Among them was Ayman al-Drees, the husband of a Saudi feminist activist, Malak al-Shehri, who had fled to the United States last year after the other women’s rights activists had been arrested. In 2016, Ms. al-Shehri herself was arrested after defying the kingdom by tweeting a photo of herself not wearing a head scarf or an abaya, part of a protest against the conservative dress code that governs Saudi women.
She was later released, but on Friday, her husband called her from his family’s farm in Saudi Arabia to tell her that he saw men “coming for him,” she said in a phone interview on Friday from California.
Sounding frightened, he told her to be careful, she said, and that he loved her, before hanging up.
Ms. al-Shehri said that her husband, who worked as an insurance underwriter, had muted his own activist posts on Twitter out of fear two years ago and had recently limited himself to translating feminist videos from English into Arabic to help spread awareness about feminist ideas in Saudi Arabia.
“We didn’t expect this, because he didn’t do anything wrong. He did nothing,” said Ms. al-Shehri, her voice breaking. “He was being careful, but it didn’t work.”
She said she had urged him to join her in the United States, but he had refused, partly because he did not think he would be a target, and partly because his income in Saudi Arabia went to support his wife.
Also among the group of recent detainees, according to Prisoners of Conscience, another rights group, was Yazed al-Faife, a journalist for a state-owned newspaper, Al Sharq. He had recently appeared in a video accusing Saudi officials of habitually neglecting parts of southern Saudi Arabia and suggesting that some officials’ dealings there had been corrupt.
Mr. al-Faife said that poverty, lack of opportunity and poor infrastructure along the Saudi border with Yemen had allowed Iranian intelligence to destabilize the area and incite discontent in the Saudi population there. This, too, may have been sensitive territory in the authorities’ eyes: Saudi Arabia, with its ally the United Arab Emirates, has drawn strong criticism globally for its destructive war in Yemen against the Houthis, a militant group believed to be propped up by Iran.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/world/middleeast/american-detainees-saudi-arabia.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Lockheed Martin-made F-35 fighter jet for Turkey arrived on Wednesday at a military training facility in Arizona, an Air Force official said on Thursday, amid a dispute over Ankara’s planned purchase of a Russian missile defense system.
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that the United States halted delivery of equipment related to the stealth F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey because of concern the NATO ally’s planned purchase of the Russian system would compromise the security of the jet, the most advanced U.S. fighter aircraft.
A second jet is scheduled to arrive at Luke Air Force Base on Friday, the Air Force official said. Two Turkish F-35 jets are already at the base.
Pentagon spokesman Charlie Summers told reporters on Thursday: “The training (for pilots) will continue at Luke Air Force Base.”
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has refused to back down from Ankara’s planned purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defense system.
The United States and other NATO allies that own F-35s fear the radar on the system will learn how to spot and track the jet, making it less able to evade Russian weapons.
In an attempt to persuade Turkey to drop its plans to buy the S-400, the United States offered the pricier American-made Patriot anti-missile system in a discounted deal that expired at the end of March. Turkey has shown interest in the Patriot system, but not at the expense of abandoning the S-400.
Turkey has engaged with U.S. negotiators in recent days about buying the Patriot system, a person familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity. The system is made by Raytheon Co.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday that Turkey had proposed to the United States that they form a working group to determine that Russian S-400 missile defense systems do not pose a threat to U.S. or NATO military equipment.
On Thursday, the Pentagon said it was not considering a technical working group and that it was not necessary at this stage.
Reporting by Mike Stone; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Peter Cooney
Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-turkey-f35-arizona/turkish-f-35-delivered-to-training-base-in-arizona-official-says-idUSKCN1RG242
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(CNN)The White House on Thursday evening informed Congress it was withdrawing its nomination of Ron Vitiello to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a letter obtained by CNN.
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/05/politics/ice-director-nomination-pulled/index.html
LONDON — British Prime Minister Theresa May said Friday she was beginning preparations to hold an election for the European Parliament despite her country’s desire to quit the European Union, an acknowledgment that its divorce efforts could be significantly delayed.
In a letter to a top E.U. official, May asked for Britain’s departure date from the European Union to be delayed until June 30 and said she would order a vote in late May to elect British members of the European Parliament, assuming Britain is still an E.U. member. Without a reprieve from the other 27 leaders of E.U. nations, Britain is due to crash out of the club without a safety net on April 12.
May’s government is “undertaking the lawful and responsible preparations” for an election, May said in her letter to European Council President Donald Tusk. She said that if Britain and the European Union manage to ratify a divorce deal before late May, she would seek to depart from the bloc more quickly and skip the vote. Many hard-line Brexit advocates loathe the idea of participating in the election.
[Brexit may no longer mean Brexit]
The decision opens the door to a longer extension from E.U. leaders, who said that Britain could not continue to be a member of the European Union beyond May 22 if it did not hold the election. They feared that any law passed by the new European Parliament could be challenged if Britain were not represented in it.
European leaders will gather in Brussels on Wednesday to decide what to do about Britain. Any move must be taken with unanimity, and there have been splits about how strict to be. France in particular has been eager to usher the country out of the European Union as quickly as possible, whether or not London has approved a divorce deal. But other countries want a more flexible approach, and many E.U. diplomats who handle Brexit issues expect that leaders will offer a delay.
Tusk has proposed a year-long reprieve that could be ended early if British leaders settle on a divorce approach in the meantime, according to diplomats familiar with the discussions. The approach, deemed a “flextension” among policymakers with a penchant for acronyms and jargon, would significantly reduce the risk of a Brexit without a safety net. Economists say that a no-deal Brexit could unleash turmoil across Europe, particularly in Britain.
Some E.U. diplomats, sick of their bandwidth being consumed by Brexit, say they are unlikely to agree to a short extension of the type requested by May. More likely is a tough fare-thee-well and a departure on April 12, or Tusk’s longer-term proposal.
Tusk’s approach was endorsed Friday by one influential voice in Germany.
“E.U. has already ruled out 30 June,” Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee, wrote on Twitter. “Tusk’s offer of flextension would be a wise decision of [E.U. leaders], both insuring integrity of E.U. elections & leaving all options on table.”
[Is Britain falling apart? Leak in Parliament forces lawmakers to evacuate.]
Still, for many Europeans, a longer extension is unappealing. They worry that it would take pressure off the British Parliament to agree on a deal. Many leaders also have concerns with Britain’s lingering in their club. They fear that British policymakers could turn obstructionist, since they would retain their power to shape E.U. policy on their way out the door.
