The Russian lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr. after his father won the Republican nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election counted Russia's FSB security service among her clients for years, Russian court documents seen by Reuters show.The documents show that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, successfully represented the FSB's interests in a legal wrangle over ownership of an upscale property in northwest Moscow between 2005 and 2013.The FSB, successor to the Soviet-era KGB service, was headed by Vladimir Putin before he became Russian president.
The Senate parliamentarian ruled Friday that some parts of the Senate health care bill do not comply with budget rules, meaning that if they're included in the bill, they'll need 60 votes to pass.
Russia's ambassador to Washington told his superiors in Moscow that he discussed campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow, with Jeff Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, contrary to public assertions by the embattled attorney general, according to current and former U.S. officials.Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's accounts of two conversations with Sessions -- then a top foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump -- were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, which monitor the communications of senior Russian officials both in the United States and in Russia. Sessions initially failed to disclose his contacts with Kislyak and then said that the meetings were not about the Trump campaign.One U.S. official said that Sessions -- who testified that he has no recollection of an April encounter -- has provided "misleading" statements that are "contradicted by other evidence."
Stocks have shrugged off Trump headlines to hit new highs this week pic.twitter.com/BLW69BByqz
— Business Insider (@businessinsider) July 21, 2017
Perhaps Donald thinks the point of the legal system is to bluster and lose?It may be hard to think of Kasowitz, who relishes his tough-guy reputation, as a force of moderation. But if you look at the record of the client relationship between Trump and Kasowitz, there's a notable streak of restraint. Trump and Kasowitz, for instance, never followed through with libel suits against the Times - or against any other news organization in the last 30 years. (Kasowitz did represent Trump in his unsuccessful libel suit against Trump biographer Timothy O'Brien and O'Brien's book publisher.)Nor did Kasowitz file the threatened DOJ complaint against Comey. According to Bloomberg, the Trump team decided the wiser course was to stop attacking the integrity of the Russia investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In fact, the New York Times has been reporting that the president is chafing under Kasowitz's advice to keep quiet on Twitter and elsewhere about the Russia case - advice almost every defense lawyer would endorse.The best example of Kasowitz's relatively measured approach to litigation for Trump may be an enormous case Kasowitz handled early in his relationship with the president. In a prolonged battle against Hong Kong real estate partners whom Trump accused of underpricing West Side real estate, Trump replaced Kasowitz after he lost a key motion. Once Kasowitz was out, Trump pursued tactics so aggressive that they nearly cost him and Kasowitz's replacement a sanction finding.
Preliminary findings in the investigation into the collision between the USS Fitzgerald and a Philippine cargo ship off the coast of Japan in June suggest the accident was caused by multiple errors by the Fitzgerald's crew and a failure to take action in the minutes leading to the collision, according to two defense officials."They did nothing until the last second," one official said. "A slew of things went wrong." A second official said the crash "will wind up being our (the US Navy's) fault."
Anthony Scaramucci, aide to President-elect Donald Trump and founder of SkyBridge Capital, discussed possible joint investments in a meeting in Davos with the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund that the U.S. sanctioned in 2015, the fund's press service said.The meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a $10 billion state-run investment vehicle, is the first public contact between the incoming administration and Kremlin-backed business. Trump has suggested he could ease the sanctions on Russia if the Kremlin cooperates on his policy priorities. Scaramucci confirmed the Davos meeting.In an interview with the Russian state news agency TASS Tuesday, he also criticized the sanctions as ineffective.
DOYLESTOWN, Pa. -- Five years ago, the Affordable Care Act had yet to begin its expansion of health insurance to millions of Americans, but Jeff Brahin was already stewing about it."It's going to cost a fortune," he said in an interview at the time.This week, as Republican efforts to repeal the law known as Obamacare appeared all but dead, Mr. Brahin, a 58-year-old lawyer and self-described fiscal hawk, said his feelings had evolved."As much as I was against it," he said, "at this point I'm against the repeal.""Now that you've insured an additional 20 million people, you can't just take the insurance away from these people," he added. "It's just not the right thing to do."As Mr. Brahin goes, so goes the nation. [...]The change in public opinion may not denote newfound love of the Affordable Care Act so much as dread of what might replace it. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that both the House and Senate proposals to replace the law would result in over 20 million more uninsured Americans. The shift in mood also reflects a strong increase in support for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor that the law expanded to cover far more people, and which faces the deepest cuts in its 52-year history under the Republican plans.Most profound, though, is this: After years of Tea Party demands for smaller government, Republicans are now pushing up against a growing consensus that the government should guarantee health insurance. A Pew survey in January found that 60 percent of Americans believe the federal government should be responsible for ensuring that all Americans have health coverage. That was up from 51 percent last year, and the highest in nearly a decade.The belief held even among many Republicans: 52 percent of those making below $30,000 a year said the federal government has a responsibility to ensure health coverage, a huge jump from 31 percent last year. And 34 percent of Republicans who make between $30,000 and about $75,000 endorsed that view, up from 14 percent last year."The idea that you shouldn't take coverage away really captured a large share of people who weren't even helped by this bill," said Robert Blendon, a health policy expert at Harvard who has closely followed public opinion of the Affordable Care Act.
