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Pence takes two wounded war veterans to Super Bowl 51

Vice President Mike Pence picked up two wounded war veterans at Andrews Air Force Base on his way to Houston for the Super Bowl on Sunday.
Marine Staff Sgt. Anthony Mannino, Jr. and Army Staff Sgt. Frederick Manning flew aboard Air Force Two on the way to the game. Mannino was wounded while serving in Iraq in 2008 and Manning was hurt in Afghanistan last year, according to The Hill.
Mannino brought along his wife Diane and Manning brought his nurse from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Army Sgt. First Class Charles Stanley. Mannino was pulling for the Patriots to win their fifth Super Bowl, while Manning was hoping the Falcons would win their first.
“We’ve got Falcons fans. We’ve got Patriot fans,” Pence said. “There’ll be a winner on this plane on the way back.”
Mannino told the Indy Star on Sunday that he thought the initial call was a mistake. Manning added that he didn’t get any sleep Saturday before the game.
“I was like, `This is the White House? Are you sure you’ve got the right person?’” Mannino said.
After the group landed in Houston, the conclave went to Pappas BBQ in Houston for a pulled pork sandwich and some BBQ sauce.
Pence gave Pappas BBQ two thumbs up as he left to go to NRG Stadium.
"It was just great," he said, rubbing his stomach. "That's some Texas BBQ.”

Federal workers turn to secret messaging to oppose Trump policies, nominees

Some federal employees are gearing up for a cyber-battle against President Trump, and they are creating a hidden messaging system to elude detection.
According to POLITICO, employees of agencies that seem on the chopping block of the new administration are setting up new email addresses and turning to encrypted messaging apps to hold group conversations with other anti-Trump staffers, and to communicate with the press.
They’re also using these cloak-and-dagger methods to work on letters that take exception to Trump policies, POLITICO reported.
Career employees at the State Department have amassed some 1,000 signatures on a memo that expresses condemnation of Trump’s executive order that imposes a travel ban on immigrants and that puts a hold on refugee admissions from seven Muslim-majority countries deemed hotbeds of terrorist activity.
Employees of other agencies, such as the Labor Department and Environmental Protection Agency, also have turned to off-the-grid messaging to urge U.S. senators to oppose Trump Cabinet nominees and warning against the president’s plans to make cuts in some agencies.
Such off-grid communication can work, and stay within legal boundaries, say experts, so long as it is done during personal time and on personal equipment.
“It could work, but it depends on whether they are using their office computers or networks,” said Jim Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to Fox News. “If they are, they’ll be detected, even if they use encryption. If they are using private accounts or devices, it would require a warrant to find them and they aren’t violating any law if they stick to opinion.”
Lewis served as a Foreign Service officer with both the State and Commerce departments.
“Illegal surveillance would lead to a lawsuit against the [agency] that conducted it [and] the workers would win,” Lewis added. “Encryption is a problem in that it can hide communications between two people but can be a handicap if you want to share material widely.”
Some State Department employees see it as their civil duty to flag any policies or proposals that they believe will be detrimental to their agency’s role, POLITICO said.
“I think we all have to look within ourselves and say ‘Where is that line that I will not cross?’” one Foreign Service officer said about opposition toTrump's ban, according to POLITICO.
One of the most high-profile acts of dissent occurred when Acting Attorney General Sally Yates ordered the Department of Justice’s lawyers not to defend the ban order in court.
Trump abruptly fired her.
Recently, news surfaced about a Secret Service agent who last year said in a Facebook post that she would not sacrifice her life for Donald Trump if he became president.
Employees of the National Parks Service raised eyebrows when the agency’s Twitter account had a retweet of photos showing crowds at Trump’s and Barack Obama’s inaugurations.
The agency removed the retweet and described it as an error.
But so-called “unofficial resistance teams” at the park service, EPA and NASA have been apparently using alternative accounts to take jabs at Trump and his policies.
One tweet, cited by POLITICO, said: “Can't wait for President Trump to call us FAKE NEWS. You can take our official twitter, but you'll never take our free time!”
Many of the federal workers turning to under-the-radar means of communicating are using Signal, a smartphone app that can be used to send encrypted messages.
“It seems Trump is going after people who oppose things that he’s doing, so it makes sense that federal workers would be concerned about making their political ideas known,” said Jonathan Katz, director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland.“The [Signal] app is well-designed, it’s secure, it would be difficult to collect widespread information from it,” Katz said to Fox News. “But if [the government] wants to target a specific individual, it could do that.”

