Presumptuous Politics

Friday, May 13, 2016

Trump says Washington Post owner Bezos has 'huge antitrust problem'

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump lashed out at Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos Thursday, claiming that the founder of Amazon.com was using the newspaper as a tool to influence corporate tax policy.
"Every hour we're getting calls from reporters from The Washington Post asking ridiculous questions," Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity. "And I will tell you, this is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos ... Amazon is getting away with murder, tax-wise. He's using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don't tax Amazon like they should be taxed."
Trump was responding to Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward's disclosure that the newspaper has assigned 20 reporters to investigate the real estate mogul's life.
"We're going to do a book, we're doing articles about every phase of his life," Woodward told the National Association of Realtors convention Wednesday. The veteran reporter, best known for investigating the Watergate break-in that led to Richard Nixon's resignation, said he had begun investigating Trump's real estate deals in New York, which he called "more complex than the CIA."
Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013 from longtime owners the Graham family, has donated to both Democratic and Republican elected officials. According to the website OpenSecrets, Bezos and his wife gave $4,800 each to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in 2009. The couple also gave $2.5 million to support a 2012 referendum legalizing gay marraige in Washington state.
More recently, however, Bezos donated $2,700 this past September to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.
"He thinks I'll go after him for antitrust," Trump said Thursday. "Because he's got a huge antitrust problem because he's controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing.
"He's using The Washington Post, which is peanuts, he's using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust."
Neither Bezos nor Amazon had any immediate comment in response to Trump's claims.
Woodward said Wendesday that Bezos had urged the Post to run as many stories as possible about all the presidential candidates so that voters can't say they were uninformed when they select the next president.
"He said, 'Look, the job at the Washington Post has to be tell us everything about who the eventual nominee will be in both parties,'" Woodward said. "'15-part, 16-part series, 20-part series, we want to look at every part of their lives. And we're never going to get the whole story, of course, but we can get the best attainable."

Clinton charity aided Clinton friends

The Clinton Global Initiative, which arranges donations to help solve the world’s problems, set up a financial commitment that benefited a for-profit company part-owned by people with ties to the Clintons, including a current and a former Democratic official and a close friend of former President Bill Clinton.
The $2 million commitment was placed on the agenda for a September 2010 conference of the Clinton Global Initiative at Mr. Clinton’s urging, according to a document from the period and people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Clinton also personally endorsed the company, Energy Pioneer Solutions Inc., to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu for a federal grant that year, said people with knowledge of the endorsement.
The company, whose business plan was to insulate people’s homes and let them pay via their utility bills, received an $812,000 Energy Department grant. Mr. Chu, now a professor at Stanford University, said he didn’t remember the conversation.
The Clinton Global Initiative is a program of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The foundation has been a focus of criticism this political season over donations received from governments and corporations that had business before Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state and that could be affected by decisions she would make as president. The foundation has said it “has strong donor integrity and transparency practices.”
The Clinton Global Initiative’s help for a for-profit company part-owned by Clinton friends poses a different issue. Under federal law, tax-exempt charitable organizations aren’t supposed to act in anyone’s private interest but instead in the public interest, on broad issues such as education or poverty.
“The organization must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests,” the Internal Revenue Service says on its website.
Energy Pioneer Solutions was founded in 2009 by Scott Kleeb, a Democrat who twice ran for Congress from Nebraska. An internal document from that year showed it as owned 29% by Mr. Kleeb; 29% by Jane Eckert, the owner of an art gallery in Pine Plains, N.Y.; and 29% by Julie Tauber McMahon of Chappaqua, N.Y., a close friend of Mr. Clinton, who also lives in Chappaqua.
Owning 5% each were Democratic National Committee treasurer Andrew Tobias and Mark Weiner, a supplier to political campaigns and former Rhode Island Democratic chairman, both longtime friends of the Clintons.

New email release shows Clinton chose not to use secure phone line, acknowledged Blackberry risk

Hillary Clinton playing word games with email investigation?

