| Trump peddles 'war on Thanksgiving' that he probably heard about on Fox News Posted: 27 Nov 2019 09:18 AM PST  Like the so-called war on Christmas, the rhetorical assault on Thanksgiving is being led by the president's favorite cable news network.
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| U.S. accuses Russia of helping Syria cover up chemical weapons use Posted: 28 Nov 2019 04:58 AM PST  The United States on Thursday accused Russia of helping Syria conceal the use of banned toxic munitions in the civil war by undermining the work of the global chemical weapons agency trying to identify those responsible. The comments by the U.S. representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Kenneth Ward, drew a rapid denial from Moscow and came as Western powers and Russia clashed at the agency's annual conference in The Hague. Moscow has for months cited dissent by two former OPCW employees who leaked a document and an email as evidence that the OPCW doctored the conclusions of a March 1 report which found that a toxic chemical containing chlorine was used in a 2018 attack near Damascus.
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| Dutch prosecutors charge isolated farm father with sex abuse Posted: 28 Nov 2019 04:23 AM PST  A Dutch father accused of holding six of his children against their will on an isolated farm for nine years is now also suspected of sexually abusing two of his other children, prosecutors said Thursday. The abuse allegations add a grim new element to a case that is shrouded in mystery and garnered huge attention across the Netherlands. The 67-year-old father and a 58-year-old man, who is reportedly an Austrian national and rented the farm to the family, are suspected of illegal deprivation of liberty and abuse for their alleged detention of six young adults on a farm in the rural farming village of Ruinerwold.
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| ICE arrested an estimated 250 people who enrolled in a fake university set up by federal authorities as part of an immigration sting operation Posted: 27 Nov 2019 09:02 AM PST  A grand-jury indictment from January alleged that "the University was being used by foreign citizens as a 'pay to stay' scheme" to obtain visas.
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| Russia says it showed nuclear missile system to U.S. inspectors Posted: 27 Nov 2019 08:43 AM PST  Russia's Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday it had shown the country's new Avangard nuclear missile system to U.S. inspectors for the first time, a development that Moscow said showed a key arms control treaty was still effective.
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| 21 of the Most Beautiful Sacred Sites That Every Traveler Must Visit Posted: 28 Nov 2019 05:00 AM PST |
| Customs agents seize $95M in counterfeit goods along with thousands of fake IDs Posted: 27 Nov 2019 08:38 PM PST  Customs officials said in a statement that counterfeiting sales can be traced to organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorist organizations.
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| Not much for Trump to be thankful for in latest impeachment news Posted: 27 Nov 2019 02:12 PM PST  While House Democrats concluded their public hearings last Thursday in the impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump, a flurry of new developments and disclosures this week appeared to increase the odds that he will become the third U.S. president to face a trial in the Senate that could (although most likely won't) end with his removal from office.
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| Forty years on, New Zealand apologizes for Antarctic plane disaster Posted: 27 Nov 2019 08:18 PM PST  New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern apologized on Thursday for the then-government's handling of a plane crash in Antarctica 40 years ago that took the lives of 257 people in the country's worst peacetime disaster. On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand flight 901 was on a sightseeing tour from Auckland when it crashed into the side of Mount Erebus, a 3,794 meter (12,448 ft) volcano near the U.S. Antarctic research base of McMurdo Station. Originally the crash was blamed on the pilots, but following a public outcry, a Royal Commission of Inquiry was set up to investigate the disaster.
