Massachusetts governor defends 'integrity' of EBT system following report of abuse

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker defended the state’s Electronic Benefits Transfer system on Tuesday after a report published earlier in the week suggested some participants in the tax-funded welfare program committed fraud to pay for vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas and Alaska.
The Republican governor responded to a Monday report in the Boston Herald that said a review of more than 2 million EBT expenditures in the 2019 fiscal year revealed thousands of out-of-state transactions. EBT cards were swiped on 18 different occasions in Hawaii, including one that was used twice at a posh island resort where rooms fetch $800 a night, the paper reported. In one instance, an EBT card was also used to buy a $700 round-trip ticket from the state to Hawaii.
The state’s Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), which operates welfare programs including the EBT system, bars cardholders from using the EBT cards for vacation services — but hotels are not banned. Baker's administration sent a response to the Herald Tuesday, saying that the governor has invested $1 million into “program integrity” at the DTA to bolster protocol already in place that detects forms of fraud.
The statement said the DTA conducted a “residency verification check” after two transactions mentioned in the report: a $400 EBT transaction in November 2018 at the Hanalei Bay Princeville Resort on the island of Kauai, in addition to a $140 transaction in January at the Sheraton Waikiki in Honolulu. Under current DTA rules, “if an EBT card is exclusively used out of state for 45 days, a household must provide proof of current Massachusetts residence.”
The household whose card was swiped at the Princeville resort “was asked to verify residency and did not, so the case was closed and benefits expunged from the card,” according to the DTA. The second household who used their EBT card at the Sheraton “was able to prove that their travel was temporary,” but their account was later closed “because they began receiving (Social Security), which makes them ineligible for cash benefits, and system controls closed the case.”
The DTA’s response failed to address the EBT transactions recorded in Las Vegas and Alaska. The agency added that it “will continue to focus on identifying potential areas of fraud and abuse and strengthening internal controls so that benefits are administered to eligible households and used for permitted purposes.”
Fox News' Edmund DeMarche contributed to this report.

Sean Hannity blasts impeachment inquiry report

Sean Hannity slammed the House Intelligence Committee impeachment inquiry report released Tuesday, calling it "nothing but an insane, convoluted 14,000-word diatribe concocted by their fearless, compromised, corrupt, coward, congenital liar" House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff.
"The report is chock full of nothing but conspiracy theories, left-wing opinions, conjecture, hearsay, witnesses, complaints about Donald Trump's foreign policy by people that think they're more important than a duly elected president and a whole lot of outright lies," Hannity said on his television program Tuesday.
The host criticized Schiff for the timing of the report's release.
"And let's not lose sight of something very important. Schiff's rambling report was released just hours before the first official proceeding," Hannity said. "There's no time to mount any legal defense, President Trump isn't even in the country, and they knew that, too."
Hannity continued to criticize Schiff's credibility and his role in the report.
"A congenital liar compromised. Adam Schiff, who conducted the investigation, wrote the report," Hannity said. "He is a known repeated congenital liar. He lied repeatedly about Trump Russia collusion."
The Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee will move to the forefront of President Trump’s impeachment inquiry Wednesday morning with a hearing featuring four legal scholars, but no fact witnesses.
Hannity moved his focus to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler.
"[Nadler is] going to attempt to rush the impeachment sham across the finish line and get it done before Christmas. Like it or not, Nadler's planning on, well, jamming impeachment down all of our throats," Hannity said. "They don't care about the country. They've done nothing for us for three years except hate on Donald Trump."
Fox News' Gregg Re contributed to this report.

Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings by featuring four law professors

The Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee will move to the forefront of President Trump’s impeachment inquiry Wednesday morning with a hearing featuring four legal scholars, but no fact witnesses.
In the same pillared room that hosted last month's House Intelligence Committee hearings, lawmakers will hear from Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, Harvard law professor and Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman, University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt, and George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.
All are Democrat witnesses except for Turley -- a point that did not escape the notice of the president Tuesday evening.
"They get three constitutional lawyers ... and we get one," Trump said during a bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in London. "That's not sounding too good, and that's the way it is. We don't get a lawyer, we don't get any witnesses -- we want Biden, we want the son Hunter, where's Hunter? We want Schiff. We want to interview these people. Well, they said no. We can't do it."
Following opening statements from Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and ranking member Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., the witnesses will be sworn in and give opening statements of ten minutes apiece, followed by questioning.
The Judiciary Committee could approve articles of impeachment against the president within days. However, a senior member of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership team told Fox News Tuesday evening that it seems unlikely the full House can vote on impeaching Trump before Christmas, saying it's "too complex" a process.
“I just don’t see it,” the source said. “It’s too big.”
In the meantime, Democrats are trying to pass the annual defense bill. Congress has to fund the federal government by Dec. 20 or risk another shutdown. The House and Senate are expected to approve several of the annual 12 spending bills and then pass an interim spending bill for the remainder – or perhaps glom the remainders together and approve them for the rest of the fiscal year.
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) also looms large. If the decision is made to forge ahead with the USMCA this calendar year, then there is almost no way Congress can tackle impeachment. Democrats would face both a messaging problem and a floor traffic problem. Fox News has been told repeatedly in recent days that the USMCA is not ripe and action on that will likely take place after the turn of the year.
Nevertheless, Democrats have moved aggressively on impeachment. Late Tuesday, the intelligence committee voted to adopt and issue its scathing report on the findings from its impeachment inquiry, accusing Trump of misusing his office to seek foreign help in the 2020 presidential race.
The 13-9 party-line vote on the 300-page report was a necessary step before the document could be transferred to the Judiciary Committee. The report included call logs documenting apparent conversations involving Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes R-Calif., and Soviet-born businessman Lev Parnas, who was arrested in October.
"We have Americans and foreigners contact us every single day with information," Nunes told Fox News' "Hannity" on Tuesday night. "I was talking with Rudy Giuliani, and we were talking about how [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller bombed out."
Nunes added that it was possible he had spoken to Parnas. Separately, Republicans called for phone records belonging to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has acknowledged that he should have been "more clear" about his communications with the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment inquiry.
While invited to participate in the opening Judiciary hearing, the White House declined. “This baseless and highly partisan inquiry violates all past historical precedent, basic due process rights, and fundamental fairness,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote in a letter to Nadler on Sunday.
