The Justice Department's internal watchdog is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, while at the same time criticizing the bureau for systemic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials. [...]According to the two officials, Horowitz is expected to conclude that opening of Crossfire Hurricane was legally and factually justified. His report will not provide fodder for several conservative conspiracy theories surrounding the case -- particularly the notion that Papadopoulos was set up as part of a nefarious western intelligence operation.Inspector general investigators scrutinized that allegation aggressively, looking particularly at the record on Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who was critical to the opening of the case. Mifsud boasted to Papadopoulos about having "dirt" on Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails" -- before Russia's hacking of Democrats was publicly known. When the FBI learned of that conversation some months later, it felt it had to open an investigation.
The investigation regarding the 2016 campaign "fundamentally was not about Donald Trump but was about Russia -- full stop," former FBI General Counsel James A. Baker said at a Brookings Institution event in May. "It was always about Russia. It was about what Russia was, and is, doing and planning. "
These are the three most infamous politicians to describe opponents as human scum: Hitler. Stalin. Trump.As the simple truths spoken by impeachment witnesses backed him into a corner, the president repeated his use of one of history's most notorious phrases: "Corrupt politician Adam Schiff's lies are growing by the day. Keep fighting tough, Republicans, you are dealing with human scum."While Trump's command of history is limited, he is aware of the nature of this particular phrase because he has used it, and been admonished for it, before. The sick attacks on Schiff, particularly using a trope associated with two of history's most vile antisemites, calls into question when (if ever) Trump's defenders will finally say enough is enough.
Colombia's ambassador in Washington was embarrassed Wednesday by publication of a recording in which he trashes the State Department as a feckless institution subjugated to the whims of the White House.
CNN reported Thursday night (and the Washington Post later confirmed) that Inspector General Michael Horowitz has found that a former FBI lawyer might have altered a document tied to the 2016 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Critically, according to US officials who spoke to the Post, the Inspector General did not find that this possible alteration affected "the overall validity" or legal basis for the surveillance application.
Trump seems to admit quid pro quo at 6:34: "We're looking for corruption. There's tremendous corruption. Why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there's this kind of corruption? If you look at my call I said 'corruption.'" https://t.co/77jZY8DYTD
— Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) November 22, 2019
Fifty-six percent of Israelis think that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resign, according to a survey published Friday after Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced that he would be indicting the premier in three corruption cases.Just 35% of respondents said that the Likud leader should not budge from the Prime Minister's Residence, while the remaining 9% were unsure, according to the Channel 13 poll.
US President Donald Trump on Friday promoted a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, a day after a former White House adviser called it a "fictional narrative" and said it played into Russia's hands.Trump called in to "Fox & Friends" and said he was trying to root out corruption in the Eastern European nation when he withheld aid over the summer. Trump's July 25 call with Ukraine's president is at the center of the House impeachment probe, which is looking into Trump's pressure on Ukraine to investigate political rivals as he held back nearly $400 million.But he repeated his assertion that Ukrainians might have hacked the Democratic National Committee's network in 2016 and framed Russia for the crime, a theory his own advisers have dismissed.
After two weeks of riveting public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, there is a mountain of evidence that is now beyond dispute.Trump explicitly ordered U.S. government officials to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine, a country deeply dependent on Washington's help to fend off Russian aggression. The Republican president pushed Ukraine to launch investigations into political rivals, leaning on a discredited conspiracy theory his own advisers disputed. And both American and Ukrainian officials feared that Trump froze a much-needed package of military aid until Kyiv announced it was launching those probes.Those facts were confirmed by a dozen witnesses, mostly staid career government officials who served both Democratic and Republican administrations. They relied on emails, text messages and contemporaneous notes to back up their recollections from the past year.
Jerusalem and Washington. Identical rhetoric by two leaders in legal hot water pic.twitter.com/a9IyUfQ8f0
— Sam Sokol (@SamuelSokol) November 21, 2019
Show creator Michael Schur told BuzzFeed News that he's obsessed over these philosophical ideas for years while making The Good Place."You can be a good person in a vacuum," Schur said. "But being alive at some fundamental level in most of the places on Earth means interacting with other people and having other people interact with you."Pamela Hieronymi, a philosophy professor at UCLA who agreed to advise Schur on his ideas about philosophy for the show, pointed him to the book What We Owe to Each Other by T.M. Scanlon. The author was her dissertation adviser at Harvard, and when Schur explained the kinds of philosophical ideas he wanted to include in The Good Place, she said it lined up with Scanlon's work."It really sort of lit up a room in my brain that had been searching for a way to explain the kind of thing that I wanted to get at," Schur told BuzzFeed News. "And that was the idea that we owe certain things to other people, and the job of being alive on earth is to figure out what you owe to them and how you can provide it for them. That's the only way that any that there will ever be any progress."
Cars were found torched Friday morning in a number of Palestinian villages in the West Bank in a suspected hate crime by Jewish settlers.In addition to the burnt vehicles, Stars of David and other graffiti were discovered on buildings in the villages.The acts of vandalism occurred in the northern West Bank villages of Qabalan, Beit Dajan, Majdal Bani Fadil and ad-Dik, the anti-racism group Tag Meir said.