President Trump used his first Oval Office address to make an impassioned plea for border security and funding for the border wall. So let’s take a quick look at a few points Trump made that he got right and wrong.
1) The crisis at the border
“Tonight, I’m speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border,” Trump said to open his address.
There certainly is a serious problem at the southern border. It may not qualify as a national emergency, but it’s unfortunate that Democrats and members of the media have tried to downplay it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is one of many who tried to quell the idea that there’s a problem at the southern border, saying, “President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage and stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government.”
But the issue isn’t as simple as being black and white. The Washington Post reported, “Record numbers of migrant families are streaming into the United States overwhelming border agents and leaving holding cells dangerously overcrowded with children, many of whom are falling sick.”
In the month of December, two migrant children died from the harsh conditions in the southern U.S. desert after crossing the border between ports of entry. It was widely believed there was a humanitarian crisis up until Trump considered building the wall under emergency authority.
2) Drugs
“Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl,” Trump said. “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.”
The 90 percent figure is somewhat misleading. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, “only a small percentage” of heroin, as well as other drugs, is seized by U.S. authorities from border crossings between ports of entry.
The DEA said in a 2018 report that the most common drug trafficking method by transnational criminal organizations is smuggling drugs in passenger vehicles and tractor trailers through U.S. ports of entry, which are subject to inspection. Additionally, many of these drug cartels use buses, cargo trains, and even tunnels.
So yes, there are certainly many drugs pouring into the U.S. But building a border wall might not actually lead to a reduction in drug trafficking.
3) Violence
Trump described the brutal killings committed by undocumented immigrants, saying in his address, “America’s heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien, just came across the border. In California, an air force veteran was raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor.”
Trump described these particular crimes accurately. There’s no denying that. The question that needs to be asked is would these crimes be prevented with Trump’s proposed solution of a border wall?
In the case of Ronil Singh, the California police officer who was gunned down by an undocumented immigrant, Sheriff Adam Christianson said in a news conference that the suspect illegally crossed the border into Arizona.
It’s possible that a border wall would have prevented Singh’s murder as only parts of the border Arizona shares with Mexico contain any physical barrier.
In the case of Air Force veteran Marilyn Pharis, who was raped and murdered, two men were convicted of her killing: one was an undocumented immigrant, while the other was a U.S. citizen.
It’s difficult to say that Pharis’ murder could have been prevented with the construction of a border wall, since authorities could not confirm how the perpetrator entered the country.
It could be that a border wall would have prevented many of these crimes, but we also have to acknowledge that many of these perpetrators were arrested in the U.S. prior to these heinous acts. Trump’s approach to enforcing immigration law cannot be boiled down to only what happens at the southern border. If he’s serious about solving the problem, he’ll have to push for ending sanctuary cities.
The office said on Facebook that it didn’t have any other details it could release “at this time as this is a very fluid and active investigation. We will not be answering any questions or taking calls on this tonight.” A news conference was scheduled for Friday morning.
CBS Minnesota spoke to Jayme’s aunt Sue Thursday evening. She said her niece was in a hospital.
“There was rumors earlier today, and I prayed and prayed and they come to not be true,” Sue said. “And I just shut myself totally down. I thought today was going to be the day, and then I find out two hours later that she’s found and I just cannot believe this.”
CBS Minnesota also reached a woman over the phone who confirmed she was the one who first encountered Jayme.
She said she was walking her dog and nearing her cabin when she saw the 13-year-old walking down the road. Closs approached her and told her that she needed help.
“I was at the right place at the right time,” she told CBS Minnesota. The woman did not want to be identified by name.
The Associated Press quotes Barron Mayor as saying Thursday night he was overjoyed that Jamie is alive.
“There was a lot of discouragement because this took quite a while to play out,” Fladten said. “A lot of people have been praying daily, as I have. It’s just a great result we got tonight. It’s unbelievable. It’s like taking a big black cloud in the sky and getting rid of it and the sun comes out again.”
“I hope that she’s in good shape,” the mayor continued. “She’s no doubt been through just a terrible ordeal. I think everybody wishes her a good recovery and a happy life going into the future.”
Closs, 13, disappeared Oct. 15, 2018, the same day her parents — James and Denise Closs — were found shot to death inside their Barron home.
CBS Minnesota reports that up until Thursday, Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald said, investigators hadn’t received any credible leads in this case, despite thousands of tips.
A 911 call with garbled audio was made from Denise Closs’ cellphone at about 1 a.m. on Oct. 15. Police arrived four minutes later and found the bodies of James and Denise. There was no sign of Jayme inside the home.
News that Closs had been found came hours after Fitzgerald debunked a report she had been found alive near Walworth County — which is hundreds of miles away from Douglas County where Closs was found.
Sheriff searching for missing Wisconsin teen believes she’s still alive
The U.S. military began the process of withdrawing its troops from Syria following a drawdown ordered by President Donald Trump, a military official said Friday.
Col. Sean Ryan, a spokesman for the U.S.-coalition fighting the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, declined to discuss specific operational details of the pullout such as timings and troop movements, but said in an email the withdrawal was underway.
The development comes as White House national security adviser John Bolton appeared to contradict Trump’s order when he said the withdrawal would not be immediate, it would not happen before ISIS is fully defeated and it would be contingent on a pledge by Turkey not to attack the U.S.’s Kurdish military allies in Syria.
None of Bolton’s conditions have been met.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to meet with Bolton during his visit to Turkey this week and described his conditions for the U.S. troop drawdown as a “grave mistake.” Turkey considers some members of a Syrian-Kurdish Arab coalition fighting ISIS alongside U.S. troops to be terrorists and has applauded Trump’s decision.
Turkey has amassed thousands of troops along its border with Syria and has long threatened to unilaterally attack Kurdish militias who it claims has ties to separatist groups who have carried out assassinations and bombings against the Turkish government for decades. The U.S. withdrawal from the area could embolden Ankara.
“I have some concerns, my greatest concern…probably is the Kurds and… just how defenseless we are going to leave them,” newly elected Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D, told Stars and Stripes, an American military newspaper.
Trump announced the withdrawal about three weeks ago on Dec. 19. A day later, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis released a resignation letter in which he indicated that he no longer agreed with the president’s thinking on military operations.
According to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, ISIS is far from obliterated. The Washington-based think tank estimates 20,000 to 30,000 Islamic State militants may still be in Syria and Iraq.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that monitors the Syria conflict via a network of activists on the ground, said the U.S. withdrawal began Thursday night. It said a convoy of about 10 armored vehicles, in addition to some trucks, pulled out from a military base in Syria’s northeastern town of Rmelan into Iraq.
The U.S.-led coalition has been fighting ISIS in the Middle East since 2014 and Mattis said before leaving his job that declaring victory and leaving Syria would be a mistake.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been defending Trump’s order this week while on a tour of the Middle East where he has been rebuking former President Barack Obama’s policies for the region. In a speech in Cairo, he said Trump “made the right decision to bring our troops home from Syria” and the U.S. is “committed to the complete dismantling of the ISIS threat and the ongoing fight against radical Islamism.”
But Pompeo also caused confusion about Washington’s Syria policy. He said in his speech in Cairo that Obama was wrong to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.
“When America retreats, chaos follows. When we neglect our friends, resentment builds. And when we partner with enemies, they advance,” Pompeo said.
Less than 24 hours later, U.S. troops started pulling out of Syria.
In an unannounced trip to Iraq on Wednesday, President Donald Trump defended his decision to withdraw troops from Syria despite criticism from military officials and allies who don’t think the job fighting Islamic State militants there is over. (Dec. 26) AP
Hundreds of furloughed federal employees took their frustrations and anger to the White House on Thursday, demanding an end to the three-week partial government shutdown.
Fired up on a cold, blustery day, they rallied in front of the AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street NW across Lafayette Square. The crowd was large enough for the police to close the block as Democratic members of Congress and union leaders praised feds and denounced President Trump. After the rally, the protesters marched through the square to within shouting distance from Trump’s front door.
He couldn’t hear the chants of “pay the workers, furlough Trump” because he was on a public-relations campaign to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas in support of his border wall. His demand for more than $5 billion for the wall he promised Mexico would fund is behind the shutdown that has 800,000 feds furloughed or forced to work with no guarantee of when they will be paid.
Negotiations with Democratic leaders quickly collapsed Wednesday when Trump walked out of a White House meeting after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) again refused to provide tax dollars for the wall.
The shutdown situation is bleak. All taxpayers should be outraged that much of the government is out of order.
Maria Middleton is.
Demonstrators in Washington, including American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox Sr. (left), call for an end to the partial government shutdown on Thursday, the standoff’s 20th day. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
She attended the rally to tell members of Congress “while they are tweedlydeeing and tweedlyduming about some damn wall — excuse my French — that lives are being affected.” Middleton, a Treasury Department employee and National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) shop steward, emphasized she was speaking for herself during an interview.
