Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

US will ‘not repeat’ claims GCHQ wiretapped Donald Trump – BBC News


BBC News
US will 'not repeat' claims GCHQ wiretapped Donald Trump
BBC News
The US has agreed not to repeat claims the UK's communications intelligence agency wiretapped Donald Trump in the weeks after he won the US election. GCHQ denied allegations made by the White House that it spied on Mr Trump as president-elect.
Donald Trump stands by phone-tapping claimsAljazeera.com
Could GCHQ have spied on Donald Trump?Telegraph.co.uk
GCHQ dismisses 'utterly ridiculous' claim it helped wiretap TrumpThe Guardian
The Independent -Mirror.co.uk -POLITICO.eu
all 219 news articles »

Read the rest here:
US will 'not repeat' claims GCHQ wiretapped Donald Trump - BBC News

The Leader of the Free World Meets Donald Trump – Politico

Getty

WASHINGTON AND THE WORLD

Angela Merkel, whether she wants the job or not, is the Wests last, best hope.

By James P. Rubin

March 16, 2017

This time the media hype surrounding a White House meeting is no wild exaggeration. When President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel finally get together on Friday, the leaders of the Wests two most powerful countries are sure to come off more like an odd couple than two close allies chewing over plans for some joint enterprise. And for good reason. Merkel and Trump are not only polar opposites as people, but they share little in terms of international outlook.

Their styles reflect their vastly different backgrounds. Merkel, Germanys first and only female chancellor, was raised by a pastor in communist East Germany, where she earned a doctorate in physical chemistry. Although she is the longest-serving and most powerful leader in Europe, she is unfailingly modest, competent and consensus-oriented. Trumps all-about-me mentality, Queens upbringing and brash, tabloid-and-reality-TV personality couldnt be more different.

Story Continued Below

The contrast in substance is just as stark. From the Eurozone meltdown to the refugee surge, Merkel has been through multiple crises. She has no illusions about Vladimir Putin and the spy-ridden Kremlin team running Russia, and places a high value on quiet diplomacy, free trade, international law and the institutions of the European Union.

Trump is untested, unable or unwilling to criticize Russias invasion of neighboring Ukraine, determined to judge U.S. foreign policies by the trade balance involved or the extent to which the costs of U.S. military deployments are reimbursed, and happy to talk up the possibility of other EU countries following Britain out the door.

With his alliance diplomacy facing intense scrutiny following reports of tense phone conversations with the leaders of Australia and Mexico, Trump will be on his best behavior. Likewise, Germanys government has no interest in playing up controversy and hopes to declare the session a diplomatic success.

Nevertheless, Merkel will try to persuade Trump to reverse his cheerleading for the collapse of the EU and put a stop to his ignorant critique of NATO. And why not? Such reversals have become a regular feature of the Trump foreign policy. In the Middle East, despite a lot of talk, the U.S. Embassy in Israel has not moved, nor has the administration taken steps to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran. In Asia, the Chinese government humbled the new president by insisting he shelve the idea of reconsidering Washingtons support for the One China policy.

Considering that Trump went out of his way to criticize Merkel just ahead of his inauguration, saying her decision to admit hundreds of thousands of refugees was a terrible mistake and that he intended to treat her and Putin in roughly the same way, expectations for the meeting are modest. No diplomatic breakthrough is envisioned, and a general meeting of the minds between two longstanding allies before the worlds media should be sufficient to avoid further diplomatic damage.

Behind the scenes, however, the evolution of the Trump-Merkel dialogue will shape the direction and strength of the Western alliance. While Merkel has resisted the label of defender of Western values, the fact is she was the only leader prepared to play a form of hardball with the new president. By saying that Germany would work with America based on shared values (the rule of law, tolerance and equal rights), she became the de facto leader of those determined to defend those values. And this was done at the same time British Prime Minister Theresa May was rushing off to Washington to be the first European leader to meet with Trump.

