Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Voice of America.Oil prices climbed sharply Friday after OPEC and other producers led by Russia agreed to cut output to reduce global inventories of crude oil. OPEC countries and the Russian-led coalition agreed to collectively slash oil production by 1.2 million barrels a day, said OPEC president Suhail Mohamed al-Mazrouei, more than the 1 million barrel cut the market anticipated. After two days of negotiations, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries said they would cut 800,000 barrels a day, while non-OPEC allies agreed to an additional 400,000 barrels per day. The cuts, from which OPEC members Iran, Venezuela and Libya are exempt, will begin in January and remain in effect for six months. The deal highlights Russia’s new-found influence on the global oil market and the significance of Russia’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC. Oil-producing nations have been under pressure to cut production to stabilize oil prices, which have dropped sharply over the past few months. Global oil prices have plummeted by more than 30 percent since early October. The cuts were agreed to despite pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to maintain current levels of oil production, which have surged since the end of 2017. The surge is primarily due to the U.S., which has increased production by 2.5 million barrels a day since early 2016, making the U.S. the world’s largest producer. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “The World does not want to see, or need, higher oil prices!”
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Voice of America.WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is inching closer to his long-teased major White House shake-up, gearing up for the twin challenges of battling for re-election and dealing with the Democrats’ investigations once they take control of the House.The biggest piece of the shifting picture: Chief of Staff John Kelly’s departure now appears certain.Trump announced Friday he was picking a new U.S. attorney genera l and a new ambassador to the U.N. , and at the same time two senior aides departed the White House to beef up his 2020 campaign. But the largest changes were still to come. Kelly’s replacement in the coming weeks is expected to have a ripple effect throughout the administration.According to nearly a dozen current and former administration officials and outside confidants, Trump is nearly ready to replace Kelly and has even begun telling people to contact the man long viewed as his likely successor.“Give Nick a call,” Trump has instructed people, referring to Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, according to one person familiar with the discussions.Like all of those interviewed, the person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.Trump has hardly been shy about his dissatisfaction with the team he had chosen and has been weighing all sorts of changes over the past several months. He delayed some of the biggest shifts until after the November elections at the urging of aides who worried that adding to his already-record turnover just before the voting would harm his party’s electoral chances.Now, nearly a month after those midterms, in which his party surrendered control of the House to Democrats but expanded its slim majority in the Senate, Trump is starting to make moves.He announced Friday that he’ll nominate William Barr, who served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, to the same role in his administration. If confirmed, Barr will fill the slot vacated by Jeff Sessions, who was unceremoniously jettisoned by Trump last month over lingering resentment for recusing himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.Sessions was exiled less than 24 hours after polls closed. But Trump’s broader efforts to reshape his inner circle have been on hold, leading to a sense of near-paralysis in the building, with people unsure of what to do.Trump also announced that State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert is his pick to replace Nikki Haley as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and he said he’d have another announcement Saturday about the military’s top brass.All this came the same day that Trump’s re-election campaign announced that two veterans of the president’s 2016 campaign, White House political director Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, the director of the office of public liaison, were leaving the administration to work on Trump’s re-election campaign.“Now is the best opportunity to be laser-focused on further building out the political infrastructure that will support victory for President Trump and the GOP in 2020,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.The moves had long been planned, and will give Kelly’s eventual successor room to build a new White House political team.Kelly was not at the White House on Friday, but was expected to attend an East Room dinner with the president and senior staff.Ayers, who is a seasoned campaign veteran despite his relative youth — he’s just 36 — has the backing of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law and senior advisers, for the new role, according to White House officials. But Ayers has also faced some resistance. During Trump’s flight home from a recent trip to Paris, some aides aboard Air Force One tried to convince the president that Ayers was the wrong person for the job, according to two people familiar with the matter.Trump and Kelly’s relationship has been strained for months — with Kelly on the verge of resignation and Trump nearly firing him several times. But each time the two have decided to make amends, even as Kelly’s influence has waned.Kelly, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, was tapped by Trump in August 2017 to try to normalize a White House that had been riven by infighting. And he had early successes, including ending an open-door Oval Office policy that had been compared to New York’s Grand Central Station and instituting a more rigorous policy process to try to prevent staffers from going directly to Trump.But those efforts also miffed the president and some of his most influential outside allies, who had grown accustomed to unimpeded access. And his handling of domestic violence accusations against the former White House staff secretary also caused consternation, especially among lower-level White House staffers, who believed Kelly had lied to them about when he found out about the allegations.Kelly, too, has made no secret of the trials of his job and has often joked about how working for Trump was harder than anything he’d done before, including on the battlefield.
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Voice of America.— U.S. President Donald Trump has confirmed he will nominate Army General Mark Milley to replace Marine General Joseph Dunford as his next top military adviser. “I am thankful to both of these incredible men for their service to our Country! Date of transition to be determined,” Trump wrote in a Saturday morning tweet. Milley is a combat-experienced military leader and the current Chief of Staff of the Army, a position he has held since 2015. Milley, who commanded troops during multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, must be confirmed by the Senate to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some military officials at the Pentagon said Air Force General David Goldfein was also a top contender for the job but added that Milley has a good relationship with the president. Trump hinted Friday he would make the announcement Saturday while attending the annual Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. Instead, he announced it at the White House before departing for Philadelphia. As the Army’s top officer, Milley helped lead the effort to allow women to serve in front-line infantry and other combat positions. He has worked to reverse a decline in Army recruiting, which fell far short of its annual goal this year. Milley is an infantry officer by training, and has also commanded Special Forces units. His career includes deployments in the 1989 invasion of Panama, the multinational mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Iraq war. If confirmed, Milley will replace Dunford, a former commandant of the Marine Corps and commander of coalition troops in Afghanistan. Dunford is expected to serve the remainder of his term as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, which ends October 1, 2019.
Michael_Novakhov shared this story .About 90 suspected mobsters have been arrested across Europe and South America with vast quantities of cocaine and other drugs seized in a mafia purge.German federal police confirmed in a statement there had been multiple arrests in the early morning raids, with the main focus of the operation in western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which borders Holland and Belgium.The ‘Ndrangheta – which derives its meaning from the Greek word for “heroism” – is made up of numerous village and family-based clans in Calabria, the rural, mountainous and under-developed “toe” of Italy’s boot.Officials hailed Wednesday’s operation – dubbed “Operation Pollina” – as a serious blow to the group.Some 140 kilograms of ecstasy pills and 3 000-4 000 kilos of cocaine were seized during the operation, Dutch prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said at a press conference in The Hague on Wednesday. The AD said past year that Dutch police had introduced a special police unit completely dedicated to fighting mafia activities on Dutch soil.The vast anti-mafia operation was carried out by Italy’s anti-mafia and anti-terrorism force in collaboration with German, Belgian and Dutch authorities, it said. They are accused of committing “serious crimes” including activities linked to worldwide drug trafficking, Italian police said in a statement.But he warned that it was “just a first step”, saying the arrests were “nothing for the ‘Ndrangheta, there are thousands of people who should be arrested and billions that should be seized”.”It’s nearly a cliche, but the operation carried out today confirms again the great danger of the ‘ndrangheta, not just in drug trafficking, where it’s the undisputed leader, but (also) in the financial sphere”, said Francesco Ratta, a top police official in the southern Italian region of Calabria.The European police agency Europol said it was a “decisive hit against one of the most powerful Italian criminal networks in the world”.The operation took place one day after Settimo Mineo, the alleged head or “godfather” of the Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, was arrested with 46 other people in the Palermo region of Italy, according to the Italian police and anti-Mafia prosecutors in Palermo.Just under half of the suspects were detained in Italy.
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The Global Security News.Не Хляет!The Russian Mob’s attempt to take over the Free World by using the old Soviet recipes ends with a big, loud, awakening bang from the Mueller’s Investigation. And now analyze the situation properly and ask yourselves the same eternal sacramental question: “HOW COULD IT HAPPEN?!” What are the underlying root causes? How to deal with and to correct this mess?! Michael Novakhov
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Borneo Bulletin Online.| Leigh Giangreco |WHEN lawmakers hauled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to Capitol Hill for a hearing on privacy and abuse of data in April, the only clear theme to emerge from their line of bizarre questions was the Senate’s complete misunderstanding of social media. Instead of unravelling how Russian disinformation thrived on Facebook and influenced the 2016 election, Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican representative for Utah) wasted his given time asking basic questions about the platform’s business model, while Senator Brian Schatz (Democrats representative for Hawaii) took a misguided tour of the messaging app WhatsApp.In a more innocent time, the gang of clueless senators would have made for an amusing montage on The Daily Show. But in the age of information warfare, it showed that our leaders had little grasp on the greatest existential threat to American democracy.Had PW Singer and Emerson Brooking’s new book, LikeWar, come out just a few months earlier, those senators might have had a better grip on Facebook’s role as a weapon in today’s war. Packed with the past five years of news and a brief account of the birth of the Internet, LikeWar is a breezy read about modern warfare, with the authors flipping through tales of Russian bots, washed-up reality stars and Silicon Valley magnates like clips on your friend’s Instagram story.That rapid succession of stories makes it a suitable textbook for today’s journalism or political science students looking to understand how the same apps they use to communicate with friends can be amassed as tools in a potent arsenal.There are points where LikeWar is too married to that textbook format, as when it trots out a hackneyed description of the Kennedy-Nixon debate, or may try too hard to frame old mediums in a contemporary lens, calling Benjamin Franklin “the founding father of fake news in America” because he published under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Silence Dogood’ in the New-England Courant.But it’s not the young, digital natives that need LikeWar the most. When Singer’s novel, Ghost Fleet, was published in 2015, Washington’s national security community gripped it as both a cautionary tale and a future battle plan. LikeWar, on the other hand, is not a warning about tomorrow’s war – it’s a map for those who don’t understand how the battlefield has already changed.To ground their readers in familiarity, Emerson and Singer have framed the players in this new kind of war as kings overseeing burgeoning empires. But these monarchs, often clustered in Silicon Valley, could rule in peace only until a powder keg exploded.LikeWar begins with United States (US) President Donald Trump’s first tweet in 2009, announcing, “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!” But this is not (thank goodness) another book about the President. Instead, it revolves around an unholy trinity of those who have mastered the Internet as a weapon: Trump, the Islamic State (IS) extremist group and Russia.At times that carousel of deplorables can become dizzying. The three turn up in a journal published by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in a piece written by a Trump campaign organiser that links their use of meme warfare and shows how they capitalise on viral content.When Emerson and Singer note the 4Ds – “dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience” – it’s hard to tell if it’s a reference to Russia’s new defensive strategy or a wink to Trump’s bizarre dance with the media.In some cases, the opposing parties even complement each other’s goals. When IS posts videos that link gruesome acts with scripture, the website Breitbart seizes on them to fan the flames of its far-right supporters. With each ‘like’, IS gets new recruits and Breitbart gets ad dollars.Beyond recapping the news, LikeWar becomes a compelling read as Brookings and Singer give historical context to today’s news to demystify the Internet as a battlefield. The authors liken the stunning capture of Mosul, Iraq, which IS publicised far outside the Middle East by bombarding social media, to the unyielding tempo of the German blitzkrieg, which paralysed French fighters with a relentless broadcast of its attacks.Today’s ‘sockpuppets’, young Russians who masquerade online as Americans, prove to be nothing more than hipster updates to Cold War tactics deployed by the Soviet Union that targeted the extremes of American politics. The contemporary Russian General Valery Gerasimov, who in 2013 published a treatise ranking nonmilitary means above traditional weapons, is, in the authors’ telling, just a fresh take on the early-19th-Century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Just as Clausewitz established war as politics by other means, Gerasimov laid out a radical new approach to conflict by taking advantage of the Internet as the ultimate disinformation weapon.But if Clausewitz crops up as a motif that grounds the book in staid military doctrine, references to pop stars and reality television celebrities keep the text out of the realm of the typical think tank fare. It may seem a cheap bid for younger readers at first, but the authors draw smart and eerie parallels between terrorist groups and seemingly vapid celebrities. Even Vladimir Putin’s longtime media adviser admires the social media savvy of Kim Kardashian, who can direct millions of her supporters without the KGB.But the heart of LikeWar, and what would have assisted our hapless senators, lies in its explanation of homophily and its role in spreading falsehoods. Online news, true or false, is sustained by the number of people who ‘like’ it. Each successive ‘like’ contributes to an algorithm that generates similar content, guaranteeing an infinite echo chamber.LikeWar isn’t waged by sophisticated hackers but by those who know how to master the narrative with viral memes, slick videos and clickbait headlines. And when the information war is won in this abstract cyberspace, all the metal in our grand fleets and advanced fighter jets will be rendered immaterial. – The Washington Post