British diplomats scoff at those anxieties, noting that they have abstained on many E.U. discussions since the June 2016 Brexit referendum and have not obstructed.
E.U. leaders worry that could change, particularly if May is deposed as prime minister and replaced by a harder-line Conservative.
One prominent Brexit advocate sought to stoke just such fears on Friday.
“If a long extension leaves us stuck in the EU we should be as difficult as possible. We could veto any increase in the budget, obstruct the putative EU army and block Mr Macron’s integrationist schemes,” tweeted Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, an arch-Brexiteer.
Birnbaum reported from Brussels. Quentin Ariès in Brussels contributed to this report.
Read more:
Theresa May’s party is in a rage that she’s negotiating with the opposition
Brexit: Parliament rejects soft Brexit, second referendum
Perspective: Brexit has turned British politics into a zombie horror movie
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
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Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/britain-to-take-part-in-european-parliament-elections-signaling-a-brexit-delay/2019/04/05/e7042028-577f-11e9-a047-748657a0a9d1_story.html
From nearly the moment they roared down the runway and took off in their new Boeing jetliner, pilots of an Ethiopian Airlines flight encountered problems with the plane.
Almost immediately, a device called a stick shaker began vibrating the captain’s control column, warning him that the plane might be about to stall and fall from the sky.
For six minutes, the pilots were bombarded by alarms as they fought to fly the plane, at times pulling back in unison on their control columns in a desperate attempt to keep the huge jet aloft.
Ethiopian authorities issued a preliminary report Thursday on the March 10 crash that killed 157 people. They found that a malfunctioning sensor sent faulty data to the Boeing 737 Max 8’s anti-stall system and triggered a chain of events that ended in a crash so violent it reduced the plane to shards and pieces. The pilots’ struggle, and the tragic ending, mirrored an Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air Max 8 off the coast of Indonesia, which killed 189 people.
The anti-stall system, called MCAS, automatically lowers the plane’s nose under some circumstances to prevent an aerodynamic stall. Boeing acknowledged that a sensor in the Ethiopian Airlines jet malfunctioned, triggering MCAS when it was not needed. The company repeated that it is working on a software upgrade to fix the problem in its best-selling plane.
‘‘It’s our responsibility to eliminate this risk,’’ CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a video. ‘‘We own it, and we know how to do it.’’
Jim Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the preliminary findings add urgency to re-examine the way that the Federal Aviation Administration uses employees of aircraft manufacturers to conduct safety-related tasks, including tests and inspections — a decades-old policy that raises questions about the agency’s independence and is now under review by the U.S. Justice Department, the Transportation Department’s inspector general and congressional committees.
‘‘It is clear now that the process itself failed to produce a safe aircraft,’’ Hall said. ‘‘The focus now is to see if there were steps that were skipped or tests that were not properly done.’’
The 33-page preliminary report, which is subject to change in the coming months, is based on information from the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders, the so-called black boxes. It includes a minute-by-minute narrative of a gripping and confusing scene in the cockpit.
Just one minute into Flight 302 from Addis Ababa to Nairobi in neighboring Kenya, the captain, Yared Getachew, reported that they were having flight-control problems.
Then the anti-stall system kicked in and pushed the nose of the plane down for nine seconds. Instead of climbing, the plane descended slightly. Audible warnings — ‘‘Don’t Sink’’ — sounded in the cockpit. The pilots fought to turn the nose of the plane up, and briefly they were able to resume climbing.
But the automatic anti-stall system pushed the nose down again, triggering more squawks of ‘‘Don’t Sink’’ from the plane’s ground-proximity warning system.
Following a procedure that Boeing reiterated after the Lion Air crash, the Ethiopian pilots flipped two switches and disconnected the anti-stall system, then tried to regain control. They asked to return to the Addis Ababa airport, but were continuing to struggle getting the plane to gain altitude.
Then they broke with Boeing procedure and returned power to controls including the anti-stall system, perhaps hoping to use power to adjust a tail surface that controls the pitch up or down of a plane, or maybe out of sheer desperation.
One final time, the automated system kicked in, pushing the plane into a nose dive, according to the report.
A half-minute later, the cockpit voice recording ended, the plane crashed, and all 157 people on board were killed. The plane’s impact left a crater 10 meters deep.
The Max is Boeing’s newest version of its workhorse single-aisle jetliner, the 737, which dates to the 1960s. Fewer than 400 Max jets have been sent to airlines around the world, but Boeing has taken orders for 4,600 more.
Boeing delivered this particular plane, tail number ET-AVJ, to Ethiopian Airlines in November. By the day of Flight 302, it had made nearly 400 flights and been in the air for 1,330 hours — still very new by airline standards.
The pilots were young, too, and between them they had a scant 159 hours of flying time on the Max.
The captain, Getachew, was just 29 but had accumulated more than 8,000 hours of flying since completing work at the airline’s training academy in 2010. He had flown more than 1,400 hours on Boeing 737s but just 103 hours on the Max. That may not be surprising, given that Ethiopian Airlines had just five of the planes, including ET-AVJ.
The co-pilot, Ahmed Nur Mohammod Nur, was only 25 and was granted a license to fly the 737 and the Max on Dec. 12 of last year. He had logged just 361 flight hours — not enough to be hired as a pilot at a U.S. airline. Of those hours, 207 were on 737s, including 56 hours on Max jets.
Thursday’s preliminary report found that both pilots performed all the procedures recommended by Boeing on the March 10 flight but still could not control the jet.
While Boeing continues to work on its software update, Max jets remain grounded worldwide. The CEO said the company is taking ‘‘a comprehensive, disciplined approach’’ to fixing the flight-control software.
But some critics, including Hall, the former NTSB chairman, question why the work has taken so long.
‘‘Don’t you think if Boeing knew what the fix was, we would have the fix by now?’’ he said. ‘‘They said after the Lion Air accident there was going to be a fix, yet there was a second accident with no fix. Now, in response to the worldwide reaction, the plane is grounded and there is still not a fix.’’
Source Article from https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2019/04/05/gone-minutes-ethiopian-airlines-jet-final-journey/Qg9CzEjBRuBEaCRl6ZVCzI/story.html
Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump’s new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.
Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need you, Leon” — assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.
I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush’s administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn’t going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn’t a case of someone who’d spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr’s been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.
I characterized Barr’s initial four-page summary of the Mueller report as an elegant little political document and it was. It elicited exactly the response he and the White House wanted. He validated Trump’s slogan, “No Collusion, No Obstruction” while cleverly obscuring the fact that there is obviously much more to that story. After a couple of weeks of careful parsing and reconsideration of the implications by the press and various experts, Barr has now lost control of the storyline. He is promising to deliver the full report after he redacts whatever he deems necessary, but because of the game he’s been playing, there is no longer much trust that he’s acting in good faith.
