OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 2:40 PM PT – Sat. July 20, 2019
A delegation of house lawmakers visits Mexico in order to better comprehend the country’s commitment to the USMCA.
The group met with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and
others Mexican officials Friday to discuss the new trade deal. Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer is reportedly leading the
delegation, which also includes GOP Representative George Holding and
California Congressman Jimmy Gomez. Gomez said the group saw a “deep commitment” from Mexico in regard to fulfilling the USMCA. “This trip is to get a better understanding of some of the
provisions, as well as the commitment of the Mexican government to
fulfilling those provisions,” Gomez said. “We learned a lot and we saw
there was a deep, deep commitment to fulfilling the letter and the
spirit of the new USMCA.” Mexico has already ratified the new trade deal, which is still awaiting approval from Congress as well as Canadian lawmakers.
Lara Trump fired back Saturday against critics who’ve asserted that the “Send her back!” chant at President Trump’s recent rally in North Carolina was planned, instead of a spontaneous crowd response. “Anyone
insinuating that there was some premeditated plan to orchestrate the
‘send her back’ chant is obviously desperate to continue pushing a
biased, racially-charged narrative,” the president’s daughter-in-law wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
“Anyone
insinuating that there was some premeditated plan to orchestrate the
‘send her back’ chant is obviously desperate to continue pushing a
biased, racially-charged narrative.” — Lara Trump
She added the hashtag, #FakeNews. Lara
Trump’s message was in response to a Saturday article in the Washington
Examiner that reported CNN’s Anderson Cooper had criticized her on
Friday’s edition of his nightly program, “Anderson Cooper 360.” “She’s
just friggin’ lying,” Cooper said at one point, accusing the wife of
Eric Trump of misrepresenting the North Carolina situation during her
interview earlier Friday on Fox Business, the Examiner reported.
“She’s just friggin’ lying.” — CNN's Anderson Cooper
Lara Trump had said that the “send her back” chant – which the crowd directed at Somali-born U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. – was not prompted and that President Trump did not join in.
Lara Trump took issue with some remarks that CNN's Anderson Cooper made Friday, according to a report.
“It wasn’t the whole crowd,” she added. “It was just a
couple of people right there in the front, but [the president] didn’t
say it.” But Cooper argued that Lara Trump had “primed” the crowd
during her warm-up speech prior to the president’s appearance Wednesday
in Greenville, N.C., the Examiner reported. “If you don’t love our country, the president said it, ‘You can leave,’ right?” Lara Trump is heard saying in a video clip before the president took the stage. But Lara Trump was not shown coaching the crowd to chant, “Send her back!” -- contrary to what Cooper appeared to be suggesting. Following
Wednesday’s rally, critics of President Trump latched onto the chant to
advance their argument that some Twitter messages from the president
earlier in the week – targeting Omar and other far-left House Democrats
known as “The Squad” – were racist. But
the president pushed back against the racism argument, saying he was
merely opposing what he viewed as the Democrats’ negative attitudes
toward America – and that his tweets had nothing to do with race. “I
was not happy with it, I disagree with it,” President Trump said
Thursday, referring to the rally crowd’s “Send her back!” chant. “But
again, I didn’t say that, they did.”
The Republican National Committee raised more than twice as much as the Democratic National Committee
in June – $20.7 million compared to the DNC’s $8.5 million, according
to Federal Election Commission filings, Politico reported. “Our
record-smashing fundraising haul is a testament to the ongoing
enthusiasm for President Trump and the pro-growth agenda that is
delivering for every American across this country," GOP Chairwoman Ronna
McDaniel said in a statement to Fox News last week. The RNC currently has $43.5 million, more than double the cash on hand as the DNC’s $9.3 million.
The DNC spent heavily on events related to the
debates and the presidential candidates last month, including $221,000
for catering and $61,000 for event decorations for a total of $7.5
million, according to Politico. “They need to get their s-- together. Now,” Adam Parkhomenko, a former DNC national field director, told Vice. “When
Hillary became the nominee in 2016 she was handed nothing, the DNC was
nothing and there was nothing to build on. You’d think we would have
spent the last few years making sure this would never happen again, and
it has,” he said. The RNC has already spent $60 on digital
operations and $10 million on advertising and building a ground game,
according to Vice. “This is a real problem that our party and the
major donors are not facing,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb
told the publication. The
Trump campaign reported $56 million cash on hand at the end of June
compared to just $24.8 million for Pete Buttigieg, the top Democratic
fundraiser.
President Trump continued to criticize far-left Democrat Ilhan Omar on Friday afternoon, telling reporters in the Oval Office that the Minnesota congresswoman was “lucky to be where she is.” The
remark came nearly a week after the president tweeted that Omar and
three other members of “the Squad” should “go back and help fix
the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. "Then come back and show us how it is done," the president added. Trump
also defended his supporters at last week's North Carolina rally
who chanted “Send her back!” in reference to Omar -- something that,
along with the tweets, was viewed by most Democrats and some Republicans
as racially insensitive.