Cipollone accused Nadler of "purposely" scheduling the proceedings to coincide with Trump's attendance at the NATO Leaders' Meeting in London. He also said Nadler provided "vague" details about the hearing, and that only then-unnamed academics -- and not "fact witnesses" -- would apparently be attending.
Wednesday's hearing is expected to mirror the format used by the House Intelligence Committee last month. The proceedings start with a 45 minute period for the Democrats, most likely led by Judiciary Committee counsel Norm Eisen. Republicans will then get 45 minutes.
Then, the hearing will go to five-minute rounds for each of the 41 members. The five-minute round alone should consume three hours and 25 minutes.
Fox News expects the House to hold a vote series around 1:30 p.m. ET, forcing a recess in the committee. There will probably be some parliamentary fighting and stunting, which could delay proceedings further.
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and other administration officials have long argued that Democrats are wasting valuable legislative time with their impeachment probe.
“At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman [Adam] Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” Grisham said Tuesday, adding that Democrats' impeachment report "reflects nothing more than their frustrations" and "reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”
During a press conference Tuesday, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy called on Democrats to end the impeachment “nightmare," saying “They’re concerned if they do not impeach this president, they can't beat him in an election."
The Schiff-led Intelligence Committee conducted extensive interviews with witnesses connected to the Trump administration’s relationship with Ukraine after an anonymous whistleblower filed a complaint alleging that during a July 25 phone call, Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help Rudy Giuliani investigate Democratic activities in 2016 as well as former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
"The President engaged in this course of conduct for the benefit of his own presidential reelection, to harm the election prospects of a political rival, and to influence our nation’s upcoming presidential election to his advantage," the Democrats' report said. "In doing so, the President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security."
Schiff also tweeted: "The impeachment inquiry uncovered overwhelming and uncontested evidence that President Trump abused the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference in our election for his own personal, political gain."
Schiff’s committee held closed-door sessions before opening up the inquiry to public hearings, which featured testimony from witnesses including National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
The report concluded that Trump withheld nearly $391 million in military aid from Ukraine, conditioning its delivery as well as a White House visit for Zelensky on a public announcement that Zelensky was conducting the investigations. It also accuses Trump of committing obstruction by instructing witnesses not to comply with congressional subpoenas.
Republicans drafted a report of their own, which rejected the Democratic majority's claims.
"The evidence presented does not prove any of these Democrat allegations, and none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor,” the GOP report said.
If the House should vote to impeach, the Senate would hold a trial, where a two-thirds majority would be needed to convict.
A Senate trial could also dig deeper into at least one of the issues Trump once sought to have investigated: Joe Biden's role ousting a Ukraine prosecutor who had been looking into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter had a lucrative board role.
Fox News' Chad Pergram, Ronn Blitzer, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Warren's Medicare Cartoons