The German chancellor is the only leader in Europe who even has a plausible claim to moral leadership. As a victim of Soviet communism, Merkel was always going to be listened to carefully on the question of morality. And given her longevity she was always going to be respected. But it was her unexpected decision to accept some 1 million refugees that established her moral credentials, especially since no other political leader has taken such a political risk.

The cruel irony of Trumps election is that for many decades it was the United States that was seen as a moral leader. During the Cold War, Soviet dissidents looked to the United States. And after communism fell, it was the United States that led international actions to protect victims of repression or hardship. Whether it was the Kurds in northern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, or the spending on medicine to treat millions suffering from HIV in Africa, the United States was the country expected to act.

Not recently. After leading from behindway behindduring the six years of civil war in Syria, Washington was seen as abdicating its traditional role. So the mantle of leadership was empty until Merkel stepped in to help hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war and chaos. Trump not only rejects the idea that the United States should act to prevent tragedies like Syria but also that it should help care for the millions of refugees fleeing the conflict. Trump and Merkel thus represent the two poles of the debate about refugees and responsibility in 2017.

Its Germany, too, that has led the world in imposing sanctions on Russia for its invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Trump, meanwhile, not only has refused to criticize Putin for the invasionhe has often suggested that sanctions be lifted to make a new relationship with Russia possible.

One indicator of a real breakthrough between Trump and Merkel would be a recognition that he is hearing out her concerns about Putin. Merkel is the wisest leader now in office in assessing the danger from Russia, and the most experienced in dealing with Putin himself. Shell likely urge him to cool his enthusiasm for rapprochement with Moscowwill he listen?

The Russia question will play out over many months. In the meantime, those who care about Western values can continue to look to Merkel, but now with a small dose of optimism. For while this weeks election in the Netherlands may not be a permanent setback for Europes neo-nationalists, it should give comfort to those who worried that Trumps victory in America would be contagious and that continental Europe was sure to catch the disease.

Link:
The Leader of the Free World Meets Donald Trump - Politico

Donald Trump, NCAA Basketball, St. Patrick’s Day: Your Friday Briefing – New York Times


New York Times
Donald Trump, NCAA Basketball, St. Patrick's Day: Your Friday Briefing
New York Times
... president's supporters rely on. It is also at odds with some of the priorities of Congress, which has the final say. We take a look at what Mr. Trump's proposal would mean for the departments facing cutbacks, and for the budget's one clear winner ...
Judge Considers Ordering President Donald Trump to Double 50000 Refugee Inflow to the United StatesBreitbart News

all 10 news articles »

Continue reading here:
Donald Trump, NCAA Basketball, St. Patrick's Day: Your Friday Briefing - New York Times

Donald Trump’s Voldemort Budget – The New Yorker

The White Houses proposed budget represents a wish list and a numerical expression of the President's political philosophy.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX WONG / GETTY

Strictly speaking, the skinny budget that the White Housepublished on Thursday isnt a budget at all. It says nothing about roughly three-quarters of over-all federal spending, which goes to mandatory outlays such as Social Security, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. It doesnt include any projections for the deficit. And a Presidential budget isnt binding. Ultimately, Congress sets spending levels. As Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, said on Thursday morning, this is just the very start of the budget process.

What a Presidential budget really represents is a wish list and a numerical expression of the Presidents political philosophy. Philosophy isnt a word often associated with Donald Trump, but this partial budget outlinethe White House is promising to release a fuller version lateraccurately reflects the impulses, prejudices, and slogans that animated Trumps campaign. Indeed, his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, has said that he saw his job as taking what Trump said on the stump and translating it into figures.

In carrying out this task, Mulvaney performed a public service of sorts. Thanks to his translation, the entire world can see what America would look like if Trumpism were fully converted into practice. The country would be an uglier, less equal, less prosperous, more paranoid, more myopic, and more mean-spirited place. Its claims that its a role model for other countries would be besmirched, perhaps beyond redemption. And far from being rendered great again, it would be a weaker world power.