As much as she wants to return to work, like others at the rally Middleton doesn’t want the Democrats to bow to Trump’s demands on wall funding. “Let the Trump family pay for it,” she said. Noting the seizure of 110 pounds of the opioid fentanyl in Philadelphia last year, she asked “are we going to extend the wall around Philadelphia? … We don’t need to cave in.”
American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox Sr. told the protesters Trump’s “effort at extortion is more of a lockout than a shutdown. But maybe an even more accurate description of this is that it’s a shakedown.”
The Mexico promise was a sham, as is so much from a president who lies as though it is his favorite recreational activity. But the lack of paychecks is real. Friday is the first day checks will not be issued. Many are hurting.
Listen to Talten Hall, a 54-year-old Silver Spring, Md., resident who delights in his work as a gardener in the parks surrounding the White House. “I love my job. I love planting flowers and pulling weeds and making it all look good,” the NTEU member and National Park Service employee told the crowd.
He hates being furloughed.
“I’m hurting financially. I count on each and every paycheck to pay my bills,” he said. “I should be back at work and I should be getting paid for my time.” In an interview later, he mentioned postponing hernia surgery. “I had to put that on the back burner, because of the co-pay,” he said. “That’s $20 that can go somewhere else … as long as I’m not in pain.”
The rally in the District was one of several around the country, including Kentucky, Colorado, Massachusetts, California, Minnesota, West Virginia and Florida. “These rallies today illustrate not only how high the anxiety level has risen,” said NTEU President Tony Reardon, “but also how committed these employees are to serving their country.”
Upon leaving the White House a couple of hours before the rally, Trump made his case for the wall in his customary fearmongering, deceitful fashion. “This is a crisis,” he proclaimed. “You have human trafficking. You have drugs. You have criminals coming in. You have gangs, MS-13. … The Democrats don’t care about the border, and they don’t care about crime.”
Yet the shutdown this law-and-order president was once proud to claim is hurting law enforcement officers. Border Patrol agents are among the federal employees required to work without pay. Nonetheless, the leadership of their union, the National Border Patrol Council, strongly supports Trump and his wall, while the American Federation of Government Employees and AFL-CIO, the council’s parent organizations, emphatically do not.
The FBI Agents Association, however, urged Congress and the White House to quickly resolve the budget dispute before its members’ “financial insecurity compromises national security.” In a petition to the government’s elected leaders, the association said “missing payments on debts could create delays in securing or renewing security clearances.” In addition to undermining “the FBI’s ability to recruit and retain high-caliber professionals,” the shutdown and the “ongoing financial insecurity caused by the failure to fund the FBI could lead some FBI Agents to consider career options that provide more stability for their families.”
Meanwhile, the AFGE and NTEU are suing the federal government, arguing it is against the law to require employees to work without pay. “If employees are working, they must be paid — and if there is not money to pay them, then they should not be working,” Reardon said Wednesday.
Congress has approved legislation that would provide back pay to federal employees, when — or should that be if? — they get back to work. The Senate also is considering a House-approved 1.9 percent pay raise this year that would nullify Trump’s plan for a federal civilian pay freeze.
Federal employees have received back pay after previous shutdowns. However, many federal contractors, some of them low-wage workers, did not. Thirty-four Democratic senators, led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.) also are urging the administration to ensure back pay for federal contractors who are losing money during the shutdown.
“It is in the federal government’s best interest to provide funding to the extent necessary to ensure that contractors deliver back pay to their workers,” said the senators’ letter to the Office of Management and Budget. “Contractor employees cannot afford the chaos and uncertainty of government shutdowns, and some of these workers may seek other jobs if back pay is not provided to compensate for shutdown-related losses.”
Washington (CNN)Informants at risk of losing awards. A growing backlog of evidence untested. Assistance in an international kidnapping case turned down.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Friday he is planning changes including a possible pathway to U.S. citizenship to foreigners holding H-1B visas, issued temporarily to highly educated immigrants who work in specialty occupations such as technology or medicine.
“H1-B [sic] holders in the United States can rest assured that changes are soon coming which will bring both simplicity and certainty to your stay, including a potential path to citizenship,” Trump said in a Twitter post.
The Republican president has often said he wanted an immigration system that favored educated or highly skilled people. The White House did not immediately comment on what kind of changes Trump was considering.
Trump and Democrats in the U.S. Congress are at an impasse over spending legislation to fund the federal government. Trump has refused to sign on to a bill unless it includes $5.6 billion to build a wall along the country’s southern border to prevent illegal immigration by migrants.
Democrats say the wall project, which carries a total price tag of more than $20 billion, is expensive, ineffective and immoral. The dispute has led to a partial shutdown of the U.S. government that is now in its 21st day.
While Trump typically depicts undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers attempting to enter the country through Mexico as criminals and terrorists, he frequently praises those applying for H-1B visas, which require a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Competition is tough for the temporary visas. In 2018, the United States hit the limit on the number of H-1Bs it could issue, 65,000, by the first week of April, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump campaigned for president on a promise to crack down on immigrants, who he said took jobs away from U.S. citizens. In April 2017, he signed an executive order for a review of the H-1B program.
U.S. companies often use H-1B visas to hire graduate-level workers in several specialized fields, including information technology, medicine, engineering and mathematics. The visas are heavily used in the tech sector.
Reporting by Lisa Lambert and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Doina Chiacu and David Gregorio
WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of requests by men to bring in child and adolescent brides to live in the United States were approved over the past decade, according to government data obtained by The Associated Press. In one case, a 49-year-old man applied for admission for a 15-year-old girl.
The approvals are legal: The Immigration and Nationality Act does not set minimum age requirements. And in weighing petitions for spouses or fiancees, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and then whether the marriage would be legal in the state where the petitioner lives.
But the data raises questions about whether the immigration system may be enabling forced marriage and about how U.S. laws may be compounding the problem despite efforts to limit child and forced marriage. Marriage between adults and minors is not uncommon in the United States, and most states allow children to marry with some restrictions.
There were more than 5,000 cases of adults petitioning on behalf of minors and nearly 3,000 examples of minors seeking to bring in older spouses or fiances, according to the data requested by the Senate Homeland Security Committee in 2017 and compiled into a report.
Some victims of forced marriage say the lure of a U.S. passport combined with lax U.S. marriage laws are partly fueling the petitions.
“My passport ruined my life,” said Naila Amin, a dual citizen from Pakistan who grew up in New York City.
She was forcibly married at 13 in Pakistan and applied for papers for her 26-year-old husband to come to the country.
“People die to come to America,” she said. “I was a passport to him. They all wanted him here, and that was the way to do it.”
Amin, now 29, said she was betrothed to her first cousin Tariq when she was just 8 and he was 21. The petition was eventually terminated after she ran away. She said the ordeal cost her a childhood. She was in and out of foster care and group homes, and it took a while to get her life on track.
“I was a child. I want to know: Why weren’t any red flags raised? Whoever was processing this application, they don’t look at it? They don’t think?” Amin asked.
There is a two-step process for obtaining U.S. immigration visas and green cards. Petitions are first considered by USCIS. If granted, they must be approved by the State Department. Overall, there were 3.5 million petitions received from budget years 2007 through 2017.
Over that period, there were 5,556 approvals for those seeking to bring minor spouses or fiancees, and 2,926 approvals by minors seeking to bring in older spouses, according to the data. Additionally, there were 204 for minors by minors. Petitions can be filed by U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
“It indicates a problem. It indicates a loophole that we need to close,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told the AP.
In nearly all the cases, the girls were the younger person in the relationship. In 149 instances, the adult was older than 40, and in 28 cases the adult was over 50, the committee found. Among the examples: In 2011, immigration officials approved a 14-year-old’s petition for a 48-year-old spouse in Jamaica. A petition from a 71-year-old man was approved in 2013 for his 17-year-old wife in Guatemala.
There are no nationwide statistics on child marriage, but data from a few states suggests it is far from rare. State laws generally set 18 as the minimum age for marriage, yet every state allows exceptions. Most states let 16- and 17-year-olds marry if they have parental consent, and several states — including New York, Virginia and Maryland — allow children under 16 to marry with court permission.
Fraidy Reiss, who campaigns against coerced marriage as head of a group called Unchained at Last, researched data from her home state of New Jersey. She determined that nearly 4,000 minors, mostly girls, were married in the state from 1995 to 2012, including 178 who were under 15.
“This is a problem both domestically and in terms of immigration,” she said.
Reiss — who says she was forced into an abusive marriage by her Orthodox Jewish family when she was 19 — said that often cases of child marriage via parental consent involve coercion, with a girl forced to marry against her will.
