The special counsel investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia took a dramatic turn Monday with criminal indictments of two former Trump campaign officials, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Special Counsel Robert Mueller also revealed that a former Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in connection with the Russia probe. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
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The indictment against Donald Trump’s former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, and a longtime business associate alleged the two carried out an elaborate scheme that involved the use of a little-known outfit to mask years of lobbying on behalf of Ukraine’s former president, his pro-Russia political party, and the Ukrainian government. 

Manafort and his former business partner, Rick Gates, are charged in a 12-count indictment including conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements. The two could faces decades in prison if convicted, and both have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The allegations do not include collusion with Russia during the presidential campaign.

The indictment was approved by a federal grand jury on Friday and unsealed after Manafort and his right-hand man and former Trump campaign adviser, Gates, turned themselves in to the FBI. It represents the first charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Manafort’s consulting work for Ukraine started in 2006 when the Republican political strategist was retained by Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions to “advance its interests” in Ukraine. In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, the party’s candidate, was elected president. Four years later, he fled to Russia following popular protests.   

Eight-year lobbying campaign

The indictment alleges that during the eight-year period, Manafort and Gates “engaged in a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign” in the U.S. on behalf of Yanukovych, the Party of Regions, and the Ukrainian government. The two hid their activities from U.S. authorities and used offshore accounts to launder millions of dollars in Ukrainian payments.  

As part of their effort to mask their lobbying from U.S. authorities, the pair used a little-known outfit called the European Center for Modern Ukraine. The Brussels-based outfit called itself “an advocate for enhancing EU-Ukrainian relations” but in reality served as “a mouthpiece” for Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, according to the indictment. Manafort and Gates used the nonprofit to carry out lobbying and public relations campaigns, according to court records.

Manafort and Gates then hired two Washington, D.C., firms to lobby members of Congress about Ukrainian sanctions, the “validity” of Ukraine elections, and the “propriety” of Yanukovych’s imprisonment of his political rival, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. 

“Manafort and Gates did so without registering and providing the disclosures required by law,” the indictment alleges.

The two lobbying firms are Podesta Group Inc. and Mercury LLC, the Associated Press reported last year.  The Podesta Group is headed by Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, who was campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton. Politico reported on Monday that Tony Podesta was stepping down from the firm.

To conceal the lobbying effort, Manafort and Gates allegedly arranged for the two lobbying firms to be ostensibly working for the European Center for Modern Ukraine, which in fact was “under the ultimate direction” of Yanukovych, the Ukrainian government and the Party of the Regions, according to the indictment.

Manafort and Gates are also accused of using their offshore accounts to secretly pay $4 million for a report about Tymoshenko’s trial commissioned by the Ukrainian government.

Ties to Trump

Manafort and Gates joined the Trump campaign in March 2006. Gates was later promoted as deputy campaign manager and Manafort served as campaign chairman. He was fired in August after reports of his lobbying for pro-Russia interests in Ukraine.

The Department of Justice began looking into Manafort’s and Gates’ lobbying for Ukraine last year. The indictment says the two partners told investigators in 2016 that they merely “provided an introduction” between the Brussels center and the Washington lobbying firms, and that their efforts “did not include meetings and outreach within the United States.”

In fact, according to the indictment, Manafort and Gates were deeply involved in the scheme. They had weekly phone calls and email communications with officials of the two companies, directed them on “specific lobbying steps,” received regular reports from them, and updated Yanukovych about the lobbying activities. For their efforts between 2012 and 2014, the firms were paid $2 million. 

Charges

The charges against Manafort and Gates include conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, failure to report foreign bank holdings to the U.S. Treasury Department, lobbying for a foreign government without registering with the Justice Department, and making false statements about their lobbying efforts.

Manafort and Gates are accused of serving as unregistered foreign agents of Ukrainian interests in violation of Department of Justice registration requirements.

Between them, Manafort and Gates controlled 17 domestic entities, 12 Cyprus-based entities and 3 other foreign entities, according to the indictment. In all, $75 million passed through the offshore accounts. Manafort is alleged to have laundered more than $18 million. Gates is accused of laundering more than $3 million from offshore accounts.
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Washington braced Monday for the potential unsealing of the first criminal charges linked to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as President Donald Trump reiterated his stance that the underlying investigations are a “witch hunt.”

A federal grand jury on Friday approved charges in the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to several major news outlets that reported the indictment could be made public as soon as Monday.

There was no public indication of who is facing charges or what crimes are being alleged. Legal experts say the first charges could be against a peripheral figure in the case, with prosecutors using a common strategy to first build their case against lower level officials before focusing on more prominent people.

In addition to Mueller’s investigation, there are separate congressional probes into Russian meddling and possible links between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in early 2017 that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed a campaign to undermine U.S. democracy and help Trump win

Trump has insisted there was no collusion, including in a series of tweets Sunday in which he said Democrats and his election opponent Hillary Clinton are the ones who are guilty.

“The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s [Republicans] are now fighting back like never before,” Trump wrote. “There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!”

He further blamed the Russia investigations for taking attention away from Republican efforts on tax reform.

“Is this coincidental? NOT!” Trump said.

Ty Cobb, a member of Trump’s legal team, said in a statement that Trump’s comments were not related to the developments in Mueller’s investigation.

