’s tax returns.
Part of the stated motivation for Neal’s inquiry is to determine whether the IRS has audited Trump and his businesses, as Trump claims. An IRS rule put in place after a major tax underpayment by former President Richard Nixon mandates that every sitting president be automatically placed under audit.
A law put in place in reaction to a major Cabinet corruption scandal in the 1920s, the Teapot Dome Scandal, grants the heads of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee the ability to request taxpayer information from the IRS, which is a part of the Treasury Department. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin missed the first deadline set by Neal, April 10, saying that he wanted the IRS to hold off from complying with the request until it consulted with the Justice Department. Trump’s personal legal team made a similar request of the IRS.
In a follow-up letter sent on April 13, Neal told the Treasury secretary that he would view a failure to deliver Trump’s tax information by 5 p.m. Tuesday as a refusal, meaning that Neal would consider Mnuchin in violation of the law. That could set up a lengthy court battle.
Trump could voluntarily release his returns despite being under audit. Public polling has shown a majority of Americans think Trump’s tax returns should be released, though the number who believe it should be a priority is mixed. In a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted in late March, half of respondents said that forcing Trump to release his tax returns should be a priority for Congress, while only 23 percent of those polled opposed it.
A spokesperson for the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Though Mnuchin is considered one of Trump’s closest advisers, it’s not clear whether Gidley spoke for the department in his statement or only for Trump.
“He’s the president and no one cares about ridiculous charges about tax returns and all types of things Democrats are doubling down on today,” argued Gidley.
The White House plans to fight a subpoena issued by the House Judiciary Committee for former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify, according to people familiar with the matter, setting up another showdown in the aftermath of the special counsel report.
The Trump administration also plans to oppose other requests from House committees for the testimony of current and former aides about actions in the White House described in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, according to two people familiar with internal thinking who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke of the plans on the condition of anonymity.
White House lawyers plan to tell attorneys for administration witnesses called by the House that they will be asserting executive privilege over their testimony, officials said.
Such a move will intensify a power struggle between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats, potentially setting up a protracted court battle.
McGahn was mentioned more than 150 times in Mueller’s report and told investigators about how the president pressured him to oust the special counsel and then pushed him to publicly deny the episode.
McGahn’s lawyer, William Burck, began discussions with the Judiciary Committee about his potential testimony after the panel issued a subpoena Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.
Securing McGahn’s testimony would be a boon for the committee, which hopes to focus on potential obstruction of justice by Trump in a series of public hearings this spring while exploring other “abuses of power,” Democratic aides said.
Public testimony from McGahn could create a spectacle that would parallel the June 1973 testimony of President Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel, John Dean, whose live televised appearance before a Senate committee painted a vivid portrait for the country of the White House coverup of the Watergate burglary.
People close to McGahn, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said McGahn is “following the process” and working with the White House on his next steps, despite Trump’s public and private anger about his former counsel’s prominence in the Mueller report.
“He’s not eager to testify. He’s not reluctant. He got a subpoena. It compels him to testify. But there are some countervailing legal reasons that might prevent that,” said one person close to McGahn, who described private discussions on the condition of anonymity. “He doesn’t want to be in contempt of Congress; nor does he want to be in contempt of his ethical obligations and legal obligations as a former White House official.”
Trump has told advisers that McGahn was disloyal to him, and he criticized the lawyer for taking extensive notes of meetings that were cited in Mueller’s report. While initially portraying the report as an exoneration, Trump has grown frustrated with its depiction of his White House.
The two men had an adversarial relationship, with McGahn contemplating quitting several times during his tenure. But he was also key to some of the president’s main accomplishments, like the confirmation of two Supreme Court judges and a record number of federal judiciary appointments.
After a day of deadly Easter Sunday attacks, counterterrorism expert Bobby Chacon says the massacre shows the radical ideology is spreading.
Over the past three years, radical Islamic cleric Zahran Hashim, alternately known as Mohammed Zahran, has amassed an online following of thousands for his hate-filled online sermons – sometimes delivered before a banner depicting the Twin Towers – that are composed of impassioned calls for “all non-Muslims be eliminated.”
But despite reportedly being known to authorities, Hashim’s videos – which have since been removed for violating YouTube terms – were seemingly left unchecked, according to The Telegraph.
Now, unconfirmed reports are not only pointing the finger at him for being one of the suicide bombers to strike the Shangri La hotel but pegging him as the mastermind of the coordinated attacks which have left more than 320 people dead and over 500 wounded.
Over the past three years, radical Islamic cleric Zahran Hashim, alternately known as Mohammed Zahran, amassed an online following of thousands for hate-filled online sermons – sometimes delivered before a banner depicting the enkindled Twin Towers – and composed of impassioned calls for “all non-Muslims be eliminated.” (YouTube)
Sri Lanka government spokesperson Rajitha Senaratne said Monday that authorities believe a small extremist group known as the National Thowfeek Jamaath (NTJ) – despite having generated little cause for concern with the exception of slashing Buddha statues in 2017 – were the orchestrators.
Moreover, one of NJT’s leaders Hashim may have had additional terrorist ties.
A Sri Lankan Police officer inspects a blast spot at the Shangri-la hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka. (AP)
ISIS – which was officially run out of its self-designated “caliphate” in Syria just weeks ago – also capitalized on the chance to insert itself into the narrative. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an ISIS media activist used the encrypted messenger app Telegram this week to publish photographs of three armed Sri Lankan men posing in front of the trademark black ISIS flag, claiming that the men – now all dead – carried out the bombings.
“Pictures of some of the brothers who carried out the attacks in Sri Lanka, may Allah accept them,” the photo caption declared.
One of the featured individuals is believed to be Hashim, who is described as a “well-known preacher who has expressed ISIS sympathies in the past.”
“The ISIS claim of responsibility lends credence to the veracity of the assertion that the men depicted in the photographs were indeed among the perpetrators,” MEMRI stated in its threat report, highlighting that the ISIS media wing Amaq also claimed responsibility. More than 30 members of Sri Lanka’s minority Muslim population were documented to have fled abroad to fight with ISIS in Iraq and Syria in recent years, according to officials.
A relative of a blast victim grieves outside a morgue in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Sunday, April 21, 2019. More than hundred were killed and hundreds more hospitalized with injuries from eight blasts that rocked churches and hotels in and just outside of Sri Lanka’s capital on Easter Sunday, officials said, the worst violence to hit the South Asian country since its civil war ended a decade ago. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)
Sri Lankan authorities suspect that there are “international terror groups which are behind the local terrorists,” and are said to be investigating funding sources. Officials also said Tuesday that they believe the onslaught was “in retaliation” to the New Zealand mosque terror attack that claimed the lives of fifty people in Christchurch last month.
Nonetheless, Hashim had developed a reputation as a preacher who “copied” ISIS propaganda videos with his animated and vehement postings who has long espoused vocal support for the world’s most dangerous terrorist brand. The pro-ISIS “Al-Ghuraba” media channel in Sri Lanka, which operated across Facebook and YouTube as its primary platforms, reportedly featured his inflammatory videos. The videos often advocated the notion that only Muslims are acceptable rulers and he routinely railed against Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus.
Unconfirmed local reports have since indicated he once studied in neighboring India; but became a controversial figure within the Muslim community and he prompted clashed with other students before dropping out.
Yet what also remains unanswered is why a warning issued by Sri Lanka’s police chief on April 11 –who raised the alarm after receiving information from a foreign intelligence agency, allegedly India, with the caution that NTJ was concocting attacks – was ultimately ignored.
He said that he expects Treasury to provide the House Ways and Means Committee with a final decision by May 6 after receiving legal conclusions from the Department of Justice.
Neal made the request for Trump’s tax returns under Section 6103 of the federal tax code, which states that the Treasury secretary “shall furnish” tax returns upon written request of the chairmen of Congress’s tax committees, provided that the documents are reviewed in a closed session.
The April 23 deadline was Neal’s second deadline for the administration to provide Trump’s tax documents, as it missed his initial deadline of April 10. At the time, Mnuchin said Treasury was unable to complete its review of Neal’s request by the initial deadline.
Neal said in a statement Tuesday that he plans “to consult with counsel about my next steps.”
“Secretary Mnuchin and the White House have blatantly interfered with the IRS’s obligation to provide the president’s tax returns, and action is needed to force this administration to follow the law,” he added.
Mnuchin said in his Tuesday letter to Neal that the chairman’s request “presents the question whether there are any legal limits on the ability of a Congressional tax-writing committee to obtain an individual’s private tax returns from the IRS and disclose them publicly.”
The Treasury secretary took issue with Neal’s stated purpose for requesting Trump’s tax returns.
Neal said in his initial letter requesting the tax returns that he wanted them because the Ways and Means Committee is considering legislation and conducting oversight about how the IRS audits and enforces tax laws against presidents.
But Mnuchin said that Neal’s request for the documents was “the culmination of a long-running, well-documented effort to expose the President’s tax returns for the sake of exposure.”
“The public record demonstrates that the animating purpose of this effort was and remains exposure of a political opponent’s private tax information,” he added.
Mnuchin said that Neal’s stated purpose about interest in the extent to which the IRS audits presidents is “difficult to accept on its face” and that the terms of Neal’s request don’t fit his stated purpose since he requested tax information from only the current president, whose audits are ongoing.
Mnuchin said Treasury would be happy to provide Neal with more information about the IRS’s process for conducting mandatory audits of presidents and encouraged Neal to “defer” his request for Trump’s tax returns until after the Ways and Means Committee works with Treasury “to meet its stated legislative needs.”
The Treasury secretary also said it would be a “misinterpretation” for Neal to treat his response as a denial of the request since Treasury plans to make a final decision by May 6 and hasn’t yet granted or denied Neal’s request.
It is not a surprise that Treasury missed Democrats’ second deadline.
The president has made it clear that he does not want Congress to receive his tax documents. During the 2016 campaign, he became the first major-party nominee in decades to refuse to voluntarily release his returns, citing an audit. The IRS, however, has said audits don’t prevent people from releasing their own tax information.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley on Tuesday reiterated Trump’s desire to not release his returns while under audit.
“As I understand it, the president’s pretty clear. Once he’s out of audit, he’ll think about doing it, but he’s not inclined to do so at this time,” Gidley said on Fox News.
The fight over Trump’s tax returns is one of several battles that Democrats and Trump are having over investigations into the president’s finances. On Monday, Trump and his businesses filed a lawsuit in an effort to block an accounting firm from complying with a congressional subpoena for financial records about the president.
Democrats are expected to take further steps in their efforts to obtain Trump’s tax returns following the second missed deadline. Eventually, the matter is expected to result in a court case.
Our nation is made great by the many immigrants who have come here and made themselves part of the American story. We will need more immigrants if the federal government is to avoid bankruptcy.
But good government demands an understanding of who lives here and what lives they lead. Correspondingly, the Trump administration is correct to include the question on the 2020 census: “Are you a citizen of the United States?” That inclusion of that question will soon be ruled upon by the Supreme Court. Until then, and perhaps afterward, Democrats will remain upset.
