Cummings relents to one of two White House demands for ex-security chief interview

A top House Democrat has backed off a threat to hold a former White House official in contempt of Congress. De-escalating a fight over an ignored subpoena, the White House announced late Friday that it would allow former White House personnel security director Carl Kline to do a transcribed interview for the House Oversight Committee. Further assuaging the situation, Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., wrote to Kline on Saturday, saying his panel would not move forward with contempt and accept the White House demand to have a lawyer present. However, Cummings will not accept a second demand to have the interview “limited to White House personnel security policies and practices.” "Based on the record before us, I am confident that the Committee could move forward with contempt against you immediately, particularly since your defiance of the Committee's subpoena was so flagrant," Cummings wrote in a letter obtained by Politico. "However, I have always endeavored to be as fair as possible in the pursuit of truth, particularly with witnesses who are willing to come before the Committee."

House Democrats subpoenaed Kline after one of his former employees said that people in the administration were being given security clearance despite “disqualifying issues," but he declined to show up for a subpoenaed deposition after the White House advised him against it. After the Democrat-led committee scheduled a vote to hold Kline in contempt, the ranking member of the committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, appealed Friday to the White House to allow Kline to appear for a transcribed interview so as to avoid an “inter-branch confrontation.” White House counsel Pat Cipollone responded Friday with a letter stating that Kline was available for an interview on May 1 so long as the committee met their demands. It's unclear if Kline will accept Cummings' latest terms.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cummings-relents-to-one-of-two-white-house-demands-for-ex-security-chief-interview

John Bolton, Iran's foreign minister grapple over regime change in back-to-back interviews

National security adviser John Bolton and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took shots at one another in back-to-back interviews on the topic of regime change in Iran. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Zarif discussed a group of countries and officials are pushing the United States to spur a conflict with Tehran. Among them, he said, are Bolton, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.

“At least. They want — they have all shown an interest in dragging the United States into a conflict,” Zarif said. “I do not believe that President Trump wants to do that, I believe President Trump ran on a campaign promise of not bringing the United States into another war.”

Bolton, an Iran hawk, also was a guest on the show and was asked to respond to Zarif's claim that the U.S. is trying to "foment" a conflict between the U.S. and Iran. "It's completely ridiculous. I think what that interview showed was a carefully prepared propaganda script by the Iranians," Bolton said. "This is their effort to try and sow disinformation and the American body politic. The fact is the president's policy on Iran has been clear well before I arrived in the administration. It is to put maximum pressure on the regime to get it to change its behavior. And I think it's working and I think that's what they're worried about."

The U.S. announced this month that it would stop granting exemptions to countries that import Iranian oil. Countries that persist in buying oil from Iran will face U.S. sanctions. The Trump administration also designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a foreign terrorist organization, escalating tension in the region and leading Iran to label the entire U.S. military as “terrorists.”

Zarif told host Chris Wallace these hardball tactics would not succeed. “I believe President Trump’s intention to put pressure, the policy of maximum pressure, on Iran in order to bring Iran to its knees so that we would succumb to pressure is doomed to failure,” Zarif said.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/john-bolton-irans-foreign-minister-grapple-over-regime-change-in-back-to-back-interviews

Trump ‘Outs’ Judge Napolitano, Says He Came Asking For SCOTUS Nod

President Donald Trump tweeted after Saturday’s rally in Wisconsin an attack on Judge Andrew Napolitano, claiming the judge had come to him privately to ask for a Supreme Court nomination. “Thank you to brilliant and highly respected attorney Alan Dershowitz for destroying the very dumb legal argument of ‘Judge’ Andrew Napolitano….” Trump began, following his praise of Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz with an immediate pivot to an attack on Napolitano. “….Ever since Andrew came to my office to ask that I appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I said NO, he has been very hostile! Also asked for pardon for his friend. A good ‘pal’ of low ratings Shepard Smith,” the president concluded.