Unlike Ken Starr’s investigations of the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, the Mueller team didn’t use friendly members of the press to pressure witnesses and try their cases in the court of public opinion. In fact they said nothing at all outside the courtroom. But now that the investigation is over and the attorney general has taken it upon himself to summarize their conclusions they have reportedly begin to express their distress about how he’s handled that.
Numerous news outlets have confirmed that members of Mueller’s team say that Barr has mischaracterized the evidence of obstruction of justice, which by all accounts is substantial.
They have also told associates that they carefully prepared summaries for different sections of the report, assuming they would be released to the public. Those summaries should not require all this concern from Barr about redactions. This certainly comports with many experts’ assumptions about how such a report would be organized. While Barr and the Justice Department are now saying that the summaries are labeled as containing grand jury and other confidential information, therefore requiring careful review and redactions, many professionals have suggested that’s just pro forma.
I think we all knew that the question of obstruction was going to be a problem for President Trump, simply because so much of it was happening right out in the open. But according to NBC News, it’s not just that issue that has the Mueller team agitated. The “collusion” case is also being somewhat misrepresented. The special counsel decided not to charge Trump or his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government in its election interference, but that is far from the whole story. Members of the team say that “the findings paint a picture of a campaign whose members were manipulated by a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation.”
I have long been willing to believe that Trump and his minions were simply so unethical, corrupt and uninformed that they were easy marks for the Russian election sabotage campaign. We know that they behaved idiotically when Russians approached them. Donald Trump Jr. writing an emails saying, “if it’s what you say, I love it!” upon hearing that Russian emissaries want to give him dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” is not the language of a sophisticated conspirator. It’s almost as if they were testing to see if Junior was even sentient. But that doesn’t get him or Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort or Donald Trump himself off the hook. This isn’t a game. Trump is president of the United States.
Trump and his team were almost certainly compromised by the lies they told about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations. Trump knew that could be revealed at any time and his obsequious behavior toward Vladimir Putin the could easily be interpreted as bowing to an unspoken threat. Trump is conversant in blackmail threats, as we all know. We also know that he pays up when he deems it necessary.
Mueller found that none of this was prosecutable and it is vital we find out why he reached that conclusion. But to say that there was nothing there amounts to sweeping some of the worst judgment calls in the history of presidential campaigns under the carpet. And that’s really saying something.
These were outrageous decisions regardless of the criminal liability or lack thereof. I’m not sure if rank stupidity and reckless greed qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors but we should probably know the whole story before deciding about that. Even if Trump and his close advisers were suckered by the “Russian election interference activities” it’s quite clear that once Trump realized that the FBI and the intelligence community thought he might have done something illegal, he tried to cover it up. If that’s so, it’s not William Barr’s place to make the decision about criminal obstruction of justice. If the Department of Justice has concluded that it cannot charge a sitting president with a crime, it cannot clear one of wrongdoing either. It’s up to the Congress to decide what to do about Donald Trump. It seems as though the Mueller investigators agree.
Source Article from https://www.salon.com/2019/04/05/new-hints-of-the-mueller-report-did-trump-simply-get-rolled-by-the-russians/
Former Vice President Joe Biden promised to be respectful of people’s personal space after allegations of unwanted and inappropriate behavior.
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – Joe Biden’s speech Friday to a labor union will be his first following allegations of unwanted touching by several women, but few expect the former vice president will spend a lot of time addressing the issue.
“He doesn’t want it to become the Joe Biden apology tour,” said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire who specializes in presidential politics and was speaking generally. “If he feels like he needs to speak more in depth, he’ll find the proper opportunity to do it and it’ll be one and done.”
Biden, a Democrat who served 36 years representing Delaware in the U.S. Senate prior to his time as vice president, is expected by many to announce his entry into the 2020 presidential race in the coming weeks.
The timing of that decision has been complicated by allegations of improper conduct that began when Lucy Flores, a former member of the Nevada Legislature, accused Biden in a March 29 New York Magazine article of “demeaning and disrespectful” behavior for an alleged 2014 incident.
Since then, at least six other women have come forward with similar stories of Biden’s unwanted conduct.
Biden, known for his hugging and hands-on politicking style, promised to be more “mindful and respectful” in a video released Wednesday.
Related: Trump tweets video mocking Joe Biden’s explanation for touching, making a ‘human connection’
Related: How Democrats in early primary states view allegations against Joe Biden
“Social norms are changing. I understand that, and I’ve heard what these women are saying,” he said in a tweet accompanying the video. “Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future. That’s my responsibility and I will meet it.”
The former vice president will be speaking Friday to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, representing approximately 775,000 members in the construction, manufacturing, railroad and utilities fields – the kind of blue-collar workers who helped propel Donald Trump to the White House in 2016.
It will be a friendly audience, given the union’s antipathy to Trump, and one that’s likely to be more interested in hearing Biden talk about the need to improve working conditions and paychecks than how he’ll change his campaign style.
“Nothing (the Trump) administration does or proposes is designed to enhance the quality of life or working conditions for our federal employees,” IBEW Government Employees Department Director Paul O’Connor said after the president proposed deep cuts in his 2020 budget.
A spokesman for Biden, 76, declined to say what he planned to say in his remarks Friday.
A rousing speech to a friendly audience and a tweeted video promising to change his behavior won’t sweep away the challenge facing Biden, said Susan MacManus, a retired political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“It’s very clear the younger generation is not buying it,” she said, noting that attention around Biden’s behavior has overshadowed a presidential field that includes several strong female candidates after they saw sexism contribute to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. “A number of women Democrats are saying, ‘I’ve had enough.’ Those two things together are really part of why there’s outrage.”
The allegations against Biden come amid #MeToo, a movement of mostly women speaking out against innappropriate behavior. It has led to the resignation and downfall of more than 100 entertainers, executives and politicians, including Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer and Kevin Spacey. Former Minnesota Democrat Sen. Al Franken announced his resignation in 2017 following accusations of sexual misconduct. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., also stepped down, along with Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who resigned amid reports he discussed with female staffers the possibility they could be surrogates for his and his wife’s baby.
President Donald Trump has been accused of having affairs with multiple women and making unwanted advances at others. In an “Access Hollywood” tape that surfaced during the final weeks of the presidential campaign in 2016, Trump was heard making lewd comments and bragging about groping women. Trump has denied the allegations.