“Contrary to what many have suggested, the President’s comments today are unrelated to the activities of the Special Counsel, with whom he continues to cooperate,” Cobb said.

Mueller is believed to be examining activities of two key Trump campaign officials, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired by Trump less than a month after he took office for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to Washington, and Paul Manafort, who for a short time last year was Trump’s campaign manager and also had wide lobbying interests in Ukraine and links to Russia.
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President Donald Trump’s plan for overhauling the U.S. tax system faced growing opposition from interest groups on Sunday, as Republicans prepare to unveil sweeping legislation that could eliminate some of the most popular tax breaks to help pay for lower taxes.

Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives will not reveal their bill until Wednesday. But the National Association of Home Builders, a powerful housing industry trade group, is already vowing to defeat it over a change for home mortgage deductions, while Republican leaders try to head off opposition to possible changes to individual retirement savings and state and local tax payments.

Trump and Republicans have vowed to enact tax reform this year for the first time since 1986. But the plan to deliver up to $6 trillion in tax cuts for businesses and individuals faces challenges even from rank-and-file House Republicans.

House and Senate Republicans are on a fast-track to pass separate tax bills before the Nov. 23 U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, iron out differences in December, send a final version to Trump’s desk before January and ultimately hand the president his first major legislative victory. Analysts say there is a good chance the tax overhaul will be delayed until next year.

The NAHB, which boasts 130,000 member firms employing 9 million workers, says the bill would harm U.S. home prices by marginalizing the value of mortgage interest deductions as an incentive for buying homes. The trade group wants legislation to offer a $5,500 tax credit but says it was rebuffed by House Republican leaders.

“We’re opposed to the tax bill without the tax credit in there, and we’ll be working very aggressively to see it defeated,” NAHB chief executive Jerry Howard told Reuters.

Republicans warned that the Trump tax plan is entering a new and difficult phase as lobbyists ramp up pressure on lawmakers to spare their pet tax breaks.

“When groups start rallying against things and they succeed, everything starts unraveling,” Senator Bob Corker, a leading Republican fiscal hawk, told CBS’ Face the Nation.

Anxiety in high-tax states

One of the biggest challenges involves a proposal to eliminate the federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), which analysts say would hit upper middle-class families in high income tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. The states are home to enough House Republicans to stymie legislation.

The top House Republican on tax policy gave ground over the weekend, saying he would allow a deduction for some local taxes to remain.

“We are restoring an itemized property tax deduction to help taxpayers with local tax burdens,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady said in a statement.

But the gesture appeared to do little to turn the tide of opposition to SALT’s elimination.

“I’m not going to sign onto anything until the full package is fully analyzed by economists,” Representative Peter King of New York told the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures. “The fact that we’re getting it at the eleventh hour raises real issues with me,” he added.

A lobby coalition representing state and local governments, realtors and public unions rejected Brady’s statement outright, saying the move would “unfairly penalize taxpayers in states that rely significantly on income taxes.”

House Republicans have also faced opposition from Trump and others after proposing to sharply curtail tax-free contributions to 401(k) programs and move retirement savings to a style of account that allows tax-free withdrawals, rather than the tax-exempt contributions that are popular with 401(k) investors.

House Republicans now say they could permit higher 401(k) contribution limits but continue to talk about tax-free withdrawals. “We will expand the amount that you can invest. But we’ll also give you an option to actually not be taxed later in life,” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy told Fox News.

The current cap on annual 401(k) tax-free contributions is $18,000.

Corker said congressional tax committees seem to be falling short of their goal to eliminate $4 trillion in tax breaks to prevent the Trump plan from adding to the federal deficit.

“They’re having great difficulty just getting to $3.6 trillion,” said the Tennessee Republican, who has vowed to vote against tax reform if it increases a federal debt load that stands at more than $20 trillion.

Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, told Fox News Sunday that spending on entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should also be reviewed as part of the effort to pay for tax cuts.

“It may be separate from the tax bill, but it needs to happen,” Kasich said.
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Washington is abuzz over news reports a grand jury has approved the first charges stemming from the special counsel’s probe of Russian meddling in last year’s U.S. election. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, the exact charges and who stands accused of wrongdoing could be revealed at any moment.
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The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, The Associated Press has learned, abandoning the Obama administration’s policy of fully erasing that debt.

Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by now-defunct for-profit schools had more than $550 million in such loans canceled completely.

But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is working on a plan that could grant such students only partial relief, according to department officials who were not authorized to publicly comment on the issue and spoke on condition of anonymity. The department may look at the average earnings of students in similar programs and schools to determine how much debt to wipe away.

Hints of new approach

If DeVos goes ahead, the change could leave many students scrambling after expecting full loan forgiveness, based on the previous administration’s track record. It was not immediately clear how many students might be affected.

A department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

But the Trump team has given hints of a new approach.

In August, the department extended its contract with a staffing agency to speed up the processing of a backlog of loan forgiveness claims. In the procurement notice, the department said that “policy changes may necessitate certain claims already processed be revisited to assess other attributes.” The department would not further clarify the meaning of that notice.

Advocates: unjustified, unfair

DeVos’ review prompted an outcry from student loan advocates, who said the idea of giving defrauded students only partial loan relief was unjustified and unfair because many of their classmates had already gotten full loan cancellation. Critics say the Trump administration, which has ties to the for-profit sector, is looking out for industry interests.