Trump claims the opposite, of course. He says that his goal is to rebuild Americas military and secure its borders. But the White House provided few details of how the Pentagon would spend the extrafifty-four billion dollars Trump wants it to receive, or of how it might reallocate resources withinthe rest of itsbudget, which is already bigger than Swedens G.D.P.

To pay for this military buildup, plus the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, Trump would slash the budgets of many other federal agencies. The blueprint calls for a cut of thirty-one per cent at the Environmental Protection Agency; twenty-nine per cent at the State Department; twenty-one per cent at the Agriculture Department and Labor Department; sixteen per cent at the Commerce Department; fourteen per cent at the Energy Department; and thirteen per cent at the Transportation Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Many of the budget cuts would be felt directly by the poor and needy.At the Department of Housing, for example, Trump would eliminate the three-billion-dollar Community Development Block Grant program, which helps big cities pay for affordable housing, slum clearance, and many other things, including the delivery of hot meals to home-bound seniors.At the Department of Education, cuts would be made to two programs designed to prepare low-income students for college, and to a work-study program that helps those students pay their way through school once theyre there.

Many poor rural counties would also see cuts. WhileTrump would leave in place the subsidies that the Department of Agriculture provides to Big Agra, he would scale back programs aimed at small farmers and workers, such as theRural Business-Cooperative Service, which promotes rural development and the spread of coperatives. The budget would also eliminate a number of federal agencies charged with spurring development in specific deprived areas of the country, many of which voted for Trump. The Appalachian Regional Commission would be killed; so would the Mississippi River regions Delta Regional Authority.

In the long term, the prosperity of the country as a whole depends on it having a skilled labor force; world-beating science, technology, and arts; first-rate public infrastructure; and a clean and healthy environment. This budget, if it ever went into effect, would undercut all of these things.

After all Trumps talk about deindustrialization and carnage in middle America, some observers might have expected him to provide more financial assistance for displaced workers who want to find new jobs. Instead, heis proposing to eliminate aLabor Department program that provides on-the-job re-training for people older than fifty-five. The budget would also shrink the Job Corps, which provides workplace training for disadvantaged youths.

Trump would reduce by a fifth the budget of the National Institutes of Health, which finances the basic scientific research that spurs the health-care, pharmaceutical, and biotech industries.The Department of Energys Office of Science, which supports research into clean-energy alternatives, would also take a big hit. So, it seems, would the grant-making National Science Foundation, although the latter agencys budget figure isnt broken out.

Adding to the vandalism, the budget would eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which supports museums and libraries all across the country. As the Washington Posts Philip Kennicott and Peggy McGlonepointed out, Federal dollars are used to leverage state, local and private funding that supports a complex network of arts organizations, educational entities, museums, libraries and public broadcasting affiliates. Eliminating federal funding, which is the linchpin of the cultural economy, could well have a multiplier effect.

During the campaign, Trump also talked a lot about rebuilding Americas infrastructure. That, too, now looks like empty rhetoric. His budget would cut funding for the Department of Transportation by thirteen per cent. Funding for long-distance Amtrak routes would be eliminated entirely. The air-traffic-control system would be privatized. And the amount of money going to other transit programs, including highway improvements, would be significantly reduced.

The E.P.A., which tries to preserve the natural environment and clean up man-made spills, would see the biggest cuts of all. Trumps budget would kill a program to clean up some of the nations grandest waterways, including theGreat Lakes and Chesapeake Bay. Money for the Superfund program, which cleans up the most toxic sites of all, would be slashed by a third. The Interior Department, which oversees the National Parks and other public lands, would get a twelve-per-cent cut, but the blueprint didnt say how this would be allocated.