A new set of State Department documents released Thursday by the watchdog group Judicial Watch reveal then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the choice not to use a secure phone line amid a technical problem and acknowledged the risk of using a private Blackberry phone.
The documents contain a Feb. 22, 2009, email exchange between Clinton and her then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills attempting to communicate over a secure line after Clinton returned from an overseas trip.
When there were issues setting up a secure communication, Clinton wrote to Mills, “I called ops and they gave me your ‘secure’ cells… but only got a high-pitched whining sound.”
Mills then suggested that Clinton try the secure line again, but the former secretary wrote back, “I give up. Call me on my home #.”
Clinton's choice not to use a secure phone line is similar to a previous June, 17, 2011 email exchange with then-State Department deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, where she directed him to strip the classification markings of sensitive talking points and send through non-secure fax.
"They say they've had issues sending secure fax. They're working on it," Sullivan wrote to Clinton.
"If they can't, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure," Clinton responded.
In a separate email from Feb. 27, 2008 released Wednesday, Clinton apologized to health care activist/physician Mark Hyman for failing to respond to a message because, “no blackberry contact permitted in my office.”
The documents were obtained in response to a court order from a May 5, 2015 lawsuit filed against the State Department after it failed to respond to a March 18 Freedom of Information Act request.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Iran Deal Cartoons

House GOP ask top White House adviser to testify after Iran deal comments

House Republicans have invited a top White House adviser to testify on Capitol Hill after comments he made in a magazine interview about the Obama administration's efforts to promote the Iran nuclear deal sparked a firestorm in Washington.
Republican leaders of the House Oversight Committee want Ben Rhodes, one of President Obama's closest aides, to testify during a hearing next Tuesday named “White House narratives on the Iran nuclear deal,” committee spokeswoman M.J. Henshaw confirmed to Fox News Wednesday.
Henshaw added that Rhodes, who serves as deputy national security adviser, has not yet gotten back to the committee, and that no one else has been asked yet to appear.
An aide to House Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told The Hill newspaper, which first reported the hearing, that the congressman has threatened to use a subpoena to demand Rhodes'appearance.
The hearing comes nearly a week after Rhodes' comments to The New York Times Magazine ripped the Washington press corps, boasted of creating an "echo chamber" of supporters to sell the Iran nuclear deal and appeared to dismiss long-time foreign policy hands, including Hillary Clinton, as the Blob.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz on Wednesday accused Republicans of "seeking to relitigate that old political fight."
"With all the serious issues stuck in Congress right now - like preparing for Zika's arrival, helping Puerto Rico through their financial crisis, providing assistance to the people of Flint, or combatting the opioid epidemic - it is a shame that Chairman Chaffetz is choosing to take a page out of Darrell Issa's playbook to distract from all the work they should be doing," he said.

US won't seek death penalty against Benghazi suspect

What ever happen to a eye for an eye?

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khattala, the suspected Libyan militant charged in the Benghazi attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, federal officials announced Tuesday.
The department revealed its decision, which pushes the case forward toward trial, in a brief court filing that offered no additional explanation.
In a separate statement, spokeswoman Emily Pierce said Attorney General Loretta Lynch made the decision after reviewing the case and consulting with federal prosecutors. She said the department is "committed to ensuring that the defendant is held accountable" for the 2012 attacks.
Abu Khattala's attorneys, who have challenged the strength of the government's evidence, had implored the Justice Department to remove the death penalty as a possibility should he ultimately be convicted of any capital crimes at trial. With that punishment now off the table, he would face a maximum sentence of life in prison if found guilty.
"It was a decision that was the correct decision, but was also a courageous decision — so we're pleased," one of his attorneys, Eric Lewis, told The Associated Press.
Abu Khattala, captured by U.S. special forces in Libya two years ago and brought to the U.S. aboard a Navy ship, has been awaiting trial in federal court in Washington in connection with the September 2012 violence at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi. Prosecutors have described him as a ringleader of the attacks, which quickly emerged as a political flashpoint and became the topic of congressional hearings involving Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, secretary of state at the time of the rampage.
Assuming it doesn't resolve through a plea agreement, a trial of Abu Khattala would represent of the most significant terrorism prosecutions in recent years and also an illustration of the Obama administration's commitment to prosecuting suspected militants captured overseas in U.S. civilian courts.
The 18-count indictment arises from a burst of violence that began the night of Sept. 11, 2012, at a State Department diplomatic compound, an attack prosecutors say was aimed at murdering American personnel and plundering maps, documents and other property from the post.
U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in the first attack at the U.S. mission, along with Sean Patrick Smith, a State Department information management officer. Nearly eight hours later at a CIA complex nearby, two more Americans, contract security officers Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, died in a mortar attack.
Abu Khattala has pleaded not guilty to charges including murder of an internationally protected person, providing material support to terrorists and destroying U.S. property while causing death.
The case is likely to continue to focus fresh attention on security at the diplomatic compound, an issue that provoked immediate political concern and was the subject of a daylong hearing last year organized by a congressional select committee investigating the attacks.
Since arriving in the United States, Abu Khattala has made multiple court appearances alongside his lawyers. He sought unsuccessfully to have the case against him dismissed last year, and a separate request for him to be returned to Libya was also denied.
The Justice Department's decision comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of death penalty protocols at the state and federal levels, although a federal jury in Boston last year sentenced Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death after the Justice Department sought that punishment. He is being held at the Supermax federal prison in Colorado.
Executions in the federal system are exceedingly rare; the last federal defendant put to death was in 2003, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
The Justice Department has said it is reviewing the policies, though nothing has been publicly announced, and President Barack Obama has said he's "deeply concerned" about the death penalty's implementation.
At her January 2015 confirmation hearing, Lynch said she thought the death penalty still can be an effective punishment.

