Trump is 'privately fretting over impeachment' after it's revealed by CNN & NBC that he DID attend meetings with Enquirer boss to buy-and-bury stories about his affairs that broke campaign laws.

Donald Trump has reportedly spoken to some of his closest friends about his concern of impeachment. On Thursday, the president was revealed to be the third man who attended a 2015 meeting with Cohen and National Enquirer boss David Pecker (inset) where they forged a plan to keep Trump's alleged affairs out of the press. The meeting included an offer by the company's CEO to 'help deal with negative stories about the presidential candidate's relationships with women'. With Trump identified as having been there, it means he was present when a plan was developed that would ultimately lead to a felony crime that Cohen pleaded guilty to and which Pecker reached a cooperation agreement over.' The entire question about whether the president committed a criminal offense and an impeachable offense now hinges on the testimony of two men: David Pecker and Allen Weisselberg, both cooperating witnesses in the SDNY investigation,' a friend of Trump's claims. Weisselberg was the CFO of the Trump Organisation at the time, he has also reached an immunity deal amid Cohen's claims that he signed off on the payments.  This will bring the investigation to examine Trump's role in breaking campaign laws. Playboy model Karen McDougal (with Trump left) and porn star Stormy Daniels (right) allegedly received hush payments. Cohen (center), sits down for an interview with Good Morning America to be telecast Friday.
Donald Trump was in the room when his then-lawyer Michael Cohen discussed organizing hush money payments to two women with the publisher of the National Enquirer in 2015, NBC News and CNN reported Thursday.


The revelation ― first made public last month by The Wall Street Journal came after the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., signed a non-prosecution deal with federal prosecutors in which it admitted to paying off former Playboy model Karen McDougal in 2016 in order to protect Trump’s chances in the presidential election. The publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, is a longtime friend of Trump.
Allen Weisselberg, Chief Financial Officer and cooperating witness in the SDNY investigation,'



 AMI also “admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election,” prosecutors said in a statement this week. Trump, therefore, is now the only person in the room who claims that the hush money wasn't used to impact the outcome of the election. The plan the three reached included an agreement to help the campaign 'identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided'.

At the meeting, 'Pecker agreed to keep Cohen apprised of any such negative stories,' The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Trump was involved in or briefed on 'nearly every step' of the agreements.


McDougal had claimed the Enquirer bought her story as part of a “catch-and-kill” effort, meaning it acquired exclusive rights without intending to ever publish her story.

The news comes amid a spike in talk in Washington about the possibility that the president could be charged with directing a federal crime, even if it is ultimately held that he is immune from such charges due to his office and the Justice Department's prior interpretation of the Constitution that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, only impeached.

DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel determined during the Nixon Administration that a sitting president could not be indicted, although its position has not been tested in court.
Amid the swirling developments of the week, one powerful Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, is calling for that interpretation to change.

Although the founders included impeachment in the constitution as a political remedy, critics of the status quo have argued they never intended to give the executive a 'free pass' for crimes just by holding office, including alleged crimes that helped a president obtain the White House.

'I think the Justice Department needs to re-examine that OLC opinion, the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, that you cannot indict a sitting president under circumstances in which the failure to do so may mean that person escapes justice,'

Adding to the pressure on Democrats will be the statute of limitations on potential campaign finance crimes. That could allow Trump to avoid facing charges by winning election to a second term.

Former Acting Solicitor General under President Barack Obama, Neal Katyal, wrote Wednesday on Twitter that existing special counsel regulations 'put thumb on scale of Mueller asking Acting AG to indict, as that is the one way Mueller can be sure info he has uncovered in his investigation is provided to Congress. EVEN if Mueller thinks AG would say no, he may need to ask'.
Despite the current regulations, Mueller could ask the Justice Department to allow for a waiver to indict, according to Katyal.

If the official overseeing the Russia probe refuses, Mueller would be required to report it to Congress – which would then have that information as it considered any impeachment proceedings.

