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The Supreme Court unanimously says states can’t steal your car – Washington Examiner
The Supreme Court unanimously says states can’t steal your car – Washington Examiner

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it’s unconstitutional for states to steal people’s cars. That’s a great step forward in cracking down on civil asset forfeiture and the practice of states and cities seizing personal property as a means to raise money.

The decision is a victory for Tyson Timbs, an Indiana man who had been fighting the state to get his $42,000 Land Rover SUV back after it was seized during his arrest. He had purchased the vehicle with the proceeds from an insurance policy he received after his father’s death.

Nonetheless, the state thought that his guilty plea to selling a few hundred dollars in heroin to undercover police officers entitled them to the vehicle on the grounds that he had used it to transport drugs. As the Supreme Court explained, however, the forfeiture of the vehicle amounted to “more than four times the maximum $10,000 monetary fine assessable against Timbs for his drug conviction.”

That, by any measure, is excessive. So much so that it amounts to flat-out theft.

Indeed, no court disputed that seizing the vehicle amounted to an excessive fine. Instead, the Indiana Supreme Court justified the state’s seizure of the vehicle on the grounds that Eighth Amendment protections against excessive fines did not apply to states.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that Eighth Amendment protections, including the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, excessive bail, protections against excessive fines, and other government abuses, are all “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty” and that states are bound to follow them under the Fourteenth Amendment.

There was, however, a slight disagreement over which part of the amendment is binding to states. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, relied on the Due Process Clause. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch agreed, but explained in concordances that they would have relied on the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than Due Process.

All agreed, however, that protections against seizures of property that amounted to excessive fines had a long history. The court traced that history all the way back to the Magna Carta and, in the U.S., to the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights is the modern incarnation of these centuries-old rights.

After all, it’s impossible for any system that purports to protect rights and uphold justice to allow an arrest or conviction to become a license for the government to simply take whatever it wants from an individual.

That makes the ruling an important victory for criminal justice reform. It will hopefully prevent states and cities from abusing their authority to take property beyond what a court has ordered, thereby protecting the rights of individuals around the country.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-supreme-court-unanimously-says-states-cant-steal-your-car

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The Supreme Court unanimously says states can’t steal your car – Washington Examiner
The Supreme Court unanimously says states can’t steal your car – Washington Examiner

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it’s unconstitutional for states to steal people’s cars. That’s a great step forward in cracking down on civil asset forfeiture and the practice of states and cities seizing personal property as a means to raise money.

The decision is a victory for Tyson Timbs, an Indiana man who had been fighting the state to get his $42,000 Land Rover SUV back after it was seized during his arrest. He had purchased the vehicle with the proceeds from an insurance policy he received after his father’s death.

Nonetheless, the state thought that his guilty plea to selling a few hundred dollars in heroin to undercover police officers entitled them to the vehicle on the grounds that he had used it to transport drugs. As the Supreme Court explained, however, the forfeiture of the vehicle amounted to “more than four times the maximum $10,000 monetary fine assessable against Timbs for his drug conviction.”

That, by any measure, is excessive. So much so that it amounts to flat-out theft.

Indeed, no court disputed that seizing the vehicle amounted to an excessive fine. Instead, the Indiana Supreme Court justified the state’s seizure of the vehicle on the grounds that Eighth Amendment protections against excessive fines did not apply to states.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that Eighth Amendment protections, including the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, excessive bail, protections against excessive fines, and other government abuses, are all “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty” and that states are bound to follow them under the Fourteenth Amendment.

There was, however, a slight disagreement over which part of the amendment is binding to states. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, relied on the Due Process Clause. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch agreed, but explained in concordances that they would have relied on the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than Due Process.

All agreed, however, that protections against seizures of property that amounted to excessive fines had a long history. The court traced that history all the way back to the Magna Carta and, in the U.S., to the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights is the modern incarnation of these centuries-old rights.

After all, it’s impossible for any system that purports to protect rights and uphold justice to allow an arrest or conviction to become a license for the government to simply take whatever it wants from an individual.

That makes the ruling an important victory for criminal justice reform. It will hopefully prevent states and cities from abusing their authority to take property beyond what a court has ordered, thereby protecting the rights of individuals around the country.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-supreme-court-unanimously-says-states-cant-steal-your-car

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Pentagon chief briefing irks lawmakers, draws expletives from Sen. Lindsey Graham – NBC News
Pentagon chief briefing irks lawmakers, draws expletives from Sen. Lindsey Graham – NBC News

Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan clashed with Sen. Lindsey Graham over the administration’s Syria policy during a briefing last weekend, prompting Graham to unleash a string of expletives and declare himself Shanahan’s “adversary,” according to two officials in the briefing and three others familiar with the conversation.

The contentious briefing on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference rankled the bipartisan group of lawmakers and cast doubt over Shanahan’s chances of being confirmed if President Donald Trump nominates him to permanently lead the Pentagon, the officials said.

The episode highlighted Shanahan’s increasingly strained relationship with Capitol Hill two months after his predecessor, Jim Mattis, stepped down.

“He lost my confidence,” one lawmaker said of Shanahan.

The briefing turned heated as Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pressed Shanahan about the president’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, according to the five officials.

Shanahan tried to ease the concerns of the group of senators and House members by stressing that the military will keep troops in the region and will be prepared to combat a possible ISIS resurgence after the drawdown’s scheduled completion by the end of April, the five officials said.

But Shanahan’s talking-points approach to the briefing only frustrated the lawmakers, prompting Graham to unleash expletives in a sharp exchange with Shanahan, according to the officials.

Tensions escalated after Graham pointedly asked Shanahan for his opinion on Trump’s decision to leave Syria, and the acting secretary refused to condemn it. Raising his voice, Graham finally told Shanahan he should consider him “an adversary,” according to the officials.

Shanahan shot back at Graham, asking if he has any more questions “as an adversary.”

“It got pretty tense,” recalled one official in the room.

Another person familiar with the exchange said: “It was heated, particularly on Graham’s side.”

A U.S. defense official described the outcome differently, conceding that the exchange was heated, but said that the acting secretary of defense was ultimately able to reassure the members.

“They discussed a broad range of issues and the meeting ended on a positive note,” the official said.

