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U.S. President Donald Trump is contending that a controversial memo alleging that the FBI abused its power in probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election “totally vindicates” him, but that view was challenged Sunday by one of the memo’s own authors.

Trump complained in a Saturday Twitter comment that the “Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”

But Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, one of the key authors of the Republican memo released by the House Intelligence Committee, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the document does not undermine the months-long investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into the Russian campaign meddling or whether Trump obstructed justice in trying to curb the probe.

The four-page “Nunes memo,” named after the House Intelligence panel chairman, Congressman Devin Nunes of California, concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation relied excessively on opposition research funded by Democrats in a dossier compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, as its sought approval from a U.S. surveillance court in October 2016 to monitor Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, and his links to Russia.

But the memo notes that the FBI investigation that eventually led to Mueller’s probe started months earlier, in July 2016, when agents began looking into contacts between another Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, and Russian operatives. Papadopoulos, as part of Mueller’s probe, has pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his Russian contacts and, pending his sentencing, is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

Gowdy said in the television interview that “there is a Russia investigation without a [Steele] dossier” because of other Trump campaign links to Russia, including a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York set up by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., on the premise that a Russian lawyer would hand over incriminating evidence on Trump’s election opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Gowdy said the Steele dossier “also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice.”

Another Republican on the Intelligence panel, Congressman Chris Stewart of Utah, told Fox News, “I think it would be a mistake for anyone to suggest the special counsel should not continue his work.  This memo, frankly, has nothing to do at all with the special counsel.”

Democratic lawmakers opposed to Friday’s release of the memo say that as soon as Monday they will seek the Intelligence committee’s approval to release their counter interpretation of the classified information underlying the Nunes document.  The Democrats contend that the Republican-approved statement “cherry-picks” information and overstates the importance of the Steele dossier in the FBI’s effort to win approval from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court for the monitoring of Page’s activities.

Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York said the memo released by the Republicans “is a disgrace. House Republicans should be ashamed.”

Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer, in a letter Sunday, pushed Trump to approve release of the Democratic response to the Nunes memo, saying Americans should “be allowed to see both sides of the argument and make their own judgments.” 

Ahead of Trump’s approval of release of the Republican-backed House Intelligence panel’s memo, the FBI said it had “grave concerns” about its accuracy because of omissions concerning its request to the surveillance court to monitor Page. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Mueller investigation, also opposed its release.

Rosenstein was one of several Justice Department officials who signed off on the request to the surveillance court to monitor Page, leaving some Trump critics to voice fears that Trump would soon fire Rosenstein.

When asked Friday whether he still had confidence in Rosenstein or was likely to fire him, Trump said, “You figure that one out.”

Later, however, White House spokesman Raj Shah, said on Fox News, “Rod Rosenstein’s job is not on the line. We expect him to continue his job as deputy attorney general.”

FBI, DOJ response

​After the memo’s release, the FBI on Friday re-issued its statement saying the agency “takes seriously its obligations to the FISA Court and its compliance with procedures overseen by career professionals.”

The FBI noted it was given “limited opportunity” to review the document before lawmakers voted to release it. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the agency said.

Nunes issued a statement Friday expressing hope that the actions of Intelligence Committee Republicans would “shine a light” on what he called “this alarming series of events.”

“The committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes,” Nunes said. “Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies exist to defend the American people, not to be exploited to target one group on behalf of another.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions weighed in on the memo’s release Friday, saying, he has “great confidence in the men and women of this Department [of Justice]. But no department is perfect.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump, told agency employees Friday that he stood with them. “I stand by our shared determination to do our work independently and by the book,” Wray said in a statement to 35,000 FBI staff.

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Republicans who control a majority of the nation’s statehouses are considering a wide range of abortion legislation that could test the government’s legal ability to restrict a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

The Mississippi House passed a bill Friday that would make the state the only one to ban all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In Missouri, lawmakers heard testimony earlier in the week on a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks.

The Ohio House is expected to consider bills, already passed in the Senate, that would prohibit the most common type of procedure used to end pregnancies after 13 weeks and require that fetal remains be buried or cremated.

​Crucial question

Abortion is a perennial hot button issue in statehouses across the country. Republican-controlled states have passed hundreds of bills since 2011 restricting access to the procedure while Democratic-led states have taken steps in the other direction.

The early weeks of this year’s state legislative sessions have seen a flurry of activity around the issue. It comes as activists on both sides say they expect the U.S. Supreme Court to soon consider a question that remains unclear: How far can states go in restricting abortion in the interest of preserving and promoting fetal life?

The state bills debated since the start of the year “are all tests designed to see how far government power to legislate on behalf of a fetus can reach,” said Jessica Mason Pieklo, who has been tracking legislation as the senior legal analyst for Rewire, a website that promotes views supporting abortion rights.

She said the outcome will determine whether states can legally ban abortion after a specific time period and outlaw specific medical procedures. Advocates for abortion rights say those strategies undermine the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling that women have the right to terminate pregnancies until a fetus is viable.

​Women speak out

In Utah, critics have warned that a pending bill to prevent doctors from performing abortions on the basis of a Down syndrome diagnosis is unconstitutional. But its co-sponsor, Republican state Sen. Curt Bramble, said he is willing to defend the bill in court because its goal is to protect unborn children.

“There are times if the Supreme Court got it wrong, it is appropriate to push back,” said Bramble, an accountant from Provo.

The anti-abortion bills have drawn opposition from women who say they have made the excruciating choice to terminate a pregnancy, often after discovering serious fetal abnormalities.

“A 20-week abortion ban sounds OK, but if that gets passed, what’s next — 18 weeks, 15 weeks? At what point does it make abortion truly illegal?” said Robin Utz of St. Louis, 38, who submitted testimony this week against the Missouri bill. “It’s terrifying and it’s willfully ignorant.”

Utz recounted terminating her pregnancy in its 21st week in November 2016, after learning her daughter would be born with a fatal kidney disease if she survived birth. She said doctors told her that dilation and evacuation, the most common abortion procedure in the second trimester, was the safest way to terminate the pregnancy.

Court challenges underway

Undeterred by such stories, the National Right to Life Committee and its allies have been pushing for state laws that ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy and outlaw dilation and evacuation. Supporters of both measures argue that fetuses are capable of feeling pain after 20 weeks and call the procedure “dismemberment abortion.”

Several court challenges to both types of laws are underway, with federal appeals courts considering the “dismemberment abortion” bans approved last year in Texas and Arkansas. The Kansas Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the first-in-the-nation ban passed in that state three years ago.

