MANCHESTER PROBE EXPANDS

The bomb's detonator. The sophistication of the device suggests it was probably not made by Abedi himself

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The investigation into a suicide blast that killed at least 22 people at a pop concert has dramatically widened, with security services on two continents rounding up suspects amid fears that the bombmaker who devised the bolt-spewing source of the carnage remains at large. 

Griff Witte, Karla Adam and Sudarsan Raghavan report: “The arrests stretched from the normally quiet lanes of a northern English town to the bustling streets of Tripoli, where Libyan officials said they had disrupted a planned attack by the suspected bomber’s brother. But by day’s end, British authorities acknowledged that they remained vulnerable to a follow-up attack, with the nation’s state of alert stuck at ‘critical’ — the highest possible level. The sight of soldiers deploying at London landmarks such as Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street underscored the gravity of the threat."

• Authorities said this morning that the bomber, 22-year-old Salman Abedi, had been in Dusseldorf just four days before the bombing. "Authorities were investigating whether he was meeting with extremist contacts in Germany, ..." Griff, Karla Adam and Souad Mekhennet report.
• 
  
• Police continue to carry out raids across Manchester: The cops apprehended the bomber's older brother, Ismail, as well as another suspect carrying “a suspicious package” about 20 miles west of Manchester. Last night, authorities also arrested a female suspect in Manchester and a man in the English Midlands town of Nuneaton, bringing to seven the number of people detained in Britain in connection with the blast. ...

-- In the Libyan-British community where Abedi lived, he was known as a university dropout and loner – and members of the community had warned authorities about signs of possible radicalization more than a year ago. Rick Noack, Souad Mekhennet and Sudarsan Raghavan report.

Top Russian Officials Discussed How to Influence Trump Aides Last Summer.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

U.S. spies collected information last summer revealing that top Russian officials were discussing how to exert influence on Trump through his advisers. 

The New York Times reports: “The conversations focused on [Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn] … Both men had indirect ties to Russian officials, who appeared confident that each could be used to help shape Mr. Trump’s opinions on Russia. Some Russians boasted about how well they knew Mr. Flynn. Others discussed leveraging their ties to Viktor F. Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine living in exile in Russia, who at one time had worked closely with Mr. Manafort. The intelligence was among the clues — which also included information about direct communications between Mr. Trump’s advisers and Russian officials — that American officials received last year as they began investigating Russian attempts to disrupt the election…

“By early summer, American intelligence officials already were fairly certain that it was Russian hackers who had stolen tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic Party and Clinton’s campaign. That in itself was not viewed as particularly extraordinary by the Americans … But the concerns began to grow when intelligence began trickling in about Russian officials weighing whether they should release stolen emails and other information to shape American opinion — to, in essence, weaponize the materials stolen by hackers.”

JIM COMEY'S UNFORCED ERROR COULD HAVE COST HILLARY THE ELECTION.

 (Cliff Owen/AP)

-- “How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe,”

 by Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett: “A secret document that officials say played a key role in then-FBI Director James B. Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation has long been viewed within the FBI as unreliable and possibly a fake … In the midst of the 2016 presidential primary season, the FBI received what was described as a Russian intelligence document claiming a tacit understanding between the Clinton campaign and the Justice Department over the inquiry into whether she intentionally revealed classified information through her use of a private email server. The Russian document cited a supposed email describing how then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch had privately assured someone in the Clinton campaign that the email investigation would not push too deeply into the matter…

“Current and former officials have said that Comey relied on the document in making his July decision to announce on his own, without Justice Department involvement, that the investigation was over. That public announcement — in which he criticized Clinton and made extensive comments about the evidence — set in motion a chain of other FBI moves that Democrats now say helped Trump win the presidential election…

“But according to the FBI’s own assessment, the document was bad intelligence — and according to people familiar with its contents, possibly even a fake sent to confuse the bureau. The Americans mentioned in the Russian document insist they do not know each other, do not speak to each other and never had any conversations remotely like the ones described in the document. Investigators have long doubted its veracity, and by August the FBI had concluded it was unreliable.” (Read the whole article.)

REBOOBLICAN UNFORCED ERROR #23 MILLION

Consider these four top-line projections from the CBO:

-- 23 million: The House health-care bill would leave 23 million more Americans uninsured by 2026 than under current lay — only a million fewer than the estimate for the House’s previous bill, which was withdrawn because it didn’t cover enough people. Juliet Eilperin and Kelsey Snell report on the front page of today’s Post: “The new score, which reflects last-minute revisions that Republicans made to win over several conservative lawmakers and a handful of moderates, calculates that the American Health Care Act would reduce the federal deficit by $119 billion between 2017 and 2026. That represents a smaller reduction than the $150 billion CBO estimated in late March.”

