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DOJ to institute mandatory bias training

Thousands of Justice Department workers soon will receive mandatory training developed by a controversial group in order to eliminate “implicit biases” in their law enforcement judgment, Reuters reported Monday, citing DOJ officials.
More than 33,000 federal agents and prosecutors are set to get the training, which will begin in 2017, though Department of Homeland Security employees are exempt. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is scheduled to announce the program in Phoenix on Tuesday, a DOJ official told Reuters.
“Implicit bias also presents unique challenges to effective law enforcement, because it can alter where investigators and prosecutors look for evidence and how they analyze it without their awareness or ability to compensate,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in a memo obtained by Reuters.
The DOJ decision follows the examples of many local police departments that instituted similar bias training in the wake of several protests over racially-charged police actions that gained national attention.
The bias training was largely developed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington think tank which recently came under fire from law enforcement groups for its recommendations on use-of-force situations, including suggestions such as imagining public perception.
“We’re not going to stand by and let police officers be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness,” Executive Director of the Fraternal Order of Police Jim Pasco told CBS in February.
But despite police advocates protesting previous PERF proposals, Yates said DOJ felt the need to start the federal training following its implementation at lower levels.
“The program has been so well-received by our state and local counterparts, we thought it was something we should be offering to our federal agents, frankly, to get our own house in order,” she told Reuters.
Yates, who will have to undergo the training herself, said she hopes the DOJ initiative catches on with other federal departments.
In a similar vein, the Justice Department had previously released guidance to combat gender bias in relation to sex assault and domestic violence cases.

Speaker Ryan implies he would have voted in favor of Brexit

If House Speaker Paul Ryan was British, he might have been celebrating on June 23.
The Republican leader implied Monday that he would have supported the campaign to leave the European Union because their argument for leaving embodied American values.
“I can’t say I’m surprised because people want self-government, they want sovereignty, they want self-determination, and I can’t say that I would feel differently if I were a citizen of Great Britain when you have people from other countries regulating your country, writing your laws,” Ryan told Wisconsin’s WGTD radio station. “I can clearly relate to the thinking behind the Brexit vote.”
The WGTD interview was consistent with his initial statement the day after British voters shocked the world by voting to leave the EU.  Ryan said he respected and understood the UK’s decision to leave because it aligned with the “very important” American principles of sovereignty, self-determination, and government by consent.
He also reaffirmed Monday that “what is important for us as Americans is to show solidarity with the people of Great Britain, to demonstrate that they’re still our ally… Our special relationship is intact.”
President Obama and Hillary Clinton have been vocal about their opposition to the Brexit movement in the past.
Ryan joins his party’s presumptive nominee Donald Trump in supporting the majority of British voters on their move toward autonomy.

More Clinton emails released, including some she deleted

An additional 165 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton's time at the State Department surfaced Monday, including nearly three dozen that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee failed to hand over last year that were sent through her private server.
The latest emails were released under court order by the State Department to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch. The batch includes 34 new emails Clinton exchanged through her private account with her deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin. The aide, who also had a private emailaccount on Clinton's home server, later gave her copies to the government.
The emails were not among the 55,000 pages of work-related messages that Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. They include a March 2009 message where the then-secretary of state discusses how her official records would be kept.
"I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State," Clinton wrote to Abedin and a second aide. "Who manages both my personal and official files? ... I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want."
In a blistering audit released last month, the State Department's inspector general concluded Clintonand her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup violated federal records-keeping standards and could have left sensitive material vulnerable to hackers.
The audit also cited a then-unreleased copy of a November 2010 email Clinton sent Abedin in which the secretary discussed using a government email account, expressing concern that she didn't want "any risk of the personal being accessible."