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| A Chicago Student Ignored a Man's Late-Night Catcalls. Now He's Charged With Her Murder Posted: 27 Nov 2019 12:04 PM PST  Prosecutors said the man was 'angry that he was being ignored'
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| TikTok Blocks Teen Who Posted About China's Detention Camps Posted: 27 Nov 2019 05:15 AM PST  SHANGHAI -- The teenage girl, pink eyelash curler in hand, begins her video innocently: "Hi, guys. I'm going to teach you guys how to get long lashes."After a few seconds, she asks viewers to put down their curlers. "Use your phone that you're using right now to search up what's happening in China, how they're getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there," she says.The sly bait-and-switch puts a serious topic -- the mass detentions of minority Muslims in northwest China -- in front of an audience that might not have known about it before. The 40-second clip has amassed more than 498,000 likes on TikTok, a social platform where the users skew young and the videos skew silly.But the video's creator, Feroza Aziz, said this week that TikTok had suspended her account after she posted the clip. That added to a widespread fear about the platform: that its owner, Chinese social media giant ByteDance, censors or punishes videos that China's government might not like.A ByteDance spokesman, Josh Gartner, said Aziz had been blocked from her TikTok account because she used a previous account to post a video that contained an image of Osama bin Laden. This violated TikTok's policies against terrorist content, Gartner said, which is why the platform banned both her account and the devices from which she was posting."If she tries to use the device that she used last time, she will probably have a problem," Gartner said.Aziz, a 17-year-old Muslim high school student in New Jersey, said in an email on Tuesday that her TikTok videos tried to make light of the racism and discrimination she experienced growing up in the United States. In one video, she addressed a slur that she said she and other Muslims heard regularly: that they would marry bin Laden."I think that TikTok should not ban content that doesn't harm anyone or shows anyone being harmed," Aziz said.In recent months, U.S. lawmakers have expressed concerns that TikTok censors video content at Beijing's behest and shares user data with Chinese authorities.The head of TikTok, Alex Zhu, denied those accusations in an interview with The Times this month. Zhu said that Chinese regulators did not influence TikTok in any way and that even ByteDance could not control TikTok's policies for managing video content in the United States.But episodes such as Aziz's show how difficult it might be for TikTok to escape the fog of suspicion that surrounds it and other Chinese tech companies.China's government rigidly controls the internet within the nation's borders. It exerts influence, sometimes subtly, over the activities of private businesses. The concern is that, when companies like ByteDance and telecom equipment maker Huawei expand overseas, Beijing's long arm follows them.China would certainly prefer that the world did not talk about its clampdown on Muslims. Over the past few years, the government has corralled as many as 1 million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons.Chinese leaders have presented their efforts as a mild and benevolent campaign to fight Islamic extremism. But internal Communist Party documents reported by The Times this month provided an inside glimpse at the crackdown and confirmed its coercive nature.On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a news conference in Washington that the documents showed "brutal detention and systematic repression" of Uighurs and called on China to immediately release those who were detained. President Donald Trump, however, has refused to impose sanctions on Chinese officials deemed responsible, despite recommendations from some U.S. officials to do so.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| 7 People Sentenced to Death for Bangladesh’s Worst Terrorist Attack Posted: 26 Nov 2019 11:08 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- A trial court sentenced seven people to death for their roles in Bangladesh's worst terrorist attack, which killed 20 diners, most of them foreigners, in a cafe in 2016.Judge Mojibur Rahman pronounced the verdict in a packed Dhaka courtroom on Wednesday, Dhaka Metropolitan Chief Public Prosecutor Abdullah Abu said at a briefing. The decision brings to a close the year-long trial that followed a two-year investigation, which saw one accused being acquitted. The indicted have the right to appeal."They wanted to destabilize the country and destroy the economy by forcing foreigners and investors to leave Bangladesh," prosecutors said in case documents.Nine Italians, seven Japanese, one Indian and three Bangladeshis were killed by terrorists who stormed the Holey Artisan restaurant in the diplomatic area of Dhaka in 2016. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the 12-hour hostage crisis.Security forces shot dead five attackers and also, reports say mistakenly, a pizza chef during the rescue operation codenamed "Thunderbolt."The convicts yelled "Allahu Akbar," or "Allah is the greatest," in the courtroom, according to prosecutor Abu.At least two suspected militants tied to the attack are at large, according to Monirul Islam, chief of the police's counterterrorism unit.To contact the reporter on this story: Arun Devnath in Dhaka at adevnath@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Arijit Ghosh at aghosh@bloomberg.net, Jeanette Rodrigues, Abhay SinghFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Unhappy Thanksgiving: Explosions at Texas chemical plant keep more than 50,000 out of their homes Posted: 28 Nov 2019 04:15 PM PST  More than 50,000 people in southeast Texas remain under evacuation orders on Thanksgiving after two powerful explosions at a chemical plant.
