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WORLD NEWS

Putin Signs ‘Fake News’ Law Punishing Russian Media For Criticizing Him

The set of laws cracks down on “fake news” and any content that criticizes Russian authorities.

By Lydia O’Connor

03/18/2019 04:52 pm ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a set of laws Monday allowing the Kremlin to punish online media and individuals for spreading insulting information about government officials or other content deemed to be “fake news.”

The controversial move by the censorship-friendly president allows him to punish anyone who spreads information that “exhibits blatant disrespect for the society, government, official government symbols, constitution or governmental bodies of Russia,” according to The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper based in the Russian capital.

The punishments include fines of up to 1.5 million rubles ― approximately $22,900 ― for news outlets that repeatedly spread “fake news,” and fines of up to 300,000 rubles ― about $4,700 ― and 15 days in jail for insulting state symbols or Russian authorities.

Throughout the bills’ swift passage through Russian parliament, thousands of demonstrators protested against the legislation on Moscow’s streets, and the country’s Presidential Human Rights Council raised concern that the measures could be used to unfairly silence critics ― something critics have been on high alert over, as so many of Putin’s opponents have turned up poisoned or mysteriously dead in recent years.

Though Putin firmly denies any connection to those attacks, the Kremlin has a longstanding policy of cracking down on critics. During nationwide protests against the government in 2017, police arrested hundreds of young critics en masse in what human rights groups called a major violation.

The looming threats to the media from the Kremlin mirror the attitude of U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom Putin has maintained a close but secretive political relationship despite evidence of Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. Throughout his campaign and presidency, Trump has railed against most mainstream media as “fake news,” particularly in any reports that criticize him.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/putin-ru ... 0544fe84ce

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POLITICS

Muslims Praise New Zealand Prime Minister For Her Empathy, Actions After Attack

Within days of the attack, Jacinda Ardern has visited mosques, promised to reform gun laws and pledged solidarity.

By Carol Kuruvilla

03/18/2019 05:56 pm ET

American Muslims are praising New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to last week’s mosque massacre ― and pointing out how Ardern’s words and actions sharply contrast with the way President Donald Trump has responded to white supremacists in the past.

It’s been about four days since a gunman opened fire on two Christchurch mosques during Friday prayers, killing 50 worshippers and injuring dozens more. Since the attack, Ardern has visited and listened to the bereaved community, pledged to make reforms to gun laws, and repeatedly emphasized that Muslims are a vital part of New Zealand’s community.

“They were loved ones and they were New Zealanders,” Ardern said about the victims during a press conference Sunday.

Ardern wasted no time in condemning the shootings as “terrorist attack” on Friday. She visited Christchurch’s Muslim and refugee community the next day, wearing a black headscarf over her hair and conveying a message of “love and support” on behalf of her country.

Photos of Ardern hugging and consoling community members spread quickly online.

Ardern listened to families’ concerns that some loved ones’ bodies have not yet been released by authorities ― even though Islamic tradition compels bodies to be buried within 24 hours of death. On Sunday, Ardern pledged that all victims’ bodies will be returned to families by Wednesday.

Ardern also made it clear that Christchurch survivors will be able to take advantage of government programs that provide funeral grants to citizens and visitors who are injured in an accident in the country. Since many of the victims of the shooting were their families’ breadwinners, she said the government would provide financial assistance to survivors left without income, according to The New York Times.

Even though these benefit programs were already in place, it’s encouraging that Ardern’s government is actively working to make sure Christchurch survivors get the help they need, Robert McCaw, director of government affairs for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told HuffPost.

“You can see the compassion and openness of the New Zealand government in how it treats its Muslim citizens,” McCaw told HuffPost.

During a press conference on Monday, Ardern promised to announce reforms to New Zealand’s gun laws within 10 days of the attack, although she hasn’t provided details of these reforms.

Ardern’s actions during a time of crisis in her country has elicited admiration from U.S. Muslims.

Hoda Hawa, a Washington, D.C. director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told HuffPost that Ardern has done an “exceptional job” and is demonstrating how a politician should lead a country after such a horrific attack.

“She has not only remained religiously sensitive when dealing with the aftermath of the attacks, she’s also remained compassionate and aware of the role that extreme rhetoric manifests itself into hate-motivated violence,” Hawa said. “She’s continued to emphasize that New Zealander Muslims are New Zealanders, and that they are one of many communities that make up the nation.”

Ardern, 38, is New Zealand’s youngest leader in 150 years. Since becoming prime minister in 2017, Ardern has been celebrated as a progressive voice in international politics. She was the second world leader to give birth while in office. In 2018, she became the first world leader to attend the United Nations’ general assembly meeting with her baby.

Ardern has faced some criticism on home turf, however. She pledged to address the country’s affordable housing crisis by helping build 100,000 new homes within a decade. But her government had to scrap the ambitious plan this year after failing to meet its initial targets. Some critics have claimed Ardern is all style and no substance, The Washington Post reports.

Still, Ardern’s response to Friday’s massacre has earned her fans in the U.S. Farhana Khera, executive director of the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, told HuffPost that her organization commends Ardern for demonstrating an “honest, compassionate, and strong response” to the tragedy.

Khera also pointed out that Ardern has ordered a review of the country’s intelligence and security services, to determine what these agencies may have missed in the leadup to the massacre. The man charged with the murders did not come to the attention of New Zealand’s country’s intelligence or law enforcement communities before the attack.

“She’s willing to ask the hard question: Why have her country’s intelligence and security services resources predominantly been focused on Muslim communities, neglecting the white nationalist threat?” Khera told HuffPost. “This is a conversation that desperately needs to happen in our nation by our president, Congress, and intelligence and law enforcement agencies.”

Khera said Ardern’s performance has illustrated the “night and day” differences between the prime minister and Trump.

Trump, who was mentioned in the gunman’s white supremacist, anti-immigrant manifesto, has condemned the shootings as a “horrible, disgraceful thing.” But when a reporter asked if he thought white nationalism was a rising threat around the world, the president responded, “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess.”

Shortly afterwards, the president echoed the racist rhetoric of “invasion” that the New Zealand shooter used to describe immigration.

“People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is,” Trump said Friday, referring to “crimes of all kinds coming through our southern border.”

“Not only has Trump failed to acknowledge the threat of white nationalist violence, he is actively stoking it,” Khera said.

Hawa also suggested there’s a “stark contrast” between Trump and Ardern.

“When these situations occur, leaders should use the power of their bully pulpit to emphasize unity rather than continue to sow discord and marginalize communities; which is exactly what Trump continues to do,” Hawa said.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jacinda- ... 7da9f608d9

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New Zealand eyes gun reforms in the wake of massacre

By Steve Benen

03/18/19 12:48 PM

The day after a massacre in two mosques left dozens dead and dozens more injured, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern understandably turned her attention to gun laws.

Ardern said at a news conference that she was advised that the gunman had five firearms – two semi-automatic weapons, two shotguns and a lever-action firearm – and that he had acquired a gun license in November 2017.

“While work is being done as to the chain of events that led to both the holding of this gun license and the possession of these weapons, I can tell you one thing right now: Our gun laws will change,” Ardern said.

She noted that there have been attempts to change the nation’s gun laws in the past, most recently in 2017, but said “now is the time for change.” She suggested she was looking at the issues around ownership of semi-automatic weapons.

The New York Times reported this morning that the prime minister and her cabinet had agreed “in principle” to an overhaul of the country’s gun laws, though there are some details to iron out.

“Within 10 days of this horrific act of terrorism, we will have announced reforms that I believe will have made our community safer,” Ardern said.

The “within 10 days” phrase stood out for me: in the wake of a brutal crime, officials are wasting no time exploring new ways to keep their citizens safe from gun violence. The authorities in New Zealand, where there is nothing comparable to the Second Amendment that exists in the United States, are acting as if new gun laws are simply a common-sense reaction to a tragic mass shooting.

“New Zealand has to have this debate,” said Alexander Gillespie, a law professor at the University of Waikato, told the Times. “This is a place where your car has to be registered, your dog has to be registered. But your gun doesn’t.”

It all sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?

On the other side of the planet, the Donald Trump of South America has a very different kind of debate in mind. The Wall Street Journal reported the other day:

[A]s Brazil reels from one of its worst-ever school shootings, the response from President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing administration and his supporters this week has been the opposite: What Brazil needs, they say, is more guns.

In a Columbine-style massacre near São Paulo on Wednesday, two young men killed eight people, mostly students at their former school, shocking a nation already accustomed to endemic and barbaric violence.

“The logic of the left is always the same: If a crazy guy uses guns to kill people, the solution is to take guns away from people who have nothing to do with what happened,” said Rogério Mendonça, deputy leader of the governing bloc in the lower house of Congress. “Now imagine if a decent person had been armed at that school. They could have stopped the attack from ending in the bloody way it did.”

Sen. Sérgio Olímpio Gomes, another close ally of the president and one of many former police officers to join the new administration’s ranks, has advocated arming teachers in response to the tragedy.

Oddly enough, this sounds familiar, too.

Postscript: To learn more about existing gun laws in New Zealand and Brazil, the New York Times put together a helpful summary.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show ... e-massacre

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WORLD

NEW ZEALAND GUN OWNERS ARE VOLUNTARILY HANDING OVER SEMIAUTOMATIC RIFLES TO POLICE: 'WE DON'T NEED THESE IN OUR COUNTRY'

BY CHANTAL DA SILVA

ON 3/18/19 AT 6:59 AM EDT

WORLD

Since Friday's deadly attack at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, gun owners have been turning up at local police stations seeking to have their own semiautomatic rifles—the weapon believed to have been used in the shootings—destroyed.

In the days since the attacks, which saw 50 people killed and dozens more injured, a number of gun owners in New Zealand have gone on social media to encourage others to follow in their footsteps. They want them to hand over their weapons and prevent another attack like Friday's from happening again.

"Until today, I was one of the New Zealanders who owned a semiautomatic rifle," one gun owner, farmer John Hart, wrote on Twitter. "On the farm they are a useful tool in some circumstances, but my convenience doesn't outweigh the risk of misuse.

"We don't need these in our country," he added, sharing an image of a police form registering his weapon for "destruction." "We have make sure it's #NeverAgain."

Hart said he had turned over his weapon to police with "no questions asked" and was told that the semiautomatic rifle would be destroyed.

He said he had been using the rifle for pest control on his farm but said that there were other ways to do the job that do not require owning such a deadly weapon.

"It's not a big deal not having it anymore. I couldn't, in good conscience, say they shouldn't be around if I still had one," he said. "Once you accept that these things can be harmful, in the wrong hands, the trade-off is a small inconvenience."

Hart said in a separate post that he was "overwhelmed by the positive responses" he had received and that the negative reactions had been few.

Hart said he had mostly blocked those sending him negative comments, writing: "The devil doesn't need any more advocates" and that he hoped that more gun owners would follow suit in turning over their weapons.

In a separate Twitter post, another New Zealander, posting under the name Fey Hag, said she too had turned over her family's weapons following Friday's attacks, writing: "When my husband died his guns were handed to family holding the requisite license. Daughter of crack-shot food hunting parents, I have used guns from the age of 9.

"Today I requested that those guns be handed in for destruction," Hag wrote.

A third Twitter user, posting under the name Blackstone, shared an image of the "arms surrender" police form on Monday, writing that after owning a firearm for 31 years, turning over the rifle was "one of the easiest decisions I have ever made."

"Since I first heard about the atrocity on Friday afternoon, I have reflected and reserved my thoughts," the social media user wrote. "Monday morning—this is one of the easiest decisions I have ever made."

The attack on the mosques marked New Zealand's first mass shooting in nearly 30 years, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed to introduce new gun laws.

Ardern said that new reforms would be announced within 10 days of the attacks, which she called a "horrific act of terrorism."

https://www.newsweek.com/after-new-zeal ... es-1365988

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BOOKS OF THE TIMES

In ‘The Uninhabitable Earth,’ Apocalypse Is Now

By Jennifer Szalai

March 6, 2019

More than halfway through “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells addresses the reader directly, commending anyone who has “made it this far” for being “brave.” After all, the previous pages of his book have depicted in meticulous and terrifying detail the possible future that awaits the planet should we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere and fail to arrest global warming. Floods, pestilence, famines, wildfires: What he calls the “elements of climate chaos” are veritably biblical in scope.

Wallace-Wells is a deputy editor of New York magazine, where two years ago he published an article on climate change that went viral, understandably so; in 7,000 eloquent words, he bluntly laid out the calamitous costs of doing nothing — or, perhaps more realistically and therefore more menacingly, of doing something but not enough.

His new book revisits that approach, expanding his portrait of a planetary nightmare that, to judge by climatologists’ assessments, will soon take over our waking life. The crumpled carcass of a bee on the cover tells you only some of what you need to know. Yes, apian death gets passing mention, but Wallace-Wells is more concerned with the prospect of human suffering and even extinction.

There’s plenty of science consulted here, but the book, he writes, isn’t about the science of warming: “It is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” He warns of collapsing ice sheets, water scarcity, an equatorial band too hot to be livable and — for anyone fortunate enough to reside elsewhere — extreme heat waves that will burn longer and kill more. All this could come with 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the threshold that world leaders pledged to stay below in the Paris accords of 2015.

Yet Wallace-Wells insists he’s optimistic; and in fact, he obtains some consolation by peering into the abyss, entertaining the worst-case scenarios of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming. Given the prospect of utter annihilation, he says, the “degraded muddle” that we might still manage to eke out should count “as an encouraging future.” It would be “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.”

Books about global warming have sounded the alarm for some time, with classic texts from writers like Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben chronicling the ways in which humans have irrevocably transformed the climate. The science is “tentative, ever-evolving,” Wallace-Wells writes, but “none of it is news.”


“The Uninhabitable Earth” seems to be modeled more on Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” — or, at least, it’s a bid to do for greenhouse gases what Carson’s 1962 book did for pesticides. “Silent Spring” became a galvanizing force, a foundational text for the environmental movement. The overarching frame for Wallace-Wells’s book is an analogous call to action: “How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?”

Part of his strategy is to tell us how much we have already lost. “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,” he writes. Some of the technology we rely on to make the effects of climate change more bearable, like air-conditioning, also worsens them. The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.

Wallace-Wells avoids the “eerily banal language of climatology” in favor of lush, rolling prose. The sentences in this book are potent and evocative, though after a while of envisioning such unremitting destruction — page upon page of toddlers dying, plagues released by melting permafrost and wildfires incinerating tourists at seaside resorts — I began to feel like a voyeur at an atrocity exhibition. His New York magazine article already synthesized plenty of information about perilous climate risks and scared the bejeezus out of people; what are we supposed to do with this expanded litany of horrors?

“Fear can motivate,” Wallace-Wells writes. He’s aware of those who denounce the graphic doom saying as “climate porn,” but he arrived at his own ecological awakening when he started to collect “terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives” about climate change. He describes himself as a Bitcoin-buying, non-recycling city-dweller who hates camping. He was scared out of his “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded” inertia when he became immersed in the awful truth and, his book suggests, you can be too.

Besides, it’s not as if any of the hair-raising material with which he has become intimately familiar has paralyzed him with fatalism — quite the opposite. “That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair,” he writes. What some activists have called “toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse — “should be empowering.”

In the course of writing this book, even while staring down the bleak decades ahead, Wallace-Wells had a child. “She will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat,” he writes. “She will be living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.”

Wait — what? I found this lurching between sweet hopefulness on the one hand and lurid pessimism on the other to be bewildering, like a heat wave followed by a blizzard. But then Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change and collective action, which “is, dramatically, a snore.” Mobilization is impossible for people who are sleepwalking their way toward disaster; and mobilization is necessary, he says, to deploy the tools at our disposal, which include carbon taxes, carbon capture and green energy.

“The Uninhabitable Earth” wagers that we’ve grown inured to cool recitations of the facts, and require a more direct engagement of political will. “There is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try,” Wallace-Wells writes. “Any story that sticks is a good one.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/book ... wells.html

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The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition

The facts, research, and science behind the climate-change article that explored our planet’s worst-case scenarios.

a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out. Fossils by Heartless Machine


We published “The Uninhabitable Earth” on Sunday night, and the response since has been extraordinary — both in volume (it is already the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history) and in kind. Within hours, the article spawned a fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and Twitter, much of which came from climate scientists and the journalists who cover them.

Some of this conversation has been about the factual basis for various claims that appear in the article. To address those questions, and to give all readers more context for how the article was reported and what further reading is available, we are publishing here a version of the article filled with research annotations. They include quotations from scientists I spoke with throughout the reporting process; citations to scientific papers, articles, and books I drew from; additional research provided by my colleague Julia Mead; and context surrounding some of the more contested claims. Since the article was published, we have made four corrections and adjustments, which are noted in the annotations (as well as at the end of the original version). They are all minor, and none affects the central project of the story: to apply the best science we have today to the median and high-end “business-as-usual” warming projections produced by the U.N.’s “gold standard” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But the debate this article has kicked up is less about specific facts than the article’s overarching conceit. Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be? What are the risks of terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue, and what should a journalist make of those risks?

I hope, in the annotations and commentary below, I have added some context. But I also believe very firmly in the set of propositions that animated the project from the start: that the public does not appreciate the scale of climate risk; that this is in part because we have not spent enough time contemplating the scarier half of the distribution curve of possibilities, especially its brutal long tail, or the risks beyond sea-level rise; that there is journalistic and public-interest value in spreading the news from the scientific community, no matter how unnerving it may be; and that, when it comes to the challenge of climate change, public complacency is a far, far bigger problem than widespread fatalism — that many, many more people are not scared enough than are already “too scared.” In fact, I don’t even understand what “too scared” would mean. The science says climate change threatens nearly every aspect of human life on this planet, and that inaction will hasten the problems. In that context, I don’t think it’s a slur to call an article, or its writer, alarmist. I’ll accept that characterization. We should be alarmed.

I. ‘Doomsday’
Peering beyond scientific reticence.

II. Heat Death
The bahraining of New York.[/color][/size]

III. The End of Food
Praying for cornfields in the tundra.

IV. Climate Plagues
What happens when the bubonic ice melts?

V. Unbreathable Air
A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.

VI. Perpetual War
The violence baked into heat.

VII. Permanent Economic Collapse
Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.

VII. Permanent Economic Collapse
Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.

VIII. Poisoned Oceans
Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.

IX. The Great Filter
Our present eeriness cannot last.

[ TO READ THE ANOTATED EDITION - CLICK ON FOLLOWING LINK ]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/ ... gtm=bottom

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POLITICS EPA

TRUMP'S EPA HEAD SAID CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT A TOP THREAT BECAUSE IT'S '50 TO 75 YEARS OUT'

BY ASSOCIATED PRESS MARCH 20, 2019

(WASHINGTON) — The Environmental Protection Agency’s new administrator says unsafe drinking water is “probably the biggest environmental threat” the world faces.

Andrew Wheeler told CBS News in an interview airing Wednesday that climate change is “an important issue,” but most of the threats it poses are “50 to 75 years out” and it’s “unreasonable” for the 2020 Democratic candidates to focus so much on it.

Climate scientists see the necessity for broad and immediate action to address global warming. The United Nations says “now is the defining moment to do something about it.”

Wheeler was nominated by President Donald Trump and was confirmed last month. He acknowledges human behavior “certainly contributes to” climate change, and says the U.S. is working to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Wheeler says 92 percent of the country’s water meets EPA safety standards every day.

http://time.com/5554996/epa-chief-clima ... ge-threat/

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WHITE HOUSE

Trump administration withholds report justifying 'shock' auto tariffs

The Commerce Department's February finding that major tariffs on foreign cars can be justified on national security grounds has not previously been confirmed.

By ELIANA JOHNSON and ANDREW RESTUCCIA 03/20/2019 05:05 AM EDT

A confidential government report has provided President Donald Trump with a legal rationale to impose heavy new tariffs on foreign cars as soon as this spring, a prospect fiercely opposed by White House officials and congressional Republicans alarmed by its enormous economic and political stakes.

The Commerce Department submitted the report to the White House in mid-February, triggering a 90-day period for Trump to decide whether to impose tariffs, which could reach as high as 25 percent, on imported autos. It concluded that Trump could justify the tariffs on national security grounds and offered a range of options in response — putting the decision in the president’s hands, four people familiar with its conclusions told POLITICO.

Although the existence of the report was previously known, the administration has kept its findings hidden — including from a powerful Republican senator who has demanded to see it — and its conclusion had not been previously reported.

Trump has not yet made a decision, but he has long complained that the U.S is exploited economically by its allies and has repeatedly told aides he wants to impose a “ring tax” around U.S. borders to protect the country from foreign imports. Trump also has a particular interest in foreign auto competition: In a 2017 interview with the German newspaper Bild, he complained that Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue was filled with Mercedes-Benzes, adding: “It’s not mutual. How many Chevrolets do you see in Germany?”

But Trump’s senior economic advisers are almost universally opposed to slapping new tariffs on auto imports, warning of dire economic and political consequences. They argue that the tariffs would infuriate close U.S. allies from Asia to Western Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last month that the idea German cars threaten the U.S. would be “a shock.” The move could also undermine efforts to persuade Congress to approve the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal.

And while Trump can brag that he is standing up for American workers, imposing tariffs could ratchet up the price of cars by several thousand dollars, depending on the model, analysts warn.

The issue is roiling inside the White House ahead of a mid-May deadline for Trump to decide, 90 days after the submission of the Commerce Department report. Nervous Trump officials have already discussed searching for ways to delay the decision, possibly for several months.

Even some Trump advisers who have backed other Trump tariffs are wary this time. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer — who has frequently sided with Trump’s more protectionist advisers — has privately raised concerns about imposing the auto tariffs, according to two senior administration officials.

“There’s a decided lack of enthusiasm here for these tariffs,” said a senior administration official, describing the view among the president’s advisers.

Lighthizer and other senior Trump aides worry that the auto tariffs would kill the goodwill they've built with lawmakers of both parties as they've tried to persuade them to approve the USMCA. White House officials see the success of the USMCA talks as key to Trump's 2020 election bid.

One notable exception is trade adviser Peter Navarro, an unapologetic protectionist who enjoys a close relationship with Trump. That has other officials concerned that Trump might ignore the advice of his other aides and order the tariffs.

The president’s move would come as a result of the Commerce Department’s investigation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, an obscure law that the president has already used to impose steel and aluminum tariffs. The provision requires an investigation concluding that foreign imports threaten U.S. national security before tariffs can be imposed on them.

The president’s decision could set up a showdown between the White House and increasingly rebellious Capitol Hill Republicans. Two Senate GOP lawmakers have already introduced legislation that would limit the president’s ability to impose tariffs.

Some Republicans are frustrated that the administration has refused to divulge the report’s details. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who delivered the report to Trump last month, has ignored multiple requests from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to turn over a copy, according to a committee source.

Spokespeople for the White House and the Commerce Department declined to comment, and a Lighthizer spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

The Commerce Department did brief Senate Finance Committee Republicans on the report’s findings last month, according to two senior GOP aides. But while the department’s briefer strongly suggested that the report contained a national security finding allowing Trump to impose tariffs, and said that it laid out several options for him, the emissary did not disclose the report’s rationale or detail those options.

The lack of information has frustrated lawmakers and trade groups. "This is a major policy decision that would have a significant impact on an industry that employs directly and indirectly 10 million Americans. If in fact this report is a secret plan to tax hard-working Americans, we ought to know about it. It’s as simple as that,” said John Bozzella, the president and CEO of Global Automakers Group and a former Chrysler executive.

“Every automaker would be impacted in some way, shape or form. If you just assume that we are declared a national security threat and the president imposes broad, sweeping import tariffs of 25 percent, then you would naturally see the prices of all of these cars increase in a range of $2,000 to $7,000,” said Jennifer Thomas, the vice president of federal government affairs at the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the leading advocacy group for the auto industry.

