Here come the lawsuits to make the full Mueller report public

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

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A civil liberties and privacy group filed a lawsuit in federal court Friday demanding special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report from the nearly two-year probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center’s lawsuit regarding the confidential, long-awaited report, which Muller delivered to Attorney General William Barr Friday evening, could serve as an opening salvo for the bipartisan pile-on that’s surely coming for access to the full report.

While Barr said he’ll make “principal conclusions” public, Democrats have already demanded not only all of Mueller’s findings during the course of his investigation but also the underlying evidence for Mueller’s conclusions. Republicans, too, have asked that the report be released. The furor over whether President Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to sway the election has cast a long shadow over his tenure.

Read: Now the fight for the Mueller report begins.

The center is arguing on the basis of federal information laws that the public has a right to know the “full scope of Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 election and whether the President of the United States played any role such efforts,” according to the complaint filed in a Washington, D.C., court. Already, the probe has resulted in criminal charges against 34 people. Multiple news outlets have reported the investigation won’t result in any more indictments, but that doesn’t mean that the report doesn’t include serious transgressions.

“The Mueller Report and related Special Counsel records are vital to the public’s understanding of these issues and to the integrity of the political system of the United States,” the organization said in a statement.

Read: Democrats really, really want to see the Mueller report.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center first sought records relating to the investigation from the Department of Justice in November, the organization said, but did not receive a response.

Portions of the report could be delivered to Congress as soon as this weekend, although the Justice Department has reportedly signaled it’s not coming Saturday. The White House said in a tweet Friday that it hasn’t seen the report yet.

Cover: Attorney General William Barr leaves his home in McLean, Va., on Friday, March 22, 2019. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Congress won't hear about Mueller's key findings until Sunday at the earliest

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr will take at least another day to review Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report before he briefs Congress on its main points, a person familiar with the situation told VICE News on Saturday.

The Department of Justice told congressional leaders that “no additional info will be provided today,” the person said.

Anticipation is running high in Washington following the delivery of Mueller’s final report to the attorney general on Friday — a document described by Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec as “comprehensive,” although she declined to be more specific.

Yet that description suggests Mueller decided not to file a bare-bones report, an outcome legal experts following his work closely said was possible under the special counsel regulations.

Barr has said he may brief Congress on Mueller’s “principal conclusions” as early as this weekend, but he has given no clues yet in public about when that might happen.

READ: Now the fight for the Mueller report begins

The submission of Mueller’s final report marked the formal end of his 22-month investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, a probe that resulted in criminal charges against 34 people and three companies.

Mueller’s marching orders require him to submit a “confidential” report to the attorney general explaining his decisions on whether to file charges. The rules also give Barr plenty of leeway to decide how much of those findings to make public.

READ: This is everything we know about the Mueller investigation

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle called on Barr to make as much of the report public as possible. Democrats threatened legal challenges for the right to review not just the entire report, but also the underlying evidence used to draft it.

“Congress and the American public must see every single word of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, said in a statement to VICE News. “And we should see it at the same time as President Trump, a subject of the investigation, sees it. Nothing less than the rule of law in our country is on the line.”

Cover image: U.S. Attorney General William Barr departs his home March 23, 2019 in McLean, Virginia. Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered the report from his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to Barr yesterday and Barr is expected to brief members of Congress on the report this weekend. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Mueller’s last report was for the NFL on domestic violence. This is what we can learn from it.

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

WASHINGTON — Now that Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has concluded, all people can do is wait to see how much of it will end up released publicly. Attorney General William Barr informed the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees that he could deliver the “principal conclusions” from the Mueller report as soon as this weekend.

And while we wait, it’s not a totally crazy idea to take a look at the last report Mueller wrote and released publicly.

That report, released in 2015, was an investigation into Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, who was caught on video beating his fiancé in a casino elevator in February of 2014.

After initial reports of the beating and an internal investigation by the NFL, Rice was suspended for two games and ordered to pay a fine. But months later, after TMZ posted video that showed the brutality of what happened, Rice was fired by the NFL.

READ: Now the fight for the Mueller report begins

The NFL brought in Mueller to find out what the league knew about the beating, and if they’d participated in a coverup.

Mueller was hired to answer two questions: “whether anyone at the League had received or seen the in-elevator video prior to its public release on September 8; and what other evidence was obtained by, provided to, or available to the League in the course of its investigation.”

While none of the details about the Rice situation mirrors the investigation into 2016 election interference, the report Mueller produced for the NFL does provide some insight into how he thinks.

First, the NFL report is very thorough. Mueller details more than 50 interviews his team conducted, the millions of documents they obtained, and the measures they took to figure out if the video had ever been played on an NFL computer.

Take a look at part of the description of how methodically they tried to figure out who from the NFL may have acknowledged receipt of the elevator video before TMZ posted it:

First, we analyzed each of the 1,583 phone calls made from the League’s New York office on April 9. We either called the destination number to verify that the person or organization called was not the source, or we identified the number as belonging to a senior NFL employee, or an owner, coach, or employee of one of the NFL clubs. We also analyzed the League’s phone data in a variety of other ways, looking for noteworthy trends or phone numbers, and found none. Second, we interviewed every female employee or contractor present at the League’s office on April 9.

Second, Mueller stayed within the confines of questions he was hired to answer. This is crucial to what we may see in the Special Counsel’s report. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s assignment to Mueller was to conduct “a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.” That was a pretty broad assignment, but over the course of the Russia investigation, Mueller farmed out some of the non-Russia related criminal matters to the Southern District of New York. That could be a signal that the current report will be very focused on election-related conduct.

Third, Mueller didn’t pull any punches in this report despite the fact that the NFL was his client and everybody knew the Rice report would be released publicly. He calls out the NFL for the steps they didn’t take in their internal investigation. For example, he lists that the League never contacted the police officers who responded to the elevator incident and they never interviewed Rice himself during their internal investigation. Mueller points out these glaring omissions.

Mueller’s last report is almost 100-pages long, but it’s incredibly readable, much like the speaking indictments that have come out of the Special Counsel’s office in the last few years. What that points to is that the final election report, if it’s every actually released, will be a document that almost any citizen could read, understand, and form opinions from.

This segment originally aired March 22, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

How to End Endless War

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In 1992, Pentagon officials took stock of America’s fortunes. “Today, there is no global challenger to a peaceful democratic order,” observed the group, led by Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The Soviet Union had fallen. America stood alone as a global power. At such a moment, the country might have declared victory and brought its troops home. Instead, it resolved to seek greater supremacy than ever. In the future that Wolfowitz and his colleagues envisioned, the United States would maintain a “predominant military position” atop the world. No one would dare rival it.

In the Middle East, America’s pursuit of primacy led it to contain both Iraq and Iran, and to treat the advance of either as a grave threat. Under this dictate, successive presidents imposed sanctions that starved Iraqis and squeezed Iranians. They launched wars to change regimes. They partnered with authoritarians throughout the region. If all this was the price of keeping America on top, so be it.

After decades of catastrophe, the same basic strategy endures. Donald Trump’s presidency makes plain that global supremacy has become an end in itself, unmoored from the interests of the American people and most of humanity. “Our military dominance must be unquestioned,” Trump has declared, “and I mean unquestioned.” Trump has stripped supremacy of ethical pretense and strategic justification. He values it for its own sake, as a gesture of brute domination.

What have liberals to say about this? Scandalously little. For decades, they have failed to stop war and violence for the same reason they have failed to reverse soaring inequality. At best, they have offered solutions inadequate to the scale of the problem. At worst, they have denied there was a problem, casting endless war as “global leadership.” Few Democrats will admit, for example, that not one power in the Middle East poses an existential threat to the United States, not one merits devoting precious lives and scarce resources to such misadventures as Saudi Arabia’s proxy war in Yemen.

Trump and the establishment are one in assuming that the United States must maintain global military dominance, regardless of circumstances, forever. It is long past time to question this assumption, and today only the rising left possesses the dynamism and independence to do so. In order to stand for peace, systematically not episodically, the left should oppose armed supremacy as a perpetual goal of America’s foreign policy. For permanent armed supremacy produces permanent armed conflict. And its burdens are mounting.

