Navajo Nation leaders say a Utah county is trying to keep a Native candidate off the ballot during the first election since a federal judge ruled voting districts were drawn based on race.

Navajo Nation Vice President Jonathan Nez said in statement the threat of possible criminal charges is an “example of the county’s bad-faith attempt to undermine Navajo candidates and disenfranchise voters.”

San Juan County, though, maintained Friday that the investigation into whether a county commission candidate, Democrat Willie Grayeyes, lives on the Utah side of the nearby Arizona border is aimed at ensuring fair elections and isn’t related to politics or race.

Court-ordered voting districts

The dust-up comes as the largely Republican-led county fights back in court against new voting districts that they say unfairly carve up San Juan County’s largest city of Blanding, about 300 miles (482 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City.

A federal judge ordered the districts be redrawn after finding they minimized the voices of Navajo residents who make up half the county’s voters. They tend to lean Democratic, and the newly drawn districts could give local candidates like Grayeyes a better shot at winning races during the upcoming election that will be the first under the new boundaries.

The voting-rights lawsuit came amid similar legal clashes over early voting access in Nevada, Native language assistance in Alaska and voter ID laws in North Dakota. Advocates hope greater access to the ballot box could ultimately improve conditions in populations with huge disparities in health, education and economics.

County investigators looking into Grayeyes’ candidacy in Utah want to see proof of residency like a utility bill, said San Juan County spokeswoman Natalie Callahan. 

“They’re really looking for anything that would qualify where he lived,” she said.

Candidate provides proof

His lawyers counter that they’ve provided multiple documents, including satellite images of the remote Utah home where he’s lived for 20 years while holding local leadership positions and an affidavit saying he’s been registered to vote in San Juan County since he was 18. Many homes in the rural area don’t have utility hookups and the lack of a local post office means many residents collect their mail from nearby Arizona.

Grayeyes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He lives on the Navajo Nation, which overlaps with San Juan County and stretches into Arizona and New Mexico. The county says it opened the investigation after a citizen complaint questioned whether Grayeyes lives in Utah. Callahan said they’ve also found other evidence supporting the claim, though she didn’t specify, citing the ongoing investigation.

Grayeyes also serves on the board of Utah Diné Bikéyah, a group that supported the creation of the Bears Ears National Monument to protect land that tribes consider sacred and is home to ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.

The land protections were fiercely opposed by largely Republican leaders in San Juan County and statewide. President Donald Trump ordered the monument downsized last year.
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U.S. President Donald Trump has commended the release of a report by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, saying it proves there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. 

Questioned about it during a joint news conference with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump said, “We were honored. It was a great report. No collusion, which I knew anyway.”

He called the investigation “a witch hunt,” echoing a phrase he had tweeted earlier that morning, and added: “If we can get along with Russia, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. But there has been nobody tougher on Russia than me.” 

Trump was questioned about the 243-page report released Friday by the House Intelligence Committee. The report contained a large number of redactions and a conclusion that while the meddling by Russia was real, collusion with the Trump campaign was not. 

It called contacts between Russian officials and campaign aides “ill-advised” and said at least one person might have given answers in legal testimony that were “incomplete.”

The Republicans on the committee said their report was based on interviews with 73 people and a review of more than 300,000 documents.

But the committee’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, told reporters that the report exemplified “the [Republican] majority’s fundamentally flawed approach to the investigation and the superficial and political nature of its conclusions.”

The report criticized intelligence officials, saying they leaked information before and after the election that installed Trump as president. It pointed out reports published by The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC and CNN as examples of dangerous leaks. 

Much of the information in the section on leaks was redacted, a fact that gave rise to criticism of the report itself. 

Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican who is chairman of the committee, told reporters that he hoped a more transparent version of the report could be released later. He indicated the redactions were not the doing of the committee, but instead of federal agencies vetting the report. He said the committee “will convey our objections to the appropriate agencies and looks forward to publishing a less redacted version in the near future.”

A Democratic rebuttal of the report called its conclusions “misleading and unsupported by the facts and the investigative record.” It also faulted the congressional investigators for failing to interview key witnesses and issue subpoenas to get crucial information. Schiff accused the Republicans on the committee of “adopting the role of defense counsel for key investigation witnesses.”