The debate over auto tariffs follows the president’s imposition of far-reaching tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from the European Union, Canada, Mexico and other countries, a controversial move that many Trump advisers cautioned against. Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser at the time, resigned last spring after failing to persuade the president to hold off on the tariffs.

Republican lawmakers are already readying legislative responses that would curtail the president’s ability to unilaterally impose tariffs, and Grassley has said he is supportive of the initiatives.

One bill, introduced by Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, would require the Department of Defense, rather than the Department of Commerce, to conclude that the industry in question poses a national security threat justifying the imposition of tariffs and allow Congress to disapprove of any 232 finding. Another proposal, introduced by Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, goes even further, requiring Congress to approve the president’s plan to impose import tariffs for it to take effect.

GOP lawmakers suspect the Commerce Department is reverse-engineering its reports to suit the president’s policy preferences, finding a national security threat where none exists. They have pointed to the Defense Department’s finding that steel and aluminum imports did not pose a national security threat — a finding that broke with the Commerce Department’s conclusion granting Trump a green light to crack down on metal imports.

“With regard to steel and aluminum and the 232 tariffs that were put in place back in 2017, you may know this, but when the administration was asked to opine on it, the Department of Defense said it’s not a national security threat. That’s now public,” Portman said on the Senate floor when he introduced his bill. “The memo from the Department of Defense said we have enough steel production in this country to take care of our military needs. It’s not a national security issue for us.”

The administration is expected to publicly release the report, though it is unclear when.

Trump believes that the mere threat of auto tariffs gives him leverage in trade negotiations with the European Union and other countries, according to aides. Navarro has also privately raised concerns that leaks about the widespread opposition to the tariffs could weaken the president’s negotiating posture.

Asked about the prospect that he would move forward with auto tariffs against the European Union, Trump said last month that “it’s something we certainly think about.”

“We’re trying to make a deal,” he said. “They’re very tough to make a deal with, the EU. … We’re negotiating with them. If we don’t make the deal, we’ll do the tariffs.”

Auto executives say the industry is particularly anxious given that the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed by the president last year have already hurt their companies, pushing costs up and sales down.

“More than anything,” the Auto Alliance’s Thomas said, “our companies like certainty and predictability, and they’re just not finding much of it these days.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/ ... ce-1228344

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Trump blasts McCain, bemoans not getting 'thank you' for funeral

BY BRETT SAMUELS - 03/20/19 03:48 PM EDT

President Trump on Wednesday unleashed fresh criticism of John McCain, attacking the late GOP senator from Arizona for his connection to a dossier of claims about the president and Russia, his vote against a Republican effort to repeal ObamaCare and his support for the Iraq War.

Trump spent five full minutes jabbing at McCain during an official White House event intended to highlight manufacturing in Ohio. The barbs marked the fourth time in the last five days that Trump has criticized McCain, who died from brain cancer in August.

"I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve. I don’t care about this, I didn't get a thank you. That's OK," Trump told workers at a tank factory in Lima, Ohio.

"We sent him on the way, but I wasn’t a fan of John McCain."

The president stoked controversy in the days after McCain's death last year when he waited to lower flags to half-staff and offer an official statement. He later did not attend McCain’s funeral at the family’s request.

The latest criticisms of McCain briefly turned Wednesday's official White House event into a de facto campaign rally, events in which the president regularly excoriates his critics and rehashes his administration's accomplishments.

During the event Wednesday afternoon, Trump read at least some of the remarks off a teleprompter.

He elaborated on his reasons for his long-running disdain for the Arizona Republican, starting with McCain passing along to federal law enforcement a dossier of allegations about Trump's ties to Russia.

Trump went on to chastise McCain over his vote in 2017 that helped doom a GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and criticized the late senator, a Vietnam War veteran, over his record on the Iraq War and the military.

"McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the [Department of Veterans Affairs] VA," Trump said. "That’s why when I had my dispute with him I had such incredible support from the vets and on the military.

"We’re in a war in the Middle East that McCain pushed so hard," he added, referring to the Iraq War.

Trump suggested that his extended diatribe against McCain would eliminate the need for future questions about why he continues to attack the late senator.

"Not my kind of guy," Trump said. "But some people like him and I think that’s great."

Trump has in recent days gone after McCain, specifically over the dossier about his alleged ties to Russia and the late senator's vote against the repeal of ObamaCare.

A number of Republicans have condemned the president's attacks against their former colleague. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) on Wednesday said Trump's criticism of McCain was "deplorable" and showed a "lack of respect" for the Arizona Republican's military service.

Others, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have defended McCain without invoking the president's name or latest criticisms.

McCain’s family and friends have more fiercely hit back against the president’s recent comments.

Mark Salter, one of McCain’s closest advisers, replied to Trump over the weekend that “McCain will always be a better man than you in every way we measure a man’s character.”

Meghan McCain said earlier Wednesday on "The View" that she believes her father would “think it was so hilarious that our president was so jealous of him that he was dominating the news cycle in death.”

http://tribeforums.com/posting.php?mode=reply&f=3&t=6

<4



CHECKS AND BALANCES

Why Is the Trump Administration Always Getting Shut Down in Court?

By Matt Stieb

12:55 A.M. 3.20.19

Federal judges keep ruling against the Trump administration, frustrating the president’s attempts to dismantle Obama-era policies and environmental protections. In a new analysis from the Washington Post, reporters Fred Barbash and Deanna Paul determine that federal judges have blocked the Trump administration at least 63 times in the last two years.

The reporters present a pretty simple reason for the administration’s repeat defeats: “In case after case, judges have rebuked Trump officials for failing to follow the most basic rules of governance for shifting policy, including providing legitimate explanations supported by facts and, where required, public input.”

The most prominent example of the administration jumping the gun was with the travel ban, announced just seven days after Trump’s inauguration. Though a version of the ban was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court a year and a half after the initial attempt, a lower court initially blocked the move to restrict travel from predominantly Muslim countries as discriminatory. Another high-profile example is the rejection to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects some 700,000 young adults. U.S. district judge John D. Bates stated that the administration’s claim that DACA was unlawful was “virtually unexplained.”

According to the Post, two-thirds of the cases blocked by federal courts involve the Trump administration violating the Administrative Procedure Act, a statute from 1946 designed to make sure government branches are staying in their respective lanes. Normally, a given administration will win around 70 percent of APA cases, but as of January 2019, Trump’s win rate stood around 6 percent.

“What they have consistently been doing is short-circuiting the process,” Georgetown Law professor William W. Buzbee told the Post. In regulatory cases, Trump doesn’t “even come close” to properly explaining legislative action. “[They’re] making it very easy for the courts to reject them because they’re not doing their homework,” he said.

In some cases, Trump isn’t doing himself any favors. His alleged description of Haiti and El Salvador as “shithole countries” reportedly helped convince U.S. district judge Edward M. Chen to block the administration’s decision to end “temporary protected status” for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Central America, Haiti, and Sudan. Chen determined that the order was clouded with racial and ethnic bias.

According to the Post, “at least a dozen decisions have involved Trump’s tweets or comments.” In particular, the blockages are slowing down the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations.

When it comes to regulatory reform, at least, the president can retire his “tired of winning” slogan. Matthew Collette, a former deputy director at the Justice Department, told the Post that in his 30-year career there, he had not seen such a frequency of losses in such a short time. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” he said.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/ ... court.html

<5



CHRISTCHURCH MASSACRE

New Zealand Bans Sale of Assault Rifles Less Than a Week after Christchurch Shooting

By Matt Stieb

10:32 P.M. 3.20.19

Less than a week after a white nationalist killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand has reportedly banned the sale of assault and semi-automatic rifles. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also announced that the sales of high-capacity magazines and items like bump stocks – which manipulate recoil to allow semi-automatic weapons to fire more like automatics – will also be made illegal. According to reporter Andrew Beatty, the measures will be implemented “virtually immediately.”

The morning after the massacre, Ardern promised reform. “I can tell you one thing right now: our gun laws will change,” Ardern said. “Now is the time for change.” As of last year, some 15,000 of New Zealand’s 1.5 million firearms were military-style semi-automatic rifles. The minimum age to own a gun is 16, but for semi-automatics, New Zealanders must be at least 18. In the attack last week, the Christchurch shooter used two semi-automatic rifles, which he purchased legally online.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/ ... ifles.html

<6



POLITICS

INFECTIOUS DISEASE

KENTUCKY GOV. BEVIN SAYS HE DELIBERATELY EXPOSED HIS 9 CHILDREN TO CHICKENPOX

BY BRUCE SCHREINER / AP 8:31 PM EDT

(FRANKFORT, Ky.) — Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said in a radio interview that he deliberately exposed his children to chickenpox so they would catch the highly contagious disease and become immune.

During a Tuesday interview on Bowling Green radio station WKCT, Bevin said his children were “miserable for a few days” after contracting chickenpox but said “they all turned out fine.”

“Every single one of my kids had the chickenpox,” Bevin said in the interview. “They got the chickenpox on purpose because we found a neighbor that had it and I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it, and they got it. They had it as children.”

Bevin and his wife, Glenna, have nine children, four adopted.

Public health authorities strongly discourage the practice of deliberately exposing children to chickenpox, a medical expert said Wednesday.

“It’s unfortunate and not an example for any of us,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We should vaccinate all our children. It’s a great triumph of public health in the United States. Let’s not take a step backward,” he added in a phone interview.

Bevin’s office did not immediately respond to an email request for additional comment Wednesday. Bevin is seeking a second term as governor in this year’s statewide elections in Kentucky.

The Republican governor said Tuesday that parents worried about chickenpox should have their children vaccinated. But he suggested that government shouldn’t mandate the vaccination.

“Why are we forcing kids to get it?” Bevin said in the interview. “If you are worried about your child getting chickenpox or whatever else, vaccinate your child. … And in many instances, those vaccinations make great sense. But for some people, and for some parents, for some reason they choose otherwise.”

Kentucky requires that children entering kindergarten be vaccinated for chickenpox, but parents may seek religious exemptions or provide proof that a child already had the disease.

Bevin’s comments followed reports this week of a chickenpox outbreak at a Kentucky Catholic school.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends two doses of chickenpox vaccine for children, adolescents and adults who have never had chickenpox and were never vaccinated, according to its website. Children are routinely recommended to receive the first dose at 12 through 15 months old and a second dose at 4 to 6 years old, it said.

“What the governor and other like-minded folks are unaware of is that there are potentially serious complications of chickenpox,” Schaffner said.

Complications from chickenpox can include bacterial infections, pneumonia and encephalitis — inflammation of the brain, according to the CDC. Complications aren’t common in healthy people with the disease, it says, but high risk groups for complications due to a serious case of chickenpox can include infants, adolescents, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.

http://time.com/5555567/kentucky-govern ... hickenpox/

<7



California to pull National Guard troops from border to fight wildfires

BY CHRIS MILLS RODRIGO - 03/20/19 02:24 PM EDT

California will call in its National Guard to help protect communities from wildfires, including redeploying troops currently on border protection duty, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

In April, 110 troops will receive 11 days of training in thinning trees and brush, projects intended to deprive fires of fuel, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Mike Mohler told the AP.

“They will be boots on the ground ... alongside CalFire crews,” Mohler said.

“We’ve had them out for flood fighting, several different operations, but this would be the first time their mission would be fuels thinning and forest management.”

California was ravaged by deadly wildfires in 2018.

Northern California's Camp Fire in November killed more than 80 people, destroyed thousands of buildings and caused an estimated $16.5 billion in damages.

President Trump has slammed California for how it handled the wildfires, saying that "gross mismanagement" of the state's forests made the situation worse.

Trump has also threatened to withhold disaster funding until the state changes its policies.

State officials said Trump is ignoring the effects of climate change in making wildfires more deadly. But critics say the state needs to do more on forest management, including allowing more logging to prevent fires from starting.

Trump in April 2018 signed an order to authorize the deployment of National Guard troops in four states to help improve security at the southern border with Mexico.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watc ... stop-fires

<8


Wednesday's Mini-Report

Today's edition of quick hits:

By Steve Benen 03/20/19 05:30PM

* The right call: "A federal judge ruled late Tuesday that the Interior Department violated federal law by failing to take into account the climate impact of its oil and gas leasing in the West."

* Brexit: "Top officials of the European Union tossed Prime Minister Theresa May a life line on Wednesday, saying they would allow Britain to push back its departure date from the bloc, but only if Parliament endorsed her withdrawal plan."

* This is not a vote of confidence in the health of the recovery: "Not only did the Federal Reserve decide Wednesday not to raise interest rates, but it also indicated that no more hikes will be coming this year."

* Mueller probe: "Former Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates -- a central cooperating witness for special counsel Robert Mueller -- has been advised by prosecutors not to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee's broad investigation of President Donald Trump, his lawyer told lawmakers in a recent letter obtained Wednesday by POLITICO. But Gates' lawyer, Thomas Green, left open the possibility of assisting the panel 'in the coming months.'"

* In related news: "Prosecutors with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team on Tuesday cited the 'press of other work' in asking a judge to give them until April 1 to respond to the court about a request from The Washington Post to unseal records in Paul Manafort's criminal case."

* Keep an eye on this one: "A confidential government report has provided President Donald Trump with a legal rationale to impose heavy new tariffs on foreign cars as soon as this spring, a prospect fiercely opposed by White House officials and congressional Republicans alarmed by its enormous economic and political stakes."


White House concedes Trump’s economic promises come with fine print

By Steve Benen

03/20/19 12:55 PM

Kevin Hassett, the White House’s chief economist, insisted this week that the economy will grow at or above 3 percent for the next several years – a highly dubious belief that undergirds Donald Trump’s entire budget plan for the near future.

“Some folks have said, ‘Oh, sure, we did have 3 percent growth [in 2018], but that was a sugar high,’” Hassett told reporters yesterday. “Our view is that’s really not a sugar high at all.”

The truth is a little more complicated. For one thing, we didn’t quite reach 3 percent growth in 2018, at least if we measure GDP the way it’s supposed to be measured.

For another, as the White House quietly conceded yesterday, Team Trump’s growth projections come with some important fine print. The Washington Post explained:

President Trump has promised an economic boom that will last for years to come, but he’s unlikely to get one without the help of Congress to pass major new legislation, according to estimates by Trump’s own economic team.

To achieve about 3 percent growth for the next decade, Trump would need a big infrastructure bill, more tax cuts, additional deregulation, and policies that transition more people off government aid and into full-time jobs, according to the 2019 Economic Report of the President, released Tuesday by Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Oh. The original promise was that the Republicans’ tax-cut package, approved in late 2017, would fuel economic growth for a long while. A little more than a year later, that promise apparently comes with a catch: the tax breaks will fuel economic growth just so long as policymakers approve a series of other economic measures – including even more tax cuts.

The key portion of the report from the president’s Council of Economic Advisers said, “Because the Administration’s forecast is policy-inclusive, a key downside risk is the political contingency of full implementation of the President’s economic agenda, particularly in light of the inherent unpredictability of the legislative process. In addition, by definition the policy-inclusive forecast assumes that the Administration’s policies will be implemented and remain in place throughout the forecast window.”

Clearly, this language is a little clunky, but the phrase that stood out for me is “a key downside risk.” The idea, in other words, is that the White House expects to see great economic results, though there’s a “risk” that Congress won’t approve a series of wish-list agenda items – by the end of this year.

And as the argument goes, if lawmakers don’t approve Trump’s entire economic agenda – including proposals that don’t actually exist, such as the White House’s imaginary infrastructure plan – then the promised economic results will never materialize.

At that point, the president will presumably say it’s Congress’ fault that the White House’s economic plan failed to produce the results the president promised.

To believe this will be to have fallen for a rather clumsy scam.


Trump reportedly tries to take control of North Korea negotiations

By Steve Benen

03/20/19 11:20 AM

For reasons that are difficult to understand from a distance, Donald Trump has extraordinary confidence in his presidential abilities. As a candidate, the Republican assured voters, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

Two years later, the Washington Post reported that Trump didn’t care about the dearth of qualified staff around him, “because he considers himself to be his own diplomat, negotiator and strategist.”

In the wake of his failed summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the American president is apparently taking this posture to new levels. Time magazine reported overnight that Trump has taken “increased control” of negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, which has meant “sidelining his own top negotiator.”

In recent days, Trump shut down an effort by Stephen Biegun, nominally the Administration’s lead negotiator with Pyongyang, to reestablish a back channel through the North’s United Nations mission in New York, according to four U.S. and South Korean officials.

At the same time, Trump continues to dismiss the conclusions of the CIA, State and Defense Departments and other agencies that North Korea will not abandon its nuclear weapons program, continuing to insist that he and Kim can negotiate a deal, according to two U.S. officials.

An unnamed U.S. official told Time that Trump’s “constant refrain” is that the North Korean dictator is his “friend,” which as far as the American president is concerned, creates an opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough – even if he’s the only one who sees it.

The article added, “Trump’s insistence on serving as his own lead negotiator, concentrating decision making at the White House, has rattled not only U.S. officials outside the White House, but also their counterparts in South Korea and Japan, all the officials said.”

That’s an understandable concern. The United States’ first amateur president, who knows effectively nothing about nuclear weapons programs and/or international diplomacy, has convinced himself that his entire team is simply getting in the way of a deal with North Korea.

Kim, who has sent Trump flowery love letters that the Republican has reportedly carried around with him, will give the White House what it wants, the American president believes, because of the strength of their personal chemistry.

What could possibly go wrong?


On the electoral college, Trump dramatically changes direction

By Steve Benen

03/20/19 10:46 AM

Around the time of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, which the incumbent president won with relative ease, one of his high-profile hecklers denounced the system that helped keep the Democrat in office. “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy,” Donald Trump declared on Nov. 6, 2012.

At the time, Trump thought that Obama had won a second term based on electoral votes, but would end up losing the popular vote. (Obama actually topped 51% of the popular vote, though that wasn’t clear in the immediate aftermath of the election.) It was against this backdrop that Trump published a series of tweets about the need for a “revolution” to prevent the “disgusting injustice” of having an American president who only won thanks to the electoral college.

Trump added at the time that the electoral college is “phoney.” (I assume he meant “phony,” and was not trying to describing something related to phones.)

Oddly enough, the Republican continued to criticize the electoral college, even after he lost the popular vote in 2016. “I’m not going to change my mind [about the electoral college] just because I won,” Trump said the week after his election.

As recently as last spring, he remained consistent on the issue, telling Fox News in April 2018 that he’d prefer a popular-vote system.

But as his own re-election campaign nears, and a variety of Democratic presidential candidates express their opposition to the electoral college – Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for example, endorsed its demise this week – Trump has apparently abandoned everything he’s ever said on the subject. The president argued via Twitter:

“Campaigning for the Popular Vote is much easier & different than campaigning for the Electoral College. It’s like training for the 100 yard dash vs. a marathon. The brilliance of the Electoral College is that you must go to many States to win.

“With the Popular Vote, you go to just the large States - the Cities would end up running the Country. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power - & we can’t let that happen. I used to like the idea of the Popular Vote, but now realize the Electoral College is far better for the U.S.A.”

So much for his “disaster for a democracy” assertion.

To the extent that reality matters, Trump’s argument is badly flawed. For example, the electoral college doesn’t require candidates to visit “many” states; it requires candidates to visit competitive states. Millions of Americans don’t live in battleground states, and as a result, they’re largely ignored by national campaigns.

This affects residents with massive populations (California, New York), small populations (Vermont, Wyoming) and plenty of states in between (Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky). After the primaries, major-party nominees tend not to step foot in most states.

What’s more, Trump’s concern about cities “running the country” is a curious one, which I’d love to hear him explore in more detail. Does the president believe urban areas – which tend to have more diverse populations – should necessarily have less political influence?

Why?

Postscript: Overnight, the Republican also tweeted that he considers it “strange” that Democrats want to abolish the electoral college. “Actually,” Trump added, “you’ve got to win it at the Ballot Box!”

The first point contradicts the second. Indeed, that’s the whole point of the debate: the candidate who wins “at the ballot box,” as Hillary Clinton and Al Gore did, sometimes loses, despite winning more votes.


Trump admin loses in court ‘because they’re not doing their homework’

By Steve Benen

03/20/19 10:07 AM—UPDATED 03/20/19 01:23 PM

The Trump administration has an extraordinary track record for failure in federal courts. One longtime career official at the Justice Department told the Washington Post that in his 30 years at the department, he never saw a presidential administration lose so often, so quickly.

The Post had a fascinating report yesterday explaining why Donald Trump’s team has struggled so badly.

Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.

In case after case, judges have rebuked Trump officials for failing to follow the most basic rules of governance, including providing legitimate explanations for shifts in policy, supported by facts and, where required, public input. […]

[T]he rulings so far paint a remarkable portrait of a government rushing to implement sweeping changes in policy without regard for longstanding rules against arbitrary and capricious behavior.

Georgetown Law School’s William Buzbee told the newspaper that in regulatory cases, Trump administration officials are “making it very easy for the courts to reject them because they’re not doing their homework.”

The Post focused particular attention on the relatively obscure Administrative Procedure Act, approved in 1946 to limit the reach of various federal agencies. In recent years, administrations have won APA cases about 70% of the time.

The Trump administration has won about 6% of these cases.

The whole article is worth your time, but as you read it, keep something in mind: I write often about Republicans and their post-policy tendencies – one of these days, I might even write a book on the subject – and the degree to which this undermines the party’s approach to governing.

This is generally seen as a harsh criticism of the contemporary GOP, but reports like the Post’s article approach the issue from the opposite direction: if you’re a conservative who wants the Trump agenda to succeed, you want to see the administration win these court cases. Except they’re losing, not because nefarious liberals in black robes are being unfair, but because too often, Team Trump doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Update: The Post also spoke to a pro-deregulation attorney, whom you’d expect to be on the White House’s side. The article said the lawyer has seen the administration make errors so basic that “he has to wonder whether agency officials are more interested in announcing policy shifts than in actually implementing them.”

http://www.msnbc.com/maddowblog

<

<1



CONTORTIONS

Trump White House Lawyers Plan to Tell House Judiciary to ‘Go F*ck Themselves’

House Democrats want documents from the White House they think can shed light on internal corruption. You’ll never guess how the White House is responding.

Asawin Suebsaeng, Spencer Ackerman

03.21.19 2:35 PM ET

President Trump’s White House attorneys are preparing to tell a key congressional panel investigating the administration “to go fuck themselves,” as a person familiar with the deliberations characterized them to The Daily Beast.

According to three sources familiar with the situation, the White House counsel’s office, currently headed by Pat Cipollone, was still, as of Thursday morning, in the process of drafting a letter responding to the House Judiciary Committee’s request for a wide array of documents.

The documents requested by the Democratic-run committee are part of the sweeping and long-telegraphed inquiry into a range of Trump administration and Trump-associate activities earlier this month.

Cipollone’s letter response to the committee is essentially similar to one he sent to the Oversight, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence committees, which Politico reported on Thursday. Those committees, along with the Ways and Means panel, coordinate regularly over their complementary investigations into the administration.

The formal response to House Judiciary, these sources say, is expected to raise executive-privilege concerns and initially withhold any documents that the committee has requested. The response from the Trump White House is already several days overdue, per the Monday deadline set by Democratic lawmakers on the committee.

It’s the latest sign that Trump and his team are gearing up for a protracted war with the Democrats on the committee. Representatives for the committee did not immediately respond to a Daily Beast inquiry.

Committee Democrats asked for substantial amounts of material. Earlier this month, they sent the White House a 22 bullet-pointed letter requesting documents on a range of issues including the firings of FBI Director Jim Comey and Attorney General Jeff Sessions; reported internal discussions of sidelining Trump from office through the 25th Amendment; discussions of removing right-wing bêtes noire Peter Stzrok, Lisa Page, James Rybicki, Bill Priestap, Andy McCabe, or Jim Baker from the FBI or the Justice Department; as well as “discussions or attempts to provide or receive election information, campaign data, or campaign communications with, to, or from foreign entities.”

