Holdout Arizona GOP Sen. Flake says he'll vote against Iran nuclear deal

PHOENIX  –  Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, the lone Republican senator who was considering support for the Iran nuclear deal, announced plans on Saturday to vote no, dealing a significant blow to the White House's efforts to garner bipartisan backing for the controversial accord.

Flake, a freshman who had praised President Obama for seeking a diplomatic solution, had been publicly undecided, making him a top target of the White House's concerted lobbying campaign. Senate vote-counters had considered Flake the only truly undecided GOP vote, although his fellow Republicans had expressed confidence he would oppose it.
"I cannot vote in support of this deal," Flake said.
In a statement issued while Congress was on its annual August recess, Flake said he was concerned that the deal severely limits lawmakers' ability to sanction Iran for activities unrelated to its nuclear program. Obama has argued that multilateral sanctions under the United Nations umbrella will be lifted under the deal, but that the U.S. will retain sanctions punishing Iran for other issues like human rights and its support for extremist groups like Hezbollah.
"As written, this agreement gives Iran leverage it currently doesn't have," Flake said.
Flake's opposition to the deal all but guarantees that no Republicans — at least in the Senate — will back the deal, which Obama hopes will form a cornerstone of his foreign policy legacy by preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon for more than a decade. The White House offered no specific reaction to Flake's announcement, but pointed out that in the last week, seven Democrats have announced their support.
All told, 20 Senate Democrats have backed the deal, with one -- New York Sen. Chuck Schumer -- opposing it. Forty-six House Democrats have supported the deal, compared to 10 who are opposed.
Flake, who has bucked Republican leadership on a number of issues in his first Senate term, had commended the administration for seeking alternatives to military action against Iran, inspiring optimism at the White House that he might back the final deal.
Just a day earlier, Flake traveled to Cuba with Secretary of State John Kerry to attend the flag-raising at the reopened the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, another foreign policy move by Obama that most Republicans oppose.
Yet in his home state, Flake had been the target of weeklong barrage of attack ads running in Phoenix featuring a former soldier wounded in Iraq by an Iranian-made bomb. The soldier, whose face is badly scarred, said those who vote for the deal will "be held accountable."
"They will have blood on their hands," the soldier said in the ad.
Congress has until Sept. 17 to vote on a resolution either approving or disapproving the pact. Although Obama doesn't need explicit congressional approval for the deal, the resolution could scuttle the deal by blocking Obama's ability to lift harsh economic sanctions — the key concession that got Iran to agree to the deal.

Gowdy: Clinton to testify in October before Benghazi panel, all questions ‘asked’ and ‘answered’

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy said Sunday that Hillary Clinton will indeed testify Oct. 22 about her activities as secretary of state at the time of the Benghazi attacks but suggested that her demand for a one-time appearance will result in a long, hard day.

“We have agreed on the date,” Gowdy, a Republican and chairman of House’s Select Committee on Benghazi, told “Fox News Sunday.”
“And the ground rules are simple: You're going to stay there until all of the questions are asked and answered with respect to Benghazi," he continued. "If she's going to insist that she's only coming once, I'm going to insist that once be fully constructed, which means she's going to be there for a while.”
Gowdy said questions about Clinton’s growing email controversy will be part of the hearing only because they're relevant to his task of finding out what Clinton knew prior to the fatal Sept. 11, 2012, terror attacks on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the attacks.
Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Among questions still being pursued are how much did the Obama administration know about the possibility of a terror attack and did the outpost have adequate security.
The email controversy essentially centers on Clinton using a private server and email accounts while serving as the country’s top diplomat.
“Had she not had this email arrangement with herself, you wouldn't be talking to me this morning,” Gowdy told Fox on Sunday. “So, my focus is on the four murdered Americans in Benghazi. But before I can write the final definitive accounting of that, I have to make sure that the public record is complete.”
Clinton, the front running Democratic presidential candidate, has said she had no knowledge of sending or receiving information marked as classified, that she has done nothing wrong and intends to cooperate with investigations.
However, thousands of pages of her emails publicly released in recent months show she received messages later marked classified, including some that contained material regarding the production and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information.
And a recent inspector general probe raised concerns about whether classified information had traversed the email system, resulting in a counterintelligence referral being sent to the Justice Department. However, the referral did not allege criminal wrongdoing.
Intentionally transmitting classified information through an unsecured system would appear to be a violation of federal regulations.
This weekend, Clinton suggested the email controversy is also politically motivated.
“I won't get down in the mud with them,” she said. “I won't play politics with national security or dishonor the memory of those who we lost. I won't pretend that this is anything other than what it is, the same old partisan games we've seen so many times before.”
Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, has repeatedly declined to comment on whether he thinks Clinton broke federal law with what he calls her “unique email arrangement.”
However, he said Sunday that he has confidence in the FBI’s handling of the server, which Clinton turned over last week, after repeated requests, and that the agency will be the neutral observer for which he has asked.
“I think (the FBI is) the premiere law enforcement agency in the world,” Gowdy said. “I think that they're as apolitical as anything can be in this culture, and I think they're going to go wherever the facts take them.”