The report included the caveat that other investigations, including that of special counsel Robert Mueller, might have access to facts that the committee could not obtain. In addition to the House Intelligence Committee and Mueller’s probe, the Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating the matter.
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Former Democratic Gov. Philip Hoff, who’s credited with starting Vermont’s transition from one of the most Republican-entrenched states in the country to one of the most liberal, has died. He was 93.

Hoff, who became the first Democrat elected governor of Vermont in more than 100 years in 1962, died on Thursday, according to The Residence at Shelburne Bay, where he had been living.

“Phil Hoff forever changed the state of Vermont,” said Steve Terry, a former journalist who helped write a biography titled “Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State.” ”His influence in the 1960s has molded and created the Vermont many of us know today.”

During his six years in office, Hoff helped start a process that evolved into the state’s environmental movement. He focused on reducing pollution and cleaning up the state’s rivers and streams.

He also emphasized education reform and helped revamp the state’s judicial system.

Hoff’s policies helped refocus state government on meeting the needs of residents, a philosophy embraced by his Republican successor, Deane C. Davis.

The office has alternated between Democratic and Republican governors since Hoff was elected.

At the mid-point of the 20th century, Vermont remained one of the most Republican states in the country. The state was dominated by a couple of political families, but Hoff shook up the staid Vermont political structure.

He became governor when the state was under a federal court mandate to reapportion the state House, where each of the state’s 241 cities and towns were represented by a single person, no matter the community’s population.

“The people of Vermont have clearly said that they don’t want to continue with the old ways, and if we fail to respond to forces at work in our society, we face a bleak future,” Hoff said at his 1963 inaugural address.

“I loved it any time he came into the office because there was a sense of vibrancy and life,” said U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, who joined Hoff’s Burlington law firm after graduating from law school in 1964. Two years later, Hoff appointed Leahy as Chittenden County state’s attorney, a post he held for eight years, until his 1974 election to the U.S. Senate.

“I’d see the governor all the time,” Leahy said. “I was the star-struck young lawyer in his office. I’d see people staying in the halls, just waiting to say hi to him. We’d have meetings with him. It was exciting.”

Philip Henderson Hoff was born on June 29, 1924, in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. He took time off from Williams College to serve in the Navy during World War II and returned to Williams after the war. He graduated and went on to law school at Cornell University before moving to Burlington in 1951.

Hoff first ran for office in 1958 for a seat on the Burlington Board of Aldermen. He was defeated.

Two years later, he was elected to the Vermont House after running what Terry called “a minimalist campaign.” He had no campaign literature of his own and instead handed out brochures promoting the presidential candidacy of U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

After one term in the Legislature, Hoff won the race for governor in 1962 after he campaigned on the need for change and to end 100 years of one-party rule.

Hoff was briefly considered as a vice presidential candidate in 1968 but withdrew his name when it became clear his friend, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, was being considered. Hoff ran for the U.S. Senate in 1970, but lost to the incumbent GOP Sen. Winston Prouty.

Hoff returned to the Legislature in 1982 after being elected to the state Senate. He served three, two-year terms.
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Newly sworn in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is already on his first trip as the chief U.S. diplomat, headed first to a NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, and then to the Middle East. He boarded a plane just a couple of hours after his confirmation vote in the Senate. VOA’s Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine has more from Washington.
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The Department of Health and Human Services lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children it placed with sponsors in the United States, an agency official told a Senate subcommittee Thursday.

The children were taken into government care after they showed up alone at the Southwest border. Most of the children are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were fleeing drug cartels, gang violence and domestic abuse.

The agency learned the 1,475 children could not be found after making follow-up calls to check on their safety, the committee was told. 

The news has raised concern that the children could fall into the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives. 

“You are the worst foster parents in the world. You don’t even know where they are,” said Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. “We are failing. I don’t think there is any doubt about it. And when we fail kids, that makes me angry.”

Since the dramatic surge of border crossings in 2013, the federal government has placed more than 180,000 unaccompanied minors with parents or other adult sponsors who are expected to care for the children and help them attend school while they seek legal status in immigration court. 

An AP investigation in 2016 found that more than two dozen of those children had been sent to homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced to work for little or no pay. Since then, the Department Health and Human Services has boosted outreach to at-risk children deemed to need extra protection, and last year offered post-placement services to about one-third of unaccompanied minors. 

