Hunter Biden: The Most Comprehensive Timeline

Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:> According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We've got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.Both James and Hunter Biden have denied to Politico that James had ever made these comments.Up until that time, Hunter Biden had been employed as a consultant to the Delaware bank MBNA, with a $100,000-a-year retainer, according to the New York Times. The bank hired him fresh out of law school and in less than two years promoted him to senior vice president. Biden also separately worked as a lobbyist until 2008, founding the firm Oldaker Biden & Belair, where he represented mostly universities and hospitals but also drug companies such as Achaogen Inc. and Pulmatrix Inc., and the music-sharing company Napster and online gambling sites.Hunter says he has never lobbied his father on any client matter. But the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest allegedly troubled the senator at one point. According to court records in a lawsuit filed by former business partner Joseph Lotito, Joe Biden wanted Hunter Biden to find a different line of work because his presidential campaign would be greatly complicated if he remained the father of a Washington lobbyist.January 5, 2007: Lotito sues James and Hunter Biden, contending that they cut him out of the purchase of Paradigm Global Advisors. Lotito’s suit claims that the firm is paying Hunter Biden an annual salary of $1.2 million. While Biden has worked for MBNA, he has never worked for a hedge fund or investment firm before.January 7, 2007: Joe Biden announces his second bid for the presidency.January 18, 2007: Hunter Biden steps down as interim chief executive of Paradigm Global Advisors, but the company announces he will remain in his position as chairman of Paradigm’s advisory board.February 21, 2007: James and Hunter Biden countersue Lotito, arguing that he lied about his professional credentials and finances. Biden’s chief of staff tells the Washington Post, “It is apparent that Mr. Lotito is only invoking Senator Biden's name to garner media attention.”July 2007: Biden’s presidential campaign pays Hunter Biden’s firm. Oldaker Biden & Belair LLP, $20,256 for legal work for his campaign. By the end of Biden’s bid, his campaign will pay Hunter’s law firm $143,000 for “legal services.”January 3, 2008: After winning less than 1 percent in the Iowa caucus, Joe Biden announces he is ending his second bid for the presidency.July 25, 2008: An outside audit of Paradigm by the firm of Briggs, Bunting & Dougherty finds a “failure to reconcile Investment Advisors reimbursement of fund expenses, failure to reconcile and review cash account on a timely basis, and failure to reconcile and review various other accounts on a timely basis.”August 23, 2008: Barack Obama announces that Joe Biden will be his running mate. The following day, Obama campaign officials “acknowledged that the connection between the Bidens and MBNA, the enormous financial services company then based in their home state of Delaware, was one of the most sensitive issues they examined while vetting the senator for a spot on the ticket.”August 27, 2008: The Washington Post reports on an unusual loophole in Hunter Biden’s refusal to lobby his father: “Sen. Barack Obama sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients of the lobbyist son of his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, records show. Obama succeeded in getting $192,000 for one of the clients, St. Xavier University in suburban Chicago.” The Post reports that other lobbyists at Biden’s firm lobbied his father.September 6, 2008: In an interview with Tom Brokaw, Joe Biden argued there was nothing inappropriate about the biggest bank in his state hiring his son: “My son graduated from Yale Law School. The starting salary in Wall Street is $140,000 a year if you want to lawyer. Options he had. He came home to work for a bank.”September 12, 2008: Hunter Biden files paperwork to end his lobbying work for all clients.September 2008: Hunter Biden founds Seneca Global Advisors, “a boutique consulting firm” that “helps small and mid-sized companies expand into markets in the U.S. and other countries.”December 2008: James and Hunter Biden and Anthony Lotito reach a settlement and drop their suits.January 20, 2009: Joe Biden is sworn in as vice president of the United States.February 2009: Paradigm gets another headache when one of its partners, Texas financier Allen Stanford, is charged by regulators with an $8 billion fraud. However, Paradigm and James and Hunter Biden are not accused of wrongdoing, and Paradigm’s attorney, Marc LoPresti, says they never met or communicated with Stanford.June 2009: Hunter Biden co-founds his second company in less than a year, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz (the stepson of John Kerry and heir to the Heinz fortune) and Devon Archer, who had been friends with Heinz at Yale.November 12, 2009: Paradigm’s run of bad luck continues when the U.S. Department of Justice determines that the Manhattan skyscraper housing the offices of Paradigm is partially owned by individuals helping the Iranian government evade sanctions. By 2017, federal prosecutors would contend that the building “served as a front for the Iranian government and as a gateway for millions of dollars to be funneled to Iran in clear violation of U.S. sanctions laws.” There is no evidence that the Bidens or Paradigm knew of their landlord’s ties.2010: After two years of difficulties and the economic recession, James and Hunter Biden begin “unwinding” the Paradigm Fund, filing for voluntary liquidation. The man who sold them the firm, James Park, never collects on an $8 million note, according to The New Republic.2010–11: Rosemont Seneca takes off like a rocket in its ability to secure meetings with wealthy Chinese investors. From Peter Schweitzer’s Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends:> Less than a year after opening Rosemont Seneca’s doors, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were in China having secured access at the highest levels. Thornton Group’s account of the meeting on their Chinese-language website is telling: Chinese executives “extended their warm welcome” to the “Thornton Group, with its U.S. partner Rosemont Seneca chairman Hunter Biden (second son of the now Vice President Joe Biden).” The purpose of the meetings was to “explore the possibility of commercial cooperation and opportunity.” Curiously, details about the meeting do not appear on their English-language website.Also, according to the Thornton Group, the three Americans met with the largest and most powerful government-fund leaders in China -- even though Rosemont was both new and small. To put these meetings in perspective, it was as if the son of the Chinese premier held a single meeting with the heads of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Blackstone. Except, in this case, these were government entities with trillions of dollars of capital to invest. The delegate spent two days meeting with the top executives of China’s sovereign wealth fund, social-security fund, and largest banks. Hunter posed with them for a series of pictures.Sometime in 2012: Devon Archer and Hunter Biden begin meetings with “Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital,” according to The New Yorker.June 2013: Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter Biden becomes an unpaid member of BHR’s board but will not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father leaves the White House.August 19, 2013: New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his column, “In Washington, the line between lobbying and bribery is not clear-cut. Until 2008, R. Hunter Biden, son of then-Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., lobbied Congress regularly.”December 4, 2013: Hunter Biden joins his father on Air Force Two on a trip to China, where his father is meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Hunter arranges for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li have what both parties describe as a social meeting.According to The New Yorker, at this time other Obama-administration officials weren’t comfortable with Hunter Biden’s business ties in China, but they did not confront the vice president about the matter:> Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me.December 2013: “Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China,” author and investigator Peter Schweizer says. “The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.” But The New Yorker quotes a BHR representative who says the deal was signed before the vice president’s trip to China, a business license came through shortly after, and Hunter was not a signatory.April 2014: Hunter Biden joins the board of Burisma Holdings. Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who was chairman of Burisma, said at the time, “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.” Biden’s primary duty is to attend board meetings and energy forums in Europe once or twice a year, and he is paid $50,000 per month.Apter added, “This is totally based on merit.”May 13, 2014: At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney responds to a question about Hunter Biden’s joining the board and the appearance of a potential conflict of interest:> I would refer you to the vice president's office. I saw those reports. You know, Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president. But I would refer you to the vice president's office.The same day, at a State Department press briefing, AP reporter Matt Lee asks, “Does this building diplomatically have any concerns about potential perceptions of conflict or/cronyism — which is what you've often accused the Russians of doing?”“No, he’s a private citizen,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied.May 14, 2014: The U.K.-based Guardian newspaper blasts Biden’s new position, snarking, “Somebody needs to get involved in Ukraine's corporate governance, and it might as well be a clutch of rich, well-connected American dudes with weird first names.” Washington Post columnist Adam Taylor writes:> The appointment of the vice president's son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst. No matter how qualified Biden is, it ties into the idea that U.S. foreign policy is self-interested, and that's a narrative Vladimir Putin has pushed during Ukraine's crisis with references to Iraq and Libya.Sometime in 2015: Chris Heinz ends his relationship with Rosemont Seneca.December 8, 2015: Writing in the New York Times, James Risen says of the vice president’s trip to Ukraine:> The credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.December 11, 2015: A New York Times editorial praises Biden’s message to the Ukrainian government but notes:> The credibility of Mr. Biden’s message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices. A spokesman for the son, Hunter Biden, argues that he joined the board of Burisma to strengthen its corporate governance. That may be so. But Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.A few days ago, Risen wrote at The Intercept that Biden’s message on the trip was being completely misinterpreted:> The then–vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase -- not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.December 2016: Hunter Biden and his wife, Kathleen, file for divorce. The divorce becomes official April 14, 2017. Sometime when Biden is “in the middle of the divorce,” he meets the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming. As CNN described, “at its height, Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”January 20, 2017: Joe Biden’s second term as vice president ends.May 2017: Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming and Hunter Biden meet privately at a hotel in Miami. Biden says he offered to use his contacts to help “identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company CEFC China Energy, in liquified natural gas projects in the United States.” After the dinner, Ye sends a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for the meeting. During the divorce proceedings, Hunter Biden and his ex-wife Kathleen dispute the value of the diamond; he says it is worth $10,000, she contends it is worth $80,000.Biden denied that the diamond could be considered a bribe. “What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office.” Hunter Biden told The New Yorker he gave the diamond to his associates and doesn’t know what happened to it.Also during the divorce proceedings, Kathleen “requested that Hunter’s access to their joint assets be limited because the couple had a double mortgage and owed more than $300,000 in back taxes.”Summer 2017: Hunter Biden begins negotiating a deal for Ye’s company CEFC to invest in a liquefied-natural-gas project in Louisiana. Ye tells Biden that he’s worried about federal authorities’ looking into one of his business associates, Patrick Ho. Hunter agrees to represent Ho as his lawyer.October 2017: After having an unpaid role on the company’s board since 2013, Hunter Biden acquired a financial stake in BHR, a 10 percent equity interest that was worth $430,000 as of July 2019, according to Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires. At least half of the firm’s stake is owned by Chinese entities, according to business records.November 18, 2017: Patrick Ho is arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport on bribery and money-laundering charges. He makes a phone call to James Biden, Joe Biden’s younger brother, and asked Biden for a lawyer. (Hunter Biden has not practiced criminal law.)March 2018: Ye Jianming, the former boss of CEFC China Energy who gave Biden the diamond, vanishes from public sight. The Chinese government detained him for questioning, but “no Chinese authority has released any information about him, and he has not been formally charged with any wrongdoing.”June 28, 2018: Devon Archer, who co-founded Rosemont Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden back in 2009, is convicted of “conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud” for allegedly defrauding investors in sham Native American tribal bonds. A few months later, the conviction is overturned and a new trial is ordered.November 2018: U.S. prosecutors allege that a nonprofit funded by Ye Jianming -- the man who gave Hunter Biden that large diamond, who is still missing and believed detained by the Chinese government -- had used its United Nations status to offer millions in bribes to African leaders.Hunter would later tell The New Yorker that he doesn’t see Ye as a “shady character at all,” and he characterized the outcome as “bad luck.”March 25, 2019: Patrick Ho, Biden’s former legal client, is sentenced to three years in prison for international bribery and money-laundering offenses. He was convicted of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC China Energy Company Limited.April 1, 2019: Writing in The Hill, John Solomon quotes Ukrainian former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, telling him that, before he was dismissed, he was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, and that his plans included “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”May 3, 2019: The Intercept reports that Hunter Biden’s investment company in China, known as Bohai Harvest RST, invested in a company called Face++, which develops facial-recognition software. That facial-recognition software is used in an app that “provides [Chinese] law enforcement with easy, daily access to data detailing the religious activity, blood type, and even the amount of electricity used by ethnic minority Muslims living in the western province of Xinjiang.”May 16, 2019: Yuriy Lutsenko, the current prosecutor general, tells Bloomberg News that neither Hunter Biden nor Burisma was now the focus of an investigation. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws -- at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”May 20, 2019: The New York Times reports, “A lawyer for Hunter Biden said he did not conduct any business related to the China investment fund on that trip” in December 2013.The paper also reports:> [Christopher] Heinz argued to [Devon] Archer, who like Hunter Biden had joined Burisma’s board, that the posts created the appearance of selling influence, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Mr. Archer did not heed the advice. And Mr. Heinz, who was not involved in the China or Ukraine efforts, began decoupling his business interests from those of Mr. Biden and Mr. Archer.This conversation must have occurred sometime in 2013 or 2014.July 1, 2019: Hunter Biden tells The New Yorker in an interview, “I’ve pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck. I never considered it struggling, but it has always been a high-wire act.”July 22, 2019: Hunter Biden issues a new statement to the Washington Post about his time on the Burisma Holdings board: “At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business or my board service.”Shokin tells the Post via email:> All I can say is that the appointment of Hunter Biden as a member of the Board of Directors of the energy company is rather questionable from the point of view of effectiveness. After all, this person had no work experience either in Ukraine or in the energy sector. . . . The activities of Burisma, the involvement of his son, Hunter Biden, and the [prosecutor general’s office] investigators on his tail, are the only, I emphasize, the only motives for organizing my resignation.Other anti-corruption activists in Ukraine strongly disagree with Shokin’s assessment of why he was dismissed.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2mkAv1I