Graham did not return a request for comment.

Shanahan is among several candidates under consideration to helm the Pentagon, including Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Army Secretary Mark Esper, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Following the briefing in Munich, some members of Congress openly expressed disapproval for Shanahan to get the nomination.

“He is probably very good at securing government contracts, but it’s debatable whether he knows about the military,” said Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., who serves on the House Armed Services Committee. He said Shanahan does not understand the oversight, appropriations or policy roles of Congress.

A staunch Trump ally on most issues, Graham has been a critic of the president’s decision to pull all troops out of Syria. Even as Trump has expanded the time frame for withdrawal — from 30 days to several months — Graham has continued to oppose the policy.

Graham, as a longtime leading figure in the Senate on foreign policy and national security, is an influential voice in nominations for positions like defense secretary. He was a strong supporter of Mattis, who resigned as defense secretary after the Syria withdrawal announcement.

Shanahan, who was Mattis’ deputy, has been auditioning since January to replace him.

“Shanahan is just trying hard to do whatever Trump tells him,” said one person familiar with the briefing last weekend. “He’s going to do everything he can to appease the president.”

The president’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria has faced strong resistance since it was announced on Dec. 19.

Last week Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that while he knew about the president’s overall desire to leave Syria, he was not in the loop about the announcement. “I was not consulted,” Votel said.

The relationship between the Pentagon and Congress has been strained in recent weeks.

On Jan. 30, during a classified briefing on another matter, one Democratic congressman scolded a group of senior Pentagon officials for lack of transparency about decisions including sending U.S. troops to the border with Mexico.

The briefing came one day after two senior Pentagon officials appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to testify about the border mission but never mentioned a decision to deploy thousands more active duty troops to the border.

“You have betrayed this committee’s trust,” a senior member of the committee said to the officials, Lt. Gen. Richard Clarke, the Joint Staff director for strategic plans and policy, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, John Rood, according to a senior congressional staff member.

“It will take years to repair the trust that you’ve lost,” the lawmaker added.

That same week, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., sent a scathing letter to Shanahan, criticizing Rood for not disclosing the plan to send more troops to the border.

“At best this was an error in judgement, at worst this was knowingly withholding information from this committee as it performs its oversight responsibility,” Smith wrote.

Courtney Kube is a national security and military reporter for NBC News.

Carol E. Lee is a national political reporter for NBC News.

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/pentagon-chief-briefing-irks-lawmakers-draws-expletives-sen-graham-n973401

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The Supreme Court unanimously says states can’t steal your car – Washington Examiner
The Supreme Court unanimously says states can’t steal your car – Washington Examiner

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it’s unconstitutional for states to steal people’s cars. That’s a great step forward in cracking down on civil asset forfeiture and the practice of states and cities seizing personal property as a means to raise money.

The decision is a victory for Tyson Timbs, an Indiana man who had been fighting the state to get his $42,000 Land Rover SUV back after it was seized during his arrest. He had purchased the vehicle with the proceeds from an insurance policy he received after his father’s death.

Nonetheless, the state thought that his guilty plea to selling a few hundred dollars in heroin to undercover police officers entitled them to the vehicle on the grounds that he had used it to transport drugs. As the Supreme Court explained, however, the forfeiture of the vehicle amounted to “more than four times the maximum $10,000 monetary fine assessable against Timbs for his drug conviction.”

That, by any measure, is excessive. So much so that it amounts to flat-out theft.

Indeed, no court disputed that seizing the vehicle amounted to an excessive fine. Instead, the Indiana Supreme Court justified the state’s seizure of the vehicle on the grounds that Eighth Amendment protections against excessive fines did not apply to states.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that Eighth Amendment protections, including the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, excessive bail, protections against excessive fines, and other government abuses, are all “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty” and that states are bound to follow them under the Fourteenth Amendment.

There was, however, a slight disagreement over which part of the amendment is binding to states. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, relied on the Due Process Clause. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch agreed, but explained in concordances that they would have relied on the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than Due Process.

All agreed, however, that protections against seizures of property that amounted to excessive fines had a long history. The court traced that history all the way back to the Magna Carta and, in the U.S., to the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights is the modern incarnation of these centuries-old rights.

After all, it’s impossible for any system that purports to protect rights and uphold justice to allow an arrest or conviction to become a license for the government to simply take whatever it wants from an individual.

That makes the ruling an important victory for criminal justice reform. It will hopefully prevent states and cities from abusing their authority to take property beyond what a court has ordered, thereby protecting the rights of individuals around the country.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-supreme-court-unanimously-says-states-cant-steal-your-car

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Justice Department preparing for Mueller report as early as next week – CNN
Justice Department preparing for Mueller report as early as next week – CNN

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By Evan Perez, Laura Jarrett and Katelyn Polantz, CNN

Updated 1:06 PM ET, Wed February 20, 2019

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

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Washington (CNN)Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans.

      CNN’s Em Steck, Laura Robinson Sam Fossum contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/20/politics/special-counsel-conclusion-announcement/index.html

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    Massive winter storm will just graze Upstate NY – newyorkupstate.com
    Massive winter storm will just graze Upstate NY – newyorkupstate.com

    Syracuse, N.Y. — A massive winter storm hitting every state in the eastern U.S. will just graze Upstate New York.

    The storm is expected to bring 1 to 3 inches of snow to Upstate today, with a potential for a light coating of ice tonight before temperatures warm. Winter weather advisories are in place for much of Upstate through Thursday morning.

    Heavy snow is expected from Oklahoma through the Northeast, according to the National Weather Service.

    “More than 200 million Americans, roughly 60 percent of the population of the United States, will be impacted by a major storm that is set to bring snow, rain, ice or a wintry mix to every state east of the Mississippi River,” said private forecasting service AccuWeather.

    Flights were being canceled in the mid-Atlantic, and Amtrak has altered the schedule of its trains from Philadelphia to New York City. Tractor-trailer restrictions are in place along I-81 in Pennsylvania.

    Heavy rain was falling in the Southeast; in Huntsville, Alabama, police said a half-dozen roads are blocked by downed trees or utility poles plus water from flash floods. The weather service predicts as much as 8 inches of rain in spots through Saturday.