“They are subjected to a lifetime of domestic servitude and rape,” she said. “And the government is not only complicit; they’re stamping this and saying: Go ahead.”
The data was requested in 2017 by Johnson and then-Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, the committee’s top Democrat. Johnson said it took a year to get the information, showing there needs to be a better system to track and vet the petitions.
“Our immigration system may unintentionally shield the abuse of women and children,” the senators said in the letter.
USCIS didn’t know how many of the approvals were granted by the State Department, but overall only about 2.6 percent of spousal or fiancee claims are rejected.
Separately, the data show some 4,749 minor spouses or fiancees received green cards to live in the U.S. over that same 10-year period.
The head of USCIS, L. Francis Cissna, said in a letter to the committee that its request had raised questions and discussion within the agency on what it can do to prevent forced minor marriages. The agency noticed some issues in how the data was collected and has resolved them. Officials also created a flagging system that requires verification of the birthdate whenever a minor is detected.
The country where most requests came from was Mexico, followed by Pakistan, Jordan, the Dominican Republic and Yemen. Middle Eastern nationals had the highest percentage of overall approved petitions.
It’s been barely a week since Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, and already the I-word is flying around Washington. “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker,” Rashida Tlaib declared jubilantly mere hours after being sworn in. Longtime members Brad Sherman and Al Green filed articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on the first day of the new session. And the president, for his part, is clearly spoiling for the fight, declaring in a Rose Garden news conference, “Well, you can’t impeach somebody that’s doing a great job.”
Now what?
Story Continued Below
The Democrats could pass articles of impeachment tomorrow on a party line vote. As you may have noticed, they haven’t. The Sherman-Green impeachment measure was always seen as dead on arrival, and for political and practical reasons, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has no plans to change that anytime soon. But, with a boisterous and empowered Democratic majority now stalking the halls of Congress—one half of it, anyway—the impeachment question is now suddenly real in a way it hasn’t been since Trump was elected.
The progressive left, a key part of the Democrats’ base, isn’t likely to stop agitating. New York Times editorial writer David Leonhardt published a detailed, count-by-count bill of charges against Trump last Sunday that mentioned the I-word no less than 12 times. Billionaire activist Tom Steyer this week traveled to Iowa where he announced he would sink more money into his campaign to impeach Trump instead of mounting his own White House bid. Since the midterms, the question has gone from anti-Trumpist fantasy to practical gamesmanship—something being discussed in Capital Hill offices and hallways, at law firms and among party strategists and leaders.
In one sense, Trump is as vulnerable as he’s always been. In another, the risk is huge. The collision of anti-Trump forces with his powerfully loyal base—to say nothing of the president’s own thirst for conflict—would guarantee the most explosive political disruption in generations. If the effort misses, the blowback could easily propel Trump back into office in 2020, with a reinvigorated base bent on revenge.
“If they’re dumb enough to impeach him, they’re going to lose the House and he’s going to be reelected and there won’t be a Senate trial,” said Joseph diGenova, an informal Trump adviser and frequent Fox News pundit. “That’s what’s going to happen, and I hope they do it.”
So, what would an impeachment really take in the Washington of 2019, and how would it all go down? To answer these questions, POLITICO interviewed more than two dozen sources, including sitting Republican and Democratic senators and members of Congress, current and former Capitol Hill aides, political operatives, historians and legal experts. The story that follows is the most detailed accounting, anywhere, of what dominoes need to fall if House impeachment articles were really to move forward, how a Trump trial in the Senate would go down and what—if anything—might break the Senate GOP majority apart enough to vote to remove their own president from office.
The picture won’t be consoling to anti-Trumpers who hope it will be easy, but neither will it reassure loyalists who see any attack on the president as off-limits.
Impeachment is rare, and every generation comes with its own set of complications, but with Trump there are parts you really can game out, from how the known details of his misbehavior might play to the bigger economic and political factors that would serve as impeachment’s backdrop. It’s also possible to work through the Senate Republican Conference vote by vote, with a likely breakdown of just where, and when, the necessary splits might start to occur. There are also wildly unpredictable elements, starting with just what special counsel Robert Mueller turns up in his investigation—and ending with a Senate proceeding that has many of the features of a courtroom trial, but that is also much looser, and could require far more, or far less, than a courtroom for conviction.
As you read this, remember: No president has ever actually been removed from office by impeachment. The House impeached Andrew Johnson on 11 different counts in 1868, angry about how Abraham Lincoln’s successor was handling reconstruction after the Civil War, but he ultimately avoided Senate conviction by one vote. More than a century later, Richard Nixon resigned from office rather than face impeachment; in late 1998, in a highly partisan vote, the House impeached Bill Clinton on two counts, but he didn’t come close to being removed by the Senate—a lesson in overreach not lost on today’s Congress. “If and when the time comes for impeachment—it will have to be something that has such a crescendo in a bipartisan way,” Pelosi, the decisive player in any potential move by Democrats to impeach Trump, told CBS in an interview that aired Sunday.
If Trump were really to be the first, here’s what to watch for as the dominoes fall. Welcome to the Only Impeachment Guide You’ll Ever Need.
I. The Mueller Factor
Nothing is hanging over Trump’s head like the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russia to win the White House. Mueller, legendary as one of the most ambitious, aggressive and methodical directors ever to lead the FBI, is perhaps the most widely respected investigator in America. And since he’s a lifelong Republican, only the most die-hard wing of the Trump base can dismiss his work as the kind of partisan-driven overreach that discredited the investigation into Bill Clinton.
Mueller was appointed under a different set of rules than Clinton investigator Kenneth Starr, and this time there is no requirement that he deliver a detailed report to Congress. (Starr’s report in 1998 nearlybroke the earliest iterations of the internet, with some 20 million Americans logging on to read his graphic account of the president’s sexual trysts with a White House intern.)Mueller needs to send his findings only to his Justice Department supervisor, although the expectations are high that Congress will ultimately get its hand on some version of that document, and that its details will make their way to the public.
So far, Mueller has cut a wide swath through Trumpworld, securing guilty pleas from Trump’s former national security adviser; his longtime personal lawyer; and the chairman who helped run his 2016 presidential campaign, along with his deputy. Federal prosecutors working with Mueller have also implicated Trump in a set of campaign finance crimes, and the president has posted tweets and made public statements that many legal experts say could be used to charge him with obstruction of justice and witness tampering.
Any of those scandals, on their own, might have brought down a president in the past. With Trump, none has moved Congress any closer to impeachment. And despite the party handover in the House, they’re still not that close. So when Mueller does complete his work, his findings would need to include something genuinely big, and genuinely new—at least one or more pieces of irrefutable evidence that Trump has committed “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” the loosely defined grounds for impeachment spelled out in the Constitution.
In the case of Trump, the experts I spoke with said that for the Senate to actually move toward conviction—meaning at least 20 Republican senators voting to remove a Republican president—Trump would likely need to be incriminated for betraying the nation itself, not just for campaign violations, or improper behavior like paying hush money to porn stars.
What could rise to that level? Bear in mind that Trump has already faced accusations similar to those that brought Nixon down—he admitted on national television tofiring FBI Director James Comey to end the Russia investigation; and there’s plenty of evidence that he has tried to intimidate witnesses who could deliver incriminating evidence against him and lied to the public about his actions as part of a wider cover-up. Several sitting senators and members of the House, along with other close observers of Congress, told me Trump would need to face charges bigger and darker, and with the smoking-gun clarity of Nixon admitting to his schemes on tape.
For instance: actual documents showing that Trump himself knew his 2016 campaign was working in concert with Russia to win the White House, and signed off on the arrangement. Or a money-laundering scheme run through the Trump Organization on behalf of foreign governments or oligarchs, rendering the president susceptible to blackmail and extortion. If there’s hard evidence that those foreign powers shaped his policies while president, that could seal the deal even for some Republicans.
Whether Mueller’s investigation will uncover anything like this remains the most addictive guessing game in Washington. The special counsel has been on the job for nearly 20 months, and has so far shown himself to be a by-the-book operator, which cuts two ways: He won’t be scared off a scent, but it’s unclear how far he’ll stray from the original mission. Remember that the investigation that led to Clinton’s impeachment started with a 15-year-old real estate deal, but the impeachment charges themselves came from a long side investigation into whether the president obstructed justice and lied under oath about his affair with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
Mueller has yet to reveal any public threads of a conspiracy directly connecting Russia and Trump’s campaign, though attorneys for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort earlier this week disclosed an intriguing detail that raises new questions about collusion: Their client shared polling data during Trump’s 2016 race with a Ukrainian associate who has ties to Russian intelligence.
Even the Republicans I spoke with acknowledged that serious revelations about the president that aren’t yet in the public domain would be hard for their party to defend. “I think a lot of people would shift if the president clearly illegally evaded taxes the way his father did, or that he is beholden to a foreign government,” said Rick Tyler, a Republican operative who has worked for Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz, and has been an outspoken advocate of the Never-Trump camp even as his former bosses contorted themselves into presidential allies.
