Wednesday July 3rd, 2019 at 7:02 AM - "The Geopolitics are not just about Real Estate, young man." - A Saudi’s advice for Kushner: How your peace plan can still avoid catastrophic failure - Haaretz - Post Link
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Wednesday July 3rd, 2019 at 7:02 AM - "The Geopolitics are not just about Real Estate, young man." - A Saudi’s advice for Kushner: How your peace plan can still avoid catastrophic failure - Haaretz - Post Link
A Saudi’s advice for Kushner: How your peace plan can still avoid catastrophic failure Haaretz
If Jared Kushner wants to keep his Mideast peace plan alive, he's got to harness popular Arab and Islamic support. That means changing course, away from ...
House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes on Joseph Mifsud and his ties to western intelligence.
Maria Callas Live: Bizet's Carmen Habanera, Hamburg 1962
WASHINGTON — The House sued the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday, demanding access to President Trump’s tax returns and escalating a fight with an administration that has repeatedly dismissed as illegitimate its attempt to obtain the financial records.
The lawsuit moves the dispute into the federal courts after months of sniping between the Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee, which requested and then subpoenaed the returns, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The case may ultimately go to the Supreme Court, and its outcome is likely to determine whether financial information that Mr. Trump has kept closely guarded in spite of longstanding presidential tradition will be viewed by Congress and, ultimately, the public.
In Tuesday’s filing, the House argued that the administration’s defiance of its request amounted to “an extraordinary attack on the authority of Congress to obtain information needed to conduct oversight of Treasury, the I.R.S. and the tax laws on behalf of the American people.” It asked a judge to order the defendants to comply.
But with the House and the executive branch locked in a broader struggle over access to information and witnesses related to the Trump administration, the stakes in the tax-return lawsuit may be higher than that particular issue. House Democrats are facing similar resistance on a broad range of investigations that include inquiries into Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian election interference, the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, and the profits gleaned from Mr. Trump’s continuing business ventures.
In almost every instance, the Trump administration has argued that Congress’s power to gain access to those materials is inherently limited to information that would serve “legitimate” legislative purposes — defined by the executive branch to be limited to materials needed to help draft new laws and to exclude uncovering potential wrongdoing.
Congress retorts that its powers to compel information are far more sweeping than that and encompass oversight of important matters in general — and that its decisions about what information it wants to subpoena are not to be second-guessed by the White House.
The same dispute is at the center of a pair of lawsuits over subpoenas to accounting and banking firms for other financial records involving the Trump Organization. So far, two Federal District Court judges have swiftly rejected the argument offered by Mr. Trump’s private legal team that those requests did not carry legitimate legislative purposes. Mr. Trump has taken those losses to appeals courts.
A ruling by a federal court on the merits of the recurring dispute could shift the balance of power between the two branches and affect the authority of Congress to conduct oversight over not just Mr. Trump but presidents for years to come.
Depending on how quickly the courts choose to move on the litigation, though, that outcome could take months or years — a reality certain to frustrate liberals who are irate both at Mr. Trump’s vow to fight “all” congressional subpoenas and at the House’s thus far slow pace in bringing the case to court. Six months into Democratic control of the House, the tax returns lawsuit is its first attempt to enforce a subpoena in court.
Democrats have clamored for Mr. Trump’s returns since he burst onto the political stage, convinced they will show that he has distorted his assets and potentially defrauded the government. They have indicated they are preparing other lawsuits as well, including a potential suit to force Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, to testify despite White House claims that he and other top presidential advisers have “absolute immunity” from congressional subpoenas.
Mr. Trump was the first major presidential candidate in decades not to voluntarily release his tax returns. He has said that the returns were under audit by the I.R.S., but that does not actually preclude him from releasing them to the public.
The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, initially requested six years of Mr. Trump’s personal and business returns in early April using a provision of the federal tax code that grants the chairmen of Congress’s tax-writing committees the power to request tax information on any filer. The provision in question — Section 6103 — dates to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s and says merely that the Treasury secretary “shall” furnish the requested material.