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Clinton never used a government account that was set up for her, instead continuing to rely on her private server until leaving office in 2013. Though Clinton's work-related emails were government records, she didn't turn over copies until more than 30 lawsuits were filed, including one by The Associated Press.
Before providing her correspondence, Clinton and her lawyers withheld and subsequently deleted tens of thousands of messages that she claimed were personal, such as emails about her daughter's wedding plans, family vacations, yoga routines and condolence notes.
With the new release Monday, more than 50 work-related emails sent or received by Clinton have since surfaced that were not among those she provided.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon on Monday repeated past statements that Clinton had provided "all potentially work-related emails" that were still in her possession when she received the 2014 request from the State Department.
Fallon has declined to say whether Clinton deleted any work-related emails before they were reviewed by her legal team.
Dozens of the emails sent or received by Clinton through her private server were later determined to contain classified material. The FBI has been investigating for months whether Clinton's use of the private email server imperiled government secrets. Agents recently interviewed several of Clinton's top aides, including Abedin.
As part of the probe, Clinton turned over the hard drive from her email server to the FBI. It had been wiped clean, and Clinton has said she did not keep copies of the emails she choose to withhold.
In a report released Monday by Democrats on the House select panel probing the 2012 attacks on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, Republican congressional investigators asked questions about Clinton'suse of the private email server in interviews with her close aides.
Abedin told interviewers that she was aware of Clinton's heavy use of private emails from the start and that Clinton continued a practice that she had developed as a U.S. senator for New York and as a 2008 presidential candidate. "It was a natural progression from what she was doing previously, and she continued to do so."
Asked repeatedly who serviced Clinton's private server in the basement of her New York home, Abedin identified Justin Cooper, a technology staffer at that time for former President Bill Clinton, and Bryan Pagliano, a State Department technology official who is cooperating with an FBI investigation ofClinton's private server under an immunity deal with prosecutors. Abedin was hazy about Pagliano's role at the agency and his private work overseeing Clinton's server in New York.
Pagliano, who previously worked for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination and declined to answer the committee's questions. In a sworn deposition last week, Pagliano also refused to answer questions posed by lawyers from Judicial Watch, including who paid for the system and who else at the State Department used email accounts on it. Pagliano also would not answer whether he discussed setting up a home server with Clinton prior to her tenure as secretary of state, according to a transcript.
Other State Department officials told congressional investigators that Clinton never responded to internal offers to set her up with an official State account and an agency computer. Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Clinton did "not know how to use a computer to do email. So it was never set up."

House GOP Report: Despite eyewitness accounts, Clinton, administration pushed video explanation for Benghazi