Why One NYC House Democrat Is a Holdout on Impeaching Trump

NEW YORK -- To understand the anomaly of Rep. Max Rose, one of the few House Democrats who has not endorsed an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, one must first understand a few other anomalies. There is the anomaly of Staten Island, the lone stronghold of conservatism within deep blue New York City, and the heart of Rose's district. There is the anomaly of Rose himself, whose victory last year made him just the second Democrat to represent Staten Island in Congress in more than 30 years. All of which leads to the third and current anomaly: Rose's refusal to back impeachment, amid revelations that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, even as most other Democrats in vulnerable seats have signed on. When seven moderate House members with backgrounds in the military or intelligence or defense communities wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post declaring their openness to impeachment, Rose, an Army veteran, was not one of them. Instead, Rose has issued two noncommittal statements. On Tuesday, he reaffirmed his long-standing opposition to impeachment, even as he said that the whistleblower's allegations meant that "all options must be on the table." And on Friday, Rose said that "the story is far from over," and that "under no circumstances" would he "allow politics to influence my decision regarding this matter." "This is a sad day for America," Rose told reporters at the Capitol on Friday. "This is not something that anybody should be luxuriating in. This is not something that anybody should be celebrating. And certainly this is not something that anybody should be dismissing solely because it's a Republican president." He continued, "The last thing I will ever do is base any decision that I make, or any speed with which I make that decision, off of political calculation." Of course, that equivocation has ensured that Rose's political calculations are all anyone wants to talk about. Democratic activists have accused Rose of putting his own reelection above his duties as a congressman; some have spoken of recruiting a primary challenger. Republicans have assailed Rose for trying to avoid the accountability that comes with a firm position. Another first-term Democrat from New York, Rep. Anthony Brindisi, has also avoided taking a firm stance on impeachment. Brindisi, who represents Central New York, defeated the Republican incumbent, Claudia Tenney, by a little more than 4,000 votes last year. But Rose has so far received far more attention for his wavering position, including from the president. On Friday, Trump reposted an attack ad against Rose on Twitter, which had been shared by the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. The ad declared that Rose wanted "endless investigations." On Sunday morning, the president shared the ad again, this time adding his own commentary: "We will win big," the president wrote, singling out those seeking impeachment in "Trump type districts." The result is that, for all Rose's attempts to distance himself from the impeachment inquiry, his district may be a prime laboratory for one of the biggest questions it has created: Will the Democrats' about-face, after months of putting off impeachment, help or hurt them in 2020? Rose's district is particularly well suited for such a test: Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there in 2016 with 58% of the vote. His support was even more resounding in the primary election: There, Trump captured 82% of the vote against his fellow Republicans. But the district has occasionally supported Democrats. In 2012, President Barack Obama narrowly won Staten Island. And last year, Rose defeated the Republican incumbent, Dan Donovan, by almost 7 points, or about 12,000 votes, buoyed by the more liberal enclaves on Staten Island's North Shore, as well as the southern rim of Brooklyn, which makes up a slice of the district. The challenge facing Rose was apparent on Friday afternoon, on Forest Avenue in West Brighton, a neighborhood of Staten Island that split roughly evenly between Rose and Donovan. Marguerite Rivas, a professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, said she had voted for Rose and was disappointed with his careful approach. But she accepted it so long as his vote was not needed for impeachment. (So far, 225 House members have backed an impeachment inquiry, more than the simple majority required to impeach.) "I would rather he play to the middle and get reelected as a Democrat," Rivas said as she left Kings Arms Diner. Asked if she thought a more aggressive tack from Rose would cost him his seat, Rivas, a lifelong Staten Island resident, did not hesitate. "Yes, yes I do," she said.Her view was seemingly affirmed at Jody's Club Forest, an Irish restaurant, where a few men were scattered around the bar. Greeted by a reporter, they immediately demurred. But, asked again, one man relented. "Want to step outside?" he said. "This is Staten Island," the man, Arthur Alinovi, explained outside. "They'd probably hate me." Alinovi, now retired from a job at a bank, also voted for Rose. He said he was disappointed in what he perceived as Rose's preoccupation with holding onto his seat. "There are more things in life than being a senator or congressman," Alinovi said. Still, Alinovi said Rose's hesitation was not likely to make him change his vote. "I wouldn't vote for a Republican if my life depended on it," he said. Next door, at Liberty Tavern, Junior Barone was similarly immovable -- but in the other direction. Barone, 70, a retired police officer, said he had met Rose during the campaign, when Rose visited the tavern. Barone had bought him a drink and invited him to chat; he found him likable. And, he said, he agreed with Rose's call for more information on the impeachment inquiry. But Barone, a staunch supporter of Trump, said that would not sway him to vote for Rose. "I like him," Barone said. "The only thing I don't like about him is he's a Democrat." Jay Jacobs, the state's Democratic Party chairman, said he respected Rose's and Brindisi's decisions, even if he believed those views might soon change. "Every member has to represent their own unique districts in the way that those districts will support," Jacobs said. "I have no doubt that when all of the evidence is in, much like the overwhelming majority of the entire nation, both Rose and Brindisi will be where they should be to support and defend our Constitution. How they get there and why they get there will all be irrelevant." But others were less forgiving. Among progressive activist groups, including the ones that powered Rose's victory last year, displeasure has turned to planning. Sally McMahon, a founder of Fight Back Bay Ridge, an activist group in southern Brooklyn, said Rose seemed overly focused on appealing to Republicans on Staten Island, at the cost of preserving support among progressives in Brooklyn. The district's Brooklyn neighborhoods accounted for most of Rose's margin of victory. "If he does not come out for impeachment, I have a write-in candidate," McMahon said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2neWNCq

A passenger filmed the engine cover coming off a United Airlines plane, which was forced to turn back to the airport

United Airlines flight 293 had to turn back to Denver International Airport over what United called a "mechanical issue with one of the engines."

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2nbgUBh

Amtrak crash: Why train rammed into CSX freight cars, killing 2 and injuring 91, per NTSB

A CSX freight train conduc tor failed to throw the correct switch, leading to the crash that jackknifed the Amtrak train

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2ncKtm7

7 Trump administration quotes from the last week that you're going to read in a textbook one day

I am not a crook.Some 46 years ago, President Richard Nixon made that infamous declaration during a press conference in Orlando, Florida. While the quote is not exactly another "ask not what your country can do for you," his five words, perhaps more than anything else, came to define an era of American history. Today they are printed in countless history books as a study in irony, corruption, and holding our leaders accountable.Now, nearly half a century on, the murmurs of impeachment have started once again. And although no one can know the future, we very well may be listening to the words -- or reading the tweets -- that will write the chapters of our future history books. Here are seven quotes from the past week alone that students could be reciting in classrooms half a century from now.1\. "In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election." -- The whistleblower complaint, declassified Sept. 26Over the past week, reports of an anonymous intelligence officer's concerns about President Trump's July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the White House's attempted cover-up of the call, went from speculative to declassified. The now-public letter begins strikingly by accusing the president of the United States of pushing a foreign leader to investigate his potential 2020 political opponent.While the identity of the whistleblower remains closely guarded, that likely won't last forever; in the words of The Washington Post, "no one expects his anonymity to last as long as Deep Throat's did." However, his name -- and place in history -- could likewise be a future AP History test question, depending on what happens next.2\. "You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now." -- President Trump, Sept. 26You are never really off the record -- just ask the Watergate conspirators. Speaking at a private event on Thursday, President Trump was caught on tape yearning for the good old days when spies were executed. Even as a "joke," the quote is shocking, something more along the lines of what a dictator might say rather than the leader of the free world.House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has argued, though, that Trump's quote was intended to get out: "That kind of incitement to violence is only going to chill other witnesses when they come forward," he said. The whistleblower already reportedly fears for his safety, and the possibility of retaliation from Trump loyalists.Then there is the fact that, as The Week's Joel Mathis points out, Trump is "the president of the United States ... We must take his words and ideas seriously."3\. "I will be the hero! These morons -- when this is over, I will be the hero." -- Rudy Giuliani, Sept. 26Perhaps more than anything else, irony gives a political quote its staying power. And while this one might not be as short and sweet as Nixon's famous line, there is a certain poetry to Rudy Giuliani's insistence of his innocence to The Atlantic.The former mayor of New York turned Trump's personal lawyer, Giuliani has been lashing-out at critics for a week. His statements, though, could potentially lead investigators to information that could make both him and his boss vulnerable. Giuliani, after all, is tangled in the Ukraine web, having allegedly attempted to "seize an unsanctioned diplomatic role [in the country] for himself," as The Washington Post reports. Likewise, in the transcript of Trump's call with Zelensky, the American president pushes his Ukrainian counterpart to coordinate with Giuliani on dredging up Joe Biden-related dirt ... multiple times.Giuliani's insistence, then, that he will "be the hero" in this narrative seems doubtful if there is any veracity to the White House's own transcript of Trump's call. An alternative Giuliani quote from The Atlantic interview that might also find its place in textbooks could be: "If this guy is a whistleblower, then I'm a whistleblower too. You should be happy for your country that I uncovered this."4\. "If that perfect phone call with the President of Ukraine isn't considered appropriate, then no future President can EVER again speak to another foreign leader!" -- President Trump, Sept. 27 Republicans are clearly struggling to spin the whistleblower complaint into a nothingburger, seeing as most aren't exactly prepared to call it "perfect."Even with Trump's claims that the call was completely "appropriate," the White House seemed to treat the conversation differently. The New York Times reported late last week that "current and former officials said the White House used a highly classified computer system accessible to only a select few officials to store transcripts of [certain] calls," including the July call with Zelensky. Why? Well, the whistleblower has alleged that the administration tried to bury Trump's conversation with the Ukrainian president -- something that wouldn't likely have been the case if the call were considered "perfect" and "appropriate" by the administration, too.5\. "If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal." -- Robert Jeffress, quoted by President Trump, Sept. 29Sometimes it's not what you say, but what you quote. On Sunday, Trump tweeted a claim by Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who speculated that if Trump is impeached, "it will cause a Civil War."Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) slammed Trump for sharing the claim, tweeting, "I have visited nations ravaged by civil war ... I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President. This is beyond repugnant." But it also might be more than just an eye-popping pronouncement: "This tweet is itself an independent basis for impeachment -- a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally authorized power," tweeted Harvard Law professor John Coates.6\. "Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser." -- President Trump, Sept. 29On Sunday, Trump claimed in a Twitter thread that he should be allowed to meet "the so-called 'Whistleblower.'" According to Brooklyn public defender Scott Hechinger, that's "grounds for impeachment, evidence of consciousness of guilt, active obstruction of justice, and just plain old unhinged and terrifying."It's also incorrect; as Hechinger adds, "the 6th Amendment Confrontation Clause does not entitle someone to 'meet' their accuser. If this was a criminal proceeding, an order of protection would already have issued. The Constitution allows -- in a criminal trial -- the right to confront on the witness stand."Trump's insistence that he meet the whistleblower also plays into a general theme of trying to expose the identity of the intelligence official, which many critics say is an intimidation tactic. It could also be literally life-threatening; the whistleblower's attorney has said "our client will be put in harm's way" were his identity to become known in the way Trump is publicly pushing for.7\. "Arrest for Treason?" -- President Trump, Sept. 30If you stop and think about it, "Trump Raises Idea of Arresting House Chairman for Treason" is an astonishing headline.While Trump's musings about arresting Schiff became an instant Twitter meme, the reality of the quote is more worrying. Trump claims that Schiff gave a summary of the transcript that "bore NO relationship to what I said on the call [with Zelensky]," although the Times writes that the summary indeed "appears to be drawn from several portions of the call, including statements from Mr. Trump to Mr. Zelensky."Joked Aaron Rupar of Vox: "What stage of authoritarianism is 'leader publicly calls for imprisonment of his political opponents'?"I'll leave that answer up to the historians.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2nbFZfx

