Mosque developer Park51 has been leasing its building from Con Ed, which says it is owed $1.7 million in back rent — after raising the rent by 1,600 percent in August — and has threatened eviction. [NYP]
THE FEED
More details and context regarding Friday’s confrontation between a Native American drummer and Catholic school teens in D.C.
Nathan Phillips said in an interview with The Associated Press that he was trying to keep peace between some Kentucky high school students and a black religious group that was also on the National Mall on Friday. The students were participating in the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, and Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples March happening the same day.
“Something caused me to put myself between (them) — it was black and white,” said Phillips, who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. “What I saw was my country being torn apart. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen.”
Videos show a youth standing very close to Phillips and staring at him as he sang and played the drum. Other students — some in “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts — were chanting, laughing and jeering. Other videos also showed members of the religious group, who appear to be affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, yelling disparaging and profane insults at the students, who taunt them in return. Video also shows the Native Americans being insulted by the small religious group as well. …
In a joint statement , the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apologized and said they are investigating and will take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. … We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips … This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”
Sign of the times, 30 days into the longest government shutdown in American history
GoFundMe starts its own effort to assist federal workers hit by the shutdown. Employees of world’s most powerful nation “are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks,” said GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon. “It makes no sense.” https://t.co/aQDYv0EmwZ
—@HuffPost
Cohen’s lie about the timeline of a project regarding a big skyscraper with Trump’s name on it didn’t catch Donald Trump’s attention, according to Giuliani
Mr. Giuliani said that when Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that the project had ended in January 2016, Mr. Trump simply “accepted” that answer.
“The president couldn’t tell you the exact day it started and the exact day it ended; he remembers it started and he remembers it ended,” Mr. Giuliani said, but nothing more. “It never got to anything concrete.”
indigenous peoples' march
What It Felt Like to Stare Down the MAGA Teens
Buzzfeed News seems exceedingly confident about their Trump-Cohen bombshell, despite the Mueller pushback
Reporter Anthony Cormier and editor-in-chief Ben Smith appeared on Sunday’s Reliable Sources:
“We’re being told to stand our ground. Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we’re 100% behind it,” [Cormier explained to host Brian Stelter]. … [The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist], who wouldn’t reveal his sources when asked, said the story had been in the works for months and went through a “rigorous” vetting process. The story was reviewed by at least three editors, Smith said. …
Smith said BuzzFeed is “eager” to understand which parts of the report Mueller’s office is challenging as inaccurate. He said BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, who coauthored the story, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for details on how the statement from Mueller’s office was constructed. …
Journalist Carl Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, told Stelter on Sunday that he thought it was “going to take time before we fully understand what the exact truth is here.”
At one point, Stelter asked the pair, “What if your sources are wrong?” Cormier replied, “They’re not.”
An intentionally misrepresented solution to an intentionally misrepresented crisis
A Republican senator who encouraged President Donald Trump to pursue a compromise with congressional Democrats to end the partial government shutdown described the White House’s offer this weekend as “a straw man proposal” that is not intended to become law.
“What I encouraged the White House to do and multiple others encouraged the White House to do is put out a proposal,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday during an interview with host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”
“They’ve listened to a lot of Democrat and Republican members for the last month. They’ve heard all the demands, they know all the background on it,” said Lankford, a member of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Put out a straw man proposal. Get something out there the president can say, ‘I can support this’ — and has elements from both sides. Put it on the table, then open it up for debate.”
russia investigation
Giuliani: Trump’s Moscow Tower Plan Was Active Until 2016 Election
Mueller’s favorite attorney is at it again
Rudy Giuliani was “defending” the president on the Sunday morning shows again this week, and it’s gone about as well as you’d expect.
On CNN”s State of the Union, Giuliani said, “As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with [Michael Cohen about his Congressional testimony] — Certainly no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie.” But he also acknowledged, “I don’t know if it happened or it didn’t happen… I have no knowledge if he spoke to him,” before adding, “And so what if he talked to him about it?”