Ingrid Duran, director of state legislation at the National Right to Life Committee, said the model state laws drafted by her group are aimed at U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote who wrote the court’s 2007 opinion upholding a federal ban on a procedure critics call partial-birth abortion.

She said the court could use similar reasoning to prohibit dilation and evacuation and noted it has never considered whether states have an interest in protecting fetuses from pain.

“We did draft these laws with the bigger picture in mind,” Duran said.

Texas ruling shifts focus

The shifted focus comes after the court dealt the anti-abortion movement a blow in 2016 by ruling that strict Texas regulations on abortion clinics and doctors were an undue burden on abortion access and unconstitutional.

Anti-abortion groups hope President Donald Trump will be able to nominate one or more justices to the Supreme Court following last year’s confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, potentially making the court more conservative on the issue for decades to come.

In the meantime, some of them are cautioning their allies not to go too far.

Duran said the proposed 15-week ban in Mississippi, which now goes to the state Senate, caught her by surprise. She noted that prior state laws banning abortion after 12 weeks or once a heartbeat was detected have been found unconstitutional.

In South Carolina this past week, state senators tabled a bill that would have banned most abortions to give lawmakers more time to study the consequences. Also last week, a legislative committee in Tennessee amended a bill to remove language that would have outlawed abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detectable, which is usually around six weeks. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Micah Van Huss, said he would be back.

“I will not stop fighting for the lives of babies until abortion is abolished in this state,” he said.
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The White House late Saturday confirmed plans to withdraw the nomination of a climate change skeptic with ties to the fossil fuel industry to serve as President Donald Trump’s top environmental adviser.

Kathleen Hartnett White was announced last October as Trump’s choice to chair the Council on Environmental Quality. She had served under former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, now Trump’s energy secretary, for six years on a commission overseeing the state environmental agency.

But White’s nomination languished in the Senate, and was among a batch of nominations the Senate sent back to the White House at the end of 2017 when Congress closed up for the year. Trump resubmitted White’s nomination in January.

Pollution defended

White, who is not a scientist, has compared the work of mainstream climate scientists to “the dogmatic claims of ideologues and clerics.” In a contentious Senate hearing last November, she defended past statements that particulate pollution released by burning fuels is not harmful unless one were to suck on a car’s tailpipe.

Critics of White’s nomination to head the council pointed to her praise of fossil fuels as having improved living conditions around the world and helping to end slavery. She has called carbon dioxide not a pollutant but “a necessary nutrient for plant life.” 

During Perry’s tenure as governor of Texas, White often was critical of what she called the Obama administration’s “imperial EPA,” the Environmental Protection Agency, and she opposed stricter limits on air and water pollution.

White was a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that received funding from Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other fossil-fuels companies. White could not immediately be reached late Saturday for comment.

Nomination withdrawn

The Washington Post first reported late Saturday on plans by the White House to pull White’s nomination, citing two administration officials who had been briefed on the matter but spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House has not formally announced its decision.

A White House official later confirmed the Post report. The official was not authorized to discuss personnel decisions by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trump himself has called climate change a hoax and has laid the groundwork for withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. 

Other top Trump administration officials who question the scientific consensus that carbon released in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of global warming include Perry, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

U.S. Senator Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said it was “abundantly clear very early on” that heading the Council on Environmental Quality wasn’t the right job for White. Carper called withdrawing White’s nomination “the right thing to do” and urged the Trump administration to nominate a “thoughtful environmental and public health champion to lead this critical office in the federal government.”
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A controversial memo alleging FBI investigators abused their powers in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is “embarrassingly flawed,” the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said Saturday.

The memo released by the House Intelligence Committee “is a disgrace,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler said in a response to the document that has obsessed the U.S. political world this week. “House Republicans should be ashamed.”

Nadler’s six-page memo, addressed to his Democratic colleagues and obtained by television news networks, said the document — known as “the Nunes memo,” produced by House Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the Intelligence Committee — “is deliberately misleading and deeply wrong on the law.”

The memo, released to the public Friday, alleges that the FBI overstepped its authority in obtaining a surveillance warrant for an aide to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The Nunes memo says the FBI relied heavily on a dossier of information assembled by Christopher Steele, a Russia expert and former British spy, for the campaign of Trump rival Hillary Clinton, via the law firm Perkins Cole and the research firm Fusion GPS.

The release of the memo intensified the battle between Trump and his Republican allies in Congress on one side and Democrats and top FBI officials on the other about whether the probe into Russian interference in the presidential election was affected by political bias on the part of investigators.

In his rebuttal, Nadler said the Republicans failed to show that the FBI relied substantially or solely on the dossier in question. Further, he said, “the Nunes memo does not provide a single shred of evidence that any aspect of the Steele dossier is false or inaccurate in any way.”

New Trump tweets

Joining the furor Saturday evening, President Trump, who is spending the weekend at his Florida golf resort, tweeted quotes of an editorial that appeared a day earlier in the Wall Street Journal. It said, in part, “The four page memo released Friday reports the disturbing fact [misquote in tweet; WSJ said “reports disturbing facts”] about how the FBI and FISA [in WSJ, “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” was spelled out] appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.”

Trump did not quote a later paragraph in the editorial, in which the Wall Street Journal called for the release of the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo.

“Democrats are howling that the memo, produced by Republican staff, is misleading and leaves out essential details,” the Journal said. “By all means let’s see that, too. President Trump should declassify it promptly.” The editorial also called for release of a referral for criminal investigation of the dossier’s author.

Earlier in the day, Trump tweeted that the disputed Republican memo “totally vindicates” him, despite a contrary view by most Democrats.

“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” the president tweeted Saturday morning. “But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their [sic] was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”

Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted back at the president, saying, “Quite the opposite, Mr. President. The most important fact disclosed in this otherwise shoddy memo was that FBI investigation began July 2016 with your advisor, Papadopoulos, who was secretly discussing stolen Clinton emails with the Russians.”

A significant part of the document focuses on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that permitted FBI surveillance of former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, a businessman with interests in Russia.

There had been concerns about Page’s alleged contacts with Russian intelligence agents.

The memo asserts that the dossier was an “essential part” of the FISA application on Page.

​FBI, DOJ response

After the memo’s release, the FBI on Friday re-issued its statement from earlier this week, saying the agency “takes seriously its obligations to the FISA Court and its compliance with procedures overseen by career professionals.”

The FBI noted it was given “limited opportunity” to review the document before lawmakers voted to release it.

“As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the agency said.