Earlier this year, Trump paid $25 million to settle charges his Trump University misled students.

“Anything other than full cancellation is not a valid outcome,” said Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented hundreds of defrauded students of the now-shuttered Corinthian Colleges. “The nature of the wrong that was done to them, the harm is even bigger than the loans that they have.”

“Even more importantly, it is completely unfair that a happenstance of timing is going to mean that one student who’s been defrauded is going to have full cancellation and the next is not,” Connor said.

1990s regulation

A federal regulation known as borrower defense allows students at for-profit colleges and other vocational programs to have their loans forgiven if it is determined that the students were defrauded by the schools. That rule dates to the early 1990s. But it was little used until the demise of Corinthian and ITT for-profit chains in recent years caused tens of thousands of students to request that the government cancel their loans.

In the last few months of the Obama administration, the Education Department updated the rule to add protections for students, shift more financial responsibility onto the schools and prevent schools from having students sign away their right to sue a school.

That change was set to take effect in July, but DeVos has frozen it and is working on a new version. She argued that the Obama regulation was too broad and could cancel the loans of some students without a sound basis.

65,000 claims waiting

DeVos has come under criticism for delaying consideration of more than 65,000 applications for loan forgiveness under the borrower defense rule. The agency hasn’t approved a single claim since DeVos took office in February.

Jennifer Wang, an expert with the Institute of College Access and Success, said the Obama administration was providing full loan cancellations to students.

“It would be totally different from what was happening under the last administration,” Wang said. “It’s not equitable; it’s not fair for students. If she provides partial relief, it’s that she only cares what’s fair for schools and not students.”

Abby Shafroth, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said the agency could be faced with lawsuits, especially from Corinthian students, whose classmates had received full forgiveness.
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It was one of Donald Trump’s very first actions as president: pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a free-trade deal he said was hurting the American worker.

The TPP was one of the centerpieces of former President Barack Obama’s so-called Asia “pivot,” an economic, political and military realignment toward a region seen as key to America’s future.

Nine months into his presidency, Trump’s decision to abandon the TPP remains perhaps the clearest evidence yet he intends to ditch the Asia pivot, or perhaps pivot there in his own way.

U.S. officials have not said whether they will unveil a similar, definitive policy to replace the pivot. But signs of a broader strategy could emerge next week when Trump leaves on his first trip to Asia as president.

WATCH: Asia Awaits Trump’s Regional Policy

Trump skipping regional summit

The trip will include stops in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. But it’s where Trump has chosen not to go that has attracted the headlines.

Though Trump is attending the ASEAN multilateral summit in the Philippines, reports have suggested he will head home a day before the annual East Asia Summit, a regional meeting that focuses on Southeast Asia.

The move risks sending the message that Southeast Asia is not a priority for Trump, said Abraham Denmark, a former top East Asia official at the Pentagon.

“The region will see that China is there, and the United States isn’t. And that will send a very stark message,” said Denmark, who is now at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington.

It isn’t the first time that a U.S. president has skipped the summit. Obama also stayed home in 2013 to deal with domestic budget negotiations that resulted in a government shutdown.

Then, too, the move sparked controversy.

Asian diplomats and heads of state talked about Obama’s absence in private circles for years, said Harry Kazianis, who focuses on Asia at the Center for the National Interest.

“Missing one conference doesn’t mean that America is leaving the Asia-Pacific or that China is outpacing us or anything like that. But it’s an extremely big deal, and they’re not going to forget it,” Kazianis said.

​Regional influence

The move could add to concerns the U.S. is ceding regional influence to China, which intensified after Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord as well as the TPP.

The TPP decision in particular sent shockwaves throughout Asia and threatened to fundamentally reshape the U.S. economic relationship with the region.

“You can make positive and negative arguments for the TPP — it was not a net-jobs creator for the U.S. — but it had great strategic value for the U.S.,” Kazianis said. “It was a marker. America was going to be there no matter what. That’s lost, and the Trump administration hasn’t found a formula to replace that.”

Adding to the uncertainty, Trump has also threatened to pull out of the free-trade agreement with South Korea, a longstanding economic and diplomatic partner of Washington.

​North Korea

But much of Trump’s Asia tour is expected to focus on North Korea, which has dominated the bulk of U.S. foreign policy bandwidth during his first year in office.

Trump hopes to put more pressure on China, in particular, to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to make concessions on his nuclear and missile programs.

Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if necessary to defend the U.S. and its allies, at times matching the inflammatory rhetoric typically only seen from the North.

During Trump’s trip, Asian diplomats are likely to try to convince the U.S. leader of the need to pursue diplomacy and reduce the level of rhetoric, said Michael Fuchs, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

“War with North Korea is their worst nightmare,” Fuchs said.

But Trump will have plenty of time during the 12-day trip to lay out other priorities, and that can’t come a moment too soon for many.

“What our partners in Asia are looking for is not whether the Obama policy will continue,” Denmark said. “They’re looking for what is the Trump policy, what is America’s policy now.”
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For much of President Barack Obama’s presidency, U.S. officials touted the so-called “Asia Pivot,” an economic, political and military realignment toward a region seen as key to America’s future. Nine months into the Trump administration, U.S. officials are taking a different approach to Asia. And, as VOA’s Bill Gallo reports, some are concerned the White House is signaling a lack of commitment to the region.
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A U.S. federal grand jury has approved the first charges in an investigation of Russian influence on U.S. elections, according to several major news outlets.