EXCLUSIVE –  The claim that the fatal 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks were sparked by an anti-Muslim video was crafted in Washington by Obama administration appointees and reflected neither eyewitness nor real-time reports from the Americans under siege, according to the final report of the GOP-led Benghazi Select Committee.
The GOP report, released Tuesday, followed by less than a day a report by the Democrats on the panel saying that security at the Benghazi, Libya facility was “woefully inadequate” but former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never personally denied any requests from diplomats for additional protection.
According to portions of the Republican report reviewed by Fox News, one U.S. agent at the American outpost in Benghazi, whose name was withheld for security reasons, told the committee he first heard “some kind of chanting.”
Then that sound was immediately followed by “explosions” and “gunfire, then roughly 70 people rushing into the compound with an assortment of “AK-47s, grenades, RPG’s … a couple of different assault rifles,” the agent said.
In addition, a senior watch officer at the State Department's diplomatic security command described the Sept. 11, 2012, strikes as "a full on attack against our compound.”
When asked whether he saw or heard a protest prior to the attacks, the officer replied, "zip, nothing, nada," according to the Republican majority report.
“None of the information coming directly from the agents on the ground in Benghazi during the attacks mentioned anything about a video or a protest. The firsthand accounts made their way to the office of the Secretary through multiple channels quickly …,” the report concluded.
U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, foreign service officer Sean Smith and former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, were killed in the attacks.
Five days later, then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice went on every national Sunday talk show. She told Fox News Sunday, “What sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world.”
The GOP committee report also identified for the first time a White House meeting that was convened roughly three hours into the attack and included deputies to senior Cabinet members and Clinton.
Stevens was missing at the time. But the report found “much of the conversation focused on the video (which) is surprising given no direct link or solid evidence existed connecting the attacks in Benghazi and the video at the time ….”
The report found that “five of the 10 action items from the rough notes of the 7:30pm meeting reference the video.”
Unlike the Usama bin Laden raid in 2011, in which Clinton, President Obama and his national security team watched events unfold from the Situation Room, they never gathered for Benghazi.
Clinton issued the only statement that night from the administration, following the White House meeting. It read in part: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”
However, Clinton said something very different privately.
In an email provided to the Select Committee, Clinton told daughter Chelsea, “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group.”
Clinton also told Egypt’s prime minister the following day: “We know that the attacks in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack -- not a protest.”
Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Benghazi committee member, told Fox News in advance of the report’s release that the report is new and significant because it’s the first to include interviews from “everybody on the ground” in Benghazi.
More than 30 people’s lives were at risk that night, and the majority worked at the secret CIA annex in Benghazi.
Pompeo also said the findings show “it’s unambiguous the administration knew immediately it was a terror attack. And the story of fog of war was known to be false immediately by everyone in the administration.”
Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has seen her campaign plagued by questions about whether she and the rest of the State Department provided adequate security for Americans before the attacks and about why the administration continued to tell Americans the attacks were inspired by the video.
Committee Republicans say the deputies’ meeting, in which Clinton was involved, on the night of the Benghazi attack shows she’s not ready for the so-called “3 a.m. call.”
The report interviewed more than 80 witnesses previously not called before Congress to testify.   
Among them was Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, who with political adviser David Plouffe prepped Rice for her national TV appearances claiming the video was responsible for the terrorist attack.
Rice said her statements were based on the best available information, but nobody from the intelligence community such as the CIA director or the Director of National Intelligence briefed Rice. That was done by the political appointees.
In fact, a Sept. 14, 2012 memo from Rhodes included the subject line: "RE: PREP Call with Susan: Saturday at 4:00 pm ET."
The email was sent to a dozen members of the administration's inner circle, including key members of the White House communications team such as then-Press Secretary Jay Carney, who also pushed the video narrative in the days after the attacks.
In the email, Rhodes specifically draws attention to the anti-Islam Internet video, without distinguishing whether the Benghazi attack was different from protests elsewhere, including one day earlier in Cairo.
The Rhodes email, which was a catalyst for the Select Committee, was first obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal court lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
The email lists the following two goals, among others: "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy” and “to reinforce the President and Administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges."
Rhodes was the same official who signed off on Clinton’s statement the night of the attack linking the video to Benghazi.
The report found the post attack intelligence analysis had errors, contradicting the eyewitness accounts that night, and it alleges the administration latched onto the faulty analysis to defend and justify their misleading statements to the public.
There were in fact two sets of talking points – the White House version by Rhodes and the one by the CIA.  When editing the CIA's version, Deputy Director Michael Morell knew his personnel on the ground disputed the protest analysis, but he gave the final say to his analysts in Washington, thousands of miles away.

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Trump camp scrambles to shape up before GOP convention

Republicans are sprinting to shape up Donald Trump's presidential campaign before the party's national convention in three weeks, even as leading members of the party carry a deep antipathy or outright opposition to his claim on the GOP nomination.
His campaign chairman said Sunday there's a hiring spree in 16 states and the campaign is working with the Republican National Committee to solidify other matters. Paul Manafort said Trump is not all that involved in the race to organize an offensive against Democrat Hillary Clinton and catch up to her massive fundraising advantage.
"The good thing is we have a candidate who doesn't need to figure out what's going on (inside the campaign ) in order to say what he wants to do," Manafort said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We have our campaign plans in place. We have our budgets in place."
What Manafort described as a "new phase" for the campaign -- a shift from the primaries to the general election -- was a forced reshuffling of an effort hobbled for weeks by infighting, Trump's statements about a judge's ethnicity and a massive fund raising deficit to Clinton's cash-raising Goliath. Trump began June with $1.3 million in the bank, less campaign cash than many congressional candidates. The $3 million he collected in May donations is about one-tenth what Clinton raised.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday that Trump can't win the presidency unless he can compete with Clinton on the financial front.
"He needs to catch up, and catch up fast," the Kentucky Republican said on ABC's "This Week."

