The attorney general of the U.S. state of New York resigned late Monday after four women accused him of physical abuse.

Democrat Eric Schneiderman had been in office since 2010 and was running for re-election.

The New Yorker magazine published an article Monday with the accounts of the four women who said Schneiderman subjected them to non-consensual physical violence during romantic encounters.

Schneiderman issued several statements denying he assaulted anyone or took part in non-consensual sex. His resignation announcement said the allegations will effectively prevent him from carrying out his office’s work.

He has been a vocal proponent of the #MeToo movement against sexual assault and harassment, including filing a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein, one of the many high-profile men in politics, entertainment and business accused of assaulting women.
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Ahead of her confirmation hearing Wednesday, the White House is defending acting Central Intelligence Agency director Gina Haspel as the best person for the job.

“She is 100 percent committed to going through this confirmation process and being confirmed as the next leader of the CIA,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Monday. 

The 61-year-old veteran agency operative offered to withdraw from consideration for the permanent position amid concerns about her involvement in previous harsh interrogation programs, but President Donald Trump — according to administration officials — has encouraged her to hold firm.

“She wants to do everything she can to make sure the integrity of the CIA remains intact, isn’t unnecessarily attacked. And if she felt that her nomination would have been a problem for that and for the agency, then she wanted to do what she could to protect the agency,” explained Sanders. 

The CIA on Monday delivered “a set of classified documents to the Senate today so that every senator could review acting director Haspel’s actual and outstanding record,” according to an agency spokesperson. “These documents cover the entirety of her career, including her time in the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center in the years after 9/11. We encourage every senator to take the time to read the entire set of documents.”

White House officials reportedly quickly went to see Haspel at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, last Friday to convince her not to withdraw from consideration. 

Trump on Monday asserted Haspel “has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists.”

Trump tweeted: “Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!” Trump said.

Tuesday morning the president reiterated his support in another tweet.

Haspel will appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a partly open hearing on Wednesday. If confirmed, she would be the first woman to lead the agency, which was created by President Harry Truman in 1947. She will succeed Mike Pompeo, who was recently confirmed as Secretary of State. 

A 33-year veteran of the intelligence agency, Haspel previously ran CIA posts in four different countries and studied Russian and Turkish during her career. Most of the specifics of her background, including in which specific countries she operated undercover over the years, remain classified. 

Thailand detention center

Civil libertarians, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and many Democrats said Haspel should be disqualified because among the known items on her resume is supervision of a secret CIA detention center in Thailand. In 2002, two Islamic terror suspects were waterboarded there — a practice that simulates drowning and critics call torture.

Haspel authored a cable three years later calling for the destruction of nearly 100 videotapes of the waterboarding (now an illegal practice) and other interrogations. 

The ACLU is calling for senators to demand that her “torture records” be declassified. 

One Republican senator, Rand Paul, who is from Haspel’s home state of Kentucky, also opposes her nomination because of her involvement in the waterboarding of detainees and has vowed to block her confirmation. 

Another Republican, Sen. Tom Cotton of the state of Arkansas, declares opposing Haspel’s nomination for political reasons “puts our national security at risk.” 

Haspel has been meeting with senators ahead of her hearing and has reportedly assured them, if confirmed, she would oppose a revival of brutal interrogation techniques. That is something she is expected to explicitly declare during Wednesday’s hearing. 

“Through the confirmation process, the American public will get to know her for the first time. When they do, we are confident America will be proud to have the deputy director as the next CIA director,” a CIA spokesperson told VOA. “She’s a tested and respected leader who will lead consistent with our mission, expertise, values, and the law.”

VOA’s Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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A group of advocacy organizations plans to sue the Department of Housing and Urban Development and its secretary, Ben Carson, over his decision to delay an Obama-era rule intended to ensure that communities confront and address racial segregation.

A draft of the lawsuit argues that Carson illegally suspended the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act when he abruptly announced earlier this year that cities and counties receiving federal funds won’t be required to analyze housing data and submit plans to HUD for addressing segregation until after 2020.

The lawsuit was expected to be filed Tuesday by the National Fair Housing Alliance, Texas Appleseed and Texas Low Income Housing Information Service. HUD did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday.

Finalized in 2015, the rule for the first time required more than 1,200 jurisdictions receiving HUD block grants and housing aid to analyze its housing stock and come up with a plan for addressing patterns of segregation and discrimination. If HUD determined that the plan, called a Fair Housing Assessment, wasn’t sufficient, the city or county would have to rework it or risk losing funding. 

