Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that he has been denied access to interview an FBI agent and FBI analyst who met with a key source for the Steele dossier who disavowed the salacious document.
Graham has sought interviews with the FBI case agent and supervisory intelligence analyst to discuss their interview in January 2017 with the primary source for Christopher Steele, the former British spy who investigated the Trump campaign for Democrats.
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Criminals are seizing on a surge in job losses to steal unemployment benefits from Americans nationwide. This complicates an already tough situation for millions of financially strapped Americans and overwhelmed state unemployment offices.
While there’s no exact measure of how many fraudulent claims have been made, states from Washington to Maine say they’ve seen an increase and numerous federal agencies are working to fight it.
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“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling is facing hefty backlash after she posted a series of tweets about transgender people.
Rowling drew outrage Saturday on Twitter when she criticized an opinion piece published by the website Devex, a media platform for the global development community, that used the phrase “people who menstruate.”
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Amazon, Twitter, and other major tech companies are facing intense criticism on antitrust issues and censorship claims in the months since government officials reportedly began asking for help from Silicon Valley on ways to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
The president and lawmakers have turned their sights on Twitter and Amazon, respectively, while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other attorneys general are reportedly ratcheting up their antitrust investigation targeting Google’s business model. The White House asked them in March to fight coronavirus disinformation while also assisting the government in its virus response.
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President Trump delivered remarks from the Rose Garden early Monday evening to address the widespread civil unrest concentrated in urban areas across the country.
Afterward, Mr. Trump surprised the media by walking out the front door of the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church. The 204-year-old landmark was set ablaze by rioters Sunday night.
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A federal judge on Monday defended his decision not to quickly approve the Justice Department’s request to dismiss its own criminal case against former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, saying that the department’s reversal was unusual and he wanted to consider the request carefully before ruling on it.
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The FBI lawyer who signed a surveillance order against former Trump aide Carter Page that the Justice Department has deemed invalid submitted his resignation on Friday, the FBI said.
Dana Boente, the FBI general counsel, has recently come under scrutiny over his role in the various investigations against former Trump advisers, including Michael Flynn and Carter Page.
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Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is weighing subpoenas for two longtime Hillary Clinton associates who peddled a dossier of allegations about Donald Trump that mirrored those in the infamous report compiled by Christopher Steele.
Johnson seeks documents and testimony from Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, the two Clinton cronies, and 33 other witnesses as part of a sprawling probe of the FBI, State Department and other agencies.
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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said during an interview Sunday morning that he believes African-Americans in Minneapolis have reason to distrust and fear their local police.
“Sadly, yes. There is a history that has been repeated time and time again. I want to say that many officers are great people. I know so many of them and I think the chief is an extraordinary person, and the mayor and the council deserve a lot of credit for appointing Mr. Arradondo, but it is an endemic problem in the Minneapolis Police Department,” Ellison said on Fox News Sunday.
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The veteran Minneapolis police officer charged in the death of a man in his custody had 18 previous complaints of misconduct against him, according to news reports.
Only two of the old complaints against Derek Chauvin resulted in disciplinary actions, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Former Nashville mayoral candidate Carol Swain said she warned Mayor John Cooper to prepare for possible violence following Saturday’s protests downtown.
Cooper responded with a polite thank you — and, apparently, little else.
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by Jason Hopkins White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien on Sunday suggested that the Chinese Community Party would very likely try to steal American developments on a coronavirus vaccine. During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” O’Brien predicted that the United States would be the first country to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. But he added that the Chinese government has been working diligently to steal the U.S. government’s coronavirus vaccine research — and he “wouldn’t be surprised” if their espionage efforts succeeded. “I think we’re going to develop a vaccine first,” the president’s adviser said on Sunday. “Now, there’s a chance, and it has been reported that the Chinese have been engaged in espionage to try and find the research and the technologies that we’re working on — both for a vaccine and a therapy.” “Look, they’ve got a many, many year history of stealing American intellectual property and knocking off American technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did that with the vaccines,” O’Brien said. NEWS: The Trump Administration is looking at cutting off travel from Brazil amid #coronavirus pandemic, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien tells @margbrennan. See more of O'Brien's interview…
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After $3 trillion in federal stimulus money went to individuals, corporations, hospitals and numerous industries, the Class 1 freight industry has maintained its transportation operations and provided critical resources nationwide without asking for, or receiving, federal taxpayer money.