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Illegal immigrant accused in triple homicide in Florida home

A 19-year-old illegal immigrant was being held without bail Saturday after the discovery of three bodies at a crime scene in a Florida home that veteran cops called “almost unimaginable.”

Brian Omar Hyde appeared before a judge Friday on charges he killed his pregnant cousin Starlett Pitts, 17, and her 19-year-old boyfriend in a Lehigh Acres home Tuesday, and then killed his aunt and Pitts’ mother, Dorla Pitts, 37, when she walked in on the scene while on the phone with her husband. Lee County deputies said he heard her scream, “Brian! What happened here? What happened?” before the phone went silent.
 “All homicide scenes are normally violent but even for us this scene was what we considered almost unimaginable,” Lt. Matt Sands said Thursday, according to WBBH-TV.
Hyde was in the country illegally from Belize in Central America and awaiting a court hearing as an illegal immigrant, having crossed the Texas border earlier this year, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office said.
He fled to the U.S. to live with his aunt to avoid a trial in a Belize courtroom on charges of assaulting a police officer last November, the station said. He was then tried in absentia, found guilty, and given a 6-month jail sentence that remains to be served.
Hyde was also wanted in Belize on charges of robbing a cell phone store, the station said, while also reporting, according to reports, that the teen and two other men were suspects in a double homicide in 2013. Eventually, he was charged with a lesser crime of handling stolen goods.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released a statement Friday that said, “ICE has filed a request with the Lee County Sheriff's Office for notification if they intend to release the individual from custody.”
Police said the victims were killed by repeated "sharp force trauma" to the head and neck. Sands said each victim had wounds indicating they tried to defend themselves as they were being attacked.
Dorrien Pitts called a friend to check on his wife when he couldn't get her back on the phone. The friend saw blood stains on the floor and a foot near a couch, ran outside and called 911, the Fort Myers News-Press reported.
As cops collected evidence at the crime scene, Fort Myers cops stopped Hyde in an SUV for a traffic violation and arrested him for driving without a license.
When he was arrested, he had human blood on his bare feet, his shoes and pants, the paper said, citing the arrest report.
A bloody palm print recovered at the crime scene matched the left palm print taken from Hyde after his arrest in Fort Myers, the Lee Sheriff's Office said.
According to the arrest report police found a backpack full of clean clothes in the SUV along with several pairs of shoes making it appear to investigators “as if Hyde was about to flee the area.”
Investigators said they also discovered in the vehicle Hyde’s immigration papers and Dorla Pitts’ employee ID card from Naples Community Hospital where she worked as a nurse.
Hyde faces three count of second degree murder and one count of killing an unborn child by injury to the mother.
Pitts was helping her nephew obtain a high school equivalency diploma, her heart-broken sister Sasha Hyde told the News-Press from Belize.
“He was looking for something better in life,” she said.

Fox News Poll: Majority would reject Iran nuke deal

The Iran nuclear agreement goes to Congress in September.  If it were up to American voters, they would reject it -- with a large majority saying Iran wouldn’t abide by the agreement anyway. 

