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Tag: conflicts and war

  • US airstrikes kill 10 al-Shabaab members in Somalia | CNN Politics

    US airstrikes kill 10 al-Shabaab members in Somalia | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Ten al-Shabaab members were killed by airstrikes conducted by US Africa Command in Somalia in the overnight hours of Saturday, the Defense Department announced.

    “At the request of the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command conducted three collective self-defense airstrikes overnight in a remote area near Afmadow, approximately 105 kilometers north of Kismayo, against al-Shabaab terrorists,” US Africa Command said in a statement Sunday.

    The initial assessment of the Somali National Army and US Africa Command found that 10 members of the terrorist group were killed and there were no civilian casualties, per the statement.

    Al-Shabaab is the largest and most active al Qaeda network in the world, according to the US Africa Command. The group controlled a vast area of Somalia before being pushed back by government counteroffensives last year, according to Reuters.

    However, the militants continue to launch lethal attacks across the country with the aim of toppling the central government and establishing a rule based on its strict interpretation of Islam’s Sharia law.

    In late May, al-Shabaab fighters launched an attack on an African Union military base in Somalia, in which at least 54 Ugandan soldiers were killed, according to Ugandan officials.

    The US has provided ongoing support to the Somali government since President Joe Biden last year approved a Pentagon request to redeploy US troops to the area in an attempt to counter the terrorist group.

    The approval to send fewer than 500 troops was a reversal of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 decision to withdraw nearly all US troops from the country.

    The US has launched a number of strikes against al-Shabaab this year, including one that killed 30 fighters in January and three in February that killed a total of 24 soldiers.

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  • Reporters’ notebook: An intensely personal trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau | CNN Politics

    Reporters’ notebook: An intensely personal trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    This week, we traveled to Poland to help commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews revolted against their Nazi oppressors, who had forced them to live behind barbed wire walls in horrific conditions.

    We also participated in the March of the Living, an annual two-mile walk from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, where Nazis brought Jews from all over Europe to be starved, humiliated, terrorized and murdered in gas chambers.

    For both of us, this trip was intensely personal.

    I thought I knew what was in store for me visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had been there some years back when I was working on a report for CNN about my family history – I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. I had heard my parents, both Polish Jews, speak of their painful experiences surviving the war. But I never knew my grandparents because all four of them were rounded up by the Nazis and killed during the Holocaust.

    But this time was different. As our expert guide showed us the Auschwitz gas chamber, I mentioned that I had learned a few years earlier that my dad’s parents were killed at Auschwitz. Our guide said that Polish Jews were largely killed in the very gas chamber we were standing in. He pointed out the gas chamber and the adjacent crematorium, where their bodies were burned and the remains then discarded in a pit. It was the first time I realized that I was standing right where my paternal grandparents had been murdered. Tears came to my eyes.

    My father had told me much about my grandparents, Isaac and Chaya Blitzer. They were very religious and truly wonderful people who had lived and raised their six children nearby. I wish I had known them.

    I never knew my mother’s parents, Wolf and Chaya Zylberfuden, either. My mom always spoke so lovingly of them. They were rounded up elsewhere in Poland and sent to a labor camp, where they were forced to make ammunition for Nazi soldiers. The conditions there were awful, and they soon died of typhoid fever, which was spreading around the area.

    I proudly carry the names of my two grandfathers – Wolf Isaac Blitzer.

    And now a new generation is carrying on the lessons of the Holocaust. At the annual March of the Living, thousands of people – Jews and non-Jews, young and old – come from all around the world to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to honor and remember those who were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. They also come to learn and then to educate others about the horrors of the Holocaust.

    On this visit, I learned more and deepened my understanding of what my grandparents, parents and their siblings endured during the Holocaust. And as I did, I kept thinking about how important it is for all of us to educate ourselves about this horrible history to make sure we never forget. It is especially vital today in light of increasing antisemitism and Holocaust denialism. As the child of Holocaust survivors, it is hard to comprehend that there are truly evil people out there spreading lies that none of this ever happened.

    That’s why I was so moved by what I saw during our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    I had never been to Auschwitz before. I was never actually sure that I wanted to visit this place that represented the depths of hell for the 1.1 million people murdered by the Nazis there, including my own great-grandparents.

    I am now so glad that I went.

    Since I was a little girl, I have heard about the horrors of the Nazi atrocities, not just from the history books but also from my own grandfather Frank Weinman, who along with my grandmother Teri Vidor Weinman, were among the few to escape.

    They miraculously got to America in October 1941, thanks to Frank’s brother Charles, who was living in Chicago and had convinced his boss to put up the exorbitant sums of money the America government then required for Jewish refugees like my grandparents to get US visas to flee Nazi persecution.

    Grandma Teri and her family were Hungarian Jews, and her parents, Rudolph and Matilda Vidor, along with her sister Magda, were safe from Hitler’s wrath until 1944, when he invaded Hungary.

    Before visiting Auschwitz, I knew that they had been killed there.

    But having our expert guide tell my brother David and me exactly where and how was numbing.

    We saw a freight train exactly like the one they were shoved into with little to no water or food, traveling for days from Hungary to camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. We stood on the train tracks the Germans built to bring them into Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    The main railway building is pictured on the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 25, 2021.

    We saw what was left of what was likely the gas chamber where they were murdered and informed that because of their ages – both were in their 50s and not considered strong enough for hard labor – they probably were killed within a hour of arriving.

    It was a lot to take in, and it will take a while for my brother and me to process it all.

    But for both of us, our immediate takeaway was one of defiance – that our mere existence is proof that Hitler did not succeed in his quest to annihilate our family just because we are Jews.

    For years, not knowing exactly when or how her parents were killed, my Grandma Teri chose April 19, the day of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer recited on the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

    This week, my brother and I got to say Kaddish just steps from where they died.

    May their memory be a blessing.

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  • Blinken says US is ‘engaged with Syria’ in efforts to free missing journalist Austin Tice | CNN Politics

    Blinken says US is ‘engaged with Syria’ in efforts to free missing journalist Austin Tice | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The United States is “engaged with Syria, engaged with third countries” to try to bring detained journalist Austin Tice home, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

    “We are extensively engaged with regard to Austin, engaged with Syria, engaged with third countries, seeking to find a way to get him home. And we’re not going to relent until we do,” Blinken said in remarks at a Washington Post event on World Press Freedom Day.

    Tice was taken hostage in Syria in 2012. President Joe Biden declared last year that the US government knows “with certainty that he has been held by the Syrian regime” and called on Damascus to cooperate on efforts to release him.

    The government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has not publicly acknowledged they are detaining Tice. The US does not have diplomatic relations with the Syrian regime and has voiced opposition to rapprochement with Assad.

    Blinken did not provide details about the engagements to bring Tice home. White House and State Department officials would not confirm a report from the Wall Street Journal that US officials had held talks with Syrian officials in Oman.

    “We cannot confirm any specific meetings past or present. As you know in general meetings and negotiations to secure the release of wrongfully detained Americans, that is incredibly sensitive,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a White House briefing. “We want to be really, really careful and mindful and don’t want to confirm any specific conversation from the past or in the present.”

    CNN reported last August that the Biden administration had direct engagements with the Syrian government in an effort to secure Tice’s release. In 2020 under the Trump administration, Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens secretly traveled to Damascus and met with Assad regime officials.

    Austin Tice’s mother Debra Tice told CNN Monday that she thinks that the administration is committed to bringing her son home but “they stumble over what needs to be done.” She said she had no doubt that her son would walk free.

    Biden paid tribute to Austin Tice and other wrongfully detained Americans, including Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan in Russia, in remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.

    A number of family members of wrongfully detained Americans – many of whom have joined forces in an organization called the “Bring Our Families Home” campaign – as well as those who had been freed from detention gathered in Washington, DC, this week to seek a meeting with the president and call on the US government to do more to secure the release of their loved ones.

    “Although our loved ones are wrongfully detained and held hostage abroad, including China, including Russia, including Iran, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, our voices are stronger together,” said Harrison Li, the son of Kai Li, who is detained in China.

    “Although each case has its own idiosyncrasies, we all need the same things: for President Biden to meet with us, and to use all tools to bring them home,” he said.

    “We have asked for a meeting with the president for so long now that I frankly don’t know how else to ask or what else to say,” Hannah Sharghi, whose father Emad Shargi is detained in Iran, said at a news conference Wednesday.

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  • Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States.

    Birth date: June 14, 1946

    Birth place: New York, New York

    Birth name: Donald John Trump

    Father: Fred Trump, real estate developer

    Mother: Mary (Macleod) Trump

    Marriages: Melania (Knauss) Trump (January 22, 2005-present); Marla (Maples) Trump (December 1993-June 1999, divorced); Ivana (Zelnicek) Trump (1977-1990, divorced)

    Children: with Melania Trump: Barron, March 20, 2006; with Marla Maples: Tiffany, October 13, 1993; with Ivana Trump: Eric, 1984; Ivanka, October 30, 1981; Donald Jr., December 31, 1977

    Education: Attended Fordham University; University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance, B.S. in Economics, 1968

    As Trump evolved from real estate developer to reality television star, he turned his name into a brand. Licensed Trump products have included board games, steaks, cologne, vodka, furniture and menswear.

    He has portrayed himself in cameo appearances in movies and on television, including “Zoolander,” “Sex and the City” and “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”

    Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was first used by Ronald Reagan while he was running against President Jimmy Carter.

    For details on investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, visit 2016 Presidential Election Investigation Fast Facts.

    1970s – After college, works with his father on apartment complexes in Queens and Brooklyn.

    1973 – Trump and his father are named in a Justice Department lawsuit alleging Trump property managers violated the Fair Housing Act by turning away potential African American tenants. The Trumps deny the company discriminates and file a $100 million countersuit, which is later dismissed. The case is settled in 1975, and the Trumps agree to provide weekly lists of vacancies to Black community organizations.

    1976 – Trump and his father partner with the Hyatt Corporation, purchasing the Commodore Hotel, an aging midtown Manhattan property. The building is revamped and opens four years later as the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The project kickstarts Trump’s career as a Manhattan developer.

    1983-1990 – He builds/purchases multiple properties in New York City, including Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel, and also opens casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, including the Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Plaza. Trump buys the New Jersey Generals football team, part of the United States Football League, which folds after three seasons.

    1985 – Purchases Mar-a-Lago, an oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It is renovated and opens as a private club in 1995.

    1987 – Trump’s first book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” is published, and becomes a bestseller. The Donald J. Trump Foundation is established in order to donate a portion of profits from book sales to charities.

    1990 – Nearly $1 billion in personal debt, Trump reaches an agreement with bankers allowing him to avoid declaring personal bankruptcy.

    1991 – The Trump Taj Mahal files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

    1992 – The Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle casinos file for bankruptcy.

    1996 – Buys out and becomes executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants.

    October 7, 1999 – Tells CNN’s Larry King that he is going to form a presidential exploratory committee and wants to challenge Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination.

    February 14, 2000 – Says that he is abandoning his bid for the presidency, blaming discord within the Reform Party.

    January 2004 – “The Apprentice,” a reality show featuring aspiring entrepreneurs competing for Trump’s approval, premieres on NBC.

    November 21, 2004 – Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    2005 – Establishes Trump University, which offers seminars in real estate investment.

    February 13, 2009 – Announces his resignation from his position as chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Days later, the company files for bankruptcy protection.

    March 17, 2011 – During an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Trump questions whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

    June 16, 2015 – Announces that he is running for president during a speech at Trump Tower. He pledges to implement policies that will boost the economy and says he will get tough on immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people who have lots of problems,” Trump says. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

    June 28, 2015 – Says he’s giving up the TV show “The Apprentice” to run for president.

    June 29, 2015 – NBCUniversal says it is cutting its business ties to Trump and won’t air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants because of “derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants.”

    July 8, 2015 – In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump says he “can’t guarantee” all of his employees have legal status in the United States. This is in response to questions about a Washington Post report about undocumented immigrants working at the Old Post Office construction site in Washington, DC, which Trump is converting into a hotel.

    July 22, 2015 – Trump’s financial disclosure report is made public by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

    August 6, 2015 – During the first 2016 Republican debate, Trump is questioned about a third party candidacy, his attitude towards women and his history of donating money to Democratic politicians. He tells moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News he feels he is being mistreated. The following day, Trump tells CNN’s Don Lemon that Kelly was singling him out for attack, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

    September 11, 2015 – Trump announces he has purchased NBC’s half of the Miss Universe Organization, which organizes the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.

    December 7, 2015 – Trump’s campaign puts out a press release calling for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

    May 26, 2016 – Secures enough delegates to clinch the Republican Party nomination.

    July 16, 2016 – Introduces Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.

    July 19, 2016 – Becomes the Republican Party nominee for president.

    September 13, 2016 – During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says his office is investigating Trump’s charitable foundation “to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.”

