https://twitter.com/jdawsey1/status/1135628900875345921
June 3, 2019, 3:12 PM EDT
By Alex Moe, Mike Memoli and Dareh Gregorian
House Democrats announced Monday they'll hold a hearing next week focused on the Mueller Report and presidential obstruction.
The Judiciary Committee hearing will include testimony from former White House Counsel John Dean, a key figure in the Watergate hearings that helped lead to then-President Richard Nixon's resignation.
The hearing — which comes as more House Democrats clamor to launch impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump — will also include testimony from legal experts and former federal prosecutors.
“No one is above the law. While the White House continues to cover up and stonewall, and to prevent the American people from knowing the truth, we will continue to move forward with our investigation," Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a statement announcing the session, entitled "Lessons from the Mueller Report: Presidential Obstruction and Other Crimes."
George Nader, the adviser to United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, commonly called MBZ, has reportedly played an important role in shaping US policy in the Middle East for decades.
Get em all.
https://twitter.com/ICEgov/status/1135635528571736064
Guatemalan illegal alien residing in Iowa sentenced for benefit fraud
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — An illegal alien from Guatemala was sentenced in federal court Friday for fraudulently drawing welfare assistance.
This sentence resulted from an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General, and the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals Investigation Division’s Economic Fraud Control Bureau.
Cleotilde Puac-Gomez, 46, a citizen of Guatemala who is illegally residing in the U.S. in Clarion, Iowa, was sentenced to two months in federal prison after pleading guilty Feb. 6, 2019, to one count of theft of U.S. government funds.
In her plea agreement, Puac-Gomez admitted she failed to report her husband’s income when applying for, and receiving, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits between June 2012 and November 2017. During that time, her husband Melvin Rodriguez-Barrios, also an illegal alien, was working under an alias and used someone else’s social security number to obtain work. By failing to accurately report the family’s income, Puac-Gomez received $19,908.30 in overpayment of food stamps and other U.S. welfare benefits distributed by the state of Iowa.
Puac-Gomez’s husband, Rodriguez-Barrios, 44, was previously sentenced on March 27 to six months’ imprisonment following a Jan. 2, 2019, bench trial which found him guilty of three counts of unlawfully using an identification document and four counts of misusing a social security number.
Puac-Gomez was sentenced in Cedar Rapids by U.S. District Court Judge C.J. Williams. In addition to her prison sentence, she was ordered to make $19,908.30 in restitution to the state of Iowa, and she must also serve a three-year term of supervised release after she completes her prison term. There is no parole in the federal system.
Puac-Gomez is being held in U.S. Marshals custody until she can be transported to a federal prison.
This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel C. Tvedt, Northern District of Iowa.
https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1135638411660779520
Internal FBI emails released Monday show FBI officials in 2016 sought to “expeditiously” accommodate a request for information from then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, in what a conservative watchdog group claimed is evidence of “special treatment.”
Judicial Watch – a group that routinely sues for government records – obtained and released 218 pages of emails between former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Many of the emails have to do with the bureau’s investigation into whether Clinton improperly used a private email server as secretary of state to discuss classified information.
FBI SCRAMBLED TO RESPOND TO HILLARY CLINTON LAWYER AMID WEINER LAPTOP REVIEW, NEWLY RELEASED EMAILS SHOW
The emails involve discussions about so-called “302s” – reports written by the FBI after witness interviews. In one email, Page curiously acknowledged that four such 302 reports relating to the Clinton investigation “had never been written.” She didn't go into detail about why the reports weren’t written, or say which witnesses the 302s would have been about.
There have been previous concerns about missing investigative material related to the Clinton case. In 2016, Fox News reported that two “bankers boxes” of Clinton’s emails went missing during the investigation.
The emails released Monday, meanwhile, show then-FBI General Counsel James Baker writing that he spoke with Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, in August 2016 and promised that the FBI would work to hand over a copy of the 302 from Clinton’s interview “expeditiously.”
On August 16, 2016, he wrote: “I just spoke with David Kendall … I conveyed our view that in order to obtain the documents they are seeking they need to submit a request pursuant to the Privacy Act and FOIA.”
Baker added, “David asked us to focus first on the Secretary’s 302. I said OK," noting that they would "get the 302 out the door as soon as possible."
The emails show officials discussing how to appropriately handle the request, with one official suggesting the FBI process it in a way “consistent” with other requests. In an Aug. 21, 2016 email, Baker acknowledged that he planned to give Kendall a heads up before they posted the Clinton interview 302 publicly online.
“I said we would alert him shortly before it appeared on our website,” Baker wrote.
Several days later, before the 302 went public, the FBI’s FOIA unit chief said he approved of the plan, writing, “I don’t see a problem with giving a Kendall a heads up.”
On Sept. 2, 2016, the bureau released Clinton’s 302 report to the public on its website, explaining it was doing so in an effort to be transparent.
“We are making these materials available to the public in the interest of transparency and in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests,” the FBI wrote on its site at the time.
Still, Judicial Watch, in a statement, said the emails show the FBI gave “special treatment” to Clinton just before the election.
“These incredible documents show the leadership of the FBI rushed to give Hillary Clinton her FBI interview report shortly before the election,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement. “And the documents also show the FBI failed to timely document interviews in the Clinton email ‘matter’ – further confirming the whole investigation was a joke.”
The FBI has faced accusations of giving special treatment to Clinton's team before.
Internal FBI emails released by Judicial Watch earlier this year showed the agency's highest-ranking officials scrambling to answer Kendall in the days prior to the 2016 presidential election, on the same day then-FBI Director James Comey sent a bombshell letter to Congress announcing a new review of hundreds of thousands of potentially classified emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop.
They eating good.