-- 14 million: The CBO projects that the number of uninsured Americans would jump by 14 million in the first year after the House bill became law. Direct quote from the report: “Although the agencies expect that the legislation would increase the number of uninsured broadly, the increase would be disproportionately larger among older people with lower income—particularly people between 50 and 64 years old with income of less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level." 

 850 percent: “That's the CBO's estimate of how much insurance premiums would rise for elderly, poor people over the next decade if the second version of this Republican bill became law,” Amber Phillips notes. “In a report filled with brutal numbers for Republicans, this may be the most brutal. (Just like it was in the first estimate.) Republicans said their bill will make health insurance cheaper. Except, they'll have to figure out a way to explain why, under Obamacare, 64-year-olds making $26,500 a year are on track to pay $1,700 in annual premiums in 2026. And under the GOP bill, they would pay anywhere between $13,600 to $16,100." 

 One-in-six Americans could lose coverage for pre-existing conditions: “Amendments in the bill allow states to opt out of key ACA provisions such as protections for people with preexisting conditions....,” Kim Soffen and Kevin Uhrmacher report. 

The numbers above underscore how hard it will be to pass a bill through the Senate.

REBOOBLICAN UNFORCED ERROR #3:

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney holds a briefing May 22. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)

 It also came out yesterday that the debt limit will be reached way sooner than Republicans leaders planned/hoped for. 

OMB director Mick Mulvaney revealed that tax receipts are coming in “slower than expected” and that the federal government could run out of cash months before it had thought. A few hours later, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin echoed these concerns, telling a House committee: “I urge you to raise the debt limit before you leave for the summer.” ...(Damian Paletta and Max Ehrenfreund have more.)

The House Freedom Caucus replied with a statement expressing opposition to any increase in the debt limit without further cuts to the budget. That threat means Democratic votes will likely be required to prevent the U.S. from defaulting, which gives Nancy Pelosi leverage.

More significantly, an intra-party conflict over raising the debt ceiling makes it harder for Republicans to pass bills they really care about. (Keeping the government solvent does not count as an accomplishment...)

Bigger picture, there is mounting concern among senior Republicans that, from a legislative standpoint, the party will have no big-ticket items to show off after a year of unified control.

REBOOBLICAN UNFORCED ERROR #2:

Trump confers with Jeff Sessions last week. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Jeff Sessions concealed his contacts with Russian officials when filling out his security clearance form to be the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement official. 

Sari Horwitz reports: “Sessions came under fire earlier this year for not disclosing to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing that … he met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential election … In March, Sessions recused himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign after The Washington Post reported the two meetings. … The security clearance form requires anyone applying for a security clearance to list ‘any contact’ that he or his family had with a foreign government or its representatives over the past seven years.”

CNN's Manu Raju and Evan Perez, who broke the story last night, explain the DOJ's damage-control effort: "Sessions initially listed a year's worth of meetings with foreign officials on the security clearance form, according to (Sessions) spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores. But she (claims) that he and his staff were then told by an FBI employee who assisted in filling out the form ... that he didn't need to list dozens of meetings with foreign ambassadors that happened in his capacity as a senator. ... A legal expert who regularly assists officials in filling out the form disagrees with the Justice Department's explanation, suggesting that Sessions should have disclosed the meetings.”

Sessions was supposed to appear before two congressional committees this week, but he abruptly canceled both on Monday.

REBOOBLICAN UNFORCED ERRORS CONTINUE.

UNFORCED ERROR #1

Greg Gianforte, the Republican nominee in today’s special congressional election in Montana, has been charged with misdemeanor assault after allegedly “body slamming” a reporter for the Guardian. Gianforte, who has been seen as the favorite in the race to succeed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, faces a maximum $500 fine or six months in jail if he is convicted, Dave Weigel reports from Montana.

In an audio recording published by the Guardian, reporter Ben Jacobs can be heard asking Gianforte to respond to the Congressional Budget Office's new score of the American Health Care Act. After Gianforte tells Jacobs to ask his spokesman, the candidate loses it and begins to scream: “I’m sick and tired of you guys! … Get the hell out of here! Get the hell out of here!”

A Fox News crew was in the room when it happened, and veteran correspondent Alicia Acuna has written a damning first-person account: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him. At no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte.”

The unapologetic campaign released a defiant statement that attempted to slime the respected reporter as a “liberal.” His spokesman claimed that Gianforte asked Jacobs to lower the recorder before he got physical, but the audio tape and the eyewitness accounts undercut this version of events.

