Trump Offers Deportation Protections in Exchange for Wall Funding - The New York Times

"WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Saturday that he would extend deportation protections for some undocumented immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion in funding for a wall along the border with Mexico.

In casting the proposal as a compromise, Mr. Trump sought to shift pressure to Democrats to end the government shutdown.

The president, delivering a 13-minute address from the White House, said he would extend the legal status of those facing deportation and support bipartisan legislation that would allow some immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children, known as Dreamers, to keep their work permits and be protected from deportation for three more years if they are revoked.

“That is our plan,” Mr. Trump said. “Straightforward, fair, reasonable and common sense with lots of compromise.” The proposal, Mr. Trump said, was intended to “break the logjam and provide Congress with a path forward.”

Trump Offers Deportation Protections in Exchange for Wall Funding - The New York Times

Opinion | Kamala Harris, Progressive Prosecutor - The New York Times

"A civil rights advocate, taking issue with an Op-Ed article, defends the senator’s record.





To the Editor:



Re Lara Bazelon’s Op-Ed article about Senator Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial record (nytimes.com, Jan. 17):



As a civil rights and racial justice and juvenile justice advocate in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, I would like to shed some light on Senator Kamala Harris’s record as a progressive prosecutor.



As district attorney, she was on the front end of changing the way we view incarceration. I used to run a program she created in 2005, Back on Track. It pioneered job training for nonviolent, first-time offenders. This didn’t just mean helping those who were formerly incarcerated. It diverted young people who were largely arrested for crack offenses into jobs, substance abuse treatment and apprenticeship programs, and got them housing and child care.



In other counties, those charged with these same crimes were getting sentences of 20 years. It was revolutionary and the recidivism rate among graduates was only 10 percent, far lower than the state average.



As Senator Harris has written and said before, she became a prosecutor to give the job a perspective it had sorely lacked: a voice for the voiceless and vulnerable. And that’s what she did.



She enacted the first statewide implicit bias and procedural justice training in the country and made her officers wear body cameras. She started pattern and practice investigations into discriminatory actions. She demanded that data on in-custody deaths and police shootings be made public to ensure accountability.



For decades, Kamala Harris has fought to make our system more just. I give her credit and hope that others will look at the totality of her record of reform before jumping to conclusions.



Lateefah Simon

Oakland, Calif.

The writer is president of the Akonadi Foundation and an advocate for civil rights and racial justice."



Opinion | Kamala Harris, Progressive Prosecutor - The New York Times

Chris Cuomo RIPS Trump's CRAZY Reaction After Mueller Calling Buzzfeed B...

Family Separation May Have Hit Thousands More Migrant Children Than Reported - The New York Times

"HOUSTON — The Trump administration most likely separated thousands more children from their parents at the Southern border than was previously believed, according to a report by government inspectors released on Thursday.



The federal government has reported that nearly 3,000 children were forcibly separated from their parents under last year’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, under which nearly all adults entering the country illegally were prosecuted, and any children accompanying them were put into shelters or foster care.



But even before the administration officially unveiled the zero-tolerance policy in the spring of 2018, staff of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees the care of children in federal custody, had noted a “sharp increase” in the number of children separated from a parent or guardian, according to the report from the agency’s Office of Inspector General.



As of December, the department had identified 2,737 children who were separated from their parents under the policy and required to be reunified by a federal court order issued in June 2018.



But that number does not represent the full scope of family separations. Thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court, the report said.



Thus, the total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is “unknown,” because of the lack of a coordinated formal tracking system between the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the arm of Health and Human Services that takes in the children, and the Department of Homeland Security, which separated them from their parents.



“This report confirms what we suspected: This cruel family separation practice was way bigger than the administration let on,” said Lee Gelernt, who challenged the policy in court on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We will be back in court and ask the judge to order the government to explain these numbers,” he said.



The family separations were a key part of the Trump administration’s effort to deter migrant families from trying to enter the country at the Southwest border, where they have been arriving in large numbers, most of them fleeing violence and deep poverty in Central America.



While the policy was framed as a decision to prosecute those who entered the United States illegally, it resulted in thousands of migrant parents spending months in agonized uncertainty, unable to communicate with their children and in many cases not knowing even where the children were.



Infants and toddlers were among the children who were put into foster homes or migrant children shelters, often hundreds or thousands of miles away from where their parents were detained. Under separate policies, the administration also made it difficult for relatives other than the children’s parents to take the children into their own homes.



After a review of internal government tallies, The New York Times found last year that more than 700 migrant children had been separated from their families in the months before the government officially announced the zero-tolerance policy.



On June 26, 2018, a federal judge in San Diego, in response to the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, directed the federal government to halt the separations at the border and to reunite children with their parents. President Trump rescinded the policy that same month.



However, the federal inspectors found that separations have continued to occur: As of November, the report found, Health and Human Services had received at least 118 children who had been separated from their families since the court order.



Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversaw the family separations at the border, have said they have separated families only when necessary, such as when a parent is facing a serious criminal prosecution, or when authorities have reason to believe that the adult accompanying the child is not an appropriate guardian.