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| Hong Kong police enter ransacked campus after protest siege Posted: 27 Nov 2019 05:56 PM PST  Hong Kong police on Thursday entered a ransacked university campus where authorities faced off for days with barricaded pro-democracy protesters, looking for petrol bombs and other dangerous materials left over from the occupation. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University became the epicentre of the territory's increasingly violent protest movement when clashes broke out on November 17 between police and protesters armed with bows and arrows as well as Molotov cocktails. University staff said they were only able to find a single protester on campus and reporters there struggled to see any major presence in the last 48 hours.
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| Founders wanted a powerful president Posted: 27 Nov 2019 08:48 PM PST  Many on the left have made it their mission to hinder and undermine Trump's government: Opposing view
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| Your talking points for the 2020 race, in time for Thanksgiving dinner Posted: 27 Nov 2019 01:30 PM PST  Frequently asked questions — and some straightforward answers — about every candidate still in the race for the White House.
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| Europeans fear climate change more than terrorism, unemployment or migration Posted: 28 Nov 2019 06:30 AM PST ![Europeans fear climate change more than terrorism, unemployment or migration]( "Europeans fear climate change more than terrorism, unemployment or migration") Almost half of all Europeans fear climate change more than losing a job or of a terrorist attack, a study by the European Investment Bank (EIB) showed on Thursday as EU lawmakers declared a "climate emergency". The symbolic vote by lawmakers was designed to pressure for action against global warming at an upcoming United Nations summit.. The EIB survey of 30,000 respondents from 30 countries, including China and the United States, showed 47% of Europeans saw climate change as the number one threat in their lives, above unemployment, large scale migration and concerns about terrorism.
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| UN expert: Zimbabwe hunger ‘shocking’ for country not at war Posted: 28 Nov 2019 05:29 AM PST ![UN expert: Zimbabwe hunger 'shocking' for country not at war]( "UN expert: Zimbabwe hunger 'shocking' for country not at war") Zimbabwe is on the brink of man-made starvation and the number of people needing help is "shocking" for a country not in conflict, a United Nations special expert on the right to food said Thursday. Hilal Elver said she found stunted and underweight children, mothers too hungry to breastfeed their babies and medicine shortages in hospitals during her 10-day visit to the economically shattered country. Zimbabwe's food crisis has the potential to spark fighting, the U.N. expert said.
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| The Top 5 Russian Aircraft That Threaten Europe Posted: 28 Nov 2019 05:00 AM PST  The Russian military is nothing to shake a stick at.
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| UPS workers allegedly trafficked 1,000s of pounds of drugs and fake vape pens across the country Posted: 28 Nov 2019 06:56 AM PST  "They've been doing it for so long that they were truly comfortable that they were never going to get caught."
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| Row over Chinese 5G equipment further strains U.S.-German relations Posted: 27 Nov 2019 07:43 PM PST  U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell called a German official's remarks this week "an insult to the thousands of American troops who helped ensure Germany's security."
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| Spain 'narco-sub' carried 100 mn euros of cocaine: officials Posted: 27 Nov 2019 10:05 AM PST  A submarine seized off the Spanish coast over the weekend was carrying three tonnes of cocaine worth 100 million euros ($110 million), officials said Wednesday. Police intercepted the 20-metre (65-foot) submarine -- thought to be the first of its kind captured in Europe -- off the northwestern region of Galicia on Saturday. While traffickers, especially from Colombia, have been caught using submarines to transport cocaine into Mexico and the United States, police said Saturday's seizure was "the first time that this system of transporting drugs has been detected in Europe".
