Tuesday, August 16, 2016
NYT story on Manafort's Russia ties omits reporting on Clinton's Moscow speech
The New York Times published an extensive report Monday examining Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian party in Ukraine – but despite pointing to it as a “rising issue” in the presidential campaign, glossed over its own past reporting on the Clintons’ Russian connections.
The latest article detailed ledgers purportedly showing more than $12 million earmarked for Manafort by the pro-Russian party. According to the Times, investigators claim they were part of an illicit off-the-books operation, though Manafort denies ever getting such payments.
The Times noted that Manafort’s “involvement with moneyed interests in Russia and Ukraine” has been reported before – but said American relationships there have emerged as a “rising issue” in the presidential campaign.
Yet the article focused on Trump and Manafort’s ties, without harkening back to another extensive Times report in April 2015 on, among other details, a $500,000 payment to Bill Clinton for a controversial Moscow speech.
The payment came from “a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting” the stock of a company called Uranium One, which reportedly was taken over by the Russians between 2009 and 2013 – and had donor links to the Clinton Foundation.
According to the Times’ own reporting, among other donations, the company’s chairman used his family foundation to direct $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Under Hillary Clinton, the State Department also was among the agencies to sign off on the Russian takeover of what had been a Canadian company.
The report on the dealings, which Fox News also reported on at the time, was based in part on the findings of Peter Schweizer, author of the anti-Clinton book “Clinton Cash.”
The Clinton campaign at the time pushed back on any suggestion that Hillary Clinton took action to support foundation donor interests, calling the idea “utterly baseless.”
Italian restaurant under fire for selling 'Black Olives Matter' merchandise
An Italian restaurant in New Mexico is under fire after making merchandise with a slogan that mimics the Black Lives Matters Movement.
KOAT-TV reported Monday that Paisano’s in Albuquerque is selling “black olives matter” shirts and hats after making national headlines for putting the phrase on a sign outside the restaurant.
Paisano’s owner Rick Camuglia said he emblazoned the phrase on the restaurant's main sign to sell a new recipe: a tuna dish with black olive tapenade.
Camuglia posted pictures of the dish and the sign on Facebook, drawing complaints he was being insensitive and trivializing a movement aimed at trying to stop police shootings of black residents.
Within hours of Paisano’s post, Camuglia told Fox News last month the page was flooded with negative comments and the restaurant was inundated with phone calls.
“People were calling us racist. Saying we were a white supremacist restaurant. Some got really derogatory and just started cursing me out.”
Camuglia insisted he was not trying to stir racial tensions and was only trying to sell food.
He said that people from all over the world has called his restaurant to show him support.
"It's gone so viral. We've gotten calls from Australia, Spain, France, you name it," Camuglia said.
He said that he put the slogan on hats and T-shirts because people who supported the restaurant wanted to by a souvenir of sorts from the restaurant.
Camuglia also told the station that business is booming.
"People have filled the restaurant and told us to leave up the sign," Camuglia said. "That's great, you know, because a lot of people make a living off working for this restaurant."
House Republicans detail perjury allegations against Clinton
House Republicans have detailed perjury allegations against Hillary Clinton, citing the apparent conflict between her 2015 congressional testimony about her email practices and the FBI's conclusions announced in July, according to a letter to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia.
"The four pieces of sworn testimony by Secretary Clinton described herein are incompatible with the FBI's findings," House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote to US Attorney Channing D. Phillips. "We hope this information is helpful to your office's consideration of our referral."
The Justice Department Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs, Peter Kadzik, confirmed in an August 2 letter to both committees they had the perjury investigation request and the department would "take appropriate action as necessary."
The one-page response offered no timeline nor specific commitment to act on the allegations.
According to the Justice Department website, Kadzik, "led the successful effort to confirm Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates." Both women were central players handling the Clinton email matter.
Chaffetz and Goodlatte, who have direct oversight for the FBI, wrote to the US Attorney that Clinton testified under oath before the Benghazi Select Committee, where she also took questions about her email practices from Republican congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio.
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The letter continued, "Contrary to her sworn testimony, Secretary Clinton's lawyers did not read each email in her personal account to identify all the work related messages."
Clinton told Jordan that her team "went through every single email." The FBI Director said his investigators found that Clinton's lawyers did not read all the emails, and relied on a narrow set of search terms to identify which emails were work-related.
"The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all her e-emails," Comey said July 5. Instead, they "relied on header information and used search terms."
Clinton also testified to Congress there was only one server.
But the FBI Director said investigators found "Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department and used numerous mobile devices to review and send e-mail on that personal domain."
The congressmen emphasized that while Clinton told Congress, and the public, she turned over all her work-related emails, the FBI found otherwise.
"I provided you, with all my work related emails, all that I had. Approximately 55,000 pages. And they are being publicly released," Clinton testified. But FBI investigators found "several thousand work related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014."
In the course of its investigation, the FBI recovered most but not all of the deleted records. The search included “the laborious review of the millions of email fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decomissioned in 2013."
A retired assistant FBI director, and 28-year-veteran of the bureau, said a perjury review is generally straightforward for agents.
"They look at the transcript of the testimony they provided in light of what they know to be, suspect to be the truth. They investigate both sides and take the aggregate and turn it over to the prosecuting authority for a decision," Steven Pomerantz said.
"Since the Director (Comey) already established what she (Clinton) said and the investigation is complete, it would be a relatively simple matter to make a decision about perjury... given the history of this, it's hard to say - it would seem to me a matter of weeks not months in this case."
A violation of 18 USC 1621 can lead to a fine, imprisonment up to five years, or both though legal experts said the crux of the case will rely on showing intent.
When Comey testified July 7, Clinton's campaign said some of his statements vindicated the candidate's public statements.
“In his testimony today, Comey has reconciled most every apparent contradiction between his remarks Tuesday and Clinton's public statements,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said on Twitter.
GOP concerned after polling trends signal Trump's coattails could harm congressional candidates
McConnell needs to Retire? |
"Just about everybody has recognized that the Republican Party is deeply divided, and really, it's in a mess," said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "And I think Donald Trump would agree because he's not getting the kind of support that he thinks he deserves."
Sabato cited a range of races where a Trump coattail effect could make a difference.
"Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa) is very vulnerable, Sabato said. “Rob Portman (R-Ohio) is less vulnerable; he's doing better than others but he's still nervous about it. Senator Mark Kirk (R-Il)... it's hard for anybody to see how he wins."
Sabato also counted among the vulnerable: Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in Florida, Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and John McCain (R-Az). And he added this ominous warning: "There could be others popping up on the screen."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell touched on the issue last week when he told a Louisville, Ky. civic group, "What we're looking for here is a candidate who settles down and follows the script and makes the election about Hillary Clinton."
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Swing states that he must win are not polling well in his favor. A Marist NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll late last week showed Trump behind Clinton by 5 percent in Florida, by 9 percent in North Carolina, by 13 percent in Virginia and by 14 percent in Colorado.
One GOP pollster sees a threshold for a down ballot disaster in key swing states. "If he's losing by 4 or 5 points, even 6 points, we can make up that difference," said Ed Goeas. "It's when it starts inching up towards 8, 9, 10 percent difference that you can't make up the difference."
Sabato agreed. "If you're in a competitive race, you're going down. You're not going to be able to survive a 10 percent margin."
Still, Trump continues to pull in big crowds and Nov. 8 remains a long way off. Unpredictable events can change the race. "If he's at the top of his bandwith and she's at the bottom, he can win this election," Goeas said.
But that's contingent on Trump doing something that he's not been able to do yet - stay on message in attacking Clinton. The good news for Trump is that she ranks second to last in favorability of any presidential candidate in history. The bad news for Trump - he ranks dead last in the same category.
Monday, August 15, 2016
Clinton Quiet About Own Radical Ties
By James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 19, 2008
When Hillary Rodham Clinton questioned rival Barack Obama's ties to 1960s radicals, her comments baffled two retired Bay Area lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers.
"She's a hypocrite," Doris B. Walker, 89, who was a member of the
American Communist Party, said in an interview last week. "She had to
know who we were and what kinds of cases we were handling. We had a very
left-wing reputation, including civil rights, constitutional law,
racist problems."
Malcolm Burnstein, 74, a partner at the firm who worked closely with Clinton during her internship, said he was traveling in Pennsylvania in April when Clinton attacked Obama for his past interactions with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, members of Students for a Democratic Society who went on to found the bomb-making Weather Underground.
