joan1984 · 281698
0 Members and 10 Guests are viewing this topic.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that his panel would make a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding potential false testimony by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of the private military contractor Blackwater and an ally of President Trump.“The evidence is so weighty that the Justice Department needs to consider this,” Schiff said during a Washington Post Live event.Among other things, Schiff pointed to a meeting that took place nine days before Trump took office between Prince and a Russian financier close to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles islands.Prince later told congressional officials examining Russia’s interference in the presidential election that the meeting happened by chance and was not taken at the behest of the incoming administration — testimony that congressional Democrats now think was false.Prince told special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators a version of the Seychelles meeting that is at odds in several key respects with his sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.“We know from the Mueller report that that was not a chance meeting,” Schiff told Post reporter Robert Costa during an interview at the event. “We know there were communications after he returned.”“In very material ways I think the evidence strongly suggests that he willingly misled our committee, and the Justice Department needs to consider whether there’s a prosecutable case,” Schiff added.In a statement, a lawyer for Prince said there “is no new evidence here.” Matthew L. Schwartz said: “Erik Prince’s House testimony has been public for months, including at all times that Mr. Prince met with the Special Counsel’s Office. Mr. Prince cooperated completely with the Special Counsel’s investigation, as its report demonstrates. There is nothing new here for the Department of Justice to consider, nor is there any reason to question the Special Counsel’s decision to credit Mr. Prince and rely on him in drafting its report.”At this juncture, neither the Senate nor the House intelligence committees know the details of Prince’s proffer with Mueller — and whether he struck a deal that could shield him from prosecution.Schiff noted Tuesday that if Prince gave the special counsel’s team information “under the condition it not be used against him, then being able to prove” that he lied to lawmakers “might be problematic.”Congressional Democrats are also looking into whether White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. lied to them during their interviews with congressional panels.Details in Mueller’s report have solidified many Democrats’ concerns that Trump Jr. lied to them about the details surrounding the June 2016 meeting that he and others from the Trump campaign held with a Russian lawyer promising “dirt” on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and seeking to discuss sanctions against Russia with the campaign.The report has also sparked new concerns, among House investigators in particular, that Kushner misled lawmakers about the pre-inauguration contacts his business associate, Rick Gerson, had with Kirill Dmitriev, the banker who met with Prince in the Seychelles.But Democrats are reluctant to levy official accusations against Kushner and Trump Jr. until they are able to view the substance of the redactions in Mueller’s report, as well as see the transcripts of the interviews the special counsel conducted with those witnesses, to determine whether they in fact lied to lawmakers.When asked specifically about Kushner and Trump Jr. Tuesday, Schiff demurred, saying he would not comment on those individuals.“We have reached the point of ripeness with Erik Prince’s testimony that we feel it appropriate to refer it,” he added.In a separate interview at the Washington Post Live event, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said Republicans are also considering referring some congressional witnesses to the Justice Department for possibly lying to Congress.Meadows said the GOP is looking at two or three people. He declined to name them but suggested at least one is connected to Fusion GPS, the firm behind a controversial dossier alleging Trump had personal and financial ties to Russia.
The most bizarre passage in Rod Rosenstein’s letter to President Trump resigning his post as deputy attorney general is praise for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations.” It is not standard practice for the president to have personal conversations with the deputy attorney general at all, certainly not when that person is supervising an investigation into the president himself. And while we cannot know the substance of those personal conversations, we do know that Rosenstein was once so alarmed by Trump’s behavior that he discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to have him removed on account of mental unfitness.Maybe Trump’s private conversations somehow contain the humor that is completely lacking in his public persona, which consist of boasts, lies, and belittling attacks. Trump’s public treatment of Rosenstein included tweeting an image of him behind bars along with other alleged traitors. That Trump, what a jokester.Rosenstein’s status as a target of Trump’s rage, and his background as a career official, raised broad hopes that he would check the president’s authoritarian impulses. By all indications, he failed to live up to this heroic destiny. Rosenstein ended his career as a dutiful functionary, allowing Trump to trash the rule of law while claiming he had upheld it.Rosenstein deserves to be judged by the forgiving standards of a man placed in an untenable situation and having no good options. Trump’s worldview is inimical to the concept of the rule of law. The president believes the Department of Justice can and must be placed at his personal disposal, and used to harass his enemies while giving himself and his friends impunity. Trump can no more grasp a Department of Justice that holds his views at arm length than he could abide the doorman at his hotels subjecting him to strip searches.Rosenstein’s answer to this dilemma was to bend, and bend, and bend. When Trump demanded personal loyalty from the FBI director and fired him for failing to quash a probe into Trump’s campaign, Rosenstein dutifully wrote a letter supplying Trump with a phony pretext. When Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the offense of following Department rules and recusing himself from an investigation into which he was massively conflicted, he remained loyal. When Trump installed a transparent hack in Matthew Whitaker, prompting more than 400 former DOJ officials to sign a public letter of protest, Rosenstein called the choice “superb.”And then of course Rosenstein joined with Attorney General William Barr to impose their judgment that Robert Mueller’s investigation would not accuse the president of obstructing justice. One of Trump’s many acts of obstruction included instructing Corey Lewandowski, a private citizen, to order Sessions to violate Department procedure and take control of the investigation. As Ben Wittes notes, “If true and provable beyond a reasonable doubt, it is unlawful obstruction of justice.”Barr, with Rosenstein’s imprimatur, deemed these and all of Trump’s other efforts to harm the investigation to be non-crimes. He did this despite the fact that Trump’s obstruction of justice successfully obstructed the probe – by dangling pardons to key witnesses, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, thereby preventing Mueller from getting to the bottom of the campaign’s collusion with Russia. Barr and Rosenstein made the comically backward argument that because Trump prevented Mueller from proving criminal collusion, there was no underlying crime, therefore his efforts to halt the probe must go unpunished.Before his firing, Comey confided his misgivings about Rosenstein. “Rod is a survivor,” he said. And you don’t get to survive that long across administrations without making compromises. “So I have concerns.” This turned out to be a perfect epitaph for Rosenstein’s tenure.When Trump was poised to fire Rosenstein last fall, Rosenstein pleaded for his job. “I give the investigation credibility,” he said, according to the Washington Post, “I can land the plane.” Trump has a gift for homing in on this kind of weakness, and surrounding himself with morally compromised individuals who will do his bidding. Rosenstein’s desperation to avoid the ignominy of a firing and the torrent of abuse that always followed it – “I don’t want to go out with a tweet,” he said, according to the Post – made him suitably pathetic for Trump’s purposes.In a farewell speech several days ago, Rosenstein sycophantically quoted his boss: “As President Trump pointed out, ‘we govern ourselves in accordance with the rule of law rather [than] … the whims of an elite few.’” It was perhaps his most overt gesture of submission. Here Rosenstein credited a man he knows perfectly well has contempt for the rule of law with cherishing the principle he has relentlessly undermined, a task at which Rosenstein ultimately aided him. He might as well have quoted Trump proclaiming the importance of truth, chastity and frugality.We can extend Rosenstein enough credit to assume things did not follow his fondest hopes. He surely did not want the FBI Director and Attorney general to be fired for doing their jobs properly, nor to be publicly belittled by the president. Instead he seems to have convinced himself that the need for normalcy, or the appearance of it, transcended everything else. After principled resignation seemed unthinkable, every new compromise simply kept the plane on track for its landing.It turns out most of the Republicans in the bureaucracy operate along the same principles as the ones running for office. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office and disdain for democratic norms begin as a shock. Gradually, though, they recede into the background, and take their place as fixed features of the landscape around which everything else must be arranged. That is how Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have worked around and ultimately for a figure they greeted with disgust. And that ultimately is how Rosenstein, too, served Trump.
Donald Trump and his family are suing Deutsche Bank and Capital One to block subpoenas issued by House Democrats seeking Trump’s financial records.In the federal lawsuit filed Monday in New York, Trump’s lawyers argued that the subpoenas serve “no legitimate or lawful purpose.”"The subpoenas were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses, and the private information of the President and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage,” the lawsuit contends. "No grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one.”The lawsuit, seeking to invalidate subpoenas issued by the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees, is the latest escalation in Trump’s fight against mounting House investigations into his administration, presidential campaign and business empire. In recent days, Trump has vowed to fight all congressional subpoenas, accusing Democrats of trying to sully his presidency altogether.In a joint statement, House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said it was a "meritless lawsuit" that was not designed to succeed — but was "only designed to put off meaningful accountability as long as possible.“"As a private businessman, Trump routinely used his well-known litigiousness and the threat of lawsuits to intimidate others, but he will find that Congress will not be deterred from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities," they said.Democrats have said they are seeking Trump financial records as part of investigations into potential foreign influence on the U.S. political process and the abuse of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes.Deutsche Bank, a German lender, said in a statement that it was "committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations and will abide by a court order regarding such investigations.” In addition to serving as Trump’s go-to lender for years, the bank has faced scrutiny for money-laundering scandals.The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the president; his sons Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump; his daughter Ivanka Trump; and the Trump Organization.Deutsche Bank intends to begin producing documents in response to the subpoena on May 6, and Capital One also feels obligated to comply before May 6 absent court intervention, according to the lawsuit.The lawsuit describes a sweeping inquiry into the Trump family’s finances going back decades. The two banks provide the Trumps with numerous “personal, family and business accounts."The committees, the Trumps’ lawyers said, have refused to provide copies of the subpoenas to the Trump family, and their scope was learned from Deustche Bank and Capital One. But according to the lawsuit, the committees are seeking “all banking and financial records not just concerning the individual plaintiffs, but also their own family members.”"This means the subpoenas request documents about accounts of the plaintiffs’ children (and in some cases, grandchildren),” the lawyers said.For most of the documents, the lawyers added, the committees are demanding records from the last 10 years but, for others, the request is “unbounded,” going back to the childhoods of individual Trumps."The House of Representatives is demanding, among other things, records of every single checking withdrawal, credit-card swipe, or debit-card purchase — no matter how trivial or small — made by each and every member of the Trump family,” they said.Lawyers representing the Trumps include Marc Mukasey, a former law firm partner of Rudy Giuliani‘s, the president’s personal lawyer. In a statement, Mukasey and Patrick Strawbridge, who is also representing the Trumps in the case, said it was filed to "protect the privacy rights of the President, his family and their businesses.” The lawsuit claims that the subpoenas violate the Right to Financial Privacy Act."Every citizen should be concerned about this sweeping, lawless, invasion of privacy,” they said. "We look forward to vindicating our clients’ rights in this matter.”Monday’s lawsuit comes a week after the president asked a federal court to block the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s subpoena to accounting firm Mazars USA. The Democrat-led committee subpoenaed the firm to obtain eight years of Trump’s financial records.The Oversight Committee said it needs the documents in order to corroborate testimony from former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, who alleged that the president artificially inflated and deflated the value of his assets for his personal benefit.During an explosive public hearing in February, Cohen disclosed copies of Trump’s financial statements which he said were turned over to Deutsche Bank as Trump was seeking a loan to place a bid on an NFL team, the Buffalo Bills. Those statements, according to Cohen, contained false information.The committee has requested similar records from Capital One, which asked for a “friendly” subpoena before it could comply.On Capitol Hill, Republicans have rushed to Trump’s defense amid the onslaught of investigations and subpoenas, claiming Democrats are abusing their authority to take down the president and eventually impeach him.Democratic leaders remain opposed to launching impeachment proceedings against Trump — preferring instead to continue investigating the president for obstruction of justice allegations and financial misdeeds.