Several polls show Biden leading a large field of candidates even though he has yet to officially announce his candidacy.
About three in 10 Democrats (31%) said they agree Biden is “out of touch” with the challenges that younger Americans face today, compared to 52% who disagree, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll released Thursday.
The poll of 1,945 registered voters nationwide has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. It was conducted from March 29 through April 1, about the time the first allegations against Biden surfaced.
Related: How Joe Biden could make me start forgiving him for Anita Hill (first, stop touching)
Related: Joe Biden’s physicality is a mark of old-school politicians, not a creepy old man
In addition, a third of Democrats (33 percent) agree that Biden is not progressive enough to make the changes Democrats need, compared to 48 percent who disagree.
A number of former female staff members and prominent Democratic women have come out to defend Biden. One of the latest was Stacey Abrams, who nearly won a 2018 race to become Georgia governor.
“We cannot have perfection as a litmus test,” Abrams said when asked her opinion of the video Biden released Wednesday.
“The responsibility of leaders is to not be perfect but to be accountable, to say, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I understand it and here’s what I’m going to do to reform as I move forward.’ And I think we see Joe Biden doing that,” she said.
Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/05/joe-biden-address-labor-group-amid-allegations-improper-touching/3366048002/
US Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for the end of the Senate filibuster should the Democrats return to power and face obstruction.
Warren announced her support for ending the Senate rule in a series of tweets on Friday morning, and she planned to discuss it in a speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network later in the morning, according to an excerpt of her remarks shared with the Globe.
The filibuster, in which senators employ a number of delay tactics to effectively kill a piece of legislation, has often spelled doom for legislation on both sides. If Senators filibuster a bill, it then needs the support of 60 members of the Senate in order to proceed to a vote, in what’s known as invoking cloture. The end of the filibuster would mean bills and other measures could pass with a simple majority vote.
Warren said that she would support the end of the Senate rule if the Democrats win the White House and face obstruction from Republicans.
“Enough with that. When we win the election, we WILL make the change that we need in this country,” she will say in her speech Friday morning.
Warren is framing her argument in terms of racial justice, using the recent example of a bill that made lynching a federal crime. It finally passed the Senate in 2018, 100 years after a similar version had first been introduced. One of the reasons? It was often the target of a Senate filibuster, Warren says in the speech.
“An entire century of obstruction because a small group of racists stopped the entire nation from doing what was right,” Warren will say, according to the remarks. “For generations, the filibuster was used as a tool to block progress on racial justice. And in recent years, it’s been used by the far right as a tool to block progress on everything.”
With no filibuster, Democrats see an opportunity to pass major progressive legislation on things like climate change and health care should the party take the Senate in 2020 and lack a 60-vote majority. But proponents of the filibuster say it fosters bipartisanship: Legislation must be supported by a wider range of voices in order to have a chance at passage.
Warren is the first major Democratic presidential candidate to call for the end of the filibuster. In February, Washington Governor Jay Inslee told HuffPost that it was an “artifact of a bygone era.” Other candidates in the field are flatly opposing the idea: Senator Cory Booker described the filibuster as “one of the distinguishing factors of this body” to Politico in January.
Christina Prignano can be reached at christina.prignano@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @cprignano.
Source Article from https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2019/04/05/warren-call-for-end-senate-filibuster/S3saQJayxQNZBPTXQ85x1O/story.html
Mr. Tusk’s plan would need the backing of the leaders of European Union member states.
In asking for an extension until June 30 — the same date she once asked for but which the European Union previously rejected — Mrs. May was bowing to pressure from within her Conservative Party not to be seen as forcing the country into a longer delay. But she was also laying the ground for a more protracted extension by agreeing that Britain was prepared to participate in European elections in May. That was seen in Brussels as a condition for another Brexit postponement.
Mrs. May has sought over the past week to break months of deadlock by meeting with the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, to try to reach an agreement. But she said in her letter to Mr. Tusk that if those talks did not produce a compromise, she would hold a series of votes in Parliament on alternative paths in the hopes that lawmakers would eventually settle on one.
“This impasse cannot be allowed to continue,” Mrs. May wrote. “In the U.K. it is creating uncertainty and doing damage to faith in politics, while the European Union has a legitimate desire to move on to decisions about its own future.”
The prime minister’s Brexit deal has already been rejected three times by British lawmakers, and there is likely to be a lively debate in Brussels on whether — or more particularly, on what terms — to grant a second extension. Britain was originally scheduled to leave the bloc on March 29, but European leaders granted a short extension to give Parliament more time to approve the withdrawal deal.
Mrs. May and Mr. Corbyn met on Wednesday, and teams from both sides continued the discussions on Thursday. The session ended with neither breakthroughs nor breakdowns.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/world/europe/brexit-extension-may-eu.html
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(CNN)The man who falsely claimed to be Timmothy Pitzen, a boy who disappeared in 2011, was released from an Ohio prison last month after serving time for burglary and vandalism, court records show.
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/05/us/timmothy-pitzen-investigation-friday/index.html
Joe Biden hasn’t offered a full-throated apology for his treatment of Anita Hill in the 1990s. He hasn’t backed away from his view that busing was the wrong way to integrate schools in the 1970s, nor has he denounced his decades-old positions on banning federal funding for abortion services.
Over the past few days, as several women have complained that he had made them uncomfortable by touching them in separate encounters, he has adopted a tone of defiance mixed with a smidgen of contrition. He said women have a right to their views, vowed to change his behavior in the future — but made it clear that he doesn’t believe he ever acted inappropriately.
Numerous other Democratic candidates are atoning for their past personal and political sins with effusive apologies on a host of fronts, but Biden is striking an altogether different posture. It’s a strategy employed by Bill Clinton — or, more recently, President Trump — to hold firm and refuse to apologize, preventing enemies from pouncing on any weakness. It comes with one big risk: alienating the very people upset at them and those who support them.
Trump, perhaps not the most objective observer given the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct he faces, urged Biden not to apologize when asked about the former vice president by reporters.
“I wish him luck,” he said.
Biden allies defend his refusal to apologize for actions he said were not meant to be offensive, and they point toward women who have rushed to his defense. But if he decides to enter the presidential race, Biden’s limited response will test whether Democratic voters are willing to accept a candidate who not only has held positions or done things that have fallen out of favor but has yet to fully answer for them. To make it even more complicated, Biden’s actions have touched most directly two giant Democratic constituencies, blacks and women.
