ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Reuters) - Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on Tuesday of eight counts of financial wrongdoing, giving Special Counsel Robert Mueller a victory in the first trial arising from his investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election. After almost four days of deliberations, a 12-member jury found Manafort guilty on two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one charge of failing to disclose foreign bank accounts. The jury in U.S. federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, said it could not reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts with which Manafort was charged. Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on those counts. While the charges against Manafort mostly predate his work on President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, the guilty verdict triggered an outburst from Trump, who has repeatedly sought to distance himself from Manafort while denouncing the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt”. “Paul Manafort is a good man. ... It doesn’t involve me, but I still feel - you know, it’s a very sad thing that happened,” Trump said before a rally in West Virginia on Tuesday night. “This has nothing to do with Russian collusion.” Manafort’s conviction on the eight counts came in the same hour that Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations and other charges. Manafort stood quietly while the verdict was being read by the clerk. It represented a stunning fall for Manafort, a well-known figure in Republican politics for decades. Related CoverageFollow the money: how Mueller's team made the Manafort caseFactbox: Under investigation or convicted - current and ex-Trump aides facing scrutiny Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, told reporters afterward that his client was disappointed in the verdict and was evaluating his options. “He is trying to soak it all in,” Downing told Reuters. Mueller’s office declined comment on the verdict. Prosecutors accused Manafort of hiding from U.S. tax authorities $16 million he earned as a political consultant for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine to fund an opulent lifestyle and then lying to banks to secure $20 million in loans after his Ukrainian income dried up and he needed cash. The two bank fraud charges on which he was convicted each carry a potential prison term of up to 30 years. But several sentencing experts predicted Manafort, 69, would receive a prison term of about 10 years. Mark Warner, the senior Democrat on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that any attempt by Trump to use his presidential powers to pardon Manafort or interfere in Mueller’s probe “would be a gross abuse of power and require immediate action by Congress.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said in a statement: “There have yet to be any charges or convictions for colluding with the Russian government by any member of the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.” FILE PHOTO: Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort departs from U.S. District Court in Washington, U.S., February 28, 2018. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/File PhotoMoscow has denied interfering in the 2016 election and Trump has said there was no collusion. David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami, said the guilty verdict on eight of 18 counts was “a significant victory” for Mueller and that “the mistrial on the remaining 10 counts is a shallow victory for the defense.” Manafort was convicted on all five charges of filing false tax returns. Prosecutors provided evidence he did not report $16 million in overseas income from 2010 to 2014 but used it to purchase clothes and real estate and renovate his homes. The jury found him guilty for failing to report his overseas bank holdings in just one of the four years cited. Manafort’s lawyers sought to portray the law as complex and raised questions about whether Manafort willfully broke it, a notion that may have given some jurors pause. They were hung on three other related counts. Manafort was found guilty on two counts of bank fraud, one involving a $3.4 million mortgage on a Manhattan condominium and a $1 million business loan. In both cases, the evidence showed Manafort provided false information in order to get the loans. The jury was hung on seven other bank fraud counts, however, including all five conspiracy charges, possibly because the jurors doubted the credibility of Rick Gates, Manafort’s former right-hand man, who pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution. One count on which the jury was hung was a $5.5 million loan that did not close. Ellis, who was hard on the prosecution throughout the trial, questioned in open court why the government was pursuing a charge on a loan that never materialized, a comment that drew criticism from legal experts and prompted an official complaint from Mueller’s team. Ellis gave the prosecution until Aug. 29 to decide whether to retry Manafort on the charges on which the jury deadlocked. As a result, the judge did not set a sentencing date for the charges on which Manafort was found guilty. Slideshow (6 Images)So far, no jurors have spoken to the media and their names were not made public so it is unclear how they determined their verdict. Manafort now faces a second trial on Sept. 17 in Washington in which he is charged with money laundering, failing to register as a lobbyist in the United States for his work for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine, and obstruction of justice. The second trial promises to delve deeper into Manafort’s Russian connections, including his relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukranian-Russian political consultant who was indicted along with Manafort and who Mueller says has ties to Russian intelligence. Reporting by Karen Freifeld, Nathan Layne and Ginger Gibson in Alexandria, Va.; Additional reporting by Pete Schroeder and Katanga Johnson in Alexandria and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Writing by Warren Strobel and Alistair Bell; Editing by Bill Trott and Peter CooneyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The second theme is the prospect of US demands for market access and higher drug prices as part of any post-Brexit trade deal. There were typically mixed and confused signals on this issue during the summer from President Trump, and strong denials from Conservative leadership contenders that the NHS would feature in bilateral talks. But set against such assurances are the US administration’s stated goal of raising prices for US medicines abroad, in order to lower them at home, and expert opinion. Andrew Hill, an adviser to the World Health Organization, predicts that the NHS drugs bill could rise from £18bn to £45bn a year.With 59% of voters naming the NHS as the biggest issue facing the country (though only 18% say that policies on health will determine how they vote), and a chance that the increased demands of winter could see the situation in some hospitals spiral out of control, Conservative campaigners recognise the danger. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, has been meeting the NHS England boss, Simon Stevens, weekly, and No 10 is also closely involved.But the question is what, if anything, the Conservatives have to offer the health service, beyond the 3.4% annual increase to which they are already committed, taking the total budget from £115bn to £135bn over the course of the next parliament. Regular hospital visits by Boris Johnson indicate that his party believes it has a positive story to tell, and is prepared to brazen it out when confronted by angry staff or patients, as he has been more than once. But the fact is that the settlement agreed by Theresa May’s government was known at the time not to be enough, with a 4% increase recommended by thinktanks as the minimum required to reverse years of decline caused by cuts (and the additional burden imposed by council cuts to public health and addiction services to be taken into account).Determined not to be outdone, Labour has offered a “rescue package” that it says will be worth £5.5bn more a year by 2023-24, funded by higher taxes. The policy has the merit of giving voters a clear choice: to spend a lot more money, or not? But while it is right that health spending should be among key election issues, the public should not be given the false impression that it is all about the money. A swift resolution of the doctors’ pensions dispute and the return of nurses’ training bursaries (as promised by Labour) would ease staffing pressures, for example. So would doubling the number of medical school places. But staff shortages are a global issue. So is the role of prevention and public health, particularly in countries where lifestyle-linked illnesses have risen sharply. Rather than a bidding war, politicians should engage in a debate about their plans to make the UK a healthier country. Topics NHS Opinion Matthew Hancock Health General election 2019 Boris Johnson Conservatives Jeremy Corbyn editorials

America’s drug overdose crisis is still largely dominated by opioid overdose deaths. But stimulants like cocaine and especially methamphetamine seem poised for a comeback.Provisional federal data suggests that national overdose deaths linked to psychostimulants, such as meth, spiked by more than 21 percent from 2017 to 2018. Overdose deaths linked to cocaine increased by around 5 percent. That isn’t the only evidence: A recent research letter published in JAMA Network Open analyzing more than 1 million drug testing results from routine health care settings found positive hits for meth were up nearly 487 percent from 2013 to 2019, and positive hits for cocaine were up nearly 21 percent.Experts worry that the numbers for stimulants could foreshadow a larger epidemic — a potential “fourth wave” in the overdose crisis that’s killed more than 700,000 people in the US since 1999.“Every opioid epidemic in American history has been followed by a stimulant epidemic,” Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys told me.The numbers for meth and cocaine are still dwarfed by opioids. In 2018, there were more than 13,000 estimated overdose deaths linked to stimulants, particularly meth, and more than 15,700 linked to cocaine, according to the provisional data. Meanwhile, there were nearly 48,000 overdose deaths linked to opioids. Synthetic opioids excluding methadone — a category that mainly captures fentanyl — were associated with more than double the fatal overdoses linked to cocaine or meth alone. (There’s some overlap between drugs in the figures, because overdoses can involve multiple drugs.)But there are reasons to believe the crisis is broader than just opioids. A 2018 study in Science found that, while drug overdose deaths spiked in the 1990s and 2000s with the opioid epidemic, there has been “exponential growth” in overdose deaths since 1979. That suggests that America’s drug problem is getting worse in general, regardless of which drug is involved.“My question: Why are we as a country vulnerable to all of these drugs?” Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told me. “What has happened that has made it possible for these drugs to take hold in a dramatic way?”The answers to those questions could require a shift in how America approaches drugs, focusing not just on the substances making headlines but also addiction more broadly and the causes of addiction. It would mean building a comprehensive addiction treatment system that’s equipped to deal with all kinds of drugs. And it could require looking at issues that aren’t seemingly drug-related at first, like whether socioeconomic and cultural forces are driving people to use more drugs.In the 1960s and ’70s, heroin was the big drug of public concern. In the 1980s, it was crack cocaine. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was meth. Over the past decade and a half, opioid painkillers, heroin, and then fentanyl became the center of America’s drug problem. It’s not clear if the next phase is here yet — opioids are still a huge problem — but the worry is stimulants will start to pick up if opioids plateau and fall.“The drugs are driven by fads, a little bit of fashion,” Volkow said. “So you have eras when you have a flourishing of a particular drug and then another one takes over.”According to experts, there are many reasons for that. One is supply. Starting with the launch of OxyContin in 1996, there was a huge proliferation of opioid painkillers, letting people try and misuse the drugs. That was followed by waves of heroin and fentanyl as traffickers tried to capitalize on the demand for opioids jump-started by painkillers. Some research shows the supply of prescription opioids was a key driver in the rise of the current overdose crisis.There are now reports of drug cartels producing and shipping more meth than before across the US-Mexico border — a shift from the homegrown market of the 1990s and 2000s. And in general, illicit drugs have become cheaper and, in some cases, more potent over time. Federal data tracking the street price and potency of the drugs tells the story: In 1986, for example, meth was on average $575 per pure gram and on average at 52 percent purity; in 2012, it was $194 per pure gram and 91 percent purity. The price drop is similar for other drugs, though purity levels have fluctuated depending on the substance.This makes it cheaper for someone to start using drugs. The central focus of the US war on drugs for decades has been to prevent this — by fighting drug traffickers and dealers — but it’s failed as drug cartels have consistently remained ahead of the authorities, bolstered by new technologies and globalization making it cheaper and easier to ship drugs around the world.New demand for drugs is also a major factor for new epidemics — as people could, for example, want to supplant or enhance their opioid use with stimulants. Maybe they mix opioids with cocaine (a “speedball”) or meth (a “goofball”) because they like the mixed effects. Maybe they use stimulants after heroin or fentanyl to wake themselves up. Maybe they want to stop using opioids, whether due to the risk of overdose or some other reason, and believe stimulants are a better option.