Month: January 2018

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump imposed new sanctions Wednesday aimed at halting North Korea’s nuclear and missile development programs.

The Department of Treasury placed sanctions on nine entities, including two China-based trading firms that helped export millions of dollars’ worth of metals and other materials used in Pyongyang’s defense sector.

Sixteen individuals were also targeted, including members of the ruling Workers Party of Korea, who conduct business in China, Russia and the region of Abkhazia, a partially recognized state south of Russia and northwest of Georgia. The Treasury Department urged those countries to expel the individuals, who are prohibited from dealing with Americans.

Ten China- and Russian-based representatives of the Korean Ryonbong General Corporation were among those targeted. The company supports Pyongyang’s defense industry and is already under U.S. and U.N. sanctions. 

Five North Korean shipping companies and six vessels were also among the blacklisted entities.

“Treasury continues to systematically target individuals and entities financing the Kim [Jong-un] regime and its weapons programs, including officials complicit in North Korean sanctions evasion schemes,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

The latest sanctions come as the global community has resorted to an economic crackdown to curb the aggression of Kim’s regime. But the U.S. and other countries have cited continuous violations of the sanctions meant to deter the North’s nuclear and missile development programs.
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Former USA Gymnastics team physician Larry Nassar has been sentenced to up to 175 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexually abusing female gymnasts, some as young as 10 years old.

A Michigan judge handed down the sentence Wednesday.  Nassar had pleaded guilty in November to 10 counts of first-degree sex assault.

He is already serving a 60-year term on child pornography convictions.

About 160 of Nassar’s victims gave emotional statements at his sentencing hearing in a circuit court in Lansing, Michigan since it began on Jan. 16.

U.S. Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas and McKayla Maroney are among athletes who have said in recent months they were assaulted by Nassar during medical treatment.

Many victims have accused USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body in the U.S., of ignoring their complaints and the governing body of concealing them in an effort to avoid negative publicity.

Three high-ranking board members quit Monday amid ongoing criticism, following the resignation last March of the organization’s president and chief executive.

The 54-year-old Nassar served as the USA Gymnastics physician in four Olympic Games. Nassar was also the team physician for the Michigan State University gymnastics and women’s crew teams, and an associate professor at the university’s College of Osteopathic Medicine.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller is now looking to interview U.S. President Donald Trump about his firing last year of former FBI director James Comey and one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn – as part of Mueller’s ongoing criminal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mueller is investigating whether Trump obstructed justice when, as Comey says, Trump in early 2017 asked him to drop his probe of Flynn’s contacts with Russia’s then-ambassador to Washington in the weeks before Trump took office a year ago, and then months later fired Comey, who at the time was heading the FBI’s Russia probe.

U.S. news accounts say it is not known whether Trump, who repeatedly has rejected suggestions his campaign colluded with Russian interests to help win the election, will agree to the interview, when it might occur, or in what format it be might conducted, with written questions or an in-person, question-and-answer session.

Months ago, Trump said he would “100 percent” agree to meet with Mueller’s investigators, but more recently questioned why any interview would be needed since there was “no collusion.”

Mueller’s request to Trump’s lawyers to ask Trump about his dismissal of Flynn for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, his talks with Comey about dropping the Flynn investigation, and his later ouster of Comey suggest that Mueller is now focused on the obstruction issue.

Trump has denied making the demand of Comey to drop his Flynn investigation, calling it a “lie.”

U.S. law makes it a crime to obstruct justice, or hinder an “official proceeding.”

Legal experts say that while a sitting president can’t be prosecuted for obstruction of justice or any other crime, the charge of obstruction can be used by Congress to impeach a president, if it decides to pursue such a case. Former President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, in part for obstruction of justice, while one of three articles of impeachment brought against Richard Nixon in 1974 alleged obstruction of justice. Clinton was acquitted in a Senate trial, while Nixon resigned as the corruption case mounted against him.

A day after Trump fired Comey last May, the U.S. leader told Russian officials in a White House meeting that Comey was “crazy, a real nut job” and that he had relieved “great pressure” on himself with Comey’s dismissal. Days later, Trump told a television interviewer he ousted the FBI chief because of “this Russia thing.”