It is not entirely clear who is even overseeing the probe who would make that call.

Trump installed loyalist Matt Whitaker as Acting Attorney General, but Justice has refused media requests for information on whether Whitaker received an ethics review of any potential conflicts, following a slew of comments critical of the Mueller investigation.

If he weren't in an oversight role, it could be Deputy Attorney Gen Rod Rosenstein who would make the call.

Trump 'and his Republican supporters do not appreciate what legal analysts do: that the president is in serious legal jeopardy and it is mounting,' wrote former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti in Politico.

Theresa May Survives Leadership Challenge, but Brexit Plan Is Still in Peril

NY TIMES

Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, survived the gravest threat yet to her embattled leadership on Wednesday, winning a party confidence vote and averting a leadership battle that threatened to plunge the country into prolonged crisis.

But the victory celebration, if any, is likely to be short-lived.

While Mrs. May survived to fight another day, the future of her stalled plan to leave the European Union looked bleaker than ever.

She still lacks the votes in Parliament to pass it. She stands little chance of winning the concessions from Europe that she needs to break the logjam.

And the strong vote against her within her own party underscores the difficulty she faces in winning approval for any plan for Britain to leave Europe, or Brexit, as the deadline for withdrawal looms.

Also, Mrs. May won the vote only after promising that she would step aside soon after the Brexit agonies were over, according to reports from a meeting of Conservative Party lawmakers preceding the vote. That pledge removed the generally unwelcome possibility that she would stand as party leader in the next general election.

The vote does give her some breathing room. Under the Conservative Party’s rules, she cannot be challenged again by her own lawmakers for another year, which at least offers some stability for moving the Brexit plan forward. Had she lost, the Conservatives would have been thrust into a divisive, drawn-out process that would have stretched well into the next month.

Mrs. May argued Wednesday morning that the only beneficiaries of a vote of no confidence would be the opposition Labour Party.

Having survived it, she now faces an uphill task to garner sufficient support for her withdrawal agreement with the European Union, a lengthy legal document that Brussels has warned is the only deal on the table.

John Springford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research institute, said that the size of the vote against her “is an even clearer signal that she won’t be able to get her deal through Parliament. "

While Mrs. May has maintained a public face of optimism over securing some pledges from the European Union intended to reassure her own lawmakers, she is unlikely to win any game-changing concessions.

A defeat in Parliament could mean a second referendum, a mutually agreed extension of the negotiating period or even, as Mrs. May has warned her party, no Brexit at all. What does not seem to be in the cards, for now, at least, is the general election that the opposition Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been angling for throughout the Brexit process.
Her strategy appears to be to delay the critical vote — now probably January 21 — and to hope that the growing risk of a chaotic "no deal" departure brings some lawmakers back into line. But many doubt that will work.

“The best hope is that everybody calms down over Christmas, that they start to really worry about no deal, and that some more moderate people signal that they will support her. But everyone is now so high up their pole that I am not sure they can climb down.”

Mrs.  May in the House of Commons on Wednesday. CreditMark Duffy/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In Brussels, diplomats said they could see little benefit from Mrs. May’s travails, and that no new British leader would be able to change the fundamentals of the 585-page divorce agreement negotiated so painfully.

The main fear is that there is no majority in Parliament for any kind of Brexit deal, one diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity according to diplomatic protocol.

Tabloid Publisher’s Deal in Hush-Money Inquiry Adds to Trump’s Legal Exposure

American Media Inc., a tabloid publisher run by the president’s ally David J. Pecker, admitted to paying off a Playboy model in 2016 to help protect Donald J. Trump’s election prospects.CreditMarion Curtis/Associated Press

Image

American Media Inc., a tabloid publisher run by the president’s ally David J. Pecker, admitted to paying off a Playboy model in 2016 to help protect Donald J. Trump’s election prospects.CreditCreditMarion Curtis/Associated Press

With the revelation by prosecutors on Wednesday that a tabloid publisher admitted to paying off a Playboy model, key participants in two hush-money schemes say the transactions were intended to protect Donald J. Trump’s campaign for president.

