Police: Tibbetts told suspect she would call cops

Authorities said the suspect followed Tibbetts on July 18, the video recorded by a home surveillance system shows.
According to court documents, the suspect said in an interview that when he approached Tibbetts, she pulled out her cell phone and told Rivera she was going to “call the police” and that caused him to get angry.
He said he blacked out and woke up at an intersection in rural Poweshiek County, court documents say.
Rahn said the suspect told investigators he realized he had put the woman in the trunk of his car and when he took her out, he saw blood on the side of her head, the document says. He left the body in a cornfield and covered it with corn leaves, it adds.
Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency on Tuesday sent a detainer request to local authorities for Rivera, who is from Mexico. That means ICE could take custody of Rivera if he was released from local custody.
Rahn said Tibbetts’ digital footprint, which included data from a fitness tracker known as a Fitbit, played a role in solving the case.
Tibbetts’ father, Rob Tibbetts, when reached earlier Tuesday, had no comment.
Other politicians weighed in on Tibbetts’ death.
Gov. Kim Reynolds said she called Tibbetts’ family.
“I spoke with Mollie’s family and passed on the heartfelt condolences of a grieving state,” Reynolds said. “I shared with them my hope that they can find comfort knowing that God does not leave us to suffer alone. Even in our darkest moments, He will comfort and heal our broken hearts.”
She complained about a broken immigration system that allowed a “predator” to live in her state.
Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley also sent condolences and called for action on illegal immigration.
“Too many Iowans have been lost at the hands of criminals who broke our immigration laws. We cannot allow these tragedies to continue,” they said.
Vice President Mike Pence called Tibbetts an amazing woman.
“Heartbroken by the news about Mollie Tibbetts. Mollie was an amazing young woman and we are praying for her parents, brothers & friends in this time of unimaginable grief. … We commend the swift action by local, state, & federal investigators working in Iowa in apprehending an illegal immigrant, who’s now charged with first-degree murder. Now, justice will be served. We will never forget Mollie Tibbetts,” he tweeted.

Extensive and lengthy search

Before she went missing, Tibbetts’ brother dropped her off at her boyfriend’s house so she could dog-sit, HLN reported. Her family reported her missing after she did not show up for work the next day.

The poster distributed asking for information about Mollie Tibbitts’ disappearance.

Investigators launched an extensive search for Tibbetts across the area, including in ponds, fields and from the air.
Rahn said last week that authorities had received more than 1,500 tips and conducted more than 500 interviews in the case.
Tibbetts was studying psychology at the University of Iowa and wanted to get a doctorate and write books, her father said.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the first name of the suspect.

Like pathologists trying to explain a freak viral outbreak, American historians have been poring over the McCarthyist phenomenon for the past half-century, striving to explain how a small group of legislators, the House Un-American Activities Committee, managed to paralyse US democracy and scar a generation.

But the great, ironic secret at the committee’s roots has emerged only now, in Moscow. According to newly unearthed KGB files, the committee’s founding father – the man who paved the way for Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts – was a Soviet spy.
His name was Samuel Dickstein, a Democratic congressman from Manhattan who created the committee’s prototype in 1934 as a means for hunting down home-grown Nazis. His campaign against the spread of American fascism and his post-war service as a New York judge are honoured by a commemorative collection of his papers in the American Jewish Archives.