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| Fox News Backs Trump’s ‘War on Thanksgiving’ BS He Got From Fox Posted: 27 Nov 2019 08:43 AM PST  The Trump-Fox News Feedback Loop was on full display Wednesday morning when President Donald Trump's favorite morning show backed his patently absurd claim that liberals want to change the name of Thanksgiving—an idea he obviously got from Fox's recent round-the-clock "War on Thanksgiving" coverage.At his Tuesday night campaign rally in Florida, the president insisted that "some people" want to change the name of the holiday and "don't want to use the term Thanksgiving," likening this supposed anti-Thanksgiving sentiment to another infamous right-wing media invention."And that was true with Christmas. Now everybody is using Christmas again. And remember I said that," Trump declared. "Now we're gonna have to do a little work on Thanksgiving. People have different ideas on why it shouldn't be called Thanksgiving. Everybody here loves the name Thanksgiving and we're not changing it!"During Wednesday morning's broadcast of Fox & Friends, the hosts appeared to give credence to the president's conspiracy, all while sidestepping the role their network had in planting the idea in his head."Last night, the president was talking about somebody who was apparently talking about changing the name of the holiday," co-host Steve Doocy noted while airing a clip of the president's remarks."I don't think there's a huge push to change the name of Thanksgiving, is there?" Brian Kilmeade wondered aloud."You know, in 2015 there was a rumor Obama wanted to change the name but that was debunked," Doocy responded, referencing a Snopes fact-check of a viral email campaign from a few years ago. "So, perhaps what he is talking about is just all these stories about your carbon footprint and the amount of energy you use to travel over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house."In recent weeks, Fox News' opinion shows have run countless segments insisting that liberals and progressives want to "cancel" the holiday and fight a "War on Thanksgiving," tying it all to a single HuffPost opinion piece about the environmental impact of Thanksgiving dinner. The article, while providing readers with steps to reduce their carbon footprint, never called for the holiday to be abolished or even for Americans to stop celebrating it.Later in the segment, fill-in co-host Emily Compagno accepted the president's premise that there was a concerted effort to change the name of Thanksgiving, providing a counterargument to these imaginary critics."I think the issue that a lot of people have to—with potentially changing that name—is the fact that in that name we're expressing gratitude and whatever historical connotations we can acknowledge," she said. "It still doesn't take away from the fact that this is the day that we are to give thanks and gratitude for our loved ones and blessings."In its news recap of the president's remarks, meanwhile, the network framed Trump's baseless claim with the following headline: "Trump vows not to change the name of Thanksgiving despite cries from the 'radical left'". Interestingly, there was no reference to Fox's consistent coverage of the "War on Thanksgiving" in the piece.This isn't the first time that Fox News has taken a single HuffPost piece to accuse the left of trying to "cancel" something holiday-related. Last year, the network's digital site published several articles while its opinion shows ran multiple segments denouncing liberals' supposed complaints that Christmas classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was "seriously problematic," all based on a largely satirical HuffPost video.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Israel says envoy's 'GOOD LUCK' to Myanmar for genocide case was a mistake Posted: 28 Nov 2019 01:52 AM PST ![Israel says envoy's 'GOOD LUCK' to Myanmar for genocide case was a mistake]( "Israel says envoy's 'GOOD LUCK' to Myanmar for genocide case was a mistake") The Israeli ambassador was mistaken to have sent a "GOOD LUCK" message to Myanmar ahead of World Court hearings on accusations the state committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims, Israel's foreign ministry said on Thursday. Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported that the ambassador to Myanmar wished authorities good luck in tweets that have since been deleted ahead of the hearings next month at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.
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| 'A cruel and unnecessary scam': US immigration set up fake university to lure foreign students Posted: 27 Nov 2019 11:32 AM PST  Around 90 more foreign students have been arrested as a part of a sting by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which reportedly set up a fake university in Detroit that lured mostly Indian students in before revealing itself as fake.US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reportedly arrested around 250 students since January as a part of the sting, which included the establishment of a pretend university that was apparently listed on the DHS website as legitimate.
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| No F-35, But a Real Killer: Don't Underestimate China's J-20 Stealth Fighter Posted: 27 Nov 2019 01:00 PM PST  Just because it isn't as powerful as an F-22 or F-35, doesn't mean it isn't a tough plane.
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| Vietnamese village holds funeral for trafficking victims Posted: 28 Nov 2019 01:19 AM PST  The village of Dien Thinh bid farewell Thursday to two of its sons, victims of a human trafficking tragedy unveiled last month when the bodies of 39 Vietnamese were discovered in a truck in England. Coffins with the bodies of cousins Nguyen Van Hung and Hoang Van Tiep were carried to the village's Trung Song church for a funeral attended by about 300 people. "Nguyen Van Hung and Hoang Van Tiep left their hometown to find a better future for themselves and for their families," Rev. Pham Tri Phuong said.
