Late Tuesday evening, President Trump tweeted condolences for a mass shooting to the incorrect town.
Tuesday, a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns opened fire on four victims at multiple locations in the small Northern California town of Rancho Tehama. The suspect wounded more victims at an elementary school before law enforcement shot and killed him.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter response, which has since been deleted from his account but is timestamped at 11:34 p.m. on November 14, mentioned another mass shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, which occurred on November 5, killing 26 people and injuring 20 more.
“May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI and Law Enforcement has arrived,” Mr. Trump wrote in the tweet, offering thoughts and prayers to the wrong town.
It appears the response Mr. Trump intended for the victims of the violent incident in California was informed by his initial tweet regarding the Sutherland Springs shooting.
“May God be w/ the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas,” the November 5 tweet reads. “The FBI & law enforcement are on the scene. I am monitoring the situation from Japan.”
May God be w/ the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI & law enforcement are on the scene. I am monitoring the situation from Japan.
President Donald Trump pushed Republicans on Monday to cut taxes on the rich by using money that’s slated to help lower-income Americans purchase health insurance.
I am proud of the Rep. House & Senate for working so hard on cutting taxes {& reform.} We’re getting close! Now, how about ending the unfair & highly unpopular Indiv Mandate in OCare & reducing taxes even further? Cut top rate to 35% w/all of the rest going to middle income cuts?
Trump’s request, which the president relayed by Twitter from his trip through Asia, comes at a sensitive moment in tax negotiations. It also goes against his repeated insistence that tax legislation should be focused on providing middle-class tax relief rather than cutting taxes for wealthy filers like himself.
At times, the president has even predicted that he would pay more under a GOP plan (Trump has not released his tax returns, but multiple provisions in the House and Senate bills appear likely to benefit his business and family).
The House and Senate have released competing bills, neither of which ends the individual Obamacare mandate to maintain insurance coverage or lowers the top rate nearly as far as the president requested on Monday.
In the case of the House bill, the top rate would stay at the current 39.6 percent but would apply it to a higher income threshold: For married couples, it would only kick in after the first $1,000,000 in income versus $470,000 now.
The Senate bill would lower the top rate to 38.5 percent and also have a $1,000,000 threshold for married filers.
Republicans have weighed repealing the individual mandate in recent weeks, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would free up $338 billion over 10 years for tax reform.
But the savings occur only because CBO predicts 13 million fewer people would have health insurance by 2027. It’s not clear whether that’s enough to reduce top rates to Trump’s desired levels or provide additional middle-class benefits.
In general, rich households already do well in analyses of the current tax plans thanks to provisions like ending the alternative minimum tax, reducing or repealing the estate tax, and cutting taxes for pass-through entities, all of which could potentially benefit Trump himself.
Under the new Senate bill, for example, the conservative Tax Foundation estimates the top 1 percent of taxpayers would see a 7.5 percent increase in after-tax income, versus less than 2 percent for the bottom 80 percent.
Democrats, who have spent weeks attacking the Republican tax bills as a boon to the rich, quickly seized on Trump’s remarks.
“Sooner or later, President Trump’s core supporters will realize that he’s selling them out,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement. “This proposal would send premiums for millions of Americans skyrocketing, all so that the wealthy can get an even bigger tax giveaway than they’d get under the original Republican plan.”
After President Trump boasted of his “great relationship” with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during a meeting in Manila Monday, American reporters pressed Trump on whether he brought up human rights issues.
“Whoa, whoa,” Duterte said, cutting off the journalists. “This is not a press statement. This is the bilateral meeting.”
Then, Duterte told reporters: “With you around, guys, you are the spies.”
Trump laughed, according to a transcript of the conversation.
“You are,” Duterte repeated.
Hearing the Philippine president once again demonize journalists — and seeing Trump chuckle in response — struck a nerve among journalists and activists in the Philippines and beyond.
The Philippines ranks as the fifth most dangerous country for journalists, according to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 177 Filipino media workers have been killed since 1986. In the past decade, 42 journalists have been killed with total impunity, the report said, and at least four journalists have been killed in the time since Duterte took office in June 2016.
Duterte came under fire last year for appearing to defend the killing of journalists, insisting that many slain journalists had been corrupt and had “done something” to justify being killed.
“Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination if you’re a son of a bitch,” Rodrigo Duterte, then president-elect, said in May of last year, Agence France-Presse reported.
He suggested many of the killings were done in retaliation for journalists accepting bribes or criticizing people. He also called one recently slain journalist “rotten,” the Associated Press reported.