Mr. Neal, a Democrat, said he needed the returns, as well as audit information from the I.R.S., for a study of the efficacy of the agency’s mandatory presidential audit program that could potentially result in legislative changes.
Mr. Mnuchin rejected the request anyway, prompting Mr. Neal to shift tactics and counter in May by issuing subpoenas for the same material. That led to another rejection by Mr. Mnuchin. Both times, he said the requests lacked any “legitimate legislative purpose.”
The House suit asks a federal judge to enforce both approaches, validating the committee’s use of Section 6103 and Mr. Neal’s subpoenas. It says that “numerous investigative reports have revealed that President Trump, through the complex arrangements of his personal and business finances, has engaged in multiple aggressive tax strategies and decades-long tax avoidance schemes.”
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel last month endorsed Mr. Mnuchin’s rationale with a 33-page memo. The department pointed to it again on Tuesday, while otherwise declining to comment on the case. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.
In the memo, Steven A. Engel, the head of the office, cited comments by Mr. Neal and other Democrats that suggested, among other things, that they wanted to obtain and disclose Mr. Trump’s tax returns to “‘honor tradition,’ show ‘what the Russians have on Donald Trump,’ reveal a potential ‘Chinese connection,’ inform tax reform legislation, provide the ‘clearest picture of his financial health,’” and expose any hidden business dealings that may run afoul of the Constitution’s ban on receiving “emoluments” from foreign governments.
Against that backdrop. Mr. Engel dismissed Mr. Neal’s stated official rationale for seeking the returns — that Congress needs them for an investigation into how the I.R.S. audits and enforces federal tax laws against presidents — as “pretextual,” saying lawmakers instead wanted them for the political purpose of disclosing them. That purpose, he said, was not within Congress’s legitimate constitutional authorities.
The Trump administration and the president’s personal lawyers have raised the “legitimate purpose” argument repeatedly as they have sought to parry Democratic demands for information related to not just Mr. Trump’s finances but also issues ranging from the special counsel’s Trump-Russia investigation to the granting of security clearances to close Trump associates.
Last month, the House passed a resolution that cleared the way for committees to file lawsuits asking a court to order the executive branch to comply with their subpoenas without further action on the full House floor. The Ways and Means Committee lawsuit for Mr. Trump’s tax returns is the first exercise of that authority.
Even so, liberals have been frustrated with the pace of the case and have repeatedly targeted Mr. Neal in recent months, urging him to move faster. Stand Up America, a liberal advocacy group, said on Monday that it would be targeting constituents of Ways and Means Committee members by text and email to ask their representatives to press Mr. Neal to go to court.
For now, the dispute over the Mueller investigation materials, which centers on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, has not developed into a lawsuit because Attorney General William P. Barr has started providing some access to underlying material from the special counsel investigation.
The House has also held off on voting to hold Mr. Barr or Mr. Mnuchin in contempt of Congress, a step that in the past has preceded asking a judge to issue an order requiring an executive branch official to comply with a subpoena.
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MOSCOW — Fourteen sailors died in a fire on a deep-sea Russian military vessel, the Russian military said on Tuesday.
The Russian authorities did not say if the vessel was powered by a nuclear reactor, which could raise fears of radiation leaks. But some Russian media, citing military sources, said the stricken vessel was a nuclear-powered submarine.
On Tuesday evening, an official with the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Norway said the agency had taken radiation measurements after the incident but detected nothing unusual, Reutersreported.
The lethal fire broke out on the vessel based at the same Arctic port, Severomorsk, as the Kursk nuclear submarine that sank in 2000, killing 118 sailors in a searing tragedy for the Russian Navy that posed an early test of President Vladimir V. Putin’s leadership.
