A Minnesota man — who allegedly punched a Trump supporter in the contentious scene outside the president’s Keep America Great
rally in Minneapolis two weeks ago — was charged with assault Wednesday
after investigators used videos of the alleged attack to identify him,
federal prosecutors said. Dwight
Pierre Lewis, 31, of Richfield, Minn., was charged with one count of
third-degree felony assault in Minnesota’s Hennepin County District
Court. He surrendered to police Monday and was being held on a $40,000
bond ahead of his court appearance Thursday, FOX 9 Minneapolis reported.
Dwight Pierre Lewis, 31, of Richfield, Minn., is accused of
punching a Trump supporter outside a Minneapolis rally, resulting in
stitches for the victim, authorities say. (Hennepin County District
Attorney)
Authorities said Lewis admitted to punching another
man outside President Trump’s campaign stop in Minneapolis on Oct. 10.
The 22-year-old victim told police the next day that he received several
stitches after a shirtless man attacked him as he was trying to leave
the rally, The Epoch Times reported.
Investigators
said they used several videos taken by news organizations and posted to
social media to identify Lewis as the suspect. Lewis' criminal record
includes four previous convictions for disorderly conduct, two for
assault and one each for property damage and making terroristic
threats, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
Riot
police — both on bicycles and horseback — formed a barrier between
Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters outside the rally as tensions
rose. Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters set fire to Make America Great
Again hats and other memorabilia, as some threw objects at police, Fox
News’ Matt Finn, who was at the scene, reported.
Other
video posted to social media captured a scene where anti-Trump
protesters shouted profanity at, as well as shoved and punched, those
who left the rally. The Star Tribune reported that police deployed pepper spray.
Trump
— who fell just 40,000 votes short of defeating Hillary Clinton in
Minnesota in 2016 --- addressed more than 20,000 supporters at the
rally. Minnesota is expected to be battleground territory going into
2020, the president’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, told the Times.
When a group of Republicans stormed into a Democrat-led closed-door deposition Wednesday afternoon, claiming a lack of transparency in the Trump impeachment inquiry process, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was apparently not impressed.
In
a Twitter message Thursday, the New York Democrat specifically said she
objected to reports that some Republicans had asked to be arrested as
part of their demonstration.
“There have been many aspects of the
GOP’s little flash mob that have relied on mountains of entitlement and
privilege, but them *asking* the police to be arrested is just… ” she
wrote, without finishing the sentence.
Fox
News’ Chad Pergram had reported Wednesday that some members of the GOP
were hoping to be “frog marched” out of the Capitol as a result of their
action, thinking the images of them being taken into custody “would
help w/GOP narrative of Dem process abuse.”
But Ocasio-Cortez found that idea difficult to fathom.
“Well, let’s just say my community would find it hard to understand why *anyone* would ask to be arrested,” she wrote.
Entitlement
and privilege seem to be on Ocasio-Cortez’s mind lately. In a tweet
earlier this month, the congresswoman appeared to sympathize with Meghan Markle, who confessed in a recent documentary that she was struggling with some aspects of life as a duchess.
“Sudden
prominence is a very dehumanizing experience,” Ocasio-Cortez agreed.
“There’s a part of your life that you lose, & it later dawns on you
that you’ll never get it back.”
The duchess of Sussex, meanwhile, was later criticized by her half-sister Samantha.
"I
think it’s really ludicrous that someone who’s escorted around the
world by millions of dollars’ worth of security on private jets, as a
millionaire, could ever complain about anything," she said.
The world is clearly spinning off its axis when Politico is questioning whether John Bolton has become a “hero of the Resistance.”
The
reason is that as President Trump’s national security adviser, he
“raised alarms about the politically questionable role informal actors
were playing in shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine.”
Whether
people like Bolton, who clearly disagreed with his boss on a range of
issues before being fired last month, isn’t the point. When faced with
the unusual circumstances surrounding the private back-channeling over
aid to Ukraine, he did his job—telling aides, according to testimony,
that “they should have nothing to do with foreign policy” and should
“brief the lawyers.”