“People get tired of it — have been there, done that, and move on,” Steven Shoptaw, a psychologist and researcher at UCLA, told me. “There is some of that with all addictions. Some people walk away from [opioid addiction], which is great. But then they walk away from it by using stimulants.”Humphreys noted an important factor in this cycle: “Probably more Americans than ever know a drug dealer.” As millions of Americans have misused and gotten addicted to opioids, they’ve established ties with drug dealers that they didn’t have before. That makes it easier to go from heroin or fentanyl to meth or cocaine.Underlying all of this, Volkow argued, is a sense that something deeper has gone wrong in society. She pointed to the research by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton showing that there’s been a rise in “deaths of despair” — drug overdoses, but also alcohol-related mortality and suicides. Case and Deaton have pinned the rise on all sorts of issues, including the collapse of economic opportunities in much of the country, a growing sense of social isolation, and untreated mental health issues.“If all of these social factors were there, and we didn’t have the supply of drugs, of course people would not be dying of overdoses,” Volkow said. “But it is the confluence of the widespread markets of drugs — that are very accessible and very potent — and the social-cultural factors that are making people despair and seek out these drugs as a way of escaping.”One caveat to all of this: Not every place in the US is following the same drug trends. According to the Science study and the provisional federal data, meth has historically been more popular in the southwest, while fentanyl has been more widespread in the northeast. Researchers have warned that could change if, for example, fentanyl reaches California in a big way. But it goes to show that what looks like a national epidemic or trendline could also be regional epidemics, with different populations and demographics, separately rising and falling.There are things that can be done to combat drug epidemics in general.One option is to attempt to reduce supply, as the drug war has generally focused on for decades. Plenty of critics are extremely skeptical of this, pointing to the fact that illegal substances have only gotten cheaper and continued flowing into the US since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. But some work by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, indicates that prohibition makes drugs as much as 10 times more expensive than they would be otherwise — making the drugs less accessible and less ripe for an epidemic. There’s a logic in that: If drug dealers and traffickers have to grow, ship, and sell drugs while actively evading law enforcement, and therefore can’t built up the kind of mass production seen in legal markets, that adds costs.Another potential policy response is to address what some experts call the root causes of drug addiction — by rebuilding economic opportunities, helping people feel more connected, or addressing mental health issues. There’s some real-world evidence this could work: Iceland set up an anti-drug plan focused largely on providing kids and adolescents with after-school activities, which journalist Emma Young described as “a social movement around natural highs,” and saw drug use fall among younger populations in the subsequent years.There are other possible prevention efforts, such as doctors more routinely screening for drug addictions or public awareness and education campaigns (although, as the surgeon general’s 2016 addiction report cautioned, some types of campaigns work better than others). “The most impactful intervention that you can do for a medical condition is prevent it,” Volkow argued.Broadly, the US also needs to invest much more on addiction treatment. According to the surgeon general’s report, only about one in 10 people with a substance use disorder obtain specialty care, largely because it’s inaccessible and unaffordable. More money to addiction care could help boost access, although that would have to be paired with an emphasis on more evidence-based practices.At the same time, a one-size-fits-all approach for all drugs is going to fall short.For one, drugs are simply different from each other. For opioids, the biggest health risk is a fatal overdose. For stimulants like cocaine and meth, overdose is still a major concern, but the bigger health risk is the long-term damage the drugs do to the brain and cardiovascular system.From a harm-reduction standpoint, this means that simply averting overdoses can do a lot to prevent the worst health risk of opioids, even if someone continues using for years. But for stimulants, deadly harms can’t be fully reduced until levels of consumption are reduced as well. So, for example, safe consumption sites, in which trained staff supervise drug use, might have more protective benefits for opioids than stimulants. (Still, the sites can provide a lot of other services for people who use stimulants, like sterile syringes, advice on how to use as safely as possible, and a connection to addiction treatment.)Along similar lines, treatment is, for now, more effective for opioids than it is for stimulants. For opioids, we have effective medications in buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone, which, according to studies, cut the mortality rate among opioid addiction patients by half or more and keep people in treatment better than non-medication approaches. In France, the expansion of buprenorphine was a major factor in a 79 percent drop in overdoses from 1995 to 1999.There aren’t equivalent medications for stimulant addiction. In fact, the only treatment that really stands out for stimulants, according to a recent review of the research in The Lancet, is contingency management, which provides incentives, financial or otherwise, to keep people from using drugs. But this treatment is controversial — not many people want to pay people who use drugs to stop using drugs. So it’s hugely underused in addiction treatment, outside of the Veterans Affairs health care system.So simply building up America’s addiction treatment system isn’t enough to address all of the country’s drug problems. What kinds of treatment are done and how different drugs are treated also matter. And in the case of stimulants, treatment is probably going to produce disappointing results unless treatment facilities adopt an approach many are averse to and until researchers uncover better approaches.This is why experts and advocates have long warned about focusing too much on the drug crisis of the day. While the opioid epidemic is a problem that needs to be addressed now, it’s important to be realistic about what could come next — and taking steps to prevent not just the current kind of drug crisis but also what could follow. “We do have a problem in the US of tending to think of one drug at a time,” Humphreys said. “During the ’90s, everyone was worried about meth, but there were plenty of people dying of alcohol. During the ’80s, crack cocaine, even though plenty of people were dying of heroin.”The recent rise in stimulant deaths, though, suggests that America remains unprepared.

Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen accused the president in explosive public testimony before Congress of knowing in advance about key events under investigation in the Russia inquiry and of committing criminal conspiracy in the covering up of an extramarital affair.In a day of high drama before the House oversight committee, Cohen delivered a string of bombshells that could spawn fresh investigations by Congress and the FBI. Testifying on Wednesday, he labelled the US president a “racist” and “conman”, produced signed checks that he said were proof of a fraudulently disguised conspiracy to silence a former adult film actor, and gave what he claimed were eyewitness accounts that implied Trump had prior knowledge of crucial Russia links.Cohen became the first in the president’s inner circle to allege that Trump knew that his longtime adviser, Roger Stone, was communicating with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election regarding the release of hacked Democratic party emails.He also said Trump was aware of the infamous Trump Tower meeting between members of his presidential campaign, including his son Donald Trump Jr, and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin, which was arranged in order to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton.Cohen’s testimony marked a rare opportunity for millions of Americans to bear witness to the account of a central player in multiple investigations ensnaring the president and associates. Cohen acted for more than a decade as the president’s fixer – a role in which he became intimately familiar with both Trump’s personal and professional affairs.In an extraordinary and emotional closing statement, Cohen spoke directly to his former boss, admonishing Trump for a litany of sins ranging from his attacks against the media to his policy of separating immigrant families and his failure to “take responsibility for your own dirty deeds”. He exhorted those who still support the president, as he once did, not to make “the same mistakes I have made or pay the heavy price that my family and I are paying”.In his most lurid warning, Cohen suggested that America could be facing existential peril as a constitutional democracy. “Given my experience working for Mr Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”Cohen’s testimony, stretching, with breaks, over more than seven hours, highlighted how the US president faces legal and political peril on at least two fronts – the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election and possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow, as well as a criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws through the payment of hush money.“Today, I am here to tell the truth about Mr Trump,” Cohen said in his opening statement.“I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience,” he added. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”Cohen pleaded guilty in November to crimes that including lying to Congress and is scheduled to go to prison in May to begin a three-year sentence. Speaking in a measured tone, Cohen described his testimony as a step on the “path of redemption” and apologized to the panel for his previous lies.Trump, who arrived in Hanoi this week for a summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, accused Cohen of “lying in order to reduce his prison time”.Cohen testified publicly for the first time in detail about a six-figure sum that was paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels to prevent her from speaking out about an alleged affair with Trump. Cohen presented checks he said were signed by the president and his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, to reimburse him for the hush money payments totaling $130,000.“The president of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws,” Cohen said.Ro Khanna, a congressman from California, suggested that the check for $35,000 signed by Trump amounted to the “smoking gun” in legal investigations bearing down on the president. He said it gave “compelling evidence of crimes … It’s important for the American public to understand that this is financial fraud, garden variety financial fraud.”Khanna put it to Cohen that he was saying that the US president had directed payments by his son and the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, “as part of a criminal conspiracy of financial fraud”. Khanna asked: “Is that your testimony today?”Cohen hesitated for a moment, then replied: “Yes.”He told the panel that Trump knew of and approved each step of the payments, and said the president had committed other illegal acts that he was unable to discuss because they were under investigation.Cohen added that he was instructed by Trump to lie about the alleged affair to the president’s wife, Melania Trump, stating: “Lying to the first lady is one of my biggest regrets because she is a kind, good person.”The finding that Donald Jr was directly involved in the scheme to pay off Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, could mean the president’s son faces legal jeopardy. Federal prosecutors in New York, who have had copies of the checks and other records for months, say the payments violated campaign finance laws.That investigation, which is being overseen by the southern district of New York, is also examining a six-figure payment made to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who also alleged an affair with Trump, by the National Enquirer. The tabloid, which is owned by the president’s close friend David Pecker, purchased the exclusive rights to McDougal’s story and then refused to publish it in a practice known as “catch-and-kill”.Cohen said he presided over “several” similar arrangements, while telling the committee: “These catch-and-kill scenarios existed between David Pecker and Mr Trump long before I started working for him in 2007.”Forensic questioning by the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared to lay the groundwork for subpoenas to be issued for the president’s tax returns. She asked Cohen whether his knowledge of Trump’s financial affairs led him to believe that the returns would be helpful to the committee in understanding how he managed sharply to reduce his tax burden by undervaluing his parents’ real estate holdings, and he said that it would.Elsewhere in the proceedings, Cohen said that he had seen Trump’s tax returns but had not studied them. Trump had resisted releasing the documents, he suggested, because he “didn’t want an entire group of thinktanks, who are tax experts, to run through his returns”.The hearing began in dramatic fashion, with Republicans objecting to the leaking to the media of Cohen’s testimony late on Tuesday evening, and pushing to postpone the event. They were overruled by Democrats, who since assuming a majority in the House in January have vowed to act as a check on Trump.