"Those are incredible patriots,” Trump told
reporters, referring to the Wednesday crowd in Greenville, N.C. “But I’m
unhappy when a congresswoman goes and says, 'I’m going to be the
president’s nightmare.' "She’s going to be the president’s
nightmare? She’s lucky to be where she is, let me tell you. And the
things that she has said are a disgrace to our country.” Omar came to the United States as a Somali refugee when she was a teen and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. On
Friday morning, Trump tweeted that the “fake news media” had become
“crazed” over the “Send her back!” chant and asserted that a gathering
of supporters greeting Omar at a Minnesota airport last week had
been “staged.” On Saturday, an Omar ally, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., defended her fellow Democrat, claiming Trump had "relished' in the anti-Omar chanting at the rally. "He
kind of presided over the situation, he relished it, he took it in,"
Ocasio-Cortez said at a town hall on immigration in her New York City
district. When a reporter asked her whether she believed Trump had led the crowd on, Ocasio-Cortez replied: "He absolutely did." Fox News' Sam Dorman contributed to this story.
Republican
lawmakers on Tuesday criticized Google during a Senate Judiciary
Committee hearing over allegations of bias against and censorship of
conservative groups on the tech giant’s platforms. Also during the hearing, the father of Virginia reporter Alison Parker,
who was shot and killed in August 2015 while conducting an interview on
live television, called on Congress to further regulate Google and
other tech giants. Andy Parker testified on Tuesday that “the
unimaginable pain felt” by his family “was amplified after the killer
uploaded videos” of his 24-year-old daughter’s murder to YouTube. He
added that Google and YouTube needed to self-police what’s posted.
“In essence, [Google] wanted me to watch my daughter’s murder and explain to a robot why it should be removed.” — Andy Parker
The hearing, which came on a busy day on Capitol Hill
for Silicon Valley’s behemoths, was the second in recent of months in
which tech companies were grilled over accusations of discrimination
against conservative viewpoints and the suppression of free speech. “Google’s
control over what people hear, watch, read, and say is unprecedented,”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
said. “Google can, and often does, control our discourse.” Cruz added: “The American people are subject to overt censorship and covert manipulation” by Google’s algorithm. Google’s
vice president of global government affairs and public policy, Karan
Bhatia, defended the tech giant – arguing that the company has no
political bias and does not monitor content posted on its platforms.
Bhatia noted that the company does censor or take down some content, but
denied that there was any political motivation behind that. “We work hard to fix our mistakes,” Bhatia said. “But these mistakes have affected both parties and are not a product of bias.” He
added: “We are not censoring speech on our platforms... We do have
community guidelines against uploading, for example, videos that have
violent imagery.” Later in the hearing, Cruz criticized Google’s
executives for their broad support of former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, saying that 88 executives
at the company contributed to her campaign. “You know how many contributed to Donald Trump?” Cruz asked. “Zero, goose egg.” Democrats
on the committee defended the tech giant against the bias accusations
but didn’t spare the company when it came to criticism that it did
little to remove violent and disturbing imagery and videos from its
platforms. The Democrats’ criticism was bolstered by Parker’s
testimony. He has worked to press Google to remove all footage of his
daughter’s murder from its platform, with Google informing him that he
could flag the content for removal. “I pledged to honor my
daughter’s memory and advocate for sensible gun laws so that others
wouldn’t suffer the same fate as Alison,” Parker testified on Tuesday,
adding that his advocacy resulted in threats to him and his family. “They
have taken the gruesome footage of my daughter’s murder, edited it into
videos and flooded YouTube and other social media platforms with
hate-filled diatribes maligning us.” Parker
said he “implored Google and YouTube to take down the footage of her
murder and the related conspiratorial content,” adding that Google
responded by suggesting he flag the content he found offensive. “In essence, they wanted me to watch my daughter’s murder and explain to a robot why it should be removed,” Parker said.
During the hearing on Tuesday, Andy Parker, the father of Virginia
reporter Alison Parker, who was fatally shot in August 2015 while
conducting an interview on live television, called on Congress to begin
regulating Google and other tech giants.