Rep. Nunes issued a statement Friday expressing hope that the actions of Intelligence Committee Republicans would “shine a light” on what he called “this alarming series of events.”

“The committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes,” Nunes said. “Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies exist to defend the American people, not to be exploited to target one group on behalf of another.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions weighed in on the memo’s release Friday, saying, he has “great confidence in the men and women of this Department (of Justice). But no department is perfect.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray told agency employees Friday that he stood with them after the release of the memo.

“I stand by our shared determination to do our work independently and by the book,” Wray said in a statement to 35,000 FBI staff members.
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Congressional Republicans released a classified memo related to the Russia investigation Friday after President Donald Trump decided that the document should be available to the general public. The memo from Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee alleges U.S. law enforcement officials including the FBI abused their authority in seeking to put a Trump campaign associate under surveillance for possible ties to Russia. The release of the memo has set off yet another political firestorm over the Russia probe in Washington, as we hear from VOA National correspondent Jim Malone.
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A controversial document prepared by Republican members of Congress accuses U.S. law enforcement officials of abusing their surveillance authorities during the Russia investigation.

The 3½-page secret memo, written by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, was released Friday after President Donald Trump authorized its declassification.

What the memo alleges

The memo’s key allegation is that the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI improperly obtained a series of electronic surveillance warrants on former Trump associate Carter Page as part of the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Page served as a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign and came under U.S. intelligence suspicion after traveling to Moscow and meeting with Russian officials.  

FBI surveillance of foreign spies and other foreign targets in the United States is overseen by a secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). To obtain a warrant from the court, the FBI must furnish evidence that the target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign government. 

In Carter’s case, the memo alleges, the FBI substantially relied on information from a research dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer for the election campaign of Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton. The bureau used the information in its initial warrant application in October 2016 after Page had left the campaign as well as three subsequent renewal applications.

The author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, was a longtime FBI source who was paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, via the law firm Perkins Cole and the research firm Fusion GPS, to “obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia,” according to the memo.

Steele is also accused of harboring an anti-Trump bias during the campaign, telling a senior Justice Department official two months before the 2016 election that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” Trump has called the dossier’s allegations about his personal and financial ties to Russia a “Crooked Hillary Pile of Garbage.” 

But while the dossier formed an “essential part” of the Page surveillance applications, the memo says, FBI and DOJ officials failed to disclose that the underlying information had been funded by the Democrats “even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.”  

The government “had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts,” the Republicans wrote in the memo. “However, our findings indicate that … material and relevant information was omitted.” 

To support their claim that the dossier was central to obtaining the warrants, the Republicans cited December 2017 testimony by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that “without the dossier information,” no surveillance warrant would have been sought.  

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee who unsuccessfully tried to block the memo’s release blasted the document for “serious mischaracterizations.” 

In a statement, Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel, said the FBI “would have been derelict in its responsibility to protect the country had it not sought a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant.” 

What the memo doesn’t say 

While the memo says the application relied on unsubstantiated information from the Steele dossier, it doesn’t say what other pieces of evidence the FBI invoked to obtain the warrants. A FISA warrant application typically contains multiple sources of classified information to establish probable cause that the target of a proposed surveillance works for a foreign government. 

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said a key question that is left unanswered in the memo is whether other information used in the application was enough to warrant its approval.

“There is a lot of questions raised by the information that I’d like to get answers to,” Gonzales told VOA. 

Ahead of the memo’s public release, Trump tweeted that the “top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!”

But the memo does not directly accuse the top brass at the FBI and Justice Department of any wrongdoing, though it does say that senior officials, including former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, all signed off on the Page warrant applications. 

Gonzales said that top officials who sign FISA warrant applications don’t always get to read every fact included in them.

“You’re not necessarily going to know what’s not included in the application and nonetheless you go ahead and sign the FISA application,” he said.

Gonzales said criticism of the department’s top brass can trickle down to its rank and file.

“Whatever one might say about being for the rank and file at the department, the line prosecutors and line investigators, anytime you attack the leadership or the work of the department, it does hurt the morale of the rank and file,” he said.

“I’m worried that the public’s confidence in the integrity of investigations and prosecutions by the Department of Justice has been eroded,” Gonzales said. “I think that’s a terrible place to be, quite frankly.”
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FBI Director Christopher Wray told agency employees Friday that he stood with them after the release of a memo outlining allegations by Republican lawmakers that FBI investigators abused their powers in their probe of Russian interference in the presidential election.

“I stand by our shared determination to do our work independently and by the book,” Wray said in a statement to 35,000 FBI staff.

“You’ve all been through a lot in the past nine months and I know it’s often been unsettling, to say the least. And the past few days haven’t done much to calm those waters,” he said. “Talk is cheap; the work you do is what will endure.”

Wray’s letter made no direct reference to the memo released Friday. He also gave no indication that he planned to leave the agency.

President Donald Trump lashed out at the FBI and Justice Department on Friday after the memo was made public.

He tweeted: “The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people.”

When asked by a reporter whether releasing the memo made it more likely Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would be fired, Trump replied, “You figure that one out.”

Rosenstein supervises the Russia probe and named special counsel Robert Mueller to lead the investigation.

White House officials said later that the administration expected Rosenstein to remain in his job.

“No changes are going to be made at the Department of Justice. We fully expect Rod Rosenstein to continue on as the deputy attorney general,” White House spokesman Raj Shah told CNN.
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 The U.S. House of Representatives plans to vote on Tuesday on legislation to keep federal agencies operating beyond Feb. 8, when existing funds expire, a senior House Republican aide said on Friday.

The aide did not provide details, however, on the duration of this latest-in-a-series of temporary funding measures.

Congressional negotiators are fighting over defense and non-defense spending levels for the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30, as well as other unrelated matters.
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President Donald Trump says K.T. McFarland has withdrawn from consideration to be ambassador to Singapore. 

Trump issued a statement Friday. He said McFarland served his administration “with distinction” and said Democrats “chose to play politics rather than move forward with a qualified nominee for a critically important post.”  

McFarland is a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration and former Fox News analyst. She was nominated in May.

After the Republican-majority Senate did not act on the nomination by the end of last year, McFarland was re-nominated in January.

McFarland’s nomination was in doubt amid questions about her communications with ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn. 
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After phone calls with the leaders of Japan and South Korea, U.S. President Donald Trump spoke Friday in the Oval Office with a group of North Koreans who had escaped their repressive country.

“Their story is amazing,” Trump said before asking the eight Koreans to speak about their ordeals.  The president listened intently as they spoke for 20 minutes.