Trump, for his part, has complained to associates that the committee chairman, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), and the committee’s inquiry into his administration, family, and orbit, is “not legitimate,” according to a person who has heard the president discuss the matter. Further, Trump has said that Democratic lawmakers have already made up their minds that the president is a crook, are simply in search of dirt, and are trying to distract Americans from what Trump sees as his successes.

Early this month, the president told reporters, “I cooperate all the time, with everybody,” when asked about the new investigation. The very next day, however, Trump tweeted that the probe was the “greatest overreach in the history of our Country” and that the “Dems are obstructing justice and will not get anything done. A big, fat, fishing expedition desperately in search of a crime, when in fact the real crime is what the Dems are doing, and have done!”

David Bossie, a former senior Trump aide who also worked as House Republicans’ top investigator into Bill Clinton’s White House, similarly sees another witch hunt.

“The socialists running the House of Representatives right now are out for President Trump, and I don’t see this as a credible investigation, and therefore I would not cooperate with them at all,” Bossie told The Daily Beast. “It’s an illegitimate investigation and I would not cooperate with them at all if I were any of the 81 people or entities.”

The first volley in the Judiciary Committee’s aggressive campaign to investigate Trump came on March 4. Nadler sent document requests to 81 people, government agencies, and private organizations the committee believed were in a position to address a host of alleged attacks on the rule of law. The requests were divided into three overlapping categories: potential obstruction of justice, particularly concerning Russia; potential abuses of office, particularly concerning the hush-money payouts to alleged Trump mistresses; and potential corruption, particularly concerning administration attacks on the press, judges, and the FBI and Justice Department officials investigating Trump.

But the crush of documentation the committee sought turned out to present a problem. According to two knowledgeable Hill sources, substantial numbers of documents rolled in before and in the days after the Monday deadline. Roughly half of the 81 recipients had made commitments to produce the requested material in a timely fashion, one of the sources said. Not all had made good on those commitments by Monday, however, but the committee itself hadn’t definitively catalogued what it had received by mid-week. The volume of documents provided meant the mailed packages took a while to be screened off-site, another step in a laborious process.

But while the committee existed in a state of partial uncertainty, Trump’s personal attorneys didn’t. By Monday, the president’s outside lawyers, a team that includes Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, had made it clear they wouldn’t be handing over any documents, in a letter to the committee.

Their position was that the committee’s document requests were more appropriately aimed at their colleagues in the White House counsel’s office. And those colleagues don’t appear to be much more inclined to play ball.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-whi ... s?ref=home

<2



White House rejects Dem request for documents on Trump-Putin communications

BY MORGAN CHALFANT - 03/21/19 01:50 PM EDT

The White House is rejecting a sweeping request from House Democrats for documents and interviews related to President Trump’s communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a letter obtained by The Hill, White House counsel Pat Cipollone asserts that the president’s diplomatic communications are confidential and protected by executive privilege and describes the requests as beyond Congress’s legitimate realm of inquiry.

Cipollone also argues that such a disclosure could have a detrimental impact on the ability of Trump or future presidents to conduct foreign relations.

“The President must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed and used as fodder for partisan political purposes. And foreign leaders must be assured of this as well,” Cipollone writes in the letter sent Thursday to House committee chairmen Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.).

“This is why, from the Nation's beginning, Presidents from all political parties have determined that the law does not require the Executive Branch to provide Congress with documents relating to confidential diplomatic communications between the President and foreign leaders,” he writes.

Schiff, Cummings and Engel — who chair the Intelligence, Oversight and Reform and Foreign Affairs committees, respectively – sent letters to the White House and State Department in early March seeking a slew of documents and transcribed interviews with executive branch staff related to a burgeoning investigation into Trump’s communications with Putin.

The request is one of several that the White House is contending with as House Democrats move forward with a series of probes into Trump, his administration and business dealings.

In a statement issued Thursday evening, the Democratic committee chairs described the letter as continuing "a troubling pattern by the Trump Administration of rejecting legitimate and necessary congressional oversight with no regard for precedent or the constitution."

They also accused Trump of breaking with past precedent, describing a willingness by previous administrations to make officials available for interviews and produce documents related to the conduct of foreign relations.

"President Trump's decision to break with this precedent raises the question of what he has to hide," the Democrats said.

The Democrats’ request followed a a January Washington Post report that Trump had sought to keep details of his communications with Putin secret, including at one point taking the notes of an interpreter present for his conversation with Putin on the sidelines of the 2017 Group of 20 (G-20) meeting in Hamburg. Trump later dismissed the report as “ridiculous” in an interview with Fox News.

“These allegations, if true, raise profound counterintelligence and foreign policy concerns, especially in light of Russia’s ongoing active measures campaign to improperly influence American elections,” the Democrats wrote in a March 4 letter to White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney laying out their document request.

“In addition, such allegations, if true, undermine the proper functioning of government, most notably the State Department’s access to critical information germane to its diplomatic mission and its ability to develop and execute foreign policy that advances our national interests,” they wrote. They also raised concerns Trump may have violated a federal law governing records preservation.

The committee chairmen asked the White House for unredacted copies of documents referring or related to: in-person meetings between Trump and Putin or preparations for those meetings, telephone calls between Trump and Putin, records of any written communications between or about communications between Trump and Putin, guidance provided to the White House or agency personnel concerning federal records laws and compliance or noncompliance with federal records laws.

They also asked the White House to allow the committees to conduct transcribed interviews with “all White House or Executive Office of the President employees, contractors, or detailees, whether current or former, with knowledge of these communications.”

This includes interpreters and other staff who participated in or attended the meetings between Trump and Putin or listened in on their phone calls, as well as personnel involved in staffing the 2017 G-20 meeting and Trump’s one-on-one summit with Putin in Helsinki last July.

The House chairmen also separately wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with a near identical document and transcribed interview request.

The deadline for the White House and State Department to respond was March 15.

Cippolone’s letter cites federal case law and several opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued over the last four decades in arguing that the president has the exclusive authority to conduct foreign policy and therefore the House chairs’ request is beyond the scope of Congress’ oversight responsibilities.

“It is settled law that the Constitution entrusts the conduct of foreign relations exclusively to the Executive Branch, as it makes the President ‘the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations,’” states the five-page letter.

Cipollone also writes that the committees in their request “cite no legal authority for the proposition that another branch of the government can force the President to disclose diplomatic communications with foreign leaders or that supports forcing disclosure of the confidential internal deliberations of the President's national security advisors.”

The Democrats asserted in their earlier letter that Congress has a constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the White House and State Department, including to determine the impact of Trump’s communications with Putin on U.S. foreign policy and whether the president has complied with laws and regulations applicable to procedures surrounding diplomatic talks.

Democrats could look to subpoena the White House for the documents and testimony — a move that would almost certainly trigger a battle in the courts.

In their subsequent statement, the Democratic chairs said they "will be consulting on appropriate next steps."

"Congress has a constitutional duty to conduct oversight and investigate these matters, and we will fulfill that responsibility," the lawmakers said.

Trump came under intense criticism from both parties following his meeting with Putin in Helsinki, when he appeared to cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election during a press conference alongside the Russian president. Trump later walked back his remarks, saying he accepts the intelligence community’s findings.

Democrats have since sought to compel the administration to share more information about the private meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki.

Last July, Republicans blocked an effort by Schiff and other Democrats to subpoena the American translator present for the Helsinki meeting to testify before Congress in a closed session. At the time, former officials from Democratic and Republican administrations argued that subpoenaing the interpreter would set a dangerous precedent.

Democrats’ renewed scrutiny of Trump’s communications with Putin comes as special counsel Robert Mueller is believed to be wrapping up his investigation into Russia's election interference and links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump has consistently denied that his campaign colluded with Moscow to meddle in the election, branding the investigation a “witch hunt.” He has also accused Democrats investigating his administration as engaging in “presidential harassment.”

https://thehill.com/policy/national-sec ... rump-putin

<3



POLITICS

Wisconsin Judge Blocks Lame-Duck Laws That Stripped Democrats Of Power

The lame-duck laws drew national outcry as Republicans quickly moved to pass them before Democrats took office.

By Sam Levine

03/21/2019 12:56 pm ET Updated 7 hours ago

A Wisconsin judge temporarily blocked a set of laws Thursday that Republicans passed in a lame-duck session late last year that stripped Democratic lawmakers of their power.

The laws Republicans passed made cuts to early voting and limited the appointment power of the governor and the ability of the attorney general to withdraw from lawsuits. The laws drew national outcry as Republicans moved to quickly pass them after losing control of the attorney general’s office and the governor’s mansion.

A contingent of advocacy groups sued over the measures in January, saying the Legislature had not properly convened the session in which it passed the laws.

The Wisconsin Constitution says the state Legislature “shall meet at the seat of
government at such time as shall be provided by law, unless convened by the governor in special session.” Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that the December 2018 lame-duck session violated the consitutution because lawmakers didn’t pass a statute authorizing it and then Gov. Scott Walker (R) didn’t call for it.

“The bottom line in this case is that the Legislature did not lawfully meet during its December 2018 ‘Extraordinary Session,’” he wrote.

A federal court already blocked the cuts from early voting from going into effect.

In addition to blocking the laws, Thursday’s ruling also vacated 82 nominees and appointments Republicans made to various state agencies and boards during the lame-duck session.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) praised Thursday’s ruling.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the people of Wisconsin and for preserving the Wisconsin Constitution. The Legislature overplayed its hand by using an unlawful process to accumulate more power for itself and override the will of the people, despite the outcome of last November’s election,” he said in a statement.

Evers on Thursday also quickly acted on the ruling and requested that Wisconsin be removed from a multistate lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act.

State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) said they would appeal the ruling. They said it could vacate many laws passed in previous similar sessions. The legislative rule approving extraordinary sessions was passed in 1977 and there were 23 between 1980 and 2014.

“Today’s ruling only creates chaos and will surely raise questions about items passed during previous extraordinary sessions, including stronger laws against child sexual predators and drunk drivers,” Vos and Fitzgerald said in a statement, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Niess was unpersuaded by that kind of reasoning. In his opinion, he wrote that the fact that something had been done previously did not make it constitutional. He added that his ruling would not call into question other laws and called the argument “alarmist.”

“The theory is unsupported by either law or facts in this record, is pure speculation, and, most importantly, not at issue under this Court’s temporary injunction, which is expressly limited to the laws enacted in December 2018,” he wrote.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wisconsi ... 4fec35bca5

<4



Ex-senator challenges Trump to get X-rays proving he had bone spurs during Vietnam draft

BY MORGAN GSTALTER - 03/21/19 06:01 PM EDT

A former Democratic senator who lost part of his leg during the Vietnam War challenged President Trump to get X-rays of his feet to prove that he had bone spurs during the draft.

Amid a growing outcry over Trump's recent attacks on the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam prisoner of war, former Sen. Bob Kerrey (Neb.) said Wednesday during CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” that “you don’t grow out of bone spurs.”

“I call on the president, get your feet X-rayed. Let’s see those X-rays. I want to see,” said Kerrey, a 1992 presidential candidate who retired from the Senate in 2000.

“While John McCain was flying combat operations in Vietnam, you were, I think, falsifying that you had bone spurs in order not to go to Vietnam,” Kerrey said. “Now, I know lots of people who avoided the draft, but this isn’t what he’s saying. He said ‘I physically couldn’t go.’ Well, Mr. President, get your feet X-rayed and let’s see those bone spurs. I don’t think he has them.”

Trump, who has criticized McCain for being captured after his plane was shot down in 1967, said recently that McCain was “not my kind of guy," calling the Purple Heart- and Silver Star-awarded veteran "horrible" on Monday.

Kerrey said he thinks Trump’s remarks show that he thought McCain was a “fool” to have gone to Vietnam.

“We were the suckers. We were the stupid ones. We were the ones that didn’t have the resources to be able to get out of the draft,” the former senator said.

McCain himself criticized Trump’s draft deferment before his death in August from brain cancer.

“One aspect of the [Vietnam] conflict, by the way, that I will never ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest income level of America, and the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur,” McCain said in 2017. “That is wrong. That is wrong. If we are going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.”

The daughters of a New York podiatrist came forward last year and said their father may have diagnosed Trump with bone spurs to help him avoid military service.

The daughters of Larry Braunstein, the foot doctor, said they didn't know if he ever examined Trump but that he signed off on the diagnosis as a favor to Fred Trump, from whom their father rented his Queens office.

“I know it was a favor,” said Elysa Braunstein, whose father died in 2007. The Trumps sold the building in 2004.

“What he got was access to Fred Trump,” she continued. “If there was anything wrong in the building, my dad would call and Trump would take care of it immediately. That was the small favor that he got.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/administra ... bone-spurs

<5



NOT GOOD

Marine Corps Commandant Warns Pentagon: Deploying Troops at Border Poses ‘Unacceptable Risk’

4 HOURS AGO 3.21.19

In two internal memos, the Marines’ top general reportedly warned the Pentagon that military deployments along the U.S.-Mexican border pose an “unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency.” According to the Los Angeles Times, Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller wrote in the March memos that the “unplanned/unbudgeted” deployment that President Trump ordered last year required him to reduce or cancel military training in five countries and delay repairs at bases. Neller reportedly wrote to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer and Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan that the deployment and “funding transfers” were detracting from making repairs at hurricane-damaged bases and housing in North Carolina and Georgia.

He also wrote that the Marines would not be participating in “planned training exercises in Indonesia, Scotland and Mongolia” and would have to reduce its participation in Australia and South Korea. The White House and Defense Department have claimed Trump’s deployment of 6,000 troops along the southern border and his emergency declaration have not negatively affected the armed forces. The Pentagon reportedly declined the newspaper’s request for comment.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/marine-co ... k?ref=home

<6



Marines cut training to fund hurricane costs, border mission

By LOLITA C. BALDOR

2 hours ago 3.21.19

WASHINGTON (AP) — A number of unexpected costs, including major hurricane damage repairs and unplanned deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border, are forcing the Marine Corps to cancel training exercises and will degrade combat readiness, the top Marine general warned.

Gen. Robert Neller said in a memo this week to the Navy secretary that the Marines have pulled out of three military exercises and cut equipment maintenance. And he warned that Marine participation in more than a dozen other exercises will also be canceled or reduced and other cuts will be needed if the service doesn’t get budget help.

The problem, said Neller, is “imposing unacceptable risk” to Marine Corps combat readiness.

“Marines rely on the hard, realistic training provided by these events to develop the individual and collective skills necessary to prepare for high-end combat,” Neller said in the memo sent to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer. “Although some effects can be mitigated, the experience lost by these units at a critical time in their preparation cannot be recouped.”

In the memo, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times, Neller asks Spencer for help getting funding freed up for the Marine priorities.

Neller lists nine unplanned factors that led to the problem, but the Marine Corps said that, by far, the most significant issue forcing the training cuts is the widespread hurricane damage.

About $3.5 billion in damages was done to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and surrounding facilities by Hurricanes Florence and Michael.

Neller said that earlier hopes that Congress might approve requests to move larger amounts of money around in the budget now appear unlikely. He called the situation in North Carolina critical, noting that hurricane season begins in June and Marines and sailors are working in “compromised structures” that must be repaired quickly.

The Defense Department is seeking more than $2 billion in funding for hurricane damage in the 2020 fiscal year budget. But Neller said the Marine Corps needs more than $600 million in this current fiscal year to do those needed repairs and address other shortfalls.

The other shortfalls include the ripple effect of the ongoing debate over President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern border.

Currently there are about 500 Marines deployed to the border mission, where U.S. service members are helping in wall construction, transportation, surveillance and other tasks requested by the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, the Pentagon is shifting funding from various department budget accounts to pay for the wall construction costs.

Other cost issues, Neller said, include an unbudgeted civilian pay raise, unfunded increase in Marine deployment to Australia and unplanned cuts in funding for the Marine Reserve.

His memo got quick backing from a key Congress member.

“President Trump should stop treating the Pentagon as a piggybank for his misguided domestic policy aims,” said Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “President Trump has ignored the facts, ignored the experts, and ignored a big bipartisan vote against his views on border security. I hope he doesn’t try to ignore this memo.”

https://www.apnews.com/abda17ae714a4c9c984a8eab631d7080

<7



Why the US and China are sparring over 5G in Europe

The US and China have a long-simmering spat over the future of 5G. Germany is the latest flashpoint.

By Alex Ward@AlexWardVoxalex.ward@vox.com

Updated Mar 21, 2019, 11:53am EDT

The United States and China are locked in a battle over the future of cutting-edge wireless technology, with Europe caught right in the middle.

And so far, it looks like China is winning.

The fight is over whether European nations should allow the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to install fifth-generation, or “5G,” networks on the continent. That technology will change the world, providing billions of people with lightning-fast connectivity and allowing billions more devices — from cellphones to self-driving cars to even robots performing surgery — to operate better.

In other words, the company that makes 5G available to you will touch nearly every aspect of your life.

European countries want Huawei to build their 5G networks for one simple reason: It provides one of the best services at a cheap price. But the Trump administration has a starkly different view: It’s concerned that allowing a Chinese company to build such critical infrastructure is a serious national security risk, and warns that the Chinese government could exploit the network to spy on the world.

The US has already banned Huawei from doing any work with the US government. And it’s pressuring European leaders to do the same — even threatening to cut off intelligence sharing with them.

But on Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel ignored American pressure — announcing that her country won’t exclude Huawei from bidding on 5G contracts. Since Germany is arguably Europe’s most powerful country, Merkel’s decision could pave the way to other countries accepting Huawei products down the line.

That, of course, won’t make the US happy, not only because of the security concerns and the lost business for American companies but also because of what it could mean for the future.

This is a fight about handing over “the nervous system of not just the future economy, but society writ large, to an authoritarian nation” — and one that’s “an economic and strategic competitor” to the US to boot, says Peter Singer, a technology and national security expert at the New America think tank in Washington.

Which means Merkel’s decision has put Germany and Europe squarely in the center of a major US-China spat whose outcome could determine the shape of the world to come.

Why Europe wants 5G from Chinese companies

By 2024, around 40 percent of the world’s population — and some 22 billion devices, from cars to refrigerators to cellphones to traffic lights — will be on the 5G network. It’s so fast (about 100 times faster than the 4G technology we currently have) that vehicles will have an easier time driving on their own, robots will be better able to conduct surgeries, and people will be able to download full-length, high-definition films in seconds (when it currently takes minutes).

American companies like Verizon and AT&T are already working to provide 5G access to their customers, some as soon as this year. The problem is they’re not as competitive when they go up against Chinese firms like Huawei. That’s because Chinese companies have access to more digital bandwidth that makes their service faster and more reliable.

That’s not by accident: China’s government- and state-linked companies have pushed hard to lead the way on 5G, hoping to provide the best and cheapest service to millions, and maybe even billions, before American companies catch up. And if that happens, Chinese telecommunications firms would only grow in prestige and capital, possibly rivaling American giants like Apple and Microsoft.

Europe, meanwhile, has greatly fallen behind both the US and China in 5G technology and may not even offer it until 2020 or 2021. So how to move things along faster? Well, work with leading 5G providers to make up ground — which means working with Chinese companies.

Huawei is already deeply rooted in Europe and forms a major part of the way people there connect wirelessly, explained Erik Brattberg, an expert on Europe’s relations with China at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. It was therefore a natural choice to work with Huawei to develop 5G on the continent.

“In some ways, it’s already too late to talk about a ban,” Brattberg told me. For instance, Huawei has already signed contracts to provide service with at least eight European countries and is conducting trials in at least 12 of them.

There is some pushback, though. Poland doesn’t plan to use Huawei for its 5G technology. The United Kingdom reviews all Huawei products to make sure there are no security vulnerabilities. And German intelligence even said Huawei wasn’t trustworthy, which could mean Germany won’t accept the company’s products in the future despite Merkel’s announcement.

But Huawei remains extremely entrenched in the continent, making it a convenient — albeit potentially problematic — partner.

“Europe should weigh the short-term gains of what appears to be an attractive deal with long-term strategic ramifications,” Brattberg said. “Europe needs to think long and hard if that’s a dependency it wants to live with.”

The US and Huawei have been at odds for years

How closely European countries choose to work with Huawei could greatly affect their relationships — many of them longstanding — with the United States.

“If a country adopts [Chinese technology] and puts it in some of their critical information systems, we won’t be able to share information with them, we won’t be able to work alongside them,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Fox Business Network last month.

Asked specifically what the US would do if European nations adopted Huawei technology, Pompeo said he wouldn’t comment specifically but added that “we’re not going to put American information at risk.”

There’s no question part of this stance comes from the Trump administration’s hardline China strategy to curb its growing economic power. But as Singer told me, there are three key, genuine reasons to worry about Huawei.

First, traditional cybersecurity concerns: Anything that passes through Huawei technology could become intelligence for China. Huawei denies that it would spy for China. “Despite the efforts to create fear about Huawei and to use politics to interfere with industry growth, we’re proud to say that our customers continue to trust us,” Ken Hu, a Huawei rotating chair, told reporters last December.

But Chinese law allows for the government to use pretty much anything it wants for espionage in the name of national security. So if Beijing wants to use Huawei to spy, it likely could.

Second, you can mostly guarantee security today — like check for any “back door” — but that only lasts until the next software update. So far, there is no public evidence that Huawei is actually spying for China, but there could be down the line.

Third, the more that Huawei and other Chinese companies grow, the more power they have in the world. That increases the risk of a monopoly, which could prove potentially disastrous, as those companies are linked to an authoritarian government. After all, there’s a chance we’ll all have to rely on the infrastructure of government-linked companies that aim to spy on all citizens.

For those and other reasons, the Trump administration wants to stop its allies from using Huawei technology.

It’s getting some help: Australia has already banned Huawei products, and Canada in December arrested a top executive at the company at America’s request for violating Iran sanctions.

But Germany’s latest announcement shows that tensions remain high, and they’ll only grow higher as America’s friends consider using the technology of its adversary.

Correction: A previous version of this article said Japan and New Zealand had banned Huawei from their nations’ 5G networks. Both countries are still open to working with Huawei.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/20/18274163/ ... wei-merkel

<8



POLITICS

Trump wants China to ‘double or triple’ its offer to buy US goods in trade negotiations, sources say

Kayla Tausche

KEY POINTS

U.S. officials seeking a China trade deal are focused on long-term changes to that nation’s economy.

But President Donald Trump is set on reducing the trade deficit.

He is pushing his negotiators to get China to agree to purchase more goods, according to two people briefed on discussions.

PUBLISHED THU, MAR 21 2019 • 10:42 AM EDT | UPDATED THU, MAR 21 2019 • 11:48 AM EDT

U.S. officials seeking a China trade deal are focused on long-term changes to that nation’s economy. But President Donald Trump is set on reducing the trade deficit, and is pushing his negotiators to get China to agree to purchase more goods, according to two people briefed on discussions.

China has offered to purchase up to $1.2 trillion in U.S. energy, agriculture and aircraft products over a period of six years. When the offer was first reported — a month and a half after it was discussed by Trump and President Xi Jinping at the G20 in Buenos Aires — the market jumped, a signal that investors viewed the offer as a substantial bargaining chip to win over the president.

But Trump has long wanted a number “double or triple” China’s $1.2 trillion proposal, these people said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the discussions. He renewed his desire for a larger purchase deal in recent weeks, they said, following data that revealed the U.S.-China trade gap was widening.

In 2018, the U.S. posted a record $891 billion trade deficit with China, according to figures released March 6 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The deficit of U.S. goods — the metric of most importance to Trump and his China hawks — reached a record $419 billion. The data showed a sharp decrease in China’s import of U.S. goods in the fourth quarter as trade tensions escalated.


Closing the trade deficit was a pillar of Trump’s 2016 campaign and a promise he wants to keep before he enters re-election season. Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No.2 House Democrat, seized on the data, saying Trump “flunked the test he set for himself.” A White House official declined to comment.