“We are in search of the truth,” Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the committee, said.But his exchanges with Republican lawmakers often grew contentious, as allies of the president aggressively sought to undermine Cohen’s credibility as a witness.“You’re a pathological liar. You don’t know truth from falsehood,” Representative Paul Gosar, of Arizona, told Cohen.“Sir, I’m sorry, are you referring to me or the president?” Cohen retorted.Responding to his testimony, Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign condemned Cohen as “a felon, a disbarred lawyer, and a convicted perjurer”.“This is the same Michael Cohen who has admitted that he lied to Congress previously,” the Trump campaign spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, said in a statement. Cohen was convicted in December of crimes that included lying to Congress over negotiations around a possible Trump Tower project in Moscow during the 2016 campaign. Cohen testified on Wednesday that he briefed the president’s son, Donald Jr, and the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, about the deal approximately 10 times.Donald Trump Jr hit back at Cohen on Twitter, suggesting this was all an attempt by the president’s former attorney to gain publicity.In his testimony about the Trump Tower meeting, Cohen also said that he recalled Trump Jr telling his father “in a low voice” in early June 2016: “The meeting is all set.”“I remember Mr Trump saying, ‘OK, good … let me know,” Cohen said. He added that Trump had previously complained that Donald Jr “had the worst judgment of anyone in the world” and would not have set up a meeting of such significance without clearing it with his father.Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is concluding a two-year investigation into any links or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. Cohen said he had spoken with the special counsel’s office on seven occasions.Trump told Mueller in a series of written answers last year that he did not discuss WikiLeaks with Stone and did not know of the Trump Tower meeting in advance.Stone previously claimed to have been in touch with Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, but now says that he was lying about this. Stonesaid: “Mr Cohen’s statement is untrue.”Cohen’s remarks painted a scathing picture of a mobster-like president, who dispatched his former attorney to shortchange suppliers, threaten his schools that they must not release his student grades, and handle negative press around Trump’s avoidance of the Vietnam war draft.In one particularly revealing exchange, Cohen said he had probably threatened individuals on Trump’s behalf at least 500 times under his former boss’s instructions.Cohen said he planned to produce false financial statements Trump provided to Deutsche Bank in pursuit of loans. Citing a Guardian article to illustrate his argument, Cohen said Trump inflated his wealth to secure a place on rich lists and artificially reduced it to avoid paying tax.Cohen went on to note that Trump said black people were “too stupid” to vote for him and remarked during a drive through a poor area of Chicago that “only black people could live that way”.“The country has seen Mr Trump court white supremacists and bigots. You have heard him call poorer countries shitholes,” Cohen said. “In private, he is even worse.” Topics Michael Cohen Donald Trump Trump-Russia investigation Trump administration Russia US politics Donald Trump Jr news

PLANTATION, Fla. (Reuters) - The man suspected of mailing at least 14 pipe bombs to some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s leading critics was arrested on Friday in Florida on federal charges in a case echoing the rancor of one of the most toxic election campaigns in decades. Cesar Sayoc, 56, a part-time pizza deliveryman, grocery worker and former stripper once charged with threatening to bomb an electric company in a billing dispute, was taken into custody by federal agents outside an auto parts store in Plantation, Florida, near Miami as helicopters flew overhead. Authorities also seized a white van that Sayoc appeared to have used as his dwelling, its windows plastered with pro-Trump stickers, the slogan “CNN SUCKS” and images of Democratic leaders with red cross-hairs over their faces. Fingerprint and DNA evidence helped identify the suspect, but his arrest did not necessarily end the threat, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray warned at a news conference. “There may be other packages in transit now and other packages on the way,” Wray said. One federal law enforcement source told Reuters that authorities were investigating whether other individuals were involved and did not rule out further arrests. Sayoc’s arrest followed an intense four-day manhunt sparked by the discovery of bombs concealed in packages addressed to such leading Democratic figures as former U.S. President Barack Obama and former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom Trump defeated in the 2016 presidential race. Some of the parcels also contained photographs of the intended recipients marked with a red X, according to a criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court. The complaint accused Sayoc of sending 13 bombs to 11 individuals, starting with billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. A package surfaced on Monday near his home in Katonah, New York. A 14th package was found on Friday at a post office outside San Francisco addressed to another wealthy contributor to the Democratic Party and liberal causes, Tom Steyer. The bombs were sent in manila envelopes lined with bubble wrap and consisted of plastic 6-inch pipes packed with explosive material and wired to small clocks and batteries, the complaint said. Related CoverageTrump says 'Bomb' stuff' slowing Republican momentum at pollsFrom tweets to bombs, suspect's rage at Trump foes escalatedWray said investigators had yet to determine whether the bombs were actually “functional,” but added that the devices could be dangerous “if subjected to the right combination of heat or shock or friction.” All were sent through the U.S. Postal Service system and intercepted before reaching their intended targets without exploding. No one has been hurt. But the bombs have heightened tensions during the closing days of a highly contentious campaign ahead of the Nov. 6 elections in which Democrats are battling to seize control of Congress now held by Trump’s Republican Party. Wray said fingerprints on one of two packages sent to U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, a Los Angeles Democrat frequently disparaged by Trump as “low-IQ Maxine,” belonged to Sayoc. The complaint also cited a “possible DNA” link between samples taken from two of the bombs and a sample previously collected from Sayoc. Sayoc was charged with five felony counts, including interstate transportation and illegal mailing of explosives, threatening a former president, making threatening interstate communications and assaulting federal officers. If convicted, Sayoc could be sentenced up to 48 years in prison, officials said. “We will not tolerate such lawlessness, especially political violence,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a press conference. Announcing the arrest to a cheering audience at the White House, Trump said, “We must never allow political violence to take root in America - cannot let it happen,” Trump said. “And I’m committed to doing everything in my power as president to stop it and to stop it now.” A native of New York City’s Brooklyn borough and a registered Republican, Sayoc made his political views evident on social media. In Facebook and Twitter posts, he railed against Democrats, Muslims and liberals, including an anti-Soros tweet two days before a bomb showed up at the financier’s home. The Arizona Republic newspaper reported that Sayoc threatened Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Flake, one of the few Republicans in Congress openly critical of Trump, in a pair of Oct. 1 Twitter posts consisting of violent imagery and a photo of Flake’s Arizona home, with the message, “... very nice house Jeff a lot entrances.” FBI officers escort Cesar Altieri Sayoc into a waiting SUV at FBI headquarters after arresting him in connection with an investigation into a string of parcel bombs in Miramar, Florida, U.S. October 26, 2018. WSVN Ch. 7/Handout via REUTERS Public records showed numerous arrests over the years for domestic violence, theft and other charges, including the alleged bomb threat against a utility company. Sayoc was expected to be held at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami and make his first appearance before a judge on Monday, according to former Assistant U.S. Attorney David Weinstein. A public defender listed as Sayoc’s attorney of record in New York, Sarah Baumgartel, could not immediately be reached for comment. Ron Lowy, a former lawyer for Sayoc who now represents his family, told CNN he believed Sayoc was left emotionally scarred as a boy when his father left the home, developing an identity crisis in which he ultimately embraced Trump as a kind of father figure. “It’s my opinion that he was attracted to the Trump formula of reaching out, Trump reaching out to these types of outsiders - people who don’t fit in, people who are angry at America, telling them that they have a place at the table, telling them that it’s OK to get angry,” Lowy said. All the individuals targeted by the packages Sayoc is accused of sending have been outspoken critics of Trump and his administration, foils for the president and his right-wing supporters or both. Among intended recipients earlier in the week were former Vice President Joe Biden, former Attorney General Eric Holder, actor Robert De Niro and former CIA director John Brennan, whose security clearance Trump revoked after Brennan lambasted Trump’s Russia summit performance as “nothing short of treasonous.” His package was delivered to the Manhattan bureau of CNN, where he had served as an on-air analyst. On Friday, packages surfaced for Democratic U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Democratic U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California. The episode has sparked an outcry from Trump’s critics charging that his inflammatory rhetoric against perceived enemies among Democrats and the press has fostered a climate ripe for politically motivated violence. “If we don’t stop this political mania, this fervor, rancor, hatred, you’ll see this again and again and again,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told MSNBC. “...It starts with the president.” Trump’s supporters have accused Democrats of unfairly suggesting that the president was to blame for the bomb scares, and Trump himself accused the press of using coverage of the investigation to score political points against him. Slideshow (23 Images)After first calling for unity at the White House event, Trump lamented partisan attacks against him and again pointed at the media. “I get attacked all the time ... I can do the greatest thing for our country, and on the networks and on different things it will show bad,” he told the crowd, acknowledging an attendee who shouted “fake news.” Reporting by Zachary Fagenson and Bernie Woodall; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus, Gabriella Borter and Peter Szekely in New York, Mark Hosenball, Makini Brice, Susan Heavey, Sarah N. Lynch and Lisa Lambert in Washington, and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Daniel Wallis and Steve Gorman; Editing by Bill Tarrant, Cynthia Osterman and Michael PerryOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Former senior FBI agents have accused James Comey of damaging the agency’s reputation and “playing a dangerous game” with the Russia investigations by going on the offensive with an explosive book and media interviews.Those speaking out also say they have been contacted by multiple agents currently working for the FBI who are displeased and uncomfortable with Comey, their ex-director, getting into a fierce war of words with the president, who fired him last year.Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth Lies, and Leadership, is being published on Tuesday and has been previewed in the Guardian and some other outlets. And in a lengthy interview with ABC on Sunday night, the former director of the FBI said Donald Trump was morally unfit to be president. But his high-profile commentary has upset former colleagues who had held him in high regard both personally and professionally.“It’s tasteless at best. There is a total lack of dignity. He, and a number of other FBI employees who worked directly for him, have damaged the agency,” Nancy Savage, executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, said of Comey’s book and interview.Savage, who was an agent for 30 years and was president of the FBI special agents association while serving, before she retired in 2011, told the Guardian it was highly inappropriate for Comey to talk about matters relating to the president that are currently under investigation.In his interview with ABC on Sunday, Comey discussed topics such as whether Trump may have obstructed justice by pressing him, while he was still FBI director, to drop his inquiry into the former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s links to Russia. Comey repeated his assertion that Trump asked him for his loyalty, and he aired unconfirmed allegations that Russia has compromising personal material on the president.These issues are among those under investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller and two Senate committees.