Thursday, July 13, 2017
Chinese trade with North Korea jumped more than 10 percent in first half of year, official says
China’s trade with sanctions-riddled North Korea increased more than 10 percent in the first half of the year from last year, a Chinese official said Wednesday.
China’s customs spokesman Huang Songping said China’s trade with North Korea rose by 10.5 percent to $2.55 billion in the first six months of 2017. While imports from North Korea dropped 13.2 percent to $880 million in the period, exports to North Korea rose 29.1 percent to $1.67 billion, Huang said.
"As neighbors, China and North Korea maintain normal business and trade exchanges," he said.Huang also said the exports were driven by textile products and other traditional goods not on the U.N. embargo list.
Being its largest ally, Beijing has been under pressure from the U.S. to do more to rein in North Korea, according to Reuters.
President Trump denounced China’s trade with North Korea last week, saying it grew almost 40 percent in the first quarter and questioned how much it was doing to help counter the growing threat from Pyongyang.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that recent unsealed court filings show that the White House is ready to constrict cash flow to North Korea. The Justice Department pointed to “offshore U.S. dollar accounts” associated with a handful of companies linked to Chinese national Chi Yungpeng.
The Justice Department said the Chi’s network hid transactions which helped fund North Korea’s military and arms programs, the newspaper reported. While the network is not under U.S. sanctions, analysts believe can be cutoff the same way a separate Chinese firm last year.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is also said to be preparing to unilaterally tighten sanctions on North Korea.
The U.S. circulated a draft resolution that would impose new sanctions on North Korea following its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, two U.N. diplomats told the Associated Press on Monday.
The resolution has been circulated to China, as well as the three other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – Russia, Britain and France, the diplomats said.
Sanders draws Democratic challenger tired of his 'Robin Hood shtick'
Bernie Sanders’ enduring popularity across Vermont for decades has scared off political challengers, but the independent senator is facing competition in his 2018 reelection bid from a Democrat who thinks his “Robin Hood shtick” must end.
“It’s shamefully arrogant when you’re more interested in being a celebrity than honoring your progressive agenda,” challenger Jon Svitavsky told Fox News. “This wonderful, political ‘I am Robin Hood shtick’ can only last for so long.”
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An advocate for the homeless who claims to have some name recognition in the state, Svitavsky not only questions the sitting senator's commitment to Vermont voters but argues he used and undermined the Democratic Party for his 2016 presidential bid.
'He’s not a Democrat. That was a joke.'Svitavsky contends Sanders joined Democrats to seek their nomination, then damaged frontrunner Hillary Clinton enough to give then-candidate Donald Trump the edge in the general election -- only to once again become an independent.
- Jon Svitavsky, on Sanders' White House bid
He also suggests an FBI investigation into a commercial real estate loan orchestrated by the senator’s wife, Jane Sanders, has left Sanders vulnerable.
While his curmudgeonly manner has long alienated Capitol Hill colleagues, Sanders, a self-styled champion of the poor and middle class, continues to be immensely popular among voters.
A Morning Consult survey released Tuesday showed him with the highest approval rating among all 100 senators, 75 percent, based on interviews with registered voters in their respective states.
However, the poll was conducted from early April to mid-June, largely before reports of the loan started attracting national attention.
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There also have been unsubstantiated allegations that Sanders, now seeking a third Senate term, used his political office to either get the loan approved or at least OK’d swiftly.
The senator, in various interviews, has called such claims an "absolute lie" while describing the criticism of his wife as "pathetic" and political.
The self-described democratic socialist also has more than $3.8 million cash on hand in Senate accounts, according to OpenSecrets.org., which only adds to Svitavsky’s complications.
Svitavsky hopes to win the state’s Democratic primary and challenge Sanders in the general election.
In an interview Tuesday, he sounded undeterred by Sanders’ popularity and war chest, saying that his decades-long efforts in opening homeless shelters across the state has given him standing among voters.
“I think that resonates,” he said. “And I’m not unknown here. People might say I don’t have political experience but not that I’m insincere. … I’m far more liberal than Bernie, far more committed to making things happen.”
Svitavsky says he's getting strong grassroots support from across the state and country -- including a call from a guy who used to play with folk-singing legend Pete Seeger.
The Sanders campaign has declined to comment on Svitavsky’s bid.
Before Sanders was elected to the Senate in 2006, he served 19 years in the House and eight as mayor of Burlington. He was reelected to the Senate in 2012 with 71 percent of the vote, as proof of his political strength.
There has been no indication that the 75-year-old Sanders intends to retire before next year. And one source close to his 2016 presidential campaign recently told Fox News he wants to run for president again in 2020.
Right now, Sanders is still among the leading voices for national Democrats, even taking the spotlight from Democrat National Committee Chairman Tom Perez during a recent, multi-state tour that attempted to bridge the party’s lingering Clinton-Sanders divide.