The worry, two sources said, is that a ballooning trade deficit would dwarf even a trillion-dollar investment that’s spread over a number of years. But assembling an exponentially larger proposal would face challenges.

Brad Setser, senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said China could boost the total figure in its offer if it further opened up its market to U.S. pork, beef, rice or corn, where there’s already existing demand.

But unless China dramatically and permanently shifts its sourcing of goods, or repackages previously disclosed orders, it would be “impossible” to reach a figure in the trillions.

“It’s a little hard to see how you get big numbers with honest accounting,” Setser said.

Further complicating any purchase offer is the limit to the items that could potentially be included. Boeing jets are the biggest-ticket items the Chinese could add, but China’s appetite to buy more has stalled with the global grounding of the 737 Max 8 and 9 jets. And while China wants to buy more semiconductors and advanced technology, U.S. officials have raised security concerns about allowing them to do so.

“If China’s not able to buy more Boeing jets — and China’s not allowed to buy sensitive technology and defense products — there’s not a lot of room to increase the preferred shopping list,” said Gene Ma, head of China Research at the Institute of International Finance.

Trump’s advisors have sought to steer his focus in negotiations to the long-term, or so-called structural, change issues in China’s economy that must be fixed to rebalance the trading relationship going forward. In congressional testimony, television interviews and briefings with reporters, they’ve consistently said no deal will happen without sustainable, enforceable changes.

Chinese officials have continued to propose offers that play to Trump’s deficit desires. Sitting across from Trump in the Oval Office in late January, Vice Premier Liu He announced that China would buy 5 million metric tons of soybeans — an announcement that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer later told reporters took him by surprise.

“The answer is yes — it was a surprise announcement, in the sense that I didn’t know about it until a very short time before,” Lighthizer said on Jan. 31.

In a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee a month later, Lighthizer talked about the views of Chinese Americans on existing tensions, and the areas where they agree with his own personal stance on talks.

“I have found that Chinese Americans ... will say, ‘Hang tough, we need structural change, this is the only way we are going to get structural change,’” Lighthizer told lawmakers. ”‘Don’t cave; don’t sell out for soybeans.’”

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/21/trump-w ... s-say.html

<9



SAD

Profiles in Chickenshit from the Grand Old Party as Trump Spits on John McCain's American Greatness

It’s time for McCain's old senate colleagues to tell the president to shut the f*ck up and stop smearing a real hero, or give up whatever dignity and decency they have left.

Rick Wilson

03.21.19 8:27 PM ET

Damn near every elected member of the Republican Party failed another easy test this week as Donald Trump lost his grip on reality and spent days attacking the late Senator John McCain. They tripped over their own dicks in the face of Trump’s egregious bullying, racing for political cover and sacrificing their few remaining shreds of dignity because they fear this mad president more than they love their own honor.

Starting this weekend, Trump has tweeted six days worth of escalating insults on Twitter and in person at a rival who died seven months ago. Like I said, it’s an easy test: as elected leaders, as Republicans, as conservatives, as Americans, this was a moment to honor McCain and to call out the President by name for failing to do so.

Party loyalty isn’t a suicide pact… or is it?

Just two members of the Senate RINO caucus spoke with clarity and direction. Mitt Romney, hated by the Trump faction for, well, everything, said what was needed.

Johnny Isakson of Georgia, himself a Vietnam-era veteran, took the strongest and most courageous stand, telling the Washington Post:

“America deserves better, the people deserve better, and nobody — regardless of their position — is above common decency and respect for people that risk their life for your life. When the president is saying that he doesn’t respect John McCain and he’s never going to respect John McCain and all these kids are out there listening to the president of the United States talk that way about the most decorated senator in history who is dead it just sets the worst tone possible.”

The rest of the Republican Senate caucus, men and women who served with John McCain, in some cases for decades, did nothing better than vague mumblings.

In the House, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, spoke clearly and strongly — his voice resonating even more given the silence around it from most of his Republican colleagues there.

Let me help the rest of our supposed leaders. Here’s what you say to Donald Trump as he continues to Ahab McCain’s legacy:

John McCain was an American hero with more courage and decency than you will ever have. You are wrong and your behavior is despicable, Mr. President. For the good of the country, please shut the f*ck up.

Too much? Try:

John McCain is a role model and example for every American. His heroism and service to our country or a light in a dark time and I am honored to follow his example of public service and commitment to the nation before politics, and people before party. You would be best served by shutting the f*ck up.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-spi ... t?ref=home

<10


Thursday's Mini-Report, 3.21.19

Today's edition of quick hits:

By Steve Benen 03/21/19 05:30PM

* New Zealand takes swift action: "New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced plans to ban nearly all military-style semi-automatic and assault rifles on Thursday, six days after a gunman killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch."

* I have a hunch he hasn't thought this through: "President Donald Trump said Thursday that it's time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, an announcement that signals a shift in U.S. policy and comes ahead of the Israeli prime minister's planned visit next week to the White House."

* Houston: "National Guard troops have been called in and residents were told to stay inside after elevated levels of benzene were detected early Thursday near a Houston-area petrochemicals storage facility that caught fire this week."

* I hope you saw Rachel's coverage of this last night: "Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein's history of paying underage girls for sex. Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties."

* I didn't realize how significant this problem is: "In her first three months in Congress, aides say, enough people have threatened to murder [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)] that Capitol Police trained her staff to perform risk assessments of her visitors."

* I wonder what he'll say: "Former President Barack Obama will meet with House Democratic freshmen on Monday, according to an invitation obtained by POLITICO. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is hosting the reception, which will occur Monday evening after House votes, to 'celebrate the freshman class of the 116th Congress.' The event is only for members and limited to the 60-plus freshman class."


On Trump-Putin talks, White House to keep info from Congress

By Steve Benen

03/21/19 02:52 PM

Ahead of his July 2018 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump insisted that the meeting be limited to a one-on-one discussion, with no other U.S. officials, even members of the Trump cabinet, participating. As regular readers know, the White House never exactly explained why, but the assumption throughout the government was that the American leader would brief U.S. officials on the details of the meeting afterwards.

That didn’t happen. White House officials, military leaders, and even Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats all conceded in the days following the summit that they didn’t fully know what transpired behind closed doors.

It wasn’t an isolated incident. The Washington Post reported a couple of months ago that Trump has “gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations” with the Russian autocrat who attacked our elections in 2016 in order to put the Republican in power – at one point even “talking possession” of his own interpreter’s notes after a conversation with Putin.

Soon after the article ran, Trump sat down for one of his many Fox News interviews and was asked whether he’d release information about his conversations with Putin. “I would,” Trump replied. “I don’t care…. I’m not keeping anything under wraps.”

Actually, he is. Politico reported this afternoon:

*The White House on Thursday rejected congressional Democrats’ demands for documents relating to President Donald Trump’s private discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin — escalating tensions between the Trump administration and Congress over a crucial piece of Democrats’ oversight ambitions. […]

In his letter to Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), and Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), [White House Counsel Pat Cipollone] cited precedents going back to the George Washington and Bill Clinton administrations to assert Trump’s authority to conduct foreign affairs, and to argue that Congress has no right to information about one-on-one conversations between the president and a foreign leader.*

In general, that principle may seem reasonable. But in the Trump era, it’s not quite that simple.

In this case, Congress didn’t just request information on random interactions between the American president and one of his foreign counterparts. Rather, lawmakers want to know about communications between Trump and the foreign adversary who attacked our democracy – and who, many officials fear, may have compromised the man in the Oval Office.

The White House’s dismissal of the congressional request is probably not the final word on the subject. It’s likely House committee chairs will weigh issuing subpoenas, which may very well lead to some contentious court fights.

If the president was telling the truth in January, and he’s “not keeping anything under wraps” with regard to his communications with Putin, shouldn’t the White House be only too pleased to err on the side of disclosure?


On economic data, it’s Trump vs the Trump administration

By Steve Benen

03/21/19 11:20 AM—UPDATED 03/21/19 11:22 AM

For quite a while, Donald Trump was so convinced of his ability to unleash unprecedented economic growth that he made rather ridiculous promises to the public. As we we discussed a few months ago, Candidate Trump routinely promised “4% annual economic growth” – and in some cases, he suggested his policies could push growth to as high as 6%.

After the election, someone must’ve told the president that those promises were wildly unrealistic, so the White House moved the goalposts a bit, lowering the target to 3% GDP growth.

In Trump’s first year in office, economic growth reached 2.2%, which wasn’t bad, though it was short of the Republican’s promises. In his second year, according to Trump’s own Commerce Department, growth reached 2.9% – which is certainly very close to the president’s revised goal, but not quite the number Trump had in mind. (It was the same growth Americans saw in 2015, the year Trump launched his campaign, when he said the economy was awful.)

And yet, Trump and the Trump administration apparently aren’t on the same page. For example, a few weeks ago, the White House published a curious report insisting that “economic growth has reached 3 percent for the first time in more than a decade,” adding that all of the credit should go the president. Yesterday, at event in Ohio, Trump was also eager to boast about crossing the threshold.

*“We just came out with numbers – the Economic Report of the President: 3.1 percent GDP. The first time in 14 years that we cracked 3, right? That’s pretty good – 3.1. The press tried to make it 2.9. I said, ‘It’s not 2.9.’ What they did is they took odd months. I said, ‘No, no, no. You go from January to December. You don’t take certain months and add them up.’ Because I said, ‘We’re going to break 3.’ And we did. We did 3.1.

“The fake news tried to change it but we caught them. I said – I said, ‘You know, we didn’t break the 3. Oh, that’s terrible.’ They said, ‘Yes, sir, you did. They just took odd months.’ I said, ‘No, no, January to December.’ 3.1 percent, first time in 14 years. Congratulations. Sort of incredible. It’s true.”*

It’s not actually true.

Admittedly, this can get a little confusing, but the White House is playing an annoying little game. Here, for example, is the actual report from the Trump administration’s own Bureau of Economic Analysis. It says, “Real GDP increased 2.9 percent in 2018.”

Twice yesterday, Trump tried to tell an audience in Ohio that journalists “tried to change it.” That’s silly. The media reported 2.9% growth because that’s what Trump’s own Commerce Department said in published documents.

So why is the president running around bragging about 3.1% if his own team said it’s 2.9%? The New York Times noted overnight, “This claim conflates two different gross domestic product growth figures. The 3.1 percent figure refers to the increase in G.D.P. from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2018. The 2.9 percent figure refers to the increase in economic output from the annual level.”

What’s more, if we play Trump’s game and look at GDP numbers the way he suddenly wants us to, he ends up stepping on one of his other talking points: through this lens, economic growth topped 3% in 2015, too, which means the president can’t claim to have crossed the 3% threshold for the “first time in 14 years.”

The circumstances matter, of course. Trump not only made bold promises during his campaign, he also signed a massive package of Republican tax breaks, which he and other GOP leaders insisted would send the economy into overdrive. That’s not what happened.

But to play foolish numbers games like these is annoying and dishonest.


Are Florida Republicans really pursuing a new ‘poll tax’?

By Steve Benen

03/21/19 10:45 AM

It’s been a few months since voters in Florida easily approved a ballot measure called Amendment 4, which restored the voting rights of an estimated 1.5 million former felons. It was one of the biggest and most consequential steps forward for voting rights in the United States in decades.

Republicans in the Sunshine State didn’t appear to be especially pleased with the change. For example, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a former far-right congressman, was accused of trying to “slow walk the implementation” of the voter-approved measure. Now, the GOP-controlled legislature is eyeing an important new change to the law, which would be a major step backwards. Politico reported this week:

*A bill that would limit voting rights that ex-offenders gained under the ballot measure cleared its first stop in a Republican-controlled Florida House committee on a party-line vote Tuesday, and the president of the state Senate said he expects his chamber to draw up a companion measure.

Democrats and others condemned the move, likening the legislation to a poll tax imposed on African-Americans during the Jim Crow era.*

The debate is relatively straightforward: the Republican proposal would allow former felons to have their voting rights restored, as the new law demands, just so long as they first pay court costs and fines associated with their previous misdeeds. Those who don’t pay – or can’t afford to pay – wouldn’t be able to register to vote.

Was this a condition in the voter-approved Amendment 4? No, but many GOP state policymakers believe it’s a worthwhile addition.

Many Democrats and voting-rights advocates have labeled the Republican proposal a “poll tax,” and it’s easy to understand why.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern summarized the problem nicely:

*To understand why this provision is a poison pill, it’s important to understand the system of “cash-register justice” practiced by Florida and many other states. To finance its criminal justice system, Florida imposes both fines and “user fees” on defendants upon conviction. Individuals may be fined up to $500,000 for their crime, then saddled with a mind-boggling array of administrative fees.

Defendants must pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to fund court costs, “crime prevention” programs, and local jails. They must pay a fee to apply for a public defender, to receive medical treatment in prison, to reinstate a suspended driver’s license, and to participate in drug abuse treatment. Those who receive probation must pay “surcharges” to fund their supervision or room-and-board at a halfway house, as well as electronic monitoring and urinalysis.*

Most of the fees and fines are never paid in full, largely because former felons usually can’t cover the costs. And that’s where the new GOP proposal enters the picture: those who don’t pay won’t be eligible to vote, the voter-passed amendment notwithstanding.

The practical effects of this are likely to be extraordinary: Amendment 4 was expected to re-enfranchise 1.5 million Floridians, but the new state legislation will disenfranchise more than a third of them.

It’s not yet a done deal – we’ve only reached the stage at which the bill passed a state House committee – but in Florida, the state House, the state Senate, the state Supreme Court, and the governor’s office are all controlled by Republicans.


Trump’s offensive against McCain isn’t just ugly, it’s also dishonest

By Steve Benen

03/21/19 08:00 AM

In the wake of John McCain’s passing, Donald Trump made no real effort to hide his contempt for the late senator, taking cheap and unnecessary shots at the Arizonan for months. This week, however, the presidential campaign against McCain took an even darker turn.

Over the weekend, Trump lashed out at McCain for his grades at the Naval Academy, his opposition to a far-right health care gambit, and his willingness to turn the Steele dossier over to the FBI – which, incidentally, the president lied about. On Tuesday, Trump kept the offensive going during a White House visit with a foreign leader.

Congressional Republicans have reportedly begged the president to stop. Instead, yesterday, Trump did the opposite.

*President Donald Trump hit the late Sen. John McCain with a fresh attack Wednesday, hammering the former prisoner of war as weak on veterans issues – and griping about the Arizona Republican’s funeral – during a speech at an Army tank plant in Lima, Ohio.*

The full transcript of the remarks is online, and even by Trump standards, the speech was bizarre. He whined, for example, that he wasn’t thanked for McCain’s funeral, which is staggering in its pettiness, and which rested on a wild exaggeration of the president’s actual role in the services.

The president also suggested his Veterans Choice Act was proof that McCain “didn’t get the job done” for veterans, despite the fact that the law was signed into law before Trump took office – and was co-sponsored by McCain.

It’s one thing for a president to lash out publicly at a dead man who can’t defend himself; it’s something else for the president to do so while lying.

The larger question, meanwhile, is why in the world Trump is doing this.

The Washington Post reported overnight, “Some close to the president have attributed his frustrations to worrying over the looming report on Russian election interference from the special counsel’s office … while others said he simply has fewer advisers to restrain him from airing his grievances.”

Neither explanation casts the president in a flattering light. If the reporting is correct, Trump is either throwing a tantrum because he can’t handle the pressure, or because there aren’t enough grown-ups in the West Wing to restrain his worst impulses.

Or perhaps both.

For those concerned with the president’s stability, his frenzied anti-McCain rants are only going to raise the volume on some awkward questions.

<

To all my liberal friends out there - - the liberal media and democrat politician talking heads on TV were not mistaken. They just lied to you non stop the last couple years to hurt the agenda of a president of the opposite party. Some were worse than that. They wanted a soft coup. In 21st century USA.

As sad as that is, the saddest part is I bet none of you care.

In fairness, the president has lied or made misleading statements going on 9000 times in those two years. The clock keeps running.

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Mueller concludes Russia-Trump probe; no new indictments

By ERIC TUCKER, MICHAEL BALSAMO and CHAD DAY

23 minutes ago 3.22.19

WASHINGTON (AP) — Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday turned over his long-awaited final report on the contentious Russia investigation, ending a probe that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump’s presidency with no new charges but launching a fresh wave of political battles over the still-confidential findings.

The 22-month probe ended without additional indictments by Mueller despite public speculation by congressional Democrats and others that members of the president’s family, including his oldest son, could themselves wind up facing charges.

The Justice Department said the report was delivered by a security officer Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and then it went to Attorney General William Barr. Word of the delivery triggered reactions across Washington, including Democrats’ demands that it be released to the public and Republicans’ contentions that it ended two years of wasted time and money.

The next step is up to Barr, who is charged with writing his own account of Mueller’s findings and sending it to Congress. In a letter to lawmakers , he declared he was committed to transparency and speed. He said he could provide the special counsel’s “principal findings” to Congress this weekend, but that likely won’t be the last of the information he provides to lawmakers or the public.

The attorney general said the Justice Department had not denied any request from the special counsel, something Barr would have been required to disclose to ensure there was no political inference.

The White House sought to keep some distance, saying it had not seen or been briefed on the document.

With no details released at this point, it’s not known whether Mueller’s report answers the core questions of his investigation: Did Trump’s campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of the celebrity businessman? Also, did Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?

But the delivery of the report does mean the investigation has concluded without any public charges of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, or of obstruction by the president. A Justice Department official confirmed Friday that Mueller was not recommending any further indictments.

That person, who described the document as “comprehensive,” was not authorized to discuss the probe and asked for anonymity.

That’s good news for a handful of Trump associates and family members dogged by speculation of possible wrongdoing. They include Donald Trump Jr., who had a role in arranging a Trump Tower meeting at the height of the 2016 election campaign with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was interviewed at least twice by Mueller’s prosecutor. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Mueller might have referred additional investigations to the Justice Department.

All told, Mueller charged 34 people, including the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and three Russian companies. Twenty-five Russians were indicted on charges related to election interference, accused either of hacking Democratic email accounts during the campaign or of orchestrating a social media campaign that spread disinformation on the internet. Five Trump aides pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller and a sixth, longtime confidant Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied to Congress and engaged in witness tampering.

It’s unclear what steps Mueller will take if he uncovered what he believes to be criminal wrongdoing by Trump, in light of Justice Department legal opinions that have held that sitting presidents may not be indicted.

The mere delivery of a confidential report set off swift, full-throated demands from Democrats for full release of Mueller’s findings.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared it “imperative” to make the full report public, a call echoed by several Democrats vying to challenge Trump in 2020.

“The American people have a right to the truth,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement.

Democrats also expressed concern that Trump would try to get a “sneak preview” of the findings.

“The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,” they said in a joint statement.

It was not clear whether Trump, who is spending the weekend at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, would have early access to Mueller’s findings. Spokeswoman Sarah Sanders suggested the White House would not interfere, saying “we look forward to the process taking its course.” But Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, told The Associated Press the legal team would seek to get “an early look” at the findings before they were made public.

He said it would be “appropriate” for the White House to be able “to review matters of executive privilege” but he had received no assurances from the Department of Justice. He later softened his stance, saying the decision was “up to DOJ and we are confident it will be handled properly.”

Barr’s chief of staff called White House Counsel Emmet Flood Friday about 20 minutes before notifying lawmakers of the report’s arrival. Barr’s congressional letter went to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary committees.

The chairman of the Senate panel, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, was keynote speaker Friday night at a Palm Beach County GOP dinner attended by Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Barr has said he wants to make as much public as possible, and that any efforts to withhold details will prompt a tussle between the Justice Department and lawmakers who may subpoena Mueller and his investigators to testify before Congress. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., threatened a subpoena Friday.

Such a move would likely be vigorously contested by the Trump administration.

The conclusion of Mueller’s investigation does not remove legal peril for the president . Trump faces a separate Justice Department investigation in New York into hush money payments during the campaign to two women who say they had sex with him years before the election. He’s also been implicated in a potential campaign finance violation by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who says Trump asked him to arrange the transactions. Federal prosecutors, also in New York, have been investigating foreign contributions made to the president’s inaugural committee.

No matter the findings in Mueller’s report, the investigation has already illuminated Russia’s assault on the American political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts.

The special counsel brought a sweeping indictment accusing Russian military intelligence officers of hacking Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and other Democratic groups during the 2016 campaign. He charged another group of Russians with carrying out a large-scale social media disinformation campaign against the American political process that also sought to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Closer to the president, Mueller secured convictions against a campaign chairman who cheated banks and dodged his taxes, a national security adviser who lied about his Russian contacts and a campaign aide who misled the FBI about his knowledge of stolen emails.

Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations arising from the hush money payments and in the Mueller probe to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. Another Trump confidant, Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails ultimately released by WikiLeaks. It’s unclear whether any of the aides who have been convicted, all of whom have pleaded guilty and cooperated with the investigators, might angle for a pardon. Trump has left open the idea of pardons.

Along the way, Trump lawyers and advisers repeatedly evolved their public defenses to deal with the onslaught of allegations from the investigation. Where once Trump and his aides had maintained there were no connections between the campaign and Russia, by the end of the probe Trump attorney Giuliani was routinely making the argument that even if the two sides did collude, it wasn’t necessarily a crime. The goalpost shifting reflected the administration’s challenge in adopting a singular narrative to fend off allegations.

Equally central to Mueller’s work was his inquiry into whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation. Since the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017, Trump has increasingly tried to undermine the probe by calling it a “witch hunt” and repeatedly proclaiming there was “NO COLLUSION” with Russia.

But one week before Mueller’s appointment, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, later saying he was thinking of “this Russia thing” at the time.

He mercilessly harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation two months before Mueller was named special counsel, a move that left the president without a perceived loyalist atop the probe. And he helped draft a misleading statement on Air Force One as the Trump Tower meeting between his eldest son and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was about to become public.

Even as Trump blasted Mueller’s team, his White House and campaign produced thousands of documents for the special counsel, and dozens of his aides were interviewed. The president submitted written answers to Mueller regarding the Russia investigation, but he refused to be interviewed.

https://www.apnews.com/99cb78f4c67b431b9f3823b06a89179b

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POLITICS

What Mueller Leaves Behind

The attorney general says he may be able to advise Congress of the special counsel’s principal conclusions as early as this weekend.

NATASHA BERTRAND

5:14 PM ET 3.22.19

After one year, 10 months, and six days, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has submitted his final report to the attorney general, signaling the end of his investigation into a potential conspiracy between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Mueller’s pace has been breakneck, legal experts tell me—especially for a complicated criminal investigation that involves foreign nationals and the Kremlin, an adversarial government. The next-shortest special-counsel inquiry was the three-and-a-half-year investigation of the Plame affair, under President George W. Bush; the longest looked into the Iran-Contra scandal, under President Ronald Reagan, which lasted nearly seven years. Still, former FBI agents have expressed surprise that Mueller ended his probe without ever personally interviewing its central target: Donald Trump.

The content of the special counsel’s report is still unknown—Mueller delivered it to Attorney General William Barr on Friday, and now it’s up to Barr to write his own summary of the findings, which will then go to Congress.

While aspects of the central pieces of Mueller’s investigation—conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and kompromat, the Russians’ practice of collecting damaging information about public figures to blackmail them with—have been revealed publicly through indictments and press-friendly witnesses, the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, and Mueller’s own legacy, still hang in the balance. Did Trump’s campaign knowingly work with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton and win the election? And how much was Mueller actually able to uncover?

Here are the threads Mueller has begun to publicly unravel—and the lingering mysteries that might fall to Congress to solve.

Conspiracy

To date, Mueller has leveled the conspiracy charges most relevant to the core of his probe—Russia’s election interference—at Russian nationals. In February 2018, his office indicted 13 Russians connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg that flooded the internet with propaganda and divisive political content leading up to the election. Beginning in 2014, Mueller wrote, the defendants “knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other … to defraud the United States” by influencing U.S. political processes in an operation they dubbed “Project Lakhta.” Two of the defendants, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva, actually traveled to the United States in the summer of 2014 to “gather intelligence” for the project, according to the indictment. The indictment did not make a judgment as to whether the results of the election were impacted, or whether collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia occurred.

