Last Commented News Blogs (3,097)

In response to:

House panel, Justice Dept end standoff over Mueller documents

Reuters•May 22, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House Intelligence Committee pulled back on Wednesday from threats to enforce a subpoena against Attorney General William Barr after the Justice Department agreed to turn over materials relating to an investigation into Russian election interference.

The decision ended a standoff between the Democratic-led committee and the Justice Department for access to counterintelligence reports generated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller during his probe of President Donald Trump and his associates.

The dispute, one of many between the Republican administration and the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, has come as Trump refuses to cooperate with numerous congressional probes into matters ranging from his personal finances and business dealings to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

"The Department of Justice has accepted our offer of a first step toward compliance with our subpoena, and this week will begin turning over to the Committee twelve categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence materials as part of an initial rolling production," U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, said on Wednesday.

Schiff canceled a committee meeting to consider enforcement action on Wednesday.

Barr, the top U.S. law enforcement official and a Trump appointee, on May 2 snubbed the House intelligence committee, which voted to hold him in contempt of Congress for not handing over a full, unredacted Mueller report.

In a letter to Schiff on Tuesday, the Justice Department said it was willing to give Intelligence committee members and staff closed-door access to additional material if Schiff does not move forward with his threats to hold the department in contempt.

In response to:
By Chris Kahn

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of Americans who said President Donald Trump should be impeached rose 5 percentage points to 45 percent since mid-April according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday....

After a nearly two-year investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, House Democrats are pursuing multiple inquiries into Trump's presidency, his family and his business interests.

Trump is stonewalling at least a half-dozen such inquiries, refusing to disclose his tax returns, invoking executive privilege to keep the unredacted Mueller report under wraps and filing unprecedented lawsuits to block House investigators....

Trump's popularity was unchanged from a similar poll that ran last week - 39 percent of adults said they approved of Trump, while 55 percent said they disapproved.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,006 adults and had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points.

In response to:


House Judiciary votes to hold Barr in contempt for defying Mueller report subpoena

By Emily Tillett, Grace Segers

May 8, 2019 / 7:35 PM / CBS News

After negotiations with the Department of Justice fell apart, House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee voted to find Attorney General William Barr in contempt for not complying with the panel's subpoenas to provide documents related to special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report.

The vote passed along party lines, 24-16, after six hours of contentious debate on the topic. The contempt resolution will now go to the full House for a vote, where it is expected to pass, given the Democratic majority.

In response to:
Anthony Scaramucci, who infamously lasted 10 days in the administration of President Donald Trump, on Sunday compared his old boss to the most notorious nuclear disaster in history and said the president’s ongoing meltdown could lead to him getting replaced on the top of the Republican ticket for the 2020 election.

“We are now in the early episodes of ‘Chernobyl’ on HBO, where the reactor is melting down and the apparatchiks are trying to figure out whether to cover it up or start the clean-up process,” Scaramucci told Axios, comparing Trump’s presidency to the TV drama about the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union.

“A couple more weeks like this and ‘country over party’ is going to require the Republicans to replace the top of the ticket in 2020,” he said.

The former White House communications director has turned into a sharp critic of his ex-boss.

He said last month that Trump’s attacks on four women of color in Congress were “racist and unacceptable.” Last week, he called Trump’s visit to El Paso, Texas, to see survivors and first responders of the mass shooting there a “catastrophe” and “a bad reflection on the country.”

And on Saturday, he warned that Trump will eventually turn on the entire country.

In his latest critique of the president, Scaramucci said that unless Trump changes his tune soon, Republicans will start to look for a “replacement” to run in 2020.

“Right now, it’s an unspeakable thing,” he said. “But if he keeps it up, it will no longer be unspeakable.”

He also Tweeted;

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
~ Dietrich Boenhoffer

In response to:

GOP Rep. Steve King has a history of controversial remarks. Here's some that riled people up

Linh Ta,USA TODAY•August 14, 2019

Rep. Steve King has a penchant for creating uproar across the nation with his comments.

While defending his remarks, the Iowa Republican has generally claimed he is misquoted and that he doesn't trust most media outlets. But for many Democrats and Republicans, his comments have gone too far.

King is currently under fire for comments he made while defending his stance of not allowing exceptions for rape and incest in anti-abortion legislation he tried to pass in Congress. He questioned whether there would be any population left, if it were not for "rape and incest," King said during a meeting with the Westside Conservative Club on Wednesday.

"What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?" he said at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa. "Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society I know I can't certify that I'm not a part of a product of that.

Here's a history of some of King's controversial remarks.
King questions why "white nationalist," is offensive language

In an interview with the New York Times, King questioned why "white nationalist," among other terms, are deemed racist language.

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King said in an interview with the Times that published Jan. 10. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

King said not all cultures contribute equally to society

King said presuming all cultures are equal devalues the "founding fathers" while arguing with an event attendee at a town hall in Webster County, Iowa. He said that by acknowledging that every culture is equal and contributed equally to society it reduces, "...the contributions of the people that laid the foundation for America and that's our founding fathers," King said at the event on May 28, 2019, in Fort Dodge.

In response to: “The irony of the successful operation against al-Baghdadi is that it could not have happened without U.S. forces on the ground that have been pulled out, help from Syrian Kurds who have been betrayed, and support of a U.S. intelligence community that has so often been disparaged”

In response to: Al-Baghdadi Raid Was a Victory Built on Factors Trump Derides

The president cast the death of the ISIS leader as validation of his disengagement strategy. But it required intelligence agencies and allies he has spurned.

Al-Baghdadi Raid Was a Victory Built on Factors Trump Derides

By David E. Sanger

Oct. 27, 2019

WASHINGTON — The death of the Islamic State’s leader in a daring nighttime raid vindicated the value of three traditional American strengths: robust alliances, faith in intelligence agencies and the projection of military power around the world.

But President Trump has regularly derided the first two. And even as he claimed a significant national security victory on Sunday, the outcome of the raid did little to quell doubts about the wisdom of his push to reduce the United States military presence in Syria at a time when terrorist threats continue to develop in the region.

Mr. Trump has long viewed the United States intelligence agencies with suspicion and appears to see its employees as members of the “deep state.” He also has a distinctly skeptical view of alliances — in this case, close cooperation with the Kurds, whom he has effectively abandoned.

“The irony of the successful operation against al-Baghdadi is that it could not have happened without U.S. forces on the ground that have been pulled out, help from Syrian Kurds who have been betrayed, and support of a U.S. intelligence community that has so often been disparaged,” Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Sunday.