monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trudeau wants to let anyone with a driver's licence vote — like those 50,000 Syrian migrants

Justin Trudeau has introduced an extremely long and complicated new bill, called Bill C-76, to change our elections laws.

Here's one key passage. Voters will require:

"...one piece of identification issued by a Canadian government, whether federal, provincial or local, or an agency of that government, that contains a photograph of the elector and his or her name and address.”

President Donald Trump's lawyer for the probe into alleged collusion between his election team and Russia has left, in the case's latest legal shake-up.

Ty Cobb will be replaced by Emmet Flood, an attorney who defended ex-President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings 20 years ago.

President Trump’s in-house lawyer representing him in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe is set to leave this month -- and will be replaced by an attorney who represented former President Bill Clinton during his impeachment fight, Fox News has learned.

Cobb, who sports a trademark mustache, served as the president’s internal legal counsel and acted as a liaison between the White House and Mueller’s office. White House Counsel Don McGahn advises Trump internally on separate matters.

Cobb will now be replaced by Emmet Flood, who served as counsel for Clinton during impeachment proceedings in 1998. Flood also was the lead lawyer at the White House Counsel’s Office during former President George W. Bush’s second term. Flood is a partner at Williams & Connolly -- the law firm also represents Hillary Clinton, and did so during the FBI's investigation into her private email server.

A majority of evangelical Christians believe the Bible is very clear in its definition of marriage and sexuality, holding to the view described by Staver: that homosexuality behavior is sinful. Similarly, many other faith groups – including Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Mormons – don't affirm same-sex relationships. However, courts have yet to hold the Muslim faith or Muslim business practices to the same standard that's been imposed on businesses like Hobby Lobby and individuals like Jack Phillips. And Muslim politicians, such as Congressmen Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) and André Carson (D-Indiana), go unchallenged on their faith's stance on homosexuality.

Hear That Dems? North Korea Pulls Plug On Nuke Site, Releases U.S. Prisoners Ahead Of Summit

U.S. intelligence says the North Koreans have started pulling cables from the tunnels at their nuclear test site -- a first step toward closing them down, CBS News' national security correspondent David Martin reports. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has vowed to shut down the country's nuclear test site in May, Seoul's presidential office said on Sunday.

President Donald Trump personally repaid his lawyer the $130,000 that was used to buy an adult film actor's silence about an alleged affair, his legal aide Rudy Giuliani has said.

It appears to contradict Mr Trump, who said he did not know about the payment made by lawyer Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

He cited the “Founding Fathers” for his assertion, saying they “created this immunity,” something the Supreme Court has never said. The high court has not confronted the question of whether a president must comply with a grand jury subpoena for testimony in a criminal case.

But it has rejected efforts to immunize the president from the demands of courts, civil and criminal.

Sol Wisenberg, a defense attorney who was a deputy independent counsel during the Starr special counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton, said the comment "obviously increases the president's exposure to potential campaign finance violations, but it also makes him look terrible."

"I don't understand the Giuliani strategy," he added. "Maybe it's been too long since he's been in the criminal justice field.

Trump also stated in his letter informing Comey of his dismissal that the former FBI director had told him he wasn't under investigation.

"While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to lead the bureau," Trump wrote in the letter to Comey.

“I am rarely, as your viewers know, rendered speechless,” self-aware Stormy Daniels barrister Michael Avenatti said Wednesday on MSNBC. “But I am absolutely speechless at this revelation and this admission.”

Avenatti was, of course, referring to Rudy Giuliani‘s stunning admission that President Donald Trump reimbursed his attorney Michael Cohen the $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels.

The attorney did not think the other side would simply volunteer that information.

“This is an outrage what has gone on here,” Avenatti said. “The American people have been lied to about this agreement, about the $130,000, about the reimbursement, and this is consistent with what we have been saying now for months. That ultimately it is going to be proven and ultimately was going to come out. We just didn’t know that Rudy Giuliani was going to go on the Sean Hannity show and admit it on national television.”

The lawyer does think there’s a method to Giuliani’s madness:

“I see these guys coming a mile away,” Avenatti said. “Here’s the argument they’re going to make, and I don’t think it’s going to be successful. But here it is. They’re going to argue that ultimately this money was paid by Donald Trump individually, and because it was paid by Donald Trump individually, who has no limit to the amount of money that he can put in to his own presidential campaign, that somehow the reporting requirements or the limitations, et cetera, did not apply to him, and therefore there was no campaign violation because of that fact. That’s the foundation or the predicate…they’re attempting to lay at this point.”