In the Kursk sinking and subsequent accidents in Russia’s submarine fleet, the navy has been slow in acknowledging the gravity of emergencies, the scale of human loss or the environmental threat.
The military announced the latest fire and casualties on Tuesday, but said the accident happened a day earlier. It said the sailors had died from smoke inhalation. The statement offered no explanation for the delayed announcement.
It was not clear if the vessel was submerged at the time of the fire, and the military did not specify its location, other than to say it had been within Russian territorial waters. The Severomorsk base is on the Murmansk Fjord, which opens to the Barents Sea.
The Ministry of Defense issued a statement describing the stricken vessel as a “scientific experimental deep water apparatus intended to study the natural environment and sea floor.”
But some Russian media indicated that the vessel was a spy submarine. In a possible indication of the importance of the vessel or its mission, Mr. Putin said seven of those who died were captains and that two of the dead had received high military honors.
Mr. Putin canceled a planned visit to the provincial city of Tver to remain in the Kremlin, where Russian television showed him directing his defense minister to fly to Severomorsk to oversee the military’s response.
Russian authorities did not say how many people were aboard the vessel at the time of the fire. The Ministry of Defense said the vessel was returned to the base at Severomorsk.
The accident aboard the Kursk in 2000 had proved a difficult moment for Mr. Putin.
The Kursk, a strategic missile submarine powered by twin nuclear reactors, sank after a torpedo exploded during a test launch. The Russian military, threadbare after the Soviet collapse, lacked rescue equipment and waited days before appealing for international help.
The military kept shifting its accounts, saying at one point that the crew had perished instantly. But a note was later found by a crew member who survived long enough to write that 23 sailors were trapped alive.
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Legal Bombshell: Democrats Sue Donald Trump For Elusive Taxes | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC
It was the end of a tumultuous month for the Trump White House. A redacted version of the Mueller report had been released to the public. Democratic committee leaders were threatening subpoenas. The special counsel had broken his silence to criticize the attorney general’s handling of the report’s release.
In Washington DC, Donald Trump’s presidency was under as much pressure as ever. But on Facebook, the Trump circle was asserting another reality.
“While Democrats have spent the last two years wasting your money on a bogus WITCH HUNT that found NO COLLUSION, President Trump has been fighting for YOU,” read the copy in Facebook ads run by Trump’s re-election campaign on 30 April. “The Democratic Party has sunk so low that they’re embracing Anti Semite Ilhan Omar, who recently minimized the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as ‘some people did something.’ Their party is a disgrace.”
The ads were notable for a number of reasons.
- They asked users to donate prior to a “CRUCIAL fundraising deadline” even though the next major deadline would not come until 30 June, employing a time-tested marketing trick to create a false sense of urgency.
- They were numerous, with more than 200 minor variations of the ads running.
- They were topical and negative, feeding an intensely divisive controversy earlier that month over out-of-context remarks made by a Muslim congresswoman about post-9/11 Islamophobia rather than making an affirmative case for Trump’s re-election.
- And they targeted older Facebook users across the country, in defiance of conventional wisdom about who responds to social media campaigning.
All in all, the ads epitomized the unprecedented nature of the massive social media campaign being waged by Trump more than 500 days before election day.
“They’re way ahead of the field this time,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist. “They’re building their infrastructure and list and online fundraising more than a year before the election, even without any sort of credible challenge on the right. They are not only better positioned than the Trump campaign was in 2015, but in a much better place than any of the Democrats right now.”
All-in on digital
That Trump’s re-election campaign would go all-in on digital became clear in February 2018, when Brad Parscale was appointed campaign director. Parscale was a digital marketing consultant with little political experience when he was tapped to run Trump’s 2016 online operation. He was not shy abouttaking credit for Trump’s unlikely presidential victory, touting the sophistication of his Facebook strategy, which he said involved running as many as 60,000 ad variants at a time, taking the concept of A/B testing to extremes.
