A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Texas company from releasing instructions on how to use a three-dimensional printer to make guns at home.

Judge Robert Lasnik issued his restraining order from Seattle just hours before gun rights advocate Cody Wilson was to have started putting the blueprints on the internet.

“There is a possibility of irreparable harm because of the way these guns can be made,” the judge wrote.

Attorneys general from nine states and the District of Columbia had filed a lawsuit in Seattle against the Trump administration to try to prevent the gun plans from being distributed.

They said downloadable guns would be unregistered and very difficult to detect and also would be available to anyone regardless of age, mental health or criminal history.

The blueprints created by the company, Defense Distributed, would allow anyone with a 3-D printer to make the parts for a plastic gun that would cost just a few hundred dollars.

The State Department had ordered Cody Wilson to stop distributing the blueprints, arguing they violated U.S. export laws.

Wilson sued, alleging the ban violated his constitutional rights. The Trump administration reversed itself and said Wilson could again start publishing the gun plans starting Wednesday. That decision is now on hold.

But it is unclear how many people got copies of the plans before the State Department ordered Wilson to stop.

​Doesn’t ‘make much sense’

On Tuesday, Trump himself questioned the wisdom of allowing people to assemble homemade weapons.

“I am looking into 3-D plastic guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to the NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense,” Trump tweeted.

Some senators want Trump to do more than tweet and talk to the National Rifle Association. Several Democrats introduced a bill Tuesday that would outlaw the dissemination on the internet of blueprints for plastic homemade guns.

Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, appealed to Trump to fix what he called a “deadly mistake” his administration made.

“Donald Trump will be totally responsible for every downloadable plastic AR-15 gun that will be roaming the streets of our country,” he said.

Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal put it more bluntly, saying if the president did not stop plastic guns, “blood is going to be on his hands.”

Gun experts say the plastic handguns may not work without certain metal parts, and that the guns also have a tendency to blow up and break apart in users’ hands.

The experts also say the 3-D printer required to make the guns is expensive.
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday slammed the powerful Koch-led donor network as “globalist” and “a total joke,” rejecting the conservative group amid reports that the network was shifting away from him over trade and immigration issues.

Trump’s comments follow media reports that the Koch donor network sought to distance itself from Trump and the Republican Party at a weekend gathering in Colorado where concerns were also raised that his trade policies could fuel a recession.

“The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against strong borders and powerful trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” Trump said in a post on Twitter.

“Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn.”

Charles and David Koch have been a force in American politics for decades, channeling billions of dollars into conservative causes. But the billionaire industrialist pair kept their distance from Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

Charles Koch has taken the lead after his younger brother, David, stepped down from their political group and their company Koch Industries earlier in June due to poor health.

On Sunday, Charles Koch told reporters at the gathering that Trump’s trade policies, including tariffs, could trigger severe economic fallout, Bloomberg reported.

The Koch-backed network also said it would not support the Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who is facing re-election, according to the Washington Post.
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President Donald Trump is celebrating his chief of staff’s survival for a full year on the job.

Trump congratulated John Kelly in a tweet that includes a photo of the two men smiling wide.

He writes: “Congratulations to General John Kelly. Today we celebrate his first full year as (at)WhiteHouse Chief of Staff!”

Trump also marked the occasion during an Oval Office swearing-in ceremony for the new secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Kelly’s fate has been a subject of months of speculation as his standing in the West Wing diminished.

Trump has at times sounded out allies about potential replacements, and Kelly has told people he’d be happy if he made it to the one-year mark.

It was July 28 of last year when Trump announced Kelly would replace Reince Priebus.
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American culture has become “less hospitable to people of faith,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday in vowing that the Justice Department would protect people’s religious freedom and convictions.

Sessions spoke at a Justice Department summit on religious tolerance at a time when courts across the country have been asked how to balance anti-discrimination laws against the First Amendment’s religious freedom guarantees. He also announced the creation of a “religious liberty task force” to help implement that guidance and ensure that Justice Department employees are accommodating peoples’ religious beliefs.

Conservative groups immediately praised Sessions for promising to protect deeply held religious convictions, though Trump administration critics have repeatedly voiced concerns that the attorney general’s stance undercuts LGBT rights and favors the rights of Christians over those of other faiths.