Other industries and lawmakers can look to how the freight industry has weathered the economic downturn and coronavirus restrictions without receiving any federal bailout money, analysts note.
“The freight rail industry is one of the most cost-effective and efficient transportation networks in the world,” the American Railroads Association (ARA) argues. “Fueled by billions of dollars in annual private investment – $25 billion on average – railroads maintain and modernize the nation’s nearly 140,000-mile private rail network to deliver for America.”
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President Donald Trump fired Steve Linick, the State Department’s inspector general, on Friday night, sources told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Trump notified House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he was removing Linick from office, effective in 30 days. He said in the letter that “it is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General.”
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Former CIA Director John Brennan said Friday that he has yet to be interviewed by the federal prosecutor investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, but that he is willing to do so and has “nothing to hide.”
“I feel very good that my tenure at CIA and my time at the White House during the Obama administration was not — that was not engaged in any type of wrongdoing or activities that caused me to worry about what this investigation may uncover,” Brennan said in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
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U.S. Representatives Ted Budd (R-NC-13) and Ken Buck (R-CO-04) introduced the Getting Americans Back to Work Act to amend a portion of the CARES Act, which resulted in some unemployed filers receiving higher wages through unemployment compensation than through their previous jobs.
The bill caps the amount an individual can receive from unemployment insurance at 100 percent of their previous wages.
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Dozens of sheriffs across the country are refusing to enforce stay-at-home orders because of their unconstitutional nature.
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Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, visited the Justice Department last week seeking to declassify documents related to Obama administration officials’ unmasking of Michael Flynn in transcripts of phone calls he had with Russia’s ambassador, ABC News is reporting.
Grenell is asking the Justice Department to declassify a list of names of officials involved in the unmasking process, a senior intelligence official told ABC.
Unmasking refers to a process where top U.S. government officials can request information on American citizens picked up during electronic surveillance of foreigners. Flynn was unveiled as taking part in a Dec. 29, 2016 phone with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
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A Michigan health system and CBS News have come under fire after Project Veritas revealed that a line for a COVID-19 testing site was staged for television cameras.
Cherry Health and CBS News denied directing staffers to form a line to appear as patients for a coronavirus testing site before later reversing their statement and saying that the staffers were in line to “provide a visual backdrop.”
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Facebook last week announced that more than 200 news organizations will receive nearly $16 million in grants through the Facebook Journalism Project’s relief fund for local news. These grants come from $25 million in relief funding announced in March from Facebook’s $100 million global investment in news. It includes:
$10.3 million being awarded to 144 US local newsrooms as part of the COVID-19 Local News Relief Fund Grant Program. The fund is supporting many publishers who are hardest hit by this crisis: nearly 80 percent of recipients are family- or independently owned and more than half are published by or for communities of color.
$5.4 million being awarded to 59 North American newsrooms that participated in Facebook Local News Accelerator programs focused on subscriptions and memberships.
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California entered phase 2 of its reopening plan Friday, but that excluded houses of worship being able to hold in-person services. Regardless, several thousand church leaders say they plan to reopen by May 31 no matter what the governor says.
California Church United, a network of 3,000 California churches, representing 2.5 million members, announced it plans to open May 31, instead of waiting until the state implements phase 3, which includes allowing modified reopening of houses of worship.
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One of the regulators pegged to oversee the coronavirus stimulus is married to a corporate attorney who touts her history of defending companies in civil and criminal enforcement cases before the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), public records show.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tapped attorney Bharat Ramamurti to sit on the Congressional Oversight Commission, a five-member panel Congress created in March to oversee the $2.2 trillion stimulus package. The commission’s statute does not explicitly require members to disclose their finances, though three of the members are obligated to provide disclosures as they are lawmakers.
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President Donald Trump’s campaign launched a “Moms for Trump” coalition ahead of Mother’s Day during an online broadcast Saturday night.
The campaign’s online broadcast aired at 8 p.m., Trump campaign spokeswoman Sarah Matthews told the Daily Caller News Foundation. It featured top Trump 2020 advisers Lara Trump, Mercedes Schlapp, Katrina Pierson and national chair of Trump Victory Finance Committee Kimberly Guilfoyle.
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Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as “Little Richard,” died on Saturday at his Nashville home. He was 87. Millennials and such may be unaware of the man and the great American music he pioneered.