"Given her background, it was quite hypocritical," Burnstein said. "I almost called the Philadelphia Inquirer. I saw what she and her campaign were saying about Ayers and I thought, 'Well, if you're going to talk about that totally bit of irrelevant nonsense, I'll talk about your career with us.' "
In her campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination,
Clinton has said little about her experiences in the tumultuous late
1960s and early 1970s, including her involvement with student protests
and her brief internship at the law firm, Treuhaft, Walker and
Burnstein. She has said she worked on a child custody case, although
former partners recall her likely involvement in conscientious objector
cases and a legal challenge to a university loyalty oath.
But her decision to target Obama's radical connections has spurred criticism from some former protest movement leaders who say she has opened her own associations to scrutiny.
"The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence," said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.
Robert Reich, who went to Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton and later served in the Clinton administration, called Hillary Clinton's attack on Obama "absurd," adding: "That carries guilt by association to a new level of absurdity. Where does guilt by association stop? I mean, she was a partner of Jim McDougal in the 1980s, for crying out loud." Reich is now an Obama supporter.
In response to the assertion that Clinton is a hypocrite for calling out Obama's ties to Ayers, campaign spokesman Philippe Reines said: "The comparison is patently absurd." The campaign played down her friendship with a noted student protest leader and defended her work with the Oakland firm. "At the time she worked there, the firm was primarily at the forefront of civil rights advocacy cases, which was a good fit with Senator Clinton's long-standing interest in civil rights and constitutional law," Reines said.
Clinton's associations date to her years as a student leader at Wellesley from 1965 to 1969. It was the height of student opposition to the Vietnam War, and Carl Oglesby, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, came to campus to speak.
"I gave a talk at Wellesley, where she was a student," Oglesby said in a telephone interview from Amherst, Mass., where he is recovering from a stroke. "I can't say that I was a close friend of hers. It was more of a passing acquaintance. I liked her. I think of her as a good guy. I think she has a good heart and a solid mind. And I support her in the current primary."
Oglesby had been close to Ayers and Dohrn, but the couple split with the more moderate SDS factions to form the Weather Underground, which engaged in a bombing campaign to try to stop the Vietnam War. The FBI monitored Oglesby throughout the period. The Clinton campaign suggested last week that she did not meet Oglesby until the 1990s, long after his activist years. But in recent interviews, Oglesby has made clear that she stood out in his memory as he traveled across the country speaking at rallies.
In 1994, Clinton told Newsweek that Oglesby's writings in the 1960s helped persuade her to oppose the Vietnam War and to become a Democrat. She visited Oglesby in 1994 in Massachusetts, a meeting that was omitted from the First Lady's official schedule. Oglesby told the Boston Globe at the time, "We mostly discussed the '60s. I may have been a little gushy in my praise of the administration, but she was extremely impressive."
Oglesby now talks warmly about Clinton. In an interview with Reason magazine, he called their association "a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close."
But Oglesby said he has not contacted Clinton because he is afraid that he could harm her candidacy.
"A friend of mine mentioned me to her not long ago, and according to him she got a case of the shakes. I think it was because she could imagine if any of her considerable enemies on the right wanted to do her in, they would be happy to discover a relationship between her and me," he told the magazine.
Clinton interned at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein while attending Yale
Law School. The firm defended the Black Panthers, including Angela
Davis, and Clinton had been editor of the Yale Review of Law and Social
Action, which included articles about Black Panther leader Bobby Seale's
murder trial in New Haven, Conn.
Author Gail Sheehy wrote about the internship in her book "Hillary's Choice." Sheehy, who also wrote a 1971 book about the Black Panthers, interviewed firm partner Robert Treuhaft, who described Hillary Rodham attending a New Haven fundraiser for Seale's defense that he threw with his wife, author Jessica Mitford. Treuhaft -- who, with his wife, left the Communist Party in 1958 -- died in 2001.
Clinton kept up correspondence with the British-born Mitford through the early 1990s. "Top students like Hillary were much sought after by huge prestigious Wall Street-type law firms -- some, like Hillary, were far more interested in left-wing firms," Mitford wrote to a friend in 1992.