Months later, and just days before Trump’s bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Mueller pounced again: He indicted 12 Russian military-intelligence officers, alleging that they had hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and top staffers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (The entire contents of the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email inbox, stolen by Russia in March 2016, were dumped by WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood tape damaging to Trump was released by The Washington Post.)

Again, though, Mueller stopped short of alleging any kind of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. The closest he came was this sentence: “On or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office” (emphasis mine). By using the words for the first time, Mueller appeared to be emphasizing the fact that the hackers’ activity that day was unique—a significant detail, given another major event that took place on July 27, 2016: Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening,” speech, in which he implored Moscow to find Clinton’s emails.

The closest Mueller has publicly come so far to establishing a link between Trump’s campaign and the Russian hackers is through Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant whom Mueller charged in January with obstruction of justice, making false statements to Congress, and witness tampering. In a court filing last month, Mueller linked Stone directly to one of the Russian military-intelligence (GRU) officers, writing that the search warrants his team conducted against the GRU revealed that Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious online persona created by the Russians, “interacted directly with Stone concerning other stolen materials posted separately online.” Stone has said he had “a short and innocuous Direct Message Exchange with Guccifer 2.0” in August 2016, in which Guccifer offered to “help” him. The January indictment of Stone also offered the clearest link yet between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and suggested that the campaign might have known about additional stolen emails before they were released.

Many questions are still unanswered. One of them is whether Stone and the Trump campaign coordinated WikiLeaks’ release of the stolen Podesta emails to distract from the Access Hollywood tape, which showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. The emails were dumped just minutes after the tape was released on October 7, 2016, and the Stone indictment reveals a tantalizing new detail: Shortly after the Podesta emails were released, a Trump-campaign associate texted Stone “Well done.”

Also unknown: the whereabouts of a Russia-linked professor from Malta who told the Trump-campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in April 2016—before the Russian hacks were made public—that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the “form of thousands of emails,” according to a criminal information filed by Mueller against Papadopoulos in October 2017. It is still not clear how the professor, Joseph Mifsud, seemed to know in advance that Russia sought to compromise Clinton’s candidacy, and he has virtually disappeared since his name was made public in 2017.

And what about the internal campaign polling data that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort gave to the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016? One of the top prosecutors on Mueller’s team, Andrew Weissmann, said in a closed-door hearing last month that this episode goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” But it has yet to be resolved in either court filings or hearings in Manafort’s case—he was sentenced last week to serve about seven years in prison for tax and bank fraud and failing to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine.

The extent to which Manafort was using his high-level campaign role to curry favor with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska is also still unclear, as is the purpose of a meeting that another Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, had with Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen before the inauguration. A meeting that Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016, in which Kushner proposed setting up a secret back-channel line of communication to Moscow using the Russian embassy, has also never been fully explained. Nor has Kushner’s meeting around the same time with Sergey Gorkov, the CEO of the Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank and a close friend of Putin’s. The meeting came as Kushner was trying to find investors for a Fifth Avenue office building in Manhattan. (Reuters reported in 2017 that the FBI was examining whether Gorkov suggested to Kushner that Russian banks could finance Trump associates’ business ventures if U.S. sanctions on Russia were lifted or relaxed.) The Kremlin and the White House have provided conflicting explanations for why Kushner met privately with Gorkov in the first place.

A 2017 meeting in the Seychelles involving the informal Trump-campaign adviser Erik Prince and another Russian banker also remains a mystery, as does a proposed peace plan for Ukraine that Cohen delivered to the White House in January 2017, which would involve lifting sanctions on Russia. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s motivations for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak about sanctions—a felony to which he pleaded guilty in December 2017—are similarly unclear. (Flynn has been cooperating with Mueller for more than a year.) Just days after Trump took office, though, his administration looked into lifting the sanctions that former President Barack Obama had imposed on Russia over its meddling in the 2016 election, raising questions about whether some kind of quid pro quo had occurred.

And one of the biggest lingering mysteries of all: Why did a computer server for Alfa Bank, a private Russian bank led by oligarchs with close ties to Putin, convey a disproportionate interest in reaching a server used by the Trump Organization during the campaign? The server activity has been investigated in-depth by journalists and the FBI. But a conclusion has never been reached.

Obstruction of Justice

Much has been reported about the special counsel’s interest in whether Trump obstructed justice—a felony—when he asked former FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn in February 2017; fired Comey in May 2017; and, in July 2017, drafted a misleading statement about a meeting his campaign had with Russians at the height of the election. But Mueller has revealed virtually nothing about that line of inquiry in court filings, perhaps out of sensitivity to the Justice Department policy that forbids the indictment of a sitting president. Whether he addresses it in his final report is an open question.

Even so, we already know a lot about what Mueller has been interested in. According to The New York Times, Mueller has been examining how far Trump went to keep Flynn in his orbit and safe from prosecution after the White House learned that the FBI was examining Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak during the transition period. Mueller has also been investigating Trump’s decision to fire Comey a few months after asking him, unsuccessfully, for both his loyalty and to let Flynn “go.” Mueller is also reportedly interested in why Trump was so angry with then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia probe, and wants to know more about Trump’s attempts to fire him after he was appointed—attempts that were reportedly thwarted by the president’s staff.

Despite Trump’s claim that Comey was fired because of how he handled the Clinton-email probe, Trump reportedly told Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that firing Comey, whom he described as a “nut job,” had eased the pressure of the ongoing Russia investigation. “I just fired the head of the FBI,” Trump told the Russians, according to a document summarizing the meeting that was read to the Times. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

After Comey’s firing, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into the president himself—an unprecedented move—to determine whether he was acting as a secret Russian agent. The obstruction inquiry was folded into that broader counterintelligence probe, according to the acting FBI director at the time, Andrew McCabe. Mueller took over the entire Russia investigation, including the counterintelligence probe into the president, days later. The question the FBI was trying to answer—whether Trump was acting at Russia’s behest rather than in U.S. interests—remains an open one.

And then there’s the infamous Trump Tower meeting with the Russians at the height of the election—and the misleading statement that followed. In July 2017, as Trump and his aides were flying back to the U.S. from a whirlwind trip to Poland and Germany, The New York Times published what seemed like a smoking gun: Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner had attended a meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Clinton. When news of the meeting broke, Trump—who has insisted that he did not know about the meeting until it was reported in the Times—helped write a statement for his son that omitted any reference to compromising information about Clinton; it said the meeting was instead about Russia’s adoption policy, a topic the president had discussed the day before with Putin at the G20 Summit. Mueller has made that misleading statement a focus of his investigation, according to questions drafted by the president’s lawyers based on their conversations with Mueller’s team.

Kompromat

The House Intelligence Committee, led by Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, is now fixated on investigating one overarching question: Is the president currently compromised by Russia? Mueller has not publicly drawn any conclusions about how Trump’s business dealings or personal behavior might have made him vulnerable to blackmail before—and perhaps even during—his time in office. But in charges filed last year against Cohen, Mueller provided the public with evidence, for the first time, that could show that Trump was compromised by Russia while Putin was waging a direct attack on the 2016 election.

Cohen admitted in federal court in New York in November that he lied to Congress about how often he and Trump had spoken about building a Trump Tower in Moscow in 2016, and acknowledged that he had tried to organize a trip for Trump to Russia in 2016 to scope out the potential project after Trump clinched the Republican nomination. He lied both to minimize Trump’s link to the Moscow project and to limit “the ongoing Russia investigations,” according to Mueller’s team. Cohen, who sat for more than 70 hours of interviews with Mueller’s team last year after deciding to cooperate, also contacted the Kremlin “asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project” in January 2016, according to Mueller. Cohen was sentenced in December to serve three years in prison for tax and bank-fraud crimes and making false statements to Congress.

Trump had insisted both during and after the election that he had no business ties to Russia, and his alleged double-dealing could have allowed Russia to use the project—which Trump had been pursuing for decades— as leverage, intelligence experts told me. The project might also contextualize Trump’s consistent and inexplicable praise for Putin along the campaign trail. “This shows motive: Trump’s desire to pursue a major deal in Russia,” Jens David Ohlin, the vice dean of Cornell Law School, told me at the time. “It finally gives Mueller some direct evidence that Trump’s associates continued to pursue business opportunities in Russia during the campaign, which would explain why Trump was, and continues to be, so deferential to Russia in general and Putin in particular. The motive was financial.”

A dossier written by the former British spy Christopher Steele in 2016, which outlined the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia during the election, raised another possibility: that Trump engaged in lewd behavior during a trip to Moscow in 2013, which was recorded and is now being held over his head. According to the dossier, the Kremlin tried to exploit “Trump's personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable 'kompromat' (compromising material) on him.” Cohen told lawmakers last month that he had “no reason to believe” such a recording exists, and Trump has denied doing anything obscene while in Russia. His longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller reportedly told the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-door interview in 2017 that someone in Russia offered to send five prostitutes to Trump's Moscow hotel room in 2013, but that Schiller declined the offer on Trump’s behalf.

Mueller’s report is expected to address only criminal activity, so he might not be able to explain whether Trump has been compromised. But the president’s deference to Putin has largely continued throughout his time in office. In July 2018, for example, when the pair met for a bilateral summit in Helsinki, Trump stunned the world when he sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence community on questions about Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election and other bad behavior. “He tells me he didn’t do it,” Trump said of Putin, referring to the election interference. “I will tell you this, I don’t know why he would do it,” Trump said. The president has also been very secretive about his private conversations with Putin, to the point where he reportedly took his interpreter’s notes from a meeting he had with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017 and tore them up. Trump also wouldn’t allow any of his aides into his private meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

Trump’s bank of choice for decades, Deutsche Bank, is another area where Democrats say Mueller should be looking to find evidence that Trump might be compromised—the German bank was involved in a massive Russian money-laundering scandal and has loaned to Trump when no one else would. The House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees have already begun talks with the bank, which said in a statement that it plans to assist the lawmakers “in their official oversight functions.”

“If the special counsel hasn’t subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, he can’t be doing much of a money-laundering investigation,” Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, said last month. “So, that’s what concerns me—that that red line has been enforced, whether by the deputy attorney general or by some other party at the Justice Department. But that leaves the country exposed.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... mp/585526/

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U.S.

ROBERT MUELLER HAS FINISHED HIS REPORT—

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS NEXT AND WHEN THE PUBLIC WILL ACTUALLY SEE IT

BY NICOLE GOODKIND

ON 3/22/19 AT 5:52 PM EDT

Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and submitted his report to the Justice Department for review by Attorney General William Barr.

President Donald Trump said this week that he had no problem sharing the final document with the American public, but we won’t get to see the report right away. Here’s what happens next.

When Will We Be Able to See the Full Report?

This isn't yet clear, or guaranteed.

Barr, who has overseen the investigation, has said he wants to release as much information to the general public as possible, but he will ultimately decide and likely write the memo that the public sees. That means that what we end up reading will be in his words, not Mueller’s, Barr said during a hearing last month.

For now, Barr said in Friday's letter to Congress that he is currently "reviewing" Mueller's report and he "may be in a position to advise [them] of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend."

From there, it will still be up to Barr if and when the public sees this information, if at all.

What Will Be in Barr’s Memo?

Barr said that there will likely be two reports in the end, a confidential version meant for high-ranking Department of Justice officials and another for ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees and the public. The level of detail in the congressional memo is also unclear, as Barr is only required by law to tell Congress that the investigation has concluded and describe any situations in which he believed Mueller’s recommendations were unwarranted and were not pursued. His Friday letter stated that there were "no such instances."

The report could also be pretty short. The Department of Justice only requires that Mueller submit a report that explains whether he recommends or does not recommend pursuing prosecutions and give his reasoning.

Will We Hear From Mueller?

It seems unlikely that Mueller or Barr will hold a press conference with the information or the results of the report, but Congress could attempt to subpoena Mueller and his report.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, has suggested that he might try to do just that. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, also a Democrat, has said that he will attempt to subpoena all of the information that went into the report, including interview transcripts.

President Donald Trump, however, has purview over the Department of Justice and could direct them to refuse the subpoena, if he so wishes.

Is Impeachment Coming?

It's very, very unlikely. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have made it pretty clear that unless the findings of this report are shocking, they will not pursue impeachment of President Trump. And from everything we've heard so far, they won't be.

https://www.newsweek.com/robert-mueller ... ow-1372890

<4



POLITICS - CONGRESS

THE FIGHT OVER THE MUELLER REPORT IS JUST BEGINNING.

HERE’S WHAT COMES NEXT

BY ALANA ABRAMSON UPDATED: MARCH 22, 2019 7:07 PM ET

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian collusion in the 2016 election has crossed the finish line after more than two years. But for Congress, the fight is just beginning.

Attorney General William Barr wrote a letter which was hand-delivered to the top officials on the judiciary committees in Congress Friday announcing that Mueller had submitted his report. Under current regulations, Barr is only required to relay a summary of the report’s contents to Congress — more specifically to the chairman and ranking members of the Judiciary committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Barr noted in the letter, addressed to those members, that he “may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.”

Although Barr stressed in his letter that he remains “committed to as much transparency as possible,” there is no requirement that he give Congress the full report. Congressional Democrats have made clear, however, that they expect nothing less than that. They also want access to any classified portions, so they can determine if they were properly done.

“Attorney General Barr must not give President Trump, his lawyers or his staff any ‘sneak preview’ of Special Counsel Mueller’s findings or evidence, and the White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement after Barr’s letter was circulated.

Democrats have been saying for months that they will fight tooth and nail to get the report publicized. “We’re going do everything in our legal and legislative powers to compel them to release the documents” said one House Democratic leadership aide.

First though, they are are hoping that they don’t have to do that. The three months since the Democrats regained the majority in the House of Representatives have dovetailed with impending rumors that Mueller was nearing the end of the probe. They have used this newfound power to try to force Barr to voluntarily comply with their requests. On Feb. 22, six Democratic committee chairs with the broadest oversight powers wrote a letter to Barr requesting they receive the report “without delay and to the maximum extent permitted by law.”

Shortly after Friday’s announcement the chairs released a joint statement reiterating these sentiments.

It is long-standing policy in the Department of Justice that a sitting President cannot be indicted. Consequently, punitive measures for any possible crimes Trump committed that would be laid out in the report would fall to Congress. Signed by Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings, Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel, Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal, Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, and Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters, the letter uses this argument to highlight why it is so crucial Barr meet their demands.

First though, they are are hoping that they don’t have to do that. The three months since the Democrats regained the majority in the House of Representatives have dovetailed with impending rumors that Mueller was nearing the end of the probe. They have used this newfound power to try to force Barr to voluntarily comply with their requests. On Feb. 22, six Democratic committee chairs with the broadest oversight powers wrote a letter to Barr requesting they receive the report “without delay and to the maximum extent permitted by law.”

Shortly after Friday’s announcement the chairs released a joint statement reiterating these sentiments.

It is long-standing policy in the Department of Justice that a sitting President cannot be indicted. Consequently, punitive measures for any possible crimes Trump committed that would be laid out in the report would fall to Congress. Signed by Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings, Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel, Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal, Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, and Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters, the letter uses this argument to highlight why it is so crucial Barr meet their demands.

“Congress could be the only institution currently situated to act on evidence of the President’s misconduct. To maintain that a sitting president cannot be indicted, and then to withhold evidence of wrongdoing from Congress because the President will not be charged, is to convert Department policy into the means for a cover-up,” the chairs wrote.

Less than three weeks later, the House unanimously passed a resolution calling for similar measures to the one laid out in the letter. While the resolution was non-binding, Democrats believe the fact that all but four Republicans voted for it will provide further ammunition to their argument to publicly release the report. (4 Republicans voted present). Polling is also in favor of this argument. A CNN poll from February found that nine in 10 Americans wanted the report to be public knowledge. Even President Trump, who continues to deride the probe as a “witch hunt” conceded something similar earlier this week

Of course, many Congressional Democrats have expressed skepticism this public pressure will persuade Barr to give them everything they want. “After watching Barr’s testimony during his confirmation hearing, I do not believe AG Barr intends to release the Mueller report in full to Congress,” said Rep Ted Lieu, a member of the judiciary committee.

There are several options if Democrats do not obtain the full report, although the full extent is not yet clear. Nadler, who chairs the judiciary committee, has told TIME that if it is not made public he will issue a subpoena it, and possibly even bring in Mueller to testify before the committee.

But for now, they are waiting on further information from Barr. Like the rest of the public, even some of the most powerful lawmakers in American are currently in a holding pattern.

http://time.com/5557297/mueller-report- ... -congress/

<5



US POLITICS

US Government Posts $234 Billion Deficit in February

Reuters

March 22, 2019 5:59 PM

The U.S. federal government posted a $234 billion budget deficit in February, according to data released Friday by the Treasury Department.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a $227 billion deficit for the month.

The Treasury said federal spending in February was $401 billion, up 8 percent from the same month in 2018, while receipts were $167 billion, up 7 percent compared to February 2018.

The deficit for the fiscal year to date was $544 billion, compared with $391 billion in the comparable period the year earlier.

When adjusted for calendar effects, the deficit was $547 billion for the fiscal year to date versus $439 billion in the comparable prior period.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-government ... 43529.html

<6



NEWS

EU Position On Golan Heights 'Unchanged' Despite Trump Comment

Last Updated: March 22, 2019 16:22 GMT

European Council President Donald Tusk has said the EU is holding its line on the Golan Heights despite U.S. President Donald Trump's statement that Israeli sovereignty over the territory should be recognized by Washington.

"The EU's position is well-known and has not changed," Tusk told a news conference on March 22 when asked to comment on Trump's remarks. The European Union does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the area, which it captured from Syria in 1967.

Turkey, Iran, and Syria have condemned Trump's statement, while Russia voiced hope Trump's comment will remain "just a call."

Trump said it was time that the United States "fully" recognized Israel's sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in 1967.

The Golan Heights is of "critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability," Trump tweeted on March 21.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on March 22 that Trump's move had brought the region to the edge of a new crisis. "We cannot allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights," Erdogan told a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Syria's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency SANA that Damascus "condemns in the strongest terms the irresponsible statements of [Trump] regarding the occupied Syrian Golan."

Trump's remark "affirms the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist occupation entity and its unlimited support for aggressive behavior," SANA added.

Syria and Israel have fought several direct and proxy wars over the past decades and have never made a peace deal.

Iran, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main military backers, condemned Trump's remark as dangerous.

"Trump's personal and ill-considered decision is dangerous and will only lead to further crises in the Middle East," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said on March 22.

The Kremlin voiced hope that Trump's statement would not be enacted. "It is just a call for now. Let's hope it will remain a call," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call.

Israel captured the 1,800-square-kilometer Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War.

In 1981, Israel extended its laws to the region, effectively annexing it, in a move that has not been recognized by the international community.

https://www.rferl.org/a/turkey-iran-syr ... 36091.html

<7



Home / China / Top News

Belt, Road high on visit agenda

By CHEN WEIHUA,ZHOU JIN | China Daily | Updated: 2019-03-22 02:01

President Xi Jinping left Beijing for Rome on Thursday, kicking off his first overseas trip of the year — one that is aimed at broadening areas of cooperation and injecting new impetus into Sino-European ties.

During his state visit to Italy, the first stop of a six-day tour that will take him to three nations, Xi and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte will jointly witness the signing of intergovernmental cooperation documents in fields of diplomacy, economy and trade, and culture, as well as commercial agreements in infrastructure, machinery and finance.

The two countries will also work to strengthen Belt and Road cooperation.

The ambassadors of the two countries said they also hope Xi's visit will send out a clear signal that China and Italy are joining hands in promoting open and fruitful cooperation, and will serve to uphold multilateralism and rules-based global trading.

"It is in the interest of the two peoples as well as the entire international community," said Italian Ambassador to China Ettore Sequi.

"We need to work together within a fair, rules-based international trade system on a level-playing field to pull the global economy back on a path of strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth," Sequi told China Daily in a written interview.

Further opening up of our economies, societies and cultures is also conducive to the development of the two countries, he added.

The Italian ambassador described the two countries as good trade partners whose bilateral trade has been growing steadily.

Last year, bilateral trade volume reached $54.23 billion amid a global economic downturn, and two-way investment between China and Italy exceeded $20 billion, according to sources at China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"We want to expand our exports to China, rebalance our trade deficit and bring more products and services from Italy to the Chinese market," Sequi said.

"Italy can offer the Chinese people quality, innovation, design, and customer care among other things," he added, noting that Italy has been closely watching the reforms and policies made by the Chinese government related to market access for foreign products and services.

Calling Italy "a trusted friend and good partner within the European Union", Chinese Ambassador to Italy Li Ruiyu said Xi's visit will open a new chapter in the bilateral relationship — one that has already been on a fast track for many years.

He described bilateral cooperation in various areas as being "full of vitality" and described high-level contacts between the two countries as "maintaining sound momentum".

The Italian government has responded positively to the Belt and Road Initiative, a move that Li said shows Italy believes there is much to explore in terms of win-win cooperation between the two countries.

Paolo Gentiloni, then prime minister of Italy, attended the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing in May 2017.

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio signed a memorandum of understanding with China covering third-party market cooperation during his visit to China last year.

Li said many Italian port cities are increasingly interested in participating in the infrastructure and logistical cooperation associated with the BRI, and that they have noted the investments made by China COSCO Shipping Ports and Port of Qingdao in expanding and modernizing the port of Vado Ligure, near Genoa.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20190 ... 0b1ddb.html

<8



China-Africa

China amongst those praised for environmental actions

By EDITH MUTETHYA | China Daily Global | Updated: 2019-03-22 09:13

As the world strives to fight pollution and protect the degraded environment, initiatives by China, Sweden, South Africa and the European Union have been praised by experts as outstanding examples of what is needed.

The three countries and the EU have invested in environmental protection projects that are pointing the way to the future, Paul Ekins, professor of resources and environmental policy at University College London, said during a news conference on the sidelines of the fourth United Nations Environment Assembly, held last week in Nairobi, Kenya.

He said China tops the list for renewable energy and has become the largest global producer, exporter and installer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles.

"China's deployment of renewable energy has enabled Africa to access solar power at affordable cost," he added.

In 2017, the China-Africa Renewable Energy Cooperation and Innovation Alliance was established in Beijing to boost cooperation between China and Africa on clean energy.

According to a memorandum of understanding signed on Aug 30, 2017, by the alliance and the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative, the alliance will establish power supplies and transmission systems and grid in Africa through public-private partnership projects.

Overall, China led the world in the building and financing of clean energy technology in 2017, according to the United States-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

The institute said that large Chinese international clean energy projects in 2017 totaled $44 billion, up from $32 billion the previous year. Additionally, Chinese manufacturers accounted for about 60 percent of global solar cell production.

Meanwhile, Ekins praised Sweden for aiming to become, by 2045, the first nation to be completely free of fossil fuels.

Through a goal set on Feb 2, 2017, Sweden also seeks net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2045.

The emissions covered are mainly from transportation, machinery, small industrial and energy plants, housing and agriculture.

Ekins also lauded South Africa for its decision to transition from coal to renewable energy. In 2010, South Africa set emissions reduction targets of 34 percent by 2020 and 42 percent by 2025.

"South Africa was built on coal. The country has enormous coal reserves. Hence, the transition is painful especially for coal miners. There must be big political pressure for the country not to move to that direction, but the government is working on the transition," Ekins said.

South Africa has the sixth-largest amount of coal worldwide, with 31 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves, equivalent to 11 percent of the world's total, according to Universal Coal Plc.

Joyce Msuya, the acting executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said the tough decisions and conversations taking place in South Africa are encouraging, especially because African countries are perceived as being slow to act on environmental protection.

