Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Bret Baier: Obama used final speech to fire up his party
President Obama, in his farewell address Tuesday night, focused his speech on gains made during his two-term presidency and used the platform to urge his pary to rally after November's election.
“He’s trying to fire up his party,” Bret Baier, the anchor of “Special Report” said. He continued, “It is a party in the wilderness when it comes to the politics of where it goes.”
Obama issued a rallying cry to his supporters, saying: “If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try to talk with one in real life.”
“If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing. If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself,” he said. “Show up. Dive in. Stay at it. Sometimes you’ll win. Sometimes you’ll lose,” he said.
WATCH ENTIRE SPEECH: PART 1 | PART 2
He bid farewell to the country in his hometown of Chicago in front of 18,000 inside McCormick Place. His speech was forceful at times, especially when defending his major initiatives.
“If I had told you eight years ago that America would reverse a great recession, reboot our auto industry, and unleash the longest stretch of job creation in our history," he said, before listing off a series of other achievements, "...you might have said our sights were set a little too high," he said.
READ THE SPEECH
When he made a reference to the next president, Donald Trump, the crowd booed.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. One of the nation’s great strengths is the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next.”
Baier, who was interviewed after the speech by Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” pointed out that Obama got emotional when he talked about his family.
“No matter what your ideology is, you have to—at this moment—respect the sacrifice that a family goes through, when not only running for president, but being in that office for eight years. It comes with a lot of perks, but it comes with a lot of sacrifice as well.”
Kelly faces tough questions from Senate on border, heroin, cybersecurity in bid to lead Homeland Security
Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly was pressed Tuesday at a Capitol Hill hearing for answers about how he would address the country’s most pressing security concerns, including heroin trafficking and border protection, in his quest to become the next Homeland Security secretary.
Kelly -- who remains the corps’ longest-serving, active-duty general -- fielded the questions during his Senate confirmation hearing as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency.
The 66-year-old Kelly said that heroin pouring in from Mexico and other problems along the U.S.-Mexico border begin “1,500 miles south,” in Central America, and that resolving them requires improving relationships with other countries.
“Physical barriers alone won’t do it,” he testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. “We have to get after drug transporters. We need better partnerships.”
His call for forging and maintaining relations was a theme throughout the hearing, with Kelly and his supporters citing instances in his career in which he has relied on consensus building to succeed.
“I have led platoons and divisions,” Kelly said in his opening remarks. “I have held senior command positions in Iraq, served as the combatant commander of the U.S. Southern Command and … with our allies, across agencies and the private sector.
“These assignments … shared the common characteristics of working within and leading large, complex and diverse mission-focused organizations, while under great pressure to produce results.”
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain, a fellow Naval Academy graduate, who introduced Kelly, each called him “supremely qualified” and adept at managing multiple agencies.
“I’m confident that he would do as well, as secretary of state,” Gates said.
Kelly, having testified numerous times on Capitol Hill, is widely respected among members of Congress and is largely expected to be confirmed by the GOP-led Senate as the Cabinet-level agency’s seventh secretary in its roughly 13-year existence.
However, he faced several tough questions Tuesday that he appeared to struggle to answer, including a request by Ohio GOP Sen. Robert Portman to name his top-three ideas to improve agency morale.
The agency, which has roughly 240,000 employees and 20 major offices, notoriously has low morale and problems recruiting and retaining top employees.
Lawmakers repeatedly asked Kelly about domestic terrorism and cybersecurity, which he acknowledged to be a complex and inter-connected problem that needs to be stopped in large part by “cracking the nut” on people getting self-radicalized on the Internet.
Perhaps the toughest questions were posed by newly-elected California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris, who pressed Kelly on the Obama administration's immigration policy known as DACA, which allows deferred deportation for some illegal immigrants who entered the country as minors.
“I don’t know what the incoming administration is doing with that,” Kelly responded. “But I promise you, I will be involved in the process.”
However, he made clear his position about how he would deal with so-called sanctuary cities that don’t enforce U.S. immigration laws.