Pence: Will use 'all legal means at our disposal' to reinstate immigration ban

Vice President Mike Pence said Sunday that the federal judge who halted President Trump’s temporary immigration ban “made the wrong decision” and vowed to use “all legal means at our disposal” to protect Americans.
“From the outset of his campaign and administration, the president of the United States has made it clear to put the safety of the American people first,” Pence said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We are going to win this argument.”
Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 27 that temporarily halted immigration from seven mostly Muslim nations and the United States’ Syrian refugee program. The order follows his steadfast argument that radical Islamic terrorism poses a major threat to Americans’ safety.  
On Friday, a federal judge in Seattle imposed a temporary restraining order on Trump’s ban, in response to a case filed last week by Washington state and Minnesota challenging Trump’s constitutional authority to unilaterally impose such a sweeping ban.
On Saturday night, a federal appeals court denied a Trump administration request to lift the restraining order and allow the immigration ban to continue.
“Under statutory law and under the Constitution, that authority belongs to the president,” Pence also said Sunday.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” that she has “no doubt” that the legal issue will ultimately go to the Supreme Court.
Pence also supported the new sanctions Trump imposed on Iran after the country last week launched a medium-range ballistic missile.
“They have flouted the U.N. security resolution,” he said. “What we are seeing here is a hostile action, belligerent action, taken by the Iranians. And we just are not going to put up with it anymore."

Trump: Leaked transcripts of Mexico, Australia calls 'disgraceful'

