Trump says he passed on being TIME's 'Person of the Year'

In a tweet on Friday, President Trump claimed he “took a pass” on being TIME Magazine’s 2017 “Person of the Year” after the publication reportedly called and said they’d “probably” offer him the spot.

“Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photoshoot,” Trump said in the tweet. “I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!”

But in a tweet from TIME Friday night, the company said, "The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year," and that the recipient will not be announced until Dec. 6.
Trump was awarded the title last year after he won the 2016 presidential election.
The magazine’s managing editor, Nancy Gibbs, said last year that the choice of Trump was “straightforward.”
In 2015, Trump made the short-list for the award but it was instead offered to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. At the time, Trump said in a tweet that he had predicted he wouldn’t win and referred to Merkel as the “person who is ruining Germany.”
TRUMP DENOUNCES ATTACK IN EGYPT, CALLS AGAIN FOR TRAVEL BAN
TIME recently defined its “Person of the Year” as “a person (or people) who has had the most influence over the news in the last 12 months.”
While the magazine’s editors make the final choice, they reportedly take into consideration the opinions of their readers and let them vote, TIME said.
According to their posted results as of Friday night, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, was leading the pack, followed by Trump, “The Dreamers” and “#MeToo.”

Earliest Trump mention in Panama Papers dates to 1990s: Report

A reference to a Trump Corporation condo purchase and sale in the 1990s appears in the Panama Papers, a report says.  (Reuters)

A reference to a mysterious condominium purchase and sale in the 1990s is the earliest mention of Donald Trump in the notorious Panama Papers, according to a report published Friday.

A Panamanian company called Process Consultants Inc., which was owned through bearer shares, purchased a residential unit in the Trump Palace skyscraper in New York City in 1991, investigative journalist Jake Bernstein reported, citing the documents.

Bernstein is the author of "Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite."
Bearer shares, which provide a convenient means to transfer property anonymously, have been tightly regulated in recent years because they are frequently used in money-laundering and other illicit ventures.
The directors of Process Consultants (which is sometimes spelled “Process Consultans” in the documents) were employed by Mossack Fonseca, the once-obscure law firm whose clients were exposed by the massive Panama Papers leak.
But these directors were in reality “nominee directors,” Bernstein wrote, meaning that they were not the real decision-makers. Companies sometimes name nominee directors to obfuscate who is really running operations.
Jürgen Mossack, founder of the firm, was one of the nominee directors of Process Consultants, Bernstein reported.
In 1994, Process Consultants sold the apartment for $355,000 to a woman from Hong Kong, using the Trump Corporation as its broker.
While there is no indication that the sale was illegal, the quick turnaround on the condo and the secretive nature of Process Consultants spurred some concern that money laundering may have been involved, the New York Daily News reported.
Trump's name pops up elsewhere in the Panama Papers, but Bernstein’s find marks the president's earliest known appearance.
The 2016 leak of the Panama Papers, a trove of nearly 12 million financial documents tracing Mossack Fonseca's efforts to help politicians and celebrities shield their money from taxes, led to the removal of Pakistan and Iceland’s prime ministers and numerous high-level investigations around the world.
Early in November, Trump's Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was revealed in the so-called “Paradise Papers” to have conducted large business deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law.

Conyers accused of taking staff meeting in his underwear, ordering subordinate to babysit his kid

No one had to guess whether Rep. John Conyers wore boxers or briefs, according to a former key staffer, who said the embattled Michigan lawmaker once called her into a meeting while sporting only his skivvies.

Melanie Sloan, a lawyer who worked with Conyers on the House Judiciary Committee, said she was called up to the long-serving congressman's office to discuss an issue only to find him “walking  around in his underwear.”

Sloan is the third woman to accuse Conyers of inappropriate behavior.
“It made me increasingly anxious and depressed about going to work every day,” she said, adding that “there was no way to fix it.”

“It made me increasingly anxious and depressed about going to work every day."