But shortly thereafter, Mueller, over Trump’s objections, was appointed to take control of the Russia probe.

Cabinet-level interviews

Mueller’s investigation into the Russian election interference now has reached into Trump’s Cabinet. Investigators last week interviewed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who himself met with Kislyak while he was a U.S. senator and a Trump campaign advocate, and later played a role in Comey’s firing. Comey was interviewed weeks ago.

Trump has alleged that the Mueller investigation and congressional probes into the Russian meddling in an effort to help him defeat former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are a hoax perpetrated by Democrats looking to explain his upset victory.

Trump and Republican colleagues in Congress increasingly have accused the FBI of bias in pursuing the Trump investigation and their dropping without charges of a 2016 probe into Clinton’s handling of classified material on a private email server while she was the country’s top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that shortly after Trump ousted Comey, the president had a get-to-know-you meeting with Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s acting director, and asked him whom he voted for in the 2016 election.

McCabe said he didn’t vote in the election. But Trump also vented his anger at McCabe, a long-time FBI official, for the fact that his wife had received $700,000 in campaign donations for her unsuccessful 2015 state Senate race in Virginia from a political action committee controlled by a close friend of Clinton.

The head of the Republican National Committee, Ronna Romney McDaniel, dismissed concern over Trump’s question to McCabe about his 2016 vote. “I think it’s just a conversation,” she told CNN.

McCabe is retiring in March, but the Axios news website reported this week the White House and Sessions pressured the new FBI director, Christopher Wray, to dismiss high-level FBI officials, such as McCabe, who served under Comey.

Axios said Wray threatened to resign over the demand, but then the White House backed off.

Trump, who has complained in Twitter comments about McCabe and his wife’s Democratic fundraising, denied Wray had threatened to quit.

“No, he didn’t at all. Not even a little bit. Nope,” the president said when asked about it during an Oval Office event in the White House. “And he’s going to do a good job.”

Congressional correspondent Michael Bowman contributed to this report
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CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Tuesday North Korea’s nuclear missile program is designed not only for self-defense, but for intimidation as well.

“Call it coercive,” Pompeo said at an event hosted in Washington by the conservative research group the American Enterprise Institute.

Pompeo also said the intelligence agency believes North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would not only deploy nuclear weapons to remain in power, but to threaten to reunify the divided Korean Peninsula under his autocratic regime.

Pompeo added that Pyongyang is less than a year away from putting Americans at risk and said the country’s next obvious move would be to develop the capability to launch multiple missiles concurrently.

“The logical next step would be to develop an arsenal of weapons that is not one, not a show piece … but rather the capacity to deliver from multiple firings of these missiles simultaneously.”

Pompeo said U.S. President Donald Trump has been focused on pursuing a diplomatic solution to the North Korean crisis, but the CIA was working to give him a variety of other options.

“We’re not quite where we need to be,” Pompeo admitted. “Our mission is not complete but we have officers all around the world working diligently to make sure that we do everything we can to support the U.S. pressure campaign and to tighten the sanctions in such a way we have the opportunity to prevail” in the quest to achieve “the denuclearization of the peninsula.”

North Korea has aggressively developed its nuclear and ballistic missile weapons programs in defiance of international sanctions.

A number of countries and international organizations have imposed a variety of financial and trade sanctions against Pyongyang, including China’s decision to restrict oil and coal supplies to the country.

North Korea relies on imported fuel to keep its struggling economy afloat. Oil is also required for its intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear program.

Jeff Seldin contributed to this story.
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The White House has expressed confidence in FBI Director Christopher Wray following reports that Wray threatened to resign rather than give in to indirect pressure from President Donald Trump to fire his top deputy, Andrew McCabe.

“The president has complete confidence in Director Wray. He put him there for a reason, and he sees fit to let him run that agency. And he thinks he’s doing a great job, and he’s glad he’s there,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told VOA.