    October 1, 2016 – The New York Times reports Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 which could have allowed him to legally skip paying federal income taxes for years. The report is based on a financial document mailed to the newspaper by an anonymous source.

    October 7, 2016 – Unaired footage from 2005 surfaces of Trump talking about trying to have sex with a married woman and being able to grope women. In footage obtained by The Washington Post, Trump is heard off-camera discussing women in vulgar terms during the taping of a segment for “Access Hollywood.” In a taped response, Trump declares, “I said it, I was wrong and I apologize.”

    October 9, 2016 – During the second presidential debate, CNN’s Cooper asks Trump about his descriptions of groping and kissing women without their consent in the “Access Hollywood” footage. Trump denies that he has ever engaged in such behavior and declares the comments were “locker room talk.” After the debate, 11 women step forward to claim that they were sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by the real estate developer. Trump says the stories aren’t true.

    November 8, 2016 – Elected president of the United States. Trump will be the first president who has never held elected office, a top government post or a military rank.

    November 18, 2016 – Trump agrees to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against Trump University. About 6,000 former students are covered by the settlement.

    December 24, 2016 – Trump says he will dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation “to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President.” A spokeswoman for the New York Attorney General’s Office says that the foundation cannot legally close until investigators conclude their probe of the charity.

    January 10, 2017 – CNN reports that intelligence officials briefed Trump on a dossier that contains allegations about his campaign’s ties to Russia and unverified claims about his personal life. The author of the dossier is a former British spy who was hired by a research firm that had been funded by both political parties to conduct opposition research on Trump.

    January 20, 2017 – Takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts during an inauguration ceremony at the Capitol.

    January 23, 2017 – Trump signs an executive action withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration and awaiting congressional approval.

    January 27, 2017 – Trump signs an executive order halting all refugee arrivals for 120 days and banning travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days. Additionally, refugees from Syria are barred indefinitely from entering the United States. The order is challenged in court.

    February 13, 2017 – Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigns amid accusations he lied about his communications with Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later pleads guilty to lying to the FBI.

    May 3, 2017 – FBI Director James Comey confirms that there is an ongoing investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during a hearing on Capitol Hill. Less than a week later, Trump fires Comey, citing a DOJ memo critical of the way he handled the investigation into Clinton’s emails.

    May 2017 – Shortly after Trump fires Comey, the FBI opens an investigation into whether Trump “had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests,” citing former law enforcement officials and others the paper said were familiar with the probe.

    May 17, 2017 – Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is appointed as special counsel to lead the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein makes the appointment because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from investigations into Trump’s campaign.

    May 19, 2017 – Departs on his first foreign trip as president. The nine-day, five-country trip includes stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, a NATO summit in Brussels and a G7 summit in Sicily.

    June 1, 2017 – Trump proclaims that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord but adds that he is open to renegotiating aspects of the environmental agreement, which was signed by 175 countries in 2016.

    July 7, 2017 – Meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in person for the first time, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

    August 8, 2017 – In response to nuclear threats from North Korea, Trump warns that Pyongyang will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Soon after Trump’s comments, North Korea issues a statement saying it is “examining the operational plan” to strike areas around the US territory of Guam.

    August 15, 2017 – After a violent clash between neo-Nazi activists and counterprotesters leaves one dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump holds an impromptu press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower and declares that there were “fine people” on both sides.

    August 25, 2017 – Trump’s first pardon is granted to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt for disregarding a court order in a racial-profiling case. Trump did not consult with lawyers at the Justice Department before announcing his decision.

    September 5, 2017 – The Trump administration announces that it is ending the DACA program, introduced by Obama to protect nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Trump calls on Congress to introduce legislation that will prevent DACA recipients from being deported. Multiple lawsuits are filed opposing the policy in federal courts and judges delay the end of the program, asking the government to submit filings justifying the cancellation of DACA.

    September 19, 2017 – In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump refers to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man” and warns that the United States will “totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend itself or its allies.

    September 24, 2017 – The Trump administration unveils a third version of the travel ban, placing restrictions on travel by certain foreigners from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. (Chad is later removed after meeting security requirements.) One day before the revised ban is set to take effect, it is blocked nationwide by a federal judge in Hawaii. A judge in Maryland issues a similar ruling.

    December 4, 2017 – The Supreme Court rules that the revised travel ban can take effect pending appeals.

    December 6, 2017 – Trump recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announces plans to relocate the US Embassy there.

    January 11, 2018 – During a White House meeting on immigration reform, Trump reportedly refers to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

    January 12, 2018 – The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump allegedly had an affair with a porn star named Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. The newspaper states that Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, arranged a $130,000 payment for a nondisclosure agreement weeks before Election Day in 2016. Trump denies the affair occurred. In March, Clifford sues Trump seeking to be released from the NDA. In response, Trump and his legal team agree outside of court not to sue or otherwise enforce the NDA. The suit is dismissed. A California Superior Court judge orders Trump to pay $44,100 to Clifford, to reimburse her attorneys’ fees in the legal battle surrounding her nondisclosure agreement.

    March 13, 2018 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and will nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Tillerson’s replacement.

    March 20, 2018 – A New York Supreme Court judge rules that a defamation lawsuit against Trump can move forward, ruling against a July 2017 motion to dismiss filed by Trump’s lawyers. The lawsuit, filed by Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant, is related to sexual assault allegations. In November 2021, attorneys for Zervos announce she is dropping the lawsuit.

    March 23, 2018 – The White House announces that it is adopting a policy, first proposed by Trump via tweet in July 2017, banning most transgender individuals from serving in the military.

    April 9, 2018 – The FBI raids Cohen’s office, home and a hotel room where he’d been staying while his house was renovated. The raid is related to a federal investigation of possible fraud and campaign finance violations.

    April 13, 2018 – Trump authorizes joint military strikes in Syria with the UK and France after reports the government used chemical weapons on civilians in Douma.

    May 7, 2018 – The Trump administration announces a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings. Sessions says that individuals who violate immigration law will be criminally prosecuted and warns that parents could be separated from children.

    May 8, 2018 – Trump announces that the United States is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

    May 31, 2018 – The Trump administration announces it is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from allies Canada, Mexico and the European Union.

    June 8-9, 2018 – Before leaving for the G7 summit in Quebec City, Trump tells reporters that Russia should be reinstated in the group. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 led to Russia’s suspension. After leaving the summit, Trump tweets that he will not endorse the traditional G7 communique issued at the end of the meeting. The President singles out Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for making “false statements” at a news conference.

    June 12, 2018 – Trump meets Kim in person for the first time during a summit in Singapore. They sign a four-point statement that broadly outlines the countries’ commitment to a peace process. The statement contains a pledge by North Korea to “work towards” complete denuclearization but the agreement does not detail how the international community will verify that Kim is ending his nuclear program.

    June 14, 2018 – The New York attorney general sues the Trump Foundation, alleging that the nonprofit run by Trump and his three eldest children violated state and federal charity law.

    June 26, 2018 – The Supreme Court upholds the Trump administration’s travel ban in a 5-4 ruling along party lines.

    July 16, 2018 – During a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump declines to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible. The next day, Trump clarifies his remark, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He says he accepts the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia meddled in the election but adds, “It could be other people also.”

    August 21, 2018 – Cohen pleads guilty to eight federal charges, including two campaign finance violations. In court, he says that he orchestrated payments to silence women “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” On the same day, Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort is convicted on eight counts of federal financial crimes. On December 12, Cohen is sentenced to three years in prison.

    October 2, 2018 – The New York Times details numerous tax avoidance schemes allegedly carried out by Trump and his siblings. In a tweet, Trump dismisses the article as a “very old, boring and often told hit piece.”

    November 20, 2018 – Releases a statement backing Saudi Arabia in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Virginia resident, killed in October at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. Khashoggi was a frequent critic of the Saudi regime. The Saudis initially denied any knowledge of his death, but then later said a group of rogue operators were responsible for his killing. US officials have speculated that such a mission, including the 15 men sent from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to murder him, could not have been carried out without the authorization of Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the statement, Trump writes, “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

    December 18, 2018 – The Donald J. Trump Foundation agrees to dissolve according to a document filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. The agreement allows the New York attorney general’s office to review the recipients of the charity’s assets.

    December 22, 2018 – The longest partial government shutdown in US history begins after Trump demands lawmakers allocate $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall before agreeing to sign a federal funding package.

    January 16, 2019 – After nearly two years of Trump administration officials denying that anyone involved in his campaign colluded with the Russians to help his candidacy, Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, says “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign. I said the President of the United States.”

    January 25, 2019 – The government shutdown ends when Trump signs a short-term spending measure, providing three weeks of stopgap funding while lawmakers work on a border security compromise. The bill does not include any wall funding.

    February 15, 2019 – Trump declares a national emergency to allocate funds to build a wall on the border with Mexico. During the announcement, the President says he expects the declaration to be challenged in court. The same day, Trump signs a border security measure negotiated by Congress, with $1.375 billion set aside for barriers, averting another government shutdown.

    February 18, 2019 – Attorneys general from 16 states file a lawsuit in federal court challenging Trump’s emergency declaration.

    March 22, 2019 – Mueller ends his investigation and delivers his report to Attorney General William Barr. A senior Justice Department official tells CNN that there will be no further indictments.

    March 24, 2019 – Barr releases a letter summarizing the principal conclusions from Mueller’s investigation. According to Barr’s four-page letter, the evidence was not sufficient to establish that members Trump’s campaign tacitly engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the election.

    April 18, 2019 – A redacted version of the Mueller report is released. The first part of the 448-page document details the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team on potential conspiracy crimes and explains their decisions not to charge individuals associated with the campaign. The second part of the report outlines ten episodes involving possible obstruction of justice by the President. According to the report, Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump was rooted in Justice Department guidelines prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. Mueller writes that he would have cleared Trump if the evidence warranted exoneration.

    May 1, 2019 – The New York Times publishes a report that details how Giuliani, in his role as Trump’s personal attorney, is investigating allegations related to former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential Trump opponent in the 2020 presidential race. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings. In 2016, the elder Biden pressured Ukraine to oust a prosecutor who had investigated Burisma for corruption. Giuliani suggests that Biden’s move was motivated by a desire to protect his son from criminal charges. Giuliani’s claims are undermined after Bloomberg reports that the Burisma investigation was “dormant” when Biden pressed the prosecutor to resign.

    June 12, 2019 – Trump says he may be willing to accept information about political rivals from a foreign government during an interview on ABC News, declaring that he’s willing to listen and wouldn’t necessarily call the FBI.

    June 16, 2019 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveils a sign at the proposed site of a Golan Heights settlement to be named Trump Heights.

    June 18, 2019 – Trump holds a rally in Orlando to publicize the formal launch of his reelection campaign.

    June 28, 2019 – During a breakfast meeting at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman reportedly discuss tensions with Iran, trade and human rights.

    June 30, 2019 – Trump becomes the first sitting US president to enter North Korea. He takes 20 steps beyond the border and shakes hands with Kim.

    July 14, 2019 – Via Twitter, Trump tells Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Illhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to their home countries. Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley are natural-born US citizens; Omar was born in Somalia, immigrated to the United States and became a citizen.

    July 16, 2019 – The House votes, 240-187, to condemn the racist language Trump used in his tweets about Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and Pressley.

    July 24, 2019 – Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.

    July 25, 2019 – Trump speaks on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asks Zelensky for a “favor,” encouraging him to speak with Giuliani about investigating Biden. In the days before the call, Trump blocked nearly $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine.

    August 12, 2019 – A whistleblower files a complaint pertaining to Trump’s conduct on the Zelensky call.

    September 11, 2019 – The Trump administration lifts its hold on military aid for Ukraine.

    September 24, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces the beginning of an impeachment inquiry related to the whistleblower complaint.

    September 25, 2019 – The White House releases notes from the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. The readout contains multiple references to Giuliani and Barr. In response, the Justice Department issues a statement that says Barr didn’t know about Trump’s conversation until weeks after the call. Further, the attorney general didn’t talk to the President about having Ukraine investigate the Bidens, according to the Justice Department. On the same day as the notes are released, Trump and Zelensky meet in person for the first time on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. During a joint press conference after the meeting, both men deny that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden in exchange for aid.

    September 26, 2019 – The House releases a declassified version of the whistleblower complaint. According to the complaint, officials at the White House tried to “lock down” records of Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky. The complaint also alleges that Barr played a role in the campaign to convince Zelensky that Biden should be investigated. Trump describes the complaint as “fake news” and “a witch hunt” on Twitter.

    September 27, 2019 – Pompeo is subpoenaed by House committees over his failure to provide documents related to Ukraine. Kurt Volker, US special envoy to Ukraine, resigns. He was named in the whistleblower complaint as one of the State Department officials who helped Giuliani connect with sources in Ukraine.

