#Trump promptly suggested some treatments

[zealousideal-date698]

[ruth-cabbeen511]

[berbsesolmer]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 9, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

I had hoped that the days when the news came like a firehose were over, but so far, no luck.

This morning, the stock market jumped 1200 points in its first day of trading after the announcement of Biden’s election. Over the course of the day it was up as much as 1600 points, then ended for the day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 834.57 points, or 2.95%.

The strong market is at least in part because pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German drug company BioNTech announced today they have a coronavirus vaccine which appears to be about 90% effective. The Trump administration immediately tried to take credit for the vaccine, only to have Pfizer note that it has not taken federal money under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for rushing a coronavirus vaccine. Don Jr. promptly suggested that the delay in announcing the potential vaccine until this week was designed to hurt Trump’s reelection, but it seems Pfizer is likely distancing itself from Trump to avoid any suggestion that the vaccine is about politics, rather than science. In the past, the administration has touted a number of treatments for Covid-19 that have turned out to be ineffective, and the pressure for a vaccine before the election threatened to weaken public faith in one.

The pandemic continues to worsen across the country. Today we learned that Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has tested positive for the virus; so has David Bossie, the Trump adviser in charge of the campaign’s legal challenges to the election loss. Both men were at the election night watch party at the White House, along with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was infected at the time and did not wear a mask. Aides told PBS NewsHour reporter Yamiche Alcindor that they were worried the event would be a superspreader, but felt pressured to attend.

President-Elect Joe Biden started his presidential transition today, beginning by announcing the makeup of his coronavirus task force. It’s an impressive group of doctors and scientists, including Dr. Rick Bright, a whistleblower fired by Trump officials. “Please, I implore you, wear a mask," Biden told Americans. "A mask is not a political statement…. The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible.”

New leadership and the rising infection rates are shifting the conversation. Last night, Utah’s Republican Governor Gary Herbert announced a state of emergency. He has imposed a statewide mask mandate indefinitely and a ban on social gatherings outside of households for the next two weeks. He has limited extracurricular activities at schools. Businesses that don’t follow the mask mandate can be fined; organizers who ignore the social gathering rule can be prosecuted and fined up to $10,000.

Not everyone likes the idea of new leadership, though. In an unprecedented move, Trump is refusing to acknowledge that he has lost the election. He has launched lawsuits challenging the ballot counting in a number of states, and his surrogates—including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany—are accusing the Democrats of cheating. Tonight, Attorney General William Barr legitimized the idea of voter fraud by permitting federal prosecutors to investigate such allegations. Barr’s move prompted the head of the Election Crimes Branch of the Department of Justice, Richard Pilger, to resign.

But what’s so weird about this is that they are losing all these lawsuits. Indeed, some of them they’re not even trying to win: they’re not bothering to fill out the correct paperwork. It seems clear that they are simply stoking the narrative of an unfair election, but it is not at all clear to me to what end.

It is certainly possible that Trump and his people are launching a coup, as observers warn. And yet, this would not be an easy task. Biden’s win is not a few votes here or there; it is commanding, and Trump’s aides are telling reporters they think the game is played out. The military has already said it wants no part of getting involved in the election, and the courts so far are siding against the administration entirely. Even key Republican leaders, such as Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, are denying there has been any problem with the vote.

Maybe what’s at stake is that last Tuesday’s election left control of the Senate hanging on two runoff elections in Georgia. Today the Republican candidates in those races tagged on to the cries of voter fraud to call for Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign. Raffensberger is the top elections official in the state. He is a Republican. There is no evidence of any irregularity in the 2020 Georgia election, and the two senators did not offer any. But if they can get Democratic votes thrown out, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler might avoid the runoffs that look like they might well result in Democratic victories.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is determined to keep control of the Senate, and ginning up a conviction that the election was rigged could do that. McConnell defended Trump’s challenging of the election today, although he did not explicitly say he believed the election had been fraudulent. Trump’s attacks are working: new polling shows that 7 out of 10 Republican voters now think that the 2020 election was illegitimate. Barr met with McConnell before he signed onto the idea of voter fraud by announcing that federal prosecutors could go after it.

Still, while control of the Senate is likely driving McConnell, it seems highly unlikely that Trump cares about it. Perhaps the president is simply deep in a narcissistic rage, unable to face the idea of losing.

But there is something else niggling at me.

Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Biden’s win means that the current administration is denying him the right to see the President’s Daily Briefing (the PDB) which explains the biggest security threats facing the country and the latest intelligence information. Trump can keep Biden from seeing other classified information, too.

Today, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper (by announcing the firing on Twitter), and replaced him with a loyalist, Christopher C. Miller, who will be “acting” only. Trump also selected a loyalist and Republican political operative, Michael Ellis, to become the general counsel at the National Security Agency, our top spy agency, over the wishes of intelligence officials. Ellis was the chief counsel to Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), a staunch Trump loyalist. Trump is also reportedly considering firing FBI director Christopher Wray and CIA director Gina Haspel. Last week, he quietly fired the leaders of the agencies that oversee our nuclear weapons, international aid, and electricity and natural gas regulation, although the last of those officials was moved to a different spot in the administration.

In other words, Trump is cleaning out the few national security leaders who were not complete lackeys and replacing them with people who are. It’s funny timing for such a shake-up, especially one that will destabilize the country, making us more vulnerable.

Today Washington Post diplomacy and national security reporter John Hudson noted that a source told him that the “Trump administration just gave Congress formal notification for a massive arms transfer to the United Arab Emirates: 50 F-35s, 18 MQ-9 Reapers with munitions; a $10 billion munitions package including thousands of Mk 82 dumb bombs, guided bombs, missiles & more….” This deal comes two months after the administration’s Abraham Accord normalizing relations between Israel and the UAE opened the way for arms sales.

The UAE has wanted the F-35 for years; it is the world’s most advanced fighter jet. They cost about $100 million apiece. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has secretly been pushing for the sale of the arms to the UAE in the face of fierce opposition by government agencies and lawmakers.

The administration had announced a much smaller version of this deal at the end of October, in a sale that would amount to about $10 billion, but Congress worried about the weaponry falling into the hands of China or Russia and seemed unlikely to let the sale happen. In 2019, it stopped such a deal. Trump declared a national emergency in order to go around Congress and sell more than $8 billion of weapons to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. He later fired Steven Linick, the State Department’s inspector general looking into those sales, but when the IG’s report came out nonetheless, it was scathing, suggesting that they put the U.S. at risk of being prosecuted for war crimes.

When you remember that Trump’s strong suit has always been distraction, and that he has always used the presidency as a money-making venture, I wonder if we need to factor those characteristics in when we think about his unprecedented and dangerous refusal to admit he has lost this election.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Heather Cox Richardson

[bountyofbeads]

TRUMP ATTACKS FEDERAL JUDGE, PROSECUTORS IN TWITTER TIRADE DEFENDING ROGER STONE

By Allyson Chiu | Published February 12 at 7:02 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

As the fallout from the controversy surrounding Roger Stone’s prison term continued Tuesday night, President Trump defended his longtime confidant by firing off a barrage of heated tweets attacking the federal judge and prosecutors involved in the case.

Over the course of roughly two hours, Trump cranked out six blasts about the handling of Stone’s sentencing, including one that targeted U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over the case.

He implied that Jackson harbored some broad bias, linking the Stone case to her role in the sentencing of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and her dismissal of a lawsuit against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton related to Benghazi, Libya.

“Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure?” Trump wrote, sharing another tweet that named Jackson. “How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!”

Jackson is scheduled to sentence Stone, who was convicted in November of lying to Congress and witness tampering, on Feb. 20.

The timing of Tuesday’s online attack prompted many to accuse Trump, who has a long history of mounting public crusades against judges and courts over unfavorable rulings, of attempting to intimidate Jackson and secure a more lenient sentence for Stone.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.

Trump’s fusillade of tweets came shortly after news broke that the Justice Department had overruled the sentencing recommendation for Stone submitted by federal prosecutors, an action that followed Trump blasting it as too harsh.

The prosecutors, citing federal sentencing guidelines, said Stone should serve seven to nine years in federal prison.

In an early-morning tweet Tuesday, Trump lambasted the proposed punishment as “a miscarriage of justice!” Hours later, the Justice Department announced that it would be revising the recommended prison term — a stunning decision that sparked widespread concern about the president undermining the traditional independence of the agency when it comes to individual prosecutions. (The Justice Department said it did not communicate with the White House about Stone’s case this week and Trump told reporters Tuesday that he has “not been involved in it at all,” The Washington Post reported.)

The growing scrutiny of Trump’s perceived effect on the Stone case did little to keep him from weighing in again Tuesday night.

Amid slinging barbs at 2020 Democratic presidential candidates battling it out in the New Hampshire primary, Trump was in full attack mode as he griped about the original sentencing recommendation and demanded to know the identities of the prosecutors behind it. All four prosecutors withdrew from the case, with one quitting his job, following Tuesday’s events.

“Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people?) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam, and shouldn’t ever even have started?” Trump tweeted, referencing the Russia investigation overseen by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that led to Stone’s conviction.

In a later tweet, Trump appeared to suggest that he was considering the possibility of pardons for Stone and former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Mueller investigation.

Many seemed to be most taken aback by Trump’s tweet about Jackson, including Clinton, his Democratic opponent in 2016.

In the tweet, Trump questioned Jackson’s treatment of Clinton, probably referencing her dismissal in 2017 of a wrongful death claim brought against the former secretary of state in connection with Benghazi. The suit alleged that Clinton’s use of a private email server caused the deaths of two Americans at the U.S. diplomatic compound in the Libyan city.

Stone also tried to bring attention to the lawsuit last year when he shared an inflammatory Instagram post targeting Jackson, which earned him a harsh scolding from the judge.

“Do you realize intimidating judges is the behavior of failed-state fascists?” Clinton tweeted Tuesday in response to Trump.

Trump has repeatedly gone after judges who rule against him and questioned the judiciary’s constitutional authority. The president’s pattern of attacks have been condemned by lawyers and law professors, who have called his rants “worse than wrong” and “dangerous.”

His frequent references to “Obama judges” prompted Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to issue a rare rebuke of the president in 2018.