“The law is the law,” he said.
Ex-US diplomats urge Trump to rescind US-Cuba intelligence sharing
A Florida congresswoman has joined five former U.S.
diplomats in publicly urging President-elect Donald Trump to rescind
President Obama’s recent directive that U.S. intelligence agencies share
information with Cuba’s government.
Opponents, meantime, are defending the October 2016 directive.
The provisions on intelligence sharing were part of a 12-page directive Obama issued in October on trade and travel to Cuba. It instructs the U.S. director of national intelligence, the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to cooperate and share information with counterparts in Cuba on drug trafficking, immigration and counterterrorism.
Last week, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., sent a letter to Trump asking him to rescind the intelligence-sharing directives, according to the Miami Herald.
Ros-Lehtinen, who sits on the House Foreign Relations Committee, told FoxNews.com that such action was urgent.
"Any intelligence sharing with the Castro regime should cease as soon as the new administration takes power,” she said. “Sharing information with an avowed enemy of U.S. harms our national security interests because the Cuban regime has an advanced espionage apparatus that sells our intelligence to our adversaries across the world.”
The Cuban “dictatorship cannot be trusted with any kind of information,” she said, “and instead has developed strong ties with countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran who want to use Cuba as a launching pad for their spying capabilities against our nation.”
Ros-Lehtinen’s letter follows a Dec. 22 letter to Trump from five former U.S. diplomats – Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, James Cason, Everett Briggs and Jose Sorzano – that said the Cuban regime, which the U.S. long had included on a list of countries that sponsor terrorism, cannot be trusted and intelligence should not be shared with Havana.
Meanwhile, supporters of Obama’s directive say it is a practical step that merely extends an existing policy on ways to fight terrorism and drug trafficking.
William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University and co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” told FoxNews.com that U.S.-Cuba intelligence sharing is not new and has existed for decades in areas such as immigration and fighting drug trafficking.
“For many years, it was a relatively low level of cooperation, on a case-by-case basis,” LeoGrande said. “If the U.S. Coast Guard spotted a trafficker with a plane or boat, going into Cuban airspace or waters, they’d contact the Cuban Coast Guard and cooperate with them in interdicting, and vice versa.”
Critics of expanded cooperation between the two countries, LeoGrande said, have a broader agenda of dismantling the renewed diplomatic ties.
“They’re overblowing it because they’re opposed to every aspect of normalizing relations,” he said. “There’s really no downside to this [sharing]. One has to trust the intelligence community to decide what things are too sensitive to share, and what things are not.”
Opponents, meantime, are defending the October 2016 directive.
The provisions on intelligence sharing were part of a 12-page directive Obama issued in October on trade and travel to Cuba. It instructs the U.S. director of national intelligence, the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to cooperate and share information with counterparts in Cuba on drug trafficking, immigration and counterterrorism.
Last week, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., sent a letter to Trump asking him to rescind the intelligence-sharing directives, according to the Miami Herald.
Ros-Lehtinen, who sits on the House Foreign Relations Committee, told FoxNews.com that such action was urgent.
"Any intelligence sharing with the Castro regime should cease as soon as the new administration takes power,” she said. “Sharing information with an avowed enemy of U.S. harms our national security interests because the Cuban regime has an advanced espionage apparatus that sells our intelligence to our adversaries across the world.”
The Cuban “dictatorship cannot be trusted with any kind of information,” she said, “and instead has developed strong ties with countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran who want to use Cuba as a launching pad for their spying capabilities against our nation.”
Ros-Lehtinen’s letter follows a Dec. 22 letter to Trump from five former U.S. diplomats – Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, James Cason, Everett Briggs and Jose Sorzano – that said the Cuban regime, which the U.S. long had included on a list of countries that sponsor terrorism, cannot be trusted and intelligence should not be shared with Havana.
Meanwhile, supporters of Obama’s directive say it is a practical step that merely extends an existing policy on ways to fight terrorism and drug trafficking.