    October 3, 2019 – Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump says both Ukraine and China should investigate alleged corruption involving Biden and his son. CNN reports that the President had brought up Biden and his family during a June phone call with Xi Jinping. In that call, Trump discussed the political prospects of Biden as well as Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi that he would remain quiet on the matter of Hong Kong protests. Notes documenting the conversation were placed on a highly secured server where the transcript from the Ukraine call was also stored.

    October 6, 2019 – After Trump speaks on the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the White House announces that US troops will move out of northern Syria to make way for a planned Turkish military operation. The move marks a major shift in American foreign policy and effectively gives Turkey the green light to attack US-backed Kurdish forces, a partner in the fight against ISIS.

    October 9, 2019 – Turkey launches a military offensive in northern Syria.

    October 31, 2019 – Trump says via Twitter that he is changing his legal residency from New York to Florida, explaining that he feels he is treated badly by political leaders from the city and state.

    November 7, 2019 – A judge orders Trump to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit against his charity filed by the New York state attorney general. According to the suit, Trump breached his fiduciary duty by allowing his presidential campaign to direct the distribution of donations. In a statement, Trump accuses the attorney general of mischaracterizing the settlement for political purposes.

    November 13, 2019 – Public impeachment hearings begin and Trump meets Erdogan at the White House.

    November 20, 2019 – During a public hearing, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland says he worked with Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine at the “express direction of the President of the United States” and he says “everyone was in the loop.” Sondland recounts several conversations between himself and Trump about Ukraine opening two investigations: one into Burisma and another into conspiracies about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 US election.

    December 10, 2019 – House Democrats unveil two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress.

    December 11, 2019 – Trump signs an executive order to include discrimination against Jewish people as a violation of law in certain cases, with an eye toward fighting antisemitism on college campuses.

    December 13, 2019 – The House Judiciary Committee approves the two articles of impeachment in a party line vote.

    December 18, 2019 – The House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, charging a president with high crimes and misdemeanors for just the third time in American history.

    January 3, 2020 – Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announces that a US airstrike in Iraq has killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.

    January 8, 2020 – Iran fires a number of missiles at two Iraqi bases housing US troops in retaliation for the American strike that killed Soleimani. No US or Iraqi lives are reported lost, but the Pentagon later releases a statement confirming that 109 US service members had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries in the wake of the attack.

    January 24, 2020 – Makes history as the first President to attend the annual March for Life rally in Washington, DC, since it began nearly a half-century ago. Trump reiterates his support for tighter abortion restrictions.

    January 29, 2020 – Trump signs the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement into law, which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement.

    January 31, 2020 – The Trump administration announces an expansion of the travel ban to include six new countries. Immigration restrictions will be imposed on: Nigeria, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar (known as Burma), with exceptions for immigrants who have helped the United States.

    February 5, 2020 – The Senate votes to acquit Trump on two articles of impeachment. Sen. Mitt Romney is the sole Republican to vote to convict on the charge of abuse of power, joining with all Senate Democrats in a 52-48 not guilty vote. On the obstruction of Congress charge, the vote falls along straight party lines, 53-47 for acquittal.

    May 29, 2020 – Trump announces that the United States will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization.

    July 10, 2020 – Trump commutes the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger Stone, who was convicted of crimes that included lying to Congress in part, prosecutors said, to protect the President. The announcement came just days before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia.

    October 2, 2020 – Trump announces that he has tested positive for coronavirus. Later in the day, Trump is transferred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and returns to the White House on October 5.

    November 7, 2020 – Days after the presidential election on November 3, CNN projects Trump loses his bid for reelection to Biden.

    November 25, 2020 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has granted Michael Flynn a “full pardon,” wiping away the guilty plea of the intelligence official for lying to the FBI.

    December 23, 2020 – Announces 26 new pardons, including for Stone, Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles.

    January 6, 2021 – Following Trump’s rally and speech at the White House Ellipse, pro-Trump rioters storm the US Capitol as members of Congress meet to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election. A total of five people die, including a Capitol Police officer the next day.

    January 7-8, 2021 – Instagram and Facebook place a ban on Trump’s account from posting through the remainder of his presidency and perhaps “indefinitely.” Twitter permanently bans Trump from the platform, explaining that “after close review of recent Tweets…and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

    January 13, 2021 – The House votes to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” He is the only president to be impeached twice.

    January 20, 2021 – Trump issues a total of 143 pardons and commutations that include his onetime political strategist, Steve Bannon, a former top fundraiser and two well-known rappers but not himself or his family. He then receives a military-style send-off from Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration morning, before heading home to Florida.

    February 13, 2021 – The US Senate acquits Trump in his second impeachment trial, voting that Trump is not guilty of inciting the deadly January 6 riots at the US Capitol. The vote is 43 not guilty to 57 guilty, short of the 67 guilty votes needed to convict.

    May 5, 2021 – Facebook’s Oversight Board upholds Trump’s suspension from using its platform. The decision also applies to Facebook-owned Instagram.

    June 4, 2021 – Facebook announces Trump will be suspended from its platform until at least January 7th, 2023 – two years from when he was initially suspended.

    July 1, 2021 – New York prosecutors charge the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 felony counts and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 felony counts in connection with an alleged tax scheme stretching back to 2005. Trump himself is not charged. On December 6, 2022, both companies are found guilty on all charges.

    February 14, 2022 – Accounting firm Mazars announces it will no longer act as Trump’s accountant, citing a conflict of interest. In a letter to the Trump Organization chief legal officer, the firm informs the Trump Organization to no longer rely on financial statements ending June 2011 through June 2020.

    May 3, 2022 – The Trump Organization and the Presidential Inaugural Committee agree to pay a total of $750,000 to settle with the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office over allegations they misspent money raised for former President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

    June 9-July 21, 2022 – The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol holds eight hearings, where it hears from witnesses including top ex-Trump officials, election workers, those who took part in the attack and many others. Through live testimony, video depositions, and never-before-seen material, the committee attempts to paint the picture of the former president’s plan to stay in power and the role he played on January 6.

    August 8, 2022 – The FBI executes a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there.

    August 12, 2022 – A federal judge unseals the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The unsealed documents indicate the FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents from its search, including some materials marked as “top secret/SCI” – one of the highest levels of classification, and identify three federal crimes that the Justice Department is looking at as part of its investigation: violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.

    September 21, 2022 – The New York state attorney general files a lawsuit against Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals.

    October 3, 2022 – Trump files a lawsuit against CNN for defamation, seeking $475 million in punitive damages.

    November 15, 2022 – Announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

    November 19, 2022 – Trump’s Twitter account, which was banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, is reinstated after users respond to an online poll posted by Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk.

    December 19, 2022 – The Jan. 6 insurrection committee votes to refer Trump to the Department of Justice on at least four criminal charges. Four days later the panel releases its final report recommending Trump be barred from holding office again.

    February 9, 2023 – Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are restored following a two-year ban in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, a Meta spokesperson confirms to CNN. On March 17, 2023, YouTube restores Trump’s channel.

    March 30, 2023 – A grand jury in New York votes to indict Trump, the first time in American history that a current or former president has faced criminal charges.

    April 4, 2023 – Surrenders and is placed under arrest before pleading not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in Manhattan criminal court. Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election through a hush money scheme with payments made to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump. He has denied the affairs. Hours after his arraignment, Trump rails against the Manhattan district attorney and the indictment during a speech at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago.

    May 9, 2023 – A Manhattan federal jury finds Trump sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996 and awards her $5 million for battery and defamation.

    May 15, 2023 – A report by special counsel John Durham is released. In it he concludes that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The report does not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

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  • What Elizabeth Holmes’ life in prison could look like | CNN Business

    What Elizabeth Holmes’ life in prison could look like | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Once a Silicon Valley icon and paper billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes will now have to wake every morning at 6 a.m., hold a job paying as little as $0.12 an hour, and share bathing facilities at a prison camp in southern Texas.

    Holmes reported to the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, on Tuesday to begin serving out her 11-year sentence after being convicted on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the now-defunct startup Theranos. Her request to remain free on bail while she appeals her conviction was denied by an appellate court earlier this month.

    Located approximately 100 miles outside of Houston, where Holmes grew up before moving to California to attend Stanford, FPC Bryan is a minimum-security federal prison camp housing more than 600 women offenders.

    Bryan has other notable inmates. It is the same facility where Jennifer Shah, a cast member on Bravo’s “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” is serving out her own sentence for her involvement in a telemarketing fraud scheme.

    Holmes herself once graced the covers of magazines, appeared alongside prominent figures like Bill Clinton at conferences and attracted a who’s who of investors for Theranos, which promised to test for a wide range of health concerns using just a few drops of blood. But it all began to unravel after a damning Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015. Holmes is now the rare Silicon Valley founder to be tried for and convicted of fraud.

    Federal prison camps are minimum security institutions with dormitory housing, a relatively low staff-to-inmate ratio, and limited or no perimeter fencing, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. These prisons are sometimes nicknamed “Camp Fed” because they’re less restrictive than other institutions.

    But according to Mark MacDougall, a longtime white-collar defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, the prison won’t be a walk in the park for Holmes.

    “I think people who talk about ‘Camp Fed’ have never actually been inside a federal correctional institution,” MacDougall told CNN. “It’s not a place where people would want to spend time if they could be somewhere else.”

    FPC Bryan will likely be heavily populated with white-collar offenders, according MacDougall. Housing at FPC Bryan typically consists of dormitory-style arrangements featuring a four-bunk cubicle and communal bath facilities, he said.

    “There’s no privacy,” he said.

    Inmates at FPC Bryan are required to maintain a job assignment, according to the prison’s handbook, with hourly wages ranging from $0.12 to $1.15. Holmes will have to wear a uniform of khaki pants and a khaki shirt – a far cry from her black turtleneck days. She also can’t wear jewelry, except for a plain wedding band and a religious medallion without stones, according to the handbook, and the value of these items can’t exceed $100 each.

    MacDougall noted that there’s many volunteer opportunities at Bryan, and it’s very likely that someone with Holmes’ background might find herself teaching.

    “I expect she would be teaching in some fashion,” he said. “That’s a very common occupation for inmates who have some education.” (Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19 to pursue Theranos.)

    Holmes, who became a mother of two in the time between her indictment in 2018 and the start of her prison sentence, will also only be able to see her children and other family during visiting hours on weekends and federal holidays at FPC Bryan. Holmes and her family have most recently been living in California.

    As MacDougall put it, “Anybody that suggests that she’s going to be in a pleasant environment or have an easy time of it is kidding themselves.”

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  • A top House Republican backs Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, while a prominent Democrat disagrees | CNN Politics

    A top House Republican backs Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, while a prominent Democrat disagrees | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A top House Republican said Sunday he agreed with the Biden administration’s contentious decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of a new military aid package, while a prominent progressive Democrat said the US risks “losing our moral leadership” over the move.

    House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, and Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, made their remarks in separate interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    McCaul said the weapons “would be a game-changer” in the war in Ukraine, noting that “Russia is dropping with impunity cluster bombs” on Ukrainian territory.

    “All the Ukrainians and (President Volodymyr) Zelensky are asking for is to give them the same weapons the Russians have to use in their own country against Russians who are in their own country,” he said. “They do not want these to be used in Russia.”

    ‘That’s crossing a line’: Democrat responds to Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine

    The munitions, also known as cluster bombs, spread shrapnel that is designed to kill troops or take out armored vehicles such as tanks, but they also scatter “bomblets” across large areas that can fail to explode on impact and can pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines.

    Over 100 countries, including the UK, France and Germany, have outlawed the munitions under the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the US and Ukraine are not signatories to the ban – a point that McCaul emphasized on Sunday.

    CNN previously reported that President Joe Biden mulled over the decision before approving the weapons transfer on Friday.

    Biden said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that it was a “difficult decision” but he was ultimately convinced to send the controversial weapons because Kyiv needs ammunition in its counteroffensive against Russia.

    US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC on Sunday that the administration was “mindful of the concerns about civilian casualties” but reiterated that Ukrainian forces plan to use the cluster munitions to “defend their own territory, hitting Russian positions.”

    National security adviser Jake Sullivan sought Sunday to downplay any concern that Biden’s decision would present any “fracture” with allied countries that oppose the use of such weapons ahead of the president’s high-stakes trip to Europe.

    “We have heard nothing from people saying this cast doubt on our commitment, this cast doubt on coalition unity or this cast doubt on our belief that the United States is playing a vital and positive role as leader of this coalition in Ukraine,” he told reporters traveling with Biden en route to London.

    Lee, however, told CNN that cluster bombs “should never be used. That’s crossing a line.”

    “They don’t always immediately explode. Children can step on them,” she said. “The president’s been doing a good job managing this war, this Putin aggressive war against Ukraine. But I think that this should not happen.”

    Asked by Tapper if the US could be engaging in war crimes by providing the weaponry, Lee said, “What I think is that we … would risk losing our moral leadership because, when you look at the fact that over 120 countries have signed the convention on cluster munitions saying that they should never be used, they should never be used.”

    The remarks underscore the sensitivity surrounding cluster munitions, which US forces began phasing out in 2016 because of the danger they pose to civilians.