In her autobiography, "Living History," Clinton details little of the firm's background. She wrote that she "spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case."
But members of the firm have different recollections. Burnstein recalled her working on a case involving Stanford University students who refused to sign an oath attesting that they had never been communists.
Walker said that Clinton probably worked on cases to help young men avoid the draft. "We did a whole lot of conscientious-objector work," she said.
Hayden, one of the Chicago Seven who were acquitted of inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, said he is disappointed that Clinton has tried to taint Obama with guilt by association.
"Once you introduce the concept of guilt by association, everyone is in trouble because there is no end to it," he said. "The goal is to render Barack so unelectable that the party has to turn to her. Because the goal is so narrow and obsessive, she's not aware that she's also going to be collateral damage."
Researcher Madonna Lebling and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Malcolm Burnstein, 74, a partner at the firm who worked closely with Clinton during her internship, said he was traveling in Pennsylvania in April when Clinton attacked Obama for his past interactions with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, members of Students for a Democratic Society who went on to found the bomb-making Weather Underground.
"Given her background, it was quite hypocritical," Burnstein said. "I almost called the Philadelphia Inquirer. I saw what she and her campaign were saying about Ayers and I thought, 'Well, if you're going to talk about that totally bit of irrelevant nonsense, I'll talk about your career with us.' "
But her decision to target Obama's radical connections has spurred criticism from some former protest movement leaders who say she has opened her own associations to scrutiny.
"The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence," said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.
Robert Reich, who went to Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton and later served in the Clinton administration, called Hillary Clinton's attack on Obama "absurd," adding: "That carries guilt by association to a new level of absurdity. Where does guilt by association stop? I mean, she was a partner of Jim McDougal in the 1980s, for crying out loud." Reich is now an Obama supporter.
In response to the assertion that Clinton is a hypocrite for calling out Obama's ties to Ayers, campaign spokesman Philippe Reines said: "The comparison is patently absurd." The campaign played down her friendship with a noted student protest leader and defended her work with the Oakland firm. "At the time she worked there, the firm was primarily at the forefront of civil rights advocacy cases, which was a good fit with Senator Clinton's long-standing interest in civil rights and constitutional law," Reines said.
Clinton's associations date to her years as a student leader at Wellesley from 1965 to 1969. It was the height of student opposition to the Vietnam War, and Carl Oglesby, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, came to campus to speak.
"I gave a talk at Wellesley, where she was a student," Oglesby said in a telephone interview from Amherst, Mass., where he is recovering from a stroke. "I can't say that I was a close friend of hers. It was more of a passing acquaintance. I liked her. I think of her as a good guy. I think she has a good heart and a solid mind. And I support her in the current primary."
Oglesby had been close to Ayers and Dohrn, but the couple split with the more moderate SDS factions to form the Weather Underground, which engaged in a bombing campaign to try to stop the Vietnam War. The FBI monitored Oglesby throughout the period. The Clinton campaign suggested last week that she did not meet Oglesby until the 1990s, long after his activist years. But in recent interviews, Oglesby has made clear that she stood out in his memory as he traveled across the country speaking at rallies.
In 1994, Clinton told Newsweek that Oglesby's writings in the 1960s helped persuade her to oppose the Vietnam War and to become a Democrat. She visited Oglesby in 1994 in Massachusetts, a meeting that was omitted from the First Lady's official schedule. Oglesby told the Boston Globe at the time, "We mostly discussed the '60s. I may have been a little gushy in my praise of the administration, but she was extremely impressive."
Oglesby now talks warmly about Clinton. In an interview with Reason magazine, he called their association "a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close."
But Oglesby said he has not contacted Clinton because he is afraid that he could harm her candidacy.
"A friend of mine mentioned me to her not long ago, and according to him she got a case of the shakes. I think it was because she could imagine if any of her considerable enemies on the right wanted to do her in, they would be happy to discover a relationship between her and me," he told the magazine.
Author Gail Sheehy wrote about the internship in her book "Hillary's Choice." Sheehy, who also wrote a 1971 book about the Black Panthers, interviewed firm partner Robert Treuhaft, who described Hillary Rodham attending a New Haven fundraiser for Seale's defense that he threw with his wife, author Jessica Mitford. Treuhaft -- who, with his wife, left the Communist Party in 1958 -- died in 2001.