If the president is actually indicted for a crime, that obviously changes everything.”
John Cornyn of Texas, a senior member of the Senate GOP leadership whose job until January involved whipping votes in the upper chamber, said the Senate was far from likely to support removing a sitting president and called the act of impeachment “basically a futile gesture.”
But pressed on whether the special counsel’s investigators could uncover anything that would alter those Senate dynamics, Cornyn replied, “If the president is actually indicted for a crime, that obviously changes everything. But right now all I see is speculation and people who have no knowledge of what Director Mueller actually has speculating on what could happen. I don’t think that’s particularly productive. It may be interesting, but it’s not based on facts.”
Mueller may not be only important source of fresh evidence. There are the federal prosecutors in New York who convicted Michael Cohen, the former Trump attorney, and with whom Cohen continues to cooperate. There’s the newly elected Democratic attorney general in New York, who campaigned on a pledge to investigate Trump’s finances, businesses and charitable foundation. And there are the House Democrats, whose newly won congressional subpoena power could be a game-changer. They plan to launch a slew of investigations in 2019, including a re-examination of Trump campaign ties to Russia; allegations of money laundering between the Trump Organization and foreign interests; and whether Trump as president has personally enriched himself in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. House Democrats also are planning a careful push to make the president’s personal tax returns public.
Trump could dig himself in deeper, as well. Though he’s restrained himself from ending the Mueller probe, I spoke to one senior Republican official in touch with the White House who predicted Trump’s reaction could cause the president problems if the Russia investigation turned personal and Trump’s closest family members—his son Donald Trump Jr., daughter Ivanka Trump or her husband, Jared Kushner—faced criminal charges. “Everyone knows he surrounds himself with dirtbags and weak people and psychopaths,” said the official. “But the family is the family and that’s a lot closer to Trump than anything else.” That’s the situation where Trump might overreact, issuing blanket pardons or ordering up a Nixon-like Saturday Night Massacre, firing Mueller and the senior ranks of his own Justice Department.
“To me, that’s the red line,” said the official. “If that gets crossed, then everything changes in both parties.”
II. The Big Picture
Though Americans tend to think about impeachment as a legal proceeding, it’s far more a political matter than a legal one: The Constitution’s vague language leaves it up to congressional interpretation by design. Political scholars and D.C. insiders agree that impeachment simply won’t happen unless a sitting president looks politically vulnerable. A sudden downward turn in a couple of important barometers will go a long way toward determining whether Trump’s core supporters across the country—and their elected representatives—would actually abandon him.
This means, first and foremost, the economy. A president sitting on a booming economy is likely to be reelected, and a president likely to be reelected sits in a political castle that his own party would never storm. But a shaky economy—or, worse, a serious downturn—makes even a celebrity president with a die-hard base look vulnerable.
Nixon’s resignation came on the heels of not just a spiraling scandal, but a crash in the global stock market, an international oil crisis and a recession on the domestic home front that would have cast a pall on his administration even without Watergate. Clinton, president during a years-long growth spurt, survived an impeachment attempt easily.
Trump, over the past two years, has governed through an economic roller coaster, with about 4 million new jobs created and rising wages but fears of a recession and global economic decline never far from the surface. In just the past month, stock prices have taken record turns in both directions, while a government shutdown reaches historic lengths with no end in sight.
Politically, ousting Trump would require the same kind of seismic wave he successfully surfed during his 2016 campaign—nothing less, in fact, than another shakeup and realignment of the Republican Party. A pair of data points will help tell the story here. First, there’s Trump’s overall public approval ratings, which have been at historic lows throughout his presidency. The Real Clear Politics’ average currently has Trump at around 42 percent. His floor to date: 37 percent, in mid-December 2017. “Nothing’s going to change until he hits 30,” said Jim Manley, a former Senate operative who worked for former Democratic Leader Harry Reid.
But perhaps an even more important indicator on the impeachment front is Trump’s standing among likely GOP primary voters. The latest Gallup tracker shows the president holding an 89 percent approval among Republicans, the very same number he enjoyed right after he was sworn into office in January 2017. As long as figures like that don’t slide dramatically—and Republicans haven’t budged in their support despite nearly two years of White House turmoil—Trump is probably safe from seeing his own party toss him under the bus.
For Trump to be meaningfully vulnerable, Republicans in a handful of states would need to start seeing polling data that show their support for him could sink their own political futures, including in key purple state battlegrounds like Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina. In Trump’s case, there’s another, unique indicator: if he starts to lose Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
III. The House
Impeachment starts in the House, where any member can introduce a resolution seeking to remove the president. Though it’s not technically a bill, it would work much the same way—with majority votes required in committee and on the floor.
But nothing will move, officially, until it gets a green light from Democratic leadership—which means the real power for determining what happens on the impeachment front rests with Pelosi. No stranger to hardball politics, Pelosi sees impeachment as a nuclear bomb that she’d rather not have to detonate unless and until the time is right. In the meantime, she’d like to get some potential policy wins under her belt, and so the California Democrat has spent the better part of the past year pleading with her party to remain patient in any bid to remove Trump until a more complete picture has emerged spelling out the evidence of any presidential illegalities.
While Pelosi has the authority to create a special committee to consider impeachment, she’s signaled that the Judiciary Committee led by Rep. Jerry Nadler will serve as the primary venue for any hearings on the topic, and will handle any resolutions that are likely to move forward.
The institutional Democrats’ hesitation is rooted, in part, in the recent history from the Clinton era. If they fail, the damage could be enormous, both to the country and to their own party. Just as Clinton did, Trump could come out on the other side of an unsuccessful impeachment attempt with greater public sympathy and an improved prospect of winning reelection in 2020.
And House Democrats will need allies across the aisle, which also requires a cautious approach. The experts I spoke with said that without some Republican votes, it would look far too much like a belated effort to overturn the 2016 election results—and would fail to provide the bipartisan cover that Senate Republicans would need to actually vote to convict the president later.
What’s the magic number? Elaine Kamarck, a longtime Democratic operative who worked in the Clinton White House and later on Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, estimates that Pelosi would need impeachment votes from about 20 Republicans, giving a total House vote of 255-179, assuming the Democrats hold together and vote as a bloc (with one seat still vacant in North Carolina). Donald Ritchie, the retired Senate historian who helped the chamber navigate Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, said the target should actually be higher—much, much higher.
“If there’s any chance of getting two-thirds [of Senators] removing the president, you’d have to have two-thirds of the House of Representatives voting to impeach,” or closer to 100 House Republicans, with a vote of 335-99, he said. “Anything less than that, and I don’t think it would fly in the Senate.”
IV: The Senate
This is where the impeachment fight gets real. Like both Andrew Johnson and Clinton before him, Trump would still be president even if the House voted to impeach him. Trump’s fate actually rests with what happens in the Senate, where, pending a trial, a two-thirds majority vote is needed to remove a president from office.
That’s a threshold that’s never been met in the 229 years since George Washington took the first oath of office. And it’s the reason Clinton’s impeachment was more of a partisan backfire than a politically destabilizing event: Nobody believed the Senate would actually vote to convict him.Republicans held a 55-45 majority over the Democrats in 1999, andthe anti-Clinton forces needed to capture a dozen votes from the president’s own party. Not only did they net zero, they didn’t even hold onto all the Republican votes. Clinton emerged from his impeachment battle with the best public approval ratings of his presidency, and his final Gallup numbers were the highest for any outgoing president measured since the end of World War II.
As in the House, Trump’s presidency would hinge on what happens with Republicans. The math is simple: If the Democrats can secure all 47 votes in their caucus, they’d need 20 Republicans to secure a conviction. To feel comfortable moving forward with impeachment proceedings at all, they’d need to get signals from maybe half that number.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian from Rice University, said that even a Senate trial fueled by serious charges against Trump won’t be seen as a real threat to his presidency unless a sizable number of Republicans step forward early. “It’s got to hit the 10 mark to be eye-opening,” he said. “Then, you are 10 away.”
Long before the case hits the Senate floor, there will be plenty of time for the Republicans to consider the evidence and send those signals. “Remember, you’re going to have a lot of time while the House actually figures out what the articles of impeachment are supposed to be,” Kamarck said. “During that time I think you’ll see the Senate reacting or holding their cards tight. You’ll know pretty early who the ringleaders are in the Senate, if there are any.”
In Washington, the parlor game has begun: As the Mueller probe keeps drilling closer to the president, the 53 Republicans’ records and statements are being scrutinized for any signs of who potentially would ever break with Trump.
The first group of possible defectors is fairly obvious. You might call them “establishment figureheads”—lions of the pre-Trump GOP who have been uneasy with the president’s character, disagree with him on policy, and might be looking for a way to decisively detach their distinguished careers from his name.