Trump administration asks Supreme Court for green light to resume federal executions

The Trump administration filed an emergency request with the U.S. Supreme Court Monday, arguing that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had no legal basis for blocking the planned resumption of federal executions after a 16-year hiatus.
The request was sent by Solicitor General Noel Francisco to Chief Justice John Roberts, who will decide whether the Court will review the case.
The emergency request came hours after the D.C. court upheld a ruling blocking the Trump administration’s plan. The Justice Department had asked the court to block the injunction put in place by a district court judge that stalled the executions of four convicted murderers, Reuters reported.
Attorney General William Barr said in July the federal government would resume capital punishment and scheduled the executions of five death-row inmates for December and January, ending an unofficial decade-long moratorium on federal executions.
Barr said the DOJ owed it to the victims’ families to carry out the law/
A judge temporarily halted the executions after some of the chosen inmates challenged the new execution procedures. The inmates argued that the government was circumventing proper methods in order to wrongly execute inmates quickly.
A federal execution has not taken place since 2003. In the last 16 years, a protracted legal battle has drawn out over the drugs used in lethal injections.
Fox News’ Alex Pappas and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Why the press was blind to recognize Warren’s Medicare blunder

The media didn’t wake up until Elizabeth Warren started sinking in the polls.
For much of the year, she basically skated on a health care plan that is political suicide. But as the Massachusetts senator surged toward front-runner status, the poll-obsessed press essentially said hey, it’s working. Medicare for All is popular with the party’s progressive wing, Warren has a plan for everything, they’re all geniuses.
And yet, here was a leading Democratic candidate promising to run against President Trump by taking away private health insurance from 150 million Americans. It didn’t take a political genius to realize that this would be an unmitigated disaster in a general election.
But now that Warren has dropped from 27 to 16 percent in the Real Clear Politics polling average, you can hear the sound of pundits slapping their foreheads across America: Holy cow, what a blunder for her to embrace Medicare for All.
The Washington Post, in a front-page piece Sunday, describes the “political turbulence that Warren has experienced in recent weeks as she has attempted to extricate herself from a policy dilemma that has blunted her steady rise to the top ranks of the Democratic nominating contest.”
The New York Times warned the other day that “prominent Democratic leaders are sounding increasingly vocal alarms to try to halt political momentum for ‘Medicare for All’…rather than enter an election year with a sweeping health care proposal that many see as a liability for candidates up and down the ballot.”
And the Daily Beast, describing Warren’s “self-inflicted wound,” quoted an unnamed aide to a 2020 Democrat calling the proposal “f*** poison. You touch it, you turn to dust.”
Yet the press should have been all over this months ago. There was a blind spot, it seems to me, because journalists spend too much time on liberal Twitter, where government-run health insurance is beloved. And Warren did not get the usual front-runner scrutiny as her substantive campaign caught on, certainly not compared to the pummeling of Joe Biden.
And the biggest beneficiary has been Pete Buttigieg, a relative moderate who has campaigned against her approach.
The senator had signed onto the Bernie Sanders plan to make sure he couldn’t outflank her on the left, and now she’s paying the price.
Obviously, articles were written about Medicare for All and how it might be risky. Moderators dutifully asked Warren about it in several debates, and she repeatedly ducked questions on whether middle-class taxes would have to rise, focusing instead on what she claimed would be lower costs. But after each debate most journalists just moved on, and there was little follow-up in the Trump-centric environment.
Finally, Warren unveiled a gargantuan $20-trillion tax plan that simply fueled questions about paying for the massive program. And then she retreated, saying she wouldn’t push Medicare for All until the third year of her presidency—ostensibly to allow more transition time but in reality to slide the plan onto the back burner.
Warren and Sanders argue that they need big bold ideas to energize their voters. But there’s a reason that Nancy Pelosi says she’s not a fan of the plan, and that Barack Obama cautions left-leaning Democrats about touting a revolution.
The Post story said Warren had been warned that Medicare for All was a time bomb. Barney Frank, her fellow Massachusetts liberal, said he’d privately told her that backing Bernie on health care was “a terrible mistake” and that her shift should have come earlier.
“The irony is that a candidate whose political identity has been built in part on her reputation as a policy wonk — a potential president who boasts of having a plan for nearly every challenge facing everyday Americans — has been tripped up by a policy issue that has dominated politics and defined her party for years.”
The Times piece says many in the party “are gravely concerned about the impact that having a presidential nominee who backs Medicare for All at the top of the ticket would have on the most vulnerable Democratic candidates.” The paper quotes Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo as saying, “When you say Medicare for all, it’s a risk. It makes people feel afraid.”
Many Democrats with short memories forget how hard it was for Obama to pass the Affordable Care Act by a single vote, and that the flawed program has finally become popular after Trump repeatedly tried to abolish it. Allowing people to opt into Medicare, as Biden, Buttigieg and some others favor, would be a significant step forward for the party. Junking the program in favor of mandated government care — taking away people’s choice — was always pie in the sky.
But until Warren lost her polling lead, that obvious fact remained hidden in plain sight.

Top Republican urges against speculation after early leaks on FISA report findings