HUD said in January that it would immediately stop reviewing plans that had been submitted but not yet accepted, and that jurisdictions won’t have to comply with the rule until after 2020. The agency said the postponement was in response to complaints from communities that had struggled to complete assessments and produce plans meeting HUD’s standards; of the 49 submissions HUD received in 2017, roughly a third were sent back.

“What we heard convinced us that the Assessment of Fair Housing tool for local governments wasn’t working well,” HUD said in a statement. “In fact, more than a third of our early submitters failed to produce an acceptable assessment-not for lack of trying but because the tool designed to help them to succeed wasn’t helpful.”

Carson in an editorial in 2015 criticized the rule as being a form of “social engineering.”

But a draft of the suit says the fact that submissions are failing to meet the requirements “reaffirms, rather than calls into question, why HUD thought the rule necessary.”

Attorney Michael Allen said Carson’s action “tells every opponent of integration, every opponent of affordable housing and good neighborhoods, whether they’re individuals or elected officials or local governments, that nobody will put pressure on them at the HUD level for the foreseeable future.”

He said, “That means they’ll keep doing what they’re doing, which is perpetuating segregation.”

A federal judge late last year blocked Carson from suspending another Obama-era regulation intended to more accurately estimate appropriate dollar amounts for housing vouchers by basing them on ZIP codes rather than on metropolitan areas.

The plaintiffs are hoping a judge will make a similar finding in this case.

“The rule that was put into place was adopted after careful thought and consideration, and expensive input from the public, and time after time we are seeing this administration violate the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, whose firm is involved in the suit. “Secretary Ben Carson is abdicating his responsibility to fulfill HUD’s mission.”

Claudia Monterrosa, director of public policy and planning at the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department, said that although the process proved to be a tremendous amount of work, it was immeasurably valuable for the city’s progress.

“The biggest takeaway for our city is, we had a chance to have an honest conversation about race, poverty concentration and investment, addressing the affordable housing crisis through a fair housing lens,” Monterrosa said. HUD suspended the rule one day before Los Angeles expected its plan to be approved, she said.

Paul Chrystie, a spokesman for Philadelphia’s Division of Housing and Community Development, said the city’s examination of segregation extended far beyond housing to include its education and transportation systems. “It helped us think outside of our bubble,” he said.

Among the plans HUD sent back was one from Hidalgo County, Texas. Historically, the county has ignored the needs of poor communities living in colonias, rural communities within the U.S.-Mexico border region that lack basic infrastructure such as electricity and running water. 

With the suspension of the rule, Hidalgo County is no longer required to continue working on its plan.

“We’re reverting to where we were before,” said Christina Rosales, communications director for the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“It’s using federal dollars to further segregation,” she said, “to encouraging two separate and unequal societies.”
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With the midterm primaries about to go into full swing, the Department of Homeland Security is playing catch-up in helping to ensure that state election systems are secure against cyber-tampering by the Russians or others bent on mischief.

The department says it has completed on-site risk assessments of election systems in just nine of 17 states that have formally requested them so far. It has pledged to do so by November for every state that asks.

The security reviews are designed to identify any weaknesses that could be exploited by hackers.

Homeland Security officials attribute the backlog to increased demand for such reviews since the 2016 presidential election. They say they are devoting more money and shifting resources to reduce wait times.

The security reviews typically take two weeks each.

 
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Right after Republicans in the U.S. Senate passed their income tax overhaul in December, delivering tax cuts to businesses and most American taxpayers, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was buoyant.

Surrounded by jubilant fellow Republicans, he told reporters, “If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work.”

Four months later, McConnell’s attempt at levity could prove prophetic.

The most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the tightest congressional races in the November elections are talking less and less about the tax cuts on Twitter and Facebook, on their campaign and congressional websites and in digital ads, the vital tools of a modern election campaign, a Reuters analysis of their online utterances shows.

All told, the number of tax messages has fallen by 44 percent since January. For several congressmen in tough reelection fights, Steve Knight in California, Jason Lewis in Minnesota, and Don Bacon in Nebraska, messaging is down much more – as much as 72 percent.

Right after the tax law passed, lawmakers piggybacked on a surge of corporate announcements of tax-cut fueled bonuses to employees, wage hikes and job creation plans to tout the benefits of the bill to voters.