California man arrested after leading police on 2-hour chase through corn maze

A California man was caught and arrested by police Saturday morning, but not before he managed to elude them for two hours while hiding inside a corn maze.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2mpwyst

Floods kill 113 in north India in late monsoon burst, jail, hospital submerged

Heavy rains have killed at least 113 people in India's Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states over the past three days, officials said on Monday, as flood waters swamped a major city, inundated hospital wards and forced the evacuation of inmates from a jail. India's monsoon season that begins in June usually starts to retreat by early September, but heavy rains have continued across parts of the country this year, triggering floods. An official said that at least 93 people had died in most populous Uttar Pradesh since Friday after its eastern areas were lashed by intense monsoon showers.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2oKdlTn

3 big reasons Biden is no longer the definitive 2020 Democratic primary frontrunner

The more voters see of Biden, the less they like him. And the more they see of his main rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the more they like her.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2n2suyU

Trump demands to meet whistleblower and leakers of his Ukraine call

President Donald Trump asserted on Sunday that he’s entitled to meet the whistleblower whose complaint has entangled his administration and led to the opening of an official impeachment inquiry. The tweet followed a morning of network appearances by Trump allies aimed at discrediting the complaint and the impeachment process, after reports that the president asked Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Trump claimed that the whistleblower incorrectly “represented” the July 25 call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, even though the White House released a memo of the call on Wednesday.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2nIShvN

Trump’s Claims About Biden Aren’t ‘Unsupported.’ They’re Lies.

By BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2neddLi

As Democrats Rally Around Adam Schiff, President Trump Redoubles His Attacks

As tensions over an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump continue to heat up on Capitol Hill, both Democrats and Republicans are focused on a single man: Rep. Adam Schiff.

Many Democratic lawmakers see Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as the natural choice to head up the impeachment inquiry. A group of moderate, first-term Democratic members met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday to urge her to elevate Schiff as the public face of the inquiry, according to four Congressional officials.

This group of lawmakers, who were mostly from swing districts and therefore in danger of losing their re-election bids next year, told the Speaker they see Schiff as a better choice than Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, another top Democrat. Nadler is seen as more partisan, the sources said.

But as Schiff’s star rises among Democrats, he is increasingly the target of Republicans’ ire.

On Monday morning, Trump attacked on the representative from California on Twitter. “Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement,” the President wrote. “It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?”

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2019

Trump’s tweet was in reference to Schiff’s flippant comments during a Sept. 26 hearing with Joseph Maguire, who became the acting spy chief in August. During the hearing, Schiff characterized Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “classic organized crime shakedown.”

“Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the President communicates,” Schiff said in prepared remarks. He then proceeded to imitate the President’s recognizable cadence of speech: “I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good,” Schiff said, speaking as Trump. “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand? Lots of dirt, on this and on that.”

Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Elise Stefanik, argued that Schiff’s comments were inappropriate.

“It is disturbing and outrageous that Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff opens up a hearing of this importance with improvised fake dialogue,” Stefanik, a New York Republican, wrote on Twitter.

It is disturbing and outrageous that Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff opens up a hearing of this importance with improvised fake dialogue between President Trump and President Zelenskyy. We should focus on the facts.

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) September 26, 2019

Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee reached for comment defended Schiff’s characterization of the call. One argued in a message on background that Republicans were “grasping for straws” by criticizing Schiff over the comments, saying “they have nothing else.”

“Anyone else who thinks Schiff was ‘wrong’ is merely pearl-clutching and underestimating the intelligence of the typical person who would even know who Adam Schiff is, let alone had listened to his opening statement at a committee hearing,” says T.J. Helmstetter, a former Democratic National Committee spokesman who now advises progressive organizations. “Schiff’s rhetorical device was perhaps slightly clumsy, but it was also clear to the intended audience of highly engaged people.”

Schiff also defended his own characterization of Trump’s phone call, arguing that while he did not quote the transcript of the phone call verbatim, he correctly relayed “the message” of the call.

“My summary of the President’s call was meant to be at least, part, in parody,” he said. “Of course, the President never said, ‘If you don’t understand me, I’m going to say it seven more times.’ My point is, that’s the message.”

Trump’s Monday attacks on Schiff came after a similar outburst on Friday, when the President tweeted that Schiff had “fraudulently read to Congress” a version of the July 25 phone call. Trump said that Schiff “was supposedly reading the exact transcribed version of the call, but he completely changed the words.” Schiff did not say he was reading from the transcript.

Trump’s suggestion that Schiff’s comments amounted to treason came just days after the President described the sources of the whistleblower’s complaint in similar terms. The whistleblower submitted a complaint flagging Trump’s possible abuse of power during the phone call with Zelensky. Trump said the whistleblower’s actions made them “almost a spy.”

“We used to handle” spies and treason “a little differently than we do now,” Trump told a private group, to appreciative laughter.

According to the rough transcript of the call released by the White House, Trump underscored the United States’ generosity towards Ukraine before asking Zelensky “to do us a favor.” He goes on to say he would like the Ukrainian government to investigate three issues involving the U.S., including investigating Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in a case involving Biden’s son.

“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time,” Trump told Zelensky, according to the White House’s rough transcript. A little while later, Trump says, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” The conversation between the two leaders occurred soon after the Trump administration withheld nearly $400 million in congressionally approved aid for the country.

Trump also told Zelensky that his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Attorney General William Barr should be involved.

The transactional nature of the call alarmed Democrats and prompted Schiff’s description of the call as a “shakedown.”

“You know what I’m asking, so I’m only going to say this a few more times, in a few more ways,” Schiff said during the hearing, imitating the President’s speech patterns. “And by the way, don’t call me again. I’ll call you when you’ve done what I asked.”

