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Police end NAACP sit-in against nominee for attorney general

MONTGOMERY, Ala. –  The national president of the NAACP and five others were arrested after staging a sit-in Tuesday at the Alabama office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, the nominee for U.S. attorney general, the civil rights group said.
The organization held the demonstration to protest Sessions' nomination by President-elect Donald Trump, criticizing Sessions' record and views on civil rights, immigration, criminal justice reform, and voting rights enforcement.
"We have an attorney general nominee who does not acknowledge the reality of voter suppression while mouthing faith in the myth of voter fraud," NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said by phone earlier in Tuesday's protest. Brooks called Sessions a poor choice to lead the U.S. Justice Department.
The sit-in at Sessions' office in Mobile, Alabama — the city the Republican senator calls home — began around 11 a.m. Tuesday. Demonstrators refused a request by the manager of the building— which includes several other tenants in addition to Sessions— to leave when the building closed for the day at 6 p.m. Police could be seen on video footage coming and handcuffing the six protesters and escorted them to a police van.
"We all are aware of the laws of trespass. We are engaging in a voluntary act of civil disobedience," Brooks told the officers who arrived at the scene.
The NAACP broadcast the events live on the organization's Facebook page. WKRG of Mobile reported that the six, which included Brooks and the president of the Alabama NAACP, were charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass and released on bond.
The all-day protest ended in handcuffs but without confrontation. Brooks shook the hands of the officers and the officers allowed the protesters to kneel and pray before they were led away.
Brooks criticized Sessions' prosecution of African-American voting rights activists on voter fraud charges when he was a U.S. attorney in Alabama. The group also raised concerns about immigration policies under Trump, the future of the Voting Rights Act and noted allegations — raised decades ago in Sessions unsuccessful 1986 confirmation hearing for a federal judgeship — that Sessions made racially insensitive remarks when he was a U.S. attorney.
Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for Sessions, said in a statement that the nominee has dedicated his career to upholding the rule of law, ensuring public safety and prosecuting government corruption.
"Many African-American leaders who've known him for decades attest to this and have welcomed his nomination to be the next Attorney General. These false portrayals of Senator Sessions will fail as tired, recycled, hyperbolic charges that have been thoroughly rebuked and discredited," the statement added.
Sessions was in Washington D.C. and not in his Mobile office at the time of the protests.
In testimony at the 1986 confirmation hearing, Sessions was accused by some hearing witnesses of saying the NAACP was "un-American" and saying he thought Ku Klux Klan members were "OK until I found out they smoke pot,"
Sessions said during the hearing that the Klan remark was a joke and that other remarks were mischaracterized. What he had said, Sessions said, was that civil rights groups hurt themselves when "they take positions that people think are un-American they hurt themselves." He then praised the work of the NAACP.
The demonstration marked the latest criticism of Trump's pick for attorney general. Sessions' confirmation hearings are expected to begin next week, highlighted by a vigorous push both by those favoring the nomination and those opposed to it.
Former Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who was part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team representing the black civil rights activists in the voter fraud prosecution, on Tuesday urged U.S. senators to reject Sessions' nomination.