Wolfowitz and his Pentagon colleagues originally justified their focus on primacy by claiming that it would bring peace. In a draft of their report, called the Defense Planning Guidance, they argued that the United States should seek a preeminence so overwhelming as to prevent any potential rival from even “aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” After a public outcry, the final language was softened. But at least policymakers back then felt some compunction to demonstrate that Pax Americana would live up to its name.

Decades later, the opposite has transpired. America spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined, with roughly 800 bases ringing the globe, yet its might has not prevented China from rising nor Russia from asserting itself, and may have antagonized both. Instead of cowing others into peace, primacy has plunged America into war. It has forced the United States to resist any significant retraction of its military power, lest it lose influence relative to anyone else. The endless wars are endless because the United States has appointed itself the world’s “indispensable nation,” in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s formulation, responsible less for ensuring its own safety than for maintaining its material and moral privilege to police the world. The costs include 147,000 lives in Afghanistan and $5.9 trillion for a war on terror that has stretched on since 2001, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

What’s more, armed primacy may well have allowed Trump to rise in the first place. To justify America’s massive commitment of resources around the world, leaders have routinely claimed that foreigners are going to kill us. Trump took those inflated threats and ran with them, turning fear of deadly foreigners into the basis for his movement. That fear dates back to the second term of George W. Bush, when the xenophobia he directed toward distant “Islamofascism” turned inward. White supremacists rallied against immigrants at the border; nativists spread conspiracy theories that Sharia law was subverting American society. Now Trump has birthered his way to the White House, surrounded by a national security adviser and secretary of state who indulge rank Islamophobia. (John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have ties to Frank Gaffney, the author of such manifestos as “The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration.”)

To be sure, many advocates of American primacy did not wish for this to happen. But it has happened. We face a world beset by war and awash in nationalism and nativism—our own included. And as other powers rise, the costs of pursuing primacy will rise with them.

Only a particularly enlightened and unaggressive country, facing deplorable alternatives, should exercise enormous coercive power over peoples to whom it offers no membership and no accountability. Today the United States is not that country, if it ever was. Its political system is hardly delivering for its own citizens, let alone those of other countries. Even if Democrats were angels, they rotate power with a Republican Party whose last two presidents married aggressive visions with careless decisions. All other things equal, the world will be better off as America retracts its coercive power, and so will America.

True, the United States should retain a potent military, and other instruments, to pursue the genuine interests of its people. And it matters what powers might take the place of a hegemonic America. But endless supremacy must itself end. The burden of proof now falls on those who favor a large military role, and they must justify not only the purposes they seek but also the perils that outsize power poses when the vicious and the reckless get to swing the sword.

At an uncertain moment, the left has the opportunity to bring some measure of soundness to America’s world role. After decades of misrule and misconceptions, we begin our foreign policy over again.

Gun owners in New Zealand brace for big changes to their right to carry…

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Gun owners in New Zealand brace for big changes to their right to carry

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Some rushed to their trusted online dealers and stores to stock up on semiautomatic assault rifles. Others unlocked their secure cabinets, picked up their firearms and turned them into police stations, no questions asked.

The estimated quarter of a million gun owners across this largely quiet, peaceful South Pacific country, many of them dedicated hunters, are bracing for what are likely to be significant reforms to New Zealand’s firearm laws. Leaders have hinted the changes will impact the proliferation and availability of semiautomatic weapons in particular.

The changes, agreed to in principle by the country’s coalition government Monday – just 72 hours after the deadliest act of gun violence in New Zealand history – put the country in line with others that have taken swift action following tragedy within their borders. Details of the changes will be announced within the week, and must be passed by parliament.

A gunman who pledged allegiance to white nationalist causes killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch on Friday, and has been remanded on one charge of murder with more to follow. He has been identified by police as 28-year old Australian Brenton Tarrant who in one day killed more than all the people murdered across New Zealand in 2017.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern labeled the massacre “the worst act of terrorism on our shores” and immediately promised swift action, calling for gun laws to be changed. Her declarations have been celebrated by many in New Zealand, some of whom had no idea that military-style semiautomatic weapons were so prolific in a country famously known for its extremely low murder rate.

On Monday, the e-commerce website Trade Me, similar to eBay, halted the sale of semiautomatic weapons on its platform.