Over two decades, Deutsche Bank lent Donald J. Trump billions of dollars, even as his tarnished financial record put him off limits for most of Wall Street.“You are a great friend,” Mr. Trump wrote to his Deutsche Bank contact in 1998. “We have a great relationship,” he said in 2013. “They are totally happy with me,” he declared three years later.Now, Deutsche Bank is putting the president on the defensive.Lawyers for the bank have spent months cooperating with investigators from two Democratic-controlled congressional committees, which issued what one lawmaker called a “friendly subpoena” to the bank in mid-April. The bank could end up sharing decades of his personal and corporate financial records.That prospect prompted Mr. Trump to file a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan on Monday in an attempt to block Deutsche Bank and another financial company, Capital One, from sharing documents. Mr. Trump’s lawyers said the subpoenas had no legitimate purpose and were an attempt to pry into his finances for political gain.The heads of the two committees that issued the subpoena, Representatives Maxine Waters and Adam B. Schiff, called the suit “meritless” and an attempt to obstruct congressional oversight.The rich trove of records held by Deutsche Bank includes internal corporate documents, descriptions of the value of Mr. Trump’s assets, and portions of his personal and business tax returns. The subpoena, issued April 15, casts a wide net for documents related to Mr. Trump’s businesses and other entities, including family trusts.If the bank handed over even parts of Mr. Trump’s returns, it would be a dramatic end run around the president, who broke with decades of precedent by refusing to release them during the 2016 campaign.Mr. Trump’s lawsuit puts the financially ailing Deutsche Bank in an awkward situation. The German lender’s share price has fallen substantially over the past decade, and politicians and regulators in Germany are pushing for it to make radical changes to reduce its riskiness and improve profitability. Last week, Deutsche Bank’s future became even murkier after it abandoned talks to merge with another large German lender, Commerzbank.Mr. Trump has broadly sought to keep his finances private during his presidency. He told The New York Times in 2017 that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, would cross a line by examining his family’s finances beyond any relationship with Russia.In a sign of Mr. Trump’s sensitivity to the cache of documents held by Deutsche Bank, he erupted in anger later that year in response to news reports that Mr. Mueller had subpoenaed his records from the bank. The reports turned out to be inaccurate.Since Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January, Deutsche Bank officials have been working closely with investigators from the chamber’s Financial Services and Intelligence Committees to identify information that might assist their investigations into the president, according to people familiar with the discussions. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.Bank officials have told The Times that they were eager to provide the materials to Congress. In part, they said additional transparency might help squelch speculation that Deutsche Bank had served as a conduit for Russian money to get to Mr. Trump.Despite that willingness to cooperate the bank appeared ready to leave the legal battle to House Democrats and let the courts decide what it must do.“We remain committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations and will abide by a court order regarding such investigations,” a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, Kerrie McHugh, said in a statement.Deutsche Bank has been cooperative with Congress in recent months. Lawyers for the bank worked with congressional staff members to narrow the scope of the subpoena to make it easier for the bank to quickly produce the requested materials, according to the people. That assistance was apparently what led Mr. Schiff, the Intelligence Committee’s chairman, to praise their cooperation and to describe the demand for materials as a “friendly subpoena.”Subscribe to With InterestCatch up and prep for the week ahead with this newsletter of the most important business insights, delivered Sundays.SIGN UPThe subpoena demanded Deutsche Bank hand over materials related to the Trump family’s companies — including “parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, branches, divisions, partnerships, properties, groups, special purpose entities, joint ventures, predecessors, successors or any other entity in which they have or had a controlling interest.”It also sought information about any accounts held by Mr. Trump and his immediate family, including materials that were provided to the bank when those accounts were opened. The bank has detailed financial materials on some of Mr. Trump’s children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser. The deadline to comply with the subpoena was May 6.Deutsche Bank executives and congressional investigators, led by a pair of former Manhattan federal prosecutors, expected that Mr. Trump would mount a legal challenge to block the bank from complying with the subpoena, according to the people.But bank officials have nonetheless compiled reams of materials to hand over. Included in those documents are multiple pages from each of Mr. Trump’s annual federal tax returns, which the bank received before lending him hundreds of millions of dollars for the Doral golf resort in Florida and the Old Post Office hotel project in Washington, according to current and former bank employees.Despite the amiable history between Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank, the lawsuit is not the first court fight between them. In fall 2008, Mr. Trump defaulted on a loan from Deutsche Bank, then sued it, claiming it had caused the financial crisis and engaged in predatory lending against him. Deutsche Bank responded by suing Mr. Trump, demanding that he immediately repay the portion of the loan, $40 million, that he had personally guaranteed.The litigation lasted into 2010. After the suit was settled, Deutsche Bank resumed lending to Mr. Trump, dispensing more than $300 million to him over the next several years.
In April 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate and club, for a two-day summit. While Xi and his delegation stayed at a nearby hotel, Trump and his advisers stayed at the peach-colored, waterfront resort.That evening, Trump and a dozen of his closest advisers hosted Xi and the Chinese delegation in an ornate dining room where they ate Dover sole and New York strip steak. Those sorts of lavish, formal gatherings are expected for a major bilateral summit.But then there are less formal events. At some point later that evening, a group repaired to Mar-a-Lago’s Library Bar, a wood-paneled study with a portrait of Trump in tennis whites (titled “The Visionary”) hanging nearby. The group asked the bartender to leave the room so it “could speak confidentially,” according to an email written by Mar-a-Lago’s catering director, Brooke Watson.The Secret Service guarded the door, according to the email. The bartender wasn’t allowed to return. And members of the group began pouring themselves drinks. No one paid.Six days later, on April 13, Mar-a-Lago created a bill for those drinks, tallying $838 worth of alcohol plus a 20% service charge. It covered 54 drinks (making for an average price of $18.62 each) of premium liquor: Chopin vodka, Patron and Don Julio Blanco tequilas and Woodford Reserve bourbon. Watson’s email did not specify how many people consumed the alcohol or who the participants were. (It stated that she was told the participants included then-strategist Steve Bannon and then-deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin. Bannon, who has said he stopped drinking years ago, said he didn’t drink at Mar-a-Lago and didn’t recall the episode. Hagin did not respond to requests for comment.)The bill was sent to the State Department, which objected to covering it. It was then forwarded to the White House, which paid the tab.The unusual cocktail hour underscores a unique push and pull in the current administration: Donald Trump’s White House pays a bill and Donald Trump’s club reaps the revenue. (It’s unclear if the White House asked any of those drinking to reimburse the government; the White House declined to comment.)The premium liquor costs are only the beginning of government spending at Mar-a-Lago that emerges in hundreds of pages of receipts and email correspondence between Trump Organization employees and staffers for the State Department, which oversees presidential diplomatic travel and works with the Secret Service and White House. The emails show that the president’s company refused to agree to what was essentially a bulk-purchase agreement with the federal government, and that it charged the maximum allowable federal rate for hotel rooms. The Trump Organization could be obstinate when it came to rates for, say, function rooms at Mar-a-Lago, a problem that was eased when the president signed a law lifting the maximum “micro-purchase” the government can make.The emails have been released as part of an ongoing lawsuit between the nonprofit Property of the People, a Washington-based transparency group, and the federal government. Property of the People provided the emails and receipts to ProPublica and we, in turn, have added them to our tracker of government spending at Trump-owned properties for our interactive graphic Paying the President. (The State Department is expected to release an additional 1,800 pages of records as part of the lawsuit, which was filed under the Freedom of Information Act.)In response to questions from ProPublica, the State Department asked for and received the documents described in this article. State Department officials promised a detailed response, but then declined comment.The documents reveal the intersection between Trump’s conflicting interests. The emails show that “Mar-a-Lago wanted to have the government money without the government rules,” said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who served on the congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.A few months after Trump’s inauguration, the State Department proposed a contract that would pay $200,000 for all room costs for federal employees who stay at Mar-a-Lago over the first term of his presidency. But Mar-a-Lago rejected the government’s proposal. Instead, Trump’s resort bills the government the maximum permitted by federal rules: 300% of the government’s per diem rate, which works out to $546 per night.Mar-a-Lago rejected the proposed flat-fee arrangement, according to the emails, because of concerns the club’s lawyers had about the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR, which governs federal purchases and is overseen by contracting officers. FAR seeks to promote competition and maintain “the public’s trust.”The emails suggest the Trump Organization was worried that the lack of competitive bidding could run afoul of federal rules, among other concerns. A State Department staffer wrote in May 2017 that Mar-a-Lago’s attorneys brought up federal “small business set-aside” requirements, which set strict rules for sole-source government bids for small businesses. The State Department staffer wrote that Mar-a-Lago’s “concerns are based on their general lack of knowledge on the applicability of the FAR regulations.”Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Organization did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.Since Mar-a-Lago wouldn’t agree to a bulk contract, the State Department had to go to Plan B. When it came to the meeting with China’s president, for example, the agency had to go into some contortions to make Mar-a-Lago’s $546 nightly room rate square with its rules on competitive bidding, given that there are other less expensive hotels nearby. At least 16 staffers stayed at the Hampton Inn in West Palm Beach; at least eight stayed at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn; and four others stayed at the Tideline Ocean Resort & Spa, where the press pool also stayed, according to a hotel manifest obtained through the FOIA lawsuit. The government-negotiated rates at those establishments ranged from $195 to $305 per night.(At least 24 White House and federal staffers stayed at Mar-a-Lago during the Xi visit. They included then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; then-chief of staff Reince Priebus; then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; then-National Economic Council adviser Gary Cohn; and other advisers, past and present, such as Bannon, Hope Hicks, Stephen Miller and Sean Spicer.)The State Department also broke with protocol regarding taxpayer-funded travel and applied for a Citibank travel card just for Mar-a-Lago visits.Meanwhile, other problems emerged:Mar-a-Lago can’t process charges over $10,000, which led to problems when the club split bills and charged the government card for multiple transactions, emails show.Mar-a-Lago refused government requests to waive the costs of its “function room” for press and other official meetings in April 2017, leading to a near-violation of a $3,500 government spending cap. Last year, Trump signed a law that lifted that cap, known as the “micro-purchase threshold,” from $3,500 to $10,000. The law does not appear to have been aimed at facilitating spending at Mar-a-Lago, but it allows the club to avoid additional government contracting rules when charging sums below $10,000.In one instance, after the government was charged more than $3,500 for conference space at Mar-a-Lago, it asked the Trump Organization for a 10% discount so that it wouldn’t violate the micro-purchase threshold. Mar-a-Lago relented, but only after months of haggling.In the emails, the director of presidential travel support, Michael Dobbs, frequently described the creation of a charge card unique to Mar-a-Lago as a “headache.”As Steve Schooner, a professor of government contracting law at George Washington University, put it, “The fact that we have a State Department contracting officer saying this is a headache is a reminder that, but for the relationship with President Trump, this would not be a contract the government would be having. That’s a problem.”Many of the expenses incurred by White House staff are arranged and paid for by the White House’s Office of Administration. These expenses are not required to be made public. The same goes for Secret Service spending to protect the president on such visits. (The Government Accountability Office released a report last month evaluating spending at Mar-a-Lago in February and March 2017 and found that a total of $60,000 was spent at the hotel during four trips; the figure ran to $13.6 million when costs for plane travel, secret service, security and other logistics were included.)The State Department payments, and its work on behalf of the White House and other traveling staff, are considered public records.Between 2015 and June of 2018, at least $16.1 million has poured into Trump Organization-managed and branded hotels, golf courses and restaurants from his campaign, Republican organizations and government agencies. Because Trump’s business empire is overseen by a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, he profits from these hotel stays, banquet hall rentals and meals.Federal spending rules don’t specifically address agency-level spending on alcohol that is directly invoiced to the government, as occurred with the $1,000 bar tab at Mar-a-Lago. The State Department and the White House have had exemptions included in their appropriations legislation to allow for alcohol purchases.Individual government employees are not permitted to use charge cards for “improper” purposes, such as alcohol, and federal per diem rules allow for charges for breakfast, lunch, dinner and related tips and taxes but specifically exclude alcoholic drinks.Six government contracting experts said Mar-a-Lago may be violating rules requiring competitive bids. They argue that Mar-a-Lago’s practice of invoicing meeting spaces, hotel stays and meals separately is a way to get around federal spending rules.“Mar-a-Lago didn’t want to compete, they wanted to sneak around the requirements, and charge much higher prices than the competition,” said Tiefer, who served as deputy general counsel with the House of Representatives for 11 years. “It’s not the first time in history that vendors have tried to get around the rules by charging individual components. This is familiar to every contracting officer. And it’s wrong. It’s not just a technicality. It’s not a game. The only safeguard the public has against the Trumps swallowing up all the government business is at least minimal competition.”Several experts contend the State Department is exploiting loopholes in government spending rules to facilitate official gatherings at Mar-a-Lago. “It’s one of the biggest fears coming true, that they are bending over backwards to help the Trump Organization,” said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project On Government Oversight. “I’m frustrated the State Department would exploit the system to bill Uncle Sam and the taxpayers. To have the government bicker to get a 10% discount shows the Trump Organization isn’t putting the American public first. It’s a worst-case scenario when it comes to conflicts of interest, with the president and his children putting themselves and profits ahead of the public.”
HILLSDALE, N.Y. — His bosses at the Trump country club called it “side work.”On some nights, after the club’s Grille Room closed, head waiter Jose Gabriel Juarez — an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — was told to clock out. He pressed his index finger onto a scanner and typed his personal code, 436.But he didn’t go home.Instead — on orders from his bosses, Juarez said — he would stay on, sometimes past midnight. He vacuumed carpets, polished silverware and helped get the restaurant at Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., ready for breakfast the next day.All off the clock. Without being paid.“It was that way with all the managers: Many of them told us, ‘Just clock out and then stay and do the side work,’ ” said Juarez, who spent a decade at the golf club, before leaving in May 2018. “There was a lot of side work.”Allegations that workers were routinely shortchanged on their pay at President Trump’s suburban country club are now the subject of an inquiry by the New York attorney general, whose investigators have interviewed more than two dozen former employees.The inquiry could raise awkward political questions for Trump, who has made stopping illegal immigration a centerpiece of his presidency and his reelection campaign but faces allegations that his business benefited from low-paid undocumented workers.In interviews, six former Trump workers told The Washington Post that they felt systematically cheated because they were undocumented. Some told The Post about being denied promotions, vacation days and health insurance, which were offered to legal employees. The same pattern of unpaid labor was also described by a former manager.Others recounted practices that could violate labor laws. Two told The Post that they had been required to perform unpaid side work. Two others said managers made them work 60-hour weeks without paying them overtime.A spokesman for the New York attorney general’s office confirmed that it had received complaints from workers about conditions at the club but declined to comment further.The Trump Organization has denied the allegations, and workers who spoke to The Post did not keep paper records of the extra hours they said they worked.But Juarez was among nearly 30 former employees at Trump’s golf courses in New York who met with prosecutors in February. They handed over pay stubs and W-2 forms and answered questions about their salaries, hours, tips and lack of benefits in one-on-one interviews over many hours, according to several workers. Some have follow-up meetings scheduled in coming weeks.“They were focused on the payments,” Gabriel Sedano, who worked in maintenance at the club for 14 years, said of the prosecutors. “The days they paid us. The extra hours they didn’t pay us. The tips.”Many who met with investigators were among those who were fired as part of a companywide purge of unauthorized workers earlier this year.In a statement, the Trump Organization called the former workers’ accounts “nonsense.”“The Trump Organization has extensive policies and procedures in place to ensure compliance with all wage and hour laws,” spokeswoman Kimberly Benza said, after The Post sent a brief description of the employees’ accounts. “This story is total nonsense and nothing more than unsubstantiated allegations from illegal immigrants who unlawfully submitted fake identification in an effort to obtain employment.”In January, the company said it would start using E-Verify, a federal program that allows employers to check whether new hires are legally eligible to work in the United States.The inquiry adds to the list of inquiries by New York state investigators and Democrats in Congress scrutinizing aspects of Trump’s life, including the business on which he built his fame and fortune.Trump has decried unauthorized immigrants as a threat to the country’s safety and social fabric. He also has blamed undocumented workers for driving down wages and taking jobs that American citizens could perform.But over the years, his company has routinely relied on that same low-wage, illegal labor, and his company has not explained how some employees kept their jobs for years despite lacking proper papers. Since December, The Post has spoken with 36 such people, who worked at four Trump golf courses and country clubs as well as a personal hunting lodge that his two adult sons own in Upstate New York.Trump still owns his businesses, but he has handed over day-to-day control to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric. The company has said it did not know it employed workers who lacked legal status until this year, when an internal audit discovered that many had presented fraudulent papers.One former manager from the Westchester club, who said he thought the undocumented workers at the club were exploited, described an environment where — in managers’ meetings — it was clear that supervisors not only knew these workers lacked authentic documents but used that information to meet the company’s cost-cutting goals.The former manager said that “The City” — the club’s word for bosses at Trump Tower in Manhattan — was constantly demanding a reduction in overtime costs.The solution, going back a decade at least, the former manager said, was to pressure the undocumented workers.