    Another Democrat, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, said Sunday he appreciated that the Biden administration “grappled with the risk and reached agreements with the Ukrainian military” about the use of the munitions but he has “real qualms” about the decision.

    “There is an international prohibition. And the US says, ‘But here is a good reason to do something different.’ It could give a green light to other nations to do something different as well,” Kaine said.

    Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, welcomed the sending of cluster munitions to Ukraine but said the US was taking “too long” to supply weapons to the country.

    “The best thing we can do now is to step up,” Barrasso told Fox News. “It just does seem to me there is so much delay in the activity of this administration and ultimately getting to Ukraine what they need.”

    Lee and McCaul also diverged Sunday on the chaotic 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has reemerged as a topic after the recent release of a State Department report that found that both the Trump and Biden administrations’ decisions to pull all US troops from Afghanistan had detrimental consequences.

    “I don’t believe the (Biden) administration deserves any blame for this,” Lee said.

    “We have to remember that Donald Trump made this agreement with the Taliban. Secondly, the Trump administration literally gutted our State Department and our diplomatic corps. I believe that the State Department and those who were involved in the end of the Afghanistan war, which should have happened before then, I believe, did the best they could,” Lee said.

    McCaul called the report “damaging” and said the entire ordeal was a “huge foreign policy blunder.”

    The report was publicly released on June 30, more than a year after the 90-day review of the evacuation was completed and includes findings around the tumultuous final weeks of the US presence in Afghanistan, as well as several recommendations for improvement moving forward.

    The Biden administration’s frenzied withdrawal after 20 years of US involvement has come under immense scrutiny by predominantly Republican lawmakers. However, accusations about who was responsible for the chaotic final weeks have fallen largely along party lines, with Republicans pointing fingers at the Biden administration and Democrats, including the White House, casting blame on the Trump administration for the deal that set the US withdrawal into motion.

    Asked on June 30 about the report and whether he admitted there were “mistakes during the withdrawal,” Biden noted that he had vowed that al Qaeda “wouldn’t be there.”

    “I said we’d get help from the Taliban,” the president said. “I was right.”

    McCaul on Sunday said the president’s response was “devoid of reality.”

    “It’s a little bit eerie that a president of the United States would … be so disillusioned about what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan, the idea that al Qaeda is gone,” the Texas Republican said. “He just really wants to sweep Afghanistan under the rug.”

    Since retaking control of Afghanistan, the Taliban has rolled back decades of progress on human rights.

    According to a recent report by United Nations experts, the Taliban has committed “egregious systematic violations of women’s rights,” by restricting their access to education and employment and their ability to move freely in society.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Biden to allow US to share evidence of Russian war crimes with International Criminal Court | CNN Politics

    Biden to allow US to share evidence of Russian war crimes with International Criminal Court | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has decided to allow the US to cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, two US officials and a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The decision comes after months of internal debate and marks a historic shift, as it would be the first time the US has agreed to share evidence with the court as part of a criminal probe into a country that is not a member of the ICC. Neither the US nor Russia are members of the court.

    “It could be deeply consequential,” one of the sources said, adding that the US government now has “a clear green light” to share information and evidence with the ICC.

    What information the US shares will ultimately depend on what the ICC prosecutor requests for the investigations, the source explained.

    A National Security Council spokesperson would not comment directly on the decision, but said in a statement that Biden “has been clear: there needs to be accountability for the perpetrators and enablers of war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.”

    “We have been clear that we support a range of international mechanisms to identify and hold accountable those responsible, including through the Office of the Ukraine Prosecutor General, the Joint Investigative Team through Eurojust, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission, the Expert Missions established under the OSCE’s ‘Moscow Mechanism,’ and the International Criminal Court among others,” the spokesperson added.

    The New York Times first reported on Biden’s order.

    Over the course of the war, Biden administration officials have obtained evidence of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, through intelligence gathering mechanisms among other channels, officials told CNN. But the administration debated for months internally over whether to share that evidence with the court, as officials grappled with the possibility that doing so could set a precedent that could one day be used against the United States, officials explained.

    The Pentagon was the most concerned about cooperating with the court, officials said, and worried that doing so might set a precedent for the ICC to investigate alleged war crimes carried out by Americans in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin raised his concerns with the president earlier this year, but told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this month that the Defense Department would cooperate with whatever policy decision was made by the president.

    The NSC spokesperson noted that the US has already “deployed teams of international investigators and prosecutors to assist Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General in documenting, preserving, and preparing war crimes cases for prosecution, and the Department of Justice has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate with Ukraine on investigations and prosecutions of war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

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  • Navy commander removed from job early after death of SEAL candidate last year | CNN Politics

    Navy commander removed from job early after death of SEAL candidate last year | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A Navy commander reprimanded over the death of a SEAL candidate last year has been removed from his job early, according to two Navy officials, as the Navy prepares to release a broader investigation into the notoriously difficult SEAL training course.

    Capt. Brian Drechsler, who served as commander of Naval Special Warfare Center, was relieved in a change of command ceremony on Tuesday, the Navy said. The change of command came two months early for Drechsler, an official said, who was one of three Navy officers to receive administrative action after the death of Navy SEAL candidate Kyle Mullen in February 2022.

    In a brief statement Tuesday, the Navy made no mention of Mullen. “Capt. Mark Burke relieved Capt. Brian Drechsler as commander of the Naval Special Warfare Center (NSWCEN),” the Navy said. Naval Special Warfare Center’s mission includes the “assessment, selection, and training of SEALs and [Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen].”

    One of the officials said Drechsler is expected to retire soon.

    Mullen, 24, died of bacterial pneumonia in the hours after completing what is known as “Hell Week” during the special operations force’s demanding basic training program. In the 24 hours before he completed his training, Mullen had breathing issues and coughing up fluid, but he was not pulled from training or sent to a hospital upon the course’s completion.

    Navy investigators concluded Mullen died in the “line of duty, not due to his own misconduct,” Naval Special Warfare Command said in a statement at the conclusion of a line of duty investigation in October.

    A separate, broader investigation into the grueling SEALs selection course is expected soon, one of the Navy officials said.

    Initiated by the previous Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. William Lescher, the investigation is examining oversight of the most difficult and punishing elements of the SEALs selection course, including a look at the use of performance enhancing drugs within basic training to complete the course.

    Mullen’s death drew increased scrutiny of the policies, staff preparation and safety measures around one of the military’s most elite units.

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  • Another historic week in the investigation and prosecution of Donald Trump | CNN Politics

    Another historic week in the investigation and prosecution of Donald Trump | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned on federal charges this week in a never-before-seen moment in American political and legal history that captured the attention of a nation that has for years been captivated by his norm-busting episodes.

    The former president’s booking at a federal courthouse in Miami on charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified government documents is just the latest twist in his post-presidency legal drama – which has now become a key issue in the GOP primary contest as Trump mounts a third White House bid.

    Here’s the latest on Trump’s legal troubles:

    On Tuesday, Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents.

    “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” Trump attorney Todd Blanche told the judge.

    Trump’s aide and co-defendant, Walt Nauta, was also arrested, fingerprinted and processed. He had an initial appearance Tuesday but will not be arraigned until June 27.

    The DOJ recommended that both Trump and Nauta be released with no financial or special conditions. Prosecutor David Harbach said that “the government does not view either defendant as a flight risk.”

    The federal criminal charges Trump faces were brought following an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, who attended Tuesday’s arraignment.

    In the indictment unsealed last week, the Justice Department charged Trump with 37 felony counts, alleging he illegally retained national defense information and that he concealed documents in violation of witness-tampering laws in the Justice Department’s probe into the materials.

    The charges are drastically more serious than those he faces in a separate New York case and present the possibility of several years in prison if Trump is ultimately convicted.

    For his part, Nauta, who serves as Trump’s personal valet, faces six counts, including several obstruction- and concealment-related charges stemming from the alleged conduct.

    In her first order after the indictment,US District Judge Aileen Cannon – a Trump appointee – told DOJ and Trump attorneys’ parties to get the ball rolling to obtain security clearances for the lawyers who will need them.

    Both of Trump’s attorneys – Blanche and Chris Kise – have already been in touch with the Justice Department about obtaining the necessary security clearances to try the case, a source familiar with the outreach told CNN Thursday evening.

    Cannon’s order reflects how the case concerns highly sensitive, classified materials – adding another layer of complexity to the high-stakes, first-of-its-kind federal prosecution of a former president.

    How long the proceedings stretch out, and whether the trial takes place before or after the 2024 election, will depend in part on how efficiently Cannon manages her docket. Thursday’s move by Cannon suggests an interest, at least for now, in moving the proceedings along without delay.

    In an expected, procedural step Friday, Smith’s team asked the judge to bar Trump and his defense team from publicly disclosing some of the materials shared in the criminal case as part of the discovery process. Lawyers for Trump and Nauta do not oppose the requested protective order, according to the new filing, and Cannon has referred the matter to a magistrate judge.

    Trump had already been indicted earlier this spring in a separate case, this one brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in New York state court.

    Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over hush money payments made during the 2016 campaign to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump, which he denies. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

    The case has remained relatively quiet since Trump pleaded not guilty to all of those charges in April, with the judge setting a trial date in New York County for March 2024.

    Still, the former president’s legal team has been attempting to move the case to federal court, and on Thursday his attorneys asked a federal judge to deny Bragg’s motion to remand the case back to the state Supreme Court, again arguing that the charges are related to his duties as president and therefore should not be heard in state court.

    A hearing on the issue is scheduled for June 27.

    Trump still has other active investigations looming over him, including a probe by Smith, the special counsel, into the January 6, 2021, US Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

    And in Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has recently indicated that she’s likely to make charging decisions public in August as part of her probe into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.

    In a letter obtained by CNN last month, Willis announced remote workdays for her staff in August and asked judges to refrain from in-person hearings for parts of that month.

    Trump has insisted that any criminal charges will not stop his 2024 campaign, and so far he’s keeping to that commitment.

    On Wednesday, his campaign said it had raised more than $7 million since the former president was indicted in the federal case.

    “The donations are coming in at a really rapid pace,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email.

    Meanwhile, his GOP primary opponents have been weighing in on the new charges in a number of different ways, with some casting the prosecution as political while also stressing that the charges are concerning.

    Trump can still run for president after being indicted or if he is eventually convicted.

    Still, the existing indictments, as well as a potential conviction ahead of the 2024 election, could make it more difficult for Trump to win back the White House.

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  • China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics

    China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    China-based hackers have breached email accounts at two-dozen organizations, including some United States government agencies, in an apparent spying campaign aimed at acquiring sensitive information, according to statements from Microsoft and the White House late Tuesday.

    The full scope of the hack is being investigated, but US officials and Microsoft have been quietly scrambling in recent weeks to assess the impact of the hack, which targeted unclassified email systems, and contain the fallout.

    The federal agency where the Chinese hackers were first detected was the State Department, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. The State Department then reported the suspicious activity to Microsoft, the person said.

    The Department of Commerce, which has sanctioned Chinese telecom firms, was also breached. The hackers accessed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s email account, one source familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Washington Post first reported on the access of the secretary’s account.

    The Chinese hackers were detected targeting a small number of federal agencies and just a handful of officials’ email accounts at each agency in a hack aimed at specific officials, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

    “Microsoft notified the (Commerce) Department of a compromise to Microsoft’s Office 365 system, and the Department took immediate action to respond,” a department spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.

    The spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the targeting of Raimondo’s email account.

    The hackers targeted email accounts at the House of Representatives, but it was unclear who was targeted and if the breach attempts were successful, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The breaches add to what is already one of the steepest cybersecurity challenges facing the Biden administration: limiting the ability of Beijing’s formidable hacking teams to access US government and corporate secrets.

    “Last month, US government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to CNN.

    “Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Hodge said. “We continue to hold the procurement providers of the US Government to a high security threshold.”

    The State Department “detected anomalous activity, took immediate steps to secure our systems, and will continue to closely monitor and quickly respond to any further activity,” a department spokesperson said on Wednesday.

    US Capitol Police declined to comment, referring CNN to the FBI.

    Hodge did not identify who was behind the hack, but Microsoft executives said in a blog post that the hackers were based in China and focused on espionage.

    In response to the Microsoft and White House statements, the Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday accused Washington of conducting its own hacking operations.

    US officials have consistently labeled China as the most advanced of US adversaries in cyberspace, a domain that has repeatedly been a source of bilateral tension in recent years. The FBI has said Beijing has a larger hacking program than all other governments combined.

    China has routinely denied the allegations.

    The hacking began in mid-May, when the China-based hackers used a stolen sign-in key to burrow their way into email accounts, according to Microsoft. The tech giant has since blocked the hackers from accessing customer emails using that technique, Microsoft said late Tuesday.

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in mid-June, but it was not immediately clear if the cyber-espionage campaign was connected to that high-stakes visit.