The comments spurred widespread condemnation from journalists and activists worldwide. The Committee to Protect Journalists said his remarks threatened to turn the Philippines into a “killing field for journalists.”
Duterte himself has been accused of ordering the assassination of a journalist. In February, a former Philippine policeman, Arturo Lascanas, acknowledged his role in the 2003 killing of radio journalist Juan “Jun” Pala.
He said the assassination was ordered and paid for by Duterte, then mayor of Davao City, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and local news reports. The former policeman said Duterte ordered a “death squad” to carry out extrajudicial killings, which Duterte has repeatedly denied, Reuters reported.
Duterte’s administration has pledged to investigate and solve the murders of journalists. In October of last year, he formed a Presidential Task Force on Media Security designed to speed up investigations and prosecutions of media killings. But so far, there have been no convictions, and “little evidence that the task force has actively pursued attacks on journalists,” according to Human Rights Watch.
In a span of two days in August, two radio journalists were shot dead. Rudy Alicaway, a 46-year-old radio host, was fatally shot on his way home from work in the southern province of Zamboanga del Sur. Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot him, before getting off the vehicle and shooting him again as he tried to flee, ensuring his death, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines.
The following day, a 60-year-old local columnist and radio reporter, Leodoro Diaz, was fatally shot on his way home in Sultan Kudarat province. Earlier that day, he told his colleagues he planned to publish a report on illegal drugs, according to Human Rights Watch. Authorities have not determined a motive for the killing of either Alicaway or Diaz.
On Aug. 10, three days after Diaz’s death, an assailant shot 65-year-old columnist Crisenciano Ibon in Batangas City. Ibon survived the shooting, which police suspect may have been ordered by operators of illegal gambling. Ibon’s recent columns had shed a negative light on the industry, according to the Philippine Star.
The single deadliest attack on journalists anywhere in the world took place in the Philippines. The 2009 Maguindanao massacre left 30 local journalists and two media workers dead, along with 26 other civilians.
A convoy of family members and supporters had been accompanying a local vice mayor on the island of Mindanao to register his candidacy for upcoming gubernatorial elections, according to a lengthy report in Human Rights Watch called “They Own the People.”
Around 30 members of the news media went along to cover the event. As the group drove down the highway, about 200 armed men forced them out of their vehicles and summarily executed them all, burying them at the site.
Eight years later, not a single person has been convicted in connection with the mass killing. Three suspects were acquitted in July because of lack of evidence, the Philippine Star reported.
“The fact that no one has yet been convicted nearly eight years after the massacre underscores the fact impunity reigns in this country,” the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said in a statement.
“Impunity exists to this day under the Rodrigo Duterte government, which is not doing any better than his predecessors,” the union continued. “In fact, he himself justified the killings of journalists.”
“Fake news” in the Philippines — in the form of dubious and counterfeit online news sites — has built support for Duterte, Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, wrote in the New York Times. These sites have featured false endorsements of Duterte from leaders such as Pope Francis and Angela Merkel, and celebrities including Angelina Jolie and Dwayne Johnson.
During the presidential election, Duterte’s social media team paid hundreds of prominent online commentators to post a barrage of pro-Duterte comments on social media and bash critics. As the New Republic reported, online trolls with fake social media accounts can earn up to $2,000 a month to post pro-Duterte propaganda on the Web.
The messages seemed to work — the president maintained approval ratings above 60 percent until last month, when his net satisfaction rating fell to 48, classified as “good,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
The drop in ratings comes as the president continues to wage a bloody drug war that has claimed thousands of lives in extrajudicial killings by police or hit men.
According to the International Press Institute, Duterte’s assaults on the news media seem to be rubbing off on his supporters. Journalists who are critical of Duterte’s policies or write about issues such as drug trafficking or corruption face defamation suits and online backlash, IPI reported.
On Monday, journalists and human rights activists on social media were quick to point out that accusing journalists of being spies is no joke in the Philippines — or anywhere, for that matter. Some criticized Trump for laughing at Duterte’s comment, while others said they weren’t all that surprised.
Barely any mention of Duterte’s gross human rights abuses and then Trump let Duterte steamroll American journalists? I’d say I am shocked, but Trump’s embrace of dictators and animosity towards the press isn’t new. https://t.co/7EXg0stvhX
I’ve had too many friends run out of countries or worse to find this even slightly amusing. And it’s usually the spy agencies of authoritarians who harass and torture journalists. So, yeah. Hilarious.
