Trump confirms he OK’d US cyberattack against Russia in 2018: report

President Trump acknowledged this week that in 2018 he authorized a covert U.S. cyberattack against a Russian “troll farm,” according to a report.
The attack targeted Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg organization that led Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election and was repeating its efforts ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, The Washington Post reported.
In an interview with Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, Trump said he OK’d the U.S. operation after receiving an intelligence report about Russia’s activities.
“Look, we stopped it,” the president said, contrasting his action with what he claimed was former President Barack Obama’s reluctance to take action in 2016.
According to Thiessen, Trump claimed Obama “said nothing” about Russian interference that year because he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the race for the White House against Trump.
Trump said Obama “knew before the election that Russia was playing around. Or, he was told. Whether or not it was so or not, who knows? And he said nothing. And the reason he said nothing was that he didn’t want to touch it because he thought [Clinton] was winning because he read phony polls. So, he thought she was going to win.
“And we had the silent majority that said, ‘No, we like Trump,’” the president added.
The Washington Post previously reported about the attack in February 2019 but this week’s interview was the first time the president confirmed his involvement, the Post reported.

Missouri couple who defended home have rifle seized during police search

Just protecting their own.

Authorities in St. Louis executed a search warrant Friday evening at the home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who made headlines last month when they took up arms to defend their home from protesters.

During the search, police seized the rifle that Mark McCloskey was shown holding during the June 28 incident, KSDK-TV of St. Louis reported, citing information from a source.
The couple claimed the pistol that Patricia McCloskey held during the June confrontation was already in the possession of their attorney, the station reported.
There was no immediate indication the McCloskeys were arrested or charged with a crime. The warrant applied only to a search for the guns, KSDK reported.
On Monday, the McCloskeys appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” and disclosed that protesters had returned to their neighborhood July 3 – but the couple was alerted in advance and hired a private security company to protect their residence.
The previous night, “we started hiding valuables and securing the house,” Mark McCloskey told host Sean Hannity.
Last week’s protest was loud but non-violent, the homeowner said.

In the June incident, Patricia McCloskey said, the couple was startled just before dinnertime when “300 to 500 people” entered the gated community where they live.
"[They said] that they were going to kill us," Patricia McCloskey told Hannity on Monday night. "They were going to come in there. They were going to burn down the house. They were going to be living in our house after I was dead, and they were pointing to different rooms and said, 'That’s going to be my bedroom and that’s going to be the living room and I’m going to be taking a shower in that room’.”"

Mark and Patricia McCloskey are seen outside their St. Louis home during a confrontation with protesters, June 28, 2020. (Getty Images)

The couple said protesters also threatened to harm their dog, which was outside the home at the time.
The protesters claimed they were passing the McCloskeys' home while heading toward the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson, to demonstrate there.
Soon after the June incident, Kimberly Gardner, circuit attorney in St. Louis, announced that her office and the St. Louis Police Department would be conducting an investigation into the McCloskeys’ display of firearms.
The couple’s attorney at the time, Albert Watkins, said in a statement that the couple did not arm themselves until after they began feeling threatened.

"My clients didn't sit on their front stoop with guns. ... No firearms were on them at the time that they, were, as property owners standing in front of their home," Watkins said at the time. "It was not until they basically were in a position of seeing and observing violence, recklessness, lawbreaking, and knowing that the police were not going to be doing anything."
Late Friday, KSDK reported that Watkins was no longer representing the couple and had been replaced by attorney Joel Schwartz, who confirmed a search warrant was issued at 8 p.m. Friday.
Schwartz would not confirm if authorities took anything from the home and said he was unaware of the location of the couple's handgun, KSDK reported.
The couple's new lawyer also said he hopes to meet with Gardner's office next week but said no appointment had yet been scheduled, according to KSDK.

All Lives Matter Cartoons

College offers foreign students ‘sanctuary’ amid new rules

AMHERST, Mass. (AP) — A western Massachusetts college is promising to offer “sanctuary” to international students as President Donald Trump’s administration moves to expel foreign students if their school is only offering online courses.

Hampshire College President Ed Wingenbach said in a statement this week that the private, liberal arts college in Amherst isn’t directly impacted by the new measures since it is offering a mix of online and in-person classes for the upcoming fall semester.

But he said the school has capacity to safely add students on campus and is “actively seeking to help international students at other colleges whose education is threatened” by housing them.

Wingenbach also called the new measures “deliberately cruel and manifestly unjust.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which issued the new measures Monday, declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit Wednesday to try to block the new measure. That lawsuit has also been joined by Northeastern University in Boston.

ICE said international students will be forced to leave the U.S. or transfer to another college if their schools operate entirely online this fall.

New visas will not be issued to students at those schools, and others at universities offering a mix of online and in-person classes will be barred from taking all of their classes online.

Homeland Security gets new role under Trump monument order

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Protesters who have clashed with authorities in the Pacific Northwest are not just confronting local police. Some are also facing off against federal officers whose presence reflects President Donald Trump’s decision to make cracking down on “violent mayhem” a federal priority.

The Department of Homeland Security has deployed officers in tactical gear from around the country, and from more than a half-dozen federal law enforcement agencies and departments, to Portland, Oregon, as part of a surge aimed at what a senior official said were people taking advantage of demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd to commit violence and vandalism.

“Once we surged federal law enforcement officers to Portland, the agitators quickly got the message,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing operation.

The deployment represents somewhat of a departure for DHS, which was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and is primarily focused on threats from abroad and border security. During the Trump presidency, its focus has been largely on carrying out the president’s tough immigration agenda. Now it is in the role of supporting Trump’s law-and-order campaign, raising questions about overstepping the duties of local law enforcement.

Portland Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis said his department did not request the assistance and did not coordinate efforts with the federal government amid often chaotic clashes that have ranged across several downtown blocks after midnight for weeks.

“I don’t have authority to order federal officers to do things,” Davis said. “It does complicate things for us.”

The DHS officers’ presence comes at an incredibly tense moment for Portland. After Floyd’s death, the city for days saw marches and rallies that attracted more than 10,000 generally peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters to the downtown area. The police took a “mostly hands-off approach” to those events because they were orderly, Davis said.

Civil liberties advocates and activists have accused federal authorities of overstepping their jurisdiction and excessive use of crowd-control measures, including using tear gas and patrolling beyond the boundaries of federal property. Portland police are prohibited from using tear gas under a recent temporary court order unless they declare a riot.

“DHS should go back to investigating the rise of white supremacist activity and actors who are seeking to cause violence against these peaceful protests, that is under the purview of the agency’s mission,” said Andrea Flores, the deputy director of immigration policy at the American Civil Liberties Union who was a DHS official during the Obama administration.

Trump issued an executive order on June 26 to protect monuments after protesters tried to remove or destroy statues of people considered racist, including a failed attempt to pull down one of Andrew Jackson near the White House.

The president has denounced the Black Lives Matter movement and protests calling for the removal of statues honoring racist figures, associating peaceful protests with the sporadic outbursts of vandalism and looting at some demonstrations. He referred to “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats,” as well as the “merciless campaign to wipe out our history,” in his July 3 Mount Rushmore speech.

Following the executive order, DHS created the Protecting American Communities Task Force and sent officers from Customs and Border Protection and other agencies to Washington, D.C., Seattle and Portland. Others were ready to deploy elsewhere if needed.

Improving coordination among law enforcement agencies is part of DHS’s mission. It also oversees the Federal Protective Service, which guards federal government buildings around the nation.

But the FPS doesn’t have the resources to respond to the kind of sustained attacks that have taken place in Portland and elsewhere on the margins of protests over the May 25 killing of Floyd in Minneapolis.

Federal Protective Service Officer David Underwood was shot and killed outside a federal building in Oakland during a protest in May. Authorities charged an Air Force staff sergeant affiliated with the far-right, anti-government “boogaloo” movement with his murder.

As local governments in Washington, D.C., and Portland have stepped back to allow space for peaceful demonstrations, the Trump administration has stepped up its effort against what the senior official called “opportunistic criminals.”

Attorney General William Barr says there have been more than 150 arrests on federal charges around the country, with about 500 investigations pending related to recent protests. There were at least seven in Portland in recent days.

Portland police officials say the cycle of nightly attacks, which have shut down much of the downtown, has been unprecedented. Early Thursday, a man in a SUV fired several times into the air as he drove away from protesters who had surrounded his car. “We’ve never seen this intensity of violence and focused criminal activity over this long period of time,” Davis said.

Among the federal forces deployed in Portland are members of an elite Border Patrol tactical team, a special operations unit that is based on the U.S.-Mexico border and has been deployed overseas, including to Iraq and Afghanistan.

BORTAC members, identifiable by patches on their camouflage sleeves, are mixed in with Federal Protective Service outside the courthouse. Others in the unit, which includes snipers, have been stationed in “overlook” positions on the courthouse’s ninth floor, where a protester in a black hoodie shined a green laser into the eyes of one of the officers on Monday, according to court documents.

The night before, a BORTAC agent tackled and arrested a demonstrator suspected of pointing a laser at him and others from a park across the street from the courthouse.

A former DHS official said BORTAC agents were viewed as “highly trained, valuable, scarce resources” and would typically be used for domestic law enforcement in extraordinary circumstances. “These units don’t normally sit around idle,” said the official, who spoke on condition anonymity because he no longer works at the agency, after serving under Trump and President Barack Obama, and is not authorized to discuss operations.

“What did they get pulled off of in order to watch over statues?”

___

Fox reported from Washington.