Sessions, the country’s chief law enforcement officer, warned of a “dangerous movement” that he said was eroding protections for religious Americans.

He asserted that “nuns were being forced to buy contraceptives” — an apparent, though not fully accurate, reference to an Obama administration health care policy meant to ensure women covered by faith-based groups’ health plans have access to cost-free contraceptives. Religious groups that challenged the policy argued it violated their religious beliefs.

Sessions also said it was inappropriate that judicial and executive branch nominees were being asked about their religious dogma. And he praised a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple in a case that reached the Supreme Court and ended in his favor this year. That baker, Jack Phillips, was part of a panel discussion at the Justice Department summit.

“Let’s be frank: A dangerous movement, undetected by many but real, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom. There can be no doubt. It’s no little matter. It must be confronted intellectually and politically, and defeated,” Sessions said. “This election, this past election, and much that has flowed from it, gives us a rare opportunity to arrest these trends and to confront them.

“Such a reversal will not just be done with electoral victories, however, but by intellectual victories,” he added.

Sessions, a Methodist and former Republican senator from Alabama, has made protecting religious liberty a cornerstone agenda item of his Justice Department — along with defending freedom of speech on college campuses.

In his speech, the attorney general noted that he had issued guidance last year advising executive branch employees on how to apply religious liberty protections in federal law.
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Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who had publicly wavered as to whether he would support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, endorsed him Monday.

Paul of Kentucky says he will back Kavanaugh despite misgivings about the judge’s views on surveillance and privacy issues. Few had expected Paul would oppose President Donald Trump’s choice in the end.

The endorsement gives Kavanaugh a boost as he prepares to sit down Monday afternoon with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of a handful of Democratic senators seen as potential swing votes in the confirmation fight.

Manchin has said he’s interested in Kavanaugh’s views on the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The senator has also asked West Virginia residents to send him questions for the meeting.

Manchin was one of three Democrats who voted to confirm Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota were the others. All three are up for re-election in states Trump easily won in 2016.

Republicans have a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate. With the absence of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is fighting brain cancer, they cannot afford to lose a single Republican vote if all Democrats vote “no.”

Paul had let Trump know he preferred other potential Supreme Court nominees he viewed as more conservative. He had expressed concern over Kavanaugh’s record on warrantless bulk collection of data and how that might apply to important privacy cases.

Paul said he hoped Kavanaugh “will be more open to a Fourth Amendment that protects digital records and property.”

Yet he also said his vote doesn’t hinge on any one issue. “I believe he will carefully adhere to the Constitution and will take his job to protect individual liberty seriously,” Paul said.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s attorney said Monday it remains unlikely  Trump will agree to answer questions from special counsel Robert Mueller about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and whether the president obstructed justice by trying to thwart the investigation.

“The odds are against it, but I wouldn’t be shocked, because he wants to do it,” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said of the president in a CNN interview.

Giuliani said, however, that if Trump does sit for an interview, he would only agree to answer questions about whether his campaign colluded with Russia to help him win, not questions, except in a very limited way, about obstruction.

Trump has for months said there was “no collusion” between his campaign aides and Russia and that as president he did not attempt to block Mueller’s probe.

Trump unleashed a new broadside against Mueller and his investigation late Sunday, accusing the prosecutor of undisclosed “conflicts of interest” involving him, “including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business relationship.”

Giuliani declined to say what the purported Trump-Mueller business relationship was and said it was up to Mueller to reveal it, even though Trump raised the issue with his Twitter comment.

The former New York mayor said if Trump is interviewed by Mueller’s legal team, “Our real concern is they’re going to set up a perjury trap,” attempting to catch Trump, who often misstates facts, in a lie, which is a criminal offense.

He said Trump’s legal team presented its offer for limited questioning of the president to Mueller’s team 10 days ago but has not heard back. Mueller, if he does not like the proposed limits on questioning, could subpoena Trump to testify, setting the stage for a legal fight that could eventually be decided by the Supreme Court over whether a sitting president can be compelled to testify.

Mueller is expected to adhere to U.S. Justice Department guidelines to not indict a current president, but is expected to write a report on his findings that could, if wrongdoing is alleged, be turned over to Congress. If it wishes, Congress could start impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Giuliani said he thinks Mueller wants to conclude his now 14-month probe by sometime in September, enough time before the nationwide congressional elections on November 6, “so they can say they didn’t interfere in the elections.”