“We’ve had a lot of contact from Kiwis over the weekend about this issue, and many felt we should stop the sale of these items in the wake of this attack,” Trade Me said in a statement. “We’ve listened to these sentiments and we’ve put this ban in place while we await clear direction from the government.”

John Hart, a gun owner, said on Twitter he had given up his AR-15 rifle and ammunition because his “convenience doesn’t outweigh the risk of misuse.”

Still, some gun dealers have also bristled at the idea that they or the weapons they sell are culpable in Friday’s events, and have resented being put on the spot.

“We have good laws, we’ve always had good laws,” said Wayne Chapman, owner of The Gunshop in Upper Hutt, a city northeast of Wellington. His store, he said, “has not seen a surge or had any problems.”

David Tipple, managing director of Gun City, one of the largest firearms retailers in New Zealand, called a news conference Monday to announce that Tarrant had bought four guns from Gun City’s online store and had them delivered through mail.

Gun City has been the focus of criticism and has seen small protests outside their stores in recent days. Many on social media have said a billboard outside the store’s Christchurch outlet, which shows a man teaching two young children how to shoot, is in poor taste considering the country is in a state of mourning over the killings.

Tarrant, he said, had obtained his gun license in November 2017 and purchased his first firearm about a month later. He bought his last firearm from Gun City in March 2018, and had also purchased ammunition Tipple has shared this information with authorities.

But in a testy exchange with reporters, he pushed back on the charge that the guns he sold Tarrant were the exact ones used in his attacks. Tipple said the guns were “A-category” guns, which can be bought with the most basic weapons license.

Assault rifles are A-category guns as long as they have a magazine that holds only seven rounds. The weapons seen in a video of the massacre that Tarrant live-streamed had much larger magazines.

“I totally agree there should be a gun debate, but today is not the day,” said Tipple. “We are not a country of emotional responses, we are a country with laws [and] what we are doing is legal.”

New Zealand gun owners point out that it is exactly the loophole Tipple brought up – purchasing larger magazines – that enabled Tarrant’s shooting spree. One gun owner who owned several AR-15s, but has since given them up, said they only cost $1,200 in New Zealand, but would cost $25,000 or more in Australia on the black market, because they are effectively banned there.

“You can get an AR-15 from anywhere really, and while the [30-round magazine] is not allowed legally, they will fit and they will work,” said Pete Breidahl, a gun owner and former competition shooter who recently gave up his firearms license. “How, in 2019, can this still be going on? How has this loophole not been fixed?”

New Zealand, like the United States, also has no requirement for gun owners to register their weapons, unlike many countries in the world.

The tightened gun laws will put New Zealand in line with several other countries who have changed legislation in the wake of tragedy. The Port Arthur massacre in Australia in 1996 shook the continent, changed gun legislation the Pacific nation, strictly restricting self-loading rifles and other weapons.

A buyback program destroyed thousands of guns and high-capacity magazines. A shooting at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, that same year also prompted a campaign for tighter restrictions on firearms, which led to a virtual ban on civilian ownership of handguns.

Still, New Zealand has made the decision in almost record time. In Australia, it took 12 days after the mass shooting for the government to finalize changes to legislation. It took almost two years for the ban on handguns to become law in the United Kingdom in 1998. Ardern has promised details of changes within 10 days of the attack.

Experts argue that New Zealand has indeed been on the cusp of change in gun legislation for years, but never had political unity around the issue. After the country’s last mass shooting in 1990, where 13 people including local police were killed in the seaside town of Aramoana, changes were made to firearm legislation including some restrictions on semiautomatic firearms and the requirement for 10-year licenses.

Four inquiries have been undertaken by government in recent years. A 1997 review recommended that all guns should be registered and that the government institute a full buyback of all military-style assault weapons, similar to what was done in Australia.

These suggestions, said Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Sydney and founding director of GunPolicy.org, “are all now back on the table.”

The government’s decision, he said, has been in part motivated by the frequency of mass shootings in the United States, which has among the most lax gun laws in the world.

“There is a baseline determination not to go down the American road,” he said.

– – –

The Washington Post’s Emanuel Stoakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, contributed to this report.