On Tuesday, Trump’s swipe at Jackson was similarly received. People rushed to fact-check the tweet and denounced Trump for “siccing his 70 million Twitter followers” on Jackson, as one person put it. Within moments of the tweet getting posted, Trump’s supporters were already chiming in, calling Jackson “truly evil” and slamming her as “a far-left activist Judge.”

But, the tweet misrepresented Jackson’s involvement in the Manafort case since the judge only sentenced Trump’s former campaign manager to 7½ years and was not responsible for the conditions of his confinement while awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, Trump resumed tweeting early Wednesday morning about the case, praising Attorney General William P. Barr and railing against “Rogue prosecutors.”

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THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CONFIRMS THINGS ARE EVEN WORSE THAN WE FEARED

By Randall D. Eliason | Published Feb 12 at 4:09 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

THIS STARTED OUT AS A DIFFERENT COLUMN.

Tuesday morning, I began to write about how things seemed to be okay at my old workplace, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. True, Attorney General William P. Barr had recently installed his close aide, Timothy Shea, as the new U.S. attorney. And there had been rumblings that the office might soften its position on the sentencing of convicted former national security adviser Michael Flynn. But the government’s tough sentencing memorandum concerning Roger Stone seemed to be a good sign. I wrote that, at least when it comes to interfering in the cases of those convicted during the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, maybe my worst fears about Barr’s Justice Department were not going to be realized.

By midday, that draft column was in the trash. It didn’t take long for the Justice Department to demonstrate that, on the contrary, things are even worse than many have feared.

Political operative and Trump ally Roger Stone was convicted in November on seven felony counts of obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering. A jury found that he repeatedly lied to a congressional committee about his role as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks concerning stolen Democratic emails and that he threatened another witness, Randy Credico.

Federal sentencing guidelines, as calculated by the U.S. probation office, call for a sentence of about seven to nine years in prison. That’s a hefty penalty for this type of crime, but it was boosted by Stone’s threats to Credico and by the duration and breadth of Stone’s misconduct. In a memorandum filed on Monday, federal prosecutors strongly condemned Stone’s actions and recommended a sentence in line with the guidelines.

Then, on Tuesday, a senior Justice Department official said the department’s leadership believed the recommended sentence was “extreme, excessive, and grossly disproportionate.” Later that day, Shea filed a memorandum urging a lower sentence and arguing that the sentence his prosecutors had endorsed a day earlier — in a pleading bearing his name — would be “excessive and unwarranted.” All four of the Stone prosecutors promptly withdrew from the case in protest.

So what changed in the less than 24 hours since the initial sentencing memorandum was filed? Nothing — except President Trump tweeting that he thought Stone’s situation was “horrible and very unfair.”

Anyone who hasn’t been a prosecutor may not fully appreciate what a wildly inappropriate and unprecedented punch to the gut this was. Those lawyers had appeared before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson for more than a year on this case. When they filed papers or stood up in court, they were understood to be speaking for the Justice Department. This move cut their legs out from under them and destroyed their credibility. Withdrawing was their only honorable option, and they should be commended for exercising it.

Of course, supervisors have the right to review subordinates’ work and to correct perceived errors. But the Justice Department’s pearl-clutching — suggesting that the sentencing recommendation was so out of bounds it required this extraordinary public rebuke of the prosecutors — is not remotely credible. The prosecutors’ position was not outrageous; they simply endorsed the sentence recommended by the probation office. That’s standard operating procedure. One thing is clear: If Stone were not a Trump crony, no one at the Justice Department would have batted an eye about his proposed sentence.

It has long been evident that Trump does not appreciate the norms that historically have shielded criminal prosecutions from political influence. But for the first years of his presidency, at least there were some guardrails. When Trump tried to get then-White House Counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mueller, McGahn refused and was ready to resign in protest. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, properly recused himself from the Russia investigation and then refused Trump’s entreaties to unrecuse so he could end the investigation.

But now, with Barr at the helm, it appears there is no one at the Justice Department to stand in Trump’s way. On Twitter on Wednesday, the president congratulated Barr for “taking charge” of the Stone case, which he claimed was “totally out of control.” Trump plainly believes he can do whatever he wants as president, including meddling in criminal prosecutions of his associates. The politicization of the Justice Department appears complete. Trump tweets, and the DOJ jumps.

The norms concerning the Justice Department’s independence have been built up over generations. They are fundamental to the rule of law and have distinguished the United States from authoritarian regimes whose despots use criminal prosecution as a political weapon. Trump has repeatedly tested those norms, but this blatant political interference in the Stone sentencing represents a new low. That’s why so many former Justice officials are sounding the alarm.

One day, Trump will leave office. But the damage he has done to the Justice Department will endure — and may be irreparable. For those of us who cherish the department and the ideals for which it stands, this is heartbreaking. For the country, it’s extremely dangerous.

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TRUMP JUST MADE THE DOJ’s ROGER STONE INTERVENTION LOOK EVEN WORSE

By Aaron Blake | Published February 12 at 11:10 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

Amid a growing storm Tuesday within the Justice Department over its unorthodox intervention in the sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime ally of President Trump, officials maintained that there was nothing untoward about what happened. They said the decision was made independent of Trump’s very public gripes about the matter. They said it was the result of a “breakdown” in communication.

THEN TRUMP TWEETED.

The president took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to congratulate Attorney General William P. Barr for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.”

The president’s implication: This was his own, appointed attorney general — whose repeated interventions in Trump’s favor have caused almost constant controversy — getting involved to lighten the sentencing recommendation for Trump’s own ally.

The tweet may not directly contradict the Justice Department’s version of events Tuesday, but it sure colors it in a different way. In one tweet, Trump appeared to confirm reports that Barr has taken an interest in matters that involve the president personally. And there are growing questions about whether that’s just on the Stone matter.

The Justice Department also recently scaled back its language in recommending a sentence for former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. It was initially zero to six months, and in that early January filing, prosecutors referred to Flynn’s offense in stark terms. But later that month, a filing added that probation was a “reasonable” sentence and more effusively referred to Flynn’s long service in government. It was a pretty noted change in tone that turned heads at the time. And it came despite Flynn now attempting to withdraw his guilty plea for lying to investigators.

That shift takes on new significance with Trump’s Wednesday tweet. It’s difficult not to read it as him linking Barr directly to these kinds of decisions, whether that’s actually the case.

The latest intervention has triggered a mass protest from the prosecutors who handled the Stone case. All four withdrew from the case, and two of them resigned positions in the Justice Department. The exodus appeared to confirm that there was dissension among the prosecutors over more senior Justice Department officials intervening to call for a lesser sentence. Former Justice Department officials cried foul over alleged political influence in what is supposed to be an independent prosecution.

The initial recommended sentence of seven to nine years was harsh, but it was within the guidelines for the seven counts on which Stone was convicted — a situation in which prosecutors are generally given discretion to make a recommendation. An anonymous senior Justice Department official said Tuesday that the recommendation was considered “extreme and excessive” and that the prosecutors hadn’t accurately communicated what it would be up the chain of command.

Even if that’s what happened, this was still senior Justice Department officials intervening in an unusual way — and in a case of distinct personal interest to the president. Even if Trump hadn’t directly lobbied for the decision, it would be problematic, because it suggests that his political appointees are riding to the aid of his allies, over the judgments of prosecutors handling the cases. A Justice Department official on Tuesday couldn’t name another instance in which a sentencing recommendation had been overturned so quickly. And now Trump is linking this personally to Barr — the man whose conduct on the Russia investigation has erred repeatedly in Trump’s favor.

Trump has essentially argued that there is nothing wrong with such an intervention, even if he had directly ordered Barr to take such actions (which Trump denies having done in this case). Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Trump said that he “would be able to do it if I wanted” and that “I have the absolute right to do it.” Trump routinely claims such broad authority, but generally the Justice Department guards against perceptions of political influence in investigations — and that’s particularly important in cases involving the president and his allies.

We’ll surely learn more about how all that went down in the days to come. But Trump’s tweet sure didn’t diminish the idea that his Justice Department is doing his political bidding — starting at the top.

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THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST ODIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS OF TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY

By Harry Littman | Published February 11 at 7:52 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

The withdrawal of all four career prosecutors handling the case against Roger Stone, in the wake of the Justice Department’s sentencing shift, underscores that Attorney General William P. Barr’s department has effectively gone rogue.

Prosecutors Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed and Michael Marando all sought permission Tuesday to leave the case. A fourth, Jonathan Kravis, has fully resigned his job as an assistant U.S. attorney. These actions threaten to throw the Justice Department into existential crisis.

None of the prosecutors gave a reason for their actions, but their exits followed the announcement Tuesday morning that the department would reduce its sentencing recommendation for Stone, a confidant of President Trump. That news itself came hours after Trump tweeted that Stone’s sentence was “horrible and very unfair.”

Resignation is the strongest possible protest that prosecutors can employ, within professional bounds, against improper conduct by their leadership. The president’s tweet and the department’s reduction of Stone’s sentencing were utterly rank and improper. The action runs counter not only to standard practice but also to the standard that the Justice Department is supposed to embody: the administration of justice without fear or favor.

It is hard to overstate the irregularity and impropriety of the department’s rollback of Stone’s sentence.

Stone was convicted of serious crimes: lying to Congress and witness tampering. His recommended sentence was by the book — literally. Federal prosecutors go by a manual from the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Commission that lays out appropriate sentences for specific offenses. The seven- to nine-year sentence that prosecutors had sought was precisely what equal justice mandated. That’s far from the “miscarriage of justice” that Trump called it in a tweet.

The Justice Department updated its sentencing recommendation Tuesday in a filing that said the initial guidance “could be considered excessive and unwarranted under the circumstances.” The department’s leadership had been “shocked” at the initial recommendation, an official reportedly told The Post.

Keep in mind, however, that Stone chose to go to trial. He also sought to vilify the prosecution and engage in circus maneuvers designed to suggest his prosecution was a joke. Federal defendants who engage in such tactics virtually never receive sentences lighter than the guidelines stipulate. The system would break down were it otherwise.