    Some US officials credited the State Department with investing in more cyber-defense capabilities, allowing the agency to detect the suspicious activity earlier than in past advanced hacks.

    The number of US organizations, public or private, impacted by the hacking campaign is in the “single digits,” a senior US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official told reporters on Wednesday.

    “This appears to have been a very targeted, surgical campaign,” the official said.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Blinken speaks to Russian foreign minister about WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan | CNN Politics

    Blinken speaks to Russian foreign minister about WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke Sunday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and called for the “immediate release” of detained Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, according to the US State Department.

    “Secretary Blinken conveyed the United States’ grave concern over Russia’s unacceptable detention of a U.S. citizen journalist,” a readout from the department said.

    “Secretary Blinken further urged the Kremlin to immediately release wrongfully detained U.S. citizen Paul Whelan,” the readout continued, adding that the secretary and Lavrov “also discussed the importance of creating an environment that permits diplomatic missions to carry out their work.”

    Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Russia, was detained last week on charges of espionage – the first time an American journalist has been detained on such accusations by Moscow since the Cold War. US officials in Moscow had not yet been granted consular access to Gershkovich as of Sunday.

    The Journal’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, said Sunday that the call between Blinken and Lavrov was “hugely reassuring.”

    “We know that the US government is taking the case very seriously right up to the top,” she told CBS News.

    Whelan, meanwhile, is serving out a 16-year prison sentence for the same charges, which he strongly denies. His brother David Whelan said in an email to the press Thursday that his family was sorry to hear “that another American family will have to experience the same trauma that we have had to endure for the past 1,553 days.”

    Whelan has been designated as wrongfully detained by the US State Department, and Gershkovich is expected to receive the same designation but had not yet as of Sunday morning. Tucker said she hopes the US government will act swiftly to label Gershkovich as wrongfully detained, saying it will be anofficial recognition that the charges against the reporter are “entirely bogus.”

    The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Sunday’s phone call was initiated by the US and that Lavrov told Blinken that Gershkovich’s fate would be determined by a Russian court.

    Lavrov also blamed Washington and the Western press for politicizing the arrest.

    “It was emphasized that it is unacceptable for officials in Washington and Western media to hype up [the issue] with the clear intention of giving this case a political coloring,” the statement said.

    Gershkovich is currently being held in the notorious Lefortovo pre-detention center until May 29. He faces up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges.

    Sunday’s call was only the third time that Blinken has spoken with his Russian counterpart since the war in Ukraine began, and all of those conversations have discussed detained US citizens. The two spoke in person for the first time since the war broke out on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers meeting in India last month, and Blinken said he raised the issues of the war, Russia’s suspension of its participation in the New START nuclear agreement, and Whelan’s ongoing detention.

    The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Sunday expressed support for the Biden administration’s efforts to negotiate with Russia for Gershkovich’s release.

    “Certainly the Biden administration should continue its efforts to negotiate and to try to get the release of this journalist, but overall, people should be very cautious about staying in Russia,” Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

    Turner noted that the US government “gave people notice that they should get out of Russia” and said he would continued to encourage people to do so. The Biden administration has echoed those assessments. While the Kremlin has asserted that Russia is safe for accredited journalists, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told CNN on Friday, “Russia is not safe for Americans.”

    Turner appeared on “State of the Union” on Sunday from southern Poland, where he said he is “meeting with those who are active in intelligence and meeting with our servicemembers who are active in the support of Ukraine.”

    Pressed by Bash on remarks by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley that the war in Ukraine will likely not be won this year, the Ohio lawmaker appeared to agree.

    “One thing I can tell you is that Russia is not going to win either,” he said. “This is a war that Russia is not winning, and they’re not winning it because Ukraine realizes that they’re standing up for democracy, they’re fighting for their country. And as they continue to do so, the United States’ assistance and certainly the assistance of our NATO allies and partners are making a huge turnout for the battlefield.”

    This story has been updated with additional reaction.

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  • McCarthy tells Republicans he’s ‘nowhere near’ a debt limit deal with Biden as deadline nears | CNN Politics

    McCarthy tells Republicans he’s ‘nowhere near’ a debt limit deal with Biden as deadline nears | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Republicans during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday that he’s not close to a bipartisan deal with President Joe Biden to avoid a first-ever default on the nation’s debt.

    “We are nowhere near a deal,” McCarthy told Republicans. “I need you all to hang with me.”

    As each day passes without a deal, the clock is ticking closer to a looming deadline for default – which could be catastrophic for the global economy and have financial effects on countless Americans.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reaffirming in a letter to McCarthy on Monday that it is “highly likely” that the US Treasury will not be able to pay all of its bills in full and on time as soon as June 1. But several Republicans, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, have suggested that they do not believe Yellen’s estimate of June 1 as the so-called X-date for potential default and called on her to testify before Congress.

    While McCarthy has maintained that both parties could still obtain a deal by the June 1 deadline, he is also now accusing the president of trying to “disrupt” negotiations by bringing proposals involving Medicare and Social Security back “into the fold.”

    Republican Study Committee Chairman Kevin Hern said McCarthy told members during Tuesday morning’s meeting they should go home and work their districts if a deal isn’t reached by the White House and Republican negotiators by Memorial Day weekend. Members can always be called back, but Hern told reporters that this is a deal that has to be reached between a few key people.

    “The negotiations are with the speaker and his team and the White House and their team. And so the rest of us being here, just waiting around, doesn’t do any good for anyone,” Hern said.

    McCarthy’s continued optimism about securing a deal before next month follows a meeting at the White House with Biden on Monday evening, where he had underscored that both parties are united in their goal of reaching an agreement to raise the nation’s debt limit before the country defaults.

    “I felt we had a productive discussion. We don’t have an agreement yet, but I did feel the discussion was productive in areas that we have differences of opinion,” McCarthy said outside the West Wing, adding that the “tone” of Monday’s meeting was also “better than any other time we’ve had discussions.”

    Monday evening’s meeting at the White House came after negotiations hit a snag and were put on pause Friday, and representatives of each side spent most of the next two days criticizing the other while defending their own positions. But the parties appeared to smooth things over to resume negotiations when Biden and McCarthy spoke over the phone as the president was aboard Air Force One returning to Washington after a trip to Japan.

    Biden, in a statement, called Monday’s discussion in the Oval Office productive while acknowledging that areas of disagreement persist.

    “We reiterated once again that default is off the table and the only way to move forward is in good faith toward a bipartisan agreement,” Biden wrote. “While there are areas of disagreement, the Speaker and I, and his lead negotiators … and our staffs will continue to discuss the path forward.”

    On Monday evening, McCarthy maintained that both he and the president “agree we want to be able to come to an agreement.”

    McCarthy’s team and White House negotiators have been meeting daily in an effort to come to a consensus on the budget and the debt ceiling. Negotiators also met through the night on Monday and reconvened Tuesday morning.

    The speaker on Monday also acknowledged that he does not plan to waive the House’s three-day rule – which requires that legislation be posted for at least three days to allow House members to study it before it can be voted on.

    McCarthy has repeatedly warned that the White House and House GOP must reach a deal this week to avoid default. And if negotiations drag on, waiving the three-day rule could allow the legislation to pass more quickly. However, there are concerns that expediting the legislative process by waiving the rule may lead to members voting to support something they aren’t fully informed on.

    The speaker said he “would give everybody 72 hours, so everybody knows what they’re voting for.”

    Despite continued talks, House members on both sides of the aisle appear remain divided over the approach to debt ceiling discussions.

    House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Monday evening asserted that talks are moving in the “wrong direction.”

    At a hastily called news conference on the steps of the Capitol, Jeffries attacked the GOP for rejecting a White House compromise – to freeze domestic spending at the current levels. Republicans instead want to roll back spending to previous years’ levels and write into law that spending would be capped for several years.

    “They’ve rejected the fact that President Biden is willing to consider freezing spending. It will reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. This is what the extreme MAGA Republicans say that they want. They rejected. They rejected an unwillingness to not put the country through this again,” the New York Democrat said. He also repeatedly refused to say if House Democrats would accept a spending cut, as McCarthy has demanded.

    Jeffries’ position is critical because McCarthy will almost certainly need House Democratic support to pass any deal cut with the White House.

    During Tuesday’s closed-door meeting with Republicans, at least one hardline member – Rep. Chip Roy of Texas – complained about Republicans seeking a compromise that water downs what they passed in the House, according to a source in the room. Roy said it’s about saving the country, not seeking a deal.

    Still, a number of Republicans – even some who haven’t always backed McCarthy – said they are standing by the speaker and are happy with how he’s negotiated up until this point.

    “I am very confident in Kevin McCarthy as our speaker,” Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina told CNN. “I don’t want Speaker McCarthy’s job. That’s a very tough job … he’s got the five families to deal with and a caucus of one right here. He’s doing a great job of pulling people together.”

    “I do not envy his position. I would not want it. He’s had a lot of success in bringing a lot of different factions together within the party and that is no small feat, and it’s not easy,” Mace said.

    Rep. Tim Burchett, who voted against the House’s GOP debt ceiling plan said that “McCarthy is very good at deal cutting. I trust him.”

    “If he says it’s going to start snowing in Knoxville tomorrow, I am running down … and buying a new sled,” Burchett added.

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  • Exclusive: Ukraine has cultivated sabotage agents inside Russia and is giving them drones to stage attacks, sources say | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: Ukraine has cultivated sabotage agents inside Russia and is giving them drones to stage attacks, sources say | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Ukraine has cultivated a network of agents and sympathizers inside Russia working to carry out acts of sabotage against Russian targets and has begun providing them with drones to stage attacks, multiple people familiar with US intelligence on the matter told CNN.

    US officials believe these pro-Ukrainian agents inside Russia carried out a drone attack that targeted the Kremlin in early May by launching drones from within Russia rather than flying them from Ukraine into Moscow.

    It is not clear whether other drone attacks carried out in recent days – including one targeting a residential neighborhood near Moscow and another strike on oil refineries in southern Russia – were also launched from inside Russia or conducted by this network of pro-Ukrainian operatives.

    But US officials believe that Ukraine has developed sabotage cells inside Russia made up of a mix of pro-Ukrainian sympathizers and operatives well-trained in this kind of warfare. Ukraine is believed to have provided them with Ukrainian-made drones, and two US officials told CNN there is no evidence that any of the drone strikes have been conducted using US-provided drones.

    Officials could not say conclusively how Ukraine has managed to get the drones behind enemy lines, but two of the sources told CNN that it has established well-practiced smuggling routes that could be used to send drones or drone components into Russia where they could then be assembled.

    A European intelligence official noted that the Russian-Ukrainian border is vast and very difficult to control, making it ripe for smuggling – something the official said the Ukrainians have been doing for the better part of the decade that they’ve been at war with pro-Russian forces.

    “You also have to consider that this is a peripheral area of Russia,” the official said. “Survival is everyone’s problem, so cash works wonders.”

    Who exactly is controlling these assets is also murky, the sources told CNN, though US officials believe that elements within Ukraine’s intelligence community are involved. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has set general parameters for what his intelligence and security services are allowed to do, two of the sources said, but not every operation requires his sign-off.

    Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the head of the Ukrainian Security Service suggested to CNN that the mysterious explosions and drone strikes inside Russia would continue.

    “We will comment on instances of ‘cotton’ only after our victory,” he said. Quoting the head of the Security Service, Vasyl Malyuk, the spokesperson added that regardless, “‘cotton’ has been burning, is burning, and will continue burning.”

    “Cotton” is a slang-word that Ukrainians use to mean explosions, usually in Russia or Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. Its origins date back to the early weeks of the war and stem from the fact that the Russian word for a “pop” is very similar to the Ukrainian word for cotton.

    There has been a steady drumbeat of mysterious fires and explosions inside Russia over the last year, targeting oil and fuel depots, railways, military enlistment offices, warehouses and pipelines. But officials have noticed an uptick in these attacks on Russian soil in recent weeks, beginning with the attack on the Kremlin building. It appears to be “a culmination of months of effort” by the Ukrainians to set up the infrastructure for such sabotage, said one of the sources familiar with the intelligence.

    “There has been for months now a pretty consistent push by some in Ukraine to be more aggressive,” this person said, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of US intelligence. “And there has certainly been some willingness at senior levels. The challenge has always been their ability to do it.”

    A specialist inspects the damaged facade of an apartment building after a reported drone attack in Moscow on May 30, 2023.

    Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, has consistently proposed some of the most brazen plans for operations against Russia and values symbolic acts, US officials told CNN.

    Classified Pentagon documents leaked online earlier this year revealed that the CIA urged Budanov to “postpone” attacks on Russia on the anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine, according to the Washington Post. Budanov agreed to the CIA’s request, the classified documents reportedly said. But drones were spotted near Moscow on February 28, just days after the one-year anniversary of the war.

    Another leaked US intelligence report obtained by CNN, which is sourced to signals intelligence, says that Zelensky in late February “suggested striking Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast” using drones, since Ukraine does not have long-range weapons capable of reaching that far.