“You want to be here? Don’t clock in for overtime,” the former manager said, paraphrasing the message to these workers. “Clock out, and work off the clock.”“There was a conscious effort to pay less wages, because they knew about the lack of documents,” said the former manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company policy. “You know, where are they going to go?”The former manager said that this period included a time when Dan Scavino — now the White House director of social media — was general manager of the Westchester club.When The Post asked Scavino whether he had known about these practices, he said he was unaware of any violations and called the questions an “attempt to attack the President through me, one of his senior staff.”“To my knowledge, Trump National is in compliance with the relevant state and federal labor laws, and during my employment, which was SIX YEARS ago, I was personally unaware of any violations of those laws,” Scavino said in a written statement issued through the White House press office. “If such violations occurred and I had been aware, I would have immediately addressed it, and stopped them.”Trump’s Westchester club is tucked in the woods in the wealthy enclave of Briarcliff Manor, about an hour north of Manhattan along the Hudson River. The club drew on a community of immigrants from Ecuador and Mexico living in nearby Ossining to staff many manual-labor jobs.Former workers say getting hired was easy. Applicants could purchase fake green cards and Social Security numbers along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens that their bosses would place on file and generally not mention again. Nearly all employees interviewed say they are certain that their bosses knew their papers were fraudulent but hired them anyway.On the job, however, things became more difficult. Employees without legal status often worked at the club for years on hourly wages that they said barely budged upward. They felt blocked from promotion opportunities, they said, and generally received no health insurance, retirement benefits or vacation days. Many said the company shaved hours off their paychecks.Juan Pablo Morejon, a dishwasher from Cuenca, Ecuador, said he often worked into the early-morning hours cleaning up after banquets and parties but didn’t get paid for overtime. “I had to punch out and keep working,” he said. “When you left, they paid you eight hours, even if you worked 12 or 13 hours.”Requiring employees to work unpaid hours is prohibited by New York labor law, lawyers practicing in the state said.“Requiring employees to clock out and continue working is classic wage theft. You have to pay employees for all hours worked,” said Louis Pechman, a lawyer in Manhattan who said he has handled more than 200 cases involving allegations of wage theft. “Undocumented workers have the same rights as documented workers. It makes no difference.”Morejon, who was hired at the club in 2012, said he regularly complained to superiors about missing hours and overtime on his paychecks. The issue came up again when he was fired last year. A supervisor had discovered that Morejon was using the same green card number as his nephew. “He told me to go back to Queens and get a new number, apply again, and you can continue working,” he said, echoing the experience of another former worker at the course who told The Post that he, too, was told to get new papers.Morejon quit instead. “They would have eventually fired me anyway, like the others,” he said.Morejon, who spoke to prosecutors in February, said that the company owed him for his last 15 days of work but that he never received a final paycheck.The supervisor could not be reached to comment. Two of Morejon’s dishwashing colleagues, Jose Blandon, 55, and his son, Wiston Blandon, 35, said they felt similarly shortchanged by the Trump Organization. The pair, from Nicaragua, got hired in 2016 after hearing from a friend “that they were letting people work there without papers, and that they needed dishwashers,” Jose Blandon said. Trump was campaigning for president at the time, and the two also were eager to work for a famous and powerful boss.The enthusiasm quickly subsided. Jose Blandon said he felt overwhelmed by the demands of the job, working long hours and juggling dishwashing duties in the banquet kitchen and the Grille Room for club members.On a few occasions, he said, he and his son would work about 60 hours one week, and their boss would have them work 20 the next. The paycheck cycle would average out to two 40-hour workweeks with no overtime. Jose Blandon complained about such practices but said he was told, “That’s why they hired you, to work.” “This bothered me a lot,” he said. “I felt this was labor abuse.” This practice — called “averaging hours” — is also prohibited by New York law, legal experts said.“Can they be averaged? Absolutely not. Overtime is measured in terms of the week itself,” said James J. Brudney, a professor of employment law at Fordham University in New York. “If what they’re trying to say is that they’ll average overtime over a two-week period, they can’t do that.”Some former Westchester managers disputed that the company exploited staff members or that it knew they did not have legal status.“Anybody that applied and went through the application process was told you have to have valid ID, and everybody that applied provided that,” said one former manager involved in hiring who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policies. “This isn’t a company that turns around and says, ‘You, you and you — come on board.’ Everything was done by government standards.”The former manager added that salaried workers were offered a benefits package including health insurance, two weeks’ vacation after one year of employment, 401(k) contributions and sick days. All employees were paid more than minimum wage and were offered benefits if they worked enough hours to qualify for them, the former manager said.“Several employees were there for several, several years,” the former manager said. “It’s pretty simple. Nobody goes to a job that they hate or that they’re treated badly at. You don’t work at a company for that long if it’s a bad company.” Murat Nalcioglu, food and beverage director in the Grille Room in 2016, also disputed that any employees were mistreated.“It was a good work environment,” Nalcioglu said. “The Hispanics were treated as good as anybody else. They were obviously the hardest workers there. They were the majority of the team.”As head waiter for a decade in the clubhouse restaurant, Juarez, who went by “Gabbie,” was well-known by members, including the Trumps. Before he became president, Trump often golfed on Sundays in Westchester then ate lunch at a circular corner table — Table 5 — with a view of a TV screen. Juarez mastered Trump’s finicky preferences. He knew to pour Trump’s Diet Coke from particular miniature glass bottles into a plastic cup, never letting Trump see anyone touch the straw.In the clubhouse computer, Trump automatically got a hefty discount, Juarez recalled: at least half off everything he ordered. He could never be brought a bill.“He would fire me for that,” Juarez said.Juarez was 16 years old in 2001 when his sister persuaded him to leave their village at the base of a volcano outside Mexico City and join their father in New York. He started working as a busboy at an Italian restaurant in Queens and has been employed at more than half a dozen eateries since, he said, from fine-dining restaurants to pizza joints. In 2008, his brother was working in the clubhouse restaurant of Trump’s Westchester club and recommended Juarez for the position of head waiter. He was hired using falsified documents he bought in Queens. The Grille Room was different from the other restaurants Juarez knew. He was paid hourly — $15 an hour when he started and $18 per hour when he left a decade later — but generally did not receive tips.When the golf course closed for winter, Juarez was part of a skeleton staff that stayed on, organizing storage rooms and helping with painting and repairs. There were also odd jobs. He said he moved furniture in and out of apartments in Ossining that the Trump Organization rented for foreign workers on temporary visas who would fly in for the summer season.Despite his decade of service and full-time work year-round, Juarez said he was not offered retirement, vacation or health insurance packages that other employees received. Every paycheck, taxes for Social Security and Medicare would be withheld — benefits he will never receive.Over his 10 years at the club, he earned an average of $31,600 per year and paid an average of $5,600 of that in federal and state income taxes, as well as Social Security and Medicare taxes, according to W-2 forms from the Trump Organization reviewed by The Post.But those tax documents do not tell the whole story, he said.Whenever Juarez clocked in and out at the fingerprint scanner, he kept a scrap of paper in his wallet to write down his hours as a way to double-check the computer.“Every check, they were always short on the hours,” he said. “Always missing two hours, or four hours.”He said he didn’t save the scraps of paper.Last spring, Juarez quit to accept a new job, fearful that Trump would eventually fire all the employees with false papers.In his time at the club, he enjoyed meeting many of the members, he said, and has some fond memories of the Trump family. But the working conditions weren’t fair, he said, and he thought he knew why.“They treated us that way” because they were undocumented, he said. “They thought, ‘Oh, they’re not going to do anything about it.’ ”
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr stumbled at repeated questions during a Senate hearing Wednesday as to whether President Donald Trump or anyone in the White House directed him to investigate certain individuals.During a heated line of questioning from Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Barr could not directly answer if he had been pointed to investigate anyone, whether that came in the form of suggestions or nudging from White House officials."Has the president or anyone at the White House asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?" Harris asked Barr.Barr initially struggled to understand the question and asked Harris to repeat it. "It seems you'd remember something like that and be able to tell us," she said.But Barr could not give Harris a definitive answer, instead acting confused at the concept of suggesting an investigation versus ordering one outright."I'm trying to grapple with the word 'suggest,'" he said. "I mean there have been discussions of matters out there that they've not asked me to open an investigation."Harris pressed further, questioning whether starting an investigation had been "inferred" by anyone at the White House, to which Barr said he does not know.Barr spent the better part of Wednesday taking questions from Republicans and Democrats on the powerful Senate panel. The hearing focused on the conclusion of the special counsel investigation headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.Barr is facing increased scrutiny over his handling of the investigation's final report, which included a brief summary letter followed by a partially redacted 400-plus page report from Mueller and his team.