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Despite the stated support for Trump, antipathy toward him projected from the Sunday shows and beyond.
A few hundred delegates to the Republican National Convention are pushing to change the rules and make it possible for them to vote for someone other than Trump.
Many congressional Republicans are skipping the gathering in Cleveland altogether, the latest being Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are not attending. And 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, one of Trump's most outspoken Trump critics, has opted to spend July 10 through July 21 elsewhere.
Trump has said he doesn't want support from them, but also groused that overall support from Republican leaders has been lacking.
On the matter of staffing, there's evidence the Trump campaign is having trouble attracting some political veterans who are reluctant to sign on to such a late-starting and tumultuous campaign.
McConnell refused to say on Sunday whether Trump is qualified to be president. And he suggested that the GOP platform would not reflect Trump's ideas, including restrictions on Muslim immigration to the U.S.
"It's my expectation that the platform will be a traditional Republican platform, not all that different from the one we had four years ago," McConnell replied.
With just three weeks to go until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the Trump campaign and the RNC are laboring to set up staff in what Manafort said were 16 states in which the campaign aims to compete heavily. He said the campaign will announce more about staffing this week, an effort to reassure people that Trump's unorthodox campaign is viable.
On Sunday, Manafort sought to calm the angst, describing a partnership between Trump's campaign operation and the Republican National Committee that goes beyond the RNC's traditional role of raising money for the GOP nominee. He said the transition to the general election is complete -- but the details have not necessarily been made public.
"We are fully now integrated with the Republican National Committee," Manafort said. He said this week the campaign will announce "people who are taking over in major positions in our national campaign, as well as in our state campaigns. We're organized in all 16 states that we're going to be targeting as battleground states."
McConnell and other Republicans said they got the first glimmers of reassurance this week when Trump fired former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in what Trump described as a change of direction from the GOP primaries to the general election. Lewandowski was at the center of the campaign's most corrosive internal battles, which Trump allowed to fester for months.

Man featured in Elizabeth Warren's anti-Trump ad voted for Trump

Michael Levin’s photogenic, mixed-race family appears straight from central casting for the modern American middle-class family, seemingly the perfect choice to be featured in Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s video for MoveOn attacking presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Just one problem: Levin is not anti-Trump. In fact, he voted for the billionaire businessman in the Massachusetts primary.
“On Monday I got a text from a friend who said, ‘Hey, I just saw you in the new Warren video attacking Trump.’ And I thought, ‘You've got to be kidding me,’” Levin told "Fox and Friends" on Sunday. “I watched the video, and to my shock and surprise, there I was.”
Levin and his family are featured in two clips about 2:30 into the Internet video. In the first, he’s helping his daughter strap on a bicycle helmet. In the second, Levin and his wife are shown gazing into the distance. Warren’s voiceover during the clips declares: “They pay their fair share.”
Anything Levin pays comes from his job as a writer. He’s contributed to The New York Daily News, Politico, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He told "Fox and Friends" that he's written about Trump and 10 seconds of research would have revealed his actual feelings about the Manhattan mogul.
“I’m certainly not anti-Trump,” he said.

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When Levin voted in the Massachusetts primary on March 1, he even brought along his bicycle-riding daughter.
“The little girl you saw in that video actually came with me to the polls with her siblings to watch me vote for him,” Levin said.
So how did Massachusetts' Warren and MoveOn get it wrong? Levin said they simply never asked him. The clip, he said, originated from an Al Jazeera special several years ago about the American family which he agreed to be part of. The Al Jazeera logo is still visible in the lower left corner of the MoveOn video.
“And apparently it's still up on YouTube,” Levin said. “And I think the Warren people just googled ‘American Dream,’ found us, and said, ‘What a nice mixed-race couple. They're probably sort of working-class people.’”
Levin said he hasn’t been contacted by Warren since the video hit the web.
“There were no such calls, and I only found out after the video had gone viral,” he said. “I think about 12 million people have now seen me actually assenting – or appearing to assent – to her position on Trump.”