    It is not clear whether that plan moved forward, but oil facilities in Rostov Oblast have caught on fire after being hit by suspected drones several times over the last year – attacks Russia is now investigating and has blamed on “criminal actions by the Armed formations of Ukraine.”

    “All I will comment on is that we’ve been killing Russians,” Budanov told Yahoo News last month when asked about the car bomb attack that killed the daughter of a prominent Russian political figure in Moscow’s suburbs last year. The US intelligence community assessed that that operation was authorized by elements within the Ukrainian government.

    “And we will keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world until the complete victory of Ukraine,” Budanov added.

    Publicly, senior US officials have condemned the strikes inside Russia, warning of the potential for an escalation of the war. But speaking privately to CNN, US and western officials said that they believe the cross-border attacks are a smart military strategy that could divert Russian resources to protecting its own territory, as Ukraine gears up for a major counteroffensive.

    On Tuesday, the UK’s Foreign Secretary told reporters that Ukraine has “the right to project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia’s ability to project force into Ukraine itself. Legitimate military targets beyond its own borders are internationally recognized as being part of a nation’s self-defense…We should recognize that.”

    French Vice Admiral Nicolas Vaujour, chief of operations of the Joint Staff, told CNN on Friday that the attacks inside Russia are merely “part of war” and offer an opportunity to send a message to Russia’s population.

    “There is a war there and it could concern you [the Russian public] in the future,” Vaujour said of the attacks. “And so it’s a good way for Ukrainians to address a message not only to Vladimir Putin, but to the Russian population,” he added.

    Regarding the attacks, he said that it wasn’t “forbidden” for Ukraine to think about that.

    Ukrainian officials, moreover, have said privately that they plan to continue the attacks inside Russia because it is a good distraction tactic that is forcing Russia to be concerned with its own security at home, according to a US source who has spoken to Ukrainian officials in recent days.

    In an intelligence update, the UK Ministry of Defense said that attacks by pro-Ukrainian partisan groups and drone strikes in the border region of Belgorod have forced Russia to deploy “the full range of military firepower on its own territory.”

    “Russian commanders now face an acute dilemma,” the update said, “of whether to strength defences in Russia’s border regions or reinforce their lines in occupied Ukraine.”

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  • TSMC confirms supplier data breach following ransom demand by Russian-speaking cybercriminal group | CNN Business

    TSMC confirms supplier data breach following ransom demand by Russian-speaking cybercriminal group | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC confirmed Friday that one of its hardware suppliers was hacked and had data stolen from it, but said the incident had no impact on business operations.

    Confirmation of the breach came after Russian-speaking cybercriminals claimed TSMC as a victim on Thursday and demanded an extraordinary $70 million ransom from the semiconductor firm.

    There were no signs that TSMC or the hardware supplier, Taiwanese firm Kinmax, had any plans to pay the hackers (representatives from both companies didn’t respond to CNN’s questions about any ransom).

    TSMC — one of the world’s largest chipmakers and a key supplier to Apple

    (AAPL)     — was quick to assure investors and the public that the hack had no impact on its operations and that it did not compromise its customers’ data.

    “After the incident, TSMC has immediately terminated its data exchange with this concerned supplier in accordance with the Company’s security protocols and standard operating procedures,” TSMC said in a statement to CNN.

    The hackers accessed Kinmax’s internal “testing environment” for the technology it prepares to deliver to customers, Kinmax said in a statement distributed by TSMC.

    “The leaked content mainly consisted of system installation preparation that the Company provided to our customers as default configurations,” Kinmax said. The company apologized to customers whose names may show up in the leaked data.

    Ransomware groups are known to exaggerate the value of the data they steal and make outlandish demands that are never met.

    LockBit is the name of the group claiming responsibility for the hack of the TSMC supplier and the type of ransomware they use. LockBit ransomware was the most deployed ransomware around the world in 2022, according to US cybersecurity officials.

    Jon DiMaggio, an executive at security firm Analyst1 who has studied LockBit extensively, said the hackers will likely publish the stolen data or sell it if TSMC refuses to negotiate a ransom.

    For years, American officials and Taiwanese cybersecurity experts have looked to fortify the island’s infrastructure in the face of hacking threats.

    Taiwan’s chip industry is critical to the global hardware supply chain, making any potentially impactful cyberattacks on it a concern for government officials and business executives around the world.

    While the TSMC-related hacking incident doesn’t appear to have been impactful, a separate ransomware attack in 2020 on Taiwan’s state-run energy company temporarily disrupted some customers’ ability to pay for gas with company cards, according to local media reports at the time.

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  • Rapper Meek Mill vows to ‘spread the word’ against antisemitism after Auschwitz visit | CNN Politics

    Rapper Meek Mill vows to ‘spread the word’ against antisemitism after Auschwitz visit | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Some 10,000 people from all over the world gathered last week in Poland for the annual March of the Living, a 2-mile walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, where Nazis murdered over a million civilians – mostly Jews – during World War II.

    One of the most famous marchers was Meek Mill, a 35-year-old African American rapper from Philadelphia without any prior connection to the atrocities that happened there.

    But at a time of rising antisemitism in the US, his presence spoke volumes, and that was the point.

    “I always stand on anything that condemns racism, but now that I had an education, I’ll definitely spread the word to people in my culture about what I’ve seen and what I felt at that concentration camp today,” Mill told CNN during the march.

    Mill is a friend of New England Patriots owner and philanthropist Robert Kraft, whose Foundation to Combat Antisemitism is in the midst of a $25 million national campaign, #StandUpToJewishHate. The effort, identified by a blue square emoji, includes paid television ads that share stories of antisemitic incidents in the US, which are on an alarming rise.

    Data from the Anti-Defamation League traces a spike in recent incidents against Jews to repeated, hateful comments by rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, who is unapologetic about his pro-Hitler, anti-Jewish language.

    “We are two different artists. We represent two different things,” Mill said.

    Mill said he “wasn’t educated to even know right from wrong” when Ye was making his remarks.

    “But I know a lot of the things he was saying was wrong because it sounded like hate,” Mill said. “Now that I’m educated to a small degree, because I’m at the beginning point, just, you know, spreading the word for humanity. Pushing the cause.”

    Kraft got to know Mill during the rap artist’s 12-year legal fight stemming from an arrest on gun and drug charges when he was 19 years old.

    The two were introduced by a mutual friend, according to a Kraft spokesperson, and Meek would occasionally reach out to the Patriots owner for some friendly advice. When Meek was incarcerated, Kraft visited him in prison, and the two stayed in touch and have remained friends.

    Mill’s case helped spur activism among many high-profile figures, including Kraft, on the issue of criminal justice.

    “It’s important for me to learn humanity’s history,” Mill said. “But I think it’s also important for me to support Robert, all my Jewish friends, everyone that always supported me. Robert supported me at a very high level. When I was going through what I was going through, he learned my lifestyle. He learned my cultures, where I come from, my background.”

    Mill said he went to Auschwitz to “see this for myself and learn about it for myself,” describing what he saw there as “terror, pain, something you can’t really explain.”

    “He’s a man who’s very caring, and it’s very important to him to build bridges between people of the Jewish faith and people of color in America,” Kraft said of Mill.

    “He’s a sensitive man who has gone through some difficult situations where he wasn’t treated fairly. And I think for him to understand the culture of our people, what we’ve gone through and how many of the experiences are similar – where people, for no good reason, just stand up and hate,” added Kraft.

    Mill not only toured Auschwitz and took part in the March of the Living, but he also participated in events around the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland. The popular artist has nearly 25 million Instagram followers and said he now intends to use his megaphone to make sure his fans understand that all hate – whether racism against Blacks or antisemitism – is rooted in the same ignorance and cannot be tolerated.

    “Through my music, I always use my platforms. I come from the ghettos of America – from the streets. That’s what I started talking about because that was my lifestyle,” Mill said.

    “But through education and learning more and seeing more, I think I would be able to deliver some things that will touch on moments like this and be able to express and tell a story about what I witnessed and what I’ve seen.”

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  • Russia’s jamming of US-provided rocket systems complicates Ukraine’s war effort | CNN Politics

    Russia’s jamming of US-provided rocket systems complicates Ukraine’s war effort | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Russia has been thwarting US-made mobile rocket systems in Ukraine more frequently in recent months, using electronic jammers to throw off its GPS guided targeting system to cause rockets to miss their targets, multiple people briefed on the matter told CNN.

    Ukrainian military officials, with the US’ help, have had to come up with a variety of different workarounds as it continues to use the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) which has been perhaps the most revered and feared piece of weaponry in Ukraine’s fight.

    The medium-range rocket systems were hailed as a game changer in the conflict and have played a key role since the moment they arrived in Ukraine last summer, including in last year’s offensive that allowed Ukraine to take back significant swaths of territory from Russia.

    But in recent months, the systems have been rendered increasingly less effective by the Russians’ intensive blocking, five US, British and Ukrainian sources tell CNN, forcing US and Ukrainian officials to find ways to tweak the HIMARS’ software to counter the evolving Russian jamming efforts.

    “It is a constant cat-and-mouse game” of finding a countermeasure to the jamming, a Pentagon official said, only to then have the Russians counteract that countermeasure. And it is not clear how sustainable that game is in the long term.

    With a major Ukrainian counteroffensive expected to start very soon and Ukraine’s reliance on HIMARS, solutions are even more of a priority so that Ukrainian troops can make significant headway.

    “It’s one thing to be able to hold the Russians off where they are right now. It’s another thing to drive them out,” retired US Army Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson told CNN. “They’re dug in, they’ve been there for a year.”

    HIMARS “have been extremely important,” he added. “They have to be able to keep those HIMARS in the game and keep using them to be able to make effective deep strikes.”

    Ukraine has received 18 American HIMARS to date and the US has committed to sending 20 more. Other NATO allies have donated 10 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, according to the State Department.

    The routine announcements from the Biden administration of hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid for Ukraine, including one on Wednesday, regularly include HIMARS munitions, called GMLRs, as a top item, though notably the exact number is not revealed.

    The US has also helped the Ukrainians locate the Russian jammers and destroy them – a “high priority” effort, according to a secret Pentagon document that was part of a trove allegedly leaked by Airman Jack Teixeira.

    “We will continue to advocate/recommend that those jammers are disrupted/destroyed,” the document says, “to the maximum extent possible.”

    GPS jamming can affect other “smart” US munitions like the precision-guided Excalibur artillery shells fired from Howitzers and air-dropped bombs called JDAMs. The leaked Pentagon document described the JDAMS as being particularly susceptible to the disruption.

    A US official confirmed that the US has been advising the Ukrainians on how to identify and destroy Russian jammers since there are a limited number of ways to modify HIMARS and their rockets.

    A senior Pentagon official downplayed the impact of the interference, telling CNN that on Monday Ukrainian forces fired 18 rockets without issue, about the daily rate of the past few weeks. The official declined to comment on the broader impact of the jamming. HIMARS are manufactured by Lockheed Martin, which deferred questions on jamming to the US government.

    Electronic warfare is carried out by both sides, up and down the front line where there is heavy drone activity used for surveillance and in partnership with artillery targeting. The hardware can also be mounted on or around whatever might be targeted.

    Depending on the location and strength of the jamming, a rocket can still launch and result in a successful strike with significant damage. In addition to GPS guidance, the rockets have inertial navigation systems that are not susceptible and remain accurate, though not as precise as when guided by GPS coordinates.

    Widespread Russian jamming can have drawbacks for their own forces as well, impacting their ability to communicate and operate.

    But even when they do function, the HIMARS have increasingly been missing targets, said one Ukrainian source briefed by drone operators on the frontlines.

    One drone pilot on the Eastern front described the jamming of the mobile HIMARS as “significant,” according to the source, something he hadn’t seen in his area before last November, several months after the HIMARS first arrived in Ukraine at the beginning of the summer.

    Another drone operator in the southern Kherson region claimed to the source that the effectiveness of HIMARS was down dramatically while cautioning that they’re still very necessary and relied on but no longer as dominant as they once were.

    For nearly a year, the HIMARS system has been the longest-range rocket system Ukraine has, allowing troops to fire up to six rockets in quick succession at Russian positions as far as 50 miles away. With an accuracy of around 10 feet, the 200-pound warheads have taken out logistics hubs, ammunition depots, command posts and communication nodes, among other targets.

    They were also instrumental in helping Ukraine retake significant amounts of territory in the south and northeast last fall, and as of February, Ukraine had expended approximately 9,500 HIMARS rockets, according to a daily update from the time reviewed by CNN.

    A US official familiar with the workarounds said they include updates to the software on both the targeting system software as well the rockets.

    The senior Pentagon official described it as: “constant tweaking to get them to stay effective,” adding that updates had been made as recently as this week.

    “If their jamming gets more sophisticated, then your countermeasures have to get more sophisticated,” a British official agreed.