“He’s not a Democrat. That was a joke,” said Svitavsky, who argues the Democratic Party was outfoxed by Sanders but is now coming to its senses. Svitavsky cannot officially file to run until next spring.
Sanders and his White House bid captured the political interests of tens of millions of voters -- particularly younger Americans -- with promises of a free college education, universal health care and legalized marijuana.
However, Svitavsky largely dismissed those promises as unrealistic because they would be too expensive for taxpayers, even if Congress approved them.
“This cannot go on forever,” he said.
'Everybody would do that': Trump downplays son's meeting with Russian lawyer
President Trump on Wednesday told Reuters that he was unaware of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer until a “couple days ago,” and did not fault his son for accepting the meeting.
“It was a 20-minute meeting, I guess, from what I’m hearing,” Trump said. “Many people, and many political pros, said everybody would do that.”
The White House on Wednesday worked to try and go on the offensive, and change the conversation into what it sees as a Democrat double standard for their associates’ alleged coordination with foreign governments in 2016.But one important issue is that Trump Jr. was did not immediately report that he met with the lawyer. The New York Times claimed that Trump Jr. only tweeted images of the emails after “he was told NYT was about to publish the contents of the emails.”
Trump Jr. acknowledged in an exclusive interview with Fox News' "Hannity" Tuesday night that he "probably would have done things a little differently"
"This [was] pre-Russia fever. This [was] pre-Russia mania," Trump Jr. told Fox News' Sean Hannity. "I don’t think my sirens went [off] or my antenna went up at this time because it wasn’t the issue that it’s been made out to be over the last nine months, ten months."
The president’s eldest son also described the meeting as "a nothing," adding, "I wouldn’t have even remembered it until you started scouring through this stuff. It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame."
Trump, for his part, said on Twitter that the White house was “functioning perfectly, focused on HealthCare, Tax Cuts/Reform & many other things. I have very little time for watching T.V.”
Florida Congressman Proposes Taxpayer Pension Disclosure Act
A Florida Congressman has introduced a bill to increase transparency of government pensions. Currently, the amount paid to former government employees after they retire is unknown by taxpayers footing the bill. It would take an act of Congress to force those records open.
Congressman Ron DeSantis (FL-R) is looking to do just that with the Taxpayer Pension Disclosure Act. “Taxpayers have a right to know how their money’s being spent” DeSantis said.
Roughly 125 billion dollars is spent annually on federal pensions. Federal courts have consistently ruled that disclosing federal pension amounts of retired congressional representatives and senators violates privacy rights.
DeSantis is against Congressional pensions altogether, however the bill is not to get rid of them, but to lift the veil and let taxpayers know where and to whom their money is going. “Regardless of your political affiliation,” said DeSantis, “most voters and most taxpayers think they have a right to know how their money’s being spent. It should not be done in the dark.”
He used former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit at the I.R.S., Lois Lerner as one example as to why he believes taxpayers should have the right to pension information.
“There are certain offenses that if you get convicted of then your pension goes away. Then there are other offenses where it doesn’t like Lois Lerner.” Lerner became the center of controversy when she was accused of targeting conservative organizations. “[Lerner] was at the I.R.S. really at the center of that. She was allowed to retire and she’s getting a full pension. We know it’s a 6 figure pension but we don’t know exactly how much.”
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
FBI document dump reveals secrets of Clinton probe as new director nominee faces Senate
Some 42 pages of highly redacted documents
from the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's
mishandling of highly classified materials paint a picture of a serious,
but flawed investigation hindered by a lack of cooperation, according
to a key watchdog group.
The materials, all part of the
probe dubbed "Midyear Exam,” included several documents designated as
“grand jury material,” indicating the potential seriousness of the
investigation that would ultimately be ended by FBI director James Comey
in July, then restarted for a brief period in October before being shut
down for good.
One redacted exchange reveals a back and forth
subpoena response to the FBI from one of Mrs. Clinton's private
attorneys, Katherine Turner, a partner at Washington DC powerhouse firm
Williams & Connolly. In the document, Turner agreed to turn over one
of Mrs. Clinton's non-secure Apple iPads and two of her BlackBerrys to
the FBI.“The new records show how badly the Obama Justice Department and FBI mishandled the Clinton email investigation. "But neither smartphone received from the law firm contain SIM cards or Secure Digital (SD) cards, and a total of 13 mobile devices identified by the FBI as potentially using clintonemail.com email addresses were never located by Williams & Connelly.
"We are presuming there are still 13 devices at issue,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told Fox News. “The new records show how badly the Obama Justice Department and FBI mishandled the Clinton email investigation. They get the equivalent of wiped phones from the Clinton lawyers and do nothing?"