In many ways, that 2016 presidential campaign never ended. Trump filed for re-election on the day of his inauguration and has held dozens of campaign rallies since. Evidence of this permanent campaign is even more apparent online.
The Trump campaign’s spending on Facebook and Google advertisements leading up to the 2018 midterm elections dwarfed every other candidate besides Beto O’Rourke – and Trump wasn’t even on the ballot. In the first six months of 2019, Trump spent more than $11.1m on Facebook and Google ads alone, according to disclosures by the social media companies. For the corresponding six months of the most recent presidential race with an incumbent – January through June 2011 – Barack Obama spent just $850,000 on online advertising, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.
A Trump campaign official, who insisted on speaking on background, offered only vague generalities about the current iteration of the digital campaign. He said it was rooted in a Silicon Valley mindset and was akin to high-frequency trading. He described the format of the ads as “direct response marketing”, meaning that they are designed to induce a response – either a donation, an email signup, or a mobile phone signup – from the target.
The official denied a Bloomberg report that the 2016 campaign used Facebook ads as part of a voter suppression effort designed to dampen enthusiasm among likely Democratic voters, and refused to commit not to run such ads in the 2020 campaign.
An analysis of the content and targeting of Trump presidential campaign ads by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic digital campaigning firm that has built an interactive tool to compare spending across campaigns, found that more than half (54%) of Trump’s ads have mentioned immigration issues and nearly half (44%) are targeting voters over the age of 65.
The campaign’s demographic and geographical targeting so far hasn’t been particularly out of the ordinary, said Mike Schneider, a partner at Bully Pulpit. But the general tone of the ads has been surprisingly reactive and negative, he said. Since Facebook began archiving political ads in May 2018, Trump has run about 26,000 that mention “fake news”; 14,000 that reference the border; and 3,600 that include the phrase “witch hunt”, the Guardian found. Ads hawking an “executive membership card” (2,700) appear to be more common than ads that address issues such as health care.
Eric Wilson, the Republican strategist, said that such metrics reveal more about what topics and communication styles resonate with Trump voters on Facebook than they do about the overall message of the campaign.
“The campaign is putting out messages that are going to convert the most donors and supporters at the lowest cost possible,” he said. “The only thing we can read into Facebook advertising is what’s working on Facebook. There is a science and art to driving conversions on Facebook, and that is separate to a broader political strategy. It’s in harmony, but it’s not wagging the dog.”
‘Politics is way behind’
While Trump may be dominating the digital field at this stage, his tactics are not particularly groundbreaking, several experts told the Guardian. His opponents simply haven’t fully gotten into the game yet.
“I don’t think Trump’s campaign is incredibly sophisticated compared to corporations and how they use digital. It’s just that politics is way behind,” said Jessica Alter, co-founder of Tech for Campaigns, a volunteer organization that is connecting Silicon Valley tech talent with Democratic campaigns. “Trump spent 44% of his media budget on digital. Other campaigns are closer to 6-8%. Industry standard for corporations is 54%. It starts there.”
Alter’s organization undertook a comprehensive analysis of the political ads run by both parties in the 2018 midterms. Among other things, their findings help explain why the Trump campaign is targeting older people.
“There’s this myth that digital is for young people,” said Alter. “People 55 years and older have a three times higher propensity to click on a digital ad than the younger generation.” That higher click rate means more donations, more email addresses, and more cell phone numbers, all of which are key to staying competitive and, 16 months from now, turning out the vote.
‘A corrupting influence’
Still, the concerns are many. Digital campaign ads, and the data used to target them at tiny subsets of the electorate, were an important part of the Russian troll farm’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, as well as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
And the ability to micro-target various groups with finely tuned messages pushes campaigns toward anti-democratic behavior, warned Anthony Nadler, an associate professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College.
Nadler compared the use of A/B testing on users – whose reaction to an ad is recorded whether they click on it or not – to turning Facebook users into “unwitting subjects in what is more or less psychological testing”.