President Trump on Saturday denounced the leaks of transcripts of his telephone conversations with leaders of Australia and Mexico as “disgraceful” and said his administration was searching “very, very hard” for the leakers.
Trump, speaking exclusively to Fox News, accused “Obama people” of giving news organizations embarrassing details of his recent tense phone conversations with his Australian and Mexican counterparts, and said that the holdovers from the Obama administration still serving on his White House and National Security Council staff were being replaced.
“It’s a disgrace that they leaked because it’s very much against our country,” Trump said, without stating why he believed that career civil servants who work in Democratic and Republican administrations were the source of the leaks. “It’s a very dangerous thing for this country,” he said.
Trump said that media reports of what appeared to be angry exchanges between him and the two foreign leaders had been mischaracterized, and insisted that he had “positive” relations with both countries and their leaders.
Meanwhile, hours before a federal judge in San Francisco turned down the Trump administration’s request to reinstate travel restrictions on refugees and foreign travelers, President Trump defended his administration’s travel ban, saying the temporary halt was needed while the administration reviewed vetting procedures to prevent “people with bad intentions” from entering the country.
“I just want a safe country, and you can’t have a safe country with open and weak borders…you can’t,” he said.
Trump said that the FBI had informed him that the bureau had “1,000 investigations” ongoing into potential terrorist threats and lacked sufficient manpower to pursue them all.
Finally, he disputed press reports which characterized the sanctions he imposed last week on Iran as weak and ineffective. He said that punishing Tehran for violating United Nations Security Council restrictions on ballistic missile testing was “the right thing to do,” and argued that the sanctions were already beginning to constrain Iranian aggression. Iran, he said, was trying to undermine and destabilize U.S. allies by exporting sensitive technology to countries “around the world” and that such aggressive conduct had to be countered. The sanctions were already working, he asserted. “Have you noticed they’ve been very quiet in the last two days?”
Trump made these and other comments in a conversation with three journalists whom he had invited to join him after the 60th annual International Red Cross ball, a fundraiser for the charity that was held this year at his club, Mar-a-Lago.
In his first trip back to his home in Palm Beach since becoming president, Trump answered several questions on wide-ranging topics from this reporter, Christopher Ruddy, founder and chief of Newsmax Media, and Melanie Dickinson, president and publisher of the South Florida Business Journal, an online and print business publication. Trump and his wife Melania lingered on after the ball to mix with admirers and some of the estimated 800 Red Cross supporters attending the black-tie event at Mar-a-lago, which has become known as “The Winter White House.”
While wealthy supporters of the charity rubbed shoulders with one another and clustered around the table occupied by Trump and his wife, eager to congratulate him and take photos with First Couple, some 4,000 people turned out for an anti-Trump march in West Palm Beach. Hundreds of protesters made their way from Trump Tower in West Palm Beach to a staging area near Palm Beach on Bingham Island, and then to the entrance of the exclusive club, where they shouted anti-Trump slogans and yelled chants against the new administration’s policies. Many of the protesters, most of whom were peaceful, carried placards criticizing Trump, his immigration and other policies, and several of his wealthy Cabinet nominees. The protest was among the largest, if not the largest, in recent Palm Beach county history.
Inside the huge ornate ballroom, Trump seemed particularly insistent on disputing the notion that his travel restrictions now being challenged by several courts were unpopular. “They’re very popular,” he insisted. But, he added, he would have imposed them whether or not Americans approved of them. “I’m not doing it for popularity. I’m doing it because our country is like a sieve for people coming in,” he said.
He said that he had learned in his meetings with FBI officials that the bureau was having a difficult time staffing the more than 1,000 investigations it was conducting into potential threats to the country. “There’s no manpower to do them.”
Calls to FBI headquarters regarding the number of ongoing terror investigations were not returned on this Super Bowl Sunday. But last summer, James Comey, the FBI director, testified that the bureau had about 1,000 open terror-related investigations in 2016 and at least one in all of the 50 states. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who follows counter-terrorism efforts closely, confirmed that senior FBI officials have spoken of nearly 1,000 ongoing investigations. John Pistole, the former FBI deputy director, told Fox News last summer that the FBI lacked the resources and legal authority to maintain investigations “on everybody they talk to,” he said. The FBI had perpetrators of the terror attacks carried out in Orlando, San Bernardino, and Boston under surveillance for a time, but closed out their inquiries before the attacks.
Trump said Saturday night that many Americans did not realize the danger posed by America’s “open” borders and insufficient vetting. “You don’t realize it,” he said.
However, groups helping asylum seekers, refugees, and other civil and human rights groups point out that no Americans have been killed in domestic terror attacks by asylum seekers and refugees from the seven Middle Eastern countries with majority Muslim populations who would be barred from entering the U.S. for 120 days while the administration reviews its immigration and vetting policies.
Under Trump’s executive order, refugees from Syria would be permanently barred, exclusions whose legality several civil rights and civil liberties experts and groups have challenged. They also argue that political refugees are already among the most heavily vetted of all immigrants.
“I’m doing this because our country is like a sieve for people coming in,” Trump said.
One former CIA official said that while the administration’s implementation of its executive order was “clumsy, the concerns behind it are real.” But the constitutionality of the executive order seems headed for a Supreme Court challenge.
The FBI also did not return calls for comment Sunday on whether it was conducting an investigation into the leaking of transcripts of the president's telephone calls with foreign leaders. While White House press spokesman Sean Spicer recently said that the president had asked his team to “to look into this because those are very serious implications," Trump had not previously discussed his own view of the embarrassing leaks. His comments Saturday underscored his concern about what has become widespread early on in his administration — the unauthorized distribution of material highlighting numerous exaggerations and false statements by him and senior members of his White House and other incidents that seem to reflect incompetence or inexperience.
Trump seemed particularly anxious to reinforce his spokesman’s descriptions of his conversations with the leaders of Australia and Mexico as “candid," but respectful. Spicer noted that both leaders have disputed some of the details as reported.
Based on the transcripts, the Washington Post and several media outlets, for instance, reported that Trump hung up on Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after an angry discussion of a refugee swap negotiated by former President Obama. In a recent interview, Turnbull called his discussion with Trump “frank” but said that Trump had agreed to abide by the refugee swap negotiated by former President Barack Obama. In one interview, he said it had been a "good week" for Australia.
In an earlier call with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, Trump apparently threatened to send the U.S. military to Mexico to stop drug cartels -- according to a transcript published by a Mexican news organization and the Associated Press. The White House later said the comments were intended to be “lighthearted.”