This group starts with Mitt Romney, the freshman from Utah who marked his arrival in the Senate with a blistering op-ed attacking the president as unfit for office. It also includes Pat Roberts of Kansas and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, two senior Republicans who have announced they won’t be running for reelection in 2020, freeing them to think more about history than their political futures. There’s also Richard Burr of North Carolina, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has led his chamber’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and seen much of the still-classified evidence firsthand.
Other Republican senators who could be in the first group to peel off are Ben Sasse, the first-term Nebraskan who refused to vote for Trump in 2016 and even compared his party’s nominee to the white supremacist David Duke; and Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska senator who has already defied Trump by not voting to confirm his most recent Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
If those senators were to abandon Trump—and there’s no guarantee that even with their significant personal and policy differences they will—that gives a tentative count of six Republican defectors, and 47 still in Trump’s camp.
To get to the 10 required for a realistic Senate trial, another group would need to come into play—the “vulnerable 2020 class.” These are the handful of incumbents from swing states who are up for reelection in less than two years, and who could easily lose their seats if enough of their home-state Republican voters turned against the president.
This group consists of five: Susan Collins of Maine, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. They’re genuinely caught in a political vise: A vote against Trump could kill their chances if it comes before they’ve faced their own primary voters, but a vote to save the president could torpedo them in the general election. For these senators, Trump’s approval among the primary electorate is a key indicator, as is the exact timing for when they’d be forced to take any vote for conviction.
The next category would be the Republican senators who won’t face voters again until 2022 or ’24—let’s call them “anxious incumbents.” Not all of the GOP senators in those election cycles are likely to peel away from Trump, but some could: Mike Braun of Indiana, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Mike Lee of Utah, Rob Portman of Ohio, Rick Scott of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina and John Thune of South Dakota.
That now makes 23 senators who could be considered in play based on home-state politics, Trump’s popularity and staying power and a variety of other factors. If even half started to signal they’d consider impeachment charges, the debate would take on far more significance and likely trigger a last-stand defensive campaign from the president.
Scott Mulhauser, a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden, said he expects GOP senators would look for guidance to the likes of Vice President Mike Pence and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on what would likely be the most historic vote of their careers.
“To have this land in a real way, not only will the work of Mueller and his team of course have to be ironclad. But it will also have to be damning to the point where these guys have no choice,” he said. They also should anticipate a full-throated fight from Trump: “If it’s his future, the wrath is coming.”
V. The proceedings
Once any impeachment charges are before the Senate, there’s no guarantee here but one: It will be a hell of a show.
Republicans could disregard anything the House does and simply table the matter, which Trump allies say would be a viable position for GOP leaders to take. “If I’m McConnell, I say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to have an election in 2020. It will be the trial,” said diGenova, a former federal prosecutor who nearly joined the president’s legal team last year.
But public pressure leading into the next election cycle could also be hard to ignore. “If the House acted, I don’t think the Senate could not act,” said Ritchie, the historian emeritus of the Senate.
If there is a trial, all 100 senators would be serving as Trump’s jury, meeting in a solemn courtroom-like atmosphere where they’d be asked to sift through reams of evidence and, potentially, live witnesses. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts would preside, while House Democrats would serve as the president’s prosecutors, and Trump’s attorneys as his defense counsel. Rudy Giuliani vs. Jerry Nadler, anyone?
To convict, the Senate needs to get to 67 votes. Depending on the signals we’ve seen from that first group of senators, that means about a dozen or more additional Republicans would have to brave Trump’s rhetoric, which will no doubt be escalating as he digs in, and also flipping on the leader of their own party.
Who else could Trump lose? Once truly damning evidence started coming out, the president would need to watch his back for another group, aptly dubbed “his former political foes”: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham and even McConnell. All have accommodated themselves to the president in the interest of power. But none are likely to have forgotten Trump’s mean tweets, nasty nicknames and otherpersonal, out-of-the-norm attacks on their appearance, family, and more. Any or all of these could see a vote for his conviction as the ultimate payback. They might even take a special relish in watching the whip count nudge up to 66 and then casting the decisive vote.
“The question is: Do any of these people feel they owe Donald Trump anything?” said Kamarck. “I think it will get very personal. It will devolve on a personal level. What you have to ask yourself is, who has Donald Trump gone out of his way to be a total, utter asshole to?”
I think it will get very personal. It will devolve on a personal level. What you have to ask yourself is, who has Donald Trump gone out of his way to be a total, utter asshole to?”
Beyond golfing with a couple of Republicans, Trump has built few of the personal relationships that might help save him in the Senate. “You should hear the way these guys talk about him behind his back,” Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democratic senator who lost her reelection bid in 2018, told The New Yorker Radio Hour when asked whether Republicans were really loyal to Trump.
Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political adviser, told me that this—the president’s lack of Senate friends—rather than the substance of the impeachment articles, could be a problem if impeachment proceedings did actually kick into gear.
“I don’t see a real charge that’s problematic,” Stone said. “On the other hand, most of the Senate Republicans are establishment Republican, country club, neocon types. I don’t think Donald Trump is terribly popular with them to begin with.”
Interviewed on the record, Republican senators right now have one consistent message on impeachment: We know nothing. “I think we’ve got to let this process continue and we’ve got to allow the facts go to where they will and not have any political interference,” Rob Portman said; John Thune, the new Republican Senate whip in 2019, also demurred: “I think we just don’t have the full picture yet.” Ron Johnson said of an impeachment: “If that were to occur, you’re acting as a juror in a trial, and you need to take a look at all the evidence. That’s how I’d approach it.”
As for Senate Democrats, they plan to work their own individual relationships across the aisle to size up what’s possible. “I think all of us will be having conversations just as we’ve been discussing the investigation and protecting it,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal told me. They’d be reporting what they hear from Republicans up the chain to party leaders Pelosi and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who’d be in charge of counting votes. “Park yourselves on the sidelines,” explained Illinois’ Dick Durbin, who as the Senate Democratic whip would also have a big role to play ahead of a conviction trial, told ABC’s “This Week” in December when asked about the president’s legal and political liabilities.
***
To be sure, many observers still don’t see any way that 20 Senate Republicans and a corresponding number of House Republicans would ever risk their own political futures abandoning Trump absent something jarring—something that to date Mueller or other investigators have yet to produce.
“They’re going to have to really have a smoking fucking gun to show this is a bipartisan exercise,” said Sam Geduldig, a former House GOP leadership aide. “There are not a lot of Republicans who’d want on their tombstone: ‘Impeached President Trump.’”
“Renaming a post office is one thing. To have them do substantive work on a controversial issue and have 67 agree is virtually unheard of,” explained Mulhauser, who also has worked for several Senate Democrats.
There are of course many other possible scenarios for Trump beyond impeachment. Neal Katyal, the former acting Obama solicitor general, suggested last month that the president already faces enough legal jeopardy once he’s out of office that his attorneys may want to consider negotiating a deal with prosecutors to resign rather than face jail time when his term is up.
Democrats have other political calculations to keep in mind, too, including their chances of winning back the White House in 2020. If they succeed in impeaching Trump in the House and somehow convicting him in the Senate, they’d need to draw up an entirely new general election playbook for going up against a different Republican, presumably a President Mike Pence.
“You don’t want the Republican Party reinventing itself post-Trump” if you’re the Democrats, said Brinkley, the presidential historian. “The longer Trump is in legal limbo, the more of this sort of drip-drip about Russian collusion and the financial dealings, the longer it goes on, the better for the Democrats.”
But if an impeachment process starts and fails, Trump could effectively use the fight to his electoral advantage. Democrats would also need to consider their own election prospects in the House and Senate in 2020 if Trump is still at the top of the ticket, only more popular because he’s withstood his opponents’ assault. It may be that impeachment—as much as it excites some of the Democratic base—is in nobody’s immediate political interest at all.
“That’s the problem with an impeachment strategy,” Brinkley added. “The Democratic Party is better off running against a deeply damaged President Trump that seems to have a lot of terrible legal woes and ethical damage. It’s better off to run against a wounded Trump than to drive Trump out of office.”
President Trump used his first Oval Office address to make an impassioned plea for border security and funding for the border wall. So let’s take a quick look at a few points Trump made that he got right and wrong.
1) The crisis at the border
“Tonight, I’m speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border,” Trump said to open his address.
There certainly is a serious problem at the southern border. It may not qualify as a national emergency, but it’s unfortunate that Democrats and members of the media have tried to downplay it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is one of many who tried to quell the idea that there’s a problem at the southern border, saying, “President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage and stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government.”
But the issue isn’t as simple as being black and white. The Washington Post reported, “Record numbers of migrant families are streaming into the United States overwhelming border agents and leaving holding cells dangerously overcrowded with children, many of whom are falling sick.”