He [Giuliani] cited the “Founding Fathers” for his assertion, saying they “created this immunity,” something the Supreme Court has never said. The high court has not confronted the question of whether a president must comply with a grand jury subpoena for testimony in a criminal case.

But it has rejected efforts to immunize the president from the demands of courts, civil and criminal.[/color]

The Supreme Court has ruled in two cases involving claims of presidential immunity from judicial processes. In United States v. Nixon, the 1974 Watergate tapes case, a unanimous court rejected President Richard M. Nixon’s arguments that he did not have to turn over secretly recorded White House tapes in response to a subpoena.

“Neither the doctrine of separation of powers nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances,” the court said in an opinion written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger.

The case differed from any that Trump would face largely because it involved a subpoena not for testimony but for tapes.

In Clinton v. Jones, the court ruled in 1997 that President Bill Clinton enjoyed no immunity from a civil suit brought against him by Paula Jones, who alleged sexual advances by Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. It also declined to defer the litigation until the end of Clinton’s presidency, saying that was not constitutionally required either.

But there is an important limitation on Mueller’s activities, no matter how well regarded he is: The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the executive branch’s most authoritative in-house lawyer, has long taken the position that the president cannot be prosecuted or even indicted while still in office.


First in 1973 with President Richard M. Nixon, and then again in 2000 with President Bill Clinton, the OLC determined that the indictment or prosecution of a sitting president “would be unconstitutional because it would impermissibly interfere with the President’s ability to carry out his constitutionally assigned functions.” Despite its Nixon-era origins, the theory is not that the president is above the law, but rather that any criminal case must wait until after he or she leaves office.

The issue is one of separation of powers. Although the Constitution sets out a mechanism by which Congress may remove the president — the impeachment process — any attempt to prosecute the commander in chief before he or she leaves office would, in the OLC’s view, constitute an unworkable intrusion into the president’s core responsibilities. Both in 1973 and 2000, the OLC analysis noted that the presidency is unique because the executive branch is ultimately led by a singular figure on call and on the job 24 hours a day, unlike Congress or the judiciary. If one or more members of the legislative or judicial branches are temporarily distracted, others on the job can step in to keep business going.

Not everyone agrees with the OLC’s view of the law. Hofstra law professor Eric Freedman, for instance, has argued that the office’s interpretation “is inconsistent with the history, structure, and underlying philosophy of our government, at odds with precedent, and unjustified by practical considerations.”


The government’s position has never been tested in court — although it came close during Watergate.

Tell me again, republicans, why you didn't want Hillary in office?

Quote:

President Donald Trump personally repaid his lawyer the $130,000 that was used to buy an adult film actor's silence about an alleged affair, his legal aide Rudy Giuliani has said.

It appears to contradict Mr Trump, who said he did not know about the payment made by lawyer Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43985260

White House insists Trump only learned of Cohen payment recently

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday sought to explain why President Trump was untruthful about his knowledge of a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

"This was information the president didn't know at the time, but eventually learned," Sanders told reporters at her daily press briefing.

The spokeswoman was pressed about why the White House has repeatedly said things that are not accurate.

"We give the very best information we have at the time," Sanders replied.
Sanders faced a barrage of questions about Trump's admission that he reimbursed his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the $130,000 payment to Daniels, who says she had a sexual encounter with Trump.

The president's new Russia attorney, Rudy Giuliani, revealed that Trump paid Cohen back during a Wednesday night interview on Fox News.

The admission caught White House staffers off-guard; Sanders said she first learned Trump learned of the reimbursement during Giuliani's interview.

Trump told reporters last month he had no knowledge of the payment and did not know the source of the money.

When did he pay Cohen back?

Later, in an interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani said the repayments to Cohen mostly took place in 2017, though he allowed that there could have been a payment in 2018..

Quote:

"We give the very best information we have at the time," Sanders replied.

As of last week, the American public had been told that President Trump’s doctor had certified he would be the “the healthiest individual ever elected.” That the president was happy with his legal team and would not hire a new lawyer. That he did not know about the $130,000 payment to a former pornographic film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him.

As of this week, it turns out that the statement about his health was not actually from the doctor but had been dictated by Mr. Trump himself. That the president has split with the leaders of his legal team and hired the same new lawyer he had denied recruiting. And that Mr. Trump himself financed the $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of the actress known as Stormy Daniels.

Even in the current political environment that some derisively call the post-truth world, the past few days have offered a head-spinning series of revelations that conflicted with the version of events Mr. Trump and his associates had previously provided. Whether called lies or misstatements, Mr. Trump’s history of falsehoods has been extensively documented, but the string of factual distortions that came to light this week could come back to haunt him.
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