Shut Down News
The Shutdown continued into this week, making it the longest in history.
Pelosi canceled the State of the Union today saying that she does not want to put the security and secret service through the work to prepare for one when they are not getting paid due to the shutdown.
Trump and his White House was quiet for about 24 hours. Then they released a letter to Pelosi saying the he was canceling a congressional trip to Afghanistan she was planning on taking Thursday afternoon.
Coppins reports on Friday that the mood in Congress is bleak, that the only thing that will force Trump and/or Pelosi to deal is a national disaster that results from the shutdown.
The Democrats offered an extra billion dollars for border security. Saturday afternoon, Trump announced his offer: three years of protections from deportation for Dreamers in exchange for $5.7 billion for the wall.
In Russia News
There continues to be debate over whether is it appropriate for the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation against the president. Jack Goldsmith admits that we don’t have all the facts that the FBI did, but it is troubling if FBI agents chose to investigate a president for adopting a foreign policy they disagree with. David French writes a good counter argument, that Executive Order 12333 delegates to the FBI the responsibility of investigating “espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers.” He writes: “If Russia has engaged in “espionage” or “other intelligence activities” to induce the president (knowingly or unknowingly) to act on its behalf, then those actions (and their effects) are within the scope of the FBI’s mission. It’s black-letter law under a currently operative presidential order.”
The Senate voted on whether to allow sanctions to continue against Deripaska’s aluminum companies. 11 Republicans joined the Democrats but the 60 vote threshold was not met, so the sanctions will end.
Bob Barr had his two day confirmation hearing this week. He promised to protect the Mueller investigation and allow it to conclude.
At 10:11pm Thursday night Buzzfeed (Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold) dropped a story that says they have two federal law enforcement officials who say there is documentary evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow.
Friday evening the Special Counsel Office released a statement about the Buzzfeed story: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”
Marcy Wheeler was skeptical of the story even before the SCO’s press release.
Immigration News
A federal judge blocked Trump’s move to add a citizenship question to the 202 census.
The Inspector General for DHHS released a report on child separation that claims and unknown number–but as many as “thousands”–of children were separated from their parents at the border prior to Trump and Session’s Zero Tolerance Policy:
- “Because of the federal government’s failure to keep records about which children in its care had been separated from their parents, the public will never know the full scope of the Trump administration’s use of family separation against border crossers in Trump’s first year and a half in office.”
- “Sabraw’s order [to tally and reunify] only applied to children who were in HHS custody on June 26. It didn’t apply to children who had already been released.”
- “In both years [2017-18], parents and close relatives made up about 90 percent of sponsors.But it is possible that a disproportionate number of separated children were placed with unrelated sponsors as foster children — or released because they chose to be returned to their home country (perhaps to reunite with their parents). We don’t know. We’ll never know.”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.0%