Two of the state’s largest newspapers quickly withdrew their editorial endorsements of Gianforte....

But, but, but: Heavy early voting means that Gianforte may win anyway. Perversely, a physical altercation with a reporter might also help him coalesce/gin up his base. (Donald Trump won Montana last November by 20 points.) “What turnout will look like in a special election is hard to predict, but if it’s similar to 2014, 62 percent of votes have already been cast early,” Philip Bump explains. 

Bottom line: In many ways, it is now worse for national Republicans if Gianforte wins. If he loses, the NRCC can pretty easily explain it away by calling him a terrible candidate. The incident makes it harder for anyone to draw conclusions about the broader national political environment from the outcome. If he wins, though, Gianforte suddenly becomes another headache for Paul Ryan. The ongoing legal issue will be covered as a major story, and his every move in the Capitol will be tracked aggressively by the press. He becomes a liability for the party in 2018, especially if his new colleagues defend him.

TERROR IN THE U.K., DAY 2

The family of the Manchester suicide bomber have links to terror networks around the world, it has been revealed. Salman Abedi killed 22 people and injured at least 119 more when he detonated a bomb on Monday night as children were piling out of Manchester Arena having watched Ariana Grande. His father Ramadan and younger brother Hashem were in custody in Libya last night after being arrested by counter-terror police. Detectives said Hashem had links to ISIS and was planning to carry out a terror attack in Tripoli. Hashem was accused of having known about his brother's murderous plans for more than a month, while it emerged his father had been a revolutionary fighter who publicly voiced support for an Al Qaeda-linked group in Syria. A third relative, Abedi's older brother Ismail, was arrested in Manchester. It is not known what his involvement, if any, was. He was once reported to a counter- terrorism unit after concerns were raised by members of the Muslim community. Last night, attention focused on how the bomber had been allowed to slip through the net. Key warnings about his descent into jihadism were apparently overlooked.   Daily Mail


 “In suburban Manchester, a search for what might have motivated the attacker,” by Rick Noack and Souad Mekhennet: “With its red brick buildings, large villas and green lawns, the Fallowfield area of southern Manchester might appear to be an unlikely location ... But on Tuesday, police forces launched at least three operations (here) in connection with the devastating attack four miles away in the north of Manchester. In other communities at the center of recent terrorism investigations — such as the Molenbeek district of Brussels and some Parisian suburbs — authorities have openly acknowledged problems with Islamist extremism. Poverty, crime and high unemployment in these areas have long played into the hands of radicals, they say. Manchester is different. Suburbs such as Fallowfield are mostly culturally or ethnically diverse and wealthy, with little to suggest that neighborhoods there have dealt with extremism for years. ... More recently, however, authorities have largely lost the ability to monitor terrorism suspects during their visits to mosques or community centers. Instead, groups of friends or acquaintances are meeting in apartments, making it nearly impossible for Britain’s stretched security services to monitor suspects, a dynamic that could explain the seemingly sudden emergence of groups of radicalized individuals."

SUICIDE BOMBER KILLS 22 AND INJURES 59 AT POP CONCERT IN MANCHESTER, ENG.

Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In Manchester, a Loud Bang, Three seconds of silence, Then Screaming and Blood.

WASHINGTON POST

 A lone suicide bomber blew himself up at a Ariana Grande pop concert  filled with teenagers in Manchester, England, killing 22 and injuring 59 more in an apparent effort to harm as many young people as possible. Griff Witte and Karla Adam report: “British Prime Minister Theresa May said it was ‘now beyond doubt’ that it was a ‘callous, terrorist attack.’...

----

• ISIS claimed responsibility, but authorities are still trying to determine if the suicide bomber acted alone or was part of a larger network.
• The Greater Manchester Police said that they arrested a 23-year-old man in south Manchester in connection with the attack, as hundreds of police swarmed through the city in the aftermath of the blast.

-- Well into Tuesday morning, fathers and mothers who had lost contact with their children posted desperate pleas for information on social media using the hashtag #ManchesterMissing.

This graphic shows where the explosion took place, in the foyer area, leading towards Victoria railway station 

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 Amid the terror and chaos that gripped Manchester, many residents took to social media to offer aid to those affected by the deadly blast. Isaac Stanley-Becker reports: “They came offering rooms and rides, food and drink. They came by [Twitter]— so often a site of anonymous derision — as a tool of collective uplift. The messages, some of which gained thousands of retweets, offered a small glimmer of hope in an otherwise ghastly night of carnage, confusion and loss. And as fear and uncertainty yet again gripped Western Europe, the response from those closest to the violence suggested an unwillingness to be cowed by such strikes. ‘I have a sofa, floor, blankets and tea, 5 minutes from Arena for anyone in need,’ one user offered. ‘If you need a place to crash I live around the corner from Manchester Arena,’ another wrote. Several hotels in Manchester sheltered children — who made up a large share of concert-goers — as frantic parents sought to locate them. And taxis in the city's center offered free rides through the night.”