In 1973, when Donald J. Trump’s real estate firm faced a potentially existential threat from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s accusations of discriminatory practices, his lawyer, Roy Cohn, filed a countersuit against the government, accusing the agency of defamation.The gambit, announced at a news conference, helped Mr. Trump, then 27, slow down the HUD legal action, buy time and eventually claim a victory when, two years later, he signed a consent agreement with no admission of guilt.The president has used that approach ever since, suing governments, banks, former employees and former business partners — even when there appeared to be no grounds — if he thought it would give him some tactical advantage.Now, as the Democrat-controlled House tries to pry open the financial records of Mr. Trump and his businesses, lawmakers are finding themselves up against the same familiar tactics, along with a bevy of other actions from the Trump administration meant to halt their work. They are struggling to figure out how to respond to a president who refuses to recognize the norms of his office — or, they argue, the institutional authority of a coequal branch of government.On Monday, Mr. Trump, three of his adult children and his company filed suit against two financial institutions subpoenaed by House Democrats seeking the president’s records. The move was meant to stop Deutsche Bank and Capital One from turning over those records, which Mr. Trump’s family and advisers say was an overly broad request.Timothy L. O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald,” who was sued by Mr. Trump years ago for his characterization of the real estate developer’s personal wealth, said that the countersuit in 1973 taught Mr. Trump a lesson he did not forget.“It’s the moment in which Roy Cohn teaches him that you can throw sand in the gears of any kind of scrutiny or enforcement action if you’re willing to hit back hard in the courts and make any kind of wild claims about the people coming after you,” Mr. O’Brien said.In the suit filed this week, Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused House Democrats of making a number of statements about investigating him, some of which were either taken out of context or misattributed. They accused the lawmakers of targeting a “private citizen,” despite the fact he is president. And they said the documents sought included some for accounts linked to underage relatives of Mr. Trump’s, which they said could serve no relevant purpose.The lawyers also said that the subpoenas serve no legislative function, and are merely political tools to “harass” the president.Mr. Trump’s entire legal team and family were on board with the suit, as well as with one the Trumps filed a week earlier to keep the president’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, from responding to congressional subpoenas, according to people familiar with the strategy. No one took convincing.“We’re not going to sit idly by with congressional presidential harassment and overreach,” said Jay Sekulow, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers. “The requests for information have raised serious constitutional issues that don’t just impact this president, but future presidents. We’re not allowing a congressional free-for-all.”Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said that there was precedent for people who believe congressional subpoenas may be overly intrusive seeking help from the courts.“It’s a long shot on the merits, but it’s not frivolous,” Mr. Vladeck said of the suit.The congressional committees are only the latest targets Mr. Trump has sued, countersued or threatened to sue. They include former and current friends, like the casino magnate Steve Wynn; media figures and news outlets; the National Football League; and former employees of his campaign or the White House.A running tally from USA Today found that Mr. Trump has been connected to more than 4,000 lawsuits over three decades.Like others targeted in Trump lawsuits past, the latest legal offensive has left Democrats scrambling to calibrate a public relations and legal response. Even if the lawsuits are unlikely to succeed in court, they believe, they may still succeed in the meantime in discouraging the cooperation of congressional witnesses and strengthening the president’s resistance.But the challenge to Democrats is greater, in part, because of Mr. Trump’s apparent disregard for the precedent and procedures that typically govern one branch of government’s oversight of another.Presidents from both parties have done their best to defy and limit Congress’s access to executive branch information in recent decades, but ultimately they have played by a set of unwritten rules that after leverage like subpoenas, budget appropriations and the possibility of public shaming have been deployed, the two sides meet somewhere in the middle.Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the House oversight panel during Barack Obama’s presidency, said Mr. Trump’s actions reflected an understanding that congressional subpoenas have been losing power for years.“Your subpoena is only as good as your ability to enforce it,” Mr. Chaffetz said, “and the reality is the only way to enforce a subpoena is through the Department of Justice, so good luck with that.”At least so far, Mr. Trump has chosen not to compromise with his Democratic investigators.“He doesn’t care about any of that stuff,” Mr. O’Brien said. His Democratic critics, Mr. O’Brien said, “have no leverage over his conscience.”Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that the latest lawsuit targeting her committee’s subpoena only highlighted questions about what in his financial history the president was so determined to hide from public view. Democrats, she said, would fight him “tooth and nail.”“He may file the lawsuit,” Ms. Waters said, “but that is not the end of this game.”Democrats are contemplating a range of responses. They could go to court themselves to try to seek orders enforcing the subpoenas. They could hold administration officials or other witnesses in contempt of Congress. Or they could initiative impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump or other officials.They appear determined to continue their financial investigations, as well. The House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels behind the subpoenas, has hired Patrick Fallon, the former head of the F.B.I.’s financial crimes unit, to aid the effort, according to a committee official who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.“At the end of the day, Congress’s remedies here are legislation and impeachment,” Mr. Vladeck said.But each has limitations, and even if Democrats are successful in ultimately getting ahold of the evidence and testimony they seek, Mr. Trump’s actions could slow their investigations. Mr. Vladeck said the delay would depend on the rulings of the judge overseeing the case, but he noted that if it goes through an appeals process, that could lead to significant delays.“If you really think about it, I was being sued for doing my job,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, whose subpoena of Mazars USA prompted the lawsuit last week.“America needs to pay close attention when the American people have sent to Washington — a Democratic Congress to act as a check on the president and to make him accountable — and then he does things to block us from getting information,” Mr. Cummings said.Republicans in Congress have presented Democrats with their own obstacles. In addition from casting Democrats as politically craven and illegitimate, for example, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the oversight panel, has written to the subjects of multiple Democratic document requests to urge them not to comply.Finding such allies was one of the lessons that Mr. Trump learned from Mr. Cohn.Mr. O’Brien, the biographer, recalled that Mr. Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was the focus of congressional and state hearings over accusations that he profiteered off publicly funded subsidies. But Fred Trump did not fight the government and accepted being shut out of subsidy programs, Mr. O’Brien said.“Then, the government comes after the Trump Organization in 1973 alleging discrimination — most people of Fred’s ilk would have said, ‘Pay your fine and move on,’” Mr. O’Brien said.“Donald, I think with Roy baiting him,” chose another path, he said.
LOS ANGELES — On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a "central database," an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News."n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children."In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could.The gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration's "zero tolerance" policy. Officials had to review all the relevant records manually, a process that continues.Nearly a year later, as many as 55 children separated last year under zero tolerance are still in Health and Human Services (HHS) custody at shelters around the country. The shortage of data has also complicated efforts to find many other children, potentially thousands, separated prior to zero tolerance. The administration's lawyers have said in court filings that reunification could take years.'WE MAY NOT HAVE SOME OF IT'On June 20, 2018, President Donald Trump ended his separation policy by executive order amidst immense public pressure. Three days later, the Department of Homeland Security issued a fact sheet proclaiming the "United States government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families."The document said that DHS and HHS, the agency that cares for undocumented children when they are separated from their parents, "have a process established to ensure that family members know the location of their children," with "a central database which HHS and DHS can access and update."But at the time, there was no database with information for both parents and children. Some of the necessary information was missing altogether. Behind the scenes, officials began exchanging emails, provided to NBC News by the House Judiciary Committee, that revealed how unprepared the agencies were to reunite families.On the afternoon of June 23, Thomas Fitzgerald, a data analyst at HHS, e-mailed Matthew Albence, then the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's enforcement and removal operations and now the acting head of ICE. ICE was and remains the agency responsible for detaining, releasing or deporting separated parents.Fitzgerald asked for "alien numbers" of separated parents to be filled into a spreadsheet of 2,219 children, along with whether or not the parent was already deported, among other information. Alien numbers are assigned to every migrant apprehended by Border Patrol and are how the government tracks them.lbence replied several hours later. The first line of his email asks, "[A]re you saying you don't have the alien number for any of the parents?""[T]he type and volume of what you are requesting," Albence said, "is not something that we are going to be able to complete in a rapid fashion, and in fact, we may not have some of it."Fitzgerald wrote back to Albence, confirming HHS did not have a way to connect the thousands of children to their parents. He said he had information for a handful of parents, "about 60."The emails confirm a finding by the DHS Office of Inspector General last September. In a report on family separations, the IG said that conversations with ICE employees indicated there was "no evidence" of a centralized database "containing location information for separated parents and minors."A former administration official told NBC News that there was a central database, "but the database did not contain enough information to successfully reunite parents and kids. …The information sharing from DHS provided initially was not enough to be able to quickly reunite parents and kids."Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other government officials repeatedly claimed that the Trump administration was keeping track of separations. In a June 19, 2018, press conference at the White House, Nielsen insisted all separated children were being tracked."It is not that I don't know where they are," said Nielsen. "I'm saying that the vast majority of children are held by Health and Human Services."Albence did not respond to a request for comment. Fitzgerald referred questions to DHS. DHS said that DHS and HHS took the information about parents entered on spreadsheets and added it to a SharePoint site already populated by HHS with information about unaccompanied children.HHS referred NBC News to a June 26, 2018 quote from Secretary Alex Azar: "There is no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located. I've sat on the ORR portal with just basic keystrokes, within seconds could find any child in our care for any parent."In a statement, HHS spokesperson Evelyn Stauffer said, "HHS knows where each and every unaccompanied child in HHS custody is at any given time, and that was true during the summer of 2018. What Secretary Azar said was true and is still true today."'THEY DIDN'T COMMUNICATE'Three days after the emails between Fitzgerald and Albence, Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California ordered the Trump administration to reunite families within 30 days.Once that deadline passed with hundreds of families still waiting in limbo, Sabraw expressed his frustration with the government agencies responsible for reunifying families."Each had its own boss," Sabraw said in his San Diego courtroom. "And they didn't communicate, so what was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn't know where the children were, and the children didn't know where the parents were. And the government didn't know, either."Lee Gelernt, lead lawyer for the ACLU in the separations case, said Wednesday, "It is now clear beyond doubt that the government never had a proper tracking system but unfortunately they pretended in the beginning that they did. It is likely there's still much more for the public to learn about how bad things really were."