The White House wants Congressional approval for the agreement that would ease U.S. economic sanctions for 10 years in return for Iran stopping its nuclear program during that time.
The latest Fox News national poll asks voters to imagine being a lawmaker and casting a vote on the deal:  31 percent would approve it, while nearly twice as many, 58 percent, would reject it.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE POLL RESULTS
In an August 5 speech, President Obama said if lawmakers vote down the deal, the agreement will fall apart and war will come “soon.”
Even so, only half of Democrats would approve the deal (50 percent).  More than a third would vote it down (35 percent).
Most Republicans (83 percent) and a majority of independents (60 percent) would reject it.
One reason to oppose any deal is if you think the other side won’t keep the bargain -- and that’s certainly the case here: Three-quarters of voters say Iran cannot be trusted to honor the agreement (75 percent).  That includes almost all Republicans (93 percent), most independents (80 percent) and a majority of Democrats (59 percent).
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the second-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate and a prominent supporter of Israel, recently announced his opposition to the Iran deal.  By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters say Schumer’s opposition makes them feel less favorable toward the agreement (13 percent less favorable, 7 percent more favorable).  Sentiment is almost identical among Democrats.  Still, Schumer’s disapproval wouldn’t sway most voters either way (76 percent).
The poll finds the president’s job rating down a bit this week:  42 percent of voters approve of the job Obama is doing, while 51 percent disapprove.  Two weeks ago it was 46-46 percent.
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cell phone interviews with 1,008 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from August 11-13, 2015. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters.

Carson critical of Black Lives Matter message, strategy of disrupting campaign events

Black Lives Matter groups are meeting with Democratic presidential campaigns after members disrupted several events to get out their message but apparently have eschewed such a strategy with Republican candidates, which is OK with GOP contender Ben Carson.

Carson told Fox News on Thursday he doesn’t agree with the groups' apparent strategy of forcing a meeting or their agenda upon 2016 candidates, by either disrupting or threatening to disrupt a campaign-related event.
“Of course not,” said Carson, who is black. “I would like them to start paying attention to the carnage rather than making it a political issue. The most common cause of death for young black males in cities is homicide.”
Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon and social conservative, also argued that black males killing each other is as large an issue as Black Lives Matter activists’ major concerns of criminal justice-reform and blacks dying while in contact with police.
The campaigns of 2016 Democratic White House candidates Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders each confirmed earlier this week that their officials met with leaders of the loosely-knit Black Lives Matter movement.
But the specifics of the meetings, including whether the sides have reached any agreement to avoid further disruptions, remain unclear because the group will not allow the details to be made public.

More on this...