"This is a good example because the government has to think about the number of jobs to be affected and the financing cost, noting that most of the African countries don't have significant financial resources that are required for such a transition," Msuya said.

However, Ekins said much remains to be done.

"No country is yet doing enough, some are doing more than others, some have made progress in some areas more than the others－just like China, Sweden, South Africa and the European Union－but all countries need to do more," he said.

Ekins said the sixth Global Environment Outlook report, released last week by the UN Environment Programme, raises concerns that speak to conditions of each country and challenges them to do more.

The report starkly warned that the world is unsustainably extracting natural resources and producing unmanageable quantities of waste, thereby degrading Earth's ecosystems and endangering the ecological foundations of society.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20190 ... b1ee0.html

<9



TRAGIC

Parkland Shooting Survivor Sydney Aiello Takes Her Own Life

Sydney Aiello, 19, was a senior when she survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Her friend Meadow was one of 17 people who died in the massacre.

Pilar Melendez

03.22.19 3:50 PM ET

Sydney Aiello—who survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead—took her own life on Sunday afternoon, authorities confirmed.

“Sydney spent 19 years writing her story as a beloved daughter, sister and friend to many,” the 19-year-old’s family wrote. “She lit up every room she entered. Sydney aspired to work in the medical field helping others in need.”

Aiello’s death was ruled a suicide by the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office, a spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

“The investigation is ongoing,” a Coconut Creek police spokesperson said, confirming authorities received a call about Aiello around 3:23 p.m. Sunday.

Describing her as a “vibrant young woman who was focused on her grades and a joy to be around,” Aiello’s mother, Cara Aiello, told CBS Miami that her daughter struggled with survivor’s guilt after the Parkland shooting and was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sydney Aiello was close friends with Meadow Pollack, one of the 17 people killed at the school on Feb. 14, 2018, when accused shooter Nikolas Cruz opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. Cruz, 19, is currently being held in Broward County jail.

“It’s terrible what happened. Meadow and Sydney were friends for a long, long time,” Meadow’s father, Andrew Pollack, told the Miami Herald on Friday, adding that his “heart goes out to those poor, poor parents.”

“Killing yourself is not the answer,” he added. “If anyone feels like that they have no one that can understand their pain, if there’s any student out there that’s having a hard time, please reach out to me on Twitter. I understand you. You aren’t alone.”

Sydney’s mother told CBS Miami that her daughter had been enrolled in college classes, but was struggling to attend because she was so afraid of entering a classroom.

“Beautiful Sydney with such a bright future was taken from us way too soon. My friend’s sister and someone dear to Meadow,” Hunter Pollack, Meadow’s brother, tweeted Wednesday, pointing users to a fundraising campaign set up by Aiello’s family to help cover her funeral costs.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/parkland- ... e?ref=home

<10


Friday's Mini-Report, 3.22.19

Today's edition of quick hits:

By Steve Benen 03/22/19 05:30PM

* This is not a drill: "Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday wrapped up his nearly two-year investigation into Donald Trump and Russia and sent his report to Attorney General Barr."

* Afghanistan: "Two U.S. service members were killed on Friday while conducting an operation in Afghanistan, according to a statement from the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Kabul."

* Brexit: "British Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday won approval of her request for an extension to the deadline for the U.K. to exit the European Union, delaying the departure until either early April or late May."

* Moving backwards:" North Korea staff members said they were pulling out due to instructions from 'the superior authority,' according to South Korea, which expressed its regret for the decision and hoped the North would soon return. The office opened last year amid detente between the two Koreas to facilitate close communication for joint projects."

* It's as if everything that was said about Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016 meant nothing: "The chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee revealed information on Thursday that he said showed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner used private messaging services for official White House business in a way that may have violated federal records laws."

* Expect litigation: "Phil Bryant, the Republican governor of Mississippi, on Thursday signed a bill largely banning abortions once doctors can detect a trace of a fetal heartbeat with an ultrasound, a milestone that can come as early as six weeks into pregnancy."

* Guilty plea: "A Florida man has pleaded guilty to sending a wave of pipe bombs to CNN and prominent critics of President Donald Trump. Cesar Sayoc entered the plea Thursday before a federal judge in New York."

* Virginia: "Schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, remained closed for a second consecutive day on Friday as police investigated a threat of racist violence against non-white students that had been posted online, officials said."


Under Trump, US is ‘losing its position as the global arbiter’

By Steve Benen

03/22/19 10:06 AM

The Trump administration has taken a hard line against using telecommunications equipment from Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, and on this issue, there’s a compelling reason to believe administration officials are correct.

But a funny thing happened when Team Trump launched an aggressive diplomatic lobbying campaign, urging U.S. partners to follow our lead: they ignored us. The New York Times reported this week, “Over the past several months, American officials have tried to pressure, scold and, increasingly, threaten other nations that are considering using Huawei in building fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless networks.”

In response, a variety of countries – including some of our close European allies – effectively blew off American concerns.

In isolation, a story like that reinforces doubts about the efficacy of Trump administration diplomacy, but there’s also a larger context. Axios had a good piece this morning noting the degree to which the United States has lost its role as a global leader – a dynamic that’s “accelerated” since Donald Trump took office.

*The United States is no longer driving the conversation on some of the biggest issues facing the world, both short- and long-term. Instead, foreign nations are making the decisions.

America is losing its position as the global arbiter for international norms — from airline safety to online privacy to the response to climate change.*

The controversy over the Boeing 737 MAX helped drive the point home. Whereas the United States has long been the dominant world power in air-travel standards, it was the Trump administration that followed others’ lead earlier this month.

Axios’ report added, “So on some of most consequential issues that will shape the world this century, the U.S. is taking a back seat, like privacy, foreign investment, climate and finance.” It spoke to one international observer who noted that when countries took major actions, their first thought used to be, “What will Washington think?”

That’s no longer the case.

To hear the Republican president tell it, he’s ushered in a new era in which the United States is held in the highest regard around the globe. “This is a new age,” Trump said at a White House event last month. “This is a very exciting time. It’s very exciting time for our country. Our country is respected again all over the world, they are respecting like we haven’t been respected in many, many years, I’ll tell you.”

This is, to be sure, one of the president’s favorite arguments. As we discussed at the time, Trump has convinced himself that the United States was a global laughingstock before he took office, and now the country commands respect and admiration the world over. As the Republican sees it, the reversal is the direct result of his awesomeness.

In reality, American influence on the international stage has reached depths without modern precedent – a dynamic bolstered by extensive polling showing a significant drop in respect for and trust in the United States since Americans elected a television personality to the White House.

This is not to say that we’ve permanently forfeited our role as a global leader, but to reclaim the position, it’s going to take time and effort, and in all likelihood, it may also require a significant change in the White House.


Under Trump, America increasingly loses its global lead

Nicholas Johnston - AXIOS

16 hours ago 3.22.19

The United States is no longer driving the conversation on some of the biggest issues facing the world, both short- and long-term. Instead, foreign nations are making the decisions.

Why it matters: America is losing its position as the global arbiter for international norms — from airline safety to online privacy to the response to climate change. It's a trend that predates President Trump, but it's accelerating now — and it makes Americans beholden to the decisions of foreigners.

Driving the news: The Boeing 737 MAX wasn't grounded last week because the U.S. took the lead. It was because the EU, China, and many other countries acted first, rattled by two plane crashes under similar circumstances.

The U.S. response "undermined American credibility as the pacesetter for global aircraft standards, while potentially ushering in an era in which international regulators — particularly those in China and Europe — assert growing clout," as the Washington Post put it.

And the U.S. is having trouble persuading other countries to follow its lead — especially on the Trump administration's efforts to block Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications equipment from being used in 5G.

Global trust in U.S. leadership is near record lows, according to Gallup; 31% of people worldwide surveyed last year said they approve of U.S. leadership, lower than Germany and China.

So on some of most consequential issues that will shape the world this century, the U.S. is taking a back seat, like privacy, foreign investment, climate and finance.

Our thought bubble, via a sentiment Axios World editor David Lawler says he's hearing more often: When countries take action around the world, their first thought used to be, "What will Washington think?" China's goal is to make them think about Beijing just as quickly, if not before.

The bottom line from Eurasia Group and GZERO Media president Ian Bremmer (punctuation his):

this didn’t start with trump (remember obama’s "assad must go" and "russia must leave ukraine"), but it's sped up dramatically with his america first-style unilateralism, weakening us-led institutions that had already been eroding through neglect. the geopolitical balance in the world is changing fast; american perceptions of those changes, not so much.


Why it matters that a judge blocked the Wisconsin GOP’s power grab

By Steve Benen

03/22/19 09:20 AM—UPDATED 03/22/19 11:31 AM

After struggling in recent elections cycles, Wisconsin Democrats scored major victories up and down the ballot in 2018. As regular readers may recall, voters in the Badger State elected a Democratic governor, re-elected a Democratic U.S. senator, re-elected a Democratic secretary of state, and elected a Democratic state attorney general. Even in the state legislature, Democratic candidates easily won the most votes.

Republicans didn’t exactly take their electoral setback gracefully. On the contrary, GOP officials scrambled to approve a power-grab, stripping offices Democrats had won of key powers, before the newly elected officials were even sworn in.

The Republicans’ posture was based on a staggering arrogance that democracy is an annoyance that must occasionally be ignored. It’s a sentiment that effectively asked, “Who are the voters to tell us what to do with state government?”

Not surprisingly, the scheme is now the subject of an important lawsuit – which, as of yesterday, isn’t going the GOP’s way.

*A judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Wisconsin Republicans’ contentious lame-duck laws limiting the powers of new Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who immediately used his restored authority to pull the state out of a multistate challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess brushed aside GOP concerns that the move would leave thousands of statutes passed in so-called extraordinary sessions susceptible to challenge. Republican legislative leaders vowed to appeal.*

In terms of the practical implications, it’s tempting to think the resolution of the fight will have to wait until various appeals are exhausted, but in one especially important area, that’s not quite right.

Before losing his re-election bid, then-Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed on to a ridiculous legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, intended to, among other things, gut protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. In 2018, the Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general – Tony Evers and Josh Kaul, respectively – told voters they’d withdraw Wisconsin from the lawsuit if voters elected them.

Evers and Kaul won, but the Republican power-grab blocked their ability to keep their promise – at least until yesterday.

Specifically, the GOP measure approved late last year prevented the Democratic officials from withdrawing from any lawsuit without the approval of the Republican-led legislature. (The GOP majority only exists because of gerrymandering.)

Yesterday, however, the existing dynamic was jolted by a state court, which halted the Republicans’ power-grab, and which invalidated the new law intended to tie the governor’s and the state attorney general’s hands.

With this in mind, less than two hours after the judge in this case temporarily blocked the GOP scheme, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor directed Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general to do what they promised voters they’d do: they ended the state’s support for the anti-health-care lawsuit.

Time will tell what the appeals process has in store for Wisconsin, but for now, the developments are good news for Democrats – and democrats.


Marine Corps leader sees ‘unacceptable risks’ in Trump’s border agenda

By Steve Benen

03/22/19 08:00 AM—UPDATED 03/22/19 08:05 AM

Donald Trump has bragged for months about deploying U.S. troops to the country’s southern border, though at times, it seems the president has been confused about their mission and the kind of work the troops can do on American soil. What Trump has not addressed, however, are the concerns of military leaders who disapprove of his efforts.

The L.A. Times reported yesterday:

*The commandant of the Marines has warned the Pentagon that deployments to the southwest border and funding transfers under the president’s emergency declaration, among other unexpected demands, have posed “unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency.”

In two internal memos, Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller said the “unplanned/unbudgeted” deployment along the border that President Trump ordered last fall, and shifts of other funds to support border security, had forced him to cancel or reduce planned military training in at least five countries, and delay urgent repairs at bases.*

The Times spoke with experts who were struck by the four-star general’s candor in the memos, which were dated earlier this week, and which were rather explicit in making the case that the White House’s agenda is adversely affecting military readiness.

Mandy Smithberger, a defense expert at the Project for Government Oversight, told the newspaper, “It’s pretty unusual for the commandant to be raising concerns that … a top political priority for the president is undermining the ability of the Marine Corps to do the training they need.”

If the Marine Corps commandant were alone in his concerns, they’d still be notable, but the significance of Neller’s memos are amplified by a larger pattern.

It was, after all, just last month when Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the four-star Air Force general in charge of domestic defense, told Congress that there is no national emergency at the U.S./Mexico border.

As Rachel noted on the show, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) specifically asked the four-star general whether he believes illegal border crossings represent a military threat. O’Shaughnessy expressed his support for “a secure border,” but quickly added that conditions at the border are “not a military threat.”

One month prior, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued its annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment” report, and while it pointed to a series of legitimate challenges to our national security, it largely ignored conditions at the U.S./Mexico border.

Do you ever get the feeling Trump and the Trump administration’s national security team aren’t on the same page?

http://www.msnbc.com/maddowblog

<11

POLITICS - CONGRESS

'CHANGE IS CLOSER THAN WE THINK.'

INSIDE ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ'S UNLIKELY RISE

'Change Is Closer Than We Think.' Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Unlikely Rise

By Charlotte Alter

March 21, 2019

Every 10 minutes or so, someone knocks on the big wooden door of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office on Capitol Hill. The noise makes staffers stiffen. It’s almost always a harmless fan, one of dozens who arrive each day, leaving neon-colored Post-it notes as devotional offerings. But in her first three months in Congress, aides say, enough people have threatened to murder Ocasio-Cortez that Capitol Police trained her staff to perform risk assessments of her visitors.

This is the daily reality for America’s newest human Rorschach test. Wonder Woman of the left, Wicked Witch of the right, Ocasio-Cortez has become the second most talked-about politician in America, after the President of the United States. Since beating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary to represent New York’s 14th District last June, the 29-year-old former bartender has pressured 2020 presidential candidates into supporting her Green New Deal, made campaign-finance reform go viral and helped activists banish Amazon from Queens with a couple of tweets. No lawmaker in recent memory has translated so few votes into so much political and social capital so quickly. Her Twitter following has climbed from about 49,000 last summer to more than 3.5 million. Thousands of people tune in to watch her make black-bean soup or re-pot her houseplants on Instagram Live. Immediately after she tweeted the name of her signature red lipstick—Beso, by Stila—it sold out online.


At the same time, she’s a freshman legislator trying to get the hang of her first big full-time job. “I miss being able to go outside in sweats,” she says in her office one day in March, settling into a black leather chair after a long day of subcommittee hearings. She’s much smaller than she looks on TV, with a warm but cautious manner. “I can’t go anywhere in public and just be a person without a lot of people watching everything I do.”

Ocasio-Cortez represents one vision of the Democratic Party’s future. She’s a young Hispanic woman, three cornerstones of the party’s electoral coalition. She’s a democratic socialist at a time when confidence in capitalism is declining, especially among progressive millennials. The issues she ran on—a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, abolishing ICE—are animating a new generation of Democrats. She’s a political phenomenon: part activist, part legislator, arguably the best storyteller in the party since Barack Obama and perhaps the only Democrat right now with the star power to challenge President Donald Trump’s.

The woman everyone calls AOC is as much a villain to the right as she is a hero to the left. She’s replaced Hillary Clinton as the preferred punching bag of Fox News pundits and Republican lawmakers, and the hits are taking their toll. Public opinion of Ocasio-Cortez has soured as she becomes better known; according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, 31% of Americans overall have a favorable impression of her, against 41% unfavorable—a 15-point swing since September. The same poll found that her popularity had increased with Democrats and nonwhites. Her Green New Deal proposal has driven policy debates on the left, but it has virtually no chance of becoming law anytime soon. Her allies plan to boost primary challengers to moderate and conservative Democrats, a push that Ocasio–Cortez has distanced herself from but one that has earned her the enmity of some colleagues. Many House Democrats resent her celebrity and worry it overshadows efforts to reach the moderate voters who propelled the party to the majority. Privately, some admit they’re also a little afraid of her.

That’s because Ocasio-Cortez threatens the status quo, bringing a youthful impatience to a set of policies popularized by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college. Like Sanders, she seems more concerned with movements than elections; she doesn’t talk about flipping seats and votes, but rather of winning hearts and minds. Hers is the politics of the possible, not the practical. “By the time legislation actually gets through, it is five years from now,” she says. “So everything we introduce needs to have 2025 or our kids in mind.” She’s not thinking about how to keep the Democratic majority for another two years; she’s thinking about how to define the agenda for the next two decades.


It’s a big change in a party that spent the last 10 years following incrementalist leaders like Obama and Hillary Clinton. It’s not just that Ocasio-Cortez is pushing for more progressive policies. She’s recast the division between left and center as a tug-of-war between the party’s past and its future. “There’s always this talk about division within the Democratic Party, ideological differences,” she says in her office. “But I actually think they’re generational differences. Because the America we grew up in is nothing like the America our parents or our grandparents grew up in.”


On Ocasio-Cortez’s office bookshelf, near a picture of her late father and a photo of her with a local Girl Scout troop, two books nestle together in uneasy union. One is the Federalist papers, written mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and published in 1788. The other is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, written by journalist David Wallace-Wells 231 years later. There’s a picture of Wonder Woman leaning in one corner of the office and a giant cardboard cutout of Cardi B’s face in another. On her desk are handwritten crib sheets for a February hearing. (“I’m going to be the bad guy,” she wrote in pencil.) More than 40 million people watched a subsequent NowThis News clip of her questioning a -government-accountability watchdog about campaign-finance laws.


Ocasio-Cortez was born in 1989, a few weeks before the Berlin Wall fell. George H.W. Bush was in his first year as President, Nancy Pelosi had just gotten to Congress, Sanders had already lost two Senate races, and Joe Biden had just bungled his first presidential bid. She was in elementary school during the financial prosperity of the 1990s, eating Dunkaroos while grownups clucked on television about Bill Clinton balancing the budget. “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity,” she says. “I have never seen that, or experienced it, really, in my adult life.”

She was born into a working-class family in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. Her dad owned a small architecture company; her Puerto Rico–born mother cleaned houses. They were deeply rooted in the neighborhood but also wary of its limitations. Ocasio-Cortez has told friends she learned early on that wearing hoop earrings and nameplate necklaces was fine in the Bronx, but she wouldn’t be taken seriously if she wore them to a job interview. The family moved to the prosperous Westchester County suburb of Yorktown Heights when she was about 5 so that she and her brother could go to better schools, but they returned frequently to see the rest of their family. Those 40-minute drives taught her how ZIP code determines destiny, she says. By the time she was in college, some of her cousins were already having kids.

Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a “dorky kid” who once asked for a micro-scope for her birthday. Her 2007 high school microbiology project, on the effects of antioxidants on the life span of roundworms, won second place in the microbiology category at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. She often joined her mom to clean the homes of neighbors, and she wrote her college-application essay about the two of them helping a man who’d lost his wife the only way they could—by cleaning out his fridge. She took out student loans to enroll at Boston University, graduating in 2011 with a degree in economics and international relations.


Her gregarious dad was her introduction to community organizing, she recalls. He died when she was in college.

When Ocasio-Cortez was a teenager, her father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Just before she returned to Boston for her sophomore year, she went to see him in the hospital. “I didn’t know that it was going to be the last time that I talked to my dad, but toward the end of our interaction, I started to feel like it was,” she says. “I said goodbye, but I think he knew, and I knew. And so I started to leave, and he kind of hollered out, and I turned around in the doorframe, and he said, ‘Hey, make me proud.’”

He died about a week later, in the fall of 2008. The death plunged the family into financial trouble just as the economy was melting down; her mother picked up a job driving school buses to stave off foreclosure on their home. After graduation, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx to work at an educational nonprofit, with a side gig as a bartender at a Manhattan taco joint. Most of her peers were piecing together two or three jobs to stay ahead of the bills. “Spoiler alert: the gig economy is about not giving people full-time jobs,” she says. “So it should be no secret why millennials want to decouple your insurance status from your employment status.”

For most of her 20s, she lived paycheck to paycheck. She paid $200 a month for an Affordable Care Act health insurance plan with a huge deductible. Like 44 million other Americans, she had student-loan debt: about $25,000 worth, which meant $300 a month in payments. “We have an entire generation that is delaying or forgoing purchasing houses,” she says. “Our entire economy is slowing down due to the student-loan crisis.”

Ocasio-Cortez had gotten her first taste of politics during college, as an intern in Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy’s office. By the time -Bernie Sanders launched his 2016 campaign, she was hooked. She volunteered to knock on doors for his campaign across the Bronx and Queens. “I had done grassroots organizing before,” she says. “But Sanders’ race was one of my first times where I crossed that bridge from grassroots community organizing to electoral organizing.”


She graduated from Boston University in 2011 with a degree in economics and international relations and $25,000 in student debt.

When Trump won, Ocasio-Cortez was shocked but not surprised. In the weeks after the election, she and her friends piled into a borrowed 1998 Subaru and drove from New York City to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to join the Lakota Sioux’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. They drove through the Midwest, stopping in Flint, Mich., on their way to the freezing plains of North Dakota. They had long bull sessions about whether Sanders would have beaten Trump and whether the media had been in the tank for Clinton. They sang TLC’s “No Scrubs” and subsisted on Red Bull, Clif Bars and Hot Cheetos from gas stations.

The Standing Rock trip was “transformational” for Ocasio-Cortez. She had visited a city poisoned by lead on her way to help a community fight the construction of a massive government-backed oil pipeline. The trip helped her “connect a lot of different dots” about how environmental degradation affects everybody, no matter where you live. “I think the me that walked out of that,” she says, “was more galvanized and more open to taking risks.”

Then, as she was driving back to New York, she got a call she never expected. Someone wanted her to run for Congress.

Once it became clear that Sanders wouldn’t win the nomination, a few of his former staffers formed a group called Brand New Congress. The goal was to recruit progressives who weren’t wealthy, well–connected white men to run for the House and Senate so that a future progressive President would have allies in the legislature. Saikat Chakrabarti, now Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, and Corbin Trent, now her communications director, began soliciting names of working-class leaders who might be willing to run. In the end, they got some 11,000 nominations from across the country. One of them was a letter from Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez, 26, touting his older sister Alexandria. She fit the mold exactly. “We looked at the brother telling the story of a sister who wasn’t a giant nonprofit executive, she didn’t go work on the Hill for 10 years,” recalls Alexandra Rojas, now executive director of Justice Democrats, an organization allied with Brand New Congress. “She was someone who watched her family struggle through the financial crisis.”

The campaign was a long shot from the start. “Everyone said, ‘She’s really cute, but maybe next time,’” Ocasio-Cortez recalls. Crowley, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, was a prolific fundraiser who had been in Congress since 1999. Her campaign was mostly volunteers. Staffers wrote their job titles on Post-it notes above their desks in their small Queens office. Ever the activist, her campaign had an informal, flexible structure resembling “leaderless” social movements like the one she saw at Standing Rock.


When a new progressive group solicited candidate nominations, her brother Gabriel (top) submitted her name.

One of Ocasio-Cortez’s first events was at the home of Jake DeGroot, a former theater lighting designer who had been involved in Occupy Wall Street. After hearing Ocasio-Cortez shout over the air conditioner in his living room to fewer than a dozen people, DeGroot joined her campaign, first as a volunteer and then as digital organizing director. Many of her top volunteers were former actors who had gotten involved with politics during the Sanders campaign and now saw organizing as a second career. (The 14th District contains parts of Astoria, Queens, which is nicknamed Actoria because so many actors live there.) That meant her campaign was infused with the imagination that animates all good drama, and a team that knew how to tell a story. -“Theater and politics are very simpatico,” says DeGroot. “Theater done well is politics; politics done poorly is theater.”

More important, there was a shared sense among the young volunteers that they had been screwed. “We were all children of the recession,” say Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats. “There’s an overwhelming sense that the economic and political system in our country is rigged.”

That’s why young Americans have become increasingly attracted to democratic socialism, which aims to build a stronger social safety net through democratic elections. After Sanders’ rise in the 2016 Democratic primaries, membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) soared from fewer than 10,000 members in early 2016 to more than 55,000 by 2019. A 2018 Harvard poll found that 39% of young Americans favor democratic socialism, and even young Americans who don’t identify with the movement overwhelmingly support ideas like Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and a Green New Deal. “Every year, young people are ticking a couple points more left,” says John Della Volpe of the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, who has been tracking youth political attitudes since 2000. “On literally every single question they’re moving left.”

The DSA endorsed Ocasio-Cortez, and young, enthusiastic volunteers stormed her district in the weeks leading up to the election. In the end, she beat Crowley by about 4,000 votes. The upset made her the new face of the young progressive movement. Within weeks, she was traveling the country, speaking to packed rooms and standing ovations as she stumped for candidates in Kansas, Missouri and Michigan. She pointed to her own unlikely victory and Sanders’ insurgent campaign in the 2016 primaries as evidence that progressives could win across the country. “She has this ability to understand a moment and then how to leverage it,” says Rhiana Gunn-Wright, policy director for the left-wing policy shop New Consensus. “She understands that she has a lot of shine right now.”

And yet most of the campaigns Ocasio-Cortez supported ended up losing. Of 78 candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats in 2018, only four nonincumbents won their seats, all replacing other Democrats in deep-blue districts. Organizers argue that losing isn’t really losing, since progressive primary challengers often pull moderate nominees to the left. Still, “America isn’t her district,” says Joel Benenson, a Democratic consultant who advised Obama’s and Clinton’s presidential campaigns and argues that neither party can win if they don’t win moderates. “Democrats shouldn’t take the bait.”


But this is the paradox facing the Democrats: Ocasio-Cortez represents a merging of movement and electoral politics that hasn’t permeated the rest of the party, let alone the rest of the country. The ideas generating the most enthusiasm among the party’s very loud, very online left flank don’t necessarily win elections. Which to some progressives is beside the point. “The point of a message is not to win an election—it’s to change policy, to move things for people, to lead with your ideals,” says Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, 34, who stumped with Ocasio-Cortez in his bid to become governor of Michigan. “Who cares about winning elections?” Indeed, he lost the Democratic nomination by more than 20 points.

When she goes to meetings in her district, Ocasio-Cortez takes notes, hunched over a single-subject notebook as if she were in science class. As soon as she starts speaking, the room changes. In a hot and stuffy education meeting in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights, the crowd stood up and cheered when she took the microphone, then swarmed her afterward to ask for hugs and selfies. At a community board meeting in an Astoria wedding venue, one older board member slept through the entire session, waking up only to click a few pictures of her on his cell-phone camera. Afterward, Ocasio-Cortez crouched to listen to a constituent’s concerns about the rise of anti-Semitism. Her beige heels, slightly scuffed, were a half size too big.

The reception in Washington hasn’t been quite as warm. Ocasio-Cortez is among the most visible of a group of young, left-wing freshman Democrats—-including Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—who have sparked controversy for their views on everything from impeachment to Israel. Some fellow first-term Democrats welcome the spotlight she brings. “We have this really dynamic rock star who is getting a lot of attention,” says Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan, a co-president of the freshman class. “Why is that a bad thing?” In person, Democratic sources say, Ocasio-Cortez is friendly and respectful, nothing like the firebrand who spars with -critics online. “She’s quiet as a mouse” in caucus meetings, says one congressional source.

Yet the attention she gets has also prompted plenty of grumbling from colleagues. “You could go a day without writing a story about AOC,” groused Representative Mark Pocan, a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal.

Many Democrats argue that proposals like the Green New Deal—a nonbinding resolution that won’t become law with Republicans in control of the Senate and the White House—put Democrats in purple districts in a tough spot. Ninety House Democrats have signed onto it. But others who care about climate change are wary of backing a document that contains provisions—like a jobs guarantee—that put off moderates and tee up GOP attacks. At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka dubbed the proposal a “watermelon,” because it was “green on the outside, [and] deep, deep communist red on the inside.” Freshman Democrats representing conservative districts, including Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Ben McAdams of Utah—have been asked about socialism at their town halls.


The old adage in Washington is that there are two types of members of Congress-: workhorses who revel in the details of legislating and constituent work, and show horses who crave the cameras. In interviews, a half dozen House Democratic aides described Ocasio-Cortez as the latter. (Her office says she attends more hearings than any of her colleagues.) There’s little question her first months in Congress have included some freshman blunders. Her office botched the rollout of the Green New Deal by inadvertently posting an unfinished version; she took two months longer than any other freshman Representative from New York to open a district office; and conservative groups have filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission alleging improper -campaign-finance arrangements. (Ocasio-Cortez has called the allegations “bogus,” and experts have suggested it’s unlikely her team committed significant campaign-finance violations.) She boosted the grassroots effort to block Amazon’s plan to establish a new hub in New York, but critics say the deal’s collapse cost the city jobs. She sometimes responds to tough coverage—including media outlets pointing out errors she’s made—by firing back at the press. “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

As an activist, Ocasio-Cortez is used to focusing more on moral imperatives than on incremental policy wins. “I don’t think that we can compromise on transitioning to 100% renewable energy. We cannot compromise on saving our planet. We can’t compromise on saving kids,” she says. “We have to do these things. If we want to do them in different ways, that’s fine. But we can’t not do them.”

Capitol Hill’s traditional emphasis on civility and compromise, she thinks, is merely a delay tactic. “There are always these folks that will say, ‘You’re not wrong, but …’” she says, rolling her eyes. “They avoid the political liability of disagreeing with you, but also they can stall you as much as possible to actually prevent the thing from happening.”

So evaluating Ocasio-Cortez’s success depends on the time frame in which she is judged. Will she help deliver Medicare for All and a Green New Deal in the next two years? No. But having the debate is already making a difference in how D.C. does business. “I used to be much more cynical about how much was up against us,” she says. “I think I’ve changed my mind. Because I think that change is a lot closer than we think.” —With reporting by Alana Abramson/Washington

http://time.com/longform/alexandria-oca ... z-profile/

[DISCONCERTING

LOOKS LIKE TRUMP'S TRADE & TARIFF POLICIES ARE LEAVING EUROPE & ASIA WITH BAD TASTES IN THEIR MOUTHS

IGNORING TRUMP THREATS CONCERNING DEPLOYMENT OF "5G" NETWORKS & CHINA'S MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR "BELT & ROAD INITIATIVE"

CHINA IS A WINNER IF AWARDED THE '5G" DEPLOYMENT CONTRACT; US WILL BE THE LOSER

LOSING SOME TRADING PARTNERS ASIA & EUROPE LOOKING AT GOING IT ALONE ]

<1



CYBERSECURITY

EU to drop threat of Huawei ban but wants 5G risks monitored

KEY POINTS

The European Commission is ignoring U.S. calls to ban Huawei Technologies
.
The European Commission will next week urge EU countries to share more data to tackle cybersecurity risks related to 5G networks.

PUBLISHED FRI, MAR 22 2019 • 4:47 PM EDT

Besides the Huawei issue, the bloc also plans to discuss Chinese subsidies, state involvement in the Chinese economy and more access to the Chinese market at an EU-China summit.

The European Commission will next week urge EU countries to share more data to tackle cybersecurity risks related to 5G networks but will ignore U.S. calls to ban Huawei Technologies, four people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

European digital chief Andrus Ansip will present the recommendation on Tuesday. While the guidance does not have legal force, it will carry political weight which can eventually lead to national legislation in European Union countries.

The United States has lobbied Europe to shut out Huawei, saying its equipment could be used by the Chinese government for espionage. Huawei has strongly rejected the allegations and earlier this month sued the U.S. government over the issue.

Ansip will tell EU countries to use tools set out under the EU directive on security of network and information systems, or NIS directive, adopted in 2016 and the recently approved Cybersecurity Act, the people said.

For example, member states should exchange information and coordinate on impact assessment studies on security risks and on certification for internet-connected devices and 5G equipment.

The Commission will not call for a European ban on global market leader Huawei, leaving it to EU countries to decide on national security grounds.

“It is a recommendation to enhance exchanges on the security assessment of digital critical infrastructure,” one of the sources said.

The Commission said the recommendation would stress a common EU approach to security risks to 5G networks.

The EU executive’s guidance marks a tougher stance on Chinese investment after years of almost unfettered European openness to China, which controls 70 percent of the global supply of the critical raw materials needed to make high-tech goods.

The measures, if taken on board, will be part of what French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday was a “European awakening” about potential Chinese dominance, after EU leaders held a first-ever discussion about China policy at a summit.

Germany this month set tougher criteria for all telecoms equipment vendors, without singling out Huawei and ignoring U.S. pressure.

Big telecoms operators oppose a Huawei ban, saying such a move could set back 5G deployment in the bloc by years. In contrast, Australia and New Zealand have stopped operators using Huawei equipment in their networks.

The industry sees 5G as the next money spinner, with its promise to link up everything from vehicles to household devices.

Alongside from the Huawei issue, the bloc also plans to discuss Chinese subsidies, state involvement in the Chinese economy and more access to the Chinese market at an EU-China summit on April 9.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/eu-to-d ... tored.html

<2



Report: EU to reject ban on Huawei

BY HARPER NEIDIG - 03/22/19 04:36 PM EDT

The European Union (EU) will not require its member countries to ban Huawei from their wireless networks, spurning U.S. warnings that the Chinese telecom poses an intelligence threat, according to Reuters.

Citing four unnamed sources familiar with the decision, the outlet reported that Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s digital chief, will present his recommendation next week.

The proposal will reportedly advise member states to adopt the EU’s cybersecurity guidelines to coordinate and share information on their wireless networks.

According to Reuters, the plan would be to allow countries to decide for themselves whether to ban Huawei.

The U.S. has pushed its allies to reject Huawei, arguing that it has close ties to the Chinese government that could give Beijing the ability to use the company’s hardware to spy on other countries.

Huawei has repeatedly denied that it shares information with the Chinese government or that its technology is compromised.

Many European telecommunications providers have argued that banning Huawei would set the continent back years in its efforts to deploy 5G networks.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4 ... n-on-huawi

<3



Diplomacy

Italy becomes first Western European nation to sign up for China’s belt and road plan

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Chinese President Xi Jinping witness signing of memorandum of understanding in Rome

Among other pacts are management deals for the ports of Trieste and Genoa

Kinling Lo

Published: 5:06pm, 23 Mar, 2019

Italy has signed up for China’s multibillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative”, becoming the first Western European nation to jump on board despite scepticism from its EU counterparts and Washington.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Chinese President Xi Jinping witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding on Beijing’s trade and infrastructure scheme on Saturday in Rome.

Among the 29 other agreements signed were two port management deals between China Communications Construction and the ports of Trieste, situated in the northern Adriatic Sea, and Genoa, Italy’s biggest seaport.

While Genoa is a long-established port, Trieste has the most potential for China, Italian government sources earlier told the South China Morning Post.

The port is strategically important for China because it offers a link from the Mediterranean to landlocked countries such as Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Serbia, all of which are markets Beijing hopes to reach through its belt and road programme.


Other deals signed cover areas including satellites, e-commerce, agriculture, beef and pork imports, media, culture, banking, natural gas and steel. The two countries also agreed to boost cooperation on innovation and science, increase bilateral trade and set up a finance ministers’ dialogue mechanism.

Although full details of the contracts were not given, a government source told Reuters the deals could be worth up to €20 billion (US$22.64 billion). The value was estimated at around €5 billion by Italian media.

In a joint communique released through Chinese state broadcaster CCTV after the signing ceremony, China and Italy said they were willing to “deepen cooperation on ports, logistics and maritime cooperation” and “work under the foundation of the AIIB”, the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

“Both sides welcome the signing of the [Belt and Road Initiative] MOU … [after] realising the great potential the BRI has in advancing interconnections,” the statement said.

Italy is now the first Group of Seven nation – and the first founding European Union member – to sign up to the trade initiative that the US and EU have characterised as a “debt trap” or neocolonial project.

While no details were given as to how the ports would be managed, European nations have been critical of Chinese investments in the region amid concerns they could be used for naval deployments. Chinese warships have paid visits to Piraeus port, Greece’s largest seaport that is majority-owned by China’s Cosco Shipping.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who will meet Xi in Paris next week, said on Friday after an EU summit in Brussels that letting Chinese companies buy up European infrastructure such as ports had been a “strategic error”.

Washington had meanwhile warned Rome against joining the belt and road scheme, calling it a Chinese “vanity project”, after the plan was revealed in early March.

But the Italian government, grappling with the country’s third recession in a decade, was keen to boost trade and try to revive the economy through the deal with China.

facing pressure from Washington and the EU, which has called China a “systemic competitor”, Italy had, however, watered down the memorandum of understanding with China, removing references to data sharing, 5G telecoms networks and strategic infrastructure, Politico reported. Washington has pressed its allies to ban Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies from developing their 5G networks.


After Xi met Italian President Sergio Mattarella on Friday, Mattarella tried to address concerns that China would be the only winner from Italy’s involvement in the programme.

“The New Silk Road must be a two-way street to share not only goods but also talent, ideas, knowledge, forward-looking solutions to common problems and projects for the future,” Mattarella said.

Xi is on a six-day trip to Europe – including stops in Monaco and France – as he tries to ease concerns about Chinese investment in the region. He will meet Macron in Paris on Tuesday, and in a surprise move Macron asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to join the meeting, apparently to step up pressure on China.

The EU has been reviewing its China policy and last week proposed “10 actions” to its member states, including requiring reciprocity in market access and investment, and raising awareness of national security risks “posed by foreign investment in critical assets, technologies and infrastructure”.

“China today for us is a competitor, a partner, a rival,” Juncker said on Friday, after a summit with EU leaders in Brussels. “We can’t construct something stable on the basis of persistent imbalances.”

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diploma ... xi-jinping

<4



Home / World /

019 Xi visits Europe

China, Italy sign BRI MoU to advance connectivity

Xinhua | Updated: 2019-03-23 19:48

ROME -- China and Italy signed here Saturday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to jointly advance the construction of the Belt and Road during Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to the country.

The two sides welcome the signing of the intergovernmental MoU on jointly advancing the Belt and Road construction, said a joint communique issued by the two countries.

The two sides realize the huge potential of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in promoting connectivity, and stand ready to strengthen the alignment of the BRI and Trans-European Transport Networks and deepen the cooperation in ports, logistics, marine transportation and other areas, the communique said.

The two sides expressed willingness to join efforts under the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to advance connectivity in line with the AIIB's mission and functions.

More air links can be expected as the two sides agreed to facilitate airlines from each other to do business and ease the market access for them, according to the communique.

During his state visit to Italy from March 21 to 24, Xi held talks with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on bilateral ties, as well as regional and international issues of common interest.

The communique said the two sides have agreed to advance China-Italy comprehensive strategic partnership in the spirit of mutual respect and mutual benefit for win-win outcomes.

Actions will be taken to fully implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, it added.

The two sides reiterated their commitment to promote multilateralism and maintain the international system with the United Nations at its core. They agreed to oppose protectionism of any form, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, maintain the World Trade Organization (WTO)'s central role and jointly push for necessary reforms to the WTO.

The two sides agreed to work with each other on cooperation in fields such as environment and sustainable energy, agriculture, sustainable urbanization, health, aviation, space technology, infrastructure and transportation, according to the communique.

The two sides also expressed willingness to strengthen cultural cooperation that includes heritage protection and fight against relic trafficking, education cooperation that highlights language studies, judicial cooperation that involves extradition and anti-graft experience sharing, and law enforcement cooperation.

During Xi's visit, the two sides signed 19 intergovernmental bilateral cooperation documents, the communique said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20190 ... b229f.html

<5



POLITICS

DOJ Disclosures In Hillary Clinton Probe Will Make It Tough To Hide The Mueller Report

The department’s release of information about the former secretary of state’s emails sets a precedent that may complicate arguments for secrecy.

By Ryan J. Reilly

03/22/2019 10:10 pm ET

WASHINGTON ― The Justice Department’s recent decision to provide Congress with a wide range of documents surrounding the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails will increase pressure on DOJ to be fully transparent about Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into President Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Attorney General William Barr is reviewing Mueller’s confidential full report and is expected to inform Congress about its principal conclusions in the coming days. But Democrats and Republicans want Barr to release the full thing, and the House recently voted unanimously ― 420 to 0 ― for the Justice Department to release Mueller’s full report.

Barr told Congress that concerns over Trump’s privacy could limit the information he makes public. Given Barr’s broad view of executive privilege, he’s also likely to abide by any claims the White House makes that portions of the report should be withheld.

But the Justice Department has recently provided Congress with extensive access to materials about the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. Some of the materials ― such as text messages exchanged between two officials involved in the Clinton investigation as well as the Russia probe ― have provided fodder for Republicans seeking to help Trump undermine the Mueller investigation. The Justice Department’s recent unprecedented disclosures have included Clinton investigation 302s (records of FBI interviews) as well as Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders connected to the Russia investigation.

Ron Weich, a former Justice Department congressional liaison who is now dean of the University of Baltimore’s law school, said that he thinks the full report will ultimately end up in congressional hands.

“There are plenty of precedents where the public interest outweighs the concerns,” Weich told HuffPost. “In this case, the public interest is overwhelming.”

That will especially be true if Mueller’s report suggests that Trump committed conduct that would have led to his indictment if not for the Justice Department’s restrictions on charging a sitting president.

“If it’s that momentous ― if it’s ‘we believe the president engaged in conduct that would have led to criminal charges were he not the president’ ― obviously that has to go to Congress,” Weich said. “The only reason he can’t be indicted is because the remedy is, in Congress, impeachment. That’s the basis for the department policy that he can’t be indicted, that’s there’s another remedy in the Constitution.”

Former Attorney General Eric Holder agrees. “If the Mueller Report contains evidence about impeachable conduct/offenses that, at a minimum, must be shared with Congress,” he tweeted Friday. “It would be irresponsible for DOJ to hold on to this kind of information - for any reason. No privilege claim would be valid.”

Weich pointed to a few additional examples of cases in which DOJ provided material about cases that didn’t result in an indictment: The Justice Department provided extensive information about the decision not to indict the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; the investigation into “enhanced interrogation” by the CIA; and the investigation of former IRS official Lois Lerner.

Beyond just seeing Mueller’s final report, Democrats are eager to obtain the raw investigative material that the special counsel compiled. A statement from the chairs of six House committees ― Judiciary, Oversight, Intelligence, Financial Services, Ways and Means, and Foreign Affairs ― asked for Mueller to turn over everything he’s got.

“Consistent with the Justice Department’s past practice and to ensure Congress can discharge its constitutional responsibilities, we also expect the underlying evidence uncovered during the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation will be turned over to the relevant Committees of Congress upon request,” the six officials said in a statement.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mueller- ... f7330ada53

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Swalwell on Hicks testimony: 'She's going to have to tell us who she lied for' in Trump admin

BY RACHEL FRAZIN - 03/21/19 09:20 PM EDT

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) told MSNBC on Thursday that former White House communications director Hope Hicks will "have to tell us who she lied for" as she cooperates with the House Intelligence Committee.

"She also told me when I interviewed her that she had told lies for the president and when I asked her what she had lied about, she refused to testify and then the Republicans did not force her to actually give us an answer,” said Swalwell, who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which interviewed Hicks last year.

“That won’t be the case now, she’s going to have to tell us who she lied for," he added.

Swalwell said when he interviewed her previously, Hicks seemed to have a lot of information on the Trump campaign and administration.

"She is, just like Michael Cohen, a witness who has seen a lot,” he said.

An Intelligence Committee spokesperson told The Hill on Wednesday that Hicks will cooperate with the committee and provide documents.

The committee requested documents from 81 individuals and entities, including Hicks, as part of a probe into President Trump's businesses, campaign and administration.

Republicans committee aides told The Hill Monday that at least eight individuals and entities have already provided 8,195 pages of documents relating to the probe.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-sec ... ve-to-tell

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MASSACRE

134 Herders Killed by Gunmen in Mali's Worst Violence Yet

4 HOURS AGO 3.23.19

Gunmen killed at least 134 herders in Mali on Saturday, the deadliest attack of recent times in a region suffering from worsening ethnic and jihadist violence. Moulaye Guindo, mayor of the nearby town of Bankass, said armed men, dressed as traditional hunters, encircled and attacked the herders at about 4 a.m. “We are provisionally at 134 bodies recovered by the gendarmes,” Guindo told Reuters. Security sources said the dead included pregnant women, children, and elderly people. The assault, along with another on a nearby village, took place as a U.N. Security Council mission visited Mali seeking solutions to violence that killed hundreds of civilians last year and is spreading across West Africa’s Sahel region. One resident said the attack appeared to be in retaliation for an al Qaeda affiliate’s claim of responsibility on Friday for a raid last week that killed 23 soldiers.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/134-herde ... t?ref=home

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U.S.

'TOAD VORTEX': THOUSANDS OF POISONOUS TOADS INVADE FLORIDA NEIGHBORHOOD, ENDANGERING PETS

BY DANIEL MORITZ-RABSON ON 3/22/19 AT 11:39 AM EDT

U.S.
An invasion of poisonous toads in Florida's Palm Beach Gardens has prompted concern among residents of the town.

Thousands of the toxic Bufo toads have swarmed the area, ending up in the pools and patios of people living in the Mirabella neighborhood, WPTV reported.

The amphibians, also known as cane toads, emit toxic secretions that can kill animals, CBS 12 reported.

Melinda Schuman, a biologist at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, told Newsweek that the secretions from cane toads are only used in defense and that the toads "cannot squirt" the toxins. Schuman said that children and adults should not pick up the toads with bare hands "because the secretions can be irritating to eyes, nose or mouth along with any open wounds."

Mark Holladay, lead technician of toad removal company Toad Busters, told CBS Miami that the influx of toads was due to a warm winter, followed by "torrential rain" a few weeks ago. The downpour catalyzed a breeding cycle, Holladay said.

Newsweek reached out to the Florida Environmental Pest Management, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Palm Beach County Health Commissioner but had not received comment at the time of publication.

Schuman noted that the amphibians, which are not from Florida, have been in the state since at least the 1950s. "At this point there will not be a way to eliminate all cane toads from Florida, but with research and management it may be possible for the populations to be kept in check," she told Newsweek.

Many of the toads normally die during the winter, but more forgiving temperatures this year meant fewer of the toads died, Lizz Egan, a media representative from Toad Busters, told The Palm Beach Post. She described the situation as a "toad vortex" and said "we’ve been fielding calls all day from all the counties. People are all of a sudden inundated with toads."

Holladay told WPTV that more toads would be born in 22 days and would affect "every community in Florida."


Local resident Jenni Quasha told CBS Miami that her children were on spring break and her daughter was afraid to go outside because of the reams of toads. Quasha also told ABC 25 that she thought the lake behind the community was a breeding ground for the amphibians.

The homeowners association disagreed.

"This event is a natural course of nature not having anything to do with an in balance within the ecosystem of the lake. Both Northern and Solitude agreed, the toads are babies of the Bofu (cane) species. The majority of the babies will die. The opinion is that this is an isolated occurrence not derived from the lake," a message from Lang Management said in a letter to residents, according to CBS 12. "It is suggested, to avoid attracting toads to areas where pets are, do not leave pet food in open dishes in the yard. Bufos are attracted to dogs' watering dishes and may sit in the rim long enough to leave enough toxin to make a dog ill."

https://www.newsweek.com/poisonous-toad ... ns-1372218

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<1

[ MORE ON - DISCONCERTING

LOOKS LIKE TRUMP'S TRADE & TARIFF POLICIES ARE LEAVING EUROPE & ASIA WITH BAD TASTES IN THEIR MOUTHS ]



Chinese leader visits Monaco amid European 5G tech worries

By ANGELA CHARLTON

today 3.24.19

PARIS (AP) — Chinese President Xi Jinping has found one country in Europe that isn’t worried about China’s growing global clout or its ambitions to dominate the future of technology: Monaco.