    Forecasters say moisture from the Gulf is mixing with weather systems moving eastward in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

    Winter weather alerts are in effect from Minnesota to Mississippi, and all the way into Maine.

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Another wintry mix likely for Upstate NY this week

    Source Article from https://www.newyorkupstate.com/weather/2019/02/massive-winter-storm-will-just-graze-upstate-ny.html

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    Ocasio-Cortez goes on tear defending role in Amazon’s New York exit – Fox News
    Ocasio-Cortez goes on tear defending role in Amazon’s New York exit – Fox News
    Video

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faces criticism for Amazon’s escape from New York

    Some Democrats are criticizing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her role in Amazon’s decision to cancel plans for a huge investment in New York; Doug McKelway reports.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vigorously defended her role in sinking Amazon’s move to New York City on Tuesday in the face of bipartisan criticism, claiming the deal would have been “one of the biggest giveaways in state history” and would have priced people out of the local community.

    “Frankly, the knee-jerk reaction assuming that I ‘don’t understand’ how tax giveaways to corps work is disappointing,” she tweeted. “No, it’s not possible that I could come to a different conclusion. The debate *must* be over my intelligence & understanding, instead of the merits of the deal.”

    AMAZON PULLS OUT OF PLAN TO BUILD NEW YORK CITY HQ AFTER BACKLASH

    The freshman Democratic New York congresswoman has faced days of criticism from normally friendly media voices and fellow Democrats over her role in Amazon’s decision to pull back from building a $2.5 billion campus in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens.

    Amazon had cited the opposition of “a number of state and local politicians” in its decision to abandon the plans. Ocasio-Cortez and others at the local level had pointed to incentives such as a $2.5 billion in tax breaks as a reason for their opposition.

    “If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to,” Ocasio-Cortez said last week.

    Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed back on that claim on Sunday. Even as he slammed Amazon for its decision, the mayor said critics wrongly suggested that tax breaks represented money that could be spent on other things. He said it wasn’t “money you had over here. And it was going over there.”

    The Democratic mayor said: “That $3 billion that would go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the revenue.”

    Video

    Fellow Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., accused those who are against the deal, including Ocasio-Cortez, of being opposed to jobs.

    “It used to be that we would protest wars. Now we are protesting jobs?” she said on CNN Friday, before criticizing the economic arguments of those opposed to the Amazon move.

    BILL DE BLASIO CORRECTS OCASIO-CORTEZ’S CLAIM ABOUT SPENDING AMAZON TAX BREAK MONEY

    “I’m a progressive too, but I’m pragmatic,” she said. “We are $4 billion less than we usually get and yet we are kicking out a company that would have been projected [to pay] over 10 years roughly $27 billion in taxes.”

    New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin ripped into critics of the deal, saying it was evidence of a “financial literacy epidemic” in America.

    “Quick lesson: NYC wasn’t handing cash to Amazon. It was an incentive program based on job creation, producing tax revenue,” he tweeted. “There isn’t a $3 billion pile of money that can now be spent on subways or education.”

    But on Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez mocked critics, saying “there’s NO WAY that this deal – one of the biggest giveaways in state history – could possibly have been bad, right?

    “Surely there can’t be anything wrong with suddenly announcing a massive restructuring & pricing out of a community without any advance notice or input from them,” she asked.

    In her list of criticisms, she included claims that Amazon was selling facial recognition tech to immigration officials, and that real-estate insiders were creating rent spikes.

    CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

    “Folks handling the failed deal treated community w/condescension+disdain for  their legitimate concerns,” she argued. “I warned early to any & all that surging NYC costs+failing subways are creating major political forces to be reckoned with.”

    “But I don’t know what I’m talking about, right?” she quipped, with a shrugging emoji.

    Fox News’ Frank Miles contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-tear-role-amazon-deal

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    Trump, McCabe, Whitaker, and the FBI Test Presidential Authority – Bloomberg
    Trump, McCabe, Whitaker, and the FBI Test Presidential Authority – Bloomberg

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    To continue, please click the box below to let us know you’re not a robot.

    Source Article from https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-20/trump-mccabe-whitaker-and-the-fbi-test-presidential-authority

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    Partisan applause lines won’t help topple Nicolas Maduro – Washington Examiner
    Partisan applause lines won’t help topple Nicolas Maduro – Washington Examiner

    On Monday, President Trump made the crisis in Venezuela a central part of a rally in Florida. And yes, to rail against a socialist country where people quite literally don’t have enough to eat is a great implicit knock on potential 2020 Democratic challengers who embrace socialism, either in name or in the form of policies such as “Medicare for all” and free college tuition.

    But Trump should be wary of attaching foreign policy threats to rhetoric motivated by domestic politics, as he did at the rally in Miami.

    For one thing Democrats, for all of their flirtations with socialist policies, aren’t authoritarian in the mold of embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. They aren’t advocating for state control of food distribution, they aren’t claiming that the military is the rightful enforcer of the president’s will, and they certainly aren’t calling for a dictatorial centrally planned economy — at least not most of them.

    What’s more, most Democrats side with Trump on this as an issue of foreign policy. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders I-Vt., has spoken out against the Maduro regime:

    Trump has a tendency to take the socialist brand and run with it, talking about the crisis in Venezuela as if Democrats wanted to turn Washington into Caracas. Indeed, he alleged as much against Democratic candidates during the midterm elections:

    Trump also did this in the State of the Union. He began well enough: “We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom — and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime.” He went on to blame “socialist policies” for turning the country into “a state of abject poverty and despair.”

    Then he immediately followed those remarks saying, “Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country.” He added forcefully, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

    Those remarks clearly play well with his target audience. But if anything they undermine what has been a broad, bipartisan U.S. opposition to Maduro’s regime. It isn’t just inaccurate to conflate socialism with traditional social-democratic policies like government funded education or healthcare. It’s also counterproductive to drag criticism of Democrats into his justifications of backing Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido. He needs Democrats on his side.

    Trump is right to take a strong stand against Maduro and the military that supports him, but he isn’t going to beat the dictator with applause lines that are meant primarily to appeal to his own domestic political base in the U.S.

