Esper: US troops, armored vehicles going to Syria oil fields

BRUSSELS (AP) — The United States will send armored vehicles and combat troops into eastern Syria to keep oil fields from potentially falling into the hands of Islamic State militants, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said.

It was the latest sign that extracting the military from Syria is more uncertain and complicated than President Donald Trump is making it out to be. Though Trump repeatedly says he is pulling out of Syria, the reality on the ground is different.

Adding armored reinforcements in the oil-producing area of Syria could mean sending several hundred U.S. troops -- even as a similar number are being withdrawn from a separate mission closer to the border with Turkey where Russian forces have been filling the vacuum.

On Friday, Esper described the added force as “mechanized,” which means it likely will include armored vehicles such as Bradley armored infantry carriers and possibly tanks, although details were still be worked out. This reinforcement would introduce a new dimension to the U.S. military presence , which largely has been comprised of special operations forces not equipped with tanks or other armored vehicles.

Esper spoke at a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he consulted with American allies.

Sending an armored force to eastern Syria would partially reverse the ongoing shrinkage of the U.S. troop presence in Syria. Trump has ordered the withdrawal of nearly all 1,000 U.S. troops who had been partnering with a Syrian Kurdish-led militia against the Islamic State group. That withdrawal is proceeding even as Esper announced the plan to put reinforcements in the oil-producing area.

Speaking to reporters Friday at the White House, Trump said the U.S.-brokered agreement with Turkey to halt its offensive against U.S.-supporting Syrian Kurdish fighters was a win for his administration. That offensive began after Trump announced U.S. troops would not stand in the way, though he also said the U.S. would punish Turkey’s economy if the country acted inhumanely.

He also said anew on Friday that “we’re getting our troops out” of Syria, without mentioning Esper’s announcement.

“We are doing well in Syria, with Turkey and everybody else that we’re dealing with,” Trump said. “We have secured the oil. ... We have a couple of people that came knocking, we said don’t knock. And I think I would say that things are going very well.”

White House officials would not clarify whom he was referring to as “knocking.”

The U.S. special envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, said in Geneva on Friday he had talked to a Russian official about an unspecified issue in Syria’s oil region.

“We are currently very concerned about certain developments in the south, in the Deir el-Zour area,” Jeffrey said. “I’ve talked to my Russian colleague about that and we’re having other contacts with the Russians concerning that situation. We think it is under control now.”

Although Esper did not mention the size of the U.S. reinforcements, it could total several hundred troops because fuel-guzzling tanks and other armored vehicles depend on a large supply and logistical support group. One official, who discussed the planning on condition of anonymity because some details remained to be agreed, cautioned that tanks might eventually be eliminated from the mix because of logistical challenges, including air transport.

Russian and Turkish leaders have now divided up security roles in northeast Syria following Trump’s abrupt troop withdrawal from the Turkey-Syrian border region. The American move triggered widespread criticism that the U.S. administration had abandoned the Syrian Kurdish fighters who fought alongside the U.S. against IS for several years.

Esper’s announcement came even as Trump again indicated in tweets that the U.S. military mission in Syria is complete. He previously has acknowledged a willingness to help protect the oil fields in eastern Syria, suggesting they could benefit the Kurds as well as the United States, although those resources belong to the Syrian government.

“Oil is secured,” Trump tweeted Friday. “Our soldiers have left and are leaving Syria for other places, then.... COMING HOME! ... When these pundit fools who have called the Middle East wrong for 20 years ask what we are getting out of the deal, I simply say, THE OIL, AND WE ARE BRINGING OUR SOLDIERS BACK HOME, ISIS SECURED!”

Asked about America’s shifting Syria strategy, Esper said the U.S. mission has always been to prevent the resurgence of IS. “That mission remains unchanged,” he said.

But Esper said at NATO that the U.S. is “considering how we might reposition forces in the area in order to ensure we secure the oil field.” He added: “We are reinforcing that position. It will include some mechanized forces.”

He made clear the main purpose is to prevent IS from regaining access to Syrian oil, which prior to 2017 was a major source of its revenue.