Throughout his decades in public life, Biden has never been one to freely offer apologies, particularly when he is confronted with charges that cut to his character or a personal decision.
During his first presidential campaign, in 1987, he was accused of plagiarizing speeches — as well as a law review article he wrote in law school. He insisted that it was “much ado about nothing.”
“In the marketplace of ideas in the political realm, the notion that for every thought or idea you have to go back and find and attribute to someone is frankly ludicrous,” he said. A week later, he withdrew from the race.
“The exaggerated shadow” of his mistakes, he said, had “begun to obscure the essence of my candidacy and the essence of Joe Biden.”
On the day he announced his next presidential campaign, in 2007, he was besieged by criticism for calling then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Biden, holding a conference call with reporters, was not fully repentant.
“I really regret some have taken totally out of context my use of the word ‘clean,’ ” he said.
In 2014, the White House said that then-Vice President Biden had apologized to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for suggesting his country had mistakenly helped terrorist groups. Biden insisted he had not, in fact, apologized.
“I never apologized to him,” Biden said in a CNN interview. “I know him well. I’ve dealt with him. I called him and said, ‘Look, what was reported was not accurate to what I said. Here’s what I said.’ ”
One rare apology contained an acknowledgment that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around what he was about to do. It occurred in 2013, when he visited Selma for the annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday.
“I regret and — although it’s not a part of what I’m supposed to say — I apologize it took me 48 years to get here,” Biden said before marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where civil rights activists in 1965 were attacked by police. “I should have been here. It’s one of the regrets that I have and many in my generation have.”
More recently, he has tried to answer to some of the positions he has held over his nearly five decades in public life. During a Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast this year, he attempted to address his support for a 1994 crime bill.
“I haven’t always been right,” he said. “I know we haven’t always gotten things right, but I’ve always tried.”
Last week, he attempted to address criticism that he mishandled Hill’s testimony during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “To this day, I regret I couldn’t give her the kind of hearing she deserved,” Biden said. “I wish I could have done something.”
The comment triggered more criticism from those who said that he wasn’t taking ownership of his actions. He, after all, could have done something: He was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and presiding over the hearings.
“It’s become sort of a running joke in the household when someone rings the doorbell and we’re not expecting company,” Hill told Elle magazine last year. “ ‘Oh,’ we say, ‘is that Joe Biden coming to apologize?’ ”
She’s still waiting.
Biden’s advisers realized over the past few days the he needed to do more to quell the days-old controversy over his intimate style that began after Lucy Flores, the former Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Nevada, described Biden’s touching of her in 2014 as “blatantly inappropriate and unnerving.” Several other women have since echoed her criticism after detailing their experiences with Biden.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested that Biden’s initial comments, in which he said he would “pay attention” to the women’s complaints, had been insufficient.
“To say, ‘I’m sorry that you were offended,’ is not an apology. ‘I’m sorry I invaded your space,’ but not, ‘I’m sorry you were offended.’ Because that’s — what is that?” she asked. “That’s not accepting the fact that people think differently about communication whether it’s a handshake, a hug.”
One reason Biden has had trouble apologizing is that the criticism lands at the core of who Biden is, those close to him say. He is affectionate and, to his supporters, that is what makes him so likable.
“At least he’s engaging in a dialogue about it,” said one former staffer, “which is the most important piece.”
Politicians often struggle with apology. Mitt Romney wrote a book, “No Apology,” partly as a way to criticize Obama’s perceived willingness to apologize. Yet, this year’s crop of presidential candidates seems to have mastered it.
After harassment complaints arose regarding his 2016 presidential campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) apologized to any woman who felt mistreated. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) recorded a video in January to announce that she was “deeply sorry” for past anti-gay views, while Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) apologized for her past conservative stances on immigration.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in February apologized for her claim of a Native American ancestry: “My apology is an apology for not having been more sensitive about tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty.”
Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from Texas, in March apologized for not being more sensitive while talking about his wife raising their children. He also apologized for things he wrote as a teenager. He acknowledged criticism that he has enjoyed white privilege.
“Beto, or whatever his name is,” former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said dismissively, “he apologized for being born.”
Biden so far has not offered an apology, and it’s unclear if he will.
“Biden is always going to be Biden. He’s not changing anytime soon,” said Rebecca Katz, a Democratic consultant. “Advisers around him should realize, if you’re going to be a 2020 candidate, you have to have a 2020 mind-set. But that’s not Biden. To apologize, he has to believe he did something wrong, and I don’t believe he thinks that.”
Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joe-bidens-long-running-no-apology-tour-hits-the-metoo-era/2019/04/04/caf47bdc-56e7-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_story.html
William Barr was invited to meet justice department officials last summer, on the same day he submitted an “unsolicited” memo that heavily criticized special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into obstruction of justice by Donald Trump.
Barr, who was a private attorney at the time, met the officials for lunch three weeks later and was then nominated to serve as Trump’s attorney general about six months later.
The revelation about the meeting, which was arranged by Steve Engel, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, and which has not previously been publicly disclosed, raises new questions about whether the White House’s decision to hire Barr was influenced by private discussions he had about his legal views on Mueller’s investigation.
Barr announced last month he had concluded there was “not sufficient” evidence found in the special counsel’s investigation to establish that Trump had committed obstruction of justice. He made the decision, he wrote in a letter to Congress, after consulting with Engel – who is a legal adviser to the White House – and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.
Barr’s decision is controversial because, months before he was hired, he sent a 20-page memo to two top officials at the DoJ – Engel and Rosenstein – that called Mueller’s obstruction theory “fatally misconceived” and “legally insupportable”. Barr, who served as attorney general under George HW Bush, said he had written the memo in order to “make sure that all of the lawyers involved carefully considered the potential implications of the theory” that Mueller appeared to be pursuing.
Unnamed officials told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the memo’s existence, that the memo played no role in the decision to hire Barr.
In written answers to questions posed by senators as part of his confirmation hearing, Barr said he had provided copies of his memo to Rosenstein and Engel on 8 June 2018. He said he had discussed his legal opinions with Rosenstein at lunch in early 2018 and then later, on a separate occasion, he briefly discussed his views with Engel. He then said in written answers that after writing the memo: “There was no follow-up from any of these Department officials”.
But a person with knowledge of the matter said that Engel extended an invitation to Barr on 8 June last year – the day the memo arrived at the justice department – for a “brown bag” lunch, in which he was invited to speak to justice department staff.
The lunch then occurred on 27 June.
A spokeswoman for the DoJ confirmed that the lunch occurred. “The timing was coincidental and the memo was not discussed,” the spokeswoman said.