Congratulations Sean Spicer. You've got more guts than Jeff Sessions!
— Maxine Waters (@MaxineWaters) July 21, 2017
It is certainly true that ISIS messaging over the past year or so has tried to address the group's contracting control of territory. Notable examples include the now-deceased spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani's speech released in May 2016, which mocked the idea that the loss of Mosul, Raqqa, and the Libyan city of Sirte would mean the end of the caliphate. Instead, Adnani argued, the only real defeat would come with the end of the will to keep fighting. An editorial in the ISIS newsletter al-Naba' in June 2016 reflected similar ideas to Adnani's speech.In reality, though, this shift in messaging reflects damage control and a response to the overall tide turning against ISIS, not a stroke of genius in which ISIS strategists foresaw all of this, even at the height of the group's power. It is by no means evident that ISIS could have foreseen these losses back in 2014. While memories may fade quickly, I remember widespread predictions in 2014 that many if not most of the Sunni areas controlled by ISIS in Iraq would never return to Iraqi government control. Some of these arguments were based on the supposed unwillingness of Shiite fighters to take the fight to areas that were not their hometowns. This particular claim even had considerable resonance in late 2015, as the French professor Olivier Roy declared in The New York Times in November 2015 that "the Shiites of Iraq, no matter what pressure they face from America, do not seem ready to die to reclaim Fallujah," only for that city to be retaken through the extensive participation of Shiite fighters several months later.Others said that Iran had an interest in keeping Iraq as a rump state with ISIS advances stalled to exert maximum influence, and thus retaking places like Mosul would not be a concern. Proclamations of the "end of Iraq" were frequent. The tendency to rush to judgment based on developments of the day persisted after 2014, as ISIS gained control of Ramadi and Palmyra despite the coalition campaign against it. Proclamations that the Islamic State was winning and on the march quickly took hold.The belief in the necessity of a "Sunni force" to retake Mosul has long been popular, as though the grueling, destructive fight to take parts of the city, street by street, would have been vastly different simply on the basis of sect affiliation of the forces fighting ISIS. For a time, I myself partly bought into the "Sunni force" idea in suggesting in 2014 that one would have to co-opt elements of Iraq's other Sunni insurgent groups to take on ISIS. In fact, as quickly became evident, those groups have long been weak and ineffectual, often deluded with notions of "revolution" against the government in Baghdad.If the claims that Mosul and other Sunni towns that fell to ISIS would be unlikely to return to Iraqi government control gained such widespread currency, what makes one believe that ISIS, which based its main selling point on its ability to control territory and run the ideal governance project, did not actually think it had a serious chance of at least enduring in a state form, even if it could not indefinitely expand and take over the world?
A source familiar with the situation tells CNN that Christopher Buckley "expressed great dismay" at the announcement that the award would go to Hannity, who has spent a great deal of time insulting conservative intellectuals on Twitter, particularly since he became a strong supporter of Donald Trump. [...]Sources tell CNN that the MRC leadership discussed ways to allow Hannity to save face by acting as if a scheduling conflict would prevent him from accepting the award."It's my understanding there was a scheduling conflict," Ryan Moy, a spokesman for the MRC, told CNN.
Steve Bannon has largely disappeared from the White House's most sensitive policy debates -- a dramatic about-face for an operative once characterized as the most powerful man in Washington.Bannon, chastened by internal rivalries and by President Donald Trump's growing suspicion that he is looking out for his own interests, is in a self-imposed exile, having chosen to step back from Trump's inner circle for the sake of self-preservation, according to several White House advisers who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering a colleague.
Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Dick Durbin are introducing the DREAM Act -- a new bipartisan push to reform immigration legislation about rights and protections for undocumented people whose parents immigrated to the U.S. illegally.The bill is butting up against Trump's intention to allow DREAMers to be deported, and just yesterday Marc Short said the administration would likely oppose the bill. Trump has until Sept. 5 to decide whether to rescind the program or face court challenges.Big picture: Graham told reporters Thursday that when history is written about how the U.S. treated so-called DREAMers, he's "going to be with these kids" and that they're "trying to do a good thing," adding that both Trump and the Republican Party are going to have to make a decision about where they fall.
Some of President Trump's lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president's authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the probe, according to one of those people. A second person said Trump's lawyers have been discussing the president's pardoning powers among themselves.
Asma Jama was out to dinner with her family at an Applebee's in Coon Rapids, Minn., in October 2015, when a woman seated nearby starting getting angry. Why? Jama, who is Somali-American and Muslim, was speaking Swahili and wearing a hijab.The woman, Jodie Bruchard-Risch, demanded that Jama speak English -- and then smashed Jama in the face with a glass beer mug."I could see it from the doctor's face that it was really bad," says Jama, who is 39. "I had lacerations across my chest, all over my hands, and 17 total stitches."Bruchard-Risch pleaded guilty to felony assault charges, admitted she acted out of bias, and served time in jail for the assault crime.After the trial ended, Jama found support from an unlikely source -- her attacker's sister.Dawn Sahr, 50, contacted Jama online to see how Jama had been doing in the year since the incident occurred. The two met in person for the first time when they came to StoryCorps to talk about the attack."I wanted to reach out to you so much," Sahr says. "I just wanted to know that you were OK. That was my biggest concern."