'We could have been there': Squadron member speaks out on stalled Benghazi response

His squadron got the alert: a “real world mission was going down.”
The team – at Aviano Air Base in northeastern Italy – raced to the field and was briefed, as planes were armed and prepared to launch. Hundreds of miles away, fellow Americans were under attack in Benghazi.
"There were people everywhere. That flight line was full of people, and we were all ready to go” to Benghazi, he said.
Only they were waiting for the order. It never came.
“The whole night we were told that we are waiting on a call,” he told Fox News.
This account is from a squadron member at Aviano the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack in Benghazi. The source, the first in his squadron to speak out publicly since that attack, is going public to explain – in his view – that more could have been done to save Americans under attack that night.
He asked that his identity be protected for fear of retribution. He says others in his squadron also have wanted to talk about Benghazi from the beginning, but no others have been interviewed and all are afraid of the potential backlash from speaking out.
“I'm not trying to give away any type of [information] that could ever harm the military,” the source told Fox News. “That is never my plan. I feel that some things need to come to light.”
Namely, he said, that a team was ready to go that night to help protect Americans under fire in Benghazi – an account that runs counter to multiple official reports, including from a House committee, a timeline provided by the military and the controversial State Department Accountability Review Board investigation, which concluded the interagency response to Benghazi was “timely and appropriate.”
The source said: "I definitely believe that our aircraft could have taken off and gotten there in a timely manner, maybe three hours at the most, in order to at least stop that second mortar attack … and basically save lives that day."
Former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed in that second wave. Ambassador Chris Stevens and information officer Sean Smith were killed in the initial attack on the main compound.
“We could have been there. That's the worst part,” the source said.
The source who spoke with Fox News challenged the military claim that a re-fueling tanker wasn’t available. He said American jets routinely refuel by using what’s called a “hot pit maneuver,” which allows the jets to land and then get fuel without shutting off the engines.
Multiple sources say there were multiple locations available the night of the attack.
He said they were waiting on the call, though, through the night. The men say they didn’t truly learn about the mission they had missed until they returned home the next day from the airfield and saw the reports about the Benghazi attack on the news.
Many still don’t talk about the subject and some insist it has hurt morale within the squadron because “people know we were stationed there and didn’t respond.”
The same frustrations have compelled Mike, a former team sergeant for a military anti-terror quick reaction force, once known as the CIF, to talk.
“For some reason they were all shut down, and I think it leads back to a policymaker somewhere because nobody in the military is going to shut down an operation,” he said. On the night of the attack, Mike was at Delta Force headquarters in the U.S. monitoring the events as they happened.
“We had hours and hours and hours to do something ... and we did nothing," he said.
Despite the claim by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department that nothing more could have been done, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit recently revealed that Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash immediately offered assistance to the State Department on the night of Sept. 11, saying forces could move to Benghazi and “they are spinning up as we speak.”
Mike echoed that: “I know everything was spun up and nothing was done.”
He added: "At our level, we were doing everything we were supposed to be doing. At everybody else's level above us, it was political."
In June 2014, Delta Forces captured Abu Khattala, a man now charged in the attack.
Mike, though, said Khattala is a low-level operative and not one of the terror cell leaders. He said the U.S. could have collected intelligence leading to “bigger fish” had the U.S. acted sooner following the attack.
Meanwhile, while Democrats have called the House investigation into the Benghazi attacks a waste of time and money, committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., says his committee has uncovered new facts – but does admit they still are having issues finding witnesses.
“It’s been very frustrating,” Gowdy told Fox News.
In response to Fox News’ reporting, he also issued a statement saying it is “deeply troubling there are individuals who would like to share their stories, but have not because they are afraid of retaliation from their superiors.”
The two men who spoke with Fox News have not spoken with the committee.