Most, if not all, of these domestic policy cuts are unnecessary and shortsighted.Then there are thedeliberate assaults on anything that smacks of internationalism, or of a benign and coperative American presence in the world. Someone in the Trump Administration appears to have gone through the entire budget looking to eliminate funding for small entities that try todo some good.These include the Africa Development Foundation, an independent organization that provides grants to small businesses and community groups in some of the worlds poorest countries, and theInstitute of Peace, a nonpartisan organization, founded in 1984, that supports efforts to resolve violent conflict, promote gender equality, and strengthen the rule of law around the world.The budget would even eliminate a program co-founded by Bob Dole, who backed Trump in the Republican primary: the McGovern-Dole Food for International Education Program, which helps provide school meals and nutritional programs in impoverished nations.

What is the point of killing programs like these? Expenditures on diplomacy and foreign aid make up a very modest part of the over-all budget, and virtually all national-security experts agree that they promote Americas soft power: its ability to advance its interests without resorting to military force.The State Department, USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Peace Corps and other development agencies are critical to preventing conflict and reducing the need to put our men and women in uniform in harms way, more than a hundred retired generals wrote in apublic letterlast month.

Fortunately, there is little chance of this proposal making it far on Capitol Hill, where individual appropriation bills often require sixty votes.You dont have fifty votes in the Senate for most of this, let alone sixty, Steve Bell, a former Republican budget aide who is now an analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center,told the Wall Street Journal.Theres as much chance that this budget will pass as there is that Im going to have a date with Elle Macpherson.

Thats reassuring, but the White Houses proposal cant be dismissed entirely. It shows what you get when you combine the crass America First jingoism of Trump with the drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub philosophy of the House Republicans: a Voldemort budget.

Continued here:
Donald Trump's Voldemort Budget - The New Yorker

President Trump Wants Sheriffs to Help With Deportations. Here’s What Sheriffs Think – TIME

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke leaves Trump Tower on November 28, 2016 in New York City.Spencer PlattGetty Images

David Clarke, the mustachioed and cowboy-hatted sheriff of Milwaukee County, made a request to the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month.

In a March 9 letter to acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thomas Homan, Clarke said he was deeply concerned " about the potential threats that he said undocumented immigrants pose to citizens under his jurisdiction. He asked ICE to empower his officers to round up undocumented immigrants in his community.

Clarke, a cheerleader of President Donald Trumps hardline immigration policies, wanted Milwaukee County to join an ICE program called 287(g). Named after a provision in a 1996 immigration law, the voluntary program lets the feds deputize state and local officers to perform some of the duties of federal immigration agents. Clarke wanted to participate in a version of the program that screens for undocumented immigrants in local jails and allows trained officers to patrol the streets and identify undocumented immigrants in the community for removal.

The controversial sheriff is one of several to make such a request in the early weeks of the Trump Administration. Officials in Anne Arundel County, Md. , have applied to join the program. Bill Waybourn, the sheriff of Tarrant County, Tex. , wants deputies in his jail to be able to identify undocumented immigrants. Sheriff P.J. Tanner of Beaufort County, S.C . applied to revive the task force model of 287(g), which would allow certain officers in his jurisdiction to arrest and detain the worst of the worst among undocumented immigrants, including gang members, drug dealers and other violent criminals.

Those requests are pending, and formalizing the agreements will take time. But Trump's support for 287(g) alarms immigration-reform advocates. I thought that we were close to closing the chapter of the ugly history of the 287(g) program, says Chris Newman, the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network . Since the first 287(g) agreements were signed in 2002, the program has been a source of controversy. The Obama Administration reduced its use, instead focusing on a mandatory program that identified criminal undocumented immigrants in police custody. The number of places participating in 287(g) dwindled during Obama's presidency, from 72 in 2011 to 37 in 16 states as of this month.

That could change under Trump. The President asked DHS to enter into more 287(g) partnerships in his January executive order on immigration. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly called the program a "highly successful force multiplier" in memos outlining the order's guidelines . "Empowering state and local law enforcement to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law is critical to an effective enforcement strategy," Kelly said. Between 2006 and 2015, more than 402,000 immigrants were identified for removal as a result of the program.