But that anomaly is the least of the outrages in this situation. More worrisome is the naked countermand of the recommendation of career prosecutors in favor of a sweetheart recommendation for a political ally of the president. This is indefensible in the U.S. justice system for any reason, least of all raw political favoritism.

I have never experienced or even heard of a situation in which a career prosecutor had been ordered to withdraw a sentencing memorandum within the guidelines’ range. The original filing in the Stone case came from two career federal prosecutors and two special assistant U.S. attorneys. This rebuke has to be maddening for them.

As a general matter, the Justice Department and the White House are supposed to communicate only in rare, well-defined instances and almost never about the results of individual cases. Such contact is a third rail. For those of us committed to the normal course of legal justice, it cuts into bone for the department to do the White House’s bidding in a case in which the president has a strong personal stake.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said that the sentencing decision was made before the president’s tweet and that the White House did not communicate with the department on Monday or Tuesday. If that’s true, that would in some ways be worse: It would mean that the department has become so attentive to the president’s political preferences that it is willing to cross the political divide uninstructed.

The Stone rollback is particularly disturbing amid a flurry of crass political maneuvers undertaken since the impeachment trial ended. These include the similar reversal in the case of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who, like Stone, has made it a point of his defense to belittle the department; the recent memorandum ordering that the attorney general must sign off on any politically oriented prosecution and even on the FBI opening a criminal investigation; the institution of a process within the department to consider the opposition research that Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has gathered in Ukraine; and the sudden ouster of U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu, in favor of a Barr acolyte, from the office that is prosecuting Flynn and Stone. (Liu’s December exit from the U.S. attorney’s office came with the promise of a nomination to a Treasury post — a nomination that Trump is withdrawing, Axios reported Tuesday evening.)

Amid this troubling trend, the prosecutors’ departures will ring the loudest alarm in the Justice Department and in Washington generally. The department’s reputation for doing the right thing, already eroded by the abuses that have piled up since Barr became attorney general, is on life support. That is among the most odious achievements of the Trump presidency.

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HOUSE DEMOCRATS ASK SECRET SERVICE FOR DETAILS ABOUT ITS PAYMENTS TO TRUMP’S COMPANY

By David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O'Connell | Published February 12 at 12:06 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday asked the Secret Service to provide a full accounting of its payments to President Trump’s private company — after The Washington Post revealed that the Secret Service had been charged up to $650 per night for rooms at Trump clubs.

In a letter to the Secret Service, signed by chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and member Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), the committee asks for any records of payments to Trump properties, and copies of any contracts between the Secret Service and Trump clubs.

Last week, The Post reported that the Secret Service had been charged up to $650 per night for rooms at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, and charged $17,000 a month for a cottage that agents used at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, N.J. President Trump still owns his companies. These payments show he has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government.

[Read the House Democrats’ letter on website]

The letter said those charges stand “in stark contrast” to the Trump Organization’s public statements. Trump’s son Eric, who runs the company day-to-day, had previously said that the company charged government employees at a steep discount.

“They stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Eric Trump said last year in an interview with Yahoo Finance. Eric Trump estimated the charge per room was “like 50 bucks.”

The actual charges revealed by The Post “raise serious concerns about the use of taxpayer dollars and raise questions about government spending at other Trump properties,” the letter said. Maloney took over the committee in November, following the death of former chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.).

The Secret Service did not respond to questions about the letter Wednesday morning.

The Trump Organization has continued to say it charges the government “at cost,” but it has not responded to questions asking how it calculates those costs — or why the actual rates are so much higher than the $50 figure Eric Trump cited.

The Post identified $471,000 worth of payments from the Secret Service to Trump’s company, but — because so little data is available — the actual number is probably higher. The payments are not listed in a public spending database, as is usually required for payments above $10,000. Instead, The Post pieced them together using documents from public records requests — but most of the available documents date back to 2017 or 2018.

In its letter, the committee said that the “Secret Service has not disclosed the full scope of its payments to the President’s businesses or its expenses for presidential travel to [Trump’s] own properties.”

The Secret Service is legally required to send Congress a report every six months on its spending to protect presidential residences. But since the start of Trump’s term, the letter said, the Secret Service has provided only three of the required six reports.

And, even in those three, the lines for spending at Trump’s Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago clubs are both blank, the committee said. The letter asks the Secret Service to explain why.

The committee set a deadline of Feb. 25.

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Barr pledged that investigations would be ‘sacrosanct from political influence.’ THAT’S IN REAL DOUBT NOW.

By Aaron Blake | Published February 12 at 3:47 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

Attorney General William P. Barr faced big questions during his confirmation last year about whether he would maintain independence from President Trump when it came to the Russia investigation. To combat them, he assured senators — repeatedly — that he viewed his job as conducting investigations irrespective of the president’s political wishes.

That’s increasingly in doubt.

On Tuesday, all four prosecutors on the Roger Stone case moved to withdraw after senior Justice Department officials overrode their recommended sentence for Stone. The unorthodox move was announced shortly after Trump decried the proposed sentence of seven to nine years. The Justice Department said Trump’s comments played no role and came after the decision was made.

Even if that’s true, this is still higher-ups in the Justice Department intervening on behalf of perhaps the president’s oldest political ally to reduce his recommended sentence. And Trump on Wednesday implicated Barr directly in that effort, tweeting his congratulations to him for the decision to overrule the prosecutors.

It’s the kind of situation that Barr indicated during his confirmation that he would guard against.

At the time, such questions pertained mostly to his impending oversight of the Russia investigation. But lawmakers also asked him more broadly about whether he would do Trump’s bidding. The president, after all, had repeatedly expressed frustration that his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had not taken the investigatory actions Trump desired.

Barr had said it’s not always out-of-bounds for presidents to request specific investigations, and he has long had an extremely broad view of presidential power. But when it came to letting presidential politics seep into investigations, he said he drew a line.

At one point, he was asked about electoral advice he’d given the man who previously appointed him as attorney general, George H.W. Bush. Barr said such advice is part of an attorney general’s job, but investigations are different.

“There are sort of three roles the attorney general plays,” Barr said. “One is the enforcer of the law. In that, the role of the attorney general is to keep the enforcement process sacrosanct from political influence.”

Later, he expanded upon that answer, saying, “I think on the enforcement side, especially where matters are of either personal or political interest to people at the White House, then there would be — there has to be an arm’s length relationship.”

Barr also was asked what would be the breaking point at which he would resign rather than carry out the directive — his “Jim Mattis moment,” in the words of Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).

Barr assured the lawmakers: “I will not be bullied into doing anything I think is wrong by anybody, whether it be editorial boards or Congress or the president. I am going to do what I think is right.”

Barr also repeatedly pitched himself as someone uniquely able to exercise such independence. He noted he was in the twilight of his career and didn’t need to worry about the fallout of a clash with a president.

“I feel that I’m in a position in life where I can provide the leadership necessary to protect the independence and the reputation of the department,” he said.

He added: “I feel I’m in a position in life where I can do the right thing and not really care about the consequences — in the sense that I can be truly independent.”

People can judge for themselves whether those quotes contradict what we are seeing today. We will almost certainly see more evidence about how all of this went down.

But what we know today is that senior officials at Barr’s Justice Department — and perhaps Barr himself, as Trump has indicated — have overridden the decision of career prosecutors and asked for a lighter sentence for a presidential ally. And even if that initially requested sentence was on the harsh side, that’s still a highly unusual intervention.

Has this kind of thing happened with anyone else whose case didn’t involve Trump or an ally? A Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and who explained the situation to The Washington Post on Tuesday, couldn’t point to one. What are the odds that the lone or one of relatively few situations in which this action would be taken just happens to be in a case involving Trump? As the now-withdrawn prosecutors argued during the case, Stone lied to investigators and tampered with a witness because the truth “looked terrible” for Trump and his campaign. So Trump has an obvious interest here.

There are also real questions about whether it’s the first time such an action has been undertaken in the case of a Trump ally. Back in January, the Justice Department requested a sentence of zero to six months in prison for former national security adviser Michael Flynn and criticized him in stark terms. A few weeks later, though, it filed something else indicating a sentence of probation would be “reasonable” and speaking in much more admiring tones about Flynn’s service to the country.

The Stone reversal is much more apparently problematic, but both of these cases warrant probing. And if this isn’t unusual, it would behoove the Justice Department to point to other similar instances that don’t involve Trump in some way.

Barr has long found ways to justify controversial decisions that benefit Trump, up to and including his decision not to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice following the report by then-special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III. Oftentimes, the justifications stem from his belief in the power of the presidency.

In these cases, it seems eminently possible that Trump never personally leaned on Barr to take such actions and that Barr made the decisions on his own. But it’s also true that Trump has made little secret of how he’d like them handled, via his public comments.

A relevant anecdote comes from the new book by The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, “A Very Stable Genius.” They reported that, after the Mueller report was sent to the Justice Department, Trump didn’t reach out to Barr to suggest what he might do with it. So when Barr issued a misleading summary of it, echoed Trump’s political talking points about it and also cleared him of obstruction, he wasn’t directly acting on Trump’s orders. But he still erred decidedly in Trump’s direction.

It seems possible that that’s what happened with him or other senior officials in this case — they’ve done these things without directly taking orders from Trump and can justify them as the right things to do, free of political influence. Perhaps, in this case, they believe that’s the case because the recommended sentence for Stone was indeed harsh.

But just because Trump may not have picked up the phone and asked doesn’t mean the decision isn’t tinged by presidential politics. They had to know when they did this that it would, at the very least, look bad — as if the Justice Department might be intervening in an independent investigation in a way the president would prefer. And they did it anyway.

It’s not exactly the image of an independent Justice Department that Barr said he was uniquely able to provide.

*********

Trump’s retweets range far and wide, but how did a sex therapist become a three-time presidential favorite?

By Anne Gearan and Josh Dawsey | Published February 12 at 2:51 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted Feb 12, 2020

President Trump apparently has a thing for @SexCounseling.

Trump has recently retweeted posts from a California sex therapist, Dawn Michael, whose professional Twitter home is a mix of pro-Trump material and, well, other things.