—With reporting by Lissandra Villa

from TIME https://ift.tt/2n4ASxS

Barr personally asked foreign officials to aid inquiry into CIA, FBI activities in 2016 - The Washington Post

1. Barr personally asked foreign officials to aid inquiry into CIA, FBI activities in 2016  The Washington Post
2. Trump Pressed Australian Leader to Help Barr Investigate Mueller Inquiry’s Origins  The New York Times
3. Barr asked Trump to speak to other countries in Durham probe, official says; source pushes back on NYT repo...  Fox News
4. If you want the truth on impeachment, stay away from the fringes  The Washington Post
5. Trump pressed Australia to help investigate Russia probe origin, source says  CNN
6. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2o4bwQv

California man charged in elaborate Chinese spy operation - NBC News

1. California man charged in elaborate Chinese spy operation  NBC News
2. DOJ charges US man with spying on behalf of China  CNN
3. California man accused of spying for China, US officials say  Fox News
4. Hayward man charged with spying for China, making ‘dead drops’ in Newark, Oakland  The Mercury News
5. U.S. Alleges California Tour Guide Worked as Spy for Chinese Intelligence  The Wall Street Journal
6. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2oHC5vo

Sterigenics is leaving Willowbrook, eliminating key source of cancer-causing ethylene oxide in Chicago’s weste - Chicago Tribune

1. Sterigenics is leaving Willowbrook, eliminating key source of cancer-causing ethylene oxide in Chicago’s weste  Chicago Tribune
2. Cobb activists celebrate Sterigenics' closing in Willowbrook, Illinois  Atlanta Journal Constitution
3. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2n28wUZ

Jeff Flake urges Republicans to not back Trump's reelection - POLITICO

1. Jeff Flake urges Republicans to not back Trump's reelection  POLITICO
2. Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake Says Trump's Actions 'Warrant Impeachment'  Newsweek
3. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2oEhrME

Russia says Trump can't release phone calls without Kremlin permission - NBCNews.com

1. Russia says Trump can't release phone calls without Kremlin permission  NBCNews.com
2. The Russia Hawk in the White House  POLITICO
3. Kremlin says disclosure of Trump-Putin phone calls would need Russian consent  Reuters
4. Trump Hints at Civil War But He Launched a War on Facts  Bloomberg
5. An American president who doesn’t understand the meaning of America  The Washington Post
6. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2mpigrN

Robert De Niro’s foul-mouthed CNN appearance raises eyebrows inside network: ‘What did our viewers gain?’ - Fox News

1. Robert De Niro’s foul-mouthed CNN appearance raises eyebrows inside network: ‘What did our viewers gain?’  Fox News
2. Robert De Niro: Trump should not be President. Period.  CNN
3. Robert De Niro Calls Donald Trump A "Lowlife", And Wants Him To Be Impeached | MEAWW  MEAWW
4. 'F**k em': Robert De Niro unleashes expletive-filled rant against Trump-supporting Fox News critics  TheBlaze
5. Robert De Niro has some choice words, and a couple f-bombs, for his Fox News critics  CNN
6. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2n9z72g

New top story on Hacker News: Cargo Cult Science

Cargo Cult Science
4 by fipar | 0 comments on Hacker News.

Leaked Memo: Colleagues Unload on John Solomon, the Journo Who Kicked Off Trump’s Ukraine Conspiracy

Gerald Martineau/The Washington Post/GettyBeltway-centric newspaper The Hill employs a team of dozens of journalists from a variety of backgrounds. But only one has managed to alienate many of his colleagues, fuel the paranoia of Fox News viewers, and inadvertently play a key role in the whistleblower complaint and President Donald Trump’s potential impeachment.Over the past several years, John Solomon, a long-time journalist with bylines at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Newsweek/The Daily Beast, has pivoted to becoming the Trumpian right’s favorite “investigative reporter.” And now, thanks to several mentions in the whistleblower’s complaint, his work has come under intense scrutiny following the revelation that a series of his stories about Ukraine, along with his Fox News appearances promoting them, may have led to the president asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to team up with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate the Biden family.Over the past several months, and with the benefit of substantial airtime from Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity, Solomon has peddled a series of Ukraine-based conspiracy theories and allegations that have primarily taken aim at two of Trumpworld’s biggest targets: Biden and Hillary Clinton.In the process, his questionable reporting, which often seems specifically tailored to stoke the flames of right-wing paranoia, has enraged many of his colleagues at The Hill who have for years seen his tactics and reporting as overtly ideological, convoluted, and often lacking in crucial context.“He’s a lightning rod of anxiety for us,” one Hill insider told The Daily Beast.Hired away from now-defunct news site Circa in 2017 to help launch The Hill’s over-the-top streaming service Hill TV, Solomon split his time between digital video strategy and running his own one-man conservative investigative unit, pumping out stories destined for Hannity’s show and—inevitably—the eyes of the president.Before pivoting to Ukraine conspiracy theories, Solomon wrote a series of stories heavily suggesting the Department of Justice covered up a quid pro quo between Clinton and Russia during the approval of the Uranium One deal—a debunked scandal that nevertheless provided ammo for Trumpworld’s long-running narrative that the “real Russia scandal” centered on Clinton and the Obama administration. He also published an “exclusive” story saying that several women who accused Trump of sexual harassment sought payments from tabloid news outlets for exclusive rights to their stories as well as financial support from partisan donors.While both questionable-at-best stories received the usual conservative media plaudits, Solomon’s reporting rankled colleagues and reportedly caused consternation among Hill middle management.The Washington Post reported that more than a dozen staffers wrote a memo specifically criticizing Solomon’s handling of the story about Trump’s alleged harassment victims, which they said omitted the important context that seeking donor support is neither a new practice nor is it unique to one political party. The staffers also expressed dismay about other stories, including the Uranium One deal, and noted that Solomon’s work often negatively colored the way some important sources viewed engaging with The Hill.“I am disturbed that a reporter at a purportedly non-partisan publication is pumping out pieces that appear to be heavily slanted towards one side of the ideological spectrum, and I am especially disturbed that these stories appear to be repeatedly leaked to a close informal adviser of President Trump (Sean Hannity) ahead of their publication,” one staffer wrote, according to a copy of the 2018 memo obtained this week by The Daily Beast. “It is difficult to see myself having a future at this company if it continues to prioritize heavily-slanted reporting that appears to be designed to curry favor with one side of the aisle.”As a result of the memo, Hill management tried to simultaneously assuage internal concerns and tamp down any perception of internal strife. Editors eventually sent around a social-media policy memo unsubtly warning staffers against publicly criticizing colleagues or talking about internal matters to outside media. But the company also tried in earnest to quell tension in the ranks, instituting a parental leave program—which staff had been seeking for months—and, in a victory for the paper’s reporting staff, labeling Solomon’s stories as “opinion” pieces. (Hannity, of course, has continued to hype Solomon as an “investigative reporter,” despite The Hill’s clarification.)And yet even with his own employer openly downplaying the “reporting” aspect of his work, Solomon emerged this year as a key figure in jump-starting Team Trump’s Ukraine-Biden narrative that may now lead to impeachment. In Solomon’s March 20 interview with Yuriy Lutsenko, the then-Ukrainian prosecutor general made a series of wild claims, including accusing Biden of pressuring the then-Ukrainian president in 2016 to fire the country’s top prosecutor—at the time, Viktor Shokin—to squash an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company connected to Hunter Biden. (Lutsenko would later retract some of the claims made to Solomon, eventually walking back his claims of wrongdoing by the Bidens, ultimately concluding: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws.”)This specific interview with Solomon was featured in a U.S. government whistleblower’s complaint as one of the key circumstances that eventually led to Trump’s now-infamous request on a July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. Solomon also promoted the interview and its unfounded claims on Hannity’s show later that evening, prompting an approving tweet from the president.Giuliani, meanwhile, had already met with Lutsenko twice by the time of the interview, in January and February 2019, according to the complaint. And following his Lutsenko chat, Solomon published a piece on April 1 claiming the investigation into the Biden-connected energy company had been revived—“Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian nightmare,” as Solomon blared. That article, too, was referenced in the whistleblower’s complaint. Besides reporting that Shokin claimed he “had made specific plans” to investigate the company’s board, “including Hunter Biden,” Solomon claimed that part of the probe was “reopened in 2018” and Lutsenko was now looking to share information with U.S. Attorney General William Barr.Following the piece, Hannity and several of his Fox News colleagues ran wild with the story, with multiple on-air segments on it over the following days, including an April 3 broadcast in which Hannity declared that Solomon had caught Biden in an “international corruption scandal.”And on the same day that Biden officially launched his presidential campaign, Hannity interviewed both Solomon and President Trump on his program. During that April 25 broadcast, Hannity cited Solomon’s reporting to claim Ukraine had evidence that Biden was “bragging about having gotten [the prosecutor] fired using American money” while Solomon said the prosecutor was actively investigating the junior Biden at the time. (The investigation into Burisma, the energy company, had long been dormant.)Trump, meanwhile, said that Lutsenko’s “incredible” and “big” allegations laid out by Solomon—that Ukrainian officials leaked information on Paul Manafort to help Clinton—was something he “would imagine” Barr would want to look into. This was also highlighted in the whistleblower’s complaint.Solomon’s connection to the Ukraine scandal re-opened old wounds at The Hill, particularly among staffers who have long been troubled by Solomon’s reporting.Following the Thursday release of the whistleblower’s complaint, many staffers privately grumbled about the fact that, although Solomon’s pieces were now edited by the site’s opinion editor, they were styled after regular news stories and were also occasionally reviewed by top news editors before they went live.Earlier this month, Solomon announced that he will leave The Hill to create his own start-up media firm. In an email to staff obtained by The Daily Beast, he seemed to attempt to quash any suggestion that his departure was related to his reporting problems, saying that he had agreed with Hill CEO Jimmy Finkelstein months ago that he would depart but stay on as a consultant for Hill TV.In a statement, a Hill spokesperson relayed that “Mr. Finkelstein says John Solomon’s has done excellent work for The Hill and wishes him success with his new media venture.”And despite Solomon’s imminent exit, several Hill insiders told The Daily Beast that some staffers have discussed whether they should raise the Ukraine issue to management, or even issue a public response, noting how the whistleblower complaint had brought negative attention to the company and its reporters.“This is the most press Hill TV has gotten,” one staffer quipped, expressing exasperation with Solomon.On Thursday afternoon, Solomon responded on Twitter to being named in the whistleblower’s complaint, saying he stands “100 percent” by his “completely accurate and transparent” stories.“So I'm fast at work writing my next column and will strive to make it as accurate and transparent as my past work,” he added. “As that work documented, the people and leaders of Ukraine have been trying to send a loud message to America about the conduct of our government.”Solomon appeared on Hannity’s show on Thursday night to promote his latest piece for the outlet he will soon leave. (The article was essentially a recap of his previous columns packaged as a brand-new bombshell on the Biden-Ukraine ties.) Somewhat acknowledging his omnipresence throughout the complaint, Solomon defended his work to Hannity’s viewers, claiming he’d gathered hundreds of pages of “once-secret memos” over the past 18 months that put Biden’s story in doubt, calling on the ex-veep to put out his own documents to challenge his work.“Where are Joe Biden’s documents? Let’s put forth the proof that they really thought this guy had the evidence—he has not done that.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2np17yO