Michael_Novakhov shared this story .Anthony T. Podesta (born October 24, 1943), commonly known as Tony Podesta, is an American lobbyist best known for founding the Podesta Group.[1] He used to be one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists and fundraisers.[2][3][4]Podesta and the Podesta Group are reportedly under federal investigation regarding compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act for their work for a Ukrainian group tied to the pro-Russian former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych beginning in 2012.[5][6]
Michael_Novakhov shared this story .Seventeen months in, Kelly and President Donald Trump have reached a stalemate in their relationship and it is no longer seen as tenable by either party. Though Trump asked Kelly over the summer to stay on as chief of staff for two more years, the two have stopped speaking in recent days.The expected departure would end a tumultuous tenure for Kelly, who was brought on to bring order to the White House but whose time as chief of staff has often been marked by the same infighting and controversy that has largely defined Trump’s presidency from its beginning. Many of the storms in which Kelly became embroiled were by his own making.Trump is actively discussing a replacement plan, though a person involved in the process said nothing is final right now and ultimately nothing is final until Trump announces it. Potential replacements include Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, who is still seen as a leading contender.CNN reported last month that Trump was considering potential replacements for several senior positions in his administration as part of a post-midterms staff shakeup.Once seen as stabilizing forceJUST WATCHEDSources: Ayers may be Kelly’s replacementMUST WATCHPlayCaption Settings DialogBeginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.02:08When Kelly first replaced Reince Priebus as chief of staff last summer, he ruled with an iron fist. He curbed Oval Office access, blocked certain outsiders from being able to call the White House switchboard and had broad authority over staffing.But in the last months, Kelly has seen his status as chief of staff diminish. Trump began circumventing many of the policies and protocols he enacted, and he was on the verge of being fired or resigning numerous times.Trump often vacillated between criticizing and praising Kelly, sometimes within minutes of each other. Kelly started holding increasingly fewer senior staff meetings — once daily occurrences were whittled down to weekly gatherings — and began to exert less control over who talks to the President.White House officials believed Kelly was close to resigning after he got into a heated shouting match with national security adviser John Bolton in October. Bolton had criticized Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during an Oval Office discussion about the border, and Kelly stormed out of the West Wing after their profanity-laced argument spilled over into the hallways.Controversial tenureJUST WATCHEDBolton, Kelly get into heated shouting matchMUST WATCHPlayCaption Settings DialogBeginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.02:12Kelly’s tenure working for Trump was pocked with controversies, and officials were often amazed at how he managed to survive. Weeks after taking over for Priebus, his predecessor who was unceremoniously fired over Twitter while he sat on a rainy tarmac, Kelly was faced with Trump’s controversial response to the racially charged protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was photographed looking grim-faced in the lobby of Trump Tower as the President declared there were “good people” on both sides of the racist violence.At times, Kelly was the source of his own downfall. He insulted Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Florida, using inaccurate information, later declaring he would “never” apologize. He said some of those eligible for protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals were “lazy.”But perhaps most damaging was his handling of the situation involving former staff secretary Rob Porter, who was accused by two of his ex-wives of abuse. Kelly’s shifting accounts caused his credibility inside the West Wing to plummet, and it never truly recovered, according to officials. Kelly’s highly criticized handling of the Porter controversy was an inflection point in his tenure, and some of his internal relationships became strained in the months that followed the former staff secretary’s ouster.This story is breaking and being updated.CNN’s Kevin Liptak, Jeff Zeleny, Jeremy Diamond and Sarah Westwood contributed to this report.
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Trump Investigations Report.Mueller’s next big reveal CNN(CNN) Robert Mueller is ready to tighten the net again. In a pair of highly significant court maneuvers, the special counsel is expected to unveil new details of his … “Putin and American political process” – Google News 1. Trump from Michael_Novakhov (198 sites)
When Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Helus and a California Highway Patrol officer responded to a shooting last month in Thousand Oaks, Calif., they faced a …View full coverage on Google News
Oil prices climbed sharply Friday after OPEC and other producers led by Russia agreed to cut output to reduce global inventories of crude oil. OPEC countries and the Russian-led coalition agreed to collectively slash oil production by 1.2 million barrels a day, said OPEC president Suhail Mohamed al-Mazrouei, more than the 1 million barrel cut the market anticipated. After two days of negotiations, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries said they would cut 800,000 barrels a day, while non-OPEC allies agreed to an additional 400,000 barrels per day. The cuts, from which OPEC members Iran, Venezuela and Libya are exempt, will begin in January and remain in effect for six months. The deal highlights Russia’s new-found influence on the global oil market and the significance of Russia’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC. Oil-producing nations have been under pressure to cut production to stabilize oil prices, which have dropped sharply over the past few months. Global oil prices have plummeted by more than 30 percent since early October. The cuts were agreed to despite pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to maintain current levels of oil production, which have surged since the end of 2017. The surge is primarily due to the U.S., which has increased production by 2.5 million barrels a day since early 2016, making the U.S. the world’s largest producer. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “The World does not want to see, or need, higher oil prices!”
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko expects that the newly elected leader of the German Christian Democratic Union Party, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, …
“Russia Ukraine” – Google NewsNext Page of StoriesLoading…Page 2
President Donald Trump is inching closer to his long-teased major White House shake-up, gearing up for the twin challenges of battling for re-election and dealing with the Democrats’ investigations once they take control of the House.
The biggest piece of the shifting picture: Chief of Staff John Kelly’s departure now appears certain.
Trump announced Friday he was picking a new U.S. attorney genera l and a new ambassador to the U.N. , and at the same time two senior aides departed the White House to beef up his 2020 campaign. But the largest changes were still to come. Kelly’s replacement in the coming weeks is expected to have a ripple effect throughout the administration.
According to nearly a dozen current and former administration officials and outside confidants, Trump is nearly ready to replace Kelly and has even begun telling people to contact the man long viewed as his likely successor.
“Give Nick a call,” Trump has instructed people, referring to Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, according to one person familiar with the discussions.
Like all of those interviewed, the person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
Trump has hardly been shy about his dissatisfaction with the team he had chosen and has been weighing all sorts of changes over the past several months. He delayed some of the biggest shifts until after the November elections at the urging of aides who worried that adding to his already-record turnover just before the voting would harm his party’s electoral chances.
Now, nearly a month after those midterms, in which his party surrendered control of the House to Democrats but expanded its slim majority in the Senate, Trump is starting to make moves.
He announced Friday that he’ll nominate William Barr, who served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, to the same role in his administration. If confirmed, Barr will fill the slot vacated by Jeff Sessions, who was unceremoniously jettisoned by Trump last month over lingering resentment for recusing himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.
Sessions was exiled less than 24 hours after polls closed. But Trump’s broader efforts to reshape his inner circle have been on hold, leading to a sense of near-paralysis in the building, with people unsure of what to do.
Trump also announced that State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert is his pick to replace Nikki Haley as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and he said he’d have another announcement Saturday about the military’s top brass.
All this came the same day that Trump’s re-election campaign announced that two veterans of the president’s 2016 campaign, White House political director Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, the director of the office of public liaison, were leaving the administration to work on Trump’s re-election campaign.
“Now is the best opportunity to be laser-focused on further building out the political infrastructure that will support victory for President Trump and the GOP in 2020,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.
The moves had long been planned, and will give Kelly’s eventual successor room to build a new White House political team.
Kelly was not at the White House on Friday, but was expected to attend an East Room dinner with the president and senior staff.
Ayers, who is a seasoned campaign veteran despite his relative youth — he’s just 36 — has the backing of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law and senior advisers, for the new role, according to White House officials. But Ayers has also faced some resistance. During Trump’s flight home from a recent trip to Paris, some aides aboard Air Force One tried to convince the president that Ayers was the wrong person for the job, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Trump and Kelly’s relationship has been strained for months — with Kelly on the verge of resignation and Trump nearly firing him several times. But each time the two have decided to make amends, even as Kelly’s influence has waned.
Kelly, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, was tapped by Trump in August 2017 to try to normalize a White House that had been riven by infighting. And he had early successes, including ending an open-door Oval Office policy that had been compared to New York’s Grand Central Station and instituting a more rigorous policy process to try to prevent staffers from going directly to Trump.
But those efforts also miffed the president and some of his most influential outside allies, who had grown accustomed to unimpeded access. And his handling of domestic violence accusations against the former White House staff secretary also caused consternation, especially among lower-level White House staffers, who believed Kelly had lied to them about when he found out about the allegations.
Kelly, too, has made no secret of the trials of his job and has often joked about how working for Trump was harder than anything he’d done before, including on the battlefield.Read the whole story · · · ·
U.S. President Donald Trump has confirmed he will nominate Army General Mark Milley to replace Marine General Joseph Dunford as his next top military adviser. “I am thankful to both of these incredible men for their service to our Country! Date of transition to be determined,” Trump wrote in a Saturday morning tweet.
Milley is a combat-experienced military leader and the current Chief of Staff of the Army, a position he has held since 2015. Milley, who commanded troops during multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, must be confirmed by the Senate to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some military officials at the Pentagon said Air Force General David Goldfein was also a top contender for the job but added that Milley has a good relationship with the president. Trump hinted Friday he would make the announcement Saturday while attending the annual Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. Instead, he announced it at the White House before departing for Philadelphia. As the Army’s top officer, Milley helped lead the effort to allow women to serve in front-line infantry and other combat positions. He has worked to reverse a decline in Army recruiting, which fell far short of its annual goal this year. Milley is an infantry officer by training, and has also commanded Special Forces units. His career includes deployments in the 1989 invasion of Panama, the multinational mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Iraq war. If confirmed, Milley will replace Dunford, a former commandant of the Marine Corps and commander of coalition troops in Afghanistan. Dunford is expected to serve the remainder of his term as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, which ends October 1, 2019.
About 90 suspected mobsters have been arrested across Europe and South America with vast quantities of cocaine and other drugs seized in a mafia purge.
German federal police confirmed in a statement there had been multiple arrests in the early morning raids, with the main focus of the operation in western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which borders Holland and Belgium.
The ‘Ndrangheta – which derives its meaning from the Greek word for “heroism” – is made up of numerous village and family-based clans in Calabria, the rural, mountainous and under-developed “toe” of Italy’s boot.
Officials hailed Wednesday’s operation – dubbed “Operation Pollina” – as a serious blow to the group.
Some 140 kilograms of ecstasy pills and 3 000-4 000 kilos of cocaine were seized during the operation, Dutch prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said at a press conference in The Hague on Wednesday. The AD said past year that Dutch police had introduced a special police unit completely dedicated to fighting mafia activities on Dutch soil.
The vast anti-mafia operation was carried out by Italy’s anti-mafia and anti-terrorism force in collaboration with German, Belgian and Dutch authorities, it said. They are accused of committing “serious crimes” including activities linked to worldwide drug trafficking, Italian police said in a statement.
But he warned that it was “just a first step”, saying the arrests were “nothing for the ‘Ndrangheta, there are thousands of people who should be arrested and billions that should be seized”.
“It’s nearly a cliche, but the operation carried out today confirms again the great danger of the ‘ndrangheta, not just in drug trafficking, where it’s the undisputed leader, but (also) in the financial sphere”, said Francesco Ratta, a top police official in the southern Italian region of Calabria.
The European police agency Europol said it was a “decisive hit against one of the most powerful Italian criminal networks in the world”.
The operation took place one day after Settimo Mineo, the alleged head or “godfather” of the Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, was arrested with 46 other people in the Palermo region of Italy, according to the Italian police and anti-Mafia prosecutors in Palermo.
Just under half of the suspects were detained in Italy.Read the whole story · ·
Irish Times-19 hours agoGemany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have elected Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to succeed Angela Merkel as party leader, a decision that …
Irish Times-19 hours agoAnnegret Kramp-Karrenbauer succeeds Angela Merkel as CDU party …. (CDU) has backed Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer as its new leader, …
WFTV Orlando-19 hours agoHAMBURG, Germany – HAMBURG, Germany (AP) – Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is elected …
Deutsche Welle-16 hours agoThe Christian Democrats (CDU) have elected the party’s secretary general and former Saarland state premier, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to …
<a href=”http://NBCNews.com” rel=”nofollow”>NBCNews.com</a>-Dec 3, 2018“I think people see me as authentic, just like I am, with my ideas, my style of doing politics,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told NBC News after a …
<a href=”http://Novinite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Novinite.com</a>-18 hours agoAnnegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a close ally of Angela Merkel, won a tight race to succeed her as party leader Friday, seeing off a longtime rival …
euronews-Dec 6, 2018Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is one vote away from reaching the top of German politics. She is one of the favourites to take over as the leader …
Toronto Star-18 hours agoAnnegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, 56, narrowly defeated one-time Merkel rival Friedrich Merz at a congress of the centre-right Christian Democratic …
SPIEGEL ONLINE-2 hours agoIm Augenblick des Triumphs zeigte Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, dass sie nicht einfach eine saarländische Version von Angela Merkel ist.Sie hat die CDU gepackt International-FAZ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung-14 hours agoView allRead the whole story · · · · ·
The Russian Mob’s attempt to take over the Free World by using the old Soviet recipes ends with a big, loud, awakening bang from the Mueller’s Investigation.
And now analyze the situation properly and ask yourselves the same eternal sacramental question: “HOW COULD IT HAPPEN?!” What are the underlying root causes? How to deal with and to correct this mess?!
Michael NovakhovNext Page of StoriesLoading…Page 3
WHEN lawmakers hauled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to Capitol Hill for a hearing on privacy and abuse of data in April, the only clear theme to emerge from their line of bizarre questions was the Senate’s complete misunderstanding of social media. Instead of unravelling how Russian disinformation thrived on Facebook and influenced the 2016 election, Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican representative for Utah) wasted his given time asking basic questions about the platform’s business model, while Senator Brian Schatz (Democrats representative for Hawaii) took a misguided tour of the messaging app WhatsApp.
In a more innocent time, the gang of clueless senators would have made for an amusing montage on The Daily Show. But in the age of information warfare, it showed that our leaders had little grasp on the greatest existential threat to American democracy.
Had PW Singer and Emerson Brooking’s new book, LikeWar, come out just a few months earlier, those senators might have had a better grip on Facebook’s role as a weapon in today’s war. Packed with the past five years of news and a brief account of the birth of the Internet, LikeWar is a breezy read about modern warfare, with the authors flipping through tales of Russian bots, washed-up reality stars and Silicon Valley magnates like clips on your friend’s Instagram story.
That rapid succession of stories makes it a suitable textbook for today’s journalism or political science students looking to understand how the same apps they use to communicate with friends can be amassed as tools in a potent arsenal.
There are points where LikeWar is too married to that textbook format, as when it trots out a hackneyed description of the Kennedy-Nixon debate, or may try too hard to frame old mediums in a contemporary lens, calling Benjamin Franklin “the founding father of fake news in America” because he published under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Silence Dogood’ in the New-England Courant.
But it’s not the young, digital natives that need LikeWar the most. When Singer’s novel, Ghost Fleet, was published in 2015, Washington’s national security community gripped it as both a cautionary tale and a future battle plan. LikeWar, on the other hand, is not a warning about tomorrow’s war – it’s a map for those who don’t understand how the battlefield has already changed.
To ground their readers in familiarity, Emerson and Singer have framed the players in this new kind of war as kings overseeing burgeoning empires. But these monarchs, often clustered in Silicon Valley, could rule in peace only until a powder keg exploded.
LikeWar begins with United States (US) President Donald Trump’s first tweet in 2009, announcing, “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!” But this is not (thank goodness) another book about the President. Instead, it revolves around an unholy trinity of those who have mastered the Internet as a weapon: Trump, the Islamic State (IS) extremist group and Russia.
At times that carousel of deplorables can become dizzying. The three turn up in a journal published by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in a piece written by a Trump campaign organiser that links their use of meme warfare and shows how they capitalise on viral content.
When Emerson and Singer note the 4Ds – “dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience” – it’s hard to tell if it’s a reference to Russia’s new defensive strategy or a wink to Trump’s bizarre dance with the media.
In some cases, the opposing parties even complement each other’s goals. When IS posts videos that link gruesome acts with scripture, the website Breitbart seizes on them to fan the flames of its far-right supporters. With each ‘like’, IS gets new recruits and Breitbart gets ad dollars.
Beyond recapping the news, LikeWar becomes a compelling read as Brookings and Singer give historical context to today’s news to demystify the Internet as a battlefield. The authors liken the stunning capture of Mosul, Iraq, which IS publicised far outside the Middle East by bombarding social media, to the unyielding tempo of the German blitzkrieg, which paralysed French fighters with a relentless broadcast of its attacks.
Today’s ‘sockpuppets’, young Russians who masquerade online as Americans, prove to be nothing more than hipster updates to Cold War tactics deployed by the Soviet Union that targeted the extremes of American politics. The contemporary Russian General Valery Gerasimov, who in 2013 published a treatise ranking nonmilitary means above traditional weapons, is, in the authors’ telling, just a fresh take on the early-19th-Century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Just as Clausewitz established war as politics by other means, Gerasimov laid out a radical new approach to conflict by taking advantage of the Internet as the ultimate disinformation weapon.
But if Clausewitz crops up as a motif that grounds the book in staid military doctrine, references to pop stars and reality television celebrities keep the text out of the realm of the typical think tank fare. It may seem a cheap bid for younger readers at first, but the authors draw smart and eerie parallels between terrorist groups and seemingly vapid celebrities. Even Vladimir Putin’s longtime media adviser admires the social media savvy of Kim Kardashian, who can direct millions of her supporters without the KGB.
But the heart of LikeWar, and what would have assisted our hapless senators, lies in its explanation of homophily and its role in spreading falsehoods. Online news, true or false, is sustained by the number of people who ‘like’ it. Each successive ‘like’ contributes to an algorithm that generates similar content, guaranteeing an infinite echo chamber.
LikeWar isn’t waged by sophisticated hackers but by those who know how to master the narrative with viral memes, slick videos and clickbait headlines. And when the information war is won in this abstract cyberspace, all the metal in our grand fleets and advanced fighter jets will be rendered immaterial. –The Washington PostRead the whole story · · · ·
Rachel Martin talks to Michael Isikoff, chief investigative reporter for Yahoo News and co-author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller has been notably free of leaks. What we know so far has come in the form of official court filings, like indictments, plea agreements and what we’re seeing this week – sentencing memos. The special counsel on Tuesday released such a memo on Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Similar memos are expected Friday for former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and former campaign chair Paul Manafort. In the case of Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, Robert Mueller recommended a sentence with little to no prison time. The memo mentioned Flynn’s, quote, “substantial” cooperation in several ongoing investigations, although details were heavily redacted.
We’re going to try to put all this into the context of the larger Russia investigation with Michael Isikoff. He is chief investigative reporter for Yahoo News. He is also the co-author of the book titled “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story Of Putin’s War On America And The Election Of Donald Trump.” Michael, thanks for being here.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Good to be here.
MARTIN: So let’s be clear to start off – these memos are filings meant to serve a legal purpose and message to the judge. They’re not press releases. They’re not statements from the prosecutors. But having said all that, what should we, the public, take away from the filings?
ISIKOFF: Well, you know, it’s really like reading tea leaves here because it’s a cryptic document. It does refer to Michael Flynn’s substantial cooperation with the government over the course of the last year since he pled guilty to lying to the FBI. It does reference, as you pointed out, several investigations. But I should point out that when you read it closely, only one of those appears to be related to Robert Mueller’s core mandate of the Russia investigation itself – coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
There’s a reference to a mysterious other criminal investigation that the memos – the sentencing memo says that Flynn has provided substantial cooperation for. But the close reading suggests that that’s not something Mueller himself is handling. It’s been farmed out to other Justice Department prosecutors. There’s some reporting this morning that they may involve an illegal lobbying effort that Turkey was conducting. Flynn had been lobbying for the government of Turkey, had not registered with the Justice Department for that as he should have.
MARTIN: So while potentially nefarious, not connected necessarily to the core mandate.
ISIKOFF: Not connected, right – and then there’s a reference to another investigation that may or may not be within Mueller’s mandate, for which it says Flynn has provided useful information. So the substantial information says to me, that’s assistance – information that the Justice Department can use to prosecute others, to bring other cases. But the one time that that’s used in the memo when it breaks down – Flynn’s cooperation – it’s in reference to that other mysterious investigation – non-Russia.
MARTIN: So words like collusion and obstruction, which we hear about often in conversations like this – notably absent from the visible portion of the Flynn memo.
ISIKOFF: Right, this doesn’t really tell us whether Mueller has other cards to play in the core Russia investigation itself. It certainly talks about how Flynn has provided important information, timely information about contacts between the Trump transition team and Russians. That’s what Flynn originally pled guilty to lying about. But it’s not really much of a roadmap as to whether there are more prosecutions to bring on that front.
MARTIN: I want to play a bit of tape. This is Congressman Mark Meadows. He’s a stalwart supporter of President Trump. This is what he said on Fox.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “HANNITY”)
MARK MEADOWS: Let’s look at what’s not in there. There is no suggestion that Michael Flynn had anything to do with collusion. He was with the transition team. He was part of the campaign. And yet there’s no mention of collusion. I think it’s good news for President Trump tonight.
MARTIN: Do you think he’s right? Do you think it’s good news?
ISIKOFF: Well, you know, he may be. We just don’t know. Look, there’s a whole other part of Mueller’s investigation. That’s the obstruction question. Did President Trump obstruct justice when he fired James Comey, when he asked, before that, James Comey to let Michael Flynn go? One would think that Flynn’s cooperation would be very important for that part of the Mueller probe. But remember, the chief target of an obstruction investigation would be the president himself. It was his actions that that spurred all this.
And under DOJ policy, presidents cannot be indicted. So what Mueller would do with that information is provide it in a report that presumably, at this point, would go to the acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker. What happens after that is very much unclear. Certainly, Congress will want access to it. The Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee certainly will. How much of that they will see we don’t know at this point.
MARTIN: Quickly, what do we know, if anything, about the Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort memos expected?
ISIKOFF: I think those are going to be highly informative. Both are very key witnesses. Michael Cohen pled guilty last week and provided some really substantial information about the Trump Organization and contacts with the Kremlin in reference to a Trump Tower meeting. Paul Manafort, the prosecutors have accused of lying to them. And they are expected this Friday in a memo to lay out what they believe Manafort lied to them about. We’re all going to be waiting with pins and needles to read that.
MARTIN: Michael Isikoff, chief investigative reporter for Yahoo, co-author of the book “Russian Roulette,” thanks so much. We appreciate it.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Read the whole story · · · ·
Anthony T. Podesta (born October 24, 1943), commonly known as Tony Podesta, is an American lobbyist best known for founding the Podesta Group.[1] He used to be one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists and fundraisers.[2][3][4]
Seventeen months in, Kelly and President Donald Trump have reached a stalemate in their relationship and it is no longer seen as tenable by either party. Though Trump asked Kelly over the summer to stay on as chief of staff for two more years, the two have stopped speaking in recent days.
The expected departure would end a tumultuous tenure for Kelly, who was brought on to bring order to the White House but whose time as chief of staff has often been marked by the same infighting and controversy that has largely defined Trump’s presidency from its beginning. Many of the storms in which Kelly became embroiled were by his own making.
Trump is actively discussing a replacement plan, though a person involved in the process said nothing is final right now and ultimately nothing is final until Trump announces it. Potential replacements include Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, who is still seen as a leading contender
that Trump was considering potential replacements for several senior positions in his administration as part of a post-midterms staff shakeup.
Once seen as stabilizing force
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When Kelly first replaced Reince Priebus as chief of staff last summer, he ruled with an iron fist. He curbed Oval Office access, blocked certain outsiders from being able to call the White House switchboard and had broad authority over staffing.
But in the last months, Kelly has seen his status as chief of staff diminish. Trump began circumventing many of the policies and protocols he enacted, and he was on the verge of being fired or resigning numerous times.
Trump often vacillated between criticizing and praising Kelly, sometimes within minutes of each other. Kelly started holding increasingly fewer senior staff meetings — once daily occurrences were whittled down to weekly gatherings — and began to exert less control over who talks to the President.
with national security adviser John Bolton in October. Bolton had criticized Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during an Oval Office discussion about the border, and Kelly stormed out of the West Wing after their profanity-laced argument spilled over into the hallways.
Controversial tenure
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Kelly’s tenure working for Trump was pocked with controversies, and officials were often amazed at how he managed to survive. Weeks after taking over for Priebus, his predecessor who was unceremoniously fired over Twitter while he sat on a rainy tarmac, Kelly was faced with Trump’s controversial response
to the racially charged protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was photographed looking grim-faced in the lobby of Trump Tower as the President declared there were “good people” on both sides of the racist violence.
At times, Kelly was the source of his own downfall. He insulted Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Florida, using inaccurate information, later declaring
he would “never” apologize. He said some of those eligible for protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals were “lazy.”
of the situation involving former staff secretary Rob Porter, who was accused by two of his ex-wives of abuse. Kelly’s shifting accounts caused his credibility inside the West Wing to plummet, and it never truly recovered, according to officials. Kelly’s highly criticized handling of the Porter controversy was an inflection point in his tenure, and some of his internal relationships became strained in the months that followed the former staff secretary’s ouster.
This story is breaking and being updated.
CNN’s Kevin Liptak, Jeff Zeleny, Jeremy Diamond and Sarah Westwood contributed to this report.Read the whole story · · · · · · ·
Inside the mind of Robert Mueller. We’ll unpack the latest news from the Mueller investigation and explore what makes the special prosecutor tick with his biographer, Garrett Graff.
The Letter Giving Robert Mueller Charge To Investigate Russian Interference
The Carter Page FISA Documents
Mueller’s Sentencing Memo For Michael Flynn
From The Reading List
Wired: “14 Trump and Russia Questions Robert Mueller Knows the Answers To” — “Michael Flynn’s sentencing memo, filed yesterday with the most intriguing and interesting parts redacted by special counsel Robert Mueller, provided yet another frustrating glimpse into an investigation that seems at times almost maddeningly opaque. It made clear that Flynn was cooperating in three criminal investigations—and that he had cooperated extensively—but shed little light on the ‘what’ or the ‘how.’
“Amid the flurry of revelations from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign, it’s worth revisiting the loose ends of his probe. Specifically, focusing on questions that remain mysteries to us but that clearly Mueller himself knows by this point—the Rumsfeldian “known unknowns”—provides particular clarity as to where the investigation will head next.
“Decoding Mueller’s 17-month investigation has been a publicly frustrating exercise, as individual puzzle pieces, like Flynn’s sentencing memo, often don’t hint at the final assembled picture—nor even tell us if we’re looking at a single interlocking puzzle, in which all the pieces are related, or multiple, separate, unrelated ones.
“The sheer breadth of alleged, unrelated criminality by so many different Trumpworld players—from Paul Manafort’s money laundering and European bribes to Michael Flynn’s Turkish conspiracies to Michael Cohen’s tax fraud to even the indictments of the first two members of Congress to endorse Trump, representatives Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter—make it particularly difficult to disentangle what might have transpired at Trump Tower and the White House.
“Mueller’s investigation, though, has been remarkably focused and consistent straight through—zeroing in on five distinct investigative avenues: money laundering and Russian-linked business deals; the Russian government’s cyberattack on the DNC, other entities, and state-level voting systems; its related online information influence operations, by the Internet Research Agency; the sketchy contacts by Trump campaign and transition officials with Russia; and the separate question of whether Trump himself, or others, actively tried to obstruct justice by impeding the investigation of the above.”
Book Excerpt from “The Threat Matrix” by Garrett Graff
INTRODUCTION Public Enemy #1
The final minutes of George W. Bush’s eight years as president ticked away as Bob Mueller stepped down onto the inaugural platform. Despite weeks of wall-to-wall news coverage warning of overcrowding for the inauguration—millions of people who might clog the Washington Beltway and the Metro system for hours—the chilly January day had deterred few inaugural-goers. More than perhaps anyone else on the inaugural platform, Mueller, the director of the FBI, was responsible for keeping everyone safe for the day.
The previous twenty-four hours had been nerve-racking, like so many of the days and nights of the past seven years. A threat out of the Middle East, sketchy at best. Reports of a man barreling down the Jersey Turnpike with a bomb. Agents from the FBI, the CIA, and a dozen other agencies fanned across country and several continents, hoping to run down the information before noon Tuesday, H-Hour for the handover of government, democracy’s greatest rite—the peaceful and amicable transfer of power from one party to another with nearly diametrically opposed views.
The last time the nation had gathered to do this, in January 2001, the world had been a different place. That was, as everyone now said, before. This was the first transfer of power after. Before, the Clinton administration had balked at targeting a shadowy terrorist named Osama bin Laden in a faraway place called Afghanistan. Before, the argument had been, What had bin Laden ever done to deserve assassination? The United States didn’t do that type of thing. Now, after, everything was different.
Just days prior to the inauguration of Barack Obama, Hellfire missiles launched from a Predator drone half a world away from Washington had killed two Kenyans suspected in the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Usama al-Kini, also known as Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam, and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan likely never saw the missiles closing on them at speeds topping Mach 1.3 and likely never felt the twenty-pound warheads explode. Although the FBI’s global footprint had expanded considerably, the United States had no other practical means to eliminate this pair of terrorists. The two men, living in South Waziristan—a remote tribal part of Pakistan most Americans would be hard-pressed to locate on a map—were unreachable. The CIA drones and their Hellfire missiles were a different type of justice, an outside-the-courtroom, permanent justice—one that, after, the U.S. government had decided was more than appropriate to mete out but had been off the table before. (The precise term for such measures—extralegal—had become all too familiar to the American people after.)
Al-Kini and Swedan were both on the Bureau’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” list, making the attacks a big victory for the United States, yet, since the United States didn’t acknowledge these covert missile strikes, it didn’t officially consider them dead. Months later, both men’s names would still be on the FBI’s public list; inside the government, though, no one was looking too hard for them.
The minutes ticked away on inaugural day. Of the government men onstage, only a few had been in the fateful national security meeting the morning of September 12, 2001, the day after everything had changed. Now, in just two hours, most of them would depart government. A green-and-white Marine helicopter from HMX-1, the presidential helicopter squadron, sat on the East Front Plaza of the Capitol, waiting to ferry George W. Bush back to private life. Vice President Dick Cheney, confined to a wheelchair after straining his back moving boxes the weekend before, would also depart—only to appear in the coming months as a vocal opponent of the new administration’s approach to terrorism. Of the entire national security team, those departures would leave only Mueller still in the position he had held on September 11, 2001, that brilliant and crisp fall day when the planes had come.
Only one other member of the national security team would be carrying over from Bush to Obama—and his absence today was intentional. Hidden in a secure location outside Washington, Robert Gates—the wizened secretary of defense who on 9/11 had been a dean at Texas A&M—was, in the bland parlance of bureaucracy, the “designated successor,” part of the elaborate continuity-of-government plans created during the Cold War to ensure the United States would survive even the most catastrophic assault. Originally designed to protect against surprise Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles coming in over the North Pole, the continuity-of-government operation now mostly guarded against terrorists with a smuggled nuclear weapon stuffed in a suitcase. In the coming hours, a new national security team would begin to flow into the federal apparatus across the city and move into the White House, where air pressure is always kept elevated to ensure biological or chemical agents can’t penetrate inside. Only Mueller would be left among the security team to recall the fear, tension, and shock of September 12, 2001, the uncertainty of the day after. The soldiers in the streets; the smoke, visible from his office, rising from the Pentagon across the Potomac River; the concrete barriers that sprang up everywhere overnight like some sort of ugly, aggressive species of weed; that smell—part burning jet fuel, part burning paper, part burning flesh.
Mueller, wrapped in long overcoat and scarf, his gloved hands protected from the cold, walked to the front of the stage, his longtime wife and companion, Ann, by his side. On 9/11, just days after moving to Washington, she had sat through that historic day alone, watching the television in their temporary apartment six blocks from where they now stood. Her husband hadn’t returned until long after she’d gone to sleep.
From the banister, they could survey the largest crowd ever assembled for a presidential inauguration. It spread out for over a mile, the length of the National Mall, the nation’s so-called backyard. Somewhere out in the crowd were 155 teams of Mueller’s agents in plainclothes, watching for anything unusual. A few blocks away, the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, created thirty years earlier as the nation’s elite antiterror strike force, sat poised to react. To back them up, SWAT teams, hazardous-material units, bomb squads, and even weapons of mass destruction response teams were located at strategic points around the crowded city. Armored military-like vehicles topped with flashing lights were hidden just out of sight, ready for action. Police helicopters circled the city, their expensive sensors and surveillance gear hard at work. Gas masks hung from the waists of thousands of law enforcement personnel, as well as the National Guard troops who stood on every street corner for miles. Fighter jets bristling with missiles slung under their wings waited to respond to trouble from above, while deep beneath the city Secret Service agents searched tunnels and sewers for trouble below. Most military coups in the world were carried out with less firepower, materiel, and personnel than were deployed to the streets of Washington for what everyone hoped would be a peaceful and uneventful transition of power.
The early-morning crowd before Mueller was ecstatic despite the hour, the security hassles, and the bone-chilling cold. While the crowd on the Mall and in the Capitol complex was swept up in the euphoric moment of hope and the promise of change brought about by the election of the nation’s first black president and a team representing a youthful new generation of leadership, Mueller knew the fear that prevailed behind the scenes.
Until hours earlier, it had seemed possible that the day would go very differently. Three different threads of intelligence had indicated that al-Shabaab, one of the many Islamic jihadist groups that formed the international web of al-Qaeda affiliates, had dispatched attackers from its base in Somalia to slip across the Canadian border and explode bombs on the Mall during the inauguration. The government had been tracking the intelligence for weeks, but only recently had new information moved the threat onto a different tier of seriousness.
Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen—the “Movement of Warrior Youth”—was still relatively new to the terrorism game; it wouldn’t even formally be declared a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” by the State Department for another month, yet its capabilities were already well-known enough to seriously worry the government officials in the days leading up to the inauguration. (Kenya, the president’s ancestral country and the site of the 1998 embassy attack that had helped usher in the age of al-Qaeda, was also under threat, according to the available intelligence.)
The national security teams of President Bush and President-elect Obama had been gathering repeatedly in the White House and at the guest residence, Blair House, for the week leading up to the inauguration to track the latest intelligence. The rooms pulsed with a sense of nervous energy on the part of the new Obama staff and a world-weariness on the part of the Bush officials who had only days left to go in their public service.
While the two national security teams didn’t have much history working together, sitting on one side was a face familiar to everyone: John Brennan, one of the nation’s most skilled counterterrorism leaders who had led the newly formed National Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, only to part ways with the Bush administration over its handling of the Iraq war. Brennan had become a close adviser to the Democratic nominee and had been the top candidate to take over the CIA until concerns about his role in the Agency’s enhanced-interrogation program earlier in the decade had forced him into a position that didn’t require Senate confirmation. Now Brennan served as the calming force on the Obama team in the room. He’d been through this sort of thing before.
A week before, the two national security teams had teased out a mock scenario imagining multiple bombs detonating simultaneously around the country—a domestic version of what had happened in East Africa in 1998, in Madrid in 2004, and twice in London in 2005. Hanging over every meeting and every discussion was a question spoken only in whispers: How real did the threat have to be before the government should consider canceling the ceremony or moving it indoors to a secure location? There was some precedent: President Reagan’s second inaugural had been moved to the Capitol Rotunda because of nasty cold weather. This weather was heavier.
In one meeting, incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton had asked a pointed question: “So what should Barack Obama do if he’s in the middle of his Inaugural Address and a bomb goes off way in the back of the crowd on the Mall? What does he do? Is the Secret Service going to whisk him off the podium, so the American people see their incoming president disappear in the middle of the Inaugural Address? I don’t think so.” But was that truly credible?
The decision was made: Obama would continue the speech, if at all possible.
(CNN) Robert Mueller is ready to tighten the net again. In a pair of highly significant court maneuvers, the special counsel is expected to unveil new details of his …
“Putin and American political process” – Google News
Top US officials opened a secret obstruction of justice probe into Donald Trump after he sacked FBI Director James Comey, it has been revealed.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe became increasingly troubled by Trump’s behaviour following the firing.
In an attempt to reign him in, the Department of Justice launched an obstruction of justice investigation into the president’s potentially unconstitutional operations.
The covert scheme was actioned after officials grew increasingly more worried about Trump’s attempts to control other government operations – particularly Comey’s investigation into his former security advisor, Michael Flynn, CNN have said .
Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said on Thursday that Trump had a ‘legal right’ to fire Comey.
“It’s shocking that the FBI would open up an obstruction case for the president exercising his authority under Article II,” Giuliani told CNN.
The investigation started in the eight days between Comey’s termination and special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment.
Rosenstein appointed Mueller on May 17, 2017, to lead the now-19-month-long deep dive into investigating alleged collusion between the Trump administration and the Russian government.
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Last year, the Washington Post reported that the DOJ had commenced its own research project into Trump.
As part of the discussions about how to rein in Trump, Rosenstein had offered to wear a wire while meeting with Trump, though he has later said he was joking.
He also reportedly proposed looking into whether Cabinet members would be willing to impeach Trump using the 25th Amendment.Read the whole story · ·Next Page of StoriesLoading…Page 6
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One theory is that special counsel Robert Mueller is using pleadings on the Trump-Russia investigation to make his report
Last February, legal analysts reeled at the indictment of 13 Russians for alleged election tampering in the US, not only for the extraordinary nature of the charges but for the remarkable way in which the indictment was written.
Special counsel Robert Mueller had chosen to tell a story, about a multi-stage, years-long plan directed at the top levels in Moscow to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election using multiple techniques, from attempted voter registration hacking to social media monkey-wrenching.
Yet it was unlikely that any of the Russians would ever appear in a US courthouse. But, with his indictment, Mueller had disclosed details – including an account of an intelligence-gathering road trip that two of the Russians took from California to New York – that would cast suspicion on the motives of anyone who denied the Russian plot.
As well as legal charges, some observers spotted a broader power-play by the man tasked with investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Among the first analysts to see a canny purposefulness in Mueller’s use of a “speaking indictment,” as it is known, was Marcy Wheeler, a journalist who writes about national security issues and civil liberties on her web site emptywheel.
By using criminal indictments and informations, sentencing memoranda and other official filings to tell a bigger story, Wheeler has since noted, Mueller has diminished the need to issue a doorstop “Mueller report” at the end of his investigation, in order to bring his discoveries to light. In effect, as America’s body politic awaits the Mueller report with baited breath – it might in fact be already reading large chunks of it.
The Mueller report, in this sense, is being written in chapters and excerpted in court documents, under Donald Trump’s nose. Chapters to come soon might detail previously unknown features of the Trump campaign’s relationship with Moscow, just as plea documents submitted by Mueller last week shed new light on the Trump organization’s effort to build a Moscow tower.
The theory has gained traction in legal circles. “I’m down with the theory that Mueller will use pleadings to ‘make his report’, as @emptywheel suggests,” the lawyer Ken White recently tweeted @popehat. “My sense of Mueller is that he’ll do it in cases where it’s material, though” – meaning no gratuitous expository writing by the special counsel.
One such case will resurface on Friday, when Mueller is scheduled to submit a report describing how former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort broke his plea agreement by allegedly lying to investigators.
The Mueller report is being written in chapters and excerpted in court documents, under Donald Trump’s nose.
That document is expected to shed light on what Mueller knows about Manafort’s contacts with his former partners in the former Soviet bloc, and it could hold new information about the nature of ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
However, other experts think Mueller will still submit a final full report to the justice department.
“I think there will be a report at the end, because I think there’s a whole lot more that needs to be laid out and put together, and the whole picture presented,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court.
“People have talked about he’s trying to get the story out through these speaking indictments and speaking informations. I don’t think that – my guess is that Mueller is just sort of doing his job and and doesn’t have some sort of grand strategy that way.”
Even analysts, who find the notion plausible that Mueller is writing his report in public in pieces, think he still might file a report with his superiors at the justice department at the conclusion of his investigation.
Wheeler has separately noted that Watergate precedent affords a path for a Mueller report to make its way to the House judiciary committee, even if Mueller were fired.
Federal code governing the special counsel’s work explicitly demands a report: “At the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work,” the law says, “he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.”
But with apparent Trump loyalist Matt Whitaker currently running the justice department, there is ample concern that such a report might be suppressed. Trump himself has even called publicly for the investigation to be ended and frequently lambasts Mueller and his colleagues as conducting a “witch hunt”.
“[Whitaker] plays a crucial role in determining what report by Mueller, if any, is given to congress and ultimately the public,” wrote Neal Katyal, an author of the special counsel regulations, in the Washington Post.
Whatever Mueller’s plan, the overwhelming sense is that he has one – if simply to work and follow the investigation wherever it leads and despite what obstacles – or tweets – might be put in his way.
Or, as lawyer and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa put it after Trump installed Whitaker: “Mueller has this whole thing booby trapped for precisely these kinds of Mickey Mouse moves by POTUS.”Read the whole story · · · ·Next Page of StoriesLoading…Page 7
Они будут обеспечивать защиту бронетехники, автомобильной техники и личного состава от поражения радиоуправляемыми устройствами как во время стоянки, так и в движении.
Express.co.uk–Dec 4, 2018“Ukraine is not a NATO member but we strongly support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. “We also call on Russia to release the …NATO set to meet over Ukraine-Russia crisis United News of India–3 hours agoView all
New York Times–Nov 29, 2018MOSCOW — Since Russia fired shots at three Ukrainian Navy ships over the weekend, Western countries have issued statements saying they …Ukraine asks for NATO vessels in Sea of Azov over Russia standoff In-Depth–<a href=”http://Aljazeera.com” rel=”nofollow”>Aljazeera.com</a>–Nov 29, 2018View all
Irish Times–18 hours agoNato has accused Russia of seeking to establish total control over the … control the Sea of Azov,” Nato’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg …
The National Interest Online (blog)–Dec 1, 2018The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has accused Russia of jamming GPS signals during its recent military exercise in Norway.
U.S. News & World Report–15 hours agoThe U.S. has shared intelligence evidence with its NATO allies that Russia’s new SSC-8 ground-fired cruise missile could give Moscow the …Read the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
MOSCOW: Moscow on Wednesday dismissed US claims it is violating a major Cold War treaty limiting mid-range nuclear arms, as a senior general lashed out at Washington’s attempts to “contain”
said Washington would withdraw from the treaty within 60 days if Russia does not dismantle missiles that the US claims breach the deal.
“Groundless accusations are again being repeated,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Zakharova said “no proof has been produced to support this American position” on the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which she described as a cornerstone of global security.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said facts had been distorted “in order to camouflage the true goal of the US withdrawing from the treaty”.
sparked global concern by declaring the United States would pull out of the deal and build up America’s nuclear stockpile “until people come to their senses”.
But on Monday, the US leader said he wants talks with his Chinese and Russian counterparts Xi Jinping and
“to head off a major and uncontrollable arms race”.
Meanwhile, the Russian Army Chief of Staff Vasily Gerasimov said Wednesday that Moscow would increase the capabilities of its ground-based strategic nuclear arms.
“One of the main destructive factors complicating the international situation is how the US is acting as it attempts to retain its dominant role in the world,” he said in comments released by the defence ministry.
“It is for these purposes that Washington and its allies are taking comprehensive, concerted measures to contain Russia and discredit its role in international affairs.”
foreign ministers on Tuesday that there was no reason why the US “should continue to cede this crucial military advantage” to rival powers.
NATO said it was now “up to Russia” to save the treaty.
The Trump administration has complained of Moscow’s deployment of Novator 9M729 missiles, which Washington says fall under the treaty’s ban on missiles that can travel distances of between 310 and 3,400 miles (500 and 5,500 kilometres).
The nuclear-capable Russian cruise missiles are mobile and hard to detect and can hit cities in Europe with little or no warning, according to NATO, dramatically changing the security calculus on the continent.
The State Department said in a statement Tuesday that it had provided Moscow with “more than enough information for Russia to engage substantively on the issue”.
The information included details on the missile’s test history and the names of companies involved in developing and producing the missile and its launcher, the State Department said.
US-Russia ties are under deep strain over accusations Moscow meddled in the 2016 US presidential election.
The two states are also at odds over Russian support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria’s civil war, and the conflict in Ukraine.Read the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
BERLIN — The Latest on raids on the Italian mob across Europe (all times local):
12:10 p.m.
Police say they have arrested about 90 suspected mafia members in a series of coordinated raids in four European countries.
The arrests in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium came as part of an investigation codenamed Pollino that was launched in 2016 against the ‘ndrangheta criminal group on allegations of cocaine trafficking, money laundering, bribery and violence, said Eurojust, the European agency that fights cross-border organized crime, which coordinated the operation.
Dutch chief public prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said Wednesday dozens of raids also netted about 2 million euros in criminal proceeds as well as drugs including ecstasy and cocaine.
___
8:55 a.m.
Authorities are conducting coordinated raids in Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands in a crackdown on the Italian mafia.
German federal police said in a statement Wednesday that there had been multiple arrests in the early morning raids on premises linked to the ‘ndrangheta, a southern Italy-based organized crime group.
In Germany the focus was on the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which borders the Netherlands and Belgium, and Bavaria to the south.
Police say the operation is being coordinated by Eurojust, a European unit established to fight cross-border organized crime
Further details were not immediately available but a news conference was scheduled for later in the day in The Hague.
Investigate the investigators! Save America! Reform the FBI now!
M.N.: Investigate the entire upper echelon of the Obama’s FBI, and consider bringing the criminal charges against all the former and current FBI officials who were involved in “Clinton emails investigation” (which was designed by the adversaries, and was used to divert the resources), and “Trump – Russia NON-INVESTIGATION” for this fundamental, historical, unprecedented failure of the American Counterintelligence which is primarily the responsibility of the FBI.
The least that they can be accused of is the manifest and obvious, utter professional incompetence. The worst, no one wants to think and to talk about. They made the FBI and the American political system the laughing stock of the world. They undermined the American and the Global Security.
Bill Priestap, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, will exit the agency at the end of the year, according to a new report.Priestap, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence division, has decided to retire from the bureau, the Wall Street Journal reported.He was involved with the investigation regarding the unauthorized email server of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that she used while she was secretary of state and the investigation examining Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.With officials like former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe no longer at the FBI, Priestap is currently the last high-ranking official at the FBI who originally worked on both investigations.The investigations have come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats, who have cited mismanagement issues in both. For example, Democrats have expressed frustration that the FBI shared they were conducting an investigation into Clinton prior to the election but waited until after the election to disclose they were also investigation Russian interference.Meanwhile, Republicans fault the FBI for going easy on Clinton and not charging her with any wrongdoing and have claimed that the FBI inappropriately obtained a surveillance warrant to monitor a Trump campaign aide.The FBI told the Journal that Priestap’s retirement was unrelated to the 2016 investigations and said he “became eligible to retire and has chosen to do so after 20 years of service.” It’s uncertain what Preistap plans to do following his retirement.