“The report vindicates what D.H.S. has long been saying,” said Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the department. “For more than a decade it was, and continues to be, standard for apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk, or serious criminal activity by the adult. We are required under the law that Congress passed to send all unaccompanied alien children to H.H.S.”



Ann Maxwell, the Health and Human Services Department’s assistant inspector general for evaluation and inspections, said the separations appeared to have been occurring for a full year before the court issued its order.



“Thousands of children were separated from parents and guardians, referred to H.H.S. and released from H.H.S. care before the court order,” Ms. Maxwell said in a conference call with reporters.



“The total number is unknown,” she said. “It is certainly more than 2,737, but how many more, precisely, is unknown.” Moreover, that number may never be known: Department officials, she said, had told her office that there were “no efforts underway to identify that. It would take away resources from children already in care.”



In an email after the call, Ms. Maxwell’s spokesman confirmed that inspectors believed the number of separated children may be “thousands” more than the 2,737 reported to the court.



The inspectors provided no precise data to support that estimate, though Ms. Maxwell said that Health and Human Services had noted a “spike” in the frequency of children being separated from their families, from 0.3 percent of all apprehended families in 2016 to 3.8 percent in 2017.



Family separations have occurred for years, but they had previously been “fairly rare,” Ms. Maxwell said, occurring only in cases where there were concerns about child welfare. That changed in 2017, she said.



Ms. Maxwell said that most of the families on the list of separated families had been reunited, pursuant to the court order. But she said the figures continued to evolve, for several reasons. The absence of an integrated data system to track separated families through the two federal agencies that oversee them was one problem, she said.



Also complicating the issue, she said, was the complex problem of determining which children should be considered officially “separated” from their families. That meant that the list of families entitled to reunification was still being revised as late as December 2018, more than five months after the court order took effect.



The Department of Health and Human Services, in its official response, said it had accounted publicly for all children separated from relatives at the border and then delivered to the agency for care.



“H.H.S. faced challenges in identifying separated children,” the agency said. “The effort undertaken by H.H.S. was complex, fast-moving and resource-intensive.”



The inspector general’s report, the department said, “provides a window into the herculean work of the H.H.S. career staff to rapidly identify children in O.R.R. care who had been separated from their parents and reunify them.” O.R.R. refers to the resettlement office.



The department emphasized that the inspector general found “no evidence whatsoever” that it had lost track of children in its care. Though there were delays in linking children to parents, partly as a result of the Department of Homeland Security’s tracking system. When immigration agents separated families at the border, records that could have been used to connect parents and children were automatically deleted because the computer system had not been modified to account for separated families.



In its response on Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services said that the inspector general’s report “corroborates what H.H.S. has said all along: H.H.S. can determine the location and status of any child in O.R.R. care at any time by accessing the case management records for the child, or the O.R.R. online portal.”



Family Separation May Have Hit Thousands More Migrant Children Than Reported - The New York Times

Donald Trump Told Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About Moscow Tower Project. (Clear grounds for impeachment, suborning perjury a criminal offense)

Donald Trump Told Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About Moscow Tower Project

Rudy Guiliani says, 'I have never said there was no collusion' between Trump campaign and Russia - The Washington Post. HaHa, Here We go. LOL

Rudy Guiliani says, 'I have never said there was no collusion' between Trump campaign and Russia - The Washington Post

What are the five main claims about Donald Trump and his team from the alleged Russian dossier?

It is time for us to revisit the allegations made in the Russian Dossier.   The claims made seem even more credible than they did initially and they were believable then.



"At some point in 2016, a Washington DC based investigative agency began working with a former British foreign intelligence officer to look into Donald Trump's ties with Russia. 



Together they compiled a report, purportedly based on testimony from a network of high-placed sources in the Russian government and Mr Trump’s entourage. 



Over the summer, the document passed through the hands of senior Democratic party officials, the Republican senator John McCain (who was handed a copy by a former British diplomat who had served in Moscow and passed the document on to the FBI), and several Washington-based journalists.



The Telegraph first heard of some of the allegations in August, when a US former intelligence source said the Russians had material to blackmail Mr Trump. He cited a different source to the former British intelligence officer.



In a press conference on Wednesday, Mr Trump dismissed all of the claims, calling them "nonsense that was released by, maybe the intelligence agencies, who knows, but maybe the intelligence agencies ... It should never have been written, it should never have been released."



"It's all fake news. It didn't happen. It's phony stuff. It was a group of opponents who got together, sick people, who put that out."



These are the five central claims made in the report, which at the time of writing has not been independently verified.



1: Donald Trump’s family has been a Russian intelligence asset for at least five years 

The report says that the Russian relationship with Mr Trump works both ways. In exchange for assistance against Mrs Clinton’s campaign, Mr Trump has been gathering intelligence on the financial and other activities of Russian businessmen in the US, and passing it back to the Kremlin.



In a report dated June 2016, the author cites two anonymous sources – one a senior figure in the foreign ministry, the other an ex-Russian intelligence officer “still active in the Kremlin” – saying the relationship goes back at least five years.