Trump looks for political edge in latest high court rulings

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump won the White House on the promise of bringing a conservative shift to the Supreme Court. But this year and last, even with two justices Trump hand-picked, the court has shown it is no rubber stamp for him or his administration’s policies. That’s drawn the president’s ire and teed up a renewed battle over the court as Trump seeks political advantage ahead of November’s election.

In the last few weeks, as the court has handed down its biggest decisions of the term, Trump found himself with mounting losses and just a few wins. Trump’s high-profile defeats began in mid-June. First, the court ruled that a landmark civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination in employment. Then, it said the Trump administration hadn’t acted properly in ending the 8-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects some 650,000 young immigrants from deportation.

ADVERTISEMENT

Finally, on Thursday, in two cases about access to Trump’s financial records, the justices rejected broad arguments by Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department that the president is absolutely immune from investigation while he holds office or that a prosecutor must show a greater need than normal to obtain the records.

Despite White House’s claims of victory in the Thursday cases, Trump was livid -– lashing out on Twitter about the high court and painting its ruling as part of a pattern of “political prosecution” against him.

The rejection of Trump’s assertions of executive power was tempered by the practical impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to remand the cases to lower courts -– all but assuring that the potentially embarrassing disclosures won’t be required before his political fate is decided on Nov. 3.

Trump did notch two wins in important religious liberty cases on Wednesday, but he wasn’t in a celebratory mood after Thursday’s decisions.

“Courts in the past have given ‘broad deference’. BUT NOT ME!” he tweeted. And: “Now the Supreme Court gives a delay ruling that they would never have given...for another President.”

Last month, after the administration lost the DACA case, Trump tweeted: “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”

ADVERTISEMENT

He followed with an appeal to his base supporters, perhaps hinting at a future campaign theme: “These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!”

The attacks on the court marked a return for Trump to a key issue in his 2016 campaign.

Four years ago, it was clear the incoming president would fill a Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and the Republican-held Senate’s refusal to hold hearings on President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. To reassure wary conservatives, Trump took the unprecedented step of releasing lists of judges he said he’d likely select from if elected president.

“If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges,” he said at a July 2016 rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Once elected, Trump delivered.

He selected conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to fill the seats of Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018. Their selection, however, hasn’t meant automatic wins for Trump at the court, which has a 5-4 conservative majority. The DACA ruling was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s liberals. In the LGBT ruling, Gorsuch joined with Roberts and the court’s liberals in ruling 6-3 against the administration.

On Thursday, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined the majority in both cases along with Roberts and the four liberal justices. Roberts wrote both opinions.

“The justices did not rule against him, in fact it was a unanimous opinion saying that this needs to go back to the district court, and they even recognized that the president has an ample arsenal of arguments that he can make,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed. Still, she acknowledged, Trump “takes issue with the point that the majority made on absolute immunity.”

Trump has seen mixed results in past terms too. In 2018, the court’s conservatives upheld the president’s travel ban. Last year, Roberts’ vote with the court’s liberals kept the administration from putting a controversial citizenship question on the 2020 census.

Those losses were at least in part due to legal strategies that lawyers for Trump and his administration embraced in pursuing rapid changes and using what experts called weak legal arguments.

But Trump, in an effort to draw a contrast with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and stoke enthusiasm among social conservatives who played a pivotal role in elected the president four years ago, is using his defeats to argue that work in reshaping the court is only just getting started.

After the stinging losses in the DACA and LGBT cases, Trump last month promised to release a new list of “conservative” judges he would choose from should a new vacancy arise.

Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, said that presidential candidates of both parties should make judicial nominations and the courts part of their campaigns, particularly because while a presidency lasts four or eight years, judges sit for decades. And she noted judicial nominations took on singular importance in Trump’s 2016 campaign because Republican voters were uncomfortable with some other aspects of his candidacy.

“Republican voters have focused on the courts probably more than Democratic voters have. I think that might be starting to change,” she said, adding that she believes “progressives have been a little late to the game” in focusing on judicial nominations.

“With abortion rights so clearly in the balance I think progressives are really waking up to the crucial importance of the courts,” she said.

Biden months ago made something of a promise related to the Supreme Court, saying he’d be “honored to appoint the first African American woman” to the court.

