U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this week arrested two millionaire fugitives from Ecuador whose family donated heavily to American political campaigns.

Roberto and William Isaías, 74 and 75, were detained Wednesday in Miami and taken to a detention facility for undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation, The New York Times reported Friday.

ICE told the Times that the brothers were “unlawfully present” in the U.S.

The Isaías brothers were convicted in 2012 of embezzlement by an Ecuadorean court and sentenced to prison terms in absentia, since they had been living in South Florida for nearly a decade. The brothers have denied any wrongdoing, claiming the Ecuadorean government politicized the case and wrongfully seized their assets, the Times reported.

The Ecuadorean government alleges that the brothers cost the country $400 million and has sought their extradition for years.

As Ecuador sought the duo's extradition, the Isaías family reportedly donated tens of thousands of dollars to members of the U.S. Congress and $90,000 to former President Obama’s reelection campaign.

https://freedomoutpost.com/ice-busts-millionaire-obama-donors/

According to fired FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe, intelligence officials were briefing President Trump on the state of North Korea's ballistic missile program when Trump said he did not believe North Korea possessed the capability to launch missile attacks on the United States because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that Pyongyang did not possess such missiles.

McCabe's comments on 60 Minutes led MSNBC's Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski to ask politics editor at The Daily Beast Sam Stein, "What would be the indications at this point that President Trump is not a puppet for Vladimir Putin? Tell me all the ways in which he's made it clear that he's not in his actions."

Stein could have listed several policies that showed that Trump has taken actions that no Putin puppet would ever take. No Putin puppet would support Juan Guaidó in Venezuela, strike Syrian targets twice after Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, or sell anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Nor would he withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran or the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, but Morning Joe opposed both of those moves, saying the latter was part of Trump's plan to start a war with Iran and that the latter would start a nuclear arms race. Using Mika's own logic, Morning Joe is a Putin puppet.

However, Stein did not cite any of those examples, but instead replied, "That's a rhetorical question, Mika. It's very difficult to find those cases." Stein also lamented that, "For all of his faults, all his problems, he's done one thing really effectively, which is he's muddied the waters and he's convinced half the population that Andy McCabe can't be trusted, that his account is something written out of vindictiveness."

Perhaps the reason why McCabe isn't trusted is not because Trump has waged a PR war against him, but because he was fired for lying about leaks to the press on the suggestion of the inspector general, who also recommended a criminal investigation into the matter.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/alex-christy/2019/02/18/morning-joe-insists-trump-putin-puppet-laments-public-does-not