Tag: Upper house

A Republican-controlled Senate panel has said that further evidence has been found to support a US intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help elect Donald Trump. US and Russian officials hold 'frank' talks before Trump-Putin summit Read more The Senate intelligence committee said “information obtained subsequent to publication” of a January 2017 report by US intelligence agencies “provides further support” to the conclusion that Vladimir Putin and his government aimed to discredit Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. No further detail was given. The discovery was noted on Tuesday in a summary of initial findings from the committee’s review of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment (ICA), which it said was a “sound intelligence product” backed up by evidence. Tuesday’s publication by the committee further isolates Trump, who has repeatedly cast doubt on the conclusion that his campaign was aided by Putin and highlighted denials by the Russian president. A special counsel, Robert Mueller, is investigating possible collusion between Russia and members of Trump’s campaign team. Mueller is thought to be investigating whether Trump has tried to obstruct his investigation. Michael Cohen hints at flipping and says 'first loyalty' is to family – not Trump Read more In the January 2017 report, the CIA and FBI said they had “high confidence” in the conclusion about Putin favouring Trump while the NSA said it had “moderate confidence”. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement that it “sees no reason to dispute the conclusions” of the January 2017 intelligence report. His Democratic vice-chairman, Mark Warner, said: “The Russian effort was extensive and sophisticated, and its goals were to undermine public faith in the democratic process, to hurt Secretary Clinton and to help Donald Trump.”

We’ll never know the truth behind Donald Trump’s humiliating reversal of his own brutal policy of separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border. But we do know that Trump will lie about his actions, and will be utterly incompetent about fixing the crisis he created. Instead of imprisoning children separately, the United States will now imprison them together with their parents indefinitely. Yes there were legal constraints on jailing children for more than 20 days, whether alone or with their parents. You also should tell him to stop blaming other White House officials for his own disastrous policies. That’s a tough dilemma. For most normal adults, this is an astonishingly simple choice: do you prove your toughness by brutalizing children or do you treat them with the essential sympathy that we like to call human nature? But there was at least one glaring difference between the politics of these two supposedly tough dilemmas: President Bush was widely seen as protecting Americans from a threat that killed several thousand people. However, this is also not the end of the story for the thousands of children currently separated from their parents. Some people have suggested this crisis of Trump’s making is his own personal Katrina: the hurricane that laid bare the incompetence of the Bush administration.