Some of their concerns are more justified than others. Take the analysis from left-wing news site Vox. Senior Correspondent Dara Lind notes that Democrats in blue states are “worried [the question’s inclusion] will make their residents less likely to return their census forms — and thus hurt their apportionment in Congress after the 2020 census results are tallied.”
If the best reason not to do this is that Democrats rely on non-voter illegal immigrants to artificially boost their apportionment of seats in the post-2020 House of Representatives — well, do they really want to admit to that?
Other excuses against the citizenship question seem more justified. It is more reasonable, for example, to believe that longtime illegal residents of the U.S. might not complete the census form in fear of being identified and deported. That would negatively affect the development of good policy and also risk inaccurate social science analysis.
Still, the basic point here is whether it is appropriate to ask residents of America whether they are citizens. I believe it is.
To hear White House adviser Jared Kushner tell it, Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election didn’t amount to more than a couple of ads on Facebook, and anyway, as another Trump administration official said, President Donald Trump repeatedly denounced it.
But neither of those claims is true.
Kushner downplayed Russia’s interference campaign during his first public comments since the Mueller report was released last Thursday — an interview with Time magazine during the Time 100 Summit in New York City. He went as far as to claim that the investigations into Russian interference have been more harmful to the country than Russia’s attack on American democracy.
“You look at what Russia did, buying some Facebook ads to try to sow dissent and do it, and it’s a terrible thing,” Kushner said. “But I think the investigations and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads.”
Watch:
Kushner is mentioned in Mueller’s report. A lot.
Kushner is hardly an unconflicted source when it comes to Russia’s interference campaign. He was in the room during the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer who had promised dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” and suggested creating a secret back channel to communicate directly with the Kremlin, going around US intelligence. He’s mentioned many times in Mueller’s report for these and other activities that still have not been fully explained.
Despite what Kushner said on Tuesday, it is not the case that Russian interference didn’t go beyond a handful of Facebook ads. According to information released by the House Intelligence Committee last year, Russian agents actually purchased about 3,500 Facebook ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, spending more than $1 million a month to reach about 10 million users. Meanwhile, Russian agents also purchased ads on Instagram and created thousands of bot accounts on Twitter that almost exclusively spread propaganda aimed at helping Trump by damaging Hillary Clinton.
Beyond that, Kushner’s comments on Tuesday completely ignore the Kremlin-orchestrated hacking campaign against Democratic targets — hacks that resulted in WikiLeaks publishing tranches of emails online during key stretches of the 2016 campaign. Trump mentioned WikiLeaks about five times a day during the closing weeks of the campaign, but recently claimed he “know[s] nothing about WikiLeaks … it’s not my thing.”
Kushner added that “one thing the Mueller report was very conclusive on was there was absolutely no coordination or collusion with the Trump campaign. Everything the president’s been saying and I’ve been saying for two years has been fully authenticated.”
In fact, the Mueller report says that the Trump campaign “expected that it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” which amounted to a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign. Kushner’s name is mentioned 263 times.
Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson claimed Trump has repeatedly denounced Russian interference. He hasn’t.
While Kushner was downplaying Russian interference in New York City, Trump administration spokesperson Hogan Gidley was back at the White House falsely claiming that Trump has denounced Russian interference “multiple times.”
But as Maggie Haberman of the New York Times alluded to in the above tweet, Trump has done nothing of the sort. In fact, during his infamous news conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, last summer, Trump indicated that he took Putin’s word for it that Russian didn’t interfere above the conclusion of his own intelligence agencies.
“My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia,” Trump said. “I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.”
When Gidley was asked whether Trump would once again accept Russia help in 2020, he notably did not say “no,” adding, “I don’t understand the question.” Gidley’s comments came two days after Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, went on a number of Sunday morning news shows and made a case that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” completely ignoring that the information in question was acquired through crimes committed against American citizens.
Mourners gather during a mass funeral at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo on Tuesday, following a series of coordinated bombings of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday.
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Mourners gather during a mass funeral at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo on Tuesday, following a series of coordinated bombings of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday.
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Sri Lanka held its first mass funerals on Tuesday for victims of the Easter Sunday attacks, a string of bombings at churches and hotels that has left a nation in mourning. The death toll rose to 321 people since the first blasts.
In Negombo, about 20 miles north of the capital, Sri Lankans gathered at St. Sebastian’s church after going through body checks. Security forces stood guard at the edges of the crowd, protecting men and women who sang solemn hymns through tears. Each casket was brought to a plot of land to be buried. Flowers, candles and white crosses adorned the fresh graves.
At the Cinnamon Grand hotel in the capital, Colombo, a spokesperson tells NPR that staff held a private funeral with religious leaders from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim communities — Sri Lanka’s main religious groups.
There were 15 guests and five staff members who died in the hotel’s restaurant. One of the employees was not working, the spokesperson says. Instead, T.A.A. Yaheya was celebrating his birthday with his family. His wife and child survived.
“We need to say our goodbyes,” the spokesperson said. “There is a sense of sadness and loss.”
Three workers at the Shangri-La hotel died in the attack along with a number of guests, the hotel said in a statement. It will close until further notice and remain protected by the military and the police, the hotel said.
At least one entire family was erased in the Negombo bombing. Rangana Fernando died with his wife, Danadiri; their 6-year-old daughter, Biola; 4-year-old daughter, Leona; and 11-month-old son, Seth. “I’m jealous my sister is not with me anymore, but she and her family died in an instant and are now in a better place,” Danadiri’s brother told the BBC.