“It has a sort of corrupting influence, turning campaigns as a whole toward trying to mobilize people in very niche ways, trying to influence people in a very niche way, and trying to demonize the other side,” Nadler said.
Nadler has called for a ban on A/B testing in online digital campaigning, a somewhat far-fetched proposal that would require campaigns to stick to a single version of an ad, rather than constantly test minor variations on users.
While companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter have made it easier following the 2016 election to monitor what campaigns are doing on their platforms by setting up new public transparency tools to monitor the ads campaigns are putting out on their platforms, those tools won’t be a true bulwark against the kind of dirty tricks that Russia’s Internet Research Agency deployed in 2016, Nadler warned.
“Dark money groups are particularly dangerous because they have no reputation to protect,” he said, referring to not-for-profit organizations that can engage in political campaigning without disclosing the source of their funding. Although Facebook now requires political ads to disclose the name of the organization funding the ad, Nadler noted that it is “pretty easy” for motivated bad actors to create new not-for-profit groups through which to funnel money for campaigning.
“I think they’re going to be the pioneers of pushing these tactics to the furthest reaches,” he said.
These strategies could include efforts to create division or suppress enthusiasm within the opposition. A dark money group could even pose as being part of a certain political coalition, without it being true, as the Russian troll groups did.
“As opposed to persuading individual voters, you can just get certain groups of people to not be too excited, or cynical and sour,” Nadler said. “That matters, and that’s what social media can do.”
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1:48 AM 7/3/2019 – All News Review In 25 Saved Stories
Trump and Trumpism – Review Of News And Opinions: 7:53 AM 7/2/2019 – Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠: 6:58 AM 7/2/2019 – “Fear, and the paralysis…”: Trump corruption investigators risk jobs, reputations for seeking truth – By Michael J. Stern | Trump and Trumpism – Review Of News And Opinions – Topic Review: New Abwehr, WW2, Japan, Korea
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| Sanders trails Buttigieg by millions in second-quarter money chase – POLITICO |
Sanders trails Buttigieg by millions in second-quarter money chase POLITICOBernie Sanders raised $18 million over the past three months, his campaign announced Tuesday — trailing significantly behind Pete Buttigieg after leading the … |
| Researchers say they’re closer to finding cure for HIV after using CRISPR technology to eliminate disease in live mice for the first time – CNBC |
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Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference | Osaka, Japan
Whitehouse.gov (press release)-Jun 29, 2019
I want to thank everyone for being here today. ... And it's really a — the job they do with industrial manufacturing and lots of ..... presidency is illegitimate and that you only got the White House with help from Russia. ..... I'm talking about equipment where there is no great national emergency problem with it.
Trump plans to declare new national emergency to impose tariffs
The Hill-Jun 6, 2019
The White House has said it plans to impose the tariffs under the 1977 International ... Mexican manufacturing shares value chains with U.S. ...
What Trump's Huawei Reversal Means for the Future of 5G
The New York Times-Jul 1, 2019
In an impromptu question-and-answer session late last month at the White House, ... could sell to Huawei without creating a “great, national emergency problem.” .... The spectrum challenge creates a negative feedback loop for manufacturers, which may help ... Order Reprints | Today's Paper |
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1:48 AM 7/3/2019 – All News Review In 25 Saved Stories
Trump and Trumpism – Review Of News And Opinions: 7:53 AM 7/2/2019 – Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠: 6:58 AM 7/2/2019 – “Fear, and the paralysis…”: Trump corruption investigators risk jobs, reputations for seeking truth – By Michael J. Stern | Trump and Trumpism – Review Of News And Opinions – Topic Review: New Abwehr, WW2, Japan, Korea
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| Sanders trails Buttigieg by millions in second-quarter money chase – POLITICO |
Sanders trails Buttigieg by millions in second-quarter money chase POLITICOBernie Sanders raised $18 million over the past three months, his campaign announced Tuesday — trailing significantly behind Pete Buttigieg after leading the … |
| Researchers say they’re closer to finding cure for HIV after using CRISPR technology to eliminate disease in live mice for the first time – CNBC |
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Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference | Osaka, Japan
Whitehouse.gov (press release)-Jun 29, 2019
I want to thank everyone for being here today. ... And it's really a — the job they do with industrial manufacturing and lots of ..... presidency is illegitimate and that you only got the White House with help from Russia. ..... I'm talking about equipment where there is no great national emergency problem with it.