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., on Monday downplayed leaked reports that said the Justice Department’s inspector general's probe into the start of the FBI's Russia investigation determined that there was enough information to justify the agency's probe into members of the Trump campaign.
Meadows was asked about a report in the Washington Post that said Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report justified the FBI's action at the time. The New York Times, citing two unnamed sources, reported that the findings are expected to contradict some of the theories that President Trump has mentioned.
The former chairman of the House's Freedom Caucus said that all the reports are "based on speculation on information which has been leaked."
"There is little doubt in my mind that it will not be one the FBI’s finest days when the report is released," he said. "No one other than Horowitz and his team knows what’s in the report and they have left no stone unturned."
The reports, if true, would be seen as a potential setback for President Trump, who has insisted that the FBI's investigation was a witch hunt from the beginning and a blatant attempt by Democrats to overthrow his presidency.
Horowitz, who has not commented on the over year-and-a-half investigation, told Congress in a letter last month that he intended to make as much of the report public as possible, with minimal redactions. The report is due next week.
A key question examined by Horowitz has been the FBI’s application for a secret warrant to monitor Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide.
The Justice Department and the FBI obtained warrants in 2016 to monitor Page. Page told Fox News earlier this month he was "frustrated" he had not been interviewed in Horowitz's probe.
The warrant was renewed multiple times by judges, but Republican critics have decried the fact that the FBI relied in part in its application on uncorroborated information obtained by Christopher Steele, a former British spy who had been paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to conduct opposition research.
The government did disclose to the court the political loyalties of the people who hired Steele, according to Democrats on the House intelligence committee who released their own memo last year aimed at countering Republican allegations of law enforcement misconduct.
Horowitz provided a draft copy to Attorney General William Barr in September, and the Justice Department has since been conducting a classification review.
The Post, citing unnamed sources, reported that Barr disagrees with the report’s conclusion. He reportedly questioned whether or not the CIA, or other agencies hold information that could change the inspector general’s conclusion.
Barr has praised Horowitz in the past and called him “fiercely independent.”
"Inspector General Horowitz is a fiercely independent investigator, a superb investigator who I think has conducted this particular investigation in the most professional way, and I think his work, when it does come out, will be a credit to the department," Barr said earlier this month.
The Justice Department told Fox News  in a statement that "uncovered significant information that the American people will soon be able to read for themselves. Rather than speculating, people should read the report for themselves next week, watch the Inspector General’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and draw their own conclusions about these important matters."
Trump has tweeted about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and told “Fox & Friends” earlier this month that "what they have coming out is historic."
Fox News' Brooke Singman, Jake Gibson and the Associated Press contributed to this report

North Korea warns US will choose its 'Christmas gift' if Trump fails to meet looming nuclear deadline

The North Korean foreign ministry said on Tuesday that Washington would decide what “Christmas gift” it would receive if the United States fails to change its “hostile policies” on denuclearization before the end of the year, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
Ri Thae Song, North Korea’s vice minister of foreign affairs in charge of relations with the United States, warned of an approaching end-of-year deadline, saying that President Trump’s recent calls for more talks is “nothing but a foolish trick hatched to keep the DPRK bound to dialogue and use it in favor of the political situation and election in the U.S.,” Reuters reported.
He referred to North Korea by the initials of its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“The DPRK has done its utmost with maximum perseverance not to backtrack from the important steps it has taken on its own initiative,” Ri said in his statement. “What is left to be done now is the U.S. option and it is entirely up to the U.S. what Christmas gift it will select to get.”
North Korea has been ramping up missile tests and other military demonstrations in recent months in an apparent pressure tactic over the talks. Negotiations have faltered since a February summit between Kim Jong-un and Trump in Vietnam which broke down after the U.S. rejected North Korean demands for broad sanctions relief in exchange for a partial surrender of its nuclear capabilities.
Kim later issued his end-of-year deadline and has also said the North would seek a “new path” if the U.S. persists with sanctions and pressure. Working-level talks last month in Sweden broke down over what the North Koreans described as the Americans’ “old stance and attitude.”
On Tuesday, Ri did not clarify what he meant by a “Christmas gift,” but a Reuters breaking news editor speculated on Twitter that North Korea could be threatening a satellite launch, an outright ICBM test, a SLBM test far from Korean Peninsula or a nuclear test.
In a November 18 statement, Foreign Ministry adviser Kim Kye Gwan suggested North Korea had no interest in meeting with Trump at another summit unless the U.S. offered substantial concessions before the deadline. The statement issued through KCNA came in response to a tweet from Trump that urged Kim to “act quickly, get the deal done” and hinted at another summit between them, saying “See you soon!”
“Three rounds of DPRK-U.S. summit meetings and talks were held since June last year, but no particular improvement has been achieved in the DPRK-U.S. relations,” the statement began. “The U.S. only seeks to earn time, pretending it has made progress in settling the issue of the Korean Peninsula.”
“We are no longer interested in such talks that bring nothing to us. As we have got nothing in return, we will no longer gift the U.S. president with something he can boast of, but get compensation for the successes that President Trump is proud of as his administrative achievements.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.