Donald Trump meets with Republican members of Congress on Friday. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Donald Trump continued to fume over the Russia investigation on Sunday, more than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report without recommending charges against the president but only three days after the justice department said it would drop its case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.

“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote in a tweet accompanying a conservative talk show host’s claim that Barack Obama “used his last weeks in office to target incoming officials and sabotage the new administration”.

The tweet echoed previous messages retweeted by Trump, which earned rebukes for relaying conspiracy theories. On Sunday afternoon the president continued to send out a stream of tweets of memes and rightwing talking heads claiming an anti-Trump conspiracy. One tweet by Trump simply read: “OBAMAGATE!”

Trump fired Flynn, a retired general, in early 2017, for lying to Vice-President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions levied by the Obama administration in retaliation for interference in the 2016 election.

The US intelligence community has long held that such efforts were meant to tip the election towards Trump and away from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI – which Trump has acknowledged – and co-operated with Mueller, who was appointed to take over the investigation of Russian interference after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.

Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy but did lay out extensive links between Trump and Moscow and instances of possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Flynn sought to change his plea while awaiting sentencing and the president championed his case, floating a possible pardon. On Thursday, in an act that stunned the US media, attorney general William Barr said the justice department would drop the case entirely.

Michael Flynn at a campaign event in Virginia Beach in September 2016. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

Trump and his supporters have loudly trumpeted the decision and across Saturday and Sunday, the president unleashed a storm of retweets of supporters and conservative commentators attacking targets including Obama, Mueller, Comey, and House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff.

The talk show host retweeted by the president, Buck Sexton, is a former CIA analyst who now hosts a show which he says “speaks truth to power, and cuts through the liberal nonsense coming from the mainstream media”.

In another message retweeted by the president, Sexton called former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe – who Trump fired just short of retirement – “a dishonorable partisan scumbag who has done incalculable damage to the reputation of the FBI and should be sitting in a cell for lying under oath”.

In February, the US justice department said it would not charge McCabe over claims he lied to investigators about a media leak.

Like Comey, McCabe released a book in which he was highly critical of Trump, who he said acted like a mob boss. McCabe also wrote that Trump had unleashed a “strain of insanity” in American public life.

In his own tweets, Trump did not directly address comments by Obama himself which were reported by Yahoo News. The former president told associates the Flynn decision was “the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic – not just institutional norms – but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk”.

But Trump’s anger was evident.

“When are the Fake Journalists,” he wrote on Sunday, “who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!”

The president did not immediately name anyone.

But in 2018 the Pulitzer committee did, awarding its prize for national reporting jointly to the Washington Post and the New York Times for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team, and his eventual administration.”

Trump has further reason to resent the Pulitzer committee and question its choices.

In 2019, for example, a New York Times team won a Pulitzer for an “exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges”.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, was rewarded for “uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment”.

Trump’s actual impeachment, which he survived at trial in the Senate in February, concerned his attempts to have Ukraine investigate his political rivals. No reporter or news outlet won a 2020 Pulitzer, announced this week, for its coverage of that affair.

Trump’s focus on Sunday remained largely on the Russia investigation despite continuing developments in the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 1.3m Americans and killed nearly 80,000.

With cases confirmed among White House aides close to the president, top public health experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci in quarantine and Trump reported by the New York Times to be “spooked”, the president claimed in a rare non-Russia-related tweet: “We are getting great marks for the handling of the CoronaVirus pandemic.”

He also attacked Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, over their response to the “disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu” in 2009.

Trump also marked a special day in the calendar, tweeting in trademark capitals: “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/trump-obama-biggest-political-american-history-russia-michael-flynn

The post Trump charges Obama with ‘biggest political crime in American history’ first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

• President Donald Trump’s lawyers are duking it out with New York state prosecutors over a subpoena for his tax returns in a case that is likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
• Trump’s lawyers argue that the subpoena should be nullified because, as president, Trump is immune not just from criminal prosecution but from any investigation at all.
• Constitutional scholars told Insider there’s no legal precedent backing up Trump’s position, which one called “untenable.”
• “Chief Justice John Roberts looks for big cases around which he can build a consensus,” one legal expert said. “That’s exactly this case. I suspect that the vote at the Supreme Court would be 7-2, 8-1, or even 9-0 in favor of the state of New York.”
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump’s lawyers are putting forth a bold argument as they battle a subpoena from New York state prosecutors for Trump’s tax returns: that the president is immune not just from criminal prosecution but from the criminal investigation as well so long as he is in office.

The notion that a sitting president cannot be indicted isn’t new; it was put forth in a 1973 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under the Nixon administration and proved pivotal in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

But Trump’s argument — that he’s immune from being investigated in the first place — has confounded legal and constitutional scholars and even sitting judges.

The fight over Trump’s taxes is likely to make it all the way to the Supreme Court. If he loses, the public would get a window into Trump’s closely-held finances before the 2020 election.

Louis Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, told Insider that there’s no legal precedent backing up the Office of Legal Counsel memo’s claim. The Supreme Court also held, in Clinton v. Jones, that a president could be sued civilly while in office.

Moreover, even the Office of Legal Counsel opinion doesn’t go as far as to say a sitting president cannot be criminally investigated while in office, as Trump’s lawyers have claimed in the legal fight over his tax returns.

To be sure, “even if actual indictment has to be delayed, there can be strong reasons to investigate now while the recollection of witnesses is fresh and evidence is still available,” Seidman said.

The subpoena for Trump’s taxes, issued by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, is part of a criminal investigation into whether the Trump Organization fabricated business records related to hush-money payments made to women who say they’ve had affairs with Trump.

After the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm for the records, Trump’s team countersued to nullify the subpoena.

An ‘untenable’ position

Earlier this month, US District Judge Victor Marrero dismissed the countersuit, ruling that Trump’s lawyers were making an “extraordinary” reach that was “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.”

Marrero wrote that Trump’s argument implied “the constitutional dimensions of the presidential shield from the judicial process are virtually limitless.”

If that argument held, then until Trump leaves office, “his exemption from criminal proceedings would extend not only to matters arising from the performance of the President’s duties and functions in his official capacity, but also to ones arising from his private affairs, financial transactions, and all other conduct undertaken by him as an ordinary citizen both during and before his tenure in office,” the ruling said.

Trump’s lawyers contested the ruling, and the case is now being considered by the federal appeals court in New York.

On Wednesday, during a hearing before the three-judge appeals court panel, Trump’s lawyers went a step further and said the president would theoretically be immune from investigation or prosecution even if he were to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, alluding to comments he made during the 2016 election.

Jens David Ohlin, a vice dean at Cornell Law School who is an expert in constitutional and criminal law, told Insider that the case looked “destined” for the Supreme Court — and not because it’s a close call but rather because it’s the opposite.

“Chief Justice John Roberts looks for big cases around which he can build a consensus,” Ohlin said. “That’s exactly this case. I suspect that the vote at the Supreme Court would be 7-2, 8-1, or even 9-0 in favor of the state of New York.”

Ohlin added that Trump’s legal position was “untenable” and stood little chance of withstanding scrutiny.

“Even if you accept that the president can’t be indicted while in office (which is contested), the president must be subject to investigation; otherwise, it would be nearly impossible to prosecute him after leaving office,” he said. “It would also be impossible to prosecute conspirators who don’t have presidential immunity because both — the conspirators and Trump — would be part of the same investigation.”

Seidman struck a more cautious tone, suggesting that how the Supreme Court would rule was anyone’s guess. The bench has a 5-4 conservative majority, and two of the justices were appointed by Trump.

Cases surrounding the president, Seidman said, are so politicized that predicting how the highest court would rule is “more a judgment about what the individuals think about Trump than what they think about the law.”

• Read more:
• Trump’s lawyers say he couldn’t be investigated or prosecuted if he shot someone on 5th Avenue
• Newly uncovered tax documents show Trump kept ‘2 sets of books’ and may have committed financial fraud
• A federal court ordered Trump’s accounting firm to turn over 8 years of his taxes to Congress
• A Fox News poll just found that more than half of American voters want Trump impeached and removed from office

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-taxes-new-york-subpoena-supreme-court-2019-10

The post Legal experts say Trump’s last-ditch effort to hide his taxes is ‘untenable,’ and we could see them as soon as next year first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

President Trump took extraordinary steps on Thursday to give Attorney General William P. Barr sweeping new authorities to conduct a review into how the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were investigated, significantly escalating the administration’s efforts to place those who investigated the campaign under scrutiny.

In a directive, Mr. Trump ordered the C.I.A. and the country’s 15 other intelligence agencies to cooperate with the review and granted Mr. Barr the authority to unilaterally declassify their documents. The move — which occurred just hours after the president again declared that those who led the investigation committed treason — gave Mr. Barr immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.

The order is a change for Mr. Trump, who last year dropped a plan to release documents related to the Russia investigation amid concerns from Justice Department officials who said making them public could damage national security. At the time, the president was being encouraged by a group of Republican Congress members to declassify the information.

Mr. Barr, who has used the word “spying” to describe how the Trump campaign was investigated, has been deeply involved in the department’s review of how intelligence was collected on the campaign. Mr. Barr has told Congress that he personally authorized the review. While he has asked John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, to spearhead it, a Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr has personally met with the heads of the intelligence agencies to discuss the review and that the project was a top priority after the release last month of the special counsel’s report.

One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said previously that Mr. Barr wanted to know more about what foreign assets the C.I.A. had in Russia in 2016 and what those informants were telling the agency about how President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sought to meddle in the 2016 election.

The C.I.A. on Thursday referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A spokeswoman for the office did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The directive is likely to irk the intelligence community, which has long prized its ability to determine what information about its operations can be released to the public. During the investigations of the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation programs, the agency stymied investigators by refusing to declassify documents.

