Nearly 6,000 Palestinians have been injured since March by the Israeli army's use of live ammunition during protests in the Gaza Strip
Palestinians have held protests in Gaza every Friday since 30 March (Reuters/File photo)
Friday 30 November 2018
At least 18 Palestinians have been injured after the Israeli army opened fire on weekly protests in the Gaza Strip, the health ministry in the blockaded enclave said.
The injured were hit with live ammunition on Friday as a few thousand Palestinians gathered in different spots along the fence dividing Israel from Gaza, the ministry said.
None were reported to be in life-threatening condition, it said.
Palestinians in Gaza have rallied every week since the end of March as part of the Great March of Return.
The protesters are calling for an end to the stifling blockade on the coastal Palestinian territory and demanding the right to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel.
The number of participants at the protests has gone down since a ceasefire agreement was reached earlier this month between Israel and Hamas, which governs Gaza.
However, at least 235 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since March, mostly by Israeli fire, but also by air and tank strikes. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed over that same period.
Nearly 6,000 Palestinians have also been injured by the Israeli army's use of live ammunition at the protests, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Earlier this week, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said the healthcare system in Gaza was struggling to meet the needs of Palestinians who have been injured by live fire during the demonstrations.
As a result, thousands of Gaza residents are suffering from long-term injuries, the medical charity said, and the majority of MSF's patients need further medical treatment to properly heal from their wounds, or receive necessary rehabilitation.
"A slow-motion healthcare emergency is unfolding in Gaza as the cumulative needs of patients shot by the Israeli army and seriously injured during protests mount," the group said.
"This burden is too much to bear for the health system in Gaza in its current form, weakened as it is by more than a decade of blockade."
Marc Lamont Hill gave a beautiful speech at a United Nations event marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People this week.
For this, the Temple University professor and long-time advocate for Palestinian rights has been the target of an orchestrated political lynching by Israel lobby groups.
Smeared as an anti-Semite and grotesquely and falsely accused of calling for genocide against Jews, Hill was fired from his role as a political commentator for CNN.
The same Israel lobby operatives who bullied CNN into ending Hill’s contract are also demanding that he be fired from his teaching position.
The university has rebuffed these calls, citing Hill’s “constitutionally protected right to express his opinion as a private citizen.”
The accusations against Marc Lamont Hill are outright lies promoted by high-leveloperatives of the Israel lobby in their latest effort to silence and punish anyone who dares speak out in support of Palestinian equality and freedom from Israel’s brutal regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.
They perfectly match the kind of smear and sabotage tactics revealed in the censored Al Jazeera documentary on the US Israel lobby that was recently published in full by The Electronic Intifada.
Israel and its lobby see solidarity for Palestine from Black people as a particularly dangerous threat to be combatted with special zeal. It is no wonder that Jackie Walker, a Black Jewish anti-Zionist activist in Britain’s Labour Party, has likened the years-long smear campaign targeted at her by the Israel lobby to a lynching.
At the top of this page is the full video of Hill’s UN speech, published by the anti-Palestinian group UN Watch, no doubt in an effort to embarrass him.
Anyone familiar with Israel lobby defamation campaigns will not be surprised to learn that there is not one word of bigotry and of course nothing that can remotely be construed as a call for genocide.
Real solidarity
Rather, Marc Lamont Hill commits an even more unforgivable thought crime in the eyes of Israel and its lobby: he calls for effective solidarity with the Palestinian people on the basis that the full range of rights contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should apply to them no less than to any other people.
Hill also draws on the Black history of struggle against American state racism as a source of inspiration for that solidarity. His own words are worth quoting at length:
As a Black American, my understanding of action and solidarity action is rooted in our own tradition of struggle. As Black Americans resisted slavery, as well as Jim Crow laws that transformed us from a slave state to an apartheid state, we did so through multiple tactics and strategies. It is this array of tactics that I appeal to as I advocate for concrete action from all of us in this room.
Solidarity from the international community demands that we embrace boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as a critical means by which to hold Israel accountable for its treatment of Palestinian people. This movement, which emerges out of the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society offers a nonviolent means by which to demand a return to the pre-1967 borders, full rights for Palestinian citizens and the right of return as dictated by international law.
Solidarity demands that we no longer allow politicians or political parties to remain silent on the question of Palestine. We can no longer in particular allow the political left to remain radical or even progressive on every issue from the environment to war to the economy. To remain progressive on every issue except for Palestine.