“If he had any discussions with him, they’d be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them which they all believe was true,” Giuliani also explained, and angrily accused host Jake Tapper of having “hysteria” after Tapper said he wanted to learn the truth about the Cohen-Trump interactions. “You should all be careful,” Giuliani said.
On Meet the Press, Giuliani was “100 percent certain” that Trump did not ask Cohen to lie.
“I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was, ‘Tell the truth,’ he added. “We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress,”
Giuliani also admitted on MTP that Trump’s discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow went on “throughout 2016”, and possibly even into November — even though Trump said then and later that he had no business with Russia.
“It’s our understanding that [the Trump Tower Moscow talks] went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them, but there were conversations, can’t be sure of the exact date. … Probably up to — could be up to as far as October, November.”
It’s morning in America, and the president has already
1) Threatened to hunt down and deport DACA recipients if Democrats don’t accept his offer to temporarily cancel his cancellation of DACA, while also assuring the (pissed-off) far right that the deal doesn’t include amnesty, while also suggesting full amnesty would be an option sometime later, if he gets what he wants.
2) Used the severe winter weather striking much of the U.S. to make fun of climate change (which is causing more severe weather, year-round).
3) Attempted to rebrand Nancy Pelosi as… a “radical Democrat.”
4) Made another effort to dominate Pelosi in response to her cancellation of his State of the Union speech, insisting he has “so many options” which include “doing it as per your written offer (made during the Shutdown, security is no problem), and my written acceptance,” whatever that is supposed to mean.
the national interest
Trump’s One Legislative ‘Win’ Is Actually a Failure
Politics
More comments from the Native American elder who was harassed by MAGA-clad teens on Friday in D.C.
[64-year-old Nathan] Phillips, who was singing the American Indian Movement song that serves as a ceremony to send the spirits home, said he noticed tensions beginning to escalate when the teens and other apparent participants from the nearby March for Life rally began taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd. …
“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”
So, he kept drumming and singing, thinking about his wife, Shoshana, who died of bone marrow cancer nearly four years ago, and the various threats that face indigenous communities around the world, he said.
“I felt like the spirit was talking through me,” Phillips said. …
Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War and now lives in Michigan, has long been active in the indigenous rights movement. A co-founder of the Native Youth Alliance cultural and education group, he shows up to Arlington National Cemetery every Veterans Day with a peace pipe to pay tribute to Native Americans who served in the U.S. military.
RIP
Photo: "Ghadir Taher, 27, an interpreter who worked for a U.S. defense contractor, was the 4th American killed in the suicide bombing attack in Syria this week. She was born and raised in Damascus and immigrated to the US in 2001, eventually becoming a naturalized citizen." - CNN's Jake Tapper
Another reason why Trump’s deal carries little weight
One big development in the last 24 hours was the Supreme Court deciding not to take the DACA case. Trump has said he was waiting for the court to uphold his decision to terminate DACA. Now, looks like that leverage gone until at least summer, 2020.
—@shearm
2019 women's march
The Most Powerful Scenes From the 2019 Women’s March
Trump’s big announcement: repeat his prime time address and add a D.O.A. proposal extending the limbo of DACA/TPS recipients
Below are some highlights from the reaction to Trump’s Saturday theatrics.
Democrats were hopeful that the president was finally willing to reopen government and proceed with a much-need discussion to protect the border. Unfortunately, initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives. It is unlikely that any one of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter.
As did a key would-be Democratic compromiser on the issue, per CNN’s Ryan Nobles:
[Senator Dick Durbin], who co-authored the [bipartisan] BRIDGE Act which is said to be part of the POTUS proposal to end the shutdown, says he “cannot support the proposed offer as reported”
The proposal wasn’t the BRIDGE Act, either. Vox’s Dara Lind, like many others, had some deja vu:
The stuff Trump is talking about right now is pretty much verbatim the stuff offered in the last version of a proposal, sent as a letter 2 weeks ago, plus a legislative extension of existing DACA and TPS protections.