“OLC regularly brings back the former heads of OLC (as do other divisions) to eat with the new team and share experiences from their time at OLC,” she added.
The Barr luncheon was, however, not an entirely routine affair. While brown bag lunches had been a tradition at DoJ in the past, a person with knowledge of the matter said the Barr lunch was meant to kickstart the tradition again, after two years in which no such lunches had occurred.
The DoJ spokeswoman initially disputed that account and promised to give the Guardian a list of names and dates of other former officials and notable individuals who had attended such “brown bag” luncheons before Barr. But the spokeswoman then did not provide any further information.
“This revelation adds yet another data point that suggests Barr’s outlandish memo signaled he would protect Mr Trump even on highly dubious or erroneous legal grounds, and that he was swept into the administration on that basis,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at NYU and former special counsel at the Department of Defense.
While Mueller’s investigation was believed to be focused on Trump’s decision to fire James Comey, who was the head of the FBI and was conducting an investigation into a possible conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, Barr argued in his memo that a true act of obstruction had to involve explicit destruction of evidence. Such acts might include witness tampering or other deliberate acts to impair the integrity of evidence.
The DoJ has played down the significance of Barr’s June memo. Rosenstein told the WSJ that Barr had not sought or received any non-public information regarding the ongoing investigation, and that Barr’s memo had “no impact” on the investigation.
A person with knowledge of the matter said that any discussions between Barr and Engel would be relevant because it would have informed the DoJ, and possibly the White House, of Barr’s views on executive power.
Engel has kept a relatively low profile in his role at the Office of Legal Counsel. He served on the Trump campaign transition team and is known to be a close friend of the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Engel does not serve as a personal attorney to Trump. In his capacity at the OLC he offers advice to the White House on the scope of their powers, sometimes offering legal justification for certain White House actions.
Trump recently told Senate Republicans that he had great affection for Barr.
“I love the AG. He works fast. I love this guy. You told me I would,” he told the group, according to a report in the New York Times.
Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/05/william-barr-memo-meeting-justice-department-steve-engel
It comes as no surprise to President Trump that the late first lady, Barbara Bush held him in low regard. “I have heard that she was nasty to me, but she should be. Look what I did to her sons,” he told The Washington Times in an interview published Thursday.
A new biography of Bush, “The Matriarch,” by USA Today’s Susan Page, contains a number of attacks on the president’s character, both in her interviews with Page and also in her journals, which were provided to Page.
President Trump soundly defeated Bush’s son, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in the 2016 primaries, and often disparaged him as “low-energy.” Her other son, former President George W. Bush, was also a frequent target of attacks by Mr. Trump, as well, largely for his handling of 9/11 and prosecution of the Iraq War.
“Look, she’s the mother of somebody that I competed against. Most people thought he [Jeb Bush] was going to win and he was quickly out,” Mr. Trump told the Washington Times.
“I hit him very hard in South Carolina,” he said. “Remember? He was supposed to win South Carolina and I won it in a landslide. I hit him so hard.
“That’s when his brother came to make the first speech for him,” Mr. Trump recalled. “And I said, ‘What took you so long?'”
In the end, the president seems to think her dislike of him is justified: “She was nasty to me, but she should be.”
But Bush’s dislike for the president predated his remarks about her sons. In 1990, Page notes, Mr. Trump had remarked on then-President George H.W. Bush’s high-dollar speeches in Japan. Barbara Bush wrote in her diary, “Trump now means greed, selfishness and ugly. So sad.”
Page talked with CBSN’s Elaine Quijano about the extent of Barbara Bush’s negative reaction to Mr. Trump. Near the end of her life, Bush told Page she’d “probably say no today” when she was asked whether she considered herself a member of the party in the era of Trump.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” she said of the Trump presidency in an interview with Page. “We’re a strong country, and I think it will all work out.”
Page told Quijano that she thought it was “the accumulation of concern over the direction of the country, about the nature of President Trump’s rhetoric.”
Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-gets-why-barbara-bush-attacked-him-look-what-i-did-to-her-sons/
Trump says if he doesn’t see results on border security he will tax cars and close border; chief White House correspondent John Roberts reports.
President Trump on Thursday said he was giving Mexico a “one-year warning” to stop the flows of migration and drugs into the U.S., or he would slap tariffs on cars made there and close the southern border.
“We’re going to give them a one-year warning and if the drugs don’t stop or largely stop, we’re going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular cars,” he told reporters at the White House. “And if that doesn’t stop the drugs, we close the border.”
OBAMA’S BORDER CHIEF WARNS CONGRESS: IMMIGRATION CRISIS ‘AT A MAGNITUDE NEVER SEEN IN MODERN TIMES’
He said that Mexico had “unbelievable” and “powerful” immigration laws and that such a threat would be a “powerful incentive” for it to act.
The warning is a step back from the threat he issued last week when he threatened to close the border this week unless Mexico stopped “all illegal immigration” into the U.S.
On Tuesday, his stance appeared to soften, when he told reporters that Mexico had started taking further measures to stop migrants traveling into the U.S., and White House officials said that closing the border was one of a number of options on the table.
“I will say this, that Mexico the last four days has really done a great job on their southern border, with Honduras, with Guatemala, with El Salvador, of grabbing and taking and bringing people back to their countries,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday afternoon. “They have the strongest immigration laws, as strong as there is anywhere in the world. They can do it if they want to do it. They’ve never really wanted to do it for many, many years. And we’ve told them, ‘If you don’t do that, we’re going to close the border.’ But before we close the border, we’ll put the tariffs on the cars.
“I don’t think we’ll ever have to close the border because the penalty of tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Mexico at 25 percent will be massive,” the president added.
Trump also faced opposition from members of his own party, including Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who had warned that closing the border would have “unintended consequences.”
On Thursday, Trump said he fully intended to carry out his threat, but added the one-year delay, as well as the additional threat to put tariffs on cars.
“You know I’ll do it, I don’t play games,” he said.
IT’S A ‘CAT 5’ IMMIGRATION CRISIS: NIELSEN
Trump’s remarks came as the administration struggles to get a grip on the escalating crisis on the southern border, with Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) saying last week they were on track to apprehend more than 100,000 border crossers in March.
Trump declared a national emergency on the border in February after Congress granted only a fraction of the $5.6 billion he had sought for funding for a wall on the border. That move, which was opposed by both Democrats and some Republicans, allows the administration to access more than $3 billion extra in funding for the wall.
Since then, Trump has blasted both Congress and Mexico for not doing enough to stop the crisis at the border as numbers of migrants continue to increase.