“There was no mechanism I could use, no person I could go to,” she said.
Sloan was a well-known Washington lawyer when she worked as Democratic counsel on the House Judiciary Committee in the 1990s. It was not clear exactly when the strange encounter with the lawmaker, now 88, occurred.
During her time working for the committee, she claims Conyers often screamed at her, fired her then re-hired her, criticized her for not wearing stockings and once even ordered her to babysit one of his children.
While those revelations came out earlier this week, word of Conyers, who was first elected to Congress in 1964, taking a meeting in his underwear came this week in a Detroit Free Press article.
Though Sloan maintains Conyers did not sexually assault her, she told the Detroit Free Press that “his constant stream of abuse was difficult to handle and it was certainly damaging to my self-respect and self-esteem.”
Conyers’ hometown newspaper earlier this week called for his resignation in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against him as well as a questionable payout to one alleged victim.
Conyers is accused of using taxpayer dollars to settle a claim in secret, after a former staff reportedly claimed she was fired for rejecting his advances.
In a scathing editorial published late Tuesday, the Detroit Free Press demanded the Democrat step down immediately.
The paper called Conyers' actions “the kind of behavior that can never be tolerated in a public official, much less an elected representative of the people.”
“He should resign his position and allow the investigation into his behavior to unfold without the threat that it would render him, and the people he now represents, effectively voiceless,” the board wrote.
BuzzFeed reported Monday that Conyers settled a wrongful termination complaint in 2015 with a staffer who claimed she was dismissed because she did not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”
Conyers acknowledged in a statement that his office paid his accuser the money -- reportedly a $27,000 sum -- but “vehemently” denied the underlying claims.
“I expressly and vehemently denied the allegations made against me, and continue to do so,” Conyers, who has spent 53 years in Congress, said. “My office resolved the allegations – with an express denial of liability – to save all involved from the rigors of protracted litigation. That should not be lost in the narrative.”
But the Detroit Free Press, which described Conyers as an “undisputed hero of the civil rights movement,” took issue with how Conyers’ office chose to handle the issue.
After the alleged victim made a formal complaint through Congress' Office of Compliance, Conyers’ office reportedly pushed to handle the situation on its own. If the woman dropped her complaint, signed a legal document saying Conyers had done nothing wrong and promised not to make any additional claims against him, she would be re-hired as a temporary “no-show” employee and paid $27,111.75 for three months, according to reports. The accuser agreed to the terms.
Conyers’ office defended the agreement as a way to avoid litigation – though House ethics rules bar lawmakers from keeping an employee on the payroll who isn’t doing anything.
"A House member can’t retain an employee who isn’t performing work commensurate with the pay, and regardless, can’t give back pay for work that stretches further than a month," the editorial board wrote.
While acknowledging that payoffs happen in the private sector, the board said “it should never, ever happen where public dollars (and public accountability) are concerned.”
Calling it a “public betrayal,” the board wrote it’s impossible to know how often the practice takes places in Congress but added Conyers should have known better.
Even though resigning would end his otherwise “stellar career,” the paper wrote that it’s “the appropriate consequence for the stunning subterfuge his office has indulged here, and a needed warning to other members of Congress that this can never be tolerated.”
The House Ethics Committee announced Tuesday it has opened an investigation into the matter.

Bill Clinton and Monica Cartoons

Sex scandal boomerang: Is the left ready for a Bill Clinton 'reckoning'?

When Jeff Sessions testified on the Hill yesterday, he was grilled about the Justice Department's disclosure that it may seek a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton.

Was it political retribution? Perhaps there should be a probe of whether donations to the Clinton Foundation were tied to a 2010 Obama administration decision, in which Clinton participated, to allow a Russian agency to buy a company that had uranium rights in America.