That would mean Mr Trump’s relationship with Russia began in 2011. In a separate dispatch, dated to July 2016, the author cites a “Russian émigré” source on Mr Trump’s team who repeats the claim of gathering information about Russia businessmen, but says the relationship actually began eight years ago – in other words, 2008.



It is not made clear how this relationship was supposedly established, nor how it benefited Mr Trump prior to his election bid. As the report notes, his efforts to entice the Russian real estate sector have met will little success. 



Mr Trump said: “Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is "A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE." Very unfair!” He presumably meant that the substance of the report, not the Russian denial of it, was unfair.



2: The Kremlin holds “Kompromat” on him

The report claims the Russian government has gathered “kompromat” – embarrassing material that can be used for blackmail – on Mr Trump, including his alleged use of prostitutes in Moscow and St Petersburg.



One set of allegations, regarding a visit to Moscow in 2013, is very specific.



This claim is consistent with a few publicly known facts: it is true that Mr Trump visited Moscow that year to host a beauty pageant. It is also true that the Russian secret services have used embarrassing sex videos for political means in the past.



But there is no public evidence that stands up these particular allegations about what happened in the Ritz Moscow’s presidential suite in 2013. 



The dossier (perhaps conveniently) claims the Kremlin promised not to use the material in view of Mr Trump’s helpfulness over the years, and that witnesses of the St Petersburg escapades have been ‘silenced’. 



Mr Trump tweeted on Wednesday:  “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”



3: Trump's team knew about, paid for, and helped cover up the Russian hacking of the DNC

Not only did the Kremlin order hackers to steal and leak embarrassing emails from the Democratic Convention in order to damage Hillary Clinton, the dossier claims. 



According to the author’s host of anonymous sources, Mr Trump’s team was aware of the operation, partially paid the hackers, and cooperated on contingency plans for a cover up should it be found out.



The key claim is that Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Mr Trump, met with Kremlin contacts in Prague to discuss how to funnel the payments and cover up the trail. Responding to the allegations, Mr Cohen said he had never visited Prague in his life.



Investigative journalists with the Czech weekly Respek say they have found no record of him arriving in the city by air (he could conceivably have driven in from another European country, however, thanks to the Schengen zone’s open borders). 



The man he is said to have met, Oleg Solodukhin, is a serving diplomat at the Russian embassy there who is well known to in Prague think tank circles.  He denied meeting Mr Cohen when approached by reporters from Respekt.



4: The Kremlin “offered Trump an oil deal to drop sanctions”

Another claim centres on a much reported, but never proven (or disproven) meeting between Carter Page, a one-time Trump adviser, and Igor Sechin, Mr Putin’s long-time ally and the head of state oil company Rosneft.



The alleged meeting with Mr Sechin was first reported by Yahoo news, citing “intelligence reports” in September. It is unclear, but seems likely, that Yahoo’s source was the same report published by Buzzfeed.



The dossier claims Mr Sechin offered Mr Trump’s associates brokerage of 19 percent of Rosneft in a privatization plan in exchange for the suspension of sanctions against Russia should he win the election.



Mr Page did indeed visit Moscow in July, where he gave a speech at the New Economic School.



But both he and spokesmen for Rosneft have denied the “secret meeting” ever occurred.



Mr Page in September called the claim  “completely false and inconceivable”.



5: The operation caused an earthquake in the Kremlin

Vladimir Putin sacked Sergei Ivanov, his long serving chief of staff, for wrongly predicting the leaks would not be traced back to Russia, the dossier claims. 



Sources cited by the author say Mr Ivanov, a former KGB spy, and the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, persuaded Mr Putin to authorise the DNC leaks despite warnings from the Russian foreign ministry that it could be counter productive.



When the foreign ministry proved to be right, Mr Ivanov had to go, according to this account.



Like all Kremlinology, this claim is neither entirely implausible nor easily verifiable.



Mr Ivanov’s resignation in August did indeed come as a shock for Kremlinologists, and led commentators to propose several  lurid  (and utterly unsubstantiated) theories, including the idea that he was plotting a coup.



There are, however, much more mundane explanations.



For example, Kremlin spin doctors briefed journalists at the time that Mr Ivanov retired because he was exhausted, ill, and badly affected by the death of his only son.  That may well be a political cover story, but it is at least as plausible as any other tale.



The dossier is also inconsistent.



Another source quoted in a different memos says Mr Ivanov was furious at the leaks, which were actually coordinated by Mr Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.



The sources even claim the fallout from the hacking scandal sparked a three-way conflict between Mr Peskov, Mr Ivanov, and Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister.



This kind of juicy insider detail is the bread and butter of Kremlinology. And because the Kremlin is so opaque, it will probably be years before we know whether it is true or false.



Mr Peskov called the claims “pulp fiction.”  “This is an absolute canard, an absolute fabrication, and it’s complete nonsense,” he said in a statement on Wednesday. “The Kremlin does not engage in collecting kompromat.”


What are the five main claims about Donald Trump and his team from the alleged Russian dossier?

Border Wall: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Why Is Trump So Friendly Toward Russia and Putin? - The Atlantic

Why Is Trump So Friendly Toward Russia and Putin? - The Atlantic