That leaves Mr. Trump in an increasingly isolated and legally precarious position, according to election law experts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments made in 2016 to keep two women silent about alleged affairs are now firmly framed as illegal campaign contributions. The tabloid publisher, the parent company of The National Enquirer, said it had bought one of the women’s stories to ensure she “did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate.”

“A.M.I. further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election,” prosecutors said in a statement announcing they had struck a deal not to charge the company in exchange for its cooperation. 

Where the investigations go from here is not clear. The prevailing view at the Justice Department is that a sitting president cannot be indicted, though prosecutors in Manhattan could consider charging him after leaving office.

Investigators have continued to scrutinize what others in the Trump Organization may have known about the crimes described by Mr. Cohen, including its chief financial officer, according to people briefed on the matter. Prosecutors have met with campaign officials and asked how the campaign interacted with Mr. Trump’s company, which shared office space and employees.

Mr. Trump with Karen McDougal, a model who was paid by A.M.I. in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair.

Establishing a nexus between Mr. Cohen’s efforts to silence the women and Mr. Trump’s campaign is central to making a criminal case of election law violations. That is why A.M.I.’s admission carries so much weight, said Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

“It’s looking a lot like an illegal and unreported in-kind corporate contribution to help the campaign, exposing the Trump campaign and Trump himself to possible criminal liability,” Mr. Hasen said.

Until this week, it was largely Mr. Cohen’s word against the president’s denials. That is why the admission by A.M.I. is “highly significant, because it goes to corroborate” Mr. Cohen’s testimony, said Jeff Tsai, part of the prosecution team that accused Senator John Edwards of campaign finance violations when he arranged for payoffs to a pregnant mistress during his 2008 presidential campaign.

The Edwards case — which ended in an acquittal and mistrial — has been invoked by Trump allies as an example of prosecutorial overreach. Central to Mr. Edwards’s defense was that the payments were intended not to help his campaign but to hide the affair from his wife — that they were personal, not political.

The A.M.I. agreement with prosecutors said there was at least one other person associated with Mr. Trump’s campaign involved in an initial discussion in August 2015, attended by Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pecker, in which they agreed that the publisher would help the campaign by identifying negative stories about Mr. Trump’s relationships with women “so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

But many details remain hidden. Among them, the statement did not say whether the other campaign member was Mr. Trump himself — identified by prosecutors last week as attending a similar meeting — or some other person. A.M.I. had no comment on Wednesday.

NY TIMES

Michael Cohen sentenced to 3 years after implicating Trump in paying women for their silence during 2016 election. He said he acted out of 'blind loyalty to cover up the 'dirty deeds' of Donald Trump. Mueller probe says he gave them 'useful' evidence'


Michael Cohen faces sentencing in Manhattan federal court on nine criminal charges. Cohen left his Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan, accompanied by his wife Laura, and his two children. Prosecutors in The Southern District of New York argued he should get a 'substantial' sentence after taking his extensive cooperation with the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe into consideration.

Judge William H. Pauley III called Mr. Cohen’s crimes a “veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” and added, “Each of the crimes involved deception and each appears to have been motivated by personal greed and ambition.” He added that Mr. Cohen’s particular crimes — breaking campaign finance laws, tax evasion and lying to Congress — “implicate a far more insidious harm to our democratic institutions.” The judge said Mr. Cohen’s assistance to the special counsel’s office, though useful, did not “wipe the slate clean,” and a “significant term” of prison was justified. Cohen, the prosecutors said, offered to help them, but only on his terms, and there were some subjects he declined to discuss.

Mr. Cohen admitted in court that he had arranged the payments “for the principal purpose of influencing the election” for president in 2016.


The payments included $130,000 to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, which the government considers an illegal donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign since it was intended to improve Mr. Trump’s election chances. (The legal limit for individual contributions is $2,700 in a general election.)