Trump, Ryan to meet amid growing Republican calls to unify

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump took a conciliatory tone toward House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., late Wednesday ahead of a planned sitdown on Capitol Hill.
When asked by Fox News' Greta van Susteren, "Who is the leader of the Republican Party today?", the real estate mogul responded, "Well, I would say Paul Ryan ... for the time being and maybe for a long time."
Trump is scheduled to meet twice with Ryan Thursday, once alongside Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Reince Priebus and again with Ryan's House leadership team. Trump is also expected to meet with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other top Senate Republicans.
Ryan, the highest-ranking GOP elected official, has so far refused to endorse Trump, saying last week he was "just not ready to do so." On Wednesday, Ryan said he wanted to pursue "real unification" among Republicans after a hotly contested primary campaign.
"We cannot afford to lose this election to Hillary Clinton,” Ryan told a news conference Wednesday, adding that "to pretend [Republicans are] unified as a party" would mean contesting the general election campaign at "half strength."
In a closed-door GOP meeting Wednesday a number of Republicans stood up and argued in support of Trump, with one saying that anyone who cares about "unborn babies" should get behind him because of the likelihood the next president will make Supreme Court appointments, and Trump's would be better than Clinton's, lawmakers who were present told the Associated Press.
Others expressed reservations, and asked Ryan to raise concerns with Trump about where he really stands on social issues and budgetary policies, including changes to Social Security and Medicare. Trump has said in the past that he doesn't want to touch Social Security or Medicare, whereas Medicare cuts have been a centerpiece of GOP budgets Ryan has shepherded over the years.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump sought to downplay the stakes of his visit with Ryan, telling "Fox and Friends", "If we make a deal, that will be great. And if we don't, we will trudge forward like I've been doing and winning all the time."
Trump's allies and advisers have repeatedly insisted that he can claim the White House with or without leading congressional Republicans, who continue to express reservations about his tone and inconsistent policy prescriptions. Additionally, Trump's team doesn't believe Ryan or the GOP's other congressional leaders have any significant influence on the majority of general election voters.
Some congressional Republicans have made clear that they would like to see Ryan come around to supporting Trump sooner rather than later.

"If Paul had come out and said he was going to support our nominee after the convention, whoever that is, there'd be no story," said Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., a leader in the conservative Freedom Caucus. "And now we have to deal with the story."

"Donald Trump is unifying the party already," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Trump's chief Washington ally. "The party is the people who vote."
Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., also a Trump supporter, said the businessman would be stronger with Ryan's support, "but frankly, Donald Trump is going to win regardless of who supports him and who doesn't support him."
Another Trump supporter, Rep. John Fleming, R-La., predicted it was "very unlikely" that Ryan would not ultimately back the Republican nominee.
"He wants to unify the Republican Party, and it all sort of begins tomorrow," Fleming said of Ryan.
Wednesday night, Trump's campaign released an endorsement signed by the chairs of seven House committees. "It is paramount that we coalesce around the Republican nominee, Mr. Donald J. Trump," the GOP lawmakers wrote.
While Trump's team is prepared to shrug off much of the party's establishment, that does not include the RNC.
The political novice plans to rely heavily on the committee's expansive political operation to supplement his bare-bones campaign, which has so far ignored seemingly vital functions such as voter data collection, swing-state staffing and fundraising infrastructure.
"As we turn our focus toward the general election, we want to make sure there's the strongest partnership," said Sean Spicer, the RNC's chief strategist.
Absent a viable Republican alternative, there were new signs on Capitol Hill that Trump's conservative critics were beginning to fall in line.
"As a conservative, I cannot trust Donald Trump to do the right thing, but I can deeply trust Hillary Clinton to do the wrong thing every time," said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., adding that he would vote for Trump if that's the choice he has.
Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho., said he will support Trump, although "I'm not enthusiastic about it."
"He can get us enthusiastic if he comes to talk to us," continued Labrador, who is part of the Freedom Caucus. ''These are the people who are going to go out to the districts that he needs to win overwhelmingly so he can win the nominations."
Meanwhile, more Republican voters appear to be moving behind Trump, despite big-name holdouts such as Ryan, both former president Bushes and the party's 2012 nominee Mitt Romney.
Almost two in three Republican-leaning voters now view Trump favorably, compared to 31 percent who view him unfavorably, according to a national Gallup Poll taken last week. The numbers represent a near reversal from Gallup's survey in early March.