Another High-Ranking FBI Official to DepartWall Street Journal–7 hours agoWASHINGTON—A top FBI official who helped oversee two politically … BillPriestap, who currently serves as assistant director of the Federal … shortly before Election Day after obtaining newevidence, with some saying that it …After a Hiatus, China Accelerates Cyberspying Efforts to Obtain US …New York Times–Nov 29, 2018The new operatives have intensified their focus on America’s commercial …. F.B.I. director, Bill Priestap, called “the Chinese government’s direct …Demoted FBI agent Peter Strzok had larger role in Clinton, Russia …Fox News–Jun 5, 2018Demoted FBI agent Peter Strzok had larger role in Clinton, Russia probes than … including a closed-door interview with FBI espionage chief Bill Priestap. … 30 of that year, Strzok emailed Priestap and another FBI colleague … Top Dem blames Trump for GM plant shutdowns, praises new truce with China …EW Priestap Named Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence …Federal Bureau of Investigation (press release) (blog)–Dec 21, 2015FBI Director James B. Comey has named E.W. “Bill” Priestap as the assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters …
CNNMueller filing: Flynn gave substantial assistance CNN Special counsel Robert Mueller told a federal court that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has given “substantial assistance” to the Russia investigation and should not get jail time. Source: CNN …
Wall Street JournalMike Flynn Report Expected to Shed Light on Mueller Probe Wall Street Journal WASHINGTON—A new filing Tuesday is expected to detail how former Trump adviser Mike Flynn has been helping federal investigators since pleading guilty a year ago, potentially providing a window into the special counsel probe into Russian election …and more »
BBC NewsNato accuses Russia of breaking nuclear missile treaty BBC News Western military alliance Nato has formally accused Russia of breaching the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned land-based nuclear missiles in Europe. Following a meeting, Nato foreign ministers issued a statement …and more »
Wall Street Journal–7 hours agoWASHINGTON—A top FBI official who helped oversee two politically … BillPriestap, who currently serves as assistant director of the Federal … shortly before Election Day after obtaining new evidence, with some saying that it …
New York Times–Nov 29, 2018The new operatives have intensified their focus on America’s commercial …. F.B.I. director, Bill Priestap, called “the Chinese government’s direct …
Fox News–Jun 5, 2018Demoted FBI agent Peter Strzok had larger role in Clinton, Russia probes than … including a closed-door interview with FBI espionage chief Bill Priestap. … 30 of that year, Strzok emailed Priestap and another FBI colleague … Top Dem blames Trump for GM plant shutdowns, praises new truce with China …
Federal Bureau of Investigation (press release) (blog)–Dec 21, 2015FBI Director James B. Comey has named E.W. “Bill” Priestap as the assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters …Read the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Bill Priestap, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, will exit the agency at the end of the year, according to a new report.
Priestap, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence division, has decided to retire from the bureau, the Wall Street Journal reported.
He was involved with the investigation regarding the unauthorized email server of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that she used while she was secretary of state and the investigation examining Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
With officials like former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe no longer at the FBI, Priestap is currently the last high-ranking official at the FBI who originally worked on both investigations.
The investigations have come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats, who have cited mismanagement issues in both. For example, Democrats have expressed frustration that the FBI shared they were conducting an investigation into Clinton prior to the election but waited until after the election to disclose they were also investigation Russian interference.
Meanwhile, Republicans fault the FBI for going easy on Clinton and not charging her with any wrongdoing and have claimed that the FBI inappropriately obtained a surveillance warrant to monitor a Trump campaign aide.
The FBI told the Journal that Priestap’s retirement was unrelated to the 2016 investigations and said he “became eligible to retire and has chosen to do so after 20 years of service.” It’s uncertain what Preistap plans to do following his retirement.
N.A.T.O. yesterday formally accused Russia of breaching the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (I.N.F.), issuing a statement supporting U.S. accusations of Russian violations. “Allies have concluded that Russia has developed and fielded a missile system, the 9M729, which violates the INF Treaty and poses significant risks to Euro-Atlantic security,” N.A.T.O. foreign ministers said in a statement after the meeting, adding: “we strongly support the finding of the U.S. that Russia is in material breach of its obligations under the I.N.F. Treaty,” Reuters reports.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced yesterday that the U.S. would suspend its obligations to the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (I.N.F.) in 60 days’ time unless Russia takes steps to return to compliance. The move follows remarks in October from President Trump, who claimed that the U.S. would withdraw from the accord as Russia had been violating the agreement “for many years,” Jessica Donati and Daniel Michaels report at the Wall Street Journal.
The Kremlin said today that the U.S. was manipulating facts in order to falsely accuse Moscow of violating the I.N.F. and thus create a pretext to leave it. When asked about the ultimatum, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said statements from the United States and N.A.T.O. are serving to stir up tensions, Reuters reports.
Deaths from terrorism declined worldwide in 2017 for the third straight year but far-right extremism was found to be on the rise, according to the 2018 Global Terrorism Index report, out today. The Daily Beast reports.
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“Prosecutors say employees of both companies “referred to the client in ways that made clear they knew it was Ukraine.” One Mercury employee said the nonprofit was the client “in name only,” likening the situation to “Alice in Wonderland.” A Podesta employee referred to the nonprofit’s certification that it wasn’t related to the Ukrainian political party as a “fig leaf on a fig leaf.”
Mueller’s team also noted that “the head of” the Podesta Group, an apparent reference to Tony Podesta, told his team to think the president of Ukraine is the client.”
Law & Crime–13 hours ago… of Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs, the former being the firm of TonyPodesta, brother of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
<a href=”http://NBCNews.com” rel=”nofollow”>NBCNews.com</a>–Nov 26, 2018Trump’s Monday tweet also asks, “Whatever happened to Podesta?” — an apparent reference to Tony Podesta, the former lobbyist under …Trump asks why Mueller hasn’t interviewed ‘hundreds’ of campaign … Yahoo Finance–Nov 26, 2018View all
Wall Street Journal–Apr 19, 2018Tony Podesta was in line to be king of K Street. His lobbying firm ended 2015 as the third largest in Washington, D.C., with nearly $30 million in …
ABC News–May 20, 2018Lobbyist Anthony “Tony” Podesta filed his final papers with the Department of Justice earlier this month chronicling the last work performed by …
Fox News–May 21, 2018Tony Podesta, the older brother of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and co-founder of the onetime lobbying powerhouse the …
WAVY-TV–Nov 26, 2018Prosecutors there are looking into the conduct of longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig …Manafort lied, breached plea deal, prosecutors say NWAOnline–Nov 27, 2018View allRead the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
An investigation referred to Justice Department prosecutors by Special Counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year into possible criminal activity by Clinton-linked Washington insider Tony Podesta and former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig is heating up, according to a new report that underscores federal authorities’ increasing enforcement of laws governing foreign business relationships.
The inquiries center not only on Craig and Podesta — a Democratic lobbyist and co-founder of the onetime lobbying powerhouse known as the Podesta Group — but also on Vin Weber, a former GOP congressman from Minnesota.
The probes had been quiet for months since Mueller referred them to authorities in New York City because they fell outside his mandate of determining whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia.
But in a flurry of new activity, Justice Department prosecutors in the last several weeks have begun interviewing witnesses and contacting lawyers to schedule additional questioning related to the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs, people familiar with the inquiry anonymously told the Associated Press.
The apparent ramp-up comes as multiple reports and indications suggest that the Mueller probe into possible collusion in 2016 between the Russian government and President Trump’s campaign is winding down.
The New York work underscores the broad effects of Mueller’s investigation, extending well beyond that collusion question. Mueller has made clear he will not turn away if he discovers alleged crimes outside the scope of his inquiry; instead, he refers them out in investigations that may linger on even after the special counsel’s work concludes. Other Justice Department referrals from Mueller have ended in guilty pleas, including the hush money payment case of Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen.
The investigation reflects how Mueller, in latching onto an obscure law, has shined a light on high-dollar lobbying practices that have helped foreign governments find powerful allies and advocates in Washington. It’s a practice that has spanned both parties and enriched countless former government officials, who have leveraged their connections to influence American politics.
In New York, Mueller’s referral prompted a fresh look at the lobbying firms of Podesta and Weber, who have faced scrutiny for their decisions not to register as foreign agents for Ukrainian lobbying work directed by ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Fox News first reported, and court filings later confirmed, that Podesta was offered “use immunity” by Mueller this summer to testify in the Washington, D.C., trial of Manafort that was planned at the time — separate from the Virginia case in which he was convicted on bank and fraud charges.
Prosecutors typically offer witnesses immunity to legally prevent them from asserting their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying. “Use immunity” means prosecutors agreed not to use any statements Podesta would make on the witness stand against him in court.
“Use immunity” is not as expansive as “transactional immunity” — which would have protected Podesta more broadly from being prosecuted on the subject matter of his testimony, even if prosecutors could independently confirm relevant details and didn’t need to use his statements on the stand.
Manafort averted the D.C. trial by pleading guilty to two federal counts in September and agreeing to cooperate with the Mueller probe, meaning Podesta did not have to testify at all, seemingly rendering the immunity deal moot as to any potential future prosecutorial action involving Podesta.
An attorney for Greg Craig claims his client “was not required to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.” (Facebook)
Mueller’s team has since said Manafort violated that agreement, and the Special Counsel’s office is set to file a sentencing memorandum in Manafort’s case on Friday that is expected to include prosecutors’ recommended sentence for him.
Podesta is a longtime Democratic operative whose brother, John Podesta, ran Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign; Weber is a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. Neither man has been charged with any crimes. Their firms have defended the decisions by saying they relied on the advice of outside attorneys.
Mueller’s referral also involved Craig, a former White House counsel for President Barack Obama. Craig supervised a report authored on behalf of the Ukrainian government, and Mueller’s team has said Manafort helped Ukraine hide that it paid more than $4 million for the work. CNN reported in September that prosecutors were weighing charges against Craig.
It’s unclear if the renewed interest will produce charges or if prosecutors are merely following up on Mueller’s referral.
Lawyers for Weber and Craig and a spokeswoman for Podesta declined to comment. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan didn’t return an email seeking comment.
Mercury spokesman Michael McKeon said the firm has “always welcomed any inquiry since we acted appropriately at every step of the process, including hiring a top lawyer in Washington and following his advice. We’ll continue to cooperate as we have previously.”
Foreign lobbying work was central to Mueller’s case against Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates, two high-profile Trump campaign officials who pleaded guilty earlier this year and have been interviewed extensively by prosecutors.
The Podestas have been frequent targets of Trump and his associates, who have repeatedly demanded to know why Tony Podesta has not been arrested and charged. Trump confidant Roger Stone, for instance, has insisted a 2016 tweet of his that appeared to presage the release by WikiLeaks of John Podesta’s emails — “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel” — was instead a reference to the brothers’ foreign connections getting them into the hot seat.
Stone’s legal team announced in a letter Tuesday that Stone would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to testify or provide documents to a Senate committee investigating potential collusion between the president’s team and Russia.
“Mr. Stone’s invocation of his Fifth Amendment privilege must be understood by all to be the assertion of a Constitutional right by an innocent citizen who denounces secrecy,” Stone’s attorney, Grant Smith, said in the statement. He also called the Senate Judiciary Committee’s requests a “fishing expedition” that is “far too overboard, far too overreaching, far too wide-ranging.”
In September, Manafort admitted to directing Mercury and the Podesta Group to lobby in the U.S. on behalf of a Ukrainian political party and Ukraine’s government, then led by President Viktor Yanukovych, Manafort’s longtime political patron.
Tony Podesta’s firm is facing scrutiny from the Robert Mueller probe. (Facebook)
While doing the lobbying, neither the Podesta Group nor Mercury registered as foreign agents under a U.S. law known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires lobbyists to declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders, governments or their political parties.
The Justice Department has rarely prosecuted such cases, which carry up to five years in prison, but has taken a more aggressive tack lately.
To secretly fund the lobbying and to avoid registration with the Justice Department, Manafort said he along with unidentified “others” arranged for the firms to be hired by a Brussels-based nonprofit, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, rather than the Ukrainian political interests directly.
Mercury and Podesta, which were paid a combined $2 million on the project, then registered under a less stringent lobbying law that doesn’t require as much public disclosure as FARA.