Clinton kept up correspondence with the British-born Mitford through the early 1990s. "Top students like Hillary were much sought after by huge prestigious Wall Street-type law firms -- some, like Hillary, were far more interested in left-wing firms," Mitford wrote to a friend in 1992.
In her autobiography, "Living History," Clinton details little of the firm's background. She wrote that she "spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case."
But members of the firm have different recollections. Burnstein recalled her working on a case involving Stanford University students who refused to sign an oath attesting that they had never been communists.
Walker said that Clinton probably worked on cases to help young men avoid the draft. "We did a whole lot of conscientious-objector work," she said.
Hayden, one of the Chicago Seven who were acquitted of inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, said he is disappointed that Clinton has tried to taint Obama with guilt by association.
"Once you introduce the concept of guilt by association, everyone is in trouble because there is no end to it," he said. "The goal is to render Barack so unelectable that the party has to turn to her. Because the goal is so narrow and obsessive, she's not aware that she's also going to be collateral damage."
Researcher Madonna Lebling and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Trump to deliver foreign policy speech, focusing on fighting ISIS
JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Donald Trump will declare an end to nation building if elected president, replacing it with what aides described as "foreign policy realism" focused on destroying the Islamic State group and other extremist organizations.
In a speech the Republican presidential nominee will deliver on Monday in Ohio, Trump will argue that the country needs to work with anyone that shares that mission, regardless of other ideological and strategic disagreements. Any country that wants to work with the U.S. to defeat "radical Islamic terrorism" will be a U.S. ally, he is expected to say.
"Mr. Trump's speech will explain that while we can't choose our friends, we must always recognize our enemies," Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said Sunday.
On the eve of the speech, the Clinton campaign slammed Trump's campaign manager for ties to Russia and pro-Kremlin interests, an apparent reference to a New York Times story published Sunday night. The story alleges Paul Manafort received $12.7 million from Ukraine's former pro-Russia president and his political party for consultant work over a five-year period. The newspaper says Manafort's lawyer denied his client received any such payments.
Trump on Monday is also expected to outline a new immigration policy proposal under which the U.S. would stop issuing visas in any case where it cannot perform adequate screenings.
It will be the latest version of a policy that began with Trump's unprecedented call to temporarily bar foreign Muslims from entering the country — a religious test that was criticized across party lines as un-American. Following a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June, Trump introduced a new standard.
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Trump is also expected to propose creating a new, ideological test for admission to the country that would assess a candidate's stances on issues like religious freedom, gender equality and gay rights. Through questionnaires, searching social media, interviewing friends and family or other means, applicants would be vetted to see whether they support American values like tolerance and pluralism.
The candidate is also expected to call in the speech for declaring in explicit terms that, like during the Cold War, the nation is in an ideological conflict with radical Islam.
Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and top U.S. government officials have warned of the dangers of using that kind of language to describe the conflict, arguing that it plays into militants' hands.
While Trump has been criticized in the past for failing to lay out specific policy solutions, aides say that Monday's speech will again focus on his broader vision. Additional speeches with more details are expected in the weeks ahead, they said.
Trump is also expected to spend significant time going after President Barack Obama and Clinton, the former secretary of state, blaming them for enacting policies he argues allowed the Islamic State group to spread. Obama has made ending nation building a central part of his foreign policy argument for years.
"Mr. Trump will outline his vision for defeating radical Islamic terrorism, and explain how the policies of Obama-Clinton are responsible for the rise of ISIS and the spread of barbarism that has taken the lives of so many," Miller said Sunday in an email, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State group.
The speech comes as Trump has struggled to stay on message. Last week, an economic policy speech he delivered calling for lower corporate taxes and rolling back federal regulations was overshadowed by a series of provocative statements, including falsely declaring that Obama was the "founder" of the Islamic State group.
Trump's allies said Sunday they're confident that this time, the billionaire developer will stay on track.
"Stay tuned, it's very early in this campaign. This coming Monday, you're going to see a vision for confronting radical Islamic terrorism," his vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, said on Fox News Sunday.
Trump and his top advisers, meanwhile, have blamed the media for failing to focus on his proposals.
"If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn't put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20 percent," he tweeted Sunday.
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