The grand jury’s action, resulting from the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller, was first reported by CNN on Friday evening. It quoted sources as saying anyone who was charged could be taken into custody as soon as Monday. The exact charges were unclear.

Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News subsequently issued similar reports. All the reports were attributed to unnamed sources.

President Donald Trump on Saturday visited his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. He sent three tweets but they did not refer to the reports.

On Friday evening, the president did post a social media message linking to a New York Post story headlined: How Team Hillary played the press for fools on Russia.

White House officials have not commented on the president’s activities Saturday, but he was seen by VOA News exiting the north portico of the residence, clad in slacks, a windbreaker, what appeared to be white golf shoes and a baseball cap before entering a black vehicle for the 40-minute ride in the presidential motorcade to his private club along the Potomac River.

CNN said lawyers working on Mueller’s team were seen entering the federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Friday, where the grand jury meets to hear testimony.

Mueller has kept a tight lid on information about the probe, and a spokesman for Mueller’s office declined requests for comment on the media reports about the indictment.

Working since May

Mueller was appointed special counsel in May, shortly after the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, to look into allegations that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia to win the election. He is also examining the possibility that the president may have tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.

The probe also is examining possible financial ties between Russian businesses and members of the Trump campaign, and foreign lobbying conducted by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In addition to Mueller’s probe, three congressional committees are conducting their own investigations into possible Russian influence on the election.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday told reporters it was “a pretty big waste” for the news media to investigate connections between Trump associates and Russia. Her comment was made in response to a question about Trump’s tweeting earlier in the day that it was “commonly agreed” there had been no collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia.

“It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!” the president tweeted.

HC is a reference to Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee whom Trump defeated in last November’s presidential election.

VOA’s Marissa Melton contributed to this report.
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U.S. border agents are searching nearly four times as many international travelers’ smartphones and other electronic devices as they did two years ago, expanding the use of a little-known search-and-seizure authority that has sparked fresh legal challenges from digital rights advocates and defendants in several criminal cases.

The content searches of electronic devices, conducted without a warrant or any individualized suspicion, spiked during the final year of the Obama administration but have continued to surge this year as the Trump administration has adopted extreme vetting of travelers entering the country.

In the first six months of fiscal 2017, which ended Sept. 30, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents searched the electronic devices of 14,993 arriving international travelers, according to the most recent CBP data.

CBP has not released data for all of 2017, but unofficial estimates put the number of searched devices at 30,000. That compares with 19,000 in 2016 and 8,500 in 2015.

​‘Border search exception’

The searches are conducted under the so called “border search exception” to the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The amendment protects Americans’ rights against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. But the U.S. border is a legal gray zone, where customs agents have long enjoyed legal authority to stop and search “any vehicle, beast or person” without a warrant.

Since the 2000s, the Department of Homeland Security has interpreted the border exception authority to include examinations of a host of electronic devices: cellphones, tablets, laptops, cameras and digital media players.

A 2009 CBP directive authorizes agents to examine electronic devices and to “review and analyze” their information “with or without suspicion.”

All travelers, whether U.S. citizens or foreign nationals, are subject to these searches. The CBP directive says privileged and other sensitive material, including legal communications, are not “necessarily exempt from a border search.”

Refusal to unlock and hand over a device may result in its “detention.”

Agents look at text messages, emails, photo albums and other personal data for evidence of terrorism links or criminal activity, such as child pornography.

CBP agents are allowed to seize devices and copy their content for on-site or off-site forensic tests, which can take weeks and sometimes months and yield personal data, sometimes in large quantities. In one case, a forensic test performed on a cellphone generated enough information to “fill 896 printed pages.”

Former Acting CBP Commissioner Jay Ahern, who signed the directive, called it “the broadest search authority anywhere in the world without a warrant.” He spoke at a Cato Institute criminal justice conference in Washington last week.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents operate under similar guidelines.

Numbers

CBP and ICE officials defend the practice, noting that the searches affect less than 1 in 10,000 international travelers and an even smaller number of U.S. citizens.

Last year, CBP processed more than 390 million international travelers at the country’s 238 ports of entry.

“It’s something we use in a very measured fashion when there is an indicator of concern,” Acting CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, who is President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, told a Senate panel Wednesday.

Search triggers range from a previous violation of a customs law to having a name that matches a person of interest in a U.S. national security database, according to the CBP form that agents hand to travelers whose devices are detained. Travelers may also be stopped at random.

McAleenan said the searches of electronic devices have yielded “very serious and significant information,” including “everything from national security concerns to child pornography to evidence of crimes to determinations of people’s admissibility status.”

​Court challenges

But as border agents look at a larger number of people’s electronic devices for evidence of terrorism or other national security matters, privacy rights groups say the once-narrow border search authority is being too broadly interpreted for the digital age. The advocates are now challenging the government’s authority in court.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) sued the acting heads of the Department of Homeland Security, CBP and ICE on behalf of 11 travelers whose devices were searched and, in some instances, seized over the past year.

The complaint alleges that the “warrantless and suspicionless searches” violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment on free expression and assembly and the Fourth Amendment on privacy.