As the impeachment drama has unfolded, people caught up in the investigation are drawing fire for being disloyal to Trump.
It
was the president who tweeted: “Never Trumper Republicans, though on
respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more
dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for
them, they are human scum!”
But—leaving the rough language
aside—is everyone who offers information unhelpful to the president a
Never Trumper? Bolton, a full-throated conservative hawk, was the
president’s pick after two previous national security advisers were
forced out.
In our tribal politics, does every former friend, aide
and ally whose professional path diverges automatically get branded an
enemy?
I
got a taste of this yesterday when I said the closed-door testimony of
William Taylor was a setback for the president. You know who agreed with
me? John Thune, the Senate Republican whip, who said of Taylor’s
testimony that “the picture coming out of it…is not a good one.”
I
further noted that Taylor is a career foreign service guy, first named
ambassador to Ukraine by George W. Bush, and lured out of retirement by
Mike Pompeo to be acting ambassador. That hardly fits the resume of a
Never Trumper.
But I got slammed by pro-Trump tweeters as unfair
to the president as they insisted we didn’t know what Taylor had
testified. Sorry, his lengthy opening statement was made public.
The
president’s preferred narrative is that he’s constantly being
undermined by the Deep State. And sometimes that’s true. The senior
administration official dubbed Anonymous—who ripped Trump as amoral in a
New York Times op-ed and is about to publish a book—is certainly no friend of the president.
But not everyone—certainly not John Bolton—fits under that umbrella. As the Times pointed out yesterday:
“The
witnesses heading to Capitol Hill do not consider themselves part of
any nefarious deep state, but simply public servants who have loyally
worked for administrations of both parties only to be denigrated,
sidelined or forced out of jobs by a president who marinates in
suspicion and conspiracy theories.
“But it is also true that some
career officials, alarmed at what they saw inside the corridors of
government agencies, have sought ways to thwart Mr. Trump’s aims by
slow-walking his orders, keeping information from him, leaking to
reporters or enlisting allies in Congress to intervene.”
The paper has another piece on former top aide Steve Bannon and friends setting up a pro-Trump war room, built around a small radio show. And their message:
“Stop
calling the inquiry a ‘witch hunt’ and a ‘deep state’ conspiracy, they
said by way of guidance to the president and his advisers, because it’s
deluding too many Trump supporters into a sense of complacency.
“Stop insisting that polls showing majority public support for the impeachment inquiry are ‘fake news’ — because they aren’t.
“Stop
dismissing everyone who testifies about the Trump administration’s
dealings with Ukraine as a radical unelected bureaucrat.”
Radical unelected bureaucrat was the phrase in a White House statement aimed at Bill Taylor.
Sometimes
in politics, there’s a rough parting of the ways. Trump was friendly
with Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Anthony Scaramucci,
Omarosa, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and many others, and now he’s not.
Some of them betrayed him, or turned out to be crooks; others he simply
soured on.
But
those who are caught up in the Ukraine investigation are not
necessarily anti-Trump backstabbers. They can also be people who tried
to do the right thing and now want to tell the truth.
A senior Democrat
on the Senate Appropriations Committee introduced a bill Thursday
seeking to reclaim $3.6 billion in emergency funds the Trump
administration reallocated to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.,
said the Stopping Executive Overreach on Military Appropriations Act
(SEOMA) would reinstate funding for 127 military projects in 26 states
and territories, including an $89 million naval base project within her
home state of Washington.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper last
month signed off on $3.6 billion in Defense Department construction
funds for 175 miles of wall on the border.
“The President’s
decision to use a phony emergency declaration to take money away from
our service members and their families is a gross abuse of executive
power that hurts military families in my state and others, and puts our
nation’s security at risk,” Murray said in a statement.