Mr. Cohen also admitted he had arranged for an illegal corporate donation to be made to Mr. Trump when he orchestrated a $150,000 payment by American Media Inc. to a former Playboy playmate, Karen McDougal, in late summer 2016.


Prosecutors in Manhattan wrote last Friday to Judge Pauley that Mr. Cohen, in arranging the payments, “acted in coordination with and at the direction” of Mr. Trump, whom they referred to as Individual 1.

'I will fight it with everything I've got': Defiant Theresa May vows to contest TONIGHT'S no-confidence vote after Tory rebels trigger leadership battle by finally getting 48 letters from MPs.

Theresa May vowed to fight with 'everything I've got' today after a Tory no-confidence vote was dramatically triggered - and will be held tonight. The PM said she would not give up after Eurosceptics [anti-European Union] secured the 48 letters from MPs needed to force a ballot that could end the PM's time as leader. Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the powerful 1922 committee, said the threshold had been 'exceeded' and Mrs May was eager to resolve the issue 'rapidly'. He said she will deliver a speech to MPs at 5pm before voting begins an hour later. She was very concerned that the matter should be resolved as rapidly as possible.' Cabinet ministers immediately rallied to try and shore up support for Mrs May, warning that 'chaos' will ensue if the party kicks her out at this point. Mrs May wins tonight and said Brexit will have to be postponed, probably six months, if she loses. 'Clearly there would have to be a delay,' he said. If she wins by one vote she is immune from challenge for 12 months but narrow victory could still be fatal If Mrs May loses she will stay on as Prime Minister while another Conservative Party leader is chosen.In a defiant speech on the steps of Downing Street, Mrs. May warned Brexit would need to be delayed beyond March 29 if she loses and Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn might end up in power.  Mrs May was forced to postpone a crunch Commons Brexit vote to avoid humiliating defeat.A leadership contest will throw Brexit as well as the Tories into turmoil. Mrs May decided earlier this week not to put her deal to a vote, accepting it would be heavily defeated.She announced she would try to secure fresh concessions on the Irish border backstop, and would hold a fresh parliamentary vote by January 21. A challenge would throw that calendar into chaos.

Mrs May can stay on if she wins the confidence ballot by just one vote, and would theoretically be immune from challenge for another 12 months. But in reality anything short of a handsome victory will make it almost impossible for her to cling on.

How can Theresa May be ousted as Tory leader?

A Tory leadership contest can be called in one of two ways - if the leader resigns or if MPs force and win a vote of no confidence in them.

It is not the same as a vote of confidence in the government - which happens on the floor of the Commons and involves all MPs. 

Calling votes of no confidence is the responsibility of the chairman of the 1922 Committee, which includes all backbench Conservative MPs.

Chairman Graham Brady is obliged to call a vote if 15 per cent of Tory MPs write to him calling for one - currently 48 MPs. 

The process is secret and only Mr Brady knows how many letters he has received.

Once triggered, the ballot can be organised very quickly - potentially even the next day.

The no-confidence vote is purely on whether the leader should stay in place or not, rather than a contest.

Crucially, if the incumbent receives more votes in support than opposed they cannot be challenged for 12 months.

The procedure was last used in 2003 when Iain Duncan Smith was removed as Tory leader.

If the leader is ousted, they typically remain as Prime Minister until a successor is appointed and ready to be confirmed by the Queen.

Any MP - apart from the ousted leader - is eligible to stand in the subsequent contest.

Conservative MPs hold a series of ballots to whittle the list of contenders down to two, with the lowest placed candidate dropping out in each round.

The final two candidates are then offered to the Tory membership at large for an election. 

 A Quiet Revolution: Cultural Change in Gender Roles Starts with Us. Early.

ERROL LEWIS, NY DAILY NEWS

It is wonderful to see girls and women gravitate toward politics, whether as candidates, protesters, campaign professional or volunteers. But scratch the surface at most workplaces or social settings, and you encounter the kind of deeply ingrained sexism that fuels job and wage inequality, exclusion from key political and civic leadership roles and other forms of discrimination.

We see it in business meetings where men will still ignore the ideas of a woman at the table — only to praise a man who makes the same point seconds later. We see it in the epidemic of violence against women: The Washington Post recently analyzed 4,484 killings of women in 47 cities over the last 10 years, and found that 46% died at the hands of intimate partners.

The problem is deeply rooted in our culture. We still train young boys to be assertive, aggressive and disconnected from feelings of kindness and care. We still squelch overly independent girls, letting them know that being “good” or popular means remaining silent at times and putting others’ needs before their own.

More than 30 years ago, author and psychologist Carol Gilligan sparked a revolution with the publication of “In a Different Voice,” which laid bare the phenomenon of women being ignored, silenced, misinterpreted or simply not heard.

Gilligan, a professor at NYU, has revisited the topic with co-author Naomi Snider in “Why Does Patriarchy Persist?” The book is based on a decade’s worth of conversations with young people about the key moments when culture — peers, parents, teachers, the media — pressed them into traditional roles.

“For the girls, it’s ‘If you want to be one of those girls people want to be with, then don’t say what you think and feel — this is what you should say,’ ” Gilligan told me.
As for boys, says Gilligan, “Around 4, and 5 and 6 years old, if you’re not one of the boys, then you’re called girly or you’re called gay. And you’re teased. So if you want to be a so-called real boy or a good girl, then you have to conceal those aspects of yourself that would lead you to be seen as not a real boy, or not the kind of girl people want to be with.”
According to Gilligan, most of us simply yield to the pressure to conform to stereotypical roles, not recognizing the psychological harm — Gilligan calls it trauma — that comes from betraying our own desires.

She quotes a young woman named Neeti who complains about the burden of being made to feel she has to put others’ needs before her own. “The voice that stands up for what I believe in has been buried deep inside me,” says Neeti.

Another woman, Carrie, says: “You become so much less of a person when all you’re doing is trying to please others. You are not being who you are and after a while you lose who you were.”

A man named Adam recalls distancing himself from a best friend who turned out to be gay. “It was as if something was telling me that I needed to separate my mind from my emotions, but I wasn’t aware of what exactly it was.”

Gilligan wants us to be conscious of how we’ve been raised — and to rebel against it, politically and culturally.

Much will be made of the laws and policies that newly elected women and leaders of the #MeToo movement are pushing for. But deeper change will require a thousand small acts of introspection and personal transformation. The change starts with you.

Carol Gilligan is one of America's most distinguished writers and teachers in the field of psychology. She was born and raised in New York City and earned her Ph.D. from Harvard where she was a member of the faculty for 34 years. Her award-winning research led in 1997 to the creation of Harvard's first professorship in Gender Studies and in 2001 to the founding of the university's Center for Gender and Education. Her 1982 book, In A Different Voice, has been translated into 17 languages. Returning to New York to become University Professor at NYU, she lives with her husband in New York City and in the Berkshires.

Louis is political anchor at NY1 News.

The New York Daily News has taken aim at President Donald Trump as he searches for a new chief of staff to replace John Kelly. 

The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born 100 years ago today, did more than anyone to bring the Soviet Union to its knees.

NY TIMES

The 2018 Vanity Fair Hall of Fame

photographs by 

• ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

VANITY FAIR

Stormy Daniels,
Lady and the Trump

By Christopher Buckley

“It was a blonde,” Raymond Chandler wrote in Farewell, My Lovely. “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Gregory Clifford)—the face that launched a thousand memes (“Yeti pubes,” “Mario Kart mushroom dick”)—may bring down the whole building. Trump’s fixer, Michael “I’d take a bullet for him” Cohen, may go to jail, in part, because he never got his client to sign the damned non-disclosure form, making that $130,000 the loudest “hush money” in American history. (SAD!) The Donald allegedly promised to make her a star on The Apprentice, but didn’t. (BAD!) She became the star of her own reality show; the only stripper to open her act with a clip from 60 Minutes. Say what you will, but she’s funny: she considered running for the U.S. Senate on the slogan “Stormy Daniels: Screwing People Honestly.” And she’s got taste: every time she sees the leader of the free world on TV, she thinks: I had sex with that . . . Eech.