In the CNN interview, Giuliani sharply attacked Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, for taping conversations with clients, including one in which the future president discussed a hush money payment to former Playboy magazine model Karen McDougal shortly before the 2016 election to buy her silence about the alleged affair she says she had with Trump more than a decade ago.

Giuliani accused Cohen of “fooling, lying, deceiving everyone he talked with.” He said Trump, who employed Cohen for a decade, “had a close friend betray him. It happens in life.”

“You’ve forfeited your law license, as far as I’m concerned,” Giuliani said. “You can’t record your client without his permission. It’s outrageous.”
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The trial of President Donald Trump’s onetime campaign chairman will open this week with tales of lavish spending, secret shell companies and millions of dollars of Ukrainian money flowing through offshore bank accounts and into the political consultant’s pocket.

What’s likely to be missing: answers about whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election, or really any mention of Russia at all.

Paul Manafort’s financial crimes trial, the first arising from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, will center on his Ukrainian consulting work and only briefly touch on his involvement with the president’s campaign.

But the broader implications are unmistakable.

The trial, scheduled to begin Tuesday with jury selection in Alexandria, Virginia, will give the public its most detailed glimpse of evidence Mueller’s team has spent the year accumulating. It will feature testimony about the business dealings and foreign ties of a defendant Trump entrusted to run his campaign during a critical stretch in 2016, including during the Republican convention. And it will unfold at a delicate time for the president as Mueller’s team presses for an interview and as Trump escalates his attacks on an investigation he calls a “witch hunt.”

Adding to the intrigue is the expected spectacle of Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, testifying against him after cutting a plea deal with prosecutors, and the speculation that Manafort, who faces charges in two different courts and decades in prison if convicted, may be holding out for a pardon from Trump.

“Perhaps he believes that he’s done nothing wrong, and because he’s done nothing wrong, he’s unwilling to plead guilty to any crime whatsoever — even if it’s a lesser crime,” said Jimmy Gurule, a Notre Dame law professor and former federal prosecutor. “Obviously, that’s very risky for him.”

Manafort was indicted along with Gates in Mueller’s wide-ranging investigation, but he is the only American charged to opt for a trial instead of cooperating with the government. The remaining 31 individuals charged have either reached plea agreements, including ex-White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, or are Russians seen as unlikely to enter an American courtroom. Three Russian companies have also been charged.

Prosecutors in Manafort’s case have said they may call 35 witnesses, including five who have immunity agreements, as they try to prove that he laundered more than $30 million in Ukrainian political consulting proceeds and concealed the funds from the IRS.

Jurors are expected to see photographs of his Mercedes-Benz and of his Hampton property putting green and swimming pool. There’s likely to be testimony, too, about tailored Beverly Hills clothing, high-end antiques, rugs and art and New York Yankees seasons tickets.

The luxurious lifestyle was funded by Manafort’s political consulting for the pro-Russian Ukrainian political party of Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed as Ukraine’s president in 2014.

Lawyers have tangled over how much jurors will hear of his overseas political work, particularly about his ties to Russia and other wealthy political figures.

At a recent hearing, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III, who will preside over the trial, warned prosecutors to restrain themselves, noting the current “antipathy” toward Russia and how “most people in this country don’t distinguish between Ukrainians and Russians.” He said he would not tolerate any pictures of Manafort and others “at a cocktail party with scantily clad women,” if they exist.

Prosecutor Greg Andres reassured the judge that “there will be no pictures of scantily clad women, period,” nor photographs of Russian flags.

“I don’t anticipate that a government witness will utter the word `Russia,”‘ Andres said.

While jurors will be hearing painstaking detail about Manafort’s finances, they won’t be told about Manafort’s other criminal case, in the nation’s capital, where he faces charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent and lying to the government.

Nor will they hear about the reason he’s been jailed since last month after a judge revoked his house arrest over allegations that he and a longtime associate attempted to tamper with witnesses in the case. And they won’t learn that Manafort’s co-defendant in the Washington case is a business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who lives in Russia and who U.S. authorities assert has connections to Russian intelligence.

Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly sought to play down Manafort’s connection to the president, yet the trial won’t be entirely without references to the campaign.

Mueller’s team says Manafort’s position in the Trump campaign is relevant to some of the bank fraud charges. Prosecutors plan to present evidence that a chairman of one of the banks allowed Manafort to file inaccurate loan information in exchange for a job on the campaign and the promise of a job in the Trump administration. The administration job never materialized.

The trial will afford the public its first glimpse of a defense that so far has focused less on the substance of the allegations than on Mueller’s authority to bring the case in the first place. At one point, his defense lawyers sued Mueller and the Justice Department, saying they had overstepped their bounds by bringing a prosecution untethered to the core questions of Mueller’s investigation — whether Russia worked with the Trump campaign to tip the election.

Ellis rejected that argument despite having initially questioned the special counsel’s motives for bringing the case. He noted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, had explicitly authorized Mueller to investigate Manafort’s business dealings. Mueller’s original mandate was to investigate not only potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but also any other crimes arising from the probe.

“When a prosecutor looks into those dealings and uncovers evidence of criminal culpability,” said Stanford law professor David Alan Sklansky, “it doesn’t make sense to ask him to avert his eyes.”
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Intrigue surrounding the U.S. Justice Department’s Russia probe has risen once again amid reports President Donald Trump’s former attorney is claiming Trump knew in advance of a 2016 meeting his top campaign staff and close family members held with Russians promising compromising material on then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. VOA’s Michael Bowman has this report.
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U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday he recently told the publisher of The New York Times how he came to describe the mainstream news media as the “Enemy of the People,” but the news executive said he in turn told Trump his language was “inflammatory” and “increasingly dangerous” for journalists around the world.

In a Twitter comment, Trump described his July 20 meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger as “very good and interesting.” The U.S. leader said he “spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”

Later Sunday afternoon, Trump sent multiple tweets attacking the media, and mentioning the “failing New York Times” and “the Amazon Washington Post.”

Sulzberger, perhaps the most prominent publisher in the U.S., said that in keeping with the “long tradition” of Times publishers meeting with past U.S. presidents, the conversation was “off the record,” at Trump aides’ request, meaning it was not intended for publication.

But the publisher said that with Trump’s tweet putting the meeting on the record, he decided to respond to give his account of the conversation from notes he took, along with those of the newspaper’s editorial page editor, James Bennet, who also attended the meeting.

“My main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” Sulzberger said. “I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.”

The publisher said, “I told him that although the phrase ‘fake news’ is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists ‘the enemy of the people.’ I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”

Sulzberger added, “I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.”

He said that “throughout the conversation, I emphasized that if President Trump, like previous presidents, was upset with coverage of his administration, he was of course free to tell the world. I made clear repeatedly that I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair. Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country.”

Trump often disparages news accounts he does not like as “fake news,” while calling Sulzberger’s paper the “failing New York Times.”

As he spoke to a veterans group last week, Trump pointed to reporters and told his crowd, “Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.”

To accompanying boos of reporters, Trump said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Sulzberger did not say how Trump reacted to his comments at their White House meeting.

 
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U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh says he recognizes that gun, drug and gang violence “has plagued all of us.” Still, he believes the Constitution limits how far government can go to restrict gun use to prevent crime. 

As a federal appeals court judge, Kavanaugh made it clear in a 2011 dissent that he thinks Americans can keep most guns, even the AR-15 rifles used in some of the deadliest mass shootings. 

Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Donald Trump has delighted Second Amendment advocates. Gun law supporters worry that his ascendancy to America’s highest court would make it harder to curb the proliferation of guns. Kavanaugh has the support of the National Rifle Association, which posted a photograph of Kavanaugh and Trump across the top of its website. 

The Supreme Court has basically stayed away from major gun cases since its rulings in 2008 and 2010 declared a right to have a gun, at least in the home for the purpose of self-defense. 

Gun rights advocates believe Kavanaugh interprets the Second Amendment right to bear arms more broadly than does Anthony Kennedy, the justice he would replace. As a first step, some legal experts expect Kavanaugh would be more likely to vote for the court to hear a case that could expand the right to gun ownership or curtail a gun control law.