“We’re
taking action to not only reverse President Trump’s reckless decision
to ransack funds for critical military priorities and infrastructure
projects that help keep our country safe, such as the pier and
maintenance facility at Naval Base Kitsap in my home state of
Washington, but also to make sure no President going forward can take
reckless, harmful steps like this one.”
In August, the Supreme
Court cleared the way for the government to use about $2.5 billion in
Defense Department funds after that money had been frozen by lower
courts while a lawsuit was proceeding. Trump had directed $155 million
to be diverted to border facilities from FEMA disaster relief.
Co-sponsors
of Murray's bill were Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick
Durbin of Illinois, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Brian Schatz of
Hawaii. The proposed legislation would also direct the Office of
Government Ethics to review all current and future contracts related to
the border wall to determine if the president, his family, or his top
allies would personally profit from such contracts, or if there is any
conflict of interest, the news release said.
Murray acknowledged the bill would likely not pass in the GOP-controlled Senate, but told the Kitsap Sun
that there were lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who were
interested in halting the border funding and redirecting it back toward
the military projects. Fox News’ Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.
SAN
FRANCISCO (AP) — Dangerously windy weather sweeping through the state
brought power outages to Northern California as the state’s largest
utility staged blackouts designed to prevent catastrophic wildfires.
Pacific
Gas & Electric Co. on Wednesday began rolling blackouts stretching
from the Sierra foothills in the northeast to portions of the San
Francisco Bay Area. A couple of counties kept their power until after
midnight.
The blackouts impact a
half-million people — or nearly 180,000 customers — in 15 counties, and
PG&E warned that a second round of outages could occur over the
weekend when winds return to the region.
In
the south, where hot, dry Santa Ana winds were expected to hit
Thursday, Southern California Edison warned that it might black out
about 308,000 customers — perhaps 750,000 people — depending on the
forecast.
San Diego Gas & Electric warned of power shutoffs to about 24,000 customers.
The
utilities have said the precautionary blackouts are designed to keep
winds that could gust to 60 mph (97 kph) or more from knocking branches
into power lines or toppling them, sparking wildfires.
Electrical
equipment was blamed for setting several fires in recent years that
killed scores of people and burned thousands of homes.
“We
understand the hardship caused by these shutoffs,” PG&E CEO Bill
Johnson said Wednesday. “But we also understand the heartbreak and
devastation caused by catastrophic wildfires.”
The
latest outage comes two weeks after PG&E shut down the power for
several days to about 2 million people in northern and central
California.
The current outages will last
about 48 hours, the utility said. But its seven-day forecast shows a
likelihood of another planned blackout across a much larger area. The
timing wasn’t clear but it could start as early as Saturday, when even
heavier winds are expected to move through.
“This could be the strongest wind event of the season, unfortunately,” PG&E meteorologist Scott Strenfel said.
Strenfel
called the current wind event a “California-wide phenomenon.”
Conditions should begin easing in the northern part of the state around
midday Thursday, when crews will begin inspecting lines to make sure
they’re safe to re-energize.
That’s when Santa Ana winds were expected to begin whipping up in the south.
The
small city of Calistoga, in the Napa Valley, known for its hot springs
and wineries, was among those hit by Wednesday’s outage.
“It’s
very frustrating,” said Michael Dunsford, owner of the 18-room
Calistoga Inn, which has rented two powerful generators for the month at
a cost of $5,000. Like many, he felt the outages need to be better
managed, better targeted and less expansive.
“Right
now, we have no wind. Zero. I don’t even see a single leaf blowing. Did
they really have to cut the power right now?” he said, shortly after
the lights went out Wednesday afternoon and he revved up the generators.
“When the wind picks up to 40 mph maybe that’s a good time to close the
power.”
“They’re not appreciating enough the impact this has on everybody,” he said about PG&E.
Some of the frustration was being taken out on PG&E employees, the company’s CEO said.
Johnson
said Wednesday that a PG&E employee was the target of what appeared
to be a deliberate attack in Glenn County. He said a projectile that
may have come from a pellet gun hit the employee’s front window. The
employee wasn’t hurt.