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.The 90-story Manhattan building, part of the real estate empire of Donald Trump, had housed diplomats and foreign officials before the property developer became president. But now that he is in the White House, such transactions must pass muster with federal lawmakers, some legal experts say. The emoluments clause bans U.S. officials from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments without congressional consent.The rental transactions, dating from the early months of Trump’s presidency and first revealed by Reuters, could add to mounting scrutiny of his business dealings with foreign governments, which are now the subject of multiple lawsuits.Congressional staffers confirmed to Reuters that the Trump World Tower lease requests were never submitted to Congress. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said his committee has been “stonewalled” in its efforts to obtain detailed information about foreign government payments to Trump’s businesses.“This new information raises serious questions about the President and his businesses’ potential receipt of payments from foreign governments,” Cummings said in a statement to Reuters. “The American public deserves full transparency.”A State Department spokesperson referred Reuters to the Justice Department because the subject involved “matters related to ongoing litigation.” The Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred a request for comment to the State Department and the Trump Organization, which did not comment.The 1982 Foreign Missions Act requires foreign governments to get State Department clearance for any purchase, lease, sale, or other use of a property in the United States. Through the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters obtained diplomatic notes sent to the agency under this requirement from early 2015 until late 2017.The records show that in the eight months following Trump’s January 20, 2017 inauguration, foreign governments sent 13 notes to the State Department seeking permission to rent or renew leases in Trump World Tower. That is more solicitations from foreign governments for new or renewed leases in that building than in the previous two years combined.The governments of Iraq, Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Thailand and the European Union got the green light to rent a combined eight units in Trump World Tower and followed through with leases, according to other documents viewed by Reuters and people familiar with the leases. Five of those governments - Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and the European Union - had also sought to rent units there in 2015 and 2016, State Department records showed.Reuters could not confirm whether the State Department signed off on two other lease requests from Algeria and South Korea and three additional requests from Kuwait.“Letting this go without Congress knowing about it condones the creation of a second, opaque track of foreign policy,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor at Yale Law School and former legal adviser at the State Department. “What it might lead to is a group of countries enriching the people in power on the mistaken belief that it’s going to improve their access.”The 18-year-old luxury skyscraper is located next to the United Nations headquarters near the East River, and is not to be confused with Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue landmark where Trump maintains a residence. Trump World Tower is controlled by a limited partnership owned by Trump and managed by the Trump Corporation, a Trump-owned company that draws its income from fees paid by unit owners, according to the building’s financial records.When privately-owned units are leased, their owners typically use the rental income to cover those common charges, according to unit owners and real estate experts interviewed by Reuters. The State Department records did not make clear who owned the units in question.The revenue Trump draws from foreign government business at his properties, such as the recently opened Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., has sparked lawsuits by U.S. lawmakers and the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, alleging this income violates the emoluments clause.Trump’s attorneys have argued in court that the Constitution only requires him to seek congressional approval for foreign emoluments offered in connection with his role as president. Trump has retained ownership of his global business interests while president, but handed off day-to-day control to his oldest sons and a longtime company executive.On Tuesday, a U.S. federal judge denied Trump’s motion to dismiss one of the emoluments lawsuits against him, saying Trump’s narrow definition of emoluments was “unpersuasive and inconsistent”. Courts may ultimately decide whether some of Trump’s business dealings violate the Constitution.Issuing such judgments is not the job of the State Department office in charge of reviewing foreign government property requests, according to Patrick Kennedy, who from 2007 to 2017 was the top State Department official in charge of the internal administration of the agency. He said that office’s mandate is to screen for national security and diplomatic concerns, not for potential emolument violations.If the State Department began obstructing requests from foreign governments to lease units in Trump-affiliated properties, he said, it could prompt them to retaliate against U.S. diplomats seeking housing in their territories.“The State Department’s interest in saying ‘no’ is probably zero if there’s no security threat and we have good reciprocal relations with the countries,” Kennedy told Reuters.‘CONVENIENT AND COMFORTABLE’According to the State Department records obtained by Reuters, which covered the period from January 2015 through September 2017, Trump World Tower was the only Trump-affiliated building in the United States where foreign governments sought to lease or buy units.In 2017, the median monthly asking rent for units in Trump World Tower was $8,500, according to real estate website StreetEasy. That was more than 2.5 times the median in the surrounding neighborhood, known as Turtle Bay.Some of the foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, had previously purchased property in the building, where the average unit currently sells for nearly $7 million, according to StreetEasy.Mohammad Alkadi, a spokesman for the Saudi Mission to the United Nations, said Trump World Tower’s prime location near U.N. headquarters was the kingdom’s motivation to lease there.“The governments pay for these units in the building not to get favors from Trump or anything, but just because it’s very convenient and comfortable for us,” Alkadi said. He said he moved into his own unit in Trump World Tower at the end of 2017.The Trump administration has closely aligned itself with Saudi Arabia on a host of issues, despite a CIA assessment that the country’s crown prince ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and U.S. congressional opposition to American involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which has driven millions of Yemenis to the brink of starvation.Slovakia, another Trump World Tower renter, said in a statement that its lease was “fully in line with U.S. legislation and our internal guidelines.” Slovakia’s prime minister is scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on May 3 to discuss security cooperation and other issues.The Malaysian mission to the United Nations said it was not currently renting a unit in Trump World Tower when reached by phone in April. It declined to comment on the unit it rented in 2017. That lease was confirmed to Reuters by a person familiar with the transaction.All the other governments that sought to rent units after Trump’s inauguration declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.In 2017, the president earned more than $15 million in management and related fees through the properties managed by the Trump Corporation, according to the president’s financial disclosure. The document did not reveal how much of that sum came from Trump World Tower.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The California Legislature is trying again to force presidential candidates to publicly disclose their tax returns, hoping a new Democratic governor known for his clashes with President Donald Trump won’t block them this time.The state Senate voted 27-10 on Thursday to require anyone appearing on the state’s presidential primary ballot to publicly release five years’ worth of income tax returns. The proposal is in response to Trump, who bucked 40 years of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns prior to his election in 2016.California’s presidential primary is scheduled for March 3. If the bill becomes law, Trump could not appear on the state’s primary ballot without filing his tax returns with the California secretary of state.“We believe that President Trump, if he truly doesn’t have anything to hide, should step up and release his tax returns,” said Sen. Mike McGuire, a Democrat from Healdsburg and the co-author of the bill along with Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat.The Legislature passed a nearly identical bill in 2017, only to have it vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown, telling lawmakers he was concerned the law was unconstitutional. Brown, a Democrat, refused to release his tax returns while in office.He left office in January and was replaced by Gavin Newsom, who has released his tax returns and embraced his role as a national “resistance” leader to Trump and his policies.Newsom’s office didn’t say whether he’d sign it. If the bill reaches his desk, “it would be evaluated on its own merits,” spokesman Brian Ferguson said.McGuire said he has had “initial discussions” with the Newsom administration about the proposal.“I never want to put words into his mouth, but here’s what I’ll say: Gov. Newsom has led by example,” by releasing his own tax returns, McGuire said.The bill would also apply to the more than a dozen candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. But many of them have already released their tax returns. They include California Sen. Kamala Harris and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who released his tax returns last month after refusing to do so in 2016.Candidates would have to submit tax returns to the secretary of state’s office, which would work with the candidates to redact some information before posting the returns online.All 10 Republicans in the state Senate voted against the bill, arguing it is unconstitutional.“I get that playing the resistance card may be good politics for the majority party, but I would submit that it’s bad policy for Californians,” Sen. Brian Jones said.McGuire said the office of the legislative counsel has some concerns about the constitutionality of the bill, but he noted the chief ethics lawyers for former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama say the bill is constitutional.“We can all debate on the floor about the constitutionality of this bill,” McGuire said before the vote. “But we also have to look at what makes our democracy strong. The foundation of any successful government is transparency.”
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin briefly discussed the Mueller report in an hour-long phone call on Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said later in the day. But she suddenly clammed up when asked whether they had discussed the thing that launched the whole Mueller probe: Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.And now Trump seems to have clarified that they did not:https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1124381813898715136Welker: Did you tell him not to meddle in the next election?Trump: "Excuse me. I'm talking. I'm answering this question. You are very rude."Welker: Did you tell him not to meddle in the next election?Trump: "We didn't discuss that, really, we didn't discuss it."Which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trump has made clear this isn’t his favorite topic. Reporting has long indicated that he does what he can to avoid it. The New York Times reported last week that then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was instructed not to bring it up in Trump’s presence, even as she was tasked with ensuring the security of the 2020 election. Similarly, officials told The Washington Post in late 2017 that mentions of Russian interference take meetings with Trump “off the rails.” This would seem a somewhat tired story.But consider this: The Mueller report just laid out the Russian interference effort in detail, yet to this date Trump’s most recent comments have seeded doubt about just how serious — or even real — that interference was. Trump’s first impulse is to downplay its impact, and he’ll often even suggest it might not have happened.Let’s run through his most recent substantive comments on the topic.In July, Trump held his news conference with Putin in Helsinki, where he was asked about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. He said of Putin: “He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason it would be.” (Trump later claimed he meant to say “wouldn’t,” rather than “would.”)In October, Trump submitted to an interview with “60 Minutes.” Interviewer Lesley Stahl brought up Russian interference, and Trump immediately reverted to his other-countries-do-it-too strategy. He even said China was “a bigger problem”:STAHL: Do you believe that the Russians interfered in the 2016 campaign election? Our election-TRUMP: They -- they meddled. But I think China meddled too.STAHL: But why do you --TRUMP: And I think other countries --STAHL: -- say China meddled too?TRUMP: And you wanna know something?STAHL: Why do you say Chi -- why don’t you just say --TRUMP: Well, let me ask you --STAHL: -- the Russians meddled?TRUMP: Because I think China meddled also. And I think, frankly, China --STAHL: This is amazing.TRUMP: -- is a bigger problem.STAHL: You are diverting the whole Russia thing.TRUMP: I’m not doing anything.STAHL: You are, you are.TRUMP: I’m saying Russia, but I’m also saying China.Then, in March, Trump discussed this with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, and he suggested the impact of the Russian interference was basically nil. Trump also slipped in a reference to “whether they tried” to interfere — as if it was in doubt.“I think it’s very important to know that Russia or anybody else had no impact on votes; that is very important for people to know,” Trump said. He added: “So whether they tried, and how hard they tried, and President Obama knew, the bottom line is, they had a zero impact on the election of 2016.”(Side note: There is no way of knowing how much impact Russian interference had, but the idea that it didn’t affect one vote is difficult to swallow, given that the interference produced the hacked Clinton campaign emails that Trump so gleefully focused his messaging on. Philip Bump has the details here.)Aside from these comments, Trump has rarely been asked to account for actual Russian interference. The few times he has, this is what he’s produced: Downplay it and even cast doubt upon the effort.The release of the Mueller report would seem to have been an ideal time to re-up this issue with Putin, given that Mueller once and for all characterized the scope of the Russian interference effort. Mueller wrote that, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” He detailed how Russia’s Facebook efforts reached more than 100 million people. He wrote about how Russia organized pro-Trump rallies.None of that was apparently worth Trump’s time when he had a chance to talk to the man who U.S. intelligence says was behind it all.
