Storm builds around Barr over dropping of Flynn case

Democrats and other critics are seizing on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to drop the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, arguing it shows how heavily politicized it has become under Attorney General William Barr.

Anger over the extraordinary move by Justice to drop charges even after it secured a guilty plea has created a new political storm around Barr, who had previously angered Democrats for his handling of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The latest surprise move approved by Barr makes him even more of a political lightning rod figure in Washington.

“Attorney General Barr’s politicization of justice knows no bounds,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement Thursday evening.

Critics see the abrupt reversal in the Flynn case as a fresh example of Barr’s willingness to bend the Justice’s norms to appease Trump, who had criticized the case against his former national security adviser during the Mueller probe.

“Overruling the special counsel is without precedent and without respect for the rule of law,” Pelosi said in remarks echoed by other Democrats.

Trump, for his part, hailed the decision and called Barr “a man of unbelievable credibility and courage.”

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal agents about conversations he’d had with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition. But earlier this year he moved to withdraw his plea, claiming that his case had been tainted by “the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness, and breach of the plea agreement.”

Newly uncovered FBI documents providing a behind-the-scenes look at how his prosecution had unfolded angered conservatives, and bolstered the case that he was unfairly prosecuted, according to Trump and Flynn’s allies.

But it was stunning to many that Justice would drop its charges against Flynn.

In a court filing, DOJ lawyers argued the new documents showed that agents mishandled the probe and had private misgivings about whether Flynn had in fact lied during his interview.

Barr called the dismissal “an easy decision.”

“I wanted to make sure that we restore confidence in the system,” he told CBS News on Thursday. “There's only one standard of justice. And I believe that this case, that justice in this case requires dismissing the charges against General Flynn.”

Barr has maintained that Trump does not influence his decisions as attorney general, but critics are skeptical.

Eyebrows were raised when career prosecutor Brandon Van Grack, who had helped secure Flynn’s plea agreement, abruptly withdrew from the case less than an hour before the charges were dropped. He reportedly also withdrew from other cases, but has not resigned.

It quickly drew comparisons to the decision by prosecutors handling the case against Trump’s political ally Roger Stone to withdraw from that case, after top DOJ officials overruled career prosecutors and sought a lighter sentence against Stone.

“I think we lost 50 years worth of ground in solidifying the independence of the Justice Department after Watergate,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Thursday night on MSNBC. “The common denominator between these two cases — Roger Stone and Mike Flynn — is this: Both men lied on behalf of the president.”

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/496895-storm-builds-around-barr-over-dropping-of-flynn-case

Israel approves 7,000 new settlement units in southern West Bank

Area between Bethlehem and Hebron is becoming the next annexation battleground

Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennett has approved the expansion of the mega Efrat settlement in the southern occupied West Bank with 7,000 new housing units — nearly doubling the settlement in size.

With Bennett’s approval, Israel’s Housing Ministry can move into the planning stages for the “neighborhood”, which sits on 1,100 dunams (225 acres) of Palestinian land, known to locals as al-Nahla, and to settlers as Givat Eitam.

The settlers of Efrat have been in engaged in a decades-long legal battle with Palestinians over the land, where dozens of Palestinian families from surrounding villages own land that they use for farming and agriculture.

The land in question was designated by Israel as “state land” back in 2004, a move that was vehemently opposed by Palestinians as paving the way to allocate the land for eventual settlement expansion. They petitioned to the Israeli High Court against the “state land” designation, but were rejected by the court.

Bennett’s decision this week came just days after the Israeli Civil Administration denied a 2019 appeal filed by Palestinians and settlement watchdog Peace Now to allocate land in al-Nahla for Palestinian use, rathern than for the settlers.

The claim argued that the Palestinians had been farming the land for years, and therefore had stronger ties to the land than the settlers in Efrat.

Additionally, they argued that by expropriating this land for settlement expansion, Israel would be effectively cutting off the city of Bethlehem from the villages to its south, with Efrat running straight through the middle.

The Civil Administration, however, ruled on Sunday to reject the Palestinians’ request, and instead give the land to the settlers, arguing that “Efrat has almost no land reserves, and Givat Eitam is the only possible reserve it could acquire,” Haaretz reported.

According to Peace Now, data indicates that since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, 99.8% of state land in the occupied territory has been allocated for Israeli and settlement use, while less than 0.2% has been given to Palestinians.

Peace Now said it plans to fight back against Bennett’s decision with a petition to the court in the coming days.

“This is a cynical move by a caretaker defense minister at the end of his mandate while the nation is still reeling from the corona crisis to advance a dangerous plan aimed at entrenching permanent Israeli domination in the southern West Bank and harming the prospect of a two-state solution,” Peace Now said in a statement.