“There is no justification for this sort of violence,” Johnson said. “Wherever you see crews they are there to help you.”
Mandatory
evacuations were prompted east of Geyserville after a wildfire sparked
in northeastern Sonoma County along the Lake County line late Wednesday.
The Press Democrat reports that according to dispatch reports, the Kincade fire spread to about 1,000 acres by 11 p.m.
Cal Fire spokesman Will Powers said the blaze near the Geysers area was burning at a “dangerous rate.”
Sonoma
County Supervisor James Gore said PG&E was better this time about
getting information to people who would be affected, but he was still
astonished by the need to resort to largescale blackouts.
“I
am a big believer in shutdowns to prevent fires. But the thing that
erodes public trust is when it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You say,
‘God, I know if we can put a man on the moon ... we can manage a (power)
grid.’”
__
Associated Press writers Janie Har in San Francisco and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Ambassador Philip Reeker is expected to appear in closed session before three Democrat-led House committees conducting an impeachment investigation into President Trump on Saturday, a congressional source told Fox News.
Acting Assistant Secretary of State Philip Reeker is expected to appear in a closed session Saturday.
(State Department)
Reeker’s testimony was
originally scheduled for Thursday but members did not want to question
the witness during a ceremony where the late Rep. Elijah Cummings,
D-Md., will lie in state at the Capitol. Cummings’ funeral will be in
Baltimore on Friday.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is the
top-ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, wrote a letter
to Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state, demanding that the
deposition be rescheduled to a business day to allow more GOP lawmakers
to attend.
Jordan called on Reeker to explain the reasoning
behind the rare Saturday deposition. He said he regrettably had to ask
Reeker directly for the information because he has "no confidence" that
Rep. Adam Schiff, as the leader of the impeachment inquiry, is
"operating fairly or in good faith."
Former
Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Charles
Kupperman is expected to appear in a closed session on Monday
and Timothy Morrison, a special assistant to the president, is expected
to appear in a closed session next Thursday. The Committees are in
ongoing discussions with other witnesses. Fox News’ Chad Pergram contributed to this report.
Laura Ingraham made the case for yet another Hillary Clinton presidential run Wednesday saying the Democratic field has proven its weakness and that she might be a "stronger candidate."
"Just
a few months ago, I dismissed the idea of Hillary 2.0 kind of out of
hand. She wouldn't be that arrogant and ungracious toward the current
field. No way," Ingraham said on "The Ingraham Angle." But then the weakness of the Democrats sleep surprised even me. Nothing's working."
Clinton
in recent weeks has privately stated she would enter the 2020
presidential race if she were certain she could win, The New York Times
reported Tuesday.
Ingraham spoke of the weakness among the Democratic frontrunners, in particular former Vice President Joe Biden.
"The
walking, talking gaffe-a-matic machine known as Joe Biden may have
dropped in the polls for a few weeks, but now he's back on top. And what
seems to be the grudging recognition that the other top candidates,
Warren and Sanders, are just not going to cut it in key battleground
states where common sense still means something," Ingraham said. "I
mean, who doesn't think that Hillary is a stronger candidate than that
goofball Biden."
The host made the case for why Clinton may be a possibility.
"She
has instant name recognition, a massive fundraising apparatus that
could be reactivated, and her old campaign team would quickly
reconstitute," Ingraham said.
Ingraham laid out what could be pushing Clinton to run and what could also be stopping her.
"A
combination of Hillary's pride, her desire for revenge, a weak
Democratic field and a consultancy class that can sell sand in the
desert may be pointing us toward another Trump-Clinton face off,"
Ingraham said. "Of course, Hillary is smart enough to know that the only
thing worse than losing once to Donald Trump would be losing twice to
him. And that, too, is a distinct possibility."
Just hours after dozens of House Republicans stormed a closed-door deposition in a secure area and
disrupted Democrats' impeachment inquiry, House Oversight Committee
ranking member Jim Jordan kept the pressure on Democrats by pushing for
more transparency -- including public testimony from the whistleblower
at the center of the probe.