The Post’s Matt Viser notes some rhetorical whiplash, too:
“The radical left can never control our borders. I will never let it happen. Walls are not immoral,” President Trump says, minutes after calling for both sides to work together for common compromise.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is riding in on a hypocritical high horse, per CNN’s Manu Raju:
McConnell, who has said repeatedly only bills with support of Trump and Democrats can end shutdown, says he will hold vote on Trump proposal — even though Dems are rejecting it. “Everyone has made their point—now it’s time to make a law. I intend to move to this legislation this week”
Trump’s “asylum reforms” riff is code for denying due process for unaccompanied minors and eviscerating [the] Flores Settlement. Means that kids who now get protection will get sent back to face death and kids will be detained for as long as Trump wants.
Isn’t this a kind of hostage-taking squared? First end the programs. Then shut the government. Then promise to temporarily restore the programs you’ve ended & reopen the government you have closed, in return for the ransom of money for a wall that 55-60% of country consistently opposes?
And the Post’s Glenn Kessler points out a glaring political fail:
Unless I missed it, Trump expressed no sympathy for federal workers who are furloughed or working without pay.
On cue, several Republican lawmakers were in their foxholes claiming that Trump is now the reasonable one. But CNN’s Eliana Johnson reported that White House staffers were nervous about today:
[I’m told] there’s increasing nervousness inside the White House that Trump’s gambit will fail with Dems, which seems clear at this point — but also that it will hurt him with his base, which has supported him thru shutdown.
Sure enough, Ann Coulter is not amused:
Trump proposes amnesty. We voted for Trump and got Jeb!
Nor are immigration hawks, per Politico’s Gabby Orr, who offers a key refresher as well:
The pile-on begins and it’s not just from Dems. NumbersUSA head Roy Beck calls Trump’s proposal “a loser for the forgotten American workers who were central to his campaign promises.”
The last time Trump faced intense criticism from the immigration hawks in his base — when he was prepared to sign a clean CR — he did a 180 & triggered the shutdown. Its hard to picture him backing away a 2nd time (no guarantee he will) without jeopardizing their support.
[White House Chief of Staff] Mick Mulvaney is blaming Democrats if [federal workers] don’t get paid next week: “If the bill is filibustered on Tuesday, and we do not get a motion to proceed, people will not get paid. I will be very curious to see how the Democrats — especially in the Senate — choose to deal w/ this piece of legislation.”
2019 women's march
Ocasio-Cortez’s Women’s Rally Speech Was a Fierce Call to Action
Trump expresses appreciation to WITCH HUNT leader he has repeatedly attacked and sought to discredit
TRUMP this morning: “I appreciate the special counsel coming out with a statement last night. I think it was very appropriate that they did so. I very much appreciate that.” https://t.co/YXRoCOUyPU
—@stark_talk
Democrats appear to have no interest in Trump’s impending “compromise” offer regarding DACA and TPS recipients
The Wall Street Journal updates:
Mr. Trump is scheduled to make his announcement [on Saturday] at 4 pm. Aides cautioned that the announcement has already been delayed once by an hour, and that the president may still change his approach.
The offer to codify protections for young immigrants brought to the U. S. as children, known as Dreamers, is seen as a major concession inside the White House.
Axios passes along a pre-announcement rejection from a House Democratic aide:
“Dems were not consulted on this and have rejected similar overtures previously.”
“Similar inadequate offers from the Administration were already rejected by Democrats.”
“The BRIDGE Act does not fully protect Dreamers and is not a permanent solution.””This is not a compromise as it includes the same wasteful, ineffective $5.7 billion wall demand that shut down the government in the first place.”
“This cannot pass the House or Senate.””The President must agree to re-open government and join Democrats to negotiate on border security measures that work and not an expensive and ineffective wall that the President promised Mexico would pay for.”
Democrats have been under pressure from immigrant rights organizations not to give Trump funding for a wall. And Trump’s offer would not provide a path to permanent legal status — or citizenship — that many Democrats have sought in any immigration deal that would dramatically ramp up border security measures. …
Trump also could face blowback from conservatives, including prominent commentators, who have opposed any attempts to extend deportation protections from undocumented immigrants.