Republicans deliver on 'Day One' promise, begin ObamaCare repeal on Hill

Republicans delivered Tuesday on their “Day One” promise to start repealing ObamaCare at the start of the 115th Congress, introducing a resolution to dismantle the 2010 health care law.
“Today, we take the first steps to repair the nation’s broken health care system, removing Washington from the equation and putting control back where it belongs: with patients, their families and their doctors,” said Wyoming GOP Sen. Mike Enzi, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Enzi and other leaders of the Republican-controlled Congress are relying on a parliamentary maneuver known as “budget reconciliation” to dismantle the law because it avoids a Senate Democrat filibuster and requires only a 51-vote majority for passage in the chamber, not the 60-vote majority.
Republicans have a 52-to-48 member majority in the Senate and a 241-to-194 majority in the House, which requires only a simple majority for passage.
The GOP can use the reconciliation tactic because federally-subsidized ObamaCare directly impacts the federal budget. (And congressional Democrats used the same tactic in 2009 to complete passage of the law, officially known as the Affordable Care Act.)
Incoming GOP President Donald Trump won the 2016 White House race in part on a vow to repeal ObamaCare on “day one” of his administration and to replace it with “something terrific.” But the dismantling process will be decidedly longer and more complicated.
Top congressional Republicans in the weeks after Trump’s Nov. 8 win started saying that replacing ObamaCare could take two to four years.
A top Senate aide declined Tuesday to give a timeline on when the resolution -- which must pass in three House and four Senate committees -- will be passed and ObamaCare will officially be repealed.
The aide said the focus is on getting through the process “as quickly as possible.”
However, Enzi’s office said that Senate debate on the issue will begin next week and that the seven committees should hold preliminary “repeal legislation” votes by Jan. 27.
The House is expected to begin debate on the issue next week.
To be sure, Republicans are now the party under pressure with ObamaCare -- after years of crticizing the law and now that they finally have a president who will sign repeal-and-replace legislation.
In addition, some of the most conservative House Republicans are already raising concerns about their leaders wanting multiple years to implement a replacement plan, fearing backlash from voters at home.
And Trump’s victory over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has spotlighted her party’s argument that Republicans have no viable ObamaCare replacement, despite years of criticism and promises.
Meanwhile, President Obama will be on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to talk with fellow Democrats about how to save his signature health care law.
And Democratic congressional leaders are urging rank-and-file members to hold rallies to tell voters about the importance of preserving ObamaCare. They have planned a national “Day of Action” on the matter for January 15.
Dismantling the government-mandated insurance without an alternative for the roughly 20 million Americans now enrolled could indeed be a political disaster, particularly before the 2018 midterms.
ObamaCare was created to drive down overall insurance costs by reducing emergency-care visits and other uninsured medical expenses.
However, lower-than-projected enrollment among younger, healthy Americans and insurance companies dropping out of the program have contributed to significantly increasing premium costs.
And while 2016 voters disaffected with big government will likely want Trump to fulfill his repeal-replace promise, the president-elect and others have hinted at keeping some parts of ObamaCare, including young adults being allowed to stay on their parents’ plan.
Late Tuesday, the House passed the set of rules that will govern the body through the 115th Congress -- minus a controversial provision quietly inserted late Monday by Republican members to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics and put it under lawmakers' control.
The provision was removed under pressure from Trump, as well as furious Democrats.
The approved rules package, however, now includes provisions that allow Republican leaders to fine members who use electronic devices to take pictures or video from the House floor.
The change comes six months after Democrats live-streamed a sit-in on the House floor for 26 hours to call attention to their demand for votes on gun control.
Under the new rules, first-offenders get a warning. The next offense comes with a $500 fine, and ensuing ones could cost members $2,500 apiece.

Trump sets long-awaited news conference for January 11

President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he would hold a "general news conference" on Jan. 11, his first formal press conference since his November election victory.
Trump had been scheduled to hold a press conference on Dec. 15 to discuss his plan to leave his sprawling business empire as he takes office Jan. 20, but that event was postponed.
Since taking office, Trump has sat for a few television interviews and has taken a handful of shouted questions from the press pool — a small group of reporters who follow the president — both at Trump Tower in New York and outside his coastal Florida estate.
Trump's last full-fledged news conference was July 27, which he held at his Miami-area golf course as counterprogramming to the ongoing Democratic National Convention. It was there that Trump called upon Russia to hack his opponent Hillary Clinton's emails saying, "I will tell you this, Russia: If you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
His staff later insisted that Trump was joking.
In lieu of press conferences, the president-elect has communicated to the American public through tweets, as well as a series of December "Thank You" rallies in states that helped provide his winning margin in the Electoral College.
Trump's team has downplayed the need for news conferences. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, said last month that the press would have access to the president.
"This will be a traditional White House in the sense that you will have a great deal of press availability on a daily basis and you'll have a president who continues to be engaged with the press," she said in an interview with ABC.
While Trump's lack of press interaction is a worry to some, many of his supporters cheered the celebrity businessman's battles with what they felt were biased reporters. Trump made his antagonistic relationship with the media a centerpiece of his campaign, inciting his rally crowds to boo the press, singling out individual reporters with derogatory names like "sleazebag" and using Twitter to attack coverage he didn't like.
His predecessors took a different approach.
Two days after the Supreme Court decision gave him the 2000 election, George W. Bush held a press conference where reporters asked him about his Cabinet picks and tax plans. He proceeded to field more questions each of the next two days. Barack Obama, also regularly held news conferences after winning, taking questions from the White House press corps 18 different times as president-elect. Bush, who had a shorter transition due to the extended Florida recount, did so 11 times.