William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University and co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” told FoxNews.com that U.S.-Cuba intelligence sharing is not new and has existed for decades in areas such as immigration and fighting drug trafficking.
“For many years, it was a relatively low level of cooperation, on a case-by-case basis,” LeoGrande said. “If the U.S. Coast Guard spotted a trafficker with a plane or boat, going into Cuban airspace or waters, they’d contact the Cuban Coast Guard and cooperate with them in interdicting, and vice versa.”
Critics of expanded cooperation between the two countries, LeoGrande said, have a broader agenda of dismantling the renewed diplomatic ties.
“They’re overblowing it because they’re opposed to every aspect of normalizing relations,” he said. “There’s really no downside to this [sharing]. One has to trust the intelligence community to decide what things are too sensitive to share, and what things are not.”
President
Barack Obama talks with Cuban President Raul Castro before a bilateral
meeting, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015, at the United Nations headquarters.
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Ethics official takes heat for knocking Trump Cabinet hearings, giving Clinton a 'pass'
The director of the Office of Government Ethics fueled Democrats’ concerns about Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks over the weekend by accusing Republicans of rushing their hearings. But one conservative group says Walter Shaub was just showing his partisan stripes – and claims his office even “covered for” Hillary Clinton when Congress sought records on her speech income more than a year ago.
America Rising PAC claims Shaub’s office displayed “utter incompetence” when it came to documenting then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s income -- which Shaub, in a House Oversight Committee hearing in December 2015, said the office did not have to disclose.
“Walter Shaub gave Hillary Clinton a complete free pass on her unethical activity, especially her lucrative paid speeches,” Scott Sloofman, the PAC’s rapid response director, told FoxNews.com. “His outburst over the weekend reeks of partisan politics from an embittered Democrat still reeling from November’s election result.”
At the time of the Clinton questions, Republicans complained Clinton had not disclosed compensation for at least five speeches that was then sent to the Clinton Foundation between 2014 and 2015. They pressed the OGE for answers, but Shaub told the House oversight committee the funds were not required to be disclosed.
The Washington Examiner first reported on the PAC’s concerns.
The Office of Government Ethics had no comment on America Rising PAC’s claims, referring FoxNews.com to the original letter Shaub sent to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., raising concerns about the Trump nominees' hearings.
“For as long as I remain Director, OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials will not succumb to pressure to cut corners and ignore conflicts of interest,” Shaub wrote in the letter.
Shaub’s letter outlined concerns regarding the speed of the Senate confirmation hearings schedule, and that several nominees had not completed the ethics review process. Shaub wrote that the announcement of nominees prior to consulting OGE for an evaluation of ethics issues also complicated this “normally intensive process.”
Schumer responded saying the OGE letter made “crystal clear” the transition team’s “collusion” with Senate Republicans was unprecedented.
“The Senate and American people deserve to know that these cabinet nominees have a plan to avoid any conflicts of interest, that they’re working on behalf of the American people and not their own bottom line, and that they plan to fully comply with the law,” Schumer said in a statement. “Senate Republicans should heed the advice of this independent office and stop trying to jam through unvetted nominees.”
Some hearings have since been delayed, a development cheered by Schumer.
Meanwhile, former White House ethics counsel officials are coming to Shaub’s defense, calling the claims against him unfair.
“I worked with Walter when he was at OGE and I was at the Bush White House,” Richard Painter, former White House Ethics Counsel under President George W. Bush, told FoxNews.com in an email. “He bent over backwards to get things done – he was a strong supporter of our ethics program.”
Painter told Foxnews.com that the attacks on the OGE are “disturbing” and that the motives seem “quite transparent.”
Ambassador Norm Eisen, former White House Ethics Counsel under President Obama, told FoxNews.com this was an “unfair attack.”
“Director Shaub has served presidents of both parties with distinction – sometimes we agreed and sometimes we disagreed, but he always tries to do the right thing – I say to those smearing him, have they no shame?” Eisen said.
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