As those corporate announcements trailed off in March and

April, so did Republican politicians’ messages about tax relief, the Reuters review found. With the exception of a flurry of news releases on or around April 17, when federal tax returns were due, few incumbents kept up the pace. The Reuters review did not capture candidates’ email, direct mail or private conversations with donors or voters or stump speeches.

Most of the 13 Republican incumbents in the most competitive reelection bids, and their aides, declined to answer Reuters’ questions on why they were communicating less online about the tax cuts. But a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from March 14 to 29 found that just 3 percent of American adults were aware of receiving a material benefit from the Republican legislation.

Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, said that is why his party’s candidates need to energize voters by talking about other issues, too, like restricting immigration and stopping Democrats from taking control of the House of Representatives so that they cannot impeach President Donald Trump.

Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, acknowledged there “has been a downtick in what voters are hearing from members and businesses on the tax reform front.” He said it was because lawmakers had moved on to other issues.

“Candidates and members need to make sure that they stay focused on what is our signature achievement in this Congress,” Hunt said.

Five of the 13 candidates who did respond to Reuters said they do talk regularly to voters at events.

The Republican tax law sharply cut the corporate tax rate, encouraged corporations to repatriate overseas income at lower rates, and at least temporarily, cut taxes for the wealthy and most other Americans. Many of the benefits to individuals won’t become obvious until they file their tax returns in early 2019, and that is long after the congressional elections.

Koch spending

The election cycle is still in its early stage, so the volume of talk on the tax overhaul could always increase. And even if politicians are reluctant to tout it, conservative financial supporters are showing an eagerness to fill the gap.

Billionaires Charles and David Koch are spending $20 million to promote the benefits of the tax cuts in battleground states with digital ads and even door-to-door canvassing.

Some polling results suggest that taxes are not the burning issue for voters that Republicans hoped they would be. A Quinnipiac University poll released in March said only 8 percent of voters thought taxes was the most important issue in deciding how to vote in the congressional elections. It was fifth, behind healthcare, the economy, gun policy and immigration.

It is also harder for Republicans to talk about lower taxes in states with high local taxes like New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. That also happens to be where 10 of the 17 most competitive congressional races are.

Many taxpayers in those states will pay more in federal taxes because the new law reduces the deduction for state and local tax payments. About one in four Americans expect their state and local income taxes to rise because of the Republican

tax law, while only 11 percent expect them to fall, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

What they do say

Barbara Comstock, locked in a tight race for reelection in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, says she talks about the tax overhaul at campaign events.

The Reuters analysis shows that though she mentioned the benefits of the tax cuts 36 times in January in social media, she did so only 13 times in March and then 22 times in April.

She said in an interview that she is reacting to constituents, whose interests have moved on to other issues.

Don Bacon, of Nebraska’s 2nd district, sees economic growth, and the threats posed by North Korea and Islamic State as the election-winning issues for Republicans. “Taxes will be one of the pillars of our campaign, but more indirectly. In the end, it’s going to be about an economy that’s growing.”

Republican Mike Coffman, whose reelection prospects are rated a toss-up in his Denver-area congressional district, has not been visible at all on taxes via social media. But his campaign spokesman, Tyler Sandberg, said Coffman talks about tax cuts regularly with supporters via email and with small business owners.

When they do talk about taxes, Republican candidates prefer to talk about the tax law in the context of how it is really a form of financial assistance to help families cope with college tuition, buy new cars, make mortgage payments, or even pay for summer camp.

Democrats, meanwhile, are attacking the new tax law as a boon for corporations and the wealthy that will add $1.5 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade.

They received some unexpected help from Republican Senator Marco Rubio last week. Rubio, who is not facing re-election this cycle, told the Economist magazine that benefits are going to corporations instead of employees.

“They bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker,” he said.

Despite that criticism, some Republican incumbents are still making a determined effort to sell voters on the merits of the new tax law.

Dean Heller, 2018’s most vulnerable Republican senator, has been far and away the most aggressive on tax messaging. He has sent out 380 messages in the first four months of the year, or almost one-third of a total 1,287 messages.

But even his communications have dropped by 44 percent since the end of January. “Let me be very clear, our campaign moving forward will be based on lower taxes and less regulation,” Heller said in an interview. “The trend you’ve seen in the first quarter of this year, I assure you, is not going to be the trend over the next six months.”
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Chelsea Manning is no longer living as a transgender woman in a male military prison, serving the lengthiest sentence ever for revealing U.S. government secrets. She’s free to grow out her hair, travel the world, and spend time with whomever she likes.