Kavanaugh would be a “big improvement” over Kennedy, said Erich Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America. Kennedy sided with the majority in rulings in 2008 and 2010 overturning bans on handgun possession in the District of Columbia and Chicago, respectively, but some gun rights proponents believe he was a moderating influence.

“Kennedy tended to be all over the map” on the Second Amendment, Pratt said.

​’Dangerous views’

Former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, the Arizona Democrat who was gravely wounded in a 2011 shooting at a constituent gathering, said in a written statement that Kavanaugh’s “dangerous views on the Second Amendment are far outside the mainstream of even conservative thought.”

She predicted that Kavanaugh would back the gun lobby’s agenda, “putting corporate interests before public safety.”

In his 2011 dissent in a case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh argued that the district’s ban on semiautomatic rifles and its gun registration requirement were unconstitutional.

That case is known as “Heller II” because it followed the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller striking down the city’s ban on handguns in the home.

Kavanaugh said the Supreme Court held that handguns are constitutionally protected “because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens.”

“Gun bans and gun regulations that are not long-standing or sufficiently rooted in text, history and tradition are not consistent with the Second Amendment individual right,” he wrote in a point rejected by the majority.

Critics contend Kavanaugh’s analysis is flawed because AR-15s were not around during the early days of the republic.

Constitutional limit

In his dissent, Kavanaugh wrote that he had lived and worked in Washington for most of his life and was “acutely aware of the gun, drug and gang violence that has plagued all of us.”

He said few government responsibilities are more significant than fighting violent crime. “That said, the Supreme Court has long made clear that the Constitution disables the government from employing certain means to prevent, deter or detect violent crime,” he wrote. 

He said it was unconstitutional to ban the most popular semiautomatic rifle, the AR-15, since it accounted for 5.5 percent of firearms by 2007 and over 14 percent of rifles produced in the U.S. for the domestic market.

He said semiautomatic rifles had been commercially available since at least 1903, “are quite common in the United States” and the Supreme Court said in a 1994 ruling that they “traditionally have been widely accepted as lawful possessions.”

Semiautomatic rifles were used in several mass shootings in recent years, including the February killing of 17 people at a Florida high school.

Kavanaugh rejected the majority’s reasoning that semiautomatic handguns were sufficient for self-defense, saying: “That’s a bit like saying books can be banned because people can always read newspapers.”

He belittled the description of the guns as “assault weapons,” saying that handguns could be called the “quintessential” assault weapons because they are used much more than other guns in violent crimes. 

He was equally dismissive of Washington’s gun registration protocol, saying it had not been traditionally required in the nation and “remains highly unusual today.”

Machine guns

Still, Kavanaugh supported the ban on full automatics or machine guns, reasoning that they “were developed for the battlefield and were never in widespread civilian use.”

In 2016, Kavanaugh dissented when two of his colleagues lifted an order blocking the city from enforcing a limit on issuing licenses to carry concealed firearms.

The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence said the dissent shows Kavanaugh believes the district’s “good reason” requirement for concealed-carry permit applicants is unconstitutional. His views on that subject drew more scrutiny after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 days ago in a Hawaii case that people have the right to openly carry guns in public for self-defense. 

Phil Mendelson, a Democrat and chairman of the D.C. Council, said Kavanaugh’s dissent made clear that “his views on gun control are on the extreme side.” Councilmember Mary M. Cheh, a Democrat and professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, said she’s “worried about the shift to the right, for sure.”

Some legal experts believe Kavanaugh’s confirmation would make it more likely the court would hear another potentially groundbreaking Second Amendment case. Only four of nine justices need to vote in favor of reviewing a case.

UCLA law school professor Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, said Kavanaugh could become that crucial fourth vote because three justices — Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. — all have voiced support for the court to take on Second Amendment cases.

Still, it takes five justices to win a case and Chief Justice John Roberts may turn out to be as reluctant as Kennedy to further define the law.

Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall said the court’s recent silence on gun laws has fueled speculation that neither the conservative justices nor their liberal colleagues knew how Kennedy would vote. Segall suspects the Supreme Court would be more likely to review a Second Amendment case if Kavanaugh is confirmed because there is less uncertainty about where he stands compared with Kennedy.

“The lower courts are just all over the place, reaching different results on different gun laws. The court has to provide guidance at some point, and it will,” Segall said.
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