UNICEF spokesperson Christophe Boulierac tells NPR that 45 children are among the people killed in the attacks. Of that number, 40 are Sri Lankans and five are from other countries. The youngest victim in the eastern city of Batticaloa, where Zion Church was attacked, was 18 months old, Boulierac said.
“These assessments might unfortunately change over time, as we know that some of the children who have been injured are currently fighting for their lives, particularly in the hospital of Colombo,” he added.
A woman cries as she reaches toward a coffin in Negombo. More than 300 people were killed in the attacks.
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A woman cries as she reaches toward a coffin in Negombo. More than 300 people were killed in the attacks.
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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says that as of Tuesday, 34 foreigners were killed. They came from Bangladesh, China, India, Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Spain, Turkey, Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Another 14 are still missing.
The victims include a fifth grader who attended a private school in Washington, D.C., a man from Colorado, at least 10 Indian citizens and three children of a Danish fashion tycoon.
Rui Lucas was killed at the Kingsbury hotel in Colombo while on his honeymoon, according to Portuguese media. An automation and energy technician, he was about 30 years old.
Monique Allen, a Dutch woman, was on vacation with her family. She died in the restaurant at the Cinnamon Grand while eating with her son, as her husband and two other sons were upstairs in their hotel room, the BBC reported.
“My son blacked out for a few minutes, and he woke up and he saw his mother with a big head wound and lots of blood,” Lewis Allen said. “We went to the mortuary and they pulled back sheet after sheet. I was praying, let that not be Monique, let that not be Monique.” Sri Lanka was her favorite country, he added.
An Australian man told ABC News that his wife, Manik Suriaaratchi, and their 10-year-old daughter, Alexendria, died at the service at St. Sebastian’s Church. “My daughter and my wife were really excited to go to the church ceremony,” Sudesh Kolonne said. He walked out of the building before them and then a bomb detonated. “I jumped into the church and I saw that my daughter and my wife were on the floor.”
Two engineers from Turkey died, according to state news agency Anadolu. Yiğit Ali Çavuş was described as an honors graduate from the Istanbul Technical University. Serhan Selçuk Nariçi was living in Sri Lanka and had wished his father “Good morning” on WhatsApp before the day’s attacks, Anadolu reported.
Two Spaniards from a small town in Galicia were reported to be among the dead. Alberto Chaves Gómez, 31, was on vacation at the Kingsbury hotel and his girlfriend, María González Vicente, 32, was visiting. The families identified their bodies by their tattoos, El País reported.
Two Saudi Arabian Airlines crew members, Ahmed Zain Jaafari and Hani Maged Othman, were killed in Colombo, the airline said in a statement. “Our hearts are filled with pain for the indescribable loss that their families are facing,” Director General Saleh bin Nasser al-Jasser said.
Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena declared Tuesday a day of national mourning. The country’s flag was lowered to half-mast and a moment of silence was held as survivors, filled with grief and fear, were left to go on without their loved ones.
“After that, I won’t go to church because I’m very scared to go,” a woman named Ab Nirmala told The Guardian. She survived the St. Anthony’s Shrine explosion. “I don’t know what is going to happen to me.”
Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Colombo called on the Sri Lankan government to improve its intelligence apparatus. “We were shocked to hear media reports that there had been prior information on the attacks,” Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith said, according to Sri Lanka’s Daily News.
“The Prime Minister and a Cabinet Minister confirmed such reports,” he continued. “It is questionable as to why immediate action was not taken.”
NEW YORK — Jared Kushner on Tuesday said he believes the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election have been “way more harmful to our democracy” than the interference itself.
“If you look what Russia did, you know, buying some Facebook ads to try to sow dissent, it’s a terrible thing,” Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser, said during the inaugural Time 100 summit here. “But I think the investigations and the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple Facebook ads.”
Russia did more than buy a “couple Facebook ads,” U.S. investigators have determined. Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice charged 13 Russians and three Russian entities for allegedly carrying out an elaborate plot to interfere in the 2016 election. The Russian operatives allegedly used fake social media accounts, created false advertisements and even traveled to the United States in an effort to support Trump’s White House bid — and to disparage his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The Kremlin-linked troll farm Internet Research Agency also organized “dozens” of political rallies in the U.S. with the purpose of sowing political discord, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian election interference, which he called “sweeping and systematic.”
Facebook recently acknowledged that at least two networks linked to Russia spent about $160,000 on ads to promote its disinformation campaign. Kushner, who was an adviser to the Trump campaign and considered the architect of its social media operation, scoffed at the figure.
“I spent $160,000 every three hours during the campaign,” he said.
Sounding like his father-in-law, Kushner said the investigations into Russian interference in the election were an excuse by Trump’s opponents to try to explain his improbable victory.
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“All these people thought Trump was gonna lose. They all predicted Trump was gonna lose. They were wrong,” Kushner said. “The American electorate in this great democratic system chose the opposite. And I think that instead of saying, ‘Oh wait, we got it wrong,’ they said, ‘Well, maybe it was Russia.’ And I think we’ve spent two years going through that nonsense.”
Kushner, who appears multiple times in Mueller’s report, downplayed a now infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting he attended with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Clinton.
“We ran a very untraditional campaign,” Kushner said. “We had a lot of outsiders coming in.”
He also cited a text he sent during the meeting as proof the campaign did not get any dirt on Clinton.
“Lindsey Graham told me I had the best text message in the history of text messages when I was in that crazy Trump Tower meeting and I said ‘get me the hell out of here’ basically,” Kushner said. “It’s a meeting that if it hadn’t come up, I would’ve never thought about it again.”
He added: “The media spent so much time focusing on it, and frankly it’s just a big distraction for the country.”