Contrary to Western mythology, Black resistance to American apartheid did not come purely through Gandhi and nonviolence. Rather, slave revolts and self-defense and tactics otherwise divergent from Dr. [Martin Luther] King or Mahatma Gandhi were equally important to preserving safety and attaining freedom.
We must allow – if we are to operate in true solidarity with Palestinian people, we must allow the Palestinian people the same range of opportunity and political possibility.
If we are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself. We must prioritize peace. But we must not romanticize or fetishize it.
We must advocate and promote nonviolence at every opportunity, but we cannot endorse a narrow politics of respectability that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in the face of state violence and ethnic cleansing.
Hill ended his speech with a call for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
The political lynch mob tried to spin these words as a genocidal call for the destruction of Israel.
But they are a simple recognition of reality: historic Palestine – what is today Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip – is not free between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
You can quote me: I call for the full liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, an end to the Israeli Zionist system of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid, and its replacement with democracy, equality and justice for Jews, Palestinians and all in that land.
As a landmark UN report– quickly withdrawn under Israel lobby pressure – documented last year, the entire territory and the entire Palestinian people are subject to an “apartheid regime.”
The report found “beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crimes of apartheid” as defined in international law.
With clarity and courage Marc Lamont Hill rightly stands by his principled words and we should stand by him – as many are doing.
Almost 5,000 people have already signed a petition demanding that CNN reinstate Hill.
The Prime Minister arrived in Argentina for the G20 summit keen to sell the benefits of Brexit. World leaders met against a backdrop of crisis in Crimea and the Saudi Arabian murder of a dissident journalist, but the European Council President Donald Tusk took the opportunity to say the EU stands ready for “no deal or no Brexit at all” if MPs reject the deal. We speak to Theresa May.
Asia-Pacific countries are leading the way in real wage increases, taking 14 spots in the top 20 highest rises across the globe. Source: Ingus Kruklitis/Shutterstock
ASIA-PACIFIC countries are leading the way in real wage increases, taking 14 spots in the top 20 highest rises across the globe. All but one of the top 10 are Asian countries.
A Salary Trends survey from ECA International predicts the real average salary increase in Asia-Pacific will by 2.7 percent in 2019 – that’s more than double the global average of 1.2 percent.
India tops the world rankings with employees forecast to receive a 5.1 percent increase in real salary over the next 12 months.
Vietnam is a close second with an expected rise of 4.9 percent, followed by Indonesia with 4.2 percent.
China (4.1 percent), Thailand (4.1 percent), Bangladesh (3.9 percent), Cambodia (3.4 percent), Sri Lanka (3.2 percent), South Korea (2.7 percent), and Malaysia (2.7 percent) round out the top 10.
Not far behind is Southeast Asian neighbour Singapore with a rise of 2.6 percent. ECA said Singaporeans will see their nominal salaries increase by four percent in 2019 but, after factoring in inflation which the International Monetary Fund predicts to be 1.4 percent next year, employees will see a real salary increase of 2.6 percent.
Asia Pacific leads the way in salary increase for a number of reasons, the first being the number of developing economies in the region. These will generally have high rates of inflation, having a knock-on effect on salaries, explains ECA International Regional Director for Asia, Lee Quane.
“When companies are employing people they need to make sure at the very least they keep pace with inflation, but you also want to ensure in real terms employees are seeing an increase in their salaries,” Quane told Asian Correspondent.
A stock trader watches share prices on his screen at a brokerage house in Mumbai on July 26, 2018. Asian stocks mostly fell on July 26 as investor relief at US President Donald Trump and the European Commission chief’s plan to ease trade tensions was offset by disappointing Wall Street earnings. Source: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP
In countries with high economic growth – most of those with the highest growth globally are located in Asia Pacific – the measures needed to retain talent also grows.
“Given the fact there is a lot of competition for people in these locations, companies have to offer relatively high salaries to both attract workers and retain their existing staff,” Quane said.
But while growth is happening across the region, there are some countries whose increase is slowing. Singapore is one of them who is down 0.3 percent from their 2.9 percent increase this year.
Malaysia also bucks the trend and, while salaries are still expected to grow, the rate at which they do is slowing.
ECA predicts Malaysians won’t see as a high rate of increase in their real incomes in 2019 as they did this year. The dramatic May election outcome, which saw a complete overhaul of the government, caused companies to adopt a more cautious stance on business expansion and salary hikes.
While greater clarity as to the new government’s policies and direction is slowly being achieved, this uncertainty with respect to Malaysia’s economic performance is likely to continue into 2019, Quane said.