In the month of December, two migrant children died from the harsh conditions in the southern U.S. desert after crossing the border between ports of entry. It was widely believed there was a humanitarian crisis up until Trump considered building the wall under emergency authority.
2) Drugs
“Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl,” Trump said. “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.”
The 90 percent figure is somewhat misleading. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, “only a small percentage” of heroin, as well as other drugs, is seized by U.S. authorities from border crossings between ports of entry.
The DEA said in a 2018 report that the most common drug trafficking method by transnational criminal organizations is smuggling drugs in passenger vehicles and tractor trailers through U.S. ports of entry, which are subject to inspection. Additionally, many of these drug cartels use buses, cargo trains, and even tunnels.
So yes, there are certainly many drugs pouring into the U.S. But building a border wall might not actually lead to a reduction in drug trafficking.
3) Violence
Trump described the brutal killings committed by undocumented immigrants, saying in his address, “America’s heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien, just came across the border. In California, an air force veteran was raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor.”
Trump described these particular crimes accurately. There’s no denying that. The question that needs to be asked is would these crimes be prevented with Trump’s proposed solution of a border wall?
In the case of Ronil Singh, the California police officer who was gunned down by an undocumented immigrant, Sheriff Adam Christianson said in a news conference that the suspect illegally crossed the border into Arizona.
It’s possible that a border wall would have prevented Singh’s murder as only parts of the border Arizona shares with Mexico contain any physical barrier.
In the case of Air Force veteran Marilyn Pharis, who was raped and murdered, two men were convicted of her killing: one was an undocumented immigrant, while the other was a U.S. citizen.
It’s difficult to say that Pharis’ murder could have been prevented with the construction of a border wall, since authorities could not confirm how the perpetrator entered the country.
It could be that a border wall would have prevented many of these crimes, but we also have to acknowledge that many of these perpetrators were arrested in the U.S. prior to these heinous acts. Trump’s approach to enforcing immigration law cannot be boiled down to only what happens at the southern border. If he’s serious about solving the problem, he’ll have to push for ending sanctuary cities.
BARRON, Wis. — A Wisconsin 13-year-old missing since October has been found alive, according to the Barron County Sheriff’s Department.
The department shared on Facebook Thursday night that they’ve been notified by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department that they have located Jayme Closs alive.
A suspect has been taken into custody and the sheriff will give a press briefing at 10 a.m. Friday.
“I mean I’m shocked,” said Jayme’s aunt, Kelly Engelhardt. “It’s what we’ve prayed for every single day.”
When investigators entered the home off Highway 8 they found the bodies of James and Denise Closs, but there was no sign of their daughter.
Closs was found at Eau Claire Acres, a small development about six miles east of Gordon, Wisconsin on Highway Y, according to the board chairman from the Town of Gordon.
The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that a citizen phoned in the information. She was located at 4:43 p.m. on Thursday and a suspect was taken into custody at 4:54, according to Douglas County.
“I honestly had faith,” Engelhardt said. “I figured if they hadn’t found her by now that the person that did this didn’t want her dead, so I had hope. Every day there was hope. We had too much love and support around us for us to give up.”
Engelhardt said she believes Closs will be home Thursday night or Friday. She said the family does not believe Jayme is physically hurt that they know of, and that the FBI told the family she is talking and answering questions.
Jeff Closs, Jayme’s uncle, said they are in shock.
“It was just unbelievable because you hear about … you’re not sure if she’s going to be found. And when you actually hear it, it’s just unbelievable. We’re all just so grateful and happy,” he said. “We thought it was going to be a different ending and we’re so happy that you know, hopefully she’s OK, we don’t really know what shape she’s in. Or you know, we don’t really know a lot, all we know is just she’s alive.”
“We’ve, you know, had such bad news all the time and everything was so depressing, and now it’s good, it’s hard to even feel good because you’ve felt so bad for so long,” Engelhardt said. “When we see her it’ll be different but right now we’re just so happy.”
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(CNN)Here is a list from CNN reporting and other news outlets of the ways, large and small, that the partial government shutdown is affecting Americans nationwide.
Top Democrats say President Donald Trump walked out of a meeting with congressional leaders as talks to end the partial government shutdown remain at an impasse.” (Jan. 9) AP
WASHINGTON – Long before President Donald Trump considered declaring a national emergency to free up money for a wall along the southern border, his vice president criticized the idea of the White House making an end run around Congress.
Vice President Mike Pence, speaking on a Republican Governors Association panel in 2014, attacked the idea of using presidential powers to act unilaterally in the face of congressional opposition.
The then governor of Indiana said that “barnstorming around the country defending” such measures was “not leadership.” Leadership, he argued, came with negotiating and finding “common ground.”
Pence, in his comments, was specifically targeting former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and the executive orders he announced on Nov. 20, 2014, one day after the conference.
Although the positions were reversed, Obama was also frustrated by a lack of congressional action for what he viewed as a broken immigration system
Obama’s order shielded up to 5 million immigrants from deportation and bolstered protections for “DREAMers,” people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children . Obama’s order followed an impasse with the Republicans in Congress, who during elections that month took control of both the Senate and House. The White House at the time said allow Obama’s orders were steps to “fix our broken immigration system.”
Republicans blasted Obama for acting unilaterally, and the Supreme Court ultimately struck down the plan in 2016.
Pence said Obama’s order was a “profound mistake” and said he didn’t believe that the president should be able to “overturn American immigration law with the stroke of a pen.”
“I believe that issues of this magnitude should always be resolved with the consent of the governed,” Pence said in 2014.
As the White House faces opposition from congressional Democrats, Pence seems to view the situation differently.
“The president believes he has an absolute right to declare a national emergency,” Pence told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday. “The president is going to get this done one way or the other.”
Alyssa Farah, press secretary for Pence, said in a statement to USA TODAY about the 2014 comments that the president has “every right” to use his executive powers because Democrats have “refused to negotiate.”
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., center, speaks about her oath of office as she stands next to Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., left, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., right, following their meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2019. Susan Walsh, AP
Vice President Mike Pence, left, White House legislative affairs aide Ja’Ron Smith, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, second row left, White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, and others, walk down the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office building, on the White House complex, after a meeting with staff members of House and Senate leadership, Saturday, Jan. 5, 2019, in Washington. Alex Brandon, AP
President Donald J. Trump holds a news conference beside US Vice President Mike Pence, left,, Republican Representative from Louisiana Steve Scalise (2-R) and House Minority Leader Republican Kevin McCarthy, right, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC on Jan. 4, 2019. President Trump discussed a variety of topics, particularly his meeting with Congressional Democratic and Republican leaders for negotiations on the ongoing partial shutdown of the federal government. A partial shutdown of the government continues since Congress and Trump failed to strike a deal on border security before a 22 December 22, 2018 funding deadline. Michael Reynolds, EPA-EFE
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is met by reporters as he arrives at the Capitol on the first morning of a partial government shutdown, as Democratic lawmakers, and some Republicans, are at odds with President Donald Trump on spending for his border wall, in Washington, Saturday, Dec. 22, 2018. J. Scott Applewhite, AP
“President Trump and the entire White House team have sat down countless times with the Democrat leaders in Congress, who for weeks have refused to negotiate and are holding the government hostage,” Farah said. “As the Vice President said in 2014, and countless times during this current shutdown – House and Senate Democrats must be willing to negotiate a solution for the American people.”
She continued, saying the shutdown and disagreement over border funds “should be solved through the legislative process. But if Democrats refuse to even negotiate, the President has every right to use his executive powers to protect the American people.”
The declaration of a national emergency is different than the executive order Obama used to protect immigrants who entered the country illegally. Experts say the law appears to give wide latitude to declare an emergency and potentially redirect defense money for the wall.
But, at the root of both measures is the use of presidential powers to go around Congress when a deal proved elusive.
National emergencies are usually declared through a proclamation or executive order, which is what Obama used in 2014 for the immigration changes. The measure would allow Trump to unilaterally reprogram money that Congress appropriated for other purposes.
The $5.7 billion Trump has requested to build the wall is at the heart of a disagreement between Republicans and Democrats that has spilled into a now 20-day partial government shutdown.
CLOSE
President Trump’s main points while speaking in Texas included human trafficking, Mexico paying for the wall, and moving away from calling it a “wall” USA TODAY
Since 1976, when Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, presidents have declared at least 58 states of emergency – not counting disaster declarations for weather events, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. Dozens remain in effect, extended by subsequent presidents.
Trump has signed three executive orders that relied in part on the National Emergencies Act, including an order in September that gave him power to slap sanctions on any foreign country that interferes in a U.S. election. That action was taken after criticism that Trump did not do enough to confront Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Of course, Pence isn’t the only one who criticized Obama for going it alone on immigration. Trump did, too.