President Trump, who is in Washington, apparently approved of Kushner’s performance.
“Great interview by Jared,” he tweeted. “Nice to have extraordinarily smart people serving our Country!”
On Monday, Trump tried to undermine the findings in the Mueller report by falsely suggesting no one close to him cooperated with the special counsel.
“Isn’t it amazing that the people who were closest to me, by far, and knew the Campaign better than anyone, were never even called to testify before Mueller,” the president tweeted.
Kushner said he spent 9 hours being interviewed by Mueller’s team.
“When the whole notion of the Russia collusion narrative came up, I was the first person to say, ‘happy to participate in any investigations,'” Kushner said. “I thought the whole thing was nonsense.”
President Donald Trump met with Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey at the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Sarah Sanders confirmed after the meeting had ended.
Shortly thereafter, Trump tweeted: “Lots of subjects discussed regarding their platform, and the world of social media in general. Look forward to keeping an open dialogue!”
Following the meeting, a Twitter spokesperson told NBC News that “Jack had a constructive meeting with the President of the United States today at the president’s invitation. They discussed Twitter’s commitment to protecting the health of the public conversation ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections and efforts underway to respond to the opioid crisis.”
Trump’s positive assessment of the meeting represented a reversal from his attitude toward the company just hours before, on Tuesday morning, when he used his personal Twitter account to criticize the tech giant.
There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Twitter is “very discriminatory,” or that it is “hard for people to sign on.” Trump’s allegation that Twitter is “constantly taking people off list,” likewise appears to be unfounded, although the site does take steps to remove automated accounts that impersonate real people, known as bots. It was also unclear precisely what Trump was referring to by, “Big complaints from many people.”
In response to similar criticism from Trump in March, the company said, “We enforce the Twitter rules impartially for all users, regardless of their background or political affiliation.”
Trump is a prolific tweeter, and his account had more than 59 million followers as of Tuesday afternoon. The president uses Twitter practically every day to communicate directly with the public on issues affecting every facet of his administration.
Over the course of a day, Trump’s Twitter topics can range from serious foreign policy matters like the North Korean nuclear talks, to small scale domestic political rivalries.
The social media platform was instrumental in driving Trump’s meteoric rise through the ranks of Republican politics. In 2015 and 2016, Trump’s blunt, outspoken tweets helped him to break through a crowded Republican primary field to win the party’s presidential nomination and from there, the White House.
Right now, Robert Mueller’s report gives Democrats a clear political advantage over President Trump. The report lays out, in ample detail, the chaos, pettiness, self-centeredness, and borderline corruption with which Trump has imbued the Oval Office. Trump’s poll numbers, already low, have taken yet another hit since the report’s release, tying his prior presidential nadir.
Meanwhile, Democrats determined to impeach Trump show political ineptitude, misapply constitutional principles, and abdicate their legislative responsibilities.
If Democrats keep citing the report in speeches and press statements, when and where relevant but without overdoing it, they will continue to reap political rewards against Trump without any downside risk to themselves. But if they try to drag the country through an impeachment process based on allegations that at worst put Trump in a legal gray area, but which most Americans seem to believe amount to iniquity rather than criminality, Democrats almost certainly will feel the stinging whip of a nasty political backlash.
As for the substance of impeachment, the Mueller report provides too little fodder for a serious attempt to charge the president with “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Obviously there was not enough evidence to justify a charge of illegal conspiracy with Russian entities. The obstruction of justice question is more nuanced. Without belaboring a point-by-point analysis of the instances of possible obstruction, suffice it to say that no single allegation carries enough evidentiary weight to sustain a clear conclusion that illegal obstruction occurred.
The most the president’s critics can say is that, taken all together, Trump’s multitudinous rantings and directives toward the end of impeding investigators amounted to a “pattern or practice” that carries a collective weight of guilt that no individual charge can bear.
Granted, this is not a negligible concern. Plenty of RICO convictions have been secured via demonstration that a pattern or practice of behavior evinced criminal intent. In an ordinary trial before an ordinary jury, it’s probably fair to say the “pattern or practice” charge of obstruction against Trump might have almost a 50-50 chance of success.
But impeaching a president isn’t ordinary. A House impeachment and Senate trial would badly hobble civic life — we learned that 20 years ago. The nation’s founders surely did not intend to so destabilize the civic order in cases where guilt is a matter of gray-area interpretation rather than plainly obvious malfeasance.
Impeachment would be both politically and constitutionally suspect. It also would be an abdication of duty. As mentioned above, an impeachment inquiry becomes an all-encompassing endeavor. While ongoing, it tends to push into the background, almost to the point of oblivion, all other legislative work. It certainly sucks oxygen from the rest of Congress’ other executive-administrative oversight functions.
Such distractions from ordinary, constitutionally assigned legislative work would be necessary to rein in a rogue president clearly trampling the law or public order. Otherwise, though, impeachment as a game of political “gotcha” is an impediment to Congress’ intended purpose, and to public service rightly understood.
In sum, the Mueller report gives Democrats good reason to verbally bash Trump. Bash, but not to impeach him.
‘The Mueller Report proves journalists were right” read a April 19 headline in Slate. “If some of the revelations in Robert S. Mueller III’s redacted report sound familiar,” noted a New York Times’ subtitle, “it’s because many of them were previously published by The New York Times and other news outlets.” Meanwhile, CNN’s Reliable Sources, touted the fact that CNN, The Washington Post, and the New York Times were cited 203 times in the report.