“The right thing to do is to allocate the land for Palestinian construction, but the Ministry of Defense is currently run by an irresponsible politician willing to cross any red line in the name of his anti-democratic ideology.”

https://mondoweiss.net/2020/05/israel-approves-7000-new-settlement-units-in-southern-west-bank/

Coronavirus Cases, Death Toll: Parts of Germany Postpone Reopening After Rise In Infections

Parts of Germany are putting off reopening businesses as coronavirus infections rise. As of 9:40 p.m. ET, there are 170,588 cases in Germany, with the country’s death toll standing at 7,510.

The district of Coesfeld, located in Germany’s most-populated state, North Rhine-Westphalia, is postponing the reopening process after more than 180 employees tested positive Saturday for the virus at the Westfleisch meat-packing plant. The outbreak has forced the Westfleisch plant to shut down.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday outlined a plan to ease restrictions, allowing shops to reopen with additional hygiene requirements. Social distancing requirements of about 5 feet will continue until June 5, while Germany’s football season will restart sometime in the second half of May.

Germany’s 16 federal states have been given the responsibility to determine when to open up restaurants, bars, gyms, amusement parks and other public venues. The country has to adhere to an “emergency brake” mechanism where certain towns or districts will shut down again if new cases exceed 50 a day per 100,000 inhabitants.

Germany has managed to have fewer deaths than other European hotspots, due to an oversupply of hospital beds and widespread testing. Last month, Germany took in more than 200 coronavirus patients from other European Union member states in an act of solidarity.

The coronavirus originated at an animal and seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and has since spread across the world. There are 3,965,863 cases of the virus worldwide, with the global death toll at 275,527.

https://www.ibtimes.com/coronavirus-cases-death-toll-parts-germany-postpone-reopening-after-rise-infections-2973363

This Oval Office Meeting Attended By Obama and Biden Was Key To the Anti-Trump Plot

On January 5, 2017, a meeting was held in the Obama White House in the Oval Office. Both President Obama and Vice President Biden attended. This meeting, it turns out, was critical to the anti-Trump operation by the Obama administration, reports Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. “It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration,” she wrote.

Also in attendance at this meeting was then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-national security adviser Susan Rice, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and other members of the national security council.

It was at this meeting that Barack Obama spoke with Yates and Comey about wiretapped conversations of Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition, indicating that President Obama was directly knowledgeable of the efforts to surveil the Trump campaign and undermine the incoming administration.

Susan Rice wrote herself a now-infamous email documenting the meeting, writing “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

After this meeting took place, “high-level operatives began intensely leaking selective information supporting a supposed Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, the incoming National Security Advisor was ambushed, and the incoming Attorney General [Jeff Sessions] was forced to recuse himself from oversight of investigations of President Trump.”

Top Obama officials have since testified that they never had any empirical evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

As Hemingway notes, “explosive media leaks were a key strategy in the operation to take down Trump.” Per Obama’s direction, information on Russia was “not fully shared with the incoming Trump team” and “the leaks and ambushes made the transition chaotic, scared quality individuals away from working in the administration, made effective governance almost impossible, and materially damaged national security.”

President Trump has indicated that more damning evidence against Obama and Biden will see the light of day.

“There’s more to come, from what I understand. and they’re gonna be far greater than what you’ve seen so far—and what you’ve seen so far has been incredible—especially as it relates to President Obama because if anyone thinks that he and sleepy Joe Biden didn’t know what was going on, they have another thing coming.”

“It is clear that understanding what happened in that January 5 Oval Office meeting is essential to understanding the full scope and breadth of the corrupt operation against the Trump administration,” explained Hemingway.

It’s time to get some answers, especially from Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/09/this-oval-office-meeting-attended-by-obama-and-biden-was-key-to-the-anti-trump-plot-n389501

Trump's Ambassador to Israel Says US Ready to Recognise Israeli Sovereignty Over 30% of West Bank

Now that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has formed a unity government with his previous rival, Benny Gantz, the world waits with bated breath for the two to act on their pledge to annex parts of the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

The United States’ Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has announced that the Trump Administration is ready to recognise Israel’s sovereignty of 30% of the West Bank, according to Israel Hayom.

In the interview, Mr Friedman said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be prepared to enter negotiations with Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas over the creating of a Palestinian state .

“The primary task belongs to the Israeli side because they're the ones that have to come up with what's best for the state of Israel. The overriding requirement [is] that the Israeli portion of area C will not exceed 50% of area C [which], 30% of the West Bank,” Mr Friedman said.

As per the Oslo II Accord signed in 1995, negotiated between then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Yasser Arafat under the auspices of US President Bill Clinton, Area C was to constitute 61% of the West Bank and would be “gradually transferred to Palestinian Jurisdiction.”