As the big-band era of the 1940s began to wane, musicians opted for smaller combos. They pounded out a rollicking sound with a heavy backbeat, honking saxophones, percussive pianos, and simple lyrics that lingered in the mind. When Chuck Berry sang “roll over Beethoven, dig these rhythm and blues,” that was the music he was talking about. By the mid-1950s, rhythm and blues had been rebranded as rock and roll, and Little Richard was the king.
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One of the most important principles of epidemiology is weighing benefits and harms. A failure to do this can make virtually any medical treatment seem helpful or destructive. In the words of Ronald C. Kessler of the Harvard Medical School and healthcare economist Paul E. Greenberg, “medical interventions are appropriate only if their expected benefits clearly exceed the sum of their direct costs and their expected risks.”
Likewise, a 2020 paper about quarantines published in The Lancet states: “Separation from loved ones, the loss of freedom, uncertainty over disease status, and boredom can, on occasion, create dramatic effects. Suicide has been reported, substantial anger generated, and lawsuits brought following the imposition of quarantine in previous outbreaks. The potential benefits of mandatory mass quarantine need to be weighed carefully against the possible psychological costs.”
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An internal Chinese report warns Beijing officials that backlash from the coronavirus pandemic risks tilting China into a full bore armed conflict with the United States, Reuters reported Monday.
Anti-China sentiment hasn’t been this white-hot since the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than three decades ago, sources familiar with the paper told Reuters. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the report, which the sources say was presented to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other officials in April.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees in Massachusetts rushed officers, barricaded themselves inside the facility and caused more than $25,000 worth of damage after being told they would be transferred to a medical wing of the facility and tested for coronavirus, authorities said.
Roughly 10 inmates at an immigration detention center in Dartmouth, Massachusetts reported symptoms of COVID-19 to medical personnel, according to a press release from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office.
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Some governments are using smartphone tracking to make sure people are following social distancing rules in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Google announced it will use its massive collection of mobile location data to measure how closely people across the globe are following government directives to remain at home.
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A glitch within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has reportedly led to as many as thousands of foreign nationals receiving coronavirus stimulus checks intended for U.S. residents.
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U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Wednesday unsealed eleven pages of FBI emails and handwritten notes that provide further evidence that retired general Michael Flynn was set up for a perjury trap by the senior members of the Bureau.
The new documents are “even more appalling than the Friday production,” said Flynn’s lead attorney Sidney Powell.
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by Robert Romano The unemployment rate will likely continue rising as the spread between the 10-year treasury on one side, and the 2-year and 3-month treasuries on the other, continue rising over the next weeks and months, an analysis of interest rates over the past four recession shows, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The relationship shows that peak unemployment comes after the inversions and tends to continue until the peak the 10-year-2-year, and the 10-year-3-month spreads, with the average period lasting 26 months from when the inversions ended, and the range being from about 13 months as in the 1982 recession 30 to 31 months in the cases of the 1991, 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions. The question here is how quickly will the U.S. get to peak unemployment? Both the 10-year-2-year and 10-year-3-month spreads uninverted in Oct. 2019, and then another brief inversion happened in the 10-year-3-month last month, but not for the 10-year-2-year. So where to start counting from? October or last month? It’s impossible to know but you can produce a very wide range, and say that unemployment will probably continue rising until at least Nov. 2020,…
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The Chinese government’s foreign ministry portrayed China as the victim of coronavirus disinformation on Monday, before suggesting minutes later that the U.S. government is “hiding something” regarding the pandemic.
“China always stands against disinformation campaign. We are victim rather than producer of disinformation,” the Chinese foreign ministry wrote from its Twitter account.
The account then suggested without evidence that the U.S. government has lied about the extent of the coronavirus pandemic here.
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The U.S. Coast Guard is monitoring a situation in which dozens of oil tanker vessels are floating around the Southern California coast as they wait to dock while the country wrestles with what to do with the current glut in crude.
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World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was a top official in the Ethiopian government at the same time that it was accused of widespread human rights violations.
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Due in large part to government edicts, religious, social, and political gatherings, have been cancelled or drastically altered to meet government requirements. Schools and colleges have closed so there will be no proms or graduations to attend this spring. Restaurant dining rooms are closed, as are community centers, fitness centers, salons, barbershops, theaters, retail stores, and malls. Theme parks, beaches, and even some public parks are closed. Air travel and the use of public transportation has declined precipitously. Traffic on the roads is eerily light, and parking lots are nearly empty.