The Axios news website first reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at Trump’s urging, was pressuring Wray to remove McCabe and other members of former FBI Director James Comey’s inner circle, amid allegations that senior agency officials had shown political bias in their professional work.

Axios, noting that the firing would have created a media firestorm, reported that the White House relented after Wray pushed back against the pressure.

Trump has on several occasions fired off Tweets expressing displeasure with McCabe, noting that the FBI official’s wife received $700,000 in campaign contributions from what he described as “Clinton puppets” when the official’s wife ran for statewide office in Virginia as a Democrat, and noting with approval that McCabe is eligible to retire with full benefits in March.

Sanders Tuesday declined further comment on McCabe, except to note that he is expected to leave the agency soon.

“He’s already in the process of retirement, and I don’t have further comment on that other than to say the president wants Director Wray to make the decisions that he sees fit and sees necessary to run his agency,” she said.

Trump on Tuesday kept up his Twitter pressure on the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, noting that FBI officials have admitted that they cannot locate thousands of text messages between two senior officials accused of displaying anti-Trump bias in their work on investigations involving the president.

“In one of the biggest stories in a long time, the FBI now says it is missing five months worth of lovers Strzok-Page texts, perhaps 50,000, and all in prime time. Wow!”

The latest Trump tweet comes days after Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Wray asking to explain why it failed to preserve the text messages between Peter Strzok, the top FBI counterterrorism official, and agency attorney Lisa Page.

Strzok, who was also the lead investigator on the FBI team looking into Hillary Clinton’s email server, was removed from the Trump Russia probe months ago after it was discovered that he and Page, who were linked romantically, had disparaged Trump in text messages during the presidential campaign. The missing texts cover a five-month period from shortly after the election through May 2017.

Page had left Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team before the text messages were discovered.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last month, Trump called Strzok’s behavior “treasonous.”

As Republicans in Congress stepped up efforts to learn more about allegations of political bias at the FBI, Attorney General Sessions Monday vowed to get to the bottom of the missing text issue.

“We will leave no stone unturned to confirm with certainty why these text messages are not now available to be produced and will use every technology available to determine whether the missing messages are recoverable from another source,” Sessions said. “If we are successful, we will update the congressional committees immediately.”

Sanders last week expressed confidence that Wray would act to remove what she called “problematic” leadership at the FBI that she said has biased Mueller’s Russia probe.

“We’re glad that Director Wray is there. We feel like he’s going to clean up some of the messes left behind by his predecessor. And we look forward to this [Russia probe] concluding soon and showing what we’ve been saying all along, that there’s nothing to see here and certainly no collusion.”

 
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At least one person was killed and others wounded in a shooting Tuesday at a high school in the southeastern U.S. state of Kentucky, officials said.

Governor Matt Bevin and state police confirmed on Twitter a shooting at Marshall County High School in the city of Benton in western Kentucky.

Police said the gunman was apprehended within 15 minutes of the shooting and that the school had been “secured.”

Bevin, who quickly departed the Capitol in Frankfort for the school, issued a statement saying, “It is unbelievable that this would happen in a small, close-knit community like Marshall County. As there is still much unknown, I encourage people to love each other.”

Federal authorities have joined state and local law enforcement agencies in the investigation.

Kentucky State Police said more information would be provided when it becomes available. High school officials were not immediately available for comment.

The school, which has an enrollment of more than 1,100 students, is about 40 kilometers from Paducah, Kentucky, where a 1997 school shooting claimed the lives of three people and injured five others.

On Monday, in Texas, a 15-year-old girl was wounded after being shot by a 16-year-old classmate in the cafeteria of a high school in the town of Italy.
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U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker says he is scheduled to hold a new round of talks with Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov in Dubai on Jan. 26.

Volker told VOA’s Ukrainian Service that he will arrive in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday and stop in Kyiv on Thursday, before heading to Dubai to discuss the war in eastern Ukraine and prospects for the introduction and possible format of the peacekeeping mission.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, who confirmed the meeting at a Monday press conference, said he’s eager to see how talks go after Washington’s recent unveiling of new sanctions against Russia.