But after President Trump repeatedly urged such an investigation, critics say that naming a prosecutor would undermine DOJ’s independence. The attorney general said the decision would not be made on political grounds.
There is, at the moment, another drive under way to look back at Clinton — in this case, Bill Clinton.
In light of the intense focus on sexual assault and harassment allegations involving Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., business leaders and prominent journalists, the question arises: What about Bubba? And that question is being posed by liberal commentators.
Having covered all the Clinton sex controversies, it's generally not true that the mainstream media gave the 42nd president a pass. The Washington Post investigated the Paula Jones story and broke the news about the Monica Lewinsky probe. Kathleen Willey appeared on "60 Minutes." The Post and Wall Street Journal reported on Juanita Broaddrick, although NBC held an interview with her until after Clinton was acquitted at his Senate impeachment trial.
But a number of liberals defended Clinton during the 1990s against the allegations, blaming them on what Hillary famously called a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Chris Hayes, the liberal prime-time host on MSNBC, tweeted the other day: "As gross and cynical and hypocritical as the right’s 'what about Bill Clinton' stuff is, it’s also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him."
In a piece called "The Reckoning," Atlantic contributing editor Caitlin Flanagan wrote Monday that we should "not forget the sex crimes" of which "Bill Clinton was very credibly accused in the 1990s. Juanita Broaddrick reported that when she was a volunteer on one of his gubernatorial campaigns, she had arranged to meet him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, he had changed the location to her room in the hotel, where she says he very violently raped her. She said she fought against Clinton throughout a rape that left her bloodied.
At a different Arkansas hotel, he caught sight of a minor state employee named Paula Jones, and, Jones says, he sent a couple of state troopers to invite her to his suite, where he exposed his penis to her and told her to kiss it. Kathleen Willey said that she met him in the Oval Office for personal and professional advice and that he groped her, rubbed his erect penis on her, and pushed her hand to his crotch.
"It was a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged violent assault; the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks. But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism."
As Exhibit A, Flanagan points to this 1998 New York Times op-ed by feminist leader Gloria Steinem.
If the allegations were true, Steinem wrote, "President Clinton may be a candidate for sex addiction therapy. But feminists will still have been right to resist pressure by the right wing and the media to call for his resignation or impeachment."
On Kathleen Willey’s tale of Oval Office groping, Steinem said: "Even if the allegations are true, the president is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took 'no' for an answer."
In the case of Paula Jones, "Mr. Clinton seems to have made a clumsy sexual pass, then accepted rejection." His relationship with Lewinsky, despite the "power imbalance," was not coerced.
And he should stay in office, writes Steinem, because he was "vital" to "reproductive freedom."
This is hugely embarrassing to read now, nearly two decades later.
New York Times liberal columnist Michelle Goldberg now writes that she believes Juanita Broaddrick, that revisiting the Clinton scandals is "painful," and that "Democrats are guilty of apologizing for Clinton when they shouldn’t have."
With a lament that Hillary had to pay the price for Bill’s misdeeds, Goldberg says:
"It's fair to conclude that because of Broaddrick's allegations, Bill Clinton no longer has a place in decent society."
In the cauldron of impeachment politics, some liberals were as wedded to defending Clinton despite the mounting evidence as some conservatives today are to defending Roy Moore.
But there is a defend-our-guy-at-all-costs mentality in such cases that at least some liberals are belatedly attempting to confront.
Footnote: Sessions, whose old Senate seat is at stake in the Roy Moore race, made no attempt to defend his fellow Alabamian at yesterday’s hearing. "I have no reason to doubt these women," he said.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz. 

Congressional Russia probes likely to head into 2018

Some Republicans are hoping lawmakers will soon wrap up investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election that have dragged on for most of the year. But with new details in the probe emerging almost daily, that seems unlikely.
Three congressional committees are investigating Russian interference and whether President Donald Trump's campaign was in any way involved. The panels have obtained thousands of pages of documents from Trump's campaign and other officials, and have done dozens of interviews.
The probes are separate from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mueller can prosecute for criminal activity, while Congress can only lay out findings, publicize any perceived wrongdoing and pass legislation to try to keep problems from happening again. If any committee finds evidence of criminal activity, it must refer the matter to Mueller.
All three committees have focused on a June 2016 meeting that Trump campaign officials held in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer and others. They are also looking into outreach by several other Russians to the campaign, including involvement of George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty this month to lying to the FBI as part of Mueller's probe. New threads continue to emerge, such as a recent revelation that Donald Trump Jr. was messaging with WikiLeaks, the website that leaked emails from top Democratic officials during the campaign.
A look at the committees that are investigating, and the status of their work when they return from their Thanksgiving break:
SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
The Senate intelligence panel, which has been the most bipartisan in its approach, has interviewed more than 100 people, including most of those attending the Trump Tower meeting. Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina and the panel's top Democrat, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, have said they plan to bring in Donald Trump Jr. The president's son was one of several Trump campaign officials in the meeting.
The committee has looked broadly at the issue of interference, and called in executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google, pushing them to take steps to prevent Russian election meddling on their platforms. Warner told The Associated Press the committee is still looking for more information from those companies, which were initially reluctant to cooperate.
Burr has said that he wants to wrap up the probe by early spring, when congressional primaries begin. While there are many areas of bipartisan agreement on the meddling, it's unclear whether all members will agree to the final report. It's also unclear if the report will make a strong statement on whether the Trump campaign colluded in any way with Russia.
Warner said it's plain there were "unprecedented contacts" as Russians reached out to the Trump campaign but what's not established is collusion.
HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
In the House, Democrats hope the intelligence committee can remain focused on the Russia probe as the panel's GOP chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, and other Republicans have launched new, separate investigations into Democrat Hillary Clinton and a uranium deal during President Barack Obama's administration. Nunes stepped back from the Russia probe in April after criticism that he was too close to the White House, but remains chairman of the committee.
Some Republicans on the panel have grown restless with the probe, saying it has amounted to a fishing expedition and pushing for it to end. Still, the committee has continued to interview dozens of witnesses involved with the Trump campaign, among them several participants in the 2016 meeting. On Nov. 30, the panel will interview Attorney General Jeff Sessions behind closed doors. Lawmakers are interested in Sessions' knowledge about interactions between Trump campaign aides and Russians, and also his own contacts.
The top Democrat on the panel, California Rep. Adam Schiff, told AP the committee has multiple interviews before the New Year. He said the Republican investigations into Clinton and Obama could be "an enormous time drain," but they have not yet fully organized. He says the committee must be thorough and he doesn't believe the Russia investigation should end soon.
SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE
The Senate Judiciary Committee has also divided along partisan lines as Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the panel's top Democrat, haven't agreed on some interviews and subpoenas. But as in the House, the panel has proceeded anyway, conducting bipartisan, closed-door interviews with several people who were in the 2016 meeting.
The panel is showing recent signs that it is aggressively pursuing the investigation. The committee is the only one to have interviewed Trump Jr. And just before the Thanksgiving break, it sent Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a letter asking him to be more forthcoming with the committee.
Grassley has been focused on a law that requires foreign agents to register and the firing of James Comey as FBI director. Along with the other committees, Judiciary is also looking into a dossier of allegations about Trump's own connections to Russia.
It's not known if the panel will issue a final report, or if its probe will conclude before next year's elections.