Trump plans to declare new national emergency to impose tariffs
The Hill-Jun 6, 2019
The White House has said it plans to impose the tariffs under the 1977 International ... Mexican manufacturing shares value chains with U.S. ...
What Trump's Huawei Reversal Means for the Future of 5G
The New York Times-Jul 1, 2019
In an impromptu question-and-answer session late last month at the White House, ... could sell to Huawei without creating a “great, national emergency problem.” .... The spectrum challenge creates a negative feedback loop for manufacturers, which may help ... Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe.
Remarks by Vice President Pence at the 29th Annual Red, White and ...
Whitehouse.gov (press release)-Jun 25, 2019
We'd lost more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs across the country. ... of why we need four more years of President Donald Trump in the White House, Maryland. ... As I stand before you today, I couldn't be more proud. .... And after the President declared a national emergency in January of this year, we've ...
Remarks by President Trump in Working Lunch with Governors on ...
Whitehouse.gov (press release)-Jun 13, 2019
And today, I'm delighted to welcome the governors from both parties to .... It's very much needed for the farmers, manufacturers. .... than the training for emergency medical technicians, and sometimes ..... But the point is, it's really been a massive effort of this White House and it's really been successful.
Trump Allows High-Tech US Bomb Parts to Be Built in Saudi Arabia
The New York Times-Jun 7, 2019
The emergency authorization allows Raytheon Company, a top ... The White House did not respond to a request for comment. .... Both Republicans and Democrats also noted that it called for creating manufacturing jobs in Saudi Arabia that might otherwise have ... Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe.
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Ever since “Trump 2020” campaign posters surfaced without Mike Pence’s name on it, there has been steady buzz building that Donald Trump might be considering replacing Pence on the ticket. That speculation has seemed like little more than yet another distraction. But today, a bizarre series of events involving Pence is raising questions about whether something might truly be going on behind the scenes.
It all started when multiple major media outlets reported that Mike Pence’s planned flight to a New Hampshire fundraiser had to turn around in mid-air and return to the White House due to an “emergency.” Various reports claimed that it was a security decision made by the Secret Service, and that it had nothing to do with Pence’s health. Then the story changed, and Pence’s flight supposedly never took off to begin with, and he never left Washington, again due to a still-unspecified emergency.
So what’s really going on? Your guess is as good as anyone else’s. The real story of what happened with Mike Pence, or most of it at least, will eventually get tracked down by the media. For now, what stands out is that no one can get their story straight. When a confusing development first takes place, the media can get caught off guard and make mistakes simply due to the speed at which things are happening. But in this instance the media has gotten the story wrong in so many ways, which usually points to misinformation being purposely released by the White House in the hope of burying the real story.
So now we’re looking at a bizarre “Mike Pence emergency” and possible attempt at a coverup today, just as the narrative about Trump ditching Pence from the ticket have reached their peak. And why the oddly specific denial about Pence’s health? Maybe it’s nothing. But this administration never met a ham-fisted stunt it didn’t like. It raises the question of whether the White House is manufacturing today’s “emergency” as a way of laying the groundwork to dump Pence after all. We’ll see.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report
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Putin to meet Russian defense minister after death of sailors: RIA
TODAYonline-7 minutes ago
MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu soon, RIA quoted the Kremlin as saying on Tuesday, after 14 sailors on ...
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