    Maybe tough talk on Venezuela is politically useful for highlighting flaws in Democratic policy proposals. But right now, with Venezuela on the brink, Trump needs to be leading nation united against Maduro’s tyranny, not using Maduro to create new partisan fissures at home.

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/partisan-applause-lines-wont-help-topple-nicolas-maduro

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    Southern Poverty Law Center: Hate Groups Up 30 Percent In Past Four Years – NPR
    Southern Poverty Law Center: Hate Groups Up 30 Percent In Past Four Years – NPR

    The National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, held a rally in Newnan, Ga., in April 2018.

    David Goldman/AP


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    David Goldman/AP

    The National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, held a rally in Newnan, Ga., in April 2018.

    David Goldman/AP

    For the fourth year in a row, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, reports that hate and domestic extremism are rising in an unabated trend. The center found a 30 percent increase in U.S. hate groups over the past four years and a 7 percent increase in hate groups in 2018 alone, according to the center’s annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” report. The group designated 1,020 organizations as hate groups in 2018, a high of at least 20 years.

    The watchdog group blames President Trump, his administration, right-wing media outlets and the ease of spreading hate on social media platforms for the alarming increase. The growth, it says, is largely driven by “hysteria over losing a white-majority nation to demographic change.”

    “The numbers tell a striking story — that this president is not simply a polarizing figure but a radicalizing one,” Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, said in a statement. “Rather than trying to tamp down hate, as president of both parties have done, President Trump elevates it — with both his rhetoric and his policies. In doing so, he’s given people across America the go-ahead to to act on their worst instincts.”

    The Southern Poverty Law Center is a revered civil rights watchdog group that has been around since 1971. It is credited with dealing the final blows to the Ku Klux Klan through legal battles.

    But in the Trump era, it has been accused of blurring the line between watchdog and activist. Critics accuse the group of overblowing the threat of hate and including groups and individuals on its lists who might not belong, from anti-immigrant groups to exclusionary religious organizations. In 2018, SPLC President Richard Cohen publicly apologized and the group paid out $3.4 million to British political activist Maajid Nawaz for including him on its anti-Muslim extremist list in 2016. The self-declared former Muslim extremist is often criticized for aligning himself with right-wing anti-Muslim politicians, but even his critics questioned his inclusion on the list.

    The center found that the majority of hate groups in the United States are driven by white supremacist ideology including neo-Nazis; the Ku Klux Klan, which is on the decline; white nationalists; racist skinheads; and neo-Confederates. But in reaction to the flourishing of white supremacists, the center says that black nationalist groups are also “growing their ranks.” It said the groups are often anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT and anti-white but, unlike white nationalist groups, have little support and basically no sway in politics.

    The SPLC defines a hate group as an organization that “based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people typically for their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity.”

    The center’s report tracks with the steady rise in hate crimes documented by the FBI from 2015 to 2017. It reported a 17 percent in hate crimes in 2017, with a particular increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes. But that list isn’t complete because local law enforcement agencies report hate crimes to the FBI on a voluntary basis.

    The report found that although white supremacists are emboldened under the Trump administration and driven by the fear of the United States’ changing demographics — by 2044 the U.S. is expected to be majority minority — and by xenophobia, the groups are beginning to lose faith in the president. It quotes the now infamous white nationalist leader Richard Spencer as evidence. Spencer led a group of white supremacists in Nazi salutes and chants of “Hail Trump” after the 2016 election. But in 2018, following the midterms, he said “the Trump moment is over, and it’s time for us to move on.”

    Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696217158/u-s-hate-groups-rose-sharply-in-recent-years-watchdog-group-reports

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    A North Korean Defector Shows How Kim Makes a Chump of Trump – The Daily Beast
    A North Korean Defector Shows How Kim Makes a Chump of Trump – The Daily Beast
    29 views no comments
    Toobin: Having "So Many Bad Stories" About Trump "Almost Helps The President," Hard To Keep Up With – RealClearPolitics
    Toobin: Having "So Many Bad Stories" About Trump "Almost Helps The President," Hard To Keep Up With – RealClearPolitics

    CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin explains his theory why having so many bad stories come out about President Trump “almost helps” him on Tuesday’s broadcast of ‘CNN Tonight’ with host Don Lemon.


    “Jeffrey, how many more bombshell reports that we need like Maggie [Haberman]’s because every week there is a bombshell report?” Lemon asked.


    “In a curious way, it almost helps the president that there are so many bad stories that come out about him, it’s very hard to keep up with them. I do this for a living and I have a hard time keeping up,” Toobin said.


    “People get lost in how unprecedented this is and how beyond the norms and not only just the norms of politics,” Lemon said.

    Source Article from https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/19/toobin_having_so_many_bad_stories_about_trump_almost_helps_the_president_hard_to_keep_up_with.html

    28 views no comments
    Ocasio-Cortez goes on tear defending role in Amazon’s New York exit – Fox News
    Ocasio-Cortez goes on tear defending role in Amazon’s New York exit – Fox News
    Video

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faces criticism for Amazon’s escape from New York

    Some Democrats are criticizing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her role in Amazon’s decision to cancel plans for a huge investment in New York; Doug McKelway reports.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vigorously defended her role in sinking Amazon’s move to New York City on Tuesday in the face of bipartisan criticism, claiming the deal would have been “one of the biggest giveaways in state history” and would have priced people out of the local community.

    “Frankly, the knee-jerk reaction assuming that I ‘don’t understand’ how tax giveaways to corps work is disappointing,” she tweeted. “No, it’s not possible that I could come to a different conclusion. The debate *must* be over my intelligence & understanding, instead of the merits of the deal.”

    AMAZON PULLS OUT OF PLAN TO BUILD NEW YORK CITY HQ AFTER BACKLASH

    The freshman Democratic New York congresswoman has faced days of criticism from normally friendly media voices and fellow Democrats over her role in Amazon’s decision to pull back from building a $2.5 billion campus in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens.

    Amazon had cited the opposition of “a number of state and local politicians” in its decision to abandon the plans. Ocasio-Cortez and others at the local level had pointed to incentives such as a $2.5 billion in tax breaks as a reason for their opposition.

    “If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to,” Ocasio-Cortez said last week.

    Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed back on that claim on Sunday. Even as he slammed Amazon for its decision, the mayor said critics wrongly suggested that tax breaks represented money that could be spent on other things. He said it wasn’t “money you had over here. And it was going over there.”

    The Democratic mayor said: “That $3 billion that would go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the revenue.”

    Video

    Fellow Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., accused those who are against the deal, including Ocasio-Cortez, of being opposed to jobs.

    “It used to be that we would protest wars. Now we are protesting jobs?” she said on CNN Friday, before criticizing the economic arguments of those opposed to the Amazon move.

    BILL DE BLASIO CORRECTS OCASIO-CORTEZ’S CLAIM ABOUT SPENDING AMAZON TAX BREAK MONEY

    “I’m a progressive too, but I’m pragmatic,” she said. “We are $4 billion less than we usually get and yet we are kicking out a company that would have been projected [to pay] over 10 years roughly $27 billion in taxes.”

    New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin ripped into critics of the deal, saying it was evidence of a “financial literacy epidemic” in America.

    “Quick lesson: NYC wasn’t handing cash to Amazon. It was an incentive program based on job creation, producing tax revenue,” he tweeted. “There isn’t a $3 billion pile of money that can now be spent on subways or education.”

    But on Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez mocked critics, saying “there’s NO WAY that this deal – one of the biggest giveaways in state history – could possibly have been bad, right?

    “Surely there can’t be anything wrong with suddenly announcing a massive restructuring & pricing out of a community without any advance notice or input from them,” she asked.

    In her list of criticisms, she included claims that Amazon was selling facial recognition tech to immigration officials, and that real-estate insiders were creating rent spikes.

    CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

    “Folks handling the failed deal treated community w/condescension+disdain for  their legitimate concerns,” she argued. “I warned early to any & all that surging NYC costs+failing subways are creating major political forces to be reckoned with.”

    “But I don’t know what I’m talking about, right?” she quipped, with a shrugging emoji.

    Fox News’ Frank Miles contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-tear-role-amazon-deal

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    Kamala Harris tells business leaders: Success shouldn’t be vilified – Washington Examiner
    Kamala Harris tells business leaders: Success shouldn’t be vilified – Washington Examiner

    Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., on Tuesday told a business-orientated crowd at a breakfast in New Hampshire that success should be celebrated rather than scorned.

    “So this discussion from my perspective is not about saying, you know, people who have worked hard and gained success should be vilified. I don’t believe that, I applaud that, that’s pursuit of the American Dream,” Harris said in New Hampshire. “But I also recognize, and if we’re having an honest conversation we must all recognize, that the rules aren’t applying equally to all people in our country, that not all people in our country have equal access to a path toward success.”

    The first-term senator and former California attorney general on Tuesday said some of her ideas to address inequality included repealing the tax reforms introduced by President Trump and congressional Republicans, instead rolling out a tax credit aimed at alleviating some housing costs for eligible recipients.

    Harris, who spent President’s Day in New Hampshire, made the comments at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics’ “Politics and Eggs” speaker series, an event frequently attended by business leaders. The trip is her first to the early-voting state since she announced her White House bid last month. Her remarks come after many Democratic presidential contenders have criticized billionaires, specifically Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg, who are considering 2020 runs.

    Harris promised she would compete in the state against other Democratic candidates.

    “One of the first questions I was asked, and so I’m bringing this up because I just want to get this off the table, do you plan on spending any time here? Are you going to compete here?’ Harris said Tuesday. “And I want to let everybody know I plan on competing hard in New Hampshire, and plan on doing well here.”

    Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, who vied for the Democratic 2016 presidential nomination, bested Hillary Clinton in the state that year by more than 20 percentage points. Sanders entered the 2020 race on Tuesday morning, vowing this time would be different because he’s “going to win.”

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/kamala-harris-tells-business-leaders-success-shouldnt-be-vilified

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    Uranium Ore Stored At Grand Canyon Park Museum Unlikely To Have Been Dangerous – NPR
    Uranium Ore Stored At Grand Canyon Park Museum Unlikely To Have Been Dangerous – NPR

    The safety director at Grand Canyon National Park says people may have been exposed to radiation from three buckets of uranium ore that sat for years in a museum collection building. Whether the amount of exposure was unsafe has not been determined.

    Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty Images


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    Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty Images

    The safety director at Grand Canyon National Park says people may have been exposed to radiation from three buckets of uranium ore that sat for years in a museum collection building. Whether the amount of exposure was unsafe has not been determined.

    Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty Images

    For many years, three buckets full of uranium ore sat in a museum building at Grand Canyon National Park. Tours often visited the museum collection building, with children on tours sitting next to the buckets for a half-hour.

    Recently, the park’s safety, health and wellness manager, Elston “Swede” Stephenson, sent out an email to National Park Service employees and approached the Arizona Republic to warn that people in the building were “exposed” to radiation.

    Whether that proximity was unsafe has not been determined. Simply being near uranium ore is unlikely to result in an unsafe dose of radiation.

    “Uranium can be harmful to people’s health depending on the amount and grade of ore, how people interact with it and the exposure time,” Jani Ingram, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, tells the Associated Press.

    But, she says, “You can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, all those kids are going to develop cancer in five years’ because you just don’t know how close they were, how long they were there,” she said. “But that open bucket was probably the most concerning. It seemed that maybe whoever it was didn’t understand what they had.”

    Stephenson sent an email to employees on Feb. 4, warning that if they had gone in the museum collections building between 2000 and June 18, 2018, “you were ‘exposed’ to uranium by OSHA’s definition.”

    How was the uranium discovered after all that time? In March 2018, the teenage son of a park service employee had a Geiger counter that detected radiation in the collection room, Stephenson said. The buckets had apparently been in a basement for decades before being moved to the museum.

    Stephenson told the Republic that he immediately contacted a park service specialist to report the uranium ore. A few days later, technicians arrived.

    Photos provided to the newspaper by Stephenson show technicians arriving in June 2018 to take away the buckets of uranium ore. The technicians reportedly dumped the buckets at an old uranium mine 2 miles away, then for some reason brought the buckets back to the building.

    Stephenson said the park didn’t do anything to warn workers or tourists that they had perhaps been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation, despite a Right to Know law that he said requires disclosing the incident.