Xi visited the tiny Mediterranean principality Sunday as part of a European tour that is clouded by mixed feelings about how to engage with China and benefit from its trade — while setting limits on its appetite for greater economic and diplomatic influence.

Xi’s appearance alongside Monaco’s Prince Albert and Princess Charlene marks the first state visit by a Chinese president to the principality. The palace said Monaco is seeking to boost its trade and economic cooperation with China, without providing details on eventual contracts to be signed.

Monaco last year clinched a deal with Chinese tech company Huawei to develop its 5G telecommunications network — a thorny issue for several European countries.

The U.S. government says Huawei’s 5G network could give Chinese security services a backdoor to spy on consumers, and has pressed European partners to shun it. Huawei says the fear is unfounded.

Monaco banned all flights in its airspace during Xi’s brief visit and any sailing in its waters or mooring in its luxury yacht-filled harbor.

The Chinese leader will dine Sunday with French President Emmanuel Macron in the French Mediterranean resort town of Beaulieu-sur-Mer. A police boat and police divers worked to secure the area before his arrival, and security cordons blocked several roads in Nice, where Xi will stay overnight.

Xi will sign energy and other contracts with Macron on Monday, then meet in Paris on Tuesday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The European Union is China’s biggest trading partner, but many in Europe worry about unfair competition from Chinese companies that benefit from government financial backing.

Xi comes to Monaco and France from Italy, which just endorsed a vast Chinese transport infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative. Macron criticized Italy’s move, calling for a concerted European approach to China instead.

“There is this bad European habit to have 28 different policies, with countries competing against each other to attract investment,” a top French official said. “We need to speak with a common voice if we want to exist. We have the same approach on the 5G issue: avoiding 28 different decisions.”

https://www.apnews.com/4feda1a1277640c0abda37d9a6d500e9

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Era of 5G to open 'unprecedented' opportunities, experts say

By Cheng Yu | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2019-03-22 01:06

With the era of 5G just around the corner, the superfast technology will not only bring benefits to consumers but also offer "unprecedented" opportunities for entrepreneurs, according to industry insiders.

"The coming of 5G will offer unprecedented chance for entrepreneurs to start a business around the content, because with the superfast 5G, consumers will have a more huge demand for watching movies on mobile phone and other content-related entertainment activities," said Dai Zigeng, president of Beijing Cultural Investment Development Group Co Ltd.

From an investor view, content-related areas including high-definition video, games, augmented reality, virtual reality as well as media will become the next business spotlight, he said.

Dai said that there will be 100 billion 5G connections by 2025, among which, 90 billion will be connected to equipment.

"Thereby, internet of things will be another good business opportunity. Entrepreneurs should consider starting business in IoT equipment and services," Dai said.

Dai made the remarks on Thursday during the opening ceremony for the fifth season of Born for Maker project, an annual event aims to select and incubate the country's emerging startups.

By March this year, companies incubated in the project have raised a total of 64.4 billion yuan ($9.5 billion). Five companies have gone public while at least 13 firms have become unicorns—a startup valued at more than $1 billion.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20190 ... b1dcd.html

<3



China's beachhead in Europe

Steve LeVine Mar 23

For six years, the U.S. and Europe have been fixated on Russia as their gravest geopolitical threat — all while China has been building up its massive global infrastructure project known as One Belt, One Road. Now, Beijing and its commercial aims seem much more of a menace.

Driving the news: China today obtained the commercial equivalent of a beachhead in the heart of Europe, when Chinese President Xi Jinping and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte signed a Belt and Road accord in Rome.

Their agreement makes Italy the first G7 country to join Belt and Road, a network of highways, ports, railroads, and energy pipelines that are quickly setting commercial terms around the world.

With the accord, Beijing obtains access to the ports of Trieste and Genoa, which will be the staging point for Chinese products to go by railroad and truck across the continent.

"The EU has been so focused on Russia for so long that it’s now waking up to the reality that China poses a more serious challenge," says Jonathan Hillman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Part of the delay is that Russia has posed a military threat, while China is exercising economic power."

The U.S. has responded furiously in recent days, suggesting that Italy is a traitor to the West. Europe's largest countries, too, have expressed alarm.

What worries China critics: Thus far in China's four-decade economic surge, Beijing has largely called the shots. Its businesses have enjoyed a relative open door to western economies while it has constrained access to its own markets, and displayed little respect for Western intellectual property.

While President Trump, with his trade war, is attempting to break down some of the barriers, the Italian breach in Europe could weaken the solid western front.

"Along with China’s growing involvement in Europe’s telecom industry, we are seeing deepening economic links between Europe and China that will have long-term geopolitical implications," said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Italy itself suggests that its allies are overreacting: While it may not seem so, the deal does not come out of nowhere — Italy has been negotiating it for months, and says Washington said nothing until now.

In an op-ed yesterday in the FT, Michele Garaci, Italy's undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Economic Development, who has conducted the negotiations with Beijing, suggests that his country is being unfairly singled out.

Chinese investment in European ports is nothing new, he says: China has put money in ports in Spain, France, the Netherlands, Malta and Greece (where it has a controlling stake in the port of Piraeus). Why the fuss over Italy?

Italy, he says, is only "protecting our national interests and strategic assets" by getting onto the new Silk Road. While doing so, Italy is establishing best practices. He urges the rest of the big European nations to follow suit.

This view appears to have broad local support: "Italy is part of the NATO Alliance, a founder of the European Union, and it has been a trusted ally for decades: it supported sanctions on Russia, and never [challenged] the Trans-Atlantic pact," Andrea Montanino, chief economist at Confindustria, tells Axios.

What's next: Both Montanino and CSIS's Hillman suggest that, in the coming months, Europe will respond by forming a united front for a new trade agreement setting a more level playing field with China. "It’s hard to imagine with all the Brexit distractions right now, but a response is coming," Hillman tells Axios.

https://www.axios.com/chinas-beachhead- ... bcf5a.html

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An aerial view of the damaged Oroville Dam spillway is shown. Dams in the US are aging. In fact, the average age of of US dams is 56 years.

Our crumbling infrastructure is failing small businesses

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

BY ED MORTIMER, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 03/24/19 12:00 PM EDT 107


There are about 56,000 structurally deficient bridges in the US, according to the latest data from the Federal Highway Administration.


Los Angeles Department of Water and Power crews work to repair a juncture of a water main which ruptured near the University of California, Los Angeles on Sunset Boulevard. The pipe was 93 years old.


Most power lines in the US were built in the 1950s and 1960s.


More than $25 billion is needed to repair and grow the railway system in the US.


Crumbling roads cost Americans about $160 billion in wasted fuel in 2014, according to the report.


Public schools don't have the money they need to maintain their buildings.


The demand for more water treatment plants is expected to grow by 23% over the next 15 years.

Daniel Speer had a simple task: Visit three clients of his home remodeling company in and around Washington, D.C.

While conversations with each client averaged only 15-30 minutes, the total time invested in those three conversations totaled more than six hours, due to traffic, poor road conditions and aging infrastructure — challenge that affect Speer’s business operations every day.

Multiply that inefficiency by the 50 trucks in Speer’s fleet, and it’s easy to see why he says that the state of infrastructure today “makes it difficult to do business.”

Speer’s frustrations are a microcosm of challenges felt by small businesses across the United States, according to results of the most recent MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index.

The survey was conducted among 1,001 small business owners in all 50 states. For the first time, the survey asked small-business owners about their views on American infrastructure, including highways, roads, railroads, ports, communications, and Internet infrastructure.

The input was not good.

***Most American small businesses see local transportation as average at best, and many consider it downright poor.

***About half of small businesses worry that U.S. infrastructure is falling behind competing nations, at a time when they consider such infrastructure as strategically critical to their business operations.

***Small-business owners consider improvements to local transportation systems (local roads, highways, bridges and mass transit) as more important for success than national transportation systems like airports, railroads and ports, and harbors.

When America developed its transportation infrastructure in the 1900s, it was the envy of the world. Now, much of it has reached the end of its lifespan — and without action from the federal government, we will continue to Band-Aid an antiquated system. All this while other countries, including China, India and Spain, are adding modern, 21st century infrastructure.

This infrastructure will incorporate new, emerging technologies such as 5G, sensors, autonomous vehicles, and drones. These technologies will help link delivery systems, ports, rails, highways, and public transportation in new, unique ways. In turn, this cutting-edge infrastructure will attract highly-skilled millennial workers into valuable and rewarding jobs worldwide.

So, what should be a priority?

In the index, small-business owners had a few ideas on where policymakers could focus, prioritizing local roads as needing the most improvement (69 percent), followed by highways (44 percent), bridges (30 percent), and mass transit (25 percent). And across the board, small business owners also see improving high-speed Internet as a clear priority.

Many others have confirmed what Speer and small businesses nationwide know about the state of American infrastructure. In its “2017 Infrastructure Report Card,” the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s infrastructure a D+, with the transit sector earning a miserable D-. ASCE estimates that failing to close the infrastructure gap will cost the U.S. economy $7 trillion by 2025.

If we do nothing, we’ll lose trillions of dollars without ever breaking ground. But those dollars, those missed opportunities and those lost jobs never make it into a government end-of-year report, or a business balance sheet, or a Small Business Index. They are truly lost: things that could have been if our infrastructure had only been up to snuff.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are solutions. And though some of these solutions must come from the private sector or state governments, the federal government should help.

The U.S. Chamber believes one way the federal government can help is by enacting an infrastructure modernization plan. Just like Dwight Eisenhower developed the interstate highway system, we need to develop a vision for a 21st century infrastructure — one that enables all American businesses to compete and win in an increasingly high-tech, globalized economy. Every year we delay making these investments, small businesses will suffer due to lost productivity, and the eventual cost to modernize will only grow.

To solve this problem, the U.S. Chamber has put forward four key recommendations for rebuilding America’s infrastructure:

***modestly increase the federal motor vehicle fuel user fee;
***facilitate greater public and private investment;
***streamline America’s permitting process; and
***take steps to address the skilled-worker shortage.

This is not a partisan issue. These are common-sense solutions we can work on together to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. It’s also a great opportunity to show those outside Washington we can still work together to solve one of the nation’s most pressing problems.

The status quo simply won’t work. American’s small businesses have enough to do, and they’re looking to us for a solution. It’s up to us to take the next step and make a 21st century infrastructure a reality.

Let’s get to work.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/435 ... businesses

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The Midwest floods are going to get much, much worse

An “unprecedented” flood season lies ahead this spring, according to NOAA.

By Umair Irfan Updated Mar 23, 2019, 1:41pm EDT

A massive deluge of rain and melting snow from a “bomb cyclone” and other recent storms is inundating several Midwestern states including Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska.

The flooding has killed at least three people and caused at least $3 billion in damages so far. Rising water levels have breached levees along the Missouri River and forced several towns to evacuate. In southern Minnesota, flood impacts are expected increase substantially for the next three days, according to MPR News. In Nebraska alone, the flooding has already caused more than $1 billion in damages, with more than 2,000 homes and 340 businesses lost.

But on Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s spring outlook reported that the situation for the central US is soon going to get much, much worse.

“The extensive flooding we’ve seen in the past two weeks will continue through May and become more dire and may be exacerbated in the coming weeks as the water flows downstream,” said Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in a statement. “This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities.”

Waterways including the Mississippi River and the Red River of the North are already soaked with precipitation levels that are 200 percent above normal. Alongside rapid snowmelt, heavy spring rains and ice jams have led to a massive, destructive rise in water levels.

“It is possible that many parts of the Mississippi River will remain above flood stage ... into the first part of the summer in the slow-moving natural disaster,” AccuWeather meteorologist Alex Sosnowski told USA Today.

More frequent and severe flooding resulting from massive rainfall is one of the more devastating consequences of climate change. As average temperatures rise, air warms and holds on to more moisture, roughly 7 percent more water for every degree Celsius increase. We’ve already seen the amount of rain dished out from major storms increase over the past century.

The past five years were also the hottest on record. And as an El Niño weather pattern takes hold, forecasters think that 2019 could become the hottest year ever. So keep an umbrella close by.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18277244/ ... flood-2019

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FINANCE

Ocasio-Cortez, other Democrats squeeze big banks on guns, immigration, climate

"Not everything has to be done through legislation explicitly," Ocasio-Cortez told POLITICO.

By ZACHARY WARMBRODT 03/23/2019 06:42 AM EDT

More than a decade after Wall Street's crash wrecked the global economy, House Democrats are threatening to stigmatize the nation's biggest banks again.

Progressive freshmen like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) are joining with veteran lawmakers to try to shame the lenders into taking a stand on some of the country’s most divisive issues: climate change, gun violence and immigration.

The lawmakers are leveraging seats on the powerful House Financial Services Committee and a huge following on social media to confront finance industry executives and discourage them from funding oil pipelines, firearms makers and private prison companies that operate immigration detention centers. Like-minded activist groups are helping amplify the message.

Ocasio-Cortez, who has nearly 3.8 million Twitter followers, received more than 30,000 retweets this week for three posts targeting JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

"There's more than one way to skin a cat, and not everything has to be done through legislation explicitly," Ocasio-Cortez told POLITICO. “We can also use the tools that we have here to pressure change in other ways as well."

This is more than just a public relations nightmare for the banks. At stake is their standing with investors and customers, who have been willing to withdraw business from lenders over their positions on hot-button issues. The banks also face a potential backlash from politicians at all levels of government — including conservatives — who have taken punitive action when the companies take a stand they don’t like. In Louisiana, for example, officials banned Citigroup and Bank of America from a bond sale in response to restrictive gun policies.

Under pressure from activists and now House Democrats, JPMorgan earlier this month announced it plans to cut ties to prison companies, and Wells Fargo said it is doing the same. That prompted Ocasio-Cortez to take a victory lap on Twitter: “Huge update: JP Morgan & Wells Fargo have announced that they will no longer fund private prisons,” she wrote on March 21. “How did this happen? Through organizing people & public pressure!”

“Banks are acutely sensitive about their reputations because they are in a business acutely susceptible to severe and sudden customer attrition if consumers vote with their wallets," Federal Financial Analytics managing partner Karen Shaw Petrou said, citing Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based lender that’s reeling from a series of embarrassing scandals. “As a highly regulated business, banks are also acutely aware of how changing reputations alter their political-risk profile and what Congress can do to them when and if desired."

The banks will face a new round of jawboning from lawmakers at a Financial Services Committee hearing next month, when the CEOs of JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs are expected to testify. Each is a possible target for lawmakers looking to elevate their pet issue via viral video clips, as Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan was after he appeared before the committee on March 12. Lawmakers tweeted their exchanges with the beleaguered executive on guns, pipelines and prisons to their followers. Justice Democrats, which played a key role in Ocasio-Cortez's rise, was among the groups spreading the clips on social media.

“We'll get our lumps," one industry source said. "You know what people are going to ask when eventually that hearing happens.”

Sloan’s hearing before the committee to answer questions on Wells Fargo's growing list of customer abuses proved to other big banks that their chief executives will have to be ready to respond to a broad set of concerns about what ails society.

Ocasio-Cortez grilled Sloan about the bank’s financing of private prison companies involved in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown — "the caging of children," as she put it — and the Dakota Access oil pipeline, which was a major battle in progressives' war on fossil fuels.

“We're kind of stuck in this pattern overall where we wait for a disaster, for something horrific to happen, and then after people have died, or after people's human rights have been abused, we say, ‘Oh, we have to hold people accountable’," she later said in an interview. “We can prevent these things from happening and I think that we should.”

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a senior committee member from New York, asked Sloan why Wells Fargo stated it was willing to go above and beyond the law when it came to protecting human rights but not on gun safety. Pressley, another progressive freshman on the committee, pressed Sloan on why Wells Fargo wasn't following the lead of banks like Citigroup and Bank of America that have imposed restrictions on their gun industry customers.

“I believe in corporate responsibility," Maloney said in an interview. “I'm proud of the two banks who've come up and said we don't want to finance gun slaughter.”

Ocasio-Cortez has also targeted JPMorgan. In addition to helping activists dissuade banks from backing private prison companies, she called out CEO Jamie Dimon on Twitter over a perceived slight against her Green New Deal proposal to fight climate change, citing the bank's $13 billion settlement over its role in the mortgage meltdown and its financing of major pipelines.

Sources at the big banks say Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers are taking up issues that have long been raised by activists looking to pressure the companies. Large lenders, the sources say, were already paying more attention to their reputational risks.

“It's almost like Congress is catching up," said one bank representative who declined to be named.

Even if a bank is aligned with a member on one aspect of her policy agenda, bank sources said executives probably wouldn't dwell on how they're doing their part to change the world when they testify. They face potential blowback from the right, thanks to growing pressure by GOP members to discourage the banks from condemning legal industries.

Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) have introduced legislation designed to penalize big banks if they cut ties with the firearms industry. Kennedy for several months has bashed Citigroup and Bank of America for distancing themselves from the gun business, demanding that federal and state officials withdraw government contracts and urging GOP leadership to refrain from regulatory rollbacks that would help the firms.

Cramer and Kennedy are members of the Senate Banking Committee, where Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) has made clear that big banks should think twice about limiting credit to clients as a means of influencing social policy.

"The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu," Kennedy said in an interview." People at Citigroup and Bank of America have forgotten that. I intend to remind them of it every day for the rest of their natural lives."

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/ ... te-1289321

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POLITICS

Immigration Officials Snatch 9-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Heading To School, Hold Her For 2 Days

“I was scared. I was completely by myself,” says sobbing fourth-grader.

By Mary Papenfuss

03/23/2019 08:32 pm ET Updated 3 hours ago

A 9-year-old American citizen on her way to school was apprehended by U.S. immigration officials and detained for some 32 hours before she was released back to her family. Federal officials said later that the girl, who was carrying a U.S. passport card with her, gave “inconsistent information.”

“I was scared. I didn’t have my mom or my brother. I was completely by myself,” Julia Isabel Amparo Medina told NBC-7 TV in San Diego.

Medina, her 14-year-old brother and two friends were being driven to school by the friends’ mom from their home in Tijuana to San Ysidro last Monday. Thousands of people travel through the Tijuana-San Ysidro crossing daily for school or work.

When traffic slowed to a crawl, the mom told the children to walk across the border so they wouldn’t be late. An official detained Medina, saying she didn’t look like the photo on her passport card.

They finally released her Tuesday evening about 32 hours later. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the girl, whom they confirmed is an American citizen, “provided inconsistent information during her inspection,” which they didn’t elaborate. She was taken into custody so officers could “perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship,” according to the statement.

Officials had no explanation for why the process took 32 hours or why the 9-year-old was in custody the entire time.

Medina’s brother, who is also a U.S. citizen, said officials initially accused him of human trafficking and demanded he sign a paper saying that his sister was really his cousin.

“He was told that he would be taken to jail and they were going to charge him for human trafficking and sex trafficking,” Julia’s mom, Thelma Galaxia, told NBC.

Immigration agents’ shocking actions against citizens are being challenged in an ACLU lawsuit filed last month against CPB on behalf of two American women. They were stopped in a store in their Montana town by an immigration official because they were speaking Spanish. Both women were born in the U.S. As the agent demanded their identification, one of the women videotaped the encounter on her phone.

“Ma’am the reason I asked you for your ID is I came in here and I saw you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” the agent said on camera. The ACLU is arguing the agent had no probable cause to detain the women.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/julia-is ... 329e177fbb

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RUSSIA

NATO Confirms Plans For $260 Million U.S. Storage Site In Poland

March 24, 2019 09:38 GMT

NATO has confirmed that it plans to establish a storage facility in Poland for U.S. military equipment, including armored vehicles, ammunition, and weapons to arm a full brigade.

A NATO official on March 23 told AFP that a report earlier by The Wall Street Journal that said the $260 million facility would be located in Powidz, some 200 kilometers west of Warsaw, was accurate.

The WSJ quoted NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg as saying work on the site will begin this summer and take two years to complete.

Since Russia’s annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Poland, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as well as other Eastern European states have expressed concerns about their security.

The United States has deployed and rotated troops in the region since the Ukraine crisis began in an effort to deter Russia. NATO has also increased its presence near Russia’s borders.

Stoltenberg told the WSJ that the storage facility would help "underpin the increased U.S. presence in Poland."

Poland has been calling for more U.S. military personnel to be deployed on its territory, with Warsaw suggesting to U.S. President Donald Trump recently that he create a permanent base under the name "Fort Trump."

The NATO chief said the alliance will complete some 250 other infrastructure projects across Europe designed to increase the capacity of airports, harbors, railways, and roads to handle heavy equipment by 2021, the WSJ said.

https://www.rferl.org/a/nato-confirms-p ... 839005.html

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TRAGIC

Second Parkland Shooting Survivor Dies of Apparent Suicide

The investigation into his death continues, a spokesman for the Coral Springs Police Department said.

Victoria Bekiempis

03.24.19 12:28 PM ET

A second student who survived the Parkland school shooting died in apparent suicide Saturday night, the Coral Springs Police Department confirmed, less than a week after a 19-year-old woman who survived the shooting that left 17 people dead killed herself.

The latest student, who has only been officially described as currently attending Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, died Saturday and the death was being investigated as a suicide, Coral Springs police told The Daily Beast.

Broward County Commissioner Michael Udine, whose district includes Parkland, told The Daily Beast that the victim is a 17-year-old boy who was a sophomore at the high school.

It will be up to the Broward County medical examiner’s office to determine an exact cause of death. The Miami Herald first reported the student's death.

“The investigation is still going,” police spokesman Officer Tyler Reik told The Daily Beast, adding that police department detectives “are working with the family.”

Udine said that he will be at a 2 p.m. meeting to discuss “more proactive actions” toward mental health issues in the wake of these suicides.

The suicide comes less than a week after Sydney Aiello, who recently graduated from Marjory Stoneman, killed herself. Aiello reportedly had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder.

The suicides of two Parkland survivors come amid intensifying turmoil at the school. Principal Ty Thompson is reportedly under investigation as the school district probes circumstances surrounding the massacre.

While Thompson will stay at the school to help recovery efforts, the inquiry is poised to anger students, many of whom consider him to have been key to their healing, according to CBS Miami.

Kyra Parrow, who survived the Marjory Stoneman massacre, slammed school staffers’ handling of students’ grief in a series of Tweets.

“Throw back to when my teacher told me to put my grief in a box to finish my paper,” Parrow said, continuing that after she experienced “the deadliest high school mass shooting in American history & forced to attend to the same campus two weeks later. I remember at one point I couldn’t bare to write my paper. I went to my teacher - she proceeds to tell me to put my grief in a box to complete it.”

Parkland survivor and March for Our Lives leader David Hogg tweeted about the suicides, criticizing school and government officials for not doing enough.

“How many more kids have to be taken from us as a result of suicide for the government / school district to do anything?” Hogg tweeted Sunday morning.

Matt Deitsch, a March for Our Lives organizer, wrote “De-stigmatize mental health so that we can work at preventing trauma instead of comparing trauma.”

Aiello was found dead a week ago and her death was reported Friday.

Sydney’s mother told CBS Miami last week that her daughter had been enrolled in college, but was struggling to attend classes because due to fear of entering a classroom.

Sydney was close friends with Meadow Pollack, who was one of the 17 people killed at the school on Feb. 14, 2018, after accused shooter Nikolas Cruz opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. Cruz, 19, is currently being detained in Broward County jail.

Pollack’s father, Andrew, urged students to seek help.

“Two MSD survivors took their own lives this week. This isn’t political, these are OUR KIDS! Our most precious commodities. Students, please seek help. I don’t want any parent to feel how I feel. You’re loved. Suicide Prevention Hotline:800-273-8255” he wrote on Twitter Sunday.

If you or a loved one are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

https://www.thedailybeast.com/second-pa ... e?ref=home

<10

Geez, I thought the Winter league folder was a joke. This definitely tops it !

What!!

You guys don't read all these articles and study each word?

Say it ain't so.

NO, but I definitely get the drift.