“Overall, I and most of our members don’t think it’s appropriate for him [Comey] to be publicly discussing things that are still being investigated and it’s inappropriate to be writing a book about it,” said Savage. She added: “If he is potentially going to be a witness, he needs to provide the information he has in a controlled fashion, not going on a book tour ... it’s bad protocol, it’s unprecedented and it’s ill-advised.”She also criticized some Comey colleagues such as Andrew McCabe, who was fired last month over accusations of leaking to the press.Serving agents generally shy away from speaking publicly about FBI matters or politics but there has been plenty of talk behind the scenes. Savage and other former agents said they had heard from FBI staff in the hours since Comey’s interview on ABC aired, and they were not happy.Former senior agent Bobby Chacon said: “The majority of people I have spoken to since Sunday night think it’s unfortunate timing. They are rolling their eyes; it’s not good.”Chacon retired in 2014 as head of the FBI underwater forensic dive team based in Los Angeles, after being an agent for 27 years. He said there were “still plenty of people” in the agency who supported Comey but many were upset at him “standing on a soapbox”.Chacon is also concerned that Comey, by talking about issues involving Russia and the Trump administration and election campaign, is opening himself up to a tough cross examination if he appears as a witness in any criminal proceedings arising from the investigations.“Comey knows these things, so he may have made the judgment that he’s being careful, but he is playing a dangerous game,” said Chacon, adding: “I worked for him. He did a lot of good things at the FBI. He was popular and I didn’t like the way the White House sacked him ... but he made mistakes and now has been overtaken by his emotions. I’m surprised he has been dragged down into street-fighting with Trump.”Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s criminal division, said he thought Comey had been out of the FBI for long enough that his public comments were less likely to compromise the work of Mueller or Congress. But he said that he believed, and had heard from serving agents, that Comey’s speaking out was only fuel to Trump’s criticism of the agency.“I’m very confident that Robert Mueller knows how to conduct his investigation. But by talking like this Comey is not helping the FBI’s ability to fight back against the attacks on its reputation that have been coming from Trump,” he said. He said it would exacerbate the rift between Trump and the FBI.“I expect these wounds to remain open for a very long time,” he said. Topics James Comey FBI US politics Donald Trump Trump-Russia investigation news

Fox News, the president’s preferred TV news network, plans to air its own special on Sunday night, “The Trial of James Comey,” at 9 p.m. on “The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton.”Republicans on Friday also leapt at the chance to tie Mr. Comey to Andrew G. McCabe, his former deputy director, after the Justice Department inspector general issued a highly critical report that accused Mr. McCabe of repeatedly misleading investigators.Not all of the personal insults were coming from the president and his allies. At times, Mr. Comey seemed to be doing the same thing in his book, writing at one point that Mr. Trump’s face appeared “slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles.”Mr. Comey’s comparison of the president’s operating style to the Mafia — “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small” — might have been expected to please Democrats if it had come from someone else. But at least initially, he received a somewhat muted defense from Democrats still angry about the way he handled the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.While they cheered on his fight with Mr. Trump, they argued that Mr. Comey should not have made public the email inquiry the way he did.“He let his own ego get in the way, and it put him in charge of fate that was not his decision to act on,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “I don’t think he had partisan motivations. But there’s a lot of people I know who don’t agree with me on that.”Anger from Democrats toward Mr. Comey cascaded across social media on Friday. Ms. Palmieri said she would urge them not to join Mr. Trump in piling on Mr. Comey, even though she admitted there is “a lot of resentment” toward him.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 13, 2017. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein/File photoWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump told then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions “this is the end of my presidency” when Sessions told him a special counsel was being appointed to investigation links between his campaign and Russia, the special counsel’s report said. Writing by Bill Trott , Editing by Franklin PaulOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The Trump campaign argued in a legal filing that WikiLeaks could not be held liable for publishing emails that were stolen by Russian hackers ahead of the 2016 US election because the website was simply serving as a passive publishing platform on behalf of a third party, in the same way as Google or Facebook.Questions about WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of hacked emails, which it allegedly obtained following a plot by Russian military intelligence to steal the emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic party, are at the heart of Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.The campaign also said in a legal filing that any alleged agreement between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks to publish the emails could not have been a “conspiracy” because WikiLeaks’ decision to release the stolen emails was not an illegal act. The court filing was written in response to a civil lawsuit brought against the Trump campaign by two of Hillary Clinton’s donors and a former employee of the Democratic party.The Trump campaign’s surprising defence of WikiLeaks marks a stark departure from official US policy, which has condemned the website for frequently targeting the US government and for publishing thousands of classified documents about covert policies.Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director who now serves as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, has called WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service” that put US lives at risk, damaged national security and was “abetted by state actors like Russia”.Analysts say the legal filing is also significant because it hints at how officials in the Trump White House or individuals who served on the campaign may eventually seek to defend themselves against any criminal charges alleging that they conspired with WikiLeaks to release the emails.The legal arguments suggest the Trump White House would argue WikiLeaks was not criminally liable for the release of the emails and that it therefore would not be a criminal conspiracy to work with the website on their release.The filing also makes the case that, under the campaign’s first amendment right to free speech, it had the right to publish information – even if it was stolen – as long as it did not participate in the theft of the emails. The hacked materials were a matter of “significant public concern”, the filing said.The 32-page legal filing, which argued that the civil case against the Trump campaign had no merit, was written by lawyers at the Jones Day law firm, where Don McGahn, the White House counsel, previously worked.The Trump campaign is under close scrutiny by Mueller, but the legal filing was a response to a civil complaint that was filed by the two Clinton donors and a former employee of the Democratic National Committee whose emails were hacked.In presenting its legal defence, the Trump campaign lawyers turned to a section of the Communications Decency Act, a law that in effect gives legal immunity to big internet companies – like Facebook, YouTube and Google – and protects them from being sued for materials that are published on their platforms. The law essentially calls those companies passive publishers, and the Trump campaign is arguing WikiLeaks ought to be offered the same legal protection.“A website that provides a forum where ‘third parties can post information’ is not liable for the third party’s posted information … Since Wikileaks provided a forum for a third party (the unnamed ‘Russian actors’) to publish content developed by that third party (the hacked emails), it cannot be held liable for the publication,” the filing said.Mueller’s recent indictment of 12 members of the Russian intelligence unit that allegedly stole the hacked materials paints a different picture of WikiLeaks’ role in the publication of the emails, as does a 2017 intelligence assessment of the hack. Mueller’s indictment stated that the Russian “conspirators” discussed the release of the stolen documents with a group it refers to as “Organization 1” – widely believed to be WikiLeaks – in order to “heighten their impact” on the 2016 US presidential election.Ryan Goodman, the former special counsel of the Pentagon and co-editor of the Just Security blog, said Mueller’s recent indictment indicated that WikiLeaks had played an “active role” in producing the content and the timing of the content’s disclosure of stolen emails and documents.“That fact, which was not known before, could significantly change the calculus as to whether they could claim immunity under the Communications Decency Act [Section 230] because they are no longer playing a passive role,” he said. Topics Trump-Russia investigation WikiLeaks Trump administration Robert Mueller Law (US) US elections 2016 news

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified on Tuesday that Trump had directed him to commit a crime by arranging payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election to silence two women who said they had affairs with Trump. Cohen’s voice cracked several times as he pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges in federal court in Manhattan, including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. Facing up to five years in prison, the admissions were a dramatic change from Cohen’s earlier boasts that he was Trump’s “fixer” and would “take a bullet” for the president. Most legal experts say a sitting president cannot be indicted for a crime, but the Constitution allows Congress to impeach and remove a president from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Cohen’s accusation increases political pressure for Trump ahead of November’s congressional elections where Democrats are trying to regain control of the House of Representatives and Senate. Cohen told Judge William Pauley III that “in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office” he arranged payments to two women for their silence “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” Adult-film star Stormy Daniels was given $130,000 and former Playboy model Karen McDougal was paid $150,000. Cohen did not name Trump in court, but his lawyer, Lanny Davis, said afterward that he was referring to the president. “Today he (Cohen) stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Davis said in a statement. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?” Davis said. Trump has denied having affairs with the women. His lawyer Rudy Giuliani has said the payments were made to spare Trump and his family embarrassment and were unrelated to the campaign. Trump did not mention Cohen at a rally in West Virginia hours later. Giuliani lashed out at Cohen on Tuesday, calling him a “devious little rat” and saying he had a history of lying. “I think the president is absolutely in the clear,” Giuliani told Reuters. “The Cohen thing is over.” Under U.S. election law, campaign contributions, defined as things of value given to a campaign to influence an election, must be disclosed. A payment intended to silence allegations of an affair just before an election could constitute a campaign contribution, which is limited to $2,700 per person per election, some experts said. U.S. President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, leaves the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Court House in lower Manhattan, New York City, U.S. August 21, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid Ross Garber, a lawyer who has represented four Republican governors in impeachment proceedings, said Cohen’s statement “dramatically increases the likelihood that, were Democrats to take control of the House in the midterms, they would begin an impeachment investigation.” “The odds of an investigation have definitely gone up,” Garber said. The guilty pleas came in the same hour that a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia, convicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of eight charges of tax and bank fraud and failing to disclose foreign bank accounts. The Manafort conviction resulted from U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. The charges against Manafort mostly predate his work on Trump’s campaign. The probe also led to a referral from Mueller about Cohen to federal prosecutors in New York who began their own probe of the longtime Trump lawyer. Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion and has called the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt.” Russia has denied meddling in the election, although U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded Moscow interfered. Mueller has also brought indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers in the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. Cohen is scheduled for sentencing on Dec. 12 and his bail was set at $500,000. Slideshow (10 Images)Davis told CNN he believed his client had information that would be of interest to the special counsel, but did not give further details. Mueller’s investigation, which began in May 2017, has resulted in the indictment of more than 30 people and five guilty pleas. Reporting by Brendan Pierson and Jonathan Stempel; Additional reporting by Jan Wolfe in New York and Karen Freifeld in Alexandria, Virginia; Writing by Jonathan Oatis, Bill Rigby and Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Anthony Lin, Clive McKeef and Peter CooneyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