The 11 plaintiffs include 10 U.S. citizens and one U.S. permanent resident. Among them are three journalists, a filmmaker, an artist, a NASA engineer and a former Air Force captain. Six are Muslims, one is a Haitian national and four are white Americans.

Examples of search and seizure

Their combined experiences shed light on an otherwise opaque system and show just how far border agents would go to scrutinize electronic devices.

In July, Nadia Alasaad was stopped at the Canadian border and forced to unlock her phone and hand it over to a customs agent even after she protested that she had photos of herself without a headscarf that she did not want any male agents to view.

Akram Shibly, a New York-based filmmaker, said his phone was searched in December 2016 and January 2017 as he crossed the U.S.-Canadian border.

During the first stop, he alleges, agents ordered him to fill out a form disclosing his mobile phone password and social media identifiers. The agents used the information to view his “cloud-based apps and content.” (CBP says agents are not allowed to view data that only resides in the cloud). During the second border encounter, Shibly claims, CBP agents used force to seize his phone after he refused to hand it over.

Jeremy Dupin, the Haitian journalist who is a U.S. permanent resident, was stopped twice in December 2016, once during a layover at the Miami International Airport, and a second time as he and his daughter tried to enter the U.S. from Canada.

According to the complaint, his phone contained “reporting notes and images, source contact and identifying information, and communications with editors.”

The complaint calls the examinations “an unprecedented invasion of personal privacy” and “a threat to freedom of speech and association.” It also cites a 2014 Supreme Court decision that declared warrantless searches of cellphones of arrested suspects unconstitutional.

Supreme Court

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s claim that searching a suspect’s cellphone was indistinguishable from searching his or her other belongings.

“We think that rationale holds just as true for the border context, where the privacy interests are so great that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant,” ACLU lawyer Esha Bhandari said.

Unlike legal challenges raised against the government’s border search authority in criminal cases, none of the 11 plaintiffs named in the ACLU/EFF lawsuit is accused of any wrongdoing, noted EFF lawyer Aaron Mackey.

“This is one case where we’re trying to change the law, where we’re trying to get the courts to recognize that the practice that the CBP has been operating under and the previous decisions (in border exception cases) … were incorrect,” Mackey said.

Spokespeople for DHS, CBP and ICE declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Laura Donohue, director of Georgetown’s center on national security and the law, said electronic device searches run afoul of other constitutional guarantees as well, including the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

While courts have consistently upheld the government’s border exception authority, Donohue said, “The laws that we have focus on luggage and not digitalization.”
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The Trump administration announced a shift Wednesday in foreign aid funding for persecuted minorities. Vice President Pence told a global assembly of Christians the U.S. would instruct the State Department to stop funding United Nations programs for persecuted minorities, instead providing funding through USAID and other faith-based NGOs. VOA’s Katherine Gypson reports from Washington on the consequences of the administration’s decision.
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A White House spokeswoman said Friday that all of the women who have accused President Donald Trump of sexual harassment are lying, echoing the president’s statement last week that the accusations are “fake news.”

Sarah Sanders took a question during the White House briefing from a television reporter asking about the White House’s official position on charges by at least 16 women that the president has engaged in inappropriate behavior.

“Is it the official White House position that all of these women are lying?” asked Jacqueline Alemany of CBS News.

“Yeah, we’ve been clear on that from the beginning, and the president’s spoken on it,” Sanders answered.

The reporter asked the question after alluding to a number of other prominent men in the media who have lately been accused of harassment, such as movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, television host Bill O’Reilly, and journalist Mark Halperin, all of whom have lost jobs over the matter.

Last week Trump was queried over the accusations, in particular a subpoena issued by lawyers for a former contestant on his television show, Summer Zervos, who accused him of groping and kissing her during the taping of the show.

The president replied, “All I can say is, it’s totally fake news. It’s just fake. It’s fake. It’s made-up stuff, and it’s disgraceful, what happens, but … that happens in the world of politics.”

A year ago at a campaign rally, then-candidate Trump responded to accusations of sexual harassment by calling himself “a victim of one of the great political smear campaigns in the history of our country.”
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A U.S. federal grand jury has approved the first charges in an investigation of Russian influence on U.S. elections, a probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

A report late Friday from CNN quoted sources as saying anyone who is charged could be taken into custody as soon as Monday. The exact charges are unclear.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined CNN’s request for comment.

CNN said lawyers working on Mueller’s team were seen entering the federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Friday, where the grand jury meets to hear testimony.

Mueller has kept a tight lid on information about the probe.

Mueller was appointed special counsel in May, shortly after the firing of then-FBI director James Comey, to look into allegations that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia to win the election. He is also examining the possibility that the president may have tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.

The probe is also examining possible financial ties between Russian businesses and members of the Trump campaign, and foreign lobbying conducted by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In addition to Mueller’s probe, three congressional committees are conducting their own investigations into possible Russian influence on the election.

 
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Botulism pills. Conspiracy theories. What the government might have known and still won’t say about Lee Harvey Oswald.

The release of thousands of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy hasn’t settled the best-known, real-life whodunit in American history. But the record offered riveting details of the way intelligence services operated at the time and are striving to keep some particulars a secret even now.

“The Kennedy records really are an emblem of the fight of secrecy against transparency,” said Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the private National Security Archive research group in Washington.  “The ‘secureaucrats’ managed to withhold key documents and keep this long saga of secrecy going.”