    “My first interest is the safety of the workers and the people,” he told the Republic. He is especially concerned about kids who were potentially exposed to radiation, at levels he calculated to be 1,400 times the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safe level for children.

    Dennis Wagner, the Republic reporter who broke the story, said that Stephenson approached the newspaper to get the word out to the public after his efforts to get the park service to warn the public went nowhere.

    Grand Canyon National Park Public Affairs Officer Emily Davis said that the park service is coordinating an investigation with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

    “A recent survey of the Grand Canyon National Park’s museum collection facility found radiation levels at background levels — the amount always present in the environment — and below levels of concern for public health and safety,” Davis said in a statement to NPR. “There is no current risk to the public or park employees. The museum collection facility is open and work routines have continued as normal. The NPS takes public and employee safety and the response to allegations seriously. We will share additional information about this matter as the investigation continues.”

    OSHA confirms to NPR that it has opened an investigation into the matter.

    This isn’t Stephenson’s first time raising alarms about a dangerous working environment, the Republic reports:

    “Stephenson, a military veteran who is certified as an occupational safety and health technician, was in a similar controversy during his time in the Navy. According to court records, he began calling for action to prevent falls after a series of accidents in 2016.

    “As complaints escalated, Stephenson was fired. He turned to the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that protects whistleblowers, and his termination was stayed. It is unclear how that case was resolved, but within months, Stephenson had a new job with the National Park Service.

    “Stephenson said the uranium exposure saga developed while he was pursuing a racial-discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity office. Stephenson is African-American.”

    Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/696001017/grand-canyon-museum-reportedly-had-buckets-of-uranium-sitting-around-for-18-year

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    Dan Bongino: Like Comey and Brennan, McCabe finds impetus of Trump probe ‘inarticulable’ – Fox News
    Dan Bongino: Like Comey and Brennan, McCabe finds impetus of Trump probe ‘inarticulable’ – Fox News
    Video

    McCabe says he briefed Congress on Trump probe with no objections

    Did you notice how, during the Andrew McCabe interview with “60 Minutes,” the former FBI acting director kept talking about “articulable facts?”

    Like ex-CIA boss John Brennan and disgraced former FBI Director James Comey, McCabe was coining his own phrase to explain why the intelligence community started spying the Trump team. But the justification for mounting a probe should not lie in weasel words. It belongs in something known in law enforcement circles as “Paragraph One.”

    Paragraph One in federal investigations lays out precisely why the investigation began and how. You can’t skip over it with fanciful phrases or empty verbiage. Yet, in the case of the counter-intelligence probe that targeted Team Trump, it has been two years and we are still waiting for someone to articulate a clear reason why the program began.

    MCCABE: ‘NO ONE’ IN CONGRESSIONAL LEADERSHIP OBJECTED WHEN TOLD OF FBI’S TRUMP PROBE

    McCabe told Scott Pelley the FBI had a bunch of “articulable facts,” but he didn’t bother to articulate them. Earlier, Comey told Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier the investigation was justified by a “mosaic of facts.” The impetus was described by Brennan in still another interview as the “corpus of intelligence.”

    Is anybody ever going to describe what this is? Put yourself in Trump’s shoes. He is being investigated as a potential traitor to the United States for colluding with a foreign power and no one has yet described why they were investigating the Trump team during the campaign.

    Here’s why they can’t say what the “articulable facts,” “mosaic,” or “corpus” really are. Because it was the dossier, commissioned and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and later thoroughly discredited that prompted the never-ending probe. It was compiled by Trump-hating ex-British spy Christopher Steele, on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was hired by a law firm which in turn contracted with Clinton to get dirt – real or fake – on Trump. The dossier was the “predicate crime,” but now that it has been debunked, it is pretty hard to acknowledge what a house of cards this whole investigation has been.

    CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

    McCabe has already admitted the Justice Department would never have gotten a FISA warrant to investigate Trump, which gave them the power to monitor him, without the dossier. But you won’t hear him, Brennan or Comey say that anymore.

    When the truth is no longer “articulable,” you have to get creative.

    CLICK HERE TO HEAR MORE FROM THE DAN BONGINO SHOW

    Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dan-bongino-like-comey-and-brennan-mccabe-finds-impetus-of-trump-probe-inarticulable

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    Ahead of second summit, Trump says he’s in ‘no rush whatsoever’ on North Korean denuclearization – The Washington Post
    Ahead of second summit, Trump says he’s in ‘no rush whatsoever’ on North Korean denuclearization – The Washington Post

    Felicia Sonmez

    February 19 at 4:23 PM

    President Trump said Tuesday that he is in “no rush whatsoever” on North Korean denuclearization, setting low expectations for his summit next week with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    Trump and Kim will meet on Feb. 27 and 28 in Hanoi, following on their meeting in Singapore last June.

    Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he had a “great conversation” about the trip with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Tuesday morning. Moon’s administration has said it is hopeful that Trump and Kim can achieve “specific” progress toward denuclearization, although some observers have voiced skepticism about the effectiveness of Trump’s approach.

    Trump said that while he would “ultimately” like to see North Korea denuclearize, he has “no pressing time schedule” because “the sanctions are on.”

    “We’re in no rush whatsoever,” the president told reporters. “We’re going to have our meeting . . . As long as there’s no testing, I’m in no rush. If there’s testing, that’s another deal.”

    He added that he will be speaking with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday and that he expects next week’s summit with Kim to be “very exciting.”

    Trump had long mocked Kim as “Little Rocket Man.” But he took a different tone after their summit last year. In a tweet this month, Trump predicted that “North Korea will become a different kind of Rocket — an Economic one!”

    Trump has repeatedly argued that if he had not been elected president, the United States would “be in a major war” with North Korea, a claim that some experts have criticized as overblown.

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ahead-of-second-summit-with-kim-trump-says-hes-in-no-rush-whatsoever-on-north-korean-denuclearization/2019/02/19/a72b9d20-3487-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html

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    Trump to nominate Jeffrey Rosen to replace Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general – CBS News
    Trump to nominate Jeffrey Rosen to replace Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general – CBS News
    In this image provided by the Department of Transportation, deputy transportation secretary Jeffrey Rosen is shown in his official portrait in Washington. President Trump has nominated Rosen to be the next deputy attorney general. 