Ambassador Friedman also suggested a timeframe for the move, saying that “everyone understands that come July, certainly, people on the Israeli side, want to be ready to go on 1 July.”

“The mapping has to get done. The [Israeli] government has to agree to the freeze on half of Area C, and most importantly, the government of Israel has to declare sovereignty. We [the US] are not declaring sovereignty - the government of Israel has to declare sovereignty. And then we’re prepared to recognise it along those lines… so you have to go first” Mr Friedman added.

For his part, Prime Minister Netanyahu has emphatically welcomed the move. At the end of April, he declared that he feels "confident" that he will be able to assert sovereignty over coveted parts of the Jordan Valley and the West Bank - namely those areas that are made up of Jewish settlements. Netanyahu said that he was aiming to do so "a few months from now," which would line up with Ambassador Friedman's suggestion this week that Israel will take over the areas by July.

"For decades, I have been fighting those who sought to deny the millennial connection of the Jewish people to our homeland. I'm proud to say that the decades-long struggle has borne fruit. Three months ago, the Trump peace plan recognised Israel's rights in all of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. And President Trump pledged to recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Jewish communities there and in the Jordan Valley," The Times of Israel quoted Mr Netanyahu as saying in late April.

President Donald Trump’s peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - dubbed the deal of the century - was revealed to the world on 28 January 2020. While many within Israel embraced the plan, the Palestinian leadership outright rejected it. The head of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said that the, “change of America’s position vis-vis the Palestinians” and its “disregard for historic U.N. resolutions… do not help the cause of peace.”

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/202005091079257623-US-recognise-Israeli-annexation/

Illinois’ Request for a Federal Bailout Is an Admission of Its Massive Pension Problem

Illinois can no longer rely on tax increases, service cuts, prospective benefits reductions and workforce reductions to keep its failing pension systems on life support.

Illinois State Senate President Don Harmon, through the Illinois congressional delegation, recently requested a $10 billion public pension bailout from the federal government.

In the letter, Mr. Harmon suggests that Illinois is making progress on addressing its pension debt, but that the coronavirus pandemic is causing difficulty because of revenue losses to the state. He writes:

$10 billion in pension relief, directly for the state’s retirement systems:

Illinois largest liabilities are its unfunded pension liability at $138 billion and other post-employment benefits liability at $54 billion. Illinois law has put the state on a path to fund the pension liability in a manner that is actuarially sound, and the state has been following the payment plan set out in that law. In a normal year the size of those payments crowds out funding for services and programs. Clearly this will not be a normal year and that crowding out effect will be exacerbated by significant revenue losses. I would ask that the federal government: 1. Provide direct cash assistance to the pension systems; or 2. Offer a low interest federal loan to aid Illinois in our efforts to restore and maintain retirement security for public sector workers, many of which are on the frontlines of this pandemic battle.

Clearly this request is addressing a public pension crisis that is not short-term in nature, but one that has been going on for decades. The state created this pension crisis and while it may be amplified by the coronavirus pandemic, it certainly was not caused by it.

While the efficacy of this funding request is likely to be debated from all corners of the political spectrum, let’s look at the request for what it is — a cry for help from a state that is drowning in pension debt.

The problems with Illinois’ public pension systems have been known for years and have caused service cuts, tax increases, benefit reductions for new state workers, and dramatic reductions in the state’s credit ratings. Despite a failed attempt at pension reform in the last decade that was overturned by the courts, Illinois been unable to revisit the issue and enact meaningful pension reforms that would address its public pension plans’ funding and create more efficient and effective plans for future hires.

Hopefully, Illinois’ request for a bailout from federal taxpayers is an indication that the state is finally ready to seriously address the devastating financial crisis of its own making.

Perhaps this cry for help reflects an acknowledgment that the state can no longer rely on tax increases, service cuts, prospective benefits reductions and workforce reductions to keep its failing pension systems on life support. Laying the burden on taxpayers, students, public employees and consumers of public services is untenable.

While the pension crisis is likely to be exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic and economic downturn, that’s the reality Illinois must now live in. Economic uncertainty, which is already rising, will be amplified and cause strains on state and local government budgets going forward. Illinois should use this time of enhanced candor to look for real solutions to its pension crisis, including the introduction of fresh pension plan design options for new hires that would both better meet employee needs and eliminate the risk of accruing future unfunded liabilities.

Despite Illinois’ persistent inability to rise above politics to solve its pension problem to date, effective solutions exist and help is available.

https://reason.org/commentary/illinois-request-for-a-federal-bailout-is-an-admission-of-its-massive-pension-problem/