DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iranian lawmaker offered a $3 million reward to anyone who killed U.S. President Donald Trump and said Iran could avoid threats if it had nuclear arms, ISNA news agency reported on Tuesday amid Tehran's latest standoff with Washington.
U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood dismissed the reward as "ridiculous", telling reporters in Geneva it showed the "terrorist underpinnings" of Iran's establishment.
Tensions have steadily escalated since Trump pulled Washington out of Tehran's nuclear agreement with world powers in 2018 and reimposed U.S. sanctions. The standoff erupted into tit-for-tat military strikes this month.
"On behalf of the people of Kerman province, we will pay a $3 million reward in cash to whoever kills Trump," lawmaker Ahmad Hamzeh told the 290-seat parliament, ISNA reported.
He did not say if the reward had any official backing from Iran's clerical rulers.
The city of Kerman, in the province south of the capital, is the hometown of Qassem Soleimani, a prominent Iranian commander whose killing in a drone strike ordered by Trump on Jan. 3 in Baghdad prompted Iran to fire missiles at U.S. targets in Iraq.
"If we had nuclear weapons today, we would be protected from threats ... We should put the production of long-range missiles capable of carrying unconventional warheads on our agenda. This is our natural right," he was quoted as saying by ISNA.
The United States and it Western allies have long accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons. Tehran insists it has never sought nuclear arms and never will, saying its nuclear work is for research and to master the process to generate electricity.
The 2015 nuclear agreement overall was designed to increase the time Iran would need to obtain enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb. Parties to the deal believed, at the time, Iran could produce enough material in two to three months if it wanted.
Under the deal, known as the JCPOA, Iran received sanctions relief in return for curbing its nuclear activities. In response to Washington's withdrawal from the pact and pressure from U.S. sanctions, Iran has rolled back its commitments to the deal.
A judge on Friday sentenced former Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), an early and staunch ally of President Donald Trump, to 26 monthsin prison after he pleaded guilty last September to conspiracy to commit securities fraud.
Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, used his position as the largest shareholder in the Australian biotechnology company Innate Immunotherapeutics to illegally give other stockholders an inside tip that a test of the company’s main product had failed.
“You were a member of the board, that has legal significance. You owed a duty to Innate and you betrayed that duty,” U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick said during the sentencing. “It makes people believe the market is rigged.”
Federal prosecutors earlier this week urged a sentence of close to five years.
Before falling under criminal investigation, Collins had used his Trump endorsement to raise his profile in Washington. He bragged about the clout he gained from his early backing of Trump, claiming it made him “significantly more visible.” And he was an early adopter of Trump’s bullying and blustering style, a copycat routine that has become popular throughout the GOP.
Collins, who represented a district that covers much of western New York, committed the crime that sent him to prison while he was visiting the White House for a June 22, 2017, congressional picnic. He received an email from the CEO of Innate Immuno announcing that the company’s main drug the company’s future hinged on had failed a key test. Collins then called his son, another shareholder, from the South Lawn of the White House to tell him about the news and to plan for them to dump the stock.
The next morning Collins, his son and the father of his son’s fiancée sold their stock in the company before the drug test failure was announced and while a freeze on trading was in place for the company’s shares in Australian stock markets. They each saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling early. The company stock plunged 92% after it publicly announced the drug’s failed test.
Well before Collins broke the law, his odd position as the largest shareholder of Innate Immuno attracted attention. The Wall Street Journal and The Buffalo News both reported in January 2017 on suspicious trades Collins and other House Republican lawmakers made as Congress passed a bill that included provisions beneficial to Innate Immuno and other biotechnology firms. He also reportedly bragged to colleagues about how many “millionaires I’ve made in Buffalo.”
An investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics in 2017 found that Collins violated House ethics rules by providing nonpublic information to investors and visiting the National Institutes of Health in his official capacity to discuss Innate Immuno drug trials.
Collins, 69, was indicted and arrested for wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to the FBI on Aug. 8, 2018. After his arrest Collins initially said he would not run for reelection in 2018. But he reversed course, ran for his seat and won by less than one percentage point. He had won reelection in 2016 with 67% of the vote. His resignation from office became official last Oct. 1.
Collins was first elected to his House seat in 2012. A former mechanical engineer and business owner, he served as Erie County executive from 2007-11.
Throughout the investigation into his illegal conduct, Collins struck a Trumpian pose as an innocent targeted as part of a “partisan witch hunt.”