New Manafort travel docs reveal closer ties to Russia: report

Paul Manafort had taken 18 trips to Moscow and was in contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allies for more than a decade before running President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, a new report said Thursday.

Manafort, who was indicted by a federal grand jury last month on 12 counts including conspiracy against the United States, had also taken at least 19 trips to Kiev to work with a pro-Kremlin political faction before joining Trump’s team, McClatchy reported.

The news outlet cited flight records they obtained from Ukrainian authorities as well as intelligence gathered from current and foreign government officials. The new evidence suggests Manafort’s ties to the Kremlin go much deeper than previously thought.
Even after the February 2014 fall of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, Manafort continued to go to Kiev another 19 times in fewer than two years while working for the smaller, pro-Russian Opposition Block party, McClatchy reported.
Some have suggested Manafort had been turned into an asset acting on Moscow’s behalf.
“You can make a case that all along he ...was either working principally for Moscow, or he was trying to play both sides against each other just to maximize his profits,” Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state who communicated with Manafort during Yanukovych’s reign in President George W. Bush’s second term, told McClatchy.
“He’s at best got a conflict of interest and at worst is really doing Putin’s bidding,” Fried, now a fellow with the Atlantic Council, said.
A central question for Justice Department Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and several congressional committees has been whether Manafort collaborated with Russia’s cyber meddling aimed at giving Trump the electoral edge over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
A source familiar with the matter told McClatchy that investigators are looking over information they obtained as part of a deeper dive into Russian influence in the U.S. presidential elections.
Manafort resigned on Aug. 19, 2016 after The New York Times reported handwritten ledgers showed $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort from Yanukovych. Investigators in Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau contend the payments were part of an illegal off-the-books system.
FBI agents raided Manafort’s Virginia home in July, taking documents that included financial and tax records.
Manafort and his associate Rick Gates were indicted and last month pleaded not guilty to all 12 counts.
A judge set bond at $10 million for Manafort, and $5 million for Gates. Both were put on house arrest.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson gave Manafort and Gates permission to leave their home and have Thanksgiving with their families, but said they must wear a GPS ankle monitor and not consume alcohol.

Michael Flynn lawyers cut ties with Trump legal team, report says

Attorneys for former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn have informed President Donald Trump's legal team that they can no longer discuss Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian activities during the 2016 election campaign, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The move could indicate that Flynn's legal team either is cooperating with Mueller's investigators or is negotiating to do so.

The Times story, which cited four anonymous sources, reported that the president's attorneys have been bracing for Flynn to be indicted in recent weeks.

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Mueller probing Flynn's contact with Turkish officials

Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, resigned as national security adviser in February after admitting that he "inadvertently" gave top White House officials incomplete information about conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Former FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress in June that Trump asked him to end the bureau's investigation into Flynn's conversations with Kislyak they day after Flynn's resignation, telling him, "I hope you can let this go." Trump fired Comey as FBI director in May.
In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller was investigating whether Flynn tried to obtain Hillary Clinton's deleted emails from Russian hackers.

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WSJ: Mueller investigators looking into Kushner's contacts

Earlier this month, the Journal reported that Mueller was looking into a meeting where Flynn allegedly discussed a plan that would pay him and his son up to $15 million to kidnap a U.S.-based Muslim cleric and hand him over to Turkey's government.
Flynn's attorney's disputed the Journal report, calling the allegations "outrageous and prejudicial."