My dad was a journalist, not a spy, but after he was kidnapped, he was repeatedly tortured while his captors tried to get him to admit he was. Hilarious. https://t.co/CJ2H7qTC7j
Trump has frequently lashed out at the news media, which he has called “the enemy of the American People.” He wrote on Twitter last month that NBC News should be punished by regulators after the organization published a report that he did not like.
He suggested that networks that report “fake news” should be stripped of their licenses. First Amendment advocates condemned his comments as an attack on the Constitution.
“It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write,” Trump said. “And people should look into it.”
In August, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, the United Nations’ human rights chief, said that freedom of the press is “under attack from the president.”
“To call these news organizations ‘fake’ does tremendous damage,” he said. “I have to ask the question: Is this not an incitement for others to attack journalists?”
U.S. President Donald Trump said he believed President Vladimir Putin when he denied accusations Russia meddled in last year’s U.S. election despite U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion of Russian interference.
Trump made the comment after he and Putin met briefly at a summit in Vietnam on Saturday and agreed on a statement supporting a political solution for Syria.
It was their first encounter since July and came during a low in U.S.-Russia relations and at a time Trump is haunted by an investigation into accusations that Putin influenced the election that brought him to the White House.
Putin reiterated the denials of interference, Trump said.
“Every time he sees me he says I didn’t do that, and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One after leaving the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the resort of Danang.
“I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country,” Trump said.
Trump, who has called allegations of campaign collusion with Moscow a hoax, has faced questions from Democrats about the matter since he took office. A special counsel, Robert Mueller, is conducting a probe that has led to charges against Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates.
U.S. intelligence agencies have also concluded Russians interfered to tip the election in Trump’s favor through hacking and releasing emails to embarrass Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and spreading social media propaganda.
Russia has repeatedly denied meddling.
The top Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives intelligence committee, which is investigating the issue, harshly criticized Trump’s comments and accused him of siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies.
“The President fools no one. He understands that the Russians intervened through the hacking and dumping of his opponent’s emails, the fruits of which he exploited time and again on the campaign trail,” Adam Schiff said in a statement.
“He understands all this and more. He just doesn’t understand how to put country over self. Or to put it in terms he is more familiar with – Mr. Trump simply can’t bring himself to put America first,” the Democrat said.
President Trump on Saturday lashed out at U.S. intelligence leaders for their conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, calling them “political hacks” and slamming the investigations into Russian interference as a “Democratic hit job.”
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump blasted former U.S. intelligence officials by name, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey.
“I mean, give me a break, they are political hacks,” Trump said, according to White House pool reports. He was discussing the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election in favor of Trump.
“So you look at it, I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper and you have Comey,” he continued. “Comey is proven now to be a liar and he is proven now to be a leaker.”
“So you look at that and you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with them,” he continued, referring to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Trump said that the investigation into Russian interference in the election was a “Democratic-inspired thing” and a “pure hit job.”
Trump went on to say that he wasn’t going to “argue” with Putin about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
“He said he didn’t meddle, he said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times,” Trump said, according to pool reports.
“I can’t stand there and argue with him, I would rather have him get out of Syria, I would rather get to work with him on the Ukraine,” he added.
Multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI, have concluded that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election, and several congressional investigations are currently underway to determine the scale and scope of Russia’s interference.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is also leading an investigation into potential ties between President Trump’s election campaign and Russian officials.
Trump is in the middle of a five-nation, 12-day trip to Asia, and is currently in Vietnam. Trump participated overnight in the 25th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Danang.
President Donald Trump on Saturday lashed out at North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un after state-run media called him a “lunatic old man.”
North Korea also criticized Trump as a “warmonger” as the president toured Asia to drum up support against Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.
Trump also lashed out at the “haters and fools” who had criticized his meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. The two spoke together during the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Vietnam.
Trump faced a backlash after saying he believed Putin, who told him that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
President Xi of China has stated that he is upping the sanctions against #NoKo. Said he wants them to denuclearize. Progress is being made.
When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There always playing politics – bad for our country. I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!
Does the Fake News Media remember when Crooked Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was begging Russia to be our friend with the misspelled reset button? Obama tried also, but he had zero chemistry with Putin.
Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend – and maybe someday that will happen!
Brett J. Talley, President Trump’s nominee to be a federal judge in Alabama, has never tried a case, was unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Assn.’s judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee, denouncing “Hillary Rotten Clinton” and pledging support for the National Rifle Assn.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, approved him for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.
Talley, 36, is part of what Trump has called the “untold story” of his success in filling the courts with young conservatives.
“The judge story is an untold story. Nobody wants to talk about it,” Trump said last month, standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in the White House Rose Garden. “But when you think of it, Mitch and I were saying, that has consequences 40 years out, depending on the age of the judge — but 40 years out.”
Civil rights groups and liberal advocates see the matter differently. They denounced Thursday’s vote, calling it “laughable” that none of the committee Republicans objected to confirming a lawyer with as little experience as Talley to preside over federal trials.
“He’s practiced law for less than three years and never argued a motion, let alone brought a case. This is the least amount of experience I’ve seen in a judicial nominee,” said Kristine Lucius, executive vice president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
The group was one of several on the left that urged the Judiciary Committee to reject Talley because of his lack of qualifications and because of doubts over whether he had the “temperament and ability to approach cases with the fairness and open-mindedness necessary to serve as a federal judge.”
Some conservatives discount the ABA’s rating. “The ABA is a liberal interest group. They have a long history of giving lower ratings to Republican nominees,” said Carrie Severino, counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, which supports Trump’s nominees. She said past liberal nominees have been rated as qualified even if they had little or no courtroom experience.
Talley does have some other qualifications, some traditional, others less so. He grew up in Alabama and earned degrees from the University of Alabama and Harvard Law School. He clerked for two federal judges and worked as a speech writer on the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. And, like many people who eventually became federal judges, he became the protege of someone who became a senator.
In Talley’s case, the mentor was Republican Sen. Luther Strange, the former Alabama state attorney general who was appointed to the Senate in January to replace Jeff Sessions, who left the Senate to become U.S. attorney general. Talley worked for Strange as a deputy.
Typically, senators play the lead role in recommending nominees for the federal district judgeships in their state. Talley also had something of an inside track. This year, when Sessions moved to the attorney general’s post, Talley took a job in the Justice Department’s office that selects judicial nominees.
Trump and McConnell have succeeded in pushing judicial nominees through the Senate because the Republicans have voted in lockstep since taking control of the chamber in 2014.
When Trump took office in January, there were more than 100 vacant seats on the federal courts, thanks to an unprecedented slowdown engineered by McConnell during the final two years of President Obama’s term. The Senate under GOP control approved only 22 judges in that two-year period, the lowest total since 1951-52 in the last year of President Truman’s term. By contrast, the Senate under Democratic control approved 68 judges in the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency.
The best known vacancy was on the Supreme Court. After Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused to permit a hearing for Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee. Trump filled the seat earlier this year with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.
The Alliance for Justice, which tracks judicial nominees, said Trump’s team is off to a fast start, particularly when compared with Obama’s first year. By November 2009, Obama had made 27 judicial nominations, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Trump has nominated 59 people to the federal courts, including Justice Gorsuch. That’s also a contrast with Trump’s pace in filling executive branch jobs, where he has lagged far behind the pace of previous administrations.
Liberal advocates are dismayed that Republicans have voted in unison on Trump’s judges.
“So far, no one from his party has been willing to stand up against him on the agenda of packing the courts,” said Marge Baker, vice president of People for the American Way.
Last month, when the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on several other nominations, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked Talley about his fervent advocacy of gun rights. In a blog post titled a “Call to Arms,” he wrote that “the President and his democratic allies in Congress are about to launch the greatest attack on our constitutional freedoms in our lifetime,” referring to Obama’s proposal for background checks and limits on rapid-fire weapons following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
“The object of that war is to make guns illegal, in all forms,” Talley wrote. The NRA “stands for all of us now, and I pray that in the coming battle for our rights, they will be victorious,” he added.
A month later, he reprinted a “thoughtful response” from a reader who wrote: “We will have to resort to arms when our other rights — of speech, press, assembly, representative government — fail to yield the desired results.” To that, he wrote: “I agree completely with this.”
When pressed, he told the senators he was “trying to generate discussion. I wanted people to be able to use my blog to discuss issues, to come together and find common ground.”
In a follow-up written question, Feinstein asked him how many times he had appeared in a federal district court.
“To my recollection, during my time as Alabama’s deputy solicitor general, I participated as part of the legal team in one hearing in federal district court in the Middle District of Alabama,” he replied.
On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee approved White House lawyer Greg Katsas on a 11-9 vote to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and then approved Talley on another 11-9 vote. The nominations now move to the Senate floor, where a similar party-line result is expected.
During a speech on Tuesday before the South Korean National Assembly, Donald Trump could not help but plug his golf course to the delegation gathered for his address.
Trump was discussing Korean golfers being “some of the best” in the world when he boastfully brought up his Bedminster Golf Club.