The three retweets since January are emblematic of the president’s habit of amplifying online praise from random or troublesome corners of the Internet. He has been widely criticized for retweeting racially insensitive or allegedly anti-Semitic material — he denies any such intent. But his willingness to cast the presidential gaze and Twitter finger upon oddball figures and little-known commentators has attracted less notice.

And it also appears to be on the rise. So far in February, Trump’s retweets are outpacing his original tweets by about 2 to 1, topping 265 on Wednesday and including commentary from the likes of @HiredGun37 and @heelerhoney alongside Republican lawmakers, right-wing media figures, journalists, his sons and his campaign manager.

In the same period a year ago, Trump appears to have included only 21 retweets among 92 Twitter postings, and only one appears to be akin to the puzzling choices or otherwise obscure boosters he now promotes. On Feb. 12 last year, among a string of retweets sent from his iPhone near 10 p.m., Trump retweeted a video of jaguars lying in the sun, from the account @planetepics.

On Monday, he blasted out an assessment from @SexCounseling — “The people are happy with President Trump and they see how poorly he is being treated” — to @realDonaldTrump’s 72.4 million Twitter followers. By Tuesday afternoon, his retweet had itself been retweeted nearly 6,000 times.

It is not clear what attracted Trump to Michael’s posts, but she appears among a circle of conservative pro-Trump Twitter users who regularly retweet one another. It is also not clear whether the name of her Twitter account had any bearing on Trump’s decision to retweet her.

Michael’s account links to her YouTube channel and a video about “Couples Sensual Touching” that might be best described as R-rated.

On her website, at thehappyspouse.com, Michael calls herself “a nationally recognized relationship expert and certified clinical sexologist.”

“My mission is to help you resolve problems with your intimate life,” Michael says. “With 20 years of counseling experience, I have helped thousands of people improve their quality of life and marriage.”

She claims advanced degrees or certifications from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Human Sexuality and the American College of Sexologists. Neither are accredited by the American Psychological Association, spokeswoman Kim Mills said. The APA does not police who calls themselves a sex therapist or a “Certified Sexologist” as Michael’s LinkedIn profile identifies her.

Michael did not respond to requests for comment by phone and email.

Early in his presidency, Trump would post tweets but rarely responded or looked to Twitter for information. His staff would periodically bring him reports on how well tweets had done and would show him particularly friendly things to re-post, according to a senior administration official who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s Twitter use.

But it became “both an entrance and an exit” in 2018 as he would, on his own, dive through his replies to see who was praising him.

An aide said Trump has sometimes been taken aback by backlash to his retweets. Often, a string of retweets is not some grand statement — it’s just Trump scrolling and clicking, people close to the president said.

“If he sees it and it’s positive about him, he just posts it,” the administration official said. “It would never dawn on him to check and see who the person is.”

He also likes to use retweets to force journalists and critics to reckon with the size of his Twitter following, current and former officials said. For example, after a firefighters union endorsed Joe Biden last year, Trump went on a barrage of early-morning posts, amplifying firefighters who praised him instead.

Trump has mused to aides that he can mix it up on Twitter more than in real life — and “kind of just see how it goes,” a former senior administration official said. And there are accounts he somewhat regularly looks at for retweet potential, aides say.

But Trump has conceded in the past that he was a little too quick to hit the retweet button.

“A lot of the times, the bigger problem is the retweets,” he said last year to C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully. “You know, you retweet something that sounds good, but it turns out to be from a player that’s not the best player in the world. And that sort of causes a problem.”

Trump’s taste in retweets is varied. A recent selection of retweets includes the conservative legal group Judicial Watch and ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl. He has retweeted official Republican accounts alongside @RedPillReport, which posts pro-Trump material and conservative views that are sometimes racially tinged or sexually suggestive.

“Red-pilling” is a term that comes from the movie “The Matrix” and refers to a choice between a red pill that opens one’s eyes to an ugly reality and a blue pill that does not.

@RedPillReport returned the favor Tuesday, retweeting and commenting on a Trump insult directed at Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg.

“When a President can make you laugh . . . and fatten your 401K . . . you know you’ve got the right man!” the post said.

Trump has sometimes retweeted posts from accounts that were later suspended, or accounts that said they were associated with the Q-Anon conspiracy group.

Michael is not among the 47 people Trump himself follows on Twitter. Nor are any of the other otherwise little-known people he has retweeted recently. The common denominator is always expressions of support for Trump or criticism of his adversaries.

Late Tuesday, Trump retweeted and commented upon a post by @IsraelUSAforevr, an account that proudly notes its four presidential retweets at the top of its Twitter biography.

The original tweet endorsed the idea of pardons for convicted Trump associates Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.

“Prosecutorial misconduct?” Trump wrote in response, alongside other tweets complaining that Stone has been unfairly targeted.

Prasad Vana, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, has studied online marketing techniques and said that retweeting is marketing of a sort.

“In general the idea is to show that there is some consensus developing around an idea,” he said, “and so it’s a way of saying: ‘See? It’s not just me. It’s others who think like that.’ That is primarily the intention.”

Often, content that shocks or outrages is the most popular online, Vana said. That is not necessarily Trump’s intent, but a president retweeting an account called @SexCounseling might raise eyebrows, he said.

“We probably are biased more toward content that agrees with our own opinions, but when you’re on a big stage it is rather wise to vet some information before you put it out there,” Vana said.

_______

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

*********

WHY BILL BARR’S DOJ REPLACED CATHOLIC CHARITIES WITH HOOKERS FOR JESUS

By Dana Milbank | Published February 11 at 7:12 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking.

In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.

Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.

That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.

Federal prosecutors Monday recommended that Trump associate Roger Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.

Then Trump tweeted that the proposed sentence was “horrible and very unfair” and “the real crimes were on the other side.” And by midday Tuesday, Barr’s Justice Department announced that it would reduce Stone’s sentence recommendation. All four prosecutors, protesting the politicization, asked to withdraw from the case.

But politicization is now the norm. Last week, Barr assigned himself the sole authority to decide which presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans — should be investigated by the FBI.

Also last week, the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, announced that New York state residents can no longer enroll in certain Trusted Traveler programs such as Global Entry — apparent punishment for the strongly Democratic state’s policies on illegal immigrants.

On Monday, Barr declared that the Justice Department had created an “intake process” to receive Rudy Giuliani’s dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden — dirt dug in a boondoggle that left two Giuliani associates under indictment and Trump impeached.

The same day, Barr’s agency announced lawsuits against California, New Jersey and King County (Seattle), Washington — politically “blue” jurisdictions all — as part of what he called a “significant escalation” against sanctuary cities.

On Tuesday, to get a better sense of the man who has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s toy, I watched Barr speak to the Major County Sheriffs of America, a friendly audience, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic. “In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,” he read, deadpan.

Trump, he went on, “loves this country,” and “he especially loves you.” The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the “rule of law.”

Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked “rogue DA’s” and “so-called social-justice reformers,” who are responsible for “historic levels of homicide and other violent crime” in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer “to help criminal aliens evade the law.” Barr vowed to fight these foes with “all lawful means” — federal subpoenas to force them to turn over “information about criminal aliens,” dozens of lawsuits to invalidate statutes and attempts to deny them both competitive and automatic grants.

In response to a question, Barr railed against tech companies’ use of encryption: “They’re designing these devices so you can be impervious to any government scrutiny,” he protested.

Maybe people wouldn’t be so sensitive about government scrutiny if the top law enforcement official weren’t using his position to punish political opponents and reward political allies.

Instead, with Barr’s acquiescence, we live in a moment in which: Trump’s Treasury Department immediately releases sensitive financial information about Hunter Biden, while refusing to release similar information about Trump; Trump ousts officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry and even ousts the blameless twin brother of one of the witnesses; and Trump’s FBI decides to monitor violent “people on either side” of the abortion debate — although the FBI couldn’t point to a single instance of violence by abortion-rights supporters.

This week, the Pentagon released a new color scheme for Air Force One, replacing the 60-year-old design with one that looks suspiciously like the old Trump Shuttle. Surprised? Don’t be. Soon the entire administration will be able to apply for a Justice Department grant as a newly formed nonprofit: Hookers for Trump.

*********

[phroyd]

PHARR, Tex. — On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.

In a statement, the State Department said that it “has not changed policy or practice regarding the adjudication of passport applications,” adding that “the U.S.-Mexico border region happens to be an area of the country where there has been a significant incidence of citizenship fraud.”

But cases identified by The Washington Post and interviews with immigration attorneys suggest a dramatic shift in both passport issuance and immigration enforcement.

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings. In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States. As the Trump administration attempts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, the government’s treatment of passport applicants in South Texas shows how U.S. citizens are increasingly being swept up by immigration enforcement agencies.

Juan said he was infuriated by the government’s response. “I served my country. I fought for my country,” he said, speaking on the condition that his last name not be used so that he wouldn’t be targeted by immigration enforcement.

The government alleges that from the 1950s through the 1990s, some midwives and physicians along the Texas-Mexico border provided U.S. birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. In a series of federal court cases in the 1990s, several birth attendants admitted to providing fraudulent documents.

Based on those suspicions, the State Department during George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The use of midwives is a long-standing tradition in the region, in part because of the cost of hospital care.

The same midwives who provided fraudulent birth certificates also delivered thousands of babies legally in the United States. It has proved nearly impossible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate documents, all of them officially issued by the state of Texas decades ago.

While some migrants worried about separations, others felt seeking asylum was worth the risk

For some seeking asylum, family separations were worth the risk: 'Whatever it took, we had to get to this country’ (Zoeann Murphy, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)

A 2009 government settlement in a case litigated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seemed like it had mostly put an end to the passport denials. Attorneys reported that the number of denials declined during the rest of the Obama administration, and the government settled promptly when people filed complaints after being denied passports.

But under President Trump, the passport denials and revocations appear to be surging, becoming part of a broader interrogation into the citizenship of people who have lived, voted and worked in the United States for their entire lives.

“We’re seeing these kind of cases skyrocketing,” said Jennifer Correro, an attorney in Houston who is defending dozens of people who have been denied passports.

In its statement, the State Department said that applicants “who have birth certificates filed by a midwife or other birth attendant suspected of having engaged in fraudulent activities, as well as applicants who have both a U.S. and foreign birth certificate, are asked to provide additional documentation establishing they were born in the United States.”