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“If we don’t make a deal with Congress…or if Mexico doesn’t do what they should be doing…then we’re going to close the border, that’s going to be it, or we’re going to close large sections of the border, maybe not all of it,” he said on Tuesday.
Trump will travel to Calexico, California on Friday where he will visit a recently completed part of the barrier on the border, as well as participate in a roundtable with local law enforcement officials.
Fox News’ Samuel Chamberlain contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-gives-mexico-a-one-year-warning-to-stop-drugs-migrants-or-he-will-tax-cars-and-close-border
Companies now want to depend less on one place, which means looking for an alternative to China, Bill Winters, the chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year.
“People who are concerned at the prospect of greater tariffs on Chinese exports, for example, are looking to move export facilities from China to other countries, including Chinese companies,” Mr. Winters said.
Countries seeking to displace China have begun pointing out that exports from their countries are less likely to face tariffs.
For companies with operations in China, “the trade war between the United States and China creates a new uncertainty,” Airlangga Hartarto, Indonesia’s minister of industry, said in an interview in Davos.
The ability to diversify depends on the industry. Some auto parts companies have run their American factories more hours each day to avoid tariffs on Chinese-made goods, said Razat Gaurav, the chief executive of LLamasoft, a supply chain management company in Ann Arbor, Mich.
By contrast, he said, manufacturers of smartphones and smartphone components — which have generally not been hit by Mr. Trump’s tariffs — have found few places to move work because China dominates that supply chain. Still, some in that industry are shifting too, such as Sony’s closure of a Beijing smartphone factory last month after expanding production in Thailand.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/business/china-trade-trump-jobs-decoupling.html
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(CNN)Timmothy Pitzen’s family believed their 8-year-long search for him was over when a man claiming to be the missing boy was found roaming a Kentucky neighborhood.
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/04/us/missing-teen-timmothy-pitzen-family-neighbors/index.html
CINCINNATI — A young man’s claim to be an Illinois boy who disappeared under tragic circumstances eight years ago was disproved by DNA tests and pronounced a hoax Thursday, dashing hopes that the baffling case had finally been solved.
For a day and a half, a breakthrough seemed to be at hand when a young man found wandering the streets of Newport, Kentucky, on Wednesday identified himself as 14-year-old Timmothy Pitzen and told police he had just escaped from two men who had held him captive for seven years.
Timmothy disappeared in 2011 at age 6, and a note left behind by his mother before she took her own life in Rockford said he was being cared for and would never be found. Timmothy’s family was cautiously hopeful over Wednesday’s news, as were neighbors and others who have long wondered whether he is dead or alive.
But the FBI said Thursday afternoon that DNA tests determined the young man was not Timmothy.
Newport Police Chief Tom Collins identified him to ABC as Brian Rini of Medina, Ohio, a 23-year-old ex-convict. He was released from an Ohio prison less than a month ago after serving more than a year for burglary and vandalism.
Authorities did not say whether Rini would face charges over the alleged hoax or what his motive was.
“Law enforcement has not and will not forget Timmothy, and we hope to one day reunite him with his family. Unfortunately, that day will not be today,” FBI spokesman Timothy Beam said in a statement.
In Timmothy’s hometown of Aurora police Sgt. Bill Rowley said that over the years his department has received thousands of tips about Timmothy, including false sightings.
“We’re always worried about copycats, especially something that has a big national attention like this,” he said.
Timmothy’s family members said they were heartbroken at the latest twist.
“It’s devastating. It’s like reliving that day all over again, and Timmothy’s father is devastated once again,” said his aunt Kara Jacobs.
The boy’s grandmother Alana Anderson said: “It’s been awful. We’ve been on tenterhooks, hopeful and frightened. It’s just been exhausting.” She added, “I feel so sorry for the young man who’s obviously had a horrible time and felt the need to say he was somebody else.”
Timmothy vanished after his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, pulled him out of kindergarten early one day, took him on a two-day road trip to the zoo and a water park, and then killed herself at a Rockford motel. She left a note saying that her son was safe with people who would love and care for him, and added: “You will never find him.”
Police have said she might have dropped the boy off with a friend, noting that his car seat and Spider-Man backpack were gone.
Timmothy’s grandmother said her daughter had fought depression for years and was having problems in her marriage to Timmothy’s father. News reports suggested she was afraid she would lose custody of the boy in a divorce because of her mental instability.
At Greenman Elementary after the boy’s disappearance, Timmothy’s schoolmates, teachers and parents tied hundreds of yellow ribbons around trees and signs. A garden was planted in his memory.
The brief but tantalizing possibility that the case had been solved generated excitement in Timmothy’s former neighborhood.
Pedro Melendez, who lives in Timmothy’s former home, didn’t know the boy but saved the concrete slab with his name, handprint and footprint etched in it when he redid the back patio. It is dated ’09.
Linda Ramirez, who lives nearby and knew the family, said she was “pretty excited” but didn’t “want to have false hopes.”
Rowley expressed hope that the flurry of activity and attention had renewed interest in the case.
“Perhaps, it has people looking at the case with new eyes,” the police sergeant said.
Babwin reported from Chicago. Associated Press reporters Carrie Antlfinger in Aurora, Caryn Rousseau in Chicago and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed.
Source Article from https://www.rrstar.com/news/20190404/police-fbi-trying-to-verify-teen-is-boy-missing-since-2011
Revelations that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s still-confidential report may contain damaging information about President Trump ignited a fresh round of political fighting on Thursday, ushering in a new phase of the nearly two-year-old battle over the Russia probe.
Members of Mueller’s team have told associates they are frustrated with the limited information that Attorney General William P. Barr has provided about their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether Trump sought to obstruct justice, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
While Barr concluded the special counsel’s evidence was not sufficient to prove that the president obstructed justice, some of Mueller’s investigators have said their findings on obstruction were alarming and significant, one person with knowledge of their thinking said.
Some on the special counsel’s team were also frustrated that summaries they had prepared for different sections of the report — with the view that they could be made public fairly quickly — were not released by Barr, two people familiar with the matter said.
The developments put additional pressure on Barr to publicly release Mueller’s 400-page report in its entirety and prompted objections from Trump and his allies that Democrats are attempting to politicize what the president believes has been a 22-month “witch hunt.”
Barr has pledged as much transparency as the law and Justice Department policies allow, but House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) cited “troubling press reports” in a Thursday letter calling for Barr to “immediately release to the public any ‘summaries’ contained in the report that may have been prepared by the Special Counsel.” Nadler also asked Barr to turn over to the committee “all communications” between the Justice Department and Mueller’s office related to the report.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the Nadler letter.