While self-congratulation has its place, it should not displace self-examination. Because it hid the identity of the reporters in question, one passage in the Mueller report may not draw the level of newsroom discussion that it deserves. “GRU (the Russian intelligence agency) officers using the DCLeaks persona gave certain reporters early access to archives of leaked files by sending them links and passwords to pages on the dcleaks.com website that had not yet become public,” it read.
Importantly the Russian contacts with these unnamed journalists occurred in July and September — before the Oct. 7 joint statement by the director of national intelligence and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security that the Russians were behind the hacking of the Democratic accounts. Nonetheless, the Russian-press nexus flagged by Mueller raises the question, What should the press learn from its use of Russian hacked content in 2016?
The question is an important one because press amplification of the Russian-hacked content is a probable explanation for the October 2016 erosion in the public perception that Hillary Clinton was qualified to be president. Among the press lapses at play during that period were inadequate disclosure of sources and sundering hacked statements from context.
The failure to adequately disclose was on display as early as summer 2016, when Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, who was herself the object of a 2015 Russian smear campaign for her writings about the Russian invasion of Crimea, cautioned about it. Most “of those covering this story, especially on television, aren’t interested in the nature of the hackers, and they aren’t asking why the Russians apparently chose to pass the e-mails on to WikiLeaks at this particular moment, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention,” she wrote, “They are focusing instead on the content of what were meant to be private e-mails.” Unsurprisingly, then, the press largely sidelined the statement by national intelligence and Homeland Security that the Russians were behind the hacking. In the subsequent news coverage and in the final two debates, the illegal Russian provenance of the stolen content was all but ignored by journalists.
In the process, instead of casting the purloined Democratic communications as “stolen,” “hacked,” or “illegally gotten” the go-to label for reporters was “leaked. ” At the same time, rather than sourcing them either to Russian operatives or to fugitive from justice Julian Assange, they were credited to his organization, WikiLeaks.
To assess the impact, let me offer a thought experiment. Suppose instead of declaring “We’ve learned from WikiLeaks, that you said this,” in the third debate, moderator Chris Wallace had said, “We’ve learned from WikiLeaks, which is an organization created by Clinton-antagonist Julian Assange, an operative she sought to prosecute for disclosing classified government documents.” Or alternatively, “My next question is based on stolen Democratic materials, whose accuracy we have been unable to verify, gotten by Russian hackers through cyber-theft.” Had such characterizations been top of mind, I suspect that reporters would have been more careful in their use of the pirated content and viewers more prone to ask, “Why would the Russians and Assange want to defeat the Democratic nominee?”
One injudicious use occurred when reporters joined the Republican nominee, Breitbart News, and Rush Limbaugh in asserting that, in a hacked segment of a closed-door speech, Clinton had unequivocally supported “open trade and open borders.” Instead, what she had said was, “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”
Over 71 million viewers never heard the second part of that sentence when, in the final presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked her to “clear up your position on this issue because . . . we’ve learned from WikiLeaks, that you said this. And I want to quote. ‘My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.’ ” Because news reports and Wallace’s question both assumed that in private Clinton supported open trade and open borders, her protest that those words were out of context sounded disingenuous.
Importantly, “open borders” organized Trump’s central appeals into one resonant phrase that signaled: immigrants crossing our national boundaries to rape, murder, suppress wages, and steal jobs; trade policies that transformed working-class dreams into a nightmare; and terrorists threading their way toward a next 9/ 11. In short, a central Republican indictment of the Democratic nominee was legitimized by the problematic press use of Russian-stolen content. In “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President,” I show that those who viewed the third debate were more likely than those who didn’t to conclude that Clinton said one thing in public and another in private, an inference that predicts a reduced likelihood of projecting a vote for her. So too does the drop in her perceived competence.
To ensure that past is not prologue, the nation’s news outlets would do well to promulgate policies regarding use of hacked materials that confirm that they will examine stolen, leaked material with care, tell their audiences whether it has been independently verified, and disclose relevant information about its origins. Doing so would not only prevent decision-making on the fly but also would warn aspiring hackers that future theft-and-release will not be rewarded in 2020 and beyond in the ways in which it was in 2016.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.”
Mr. Trump has used the excuse of an Internal Revenue Service audit since the 2016 presidential campaign as a reason not to release his tax records, though no law prevents a taxpayer from releasing returns while under audit.
This month, Mr. Neal formally requested from the Internal Revenue Service six years’ worth of the president’s personal and business tax returns. The Treasury Department, which oversees the I.R.S., missed the first deadline to provide the returns, and Mr. Mnuchin previously told Mr. Neal in a letter that he needed more time to study the lawfulness of the request.
Mr. Mnuchin expressed concern that the request was being made for political purposes and was a violation of taxpayer privacy that could lead to the I.R.S. being weaponized against both parties in the future.
Mr. Mnuchin, in his most recent letter, appeared to be laying the groundwork for the legal rationale to deny the request, listing several “legal concerns” that have prompted the Treasury Department to consult with the Justice Department. Those included “constitutional limits” on gaining access to private tax returns and the “asserted purpose” for seeking the records.
Mr. Neal issued a terse statement on Tuesday but did not indicate his next move.
“This afternoon, Secretary Mnuchin notified me that once again, the I.R.S. will miss the deadline,” he said. “I plan to consult with counsel about my next steps.”
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(CNN)Connecticut State Police released body camera footage on Tuesday showing the controversial police shooting near Yale University that has led to a week of protests.
CNN’s Bonney Kapp, Janet DiGiacomo and Amanda Watts contributed to this report.
Media captionFootage shows a man with a large backpack calmly walking towards St Sebastian’s church
The Islamic State (IS) group may be linked to bomb blasts which killed 321 people and wounded 500 in Sri Lanka, the country’s prime minister has said.
