Tag: The New York Times

(CNN)Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators are pressing witnesses for information about any possible attempts by United Arab Emirates to gain political influence by funneling money to support Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times reports. The potential broadening of the special counsel's probe beyond Russian election interference to include UAE efforts to influence the Trump administration includes the questioning of a Lebanese-American businessman with ties to the Persian Gulf nation who has discussed Middle East policy with top aides to Trump, the Times reported Saturday. Mueller's team has questioned the businessman, George Nader, who has been an adviser to Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, in recent weeks, as well as other witnesses on any possible UAE efforts to buy political influence with the Trump administration, the newspaper reported Saturday. Nader was a frequent visitor to the White House last year, meeting with senior adviser Jared Kushner and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, sources familiar with the meetings told the Times. The meetings focused on US policy toward Persian Gulf nations ahead of Trump's first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia in May 2017, according to the Times. After the TImes reached him by phone, Nader said he would call back, but neither he nor his lawyer returned the Times' request for comment, the newspaper said. The White House also did not return the Times' request for comment. Last summer, Trump weighed in on a dispute that UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt were having with Qatar, calling on Qatar to stop funding terrorism and claiming credit for and endorsing the decision of Gulf nations to ostracize their neighbor even as US Cabinet officials said their blockade is hurting the campaign against ISIS. The report of a focus on UAE by Mueller's team comes after Mueller's team indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges of alleged election meddling and after Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the wide-ranging probe last month.

PLAINVILLE, Conn. — When William A. Petit Jr. was campaigning door to door here for a seat in the State Legislature, he did not have to worry about getting residents to remember his name. Mr. Petit gave up his diabetes practice immediately after the killings to focus on the foundation. In the 1990s, Carolyn McCarthy won a seat in Congress after her husband was among six passengers killed when a mentally ill man opened fire on a Long Island commuter train. Mr. Petit declined to be interviewed for this article; his office said that Mr. Petit wanted “to decrease his personal publicity, choosing instead to focus on his family and legislative work.” Friends and colleagues said that it made sense that Mr. Petit would seek a life in public service, pointing to his family’s longstanding involvement in politics in Plainville, where he grew up. “I’m not surprised that he entered politics at all,” said Ms. Tompkins, noting that both Mr. Petit’s father and sister served on the town council. “The Petit family is a big deal in Plainville.” Every year since the home invasion, Bob Heslin, a former high school classmate of Mr. Petit’s, and Mr. Heslin’s brother, Gary, have organized a road race to benefit the foundation. There was a time, according to interviews Mr. Petit has given, when he seemed doomed to endlessly replay his family’s suffering. In the early months of the foundation’s existence, Mr. Petit struggled to make it through meetings without crying. “I said, ‘You need to get some experience in Hartford before you run for governor,’” Ms. Bergenty recalled. “That he actually came back to life was such a good thing.”

Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen said that he paid $130,000 out of his own pocket to a pornography actor who allegedly had a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006. Cohen said in a statement to the New York Times that he was not reimbursed by the Trump Organization or the Trump campaign for the payment to Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Cohen wrote, “The payment to Ms Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.” Cohen told the Times he had delivered a similar statement to the Federal Election Commission in response to a complaint filed by Common Cause, a government watchdog group. Common Cause had asked the FEC to investigate the source of the $130,000 payment and determine whether it represented an excessive campaign contribution. Cohen told the Times, “The allegations in the complaint are factually unsupported and without legal merit.” The Wall Street Journal reported in January that Cohen had arranged the payment to Clifford in October 2016 to keep her from publicly discussing the alleged sexual encounter during the presidential campaign. A week later, In Touch magazine published a 2011 interview with Clifford in which she claimed she and Trump had a sexual encounter after meeting at a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, a year after Trump’s marriage to his third wife, Melania. At the end of January, Daniels said in a statement that the alleged affair never occurred. But in a TV appearance the same day, Daniels appeared to disown the statement, saying she didn’t know where it came from and the signature didn’t look like hers.

New York Times editorial director of books Radhika Jones is expected to be named Monday as the next editor of Vanity Fair, according to the New York Times. Jones will take the place of longtime editor Graydon Carter, who will step down in December. The 68-year-old Carter had been editor since 1992. The 44-year-old Jones also was also a deputy editor at Time Magazine, where her responsibilities included the publication's "Time 100" issue. She has also worked at the Paris Review, Grand Street, Artforum and The Moscow Times. Last December, it advertised itself as the magazine “Trump doesn’t want you to read” after the then-president-elect slammed it on Twitter. Trump was angered by Vanity Fair’s scathing review of Trump Grill, ripping the magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, a frequent sparring partner who once needled the businessman for having small hands. Within 24 hours of Trump's response, Vanity Fair had racked up 13,000 new subscribers. “This is the highest number of subscriptions ever sold in a single day at Condé Nast, Vanity Fair's parent company,” a spokesperson said at the time. Vanity Fair is published by Conde Nast and is based in New York.