China ‘poised to unveil new nuclear missile’ at military parade in warning to Trump

A parade by China’s secretive military will offer a rare look at its rapidly developing arsenal, including possibly a nuclear-armed missile that could reach the United States in 30 minutes, as Beijing gets closer to matching Washington and other powers in weapons technology.The Dongfeng 41 is one of a series of new weapons Chinese media say might be unveiled during the parade marking the ruling Communist Party’s 70th anniversary in power.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2ol3t2d

Trump’s Big Lie About Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine Falls Apart

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photo by Alex Wong/GettyThe big lie spouted by Donald Trump and his allies in the unfurling Ukraine affair—an unprecedented abuse of public trust, which has now led directly to an impeachment inquiry—is that former Vice President Joe Biden urged the Ukrainians to fire the Kyiv general prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in order to save Biden’s son's hide. Many of Trump’s cronies and foot soldiers have already spun this line, from Donald Trump Jr. to Rudy Giuliani to Arthur Schwartz.Others have rightly pointed out that, in reality, Biden was not simply relaying the message pushed by the Obama administration, but that his position was supported by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, European allies, and even groups like the International Monetary Foundation (IMF). As Tom Malinowski, former assistant secretary of state under Obama, recalled this week, “All of us working on Ukraine wanted this prosecutor gone, because he was NOT prosecuting corruption. So did the Europeans. So did the IMF. This didn't come from Joe Biden—he just delivered our message.”That’s all, of course, true. Anyone interested in the success of Ukraine’s democratic transition, and its efforts to clean up rampant corruption, wanted Shokin gone. But here’s something that seems to have been lost in this geopolitical shuffle. Not only was Biden not trying to protect his son, Hunter, who was then working at a Ukrainian energy company named Burisma. If anything, what the former vice president did was make the prosecution of his son’s company more likely, not less—a fact that seems to have been overlooked, but which flips Trump’s lies on their head. I’m not the first to make this point. A few months ago, when Giuliani first began laundering his accusations through friendly voices like The Hill’s John Solomon—a man with an outsized history of whitewashing post-Soviet kleptocracies—The Intercept’s Robert Mackey tried to untangle Giuliani’s ludicrous line of logic. Mackey’s conclusion: “By getting Shokin removed, Biden in fact made it more rather than less likely that the oligarch who employed his son would be subject to prosecution for corruption.”And it’s not difficult to see why. Shokin was, by any measure, a clear and present obstacle in Ukraine’s efforts to steer toward a transparent, democratic polity in the aftermath of the country’s successful 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution. Most charitably, Shokin’s work could have been described as ineffective; others would prefer the term “corrupt,” a hangover from the ancien régime, more accustomed to shakedowns and shirking his duties whenever it benefited him and his confidants. That reprehensible behavior could be seen, most pertinently, in the way Shokin treated an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Launched in 2014, the investigation focused specifically on the means and machinations of Burisma’s oligarchic owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Initially, the investigation appeared a sign of Ukraine’s new ways, of a willingness to target all and sundry, regardless of political connection.But it quickly became apparent that Shokin had little interest in actually uprooting any corruption percolating within Burisma, or within Zlochevsky’s network. According to former members of Shokin’s staff—including one, Vitaliy Kasko, who reiterated a few months ago that Biden never pressured anyone to avoid looking into his son’s company—Shokin ignored offers of aid from foreign partners to track Zlochevsky’s international financial network. In particular, Shokin effectively ignored the U.K.’s move to freeze tens of millions of dollars allegedly attached to Zlochevsky, identified during a money-laundering investigation directly tied to the ousted Ukrainian regime. Even after Britain’s Serious Fraud Office pronounced that the funds linked to Zlochevsky were “believed to be the proceeds of… criminal conduct,” Shokin didn’t budge. He and his office declined, time and again, to send London the documents necessary to link the frozen funds to Zlochevsky’s kleptocratic malfeasance. Instead, even when the case went to a British court, those advocating for the funds to remain frozen found that someone in Shokin’s office—it was never quite clear who—had written a letter to the British judge claiming that Zlochevsky was not suspected in any crimes. The case was as clear as any to come out of post-2014 Ukraine. And then it collapsed. An arrest warrant for Zlochevsky lapsed. The funds were eventually unfrozen, and allowed to seep back into the offshore networks linked to Zlochevsky, unseen since. All because Shokin, and his office, thought it better to allow the previous regime’s kleptocratic methods to flood back in.  The Americans—and the Europeans, and the IMF, and all those in Ukraine who had marched and stood and demanded better—were livid. Shokin clearly didn’t “want to investigate” Burisma or Zlochevsky, as Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center and perhaps Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption voice, recently said. Or as then-U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt pronounced in 2015, “Those responsible for subverting the case by authorizing those letters should—at a minimum—be summarily terminated.” This was the world into which Biden stepped, when he became the point-man for all of those demanding Shokin’s removal. And he did so, with thunder and alacrity. As with so many things Biden has done with Ukraine, he wasn’t concerned with whose toes he stepped on. When it came to pushing for Washington to supply arms to Kyiv to fight off Russian revanchism, it didn’t matter if Biden stood at odds with the president for whom he served. And when it came to ousting a prosecutor who refused to do his job, it didn’t matter if his son’s company—a company Hunter Biden should, obviously, never have joined—got caught in the cross-fire. Biden, as the messenger for demanding a new, and more effective, prosecutor, succeeded. That success meant that Ukraine would be more likely to investigate his son’s company. And in that success, a conspiracy theory—that Biden was actually trying to protect his son, rather than push Ukraine to a more democratic path, no matter who got caught in the middle—was born. In the time since, Shokin has taken to rewriting history, claiming that he was on the warpath trying to take down Zlochevsky. (Shokin’s preferred mouthpiece for spouting this revisionism? Solomon, unsurprisingly.) But just like the president’s claims that Biden was up to something nefarious, there’s nothing to back up Shokin’s claims. As Oliver Bullough, a British journalist who covered the Zlochevsky saga, wrote earlier this year, Solomon and the rest of the pro-Trump sycophants are “putting two and two together—and coming up with 22.” That’s putting it kindly. More broadly, they’re taking a bludgeon to anything resembling fact. The lies and spin and rank illiberalism now being spun by the White House are all in an effort to undercut a looming impeachment by rewriting a history most Americans are only now discovering. In pushing to oust the former prosecutor, Biden did the right thing, no matter the personal cost. And in pushing for impeachment, in the face of Trump’s unprecedented move to pressure Kyiv to investigate Biden, House Democrats are pursuing the right tack, no matter the political cost. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2m77x5c