For a time, President Trump was reluctant to select William P. Barr as his attorney general. The veteran Justice Department official from the George H.W. Bush administration was not a longtime Trump loyalist, and the president wondered whether one of his own political allies might serve better as a shield, people familiar with the matter said.But Trump was ultimately persuaded — in part because his lawyers and advisers told him Barr was a strong supporter of presidential power and unafraid of taking on critics. This week, the president has been thrilled with his choice, particularly after Barr sparred so vigorously with Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that some were left wondering whether he viewed himself as the president’s defense attorney, according to people familiar with the matter, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.In Barr’s first three months in the job, his actions have served to protect Trump, though his motive is up for debate. Barr’s defenders note that the attorney general has long advocated strengthening the power of the executive branch, and the attorney general has told other lawyers that he is more interested in protecting the presidency than the man in the job.But critics say that Barr has emerged as the partisan champion Trump always wanted — one willing to defend the president’s most questionable conduct, put a Trumpian spin on the results of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and mislead Congress along the way.“He has failed the men and women of the Department of Justice by placing the needs of the president over the fair administration of justice,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said at a congressional hearing Thursday that Barr skipped after a dispute over the terms of his appearance.Barr’s defenders say he is unbothered by the criticism.“He is not at all surprised at the partisan reception he received,” said Richard Cullen, an attorney and close friend of Barr’s who spoke with Barr after his Senate testimony. “He is going to follow what he believes is the law, politics be damned.” Cullen represents Vice President Pence.Political fires have raged around Barr, who was also attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, from even before his confirmation along largely partisan lines. But he has come under sustained attack this week after The Washington Post reported that Mueller had sent a memo to Barr complaining about how the attorney general had described the results of the special counsel investigation in a letter to Congress.In his letter to Congress after Mueller ended his inquiry, Barr wrote that Mueller had not found that Trump or his associates coordinated with Russia to influence the election, and that the special counsel would not reach a decision on whether the president obstructed justice. Mueller countered in his own letter that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel’s work.The revelation of Mueller’s March letter — which Barr derided as “a bit snitty” — sparked calls from some Democrats for Barr to resign. They also accused the attorney general of lying to Congress for not revealing Mueller’s concerns during a congressional hearing in April. Barr was asked during that hearing whether he knew to what media reports were referring when they revealed frustration among some on Mueller’s team about the limited information Barr had revealed to Congress about their work.“He lied to Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said during a news conference Thursday. “The attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That’s a crime.”Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said Pelosi’s comment was “reckless, irresponsible, and false.”Trump, who spent a few hours at most with Barr before picking him as attorney general, told people that he was pleased with Barr’s pugnacious performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, though one Trump ally who regularly speaks with the president said his joy was “shortsighted” because Barr lost credibility with some lawmakers who could be useful later.On Wednesday night, Trump tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal editorial lauding Barr’s testimony and bearing the headline, “A Real Attorney General” — a phrase which, to Trump, means “someone who is defending him at all costs,” one former White House official said. Trump and senior White House officials have urged surrogates to go on TV and praise Barr — and even arranged a call Wednesday afternoon to disseminate supportive talking points.People familiar with the matter said that in the call, deputy White House press secretary Steven Groves told them to say of Barr that “nobody really laid a glove on him” and that Barr had “dismembered arguments about obstruction of justice.”Before he was nominated, Barr wrote a detailed memo — which he sent to the Justice Department, as well as to lawyers working for the White House and Trump — blasting Mueller’s apparent theory of how Trump could have interfered with justice as “fatally misconceived.” In Barr’s view, the president should not be investigated for using his powers to affect an investigation — meaning that the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director would be out of reach for federal prosecutors.Democrats alleged that the memo was essentially a tip at the time about how he might curtail Mueller’s not-yet-completed probe. On Wednesday, Barr held to his view, repeatedly insisting that Trump’s asking his White House counsel to have Mueller removed was not a prosecutable obstruction case because Trump had a legal right to end Mueller’s investigation.Mueller declined to conclude whether his team believed there was a prosecutable case against Trump for obstructing justice. His report, which laid out detailed accounts of possible obstructive conduct he investigated, asserted that he could not say even privately whether the president committed a crime because of Justice Department guidance that says a sitting president cannot be indicted. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein reviewed the case themselves and determined that a charge could not be brought.A White House official said that Barr had “set the narrative” in a way that was positive for the White House and that the swirling debate about the special counsel has just been “noise.”David Rivkin, a conservative lawyer who has worked with Barr, said he believed Barr was more interested in defending the executive branch of government than the president himself. Barr was no early Trump supporter; he was a major political contributor to Jeb Bush, one of the president’s primary opponents.“His behavior is sufficiently explained by his well-known and publicly articulated views to constitutional principles,” Rivkin said.Barr also turned the tables on Mueller — expressing confusion about how the special counsel came to some decisions and confirming that he would examine, as many Republicans want, the origins of the FBI probe that the special counsel eventually took over.Trump campaign advisers, who said they had raised more than $1 million after the Mueller report was released, said the attorney general’s comments have generally been helpful — especially his earlier assertion that there was “spying” during the 2016 presidential race.At the same time, Barr sought to extricate the Justice Department from the political battles of Mueller’s investigation, declaring at one point, “We are out of it.” The comment resonated with some Barr supporters who are eager to see more stability in the Justice Department.“It seems to me that the attorney general’s handling of the report and the issues it raised now has a punctuation point, and there are many other important matters to the American people on his plate that merit attention,” said George Terwilliger, a former deputy attorney general and a friend of Barr’s.But more battles lie ahead. Last month, White House lawyer Emmet Flood sent Barr a letter declaring that Trump’s decision not to invoke executive privilege to block any portions of the Mueller report should not be over-interpreted. The president, Flood wrote, might still seek to curtail his advisers’ cooperation with Congress over the report or prevent the release of underlying investigative materials.That posture will almost certainly spark a battle between Congress and the White House — with Barr at the center of the fight.
The mother of Otto Warmbier on Friday criticized the Trump administration’s diplomatic outreach to North Korea as a “charade” and blasted dictator Kim Jong Un’s regime as “absolute evil” in the family’s first public comments on the stalled negotiations.During remarks in Washington, Cindy Warmbier, whose son died in 2017 just days after he was released, in a coma, from 17 months in captivity in North Korea, also compared Kim to Adolf Hitler, saying that the only difference is that Kim brutalizes “all of his people.”“There’s a charade going on right now. It’s called diplomacy,” Warmbier said during a Hudson Institute seminar. Of Kim, she added: “How can you have diplomacy with someone who never tells the truth? I’m all for it, but I’m very skeptical. He lies, he lies, he lies — all for himself and his regime.”Her remarks came at a sensitive moment, as there has been little communication between Washington and Pyongyang since the collapse of a leaders’ nuclear summit in Hanoi in late February, where President Trump and Kim walked away after failing to reach an agreement on denuclearization.At a news conference in Hanoi, Trump told reporters that he had raised the issue of Otto Warmbier’s death at the summit and believed Kim’s denial that he was unaware of the circumstances of his mistreatment. That prompted Cindy Warmbier and her husband, Fred, to issue a statement holding Kim accountable and saying that “no excuse or lavish praise can change that,” an implicit rebuke of the president.But the Warmbiers, who won a $500 million judgment against North Korea in a federal court for the abuse of their son, had carefully refrained from casting judgment on the Trump administration’s engagement with the country, which associates described as a good-faith effort to give the talks a chance to succeed.On Friday, Cindy Warmbier said that Kim is “not making the right decisions,” and she warned that the United States and other nations should not ease up on economic sanctions.“Unless we keep the pressure on North Korea, they are not going to change, and I am very afraid they are going to let up on this pressure,” she said.During a subsequent panel at the Hudson Institute, Tom Rose, a senior adviser to Vice President Pence, defended the administration’s approach to North Korea, asserting that Trump was “emphatic and direct” with Kim on human rights at both of their summits.Rose called suggestions that the Trump administration was putting human rights on the back burner “inaccurate and unfair,” noting that Pence met with North Korean defectors this week.“There will never be peace until these issues are resolved,” Rose said. “President Trump is committed to that. Vice President Pence is committed to that.” To the Warmbiers, he added: “Never let us off the hook. Keep the pressure on — not just on the North Korean regime but keep the pressure on us to ensure we stay on the right and true path.”White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.Trump aides said the talks in Hanoi collapsed after Pyongyang demanded the broad lifting of economic sanctions in exchange for the partial closing of its main nuclear processing facility. Kim aides countered that the United States had demanded that the North fully relinquish its nuclear and ballistic missile arsenals before any sanctions are rolled back.Michael Schiffer, a Democratic aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during the Hudson event that Congress is committed to ensuring that human rights are addressed in any potential peace agreement with North Korea.“If we can’t characterize the regime in Pyongyang as evil, then the word ‘evil’ has no meaning anymore,” he said.Since the summit, Trump has praised Otto Warmbier on Twitter and in speeches, but it is not known whether the administration has had any direct communication with the family. Trump had highlighted Otto Warmbier’s case during his State of the Union address last year and spoke with the family ahead of his first summit with Kim in Singapore in June.At times emotional, Cindy Warmbier appeared to refer to reports last month that Pyongyang had presented the United States with a $2 million bill for Otto’s medical care, which Trump said was never paid.“Had I known that North Korea wanted money for Otto, I would have gladly given them money from day one,” she said. “They want everything they can get from anyone. They have no respect for human beings.”
Trump on Sunday blamed the result of the Kentucky Derby on “political correctness,” arguing that the horse that crossed the wire first should not have been disqualified.“The Kentuky Derby decision was not a good one,” Trump said in a tweet, misspelling the word “Kentucky.” “It was a rough and tumble race on a wet and sloppy track, actually, a beautiful thing to watch. Only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn occur. The best horse did NOT win the Kentucky Derby - not even close!”He corrected the spelling in a later tweet.Maximum Security appeared to win Saturday’s race by 1¾ lengths. But then two jockeys objected, and after stewards reviewed video of the race, they disqualified the apparent winner in a unanimous ruling, handing the victory to Country House, a 65-1 shot.The review focused on a moment when Maximum Security barged to his right and impeded the paths of two other horses at the top of the back stretch. That, in turn, foiled Country House, according to Flavien Prat, the horse’s 26-year-old jockey.The stewards at the track agreed, ruling that it was enough of an infraction to demote Maximum Security, who had previously been undefeated, from first to 17th place.Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani also weighed in on the Derby on Sunday afternoon, tweeting that Maximum Security “ran an exceptional race.”“Usually a horse that is challenged several times during a race falls behind,” Giuliani said. “This horse stood up to all challengers and was stronger at the end. He won it on the track for sure.”Sunday’s race marked the second disqualification of an apparent winner in Kentucky Derby history and the first time an apparent winner was disqualified because of an infraction.In 1968, Dancer’s Image was declared the winner, only for the result to be overturned after a post-race drug test.