    Department of Transportation via AP


    President Trump intends to nominate Jeffrey A. Rosen as deputy attorney general, the White House said Tuesday. Rosen, who is currently deputy transportation secretary, will replace Rod Rosenstein, who is expected to leave his post in mid-March, CBS News reported earlier Tuesday.

    Rosesntein was expected to leave after Attorney General William Barr was confirmed and was to stay on for a few weeks after Barr was confirmed by the Senate, in order to ensure a smooth transition, CBS News’ Paula Reid reported. Rosenstein always saw his post as a two-year position, Reid was also told previously.

    It’s unclear what Rosenstein’s departure means for the special counsel’s investigation. He was tasked with oversight of the probe after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself. It was Rosenstein who appointed Robert Mueller special counsel. Once Matthew Whitaker was named acting attorney general, he assumed oversight of the special counsel investigation. Barr, who has been confirmed as attorney general, is expected to assume oversight of the investigation.

    Before joining the Transportation Department, Rosen was a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, according to the White House.

    Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to leave post at Justice Department

    Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-rosen-replacing-rod-rosenstein-deputy-attorney-general-donald-trump-2019-02-19/

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    GOP threatens retaliation against Dems probing ‘ridiculous conspiracy theory’ on White House-Saudi nuclear tie – Fox News
    GOP threatens retaliation against Dems probing ‘ridiculous conspiracy theory’ on White House-Saudi nuclear tie – Fox News
    Video

    House Democrats open inquiry into proposed deal for US to help build nuclear power facilities in Saudi Arabia

    House Republicans are pushing back against a new Democratic-led probe into an alleged plot by White House officials to share nuclear-power technology with Saudi Arabia, saying it amounts to a defamatory “conspiracy theory” and warning of consequences.

    Democrats on the House Oversight Committee opened the investigation on  Tuesday amid claims by several unnamed whistleblowers who said they witnessed “abnormal acts” in the White House regarding a proposal to build dozens of nuclear reactors across the Middle Eastern kingdom.

    According to an interim congressional report citing whistleblowers within the Trump administration, the nuclear effort was pushed by former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired in early 2017 for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and FBI agents. Derek Harvey, a National Security Council official brought in by Flynn, purportedly continued work on the proposal.

    Now, congressional Republican officials are warning that Democrats — including Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the chairman of the House oversight panel — could face ethics referrals.

    “The attack on Mr. Harvey is a ridiculous conspiracy theory floated by media partisans and now, shamefully, championed by Democrats in Congress,” House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence communications director Jack Langer told Fox News. “Members of Congress who defame staff members for political purposes will be reported to the Ethics Committee.”

    Michael Flynn at a 2017 news briefing in the White House. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

    Lawmakers from both parties have expressed concerns that Saudi Arabia could develop nuclear weapons if the U.S. technology is transferred without proper safeguards.

    FATEFUL CALL: ONETIME FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR REVEALS THE ‘ONE THING’ THAT STOOD OUT TO HIM ABOUT CONVERSATION WITH FLYNN

    The congressional report comes as Trump has made the Saudi kingdom a centerpiece of his foreign policy in the Middle East. This, as he tries to further isolate Iran, which is backing rebels against Saudi Arabia in a deadly proxy war in Yemen. In the process, Trump has brushed off criticism over the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudis’ role in the war in Yemen.

    At the same time, Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner is developing a Middle East peace plan that could include economic proposals for Saudi Arabia.

    The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the congressional report.

    Relying on the whistleblower accounts, email communications and other documents, the committee’s report details how National Security Council (NSC) and ethics officials supposedly warned that the actions of Flynn and a senior aide could run afoul of federal conflict-of-interest law and statutes governing the transfer of nuclear tech to foreign powers.

    Flynn is awaiting sentencing for lying to the FBI in the ongoing probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

    A status conference is set in his case for Mar. 13.

    On Tuesday, a person close to Flynn’s legal team told The Associated Press that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has reviewed the matters raised in the congressional report, and that no charges related to it have been filed. The person spoke on condition of anonymity, for lack of authorization to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation.

    Congressional investigators are also probing the role of Tom Barrack, a proponent of the nuclear proposal who ran Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, which is under separate investigation by federal prosecutors in New York. Rick Gates, a former Barrack employee and cooperator in Mueller’s investigation, was also involved in advocating for the nuclear proposal.

    A spokesman for Barrack said in a statement that he will cooperate with the House probe.

    “Mr. Barrack’s engagement in investment and business development throughout the Middle East for the purpose of better aligned Middle East and U.S. objectives are well known, as are his more than four decades of respected relationships throughout the region,” the statement said, noting that Barrack never joined the Trump administration.

    Pakistani protesters rally to condemn a visit of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince to Pakistan, in Lahore, Pakistan, Friday, Feb. 15, 2019. Pakistan said Wednesday that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will arrive in Islamabad later this week on an official visit that is expected to include the signing of agreements for billions of dollars of investment in Pakistan. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)

    Harvey did not immediately return a request for comment.

    According to the congressional report, the whistleblowers came to the committee because they had concerns “about efforts inside the White House to rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in potential violation of the Atomic Energy Act and without review by Congress as required by law — efforts that may be ongoing to this day.”

    A 2017 article by the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica detailed some of the concerns raised inside the National Security Council about the nuclear proposal — known as the “Marshall Plan for the Middle East” — advocated by a company called IP3 International.

    DEM REP CALLS TRUMP SAUDI ARABIA’S ‘B—-‘

    IP3 is led by a group of retired U.S. military officers and national security officials, including retired Rear Adm. Michael Hewitt, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and former Reagan National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane.

    IP3 and other proponents of nuclear power in the Middle East argue that the U.S. needs to be involved because otherwise it will lose out to Russia, China and others on billions of dollars in business. They also say that U.S. involvement — and the limits on nuclear fuel that come with it— are essential to stem an arms race in the region.

    “The only way to address concerns over development of weapons of mass destruction is for the U.S. to participate in the introduction and secure operation of international nuclear power plants,” the company said in a statement Tuesday. It also said it “looks forward to sharing what we know” with the House committee.

    Up until the month before he joined the Trump administration, Flynn listed himself on public documents as an adviser to an iteration of Hewitt’s company advocating for the nuclear power proposal.