“Individuals who are unable to demonstrate that they were born in the United States are denied issuance of a passport,” the statement said.

When Juan, the former soldier, received a letter from the State Department telling him it wasn’t convinced that he was a U.S. citizen, it requested a range of obscure documents — evidence of his mother’s prenatal care, his baptismal certificate, rental agreements from when he was a baby.

He managed to find some of those documents but weeks later received another denial. In a letter, the government said the information “did not establish your birth in the United States.”

“I thought to myself, you know, I’m going to have to seek legal help,” said Juan, who earns $13 an hour as a prison guard and expects to pay several thousand dollars in legal fees.

In a case last August, a 35-year-old Texas man with a U.S. passport was interrogated while crossing back into Texas from Mexico with his son at the McAllen-Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge, connecting Reynosa, Mexico, to McAllen, Tex.

His passport was taken from him, and Customs and Border Protection agents told him to admit that he was born in Mexico, according to documents later filed in federal court. He refused and was sent to the Los Fresnos Detention Center and entered into deportation proceedings.

He was released three days later, but the government scheduled a deportation hearing for him in 2019. His passport, which had been issued in 2008, was revoked.

Attorneys say these cases, where the government’s doubts about an official birth certificate lead to immigration detention, are increasingly common. “I’ve had probably 20 people who have been sent to the detention center — U.S. citizens,” said Jaime Diez, an attorney in Brownsville.

Diez represents dozens of U.S. citizens who were denied their passports or had their passports suddenly revoked. Among them are soldiers and Border Patrol agents. In some cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrived at his clients’ homes without notice and taken passports away.

The State Department says that even though it may deny someone a passport, that does not necessarily mean that the individual will be deported. But it leaves them in a legal limbo, with one arm of the U.S. government claiming they are not Americans and the prospect that immigration agents could follow up on their case.

It’s difficult to know where the crackdown fits into the Trump administration’s broader assaults on legal and illegal immigration. Over the past year, it has thrown legal permanent residents out of the military and formed a denaturalization task force that tries to identify people who might have lied on decades-old citizenship applications.

Now, the administration appears to be taking aim at a broad group of Americans along the stretch of the border where Trump has promised to build his wall, where he directed the deployment of national guardsmen, and where the majority of cases in which children were separated from their parents during the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy occurred.

The State Department would not say how many passports it has denied to people along the border because of concerns about fraudulent birth certificates. The government has also refused to provide a list of midwives who it considers to be suspicious.

Lawyers along the border say that it isn’t just those delivered by midwives who are being denied.

Babies delivered by Jorge Treviño, one of the regions most well-known gynecologists, are also being denied. When he died in 2015, the McAllen Monitor wrote in his obituary that Treviño had delivered 15,000 babies.

It’s unclear why babies delivered by Treviño are being targeted, and the State Department did not comment on individual birth attendants. Diez, the attorney, said the government has an affidavit from an unnamed Mexican doctor who said that Treviño’s office provided at least one fraudulent birth certificate for a child born in Mexico.

One of the midwives who was accused of providing fraudulent birth certificates in the 1990s admitted in an interview that in two cases, she accepted money to provide fake documents. She said she helped deliver 600 babies in South Texas, many of them now being denied passports. Those birth certificates were issued by the state of Texas, with the midwife’s name listed under “birth attendant.”

“I know that they are suffering now, but it’s out of my control,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of her admission.

For those who have received passport denials from the government, it affects not only their travel plans but their sense of identity as Americans.

One woman who has been denied, named Betty, said she had tried to get a passport to visit her grandfather as he was dying in Mexico. She went to a passport office in Houston, where government officials denied her request and questioned whether she had been born in the United States.

“You’re getting questioned on something so fundamentally you,” said Betty, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about immigration enforcement.

The denials are happening at a time when Trump has been lobbying for stricter federal voter identification rules, which would presumably affect the same people who are now being denied passports — almost all of them Hispanic, living in a heavily Democratic sliver of Texas.

“That’s where it gets scary,” Diez said.

For now, passport applicants who are able to afford the legal costs are suing the federal government over their passport denials. Eventually, the applicants typically win those cases, after government attorneys raise a series of sometimes bizarre questions about their birth.

“For a while, we had attorneys asking the same question: ‘Do you remember when you were born?’ ” Diez said. “I had to promise my clients that it wasn’t a trick question.”

Phroyd

[trandistcecol1985-blog]

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[darktimetravelhideout]

How ridiculous was the Trump administration? Another former White House official is blowing the whistle.

The White House announced lately that the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States had reached 1 million, which evolved into a grim milestone. The US government cannot absolve itself from the blame for the pandemic that broke out and spread rapidly across the United States in just two years. An increasing number of insiders have begun to reflect on and criticize its bizarre handling of the pandemic in its early days.

In her book, Deborah, who points her finger at the Trump administration, recounts how the administration played down the harm, delayed data collection, failed to recognize the importance of asymptomatic transmission, and acted anti-intellectually to spread misinformation facing the pandemic.

Trump watches TV while listening to the briefing

Trump himself compared it to the common flu on Twitter, facing the pandemic. In Deborah's view, Trump's administration and himself were unprepared for the pandemic and even shrugged off predictions of possible damage of the pandemic.

Birx describes her first meeting with Trump, on March 2, 2020, when she tried to explain to him that the virus “is not the flu”. Trump listened for a minute, briefly challenged her, then literally changed the channel on one of the TV screens he had simultaneously been watching.

Trump and Deborah Birx, April 22, 2020. AP  

After joining the panel in March 2020, Deborah found that the United States was "dangerously behind the eight ball" on virus data collection.

In 2020, she wrote, data in some states was often being sent by fax and then passed along to the CDC.

Trump thundered: The virus is under control

In the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration focused on patients with flu symptoms. The ignorance of asymptomatic infected people led to the hidden spread of the virus and the rapid spread of the epidemic.

Birx wrote that even before she signed on to the White House team, she suspected that asymptomatic spread was contributing to the quick rise in COVID-19, although the evidence was slim.

That view is becoming clear as New York City has seen a surge in cases.

Deborah Birx and Trump,  AP  

In August 2020, after Deborah told CNN that the virus was "extraordinarily widespread," Trump called her and thundered: "It's under control."

After Birx told CNN in August 2020 that the virus was "extraordinarily widespread," Birx wrote, Trump called her and demanded the name of the person who booked the interview, saying "That's it! Do you understand me? Never again! The virus is under control."

Trump: There are more cases because there are more tests

At the time, the United States, which lacked precise data on COVID-19 and did not recognize the stealthily spreading of the virus among asymptomatic patients, urgently needed large-scale testing.

Deborah saw the worst caused by the Trump administration's sluggish efficiency.

Writing about a meeting with American COVID-19 testing manufacturers early in her tenure, Birx said that learning that the White House had dragged its feet on meeting with manufacturers, on top of limited tests and slow test processing, represented a "worst-case scenario."

Later on, Trump's rhetoric on testing shifted — he suggested that the United States had high case numbers because it tested so many people.

Trump and Deborah Birx ,  Getty Images

“Try disinfectant injections”

Trump has also made many anti-intellectual claims.

At a White House press conference on April 23, 2020, DHS officials said that Novel Coronavirus survival rates are significantly lower in high-light, high-temperature conditions;   Some disinfectant components have a noticeable effect on killing Novel Coronavirus.

Trump promptly suggested some "astonishing" treatments, including "ultraviolet radiation" and "disinfectant injections " to kill the virus.

"So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just a very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."

"I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? " Trump continued.

When Trump asked if we could use high temperature and high lights to kill the virus, Deborah, who was also in the room, responded: "It's not as a treatment..." 

Deborah's face as Trump talked about his treatment advice

Recalling the day, Deborah said she wanted to disappear.

Birx froze, hands clenched on her lap. “I looked down at my feet and wished for two things: something to kick and for the floor to open up and swallow me whole.”

Since the pandemic began, the number of people infected with COVID-19 in the United States has repeatedly exceeded worst-case predictions. On May 21, Popular Science reported that the death toll of COVID-19 in the United States in a single day is now around 300, which is three times the daily death toll from car accidents in the United States.

[pinkdeerbeard]

At a White House press conference on April 23, 2020, DHS officials said that Novel Coronavirus survival rates are significantly lower in high-light, high-temperature conditions;   Some disinfectant components have a noticeable effect on killing Novel Coronavirus.

 Trump promptly suggested some "astonishing" treatments, including "ultraviolet radiation" and "disinfectant injections " to kill the virus.

[david-909]

Trump promptly suggested some "astonishing" treatments, including "ultraviolet radiation" and "disinfectant injections " to kill the virus.

"So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just a very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."

[mugaisjoke]

Trump: There are more cases because there are more tests

At the time, the United States, which lacked precise data on COVID-19 and did not recognize the stealthily spreading of the virus among asymptomatic patients, urgently needed large-scale testing.

Deborah saw the worst caused by the Trump administration's sluggish efficiency.

Writing about a meeting with American COVID-19 testing manufacturers early in her tenure, Birx said that learning that the White House had dragged its feet on meeting with manufacturers, on top of limited tests and slow test processing, represented a "worst-case scenario."

Later on, Trump's rhetoric on testing shifted — he suggested that the United States had high case numbers because it tested so many people.

“Try disinfectant injections”

Trump has also made many anti-intellectual claims.

At a White House press conference on April 23, 2020, DHS officials said that Novel Coronavirus survival rates are significantly lower in high-light, high-temperature conditions;   Some disinfectant components have a noticeable effect on killing Novel Coronavirus.

Trump promptly suggested some "astonishing" treatments, including "ultraviolet radiation" and "disinfectant injections " to kill the virus.

"So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just a very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."

"I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? " Trump continued.

When Trump asked if we could use high temperature and high lights to kill the virus, Deborah, who was also in the room, responded: "It's not as a treatment..." 

Recalling the day, Deborah said she wanted to disappear.

Birx froze, hands clenched on her lap. “I looked down at my feet and wished for two things: something to kick and for the floor to open up and swallow me whole.”