Wikileaks' Assange: 'A 14-year-old kid could have hacked Podesta' emails

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview that a teenager could have hacked into Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's computer and retrieved damaging email messages that the website published during last year's election campaign.
"We published several ... emails which show Podesta responding to a phishing email," Assange said during Part I of the interview, which aired on "Hannity" Tuesay night. "Podesta gave out that his password was the word ‘password’. His own staff said this email that you’ve received, this is totally legitimate. So, this is something ... a 14-year-old kid could have hacked Podesta that way."
Assange also claimed that Clinton herself made "almost no attempt" to keep her private emails safe from potentially hostile states during her tenure as secretary of state.

"Now, was she trying to keep them secure from Republicans? Probably," Assange said. "But in terms of [nation-] states, almost no attempt."
Hannity interviewed Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The Australia native has been holed up there for five years battling extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, which Assange denies.
Wikileaks published more than 50,000 emails detailing dubious practices at the Clinton Foundation, top journalists working closely with the Clinton campaign, key Clinton aides speaking derisively of Catholics and a top Democratic National Committee (DNC) official providing debate questions to Clinton in advance.

Assange has repeatedly denied claims by the Obama administration that Russia was behind the cyberattacks that exposed the DNC and Podesta emails. Assange has repeatedly insisted that Wikileaks' source for the emails was not the Russian government or any "state party," and said the outgoing administration was attempting to "delegitimize" President-Elect Donald Trump by making those claims.

In Part I of the interview, Assange criticized a Dec. 29 joint analysis of the cyberattacks by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. After the report was released, President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and closed two Russian compounds.
"On the top [of the report], there is a disclaimer, saying … there is no guarantee that any of this information is accurate," Assange told Hannity. "There’s nothing in that report that says that any information was given to us. Nothing."
Assange also criticized the mainstream media for what he called the "ethical corruption" displayed in the Podesta emails.

"The editor of the New York Times ... has come out and said that he would do the same thing as Wikileaks, [that] if they had obtained that information, they would have published it," Assange said. "Now, unfortunately, I don’t believe that is true."

Assange added that he doubted that partisan sympathy explained the cozy relationship between Podesta and reporters covering the Clinton campaign.
"It’s more like, ‘You rub my back, I’ll rub yours. I’ll give you information, you’ll come to my – I’ll invite you to my child’s christening or my next big party.’"
Assange said that the website would not have hesitated to publish embarrassing information about Trump if they had received it.
"There’s no sources coming out through other journalists … and saying, 'We gave Wikileaks all this information about Donald Trump or … Vladimir Putin and you know what? They didn’t publish it.' No one has come out and said that," Assange said. "If they did, that would hurt our reputation for trust for our sources."
The Wikileaks founder also warned Democrats that criticizing the website for publishing the emails was a "stupid maneuver."
"It’s the same reason why they lost the election, which is instead of focusing on substance, they focused on other things [like] this attempt to say how outrageous it is that the American public received true information before an election," Assange said. "The public doesn’t buy that. They want as much true information as possible."