“We have a president that can’t get anything done,” Trump told MSNBC in 2016, “so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.”
I think it would be a profound mistake for the president of the United States to overturn American immigration law with the stroke of a pen. I truly do.
I believe that issues of this magnitude should always be resolved with the consent of the governed and look, the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill and the American people changed the majority in the Senate and so, what the president ought to do is precisely what John Kasich just said, and that is the president ought to sit down in January with the new Republican majority in the Senate and the historically large new majority in the House and search for common ground. That’s what leadership looks like. That’s what we do as governor’s every day working with our legislatures, we sit down, we hammer it out. Signing an executive order, giving a speech, barnstorming around the country defending that executive order is not leadership, the likes of which we practice every day. I would implore the president to reconsider this path and to demonstrate the kind of leadership that the American people long to see and that is that this administration would sit down with this newly minted Republican Congress and find genuine common ground, border security, there’s a series of piece by piece reforms that I believe could be advanced in this Congress that would be in the longterm interest of the American people.
Contributing: John Fritze, Eliza Collins, William Cummings
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President Donald Trump, center, with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, center left, speaks during his visit to US Border Patrol McAllen Station in McAllen, Texas, on Jan. 10, 2019. Trump travels to the US-Mexico border as part of his all-out offensive to build a wall. At the event, the props in the center of the room, include an AR-15 rifle, colt handguns, a plastic bag full of cash, and black-taped bricks of heroin and meth, examples of things Border Patrol agents have seized. Jim Watson, AFP/Getty Images
A Davis police officer was shot Thursday night while responding to a traffic accident, and authorities had cordoned off parts of downtown while searching for a suspect.
Davis police said a female officer was shot around 7 p.m. after responding to a three-car accident near 5th and D streets, and that the officer was rushed to the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento in serious condition.
Police were searching near the scene of the shooting and had surrounded a home nearby, where floodlights were pointed at the house and police were ordering occupants to come out with their hands up.
There was no obvious sign of a suspect being detained, but police scheduled a news conference at headquarters that was expected to begin just before midnight.
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Davis Police Chief Darren Pytel had been expected to make an announcement earlier Thursday, but postponed the news conference around 10:30 p.m. as police pursued a lead about the suspect.
The suspect was described as a “a white male in his 20’s Average Build, Baseball Cap, Black Jacket, Blue or Tan Jeans, Black Tactical Boots.”
Heavily armed police were seen throughout the area late Thursday, blocking off intersections and scouring the area as bystanders watched, and law enforcement officers from throughout the region rushed to the area, including two dozen from the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department.
Police reportedly have the suspect cornered inside a home on 5th Street, less than a block away from where the shooting took place. Floodlights on the home. #DavisShootingpic.twitter.com/KlygyHdRdf
Public information officer Paul Doroshov said they have a lead on the suspect and police are pursuing the lead. Because of the situation, police are not comfortable disclosing further information at this time — we’ll wait for further updates. pic.twitter.com/bEWvKQfPWY
I’m at the scene of a reported officer-involved shooting in Downtown Davis. 5th is taped off from C to D Streets. Lots of police activity, K9 activity, and streets blocked to traffic around downtown, no updates yet. pic.twitter.com/ynIqENMlRo
Shortly after the shooting, UC Davis police tweeted a “shelter in place” warning and advised people to stay away from downtown Davis, and authorities issued alerts via cell phone and text messages to alert citizens. Caltrans said Richards Boulevard and Olive Drive offramps from Interstate 80 are closed.
The department is relatively small, with 61 sworn officers and 34 civilian staffers, and Davis police spokesman Lt. Paul Doroshov described it as a family, saying officers were “all pretty shocked” by the shooting.
One officer appeared at department headquarters Thursday night carrying a bouquet of flowers, but walked away after seeing the gathering of media inside.
The department’s 2017 annual report said violent and property crimes had decreased steadily in recent years, with one homicide reported in 2017 and none in 2016.
The department has not had an officer killed in the line of duty in nearly 60 years, when Douglas Cantrill was gunned down Sept. 7, 1959.
According to the previous reporting by The Sacramento Bee, the 23-year-old patrolman was found shot to death in his cruiser along H Street. Cantrill had stopped a man and woman acting suspicious in a residential neighbor when a struggle ensued and the killer had shot him with his service pistol.
Two suspects were caught but never charged with the officer’s slaying, according to the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office.
Cantrill, who had only served on the Davis force for a month after two years in law enforcement, was survived by a wife and infant child, the District Attorney’s Office said. His name is one of 11 inscribed on Yolo County’s Fallen Officer Memorial in Woodland.
BROOKSVILLE, Fla. — A death investigation is underway in Hernando County, Florida after a person was killed in an accident involving a helicopter at Brooksville-Tampa Bay Regional Airport.
According to Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis, they received a call for help around 3:35 p.m. on Thursday.
The FAA says the person was on the ground performing maintenance on the helicopter when they were struck. The person who called it in said he and another person were using a power cart to jumpstart a helicopter when for an unknown reason, the helicopter suddenly jerked up then came down.
When deputies arrived, they found a person dead near a hanger on airport property located along Flight Path Drive in Brooksville.
The man who was killed was identified as Salvatore Disi, 62. Investigators are in the process of notifying next of kin.
Nienhuis said they are contacting the FAA and NTSB to see whether they will take over the investigation.
President Trump traveled to a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, today, continuing on his campaign to drum up support for a $5.7 billion border wall. The visit came after weeks of Congressional debate about border security that has resulted in a partial government shutdown.
In his address from the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump described a “humanitarian and security crisis at our Southern border,” and focused on crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.
This fight over the border wall is just one part of the Trump administration’s hardline stance on immigration. He’s ended DACA, and pushed to make it harder for people to apply for asylum or to get greencards. He also tried to terminate the Temporary Protected Status program, which was designed to help people affected by environmental disasters or armed conflicts.
So we’re revisiting this interview with Hiroshi Motomura, an expert on refugee and immigration law who teaches at UCLA Law School. The subject of immigration isn’t merely academic for him. He comes from a family with mixed immigration statuses (he himself was declared “stateless” at one point,) and has spent decades researching, and living, the shifting fortunes of immigrants and their families.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What did growing up in a mixed status family look like for you?
My father was born in San Francisco, but he grew up in Japan. So he was a U.S. citizen by birth. My mother was born in Japan, so she has Japanese citizenship by birth. I was born in Japan. My family brought me to this country when I was 3 years old under a loophole, at a time when the laws were expressly, explicitly racially discriminatory.
My brother is six years younger than me, and he was born in the United States, so he had citizenship. So in my own family, my father’s a U.S. citizen but really felt Japanese, my mother was a Japanese citizen who felt Japanese, I grew up in this country feeling very American but finding out as a young teenager that I had no citizenship at all.
I’ll never forget the time my mother and brother and I went to visit relatives in Japan [when I was a young teen.] I had to travel on a document that can be given to refugees. I was a stateless person living in the United States.
So it’s a lot of details, but I think it shows that in one family, we often have a people separated into different legal statuses by the accident of their birth. And yet functionally, in terms of how they relate to American society, even living in the same household, they’re either identical, or separated only by generations.
Supporters of immigrants’ rights have criticized President Trump for saying he wants to limit family-based immigration. These critics have compared his policy proposals with parts of the Immigration Act of 1924, which had a national origins quota, or the Chinese Exclusion Act. Is that a fair assessment?
There’s a couple ways to think about the legislative proposals coming out of the White House. We’ve had a system for many years that has put a high value on family unity. So the proposals would seriously cut back on that.
What does that actually mean? Since 1965, we have family-based immigration playing a central role, as it always has, but a central role in a non-discriminatory system — at least as far as the legal categories are concerned. That’s meant that we’ve really diversified who can come to this country.
So now, the administration is trying to cut that back. One way to think about that is to look at the consequences: This would really make it hard to immigrate from Latin America. You’d have cutbacks in immigration from Latin America, you’d have cutbacks from Asia. The proposals to cut back on the diversity lottery would cut off a significant amount of immigration from Africa. So at one level it looks like it’s very neutral. But the fact is, in historical terms, it’s really a rollback to the period from the 1920s until 1965.
How important is family-based immigration for the people who come to this country?
It’s really been a consistent strand in American immigration history that families are the vehicle for integrating Americans into American society, and helping immigrants be productive members of American society. It’s not enough to come to this country with a diploma. It’s not enough to come with a particular skill set. You have to have people help you become part of American society. And many of the “immigrant success stories” we have are people who came with relatively few resources, or not necessarily stereotypically high education levels, but [succeeded] because there was a family standing behind them.
There are a lot of misconceptions about U.S. citizens sponsoring family members. Can you help explain the process?
