THE GOVERNMENT’S OPPOSITION TO MICHAEL COHEN’S MOTION FOR A TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/2018_0413_cohen_vs_USA.pdf
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THE GOVERNMENT’S OPPOSITION TO MICHAEL COHEN’S MOTION FOR A TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/2018_0413_cohen_vs_USA.pdf
The U.S. Justice Department can’t make cooperation with federal immigration policies a consideration in awarding grants to local law enforcement agencies for community-oriented policing, a federal judge said.
The ruling in a lawsuit Los Angeles brought against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions marks a new setback in President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on sanctuary cities where police forces have refused to get involved in enforcing immigration law.
U.S. District Judge Manuel Real agreed in a ruling Wednesday with the city’s argument that the Justice Department had abused its power by awarding bonus points to grant applicants that commit to cooperating with federal immigration authorities and policies. The grant program was created to help local police departments hire officers for community-oriented policing, or COPS.
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump is prodding his military advisers to agree to a more sweeping retaliatory strike in Syria than they consider prudent, and is unhappy with the more limited options they have presented to him so far, White House and other administration officials said.
In meetings with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump has been pushing for an attack that not only would punish the Syrian regime but also exact a price from two of its international patrons, Russia and Iran, a White House official said.
“He wants Mattis to push the limits a little bit more,” the official said.
Mr. Mattis has resisted, worried that the administration lacks a broader strategy in Syria and that military strikes could trigger a dangerous clash with Russia and Iran, U.S. officials said.
Over the past two days, the Pentagon has had two opportunities to launch attacks against Syria in reprisal for a suspected chemical weapons attack, but Mr. Mattis halted them, according to U.S. and defense officials.
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Aides said Mr. Trump is tightly focused on the Syria problem and has been quizzing staff about the best response—even members of the legal team defending him in the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump has asked for briefing materials and was moved by images of children with foam bubbling from their mouths, symptoms of chemical weapons poisoning, aides said.
At the president’s side as he weighs military action is John Bolton, a new national security adviser in his first week on the job.
Mr. Bolton favors an attack that would be “ruinous,” crippling some part of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and national infrastructure, according to a person familiar with Mr. Bolton’s thinking. Mr. Bolton doesn’t want a reprise of the 2017 attack hitting an airfield that would be up and running in short order, this person said.
In his absorbing new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey calls the Trump presidency a “forest fire” that is doing serious damage to the country’s norms and traditions.
“This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values,” Comey writes. “His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty.”
Decades before he led the F.B.I.’s investigation into whether members of Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime family; and he doesn’t hesitate in these pages to draw a direct analogy between the Mafia bosses he helped pack off to prison years ago and the current occupant of the Oval Office.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
The U.S. has had presidents who used the military to distract from domestic disasters, fabricated pretexts for war, or showed apathy toward civilian casualties. But we have never had a president whose greatest loyalty appears to be to foreign backers, nor have we had a pan-warmonger as national security adviser in an administration with a barely functioning State Department. It is difficult to say whether the U.S. winning a war–in a conventional sense–is the goal of Trump and Bolton at all.
That may sound strange–Trump’s obsession with “winning” is infamous. But the winning is always more about Trump more than it is about the United States–and at times the concepts are mutually exclusive. Trump’s definition of an attack on the U.S. is when his lawyer’s home is raided by the FBI, not when Russia attacks our elections and infrastructure.
As president, his main goals have been building a kleptocracy and dodging criminal prosecution, and any war– particularly when it involves Russia–will be enacted with those twin aims in mind. If Trump distracts the public from his own misdeeds, and financially benefits and consolidates power through war, it will not matter to him how many lives are lost–including the lives of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen. His callousness toward U.S. troops places him in stark contrast to any predecessor.
Bolton is similarly unconventional. Unlike the vast majority of state officials, he does not regret the Iraq War, and has seemingly learned nothing from its failures. His main regret seems to be that his desire for a similarly reckless invasion of other nations was not carried out. But Trump, with his visceral revulsion at the concept of service, is still the greatest danger.
It is Trump whose past has finally caught up with him; it is Trump who stands the most to lose; it is Trump who unilaterally can launch nuclear weapons. Trump has shown that human beings have little inherent value to him. If Trump senses he may have to make a personal sacrifice, he will sacrifice the world instead.
President Trump’s advisers have concluded that a wide-ranging corruption investigation in New York poses a greater and more imminent threat to the president than even the special counsel’s investigation, according to several people close to Mr. Trump.
As his lawyers went to court on Friday to try to block prosecutors from reading files that were seized from his longtime personal lawyer and fixer this week, Mr. Trump found himself increasingly isolated in mounting a response. He continued to struggle to hire a new criminal lawyer, and some of his own aides were reluctant to advise him about a response for fear of being dragged into a criminal investigation themselves.
The raids on Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, came as part of a monthslong federal investigation based in New York, court records show, and were sweeping in their breadth. In addition to searching his home, office and hotel room, F.B.I. agents seized material from Mr. Cohen’s cellphones, tablet, laptop and safe deposit box, according to people briefed on the warrants. Prosecutors revealed in court documents that they had already secretly obtained many of Mr. Cohen’s emails.
Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen on Friday to “check in,” according to two people briefed on the call. Depending on what else was discussed, the call could be problematic, as lawyers typically advise their clients against discussing investigations.
China’s military put on something of a show in the contested South China Sea this week. In its largest-ever maritime exercise, the People’s Liberation Army sent forth 48 warships, 76 aircraft, and more than 10,000 personnel, with president Xi Jinping making an appearanceyesterday to watch the proceedings and address the troops.
Speaking aboard a destroyer and dressed in military fatigues, Xi reiterated the goal of transforming the nation’s navy into a world-class force, adding, “The mission of building a mighty people’s navy has never been more urgent than it is today.”
A former Russian spy helped Donald Trump’s business team seek financing for a Trump-branded tower in the heart of Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
This connection between Trump and Russian intelligence — made public here for the first time — is known to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and raises fresh questions about the president’s connections to the Kremlin. The former agent, who had served in Russia’s military intelligence arm known as the GRU and later worked as an arms dealer, negotiated for financing from a Russian state-owned bank that was under US sanctions at the time.
But there is a twist: The former Russian spy also helped pass intelligence to the United States government on key national security matters, including al-Qaeda’s weapons caches and North Korea’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons. BuzzFeed News is not naming the Russian agent because two US intelligence officials said that doing so would endanger his life.
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The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.
It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the White House. Undercutting Trump’s repeated pronouncements that “there is no evidence of collusion,” it also could ratchet up the stakes if the president tries, as he has intimated he might for months, to order Mueller’s firing.
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Cohen has vehemently denied for months that he ever has been in Prague or colluded with Russia during the campaign. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment for this story.
It’s unclear whether Mueller’s investigators also have evidence that Cohen actually met with a prominent Russian – purportedly Konstantin Kosachev, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — in the Czech capital. Kosachev, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of a body of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, also has denied visiting Prague during 2016. Earlier this month, Kosachev was among 24 high-profile Russians hit with stiff U.S. sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s meddling.
But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016 as the ex-spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential. He wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the so-called Schengen Area in which 26 nations operate with open borders.
The disclosure still left a puzzle: The sources did not say whether Cohen took a commercial flight or private jet to Europe, and gave no explanation as to why no record of such a trip has surfaced.
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