• Dr. Ben Carson on 'Black Lives Matter,' Planned Parenthood

Last week, a group of protesters claiming to be affiliated with Black Lives Matter ended a Sanders' event before it even started, snatching the 73-year-old’s microphone so they could talk about criminal justice reform, then pushing him away when he tried to take it back.
On Tuesday, newly-hired Sanders' National Press Secretary Symone Sanders, who is black, confirmed that Black Lives Matter leaders had been in contact with the campaign but said only that Team Sanders was “looking forward to continuing the dialogue with them and getting their input on various issues."
That was not the first time the group had disrupted an event with Sanders, Vermont Independent.
In July, Sanders and O’Malley, a former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor, were essentially heckled off stage at the annual Netroots Nation convention.
O'Malley said before departing that "Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter," which prompted boos and him later issuing an apology to those who found his remark “insensitive.”
The O’Malley campaign confirmed on Wednesday with FoxNews.com that the sides had met.
A campaign spokeswoman said the discussions focused on criminal justice reform and that group members argued for why such changes “need to be a priority.”
However, the spokeswoman said that the ground-rules of the meeting prevented her from discussing specific and pointed to O’Malley's speech in late July to the Urban League in which he talked about improving and reforming the criminal justice system.
The Black Lives Matter movement purportedly started after the 2012 death of black teen Trayvon Martin and has made the recent deaths of black males in contact with police a rallying point for change.
It also met this week with leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, after announcing on social media that it would disrupt an event Tuesday in New Hampshire.
Group members were reportedly ushered into a side room and accepted an offer after the event to meet with Clinton.
The Clinton campaign declined to comment, and members of the Black Lives Matter group in Boston involved in the meeting would not discuss with reporters the details of the event.
However, Daunasia Yancey, one of the Boston group’s organizers, told Politico afterward that she didn’t hear Clinton talk about her part in “perpetuating white supremacist violence,” only her “reflection on failed policy.”
And the group tweeted: “We've gotten the attention of @HillaryClinton's staff & they are working w us.”
Black Lives Matter did not respond to requests for comment.
The group apparently has not reached out to Republican candidates including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul who has been a leading voice in Washington, even before declaring his candidacy, to ending mandatory minimum federal sentencing.
Critics argue such sentencing, particular with drug possession charges, is unfair and has resulted in the skyrocketing costs of running prisons.
Paul spokesman Sergio Gor declined to comment this week on whether the campaign had been contacted or if the candidate was even interested in talking with Black Lives Matter about the future of his campaign.
The group last week disrupted a campaign event for GOP candidate Jeb Bush in Nevada.
Carson, a first-time candidate, on Thursday also reiterated what he told reporters in New York City on Wednesday including that “We need to be talking about how we solve the problem in the black community of murder.”
He also said the solution is to re-instill such values as “family and faith” that have helped black Americans through slavery, segregation and the Jim Crow era.
“If you abandon those things, this is what we get,” he said, arguing the problems are in large part the result of the police and members of the black community being mutually fearful of each other.

Glenn Beck names 15 cities that 'you don't want to live anywhere around;' San Francisco is number 2

Former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck recently shared his list of Top 15 cities "to avoid like the plague." He says the list is based on the "least religious cities in America."

"I want to give you the top 10 or 15 cities that I think are going to melt down," Beck said on his radio program. "These are the cities that you do not want to live anywhere around as things get worse and worse."

San Francisco was number two behind Portland.

According to Beck, "These are the cities that are already having trouble and we haven't even hit the road bump," Beck said Tuesday on his radio program.

Here's the complete list:

1. Portland

2. San Francisco3. Seattle
4. Denver
5. Phoenix
6. St. Petersburg, Florida
7. Columbus, Ohio
8. Detroit
9. Boston
10. Los Angeles
11. Milwaukee
12. Las Vegas
13. Minneapolis- St. Paul
14. Washington D.C.
15. St. Louis

Documents reportedly reveal details behind AT&T-NSA partnership

AT&T in 2003 reportedly led the way on a new collection capability that the National Security Agency said amounted to a “’live’ presence on the global net” and would forward 400 billion Internet metadata records in one of its firth months operation.

The New York Times reported the Fairview program was forwarding more than 1 million emails per day to the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Meanwhile, the Stormbrew program, linked to Verizon and the former MCI company, was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic.
According to an internal agency newsletter cited by the newspaper, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the NSA in 2011, after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.” Intelligence officials told reporters in the past that the effort consisted mostly of landline phone records, the Times reported.
The agency spent more than $188 billion on the Fairview program, twice the amount spent on Stormbew, the newspaper reported.
Such details from the decades-long partnership between the government and AT&T emerged from NSA documents provided by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, the Times reported in a story posted Saturday on its website. The Times and ProPublica jointly reviewed the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013.
While its known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the NSA, the documents show that the government’s relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and productive, according to the newspaper. One document described it as "highly collaborative," while another lauded the company's "extreme willingness to help," the newspaper reported.
The documents show the telecom giant’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the Times. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they flowed across various domestic networks.
AT&T has also reportedly provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at U.N. headquarters, which is a customer of the phone company. While NSA spying on U.N. diplomats had been previously reported, the newspaper said Saturday that neither the court order nor AT&T's involvement had been disclosed.
The documents also reveal that AT&T installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, the Times reported, far more than similarly sized competitor Verizon. AT&T engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the NSA, the newspaper reported.
The NSA, AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings from the files, according to the Times. It is not clear if the programs still operate in the same way today, the newspaper reported.
One of the documents provided by Snowden reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, the Times reported, and notes, "This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship."