Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is engaging in some mildly awkward conversations about being a millionaire while constantly seeking to soak the rich. Which on this Tax Day, is kind of hilarious, so it’s how we start this week’s Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch.
The gang talks this year’s tax-refund confusions, Democrats’ fuzzy tax math, Uncle Milty’s greatest #fail, presidential-candidate tax disclosures, the gruesomely intrusive Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and much more. Also under discussion: the forthcoming Mueller Report drop, Julian Assange‘s beard, Raymond Chandler’s vocabulary, Reason‘s schmancy new website, and how all the nerds in Washington were watching Game of Thrones last night.
For the first time details of an extensive anti-smuggling surveillance operation involving eight United Nations member countries in the East China Sea, in waters near China and North Korea, have been revealed by a new Wall Street Journal investigation.
WSJ reporters accompanied the USS Milius and an allied Japanese warship, cooperating further with military surveillance aircraft, on a mission to thwart sanctions busting illegal oil transfers on the high seas to North Korean tankers.
WSJ: “The route of the North Korean ship Chon Myong 1 from Vladivostok to Nampo port, North Korea, shown on an Eikon ship-tracking screen last year. The ship delivered up to 190,000 barrels of refined petroleum to North Korea’s Wonsan port in May, two months after being sanctioned by the UN.” Image source: UN Photo/Reuters
The stunning report provides a first hand account of in some instances Chinese ships turning off their transponders (“ghosting” international trackers) to covertly transfer petroleum products to North Korean bound tankers on the open waters.
One dramatic episode involved the US warship intercepting a cluster of 3 “ghosting” ships pulling near a UN-blacklisted tanker known for illegal smuggling operations into North Korea:
One of the two smaller ships began to quickly move away from the group as the other loosened its mooring to the tanker. Both of the smaller ships carried Chinese flags. No flag was visible on the tanker.
The Milius’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Jon Hopkins, set a course to pull alongside the tanker.
“We got them,” said a Milius crew member on lookout duty.
The United Nations over a year ago imposed tight limits on North Korea’s ability to import oil and petroleum products due to its banned nuclear testing and missile program.
Via the WSJ: “The Milius changed objectives on April 1 after the sighting of other suspicious activity. Here, the Oceanic Success, a Mongolian-registered oil-products tanker, is seen from the Milius appearing to conduct a ship-to-ship transfer with a vessel directly behind it. A third ship with a red hull to the left appeared to be waiting to take part in a transfer with the Oceanic Success.”
But Pyongyang has long been known to engage in aggressive sanctions thwarting behavior, including conducting ship-to-ship transfers at sea. In response, for the past year a UN group of countries including the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and France, have patrolled a region covering 700,000 square miles in order to clamp down on sanctions evading.
Surveillance planes have also been active over the international waters, and the WSJ notes that the United States has conducted up to half of all operations among the eight UN countries.
Tracking map of ships observed as part of the report, via The Wall Street Journal:
The surveillance side of operations is geared toward blacklisting shipowners observed engaged in illegal transfers with North Korean vessels— these ships will in turn be banned by UN countries from entering international ports.
Perhaps most significant about the WSJ story is that ships were filmed and photographed in action. They were caught preparing for the illegal transfers as USS Milius naval operators and the WSJ crew looked on.
Via the WSJ: “As the Milius approached the three ships they sailed away from each other. Hoses and fenders seen here on the side of the Oceanic Success indicate that it was involved in a ship-to-ship transfer.”
As it rounded the peninsula, the North Korean ship was also being monitored by a South Korean P-3 surveillance plane, while a Chinese destroyer followed the American and Japanese ships from a distance of around 12 miles. U.S. Navy officials say Chinese warships commonly shadow U.S. naval vessels in international waters in the East China Sea. The parade of four ships continued through the night, led by the slow-moving Kum Un San.
Some among the blacklisted or at least suspect ships monitored, such as the Mongolian flagged Oceanic Success, include tankers with the capacity to transfer up to 50,000 barrels of motor gasoline to North Korea— which alone constitutes one-tenth of the what the UN allows under the North Korea sanctions and restrictions.
But it remains that the US and UN vessels don’t have a mandate to engage militarily. The Milius’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Jon Hopkins, characterized the mission as follows: “We’ve gathered good intelligence,” he said, and added, “Our mission is not to stop everything.”
But worrisome is that this appears another large scale US-spearheaded operation which could bring American vessels into conflict with Chinese warships.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2P9cwMX Tyler Durden
Back in September 2017, in what may have been the most stunning admission by Janet Yellen during her tenure as Fed chair, she said that “we don’t fully understand inflation” and added that the “shortfall of inflation this year is more of a mystery.” Since then, the Fed’s understanding of inflation appears to have solidified at least in asmuch as the Fed remains unable to find it, despite soaring US housing prices, which continue to increase at roughly 2 to 5 times greater than wage inflation every year (depending on the metro area), not to mention out of control university tuition prices, healthcare costs and sharp occasional spikes in food prices which are far more sticky to the upside, stubbornly refusing to drop after any price shock.
And then there are of course, runaway asset prices and include both domestic and international stock and bond prices, which as Goldman has repeatedly shown, have soared since January 2009. Of course, the Fed ignores these and focuses only on the BLS’ hedonically-adjusted, politically goalseeked CPI basket.
None of these considerations mattered to Chicago Fed president Charlie Evans on Monday, however, when he again said that in keeping with the Fed’s shifting approach to monetary policy which will likely include direct inflation targeting during the next recession, the Federal Reserve “should be willing to embrace inflation above 2% half the time and communicate that preference with the public to avoid missing its current target.”
In other words, in a country where the purchasing power and net worth of the middle class continues to erode, the Fed is willing and eager to accelerate this relative transfer of wealth from the 90% to the 1% by sending inflation into overdrive any and every time it so desires.
“While policy has been successful in achieving our maximum employment mandate, it has been less successful with regard to our inflation objective,” Evans said, clearly referencing US CPI and the various “real economy prices” shown on the right side of the chart above while ignoring the asset prices on the left.
“To fix this problem, I think the Fed must be willing to embrace inflation modestly above 2 percent 50 percent of the time. Indeed, I would communicate comfort with core inflation rates of 2-1/2 percent, as long as there is no obvious upward momentum and the path back toward 2 percent can be well managed.”
In other words, in a world in which central banks have led to unprecedented wealth divides in every jurisdiction, and have been instrumental in the at time violent polarization of the world between haves and have nots, with resulting populist consequences, the Chicago Fed president believes that the right thing to do is take what has clearly not worked so far, and to do much more of it.
As Reuters notes, Evans’ remarks come ahead of a broad Fed policy review this year that may result in the central bank welcoming inflation that is “slightly and temporarily over its target.” Some policymakers and analysts think the Fed now has far more ability to respond to upward spikes in prices than to persistently low readings. That is because interest rate cuts lose their potency as borrowing costs approach zero.
Of course, since any alternatives to the Fed’s current approach will lead to much higher prices borne by the US middle class, resulting in an even lower standard of living, they will be definition be controversial and to Evans this means that “the central bank will need to debate those options carefully.”
Evans also voiced support for the Fed’s current stance of patience on any further rate hikes given “heightened uncertainty,” including the outcome of U.S.-China trade negotiations; the same negotiations which have prompted euphoric stock market bullishness virtually daily for the past 4 months every time a new flashing red headline suggest that the trade deal is “optimsitically” imminent.
“At the moment, the risks from the downside scenarios loom larger than those from the upside ones,” he said at a New York Association of Business Economists event.
Evans, who incidentally is just another clueless economist and who gets his “signals” from the market, as recently as January forecasted three rate hikes this year, still says that “some further rate increases may be appropriate over time” if growth is close to its potential. He sees growth at around 1-3/4 to 2 percent this year, lower than his prior estimates.
But wait, it gets better, because just three months after seeing three rate hikes, Evans – who was one of the Fed’s greatest doves for much of the past five years – is now contemplating rate cuts and asked by reporters after his speech in New York if he would consider rate cuts to support inflation, Evans says “I think the answer has to be yes. It depends on what the scenario is.”
One scenario he proposed: “If core inflation were to move down to, let’s just say, 1.5 percent, that’s below our 2 percent goal. It’s certainly below what I would say is symmetry. So, I would assume that means that our setting of the funds rate is actually restrictive in holding back inflation, and so that would naturally call for a lower funds rate”
“I don’t expect that to be the case, but hypothetically speaking, that would be an argument.”
Another hypothetical scenario, which Evans did not mention but which is just as likely to prompt calls for rate cuts, if not QE4: a sharp drop of more than 10% in the S&P to whatever the Fed’s revised “Powell put” level may be.
Finally, when asked on the recent yield curve inversion, Evans said that “the kind of inversion we’ve seen so far is not necessarily consistent” with the type of past inversions that have presaged recessions. Of course, nobody at the Fed ever had a problem with the yield curve when it was steeper, as it was precisely the type of past inversion that presaged economic booms…
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UgpSbb Tyler Durden
When politicians and pundits take aim at cashless businesses, they often argue that such places violate the choices of consumers who lack bank accounts. But on closer examination, these places’ commitment to choice is remarkably limited.
When New York City Councilmember Ritchie Torres (D–Bronx) introduced a bill to ban card-only establishments, for example, he said that while he uses debit cards for almost all of his transactions, “that should be a choice that I make freely as a consumer not a requirement imposed on me by a business.” The ATM company Cardtronics offers a stirring, if self-interested, defense of “consumer payment choice” in written testimony supporting Torres’ legislation. And Andy Callado, a financial coach for the working poor, tells Vox Media’s Facebook show Consider It that while he wishes everyone had a bank account, “we can’t force people to do that. We have to empower people to make their own decisions and do what’s best for them.”
So far, such arguments have proven persuasive enough for cashless bans to pass in Philadelphia and New Jersey. New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are all considering prohibitions on cashless establishments.
Yet for their rhetoric about protecting choice, pro-cash politicians are happy to override businesses’ decisions. While dismissing the idea that we can’t force consumers to have bank accounts, both Collado and Torres are more than happy to force businesses into accepting cash that they otherwise wouldn’t.
Accepting cash, as Reason‘s Billy Binion has pointed out, comes with a number of costs, including the time it takes to count up bills and coins and the need to hire armored cars to transport this currency off-site. Cash-accepting businesses also face a heightened risk of theft. Surely businesses should also have the choice to avoid or minimize these costs if they want.
Consumers who avoid banks do so because banks come with trade-offs. (“You go in expecting one thing, and then once you look at your statement, you have this $35 fee, this $15 fee,” one woman tells Considering It.) Businesses that avoid cash are doing the same thing. Forcing businesses to take cash is less about protecting consumers’ choices and more about shifting the costs of these consumers’ decisions onto the businesses.
For the small minority of enterprises that have decided to go cashless, the costs of cash outweigh the sales they might lose from going card-only. For other businesses—including, I suspect, most businesses in neighborhoods where banks are scarce—the calculation points the other way. Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all standard on everyone, wouldn’t it be better to let everyone sort out all these trade-offs in the marketplace?
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UkbZbV
via IFTTT
As we enter Week 2 of earnings season, 30 S&P 500 companies, or 9% of earnings have reported, of which the most notable so far include four Financials and two Industrials reporting results last week, with only Wells Fargo missing EPS estimates.
Among the earlier reported, JPMorgan beat on sales and EPS, topping expectations across most businesses; likewise, Delta Air Lines confirmed consumer strength, citing strong travel demand especially for premium tickets, and Fastenal’s results were encouraging for Industrials.
Yet despite the strong (early) start, Bank of America notes that bottom-up 1Q EPS fell a few cents last week (to $37.23 from $37.29), hurt by continued downward revisions to Energy and Industrials estimates. At this point in reporting Consensus expects 1Q EPS to be -2% YoY despite sales growth of 5%, largely due to an expected shrinkage in non-Financial net margins which are forecast to contract to 10.1% from 11.1% in 4Q. Results are weaker down market cap: small caps continue to see bigger cuts to 1Q expectations and fewer beats so far.
Broken down by sector, the biggest EPS cuts have been to Energy, Industrials and Staples, while Industrials, Energy and Materials companies have seen the biggest revenue expectation cuts.
Of the handful of companies reporting so far, 73% have beaten on EPS, 10% higher than the same time last quarter and above the Week-1 average of 63%. And similar to last quarter at this time, 47% of companies have beaten on sales, with only 37% beating on both metrics, just below the Week 1 average of 43%.
Despite the EPS weakness, consensus expects 1Q19 sales growth to top 5% YoY, the same as last quarter, with BofA estimating that FX was a 2.1% headwind to YoY growth (vs. a 1.4% headwind last quarter), the biggest FX drag since 4Q15 (Chart 4). Moves in the yuan and the euro relative to the US dollar were the biggest contributors to the FX drag. Excluding FX/oil impacts, constant-currency sales growth for the S&P 500 ex. Fins. & Energy is expected to actually accelerate to +8% YoY from +6% YoY last quarter (Chart 5), with pick-ups in growth for Staples, Financials, Health Care, Materials and Utilities.
That said, it should not come as a surprise that Q1 earnings would be poor with even bullish analysts in recent weeks predicting an earnings contraction (although few going as far as Morgan Stanley in predicting a protracted earnings recession lasting through the end of the year).
Here, Bank of America is bullishly inclined, and writes that given the steep 7% drop in consensus 1Q EPS YTD, the bank thinks that “estimates have sufficiently reset and see upside risk to results this quarter.” Furthermore, the bank notes that in prior quarters following similarly-dramatic cuts, EPS beat in all instances by 3% on average (although Morgan Stanley is not confident we will get a similar performance this time). This quarter is shaping up in line, with reported earnings for the handful of reporters topping estimates by 2% in aggregate so far. Ultimately, Bank of America predicts, that results should beat expectations given better recent macro data and bottoming revision trends. That said, guidance is all that matters as we noted recently, and any improvement in the management guidance ratio, which had deteriorated in 1Q (as it typically does) could drive new highs for the S&P 500 (while any sharp deterioration may result in a “bad news is good news” outcome, and also driving new highs).
Looking at the current week, the docket remains relatively light, with another 15% of earnings reporting, mostly from Financials, Health Care and Industrials. Given the amount of late 2018/early 2019 de-risking and the overall “bunker” mentality of US funds, Bank of America predicts that “surprises in unloved cyclicals could see bigger reactions.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2v4t7YW Tyler Durden
Detroit’s bail system unconstitutionally punishes poor people accused of crimes, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a new federal class action lawsuit.
On Sunday, the ACLU of Michigan filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division on behalf of eight plaintiffs who had been caught in the bail system of the 36th District Court in Detroit.
According to the lawsuit, ACLU representatives have witnessed hundreds of Detroit court proceedings where magistrates simply rushed through arraignments and assigned bail amounts based on the nature of the charges without inquiring about defendants’ ability to pay. Defendants are not permitted to ask questions or explain their situation, and in 95 percent of these cases were not yet represented by attorneys.
Cash bail was ordered in 85 percent of the cases the ACLU observed. The magistrates do not determine whether the defendants are dangerous or flight risks, so the primary factor determining whether people are detained in cells while awaiting their day in court is simply whether they’ve got money. Jails in Wayne County (where Detroit is located) house about 1,600 people every night, 62 percent of whom are being detained pretrial.
A third of the people in Detroit live below the poverty line. According to the ACLU, when defendants cannot immediately make bail, they have to wait at least a week for their next hearing (when they’ll have counsel) to try to request bail to be reduced. One of the plaintiffs in the suit couldn’t afford $200 after getting arrested over an unpaid five-year-old misdemeanor ticket for staying in a park after dark. He was told he would have to stay in jail for two weeks before his next hearing. Other plaintiffs were arrested for more serious charges, in some cases violent felonies. In all cases, though, the initial arraignments remained the same. They were brought before a magistrate in a remote teleconference. The magistrate rushed through the proceedings to the point that the defendants said they didn’t even understand what was happening, setting bail amounts without asking the defendants anything or even explaining why the bail amounts were set at those levels.
Indeed, according to the lawsuit, people who appear before the magistrates are often threatened or intimidated if they try to ask questions or say anything outside the court’s script:
Once the Magistrate Defendants have announced the bail conditions, they instruct the arrestee to step away from the camera. If the arrestee seeks to ask a question, the Magistrate Defendants typically interrupt the arrestee with a warning that anything she says can and will be used against her in a court of law. In issuing such a warning, the Magistrate Defendants typically do not first inquire whether the individual’s question pertains to the underlying criminal allegations or to the court’s bail determination. In one instance on March 18, 2019, Magistrate [Millicent] Sherman told an arrestee who attempted to raise a question that “now is not the time to ask questions.” Sometimes, DDC guards can be heard over the video audibly “shushing” an arrestee or otherwise instructing them not to speak further with the Magistrate, even when the arrestee attempts to ask questions about their particular bail situation. Predictably, many individuals who are bold enough to interpose questions in the first place do not proceed with their questions after such an admonition.
This suit is similar to one the ACLU recently filed against judges in Philadelphia for engaging in similar behavior.
Bail is supposed to be applied as a way to make sure that defendants don’t skip out on court dates or commit additional criminal acts while free. Instead, many courts have simply used them as default demands, with risk assessment playing no role in determining who goes free. It’s all about whether they can scrounge up the money.
As a result, people who are poor end up being punished just for being arrested, whether or not they’re convicted. Because they cannot get out of jail, they lose income (and potentially their jobs), face evictions, and could even lose custody of children.
The lawsuit charges the Detroit magistrates with violating the detainees’ due process and equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment and their 6th Amendment right to counsel. The lawsuit is asking for a permanent injunction stopping the current bail system and substituting one that pays attention to defendants’ ability to pay and that considesr the actual risk factors of flight or danger to the community.
For more about the current legal push for bail reform, go here.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2v5mmpN
via IFTTT
A special federal law enforcement task force dedicated to stopping the flow of opioids into the United States was deployed in southern Arizona for eight days in March. The joint effort of local, state, and federal cops managed to stop more than 400 cars and conduct 129 vehicle searches.
How many opioids did all that effort yield? Less than a quarter gram of heroin.
Rather than targeting opioids, the Interior Department’s Opioid Reduction Task Force seems to have been used primarily to enforce immigration laws. According to a press release issued last week by the department, the operation conducted between March 20 and March 28 resulted in 50 arrests—with 42 of those arrests for “illegal entry.” Though the press release trumpeted the fact that the task force seized $2.3 million in illegal drugs, nearly all of that total was marijuana, not opioids. (The feds also reported seizing 31 grams of meth.)
That shouldn’t be a surprise when you considering where the task force was deployed: on the Tohono O’odham Reservation, along the United States’ southern border, and not at a port of entry. Most heroin and other opioids—and, indeed, most foreign drugs of all varieties—come into the United States through border checkpoints. The majority of heroin coming from Mexico is transported via privately owned vehicles “entering the United States at legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods,” the federal Drug Enforcement Administration concluded in a 2018 report.
That’s one of many reasons why building a massive wall along the length of the southern border is unlikely to staunch the flow of heroin into the country.
It should also raise questions about why a federal opioid task force was deployed for eight days in a part of the country that does not include a port of entry. After all, if you’re trying to stop opioids from coming into the country, it would make more sense to go where you’re most likely to find opioids. The Interior Department did not respond to questions from Reason seeking further explanation about why the task force was deployed to the Tohono O’odham Reservation—and the department did not clarify whether it viewed the eight-day operation as a success, despite the apparent lack of opioid interdiction.
What we do know is that the feds managed to harass lots of apparently innocent Americans—many of them likely Native Americans—in the effort. In addition to stopping 422 vehicles and searching 129 of them, the Opioid Reduction Task Force deployed its K-9 units 89 times and responded to 40 “K-9 alerts.” The task force also handed out 14 traffic tickets.
In all, the Arizona deployment makes a pretty good argument against using federal law enforcement to combat the opioid trade. Americans who are addicted to heroin and other opioids need safe ways to ween themselves off dangerous drugs (and better access to non-lethal drugs in the first place), a strategy that has already paid off in places like Ohio. Giving federal immigration cops—yes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was included in the Opioid Reduction Task Force—another opportunity to demand to see proof of citizenship is not helping reduce opioid addictions or deaths. If anything, government enforcement efforts are only making opioids more dangerous by creating market conditions that benefit more potent, and potentially more deadly, alternatives like fentanyl, which can be 10 times as profitable per kilogram than heroin.
The Department of the Interior says its special opioid cops have seized “millions of dollars worth of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs during the task force’s first year of existence. But its pretty clear that the most recent operation was a dud.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IlFJUm
via IFTTT
Although Republicans were pleased that Special Counsel Robert Mueller said he was unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, they fear his practice of distorting facts during his investigation will color his final report, which Attorney General William Barr is expected to release to Congress in redacted form this week.
Democrats are convinced that it will show examples of “collusion” between Trump and Russia, even if there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
Seeking to manage public perceptions about the Mueller report as much as Democrats are, Republicans say their counterparts are bent on cherry-picking its details to make it still look as if President Trump coordinated with Russia, part of their effort to keep the collusion narrative alive heading into the 2020 presidential election. They fear Mueller will make it easy for them to continue spinning that tale.
Senior Republicans on investigative committees on Capitol Hill, who have reviewed some of the same evidence Mueller’s investigators have examined, complain that the special counsel’s team of mostly Democratic prosecutors shaded evidence in charging documents filed against a number of Trump associates for process crimes unrelated to collusion (mostly lying to investigators) to suggest a broad conspiracy. They say that the special counsel and prosecutors misled the court and the media by, among other things, editing the contents of emails to cast a sinister shadow on otherwise innocuous communications among Trump advisers and by omitting exculpatory information.
They cite charging documents filed against Trump advisers George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen and former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as examples.
“The indictments that were made by the Mueller team are very questionable, and there’s pieces of them that read like Russian spy novels,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
“That was done on purpose,” he added, “to create a narrative to make the American people think, as they were indicting these people, that somehow this had to do with collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
For example, in filing false-statement charges against former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos in October 2017, Mueller’s team included a footnote that said emails obtained by the special counsel revealed that a Trump “campaign official suggested ‘low level’ staff should go to Russia.”
As the Senate Judiciary Committee pointed out in a secret letter to Mueller, the special counsel neglected to mention that the emails had been provided to it by the Trump campaign and they showed the campaign wanted someone “low level” to decline these types of invitations.
The distortions led the Washington Post, CNN and other major media to “misinterpret the nature of the internal campaign dialogue” as attempts by the Trump campaign to coordinate activities with Moscow, according to Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley, the top Republicans on the committee.
Mueller’s office declined repeated requests for comment. A spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the committee, did not respond to a request for a statement regarding Graham’s and Grassley’s concerns about Mueller’s objectivity. Feinstein on April 11 joined five other Democratic senators in signing a letter to Barr accusing the attorney general of working with Republicans to “perpetuate a partisan narrative designed to undermine the work of the Special Counsel,” arguing that their doubts about the Russia investigation only serve “to legitimize President Trump’s dangerous attacks on the Department of Justice and the FBI.”
But Republicans have pressed their own doubts about Mueller. Last month, in another little-noticed letter to Barr, Senate Judiciary Committee investigators elaborated on the Papadopoulos matter and what they described as Mueller unfairly cherry-picking from internal Trump campaign emails. They claimed that he and his prosecutors had cited only fragments of the emails in the charging document against Papadopoulos. And they pointed out that this “selective use” of the emails made it seem as if the adviser and the campaign were working behind the scenes with Russia, when in fact that was not the case.
Taken in their fuller context, the emails showed Papadopoulos was in fact discouraged from meeting with Russians. Additional context showed that Papadopoulos, acting as a foreign policy adviser, had conversations with representatives from multiple governments, not just Russia, and that his supervisor Sam Clovis, along with campaign chair Paul Manafort, had opposed any trip to Russia for Trump and the campaign.
Mueller left all of this out of the complaint he personally signed against Papadopoulos in October 2017.
Citing the misleading complaint, CNN erroneously reported that “records describe an email between Trump campaign officials suggesting they were considering acting on Russian invitations to go to Russia.” The story also stated that the Papadopoulos charge was “the campaign’s clearest connection so far to Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election.”
The following month, after Senate investigators had compared the emails quoted in the Papadopoulos filing with the full emails they had obtained separately from the Trump campaign, they called Mueller out on the omissions, arguing he took information out of context.
“In this matter, the public deserves to have the full context for the information the special counsel chooses to release,” then-Senate Judiciary chair Grassley wrote Mueller in a four-page letter. “The glaring lack of it feeds speculation and innuendo that distorts the facts.”
Mueller objected to the committee releasing the full emails at the time.
Papadopoulos said he handed over all his emails, text messages and other communications with the Trump campaign to Mueller’s investigators. He said they shaded the emails to make it seem as though he was “vaguely connected with the collusion aspect” of Mueller’s case.
Also listed on the charging document against Papadopoulos was Mueller prosecutor Jeannie Rhee, a former top Obama appointee and Clinton donor who Papadopoulos said was biased against him and had political “conflicts of interest” investigating him and the Republican campaign. She was one of 13 registered Democrats on Mueller’s team of 17 prosecutors.
Papadopoulos said Rhee repeatedly threatened him, telling him he was “looking at 25 years in prison” if he didn’t cooperate with Mueller. Ultimately he pleaded guilty to making a false statement – he claimed he did not know that Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese academic who had told him the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, had connections to the Russian government when, in fact, he did. There are no reports he tried to track down the “dirt” or told anyone in the Trump campaign about Mifsud. Ultimately he was sentenced to 14 days in jail.
Formerly a senior adviser to Attorney General Eric Holder, Rhee was a partner at Mueller’s old law firm, WilmerHale. In 2015, she defended the Clinton Foundation in a lawsuit that claimed it operated as a racketeering enterprise shaking down donors in exchange for government favors. In 2015 and 2016, she contributed $5,400 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In his new book, “Deep State Target,” Papadopoulos revealed that the FBI investigator handling his case and leading interrogations of him was FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, whom the Justice Department inspector general last year exposed for anti-Trump bias. Clinesmith was kicked off the Mueller team in February 2018 after the inspector general alerted Mueller to instant messages he wrote on FBINet revealing he was “devastated” over Clinton’s loss on Election Day and would join the “resistance” against Trump. He also called Vice President Mike Pence “stupid.”
Republicans say the special counsel also demonstrated collusion bias in its complaint against Trump National Security Adviser Flynn, former prosecutors say.
Mueller charged the retired general with lying to FBI investigators about his conversation with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, even though one of the investigators — noted Trump critic Peter Strzok — “had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying,” according to internal FBI documents uncovered by Flynn’s defense team.
In fact, former FBI Director James Comey has said Flynn provided truthful answers and wasn’t intentionally misleading investigators on Jan. 24, 2017, when he was questioned by Strzok and another agent.
Mueller omitted the exculpatory information from the charging documents he filed against Flynn.
“Flynn’s charges were made up so Mueller could get his Russian connection,” said former federal prosecutor and well-known Trump defender Victoria Toensing. “The complaint he filed against Flynn is warped.”
A third troubling example Republicans point to is the special counsel’s complaints against Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, which like other court documents included tantalizing hints of collusion that dissolved upon closer inspection. They say Mueller used the so-called Moscow Project talks – Trump’s hope to build or at least brand a Russian skyscraper — to connect Trump directly to Vladimir Putin during the campaign, while withholding from the court details that would exonerate Trump of such collusion.
A closer reading of the November 2018 charging document filed with Cohen’s false-statement plea deal reveals that Mueller — who personally signed the document — omitted a fuller accounting of Cohen’s emails and text messages which, according to Capitol Hill investigators who have seen them, make the deal look far less nefarious than portrayed in the filing and in the press.
On page 7, Mueller mentions that Cohen tried to email Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office on Jan. 14, 2016, and again on Jan. 16, 2016. But Mueller omitted the fact that Cohen did not have any direct points of contact at the Kremlin, and had resorted to sending the emails to a general press mailbox.
“It’s clear from personal messages he sent in 2015 and 2016 that the Trump Organization did not have formal lines of communication set up with Putin’s office or the Kremlin during the campaign,” one Hill investigator said. “There was no secret ‘back channel.’”
“So as far as collusion goes,” the source added, “the project is actually more exculpatory than incriminating for Trump and his campaign.”
In the end, neither Putin nor any Kremlin official was directly involved in the scuttled Moscow Project, sources say. Moreover, neither Cohen nor Trump traveled to Moscow in support of the deal, as real estate broker and Cohen business associate Felix Sater had urged. No meetings with Russian government officials took place.
It was Sater, a Russian immigrant with a checkered past, who came up with the tower project idea in 2015. But the project never went anywhere partly because Sater didn’t have the pull with Putin he claimed to have. Sources who have seen Sater’s still-secret transcripts of closed-door testimony say Sater, whom Cohen described as a “salesman,” testified to the House intelligence panel in late 2017 that his communications with Cohen about putting Trump and Putin on a stage for a “ribbon-cutting” for a Trump Tower in Moscow were “mere puffery” to try to promote the project and get it off the ground.
Also according to his still-undisclosed testimony, Sater swore none of those communications involved taking any action to influence the 2016 presidential election. None of the emails and texts between Sater and Cohen mention Russian plans or efforts to hack Democrats’ campaign emails or influence the election.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative nonpartisan government watchdog group, said the criminal-information statement of offense against Cohen reflects political bias. He said the special counsel appeared more interested in trying to draw connections to Russia than highlighting exculpatory evidence in what he called “a transparent attempt to try to embarrass the president.”
Major news organizations seized on Mueller’s misrepresentations.
CNN said the charging documents, which reference the president as “Individual 1,” suggest Trump had a working relationship with Russia’s president and that “Putin had leverage over Trump” because of the project.
“Well into the 2016 campaign, one of the president’s closest associates was in touch with the Kremlin on this project, as we now know, and Michael Cohen says he was lying about it to protect the president,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.
“Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin,” Blitzer added.
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said the development was so “enormous” that Trump “might not finish his term.” At MSNBC, pundits maintained the court papers prove “Trump secretly interacted with Putin’s own office.”
“Now we have evidence that there was direct communication between the Trump Organization and Putin’s office on this. I mean, this is collusion,” said David Corn of Mother Jones, co-author of “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”
Adam Schiff, now the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Trump was dealing directly with Putin on real estate ventures during the campaign.
Clinton supporter Rhee’s name is the first listed under Mueller’s signature as one of the prosecutors involved in the Cohen case, appearing at the end of the government’s December 2018 sentencing memorandum filed against him.
Mueller’s office declined repeated requests for comment from RealClearInvestigations. “Thanks, we’ll decline to comment,” spokesman Peter Carr reiterated Sunday evening
Attorney General Barr last week pledged to Democrats that he won’t withhold any derogatory information about the president regarding “collusion” contained in Mueller’s report.
But Republican lawmakers warn that if the special counsel’s juiced indictments are any indication, his report won’t be any more objective in detailing underlying evidence and telling the whole truth about Trump campaign activities in 2016.
Still puzzling to many Republicans is why Mueller, reportedly a Republican himself, would feint criminal collusion findings.
It’s not hard to see why many of the partisan Democrats he hired for his prosecution team, led by Clinton booster and anti-Trump “pit bull” Andrew Weissmann, would want to leave the impression Trump was actively cooperating with Moscow to steal the election from Clinton. But why Mueller?
Former prosecutors and investigators think Mueller’s hidden agenda was to protect the institutions of the FBI and Justice Department, as well as the broader intelligence community the agencies increasingly had become a part of following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
They describe Mueller as “an establishment guy” who spent some 20 years loyally working for the Justice Department and FBI, which had come under attack as politicized and even dirty for employing two standards in investigating Clinton and Trump during the 2016 campaign; they needed to be protected from what he viewed as a hostile takeover by the Trump administration, these people say
“Why did Mueller take the job? Not simply to protect the FBI but the entire intelligence community that he was part of,” said veteran FBI agent and lawyer Mark Wauck. “It’s hard to overestimate his interest in protecting DOJ from a Trump takeover.”
“To do that,” he added, “it would be helpful to not necessarily prove ‘collusion’ but show at least a colorable case that the IC could claim a reasonable belief in collusion.”
Mueller’s “hiring of extreme partisans suggest that the view of Trump was of an existential threat [to the IC] that had to be, at a minimum, neutered but hopefully dumped.”
To that end, some suggest Mueller had a more Machiavellian plan: swaying the 2018 congressional elections to change the House majority and trigger impeachment hearings.
Former federal prosecutor and commentator Andrew McCarthy pointed out that Mueller knew he had no collusion case more than a year before the midterm elections, yet kept teasing collusion in court filings throughout the 2018 campaign.
“When Mueller closed his investigation, he almost certainly knew for about a year and a half that there was no collusion case,” McCarthy said, adding that, among other things, Mueller let the surveillance warrant on Carter Page lapse in early fall of 2017.
Did prolonging his investigation influence the 2018 election results?
Exit polling shows that 49% of voters – nearly 1 in 2 – said they believed the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government during the 2016 election.
Aunt Becky is digging her heels in and setting up to fight the system.
Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli both pleaded not guilty Monday in “the largest ever college admissions scandal.” Loughlin, 54, and Giannulli, 55, both said they are waiving their right to appear in court for an arraignment, according to Fox News.
Loughlin and Giannulli didn’t appear in court on Monday and both requested to waive their appearance for an arraignment. As of now, it is not known if the judge will permit the pleas without Loughlin and her husband present.
Monday’s filing means Loughlin, currently free on bail, won’t have to come back to court in Boston anytime soon unless the judge orders an in-person arraignment, according to Tom Winter of NBC News. Previously it had been reported that Loughlin was worried about what a guilty plea would do to her daughters.
“She is very concerned about what a guilty plea would do to her daughters, who may not have grasped everything that was going on. Yes, she can think about the public perception of her, but that’s nothing compared to what her daughters think of her. So that is something that has understandably made her less likely to enter a plea,” a source told People several days ago.
Loughlin seems to be the exception to what others accused in the scandal are doing, in terms of legal strategy. Just days ago, we reported that the Harvard test taking whiz who was central to the scheme, Mark Riddell, had cut a deal with prosecutors and was facing 33 to 41 months in prison. 14 other parents were also recently indicted in the scandal last week. Two weeks ago, we noted that parents charged in the scheme were seeking out “prison life consultants” to find out what life would be like in the big house.
We have been following the admissions scandal at length. As part of our coverage, we detailed how financial speaking gigs and elite high schools helped facilitate the scam for years.
We’ve also covered the fallout from the scandal, like when UCLA’s Men’s Soccer Coach and former U.S. Men’s national team player Jorge Salcedo recently resigned from his position at the university as a result of taking bribes. We also wrote about how students were being encouraged to fake learning disabilities in order to cheat on college entrance exams.
We profiled Mark Riddell for the first time in March. Prior to that, we also reported on the tipster who gave the SEC the lead on the admissions scandal.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2v6SKZ6 Tyler Durden
A clip of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) describing the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an incident in which “some people did something” went viral on social media last week.
What followed was a vicious cycle of thunderous conservative indignation, complete with President Donald Trump tweeting a video mashing up Omar’s remarks with footage the planes hitting the Twin Towers, followed by an overreaching liberal backlash against the backlash, in which Democratic presidential contenders Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), all accused Trump of inciting violence against Omar.
The plain truth is this: Omar’s comments may sound flippant when taken out of context, but they were nowhere near as offensive as the right made them out to be—and Trump’s tweet, though thoughtless and unfair, did not represent any kind of violent threat. Everybody who got worked up about Omar was stoking unfounded outrage. And they were doing it hypocritically, since this is the kind of thing each side tends to hate when the other side does it.
Here is the full context of Omar’s remarks, delivered at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) event last month:
Here’s the truth. For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen. Frankly, I’m tired of it. And every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.
“Some people did something” is not the most sensitive way to describe 9/11, but the right—and the Trump tweet, specifically—made it sound like that was all she had said. She wasn’t minimizing the tragedy; she was suggesting that what some Muslims did threatened all Muslim Americans’ civil liberties. Omar was arguably incautious with her choice of words (and CAIR was actually founded in the 1990s), but those who dragged her for this were engaged in”patriotic correctness,” a right-wing variety of political correctness.
Omar’s remarks did not merit this level of denunciation. But as a sitting congresswoman, she’s in the political fray; she should not be immune from criticism, wrongheaded though it sometimes may be. Some of that criticism crossed a clear line: Omar has claimed that she received death threats in the wake of Trump’s tweet. No one should be threatened for expressing their opinions, and the government should take whatever action is necessary to make sure Omar is safe. But even if Trump calling attention to Omar’s comment had the effect of causing her to receive death threats, Trump himself did not threaten or incite violence, in either a strictly legal or a metaphorical sense. It would be no more appropriate to accuse Trump of inciting violence against Omar than it would be to hold the far left at fault for the 2017 congressional baseball shooting, which was perpetrated by a Sanders supporter who had appropriated some views of the Republicans-are-the-real-Taliban variety.
In general, don’t criticize a politician because some people might take it too far and threaten her would be a bad rule, one that would make it more difficult to hold politicians accountable when they really have earned a good lambasting.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IkiGZX
via IFTTT