In the copious literature of the US capital, there is a sub-genre we might call “the saint in the swamp”. It focuses on the travails of an honest man sent to wade through the muck and slime of America’s political Babylon. The exemplar is, of course, the 1939 classic film Mr Smith Goes to Washington, with Jimmy Stewart as the lone man of integrity on the Potomac. But the archetype recurs at intervals in the culture, with the West Wing’s Jed Bartlet a more recent incarnation. And now we can add a new, non-fiction addition: the memoir of James Comey, the FBI director fired a year ago by Donald Trump.Perennially cast as a boy scout – and in Washington that’s usually an insult – Comey establishes his goody-goody credentials early and often. We learn that, when he was in his 20s, people would clap eyes on the 6ft8in lawyer and instantly offer smalltalk about his presumed past as a player of college basketball. As it happens Comey hadn’t played, but in his youth he would let people think he had. “This was a seemingly small and inconsequential lie told by a stupid kid, but it was a lie nonetheless. And it ate at me. So after law school I wrote to the friends I’d lied to and told them the truth,” he writes. Later he gives the director of national intelligence a necktie. Or rather, “I regifted to him a tie my brother-in-law had given me … Because we considered ourselves people of integrity, I disclosed it was a regift.”There’s plenty in that vein, including a declaration that Comey made a habit of using the staff canteen at FBI headquarters and that “I never cut the line … even when I was in a hurry.” Acting pre-emptively to ensure the reader is not left “mildly nauseous” – to quote Comey’s description of how he would feel if he had tipped the election to Trump – by all this virtue, the introduction warns us that the author has long struggled with flaws in his character that include being “stubborn, prideful, overconfident, and driven by ego”. The word “sanctimonious” appears in the book’s first paragraph.All this moral goodness can make Comey an occasionally cloying companion. Nor is the book helped by its apparent dual function as a leadership manual aimed at those who tend to turn left when they board aircraft. There’s lots of management tips for the inspiration-hungry CEO, advice about getting the best from your team and an unfortunate tendency to describe anyone in even a vaguely senior organisational role as a “leader”.Fortunately, though, Comey has quite a story to tell – and that’s even before we get to the Clinton and Trump chapters that have made this book an instant bestseller. His life has been full of drama. As a teenager, he and his kid brother were held at gunpoint in their home by an intruder who turned out to be a wanted serial rapist. He and his wife lost a baby to a preventable infection nine days after the child was born. In his early career as a prosecutor, Comey took on and defeated the Gambino crime family.Yet the temptation is strong to read all this through the lens of what we know will follow. Indeed, the author pushes us in that direction. When he recalls some unhappy childhood memories and offers his thoughts on the psychology of the bully, we know who he has in mind. And he is not afraid to make the connection explicit. Cornered into a dinner a deux with Trump at the White House, and asked to profess his personal loyalty, he is reminded of “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony – with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man’”.For liberal Trump-haters, reading A Higher Loyalty will be a conflicted experience. Comey was both hero and villain in 2016, on the one hand closing the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of unsecured email and, on the other, revealing he’d reopened it again less than a fortnight before election day. He both saved her candidacy and buried it.Accordingly, the Hillary chapters will be hard going for those who hoped she would become America’s first woman president. Yet Comey makes a good defence of his actions, showing how he was repeatedly confronted with a series of lose-lose choices. On the late October disclosure that the email probe was active again, he writes that he faced two doors: one marked Speak, the other Conceal. Had he failed to reveal that investigators were looking anew at Clinton’s emails, and had she been elected, Americans could justifiably argue that they had not voted in full possession of the facts. The FBI’s silence would have rendered Clinton an illegitimate president. (You can imagine what the Fox-Republican complex would have done with such a revelation.)Even those who follow Comey’s logic – and most readers will, I suspect, conclude that his motives were pure – are likely to struggle nonetheless with the other crucial decision he took in 2016. If disclosure was right for Hillary, why was it not right for Trump? Why did the FBI not announce that it was also looking at Trump’s possible collusion with Russia? Here Comey’s reasoning is much less persuasive. He explains that the Trump/Russia investigation was at a much earlier stage, that they did not want to tip off possible suspects and so on. But given the stakes, and the consequences, it’s not really good enough.The truth is, and Comey admits as much, he and others, including Barack Obama, were swayed by their assumption that Clinton was cruising to victory. That led Obama to keep back what he knew about Russian meddling in the election: why undermine Americans’ faith in their democracy when those Russian efforts were apparently making so little difference? And that same assumption shaped Comey’s decisions: he allowed himself to be more worried by questions of future public faith in a Clinton victory than by the risk that his actions might derail that outcome.The Trump win and what followed provides the material for the book’s most riveting chapters. Comey has a keen eye and his observations of Trump and his enablers are sharp. He shows us attorney general Jeff Sessions, for example, under pressure, eyes down, darting from left to right. But it’s Trump we’ve paid to see.Comey cannot disguise his loathing for the man, and the portrait he paints could not be uglier. He has Trump speaking in monologue, leaving no space for anyone else to say a word, a silence the new president takes as assent and complicity. Trump is ignorant – he blanks at Comey’s use of the word “calligrapher” – incurious and casually dishonest. And his ego is unbound. When Comey attended Oval Office meetings with Obama or George W Bush, the president would take a seat with the rest of the group: primus inter pares. But Trump remains seated behind his big desk, as if on a throne attended by courtiers. Comey puts that down to insecurity. A more confident man would not need to demonstrate his status so crudely.Comey records such details throughout, noting who has emotional intelligence and who lacks it. He describes “the Washington listen”: not so much listening as waiting for your turn to speak. And he offers some fascinating observations on presidential humour. Bush could crack a joke, but it was usually at someone else’s expense. Obama laughed easily and never once used humour as a putdown. Trump, meanwhile, never laughs, not even once: to do so would require acknowledging the existence, and successful conversational play, of another person.If the book has a hero besides Comey, it is Obama. A one-time registered Republican, Comey is bowled over by the Democrat who made him head of the FBI. In Obama he sees the wisdom and human sensitivity he aspires to himself. He recalls how, at a reception to mark Comey’s appointment, Obama posed for a photograph with Comey, his wife, the couple’s two daughters and their then boyfriends. At one point, Obama gestured to the boyfriends and said, “Hey, why don’t we take another without the guys. You know, just in case.” It was done playfully, but it was also wise. With all that must weigh on a president’s mind, he nevertheless had room to imagine the awkwardness such a photo could cause several decades later.In Comey’s telling, Obama was something of a saint in the swamp. Obama valued what Comey himself cherished and regarded as near-sacred: the independence of US institutions and, more important still, the obligation to tell the truth.There was a time when we might have teased such a man, mocking him as an earnest altar boy. But we don’t have that luxury now. In today’s world, truth has become a precious commodity and those ready to risk their careers to defend it are few and far between. Comey may be self-righteous, but in 2018 and given the alternatives, that has come to look like a rather tolerable vice.• A Higher Loyalty by James Comey is published by Macmillan (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99 Topics Politics books James Comey Donald Trump reviews

Former FBI director James Comey says President Donald Trump asked him to investigate the salacious allegations from the so-called “dossier” to "prove that it didn't happen" and said it would be "terrible" if his wife Melania Trump would believe them to be true. In an exclusive interview ahead of the April 17 release of his book “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” Comey told ABC News’ chief anchor George Stephanopoulos that he met with the president to discuss the unverified allegations that the then-reality television star engaged in a sexual encounter with prostitutes during a 2013 trip to Moscow. The interview will air during a primetime "20/20" special on Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on ABC. The “dossier,” a 35-page document containing raw intelligence complied by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, includes a detailed and graphic account of the alleged encounter and even raises the possibility that it could have been captured on video. Comey says that during a private, one-on-one dinner with Trump on Jan. 27, 2017, Trump brought up the dossier and said, “He may want me to investigate it to prove that it didn't happen. And then he says something that distracted me because he said, you know, ‘If there's even a 1 percent chance my wife thinks that's true, that's terrible.’” “‘And I remember thinking, ‘How could your wife think there's a 1 percent chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow?’ I'm a flawed human being, but there is literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true. So, what kind of marriage to what kind of man does your wife think [that] there's only a 99 percent chance you didn't do that?” Comey said that Trump then told him, “I may order you to investigate that.” Comey said he preached caution. “I said, ‘Sir, that's up to you. But you'd want to be careful about that, because it might create a narrative that we're investigating you personally, and second, it's very difficult to prove something didn't happen,’” Comey said. Comey said that he first told Trump about the dossier several weeks earlier at a Jan. 6, 2017, meeting at Trump Tower in New York City, in a private, one-on-one conversation after a group of intelligence agency leaders had presented the president-elect with information about how the Russians had interfered with the 2016 election. Trump appeared less concerned by the attack, Comey said, than by how it could undermine his victory. “President-elect Trump’s first question was to confirm that it had no impact on the election … and then the conversation, to my surprise, moved into a PR conversation about how the Trump team would position this, and what they could say about this, with us still sitting there,” Comey said. “And the reason that was so striking to me [is] that’s just not done. That the intelligence community does intelligence, the White House does PR and spin.” According to Comey, no one in the room that day asked what next steps should be taken to stop the Russians from executing a similar operation in the future. “It was all, ‘What can we say about what they did and how it effects the election that we just had,’” Comey said. Comey said he then asked to speak with the president-elect alone to discuss the information contained in the “dossier.” “I'm about to meet with a person who doesn't know me, who's just been elected president of the United States, [and] by all accounts, and from my watching him during the campaign, could be volatile,” Comey said. “And I'm about to talk to him about allegations that he was involved with prostitutes in Moscow and that the Russians taped it and have leverage over him.” The conversation, Comey said, was “really weird,” resulting in what the then-FBI director called an “almost out-of-body experience.” “I was floating above myself, looking down, saying, ‘you're sitting here, briefing the incoming president of the United States about prostitutes in Moscow,’” Comey said. Comey did not reveal to the president-elect at this time that the information had come to light through opposition research financed by his opponents, “because it wasn't necessary for my goal,” which was merely to alert him the FBI had obtained the information. “I started to tell him about the allegation was that he had been involved with prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow in 2013 during the visit for the Miss Universe pageant and that the Russians had filmed the episode, and he interrupted very defensively and started talking about it, you know, ‘Do I look like a guy who needs hookers?’” Comey recalled. “And I assumed he was asking that rhetorically, I didn't answer that, and I just moved on and explained, ‘Sir, I'm not saying that we credit this, I'm not saying we believe it. We just thought it very important that you know.’” Comey said he tried to tell Trump that he didn’t know if the allegations were true, but wanted to inform the president that the FBI had the information. “I said … ‘I'm not saying that I believe the allegations, I'm not saying that I credit it,’” Comey said he told Trump. “I never said, ‘I don't believe it,’ because I couldn't say one way or another.” But when asked if he believed Trump’s denials, Comey remembered being mostly stunned. “I honestly never thought this words would come out of my mouth, but I don't know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” he said. “It's possible, but I don't know.” As of his firing, Comey said, the information remained “unverified.”

Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.Lucie Gikovich, a longtime friend and former member of California Governor Jerry Brown’s staff, repeatedly lobbied his office on behalf of a group of oil and gas companies that won major concessions from the governor on important state legislation, according to a report released today by a New York-based nonprofit organization.Gikovich’s decades-long friendship with Brown has previously been reported by the Sacramento Bee, including the fact that he stays at her home while on official business in Washington, D.C. But her oil and gas industry ties have not received attention prior to this report, according to report author Derek Seidman, a research analyst with the Public Accountability Initiative, which is funded by foundations and the American Federation of Teachers.“She’s someone that Brown clearly completely trusts and yet is being extremely well-paid by her clients to lobby on behalf of their interests,” said Seidman, whose report is titled, “The California Oil Veto: The Lobbyist Behind Governor Jerry Brown’s Concessions to Big Oil.” Gikovich, who works with the D.C.-based Crane Group, has lobbied Brown’s office on behalf of corporate clients for a range of industries since 2011. Gikovich, her business partner, and her firm have donated $114,500 to Brown’s campaigns over the years.For her part, Gikovich denies having an outsized influence on Brown and minimizes her role in legislation that the report says she influenced. “Governor Brown, more than anyone I know, makes up his own mind after hearing from all sides and carefully analyzing all aspects of the issues,” she wrote in an email. “He makes his decisions on the merits, regardless of his relationships with those involved.”Evan Westrup, a spokesperson for the governor, added a few choice words about the then unpublished report, when it was described to him in an email. “This report is about as factual–and substantive–as a tweet from Donald Trump,” said Westrup. “The governor had no knowledge that any of these companies were her clients, but even if he did, it would’ve made no difference. On these bills–and the thousands of others that have crossed his desk–the focus has always been on what’s best for California, which is why the state’s record of climate action is unmatched in the Western world.”The Public Accountability Initiative’s report builds on a longstanding critique of the California governor who, many environmentalists claim, has been too cozy with Big Oil interests in spite of his reputation as a national leader in combating global climate change and reducing demand for fossil fuels in the state. The report also calls on incoming governor Gavin Newsom to investigate Gikovich’s lobbying efforts in California and to “sever the state’s ties to Gikovich.”One of Gikovich’s clients, the oil refinery operator Phillips 66, has paid her $937,500 in fees and retainers to lobby the governor’s office and various state regulatory boards since 2012. She was the Houston-based firm’s highest paid lobbyist in California, according to the report.Gikovich served as a top aide to Brown during his first two terms as governor, and he hired her as his federal lobbyist when he was mayor of Oakland, a job that earned her $780,000 from 2001 to 2007, according to the report. She also served as Brown’s press secretary during his failed 1982 run for the U.S. Senate. As governor, Brown has included her in trade delegations to China and Mexico.Brown reportedly stayed with Gikovich in her Washington, D.C., home in 2013, at the time she was lobbying on behalf of Phillips 66 and Halliburton, and other corporate clients. Such hospitality might not violate ethics laws if the stay “is related to another purpose unconnected with the lobbyist’s professional activities,” according to the state’s ethics rules at the time.“I find it hard to believe that they would’ve not talked about any official business but no one can know for certain, of course,” says Seidman, whose report says those visits may constitute a “possible violation of ethics rules.”The visits were “all personal, not business” and evidence of Brown’s frugality as well as his desire to visit with friends, according to Gikovich’s email.Gikovich’s client during the battle over two bills to extend California’s landmark climate program, known as cap-and-trade, was Phillips 66, which operates oil refineries in Santa Maria and Rodeo. The package that the governor signed last year included major concessions to the oil industry and split the environmental community, with mainstream environmentalists supporting the compromise and environmental justice groups turning against it.Gikovich said that her work on the cap-and-trade program—for which she reportedly was paid $105,000 in 2017—was mostly confined to monitoring the legislation. “There was no contact with the governor personally on these issues,” she wrote.In 2013, Gikovich also reported lobbying Brown’s office on behalf of Houston-based Halliburton, the oilfield services giant, on a proposed Senate bill sponsored by then State Senator Fran Pavley (D-CA) that regulated hydraulic fracturing—”fracking”—an oil extraction method that brings with it the risks of drinking water contamination and of inducing earthquakes, as well as air pollution.That bill lost the support of environmentalists after the oil industry lobbied to amend it to allow fracking to continue while the process was being studied, as High Country News reported at the time. Westrup countered via email that “prior to this bill, there was no integrated, comprehensive regulatory oversight of this production stimulation method, which has been used in California for more than 30 years.”Gikovich wrote that the Crane Group “had a small subcontract” to provide strategic advice to Halliburton, and that she “never spoke even once to the governor or staff on their issues, including fracking.”The report also credits Gikovich with playing a key role in advocating for the Southern California Gas Company after its Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility sprung a massive methane leak in 2015, causing the evacuation of thousands of nearby residents. She lobbied Brown’s office on behalf of the utility in opposition of a bill that would have granted disaster victims more latitude in litigation against the company. In an email, she said that she submitted a lengthy policy memo, but did not speak to Brown or his staff.Brown nixed the bill, writing that “nothing has been shown to indicate that current law is insufficient to holding polluters accountable.”“It seems pretty clear that Gikovich’s lobbying of his office correlated really closely with his veto of this,” said Seidman.This story has been updated.