But advocates say it is hard to know how many minors may be in dangerous conditions, in part because some disappear before social workers can follow up with them, and they never show up in court. 

Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio gave HHS and the Department of Homeland Security until Monday to deliver a time frame for improving monitoring.

“These kids, regardless of their immigration status, deserve to be treated properly, not abused or trafficked,” said Portman, who chairs the subcommittee. “This is all about accountability.”
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A long-anticipated visit by U.S. President Donald Trump to the United Kingdom has been set for July 13. It will be a “working visit,” however, and not a more formal state occasion during which the president would have met Queen Elizabeth.

The announcement was made Thursday, separately by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and 10 Downing Street, the office of British Prime Minister Theresa May.

“It’s been a tortuous and very difficult process” to arrange a Trump trip to Britain, according to Andrew Marshall, the Atlantic Council’s vice president of communications. “This visit was born under a bad sign,” amid unhappiness over comments made by the president on social media, including criticism of London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

A planned visit to Britain by Trump was canceled earlier this year, during which he was to open the new U.S. embassy in London, a $1 billion cube-shaped building surrounded by sunken trenches and raised terraces that the president criticized as too expensive.

U.K. conservative groups, which support Trump, previously urged the president to avoid going to London because of a risk of “major protests, crime and disorder.” The organizations, in a letter, suggested instead that Trump visit his “ancestral home” of Scotland and if there were to be an official state visit, he should meet the queen at her castle in Balmoral.

The president’s mother was born in the Outer Hebrides archipelago on the Isle of Lewis. Trump, as a private businessman, visited Scotland frequently.

No location for the visit has yet been announced and speculation is widespread that it will occur outside London, perhaps at the prime minister’s country estate at Chequers, 65 kilometers from the capital.

Trade will be a major topic on the working visit’s agenda, with the British prime minister eager to move toward a new economic pact with the United States, one of its main trading partners.

It’s politically and economically important for May “in terms of what she’s staked her future on, which is a good, safe and prosperous future for the U.K. outside the European Union,” Marshall told VOA.

The U.S.-U.K. alliance is usually among the closest between any two nations, and U.S. leaders traditionally make visits to England early in their presidencies.

Officials on both sides of the Atlantic will be looking to resolidify that relationship with the Trump visit.

“At the moment, the U.K. is maybe standing a little aside from that role. We’ve just seen President [Emmanuel] Macron of France come here and absolutely wow Washington. Many noses will be out of joint in Downing Street and elsewhere about that. There’s a friendly rivalry with the French,” Marshall, a former foreign editor of The Independent newspaper in London, told VOA.

So far, though, with Trump and May “that chemistry is not there,” according to Marshall, who contrasts the president’s “forthright, direct and outspoken” personality with the prime minister — “a contained figure who looks sometimes like she’s walked out of a Jane Austen novel.”
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The White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, dropped his bid Thursday to head the country’s Veterans Affairs agency as lawmakers probed allegations of professional misconduct and excessive drinking.

As he withdrew, Jackson described the attacks on him as “false allegations,” but said they had “become a distraction” to President Donald Trump’s effort to improve health care for U.S. veterans.

Trump, in an interview on his favorite news talk show, “Fox & Friends,” continued to defend Jackson, his personal physician, saying, “He runs a fantastic operation.”

Trump blamed Senator Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, for the demise of Jackson’s nomination to the Cabinet position to oversee a department that serves 13  million U.S. veterans and has 377,000 employees. Tester said Wednesday that 20 current and former members of the military familiar with Jackson’s office had told lawmakers that he drank on the job, oversaw a toxic work environment and handed out drug prescriptions with little consideration of a patient’s medical background.

“They’re trying to destroy a man,” Trump said. “There’s no proof of this.” He said Tester “has to have a high price to pay” politically for his comments on Jackson.

The U.S. leader said he now has “somebody with a political background” in mind to name as a replacement for Jackson to head the Veterans Affairs agency.

Jackson said if the allegations “had any merit, I would not have been selected, promoted and entrusted to serve in such a sensitive and important role as physician to three presidents over the past 12 years. Going into this process, I expected tough questions about how to best care for our veterans, but I did not expect to have to dignify baseless and anonymous attacks on my character and integrity.”