Kylian Mbappé,

The Field Marshal

By Dave Eggers

In Russia, he became the youngest Frenchman to ever score a goal in a World Cup. A few days later, when he scored two goals against Argentina, he became only the second teenager—after Pelé—to score two goals in one Cup match. Playing against Croatia in the final, Kylian Mbappé blasted a comet from 25 yards out, helping France win the whole thing. Mbappé was still 19 when, a few weeks after being fêted by Macron and Putin amid a sudden Russian rain, he signed a contract with Paris Saint-Germain worth about $210 million, making him the most expensive teenager in the world.

All this, and his game is still developing. He’s a very good passer but often doesn’t see the wide-open man. He’s a phenomenal ball handler but often makes three feints when one will do. But there is that freakish speed. The soccer world will not soon forget the sight of Mbappé in the round of 16, charging down the field with half of the Argentinian side chasing him as he eyed an open goal. With every long stride he seemed to grow faster and taller, and the Argentines, slump-shouldered Messi among them, had to accept the inevitability of a dagger blow—and the arrival of a new king.

Hannah Gadsby,
The Great Gadsby

By Monica Lewinsky

While the comedian Hannah Gadsby has been a national treasure in Australia for more than a decade, she burst into America’s consciousness six months ago with her paradigm-shifting and thought-provoking Netflix comedy special, Nanette. It’s a familiar setup: onstage, a stand-up comic makes a joke at her own expense; the audience laughs; and whatever painful truth she reveals through her anecdote—whatever humiliating, embarrassing, or traumatic experience she hides within the husk of humor—is completely forgotten, dismissed and condoned by the waves of laughter.

The brilliance of Hannah (and the show) is that she refuses to comply with this model. Partway through her act, she declares she’s done with comedy because she no longer wants to make jokes out of her suffering. She recounts the harrowing personal ordeals that formed the basis of several of her earlier comedy routines. She forces the audience to sit with these experiences and, in doing so, creates a new framework to understand shame and humiliation.

She had us at: “There’s nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” (That motto, I predict, will be the most popular tattoo of 2019.)

Bob Woodward,Paper Trail

By Robert Redford

Bob Woodward has long impressed me: calm, unruffled, dogged, and determined to get at the facts. I’ve followed his journalism career since 1972, as he and Carl Bernstein investigated the Nixon administration. I went on to portray him in the film All the President’s Men, which chronicled the Watergate scandal. I’ve been alarmed and deeply concerned about similar presidential corruption today, which is why of all Bob’s books I’ve read, his latest, Fear: Trump in the White House, might be the most urgent—revealing an executive branch ruled by greed, feuds, viciousness of spirit, and open warfare against a free press. Once again, Woodward delivers a deeply sourced and rigorously researched account, producing, as he has called journalism itself, “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Sometimes it’s ugly, and often it’s shocking.

When put to our biggest tests, however, our democracy has remained resilient: because of our commitment to a free and independent media, epitomized by books like his. This is one of the most sacred of our principles, secured by the journalistic bravery required to reveal such hidden truths. Many of the journalists working today were first inspired by Woodward and his passion to serve. His country and its citizens depend on him, and he them.

I know Bob doesn’t like this attention; true to form he’d prefer to have his reporting speak for itself. It’s still the strongest and most powerful voice he knows.