But to the NKVD (the KGB’s precursor) Dickstein was an important, if troublesome, agent whose mercenary instincts earned him the codename ‘Crook’. For just over two years, at the onset of the second world war, his handlers believed he was worth the money. It was the first and – as far as anyone knows – the last time the Soviet spymasters managed to ‘buy’ a member of Congress.
Dickstein’s espionage has come to light now as a result of an unusual deal struck by the US publishers Random House and the KGB’s old-boy network, the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers. In return for a lump-sum payment, two researchers – Allen Weinstein, a US espionage expert, and Alexander Vassiliev, a retired Russian agent – had roughly two years, 1994 to 1996, to rummage through an assortment of KGB dossiers. They were then able to check what they found against US intercepts of Soviet intelligence communications from the period.
In their book The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev portray an unfamiliar America, where some of the richest and brightest of the New Deal era vied with one another to spy for Stalin. It was the high-water mark of the American left. The Haunted Wood describes a world where: ‘Avowed or covert Communists, democratic socialists, farmer-labour activists, and Roosevelt Democrat loyalists found common ground within the many new agencies and older departments of FDR’s government.’ The spies who sprouted from this ferment came in many varieties. Alongside Dickstein, who sold his services mainly for money, there were egalitarian New Deal policy wonks, who spied out of anti-fascist conviction, and the daughter of the US ambassador in Berlin, who did it for love and sex.
Another traitor unmasked by Weinstein and Vassiliev is Lawrence Duggan, the head of the Latin American section in Roosevelt’s State Department, who was apparently desperate to strike a covert blow for socialism.
According to Boris Bazarov, the Washington station chief, Duggan told his Soviet handlers: ‘The only thing which kept him at his hateful job in the State Department where he did not get out of his tuxedo for two weeks, every night attending a reception, was the idea of being useful for our cause.’ From the NKVD documents, Duggan comes across as a typical member of a substantial group of young American intellectuals, which included Alger Hiss – another rising State Department star in the late thirties. Their faith in the American way of life had been shaken by the Wall Street crash and the Depression, and they viewed the Soviet Union as the most effective remaining bulwark against Hitler.
Dickstein was different. He was 42 years old when he first made contact with Soviet agents in 1937. By then he had been a congressman for the Lower East Side for 15 years, and was very much part of the corrupt world of big city politics. There is evidence that he demanded under-the-counter payments from immigrants for help in securing US visas.
In The Haunted Wood, the Lithuanian-born New Yorker emerges as a jaded and cynical player. He put a price on his information, and let it be known he was available to the highest bidder. He began by offering details on Russian rightwingers living in the US, but went on to supply secret details of the 1940 war budget.
He demanded $2,500 per month for his work and complained bitterly when he was tentatively offered a fifth of that amount. It was at this point his handlers dubbed him the ‘Crook’. One of them noted in his report back to Moscow: ‘We are fully aware who we are dealing with. ‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name. This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money, consented to work because of money, a very cunning swindler.’ When the Soviets withheld payments – suspecting (with some justification) they were being palmed commonly-available gossip at absurdly high prices – Dickstein complained he had been paid by British intelligence ‘without any questions’.
Weinstein, a veteran US spy-watcher, says he and Vassiliev (who now lives in Britain) were unable to stand up Dickstein’s claims to be a part-time British agent, because our intelligence records from the era remain sealed. ‘It was his claim. It could have been a boast. At this point there’s no way of telling,’ Weinstein says.
But Dickstein’s Soviet handler, Peter Gutzeit, took him at his word and was clearly taken aback by such brazen promiscuity: ‘We are shocked,’ Gutzeit sniffed to his superiors ‘but here it is normal.’ Dickstein clearly saw selling secrets as a lucrative sideline to his legislative work, maximising the financial returns of office. But leafing through some of his personal records in the National Archives, it is at least possible to conceive of another, more sympathetic, side to Dickstein.
The files suggest that he went in search of NKVD roubles only after his self-styled crusade against the Nazis was mutated by a Congress steeped in anti-Semitism into the red-baiting witch-hunt it ultimately became.
In a December 1933 radio address, Dickstein set out the case for his Special Committee on Un-American Activities. While chairman of the Immigration and Naturalisation Committee, he said he had unearthed enough evidence of German infiltration ‘to define the Nazi government here as the most dangerous threat to our democracy that has ever existed’.
He pointed to new pro-Nazi organisations springing up across the US, such as the Friends of New Germany, and the Silver Shirts of America, which espoused the creation of a racially pure Aryan society and the segregation of Jews.
When his proposal went to the floor of the House in March 1934, however, it met determined resistance. One congressman warned against an ‘investigation of the German government or the so-called ‘persecution’ of the Jews in Germany’.
Another congressman, from Texas, waxed lyrical about his state’s tolerance for Jews. ‘Througout my life, I have been friendly with the Jewish race. We played together as boys…Some of my closest friends in life have been Jews. In every place in Texas where I have lived there has been no discrimination whatever against Jews.’ As a Jewish immigrant himself, Dickstein would have been as aware of the realities of the American South as the plight of the Jews in Germany. But to win his prize, he said what was required of him, promising Congress: ‘This committee has nothing to do with the affairs being conducted in Germany…We are not interested in what happens in Germany.’ Dickstein got his committee, but the chairmanship went instead to John McCormack of Massachusetts, who divided its investigations equally between US Nazi sympathisers and a range of leftwing groups including trade unions. By 1937, Dickstein began looking for other outlets for his anti-Nazi zeal and had become a paid Soviet agent.
When the committee was reconstituted in 1938 as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) under the rightwing leadership of Martin Dies, it turned almost its entire attention to the pursuit of suspected communists. Dickstein failed to win a seat on the new panel. He looked on powerlessly in 1939 as US ‘brownshirts’ under the leadership of the ‘American Fuhrer’, Fritz Kuhn, rallied in Madison Square Garden.
Without access to HUAC’s inner workings, he was of diminishing interest to his Soviet spymasters. Having paid him a total of $12,000 (now worth about $133,000), the NKVD decided in 1940 that he was more trouble than he was worth.
After five more years in Congress, Dickstein served as a New York judge until he died in 1954. Senator Joseph McCarthy fell from grace the same year, but by then Dickstein’s mutant creation had run amok across the US.
The committee itself stumbled on until 1976, when Congress finally killed it off. The damage it had done to American society is still visible today – for example in the almost physical horror of socialism and social democracy. After all these years, it is somehow fitting to discover that it was the brainchild of a traitor.

