Friday, Jul 18th
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Political Glance
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team wants to review emails between Paul Manafort and one of his former lawyers — messages that would typically be protected by attorney-client privilege.
Manafort’s emails are a special case, Mueller’s team argued in a court motion Wednesday. Attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply when the client enlists a lawyer’s help to commit a crime — and that’s what Mueller’s team is arguing that Manafort did.
The first juror in Paul Manafort's trial to speak out says prosecutors almost got the 18 guilty verdicts they wanted. Paula Duncan told Fox News that one juror caused a mistrial on 10 of the charges against the president's former campaign chairman.
In her interview, Duncan said she voted to convict him because the evidence was "overwhelming." She described a taxing and emotional deliberation process and said the discussions brought some jurors to tears.
According to Duncan, she and her peers worked to convince the lone dissenting juror, but ultimately failed to prevent a split verdict Tuesday.
President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify competing congressional memos about the validity of the so-called Steele dossier means the FBI has lost its authority to rebuff Freedom of Information Act requests about the bureau’s efforts to verify the report’s intelligence linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta previously blessed the FBI’s decision to refuse such FOIA requests by declining to confirm whether any records exist about aspects of its handling of the hotly contested dossier, prepared by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The judge ruled in January that Trump’s tweets about the dossier did not require the FBI and other intelligence agencies to be more responsive to public records requests on the issue.
George said he never discussed the nude Polaroids, or the twisted, secret gifts he and the other kids had been given decades ago by the men who preyed on them. These weren’t the kinds of things you could share without feeling humiliated, especially if you grew up tough, like he did on the South Side of Pittsburgh.
But you can’t outrun your nightmares forever. So on Dec. 17 — a week before Roman Catholics around the world celebrated Christmas — George met with a Pennsylvania grand jury and told it about the Rev. George Zirwas, a friendly young priest who once took him to a rectory in Munhall, a borough about 25 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh, and introduced him to some friends: The Revs. Francis Pucci, Richard Zula, and Francis Luddy.
The Senate fight over documents related to President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court is boiling over.
Trump pick Brett Kavanaugh, a circuit judge since 2006 who previously worked for President George Bush’s administration and Kenneth Starr’s investigation, has a voluminous paper trail that lawmakers estimate tops a million pages.
Democrats want to see as many of those papers as they can, while Republicans seeking to confirm Kavanaugh before the midterm elections favor a narrower scope.
Battle lines are hardening, with senators trading accusations about whether a double standard is being applied to Kavanaugh, who if confirmed will shape the political leaning of the court for decades.
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A top National Security Council official who skirmished with White House aide Stephen Miller and other immigration hardliners was forced out this week, the latest staffing change at the NSC since President Donald Trump named John Bolton his national security adviser in March.
Jennifer Arangio, a senior director in the NSC division that deals with international organizations, was let go Thursday, according to a former White House official and a former NSC staffer. The former NSC staffer said Arangio was escorted off the premises and told her services were no longer needed.
A federal judge on Thursday rejected the bulk of a Trump administration demand to block three California sanctuary laws, allowing the state to keep in place its most significant legislative measures aimed at countering President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Sacramento-based U.S. District Court Judge John Mendez rejected, for now, the Justice Department’s drive to halt a California law that limits the kinds of immigration-related information state and local law enforcement can share with federal officials. The judge also declined DOJ’s request to block another law guaranteeing California officials certain information about local and privately run jails that hold immigration detainees in the Golden State.
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