Ranil Wickremesinghe said the government believed Sunday’s attacks could not have been carried out without links to terror groups abroad.
The first mass funeral was held on Tuesday as Sri Lanka marked an official day of mourning for the victims.
A state of emergency remains in effect to prevent further attacks.
Police have now detained 40 suspects in connection with the attack, all of whom were Sri Lankan nationals.
“This could not have been done just locally,” Mr Wickremesinghe said. “There had been training given and a coordination which we are not seeing earlier.”
The Islamic State (IS) group claimed the attack on Tuesday via its Amaq news outlet. Sri Lanka’s government had previously blamed the blasts on local Islamist group National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ).
Eight blasts were reported, including at three churches during Easter services.
Three hotels in the capital, Colombo – the Shangri-La, Kingsbury and Cinnamon Grand – were also targeted.
An attack on a fourth hotel on Sunday was foiled, Mr Wickremesinghe said. He did not name the hotel. He also warned that further militants and explosives could still be “out there” following the attack.
Image copyright Reuters
Image caption
The death toll has risen to 321 with around 500 injured
Who could be behind the attacks?
IS said it had “targeted nationals of the crusader alliance [anti-IS US-led coalition] and Christians in Sri Lanka”.
It provided no evidence for the claim but shared an image on social media of eight men purported to be behind the attack.
The group’s last stronghold was declared “freed” by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on 23 March.
Although the declaration marked the last territorial victory over the group’s caliphate, experts warn it does not mean the end of IS or its ideology.
Mr Wickremesinghe said that only Sri Lankan nationals had been arrested in connection with the attack so far, but that some of the attackers may have travelled abroad before the bombings.
”We, certainly the security apparatus, are of the view there are foreign links and some of the evidence points to that. So if the IS (Islamic State) claimed it, we will be following up on this claim,” he added.
Image copyright Getty Images
Image caption
Authorities have declared a state of emergency
Earlier, the country’s defence minister Ruwan Wijewardene told parliament that NTJ was linked to another radical Islamist group he named as JMI,.
NTJ has no history of large-scale attacks but came to prominence last year when it was blamed for damaging Buddhist statues. The group has not said it carried out Sunday’s bombings.
Sunday’s attacks have highlighted rifts in Sri Lanka’s leadership, after it emerged that authorities were warned about an imminent threat from the NTJ jihadist group.
But Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the cabinet were not informed, ministers said.
‘Targets in line with IS ideology’
Analysis by BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera
The Sri Lankan government has said locals from two known groups carried out the attack. But from the start – because of the scale and sophistication of it – they have also said they thought there was an external role.
In the past, IS has sometimes claimed attacks that it was not involved in or which it simply inspired. But the details from so-called Islamic State would seem to back up the government’s assessment.
The choice of targets is much more in line with IS ideology than with the traditional types of communal violence seen in Sri Lanka.
There are still questions – did the local men affiliate themselves to IS or receive direct support? Did they travel to Syria or to other countries? The Sri Lankan government has said it believes some of them had spent time abroad, but how significant was that to the plot?
Answering questions like these will be important not just for Sri Lanka but other countries as they try and understand whether other relatively small, locally focused groups could be capable of transforming a threat into violence on such a massive scale.
Who were the victims?
Most of those who died were Sri Lankan nationals, including scores of Christians attending Easter Sunday church services.
One of the first victims to be publicly identified was Sri Lankan celebrity chef Shantha Mayadunne and her daughter Nisanga Mayadunne, who had posted a picture of the family having breakfast in the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo shortly before the deadly blast.
Sri Lankan officials said 38 foreign nationals were among the dead, with another 14 unaccounted for. The death toll includes at least eight British citizens and at least 10 Indian nationals.
Media captionMonique Allen was killed in one of the Sri Lanka attacks
The mass funeral for about 30 victims took place at St Sebastian’s church in Negombo, north of Colombo, which was one of the places targeted in Sunday’s blasts. Another funeral service was scheduled for later on Tuesday.
A moment of silence was also observed at 08:30 on Tuesday, reflecting the time the first of six bombs detonated. Flags were lowered to half-mast and people, many of them in tears, bowed their heads in respect.
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Washington (CNN)Supreme Court justices were deeply divided Tuesday over whether the Trump administration can add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, with the conservative justices showing signs that they were inclined to vote in favor of allowing the question.
Nearly 6 in 10 voters, 57 percent, disapprove of the job President Donald Trump is doing, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Despite the slide to 39 percent, there is little support for using impeachment to remove the president.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating has dropped 5 points, equaling his presidency’s low-water mark, since last week’s release of the special counsel report into the 2016 election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.
Despite his sinking poll numbers, however, there is little support for removing Trump through the impeachment process, the poll shows.
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Only 39 percent of voters surveyed in the new poll, which was conducted Friday through Sunday, approve of the job Trump is doing as president. That is down from 44 percent last week and ties Trump’s lowest-ever approval rating in POLITICO/Morning Consult polling — a 39 percent rating in mid-August 2017, in the wake of violence in Charlottesville, Va.
Nearly 6 in 10 voters, 57 percent, disapprove of the job Trump is doing.
But while views of Trump have tumbled since the publication of Robert Muller’s redacted report, so has support for impeaching him. Only 34 percent of voters believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings to remove the president from office, down from 39 percent in January. Nearly half, 48 percent, say Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings.
The split decision in public opinion — a decline in views of Trump’s job performance but fewer voters wanting Congress to pursue impeachment — mirrors the report itself, which clears Trump and his campaign of criminally conspiring with the Russian government to boost his election but which documents numerous, examples of Trump’s efforts to stymie the investigation.