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Rewriting history

Trump was alleging McCarthyism over the weekend, but it’s the Watergate comparisons he rejects that seem to be sticking.
It was Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean who flipped on Nixon and helped bring him down. In Trump’s telling, Dean is a villain of the Watergate saga because he told the truth about his boss, the president.
Trump called Dean a “RAT” on Twitter on Sunday and denied the comparison, but The New York Times reported officials in Trump’s legal team don’t actually know what McGahn might have said before Mueller’s team.

Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, stands before a map which charts Communist activity in the United States in 1954.

Watergate wasn’t the only history Trump was rewriting Sunday, as he tried to paint Mueller as a latter-day Joseph McCarthy, the notorious anti-Communist crusader of the 1950s whose name became a stand-in for government overreach.

“Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!” Trump said on Twitter.
The President may very well have studied McCarthy; in New York in the ’70s, Trump was a protege of Roy Cohn, the lawyer who decades earlier helped McCarthy try to root out communists and allege ties to the Soviet Union.

Cohn, by the way, later worked with Roger Stone, an early Trump political ally who now figures in the Mueller investigation.

Trump appearing with Roy Cohn, who died in 1986.

Trump’s ties to McCarthy are stronger than any comparison of McCarthy to Mueller, who is not a senator trying to use public hearings and reports for political gain, but rather a special counsel who by all accounts is proceeding quietly and methodically.

Verdict nears for former Trump campaign chief

The McCarthy allusion was the latest revisionist history lesson from Trump as the country waits for jurors to finish deliberating in the trial of Trump’s former campaign manager in Alexandria, Virginia, on tax evasion and fraud charges.
Earlier this month, Trump made the unwelcome comparison between that former campaign boss, Paul Manafort, and Al Capone, the infamous mob boss ultimately brought down by the IRS on tax evasion charges.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear to everyone but Mueller and his team what they’ll ultimately report. And it became clear this weekend, after Trump lashed out following a series of stories in The New York Times about White House counsel McGahn, who Trump says he early on encouraged him to cooperate with Mueller. The Times later wrote — and a source confirmed to CNN — that the White House is unclear what information McGahn may have shared with Mueller, a potentially frightening development for Trump, since McGahn could be witness to Trump’s alleged efforts to quash quash or minimize the Russian investigation.

Don McGahn in the role of John Dean?

Trump lashed out in a two-part Twitter statement Sunday, mixing a Watergate allusion with another McCarthy one.
“The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT.’ But I allowed him and all others to testify – I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide……
“….and have demanded transparency so that this Rigged and Disgusting Witch Hunt can come to a close. So many lives have been ruined over nothing – McCarthyism at its WORST! Yet Mueller & his gang of Dems refuse to look at the real crimes on the other side – Media is even worse!”
Speaking later Sunday on CNN, Dean responded, saying he’d be honored to be on a list of Trump’s enemies, and pointing out that Trump should worry about McGahn’s testimony, since McGahn’s role is to be the White House’s lawyer, not Trump’s.
“You’ve got to put this in a larger perspective,” Dean said on CNN. “McGahn is doing what he should do, and what was resolved after Watergate as to who is the client of the White House counsel. The client was presumed when I was there to be Nixon. The president. Today, it’s clear that it is not the case. It’s the Office of the President he represents, and there can be real differences between the incumbent president and the office itself, and McGahn represents the office.”
While he held the same White House title as McGahn, Dean is also featuring in another of the dramas that swirls around Trump and the current and former aides talking to authorities.

“I certainly don’t want to raise expectations that Mr. Cohen has anything like the level of deep involvement and detailed knowledge that John Dean had in the Nixon White House as a witness to Nixon’s crimes, but I did see some similarities and wanted to learn from what John went through,” Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis told Politico.
Dean cooperated with prosecutors and ultimately testified about Nixon’s misdeeds at the Watergate hearings and served four months in prison for his own obstruction of justice. It’s not clear what role if any McGahn might play in Mueller’s final report, whatever it might say, despite mounting pressure from Giuliani to get it out of the way before November elections.
Another historical note, since Trump is conflating Watergate and McCarthyism, is that a key ally of McCarthy’s before his efforts went fully off the rails was none other than Richard Nixon.