 Musician Ariana Grande, who was not injured in the blast, expressed her sorrow in a tweet: “broken,” she wrote. “from the bottom of my heart, i am so sorry. i don’t have words.” TMZ reports that she has suspended the rest of her “Dangerous Woman” tour, which was next scheduled for a stop in London on Thursday night.

 Armed police officers outside the town hall in Manchester. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

VOX

 Manchester, united.

The United Kingdom is still on critical terror alert — meaning more attacks may be imminent. Up to 5,000 soldiers will be deployed to assist police on the streets of the UK under Operation Temperer.

• The victims (consistent with Grande’s fan base) were largely young women and girls, including an 8-year-old; the bombing shattered a celebratory, joyful atmosphere, likely leaving lasting psychic marks on many of the attendees (not to mention Grande herself). [The Guardian / Alexis Petridis]
• The police say they believe the attacker was carrying an improvised explosive device, which he detonated. [The Guardian ]
• Multiple witnesses said they heard an explosion, with one telling the Guardian the blast shook the building, before “everyone screamed and tried to get out”. [The Guardian ]

 This is one of the first pictures of Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, taken some years ago during a class at a mosque. Photograph: handout

• The bomber ... has been identified as Salman Abedi, a 23-year-old born in Manchester to Libyan-immigrant parents, who was known to acquaintances as someone with extreme views but not as a possible mass murderer. [The Guardian / Ian Cobain, Frances Perraudin, Steven Morris, and Nazia Parveen] Abedi was known to the security services but was not part of any active investigation or regarded as a high risk.... 
• Salman and his brother Ismail worshipped at Didsbury mosque, where their father, who is known as Abu Ismail within the community, is a well-known figure .... Abu Ismail ...who worked as an odd-job man in Manchester, is thought to be in Tripoli. His wife, Samia, is thought to be in Manchester. The couple are believed to have another son, Hashem, and a daughter, Jomana.
  
  “Abu Ismail comes and goes between here and there,” the family friend said. “I can’t believe [Salman Abedi] would have been radicalised in Tripoli. All those types have been driven out of the city. It must have happened here. ... Officers also searched the home of his brother Ismail in the Chorlton area of south Manchester.
• On Elsmore Road there was also some indication that Abedi was not always quiet and respectful. One neighbour said that when he spoke to him about parking his car so that others could not exit their drives, “all I got was this”, and he held up his middle finger.There were also reports that in recent weeks he had taken to chanting Islamic verses loudly in the street. Meanwhile, one former school friend was reported to have said that the last time he saw Abedi he had been a Manchester United fan who rarely discussed his faith. “He always had a bit of an attitude problem. I can’t say I really liked the man.” [The Guardian]
• (It’s ...worth pointing out that in Britain, news outlets often don’t report details of incidents, out of deference to ongoing law enforcement investigations; in this case, UK officials kept updating American officials, who would then turn around and leak to US outlets, which would then publish the information — freaking out the UK.) [BuzzFeed News / Mitch Prothero]]
• ...dozens of terrorists have emerged from this northern city – many from the area of Moss Side, which is less than two miles from Fallowfield, where Monday's bomber lived.
  Once impoverished, Moss Side has had its troubles: a white and West Indian gang culture, gun crime, and race riots. Now, even as it has been gentrified by students and young families, it suffers from another infamy.[ Daily Mail ]
  
  
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Bloodied concertgoers were pictured being helped by armed police outside the arena after explosions rang out at the gig

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REUTERS/Kevin Lamarq

Immigration Arrests Rise Almost 40 Percent in Trump’s First 100 Days

REUTERS

U.S. arrests of suspected illegal immigrants rose by nearly 40 percent in the first 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency, following executive orders that broadened the scope of who could be targeted for immigration violations, according to government data released on Wednesday.

The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Thomas Homan said that arrests by his agency jumped to 41,318 between January 22 of this year and the end of April, up from 30,028 arrests in roughly the same period last year.

Of those arrested almost two-thirds had criminal convictions. But there was also a significant jump - of more than 150 percent - in the number of immigrants not convicted of further crimes arrested by ICE: 10,800 since the beginning of the year compared to 4,200 non-criminal arrests in the same period in 2016.