“That [the election] had an impact on the economy, this government appears to be more fiscally prudent than the previous regime, and that fed through to many employers being a little bit more bearish with regard to economic prospects, and as such, they’re not expecting revenue growth and for profits to be as good in 2019 as it was the previous year,” Quane explains.
Former Malaysian prime minister and opposition candidate Mahathir Mohamad celebrates with other leaders of his coalition during a press conference in Kuala Lumpur on early May 10, 2018. Malaysia’s opposition alliance headed by veteran ex-leader Mahathir Mohamad, 92, has won a historic election victory, official results showed on May 10, ending the six-decade rule of the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition. Source: Manan Vatsyayana / AFP
Another contributing factor to an uncertain economic performance was the drop in oil prices, which will have a knock-on effect on salary hikes in the industry, as well as inflation expected to be lower due to the scrapping of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
But it’s far from doom and gloom, salaries are going in the right direction across the region which bodes well for the future prospects for Asia Pacific.
The benefits of high salary increases are not just enjoyed on an individual basis but trickle down into wider society, further projecting countries into the middle- and high-income bracket of development.
Countries with good real income increases can expect to see a rise in consumption levels, Quane said. This enables a country to move away from its reliance on imports and exports, and government support.
“As income starts to increase and salaries increase, this gives people more purchasing power. The economy then transitions into a more service lead and consumption lead economy. This balances things out and the economy becomes less dependant on any particular sector.”
This can be hugely beneficial as it enables a country to weather the storm if there is any major economic or political upset, having the ability to make up loses in one sector by bulking up another to plug the hole. As Quane puts it, it creates “another engine” to a country’s economy.
With lower-income countries, such as Vietnam and Cambodia, expected to see high economic growth, and more established economies like Singapore and Hong Kong battle to retain talent, Asia Pacific is lining up to be a good region to be an employee.
From the exiled king of Belgium to the Primrose freighter in 1981, outsiders have regretted contact with the Sentinelese – as have the islanders themselves
In 1981, a freighter called the Primrose ran aground on a coral reef in the Bay of Bengal. Winds were high and the surf around the hapless vessel was heaving. The rough conditions probably saved the lives of the 28 crew aboard.
After a few days stuck in the reef, a watchman reported seeing a group emerge from the jungle on the island a few hundred metres away. The sailor’s relief at the sight of a possible rescue party ebbed as the men came into view: nearly naked, carrying spears and bows and arrows that they waved in the direction of the ship.
“Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are making two or three wooden boats,” the Primrose’s captain radioed to his headquarters in Hong Kong. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”
The same tribe killed American missionary John Allen Chau on 17 November. The crew of the Primrose survived. The surging swell repelled the tribespeople’s boats, while the strong winds kept blowing their arrows off the mark, according to an account by the author and historian Adam Goodheart. After three terrifying days – the crew keeping vigil with pipes, flares and other makeshift weapons – an Indian navy boat winched the stranded sailors to safety. The Primrose still lies where it ran aground 37 years ago.
Chau would have seen the ship’s wreckage as he circumnavigated North Sentinel Island the evening of 14 November, on a boat with five fishermen whom police say he paid 25,000 rupees (£275) to smuggle him there.
Like the Primrose incident, Chau’s apparent murder as he tried to preach to the Sentinelese – in breach of Indian law and advice that exposure to foreign pathogens could kill them – has fuelled fascination with one of the world’s most isolated communities. And among the most misunderstood, according to the handful of anthropologists and historians who have observed them.
Encounters between the tribe, loosely estimated to number 100 people, and the outside world are a violent catalogue. In 1974, a member of a National Geographic crew filming a documentary on the island was hit in the leg with an arrow.
Clouds hang over the North Sentinel Island, home to about 100 tribespeople. Photograph: Gautam Singh/AP
The following year, the exiled king of Belgium reportedly aborted his visit when a single, armed tribesman emerged from the jungle and waved his bow at the craft. In 2006, two men looking for flotsam on North Sentinel ran aground on the sand, and were hacked apart with axes. Police said this week their bodies were hung from bamboo poles and displayed to the ocean “like scarecrows”.
Yet those experienced with the Sentinelese reject the idea they are inherently aggressive. “They are a peace-loving people,” TN Pandit, an anthropologist who conducted one of the first successful meetings with the tribe in 1991, told an Indian news outlet this week.
“Their hostility is a sign of great insecurity,” agrees Vivek Rae, a former chief administrator of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the Indian territory that includes the Sentinelese home.