The 2,800 records released on Thursday night include some that had dribbled out over the years but are getting renewed attention from being in this big batch.

Some highlights:

HOOVER, WORRIED

Just a few hours after Lee Harvey Oswald was killed in Dallas, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dictated a memo saying the government needed to issue something “so we can convince the public” that Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy.

The memo was in the latest trove of Kennedy assassination files released late Thursday. The FBI director composed the memo on Nov. 24, 1963 — two days after Kennedy was killed and just hours after nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.

Hoover said that the FBI had an agent at the hospital in hopes of getting a confession from Oswald, but Oswald died before that could happen. Hoover said he and a deputy were concerned about “having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”

Hoover laments how Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, was considering appointing a presidential commission to investigate the assassination. Hoover said he suggested that the FBI give an investigative report to the attorney general complete with photographs, laboratory work and other evidence. That report, he thought, could be given to Johnson and he could decide whether to make it public.

“I felt this was better because there are several aspects which would complicate our foreign relations,” Hoover wrote. He said Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, which the FBI intercepted, read and resealed. Hoover said the letter had been addressed to the Soviet Embassy official “in charge of assassinations and similar activities on the part of the Soviet government. To have that drawn into a public hearing would muddy the waters internationally,” Hoover wrote.

Besides, Hoover said, the letter was unrelated proof that Oswald committed the murder.

LBJ’s THEORY

Everyone has their theories, including even President Lyndon B. Johnson. According to one document released on Thursday, Johnson believed Kennedy was behind the assassination of the South Vietnamese president weeks before his death and that Kennedy’s murder was payback, the newly released documents say.

U.S. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said in a 1975 deposition that Johnson “used to go around saying that the reason (Kennedy) was assassinated was that he had assassinated President (Ngo Dinh) Diem and this was just justice.”

“Where he got this idea from I don’t know,” U.S. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said in a 1975 deposition.

Diem and his brother were killed on Nov. 2, 1963 after a coup by South Vietnamese generals.

This isn’t the first time Johnson’s theory has been aired. He was also quoted in Max Holland’s book, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, as saying that Kenney died because of “divine retribution.”

“He murdered Diem and then he got it himself,” Johnson reportedly said.

Kennedy’s position on Diem’s assassination is still debated, said Ken Hughes, a historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

A month before Diem’s assassination, the south Vietnamese generals planning the coup told the CIA that they would overthrow the government if they could be assured that American aid would continue and Kennedy told them it would, Hughes said.

But a dispute remains over whether Kennedy insisted that Diem go unharmed or whether the president left it up to the South Vietnamese generals to decide what to do, said Hughes, who is writing a book on the subject.

One of the files that could shed light on that question is a CIA report on the U.S. government’s involvement in the Diem coup. The record was supposed to be released Thursday but was among the hundreds that Trump blocked from becoming public.

CASTRO, THE CIA AND A MOBSTER’S MISTRESS

A 1975 document described the CIA’s $150,000 offer to have Cuban leader Fidel Castro assassinated — but the mob insisted on taking the job for free.

The underworld murder-for-hire contract was detailed in a summary of a May 1962 CIA briefing for then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. By then, the Kennedy White House had launched its unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and several assassination attempts against Castro had failed.

At least two efforts to kill Castro were made with CIA-supplied lethal pills and organized crime-made muscle in early 1961, according to the document. The CIA’s mob contacts included John Rosselli, a top lieutenant to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who weren’t told but guessed the CIA was behind the offer. The pair, later victims of mob hits, said they want no part of any payment — but still, $11,000 in payments were made for expenses.

The mobsters came to the attention of the CIA a year earlier when Giancana asked a CIA intermediary to arrange for putting a listening device in the Las Vegas room of an entertainer he suspected of having an affair with Giancana’s mistress. The task was handed off to a private investigator named Arthur Balletti, who put the listening device in a phone in the hotel room. “The CIA reportedly did not know of the specific proposed wiretap.”

Told later about “everything,” Kennedy was “unhappy, because at that time he felt he was making a very strong drive to try to get after the Mafia.

“So his comment was to us that if we were going to get involved with the Mafia, in the future at any time, to ‘make sure you see me first.’”

The document was made public in 1997 and contained in an Associated Press report at that time.

STRANGE CALL

A British newspaper received an anonymous phone call about “big news” in the United States 25 minutes before President John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963, one file says.

A batch of 2,800 declassified documents includes a Nov. 26, 1963 memo from the CIA to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about a call received by the Cambridge News on Nov. 22, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas.

The memo from deputy CIA director James Angleton says the caller said “the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news, and then hung up.” Anna Savva, a current Cambridge News reporter, said Friday there’s no record of the call. “We have nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call,” she said.

The memo was released by the U.S. National Archives in July.

The phone call to the Cambridge News was first reported decades ago by Kennedy conspiracy theorist Michael Eddowes. In the 1980s, Eddowes, a British lawyer, claimed to have a CIA document mentioning the call. Eddowes, who died in 1992, wrote a book alleging that Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a Soviet impostor who took his identity. As a result of his efforts, the killer’s body was exhumed in 1981. An autopsy confirmed that it was Oswald.