“We actually have two other people outside and they are literally afraid of execution — they didn’t want to be with cameras,” the president told reporters.

Those defectors who decided to appear on camera thanked Trump for highlighting North Korean human rights abuses. Trump addressed the subject during his speech last November in the South Korean National Assembly and in his State of the Union address last week.

Several appealed to Trump to do more.

Those who escape North Korea to China “would rather die and kill themselves than be repatriated to North Korea,” said Lee Hyeon-soo, adding many carry poison with them in case they are caught.

“Please help us to stop the repatriations from China to North Korea,” she implored Trump.

Lee added that “escaping North Korea is not like leaving another country, it’s more like leaving another universe. I’ll never truly be free of its gravity no matter how far my journey.”

She told Trump that she fled an arranged marriage and a brothel in China.

Lee, now a student in South Korea, has written a memoir about her experience, The Girl with Seven Names.

Kim Kwang-jin, who was a banking agent in Singapore for the North Korean government and defected in 2003, told Trump his attention to the human rights issue “will be an inspiration” to many in his native country.

Ji Seong-ho, a double amputee who attended Trump’s State of the Union address, where he stood to wave his old crutches when he received an ovation, told Trump: “I’ve been crying a lot these past few days since the speech, as I was so moved by the whole experience.”

Ji also thanked the president “for paying attention and trying to help us.”

Peter Jung, who escaped to China in 2000, told Trump he is now a broadcaster for the U.S.-government-supported Radio Free Asia, which — as does VOA — broadcasts to North Korea in the Korean language.

“I was very honored to become a United States citizen” last year, he told Trump.

U.S. efforts

The president, during the Oval Office meeting, refrained from making provocative comments about North Korea or its leader.

In the past, he has threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on the country — which is building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles — and has belittled North Korea’s leader as “Little Rocket Man.”

During the meeting, Trump said, “We’re doing a lot” regarding North Korea. “We have many administrations that should have acted on this a long time ago.”

The president indicated his patience remains limited regarding North Korea’s activities.

“We have no road left,” Trump said.

“It’s a very tricky situation,” the president added. “We’re going to find out how it goes, but we think the Olympics will go very nicely and, after that, who knows?”

South Korea, Japan efforts

Vice President Mike Pence will lead the official U.S. government delegation to the opening of the Winter Games next week in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Athletes from the North and South are to march together under a common flag and will put a unified women’s hockey team on the ice.

A state of war has technically persisted on the Korean Peninsula since 1953, when the armies of China and North Korea signed an armistice with the United States and U.N. Command, which had defended the South during a three-year war.

North Korea has been under a totalitarian government since then. According to U.N. inquiries, the country’s violations of human rights are widespread, grave and systematic, rising to the level of crimes against humanity.

In his phone call Friday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the U.S. president thanked him “for Japan’s efforts to maintain international pressure on North Korea. This includes recent efforts to clamp down on North Korea’s attempts to circumvent sanctions in the waters surrounding the Korean Peninsula,” according to the White House. “Both leaders agreed on the need to intensify the international maximum pressure campaign to denuclearize North Korea.”

They also discussed expanding Japan’s missile defense capabilities, it said.

Trump, in a call with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, “discussed the importance of improving the human rights situation in North Korea and underscored their commitment to work together on this issue,” according to a readout of the discussion issued by the White House.
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U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the Republican Party’s winter dinner in Washington Thursday, aiming barbs at Democrats and touting some of the legislative successes for the party.

It was the second time in the day that Trump addressed the Republicans. Earlier he spoke to the Republicans at their retreat in West Virginia, urging those present to back his immigration proposal and help elect more Republicans.

At the dinner, Trump criticized the Democrats for “stonewalling” the critical immigration reform bill. He said while he is pushing to reach a deal, “The Democrats are AWOL. They’re missing in action,” he said.

Trump said all Democrats do is resist, taking a jab at the “resist” movement opposing him.

The president also spoke of how well his State of the Union speech had gone earlier in the week. He said, “Even the haters back there [members of the press corps] gave us good reviews on that one [State of the Union address]. It’s hard for them to do it. They came up with some fake polls, you know that fake polls. But the fake polls were even good.”

But the president’s full remarks were unavailable as the reporters present were told to shut down their cameras and were escorted out. The live feed carried by CSPAN was also cut.

The president routinely criticizes the media as being biased against him and his administration.
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The Nunes memo is a four-page document creating a big controversy in Washington, despite few people outside Congress having read it. It has even become the subject of a rift between U.S. President Donald Trump and his FBI director, Christopher Wray.

But what is in this memo that is upsetting so many people?

Critics of the document say the memo seeks to discredit the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department, which are involved in the effort to uncover whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race.

The document was created by staff members of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican, alleging the FBI abused its authority to conduct surveillance by seeking a court order to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. 

Reports say the memo was produced solely by Republican members of the committee without the knowledge of committee Democrats.

The memo, along with a 10-page Democrat rebuttal, was released to the full House of Representatives on Jan. 24.

There is controversy over whether the document should be released to the public. Republicans want to, but Democrats and other critics fear it could expose sensitive Justice Department files related to the Russia investigation. Not only could that be an immediate problem, critics say, but it could set an uncomfortable precedent that could make the FBI and DOJ (Department of Justice) reluctant to share materials with the House Intelligence Committee in the future.

Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has publicly criticized the memo as “rife with factual inaccuracies” that are “meant to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI.” 

Complicating the matter, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that tracks efforts by foreign nations to interfere with democratic institutions, the Alliance for Security Democracy, reported last month that the hashtag #ReleasetheMemo was being heavily used by hundreds of pro-Russia Twitter accounts that regularly spread disinformation. That connection could support the argument that the Republican memo is meant to discredit the FBI Russia investigation.

While the full House has had access to both the Republicans’ and Democrats’ competing papers on the subject, Democrats on the committee have drafted a 10-page rebuttal memo, but the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines Monday to release publicly only the Republican version, rejecting Schiff’s motion to release the Democratic rebuttal. This has prompted accusations that the Republicans are trying to control the conversation by releasing only what information they find advantageous. 

Republicans also rejected a motion giving the FBI and DOJ additional time to vet the document.

The president is tasked with deciding whether the Republican memo should be released to the public or kept secret. Trump has advocated release of the memo in the past.

Arguments over the memo have created new divisions in Washington, D.C. FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday openly opposed release of the Nunes memo, saying he has “grave concerns” about the memo’s accuracy.