There could be other implications for the intelligence agencies. The C.I.A. considers confidential sources its most highly classified and most protected assets, and any investigation that could possibly force it to reveal those identities is likely to create a standoff. Last year, the agency lost trust in the Justice Department’s ability to keep the names of informants and sources secret after the identity of an F.B.I. informant who interacted with two Trump campaign officials under investigation, Stefan Halper, was revealed as part of congressional inquiries, according to former intelligence officials.

Late Thursday, Jeremy Bash, a chief of staff at the C.I.A. under President Barack Obama, said that the president’s move was “a very significant delegation of power to an attorney general who has shown he’s willing to do Donald Trump’s political bidding.”

“It’s dangerous,” he continued, “because the power to declassify is also the power to selectively declassify, and selective declassification is one of the ways the Trump White House can spin a narrative about the origins of the Russia investigation to their point of view.”

He added that confidential sources around the globe might be fearful of talking now.

“It sends a signal that their identity may be exposed for purely political purposes,” Mr. Bash said. “If I were in charge of intelligence operations, I would be worried about sources clamming up tonight.”

Mr. Barr has said that he believes Mr. Trump’s campaign was “spied” on, appearing to bolster unfounded accusations that Mr. Trump has made about the Obama administration illegally wiretapping his associates.

The dual decisions on Thursday were announced in a presidential memorandum, and explained in a statement by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The directive will “help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions,” the statement said.

Despite the significant step, there are indications there may be little criminality to uncover. Mr. Durham is conducting only a limited review, not a criminal investigation, which suggests Mr. Barr may not have identified enough wrongdoing to open such an inquiry.

Mr. Durham is not the only federal prosecutor who has been examining this issue. For over a year, John W. Huber, the United States attorney in Utah, also examined aspects of the Russia investigation until Mr. Durham subsumed that part of his work. When Mr. Barr’s predecessor, Matthew G. Whitaker, was the acting attorney general, and Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed for him to appoint a second special counsel, Mr. Whitaker told people he considered Mr. Huber to essentially be serving in that role.

The post Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The official says the president is “OK” with it and will likely inform Congress of his decision Friday. The official said it would likely be released without anything edited out.

Trump is at odds with both the FBI and the Justice Department over whether to make the memo public.

Few people outside Congress have read the “Nunes memo,” named for the Republican congressman who drafted it. It allegedly includes details about Justice Department efforts before the 2016 U.S. presidential election to seek authority from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor a Trump campaign adviser’s possible contacts with Russian operatives.

U.S. Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, listens as President Donald Trump addresses the Republican congressional retreat at the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Feb. 1, 2018.

Democrats and other critics of the memo say it selectively uses classified intelligence to allege the Russia investigation is affected by political bias. Democrats have prepared their own memo, countering the Republican claims, but that memo is not expected to be released until later, if at all.

The top two Democrats in Congress, Senate minority leader Charles Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, denounced the memo Thursday and criticized Republican leaders for allegedly putting partisanship ahead of the rule of law. The Democrats called for the removal of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes over his role in creating the memo.

The partisan dispute has also drawn in the FBI. The bureau has issued a highly unusual public statement, saying it had “grave concerns” about the accuracy of the memo.

FILE – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California), left, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) speak during a briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 2, 2017.

One former FBI official still in touch with colleagues at the bureau, who spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity, said the reputation of the FBI is at stake in the dispute over release of the memo.

“When you have politicians attack these institutions for their own political gains, that weakens the credibility of those institutions to the general public,” the ex-official said. “Everyday citizens are going to say, ‘Well maybe the FBI is slanted. Maybe the CIA is slanted. Maybe our government cannot be trusted the way it should be.”

The FBI Agents Association said in a statement Thursday that it appreciates Director Christopher Wray “standing shoulder to shoulder with the men and women of the FBI as we work together to protect our country from criminal and national security threats.”

It said the FBI remains “focused on our important work to protect the country from terrorists and criminals.” The association says FBI agents take an oath both to the country and to the Constitution.

Nunes called the FBI’s objections to release of the memo “spurious.”

“The FBI is intimately familiar with ‘material omissions’ with respect to their presentations to both Congress and the courts, and they are welcome to make public, to the greatest extent possible, all the information they have on these abuses,” Nunes said in a statement.

“Regardless, it’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counterintelligence investigation during an American political campaign. Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller departs after a closed-door meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about Russian meddling in the election and possible connection to the Trump campaign, at the Capitol in Washington, June 21, 2017.

The memo concerns an application by U.S. law enforcement authorities to the surveillance court to monitor contacts Trump campaign adviser Carter Page may have had with Russian operatives leading up to the election. Some Republicans say the surveillance request may have been mishandled and suggest the episode could undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and whether Trump obstructed justice to try to impede the probe.

The memo has become a flashpoint in politically divided Washington, with some Republicans increasingly voicing complaints about Mueller’s months-long investigation and claiming that some Justice Department officials have worked to undermine Trump’s presidency.

Trump has repeatedly said there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. Last week, he said there also was no obstruction of the Russia investigation.

National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this article.

Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-at-oddes-with-fbi-justice-over-release-of-classivfied-russia-memo/4234567.html

The post White House Official: Trump to Approve Release of Classified Russia Memo first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.