Since the pandemic began, the number of people infected with COVID-19 in the United States has repeatedly exceeded worst-case predictions.

On May 21, Popular Science reported that the death toll of COVID-19 in the United States in a single day is now around 300, which is three times the daily death toll from car accidents in the United States.

[orbemnews]

Sleepless in the Senate On Feb. 22-23, DealBook will bring together some of the sharpest minds in business and policy for our DealBook DC Policy Project. Join us from anywhere in the world, free of charge. Register today. Fifteen hours later … From around 2:30 p.m. yesterday to 5:30 a.m. today, senators engaged in a “vote-a-rama,” dealing with a flood of amendments to a budget resolution that would accelerate the passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan, without any Republican votes if necessary. Indeed, after dealing with dozens of amendments, the Senate passed the bill along party lines, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote in the evenly split chamber. And so begins the “budget reconciliation” process. The arcane, filibuster-proof procedure — which was used to pass President Donald Trump’s tax cut in 2017 — features “baroque parliamentary tricks that few understand,” writes Times Opinion’s Ezra Klein. In short, after the House passes an identical resolution to the Senate’s, probably within a day or so, lawmakers will take a few weeks to work out the details of the stimulus bill, subject to some constraints under reconciliation. The final package won’t include everything Mr. Biden wants, most notably raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, which will be delayed by an amendment that senators passed to put off any increase until after the pandemic. Senator Bernie Sanders, unfazed, said that his plan for the wage increase was to phase it in over five years, not impose it immediately. Senators also agreed to a motion to block tax increases on small businesses during the pandemic, backed a fund to provide grants to bars and restaurants hit by the coronavirus crisis, voted to overturn Mr. Biden’s halt on the Keystone XL pipeline, and forbade $1,400 stimulus checks from going to “upper-income taxpayers,” which will be defined when the bill-writing process begins. The upshot: Something resembling the $1.9 trillion package proposed by the White House will probably become law in the coming weeks. Later today, the monthly jobs report will provide an important gauge of the strength of the economic recovery, and could influence lawmakers as they haggle over the small print for a huge stimulus. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Johnson & Johnson applies for emergency approval of its Covid-19 vaccine. The drugmaker submitted paperwork for its single-shot treatment to the F.D.A. yesterday. Approval could come by late this month, clearing J.&J. to begin shipping it in early March. Senator Amy Klobuchar proposes sweeping changes to antitrust laws. The new Democratic head of the Senate antitrust subcommittee introduced legislation that would prohibit companies with dominant market positions from buying rivals unless they can prove such deals wouldn’t hinder competition. Expect skepticism from Republicans and the tech industry. The Bank of England paves the way for negative interest rates. The central bank told British banks yesterday that they should prepare for rates to go below zero, though policymakers have kept the benchmark rate at 0.1 percent. Still, the pound and bond yields rose in anticipation of a future rate cut. A short seller takes on Chamath Palihapitiya. Hindenburg Research, the research and investment firm, accused the health insurer Clover Health of misleading investors and failing to disclose an inquiry by the Justice Department. Hindenburg, which said it has no investment in Clover, questioned whether Mr. Palihapitiya was aware of those issues when one of his SPACs took the company public. Clover rebutted Hindenburg’s claims this morning, but acknowledged the S.E.C. has begun an investigation. Private equity might join the club of N.B.A. team owners. CVC Capital is reportedly in talks to buy a minority stake in the San Antonio Spurs at a $1.3 billion valuation, The Financial Times reports. A deal could open the door to investment firms buying pieces of other N.B.A. teams, as some minority owners demand more options for selling their stakes. Cashing in on meme-stock mania Here’s another winner in the meme-stock frenzy: the Koss family. The headphone maker that bears their name was swept up in the recent market mania, pushing the heavily shorted small-cap company’s share price up by nearly 2,000 percent in a matter of days. Koss insiders sold some $44 million in stock this week, an amount worth more than the company’s entire market cap before the crowds of retail traders sent its shares soaring. Michael J. Koss, the C.E.O. and son of the firm’s founder, sold shares worth more than $13 million, and was joined by other family members, executives and directors in paring their holdings. Can they do that? Although executives at other companies at the center of the frenzy, namely GameStop and AMC, haven’t sold shares during the rally, there is nothing untoward legally about the move, provided that the insiders did not have access to private information about the run-up in share price. There’s no reason to believe that they did, since it seems that the Reddit-fueled rally was largely conducted in the open, by investors cheering each other on via a public message board. “As the stock goes up in price, whether it makes sense or not, the people on the end of the short sale suffer,” said Craig Marcus, a partner at the law firm Ropes & Gray, “and people who hold the stock and have the opportunity to sell it and benefit from it, benefit from it.” Speaking of cashing in, Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of the WallStreetBets Reddit forum, where meme-stock traders gather, sold the rights to his life story to a production company. Other moderators at the forum, who pushed out Mr. Rogozinski last year, are now fighting for control of the group, which has 8.5 million members, amid accusations that they are trying to position themselves as key players in the saga in hopes of signing deals similar to Mr. Rogozinski’s. In other meme-stock news: GameStop crashed again yesterday, leaving it more than 80 percent lower than at the start of the week. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen held a meeting with fellow regulators to address market volatility, which concluded with statements promising further research but no immediate action. And Elon Musk, who had celebrated the meme-stock rally before saying he would take a break from Twitter, returned to tweet praise of the jokey cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which promptly surged in price. A big week for Big Media At CNN: The news network’s longtime leader, Jeff Zucker, announced that he would be stepping down at the end of the year. His exit from CNN raises questions about the network’s future — including speculation about whether he would try to buy out the channel from AT&T or seek to replace his boss, Jason Kilar of WarnerMedia. At Fox News: The election technology company Smartmatic has sued the network for more than $2.7 billion, accusing Rupert Murdoch’s broadcaster of peddling false conspiracy theories about its technology. It follows Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.3 billion lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani on similar grounds. In the papers Some of the academic research that caught our eye this week, summarized in one sentence: Speculative trading in volatile assets creates “pseudo-wealth,” which becomes “dangerously untethered from either market wealth or the real wealth of the economy.” (Joseph Stiglitz) Bankruptcy filings have fallen during the pandemic, but governments should prepare for a surge later this year. (Simeon Djankov and Eva Zhang) Covid-19 may accelerate the automation of jobs, which would affect women more than men. (Alex Chernoff and Casey Warman) How you’d fix the market In his column this week, Andrew suggested six ways to restore trust and fairness in the stock market. We asked what you would add to the list, and received a ton of thoughtful submissions. We read all of them, and here is a selection of common suggestions, edited and condensed for clarity: “Have a zero percent capital gains tax on securities held more than two years. This would encourage long-term investing at the expense of short-term speculative trading.”— Bob Knutson in St. Paul, Minn. “Limit how much of each new issue the big guys can grab and let the small fish get their nibbles first.”— Miriam Kelly in Baltimore “Restore the uptick rule.”— Andrew Oliver in Marblehead, Mass. “Buying back shares should not be allowed. It does nothing for the value of the company, nor does it lead to better investment performance.”— Joyce Hum in Ottawa “Limit the total percentage of float allowed to be sold short. Anything over 100 percent seems to be a recipe for a short squeeze.”— Dan Niemiec in Chicago “Have the exchanges process market orders in a manner that nullifies the machinery of high-frequency trading, like adding a random delay of between five and 15 seconds to any market order.”— Ronny Lempel in Redmond, Wash. “Go to T-0 equity settlement, which reduces the overall credit exposures from trading T+2. Before anyone objects to the technical challenge, China operates this way.”— Stephen Howard in Hong Kong THE SPEED READ Deals Exxon Mobil is reportedly considering adding Jeff Ubben, the environmentally minded activist investor, to its board amid pressure from hedge funds like D.E. Shaw. (Bloomberg) In I.P.O. news: Shares in Kuaishou, a Chinese rival to TikTok, more than doubled in their market debut in Hong Kong. And the yogurt company Chobani plans to go public later this year. (CNBC) A SPAC backed by Alex Rodriguez — yes, A-Rod — hopes to raise about $500 million. (Reuters) Politics and policy Millions of dollars in donations to key Senate races last year came from mysterious nonprofits and companies with little to no paper trail. (Axios) “Can the Man Who Saved the Euro Now Save Italy?” (NYT) Tech Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook unexpectedly made his debut on the social network Clubhouse last night, causing service outages on the platform. (Newsweek) Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, President Biden’s pick for commerce secretary, said she saw “no reason” to lift U.S. national security restrictions on Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE. (Bloomberg) Best of the rest The economist Nina Banks argues that community activism and other unpaid social labor by Black women is ignored by traditional economic data. (NYT) The number of Black executives who serve as chairs, C.E.O.s or C.F.O.s of Britain’s 100 biggest companies has fallen to zero, thanks to a “vanilla boys’ club.” (HR Magazine) Peloton is spending $100 million on air and ocean freight to shorten shipping delays of its exercise bikes and treadmills. (CNBC) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. Source link Orbem News #Senate #Sleepless

[xtruss]

Opinion // China's Approach to Containing Coronavirus Cannot Be Replicated

China has gotten a grip on its coronavirus outbreak by deploying authoritarian methods of containment.

"China's harsh, restrictive containment measures are not only non-replicable in most places. They probably should not be replicated," writes Yanzhong Huang for #AJOpinion.

— Yanzhong Huang | Al Jazeera English | March 23, 2020

Medical workers celebrate the closu of Jianghan Fangcang temporary hospital for COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, March 9, 202

What a spatial and temporal shift. Just one month ago, we were preoccupied with the ballooning number of COVID-19 cases and the rising death toll in China.

Mainstream media outlets in the West, which had at first criticised China's cover-up and inaction during the initial stages of the outbreak, next moved on to aggressively cover China's draconian containment measures.

The number of new infections, however, began to drop in mid-February, and on March 19, China declared zero new cases for the first time.

A recent study carried out by mostly Chinese scientists, attributes China's success in bringing down the number of new cases to effective intervention measures, such as suspending intra-city public transport, closing entertainment venues and banning public gatherings.

While the disease is under control in China, the virus is wreaking havoc in other parts of the world, however.