“I never have, nor will I ever watch any of it for obvious reasons,” he added. He
said others have watched and flagged the videos on his behalf but the
video of his daughter’s murder was still up as of Tuesday and had more
than 700,000 views. He said he communicated with Google and even
met with representatives but since the meeting “there has been nothing
but silence” until he got an email from the company on Tuesday morning. “I
understand that the general purpose of this hearing is to consider
whether Internet gatekeepers such as Google should or should not censor
the speech of the politically unpopular, however, it is important to
note that turning a blind eye to targeted harassment over the Internet
in the name of preserving free speech has real-world and life-altering
consequences,” Parker testified on Tuesday. He added, “If
[Google] cannot properly protect citizens from online harassment, hate
speech and moment-of-death videos, I call on Congress to step in and
make sure that proper protections are in place for private citizens like
me who are continually harassed and exploited.” Parker went on to say, “We should protect the First Amendment, but it’s time for Google and social media to be regulated.” “Why
should a father have to search for, flag, and watch videos of his
daughter’s murder?” Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, the ranking Democrat on
the committee, asked. Bhatia argued that the company was working to remove the videos but has so far been unable to take down every one. Earlier,
senators grilled Facebook on its plans to launch a new digital currency
when it was still battling problems with privacy and other issues,
during a Senate Banking Committee panel. Arizona
Republican Sen. Martha McSally said she doesn't trust Facebook because
of repeated privacy violations and "repeated deceit." Facebook
executive David Marcus argued the company wants to innovate on behalf of
its users. He said if another country were to build a successful
digital currency first, the system might be out of reach of U.S.
regulations and sanctions. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Since
I’ve been tough on President Trump’s attacks on the Democratic
freshmen, and since the media outrage has been deafening, and since all
House Democrats (and four Republicans) voted for a resolution condemning
his tweets, I’ll begin by giving the floor to the president’s
supporters. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said yesterday he
does not believe the Trump attacks are racist. “I believe this is about
ideology. … This is all about politics,” he said. Newt Gingrich
said Trump believes “the more he can get the country to look at the
so-called squad, the more he can get them to realize how radical they
are, and how fundamentally anti-American their views are; in the long
run, the better off he is.” Maryland GOP congressman Andy Harris
said the tweets are “obviously not racist,” but “when anyone disagrees
with someone now, the default is you call them a racist and this is no
exception.” He said Trump “could’ve meant go back to the district
that they came from or the neighborhood they came from,” though the
president has specifically talked about Ilhan Omar and Somalia. Fox
News’ Jesse Watters said while his mother views the tweets as racist,
“Mom’s not going to scare me off. These were not racist. This was about
patriotism. When did ‘Love it or leave it?’ become racist? Not only
leave it, hey, come back and help us fix our problems.” And the
president himself tweeted yesterday that “I don’t have a Racist bone in
my body!”, adding: “The Democrat Congresswomen have been spewing some of
the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician
in the House or Senate, & yet they get a free pass and a big
embrace from the Democrat Party. … Why isn’t the House voting to rebuke
the filthy and hate laced things they have said?” What
the Republican Party now wants—or is forced to want, since most members
believe it’s political suicide to take on Trump—is to blur the debate. In
this view, it’s not about Trump saying the women should “go back” to
where they came from before returning, it’s about the left-wing
extremism of AOC, Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. This, I
believe, was Trump’s strategy all along, to create enough of a
firestorm that they become the face of the Democratic Party and his own
initial attacks become beside the point. That’s what Lindsey
Graham did in mildly suggesting that his golfing buddy “aim higher”
while trashing the freshmen: “We all know that AOC and this crowd are a
bunch of communists. They hate Israel, they hate our own country.” (His former House colleague Joe Scarborough accused him of “McCarthyism.”) A relative handful of Republicans, meanwhile, spoke out against the president’s attacks on the four women: Mitt
Romney: “Destructive, demeaning and disunifying.” Lisa Murkowski:
“There is no excuse for the president’s spiteful comments–they were
absolutely unacceptable and this needs to stop.” Tim Scott, the only
black Republican in the Senate, chided Trump for “unacceptable personal
attacks and racially charged language.” There are big challenges
here for the media as well. I said yesterday on “America’s Newsroom”
that news outlets should be cautious about branding Trump’s attacks as
racist, as if it were an undisputed fact. CNN, CBS, ABC and, after an
internal debate, the Washington Post are among those who have done so in
straight news stories and segments. My view is that readers and
viewers are smart, especially when the president uses language that
closely mirrors the historic “go back to Africa” taunts against blacks. Cover the story aggressively, lay things out, and they can make up their own minds. Don’t act like the opposition party. A larger question is whether the media are playing into the president’s hands. A New York Times editorial accused Trump of the politics of distraction: “His
comments elicited precisely the sort of media coverage and public
outcry that he thrives on. So he did what he usually does: He went a
step further… “Mr. Trump’s aim of stoking an endless culture war
puts his political critics in a bind. They can take his bait and fight
back, participating in the divisive distraction he’s designed to
energize his supporters, or they can ignore his outbursts and risk
normalizing his terrible behavior.” The
fact is that a president can command media attention any time he wants,
and that was true in the pre-Twitter age as well. And when a president
makes divisive accusations of this magnitude, and the other party
explodes in outrage, which is a very big story that can’t be minimized
or ignored. To do otherwise is to try to stage-manage the news for political reasons. And besides, it never works.
