Sunday, April 21, 2019
The Attorney General Said There Was 'No Collusion.' But Trump Associates Still Interacted With Russians More Than 100 Times
Time
Attorney General William Barr’s message at a press conference Thursday morning was crystal clear: There was “no collusion” between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
While Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found that Russia interfered in the election in an effort to undermine the Clinton campaign, no one in Trump’s orbit — or “any American” for that matter, Barr added — knowingly assisted Russia in that effort.
But while Mueller may not have found any evidence that Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election, they nonetheless had a lot of contact with Russians leading up to Election Day. In fact, investigators have found that Trump and at least 17 of his campaign officials and advisors had more than 100 contacts between Trump associates and Russians, belying the campaign’s November 2016 claim that “there was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.” According to reporting, many others associated with Trump were told about contacts with Russian-linked individuals.
TWO MILLION ISRAELIS UNVACCINATED OR PARTIALLY VACCINATED FOR MEASLES
.jpost
More than two million Israelis are either unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated for the measles, according to a Channel 13 report.
An outbreak of the measles has been worrying Israelis for months as it spread throughout the country, as well as in the rest of the world. But Israeli media reports on Tuesday night exposed the severity of the situation and the difficulty in solving the crisis.
The Health Ministry claims that it has only 115,000 doses of measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine available and 100,000 additional doses of the MMRV vaccine, which combines the diminished measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) vaccine, according to Channel 13.
State Comptroller Yosef Shapira has considered examining the Health Ministry’s handling of the recent measles outbreak, according to a report released in January.
The comptroller’s office contacted infectious disease and public health experts, and is working on compiling data about past efforts regarding the measles outbreak, examining if they were sufficient.
However, no formal decision has been made so far over the next steps to take in combating the outbreak.
The ministry released a statements in the past warning the general public about the dangers of measles, including that one out of every ten patients requires hospitalization after contracting the virus.
Mueller report unable to conclude 'no criminal conduct occurred' on obstruction
cnn
The 448-page report, which includes two volumes and appendixes, paints a starkly different picture than the one laid out by Attorney General William Barr. On Thursday morning, before the report was released, Barr said that Mueller's investigation did not establish a conspiracy with the Russian government and that Mueller did not make a decision on obstruction. But the full report lays out a significantly more complicated picture as Mueller's team weighed whether to prosecute cases.
The report includes multiple episodes that were previously unknown, stemming from both the collusion and obstruction investigations, which are likely to fuel investigations in Congress into Trump. It's also likely to add to the wave of criticism Barr has faced from Democrats, who were infuriated that he held a press conference Thursday morning.
Mueller wrote he accepted the Justice Department opinion that a sitting President cannot be indicted. But the special counsel report rejected the Trump team's legal argument that a President cannot commit obstruction of justice, leaving the door open for Congress to continue to investigate Trump.
"With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has the authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice," the report says.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, whose committee is investigating Trump, told reporters he thought it was "probably written with the intent of providing Congress a roadmap."
Sarah Sanders keeps digging herself in deeper after Mueller showed she lied
vox
Press secretary Sarah Sanders was caught lying several times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and now she’s defending herself with more misdirections.
During a string of media appearances following the release of the Mueller report on Thursday, Sanders has faced questions about a claim she made during a May 2017 press briefing that she later admitted was false during testimony to Mueller’s team. In an attempt to justify President Donald Trump’s decision to fire then FBI director James Comey, Sanders told reporters that “countless members of the FBI” had contacted her to say they had lost confidence in Comey, when in fact that wasn’t the case.
On Thursday evening and Friday morning, Sanders repeatedly downplayed that lie as a mere “slip of the tongue.” But as ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pointed out to her in an interview on Friday morning, she used the line about “countless members of the FBI” multiple times in the days following Comey’s firing — a revelation undercutting her claim that she merely misspoke.
“You said it was a ‘slip of the tongue’ when you talked about ‘countless FBI members,’ yet you repeated it twice the very next day,” Stephanopoulos said. “That’s not a slip of the tongue, Sarah, that’s a deliberate false statement.”
Sanders, however, refused to own it, and bizarrely blamed her lie on Democrats.
Friday, April 19, 2019
Mueller had everything he needed to charge Trump with obstruction, but didn't
cnn
Mueller's report Thursday walked through excruciating detail of evidence in the obstruction of justice investigation and legal analysis, hitting over and over again how prosecutors had enough to meet the legal threshold for a case against Trump.
The special counsel examined multiple incidents for potential obstruction. It showed how Trump's actions crossed the threshold for a case when Trump confronted former FBI Director James Comey to "let" national security adviser Michael Flynn go; when Trump fired Comey; when Trump directed his former White House counsel Don McGahn to shut down Mueller; and when Trump tweeted about his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort's charges as he headed to trial.
In each of these situations, Mueller found evidence that Trump took steps to harm an investigation, had the ability to harm an investigation and had a personal motivation to harm the investigation.
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Mueller report
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
Less than a month after Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrapped up a nearly two-year investigation, Americans today can read Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — minus the portions redacted by the Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice, that is.
The almost 400-page report, which covers the special counsel’s findings on Russian interference and whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice, was publicly released after Barr held a press conference Thursday morning, during which he defended Trump.
There are a number of different ways to read the redacted version of the report. Here’s how you can read the findings yourself:
Directly from the Department of Justice:
The most direct way to see the Mueller report is to visit the special counsel’s website, which posted the redacted report after it was delivered to Congress on Thursday morning. The website also contains links to other documents related to the special counsel investigation, including Roger Stone’s indictment and Michael Cohen’s plea agreement.
FOX NEWS HOST SAYS WILLIAM BARR WAS ALMOST 'ACTING AS COUNSELOR FOR THE DEFENSE' OF DONALD TRUMP IN MUELLER REPORT PRESS CONFERENCE
Newsweek
Fox News host Chris Wallace suggested Thursday that Attorney General William Barr was “acting as counselor for the defense” of President Donald Trump during Barr's press conference in advance of his release of special counsel Robert Mueller's full report on Russian meddling in U.S. elections.
“Obviously, the president was very frustrated with the actions of his first attorney general, because of the fact that he felt that Jeff Sessions was not protecting him was not functioning in that role,” Wallace said, appearing as an analyst on Fox News' America’s Newsroom following the press conference. He suggested that Trump specifically chose Barr to then–former Attorney General Sessions with the expectation that he would be more loyal.
Brooklyn measles outbreak: How a glossy booklet spread anti-vaccine messages in Orthodox Jewish communitie
nbcnews
As New York officials declared a public health emergency in parts of Brooklyn this week, establishing mandatory vaccinations in an effort to stop the city’s worst measles outbreak in almost 30 years, health advocates pointed to what they believe is a major source of vaccine misinformation in the affected neighborhoods.
The false messages that they say convinced hundreds of New Yorkers not to vaccinate their children weren’t spread in a Facebook group or on YouTube, but through a glossy magazine written by and for Orthodox Jewish parents. Copies of the magazine were shared in a way that seems old-fashioned in the age of misinformation — through family, friends and neighbors.
“The Vaccine Safety Handbook” looks legitimate but is filled with wild conspiracy theories and inaccurate data. Published by an anonymously led group called Parents Educating and Advocating for Children’s Health, or PEACH, the handbook disputes the well-established dangers of illnesses like measles and polio, challenges the effectiveness of vaccines in eradicating those illnesses, and likens the U.S. government's promotion of vaccines to the medical atrocities of Nazi Germany.
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