 
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Facebook, Google and Twitter are heading to Washington to answer questions about how their services were used by Russia-based operatives to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In Silicon Valley, there’s concern that the scrutiny may bring new regulations, as VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.
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The US Congress is considering a range of options to pressure Myanmar, also known as Burma, to stop the deadly attacks that have forced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya Muslims to flee their homes. Lawmakers are considering a stand-alone sanctions bill, but activists lobbying for the Rohingyas say a White House Executive Order could have the most immediate impact. VOA’s Katherine Gypson has more from Capitol Hill.
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At a time when Republican unity is more critical than ever to salvage President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, the party is splintering on the issue of Trump’s governance and his fitness for office. As VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, Senate Republicans are attempting to regroup after two members announced their retirement while making blistering critiques of the president. Even so, many fellow Republicans are standing with Trump.
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The Trump administration has settled lawsuits with tea party groups that received extra, often burdensome scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status, ending another chapter in a political scandal that dogged the Obama administration and remains a source of outrage for Republicans.

The Internal Revenue Service is apologizing to the groups as part of the proposed settlement agreements outlined in court filings Wednesday. The groups and the Justice Department are asking a judge to declare it illegal for the tax agency to discriminate based on political views, according to the agreements, which still must be approved by a judge.

Republicans erupted in 2013 after the IRS apologized for submitting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to intensive scrutiny, in part by zeroing in on groups with words like “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names. Many had their applications delayed for months and years. Some were asked improper questions about their donors and even their religious practices, an inspector general’s report found.

Hundreds of organizations joined lawsuits, alleging their constitutional rights were violated.

Much of the agency’s leadership, including top official Lois Lerner, resigned or retired over the scandal. One of the proposed settlement agreements calls senior management “delinquent” in providing control and direction over the process. And it faults Lerner for failing to tell upper-level management of the long delays in processing applications from tea party and other conservative groups.

Still, the Obama Justice Department announced in 2015 that no one at the IRS would be prosecuted in the scandal, saying investigators had found mismanagement but no evidence that it had targeted a political group based on its viewpoints or obstructed justice.

Republicans had hoped the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions would reopen its case against Lerner. But officials told members of Congress last month they would not charge Lerner, saying “reopening the criminal investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence.”
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When Jo Ann Davidson ran for the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, city council, she picked up a book that explained everything a candidate needed to know about running for office.  It had just three pages tailored for females.

“There really was nothing out there at the time,” said Davidson, “to help a woman candidate.”

Davidson lost that first race in 1965, but she returned strong. And won. And continued winning. She held that seat for 10 years until she was elected and re-elected to serve a total of 20 years as a state legislator. Her legislative peers elected her as the first female Speaker of the Ohio General Assembly — her enormous portrait graces the walls of the Ohio House Chamber and a second one is in the Ladies’ gallery. Davidson also served as co-chair of the Republican National Committee.  

Now, she holds an eight-month program to encourage and train Republican women about how to run for office.

‘I can do this’

With a strict application process and a cap of 25 students, the waiting list for The Jo Ann Davidson Leadership Institute is unending. Davidson says women sometimes lack confidence and knowledge of the political system. Her goal is for them to finish the training, fearlessly stating, “I can do this.”

Davison’s training is one of only a few geared toward Republican women. Dozens of training groups are aimed at women who are Democrats, non-partisan, or cater to specific gender, age or ethnic demographics. 

Gail Dixon is a founding member of Oasis, a Florida organization dedicated to empowering women. The three-day non-partisan conference, titled “Women Can Run,” is held in partnership through the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. While women are a slim majority of the U.S. population, CAWP figures show women hold just 19.6 percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress and 24 percent of statewide offices.

Just ask them

“I think that the world changes in the halls of power,” said Gail Dixon, a founding member of Oasis. Dixon says those numbers are low because of how males are socialized to be leaders, making a steeper “trajectory for women in perceiving themselves to be to be entitled to a seat at the table.”

Samantha Politano, the youngest woman at the conference at age 18, says her fellow coeds at Florida State University have grown up believing they should maintain traditional female roles, like nursing. But she’s pleased to see more women running to prove, “We can take on masculine traits without fear of being less of a woman.” Politano says someday she may run for president of the United States.

The trainers who spoke with VOA said one basic motivation would encourage more women to run. They simply need to be asked. For Suzanne Van Wyk, that took several times. She’s now running her first campaign. “My husband has suggested, prodded and encouraged me to run for probably the last seven years.”  

2016 prompts female Democrats to run

For some women, the inspiration was Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party. 

“For me, it was definitely the last straw,” said Becky Anderson Wilkins, who’s running for Illinois’ 6th district. She’s running against Republican Representative Peter Roskam, who’s held that position since 2007. 

But what sets that Illinois race apart are the numbers. 

Anderson Wilkins is one of six women running against Roskam. They first have to win the Democratic Party primary in which one of the six — or one of the four male candidates — will advance to the general election.

Wilkins calls it “a slew” of women and that “it shows that we really care that we have to make a change.”

​

‘I’m going to run for this!’

The numbers of women entering politics are increasing, slowly, yet not as quickly as some had hoped.  But if you ask Jo Ann Davidson, with her more than 50 years in politics, how females have changed she sounds optimistic. 

“Younger women are getting better at stepping up,” the sprightly 90-year-old says with a smile,” and saying ‘I’m going to run for this!”