He attacked The Buffalo News for “making up fake news on folks [the paper] can’t beat at the ballot box.” He called his then-colleague Rep. Louise Slaughter, a Buffalo-area Democrat who has since died, a “despicable human being” for filing an ethics complaint against him. And he attacked investigations into his activities as a “partisan witch hunt.”
In the wake of his guilty plea, his lawyers argued in court for a lenient sentence, saying his actions were impulsive and that he has suffered enough by losing his political career.
Collins’ son and the father of his fiancée also pleaded guilty in the case and await sentencing
Quickly joining Collins in early 1026 as Trump’s second official backer on Capitol Hill was then-Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) ― who also now faces prison time. Huner pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws in December, gave up his House seat earlier this week and awaits sentencing. Like Collins, Hunter initially characterized the charges facing him as a “witch hunt.”
Nancy Pelosi Rips ‘Shameful’ Facebook: They ‘Schmooze’ Trump for Tax Breaks
Sean Burch
Nancy Pelosi Rips ‘Shameful’ Facebook: They ‘Schmooze’ Trump for Tax Breaks
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped into Facebook and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg during a Thursday press conference, saying the tech giant is “shameful” and that it has looked to “schmooze” the Trump administration in order to get tax breaks.
“The Facebook business model is strictly to make money,” Pelosi said. “They don’t care about the impact on children, they don’t care about truth, they don’t care about where this is all coming from.”
Pelosi was responding to a question on whether Zuckerberg and other tech executives have “too much power.” Her sharp criticism adds to a growing number of Democratic politicians who have skewered the company in recent months for its decision to not fact-check its political ads. It also comes a week after President Trump said Zuckerberg had recently complimented him for being “number 1 on Facebook.”
“All they want are their tax cuts and no anti-trust action against them,” Pelosi continued. “They schmooze this administration in that regard.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Pelosi, who represents San Francisco, which is about 30 miles north of Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters, also skewered Facebook for not checking “on the money from Russia in the last election.”
The impact of bogus ads stemming from Russian troll farms has been a heated topic since the 2016 U.S. election, but there is little reason to believe it played a major role in shaping the result; a study from Oxford University found Kremlin-backed trolls spent less than $75,000 on Facebook ads between 2015 and 2017. Facebook has since made several changes to its ad accounting, introducing an ad library that publicly shares details on how much political advertisers are spending. It also now requires all U.S. political advertisers to register with a U.S. address.
You can watch a clip of Pelosi’s response below:
Pelosi criticizes Facebook, which has an office in her district: "All they want are their tax cuts and no antitrust action against them and they schmooze this administration in that regard…They intend to be accomplices for misleading the American people" https://t.co/7DMcsOnnizpic.twitter.com/P6dI9a1LEl
With preparations for the Senate impeachment trial underway, there are still several days before next week’s opening arguments, leaving a vacuum Republicans and Democrats will fill with debate over whether witnesses will be allowed to testify.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been laying the groundwork for weeks to argue against witnesses in the Senate trial. On Thursday morning he continued that effort, painting the House impeachment inquiry as “slapdash.”
“The House’s hour is over,” he said. “The Senate’s time is at hand.”
McConnell’s case against witnesses is built on a key premise that he has worked hard to establish: the idea that the House is a less serious, more partisan body whose members are more prone to take a short-term view.
“The Framers set up the Senate specifically to act as a check against the short-termism and runaway passions to which the House of Representatives might fall victim,” McConnell said.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (Screengrab via Senate.gov)
Historically, McConnell’s characterization of the difference between the Senate and House has been accurate. House members are elected every two years, and so have to worry far more about how each decision affects their chances of reelection. Senators stand for reelection every six years, giving them a bit more independence from the momentary whims of voters.
However, a few things have weakened the contrast between the Senate and House in recent years. Primaries have been increasingly dominated by hard-line extremists, making bipartisan cooperation far less common in the Senate than it used to be. Members now have to run a gauntlet to win election and then must worry far more than in the past about a more conservative or liberal candidate using any sign of cooperation with the other side against them in the next cycle.
And McConnell himself played a significant role in escalating the toxic atmosphere in the Senate in 2016 when he refused to allow a vote on then-President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
“That characterization that McConnell made, of how the Framers anticipated the Senate would be a speed bump or a cooling mechanism against partisan passions, is exactly right. But that’s not what he did when he denied Merrick Garland a vote,” Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, told Yahoo News.
“Now things have been getting more partisan than before,” Rosen said, noting that Democrats filibustered Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch in 2017.