Often characterised as a kind of irrational barbarism, their extreme suspicion of outsiders may be well-founded. “It has been passed down through generations,” Pandit says.
Centuries ago, the Andaman archipelago was a magnet for Burmese slave traders who seized members of its four hunter-gatherer tribes and sold them into slavery in south-east Asia. From 1857, the islands became a permanent British colony, a prison for those who had taken part in that year’s Indian Rebellion, the largest armed uprising against colonial rule on the subcontinent.
“The British embarked on a policy that veered between assimilation, containment and annihilation,” says Clare Anderson, a professor of history at the University of Leicester.
One practice was kidnapping members of tribes and holding them for several weeks to demonstrate the fruits of British civilisation. Maurice Vidal Portman, a commander in the Royal Navy, employed the strategy on North Sentinel Island in 1880, capturing two older tribespeople and four children he had found sheltering in an inland settlement – the only residents apparently unable to flee.
The captives “sickened rapidly”, he later wrote, “and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents”.
The tribes who relented to British rule found themselves devastated by disease and overwhelmed by contact with alcohol, tobacco, sugar and the other vices of the settlement. In 1858, the British counted at least 5,000 tribespeople across the Andamans. By 1931, their numbers had dwindled to 460.
John Allen Chau, 26, was killed by members of an isolated tribe. Photograph: Social Media/Reuters
Even to Portman, it was obvious: “[The tribes’] association with outsiders has brought them nothing but harm,” he told the Royal Society in London, “and it is a matter of great regret to me that such a pleasant race are so rapidly becoming extinct”.
During the second world war, the Andamans were a theatre of fierce fighting and bombing campaigns. PC Joshi, a professor of anthropology at Delhi University, speculates this could have had an impact on the Sentinelese. “They must be carrying some of those memories.”
From 1967, Indian government anthropologists set out to patiently win the trust of the Sentinelese, dropping them gifts of coconuts, bananas and iron rods. The last of these would later show up in the tips of the arrows the tribe would periodically fire at the exploring scholars. They saw it as evidence that the tribe, which is at least 30,000 years old, was no relic of the neolithic era: their lifestyles could evolve like those of any other human community.
The gift-dropping expeditions have ceased in the past two decades. The Indian government’s current policy is to simply leave the Sentinelese alone. It is influenced partly by the country’s experience with another Andamans tribe, the Jarawa. In 1996, a Jarawa boy broke his leg while trying to steal fruit from a modern settlement. He was taken to hospital and spent five months recuperating. He learned a bit of Hindi and discovered television. Then he returned to his tribe.
About a year later, the boy led a group of Jarawas out of the forest in a formal peace overture from the community after centuries of hostilities. Yet the Jarawa experience is no longer regarded as a triumph. Diseases such as measles have ravaged the community. Authorities have been implicated in helping to run “human safaris” in Jarawa territory. Anthropologists fear they are heading the way of other contacted Andaman tribes.
“Think of the horrible experience of the Great Andamanese tribe,” says Kanchan Mukhopadhyay, a former officer with India’s anthropological survey who served on the islands. “They died en masse. And the Onge tribe – they don’t hunt or fish anymore. They are totally dependent on food supplied by the authorities.”
Chau’s misadventure on North Sentinel Island has sparked outrage in Indiaand reaffirmed the government’s stance. An anthropologist involved in the American’s case told the Guardian this week there were no plans to go to North Sentinel to recover his body. “They shoot arrows on any invader,” the official said. “That is their message, saying ‘don’t come on the island’, and we respect this.”
Theresa May's office said she stressed importance of holding Khashoggi's killers accountable, in meeting with Saudi crown prince at G20 summit
G20 summit marks first time MBS has met with several major world leaders since the journalist Jamal Khashoggi's killing on 2 October (Reuters)
Friday 30 November 2018
Theresa May told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Friday that he should take action to prevent incidents like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi from happening again, her office said.
Saudi Arabia must take measures to “build confidence that such a deplorable incident could not happen again”, the British prime minister’s office said in a readout of a meeting May had with the crown prince, known as MBS, at the G20 summit in Argentina.
"The Prime Minister stressed the importance of ensuring that those responsible for the appalling murder of Jamal Khashoggi are held to account," the statement read.
The killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Saudi government critic, has cast a shadow over the international summit in Buenos Aires, which began on Friday.
The summit marks the first time MBS has met with several major world leaders since the journalist’s killing on 2 October inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
He received a frosty welcome from many present at the G20, as global pressure has grown to hold the Saudi crown prince accountable for Khashoggi's murder and his country’s role in the devastating conflict in Yemen.