Of the businesses that have remained open, many have reduced their operating hours. While one can reasonably expect that stay-at-home orders will reduce Chinese coronavirus cases, it remains to be seen what the human and economic toll of these orders will be; but we do know that they are devastating to small businesses and their employees.
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By a vote of 96-0, the U.S. Senate has passed a $2.2 trillion legislative package, by far the largest in U.S. history, to keep tens of millions of Americans on payroll and expand unemployment benefits to those who are laid off while the country waits out the deadly Chinese coronavirus that poses additional risk to seniors and those with underlying conditions.
That way, when the virus passes, those businesses, particularly the 30 million small businesses that are struggling most of all right now, but also critical industries, will be able to rapidly reopen and we can get back to our lives.
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Nearly 3.3 million Americans filed unemployment claims last week, a record number as businesses were forced to shut down to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday that 3.28 million claims were filed in the week that ended March 21. That marked an increase of more than 3 million claims over the week prior, when 282,000 claims were filed.
The previous high in a single week, according to the department, was in October 1982, when about 695,000 claims were filed. The nearly 3.3 million claims filed last week is nearly five times the prior record.
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by Peter Hasson World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus won his post after China backed him in the May 2017 election. Now, Tedros is leading the WHO, an arm of the United Nations, in providing cover for China’s oppressive regime as it attempts to shirk responsibility for the global coronavirus pandemic. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Chinese authorities are weaving a false counternarrative in which China was actually the victim of a foreign virus that it quickly moved to contain. And the WHO is helping them do it. Tedros has praised China’s “transparency” and held up the country as a model response — even though the communist regime covered and then concealed the severity of the outbreak. Chinese authorities forced scientists who discovered the virus in December to destroy proof of the virus, U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times reported. The Chinese regime also punished doctors who tried to warn the public in the outbreak’s early stages and suppressed information about the virus online. A Chinese real estate mogul who criticized his government’s response has since gone missing. Approximately seven million people left Wuhan in January, spreading the virus all over China and all over the world, before China restricted travel to Wuhan on Jan. 22, The…
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Alabama is now providing aggregated data for the coronavirus pandemic, state officials told The Michigan Star earlier this week.
Per Section 1702 of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires states to provide “aggregated data on testing and results from State and local public health departments.” Aggregated data includes both positive and negative test results.
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Mayo Clinic announced last week that it can now test up to 4,000 clinical samples for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, on a daily basis.
Mayo officials said they now have the capacity to process COVID-19 test samples at all Mayo Clinic sites and have started processing test samples from their clients across the state, including eight major health systems.
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A coalition of computer coders and medical experts is looking for volunteers — including from the Volunteer State — to help provide better information on COVID-19 coronavirus testing sites.
TechCrunch reported on the one-week-old Coders Against Covid project, which is building a database of testing sites. The team of about 15 developers includes Andrew Kemendo of KesselRun, an Air Force software developer, and Dr. Jorge A. Caballero, a clinical instructor of Anesthesia at Stanford University. The goal is to inform officials tracking the disease and to better distribute the tests where they are needed.
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The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) are suspending entrance fees as a way to promote social distancing amid the coronavirus outbreak, following in the footsteps of the National Park Service.
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As the threat of COVID-19 infection by coronavirus transmission grows, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been taking steps to ensure better internet access for Americans as many self-quarantine during the crisis.
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Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee issued an executive action Sunday ordering the closure of bars, restaurants, and other places of public accommodation in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has created both an economic and a health crisis and our response must continue to address both aspects,” Lee said in a statement. “Our goal is to keep the public, especially vulnerable populations, safe while doing everything possible to keep Tennesseans in a financially stable position.”
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nominee on Thursday, citing his track record in the healthcare and automotive industries as part of her reasoning.
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An illegal alien charged with raping a child was released by New York City authorities because of the city’s sanctuary policies, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were able to apprehend him shortly afterward.
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During the 2016 campaign, President Trump ran on cracking down on illegal immigration. After years of border security being largely ignored, Trump made it a central issue. After three years in office, it is clear that he is getting results.
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The number of knife crime related incidents in England and Wales hit a record high in the year to September, up by 7% on the previous 12 months.
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Health officials confirmed a second U.S. case of a coronavirus as China locked down more cities near the epicenter of the outbreak Friday.
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Profiles in Courage deserves its place in that vast mythopoeic enterprise the public knows as Camelot. But a much more important book is Peter Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elites.
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