But after that buildup, Mr. Mueller stopped short of pronouncing any conclusion about what all that evidence added up to. He instead demurred with a bland truism: “Judgments about the nature of the president’s motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.”The gap between the implications of Mr. Mueller’s rationale for stopping short of rendering any legal conclusion and the impression Mr. Barr had created last month by declaring that Mr. Mueller’s demurral “leaves it” to him, as the attorney general, to make that determination was a critical takeaway from the disclosure of the obstruction component of Mr. Mueller’s report.Mr. Barr left out of his letter that Mr. Mueller had decided it was inappropriate for prosecutors to decide whether the evidence met the standard for charging Mr. Trump because the president could receive no trial for now.Instead, Mr. Barr cited a fragment of Mr. Mueller’s rationale in what appears to be a subtly misleading way. In his letter, Mr. Barr quoted Mr. Mueller as seeing unspecified “difficult issues” of law and fact in saying that the special counsel declined to decide the obstruction question “one way or the other.”In fact, Mr. Mueller made clear that he would have pronounced Mr. Trump cleared on obstruction if the evidence exonerated the president.“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” Mr. Mueller wrote. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the president’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.”Against that backdrop, Mr. Mueller explained that it would be unfair to analyze the evidence for now because it created the risk that he would conclude that Mr. Trump committed a crime with no possibility of a speedy trial to resolve whether that was true.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer was forced on Monday to reveal in a New York federal court that Fox News personality Sean Hannity, one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, was also on his client list. Michael Cohen, Trump’s fiercely loyal and pugnacious lawyer, disclosed Hannity’s name through one of his own lawyers at the order of the judge. Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress who says she had a sexual encounter with Trump, watched from the public gallery. Daniels, in a separate civil case, is fighting a 2016 non-disclosure agreement arranged by Cohen in which she got $130,000 to stop her from discussing her claim she had sex with Trump a decade earlier, something Trump has denied. Hannity, 56, said on Monday that he had never paid for Cohen’s services or been represented by him, but had sought confidential legal advice from him. The conservative host often uses his weeknight broadcast on Fox News to defend the president against what he sees as biased attacks by the media. Sometimes Trump praises Hannity in return. Cohen was in court to ask the judge to limit the ability of federal prosecutors to review documents seized from his offices and home last week as part of a criminal investigation, which stems in part from a probe into possible collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. (Full Story) The Russia investigation has frustrated the White House as it has spread to enfold some of Trump’s closest confidantes. Judge Kimba Wood spent more than 2-1/2 hours listening to arguments by Cohen’s lawyers, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and a lawyer representing Trump in the hearing. She is expected to rule later. She ordered prosecutors to give Cohen’s lawyers a copy of the seized materials before the next hearing. The unexpected naming of Hannity made him the latest prominent media personality to be drawn into the investigation’s cast of unlikely supporting characters. Related CoverageSean Hannity says he never retained Trump lawyer Michael CohenFactbox: How does U.S. attorney-client privilege rule apply to FBI raid on Trump's lawyer?Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was another. As she arrived at the courthouse dressed in a lavender suit, photographers knocked over barricades as they scrambled to get pictures. Daniels sat with her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who told reporters they were there to help ensure protection for the integrity of the seized documents, some of which they believe pertain to the Daniels agreement. Cohen, dressed in a dark suit, at times looked tense, folding and clasping his hands in front of him. Cohen has argued that some of the documents and data seized from him under a warrant are protected by attorney-client privilege or otherwise unconnected to the investigation. But Judge Wood said she would still need the names of those other clients, and rejected his efforts to mask the identity of Hannity, a client Cohen had said wanted to avoid publicity. “I understand if he doesn’t want his name out there, but that’s not enough under the law,” Wood said, before ordering the name disclosed. Stephen Ryan, a lawyer for Cohen, drew gasps and laughter from the public gallery when he named Hannity as the client. FILE PHOTO: Fox News Channel anchor Sean Hannity poses for photographs as he sits on the set of his show "Hannity" at the Fox News Channel's studios in New York City, October 28, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Segar After his identity was revealed, Hannity said on his syndicated radio show, and again later on his Fox News program, that he had “occasional, brief discussions” with Cohen in which he sought out Cohen’s “input and perspective.” Hannity said he assumed those discussions were covered by attorney-client privilege, and insisted that none involved any matter between himself and a third party. He also said his talks with Cohen “almost exclusively focused on real estate.” Legal advice can be considered privileged even if given by a lawyer for free. Hannity, the top-rated personality on the most watched U.S. cable news network, told his viewers on April 9 that the raid on Cohen was part an effort by federal investigators to wrongly impeach the president. He never mentioned his association with Cohen during that broadcast. On Monday’s show, Hannity expressed amusement at the firestorm of media coverage unleashed by the disclosure that he and Trump shared a legal adviser in Cohen, playing a 45-second, rapid-fire montage of various TV commentators and anchors uttering his name on the air throughout the day. Cohen has asked the court to give his own lawyers the first look at the seized materials so they can identify documents that are protected by attorney-client privilege. (Full Story) Failing that, they want the court to appoint an independent official known as a special master, a role typically filled by a lawyer, to go through the records and decide what prosecutors can see. But prosecutors want the documents to be reviewed for attorney-client privilege by a “taint team” of lawyers within their own office, who would be walled off from the main prosecution team. “I have faith in the Southern District U.S. Attorney’s Office that their integrity is unimpeachable,” making a taint team “a viable option,” Judge Wood said. But she also said that to help ensure fairness and the perception of fairness, “a special master might have some role here.” Slideshow (11 Images)After the hearing, Cohen left without comment. Daniels, in contrast, stepped up to the bank of microphones set up on the sidewalk, telling reporters that Cohen had thought he was above the law. “My attorney and I are committed that everyone finds out the truth and the facts of what happened, and I will not rest until that happens,” she said. Reporting by Brendan Pierson, Karen Freifeld and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles Writing by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Susan Thomas and Rosalba O'BrienOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer said on Saturday he hoped the firing of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe would prompt Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the Russia investigation, to shut down the inquiry.John Dowd spoke hours after Trump gloated that the firing of McCabe marked a “great day for democracy”. His glee provoked a savage response from former CIA director John Brennan, who called him a “disgraced demagogue” headed for “the dustbin of history”. McCabe is a 21-year veteran of the FBI who became a lightning rod in a partisan battle over investigations into Russian election interference, potential links between Trump aides and Russia, and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.He stepped down in January but was fired on Friday night, after the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, rejected an appeal to allow him to retire on Sunday, his 50th birthday, when he would become eligible for a government pension.On Saturday, Dowd said in a statement first provided to the Daily Beast that he “pray[ed]” Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller, “will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility [OPR] and attorney general Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier”. Dowd said he was speaking as the president’s attorney but later, reached by the Guardian, he said he was “speaking for myself not the president”. He added that the investigation should be ended “on the merits in light of recent revelations”. A justice department spokeswoman declined to comment. The White House did not answer a request for comment. Senator Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, responded: “Every member of Congress, Republican and Democrat, needs to speak up in defense of the special counsel. Now.”Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, warned of “severe consequences” should Trump curtail or end Mueller’s work. Republicans have advised Trump not to fire Mueller, though they have not advanced legislation to protect him.Brennan addressed the president earlier on Saturday, writing: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.“You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America … America will triumph over you.”He was responding to a tweet sent by Trump in the early hours which celebrated McCabe’s dismissal, an act one historian likened to the “Saturday night massacre” of 1973, when Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor leading the Watergate investigation.“Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy,” Trump wrote. “Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!”Trump fired Comey as FBI director last May, an act which led to the appointment of Mueller, a former FBI director, as special counsel. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the investigation as a “witch-hunt” though his legal team has been cautious not to criticize Mueller publicly.Mueller is said to be looking into whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice when he fired Comey. The president reportedly ordered Mueller fired last June, but backed down when the White House counsel threatened to resign. Sessions, who recused himself from the Russia investigation after failing to reveal contacts with Russians, announced McCabe’s firing late on Friday.The attorney general – an early supporter of Trump who became a target of the president’s ire after his recusal – said an OPR review found McCabe allegedly “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor” during a review of the FBI and justice department’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation.In a statement, McCabe lamented an “ongoing war on the FBI” and Mueller. He said he had answered questions truthfully and had attempted to correct the record where he believed he had been misunderstood. He had been fired, he said, because of the “role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey”.Speaking to Politico, McCabe said those actions included pushing for a special counsel and briefing a congressional “gang of eight” on his efforts.“I literally walked into the building every day expecting that I would be removed from my position before the end of the day,” he said. “And if that happened, I didn’t want anyone to be able to just walk away from the work that we had done on the Russia investigation.”Multiple outlets reported on Saturday that McCabe had kept memos detailing his conversations with Trump.It was revealed this week that Mueller has subpoenaed corporate records from the Trump Organization, including those related to Russia. Trump has said investigating his family finances would be a “red line” if it extended beyond any relationship with Russia. On Saturday, Trump issued a pair of tweets, attacking the “fake news” media. “As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded,” the president wrote, referring to a Republican-authored report, “there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. #DrainTheSwamp.”Comey, who will publish a book next month, also tweeted.“Mr President,” he wrote, “the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.” Topics Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Trump administration Republicans US politics FBI news

But if the Iran deal was a mistake, could the mistake be undone by withdrawing from the deal? The costs to the U.S. were sunk. The U.S. had given up the international sanctions regime in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program that would expire in just a few years, so the dilemma of what do about it had only been postponed. Withdrawing from the deal would merely bring forward the day the U.S. would have to face the dilemma again, this time without the benefit of a united diplomatic front. In the meantime, Iran’s compliance with the deal’s limited verification regime (no military sites, no anytime-anywhere inspections, IAEA purview restricted to declared facilities) provided at least a minimal benefit.Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, then, did not ipso facto mean that the U.S. was returning to a strategy of containment backed by deterrence. If anything, withdrawing from the deal implied a policy of confrontation, but was the administration really committed to winning it? Trump’s foreign policy approach, which the Washington Post columnist Max Boot calls “belligerent isolationism,” does not shy from projecting American power abroad, but resists foreign commitments, and sometimes seems ambivalent toward the very allies needed for almost any strategy of confrontation to succeed.The administration’s approach to sanctions is a case in point. Sanctions have significantly diminished Iran’s oil revenue, with devastating effects. To soften the impact on world oil prices, America’s Gulf allies—principally Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—moved to replace the lost Iranian supply. Iran rightly saw all of this as a campaign of economic warfare, and responded by first attacking Saudi and Emirate oil shipments, then a major production facility in Saudi Arabi, and finally a U.S. drone. Yet the U.S. hardly responded to these provocations, no doubt leading many in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to wonder whether it mightn’t be safer to assume a more neutral posture toward Iran.The U.S. only reacted with force when Iran openly orchestrated a series of attacks on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and other installations in Iraq that left an American dead. The killing of an American without plausible deniability is a redline the government of Iran is not likely to cross again anytime soon. But will the credible enforcement of that redline be enough to shore up the multinational sanctions regime, or establish the level of containment necessary for stability in the region?Any chance of containing Iran depends on strengthening America’s system of regional alliances—and especially on reviving the U.S. alliance with Iraq. Americans may not understand that, but Iran does. That’s why in recent weeks it escalated from attacks on U.S. Gulf allies to direct attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq. That’s why its principal response to the killing of Iranian General Qaseem Soleimani was to attack installations with U.S. personnel in Iraq. If Iran can expel the Americans from Iraq and cow America’s other Gulf allies into assuming a more neutral posture, it can dominate much of the Middle East, no matter what the level of US. forces in the region. In that case, the loss of Soleimani will have been more than worth it.Iran may now be more hesitant to kill Americans. But if it isn’t afraid to challenge U.S. interests in other ways, then the Middle East is likely to get more dangerous in the months ahead, as Iran finds new ways of forcing America to choose between appeasement and a war that no American wants. That’s why returning to a strategy of containment, backed by clear and credible deterrence, is more urgent than ever. Mario Loyolais a program affiliate scholar of the Classical Liberal Institute of New York University, and a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He is a former foreign policy adviser at the Pentagon and in the U.S. Senate.