Singer attacked with paint at pro-Hong Kong democracy rally in Taiwan

Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho was attacked on Sunday by a masked man who threw red paint at her at a rally in Taiwan held in support of anti-government protests in Hong Kong. Ho, who earlier this month urged members of the U.S. Congress to pass legislation to combat human rights abuses in Hong Kong, was talking to reporters at the Taipei rally when the man ran up to her and poured red paint over her head. Two Taiwanese men were arrested immediately after the attack, the island's Crime Investigation Bureau said, adding that the pair were linked to an organized crime group which supports closer ties between self-ruled Taiwan and China.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2m3sbTK

Trump reportedly worked with 2 'off the books' lawyers to pressure Ukraine

"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace said that top U.S. officials confirmed President Trump was working with more than one personal lawyer "off the books" to pressure Ukrainian officials for damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2mck9rU

Trump impeachment T-shirts? Grow up, Rep. Tlaib. Removing a president is serious business.

If Donald Trump is her tutor on tactics, Rashida Tlaib is doing it wrong. Neither of them serve Americans well by appealing to their coarser appetites.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2ooSzIF

How Ukraine envoy's resignation could affect his possible congressional testimony

Kurt Volker, the State Department's special envoy for Ukraine, resigned Friday amid a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump and his communications with the Ukrainian government, including the country's president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Volker did not provide a public explanation for leaving his post, but a source familiar with his decision said Volker concluded he could not perform the job effectively as a result of the recent developments.One person familiar with the matter told NBC News that Volker's resignation will likely enable him to be much freer in what he can say about his time at his post if he is called at some point to testify before Congress.The whistleblower complaint that sparked the impeachment inquiry alleges that Volker went to Kiev to help guide Ukrainian officials on how to handle Trump's alleged demands that the government investigate former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter. He also reportedly spoke with Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in an attempt to "contain the damage" to U.S. national security.Giuliani has said Volker encouraged him to meet with Ukrainian officials regarding the Biden family. That indeed appears to be the case, but The New York Times reports Volker was acting at the request of the Ukrainians, who were reportedly concerned about how Giuliani's attempts to procure information about the Bidens and other Democrats might affect their relationship with the U.S. Read more at NBC News and The New York Times.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2o5akwh

Hong Kong’s Status as Neutral Ground at Risk as China Asserts Power

By BY PETER S. GOODMAN AND AUSTIN RAMZY from NYT Business https://ift.tt/2oqI2g4

M.L.B.’s Juggernauts Set to Clash After a Season of Extraordinary Numbers

By BY TYLER KEPNER from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2nGnFLy

Man Is Charged With Terrorism After Driving S.U.V. Through Illinois Mall

By BY MARIEL PADILLA from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2mHfgHD

Yankees Turn Their Focus to the Playoffs, and Stifling the Twins

By BY JAMES WAGNER from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2m4Qe4G

Giuliani says he spoke to Pompeo last week about Ukraine meeting - CNN

1. Giuliani says he spoke to Pompeo last week about Ukraine meeting  CNN
2. Barr 'surprised and angry' about Trump phone call with Ukraine  Washington Examiner
3. Giuliani compares Biden to Clinton Foundation, asks 'What did Obama know?'  Fox News
4. Why impeachment obsession could help keep President Trump in office | TheHill  The Hill
5. Opinion: Impeaching Trump on the phone call alone won't go far enough  Los Angeles Times
6. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2m6xUIr

Biden Campaign Urges TV Networks to Stop Booking Giuliani - The New York Times

1. Biden Campaign Urges TV Networks to Stop Booking Giuliani  The New York Times
2. Biden Campaign Demands TV News Execs Stop Booking Giuliani  The Daily Beast
3. Rudy Giuliani fires back at former White House aide  ABC News
4. Joe Biden thinks TV producers should stop putting Rudy Giuliani on air  CNN
5. Giuliani says Biden is trying to silence him because he fears what he has to say  Washington Examiner
6. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2ohyqUG

Adam Schiff says impeachment inquiry will remain focused on Trump's 'fundamental breach' of his oath of office - NBC News

Adam Schiff says impeachment inquiry will remain focused on Trump's 'fundamental breach' of his oath of office  NBC News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2nEnpMW