Both firms have said they registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, rather than FARA, on the advice of lawyers at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Craig’s former firm.
Gates admitted in his plea deal that he lied to Mercury’s attorneys about the project, a fact the lobbying firm has publicly highlighted. The Podesta Group has said it was misled by the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, citing a written certification from the nonprofit stating it wasn’t directed or controlled by the Ukrainian Party of Regions, one of Manafort’s clients.
Both firms have since registered under FARA. But in court papers filed alongside Manafort’s plea agreement, Mueller’s prosecutors suggested the firms were aware they were working on Ukraine’s behalf.
Prosecutors say employees of both companies “referred to the client in ways that made clear they knew it was Ukraine.” One Mercury employee said the nonprofit was the client “in name only,” likening the situation to “Alice in Wonderland.” A Podesta employee referred to the nonprofit’s certification that it wasn’t related to the Ukrainian political party as a “fig leaf on a fig leaf.”
Mueller’s team also noted that “the head of” the Podesta Group, an apparent reference to Tony Podesta, told his team to think the president of Ukraine is the client.
Fox News’ Bill Mears and the Associated Press contributed to this report.Read the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Flathead Beacon–Nov 27, 2018Prosecutors there are looking into the conduct of longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig …
<a href=”http://NBCNews.com” rel=”nofollow”>NBCNews.com</a>–Apr 24, 2018WASHINGTON — Former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig has left his law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the firm told …
Washington Post–Nov 27, 2018That probe is examining the conduct of Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig and former …
CNN–Sep 14, 2018(CNN) Federal prosecutors in New York are weighing criminal charges against former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig as part of an …Greg Craig Repped by Bill Taylor & Zuckerman Spaeder Amid SDNY … Highly Cited–<a href=”http://Law.com” rel=”nofollow”>Law.com</a>–Sep 16, 2018View all
Yahoo Finance–Nov 26, 2018The cases involved Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta; former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig and former Minnesota Republican Rep …
ABA Journal–Apr 24, 2018Greg Craig has retired from Skadden and his name has been scrubbed from the law … Craig, a former White House counsel during the Obama …Amid Mueller Probe, Gregory Craig Retires From Skadden Highly Cited–<a href=”http://Law.com” rel=”nofollow”>Law.com</a>–Apr 24, 2018View allRead the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Progressives are in search of a collective voice on foreign policy and national security. As one senior Democratic Senate staffer confided to me over the summer, “I keep asking, ‘What is a progressive national security policy? Are we a bunch of progressives on education, healthcare, etc. who happen to do foreign policy and it should look the same no matter who’s in charge? Or do we have a distinctly progressive outlook on the world that we’re trying to implement as practitioners?’” Until recently, the left has been unable to reliably answer these questions and it’s understandable why.
For one thing, the progressive movement is intellectually diverse. Self-identified progressives range from committed socialists to left-leaning neoliberals and — at the extreme edges of the movement — both hardcore pacifists and anti-fascist militants. Progressives have considerable differences of opinion about capitalism, using force to achieve political ends, and America’s role in the world.
In general, the progressive voice has also historically been muted when it comes to foreign policy, which has partly to do with its modest resourcing and representation. Since the Cold War, the Democratic Party has been captured by the politics of “third way” liberalism. At home, it vacillated between Roosevelt-era, New Deal-style social welfare politics and an alliance with unfettered capitalism, increasingly favoring the latter over time. Abroad, the “third way” amounted to sustaining the once taken-for-granted and now much-contested “liberal international order” — essentially a foreign policy premised on U.S. military superiority underwriting a series of global institutional, economic, and human rights commitments. At most, these “third way” positions only ever partly reflected the priorities of political progressives.
The left’s chronic under-representation within the Democratic Party extends to its presence in the “ideas industry” as well. Authentically progressive ideas are scarce in the Washington think tank landscape, and progressive mega-donors tend to finance domestic policies and projects, not foreign policy.
Constrained in all these ways, progressives have failed to articulate their own “theory of security” — a term of art referring to how their preferred pattern of foreign policy decisions defines and realizes U.S. interests. The lack of one, as Vox reporter Zach Beauchamp concluded, has meant that “foreign policy debate tends to be conducted between the center and the right.” Indeed, the inadequacies of U.S. foreign policy traditions may exist because progressives have a history of rarely showing up analytically to foreign policy fights.
But while these limitations have prevented the left from cohering around a clear theory of progressive national security, it’s possible to tease one out of the progressive worldview all the same, and that progressive vision partially accommodates America’s default position of liberal internationalism: Regional balances of power and alliances still matter, and there is a role for both the U.S. military and international institutions. But the progressive theory of security also makes its own analytical wagers, requiring alterations in key areas of the national security agenda — namely re-scoping the size and shape of the U.S. military, emphasizing political and democratic alliances, rebalancing how international institutions work, and pursuing mutual threat reduction where circumstances allow.
Saving Liberal Internationalism from Itself
America’s traditional theory of security consists in a mix of realist and neoliberal beliefs: military superiority, alliances, economic interdependence through global capitalism, and international institutions to legitimate and sustain the entire enterprise. By pursuing all of the above — it’s typically conceived of as a package deal — the United States is able to keep open a stable international trading system, maintain balances of power in key regions of the world, and minimize the prospect of arms races and interstate wars. Democrats and Republicans have assigned greater or lesser weight to different elements within this formula, but both parties have upheld the basic meta strategy over time.
Progressive principles are not entirely hostile to this theory of security. Despite its intellectual diversity, the progressive movement has a common core emphasizing the pursuit of a more just world through democracy, greater economic equality, and human rights protections, as well as opposition to imperialism and authoritarianism. Progressives are also conditional advocates for the rule of law and international institutions. As leftist author Michael Walzer has argued, “We still need global regulation by social-democratic versions of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization…” More controversially, there are strongly ingrained biases against the military in some quarters of the left. “Anti-militarism” is an emotionally loaded and imprecise term, but it translates into inherent skepticism about the value of both military spending and the use of force abroad. Taken together, these principled positions and attitudes logically require alterations to America’s longstanding theory of security, but not a wholesale rejection of it.
From Military Superiority to Military Sufficiency
The traditional realist foundation of U.S. national security has been military superiority — ensuring the U.S. military can “deter or defeat all potential future adversaries.” This theory presumes that the capability to prevail in any plausible conflict is necessary for the United States to make credible threats against adversaries and credible reassurances to allies. Military superiority also sustains regional balances of power, ensuring that no other state in Asia, Europe, or the Middle East can exercise hegemony or control of their region.
Even in a progressive government disinclined to call on the Pentagon to solve problems, the U.S. military will need to be capable of projecting power into key regions, making credible threats, and achieving political objectives with force and minimal casualties if called on to do so. But a force structure sufficient to meet these purposes might be achieved without the endlessly increasing requirements of military superiority. A standard of military sufficiency — as opposed to superiority — is both analytically plausible and more morally congruent with progressive principles for several reasons.
First, the U.S. military is traditionally sized to win in temporally overlapping wars in different regions, but the Pentagon’s force planners have assumed very little help from local allies in those fights — this fact is obvious from the massive size of the U.S. military. Yet, looking across the globe today, there is no plausible conflict that would ensnare only (or even primarily) the United States. And in any case, progressives have a consistent track record of opposing unilateral wars of choice. Second, the idea that it takes military superiority to prevent other states from dominating their regions involves some dubious assumptions about the ability of military power to prevent other countries from exercising international political influence. Stopping others from controlling a region does not mean the United States must be able to exercise regional control itself.
As such, there is a case for making America’s security more entwined — not less — with the security of regions of interest by making U.S. force structure more networked with trusted allies and partners. This could meaningfully reduce the defense budget, and the only real risk it would entail is in the assumption that friends will provide significant contributions to a fight involving U.S. forces. It also potentially makes the dirty business of war a more democratic and less imperious endeavor by wagering that “multilateralizing” force structure to a degree tamps down on the tendency to opt into ill-advised conflicts. Military sufficiency potentially ties the hands of future presidents, making them less able to launch unilateral wars, and simultaneously increases the likelihood that any conflict involving large numbers of U.S. troops will be multilateral and cooperative. It would also befit the analytical claim — which some on the left already make — that the world is less dangerous than the Pentagon supposes, implying that a posture of military sufficiency would not hazard any great geopolitical risks.
Preserving Democratic Alliances
In liberal internationalism, alliances are a means by which the United States deters aggression against its allies. They also make it possible for the United States to reliably project military power into key regions, and serve as a unique means of exerting influence in world politics. Not only do alliances act as mechanisms of risk management by controlling the aggression of allies under threat, they have also been a means of preventing nuclear proliferation. The default theory of security bets that these advantages of alliances far outweigh the calculable downsides.
Progressive principles are not necessarily at odds with the traditional reasons for the United States upholding military alliances. In fact, a wide range of progressive thinkers writing on foreign policy have also endorsed sustaining U.S. alliances, though with some qualifications. Progressives are quick to emphasize political — not just military — commitments at the state and sub-state level, and take a very circumspect view of allying with illiberal actors. The idea that “[w]e should act abroad only with those who share our commitments and then, only in ways consistent with those commitments” implies solidarity with democratic countries who see their alliance with the United States as a source of security. But it is likewise a rejection of “[p]olitical and military support for tyrannical, predatory, and corrupt regimes.”
Because one of the principal threats to U.S. security in the progressive view is the spread of authoritarianism and fascism, the United States must keep faith with democratically elected governments that rely on an alliance with the United States for their security. That includes NATO as an institution, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. But where allies turn autocratic or become incubators for fascism — such as Turkey or Hungary (both NATO members) — a commitment to the individual country will have to be tenuous, as a matter of principle. An illiberal state’s membership in an alliance institution will not prevent U.S. policy from promoting solidarity with anti-authoritarian forces within that country. NATO will not be a shield that implicitly permits the growth of illiberal, reactionary politics in Europe.
Alliances are also crucial to a progressive theory of security to the extent the United States seeks to divest itself of the military superiority imperative. As argued above, moving to a concept of military sufficiency without simply becoming isolationist (which itself would be anti-progressive) requires maintaining allies. It would be logically untenable to seek international solidarity with likeminded countries and peoples abroad while destroying alliance architectures around the world — one action would undermine the other. And where the abdication of an alliance is likely to lead to nuclear proliferation, conflict, or the spread of fascism, the alliance may have to stay in place as a short-term exception to the rule. But even then, the principle of supporting only democratic actors remains. In sum, then, the progressive theory of security requires fidelity only to democratic alliances, and any expansion of the U.S. alliance network is likely to emphasize political support first and military support last, if at all.
Reforming International Institutions
U.S. foreign policy debates routinely center on the merits of sustaining the mélange of international institutions that constitute the “post-war” or “liberal international” order: the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, among many others. These institutions play an essential role in how U.S. liberal internationalism conceives of keeping America secure. Collectively, they preserve a stable international trading system that facilitates conflict-deterring economic interdependence. The existence of international institutions also allows many (not all) nations around the world to escape the predations of international anarchy. The belief in reliable institutions lets many liberal-democratic states be liberal and democratic in their foreign policies — by focusing on trading relations and taking for granted the appearance of international stability. In the liberal internationalist theory of security, this partly explains why neither Europe nor Asia has experienced interstate wars in more than a generation — an architecture that combines U.S. military superiority and alliances with international institutions. It’s a package deal. The institutions part of that deal preserves a “capitalist peace” through economic interdependence, and at the same time encourages many states to opt out of militaristic foreign policies.