While Saudi officials have repeatedly denied MBS had any knowledge of Khashoggi’s killing, the CIA recently concluded that he ordered the assassination.
Testy exchange between Macron and MBS
Earlier this week, the British prime minister said she intended to discuss the Khashoggi case and the situation in Yemen with MBS.
"I am intending to speak with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The message that I give will be very clear ... on this issue of Jamal Khashoggi but also on the issue of Yemen," she told reporters on a flight to Buenos Aires.
While some European countries have suspended future arms sales to Riyadh in the aftermath of the journalist’s murder, the UK has not said whether it plans to end its economic ties to the Gulf kingdom.
On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that European G20 participants will coordinate on the Khashoggi case on Friday morning.
"Personally, I'm in favour of transparency and associating the international community in this affair, because the whole world is concerned," he said.
It was unclear whether the French president was calling for an international investigation beyond existing Turkish and Saudi probes.
Macron had what appeared to be a testy exchange with MBS at the summit on Friday, which was captured in video shared widely on social media.
Much of the audio is inaudible, however it is possible to make out bin Salman saying "Don't worry", to which Macron responds "I am worried". Later, Macron says: "You never listen to me", and bin Salman replies: "I will listen, of course."
MBS also "exchanged pleasantries" with Donald Trump at the summit, a senior White House official said, though the US president said the pair did not have any in-depth discussions.
The Saudi leader also had a friendly encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as the two were seen clasping hands and smiling as they greeted one another.
López Obrador, or AMLO as he is known, sees himself as the heir to Mexican giants like 19th-century reformer Benito Juárez, early 20th-century revolutionary Francisco Madero, and Lázaro Cárdenas, a popular leftist president during the 1930s. Critics see him more in the mold of Hugo Chávez, the socialist strongman who destroyed Venezuela. The big question is whether the so-called tropical Messiah will be able to fulfill his promises of national restoration, or whether his critics’ deepest fears of an authoritarian populist will come true.
López Obrador makes many people nervous for many of the same reasons that Donald Trump did during his run to the White House. He galvanized voters by attacking a corrupt establishment, made fantastic promises that seem hard to square with economic or fiscal reality, and he’s flirted with authoritarianism. (When he lost the race for president in 2006, he contested the results and questioned the legitimacy of the real winner, Felipe Calderón.) And as did Trump, AMLO comes into office with control of both houses of Congress, giving him unusual freedom of maneuver for a Mexican president.
But unlike Trump, AMLO has been an activist, mayor, and political figure for years, giving him a ballast of practical political experience. He began his career in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) before later becoming the national leader of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution. He also has, in stark contrast to Trump, a deep appreciation of history, which will help shape the course his administration takes. AMLO’s opposition to Peña Nieto’s energy reform, for instance, reflected the profound symbolic and historical importance that the 1938 nationalization of the oil sector has in Mexico.
“The grand sweep of history will color his decisions,” said Antonio Ortiz-Mena, a former Mexican government trade negotiator and economic official. “He sees himself as part of a narrative from Juárez through Madero through Cárdenas,” with himself as the fourth big hinge in Mexican history, he said.
The question that many in and outside Mexico are asking is which version of AMLO will take office. (In a symbolic bid to burnish his populist credentials, he’ll be working somewhere other than the traditional presidential residence of Los Pinos.) For decades, and during his earlier presidential runs, AMLO espoused old-school ideas, especially a statist approach to the economy. But since walking away with the election this summer, AMLO has surrounded himself with more pragmatic advisors, raising the prospect of a more moderate style in office.
Even his biggest critics concede that his 2000 to 2005 stint as mayor of Mexico City—considered one of the country’s most powerful political posts after the presidency—was a resounding success. He built much-needed infrastructure and revitalized the city center.
“His reputation by everybody who talked about him, even those who didn’t like him, was that he was a great mayor,” said Earl Anthony Wayne, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015
And while he had been a fierce critic of Peña Nieto’s efforts at reform, especially opening up the shriveling energy sector to foreign investment, AMLO appeared to moderate those views on the campaign trail this year.
The concerns center on what he’s done since winning the vote. In October, he suddenly canceled a $13-billion dollar airport construction project underway in Mexico City, sparking panic on the stock exchange and sending bonds and the peso plummeting. He’s also pushing through an $8 billion plan to build an oil refinery in his home state of Tabasco and a $6 billion to $8 billion plan to build a new railroad in underdeveloped southeastern Mexico.