Today in 5 Lines In a dramatic escalation of the Russia investigation, President Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, along with his business partner, Rick Gates, wereindicted on 12 counts, including money laundering and conspiracy against the United States. Despite Papadopoulos’s plea, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted Monday’s indictments were not related to the Trump campaign and called instead for further investigation into the potential misdeeds of Clinton. A federal courtissued a preliminary injunction on Trump’s transgender military ban, temporarily halting its enforcement. And the FBI is investigating the Puerto Rican power authority’s decision to award a $300 million infrastructure-rebuilding contract to Whitefish, a small Montana energy firm. Today on The Atlantic A Grim Foreshadowing? : Democratic lawmakers urged Republicans to support Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation in light of Monday's indictments. A Dire Situation: Puerto Ricans are facing numerous challenges in providing and accessing adequate health care, creating nothing short of a crisis. : On Monday morning, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, surrendered to the FBI. (Eileen Sullivan, The New York Times) All Access: Over bottomless wine and rounds of golf, Tim Alberta gets to know an “unchained” former House Speaker John Boehner: a liberated retiree still wrestling with his political legacy. Share your response here, and we'll feature a few in Friday’s Politics & Policy Daily.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Before Bob Corker, there was Jeff Flake. Mr. Flake, the even-tempered Republican senator from Arizona, has for months offered stinging critiques of President Trump’s character, demeanor and truthfulness — the same message forcefully echoed a week ago by Mr. Corker, a Republican colleague from Tennessee, who warned that Mr. Trump’s reckless behavior could lead to “World War III.” But there is one crucial difference between the two: Mr. Flake, unlike Mr. Corker, is running for re-election. Last weekend, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican, even if few have spoken out. Mr. Flake, by contrast, has put pen to paper with his criticism; his new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” published in August, is a blistering indictment of the Republican Party and of a president who, despite record-low overall approval ratings, has retained the support of about 80 percent of his party. “A conservative is conservative in demeanor and comportment — not just policy,” he said. “It’s difficult, particularly when there’s a lot of people who feel very, very strongly about the president’s agenda and party’s agenda,” Mr. Lane said, adding, “Any time we sense that is not a priority, for any of our delegation, that becomes a bit of a problem.” Mr. Flake favors immigration and free trade — stances that put him at philosophical odds not only with the president, but also with many Arizonans. Rodd McLeod, a Democratic strategist here, said Ms. Sinema’s entry into the race would make it more difficult for Mr. Flake — who has a firmly conservative voting record, though his mild temperament can make him seem more moderate — to appeal to swing voters. “He wrote a book about the conscience of a libertarian, yet he’s voted along the lines of the things he has criticized,” Dr. Riley said. The Flakes are a political family — the senator’s father was once mayor of Snowflake — and Mr. Flake ran a libertarian think tank, the Goldwater Institute, named for the deeply conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, before being elected to the House in 2000. That’s the kind of conservative I am, and that’s my record.” But is that the kind of conservative who is welcome in the Republican Party in the Trump era?

President Trump early Sunday blasted The New York Times over a report his administration has struggled to achieve his goals. “The Failing @nytimes, in a story by Peter Baker, should have mentioned the rapid terminations by me of TPP & The Paris Accord & the fast approvals of The Keystone XL & Dakota Access pipelines. Also, look at the recent EPA cancelations & our great new Supreme Court Justice!” Trump tweeted. The Times reported that Trump has focused on repealing former President Obama’s achievements after struggling to reach his own goals, like repealing ObamaCare. It adds that Trump is using executive orders to pressure Congress to follow his agenda. The newspaper does mention Trump’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and his decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump ended key ObamaCare payments to insurers last week and also threatened to pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal — both landmark achievements for the Obama administration.

Trump's economic adviser urged reporters not to look at individual aspects of the GOP tax plan. Now, we may know why: The New York Times reports Trump stands to save as much as a billion dollars from his own plan.…

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The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Don and Nancy. Today in 5 Lines In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donald Trump Jr. said he agreed to meet with a Russian lawyer last year because he thought it was important to learn about Hillary Clinton’s “fitness” for office, according to prepared remarks obtained by reporters. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced plans to overhaul the Obama administration’s guidance for colleges on handling sexual assault. The Senate passed legislation that temporarily raises the debt ceiling and funds the government, as part of a Hurricane Harvey relief package. While the ads didn’t directly reference the election, they appeared focused on spreading divisive social and political messages. (David A. Graham) Guilty but Innocent: A new report from ProPublica shows that some wrongly convicted defendants are pressured to sign plea deals—even when new DNA evidence can exonerate them. Snapshot What We’re Reading Behind the Scenes With Maggie Haberman: The New York Times White House correspondent describes the omnipresence of Donald Trump—and how being a bartender helped her become a better political reporter. (Kaitlin Menza, New York) Pleased With Himself: Despite Republican backlash over President Trump's deal with Democratic leaders to raise the debt ceiling, Trump seems “super upbeat.”(Josh Dawsey, Politico) Breakout Star: Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley faced a steep learning curve after becoming the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Now she’s facing her biggest test yet: North Korea. : Check out these graphics to see how the hurricane’s strength compares with that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992.