“It's not McConnell alone. And then Garland didn't come out of nowhere. But it certainly was a new frontier in partisanship,” Rosen said.
McConnell’s power play left many observers with the impression that there is nothing he will not do to consolidate power for the Republican Party, all while cloaking himself in the language of an institutionalist.
“We can put aside animal reflexes and animosity and coolly consider how to best serve our country in the long run, so that we can break factional fevers before they jeopardize the core institutions of our government,” McConnell said Thursday morning.
Yet critics see McConnell, largely because of Garland, as being at the very heart of the problem he spoke about in a Dec. 19 floor speech about institutions and norms.
“Historians will regard this as a great irony of this era: that so many who professed such concern for our norms and traditions themselves proved willing to trample our constitutional order to get their way,” McConnell said.
President Barack Obama applauds Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
Rosen noted that McConnell’s blocking of Garland “wasn't unconstitutional, but it is odd to have done that, to have so broken the traditions of bipartisan comity and then give a speech praising the Senate as a backstop against partisan passions.”
But the notion of the Senate as a higher-minded body than the House is key to McConnell’s argument that the lower chamber conducted an incomplete investigation into a whistleblower’s allegation that President Trump directed a pressure campaign on the Ukrainian government to inflict political harm on a rival for the presidency, Joe Biden.
“Previous impeachments came after months, if not years, of investigations and hearings,” McConnell said Thursday. “The House cut short their own inquiry, declined to pursue their own subpoenas and denied the president due process. But now they want the Senate to redo their homework and rerun the investigation.”
Democrats want a few things in the Senate trial: live testimony from witnesses who spoke to the House impeachment inquiry, the ability to display video footage of comments by Trump and others in his administration, testimony from four top current and former advisers to Trump who did not testify in the House process, and documents that the White House has so far refused to turn over.
It’s possible that McConnell will unify Republican senators around blocking most, if not all, of these requests.
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., told CNN that the Senate doesn’t need to hear “new evidence.”
“That’s not our job. The job is to respond to what we’ve been given and the case that was built by the House,” Perdue said. “Our job is to look at what they brought us and decide if that rises to the level of impeachment.”
However, McConnell will need to have 51 votes in favor of any proposal to bar new witnesses or documents. His party has a 53-47 majority, but a handful of Republican senators have signaled that they are open to hearing from at least one new witness: John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser.
Then-national security adviser John Bolton in 2019. (Photo: Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images)
The Democratic case is simple.
"They’re afraid of the truth,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday in a press conference.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “the president says he wants the truth, but he blocks every attempt to get the facts.”
Schumer called on McConnell to live up to the sentiments he expressed Wednesday evening after Pelosi ended a monthlong stalemate and named impeachment managers.
“The best way for the Senate to rise to the occasion would be to retire partisan considerations and to have everyone agree on the parameters of a fair trial,” Schumer said. “A trial without witnesses is not a trial. A trial without documents is not a trial.”
My Op Ed: #MoscowMitch McConnell is a known liar and traitor who is guilty of treason. He should be tried and executed for his crimes which now include obstruction of justice.
Trump did not understand Pearl Harbor, new book reveals: 'What's this all about?'
Donald Trump barely knew of Pearl Harbor, was ignorant about the basics of geography and complained the US constitution was like reading “a foreign language”, a new book reveals.
A Very Stable Genius, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, is the latest book detailing the Trump administration’s tumultuous three years in the White House.
Named after Mr Trump’s self-declared intellectual brilliance, the book, excerpts of which have been published by The Washington Post, reveals his litany of missteps and willingness to break long-standing legal and ethical norms since becoming president in 2017.
“Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Mr Trump reportedly asked John Kelly, his then-chief of staff, when they took a private tour in 2017 of the USS Arizona Memorial, a ship commemorating the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.
"Trump had heard the phrase 'Pearl Harbor' and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else," write the authors, who quote a former White House adviser concluding the US president was “dangerously uninformed”.
During a meeting with Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister’s “eyes bulged out in surprise”, the Washington Post reporters claim, when Mr Trump told him: “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”
China and India in fact share more than 2,000 miles of common border.
Mr Modi’s expression “shifted from shock and concern to resignation”, with aides telling the authors the Indians “took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the US following the meeting.
Foreshadowing the later special counsel investigation into his ties with Russia, during the presidential transition Mr Trump interrupted an interview with a potential secretary of state to inquire about when he would be able to meet Vladimir Putin.
"When can I meet Putin? Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?" he reportedly asked.