Kyiv, he said, is curious to see “how we can use new U.S. sanctions” to forge some kind of sustainable peace plan.

Volker called his last meeting with Surkov in Belgrade last November “a step back.”

“It was a welcoming meeting and a positive discussion, but it was a step back,” he said, calling Russia unready to entertain the idea of introducing a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Donbass.

“We will see what will happen at our next meeting,” he said.

This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service.
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The U.S. Senate advanced a stop-gap funding bill on Monday that paves the way to reopen the federal government three days into a partial shutdown that was triggered in part by a partisan brawl over immigration.

Thirty-three Democrats joined 48 Republicans to end debate in the 100-member chamber on a bill extending the government’s spending authority through Feb. 8, setting the stage for final Senate passage. Swift approval was expected in the House of Representatives, after which the bill would go to the White House for President Donald Trump’s signature.

The Democrats had demanded firm assurances that the chamber would consider the fate of the immigrants who were brought into the U.S. years ago by their parents before agreeing to end the legislative standoff. Democratic leader Charles Schumer said McConnell assured him if the immigration issue is not resolved by February 8, the Senate would immediately consider it right after that date.

The legislation to end the shutdown must still be approved by the House of Representatives, but that is considered virtually certain, before the measure is sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.

Ahead of the vote, federal agencies on Monday were in the midst of furloughing thousands of civil servants without pay and starting to curtail their operations at the start of a new workweek. The shutdown had started at Friday midnight after the Senate failed to adopt a House-approved stop-gap funding measure that extended through mid-February.

The stalemate roiled official Washington.

Before the vote, Trump attacked Democratic lawmakers in new Twitter comments, saying, “The Democrats are turning down services and security for citizens in favor of services and security for non-citizens. Not good!” He contended that “Democrats have shut down our government in the interests of their far left base. They don’t want to do it but are powerless!”

White House legislative affairs director Marc Short told CNN that the Trump administration wants “to find a pathway” for the young immigrants, many of whom only know the U.S. as their home country, to stay in the United States. But Short also said “a real security threat” remains on the southern U.S. border with Mexico, with Trump demanding funding for a wall to thwart further illegal immigration.

A new Trump political ad accused Democrats of being “complicit” in U.S. murders committed by illegal immigrants.

Late Sunday, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer said Democratic and Republican lawmakers had “yet to reach an agreement on a path forward” linking the full reopening of the government to resolution of the deportation issue.

Earlier, in a Senate speech, he called the partial government closure the “Trump Shutdown,” contending that he offered the president funding for the wall, a key 2016 Trump campaign promise, but that the U.S. leader would not compromise on other immigration policy changes.

“He can’t take yes for an answer,” Schumer said of Trump.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters Monday, “We’re not going to start having negotiations about immigration reform until the government’s reopened. It’s pretty simple.”

The U.S. government has partially shut down on several occasions over lawmaking and funding disputes. The most recent till now was a 16-day shutdown in 2013 in a partisan deadlock over health care policy. About 850,000 federal workers were furloughed then.

Services that stop or continue during a federal shutdown vary. But federal research projects could be stalled, national parks and museums closed, tax questions left unanswered, processing of veterans’ disability applications delayed, and federal nutrition programs suspended, as was the case in 2013.

Senate lawmakers spent all day Sunday meeting and negotiating and looking for a way to end the impasse on immigration. McConnell called off a 1 a.m. Monday vote on reopening the government in favor of the vote at noon, Washington time.

With Republican and Democratic lawmakers blaming each other for the stalemate, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday also appeared to fault the White House for the immigration standoff, specifically hardline immigration Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

“Every time we have a proposal, it is only yanked back by staff members,” Graham said. “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiation on immigration, we are going nowhere.”

Graham said Miller is out of the “mainstream” with his immigration views.

Sanders called Graham’s comments “a sad and desperate attempt…to tarnish a staffer.” She said Miller was not at the White House “to push his agenda,” but rather to support Trump’s immigration views.