But a year since former president Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence, America’s most famous convicted leaker isn’t taking an extended vacation. Far from it: The Oklahoma native has decided to make an unlikely bid for the U.S. Senate in her adopted state of Maryland.

Manning, 30, filed to run in January and has been registered to vote in Maryland since August. She lives in North Bethesda, not far from where she stayed with an aunt while awaiting trial. Her aim is to unseat Sen. Ben Cardin, a 74-year-old Maryland Democrat who is seeking his third Senate term and previously served 10 terms in the U.S. House.

 Manning, who also has become an internationally recognized transgender activist, said she’s motivated by a desire to fight what she sees as a shadowy surveillance state and a rising tide of nightmarish repression.

“The rise of authoritarianism is encroaching in every aspect of life, whether it’s government or corporate or technological,” Manning told The Associated Press during an interview at her home in an upscale apartment tower. On the walls of her barely furnished living room hang Obama’s commutation order, and photos of U.S. anarchist Emma Goldman and British playwright Oscar Wilde.

Manning’s longshot campaign for the June 26 primary would appear to be one of the more unorthodox U.S. Senate bids in recent memory, and the candidate is operating well outside the party’s playbook. She says she doesn’t, in fact, even consider herself a Democrat, but is motivated by a desire to shake up establishment Democrats who are “caving in” to President Donald Trump’s administration. She vows she won’t run as an independent if her primary bid fails.

Unconventional platform

She’s certainly got an eye-catching platform: Close prisons and free inmates; eliminate national borders; restructure the criminal justice system; provide universal health care and basic income. The top of her agenda? Abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency created in 2003 that Manning asserts is preparing for an “ethnic cleansing.”

Manning ticks off life experiences she believes would make her an effective senator: a stint being homeless in Chicago, her wartime experiences as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq – even her seven years in prison. She asserts she’s got a “bigger vision” than establishment politicians.

But political analysts suspect the convicted felon is not running to win.

“Manning is running as a protest candidate, which has a long lineage in American history, to shine light on American empire,” said Daniel Schlozman, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “That’s a very different goal, with a very different campaign, than if she wanted to beat Ben Cardin.”

Manning’s insurgent candidacy thus far has been a decidedly stripped-down affair, with few appearances and a campaign website that just went up.  In recent days, she approached an anti-fracking rally in Baltimore almost furtively, keeping to herself for much of the demonstration. But when it was her turn to address the small group, her celebrity status was evident. People who never met her called her by her first name and eagerly took photos.

Manning has acknowledged leaking more than 700,000 military and State Department documents to anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks in 2010. She said her motivation was a desire to spark debate about U.S. foreign policy, and she has been portrayed as both a hero and a traitor.

Known as Bradley Manning at the time of her arrest, she came out as transgender after her 2013 court-martial. She was barred from growing her hair long in prison, and was approved for hormone therapy only after litigation. She spent long stints in solitary confinement, and twice tried to kill herself.

The Pentagon, which has repeatedly declined to discuss Manning’s treatment in military prison, is also staying mum about her political ambitions. Democratic Party officials say they have no comment, citing a policy not to weigh in on primaries. Republican operatives are quiet.

Critics don’t see serious effort

In Maryland, a blue state that’s home to tens of thousands of federal employees and defense contractors, it appears Manning’s main supporters are independents or anti-politics, making them unlikely to coalesce politically. She recently reported contributions of $72,000 on this year’s first quarterly finance statement, compared with Cardin’s $336,000.

The candidate has barely made an effort at tapping sources of grassroots enthusiasm outside of activism circles. And it’s easy to find Democrats who feel her candidacy is just a vehicle to boost her profile.

“It feels to me almost like it’s part of a book tour – that this is her moment after being released from prison,” said Dana Beyer, a transgender woman who leads the Gender Rights Maryland nonprofit and is a Democratic candidate for state senate. “I don’t think this is a serious effort.”

Manning is indeed working on a book about her dramatic life. For now, she says she supports herself with income from speaking engagements. She’s spoken at various U.S. colleges and is due to take the stage at a Montreal conference later this month.

Last week, she appeared at a tech conference in Germany’s capital of Berlin, arriving to cheers from the audience of several thousand people. She told attendees she’s still struggling to adjust to life after prison and hasn’t gotten used to her celebrity status yet.