Trump appeared to be referring to the fallout from the recently-released Mueller report, which Napolitano has argued on his Fox Nation show “Judge Napolitano’s Chambers” stands as proof that the president obstructed justice. “Prosecutors prosecute people who interfere with government functions and that’s what the president did by obstruction, where is this going to end? I don’t know, but I am disappointed in the behavior of the president,” Napolitano said, calling that behavior “immoral,” “criminal,” “defenseless” and “condemnable.”

Dershowitz responded to Napolitano’s comments by noting during an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle” that because it was within the president’s purview to terminate the investigation or fire special counsel Robert Mueller, any attempts he made to do so could not be described as “obstruction.” “In my introduction to ‘The Mueller Report,’ I go through the elements of obstruction of justice,” Dershowitz explained. “The act itself has to be illegal. It can’t be an act that is authorized by Article II of the Constitution.”

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/04/28/trump-napolitano-ask-scotus-nod/

No Mass for Sri Lanka’s Catholics; no veils for Muslim women

AMPARA, Sri Lanka (AP) — The effects of Sri Lanka’s Easter suicide bombings reverberated across two faiths Sunday, with Catholics shut out of their churches for fear of new attacks, left with only a televised Mass, and Muslim women ordered to stop wearing veils in public. Many across the nation knelt before their televisions as Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the archbishop of Colombo, delivered a homily before members of the clergy and the country’s leaders in a small chapel at his residence in the capital.

The closing of all of Sri Lanka’s Catholic churches — an extraordinary measure unheard of in the church’s centuries on this island off the southern tip of India — came after local officials and the U.S. Embassy in Colombo warned that more militants remained on the loose with explosives a week after bombings claimed by the Islamic State group and aimed at churches and hotels killed more than 250 people.

Before services began, the Islamic State group claimed three militants who blew themselves up Friday night after exchanging fire with police in the country’s east. Investigators sifting through that site and others uncovered a bomb-making operation capable of spreading far more destruction. “This is a time our hearts are tested by the great destruction that took place last Sunday,” Ranjith told those watching across the nation. “This is a time questions such as, does God truly love us, does he have compassion toward us, can arise in human hearts.” Later on Sunday, President Maithripala Sirisena banned all kinds of face coverings that may conceal people’s identities. The emergency law, which takes effect Monday, prevents Muslim women from veiling their faces. The decision came after the Cabinet had proposed laws on face veils at a recent meeting. It had deferred the matter until talks with Islamic clerics could be held, on the advice of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

In a rare show of unity, Sirisena, Wickremesinghe and opposition leader Mahinda Rajapaksa had attended the Mass in person. Their political rivalry and government dysfunction are blamed for a failure to act upon near-specific information received from foreign intelligence agencies that preceded the bombings, which targeted three churches and three luxury hotels. Police said they had arrested 48 suspects over the last 24 hours as checkpoints mounted by all of Sri Lanka’s security forces sprung up across this country of 21 million people. Those arrested include two men whom authorities recently appealed to the public to locate. The government also warned that it would crack down on those spreading false information and making inflammatory remarks.

Police, meanwhile, entered the main mosque of National Towheed Jamaat on Sunday afternoon, just a day after authorities declared it and another organization terror groups over the bombings. Police entered the mosque, located in Kattankudy in eastern Sri Lanka, and stopped an interview among foreign journalists and mosque officials. Later, a senior police officer dispersed journalists waiting outside, saying authorities were conducting a “cordon and search operation.” Police then left, locking up the mosque just before afternoon prayers were to start.

Authorities banned National Towheed Jamaat over its ties to Mohammed Zahran, the alleged mastermind of the Easter Sunday bombings. Zahran and masked others had pledged their loyalty to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before carrying out the attacks, showing the danger the extremist group poses even after losing all its territory in Iraq and Syria.

https://www.breitbart.com/news/no-mass-for-sri-lankas-catholics-no-veils-for-muslim-women/