Like the airport, those other big-ticket decisions were based on the results of non-binding, irregular referendums in which only a handful of eligible voters took part, eroding investor confidence in a predictable framework for economic policymaking. “It’s both the decisions themselves, and the decision-making process,” said Ortiz-Mena, who is now at Albright Stonebridge Group. “I’m much more concerned than I was a few weeks ago.”
The question of which way AMLO ultimately leans matters more than it did with other Mexican presidents. With majorities in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, fueled by popular disgust at rampant corruption and insecurity, AMLO has the ability to turn a lot of his campaign aspirations into policies that stick. In addition to a big bloc among his own coalition, both of the main opposition parties—the PRI and the National Action Party—are in utter disarray. “With his big majorities in Congress, he has the ability to do a lot,” said Wayne.
But even with his fondness for a centralized government, AMLO’s congressional coalition is a patchwork spanning the political spectrum, raising questions about what economic policy the government will ultimately pursue. “His coalition has a large group of people, from very practical, pragmatic pro-market camps to more radical reformists. That’s all under his tent,” said Wayne.
Two stunning developments in the special counsel's investigation shed light on investigators' focus on President Trump as a main subject of interest.(Video: Jenny Starrs /Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey November 29 at 7:56 PM
In two major developments this week, President Trump has been labeled in the parlance of criminal investigations as a major subject of interest, complete with an opaque legal code name: “Individual 1.”
New evidence from two separate fronts of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation casts fresh doubts on Trump’s version of key events involving Russia, signaling potential political and legal peril for the president. Investigators have now publicly cast Trump as a central figure of their probe into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.
Together, the documents show investigators have evidence that Trump was in close contact with his lieutenants as they made outreach to both Russia and WikiLeaks — and that they tried to conceal the extent of their activities.
On Thursday, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress when he insisted that Trump was not pursuing plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow after January 2016, casting Trump’s repeated claims that he had no business interests in Russia in a new light. A draft special counsel document revealed Tuesday also indicates that prosecutors are closely scrutinizing Trump’s interactions with a longtime adviser, Roger Stone, as Stone was allegedly seeking information about WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked Democratic emails.
Legal experts said it’s still unclear how much peril the president might face as a result of the new evidence Mueller has gathered about the Moscow project and WikiLeaks, but his prominence in the prosecutors’ papers puts the president in an awkward starring role.
“It’s deeply troubling. It’s not a place that anybody wants to be, or where you would want your friends or family to be,” former federal prosecutor Glen Kopp said. “And it’s certainly not a place that you would want your president to be.”
The many contradictions in Trump's relationship with Russia VIEW GRAPHIC
Trump, identified as “Individual 1” in Cohen’s guilty plea, was said to have received direct updates from Cohen as he pursued a Moscow Trump Tower project with the Kremlin up until June 14, 2016.
The president also appears in the draft charging document for Trump ally Jerome Corsi, who allegedly told Stone about WikiLeaks’ plans to release damaging Democratic emails in October of that year because he knew Stone was in “regular contact” with Trump. The Washington Post reported this week that Trump spoke with Stone the day after he got the alert from Corsi.
In the draft documents, prosecutors sought to have Corsi plead guilty to lying when he said he didn’t know about WikiLeaks’ plans and urging others to visit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to obtain emails damaging to Democrats.
Trump has given slightly differing accounts of his Moscow business ties over time. In July 2016, he tweeted: “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.” A day later he claimed, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”
In January 2017, he told a reporter: “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away.”
Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday that the president’s written answers to Mueller about the Moscow project, which he submitted just before Thanksgiving, conform with Cohen’s version of events. They discussed a project, starting in 2015, continuing into 2016, and it went nowhere, he said.
President Trump stops to talk with reporters Thursday about his former personal attorney Michael Cohen as he walks to Marine One from the White House to depart for the Group of 20 summit in Argentina. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
“The president, as far as he knows, he remembers there was such a proposal for a hotel,” Giuliani said. “He talked it over with Cohen as Cohen said. There was a nonbinding letter of intent that was sent. As far as he knows it never came to fruition. That was kind of the end of it.”
Alan Dershowitz, a Trump ally and constitutional lawyer, said Cohen’s confessions don’t suggest Trump committed any crime but could suggest that Trump wasn’t telling the public the whole truth about the Moscow deal.
“This is politically damaging, but I’m not sure how legally damaging it is,” Dershowitz said. “This is all about questionable political behavior. It’s a good reason for people voting against Trump. But I don’t see a crime yet.”
But Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and frequent critic, said the developments pose significant new challenges for the president.
“This is part of the fact pattern that gets to the heart of whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the campaign,” O’Brien said. “I think the unforgiving grinding force of the U.S. justice system, which he has tried to undermine since he became president, is encircling him. I don’t think we know where he will land. But he is certainly mired in something that he is ill-equipped, legally and personally, to handle.”
Some legal experts argued Mueller appears to be drawing a picture of a candidate who was beholden to the Kremlin. Emails released in the Cohen plea show Trump seeking a financial endorsement from the Russian government on a private project while Russian President Vladimir Putin was offering to say flattering things about Trump.
“It creates the potential for Trump to feel an obligation to pay back President Putin, or Russia in general that . . . do not put the best interests of America forward,” Kopp said. “You are creating a potential vulnerability for a future leader of America.”
Trump privately stewed as he followed news coverage of Cohen’s plea early Thursday morning, a White House official said.
A Justice official called the White House Counsel’s Office on Wednesday evening to let personnel know that Cohen would be pleading guilty in a case the following day, according to one person with direct knowledge of the notice. They were not told the details, however, which they learned about shortly before Cohen’s plea Thursday morning.
Giuliani said the president believed the news development was a gratuitous slap from the Mueller team just as he was about to depart the White House for a trip to the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.
In public, Trump was defiant, telling reporters that Cohen was a liar and a “weak person” who would do anything to save himself from fraud charges he faces related to his taxi business. Speaking before he stepped onto the Marine One helicopter for his trip, he also denigrated Cohen’s intelligence, calling him “not very smart.”
“He was convicted of various things unrelated to us,” Trump said. “He’s a weak person, and what he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence. So he’s lying about a project that everybody knew about. I mean, we were very open with it.”
He questioned the scrutiny of the Moscow project.
“There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it,” Trump said. “When I’m running for president, that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to do business.”
Trump often grows aggrieved seeing Cohen on TV, aides say. Among White House advisers, Cohen is seen as an existential threat — as much or more so than the Mueller investigation itself because of his longtime role as Trump’s fixer. Trump’s legal team did not learn until Thursday that Cohen had sat for dozens of hours of interviews with Mueller’s office, according to a senior administration official.
Trump was infuriated earlier this year when Cohen released tapes of him, and asked his lawyers and advisers if anything could be done to stop him from releasing any more.
The Trump legal team cast Cohen as a flawed character whose word is meaningless, as it had when he pleaded guilty in August to eight felony counts, including paying women for their silence about alleged affairs with Trump.
Legal experts said prosecutors were not likely to build a guilty plea — a brick in the overall case — on the word of one person. The prosecutors’ filings show they have corroborated and buttressed Cohen’s account with contemporaneous emails, and people familiar with the probe say they have also obtained corroborating testimony from other witnesses.
“This is obviously a significant plea and statement. It means that when the president was representing during the campaign that he had no business interests in Russia, that that wasn’t true,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat in line to become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “If the president and his associates were being untruthful in real time as they were pursuing this deal, what does it mean now about how much we can rely on what the president is saying about any continuing Russian financial interest?”
Giuliani said the president and his business have not tried to hide his pursuit of a Moscow tower project, and voluntarily disclosed some of the documents Mueller’s team used in its probe of Cohen for lying to Congress. According to a person familiar with the investigation, Cohen and the Trump Organization could not produce some of the key records upon which Mueller relies. Other witnesses provided copies of those communications.
In the White House, two aides said Trump had complained more in recent days about Mueller’s prosecutors and has kept close tabs on the comments of Corsi and Stone. Trump has praised his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort extensively for fighting Mueller’s team, which accused Manafort this week of breaching a plea agreement by lying repeatedly to prosecutors as part of his pledged cooperation in the Russia probe. Cohen had not been on the front of Trump’s mind, both of these aides said.
Many in the White House try to avoid talking with the president about the Mueller probe, for fear they will be subpoenaed. And both of the aides said it was unclear why Trump was complaining more about the investigation recently. During the midterm campaign, the president occasionally told advisers that people had forgotten about the Mueller probe and remarked positively that it was no longer dominating TV headlines.