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday pardoned former George W. Bush administration official Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who years ago was convicted of lying in an investigation of the unmasking of a CIA agent. Democrats immediately criticized the president’s move, drawing an arc running from the Iraq war to today and linking the Libby pardon to Trump’s bitter feud with James Comey, who Trump fired as FBI director last year, and to a widening investigation of possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The Libby pardon came just hours after Trump’s morning Twitter attack against Comey. The president called the ex-FBI chief a “weak and untruthful slime ball.” Excerpts of Comey’s new book due out Tuesday, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” slam Trump, calling him “unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values.” Before heading the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Comey was deputy attorney general during the Bush administration. During that time, he appointed a special counsel to prosecute a high-profile case that led to Libby’s guilty verdict in 2007. “I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a White House statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.” Libby could not immediately be reached for comment. Conservative Republicans had sought a pardon for Libby for years after former Vice President Dick Cheney was unable to persuade Bush to grant one late in his presidency. Bush did, however, commute Libby’s 2-1/2-year prison sentence. Libby, chief of staff to Cheney during the run-up and early years of the Iraq war, was found guilty in 2007 of lying and obstructing an investigation into who blew the cover of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Her husband Joseph Wilson, a former career U.S. diplomat, had criticized the Iraq war. “President Donald Trump has granted a pardon to I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby on the basis that he was ‘treated unfairly.’ That is simply false. Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in a fair trial,” Plame said in a statement. House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement, “This pardon sends a troubling signal to the president’s allies that obstructing justice will be rewarded.” FILE PHOTO: Lewis "Scooter" Libby listens as his attorney speaks to the media at the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Washington March 6, 2007. REUTERS/Jim Bourg/FilesRepresentative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the Libby pardon was Trump’s way “of sending a message to those implicated in the Russia investigation: You have my back and I’ll have yours.” The Libby pardon coincided with the arrival in the White House of John Bolton as Trump’s new national security adviser. Bolton was a key Bush administration advocate, along with Cheney and Libby, of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I am grateful today that President Trump righted this wrong by issuing a full pardon to Scooter,” Cheney said in a statement. Bush spokesman Freddy Ford said, “President Bush is pleased for Scooter and his family.” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders, in a briefing with reporters, said on Friday that the pardon had nothing to do with Trump’s views on Mueller’s investigation. Trump has been attacking the FBI amid the investigation of his 2016 presidential campaign for possible links to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and a key Manafort associate are among those who have been indicted in the Russian meddling probe run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. FILE PHOTO: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, is greeted by photographers as he departs a federal courthouse at the end of the third day of his perjury trial in Washington,U.S., February 23, 2007. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/FilesWhite House aides said earlier this week that Trump was fuming over FBI raids related to the investigation on Monday of the office and home of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Trump has repeatedly called Mueller’s probe a “witch hunt” and he and Russia have both denied any wrongdoing. It was the second high-profile pardon of Trump’s tenure. Last year, he pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff who campaigned for Trump, less than a month after he was convicted of criminal contempt in a case involving racial profiling. Reporting by Steve Holland, Justin Mitchell and Makini Brice; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Bernadette Baum, Bill Trott and David GregorioOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The acting chief of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Friday during a tour of a Texas migrant family detention center that the federal agency was preparing for the average stay for families to increase from 10 days to up to 50 days.Matthew Albence, who was at a center about 90 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border in Dilley, said an adjustment of detention centers by the Trump administration was expected to include medical and educational services to address families’ needs as they stay longer. He also said services at the Dilley center — including a clinic, dental office and charter school — were already “robust.”The new administration rule, set to take effect in 60 days, would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain families with children beyond a 20-day limit imposed by the 1997 Flores court settlement, which governs detention conditions for migrant children. It is expected to face legal challenges.The center Albence was at Friday includes a 2,400-bed cluster of trailers housing mothers with children. There were 900 migrant family members at the Dilley detention center Friday, immigration officials said. Advertisement ICE has not received additional funding to handle increased family detentions. Albence unsuccessfully appealed to Congress this year for $81 million to add 960 migrant family detention beds. He said ICE is considering converting a roughly 700-bed family detention center built in 2014 in Karnes City, Texas, that since April has been used to house migrant women, back to a family detention center.Albence said his agency had no plans to erect temporary family detention centers at military bases like those built to house unaccompanied migrant children in Texas in the past.Migrant advocates disagree that services at the Dilley center are robust, and have particularly faulted medical services managed by prison contractor CoreCivic. A migrant mother held at the center last year sued the company and the government, alleging conditions and lax medical care contributed to the illness of her 21-month-old daughter, who died after they were released. The company denies wrongdoing, and says that the federal government is responsible for oversight of healthcare at the facility.Not all asylum-seeking families arriving at the border will be detained long-term once the new rule takes effect, officials said during Friday’s tour. Some may be sent back across the border under other Trump administration policies including the “Remain in Mexico” program or the asylum ban that a judge allowed to proceed in New Mexico and Texas. Still others may be released with notices to appear in court, ankle monitors or telephone monitoring. Advertisement Long-term family detention has been criticized by both migrant advocates and fiscal conservatives as the most expensive of those options, about $319 a day, according to the ICE budget.Albence said it was cost-effective in that it ensured migrants appeared in court and, if a judge so ordered, were deported.But Silky Shah, executive director of Washington-based Detention Watch Network, said long-term migrant family detention “creates intense amounts of trauma with terrible medical care.... We’re spending a bunch of taxpayer money to pay private prison companies that are cutting costs at every level.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An intriguing area of focus in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Kremlin’s role in the 2016 U.S. election is a proposed Moscow real estate deal that Donald Trump pursued while running for president despite denying at the time any links to Russia. The special counsel has revealed in court filings numerous details about the project, which never came to fruition. Further information has come from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer who was instrumental in the negotiations, in congressional testimony and in his guilty plea to a charge of lying to Congress about the project. Mueller’s team said in a December 2018 court filing that “the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government. If the project was completed, the Company (the Trump Organization) could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues.” The project is significant because it shows Trump was chasing a lucrative business deal in Russia at the same time that President Vladimir Putin’s government, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, was conducting a hacking and propaganda campaign to boost his candidacy. The project also coincided with Trump’s positive comments as a candidate about Putin and his questioning of U.S. sanctions against Russia. Mueller is preparing to submit to U.S. Attorney General William Barr the report on his investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia and whether the Republican president has unlawfully tried to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied election interference. Here is an explanation of the Trump Moscow tower project and what the president has said about it. Trump, a wealthy New York real estate developer, had discussed expanding his business empire into Russia for more than three decades. In 2013, after visiting Russia and hosting his Miss Universe pageant there, he wrote on Twitter: “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.” The Trump Organization’s longtime partner in the project was Felix Sater, a Russian-born, Brooklyn-raised real estate developer, according to company emails released to congressional investigators. Trump in October 2015 signed a non-binding letter of intent to move forward with a Moscow tower project with a Russian development firm. The firm, I.C. Expert Investment Co, agreed to construct the skyscraper, and the Trump Organization agreed to license its name and manage the building’s operations. The letter of intent described a building in a Moscow business district with 250 luxury residential condominiums, at least 150 hotel rooms and a luxury spa. Sater, who has served prison time in the United States for assault and later became an FBI informant on organized crime, assured Cohen in a November 2015 email he could get the Russian government to support a Trump property in Moscow. “I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this,” Sater told Cohen in that email. FILE PHOTO: Special Counsel Robert Mueller (R) departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File PhotoTrump had announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015. In testimony last month to the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee, Cohen said Sater came up with a “marketing stunt” of offering Putin a free penthouse in the tower to drive up unit prices, “no different than in any condo where they start listing celebrities that live in the property.” Cohen’s House testimony portrayed Trump as keenly interested in completing the deal even as he campaigned for president. “Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project,” Cohen testified. In his guilty plea, Cohen admitted he had lied to Congress in a 2017 letter that claimed he had only discussed the negotiations with Trump three times and that the project talks ended in January 2016. Cohen said he lied to Congress to minimize links between Trump and the project and give the false impression that the proposal had ended before key early milestones in the 2016 race to determine the Republican presidential nominee. Cohen in his guilty plea said the project was discussed within the Trump Organization multiple times and that he spoke with Sater about obtaining Russian governmental approval as late as June 2016, after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination. Legal filings in Cohen’s plea deal did not make clear why the negotiations ended. But June 2016 was the month when the Washington Post first reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s computers, a cyber operation that was a key part of Moscow’s interference in the presidential race, as described by U.S. intelligence. One of Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, indicated in January 2019 that the Moscow tower discussions had continued through the November 2016 election, though he later backtracked. Trump’s public statements about business dealings in Russia have evolved over time. In July 2016, Trump told a news conference: “I have nothing to do with Russia.” Nine days before becoming president, Trump wrote on Twitter, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” In November 2018, after Cohen’s guilty plea, Trump told reporters that in 2016 he was in a position “to possibly do a deal to build a building of some kind in Moscow.” Trump added, “There would be nothing wrong if I did do it. I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business. And why should I lose lots of opportunities?” Cohen told the House panel Trump made clear to him that he should lie about when the negotiations ended. Trump and his allies have called Cohen a liar trying to reduce his prison time after pleading guilty to a series of federal criminal charges. FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump arrives aboard Air Force One to rally with supporters in Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S. November 4, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File PhotoCohen told the House panel that he briefed the president’s son and daughter, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, about the tower negotiations. Donald Trump Jr., an executive at the Trump Organization, told Congress in September 2017 he was only “peripherally aware” of the talks during the campaign. Ivanka Trump, a former Trump Organization executive, told ABC News last month she knew “literally almost nothing” about the project, saying there were “40 or 50 deals like that were floating around, that somebody was looking at.” Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will DunhamOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.