“In fact—and you know what I’m going to say—the women’s U.S. Open was held this year at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey,” Trump said as the audience applauded. “And it just happened to be won by a great Korean golfer, Park Sung-hyun, and eight of the top players were from Korea, and the top four golfers, one, two, three, four, the top four were from Korea.”
President Donald Trump called 12 Senate Democrats Tuesday, hoping to sway them in favor of the Republican tax cut bill, and told them he would personally “get killed” financially by the GOP bill. He said the wealthy need a repeal of the estate tax, according to multiple people who were present.
“My accountant called me and said ‘you’re going to get killed in this bill,'” the president said during a phone call from his trip in South Korea. He was apparently trying to increase Democratic support by claiming the bill would hurt wealthy taxpayers like himself, making the point that only the repeal of the estate tax would provide him any benefit.
Many of those Democrats are from states Trump won in 2016.
After the call with Trump ended, the meeting, which included his legislative affairs chief Marc Short and economics adviser Gary Cohn, turned into a sparring match between Democrats and White House officials over a politically broken Senate and who is to blame, multiple senators who attended the meeting said.
Short confirmed the president’s remarks and said they were part of a discussion on the elimination of individual deductions in the tax bill. Short said the estate tax was a separate issue.
Trump told the Democrats on the phone that he wanted a repeal of the estate tax in the bill because they had to give something to rich people, people in the room said.
“I think that we’ve been advocating for the elimination of the death tax for a while,” Short told NBC News, using the favored Republican term for the estate tax.
Trump, a billionaire, has not released any tax returns and so it has not been possible for the public to assess how this plan could benefit him personally and his family. Senate Republicans are rushing to release their tax cut bill later this week.
Asked to comment on the president’s remarks to the group, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said, “The president did call in and urged senators to support the bill.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said the president told the Democrats “this bill is terrible for rich people, and we (Democrats) don’t really agree.”
An analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation found that after 2023, people making between $20,000 and $40,000 would see a tax increase. People making $200,000 to $500,000 per year would also see a tax increase after 2023 under the current GOP plan. A repeal of the estate tax would give the wealthy an additional $300 billion dollar tax break.
The House is amending its version of a tax overhaul initially released last week and the Senate is expected to unveil its version of a bill on Thursday. The Senate Finance Committee is expected to move quickly, advancing the measure though the committee process starting Monday, a timeline that Democrats say shuts them out of the process.
Senate Democrats complained about components of the House bill during the meeting, but Short and Cohn told them that the Senate bill will be much different than the House version and that the Senate bill is the one that matters.
The hour-long meeting became increasingly testy when Democrats complained about the process. Republicans have been crafting a bill behind closed doors and have sought no Democratic input.
Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., grew frustrated and got into a heated back and forth with Short.
“Give us your input now,” Short told Tester, according to the Montana senator.
Democrats continued to complain about Republicans locking them out of the process, making the argument that true bipartisan tax overhaul should get the support of 70 senators.
But Short responded to their concerns by blaming Democrats for Senate dysfunction because they have held up Trump’s nominees.
A frequent Fox News guest who has been peddling a conspiracy theory that the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was an “inside job” says he recently met with CIA Director Mike Pompeo at the urging of President Donald Trump.
In an interview with The Intercept, former National Security Agency intelligence officer William Binney says he met with Pompeo last month to discuss his theory that an internal staff member stole emails from the DNC and sent them all to WikiLeaks. He says Pompeo told them that Trump had recommended the two men talk.
The theory that the 2016 DNC hack was an “inside job” is totally at odds with U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessments that Russian intelligence operatives were behind the attack. An exhaustive Associated Press report from last week revealed that Russian hackers had targeted the DNC as far back as October 2015 by sending out a flurry of malicious phishing emails that they used to gain access to both the DNC emails and former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s personal email account.
Despite this, Binney is insistent that the DNC hack was done by a DNC insider — and he tells The Intercept that he even brought up the Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory in his meeting with Pompeo.
“It is particularly stunning that Pompeo would meet with Binney at Trump’s apparent urging, in what could be seen as an effort to discredit the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment that an alleged Russian hack of the DNC servers was part of an effort to help Trump win the presidency,” writes The Intercept, which further notes that Trump could have first learned of Binney during his appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program this past August.
“I was willing to meet Pompeo simply because it was clear to me the intelligence community wasn’t being honest here,” Binney tells The Intercept. “I am quite willing to help people who need the truth to find the truth and not simply have deceptive statements from the intelligence community.”