    Russia’s use of electronic warfare has not been nearly as widespread as expected when Russia first invaded but they have made use of it since the beginning of the war. It’s a routine part of modern warfare that can be cheap and easy to implement. It’s expected, so the focus is on ways to “dilute” the impact, the official said.

    But with Russian units largely stalled on the Ukrainian frontlines and stuck in defensive positions, Russian forces have made increasing use of their jamming systems to counteract the HIMARS, sources said.

    A separate but related problem for Ukraine is that the Russians have been moving some of their equipment further back and out of reach of the HIMARS systems, which have a range of about 50 miles.

    While the rocket systems are capable of firing longer-range missiles called ATACMS – which can reach targets over 185 miles away – the US has resisted providing them to Ukraine both because the missiles are in limited supply and because the US is worried Russia would see them as too provocative.

    The British official acknowledged that since HIMARS were first introduced, the requirements, the training and supplementary equipment has changed as Russia’s electronic interference has evolved.

    “Jamming is like the weather or the terrain, it’s something that happens that you have to deal with,” the official said. Still, he added, HIMARS remains a “highly useful piece of kit.”

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  • Biden picks Air Force general to lead NSA and Cyber Command | CNN Politics

    Biden picks Air Force general to lead NSA and Cyber Command | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has nominated an Air Force general to head the nation’s powerful electronic spying agency and the US military command that conducts offensive cyber operations – a crucial position as the US continues to battle Russia, China and other foes in cyberspace.

    Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, who has served for years in senior US military cyber positions, is Biden’s choice to replace outgoing Army Gen. Paul Nakasone as head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, an Air Force official confirmed to CNN.

    Politico first reported on Haugh’s nomination.

    The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

    Haugh’s nomination could face a roadblock in the Senate after Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama put a hold on senior military nominations because he objects to the department’s abortion travel policy.

    Haugh is currently deputy of US Cyber Command, a command of thousands of US military personnel who conduct offensive and defensive cyber operations to protect US critical infrastructure. Officials from the command traveled to Ukraine in late 2021 to prepare Kyiv for an onslaught of Russian cyberattacks that accompanied the full-scale Russian invasion.

    The command and NSA also have taken an increasingly active role in helping defend American elections from foreign interference under Nakasone’s leadership over the last five years.

    During the 2020 election, Iranian hackers accessed a US municipal website for reporting unofficial election results and Cyber Command kicked the hackers off the network out of concern that they might post fake results on the website, a senior US military official revealed last month.

    Haugh’s nomination signals a continued emphasis on election security work at Fort Meade, the sprawling military base in Maryland where the NSA and Cyber Command are housed. As a senior US military cyber official, Haugh has been involved in election security discussions in recent midterm and general elections.

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  • Beware deepfake reality as Trump dominates headlines | CNN Politics

    Beware deepfake reality as Trump dominates headlines | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    After earlier and incorrectly predicting his own arrest this week, former President Donald Trump veered into the more sinister business of predicting violence and catastrophe if he’s arrested.

    Whether the prediction turns into reality is another thing entirely.

    Trump’s reemergence into the headlines, as both a third-time presidential candidate and a potential defendant, is threatening to pull the country back into his reality. Trump has not been formally charged with any crime and denies all wrongdoing.

    Compare the lived reality where people interact, mostly in peace, and go about their lives with the Trump-centered, fake world available on social media.

    In the real world, Trump hasn’t been charged with anything. On Twitter, fake photos of his arrest generated by artificial intelligence have been viewed millions of times.

    In the real world, prosecutors have to form a methodical criminal case before they indict a defendant. On social media, Trump says everything is part of a plot against him.

    Positing the idea of violent retribution into the echo chamber of his Truth Social platform early Friday, Trump said it is “known that potential death & destruction” that would be “catastrophic for our Country” would result if a charge is brought against him.

    In a post Thursday, Trump went into all caps – the typographical equivalent of screaming – to declare his innocence and add, “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL.”

    The veiled threats place a new form of pressure on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has already been threatened by Republicans in Congress with an investigation. Without naming Bragg in the Friday post, Trump said anyone who would charge him with a crime is “a degenerate psychopath that truely (sic) hates the USA!”

    CNN’s Brynn Gingras and Kara Scannell reported Friday that Bragg’s office received a package containing a white powder substance and a threatening note. They added that while authorities determined there was no dangerous substance, the package capped off a week where law enforcement has seen continual threats against the court, including several bomb threats, all of which turned out to be unfounded.

    Meanwhile, rather than condemn Trump’s latest post, top Republicans in Washington like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy refused to answer questions about it.

    The photos of Trump being arrested were created in jest by Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, who asked an AI art generator to make a photo of “Donald Trump falling down while being arrested,” according to The Washington Post.

    “I was just mucking about,” Higgins told the Post. “I thought maybe five people would retweet it.”

    Bellingcat, ironically, uses social media posts and other digital data to prove facts, uncovering crimes and investigating atrocities. CNN worked with Bellingcat, for instance, to uncover the Russian operatives who apparently tried to poison the now-jailed dissident leader Alexey Navalny. The group has also used social media to track down apparent war crimes in Ukraine.

    The fake photos, while requiring a double take, were clearly not real. But it is that first impression that can be misleading – and lasting. They fed Trump’s narrative of persecution, a visual manifestation of the drama he puts into his posts.

    There’s more and more of this online, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell fiction from reality.

    Earlier this month, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan had an incredible video report on the power of AI-generated audio. In addition to magically mimicking Anderson Cooper, he used an AI generator to call his parents. The computer sounded like his voice, but it was not O’Sullivan talking. While his mother later said O’Sullivan’s Irish accent felt off during the conversation, she did not catch it in real time.

    “When we enter this world where anything can be fake – any image, any audio, any video, any piece of text, nothing has to be real – we have what’s called the liar’s dividend, which is anybody can deny reality,” Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, told O’Sullivan.

    There are many examples of deepfake photos and videos if not tricking people, then certainly causing harm – such as women whose faces have been deepfaked, without their consent, onto pornography.

    When something is repeated enough online or when a fake narrative takes hold, it can influence the real world. That’s certainly what happened on January 6, 2021, when conspiracy theories that blossomed online turned into an attack on the Capitol.

    “There is no online and offline world; there’s one world, and it’s fully integrated,” Farid told O’Sullivan with regard to the potential for AI to create a false reality online that bleeds into the real world.

    “When things happen on the internet, they have real implications for individuals, for communities, for societies, for democracies, and I don’t think we as a field have fully come to grips with our responsibility here,” he said.

    It’s something to be very careful of as we look at what could be a historic period in which a former president, current candidate, serial conspiracy theorist and master of social media potentially faces criminal charges.

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  • Fox News’ defamation battle isn’t stopping Trump’s election lies | CNN Politics

    Fox News’ defamation battle isn’t stopping Trump’s election lies | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The defamation clash between Fox News and a small election services firm, due to go to trial this week, represents the most significant moment yet in which those who disseminated former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen must answer for conduct that is still poisoning American democracy.

    Dominion Voting Systems alleges the conservative network promulgated the ex-president’s conspiracy theories, including about its voting machines, to avoid alienating its viewers and for the good of its bottom line.

    The trial had been scheduled to open Monday but the judge announced Sunday evening it’d be delayed until Tuesday. The reason was not immediately clear. But The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, reported that Fox had made a late push to settle the dispute out of court, citing people familiar with the matter.

    The drama expected to play out in a Delaware courtroom represents an extraordinary moment in modern American history because it could show how truth has been tarnished as a political currency and highlight a right-wing business model that depends on spinning an alternative reality. And yet, it remains unclear whether Trump – the primary author of the corrosive conspiracies that the 2020 election was fraudulent – will end up paying a significant personal or political price.

    The idea that Trump’s claims – echoed by his aides and allies on Fox and sometimes by the channel’s personalities – had any merit will not even make it to first base in the trial. In one remarkable development during pre-trial hearings, presiding Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled that jurors did not even need to decide one key issue: whether Fox’s claims about Dominion were true.

    “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Davis wrote, in a ruling last month that significantly narrowed the network’s avenues to mount a defense.

    The epic case now turns on an attempt by Dominion to prove the legal standard for defamation that Fox must have known (or strongly suspected) it was lying about the issues at hand at the time and that it acted with “actual malice.”

    Though he vigorously denies breaking any laws, the former president appears to face the possibility of indictment in probes into his attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory by a district attorney in Georgia and by special counsel Jack Smith into his conduct in the lead-up to the US Capitol insurrection. And the many layers of Trump’s democracy-damaging behavior were catalogued in interviews and public testimony taken by a House select committee when Democrats controlled the chamber last year.

    But the falsehood of a corrupt election still forms the bedrock of Trump’s 2024 campaign to win back the White House. Millions of Trump’s supporters have bought into the idea that he was illegally ejected from office on the premise that he really won in 2020.

    It’s also questionable whether viewers of conservative media will hear much about the trial and get sufficient information that might convince them to change their minds about 2020.

    Trump’s insistence that the election was stained by fraud is giving some senior Republicans nightmares as they try to rebound from his loss in 2020 and work through their disappointment at the lack of a “red wave” in the last year’s midterms, despite winning the House.

    As Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp put it on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, the ex-president is forcing his party to keep looking in the rearview mirror and hampering its effort to look to the future.

    One core argument in court will likely be trying to show that Fox believed that telling the audience inconvenient truths was bad for business – a factor that drove right-wing media in 2020 and still holds true today. Proof of this can be seen in the way the Republican Party remains unwilling to anger its base voters two years on. While many top party leaders have signaled they want to move on from Trump, the only part of the GOP that has power in Washington – the House Republican majority – has made repeated efforts to shield Trump from accountability over the 2020 election and to distort what actually happened on January 6, 2021.

    But the court proceeding against Fox – like the constitutional process that assured a transfer of power between Trump and Biden, albeit one marred by violence – shows that the country’s instruments of accountability remain intact, despite Trump’s efforts.

    Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, deny wrongdoing. They’ve argued that their conspiracy theory-filled broadcasts after the 2020 election were protected by the First Amendment and that a loss in the case would be a devastating blow to press freedoms.

    But the run-up to the trial has been a catalog of embarrassments and reversals for both the network and the broader premise that there is anything to Trump’s false claims.

    The judge, for instance, observed last week in pre-trial hearings that there were well established and accepted limits on First Amendment rights.

    “To go up there and say, ‘What Fox did was protected by the First Amendment,’ it’s half the story. It’s protected by the First Amendment if you can’t demonstrate actual malice,” he said.

    Texts and emails between Fox personalities and managers, and depositions released by Dominion, suggest that privately, some at the channel dismissed Trump’s claims but amplified them amid growing fears that telling the truth might force viewers to turn elsewhere.

    For example, Murdoch emailed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott telling her that rival conservative network Newsmax needed to be “watched.” In another message, Fox anchor Tucker Carlson told his colleague Laura Ingraham, “Our viewers are good people and they believe [the election fraud claims].”

    Fox has accused Dominion of cherry picking damaging quotes and texts ahead of the trial. But the evidence that has emerged suggests that Fox’s desire to cater to the beliefs of its viewers, even with untrue information, is closely allied to Trump’s own approach and reflects the way in which the Republican Party has been loath to antagonize the ex-president’s supporters.

    From the opening hours of his presidency, Trump made clear he would create an alternative vision of reality that his supporters could embrace and that would help him subvert the rules and conventions of the presidency. The angry exhortations by Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, in January 2017 that his boss had attracted the biggest inauguration crowd in history seemed at the time bizarre and absurd. But in retrospect, they were the first sign of a daily effort to destroy truth for Trump’s political benefit, which eventually morphed into lies about a stolen election that convinced many of the ex-president’s supporters. The culmination of all this was the mob attack by his supporters on Congress on January 6, 2021, during the certification of Biden’s victory.

    The idea that the Fox defamation trial might actually play a role in purging lies about the 2020 election seems far-fetched because the power of his falsehoods has survived many previous collisions with the truth. Although multiple courts in multiple states threw out Trump’s cases alleging election fraud after the 2020 election, the idea that the election was stolen still undermined faith in American democracy among his supporters. Only 29% of Republicans in a CNN/SSRS poll published in July 2022 had confidence that US elections truly represent the will of the people.

    This is, perhaps, not surprising. Because when he was in office, Trump made no secret of his strategy, telling the world in a moment of candor how he operated.

    “Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” he said in a directive to his supporters at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City in 2018. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

    Five years on, Trump is still at it.

    “We won in 2016. We won by much more in 2020 but it was rigged,” Trump said in the first big rally of his campaign in Waco, Texas, at the end of March.

    The fact that Trump continues to spread such falsehoods – and that many in the Republican Party remain unwilling to challenge him – irks some party leaders who watched as Trump’s handpicked candidates, who touted his election lies as the price of his endorsement, flamed out in swing states in last year’s midterm elections.

    Georgia’s Kemp warned, for example, that constantly bringing up 2020 would create another political disaster for his party.