READ THE DOCUMENTS
As extensively reported by Fox, Clinton would often task aides including Monica Hanley with finding and supplying the secretary of state's never-ending demand to use non-secure BlackBerrys for all her official government work. Some of Clinton's BlackBerrys wound up being pounded with hammers on orders by Huma Abedin after Clinton's homebrew servers went down or when news that Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal's email had been hacked in 2013 by the Romanian hacker known as "Guccifer"---Marcel Lehel Lazar.
The new documents offer a glimpse into the lawyering ballet inside the Beltway---as this surrendering of two BlackBerrys and one iPad by her private attorneys occurred just six days before Hillary Clinton, then the leading Democratic nominee for president, testified before Congress on Oct. 22, 2015 about the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
In a photo captured in the Benghazi hearing, Turner and her law partner David Kendall pointedly flanked Clinton during her marathon testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Also hovering nearby was longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who was also at the epicenter of Clinton's deliberative use of a non-secure email system while she headed one of the most sensitive federal agencies in the U.S. government.
Mills, who was Clinton’s chief of staff and counselor at State, received immunity for her cooperation into the email investigation was permitted to be in the room while Clinton interviewed by the FBI in July 2016. Comey would later admit publicly that he had never heard of a potential witness representing the subject of an FBI investigation to be present during an interview with investigators.
Nearly a year has passed since Comey's then-boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, held her infamous tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton in Phoenix, Arizona. Eight days later, Comey announced on July 5, 2016, that "regarding the handling of classified information, our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."
Comey made his determination despite noting that Clinton and her colleagues "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," and even though 22 top secret email exchanges deemed too damaging to national security to release. Some of those exchanges contained Special Access Privilege (SAP) information characterized by intel experts as “above top secret."
"They (the FBI) were played by Mrs. Clinton's lawyers and didn't care,” Fitton said. “The Trump Justice Department needs to audit this mess and figure out if the Clinton matters need to be reopened or reinvigorated."
In the latest documents dumped by the FBI, a whopping 325 pages are cited as "total deleted pages." The 42 pages that were released and are only readable in parts include 177 redactions. The redactions include those made citing Freedom of Information Act exemptions under (b) (7) (e) in which the information is denied because revelations could “disclose investigation techniques.“
Now---64 days after James Comey was fired by President Donald Trump as the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray is scheduled to sit down before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the start his confirmation process.
Two former agents with the FBI told Fox News they hope that “the atmosphere is changed with a new director.”
Pamela K. Browne is Senior Executive Producer at the FOX News Channel (FNC) and is Director of Long-Form Series and Specials. Her journalism has been recognized with several awards. Browne first joined FOX in 1997 to launch the news magazine “Fox Files” and later, “War Stories.”
Don’t blame travel ban on Iranian cancer doctor being detained, sent back, Border Patrol says
The Iranian cancer researcher who was detained at
Boston's Logan International Airport along with his family and sent back
to his home country on Tuesday was not a result of President Trump's
travel ban, a spokeswoman from U.S. Customs and Border Partol said.
Stephanie Malin, the spokeswoman,
said Moshen Dehnavi and his family were detained for “reasons unrelated”
to Trump’s executive order. She said the stop was based on information
discovered during the agency’s review. She did not elaborate.
Dehnavi was arriving in the U.S. to start work at a prominent Boston hospital.Boston Children’s Hospital said in a statement earlier Tuesday that Dehnavi was prevented from entering the country with his wife and three young children despite holding a J-1 visa for visiting scholars.
“Boston Children’s hopes that this situation will be quickly resolved and Dr. Dehnavi and his family will be released and allowed to enter the U.S.,” hospital spokesman Rob Graham said in the statement. “
But Malin noted that visa applicants “bear the burden of proof” to meet all requirements and can be denied entry for a range of reasons, including health-related issues, criminality or security concerns.
The Supreme Court recently ruled the Trump administration could largely enforce its temporary ban on travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. But the court said the ban can’t block people with a “credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”
Some advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Iranian American Council, suggested the detention might be a violation of the Supreme Court order.
“The family is very worried,” said Shayan Modarres, a lawyer for the D.C.-based council, which has been in contact with the family. “If it is a minor paperwork issue, then something needs to be told to the family so they can resolve it.”
At the very least, the incident shows how the administration’s political priorities are leading to “overzealous enforcement” of immigration laws, said Gregory Romanovsky, chair of the New England chapter of the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association.
“Exercising discretion is not what they’re comfortable doing anymore, especially if they’re dealing with someone from one of the six banned countries,” he said of local customs officials. “The travel ban and the whole anti-immigrant mood coming from the very top of this administration certainly affects their ability.”
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, a Democrat, told reporters he was waiting to hear more about the Dehnavis’ circumstances, but also suggested the case was an example of concerns with the travel ban.
“Many people, doctors and nurses and people who are students working in the world-class institutions that we have are going to be boxed out or left out of the country,” he said.
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