Shortly after Trump publicly blasted Judge Tigar, Chief Justice John Roberts came publicly to Tigar’s defense. The chief justice announced that there are no Obama or Trump or Bush or Clinton judges, just hardworking defenders of the Constitution.
by Andrew Napolitano-
( November 29, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) When Donald Trump became president, he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and enforce federal laws “faithfully.” James Madison, who was the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention, insisted on using the word “faithfully” in the presidential oath and including the oath in the body of the Constitution because he knew that presidents would face the temptation to disregard laws they dislike.
The employment of the word “faithfully” in the presidential oath is an unambiguous reminder to presidents that they must enforce federal laws as they are written, not as presidents may wish them to be. Earlier this month, Trump succumbed to Madison’s feared temptation, and last week, a federal judge corrected him. Then an uproar ensued.
Here is the back story.
Federal immigration laws, as well as treaties to which the United States is a party, require that foreigners who are seeking asylum here may enter the United States across any border they can reach, whether at a designated portal or not. If they have not entered through a designated portal, they can be brought, without a warrant, to a portal for processing.
The feds must process all asylum applications from migrants who make prima-facie cases for asylum. Once an application has been made, the feds may release the migrant (as President Barack Obama did) into the general population, or they may detain the migrant (as President Trump has done), pending a trial before a federal immigration judge.
At the trial, the migrant has the burden of proving worthiness for asylum. That worthiness can be based only on government animosity toward the migrant or government failure to protect human rights and enforce property rights in the home country. If the migrant prevails at trial, asylum is granted, and a green card is issued. If not, deportation follows.
On Nov. 9, President Trump issued a proclamation directing the Border Patrol to deny entry to all migrants, including those with legitimate asylum claims, unless they come through government portals where Border Patrol personnel are present to address their applications. Though this sounds reasonable, it directly contradicts federal law, which expressly permits migrants to enter the U.S. anywhere.
When groups of migrants challenged Trump’s order in federal court in San Francisco, Judge Jon Tigar prevented the government from complying with the president’s proclamation. The judge did not make any value judgments, nor was he critical of the president’s motivation. Rather, he ruled that the law is clear: Immigrants seeking asylum may enter anywhere, and the president cannot change federal law; only Congress can.
Trump dismissed Judge Tigar’s ruling as meritless because the judge was appointed to the bench by former President Obama. The implication in Trump’s words was that Judge Tigar ruled against him for political reasons. In reality, Judge Tigar did what any judge would do; he prevented the president from changing federal law and required him to enforce the immigration laws as Congress has written them — and to do so faithfully.
Trump should not be surprised when judges rule against him when he takes the law into his own hands. He cannot close the border without an act of Congress and a lawful withdrawal from two treaties. He cannot refuse to accept asylum-seekers based on where they enter. He cannot use the military to enforce immigration laws — his own secretary of defense called this a “stunt” — without violating other federal laws.
Judge Tigar did not necessarily inject his personal ideology into his ruling (any more than the “Trump judge” who ruled for CNN and against the president did last week); he merely applied long-standing federal law. There is no room for ideology at the trial level. I know that personally from my own experience as a trial judge in New Jersey.
Shortly after Trump publicly blasted Judge Tigar, Chief Justice John Roberts came publicly to Tigar’s defense. The chief justice announced that there are no Obama or Trump or Bush or Clinton judges, just hardworking defenders of the Constitution. That comment was met by two more from Trump, who disputed it directly.
Who is correct?
There is no question that many federal judges are nominated by presidents because of shared views on public policy. But though this is ordinarily the case for appellate judges and, in the modern era, is always the case for Supreme Court justices, it is rarely the case for trial judges, of which Judge Tigar is one.
Trial judges do not make public policy. They apply statutes as written by Congress, pursuant to precedent as set forth by the Supreme Court and the intermediate appellate court to which they are subject.
President Trump
Yet we know that there is a kernel of truth in the president’s accusation and that there is a kernel of tongue in cheek in the chief justice’s contention. Surely, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would view Judge Tigar’s ruling more favorably than Justice Samuel Alito would. Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, would probably interpret the law literally, and Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, would probably give the president some wiggle room.
Yet the spectacle of the president and the chief justice disputing constitutional values is not a happy one. Here’s why. Under the Constitution, the three branches of the federal government — legislative, executive and judicial — are equals. Yet the judiciary has the final say on the meaning of the Constitution and the laws. The judicial branch is anti-democratic. Federal judges shouldn’t care what the public thinks. Their job is to apply the Constitution and interpret federal laws as they have been written, come what may.
For these reasons, federal judges and justices have life tenure. They do not need and should not seek public approval. And they should not enter public disputes — other than by their judicial rulings — for by doing so, they can appear as political as those in the other two branches.