As of Thursday afternoon, the document remains under review at the White House. A senior administration official told The Washington Post that the president “is inclined to approve release of the memo today or tomorrow.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump warned Republican lawmakers Thursday against labeling hundreds of thousands of young immigrants facing deportation as “Dreamers,” as their advocates call them while trying to keep him from returning them to their native countries.

“Some people call it Dreamers. It’s not Dreamers. Don’t fall into that trap,” Trump told the Republicans at a political party retreat at a West Virginia resort. “We have dreamers in this country, too. We can’t forget our dreamers.”

The term Dreamers is derived from the DREAM Act, legislation that would have protected young immigrants brought to this country as children from deportation but was not passed by Congress. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an administrative program implemented under former President Barack Obama, provides many of the same protections and authorizes the young immigrants to work in the United States.

Trump plan

Trump last year rescinded DACA but gave Congress until March 5 to weigh in on the issue. He has proposed a 10- to 12-year track to citizenship for about 1.8 million younger immigrants who have DACA protection or are eligible for its guarantees.

The president said Thursday that he hoped Congress would reach an agreement on legislation to protect DACA beneficiaries, but he accused Democrats of politicizing contentious immigration issues while not seriously trying to resolve them.

“We want to take care of DACA and I hope we will,” Trump said. “We need the support of the Democrats in order to do it, and they might not want to do it. They talk like they do, but … we’re going to find out very soon. To get it done, we’ll all have to make some compromises along the way. We have to be willing to give a little in order for our country to gain a whole lot.”

​’Sanity and common sense’

Trump, as he did in his State of the Union address earlier in the week, called for the Republicans to adopt his immigration reform plans. His proposals include protection of the young immigrants who years ago were brought illegally into the country by their parents; construction of a wall along the southern U.S. border with Mexico to thwart more illegal migration; an end to a lottery for immigration applicants; and stricter family migration policies.

“What the American people are pleading for is sanity and common sense in our immigration system,” Trump said.

He said Democrats “want to use [immigration] as an election issue.” But he contended that with his proposal, which he called a compromise, “it’s an election issue that will go to our benefit, not their benefit.”

Earlier in the day, Trump said in a Twitter comment, “March 5th is rapidly approaching and the Democrats are doing nothing about DACA. They Resist, Blame, Complain and Obstruct — and do nothing. Start pushing Nancy Pelosi and the Dems to work out a DACA fix, NOW!” Pelosi is the House Democratic leader.

Trump urged the Republicans to “pass immigration reform that protects our country, defends our borders and modernizes our immigration rules to serve the needs of American workers and of American families. We want an immigration policy that’s fair, equitable, that’s going to protect our people.”

Battle at the polls

He said that if Democrats do not agree to negotiate immigration reforms, then Republicans need to elect more of their party members to increase the size of the majorities they now have in the Senate and House of Representatives.

The immigration debate is linked to discussions between Congress and the White House about funding for government agencies, with a current stopgap spending measure expiring on February 9. The immigration issue was at the center of a funding dispute that led last month to a three-day partial shutdown of government agencies.
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President Donald Trump says the ratings for his first State of the Union address this week are “the highest number in history,” but that is not true.

Nielsen reports that about 45.6 million tuned in to watch Trump Tuesday night. That’s below viewership for President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union, which was about 48 million, and Trump’s own joint address to Congress last year.

It also trails the 46.8 million viewers who tuned into President Bill Clinton’s first State of the Union speech, and the 51.7 million who watched President George W. Bush’s 2002 address.

Trump falsely argued last year that his inauguration was the most well-attended one ever.
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When Janet Yellen leaves the Federal Reserve this weekend after four years as chair, her legacy will include having shattered a social barrier: She is the first woman to have led the world’s most powerful central bank, a position that carries enormous sway over the global economy.

Yellen will be remembered, too, for her achievements in deftly guiding the Fed’s role in the U.S. economy’s slow recovery from a crushing financial crisis and recession. She picked up where her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, had left off in nurturing the nation’s recuperation from a crisis that nearly toppled the financial system.

As Jerome Powell prepares to succeed Yellen as leader of the U.S. central bank, here are five areas in which Yellen’s era at the Fed will be remembered:

Crisis management

Yellen served not just the past four years as Fed chair but for 2½ years in the 1990s as a Fed board member, then six years as president of the Fed’s San Francisco regional bank and then for four years as the Fed’s vice chair during Bernanke’s second four-year term. In all those roles, Yellen proved herself an able economic forecaster. She often detected perils before others saw reason for alarm, and she became a forceful advocate, especially during the Great Recession, for an aggressive response to economic weakness.

Transcripts of Fed policy meetings from the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers’ collapse ignited the most dangerous phase of the financial crisis, show that Yellen helped drive the Fed to unleash just about everything in its economic arsenal, including slashing its key short-term interest rate to a record low near zero.

Bold actions

As the recession deepened and millions more Americans lost jobs, Yellen was an assertive voice backing up Bernanke in the path-breaking move by the Fed to buy enormous quantities of Treasury and mortgage bonds to try to drive down long-term borrowing rates to support the economy. Critics warned that the bond purchases, which eventually swelled the Fed’s balance sheet five-fold to $4.5 trillion, could trigger high inflation. So far, inflation has not only remained low but for six years has remained below even the Fed’s 2 percent target rate.

The Yellen-led Fed continued to support the bond purchases in the face of skepticism. Later, it rebuffed pressure to start selling off its record-high bond holdings. Finally, in October, after the Fed felt it had achieved its goal of maximum employment, it began gradually paring its bond portfolio.

Clear communications

Yellen extended an innovation of the Bernanke Fed by holding quarterly news conferences after four of the eight policy meetings each year. At these roughly hour-long sessions, Yellen usually managed to shed some light on the Fed’s thinking about its rate policy while cautioning that any future policy changes would hinge on the latest economic data. By all accounts, she avoided any major communication stumbles by telegraphing the Fed’s moves in advance to avoid catching investors off guard.

Her success in this area contrasted with a rare but memorable stumble by Bernanke: In 2013, as Fed chairman, Bernanke triggered what came to be called the “taper tantrum.” It occurred when he first raised the possibility that the Fed could start gradually tapering its bond purchases sometime in the months to follow — unexpected remarks that sent bond prices plunging.

Jobs above all

Yellen, more than her predecessors, stressed the overarching importance of increasing job growth to the greatest level possible. Maximum employment is one of the two mandates Congress lays out for the Fed. The other is to manage interest rates to promote stable prices, which the Fed has defined as inflation averaging 2 percent annually.

Yellen’s predecessors typically worried most about triggering debilitating bouts of inflation of the kind that the United States suffered in the 1970s. That meant favoring higher rates to limit borrowing and spending.