    “I think any candidate, to be able to win, is to talk about what we’re for, focus on the future, not look in the rearview mirror,” Kemp told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.

    “If you look in the rearview mirror too long while you’re driving, you’re going to look up, and you’re going to be running into somebody, and that’s not going to be good.”

    Yet the fact that Trump, according to many polls, remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024 and is still wildly popular with conservative grassroots voters suggests that it will take far more than a courtroom display to restore the truth about 2020.

    And the GOP will likely be looking in the rearview mirror for some time to come.

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  • Thousands of Afghans escaped the Taliban with the help of private veteran groups. Today, many remain in limbo, held in a compound in the UAE | CNN Politics

    Thousands of Afghans escaped the Taliban with the help of private veteran groups. Today, many remain in limbo, held in a compound in the UAE | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    About 2,100 Afghan refugees remain held in a sprawling compound in the United Arab Emirates more than 18 months after they were evacuated from Afghanistan largely by private groups working with the State Department.

    They are what’s left of as many as 20,000 Afghans who were hastily relocated to the camp during the chaotic weeks surrounding the US withdrawal after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Several thousand were brought there by the State Department directly from Kabul and have since been relocated to the US or Canada.

    But thousands more, including those still stuck in the UAE, were evacuated weeks later, and sometimes from hundreds of miles away from Kabul, by private groups working to get as many out of Afghanistan as possible.

    Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that the private evacuation efforts, though well-intentioned, contributed at times to an already chaotic situation – though they also say that the frenzy of the withdrawal created unclear communication and expectations.

    Consequently, thousands of Afghans evacuated by private groups were left in a legal limbo with seemingly no clear path to the US – or anywhere else. And though the effort to resettle them has picked up in recent months, refugees inside the compound known as Emirates Humanitarian City, or EHC, are restless after almost two years of waiting inside a camp they are barred from leaving.

    Without a visa, they’re not allowed inside the country.

    When they first arrived in the UAE in August 2021, Afghan evacuees were housed across dozens of buildings in the gated compound. Afghans were separated in rooms with their families across multi-level buildings divided by a common outdoor space.

    They were supposed to be there for a few days. But that’s now approaching two years for the more than 2,000 people who remain there. The State Department says it continues to process refugees out of EHC “on an ongoing basis.” One American Marine veteran closely involved said that a family or two leave each week, bound mostly for the US and Canada, as well as Australia, with some scattered across Europe.

    At that pace it could still take more than a year to empty out the entire population of evacuees who remain at the compound.

    Their plight has gained recent attention from human rights groups, who say the refugees are being held arbitrarily by the UAE and have been subject to a host of abuses, including poor medical care and being held in “prison-like” conditions.

    A report put out by Human Rights Watch in March said Afghan asylum seekers have been “locked up for over 15 months in cramped, miserable conditions with no hope of progress on their cases” and are “facing further trauma now, after spending well over a year in limbo.”

    In a statement to CNN, a UAE official said the refugees at EHC have “received a comprehensive range of high-quality housing, sanitation, health, clinical, counseling, education, and food services to ensure their welfare.”

    The official said the UAE “continues to do everything it can to bring this extraordinary exercise in humanitarian resettlement to a satisfactory conclusion. We understand that there are frustrations and this has taken longer than intended to complete.”

    “The UAE remains committed to this ongoing cooperation with the US and other international partners to ensure that Afghan evacuees can live in safety, security, and dignity,” the official added.

    Allegations similar to those raised by the HRW report were described in an appeal to the United Nations submitted last fall by an independent American attorney, who alleged “widespread human rights abuses,” including inadequate health and mental health care, “constant” surveillance and “restricted access” to government officials working their cases.

    In a statement to CNN, Mara Tekach, State Department coordinator for Afghan relocation efforts, said that while the department is aware of the Human Rights Watch report, the US government “is not aware of any verified allegations of human rights violations at EHC.”

    CNN has not independently verified those allegations.

    One refugee still stuck at EHC who spoke to CNN described extreme frustration over a seemingly hopeless situation. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of safety concerns, said he worries about the effect the ordeal is having on his young daughter.

    “My daughter, from months ago until now, sometime when she starts talking, I can feel the pain in her voice,” he said.

    The man showed CNN what appeared to be documentation that he was recommended for a Special Immigrant Visa by a US contractor with whom he worked in Afghanistan for almost two years. It was unclear whether that documentation is sufficient for what the State Department has required. He told CNN his daughter is growing anxious to leave.

    “She says, ‘You have [taken] me somewhere that I cannot see anywhere, I cannot go outside,’” the man said. “She’s asking me every time, frequently, ‘When are we going to get out of here?’”

    During the chaotic weeks of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, thousands of American military veterans rushed to help evacuate as many Afghans as possible.

    Among them was US Marine veteran Pete Lucier, who worked with a coalition of veterans’ groups known collectively as the #AfghanEvac coalition. Lucier said he is proud of much of the work that veteran and civilian volunteers did in helping Afghans flee the Taliban, which has since reinstated many of the draconian laws it had in place before the US and allied forces invaded after 9/11.

    Afghans crowd at the tarmac of the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, to flee the Taliban which had gained control of Afghanistan

    Still, Lucier admitted there have been shortcomings, telling CNN that even well-intentioned veterans’ groups and individuals ended up “sometimes, unfortunately, making things worse for vulnerable and at-risk people.”

    Many of the individuals involved in evacuating Afghans had a “lack of familiarity with international law and the requirements of international travel,” Lucier said. “Broadly, I think EHC represents and embodies many of those challenges.”

    Dina Haynes, an international human rights lawyer and a professor at New England Law school in Boston, echoed those thoughts, saying that what has happened at EHC is “not a surprise at all to anybody who has paid attention” to the US immigration system.

    “The only people that it was a surprise to were those new people that showed up thinking that they could fly people out and land them somewhere and get the US government to help,” Haynes said.

    EHC is one of a few locations around the world where evacuated Afghans are still waiting to be processed for visas to the US or elsewhere. There are Afghans in Albania and Pakistan who were relocated there by private groups, as well as Afghans who were evacuated by the US government and are still being processed at Camp As-Sayliyah in Doha, Qatar, according to the State Department.

    Operated and funded by the UAE government, the EHC compound was first built in Abu Dhabi’s industrial Mussafah area to receive quarantine evacuees stranded in China following the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands were evacuated to the compound as part of a wider regional humanitarian call to assist.

    That was in part due to an agreement made in August 2021 between UAE officials and Joseph Robert III, a former US Marine and son of a wealthy real estate investor with connections in the country.

    Robert’s group, the Black Feather Foundation, joined the #AfghanEvac coalition made up of roughly 200 nonprofits in November 2021. Robert told CNN that relationships with UAE officials who were close with his late father helped secure the agreement to bring Afghans to UAE, sealed by a memorandum of understanding, which, according to Robert, stated that the UAE would receive and temporarily house Afghan refugees until they were able to move on to a third country.

    The EHC compound was not specifically part of the agreement, Robert told CNN, but was chosen by the UAE because of its capacity.

    This undated photo from the Emirates News Agency, the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates, shows the Emirates Humanitarian City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

    CNN visited the compound in August 2021, during the first days when Afghans were arriving. Afghans awaiting security and medical screenings were kept in assigned rooms until they were called for processing.

    UAE officials and US embassy personnel were present at the main center at EHC, where dozens of Afghan men and women sat awaiting information on their next destination. It was not immediately clear who was processing information from the evacuees.

    Robert said he has seen no signs of the alleged abuse taking place at EHC, which, he said, he visits every few weeks. He blames the US for not swiftly processing people out of EHC despite originally taking advantage of the extra hands that brought them there.

    “The US government was using us at every turn when it benefited them,” Robert said. “And then when it came time to do the work on the back end, to process them out, they tried to leave us high and dry.”

    Before going to Afghanistan in August 2021, Robert said he first flew to the UAE, where he had several meetings with officials about lining up commitments to take in refugees, as well as provide planes. When he finally landed at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on August 20, 2021, things began to change immediately.

    “It became just an on-the-fly, ad hoc assistance operation,” Robert said, adding that, suddenly, “our planes were being loaded with just people from the airport that the US would have evacuated.”

    Afghan refugees arrived at EHC in three distinct groups. The first two groups were evacuated from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in August 2021 by both the State Department and private groups working independently. The third group of Afghans were brought to EHC over the next two months by private groups, including Robert’s Black Feather Foundation, from Mazar-i-Sharif, a city roughly 260 miles from Kabul.

    The EHC resident who spoke to CNN said he was flown out of Mazar-i-Sharif with his family after attempting to get through crowds of people at the Kabul airport during the evacuation in August 2021. Despite concerns about traveling from Kabul, especially with the possibility of running into the Taliban on the way, the resident said he thought it might his best chance “to get myself and my family out of the danger zone.”

    Afghans climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan's 20-year war, as thousands of people mobbed the city's airport trying to flee the group's feared hardline brand of Islamist rule.

    Robert told CNN the manifests for those flights were submitted by other organizations either directly to him or through other members of his team. Robert said he then submitted the manifests to the UAE government, which ran them through its own security systems.

    It is almost entirely this group of people – those evacuated after August 2021 – that remains stuck at EHC, both the State Department and Robert said. In her responses to CNN, Tekach said the State Department “had limited information” about refugees who came on those separate flights. She also emphasized that that the place where people were evacuated from “is not a determining factor as to whether” they qualify for relocation and resettlement.

    Toward the end of October 2021, Robert said it was clear to him that the State Department was “not going to continue processing” any more people brought to the UAE since the evacuation had ended.

    “That’s where things with State Department started to unravel,” he said. “They processed only those that came on their aircraft, not even the ones that came on our aircraft alongside theirs during the [noncombatant evacuation]. As one State Department official told me, ‘Not our plane, not our problem.’”

    Tekach told CNN that the State Department paused processing in November 2021 “in support of US public health priorities” and began relocating individuals in March 2022.

    Still, Lucier told CNN that the US government and State Department likely were not clear enough in their communication about what private organizations could or could not do, leading to much of the confusion and at-times chaotic interference that occurred.

    Robert expressed frustration over security concerns the State Department has raised about the Afghans at EHC, saying that for the most part the evacuees are “able to provide everything they needed” in terms of paperwork and documents, including reference letters from US employers while in Afghanistan.

    While he acknowledged that there were shortcomings and mistakes made in the broader evacuation effort by private groups, Robert also said that was in part due to a “US government plan that was nonexistent.”

    All in all, Robert said volunteers were still able to evacuate “tens of thousands of individuals, despite the US government’s inability to appropriately evacuate them in the first place.”

    Joe Robert, lower left, sitting at EHC with Aziz, an interpreter, kicked off a group effort of US veterans to help evacuate Afghans to the UAE.

    Asked how many State Department officials have access to EHC and how frequently they are at the compound working to process people out, the State Deaprtment’s Tekach said US officials have access to the compound “for a number of purposes, including gathering information to work on case processing and to support the well-being of the Afghan population at the facility.”

    Robert said that over the past six months, an average of three to five State Department personnel have come to EHC twice a week. After early frictions, Robert said his relationship with US government personnel who deal with EHC is “in a much better place now.”

    Despite the delays, Robert said they’re slowly making progress in resettling the Afghans still at EHC.

    “Having 20,000 people pass through the walls of EHC, and we’re down to the last 2,000 – that’s a rather remarkable effort, although things didn’t go as smoothly as we’d planned or hoped,” he said.

    “Even though everyone wants it to be faster, things are moving at a rather steady and consistent pace, and everyone’s still actively doing everything they can to find suitable pathways for people and accommodate families, and find other opportunities if a previous one falls through. Everyone is working tremendously hard to do what is right by these people,” Robert said.

    As the US and others work to process Afghans out, Human Rights Watch is still trying to bring attention to their plight.

    “They’re still in this facility, which was never designed to hold people for this long,” said Joey Shea, the lead researcher on HRW’s recent report. “And they’ve been effectively imprisoned after an extremely traumatic experience of fleeing a Taliban takeover.”

    Shea said the clearest solution is through the US government.

    “There just needs to be more resources put by the US government to make sure that these asylum and humanitarian parole and other applications are processed quickly,” she said.

    At EHC, the current resident who spoke to CNN described how happy he was to have been evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021. Aside from marrying “the love of my life” and having children, he said that leaving Afghanistan was “the best day of my life.”

    “When the plane took off, I couldn’t fit in my own skin because of the happiness that I had,” he said emotionally. “This is a new life that I began to live with my family. I was happy and proud I could do something for my wife, my kids.”

    The recommendation letter he received from his US employer says he is “completely trustworthy, intelligent, and a faithful employee” and the “kind of person who will make a valuable contribution and service to the US, if allowed to immigrate.”

    But the longer he and his family languish at EHC, he said, the harder it is to explain his work with the US.

    “‘What will happen to us? Why are we abandoned by the US?’” he said his wife asks him. “My wife tells me that maybe it was not right that you worked for the US government.”

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