He concluded, “While I will forever be grateful for the trust and confidence President Trump has placed in me by giving me this opportunity, I am regretfully withdrawing my nomination to be Secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

Trump said in the Fox interview he had told Jackson “a day or two ago I saw where this was going,” with him dropping his effort to win Senate confirmation, but had left it up to Jackson to decide whether to do so.

Jackson was fast losing support in Congress.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers indefinitely postponed Jackson’s scheduled Wednesday confirmation hearing as they investigated the allegations.

Several news outlets reported that Jackson was known as the “candy man” for over-prescribing drug prescriptions, while CNN said that in one 2015 incident Jackson drunkenly banged on the hotel room door of a female employee in the middle of the night on an overseas trip. The U.S. Secret Service intervened to stop Jackson, according to the report, so then-President Barack Obama, sleeping in another hotel room, would not be awakened.

Jackson gained a degree of fame unusual for White House physicians earlier this year when he took questions from the White House press corps on national television, gushing at length about Trump’s health after conducting the president’s physical exam.

Trump, the oldest first-term president in American history, was plagued at the time by questions about his physical health, weight and mental stability. But Jackson gave the president a top rating. “The president’s overall health is excellent,” Jackson declared at the time.

Trump unexpectedly picked Jackson to replace a holdover from the administration of former President Obama, David Shulkin, whom Trump fired. Several lawmakers have complained that the White House did not properly vet Jackson’s background before Trump announced Jackson’s appointment.

 
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President Donald Trump often likes to boast about how different he is from his predecessors in terms of style and substance.  But it is unlikely any past president would envy the legal challenges facing Trump, from the Russia investigation to Stormy Daniels to the scrutiny law enforcement is giving his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.  VOA national correspondent Jim Malone has more on the array of legal difficulties confronting the president from Washington.
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The White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, has decided to continue his fight to win Senate confirmation to take over the country’s huge Veterans Affairs agency, even as lawmakers investigate allegations of professional misconduct and excessive drinking.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was leaving it up to Jackson to decide whether to walk away from his nomination to the Cabinet position, while appearing to nudge him toward withdrawing. But Jackson later met with Trump and told him he was not ending his bid to head the department that oversees health care for 13 million U.S. veterans and has 377,000 employees.

The White House pushed for his confirmation Wednesday, with Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling Jackson a “very highly qualified, highly respected person in the military and the medical community.” She said Jackson had discussed the allegations with Trump.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers indefinitely postponed Jackson’s scheduled Wednesday confirmation hearing as they investigate so-far unsubstantiated charges he has overseen a toxic work environment at his White House office and drank on the job.

Several news outlets reported that Jackson was known as the “candy man” for over-prescribing drug prescriptions, while CNN said in one 2015 incident, during President Barack Obama’s presidency, Jackson drunkenly banged on the hotel room door of a female employee in the middle of the night on an overseas trip. The U.S. Secret Service intervened to stop Jackson, according to the report, so then-President Obama would not be awakened.

Senator Jon Tester, the lead Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee considering Jackson’s nomination, told National Public Radio the lawmakers have heard complaints about Jackson from more than 20 current and former military members.

“We were told stories where he was repeatedly drunk while on duty, where his main job was to take care of the most powerful man in the world,” Tester said. “That’s not acceptable.”

Jackson has declined to publicly comment on the accusations, but has rejected some of the claims to senior aides and says he is being unfairly attacked.

Trump said at a Tuesday news conference he continues to support Jackson’s nomination, but he had asked Jackson, “What do you need it for?”

“The fact is I wouldn’t do it,” Trump said. “What does he need it for? To be abused by a bunch of politicians that aren’t thinking nicely about our country, I really don’t think personally he should do it, but it’s totally his decision.”

“I don’t want to put a man through — who’s not a political person — I don’t want to put a man through a process that’s too ugly and too disgusting,” Trump said.

Jackson, who currently serves as Trump’s physician, already was facing scrutiny over his lack of experience managing an agency as large as the VA, the government’s second biggest.

Trump scoffed at that concern, saying, “You could run the biggest hospital system in the world and it’s small time compared to the Veterans Administration. So nobody has the experience.”