Katherine Gypson contributed to this report
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A final batch of government documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is expected to be released Thursday, perhaps shedding new light on a tragic event that has fascinated the public and JFK experts for decades. VOA national correspondent Jim Malone reports from Washington.
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A bipartisan measure to stabilize the U.S. health insurance markets would save the government money, but do little to cut the cost of premiums for consumers or substantially change the number of people who have insurance to help pay their medical bills, a new independent study concluded Wednesday.

With Republican efforts stalled in Congress to dismantle national health policies championed by former President Barack Obama, two senators, Republican Lamar Alexander and Democrat Patty Murray, reached an accord to keep markets for individual insurance buyers from collapsing.

Good news, bad news

In the new analysis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said the compromise crafted by Alexander and Murray would cut the government’s deficit by $3.8 billion over the next decade, but “would not substantially change the number of people with health insurance coverage.” The CBO earlier said the Republican replacement plans would have cut 20 million or more people from insurance rolls.

While there is bipartisan support for the Alexander-Murray compromise in the Senate, Republican leaders who control the congressional legislative agenda have yet to commit that there will be a vote on it. Republicans have tried dozens of times over the past seven years, all unsuccessfully, to repeal the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. Their latest attempts to undermine the law failed in several key votes earlier this year.

However, key legislative leaders say the Alexander-Murray health care changes could be added to other measures that lawmakers will be debating as current government funding expires in early December.

Limited support

President Donald Trump has voiced some support for the Alexander-Murray pact, but said he wants other changes to curb payments to insurance companies as compensation for their providing lower-cost policies to poorer Americans.

About 20 million people who previously had no health insurance have gained coverage under Obamacare, but Republicans have long viewed the law as government overreach, chiefly because it requires virtually all Americans to buy insurance or pay a fine if they do not.

Most American workers get their health insurance coverage through their employers, while the government pays for much of the coverage for older and poorer people.

Individuals who buy their own insurance are most affected by the debate over the fate of Obamacare.
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Americans could see a lot more drones flying around their communities as the result of a Trump administration test program to increase government and commercial use of the unmanned aircraft.

President Donald Trump gave the go-ahead Wednesday, signing a directive intended to increase the number and complexity of drone flights.

The presidential memo would allow exemptions from current safety rules so communities could move ahead with testing of drone operations.

States, communities and tribes selected to participate would devise their own trial programs in partnership with government and industry drone users. The administration anticipates approving at least five applications, but there is no limit on the number of communities that can join.

The Federal Aviation Administration would review each program. The agency would grant waivers, if necessary, to rules that now restrict drone operations. Examples include prohibitions on flights over people, nighttime flights and flights beyond the line of sight of the drone operator.

Among the things that could be tested are package deliveries; the reliability and security of data links between pilot and aircraft; and technology to prevent collisions between drones and other aircraft and to detect and counter drones flying in restricted areas.

Drone-makers and businesses that want to fly drones have pushed for looser restrictions. Trump discussed the issue with industry leaders at a White House meeting in June.

In the past two years, the FAA has registered over 1 million drones. The majority of them belong to hobbyists. There are now more registered drones than registered manned aircraft in the U.S.

Safety restrictions on drone flights have limited drone use, and U.S. technology companies seeking to test and deploy commercial drones have often done so overseas. For example, Google’s Project Wing is testing drones in Australia, and Amazon is testing drone deliveries in the United Kingdom.

“In order to maintain American leadership in this emerging industry here at home, our country needs a regulatory framework that encourages innovation while ensuring airspace safety,” Michael Kratsios of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told reporters in a conference call.

The trial program will collect data on drone operations that will aid the government’s effort to develop a separate air traffic control system for low-flying unmanned aircraft, he said.

The test zones are expected to start going into place in about a year. The program would continue for three years after that.

Safety concerns over drones have risen recently after the collision of a civilian drone and an Army helicopter over Staten Island, New York, and the first verified collision in North America between a drone and a commercial aircraft, in Quebec City, Canada.

The test program doesn’t address complaints by local governments that low-flying drones present safety, privacy and nuisance risks. The FAA says it has the sole authority to regulate the national airspace, but some communities have passed their own restrictions.

Doug Johnson, vice president of technology policy at the Consumer Technology Association, said the test program recognizes that “the federal government cannot manage policymaking and enforcement by itself” and must work with local governments.

“Public-private partnerships like those that would be created by the program are critical to realizing the economic benefits of drones,” he said.

The association, whose members include drone-makers, has estimated 3.4 million drones valued will be sold in the U.S. this year, 40 percent more than last year. Revenue from those sales is estimated at about $1.1 billion.

 
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There are 105 women in the US Congress. Out of a total of 535 members. That’s the highest number in history. Yet, the percentage is well below the number of women who live in the US. The Center for American Women and Politics lists 400 women who are running for national office next year. They, along with many other groups, are urging women to enter politics with training sessions with names like “Ready to Run,” “Elect Her” and “Teach a Girl to Lead.” VOA’s Carolyn Presutti reports
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Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund a political research firm that produced a dossier of allegations about President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

That’s according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke Tuesday evening to The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential client matters.

The person says the arrangement, first reported by The Washington Post, was coordinated by a lawyer for the campaign and the DNC and his law firm. That lawyer, Marc Elias, did not immediately return an email seeking comment Tuesday.

The person says the political research firm, Fusion GPS, had approached Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, about doing continued research into Trump’s international business connections.

Representatives for Fusion GPS declined to comment.
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