 
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The head of Russian television channel RT says the Kremlin-funded outlet is already suffering the consequences of having to register as a foreign agent in the U.S. amid allegations that it participated in attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

A Capitol Hill committee decided Nov. 29 to revoke RT’s accreditation to cover Congress, and RT has been shut out of news events and suffered damage to its reputation, said Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the operation once called Russia Today.

“In the U.S., the country that has always been lecturing the world about the value of freedoms – of freedom of speech, of everyone’s right to speak up – the U.S. has now become a beacon, a leader, in this movement to shut everyone up,” Simonyan said in an Associated Press interview at RT’s Moscow headquarters Friday. “That’s so disappointing.”

RT insists it is a legitimate news and information network, and compares itself to the U.S.-funded Voice of America or Britain’s government-supported BBC.

But U.S. intelligence agencies say RT and state-funded Russian news agency Sputnik, for which Simonyan also serves as editor-in-chief, produced biased reports to undermine faith in the election process, damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and promote Donald Trump.

Governments in Britain, Germany and France also have complained about RT and its intentions, especially its reporting around European elections.

In the U.S., RT’s slickly produced programs can be accessed on some cable services, the internet, on social media and YouTube, and Simonyan says they’re no less balanced or impartial than reports of other news organizations.

“Listen, your own president thinks that your media is, almost all of it, is fake,” she said.

“In Russia, all of the American media are seen as carrying out the U.S. government’s policy or American policy,” she noted at another point.

RT’s programs follow a familiar cable news format, but often with guests who espouse views critical of Western systems. CNN veteran talk show host Larry King has a regular program on RT, as does former MSNBC personality Ed Schultz, known for pointing out problems of income inequality in the United States.

The U.S. government argues that the foreign agent designation was meant only to make clear to RT’s audience that it is a Russian station advancing Russia’s interests and says the broadcaster is not being blocked or censored in America. The designation was ordered by the Justice Department under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law passed before World War II to label German and Nazi publications as propaganda.

Simonyan said she can’t believe RT’s audience needed to know more than it already did about its source of funding.

“We’ve never made a secret of the fact that we came from Russia,” she said. “At any interview I ever gave, at any press conference … all the time, almost daily, we state that we come from Russia.”

Steven Barnett, communications professor at the University of Westminster in London, said he sees some merit in RT’s argument that requiring it to register as a foreign agent is infringing on its journalistic rights.

He said its journalists are not likely to challenge Russian President Putin but seem to have “a measure of discretion and freedom” when reporting on Russia and the world.

“It’s conducted along professional journalistic standards, they try to be as accurate as possible and check sources, and they’ll try to cover stories from a perspective that is not Western-dominated,” Barnett said.

He does believe, however, that viewers should be told they are watching a channel funded by the Russian government so they can make their own judgments about the material.

Since the U.S. decision, Russia in retaliation has adopted its own law to deem some media companies as foreign agents and it has named U.S.-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It is so far unclear what it means in practice for those organizations in Russia.

Simonyan, known as a pugnacious defender of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, was tapped to run RT when it was created in 2005. At the time, she was only 25.

She denies that RT is under the control of Putin or the Kremlin and says she has never even spoken to Putin on the telephone. But documents for the Russian leader’s re-election campaign name her as one of the “trusted persons” around him supporting his candidacy.

She says RT has editorial independence and brushed off a question on whether she has ever received editorial instructions from Putin or those around him.

“Our budget is controlled by so many people, including the whole of the Russia State Duma, that if I listened to everyone who was complaining … about our broadcasts, I would have hung myself by now,” she said.

This year, she said, RT will get about $300 million, less than the $700 million U.S. allocation to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees U.S.-government-funded stations.

“I’m so tired of this argument that all we ever do is under Kremlin orders and so and so forth. Tell me, how is it possible? I am not on the air. If you watch RT, you will see that all of our shows are hosted by people to whom it would be impossible to tell them anything.”

In the interview, Simonyan said she was weary of conflict, especially between Russia and the United States.

“When the world normalizes, everything is going to be fine with RT,” she said. “When the U.S. and Russia get along again – and I don’t see any deep reasons why we shouldn’t get along – … we are going to work normally like a normal news organization.”
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