Yellen was different. She believed the U.S. economy had entered an era in which the gravest threat was not a resurgence of inflation but a prolonged period of weak job growth. She argued that the Fed could leave its key policy rate at a record low near zero for far longer than had previously been thought prudent.

The Fed’s benchmark rate remained near zero from late 2008 until December 2015, when the central bank raised it modestly. Since then, the Fed has gradually raised rates four additional times, leaving its key rate in a still-low range of 1.25 percent to 1.5 percent — well below the level usually associated with a prolonged economic expansion and a tight job market.

History’s judgment

So far, Yellen has been proved correct in her bet that rates could remain lower for longer without causing high inflation. The unemployment rate has reached a 17-year low of 4.1 percent with still-low inflation.

Yet many of Yellen’s critics remain unconvinced. They contend that her insistence on low rates has helped swell dangerous bubbles in such assets as stocks and perhaps home prices. They further warn that because the Fed took so long to begin raising rates, a Powell-led Fed could trigger market turbulence with further rate increases and end up harming the economy — possibly even triggering a recession.

Yellen’s supporters, though, argue that once again she will be proved correct and that the Fed will be able to achieve an economic soft landing: Raising rates enough to keep the economy from overheating but not so much as to derail the expansion, already the third-longest in U.S. history.

 
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Public opinion polls indicate President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address got a generally positive response from viewers. The president emphasized unity and bipartisanship in his speech, which pleased many Republicans, but left Democrats skeptical about his true intentions and the road ahead. VOA National Correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
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The White House plans to release a classified House Intelligence Committee memo that Republicans say shows anti-Trump bias by the FBI and the Justice Department, U.S. President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, said on Wednesday.

“It will be released here pretty quick, I think, and then the whole world can see it,” Kelly said in an interview on Fox News Radio, adding he had seen the four-page document and that White House lawyers were reviewing it.

Kelly’s comments follow Trump’s response to a Republican lawmaker after his State of the Union speech on Tuesday that suggested there was a “100 percent chance” the memo would be made public.

Justice Department officials have warned that releasing the memo would be reckless. On Monday, department officials advised Kelly against releasing the memo on the grounds it could jeopardize classified information, the Washington Post reported.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has told the White House the memo contains inaccurate information and offers a false picture, according to Bloomberg News.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told CNN on Wednesday the memo was still being reviewed and “there’s always a chance” that it would not be released.

The memo has become a lightning rod in a bitter partisan fight over the FBI amid ongoing investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and any possible collusion by Trump’s campaign, something both Russia and Trump have denied.

Republicans, who blocked an effort to release a counterpoint memo by Democrats on the panel, have said it shows anti-Trump bias by the FBI and the Justice Department in seeking a warrant to conduct an intelligence eavesdropping operation.

Democrats have said the memo selectively uses highly classified materials in a misleading effort to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s Russia probe, and Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who hired him.

The House panel this week voted along partisan lines to release the memo. Trump has until the weekend to decide whether to make it public.

“The priority here is not our national security, it’s not the country, it’s not the interest of justice. It’s just the naked, personal interest of the president,” U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, the panel’s top Democrat, said at an event hosted

by the Axios news outlet.

Sanders told CNN Trump had not seen the memo before his address on Tuesday night or immediately afterwards.

The document was commissioned by Representative Devin Nunes, the House committee’s Republican chairman who had recused himself from the panel’s Russia probe.

Sanders said she did not know if Nunes had worked with anyone at the White House on it: “I’m not aware of any conversations or coordination with Congressman Nunes.”

 
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A train carrying several Republican lawmakers from Washington to a retreat in West Virginia was involved in an accident with a truck Wednesday in southwestern Virginia.

The White House said none of the lawmakers or their staff members were seriously injured but that one person was killed and another seriously injured. News accounts said the person killed was on the truck.

“The president has been fully briefed on the situation in Virginia and is receiving regular updates,” the statement said. “There is one confirmed fatality and one serious injury. There are no serious injuries among members of Congress or their staff. Senior administration officials are in regular contact with Amtrak and state and local authorities. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone that has been affected by this incident.”

Congressman Bradley Byrne, a passenger on the train, posted on Twitter that he and his wife Rebecca were not injured.  “The train carrying GOP members to our retreat had a collision, but Rebecca and I are both okay.  Security and doctors on board are helping secure the scene and treat injuries.”

Congressman Greg Walden also tweeted he was not injured and said emergency personnel are helping those who were on the truck.

“We are fine, but our train hit a garbage truck.  Members with medical training are assisting the drivers of the truck.”

The crash occurred about 20 miles outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.

The lawmakers were en route to the Greebrier resort in the state of West Virginia to discuss how to sell their new tax law and how to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

President Donald Trump is scheduled to join the legislators Thursday.
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Hillary Clinton says she should not have let a senior campaign adviser keep his job after a female staffer accused him of sexual harassment in 2007.

“The most important work of my life has been to support and empower women,” Clinton wrote on Facebook Tuesday night. “So I very much understand the question I’m being asked as to why I let an employee on my 2008 campaign keep his job despite his inappropriate workplace behavior. The short answer is this: If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t.”

Clinton said that senior campaign staff and legal counsel confirmed that the behavior by faith-based adviser Burns Strider had occurred after the woman came forward. Her campaign manager recommended that Strider be terminated, but Clinton said she instead demoted him, docked his pay, required counseling, separated him from the victim, and warned him that he’d be fired if he did it again.

The Times reported that Strider declined to attend the counseling sessions. He did not immediately respond Wednesday to a call and email requesting comment. Strider told BuzzFeed News that he didn’t consider his behavior “excessive, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t to” the woman.

Clinton said that there were no further complaints against Strider during the rest of the campaign, but that she is troubled that he was terminated from a job leading an independent political action committee supporting Clinton for inappropriate behavior several years later.

“I believed the punishment was severe and the message to him unambiguous. I also believe in second chances,” Clinton said in the post published shortly before the start of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. “But sometimes they’re squandered.”

She said that the reoccurrence of the behavior “troubles me greatly” and leads her to question whether it would have been better if she had fired him.

“There is no way I can go back 10 years and know the answers. But you can bet I’m asking myself these questions right now.”

Clinton said that her first thought after the Times report “was for the young woman involved” and that she reached out to her “to see how she was doing, but also to help me reflect on my decision and its consequences.”

“She expressed appreciation that she worked on a campaign where she knew she could come forward without fear,” Clinton said. “She was glad that her accusations were taken seriously, that there was a clear process in place for dealing with harassment, and that it was followed. Most importantly, she told me that for the remainder of the campaign, she flourished in her new role.”