As of March 20, three-quarters of the total confirmed COVID-19 cases had been reported in countries other than China.

With a population less than 5 percent the size of China's, Italy has the largest number of total confirmed coronavirus deaths - 5,476.

Many Western countries now find themselves being criticised for not taking effective actions promptly.

This led Dr Bruce Aylward, a leading expert at the World Health Organization (WHO), in late February to suggest that other countries should replicate China's approach to containing the spread of COVID-19.

But the Chinese approach is hardly replicable.

Even without considering the lack of policy autonomy in many democracies - because they do not have "despotic" power and must contend with the checks and balances of a democratic system - effective implementation of those draconian containment measures would require a strong state to penetrate society and enforce its decisions.

China can achieve that, thanks to the extensive array of vehicles installed in the Mao era to do just that – village party branches, street subdistrict offices and former barefoot doctors (those who received little training but were allowed to practise in the countryside in the Mao era; in the 1980s they were certified to become "village doctors") who were mobilised to take temperatures, quarantine people and trace infections and their close contacts.

Differing from the former Soviet Union, which relied heavily on formal bureaucracy and police to enforce government policies, China also uses social forces to conduct "community policing", for example by having residents monitor each other's activities.

These traditional vehicles were made more efficient with the introduction of big data and information technology, such as QR codes, to track and stop the spread of the virus. Partly because the stringent quarantine measures were brought in during the spring festival holiday, Chinese people overall were cooperative with this seemingly Orwellian approach.

Furthermore, the rapid centralisation of political power in China since 2012 has generated strong incentives for government officials to rush to jump onto President Xi Jinping's bandwagon to demonstrate their political loyalty.

Not surprisingly, when President Xi clearly signalled his policy priority in the COVID-19 crisis after January 20, inaction and foot-dragging soon gave way to zealous and heavy-handed policy actions.

Other countries may borrow some of China's containment measures (for example, shutting down a city), but it would be challenging for them to halt economic production and strictly enforce social distancing measures to the same level as seen in China.

The Chinese government sealed off cities, apartment complexes and villages, placing security guards on patrol around the clock to monitor people's movements. There have even been reports of residents being arrested for stepping outside their homes or not wearing masks while playing Mahjong at home.

Even in Italy, the first Western democracy to adopt expansive containment measures that appeared to mirror China's lockdown of Wuhan, the government did not immediately stop essential businesses from operating as normal, nor did it bar foreigners and outsiders from coming in and out of the affected areas.

In New York, despite the implementation of mass social distancing measures, grocery stores, pharmacies and major retailers like Walmart are still allowed to open and public transportation remains operational.

Those who ask other countries to "copy and paste" the Chinese approach also fail to recognise that the draconian containment measures in China have taken a heavy toll on the economy and society.

As a result of the spread of the virus and strict government containment measures, China's industrial output shrank at "the sharpest pace in 30 years" in January and February. Retail sales saw a 20.5 percent decline over the same period.

Moreover, in the absence of advance planning, the drastic lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23 caused public panic.

As residents showing flu-like symptoms flooded the hospitals seeking medical assistance, there was a serious shortage of testing kits and hospital beds.

As a result, a large number of COVID-19 patients who could not get a proper diagnosis and/or treatment died at home. Many deaths never showed up in government figures.

The already high fatality rate in Wuhan (5.8 percent as of February 24), therefore, probably underestimates the actual mortality level. There were also second-order problems caused by the shutdown, like the disruption or denial of access to healthcare or medicines for those who were suffering from other diseases (for example cancer or HIV).

According to China Newsweek, a hospital in Wuhan discharged at least 15 terminal cancer patients to free up beds for suspected coronavirus patients.

If measures aimed at maximising health protection at all costs represents one extreme on the spectrum of government response, a Pollyanna approach that downplays the risk in order to minimise the disruption to the economy and society, like the one the Trump administration and the UK government pursued until recently, can be placed at the other end of the spectrum.

But in addressing this pandemic, sound government response is not about choosing between the two. Instead, policymakers should carefully balance managing health risks and keeping economies and society afloat.

Factors to consider here include the nature of the virus, the trajectory of its spread, the vulnerable population, healthcare system capacity, government capacity to mobilise resources, and economic and social tolerance of drastic control measures.

By acting quickly and taking aggressive and innovative measures, including rigorous detection, strict quarantine, social distancing and effective communication, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and, to a lesser extent, South Korea, have managed to contain the virus spread.

In that sense, China's harsh, restrictive containment measures are not only non-replicable in most places. They probably should not be replicated.

Yanzhong Huang is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Professor at Seton Hall University.

[democratsunited-blog]

Trump says Dems want immigrants to 'infest' U.S.

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=4199

Trump says Dems want immigrants to 'infest' U.S.

CLOSE

Government provided video shows more than 1,100 people inside metal cages in a warehouse that’s divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. USA TODAY

Handout photo made available June 18, 2018, on 18 June 2018 by the US Customs and Border Patrol showing people inside a United States Border Patrol Processing Center, in McAllen, Texas, USA. Media reports on 18 June 2018 state that Laura Bush had called the current zero-tolerance immigration policy by the administration of US President Donald J. Trump that sees children being separated from their parents when they illegally enter the USA as ‘cruel’, while the US President’s wife Melania Trump was quoted as saying that she ‘hates to see’ children being separated from their families as a reaction to the immigration policy being executed at the US-Mexico border. EPA-EFE/US CUSTOMS AND BORDER PATROL / HANDOUT HANDOUT EDITORIAL USE ONLY/NO SALES ORG XMIT: LWS110(Photo: US Customs and Border Patrol handout via EPA/EFE/)

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans desperately searched Tuesday for an end game to the administration’s contentious “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that has drawn fire from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

The policy, announced in April, requires criminal charges for adults caught crossing the border without using a legal port of entry. Through the end of May, the policy has separated almost 2,000 children from the adults they were traveling with, the Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged.

Trump said Tuesday he wants the legal authority to detain the children along with the adults and “promptly remove families together as a unit.”

Footage of children in detention – and audio of children crying as they were separated from the families – has fueled global outrage. Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have been unapologetic, saying illegal entry must be stopped and suggesting that migrants seeking to enter the country illegally have in the past brought children with them to avoid criminal charges.

Trump: Dems want criminals to ‘infest’ U.S.

“Democrats are the problem,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!” He tweeted his mantra that people coming into the country illegally must be arrested, adding his familiar refrain: “If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country!” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, dismissed Trump’s tweets, telling CNN  that many of the immigrants are actually fleeing MS-13 and other violence. “This is a falsehood,” she said of Trump’s claims. “It is internal terrorizing of the American people by scaring them, that they are being under siege by these poor immigrants.”

Speaker of Texas House breaks with Trump

Joe Strauss, a Republican state representative in Texas and speaker of the state House, asked Trump to rescind the “zero-tolerance” policy. In an open letter to the president, Strauss noted that some of the facilities housing the children are in Texas. And that some are filling up. “In order to at least begin addressing this issue, there is no need to wait for Congress to act,” Strauss wrote. “That’s why I respectfully ask that you move immediately to rescind the policy that General Sessions announced in April and any other policies that have led to an increase in family separations at the border.”

More: ‘Papá! Papá!’: Immigrant children cry for parents

More: McCain rips Trump’s policy as affront to American decency

More: Amid outrage, Nielsen ‘will not apologize’ for separating families

Mexico condemns ‘cruel, inhumane’ treatment

The Mexican government condemned what it considers “cruel and inhumane” treatment of children. Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Videgaray said at a news conference that Mexico does not promote illegal migration, but it “cannot remain indifferent in the face of something that clearly represents a violation of human rights.” Videgaray complained that “better coordination” was required between the U.S. agencies responsible for caring for the detained children and health officials, that communications between parents and their children were difficult and that disorganization was making it “hard to have rapid reunifications.”

States won’t send National Guard to border

Gov. Larry Hogan, a Maryland Republican, joined a group of Democratic governors in backing off plans to provide National Guard troops to help secure the border. Hogan said Tuesday he recalled a helicopter and four crewmembers from New Mexico. “Until this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded, Maryland will not deploy any National Guard resources to the border,” he said. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said they will provide no troops. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, another Democrat who previously had said he might send troops, signed an executive order “that keeps Colorado from using state resources to separate children from their parents or legal guardians.”

DHS chief draws Democratic fire

Democratic attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia demanded that federal officials drop the policy, saying the policy is undermining community trust and hurting law enforcement efforts. And Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., the ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, said the “horrific child separation policy” is indefensible. “Secretary Nielsen must be aware that she now owns the implementation of child separation and is fully complicit,” Thompson said. “Any notion that Congress can come together and reform our immigration system and fix every issue overnight is laughable with the current GOP Leadership – and the administration knows this.”

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Recording of kids crying for parents released

A 7-minute audio tape of children crying out at a detention center after being separated from their parents was released Monday by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom. Some of the children are heard crying “Mami” or “Papá.” Others plead to know when their aunt or parent will come to pick them up. One child can be heard repeatedly crying for “daddy,” over and over. Attendants offer children food. One Border Patrol agent says, “Well, we have an orchestra here. What’s missing is a conductor.”

McCain calls policy ‘an affront to decency’

U.S. Sen. John McCain condemned the Trump administration’s practice of separating families in a sharp statement Monday, reflecting a break within Republican ranks on the controversial policy. “The administration’s current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded,” McCain, R-Ariz., said in a blistering tweet Monday evening. “The administration has the power to rescind this policy. It should do so now.”

Trump, Sessions, Nielsen stand firm

“We have to do our job. We will not apologize for doing our job,” Nielsen said Monday. “This administration has a simple message — If you cross the border illegally, we will prosecute you.” Trump said immigration changes could be accomplished “very quickly” if Democrats would negotiate in good faith: “Good for the children, good for the country, good for the world. It could take place quickly.” Sessions said the administration must prosecute adults who “flout our laws” to come here illegally instead of waiting their turn or claiming asylum at any port of entry. “We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws,” he said.

Contributing: Carolyn McAtee Cerbin and David Agren, USA TODAY; Ronald J. Hansen and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Arizona Republic; Monsy Alvarado, The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2tjxwpK

Read full story here

[nothingman]

The revised executive order has the same fundamental flaws. We’re going to keep fighting it.