Mitch McConnell, who has been avoiding the shutdown impasse, now deserves and/or is looking for credit for the offer — if you parse the update to Axios’ earlier scooplet:
[A]fter Pelosi’s letter, the source said, it became clear to McConnell she was “never going to get off her position and some other spark needed to happen.” McConnell told the president that it was his view that Pelosi was never going to move. She would and could not negotiate on border funding because of her caucus, and Trump needed to be the one to put something forward he would sign so that McConnell would have the presidential backing to bring it to the floor.
McConnell also encouraged Trump to make the offer tantalizing to Democrats; it couldn’t be something that only Trump would sign and Republicans would support, but something that could win over some Democrats. The Pence-Kushner-McConnell meeting on Thursday night solidified the plan. McConnell did not try to write the bill for them; this bill is the culmination of Kushner and Pence’s conversations with some Democrats and an inventory of proposals they discussed. Democratic whip Dick Durbin is Kushner’s closest Democratic ally in the Senate after they worked together on criminal justice reform, according to White House officials.
BuzzFeed News says it has “re-confirmed” its reporting and is standing by it
Updated statement from @BuzzFeedNews:
“As we’ve re-confirmed our reporting, we’ve seen no indication that any specific aspect of our story is inaccurate. We remain confident in what we’ve reported, and will share more as we are able.” –Matt Mittenthal, spokesperson.
—@grynbaum
“As we’ve re-confirmed our reporting, we’ve seen no indication that any specific aspect of our story is inaccurate. We remain confident in what we’ve reported, and will share more as we are able.” –Matt Mittenthal, spokesperson.
horrible things
Mob of MAGA Hat-Wearing Teen Boys Caught on Video Harassing Native Elder
2019 women's march
The Best, Smartest, and Funniest Signs From the Women’s March
education
Karen Pence’s Job at an Anti-LGBT School Is Definitely the Taxpayers’ Business
Are Democrats starting to cave? Here’s their latest offer…
House Democrats have added more than $1 billion in border-related spending to a package of funding bills that would reopen most of the government[.] … The proposal to include more spending on border measures is scheduled for a vote next week, according to two senior Democratic officials. The plan reflects a shift in strategy by congressional Democrats, who have maintained that they would not give the president a counterproposal until he drops his insistence on a wall and signs legislation to reopen the government. It is an attempt to rebut Mr. Trump’s repeated portrayal of Democrats as opponents of border security and their denunciation of his wall as an embrace of open borders.
About half the money, $524 million, would be for additional infrastructure at ports of entry on the border, one Democrat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the plans have not been formally announced, while $563 million more would be inserted to fund 75 immigration judges, who adjudicate the claims of migrants who make asylum claims at the border. …
Democrats are also considering a new funding bill for the [Department of Homeland Security,] which has $1.3 billion allocated for border security. The proposal would include additional border protection measures they have endorsed, such as more personnel and scanning technology to intercept illicit drugs.
A historic new feat for the president’s unpopularity
I don’t get wow’d by poll numbers, but a Pew poll came out with what I think is stunning: More Americans think Trump’s presidency will be unsuccessful than any presidency at any point in last 25 years (including George W. Bush in 2007 after Iraq/Katrina/2006 midterms).
It’s one thing not to like a president now… It’s another to say he’s so bad that I think in the future he’ll be seen as unsuccessful… Right now, a near majority (47%) say that. It suggests Trump will have a very hard time getting out of the cellar.
Senior polling analyst at CNN
the law
William Barr Needs Trump Just as Much as Trump Needs Him
Trump is planning make a public offer of DACA and TPS protections to get his wall and end the shutdown
Trump will present what the White House believes could be a deal to end the shutdown. The deal was largely influenced by talks between Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.
But not Democrats yet. The offer will apparently not be another threat to declare a national emergency — Axios has a preview:
The offer is expected to include Trump’s $5.7 billion demand for wall money in exchange for the BRIDGE Act — which would extend protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) — and also legislation to extend the legal status of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders, according to a source with direct knowledge.