Starting in late 2015 and continuing for many months, the U.S. conducted airstrikes against a range of oil resources in the Deir el-Zour province that had been taken over by IS. The attacks damaged or knocked out oil tanker convoys, oil processing plants, storage facilities, pumping stations, pipelines and refineries. It was called Operation Tidal Wave II, after a World War II air campaign to hit Romania’s oil industry.

Esper said IS must not be allowed to again threaten the oil.

“If ISIS has access to the resources, and therefore the means to procure arms or to buy fighters or whatever else they do, then it means it makes it more difficult to defeat ISIS,” he said.

Just last week, Trump insisted that all American forces in Syria would come home. Then he said the 1,000 in the north would return home and that American troops in the south, numbering about 200 at the Al-Tanf garrison in the south, would stay.

Trump in the past days has turned a greater focus on the Syrian oil facilities in the eastern part of the country, saying U.S. will stay in Syria to protect them.

According to officials, top military leaders have pushed for the U.S. to leave forces in Syria to guard against an IS resurgence. While the group’s physical zone of control was largely destroyed by U.S. and Syrian Kurdish forces, insurgents remain in small pockets throughout the country and in Iraq.

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AP National Security Writer Robert Burns reported from Washington. AP writer Aamer Madhani contributed.

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This story has been corrected to say Trump threatened Turkey’s economy, not Syria’s.

Hunter Biden under fire for ties to overseas business dealings in Romania

FILE – In this Oct. 11, 2012, file photo, Hunter Biden waits for the start of the his father’s, Vice President Joe Biden’s, debate at Centre College in Danville, Ky. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 7:30 PM PT — Friday, October 25, 2019

Hunter Biden can’t seem to shake off bad press over his foreign business dealings. The crosshairs are now hovering over the former vice president’s son for his consultation of a Romanian businessman who was charged with fraud.
A Thursday NBC report drew attention to a 2016 trip Biden took to advise Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu was caught up in a legal battle over a questionable land deal he made with the rector of a local Romanian university back in 2006. The school official allegedly sold off government land to the businessman for significantly less money than it was worth. The official further claimed the land belonged to the school.
The rector was arrested years later following a government investigation and Popoviciu was charged as an accessory to that deal. He appealed the decision and eventually hired Hunter Biden as a counselor for his legal team.
Sources said it’s unclear how much Hunter Biden actually contributed, but experts believe the businessman may have hired him for his relationship to Joe Biden, the acting vice president at the time. Popoviciu allegedly wanted to use Hunter’s status as the vice president’s son as leverage to win his case.
It is unknown what Hunter discussed with the official or how much he was paid, but pundits have said the optics are not good — considering his shady business deals in Ukraine and China. This comes after Hunter Biden stepped down from his position on the board of a Chinese investment company to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

President Trump will not throw out first pitch at World Series game (OAN Newsroom)

President Donald Trump walks from Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., following a trip to South Carolina on Friday, Oct. 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

President Trump just struck out on the chance to throw the first pitch at Sunday night’s World Series game. The Washington National’s baseball team announced Friday that the honor will go to celebrity Chef José Andrés.
“If a Game 5 is necessary, the Nationals will welcome chef and humanitarian José Andrés to throw a ceremonial first pitch,” read a statement from the Major League Baseball team.
The chef’s work with the World Central Kitchen played a key role in feeding those affected by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
The announcement comes after President Trump was asked at the White House if he would be willing to throw out the first pitch if the series goes to Game 5. The president said he would definitely attend the game, but that he wasn’t sure about pitching.
“I don’t know,” said President Trump. “They got to dress me up in a lot of heavy armor — I’ll look too heavy.”
He has received support from Nationals pitcher Aníbal Sánchez, who said people should respect the president’s decision if he wants to attend the game.

Democrat Whistleblower Cartoons

Minnesota Trump rally punch suspect facing felony assault charge: reports

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.

AOC derides GOP deposition-secrecy protest as ‘little flash mob’ of ‘entitlement and privilege’

Wanna be in the Movies :-)

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.

Trump team rips critics as ‘scum’ and witnesses as disloyal

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.

Trump border wall funding plan countered by Democrat's $3.6B reversal bill

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.