    Last year, IP3 told The Washington Post that Flynn was offered a role in the company but never formally came aboard. On Tuesday, the company said Flynn “was never an advisor to IP3 or its affiliate, he had no stake in the company and was never compensated or reimbursed for expenses by IP3.”

    FILE – In this file photo of Nov. 2, 2006, cooling towers of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant are reflected in the Susquehanna River in this time exposure photograph in Middletown, Pa. Forty years after Three Mile Island became synonymous with America’s worst commercial nuclear power accident, the prospect of bailing out nuclear power plants is stirring debate at the highest levels of Pennsylvania and the federal government. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

    Still, according to the report, Flynn served as a conduit for IP3 inside the White House.

    Just days after Trump’s inauguration, the company sent Flynn a draft memo for the president’s signature that would have appointed Barrack as a “special representative” in charge of carrying out the nuclear power proposal and called on the director of the CIA and the secretaries of State, Energy, Treasury and Defense to lend him support. The report also quotes former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland as saying Trump personally told Barrack he could lead the plan’s implementation.

    The report also catalogs the actions of Harvey, the Flynn confidant who was put in charge of the NSC’s Middle East and North African affairs.

    CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

    According to the report, upon entering the White House in January 2017, Harvey saw his mission as getting Trump to adopt the nuclear proposal despite the objections of ethics and national security officials.

    Even when H.R. McMaster, who replaced Flynn as national security adviser, and NSC lawyer John Eisenberg directed that work stop on the proposal because of concerns about its legality, Harvey continued pursuing the proposal, according to the report.

    Harvey was fired from the NSC in July 2017. He then joined the staff of GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California, a Trump ally and the former hairman of the House intelligence committee.

    Fox News’ Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-threatens-retaliation-against-dems-probing-ridiculous-conspiracy-theory-on-white-house-saudi-nuclear-tie

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    Trump administration moves to pull funding for California bullet train – NBC News
    Trump administration moves to pull funding for California bullet train – NBC News

    Amid a social media feud between President Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the federal government announced its intention Tuesday to cancel nearly $1 billion in pending funding for the state’s long-planned, high-speed train.

    In a letter to California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Brian P. Kelly on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation outlined the government’s reasons for pulling funding. The state has not come up with its own promised funding, will miss a 2022 completion target and has recently reconfigured the project outside the bounds of a federal pact for funding, railroad chief Ronald L. Batory wrote.

    The federal department will “de-obligate” $928,620,000 in promised cash, but California will be given a chance to argue its case, Batory said in the letter. He also said the Trump administration is “exploring all available legal options” to recover $2.5 billion in past federal grants for the project.

    An illustration of California’s high-speed rail project.CA.gov

    Newsom last week announced plans to scale back the $77 billion project. Rather than taking travelers between Los Angeles and San Francisco as originally envisioned, the train will now seek to bridge the Central Valley cities of Bakersfield and Merced.

    Construction of that 160-mile stretch is underway.

    Trump reacted to Newsom’s announcement on Twitter last week: “California has been forced to cancel the massive bullet train project after having spent and wasted many billions of dollars. They owe the Federal Government three and a half billion dollars. We want that money back now. Whole project is a ‘green’ disaster!”

    The governor responded by noting that the project had not been scrapped and that the president was “desperately searching” for money to fund his proposed border wall.

    On Tuesday, Newsom argued that the funding U-turn was more about California’s opposition to Trump’s declaration of emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border than the efficacy or evolution of the train project, which has long been opposed by the state and national Republican establishment.

    California on Monday joined 15 other states in a lawsuit challenging Trump’s emergency declaration, which allows the president to tap into funds unapproved by Congress for a border wall.

    “It’s no coincidence that the Administration’s threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the President’s farcical ‘national emergency,'” Newsom said in a statement. “The President even tied the two issues together in a tweet this morning. This is clear political retribution by President Trump, and we won’t sit idly by. This is California’s money, and we are going to fight for it.”

    State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said the state is not ready to concede. “We will fight this illegal action as we have with many of this administration’s unlawful undertaking,” he said in a statement. “This is about California’s future, and we will not back down.”

    But state Assemblyman Vince Fong, a Central Valley Republican, called for the end of the high-speed project. “Continuing to throw hard-earned tax dollars at a structurally flawed project is fiscally irresponsible, and I believe we need to scrap this project entirely,” he said in a statement to NBC News.

    Dennis Romero writes for NBC News and is based in Los Angeles.

    Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-administration-moves-pull-funding-california-bullet-train-n973396

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    2 American Wives of ISIS Militants Want to Return Home – The New York Times
    2 American Wives of ISIS Militants Want to Return Home – The New York Times

    They began talking about making a run for it, and they said they shared their growing horror over the choices they had made.

    “It’s hard to change your mind-set when you have lost everything and sacrificed everything. Even if you feel a tug that tells you something’s not right here, this isn’t O.K., and that there’s too many holes here, something’s wrong, I think it’s very, very difficult when you feel like you have burned bridges, to know how to shift,” Ms. Polman said.

    ISIS forbade anyone to leave, planting land mines and using snipers to shoot down anyone who tried. But last month, Ms. Muthana said, she decided to give it a try by latching on to a Syrian family who left Shafa at dusk.

    All she took was her baby and his stroller, she said. When darkness fell, the group got lost and spent the night in the frigid cold, she said.

    The next day, Jan. 10, she completed the journey and surrendered to American troops in the Syrian desert, who fingerprinted her.

    Days later, Ms. Polman followed the same route and surrendered as well. Weeks later, after having no contact from the American or Canadian authorities, she and Ms. Muthana reached out to the Red Cross to get help. They are also in touch with a lawyer who is trying to help navigate their return to North America.

    Ms. Muthana gave a handwritten note to the lawyer.

    “I realized how I didn’t appreciate or maybe even really understand how important the freedoms that we have in America are. I do now,” she wrote. “To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family and any concerns I would cause my country would be hard for me to really express properly.”

    Mr. Hughes, the deputy director of the George Washington University Program on Extremism, said the United States had an obligation to bring her home — “albeit in handcuffs.”

    Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/us/islamic-state-american-women.html

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