None of this is new, however, and Democrats have indicated they weren’t interested in a DACA-for-wall deal amid the shutdown fight. So this may be yet another attempt by Trump to make stagecraft stand in for substance.
Why did Mueller comment on the BuzzFeed story, but not countless other reports about the investigation? And what, exactly, did the story get wrong?
Those are the two big questions in the aftermath of Mueller’s bombshell statement in response to BuzzFeed’s bombshell report. Here are some of the responses:
From MSNBC analyst and former Justice Department spokesperson Matthew Miller:
[The investigators] can’t police every story without falling into a confirmation game (and the special counsel’s office has been more extreme on this than most DOJ offices). But the magnitude of this one, including because of the law enforcement sourcing, was different.
Also:
You can spend hours parsing the Carr statement, but given how unusual it is for any DOJ office to issue this sort of on the record denial, let alone this office, I suspect it means the story’s core contention that they have evidence Trump told Cohen to lie is fundamentally wrong. There was a lot in the [BuzzFeed] story, and maybe pieces of it are accurate. But I read the statement to say the central piece is not. Can’t see breaking their nearly two year precedent to just quibble over details.
This article spoke to specific felony, and an impeachable act that would have dictated his subsequent action and had already triggered a congressional response.
Amazing how much people read into Mueller’s motives simply because he is the one human in DC who knows how to STFU.
WIRED’s Garrett Graff, to Axios:
You have to think that the special counsel’s office is thinking through how to respond to press reports in the era of a Democratic House — they need to now set reasonable (and timely) expectations in order to ensure that Congress doesn’t [go] off the rails.
Mueller’s office, in response to the McClatchy Cohen/Prague story, issued a statement declaring that many, many media reports about its investigation have been wrong & urged media outlets to stop reporting stories without independent confirmation
But the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow points out:
Note that the general thrust of Cohen lying to Congress “in accordance with” or “to support and advance” Trump’s agenda (per Cohen’s legal memo) is not in dispute. The source disputed the further, more specific idea that Trump issued—and memorialized—repeated direct instructions.
Some have also speculated that BuzzFeed’s law enforcement sources were from another office other than Mueller’s. The Washington Post’s reporting on the statement indicates that much, if not most, of Buzzfeed’s story is wrong:
Inside the Justice Department, the statement was viewed as a huge step, and one that would have been taken only if the special counsel’s office viewed the story as almost entirely incorrect. The special counsel’s office seemed to be disputing every aspect of the story that addressed comments or evidence given to its investigators. …
The story had claimed Cohen had acknowledged to Mueller’s prosecutors that the president directed him to deceive Congress about key facts linking the president to the proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow. BuzzFeed also said Mueller learned about the directive to lie from “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.”
Mueller’s denial, according to people familiar with the matter, aims to make clear that none of those statements in the story are accurate.
But BuzzFeed News editor Ben Smith is still standing by the story, via an email to Axios:
We literally don’t know what the special counsel is referring to.
A potential perjury investigation in Trump’s cabinet
New documents show [Secretary of Homeland Security] Nielsen lied in sworn testimony to Congress about the administration’s family separation policy.
russia investigation
Mueller Disputes BuzzFeed Report That Trump Ordered Cohen to Perjure Himself
Will museums start to take names like “Koch” and “Sackler” off their donor plaques?
Our most revered institutions hold themselves to an ethical standard that does not allow accepting money from wealthy drug dealers – however tempting the prospect or worthwhile the project. They refuse to become philanthropic money launderers, cleansing dirty reputations by selling prestigious naming rights.
There is one notable exception to this institutional honor code: the Sackler family. The Sacklers have made a fortune from OxyContin, the painkiller blamed for sparking the deadly opioid crisis. They are world renowned donors – despite also being world class drug pushers, responsible for almost as many deaths last year as the drug cartels in Mexico.
The issue of ethical philanthropy goes far beyond the Sacklers. Charitable giving is a very big business – donations total $400bn a year in the US alone. It is also mostly unregulated, allowing for glaring anomalies like the American and National Museums of Natural History both accepting enormous Koch brother donations that were earned by despoiling our natural and political environments.
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