Trump, meanwhile, took to social media to press his attacks on the Mueller report, part of a shift in tone from his earlier praise for portions of the probe’s findings that he viewed as favorable to him.
“According to polling, few people seem to care about the Russian Collusion Hoax, but some Democrats are fighting hard to keep the Witch Hunt alive,” he tweeted. “They should focus on legislation or, even better, an investigation of how the ridiculous Collusion Delusion got started — so illegal!”
The political debate over the minimal information released so far about Mueller’s lengthy report seems to have led to cracks in the special counsel’s disciplined and tight-lipped team. The displeasure among some who worked on the closely held inquiry has begun to surface in the days since Barr released a four-page letter to Congress on March 24 describing what he said were the principal conclusions of Mueller’s report.
In his letter, Barr said the special counsel did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. And he said that Mueller did not reach a conclusion “one way or the other” as to whether Trump’s conduct in office constituted obstruction of justice.
“It was much more acute than Barr suggested,” said one person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.
Trump immediately seized on Barr’s letter to declare on Twitter, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.”
Though Trump’s assertion was incorrect — Mueller pointedly did not reach any conclusion on obstruction, for example — he and his allies began wielding Barr’s summary as a political cudgel to dismiss not just Mueller’s work but any future investigations into the president’s conduct.
However, the news that Mueller’s full report could contain unflattering revelations about the president and his behavior has created a potential political problem for the White House and Trump’s reelection campaign.
After initially calling for the full report to be released, Trump seemed to temper his enthusiasm this week, writing on Twitter that “there is no amount of testimony or document production that can satisfy Jerry Nadler or Shifty Adam Schiff” — a reference to Nadler and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Referring to the Democrats more generally, he also tweeted, “NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!”
Against this backdrop, grumbles from Mueller’s team have broken into public view. Some members of his office were particularly disappointed that Barr did not release summary information the special counsel team had prepared, according to three people familiar with their reactions.
“There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” according to one U.S. official briefed on the matter.
Two officials familiar with the matter added that the summaries the Mueller team had prepared were intended to be ready for public consumption in a timely manner, because the redactions could have been done fairly quickly.
Justice Department officials disputed that characterization, saying the summaries contained sensitive information that will probably require redaction.
Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement Thursday that every page of Mueller’s confidential report was marked with a notation that it may contain confidential grand jury material, adding that it “therefore could not be publicly released.”
“Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the Attorney General decided to release the report’s bottom-line findings and his conclusions immediately — without attempting to summarize the report — with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redaction process,” she said. “ . . . He does not believe the report should be released in ‘serial or piecemeal fashion.’ The Department continues to work with the Special Counsel on appropriate redactions to the report so that it can be released to the Congress and the public.”
A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment.
While the White House has publicly given Barr wide leeway to handle the Mueller report as he sees fit, congressional Democrats have been increasingly critical of his role, questioning whether he is trying to protect the president through his public letters and statements while he continues to review and redact portions of the Mueller report.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday revived her demand that Barr release Mueller’s report and tied it in spirit to a Democratic request to the Treasury Department for six years of Trump’s tax returns.
“Show us the Mueller report. Show us the tax returns,” Pelosi said at a news conference, appearing to momentarily address the president. “We’re not walking away because you said ‘no’ the first time around.”
With each passing day the report remains secret, the pressure on Barr increases, driven in part by congressional demands for transparency and by anonymous officials’ characterizations of the attorney general’s work.
Part of the difficulty for Barr, according to several current and former law enforcement officials, is that he is trying to follow Justice regulations that were written in the wake of Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, with an eye toward limiting the amount of information that can be made public.
Some senior Justice officials are also wary of repeating what they view as mistakes made in 2016 by then-FBI Director James B. Comey when he discussed details of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Because those senior officials contend Comey said too much about people who were not charged with crimes, they are now arguing internally for Barr to be more circumspect in public statements and releases of information.
People familiar with the discussions said there is frustration in the special counsel’s office with Barr’s limited characterization of their work; others say there is frustration in the Justice Department with Mueller’s decision not to reach a conclusion about whether the president tried to obstruct justice. In both camps, there is frustration that the special counsel regulations seem to make these differing viewpoints more difficult to resolve.
Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said the frustrations on Mueller’s team were coming from “disgruntled” staffers.
“They are a bunch of sneaky, unethical leakers,” he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham Wednesday night. “And they are rabid Democrats who hate the president of United States.”
Giuliani added, “I am absolutely confident that the report will bear out the conclusions. The conclusions: no obstruction, no Russian collusion of any kind. It will bear that out.”
During nearly two years of work, Mueller’s team — which included 19 lawyers and roughly 40 FBI agents, analysts and other professional staff — worked in near silence, speaking only rarely through public documents filed in court. The fact that some have been confiding in recent days to associates is a sign of the level of their distress.
Some members of Mueller’s team appear caught off guard by how thoroughly the president has used Barr’s letter to claim total victory, as the limited information about their work has been weaponized in the country’s highly polarized political environment, according to people familiar with their responses.
Their frustrations come as polls show many Americans have already drawn conclusions about the special counsel findings — even though only a handful of words from the report have so far been released.
Rosalind S. Helderman, Rachael Bade and Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/potentially-damaging-information-in-mueller-report-ushers-in-new-political-fight/2019/04/04/10ea64f0-56f0-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_story.html
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Chinese President Xi Jinping, through a message conveyed by Liu, told Trump that both sides have made new and substantial progress on key issues regarding trade in the past month, according to Xinhua. Xi said he hopes both sides will continue to work together to conclude talks on the trade text as early as possible, Xinhua reported.
Trump said on Thursday that “we’ll know over the next four weeks” if the two countries have a deal.
Greater China markets are closed on Friday.
The U.S. and China — the two largest economies in the world — are engaged in a tariff fight that started last year. The Trump administration imposed additional tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports, while Beijing slapped duties on $110 billion of American goods.
Representatives from both countries have been meeting to address their differences on issues such a trade imbalance and alleged forced technology transfers from American firms to their Chinese partners. Tensions between the U.S. and China have roiled global markets and hit economic activity worldwide.
— CNBC’s Jacob Pramuk and Kayla Tausche contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/05/us-china-trade-new-consensus-reached-says-chinas-liu-he.html
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Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen is offering Democrats new information in a bid to stay out of jail while he cooperates with Congress.
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/04/politics/michael-cohen-letter/index.html