She said the woman “read every word of this and has given me permission to share it.”

 
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The AP is fact-checking prepared remarks from President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. Here’s a look at some of the claims we’ve examined:

Tax cuts

Trump: “We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history.” — excerpt released by White House.

The Facts: No truer now than in the countless other times he has said the same. The December tax overhaul ranks behind Ronald Reagan’s in the early 1980s, post-World War Two tax cuts and at least several more.

An analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in the fall put Trump’s package as the eighth biggest since 1918. As a percentage of the total economy, Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War Two.

Valued at $1.5 trillion over 10 years, the plan is indeed large and expensive. But it’s much smaller than originally intended. Back in the spring, it was shaping up as a $5.5 trillion package. Even then it would have only been the third largest since 1940 as a share of gross domestic product.

Worker bonuses

Trump: “Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses — many of them thousands of dollars per worker.” — excerpt of speech released by the White House.

The Facts: This appears to be true, but may not be as impressive as it sounds. According to a tally of public announcements by Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that supported the tax law, about 3 million workers have gotten bonuses, raises or larger payments to their retirement accounts since the tax law was signed.

That’s about 2 percent of the more than 154 million Americans with jobs. The Labor Department said before the tax package was signed into law that 38 percent of workers would likely get some form of bonus in 2017.

Few companies have granted across-the-board pay raises, which Trump and GOP leaders promised would result from the cut in corporate tax rates included in the overhaul. Many, such as Walmart and BB&T Bank, said they will raise their minimum wages. Walmart made similar announcements in 2015 and 2016.

Energy production

Trump: “We have ended the war on American energy — and we have ended the war on clean coal.” — excerpt of speech released by White House.

The Facts: Energy production was unleashed in past administrations, particularly Barack Obama’s, making accusations of a “war on energy” hard to sustain. Advances in hydraulic fracturing before Trump became president made it economical to tap vast reserves of natural gas. Oil production also greatly increased, reducing imports.

Before the 2016 presidential election, the U.S. for the first time in decades was getting more energy domestically than it imports. Before Obama, George W. Bush was no adversary of the energy industry.

One of Trump’s consequential actions as president on this front was to approve the Keystone XL pipeline — a source of foreign oil, from Canada.
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Russia’s foreign spy chief, who is under U.S. sanctions, met last week outside Washington with U.S. intelligence officials, two U.S. sources said, confirming a disclosure that intensified political infighting over probes into Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Sergey Naryshkin, head of the Russian service known by its acronym SVR, held talks with U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and other U.S. intelligence officials, the sources said. The sources did not reveal the topics discussed.

A Russian Embassy tweet disclosed Naryshkin’s visit. It cited a state-run ITAR-Tass news report that quoted Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, as telling Rossiya-1 television that Naryshkin and his U.S. counterparts discussed the “joint struggle against terrorism.”

Antonov did not identify the U.S. intelligence officials with whom he met.

The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment. Coats’ office said that while it does not discuss U.S. intelligence officials’ schedules, “any interaction with foreign intelligence agencies would have been conducted in accordance with U.S. law and in consultation with appropriate departments and agencies.”

News of Naryshkin’s secret visit poured fresh fuel on the battles pitting the Trump administration and its Republican defenders against Democrats over investigations into Moscow’s alleged 2016 election interference.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded that the administration “immediately come clean and answer questions — which U.S. officials did he meet with? Did any White House or National Security Council official meet with Naryshkin? What did they discuss?”

The key question, Schumer told reporters, is whether Naryshkin’s visit accounted for the administration’s decision on Monday not to slap new sanctions on Russia under a law passed last year to punish Moscow’s purported election meddling.

“Russia hacked our elections,” Schumer said. “We sanctioned the head of their foreign intelligence and then the Trump administration invites him to waltz through our front door.”

A January 2017 U.S. intelligence report concluded that Russia conducted an influence campaign of hacking and other measures aimed at swinging the 2016 presidential vote to Trump over his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton.

Last week, the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported that the Netherlands intelligence concluded that some of the Russians running a hacking operation, known as “Cozy Bear,” against Democratic organizations were SVR agents.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo told the BBC in an interview last weekend that he had not “seen a significant decrease” in Russian attempts at subversion in Europe and the United States, and he expects Moscow to meddle in November’s U.S. mid-term elections.

Congressional panels and Special Counsel Robert Mueller are investigating Russia’s alleged interference and possible collusion between Moscow and Trump’s election campaign. Russia denies it meddled and Trump dismissed the allegations of collusion as a political witch hunt.

Naryshkin’s visit coincided with other serious disputes in U.S.-Russian relations. They include Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and its interference in Ukraine and Russia’s military intervention on the government’s side in the Syrian civil war.

Washington and Moscow cooperate in some areas, including the fight against Islamic militant groups, officials said.

For example, a month ago the United States provided advance warning to Russia that allowed it to thwart a terrorist plot in St. Petersburg, the White House said.

Naryshkin, who was appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to head the SVR in September 2016, was sanctioned by the Obama administration in March 2014 as part of the U.S. response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. At the time, he was speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament.

He was banned from entering the United States, but sanctions experts said there are processes for providing people under sanction permission to enter for official business. Meetings between foreign intelligence chiefs, even from rival nations, mostly are kept secret but are not unusual.
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An American news outlet that made a rare visit to North Korea to cover the country’s Olympic team is being criticized by the Trump administration for coverage that, in the words of one official, depicted “the most totalitarian country on the planet … as a cheerful winter holiday resort.”

NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt broadcast last week from the Masikryong Ski Resort, where South Korean and North Korean alpine ski teams are slated to train.

In some segments of the program, Holt was framed against a backdrop of children sledding, skiers in brightly colored gear, and jumbo screens displaying singers in military uniforms. Holt said that he and his crew had undergone an extensive customs search when entering North Korea, noting that the resort was “certainly” an aspect of North Korea that its leaders “would like us to see.”

Criticism of the broadcast erupted online, accusing NBC of misrepresenting a stage-managed piece of North Korean propaganda for American viewers. Holt defended the coverage, saying, “You go to a place like North Korea with your eyes wide open.”

A spokesperson for President Donald Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) told VOA’s Korean Service on Thursday that council members were ashamed of the network’s coverage.

“We are embarrassed for NBC. A first-year journalism student would know to highlight the severe constraints on their ability to report on North Korea as it truly is,” the official said. “It is no small feat of the most totalitarian country on the planet to be depicted as a cheerful winter holiday resort, but somehow NBC has managed to do it.”