In an initial letter to
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on Wednesday, Jordan
-- joined by House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes and
Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Michael McCaul -- called for
the whistleblower to come out of hiding, so that his or her "sources and
credibility" can be "fully assessed."
The committee chairs noted
that Schiff had previously promised that the whistleblower would provide
"unfiltered" testimony "very soon" concerning an Aug. 12 complaint.
But, the Republicans charged, Schiff abruptly "reversed course" after reports of the whistleblower's potential political bias emerged, along with evidence that Democratic congressional committee staff had spoken to the whistleblower before the complaint was filed.
The
Republicans asserted that evidence has also emerged that "contradicts"
the claims in the whistleblower's initial complaint, including that the
Ukrainian president has said he felt no "pressure" during a July call
with President Trump to investigate 2020 Dem front-runner Joe Biden, his
son Hunter and Biden business interests in Ukraine.
Multiple apparent inconsistencies
in the whistleblower's complaint, including the whistleblower's
erroneous claim that Trump had asked Ukrainians to hand over a
server, have previously prompted Republicans to demand more information
on the person's sources.
The lawmakers further demanded testimony
from any sources the whistleblower relied upon to draft the complaint,
which contained only secondhand information.
The Republicans emphasized that they lack co-equal subpoena power with majority Democrats -- a key one-sided limitation that the White House has cited in explaining why it will not cooperate with the Democrats' probe.
House
Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., claimed that Schiff "fled with
the testifying witness" when roughly 50 Republicans, including several
not on one of those three committees, went "face-to-face and demand
access to ongoing impeachment proceedings."
Some Republicans asked
to be arrested by Capitol police officers, Fox News has learned, hoping
that it would help them make their case that Democrats are abusing the
impeachment process.
The whistleblower has acknowledged to
the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) that bias against
Trump might be alleged against him or her for a third, previously
unreported reason, sources familiar with the ICIG investigation told Fox News on Wednesday.
Fox News has previously reported the whistleblower is a registered Democrat and had a prior work history with a senior Democrat.
Though Fox News has learned that an additional element of possible
bias was identified by the whistleblower, its nature remains unclear.
Separately, Fox News has obtained a letter from Jordan to Acting Assistant Secretary of State Philip Reeker, who
was slated to come to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for a deposition. Fox
News reported Monday night that the deposition was rescheduled for
Saturday, when the House would not be in session, ostensibly because
House members did not want to conduct interviews during the ceremony
Thursday in which the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who'd headed the
House Oversight committee, will lie in state at the Capitol before his
funeral in Baltimore on Friday.
In the letter, Jordan
asserted that many members won't be able to attend the unusual Saturday
session, and pushed Reeker to explain why the deposition was moved.
Jordan asked Reeker “to testify on a business day to allow robust member
attendance and participation," and suggested Schiff was hoping to
continue to shroud the impeachment proceedings in unhealthy secrecy.
Jordan
said he regrettably had to ask Reeker directly for the information,
because he had he has "no confidence" that Schiff, as the leader of the
impeachment inquiry, is "operating fairly or in good faith."
Jordan
also asked Reeker about his "announced participation in a panel
discussion sponsored by the Atlantic Council," which in 2018 received
between $100,000 and $249,000 from Burisma -- the Ukraine natural gas
company where Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, obtained a lucrative role
despite not having any relevant expertise. The Atlantic Council, Jordan
noted, recently removed Reeker's name as a panelist at the event.
Specifically,
Jordan asked Reeker why he was removed as a panelist, and who proposed
rescheduling his testimony -- and why they picked a Saturday. Fox News' Chad Pergram and Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.
Dwight Pierre Lewis, 31, of Richfield, Minn., is accused of
punching a Trump supporter outside a Minneapolis rally, resulting in
stitches for the victim, authorities say. (Hennepin County District
Attorney)