Trump has ordered DHS to hire 15,000 new agents and taken aim at so-called sanctuary cities places where local officials choose either to limit engagements with ICE or not actively enforce civil immigration lawby threatening to block some federal funding. But hiring officers takes time, and getting the money to pay them takes an act of Congress. To fulfill his pledges, the President could use the help of local and state officials. Through 287(g), ICE can tap into local resources to carry out its mission.

The program has a fraught history . Initially, its focus was supposed to be narrow: officers apprehended only dangerous criminals, and its application was limited to jails. But that changed in 2006, when Jim Pendergraph, a sheriff in the Charlotte, N.C., area, allowed his officers to screen for violations of civil immigration law. Pendergraph, whose goal was to get as many undocumented immigrants out of the area as possible, went on to become the chief of ICEs Office of State and Local Coordination , and his model informed the department's approach as the program's use grew, especially in the South.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio ran the most notorious program , using it to justify massive sweeps during which Latinos were racially profiled and suffered civil rights abuses. In Arpaio's Maricopa County, "there were people in yellow suits running around catching Hispanics," recalls Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute, which published an in-depth study on the programs in 2011. There was a lot of bad imagery.

Given this history, some law enforcement leaders have come forward to say they won't participate in the program, no matter Trump's wishes. Local law enforcement is pushing back because [287(g)] doesnt serve their interests in terms of public safety, says Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum. In late February, the newly elected sheriff of Texass Harris County, which includes Houston, announced he would no longer participate in the program. The Los Angeles Chief of Police said in November he planned to maintain separation between his departments activities and those of immigration enforcement officials. After a recent raid in Santa Cruz, Calif., the citys police chief denounced the feds' tactics.

Were not here to enforce federal, civil immigration laws. We dont enforce federal civil debt collection laws. Were a criminal law agency, says Lawrence Byrne of the New York City Police Department. Our mission is to prevent crime, investigate crime, and prevent acts of terrorism.

On March 1, the 63 police chiefs and sheriffs who make up the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force signed onto a letter that said they dont want their officers acting as immigration enforcement agents. Mike Tupper, the chief of police in Marshalltown, Iowa, was one of the signatories. He says programs like 287(g) make it hard for immigrant communities to trust local officers. If immigrants cannot differentiate between the local police and immigration-enforcement officers, Tupper says, they wont know who to trust if they witness or are the victim of a crime. The nuts and bolts of policing is daily interaction with the community that youre serving, the chief told TIME. Its very difficult to do that when youre engaged in federal immigration enforcement.

This view has been criticized by Trump and fellow immigration hardliners. The Federation for American Immigration Reform says that local authorities that shun enforcement responsibilities are being unfair to legal immigrants, and create an environment where terrorists and other criminal aliens can go unnoticed and uninterrupted.

Like other opponents of the 287(g) program, Harris County, Texas, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says it is not that he doesn't want to work with ICE, or even that he will not. He told TIME he backed out of the 287(g) program earlier this year not only because of the controversy it generated, but also because of his departments limited resources. The county spent $675,000 staffing the program, money Gonzalez says could be used to buy new patrol cars or bolster his investigative unit. I felt that it would also be appropriate," Gonzalez says, "to separate ourselves from that program and to focus instead on community policing.

The 287(g) program is more popular among sheriffs than police chiefs. Newman, of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, says that may be because police chiefs are more pragmatic, while elected sheriffslike Clarke, a celebrity among the far-right grassrootscan be driven by politics. Of the 37 existing 287(g) agreements, only two are with metropolitan police departmentsone in Las Vegas and one in Carrollton, Tex. In the city of Milwaukee, the seat of Clarkes county, Police Chief Edward Flynn has said he does not intend to have officers act in an immigration-enforcement capacity.

Pro-immigration advocates like Newman says they hope that "racist" policies like the 287(g) program are not on the rise again under Trump. I think in the future," he says, "we will look on this period with embarrassment.

See more here:
President Trump Wants Sheriffs to Help With Deportations. Here's What Sheriffs Think - TIME