Jackson gained a degree of fame unusual for White House physicians earlier this year when he took questions from the White House press corps on national television, gushing at length about Trump’s health after conducting the president’s physical exam.

Trump, the oldest first-term president in American history, was plagued at the time by questions about his physical health, weight and mental stability. But Jackson gave the president a top rating. “The president’s overall health is excellent,” Jackson declared at the time.

Trump unexpectedly picked Jackson to replace a holdover from the administration of former President Obama, David Shulkin, whom Trump fired. Several lawmakers have complained that the White House did not properly vet Jackson’s background before Trump announced Jackson’s appointment.
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Republican Debbie Lesko has won the special election in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, keeping the U.S. House seat in GOP control. 

The former state senator on Tuesday defeated Hiral Tipirneni, a former emergency room physician. Tipernini had hoped to replicate surprising Democratic wins in Pennsylvania, Alabama and other states in a year where opposition to President Donald Trump’s policies have boosted the party’s chances in Republican strongholds. 

Lesko replaces former Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican who resigned in December amid sexual misconduct allegations. 

The district sprawls across western Phoenix suburbs, covering some of the most conservative areas of the red state, including the retirement community of Sun City. 

National Republican groups spent big to back Lesko, pouring in more than $500,000 in the suburban Phoenix district for television and mail ads and phone calls to voters. National Democratic groups hadn’t committed money to the race, a sign they didn’t believe the seat was in play. Still, the influential Cook Political Report moved the race from solid Republican to likely Republican the week before the election. 

In the Feb. 27 primary, two out of every three ballots were cast for a Republican. 

The seat became open when Franks stepped down after acknowledging that he had discussed surrogacy with two female staffers. A former aide told The Associated Press that he pressed her to carry his child as a surrogate and offered her $5 million. 

Tipirneni was seen as a fresh Democratic face with relatively moderate views that could get support in the district. Making a push for older voters, she had said Lesko would vote to go after entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy. She’s pushed a plan to allow some people to buy into Medicare. 

Lesko slammed Tipirneni as being out of touch with voters who oppose government-run health care. She called the Democrat too liberal for the area, and pointed to Tipirneni’s opposition to a wall on the Mexican border. 

Several Republican voters who spoke with AP said they backed Lesko primarily because she supported President Donald Trump’s border security plans. 

David Hunt, a 64-year-old retired construction and warehouse worker from Glendale, said he cast his vote Tuesday for Lesko because he believed that immigrants in the country illegally are creating unfair competition for jobs for recent high school students in Arizona. 

“She’s the best candidate to deal with the porous border,” Hunt said. 

His views were echoed by Larry Bettis, a retiree from Glendale. 

“Immigration – the fence,” Bettis said. “That’s all I really care about.” 

Democrats said they wanted to send a message to Trump and supported Democratic health care plans. 

“I don’t like the president and felt it was time to take a stand,” said Nikole Allen, a 45-year-old medical assistant from New York now living in Glendale. “It’s time for us to vote the Republicans out.” 

Lance Ostrander, a registered Democrat who works for Maricopa County and lives in Peoria, said he’d be happy if Tipirneni wins. 

“We’d really like a change,” he said. “Trump had a lot of good ideas at first but a lot of people feel like they were hoodwinked.”
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A U.S. federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to keep in place deportation protection for 700,000 young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers.”

In a sharp rebuke to President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, District Judge John Bates also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to accept new applicants to the program.

The 2012 policy enacted under former President Barack Obama allowed undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as minors, were enrolled in or completed high school and did not have a serious criminal record to live and work in the country for two-year renewable periods without the fear of deportation.

DHS rescinded the program in 2017, arguing the prior administration lacked the legal authority to create it. 

Trump gave lawmakers a March deadline for coming up with a permanent fix for DACA recipients, but the Republican-led Congress has not acted. Several federal courts have also ruled existing DACA protections must remain in place while the overall legal challenges continue.

Judge Bates wrote in the Tuesday decision that the DHS decision to rescind DACA was “arbitrary and capricious because the department failed to adequately explain its conclusion that the program is unlawful.”

He put his ruling on hold for 90 days to give the department a chance to “better explain its rescission decision.”

There was no immediate response from the Trump administration.
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