“President Trump’s approval rating has dipped to its lowest point of his term in the immediate aftermath of the redacted Mueller report release,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “This week, 57 percent of voters disapprove, and 39 percent approve of the president’s performance — a net approval rating of –18 percentage points, compared with 55 percent who disapproved and 42 percent who approved — a net approval rating of –13 percentage points — one month ago in the aftermath of Attorney General [William] Barr’s summary of the Mueller report to Congress.”
While the report is damaging to Trump in the short term — other post-report polls also show decreases in Trump’s approval rating — it could also paint Democrats into a corner on impeachment. Mueller seemingly kicks the obstruction of justice case on Trump to Congress, and the Democratic-led House is squeezed between a majority of Democratic voters who want impeachment, 59 percent, and slightly more than a third of the electorate that agrees.
For now, most Democrats are treading lightly. In a letter to her Democratic colleagues on Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi acknowledged that her conference’s positions “range from proceeding to investigate the findings of the Mueller report or proceeding directly to impeachment.” And most of the party’s presidential hopefuls have steered clear of impeachment, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) being the highest-profile candidate to take the impeachment plunge thus far.
While Democrats in Congress are split on impeachment, most party leaders, including Pelosi, are calling for the House to pull on some of the investigative threads in the Mueller report. Voters are split on whether Congress should continue to investigate whether Trump or his campaign associates and staffers obstructed the investigation: Forty-three percent say Congress should continue to investigate, while 41 percent say it should not.
Nearly three in four Democrats, 73 percent, want Congress to keep investigating, more than the 59 percent who want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. Most notably, independents are split, 39 percent to 37 percent, on whether Congress should keep investigating — but just 31 percent of independents support beginning impeachment proceedings, compared with 44 percent who oppose impeachment.
As for the report itself, roughly a third of voters, 32 percent, say they have seen, read or heard “a lot about it,” while another third, 34 percent, have seen, read or heard “some” about it. The remaining 34 percent haven’t seen much about it or anything at all.
Among those voters who have seen, read or heard at least something about the release of the Mueller report, only 28 percent say they actually read any of the redacted report. Most of them, 73 percent, say they followed news coverage about it.
A plurality of voters, 46 percent, think the investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016 presidential election was handled fairly, while 29 percent think it was handled unfairly. There is rare partisan agreement on this question: Forty-eight percent of Democratic voters, 46 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of independents say they think the investigation was handled fairly.
Despite positive grades for the Justice Department, Barr earns lower marks for his handling of the release of information from the Mueller-led investigation. Only three in 10 voters, 30 percent, approve of the way Barr handled the case — less than the 37 percent who disapprove.
Voters were also unsure whether Barr accurately described the contents of Mueller’s report before its release, with 32 percent saying Barr described it very or somewhat accurately, 32 percent saying he didn’t describe it accurately and 35 percent undecided.
Despite Mueller’s report, which “did not establish that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” voters are still split on the question. More than 4 in 10, 41 percent, say they think Trump’s campaign worked with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The same percentage, 41 percent, say they don’t think Trump’s campaign worked with Russia. The remaining 18 percent have no opinion.
The results on this question are little changed over the past six weeks. In mid-March, before Barr’s letter to Congress after he received the report, 43 percent thought Trump worked with Russia, while 37 percent did not. Three weeks ago, between Barr’s letter and the release of the report, the percentage of voters who thought Trump’s campaign worked with Russia had ticked down to 40 percent, while 43 percent did not think his campaign worked with Russia.
While voters are divided on whether Trump’s campaign worked with Russia, only 28 percent say they think Mueller found evidence that Trump or his campaign conspired with Russia — though just a 43 percent plurality say Mueller found no evidence of coordination. Three in 10 voters are unsure.
There is greater agreement on whether Trump tried to impede or obstruct the investigation. A plurality, 47 percent, say he did, while just 34 percent say he didn’t. Nearly 2 in 10 voters, 18 percent, have no opinion.
But many voters appear confused about what Mueller found in his report. Two in 10, 20 percent, say Mueller found that Trump obstructed the investigation, while 16 percent say Mueller found that he didn’t. A plurality, 37 percent, say correctly that Mueller did not make a determination on whether Trump obstructed the investigation, but 27 percent are unsure.
The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll surveyed 1,992 voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Morning Consult is a nonpartisan media and technology company that provides data-driven research and insights on politics, policy and business strategy.
Mr. Kinney signed a deferred prosecution agreement, in which the company effectively admitted to committing the crimes. The agreement, along with a civil consent decree, were both approved by the judge.
Together, the agreement and the decree will allow the company to continue operating and set standards for its conduct, as well as providing for continued oversight, according to a court document.
“We made mistakes,” Jeff Eller, a spokesman for the company said in a statement, “and RDC understands that these mistakes, directed by former management, have serious consequences.”
State and federal authorities have struggled to hold the distributors accountable, and the lawsuits say that despite signing consent decrees and paying fines, the companies have continued to ship thousands of doses of opioids to troubled pharmacies.
It was not immediately clear whether other distributors were under investigation.
The two former Rochester officials also charged in the case were Laurence F. Doud III, who had served as chief executive, and William Pietruszewski, the former chief of compliance, several people with knowledge of the matter said.
Mr. Doud was expected to surrender to D.E.A. agents and to appear in United States District Court in Manhattan later Tuesday.
Robert C. Gottlieb, a lawyer for Mr. Doud, said he would not comment until he had had a chance to review the charges against his client. Mr. Pietruszewski’s lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.
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