When the leaders did meet, at a G20 summit in Hamburg, Mr Trump dismissed the expertise of his then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson, an oil executive who knew Mr Putin personally, telling him: “I have had a two-hour meeting with Putin. That's all I need to know ... I've sized it all up. I've got it.”
He also clashed with Mr Tillerson in 2017 when he asked his help in attempting to ditch the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a decades-old law banning Americans from bribing foreign officials for business deals.
"It's just so unfair that American companies aren't allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas. We're going to change that," Mr Trump said, according to the authors, who claim the president complained the rule prevented industry friends and his own company officials from paying off foreign governments.
When Mr Trump early in his tenure agreed to feature in an HBO documentary in which all living presidents read from the constitution, Mr Trump blamed others in the room when he struggled to read the text.
"It's like a foreign language,” he allegedly complained.
Another chapter reveals Mr Trump speculated an ex-wife of former White House official Rob Porter, who was forced to resign over domestic abuse allegations, faked a photograph in order to frame her ex-husband.
The image, which surfaced online, showed Colbie Holderness sporting a black eye.
“Maybe Holderness purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter?" Mr Trump reportedly said.
The book, the authors say, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with hundreds of sources, and corroborated when possible with documentation.
Sen. Martha McSally called a CNN reporter a “liberal hack” and refused to answer his questions on Thursday, which took place in the halls of Congress. She went on Twitter later in the day to confirm and share the exchange.
“You are,” McSally wrote in response to CNN’s Manu Raju about the moment she called him a “liberal hack.” She later included a video of the encounter. Raju, the network’s senior congressional correspondent, followed up a half-hour later with the CNN video of the incident.
“Sen. Martha McSally, a Republican facing a difficult election race, lashed out when I asked if she would consider new evidence as part of the Senate trial. ‘You’re a liberal hack – I’m not talking to you. You’re a liberal hack.’ She then walked into a hearing room,” CNN’s Manu Raju tweeted initially on Thursday.
GOP Sen Martha McSally Calls CNN Reporter ‘Liberal Hack,’ Shuts Down Impeachment Trial Question
Her refusal to answer a question about the impeachment comes as the Senate prepares to begin its impeachment proceedings. Congress impeached President Donald Trump in December and sent articles of impeachment to the Senate on Wednesday. Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani accused of being involved in the attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son in order to boost Trump’s re-election efforts, told Rachel Maddow on Wednesday that Trump “knew exactly what was going on.” He also said more documents related to the accusations against Trump will be released.
A representative for CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment on McSally’s characterization of the reporter.
Politico’s Jake Sherman commented on the interaction, calling it a “strange answer to a great reporter asking a question that literally every senator” was being asked Thursday.
Sherman also pointed out that McSally’s predecessor — the late Sen. John McCain — had a funny relationship with Raju. He pranked him in the halls of Congress a few years ago while Raju did a live report, sneaking up behind him to make a silly hand gesture as he spoke.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway was asked four times by Fox News on Thursday morning to “flat-out” refute claims from Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas that President Donald Trump was fully “aware” of what he was up to in Ukraine. She didn’t give a straight answer once.
After Fox aired a clip of Parnas’ interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow from Wednesday night, they asked her to refute his central claims. Conway first tried to laugh it off, joking with no sense of irony, “Remember, people who go on TV are never under oath.” Meanwhile, the Trump White House has blocked witnesses from testifying under oath and criticized the credibility of those who have.
But that argument didn’t satisfy Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer, who repeatedly grilled Conway on the substance of what Parnas was saying.
“Are you saying flat-out, 100 percent what he alleges is not true, yes or no?” Hemmer asked.
Instead of answering yes or no, Conway went on to offer up an “objection” to the idea that Parnas could know Trump was aware of his movements. “You cannot say what someone else knew or thought,” she said. “That was a TV show, not a court of law.”
As she continued to filibuster, Hemmer interrupted her. “But back on Parnas, cut through it: Is he lying or not, Kellyanne?”
“He’s a proven liar, he’s been indicted,” she answered, again without addressing the specific claims about Trump.
Moments later, Hemmer’s co-host Sandra Smith jumped in as well. “Just to finish on that point, it’s a yes or no question,” she said. “‘Trump knew exactly what was going on,’ said Lev Parnas and we’re asking is that statement true or false.”
“Trump knew what was going on how?” Conway said, answering the true or false question with a question of her own. “In other words, what is Lev Parnas actually saying?”
It was her fourth time refusing to answer the question and ultimately the Fox hosts had no choice but to move on.