  ICE agents at a home in Atlanta during a targeted enforcement operation in February. (Bryan Cox / ICE via AP)

TRUTHDIG

The new data reflect Trump’s campaign promise to crack down on undocumented immigration in the U.S. and come after months of anecdotes about immigration raids and arrests in various communities. And while numbers have shown that deportations were lower under Trump than in the same period a year ago, the new information is the first concrete evidence of the new administration’s strict immigration policy in action.

----

“Those that enter the country illegally, they do violate the law, that is a criminal act,” Homan said on the call, while emphasizing that immigrants who pose a threat to national security or have criminal records are still a priority for the agency.

He said ICE will continue to target people who have been issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge even if they have not committed another crime.

“When a federal judge makes a decision and issues an order that order needs to mean something,” Homan said. “If we don’t take action on those orders, then we are just spinning our wheels.”

Don’t underestimate Trump


WASHINGTON POST


-----
....as the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Russia mess has Washington buzzing with nascent impeachment talk, 25th Amendment scenarios and rumors about resignation, it is worth remembering how tenaciously Trump pursued power, along with five key assets he has to maintain his grip on it.

First, while he is proving to be an incompetent president, Trump is an incredibly skilled politician. He did not come to the presidency by accident: He spent 30 years laying the groundwork for his run — attacking President Ronald Reagan on trade in the 1980s, putting out a campaign book in 2000, forcing President Barack Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. He vanquished an all-star GOP field in 2016 — beating a Bush, the Republicans’ Obama (Marco Rubio) and lionized candidates such as Scott Walker and Chris Christie. He resoundingly won the Republican primary in New Hampshire.  He was the host of a top-rated television show for almost a decade: no small communications achievement.

Second, there is the power of the presidency, and Trump’s ability to use its allure as a bulwark against accountability. Trump’s staff may feud with one another, but — with two family members ensconced in the West Wing — they seem prepared to defend him by any means necessary. ...have shown a willingness to sacrifice their own credibility to protect Trump. And a retinue of prominent law firms appear ready to provide legal and public relations cover in defense of Trump and his family.

Third, there is the desire of many observers to try to normalize Trump and get “back to business.” This obviously includes most Republican members of Congress, who have shown a penchant for dismissing concerns about Trump so long as he continues to pursue an agenda of repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes.

But this instinct extends beyond partisans: Remember how media commentators, including some liberal voices, acclaimed Trump’s presidential leadership after one well-executed speech three months ago? It might take shockingly little — a successful foreign trip next week or progress on Obamacare repeal in Congress — for pundits to conclude that he is “back on track.”

Fourth, there is the intensity of his most devout supporters. While Trump has falsely boasted about many things, he was probably right when he said that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and still maintain their support. Trump’s “tribal” supporters back him, not because of what Trump does or says, but because they want the affiliation they enjoy as Trump supporters. While these hard-core supporters were not sufficient to put Trump in office — experts believe this group is 25 percent to 40 percent of the electorate — even at the lower end of that range, they make up a majority of Republican primary voters in most Republican-held districts. That is a powerful check on Republican senators and representatives who might stand up to Trump....

And fifth, there is the frightening risk that Trump’s die-hard supporters are more devoted to Trump than they are to the rule of law. The United States prides itself on being “a government of laws, not of men,” but polls show that an increasing number of Americans generally, and Trump supporters specifically, have “lost faith in democracy.” Sinclair Lewis’s brilliant novel “It Can’t Happen Here” portrayed an alliance between populist rhetoric and corporatist policies that established an iron grip on government and trampled legal accountability. A Trump campaign email, sent the day the latest Comey allegations emerged, echoed Lewis’s depiction, labelling the growing scrutiny of Trump as “sabotage,” accusing government officials of being against an “America First agenda” and urging supporters to “be prepared to go into the trenches to FIGHT.”

Report: Trump Asked Intelligence Chiefs to Deny Evidence of Campaign’s Collusion With Russia

President Donald Trump asked two of the country’s most senior intelligence officials to publicly deny the existence of any evidence linking his presidential campaign with Russian efforts to undermine the American political process, The Washington Post reported on Monday evening. According to the Post, Trump appealed to Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, and to Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, after then-FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that the bureau was investigating “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.” The Post also reports that White House officials asked intelligence officials about the possibility of directing Comey to end the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, apparently out of a lack of understanding of how much influence the president has over FBI investigations. “The White House does not confirm or deny unsubstantiated claims based on illegal leaks from anonymous individuals,” a White House spokesperson an anonymously said of the report. “The president will continue to focus on his agenda that he was elected to pursue by the American people.”

READ IT AT THE WASHINGTON POST