The Red Sox wrap up a road trip in Baltimore this week, but won’t all be heading back to Boston together. The team is running two separate charter flights, one going home on Wednesday, after the final game of the series, and one on Thursday, an off-day. The second is to accommodate the players, coaches, and executives who will be attending a White House ceremony for the defending champs; the first is for all those who are pointedly skipping the meeting with President Trump. It remains to be seen which flight will be fuller.Manager Alex Cora, after months of high-profile indecision on whether to avoid the ceremony as a protest of the Trump administration’s shameful handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in his native Puerto Rico, or to attend the ceremony and use it as a platform, made up his mind a few days ago. In a statement sent to El Nuevo Dia, Cora seemed to imply that skipping the trip to the White House is using his platform to draw attention to the fact that the island is still waiting on relief. He’s probably right that this will get more attention than any statement he would’ve made in the Rose Garden.“Even though the United States Government has helped, there’s still a long road ahead and that is OUR reality. I’ve used my voice on many occasions so that Puerto Ricans are not forgotten and my absence (from the White House) is no different. As such, at this moment, I don’t feel comfortable celebrating in the White House.”He noted that in Puerto Rico “some people still lack basic necessities, others remain without electricity and many homes and schools are in pretty bad shape almost a year and a half after Hurricane Maria struck.”Cora will have company. Shortstop Xander Bogaerts announced on Sunday that “I won’t be going,” declining to give details. David Price, Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr., Rafael Devers, Hector Velazquez, and Christian Vazquez had previously announced that they would not attend Thursday’s ceremony. While most have declined to talk about it, it’s safe to assume their reasons are similar to the ones that led so many Warriors and Eagles players to speak up against a ceremony that Trump disinvited the entire teams, and which led a number of notable Capitals players to skip last month’s visit.According to the Boston Globe, Rick Porcello, J.D. Martinez, Chris Sale, Mitch Moreland, Steve Pearce, Brock Holt, Matt Barnes, and Brandon Workman have said they will visit the White House, while a number of players remain undecided.Team president and CEO Sam Kennedy, who will be attending along with the rest of the owners, said the team stands behind Cora and any players who decline to attend.“We fully support Alex and respect his decision,” said Kennedy via text. “He and I have discussed this issue frequently since last November, and I know it was a hard decision for him. I am grateful to (principal owner) John (Henry) and (chairman) Tom (Werner) for creating a culture where we discuss these issues openly, and encourage individual decision-making. I appreciate Alex for talking openly with our team and supporting those who are looking forward to being honored on Thursday.”
On Monday, Michael Cohen will complete his transition from presidential fixer to prison inmate.Cohen, the former personal attorney to President Donald Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and national deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, reports Monday to a federal prison in Otisville, New York, where he will begin serving a three-year sentence."I hope that when I rejoin my family and friends that the country will be in a place without xenophobia, injustice and lies at the helm of our country," Cohen told a throng of reporters gathered outside his apartment in Manhattan on Monday morning, before ducking into a black Escalade SUV."There still remains much to be told," he added. "And I look forward to the day that I can share the truth."Although Otisville has been named one of "America's 10 cushiest prisons," his stay there is likely to be an abrupt downgrade in lifestyle for an attorney accustomed to regular power breakfasts at the Upper East Side's Loews Regency hotel, with its $26 egg white frittatas. But Cohen has had some time to prepare.He was initially set to begin his sentence March 6, but his attorneys argued successfully for his prison date to be pushed back by two months. Cohen has used those months -- and the ones since he pleaded guilty in August 2018 to tax evasion, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to hush money payments he made or orchestrated on behalf of Trump -- to turn on his former boss.After admitting in federal court in Manhattan that "in coordination and at the direction of" Trump -- thinly disguised as "Individual-1" in court documents -- Cohen made or directed payments to silence women who claimed affairs with then-presidential candidate, Cohen pleaded guilty to an additional charge. This time, he admitted to having made false statements to Congress, lying about the duration of talks concerning a prospective Trump Tower in Moscow "out of loyalty" to Trump.During those late 2018 months, he met multiple times with federal prosecutors from both the Manhattan US Attorney's office and the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as investigators from the New York attorney general's office and others.That December, Trump railed against his former attorney on Twitter, calling him a "rat," and by early the following year, Cohen took his campaign against Trump to Capitol Hill.Cohen testified publicly before the House Oversight Committee in February, armed with evidence appearing to implicate the President: copies of checks signed by Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. that Cohen said were used to reimburse him for some of the hush money.He testified privately in three closed-door sessions with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. And he appealed to Democrats on those committees to help him again postpone his prison date, telling them in April through his attorneys that he had more potential evidence to offer.But he didn't get a second delay. Cohen and his allies in recent days have argued he is somewhat of a scapegoat, saying he has taken the fall for the President and others over the payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, while never mentioning the five counts of tax evasion to which he pleaded."Cohen is still only Trump Co person going to jail. NOT Don Jr - who signed hush money checks. Why?" Cohen adviser Lanny Davis said on Twitter on Friday.But while Cohen himself said at his sentencing that he felt it was his duty to cover up Trump's "dirty deeds," he also took responsibility for the crimes."I want to be clear," he told the court. "I blame myself for the conduct which has brought me here today, and it was my own weakness, and a blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light."
BEIJING — President Trump is, according to the Chinese Internet, a Marvel supervillain who can wipe out half the universe with a snap of his fingers. But in Trump’s case, it’s the Chinese stock market he destroyed with his threats to raise tariffs if Beijing doesn’t bend to his demands on trade.“Move my fingers, wipe out half of Chinese investors,” said one popular meme circulating on Chinese social media Monday, showing Trump as Thanos, the ultimate bad guy from the Avenger series. The apocalypse-themed “Avengers: Endgame” movie is breaking box office records in both China and the United States and is clearly influencing reactions to the latest phase of the long-running U.S.-China trade war.“Trump led to global panic with his Thanos-like presence,” said another post on Weibo, showing Trump with one real hand and one jewel-encrusted metal hand like the movie villain. Trump is credited with triggering the sharpest fall in Chinese stock markets in more than three years Monday, after threatening to increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent on Friday, and levy a new 25 percent fee on the remaining $325 billion of Chinese “untaxed” imports “shortly.’’ Trump doubled down on his threat early Monday morning Washington time. “The United States has been losing, for many years, 600 to 800 Billion Dollars a year on Trade,” he tweeted. “With China we lose 500 Billion Dollars. Sorry, we’re not going to be doing that anymore!”The Shanghai Composite Index fell 5.58 percent, and the Shenzhen Component Index tumbled 7.56 percent. The tightly controlled Chinese currency dropped to a four-month low after Trump’s surprise tweets.“Go have a look at the Chinese stock market, I smashed it,” read another popular meme on Chinese social media, this one showing Trump in normal attire and with a smug look on his face. Investors were taken by surprise after both sides had signaled that they were close to reaching a deal to end their protracted trade war. American trade negotiators were in Beijing last week for talks that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin described as “productive,” after Trump last month said they were forging an “monumental” and “epic” deal.A 100-member Chinese delegation is due in Washington on Wednesday, and Trump’s sudden combative tone sparked speculation that President Xi Jinping might call off this week’s talks.But a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Monday that the Chinese delegation was set to travel as scheduled. “The Chinese team is preparing to travel to the U.S. for the trade talks,” Geng Shuang told reporters, saying that Trump had made many similar threats before.Chinese state media did not even run stories about Trump’s tweets until after the local markets had closed and until the authorities were ready to give their reaction.“China’s position is always clear-cut and U.S. knows that,” Geng said at the Foreign Ministry’s regular press briefing, describing recent rounds as making “positive progress.” “We hope the U.S. and China will work together to reach a mutually beneficial treaty on the basis of mutual respect. This is not only in the interest of China but also the interest of the U.S., as well as the aspiration of international community,” he said.However, Geng did not specifically answer whether Liu He, the vice premier who has led the Chinese negotiating team, would travel to Washington or whether lower-level officials would go.Chinese officials have become accustomed to the American president’s “dramatic zigzags,” said Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.“China’s leaders have become more accustomed to Trump’s approach, although it’s very difficult to get used to Trump,” Shi said, adding that the American president appeared to be all about grandstanding and claiming political victories.“One motivation could be so that Trump can say to the American domestic audience that he fixed China and forced China to make major concessions,” he said, describing this as an “illusion.”The pain of the tariffs has been limited so far, given that much of the cost is passed onto American consumers, but if the trade war rumbles on, and especially if tariffs increase, this could have a sizable effect on China’s slowing economy.Tariffs of 25 percent on all Chinese exports to the United States could shave as much as two points off China’s economic growth — currently forecast to be between 6 and 6.5 percent — over the following 12 months, UBS economist Wang Tao wrote in a note to clients. Even if the United States only increased the tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, it could still knock half a percentage point off the annual growth rate, she wrote.“If tariffs are hiked this Friday and new tariffs come soon after that the biggest negative impact will likely occur in the next few months,” she wrote, suggesting the central government would embark on more infrastructure spending and issue more debt to cushion the blow.
China, if you’re listening, why don’t you get Trump’s tax returns?
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said Tuesday he would not call the investigation of Trump campaign advisers in 2016 “spying’’ — distancing himself from language used by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.“That’s not the term I would use,” Wray said in response to a question from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) during a congressional hearing about the FBI’s budget.Wray, who took over the bureau in 2017, urged lawmakers to wait for the findings from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is expected to issue a report in a month or two about the origins of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign, and the law enforcement tools that were used, including foreign intelligence surveillance court orders.The FBI director’s comments are in contrast to those made by Barr at a Senate hearing April 10, when he said “spying did occur, yes,” calling it “a big deal.”At that hearing, Barr said he wanted to explore whether any Justice Department rules were violated in the course of the investigation of people associated with the Trump campaign. “Frankly, to the extent that there were any issues at the FBI, I do not view it as a problem that’s endemic to the FBI. I think there was probably a failure among a group of leaders there in the upper echelon,” Barr said.He later said he did not mean the term “spying” in a critical way, noting he had once worked as a lawyer at the CIA.Shaheen said she was “very concerned” about Barr’s use of the term. Spying, she said, “is a very loaded word, it conjures a criminal connotation.”In his testimony Tuesday, Wray tried to make clear that while he did not use the term “spying” about the Trump investigation, he was not picking a fight with those who do.“There are lots of people who have different colloquial phrases,” said Wray. “To me the key question is making sure it’s done by the book, consistent with our lawful authorities.”Asked if he believed FBI agents spied on the Trump 2016 campaign, Wray replied: “I want to be careful in how I answer that question here, because there is an ongoing inspector general investigation. I have my own thoughts based on limited information I have seen so far.”Shaheen pressed him further, asking if he had any evidence that illegal surveillance was conducted on individuals associated with the campaign.“I don’t think I personally have any evidence of that sort,” Wray said.The attorney general has said he is concerned about possible violations of government rules regarding investigations of political activity, and will conduct his own review of the issue, in addition to the work being done by the inspector general.Wray said he is working with the attorney general in that effort.“He’s trying to get a better understanding of the circumstances at the FBI and the department,” Wray said. “He and I have been in fairly close contact about it.”