NYC Black Lives Matter marches can continue despite large-event ban, de Blasio says

Mayor Bill de Blasio (married to a black)is permitting Black Lives Matter protesters to continue marching through city streets while canceling all large events through September.
Speaking on CNN Thursday night, de Blasio said the demonstrators’ calls for social justice were too important to stop after more than a month of demonstrations have not led to an outbreak of coronavirus cases.
“This is a historic moment of change. We have to respect that but also say to people the kinds of gatherings we’re used to, the parades, the fairs — we just can’t have that while we’re focusing on health right now,” de Blasio told host Wolf Blitzer.
The exception came as New York’s rate of infections has remained consistent through the civil unrest over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
A late-June study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found no evidence that coronavirus cases jumped in 315 cities in the weeks after the first protests. Researchers determined that protests may have been offset by an increase in social distancing among those who decided not to march.
Researchers reasoned the protests may have been offset by an increase in social distancing among those who decided not to march.
The City Hall shutdown will include big parades like the West Indian American Day Carnival in Brooklyn Labor Day weekend, the Dominican Day Parade in midtown Manhattan and the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy.
The de Blasio administration will also deny all permits for events in parks it believes will “unreasonably diminish public use” as well as street fairs and events stretching larger than one block or for gatherings that require a sound system.

Trump claims federal forces were 'all set to go into Seattle' when mayor ordered CHOP dismantled

President Trump claimed in an exclusive interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity Thursday that the White House had notified Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan that it would send federal forces to dismantle the infamous "CHOP"protest zone, but local police "went in before we got there."
"We were going in, we were going in very soon," Trump said on "Hannity". "We let them know that and all of a sudden, they didn’t want that. So they went in before we got there, but we were going in very shortly, very soon, and we would’ve taken the 'CHOP' ... back very easily, but they went in, and frankly, the people just gave up. They were tired. They had it for a long period of time."
Seattle police forcefully cleared out the "CHOP" area July 1 after weeks of protests that culminated in two fatal shootings, forcing the city's Democratic leadership to act after weeks of mounting scrutiny.

"We were all set to go into Seattle. Frankly, I looked forward to it."
— President Trump, 'Hannity'

Trump repeatedly offered to deploy the National Guard, vowing not to "let Seattle be occupied by anarchists" and threatening to "straighten it out" if local leaders didn't. After Durkan's repeated objections, Trump said he was prepared to take matters into his own hands.
"We were all set to go into Seattle," he said. "Frankly, I looked forward to it."
The Seattle mayor's office and police did not immediately respond to an after-hours email from Fox News for comment.

The day after Seattle police reclaimed the "CHOP" area on Durkan's orders, Trump personally reached out to the father of a 19-year-old who was gunned down in the zone.
Horace Lorenzo Anderson Sr. had made a heart-wrenching appearance on “Hannity” describing his experience since his son's June 20 death.
Trump said he invited Anderson to visit the White House "when things get adjusted," telling Hannity that his position "is so tough. I mean, what he is going through is so tough and he was treated very badly."
"They didn’t even tell him what had happened when it had happened," the president added. "Very sad thing, but I did speak to him and had a great but very sad conversation, and so ... when he’s ready, he’ll be coming down to the White House."

Omar Cartoons

Blackburn rips BLM’s ‘trained Marxists’ as threat to US – day after calling on Omar to resign

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., communicated in no uncertain terms on Wednesday regarding “trained Marxists” threatening America.
“The founders of the political arm of the Black Lives Matter organization are self-proclaimed ‘trained Marxists,’” Blackburn wrote on Twitter.
“We are witnessing a movement to wipe out our history, destroy our families and burn our country to the ground.”
Blackburn was referring to a recently resurfaced 2015 video clip in which Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors referred to her BLM colleagues as “trained Marxists” – referring to Karl Marx, the 19th century author of “The Communist Manifesto.”
“We are trained Marxists,” Cullors says in the clip. “We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk.”
Cullors, 36, was a protégé of Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground terror organization, the New York Post reported.
Blackburn’s warning about BLM came one day after she tore into controversial U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. – demanding that the congresswoman step down from office.
“Ilhan Omar took an oath to defend and protect the Constitution, not shred it,” Blackburn wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Omar and her Marxist comrades are a threat to our Democracy. Omar should resign.”
Blackburn was responding to remarks Omar had made at a news conference Tuesday in Minneapolis, in which Omar called on her supporters to go beyond the left’s “defund the police” effort and instead seek to “tear down the systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, [and] in the air we breathe.”

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.

“As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality,” Omar continued. “So we cannot stop at [the] criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
In a separate Twitter message Tuesday, Blackburn took aim at two of Omar’s “Squad” allies – U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.
“Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley want to pay states to allow convicted criminals to roam our streets and let MS-13 gangs take over our cities,” Blackburn wrote.
In that tweet, Blackburn was referring to a Fox News report about a bill that Tlaib and Pressley unveiled Tuesday, calling for the defunding of local police departments and the establishment of a reparations program for African-Americans and people harmed by police misconduct or errors in the criminal justice system.
“We must invest in a new vision of public safety,” Tlaib wrote on Twitter.
Their proposal would abolish some surveillance tactics used by law enforcement and also offer cash incentives to states that shut down detention facilities and prisons and eliminate gang databases.
The bill was considered unlikely to advance in the House because many Democrats do not support defunding police departments.