The left embraces international institutions in principle because they promote multilateralism, the rule of law, and can help attenuate conflict — all of which favor justice and egalitarianism. But some international institutions must be repurposed or reformed to serve a more democratic, and less corrupting, imperative. This is not just about justice for its own sake, but rather that justice, in the form of equality, lessens the likelihood of war. Progressives believe that yawning gaps in economic inequality are a structural cause of conflict. As Bernie Sanders remarked in 2017: “Foreign policy must take into account the outrageous income and wealth inequality that exists globally and in our own country. This planet will not be secure or peaceful when so few have so much, and so many have so little…”
A progressive security policy would therefore bet significantly on international institutions, but in qualified ways that differ from default liberal internationalism. It would seek to essentially save capitalism from itself by regulating it. At the international level, this might translate into a more democratic distribution of voting rights or agenda setting powers in international financial bodies — especially the World Bank and IMF — and a more relaxed attitude toward economic protectionism in instances where fairness or just labor practices are called into question. Although anathema to the traditional liberal bargain, these steps would serve as a means of attenuating giant wealth transfers across borders, as well as the political corruption that often accompanies those transfers, as dictators around the world have learned to “play” globalization processes to enrich themselves. Such regulations of capitalism might also dramatically elevate the importance of the International Labor Organization, a moribund body that for decades has promoted not labor but rather pro-market deregulation trends. But the larger point is best summarized by Bernie Sanders: “[W]e have got to help lead the struggle to defend and expand a rules-based international order in which law, not might, makes right.” The progressive theory of security wagers on the same institutional arrangements that make up liberal internationalism, but argues for their reform, in order to address the inequality gap, transnational corruption, and authoritarianism, thus prioritizing long-term systemic causes of conflict, even if it might risk the “capitalist peace” in the near term.
Mutual Threat Reduction
The final, and most distinct, element in the progressive theory of national security — one that’s absent from America’s default posture toward the world — is what might be called mutual threat reduction. If the progressive sensibility leads to the military being treated as a policy tool of last resort, progressives would have to prioritize the use of diplomacy to attenuate the threat landscape as a compensatory move. There is a defensible logic in this wager, because deterrence — managing threats by making threats — is not an end in itself but rather a means of buying time. The ultimate success of deterrence derives from whether the time bought was used to ameliorate the conditions that gave rise to the need for deterrence in the first place. In the progressive view, diplomacy in the name of mutual threat reduction takes on concrete meaning: arms control, Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, and international regimes that regulate technology development, transfers, and use. These kinds of initiatives are not new to U.S. foreign policy, but the progressive theory elevates their importance, and justifies taking a certain amount of risk in pursuing them with greater gusto.
Progressive principles commit the United States to doing the spade work necessary to discover whether real and potential adversaries are willing to restrain arms competitions or increase transparency into their military thinking, and to reciprocate when they do. Such a probe may require limited unilateral gestures from the United States. Advocates of realpolitik may see no reason to ever trust the intentions of an enemy or shrink U.S. advantages in military matters. But progressives should be willing to accept some amount of geopolitical risk — while stopping short of naiveté — in the name of, not only probing, but nudging the intentions of a threatening adversary toward the goal of mutual accommodation. In 2012, the Obama administration made a fleeting attempt at getting beyond mutually assured destruction with key competitors like Russia and China to reach a place of “mutually assured stability.” The premise of that forgotten project — that recognized that probing and stimulating opportunities for threat reduction is an essential part of avoiding unnecessary future wars — would be renewed in a progressive security vision. More importantly, it would become a preferred starting point for evaluating all strategic issues, from North Korea to arms races in emerging technologies.
Playing the Long Game
There are significant continuities between the liberal internationalist theory of security and that of progressive internationalism. Nevertheless, the divergences are not trivial. The table below summarizes these distinctions.
Comparing Progressive and Liberal Internationalist Theories of Security
Default Liberal Internationalism
Progressive Internationalism
Military Superiority
Military Sufficiency
Alliances
Democratic Alliances
International Institutions
Reformed International Institutions
Economic Interdependence
Mutual Threat Reduction
The progressive wager is not without risks. The process of changing American foreign policy in this way may jeopardize certain sources of stability that the progressive worldview takes for granted. But it also addresses long-term sources of recurring conflict that liberal internationalism ignores. Every theory of security amounts to a bet with distinct tradeoffs and risks. The progressive bet is that the American interest is best served by having a more peaceful world, and that’s only possible by pursuing greater justice and equity, and opposing tyranny wherever it arises.
Van Jackson is an associate editor at the Texas National Security Review, a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He is the author of On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The views expressed are solely those of the author.
Norman Eisen and Barry Berke, Opinion contributors Published 8:00 a.m. ET Dec. 2, 2018 | Updated 3:41 p.m. ET Dec. 2, 2018
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‘Avengers’ director Joe Russo launched LA restaurant Simone, all while directing the famous Marvel flicks because ‘he loves food.’ (Dec. 4)AP
MAGA hat cartoon, Nov. 30, 2018(Photo: Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune, UT)
One aspect of Michael Cohen’s blockbuster plea deal hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves. It is the possibility that the Trump Organization and others, perhaps even including the president himself, might have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). These new facts and reports are yet more evidence that Donald Trump’s business activities represent a clear-and-present threat to his presidency.
The revelations last week in connection with Cohen’s plea included the news that during his presidential campaign, Trump pursued a significant project in Russia and a report that Cohen, representing the Trump Organization, discussed with an assistant to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman the idea that the developers would be interested in giving Putin the $50 million penthouse in Trump Tower Moscow. That is, of course, assuming they were allowed to build it.
If this report is true, this type of offer is not, as the president tweeted of the project as a whole, “very legal & very cool.” It is, instead, a possible FCPA violation.
By Bayer
Is modern living making us more allergic?
US law says foreign officials can’t be bribed
Trump has brazenly argued that this long-standing law is not fair because it prevents American business people from paying bribes in jurisdictions where others might. But the FCPA has been on the books for more than 40 years, and it has been aggressively enforced through Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
That is because, as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in a speech last year on FCPA enforcement, “paying bribes may still be common in some places — but that does not make it right.”
The FCPA makes it a crime to corruptly offer anything of value to a government official for the purpose of “obtaining or retaining business.” The courts have defined “obtaining or retaining” broadly to include nearly any action that would serve a business purpose. The facts, if true, leave little room to question whether the Trump Organization was seeking to retain or obtain business given its efforts to receive government assistance to go forward with the project, and Cohen’s communications with a Putin aide to discuss that very issue.
In fact, special counsel Robert Mueller indicated as much in Cohen’s plea agreement. Cohen, speaking with the woman in Putin’s press office, “requested assistance in moving the project forward” both in financing the project and in “securing land.” She reportedly asked detailed questions and explained that she would follow up “with others in Russia.”
Similarly, it seems clear that the offer was made “corruptly” — that is, as Congress explained when it passed the FCPA in 1977, to “wrongfully influence the recipient.” It is difficult to imagine how suggesting that the president of the country may receive a $50 million benefit if the development goes forward could be anything other than corrupt.
The repeated and continuous lies about the project by Cohen and likely others, including to Congress, are further evidence of the shadiness of the deal — in other words, of corrupt intent. The false testimony is made even more troubling if individuals in our government knew of its falsity and were therefore aware that they could be subject to blackmail by Russia, whose leaders obviously knew the truth.
If it was actually suggested that should the project be approved and built, those responsible for the development were prepared to potentially offer a $50 million penthouse apartment to Putin, this would certainly appear to satisfy the “offer something of value” prong. While detractors might claim that the $50 million penthouse was not formally “offered,” experienced FCPA practitioners know this is not a defense.
It is important to note that under the FCPA, there does not have to be a transfer, or even a formal offer, of something of value. It is sufficient if there is an attempt to corruptly influence a government decision by holding out the promise of something of value, or even just the possibility it might be available, in order to obtain or retain business. Essentially, the law contemplates and prohibits the wink-and-a-nod agreements that still dominate the business landscape in many markets where public corruption is commonplace.
The $50 million question: Did Trump know?
Still unknown is how much President Trump or his family actually knew about the Putin luxury apartment offer. Cohen says he frequently communicated about the project with Trump, including keeping Trump apprised of his discussions with representatives of Putin. It would be surprising if that did not include information about an inducement of this magnitude.
Under the law of conspiracy and aiding and abetting, even if a person is not otherwise involved in offering an illegal bribe, that individual can still be guilty if he was aware of it and was otherwise part of the transaction that would benefit from it.
While the past week has added significantly to the list of potential crimes that Trump and those close to him might have committed, the potential FCPA criminal violation could be the most straightforward to prove — if the president was aware of the offer.
We know that Trump is well aware of the FCPA; he has called it “a horrible law” and “ridiculous.” We know that Michael Cohen swore in court on Thursday that he “discussed the status and progress” of the negotiations with then-candidate Trump on numerous occasions, and that he gave Trump’s adult children regular briefings.
What we don’t know yet is whether Trump or his children were made aware of this critical $50 million detail. The presidency could hang on that question.
Norman Eisen, chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is author of “The Last Palace: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House.” Follow him on Twitter: @NormEisen. Barry Berke is a nationally recognized trial lawyer specializing in all aspects of white-collar crime.
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Read or Share this story: <a href=”https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/12/02/trump-presidency-threatened-50-million-penthouse-gift-putin-column/2169500002/” rel=”nofollow”>https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/12/02/trump-presidency-threatened-50-million-penthouse-gift-putin-column/2169500002/</a>Read the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Observer–Nov 30, 2018Former Trump Organization advisor Felix Sater claimed it was his idea to gift a $50 million Moscow penthouse suite to Vladimir Putin.Trump Tower Moscow considered giving Putin $50 mn penthouse … Business Standard–Nov 30, 2018View allRead the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Sen. Chuck Grassley is calling for more information about the FBI’s raid on a former agency contractor who had given a watchdog documents claiming that federal officials failed to investigate possible criminal activity related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to a Russian company’s subsidiary.
Grassley, R-Iowa, has sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and to the Department of Justice’s internal watchdog, seeking more details on the raid of Dennis Nathan Cain in Maryland on Nov. 16, giving them until Dec. 12 to respond, reports Fox News.
Cain’s attorney, Michael Socarras, told The Daily Caller after 16 FBI agents raided the home on Nov. 19 that the agent who led the raid accused Cain of being in possession of stolen federal property.
Cain claims he that he has been recognized as a protected whistleblower under federal law by DOJ watchdog Michael Horowitz. Socarras also said Horowitz sent Cain’s information to the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Grassley, in his letter to Wray, asked why Cain’s house was raided, if the FBI knew of his disclosures to Horowitz, and if the disclosures were considered protected. Further, he asked if agents seized any classified information.Read the whole story · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Law & Crime-13 hours ago… of Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs, the former being the firm of TonyPodesta, brother of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
<a href=”http://NBCNews.com” rel=”nofollow”>NBCNews.com</a>-Nov 26, 2018Trump’s Monday tweet also asks, “Whatever happened to Podesta?” — an apparent reference to Tony Podesta, the former lobbyist under …Trump asks why Mueller hasn’t interviewed ‘hundreds’ of campaign … Yahoo Finance-Nov 26, 2018View all
Wall Street Journal-Apr 19, 2018Tony Podesta was in line to be king of K Street. His lobbying firm ended 2015 as the third largest in Washington, D.C., with nearly $30 million in …
ABC News-May 20, 2018Lobbyist Anthony “Tony” Podesta filed his final papers with the Department of Justice earlier this month chronicling the last work performed by …
Fox News-May 21, 2018Tony Podesta, the older brother of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and co-founder of the onetime lobbying powerhouse the …
WAVY-TV-Nov 26, 2018Prosecutors there are looking into the conduct of longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig …Manafort lied, breached plea deal, prosecutors say NWAOnline-Nov 27, 2018View allRead the whole story · · · · ·
An investigation referred to Justice Department prosecutors by Special Counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year into possible criminal activity by Clinton-linked Washington insider Tony Podesta and former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig is heating up, according to a new report that underscores federal authorities’ increasing enforcement of laws governing foreign business relationships.
The inquiries center not only on Craig and Podesta — a Democratic lobbyist and co-founder of the onetime lobbying powerhouse known as the Podesta Group — but also on Vin Weber, a former GOP congressman from Minnesota.
The probes had been quiet for months since Mueller referred them to authorities in New York City because they fell outside his mandate of determining whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia.
But in a flurry of new activity, Justice Department prosecutors in the last several weeks have begun interviewing witnesses and contacting lawyers to schedule additional questioning related to the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs, people familiar with the inquiry anonymously told the Associated Press.
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