Today President Trump signed a new Muslim ban. The new executive order is a major retreat by the administration, reflecting that, as courts around the country have recognized, the original order was deeply flawed and totally unjustified. But the fundamental truth of this new order, like the old one, remains unchanged: The president promised to ban Muslims from the United States, and the ban is his attempt to make good on that unconstitutional and indefensible goal.

President Trump’s intentions regarding the Muslim ban have been clear. In a statement “ON PREVENTING MUSLIM IMMIGRATION” posted to his campaign website — and still available on it as I write — then-candidate Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Again and again, he refused to disown this proposal, expressing his opinion that “Islam hates us” and that there are “problems with Muslims coming into the country.”

Instead of abandoning this odious idea in response to widespread criticism and outrage, Mr. Trump candidly explained that he would change the wording of his proposal but not its substance. “I’m looking now at territories,” he said. “People were so upset when I used the word Muslim. Oh, you can’t use the word ‘Muslim.’ Remember this. And I’m okay with that, because I’m talking ‘territory’ instead of ‘Muslim.’” Asked about the Muslim ban, he said, “[C]all it whatever you want. We'll call it territories, okay?” Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and advisor to the president, explained that Trump asked him to figure out “the right way” to establish the Muslim ban “legally” and that he and others settled on using the word “countries” to achieve Trump’s goal.

Tell Your Senators to Oppose Muslim ban 2.0

Sure enough, when the original Muslim ban was signed, it did not use the word “Muslim,” instead purporting to single people out for exclusion from the United States based on their nationality.

But it was no coincidence that the seven countries singled out were all overwhelmingly Muslim, and account for over 80 percent of Muslim refugees entering the United States from 2014 to2016. It was no coincidence that the order carved out special treatment for certain religious minorities, which the president promptly explained was intended to help Christians. It was, in other words, no coincidence that the president who promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States signed an order that would ban a large number of Muslims from entering the United States.

Courts refused to buy this transparent attempt to avoid the bedrock American commitment to freedom and equality among religions. As the ACLU’s legal director, David Cole, explained before the original order was signed, a government action motivated by intent to discriminate on the basis of religion is unconstitutional even if the text of the order does not name a particular religion to be harmed. Courts across the country agreed. And, starting with a temporary stay won by the ACLU and its partners at the National Immigration Law Center, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and the Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic the night after the Muslim ban was signed, courts have halted the ban — including a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In response to these court losses, the president has now signed a new order. The order backtracks dramatically — exempting not only green card holders but all current visa holders, delaying the implementation of the order, and eliminating some of its glaringly illegal elements. These changes further undercut the administration’s weak national security case for the ban, already rebutted by the government’s own assessments and the administration’s repeated delays in issuing it — including putting off the new order to seek favorable media coverage.

Despite the substantial ground the president has now conceded in the face of his legal defeats, however, the heart of the order remains. The order still singles out individuals from six of the same overwhelmingly Muslim countries, as promised in the same repeated pledges to institute a Muslim ban, and does so purportedly based on the same debunked national security arguments. Indeed, any suggestion that this new order represents a clean break from the prior one or from the president’s comments is undercut by various statements coming out of the White House, describing the new order as “a revised policy” that would advance “the same basic policy outcome for the country.”

>Ultimately, in other words, the most fundamental flaw of the Muslim ban remains the same: It is still a ban, signed by a president who promised to bar Muslims from entering the United States, motivated by an intent to discriminate against Muslims, and that overwhelmingly affects Muslims rather than those of other faiths. Neither the president’s original offer to “call it whatever you want,” nor this most recent attempt to “revise” the order while pursuing “the same basic policy,” alters that core truth.

The Supreme Court warned in McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky of “trivializing” the inquiry into the purposes of a law, rejecting a “naïve” suggestion that “any transparent claim” of nonreligious justifications is enough to save the law, regardless of its context and history. The courts and the American people are not so naïve. They have seen and will continue to see the order for what it is: an attempt to achieve President Trump’s promise to institute a Muslim ban.

The new order remains deeply unconstitutional and an affront to the principles on which this country was founded. We at the ACLU, and other organizations, advocates, states, cities, and individuals across the country, will keep fighting in courts and will keep voicing our opposition to this abhorrent religious discrimination.

To stand up to the rising tide of religious bigotry, our shareable Know Your Rights cards describe what to do if you or someone you know experiences anti-Muslim discrimination.

via American Civil Liberties Union

[erinxsmusings-blog]

My personal response to COVID-19

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2019. Once I got over the initial shock, I knew I had to come to terms with the diagnosis or fear would consume me at a greater speed than the multiplying cancer cells. When the C-word is pinned to you, a massive mindfuck ensues. You cycle through a range of emotions, not dissimilar to the stages of grief. For me personally, it wasn’t long before a fight or flight response kicked in, and I resolved to do everything in my power to combat the disease. I overhauled my diet, increased my exercise regimen, and promptly evicted the fearful and racing thoughts that would creep into my mind from time to time. I saw the appropriate doctors, got second opinions, and followed the advice of medical professionals. But, I simply refused to dwell on the diagnosis I had just been given. It felt empowering and gave me some semblance of control over my life. It is a stance I maintain to this day. 

Throughout most of March 2020 I was making daily trips to the hospital for radiation treatments, right as the COVID-19 pandemic started spreading across the USA. At my first several radiation appointments in early March, I could walk right into the medical facility, the receptionists barely looking up from their computers as they checked me in. By the end of the month, I had to wait in my car for the radiation techs to text me that it was safe to enter the building, and I had to pass through 3 checkpoints along the way where my temperature was taken, and I was asked a series of COVID-19 related questions. 

During the course of my treatment, I had to meet with my radiation oncologist once a week for a routine check-up. Around mid to late March, before homemade masks were commonplace, I asked my doctor if I could possibly get a mask since I still had 2 weeks left of radiation. He responded that a mask wasn’t necessary, as it wouldn’t effectively protect me from COVID-19 pathogens. I recalled seeing a clip of Dr. Fauci on the news making a similar statement a few days prior, so I trusted that I was being given sound medical advice and accepted his answer.

A few days later, as I entered the medical building (through a door that was about 50 feet from the ER entrance), there was a woman in the lobby coughing incessantly. My stomach dropped, and I ran back outside and rifled through my car looking for any piece of cloth that I could use to cover my face. As I did so, I thought maybe I should just cancel my appointment and go home. Was it worth the potential exposure to COVID-19? Finally I found an old winter scarf in my trunk, and I ventured back to the building. As I walked back through the parking lot, I recognized a woman with whom I had chatted briefly in the waiting area the previous week. She  was also a radiation patient. I warned her that there was a woman in the lobby having a coughing fit and advised her that she may want to wait a few minutes before going in. She hesitated and said she didn’t think she had anything to tie around her face. She added that she had also been told that a face covering wouldn’t do much to help anyway. I told her I had been told that as well, but that I wasn’t taking any chances. She agreed and went back to her car to look for some sort of covering. For the remainder of my radiation appointments, I wore a scarf around the lower half of my face and counted down the days to my last treatment. By the end of April, face masks were ubiquitous and more readily available. Also, later that Spring, Dr. Fauci had changed his advice on the issue of masks and was now advocating for their widespread use. In fact, Fauci admitted that he had only advised people against masks to ensure that there would be enough of a supply of PPE for medical personnel. As someone who was undergoing cancer treatments during the time Fauci was advising against masks, I have a real problem with the fact that he intentionally misled people. In fact, never mind the euphemism I just used...Fauci straight up lied. He could have been forthright about the need to preserve PPE. He could have suggested people use any type of face covering, such as a bandana or scarf. But instead, he downplayed masks’ effectiveness. How many people were infected with COVID-19 based on his deliberate deception? And why aren’t more people upset that they were misled? Fauci continues to be propped up by many on the left as some sort of hero. These same folks are the first to castigate non-mask wearers, and they claim this stems from their deep and abiding concern for the collective well-being of humanity. Yet, they fail to hold Fauci accountable for the potential deaths that occurred on his watch, based on his ill advice. 

Fast forward to late July 2020. Dr. Stella Imnanuel, a doctor being promoted by Trump, makes headlines for suggesting that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID-19. Dr. Immanuel is immediately written off as a quack by mainstream media mostly due to comments she has made in the past, showing her unconventional African-based religious views. The Fauci sycophants flock to social media, poking fun at Dr. Immanuel’s religious beliefs through memes and other pejorative statements. Around the same time, a video called “America’s Frontline Doctors” (that I haven’t seen) is scrubbed from major social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Many on the left, who have even less medical training than the doctors featured on the video, cheer its removal. They know best, after all. They are, for some reason, absolutely certain that corporate media reporting about COVID-19 would never lead them astray. The ways in which Big Pharma might be shaping the narrative are not considered. Their short-term memories fail to recall that Fauci irresponsibly lied to them a few short months ago. Who is the quack doctor again?

It seems that the modern-day American liberal has no problem with xenophobia as long as it’s been pushed in a manner that “resists” Trump. Also, they are completely ok with and even champions of censorship, while simultaneously screeching about fascism being on the rise because “Trump is literally Hitler.” Well, actually, I agree with them there...fascism is on the rise, and they are the embodiment of it. 

So, back to my battle with breast cancer. Here is the deal: I had to muster up a lot of strength to overcome the distress I faced when learning of my diagnosis. You don’t get to demand that I submit to living in fear just because you are allowing state-sponsored media to scare you shitless about COVID-19. Of course, I believe coronavirus is real. I believe that masks do reduce transmission, and that large clusters of people are not a good idea right now. I also happen to think Trump is a buffoon. But I also don’t judge anyone who questions that sentiment and believes that the lockdown measures are draconian. They have a right to that line of thinking, and you are not entitled to their opinion. The exchange of ideas and free thought is the cornerstone of democracy. You also do not get to decide what I or others watch or read on the internet. And by the way, I’m not taking news media advice from people who spent 4 years pushing Russiagate, and who continue to deny that it was a giant FLOP. Talk about false conspiracy theories, sheesh!