Stephen Hawking,
Mr. Universe

By Katherine Johnson

On March 14 of this year, the English cosmologist Stephen Hawking—who came into this world on the 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s death—transcended our physical plane, at age 76, on the 139th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birth. One could imagine that Mr. Hawking is among the aforementioned luminaries at some roundtable in the sky. But were he alive, Hawking—who, at age 21, was diagnosed with the incurable neurodegenerative disease A.L.S.—would tell you otherwise. With his dry wit and unvarnished point of view, delivered in its rhythmic and robotic tone via his speech synthesizer, Hawking might instead share his thoughts about the hereafter. As he told The Guardian, in 2011, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers.” For the millions whose eyes he opened to the wonders of the cosmos, math, and physics, however, Mr. Hawking’s afterlife is all around us: in his 13 books about the universe; in his five books of children’s fiction (which he co-wrote with his daughter, Lucy); and in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, in which Eddie Redmayne portrayed the scientific visionary who once stated: “We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.”

Neo-Nazi declared guilty of murdering Charlottesville protestor.

MAGAZINESUBSCR










BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty










James Alex Fields Jr., age 21, has been convicted by a Virginia jury of first-degree murder for ramming his car into a group of protestors during the Unite the Right rally on August 12, 2017, killing one protester, Heather Heyer, and injuring 40 others.



As The New York Times notes, “Friday’s verdict provides some closure in a case that cast a national spotlight on Charlottesville, the scene chosen by racists and anti-Semites to rally for their cause, near a Confederate monument that some city leaders were trying to remove. The August 2017 Unite the Right rally was marked by violent clashes between counter protesters and white nationalists, some of whom were convicted earlier this year.”


On the day of the murder, Fields’s mother had texted to him “be careful.” He responded “We’re not the one[s] who need to be careful.” That text was accompanied by a photo of Adolph Hitler.



Additional evidence showed that Fields’s act was an outgrowth of his neo-Nazi ideology. “Prosecutors also showed the jury a cartoon that Mr. Fields had shared months earlier on Instagram of a car ramming into a crowd, with the words, ‘You have the right to protest but I’m late for work.’” The New York Times observes. “Other evidence included recordings of conversations that Mr. Fields had with his mother after his arrest, in which he described the counter protesters at the rally as a ‘violent gang of terrorists,’ and derided Ms. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, as an ‘anti-white liberal’ who should be viewed as an enemy.”

Trump Will Nominate William Barr as Attorney General.

William Barr is to be Donald Trump's Attorney General. He served as George H.W. Bush's AG.

REAL CLEAR POLITICS

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday he will nominate William Barr, the late President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, to serve in the same role.

Democrats will presumably seek reassurances during confirmation proceedings that Barr, who as attorney general would be in a position to oversee Mueller’s investigation, would not do anything to interfere with the probe. An attorney general opposed to the investigation could theoretically move to cut funding or block certain investigative steps.

Barr was attorney general between 1991 and 1993, serving in the Justice Department at the same Mueller oversaw the department’s criminal division. Barr later worked as a corporate general counsel and is currently of counsel at a prominent international law firm, Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

Still, while in private practice, Barr has occasionally weighed in on hot-button investigative matters in ways that could prompt concerns among Democrats.

He told The New York Times in November 2017, in a story about Sessions directing his prosecutors to look into actions related to Clinton, that “there is nothing inherently wrong about a president calling for an investigation” — though Barr also said one should not be launched just because a president wants it.

He also said there was more reason to investigate a uranium deal approved while Clinton was secretary of state in the Obama administration than potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

“To the extent it is not pursuing these matters, the department is abdicating its responsibility,” Barr told the newspaper.

He also wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in May 2017 defending Trump’s decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey, one of the actions Mueller has been examining for possible obstruction of justice.

He was quoted two months later in a Post story expressing concern that members of Mueller’s team had given contributions to Democratic candidates.“In my view, prosecutors who make political contributions are identifying fairly strongly with a political party,” Barr said. “I would have liked to see him have more balance on this group.”

Barr had been on a White House short list of contenders for several weeks, said a person with knowledge of internal discussions who was not authorized to speak publicly. But some inside the White House were concerned that Barr was too aligned with establishment GOP forces.