The controversy over Holt’s coverage comes amid a slight easing of tension between Pyongyang and Seoul, a change which could undercut the Trump administration’s campaign of international sanctions and “maximum pressure” on North Korea to halt its nuclear and missile programs.

In response to last week’s White House comment, an NBC spokesperson told VOA that Holt clearly stated that the North Korean “government escorts determined where they could go, watching and listening to every move.” In one report, Holt said, “What you’re seeing here certainly flies in the face of a country that’s undergoing crippling sanctions, and that may be part of the reason we were invited to see this.”

Holt told Adweek on Monday that the Olympic Games will be conducted with a major news story in the background.

“The world is holding its breath on the issue of: Is this the breakthrough? Is this the moment when they can start having a useful dialogue?” he said. “On a geopolitical level, this may complicate how the White House views the North Korean nuclear threat if this sets a pattern for a stronger relationship between the North and South.”

North, South agreement

Earlier this month, the two Koreas held the first high-level talks in two years following Kim’s offer to discuss his country’s participation in the Olympics.

The discussions produced an inter-Korean agreement, officially announced on Jan. 20, under which the two sides agreed to march together under a single flag at the opening ceremony of the games and field a combined women’s ice hockey team. The North also agreed to send 22 athletes and a large delegation, including a cheerleading squad and performers. The athletes will compete in ice hockey, figure skating, short track speed skating, cross-country skiing and alpine skiing, the International Olympic Committee said.

North Korea on Monday canceled a joint cultural event, citing South Korean media coverage of its participation in the games.

The NBC broadcast from Masikryong came several weeks ahead of the Winter Olympics, scheduled to be held in the South Korean city of Pyeongchang from February 9-25. The games are a prized franchise for NBCUniversal, the Comcast subsidiary that is parent company of NBC, which also broadcast The Apprentice, the show that launched Trump’s reality TV career.

Since 1995, NBCUniversal has paid the International Olympic Committee (IOC) $15.63 billion for the rights to broadcast the Olympics through 2032. The money helps support the Olympic movement, according to the IOC.

VOA’s Christy Lee contributed to this report.
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The newest generation of the Kennedy political dynasty will be introduced to a national audience Tuesday night as he delivers the Democratic response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union.

Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a 37-year-old Massachusetts congressman and grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, says Democrats should focus on the economic worries of working-class voters who bolted the party in the 2016 elections.

To drive home the message, Kennedy will deliver his speech at a vocational high school in Fall River, Massachusetts, a gritty former textile hub 55 miles (89 kilometers) south of Boston.

“From health care to economic justice to civil rights, the Democratic agenda stands in powerful contrast to President Trump’s broken promises to American families,” Kennedy said in a statement, adding that his speech will be “guided by a simple belief that equality and economic dignity should be afforded to every American.”

Kennedy, the red-haired son of former Rep. Joe Kennedy II, D-Mass., was elected to the House in 2012, returning the family to Congress two years after the retirement of Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who is the son of Joe Kennedy III’s great-uncle Ted.

Besides his famous last name, Joe Kennedy III also is among a wave of younger Democrats in a caucus whose three top leaders are all in their 70s.

A former Peace Corps volunteer, Kennedy was an assistant district attorney in two Massachusetts districts before being elected to Congress. He has focused on economic and social justice in Congress and has advocated on behalf of vocational schools and community colleges and championed issues such as transgender rights and marriage equality.

To illustrate that message, Kennedy has invited Staff Sgt. Patricia King, a transgender infantry solider, to represent him at the State of the Union. King, an 18-year Army veteran, has twice been deployed to Afghanistan and has been awarded the Bronze Star.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called Kennedy “a relentless fighter for working Americans” and said he “profoundly understands the challenges facing hard-working men and women across the country.”

Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the campaign arm of House Republicans, could not conceal his glee as he welcomed the latest Kennedy as the voice of Democrats.

“Democrats using the multi-millionaire scion of a political dynasty as the face of their party shows they’ve learned absolutely nothing,” Gorman said in an email, adding that the only way to give the GOP an easier target would be for Kennedy to make the speech “live from the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis,” Massachusetts.

Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley said Kennedy will focus on education and the importance of preparing future generations for jobs while also pointing out “how Republicans fall short, and certainly the president.”

Kennedy “will be talking to the forgotten men and women — the people the president says he is speaking to but since has shown he has little or no regard for,” said Crowley, D-N.Y.

The speech is an opportunity for the three-term lawmaker to “step out a bit and make his own mark” in national politics, said Crowley, who recommended Kennedy for the role.

“He’s young, talented and smart. He’s got a great last name, but on his own, he’s a wonderful man and that will come through as well,” Crowley said. “The sky’s the limit for him, frankly.”

Before this speech, Kennedy’s best-known moment was a 2017 speech criticizing House Speaker Paul Ryan for defending the GOP effort to repeal former President Barack Obama’s health care law as “an act of mercy.”

Kennedy called the GOP effort “an act of malice” in a late-night speech that was viewed millions of times on social media.

Kennedy’s speech will be followed by a Spanish-language response delivered by Elizabeth Guzman, one of the first Latinas elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.
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U.S. Democratic senators have blocked a bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks, ensuring that the procedure stays legal through the later terms of a woman’s pregnancy.

Republican leaders in the Senate knew the bill had little chance to pass, but wanted to pressure Democrats to take a stance on abortion, particularly vulnerable Democrats facing re-election and from states that voted for President Donald Trump.

The bill fell short by a 51 to 46 vote. It needed 60 votes to end a filibuster and proceed to a vote.

The vote largely fell along party lines, with only two Republicans voting against it — Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska. Three Democrats voted for the measure. All three — Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania — are from states that voted for Trump in the 2016 election.

More than half of the Senate’s Democrats and independents are up for re-election this year, and 10 of them are in states Trump won.

“This afternoon, every one of us will go on record on the issue,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor Monday ahead of the vote.

The legislation passed the House in October largely along party lines. The bill calls for a ban on abortions after five months, and would also threaten doctors who perform abortions after that time to five years in jail. The bill exempts women who need an abortion to save their lives, as well as rape and incest survivors.

Democrats criticized the Republican leadership on Monday for prioritizing an abortion ban less than a week after a government shutdown and before issues on spending and immigration are resolved.

“While the country is waiting for us to come together and solve problems, Republicans are wasting precious time with a politically motivated, partisan bill engineered to drive us apart — and hurt women,” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, ahead of the vote.
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