22-yr-old charged with South Carolina postal worker's murder - ABC NEWS 4

1. 22-yr-old charged with South Carolina postal worker's murder  ABC NEWS 4
2. South Carolina man arrested in US Postal Service worker's slaying on mail route  Fox News
3. Man arrested for murder of South Carolina postal worker  WSAV-TV
4. New Details: 22-year-old shot postal worker ‘multiple times’ with what was believed to be AR-15  WBTW
5. Arrest made in connection with murder of SC postal worker, sheriff says  WYFF4 Greenville
6. View full coverage on Google News

from "news" - Google News https://ift.tt/2onzmqL

Why I Think Trump Did Nothing Wrong in His Phone Call with Zelensky

I  had a great discussion on The Editors Thursday about my view that President Trump did nothing wrong in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. My view seems to be the minority position, so it makes sense to lay it out as clearly as possible.Much of the confusion around this case stems from the entanglement of two groups specializing in bamboozlement: lawyers and spies. Espionage and the law have specialized argots that hide fabrication and skulduggery. Nonetheless, critical analysis reveals that the call was in bounds and that objections to it reduce to absurdity.My argument relies on an assertion, a distinction, and showing the absurdity of the other side of the argument taken to its logical conclusions.First, the assertion: The United States government has a compelling interest in knowing if its private citizens are involved in corruption abroad, either alone or in concert with current, former, or future public officials. This is not a controversial claim, yet when applied to what we know about how Joe Biden conducted his vice presidency in relation to his son Hunter Biden’s career, it invites unwarranted controversy.Here are the facts. The decision of Joe Biden, while vice president, to facilitate his son Hunter’s international business dealings presents, minimally, the appearance of a conflict of interest. Indeed, anything that Hunter Biden touched that intersected, however tangentially, with the official doings and responsibilities of his father can be presumed to be a worthy subject of investigation unless and until proven otherwise. The younger Biden’s shady dealings with his uncle dating at least to 2008, his absurd (and absurdly lucrative) board post on the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, his massive financing rounds in China, and his travel to these countries along with his father, the latter acting in his official capacity — all raise major questions.Because Hunter Biden repeatedly profited in countries where his father was conducting official business, despite having no marketable skills or relevant experience, these questions would exist even if he were a paragon of personal virtue. Yet we know that he is not. His fiscal profligacy, repeated battles with addiction, and seeming erotomania, make Billy Carter, Hugh Rodham, and Roger Clinton look like Boy Scouts. Indeed, Hunter Biden is recreationally closer to Hunter Thompson than he is to most ne’er-do-well political relatives. Hunter Biden is clearly a person who should not be anywhere near government.As a result, in the absence of clear and convincing proof that nothing is amiss in the Biden family business, there is a presumptive case for looking into the Bidens to see if all the smoke surrounding Hunter came from fire. Joe Biden didn’t choose to have a troubled son. But he did choose to integrate his troubled son into his official functions. The burden of proving that the interpenetration of government and family did not enrich the younger Biden falls squarely on the elder Biden. He has not met that burden because, given the facts already known, doing so is probably impossible.Joe Biden wishes to be president. The American people have a right to know if, as second in line to the presidency, he facilitated his family’s enrichment. Did he do so consciously or through blind irresponsibility? He flew Hunter Biden to China on an official visit: What did Joe think Hunter was doing on that trip? If nothing is amiss, follow the administration’s response to this scandal and open the books. Until that happens, an investigation — whether formal or informal — is justified.Second, my distinction: Information is not interference. Based on the call transcript, Trump asked Zelensky to get to the bottom of whether Ukraine or Ukrainians interfered in the 2016 election. One may consider Trump’s concerns absurd or silly. Alternatively, one may suspect Ukrainian involvement. I do not know and will not pretend to know, because whether Ukraine was actually involved is irrelevant. The request for information that the Ukrainian president may be uniquely positioned to offer is fair and does not, in and of itself, constitute election interference.The president is well within his rights to seek information from his counterparts abroad. He can ask Zelensky if the Dodgers will make the World Series, or who Zelensky thinks is the most formidable Democratic candidate. Soliciting information, in the form of facts or opinion, does not constitute election interference. It does not constitute having a foreign head of state do opposition research for the Trump campaign. It is not some of in-kind contribution.Nor is there anything wrong with the president using leverage to get answers to his questions. Ukraine is not in NATO. Ukraine has been an ally of the United States some of the time, but at other times has been a de facto extension of the Russian Federation. And while the United States owes Ukraine certain obligations owing to the Budapest Memorandum, obligations the last administration ignored, Ukraine does not enjoy a constitutional or treaty right to Javelin missiles. Regardless of whether or not Trump asks important questions or stupid ones, by virtue of his office, he has the right to ask what he wants and use the leverage he controls to get answers. Because the national interest is served by those questions, even if they also align with Trump’s perceived political self-interest, a quid pro quo is not a problem.While the seeking of information does not intrinsically constitute a problem — indeed, it’s exactly the sort of thing we want the president doing in exchanges with foreign heads of state — what Trump chooses to do with the information he receives matters immensely. Were Trump to pass documents to his campaign, that would blend his official powers with his electioneering apparatus, which is against campaign-finance law. Were Trump to tell Zelensky to leak whatever damaging information he might find about Biden, that too would constitute election interference. Obviously, if Trump asked Zelensky to target Biden or his campaign with hacking, it would be a crime. If he asked Zelensky to fabricate information and leak it to the public, this impeachment talk would be completely justified.Yet Trump did not do these things. He asked for information that might help him serve the national interest in his capacity as president. Whether one trusts Trump to act accordingly or not is not itself impeachable in the absence of action. Similarly, that Trump failed to follow up regarding his invocation of Attorney General Barr is neither a problem nor surprising given his lackluster organizational tendencies.But what if we were to treat the request for information as tantamount to interference? Let us trace this line of thinking to its absurd conclusion. If Trump cannot ask anyone, foreign or domestic, about the obviously dubious behavior of a political rival, then we have created a de facto immunity for anybody running for president, an immunity that extends to their family if they mix family with previous public-office holding. So long as American officials and private citizens misbehave abroad and then run for president, they cannot be investigated legitimately, so this line of thinking goes.As a historical matter, this would mean that the Benghazi and Clinton Foundation investigations undertaken by Congress were illegitimate the day they began because they had political consequences for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. They would similarly mean that the Russiagate investigation was wrong the day it began. And while many people can justifiably point to misbehavior by Russiagate investigators, it cannot reasonably be said that Donald Trump’s words, deeds, and associates made that investigation unreasonable from the get-go. Indeed, we can go still further back.Going back further still, if targeting a political opponent for investigation is illegitimate under any circumstances, then FDR was wrong to direct the FBI to work with friendly European governments to investigate Charles Lindbergh and the German American Bund.Clearly, creating an effective blanket immunity for those powerful enough to run for president is truly the stuff of banana republics. Indeed, if it achieved anything, it would only encourage well-heeled rascals to run for office while simultaneously encouraging the politically connected to engage in international graft. I, for one, think America has enough of both already.Finally, I would like to close with two observations. Neither is logically necessary to my argument, but both are sociologically and constitutionally worth examining. Many people are uncomfortable with the president leveraging America’s superior power to extract concessions from an inferior. I question this instinct. Power involves coercion and brokering. It can look and feel gross. It can be smutty. We have two and a half millennia of political philosophy in large part because goodness and political effectiveness have a complicated relationship. People can be bad and ineffective, yes. The good guys sometimes win too. But politics at the highest level has long been recognized as sitting in an awkward relationship to morality.As a result, politics isn’t for everybody. Though we misattribute the idiom to Bismarck, Americans have long understood that people prefer to eat sausage rather than see it get made. The Framers of the Constitution, who expected to be the weaker party — to be in Zelensky’s position rather than Trump’s — understood this. That’s why Article II, Section 2 gives the president the power to negotiate treaties. Those treaties come into effect only when ratified by the Senate, so the conclusion of a deal is subject to popular review. However, the back-and-forth required to get that deal is and should remain a solely presidential power. If anything, the White House was too quick to disclose the transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky.None of this guarantees that wrongdoing has not transpired. If President Trump overstepped in the ways outlined above, I will happily revisit my opposition to impeachment. The president is entitled to designate a special representative to serve as his proxy in negotiations or fact-finding, including a personal attorney with whom he enjoys attorney–client privilege over and above traditional executive privilege. However, these powers stop the minute the president directs his subordinate to go beyond information-gathering and to engage in campaigning. And if a subordinate does so of his own volition, that subordinate ought to be punished. However, nothing we have seen to date crosses these lines. Instead, opponents of the president have elevated his person above his position, deciding that the practice of executive power itself is illegitimate because of who has been elected to wield it. That is the very kind of institutional nihilism many of these same people claim to fear most about this presidency.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2nFI8zZ