In many mixed families, you have a younger child who is a U.S. citizen. And the rules say that when that citizen child turns 21, then the citizen child can sponsor or petition for their parents. But it’s not as straightforward as all that. It’s true that when the parents have the child turn 21, the child can file paperwork and the parents qualify to get into a category that allows them to get legal status. But there are a couple complications. One is that the sponsor needs to guarantee the financial support of himself and the parents.
The other thing is that just because you get into a line, it doesn’t mean you can get legal status. The system is actually incredibly complicated, and there’s talk about, Why don’t you stand in line? And yet, we have situations where even people who qualify for a status find the going very difficult.
Looking at the system as a whole, we have an emphasis on employment-based immigration that pretty much requires that you have a college degree. And yet the economy seems to have a very great need for people who don’t have a college degree, though many of them are actually very highly-skilled. And one of the reasons that in many of these families, the parents come without legal status is because the system has been set up in such a way that we, for several generations now, have tolerated, and even acquiesced, and to some extent invited people to come outside the law. Occasionally it becomes politically expedient to enforce the law harshly, and we express some shock that people are in the country working illegally.
And yet, that’s the way the system has run for at least 50 years, and to some extent the last hundred years. Especially regarding workers from Latin America who have been essential to many industries, but for whom there’s no actual line to stand in.
Historically, how has the United States treated immigrants?
I think the arc of American history has been one of generosity toward immigrants, punctuated with periods of retrogression, downright repression. That’s been the flow.
And we see this actually in the fact that the people who are kind of being hard-line against immigration now are often the very people who would’ve been discriminated against in an earlier age.
So one can look at this as hypocrisy, or irony, but the fact of the matter is, it’s also a sign that this country moves forward. And the people we discriminated against in an earlier generation, my God, they’ve become so American that they can actually discriminate against others.
Well, I think it’s very troubling. The reality is, the United States is, and will continue to be, a nation of immigrants. I’m really focusing not on the possibility that one administration or one agency can change the nature of this country or the character of this country. But I’m focusing on what that means. And I think that it really means that the government is not really taking seriously the types of contributions that immigrants have made to this country. And I think the government is really adopting the posture of, You can only come to this country if you’re going to jump through a lot of hoops. You’re going to pay a lot of money. And it’s going to be based on what you can do for us now. As in tomorrow. Or even today.
But I think many of the contributions that immigrants have made to this country have not been very obvious on Day 1. This is the many stories we have of people who came to this country either penniless or at least under modest circumstances, and really contributed and created jobs and created entire industries. And I think a lot of what I see in the removal of “nation of immigrants” is, are we not understanding the history of this country? We’re being extremely short-sighted about what has made this country great.
A previous version of this story ran on February 28, 2018.
Both Democrats and most news media are yelling as often as they can that there is no border “crisis,” even though they spent the last year telling everyone there was and even though they had no problem explicitly calling it a “crisis” in 2014, when the situation was the exact same as it is now.
“We now have an actual humanitarian crisis on the borer that only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all,” then-President Barack Obama said in the Rose Garden in 2014. “In recent weeks we’ve seen a surge of unaccompanied children arrive at the border, brought here and to other countries by smugglers and traffickers.”
“Last month, 20,000 migrant children were illegally brought into the United States — a dramatic increase,” he said. “These children are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs.”
The only difference is how the media are covering it.
The Washington Post on July 12, 2014, referred to “the current crisis on the Southwest border, where authorities have apprehended tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children since October …” The story’s lead author was Karen Tumulty, now a columnist for the Post, who completely dismissed the idea of any crisis at the border this week.
“We are headed to this extraordinary situation where the president declares a state of emergency, which does not exist, and the law does not really explain what we do if the president manufactures an emergency,” she said Tuesday on MSNBC.
On June 5, 2014, a New York Times article began, “This is what it looks like when an immigration system is overwhelmed by tens of thousands of women and children from Central America.” It further noted that, “The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been ordered to coordinate efforts to contain the crisis.”
The Times editorial board this week, however, said that the crisis is actually “in the Oval Office.”
The border crisis didn’t change between 2014 and now. The only thing that changed was who’s in the White House and how the media are reporting on it.
“I want to make clear that we have no interest in inappropriately interfering with any ongoing criminal investigations,” Mr. Cummings said.
Lawmakers of both parties have sought to protect Mr. Mueller since he was appointed. That is likely to be a key theme of the Senate confirmation hearing next week for Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William P. Barr, who could soon oversee the Mueller investigation. Democratic lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee sought assurances from Mr. Barr on Thursday that he would not interfere with the investigation as it wraps up. But they left private meetings with him saying that they would need a public pledge during his hearing.
Mr. Cummings said in a brief interview on Thursday that he had known Mr. Cohen would testify for some time and had spoken with him when arranging the hearing.
“He’ll have a chance to tell his side of the story, and we’ll have a chance to question him,” he said. “The American people deserve that.”
In a CNN interview in December, Mr. Cummings compared Mr. Cohen’s appearance to that of John Dean, President Richard M. Nixon’s White House counsel, in 1973 before a special Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal. Mr. Dean implicated himself, top administration officials and the president in a cover-up of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
“This is a watershed moment,” Mr. Cummings said, invoking Mr. Dean, who he said “changed the course of America” with his testimony.
It was unclear whether Mr. Cohen’s agreement to testify before the Oversight Committee would preclude appearances, in public or private, before other House panels.
President Trump visits McAllen, Texas to meet with Border Patrol agents on immigration, border security.
President Donald Trump told Fox News on Thursday that he has “the absolute right to declare a national emergency” if he can’t reach an agreement with congressional Democrats to provide funding for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The law is very clear. I mean, we have the absolute right to declare a national emergency,” Trump told Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview. “This is a national emergency, if you look what’s happening.”
Trump did not lay out a specific timetable for when he might take such a step, saying: “I think we’re going to see what happens over the next few days.” However, he appeared to hold out hope for making a deal to secure wall funding and fully reopen the government.
“We should be able to make a deal with Congress,” the president said. “If you look, Democrats, in Congress, especially the new ones coming in, are starting to say, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t win this battle with Trump, because of the fact that it’s just common sense. How can we say that a wall doesn’t work?’”
The president spoke to Fox News on the banks of the Rio Grande, where he traveled to argue his claim that a barrier would deter drug and human trafficking into the United States.
“Death is pouring through,” Trump said. “We have crime and death and it’s not just at the border. They get through the border and they go and filter into the country and you have MS-13 gangs in places like Los Angeles and you have gangs all over Long Island, which we’re knocking the hell out of. There should be no reason for us to have to do this. They shouldn’t be allowed in and if we had the barrier, they wouldn’t be allowed in.”
The president said a wall would be “virtually a hundred percent effective and [House Speaker] Nancy [Pelosi] and [Senate Democratic Leader] Chuck [Schumer] know that, but it’s politics. It’s about the 2020 campaign, it’s about running for president. That’s what they’re doing. They’re already doing it. It’s a shame. They’ve got to put the country first.”
Democrats repeatedly have refused to approve any legislation to fund the wall. The standoff led to the partial government shutdown, which is set to his the three-week mark Friday.
“Everyone wants us to win this battle,” Trump said. “It’s common sense … Look, we’re not going anywhere. We’re not changing our mind because there’s nothing to change your mind about. The wall works [and] if we don’t have a steel or concrete barrier, we’re all wasting a lot of time.”
The second man to have been found dead at the West Hollywood home of a prominent Democratic Party contributor was identified Thursday by the Los Angeles County medical examiner as 55-year-old Timothy Dean.
Dean was found at 1:05 a.m. (4:05 a.m. ET) Monday in the apartment of Ed Buck, a longtime financial backer of Democrats’ campaigns, after someone called 911, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Moore. The cause of death is under investigation.
Ed Buck, center, interrupts California Republican Party gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s campaign event on Sept. 22, 2010 in Los Angeles.Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images file
Buck’s attorney, Seymour Amster, said his client believes Dean was “intoxicated” from drugs when he arrived at the apartment late Sunday or early Monday.
Buck, through his lawyer, has maintained his innocence.
If drugs were involved in Dean’s demise, it would be the second time they played a role in a man’s dying at Buck’s residence. On July 27, 2017 Gemmel Moore, who would have been 29 next week, was reported dead at the apartment.
Methamphetamine was listed as an “immediate cause” for Moore’s death, according to a coroner’s report.
At the time, Moore’s mother, LaTisha Nixon, told authorities she believed Buck “may have harmed the decedent,” the coroner’s report said.
Sheriff’s homicide investigators opened an investigation into Moore’s death, but prosecutors said they saw nothing in the resulting file that warranted charges.
Sheriff’s homicide detectives said this week they are reviewing the Moore case in light of Dean’s death. The probe into the 55-year-old’s demise, however, is a death investigation and not a criminal inquiry, sheriff’s officials said.
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