“There’s been a kind of cult of personality that is really intimidating and that is overwhelming for me,” she said in Berlin.

At her Maryland apartment, Manning told the AP she occasionally wakes up panicked that she’s back in the cage in Kuwait where she was first jailed, or incarcerated at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, where a U.N. official concluded she’d been subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” She works hard to overcome anxiety, centering herself with yoga, breathing exercises, and reading.

“I’ve been out for almost a year now and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me just how deep the wounds are,” she said in her Spartan living room.

Asked how she would define success, Manning responded with passionate intensity: “Success for me is survival.”

 
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America’s latest jobs report suggests the country’s longest-ever economic expansion is continuing at a moderate, but steady pace. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, President Donald Trump is trumpeting U.S. economic performance as Washington looks ahead to November midterm elections in which Republicans will be defending majorities in both houses of Congress.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s new lawyer asserted Sunday that the president does not have to comply with a subpoena involving the burgeoning Russia investigation stemming from the 2016 election and might invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination if he is forced to testify.

“We don’t have to” honor a subpoena, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who recently joined Trump’s legal team, told ABC’s Sunday news program “This Week.”

 He added, “He’s the president of the United States. We can assert the same privileges other presidents have.”

Trump often has said he would like to sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of lawyers, if he is “treated fairly,” as he said Friday. But Giuliani said there was no guarantee that Trump would answer questions and could instead assert his 5th Amendment right against incriminating himself.

“How could I ever be confident of that?” Giuliani said of the certainty of Trump answering questions. Giuliani voiced opposition to the prospect of Trump, often given to exaggerations or falsehoods, testifying about his campaign’s links to Russia and whether he obstructed justice by trying to thwart the investigation.

To allow his testimony, Giuliani said, “I’m going to walk him right into a prosecution for perjury like Martha Stewart,” the U.S. lifestyle maven sent to prison in 2004 for lying about a stock trade she made.

Giuliani said an agreement for Trump to testify could still be worked out with Mueller, but only if Trump is told the questions in advance and that his questioning was not under oath, conditions to which most U.S. prosecutors would not agree.

Mueller has suggested he could subpoena Trump to testify under oath before a grand jury if a voluntary agreement for his testimony is not reached.

If Trump rejects the subpoena, his lawyers could contest the demand for Trump to appear before a grand jury, with the case possibly and ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. U.S. legal precedent generally holds that no individual, including presidents, are above the law.

Giuliani said of Mueller’s investigators, “They don’t have a case on collusion. They don’t have a case on obstruction.”

ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos questioned Giuliani at length about a $130,000 reimbursement Trump made to another of his attorneys, Michael Cohen, who said he paid the money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the election to keep her quiet about her claim she had a 2006 one-night affair with Trump at a Nevada hotel. Trump said the purported liaison did not occur.

Giuliani said the timing of the hush money paid to 39-year-old Daniels could have been related to the election, but that the payment was made chiefly because her accusations about the affair with Trump were “embarrassing to him and his wife,” now first lady Melania Trump.

Giuliani rejected the view of some Trump critics that the money amounted to an illegal campaign donation, made just weeks ahead of the Nov. 8, 2016, election, because its size was significantly bigger than the $2,700 limit individuals like Cohen can donate to candidates.

“It was not a campaign donation,” Giuliani contended, adding that “eventually, it was entirely reimbursed out of personal funds.”

Later on the same ABC show, Michael Avenatti, Daniels’ attorney, said, “No question, this had everything to do with the election.”

In April, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he did not know anything about the payment, although a New York Times report Friday said he knew of it months before.

Giuliani said, “I don’t know when the president learned about it. It could have been recently. It could have been a while back.”

In any event, Giuliani said that for a billionaire like Trump, the $130,000 was “not a great deal of money” and that Cohen made the payment without consulting ahead of time with Trump.

Giuliani said, ” I wouldn’t go and bother him two weeks before the election.” He said Cohen had a fund “to take care of situations like this … if it were necessary, yes.”

Giuliani said he knew of no other women linked to Trump who were paid by Cohen to keep quiet about their relations with the future president.

But former Playboy model Karen McDougal said she was paid $150,000 through the parent company of a tabloid newspaper to not talk about what she has said was a 10-month affair with Trump that allegedly started at the same celebrity golf tournament where Daniels said she met Trump. The president has also denied McDougal’s claims.

 
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