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| Beijing accuses developing countries, the U.S. of not doing enough to curb global warming Posted: 27 Nov 2019 09:07 AM PST  Beijing on Wednesday accused developed countries including the US of doing too little to curb global warming, ahead of a UN summit discussing controversial issues including climate compensation. China is the world's second-largest economy and the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, but has repeatedly argued that developed nations should lead on tackling international climate obligations.
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| Japan beer exports to S.Korea dry up amid hiccup in ties Posted: 27 Nov 2019 11:26 PM PST  Not a single drop of Japanese beer was exported to South Korea last month, according to official figures on Thursday, as a boycott campaign against Japan over a historical dispute dries up demand. Japanese beer shipments to South Korea stood at 7.9 billion yen ($72 million) last year, accounting for more than 60 percent of the country's global exports of the amber nectar. Exports of Japanese instant noodles and sake to South Korea have also plummeted.
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| 30 Clever-Approved Sofas That Won't Blow Your Budget Posted: 28 Nov 2019 05:00 AM PST |
| GOP's closed-door conspiracy theory led to Hill's public rebuke Posted: 27 Nov 2019 10:29 AM PST  Russia expert Fiona Hill rebuked Republicans during the impeachment hearings for pushing a narrative about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. It was the false equivalence between Russia's systematic, government-driven campaign and the actions of a few Ukrainian individuals that created Hill's concern.
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| Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp fumes at 'attacks' over Senate appointment Posted: 27 Nov 2019 04:34 PM PST  Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp pushed back on Wednesday against speculation over who he'll appoint to replace retiring Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson.
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| The Secret of China's Aircraft Carriers Posted: 28 Nov 2019 12:30 AM PST  "China understands that if conflict with the United States comes, its carriers' warfighting capability would—like the rest of its arsenal—have to be employed based on the principle of calculated risk. It would be wise for strategists in the United States to remember these same principles."
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| The Latest: Highway lanes from California to Oregon reopen Posted: 27 Nov 2019 04:09 AM PST  The northbound lanes of Interstate 5 have reopened heading from Redding, California, all the way to the Oregon border. California transportation officials said Wednesday the freeway was clear and no chains are required. Don Anderson, deputy director of the California Department of Transportation in Redding, says Caltrans and many other agencies worked hard to communicate the seriousness of the storm but that many drivers were still caught by surprise.
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| Detective: "Payback" written on wall where doctors found dead Posted: 28 Nov 2019 12:38 AM PST  Officers showed a knife they believe was used in the murder and words written on the wall of the doctors' penthouse.
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| Private investigators focused on frat party in Cornell University freshman’s death Posted: 28 Nov 2019 02:30 AM PST  Another element of the parents' search for answers is the history of Cornell student suicides connected to the gorges in Ithaca.
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| Gaza protests cancelled for third week: statement Posted: 28 Nov 2019 03:16 AM PST  Palestinian protests along the Gaza-Israel border have been cancelled for the third week, organisers said on Thursday, amid declining turnout and fears of a fresh conflict in the Gaza Strip. A statement by the organising committee said it had decided to postpone this Friday's marches to "avoid giving an opportunity to the Zionist enemy (Israel)" and due to "the very dangerous security conditions" after a deadly flareup in Gaza earlier this month. It argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was looking for an opportunity to divert attention after being indicted on corruption charges and a new conflict with Gaza could help him do so.
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| U.S. Fertility Rate Falls for Fourth Consecutive Year in 2018, Reaching Record Low Posted: 27 Nov 2019 06:00 AM PST  The U.S. fertility rate declined in 2018 for the fourth consecutive year, reaching a record low 59.1 births for every 1,000 women able to bear children, the National Center for Health Statistics announced on Wednesday.The fertility rate has been on the decline since the 2008 recession, with a slight rebound in 2014. Typically, economic crises lead to a decline in fertility rates, but the current decline has not reversed even as the economy has recovered."It is hard for me to believe that the birthrate just keeps going down," University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson told to the New York Times."The data suggest that people want to establish themselves before having children," Alison Gemmill, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University, told the Times. "They also want to make sure they have adequate resources to raise quality children."The median age at which women give birth has increased continuously over the past several decades. William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, said the median childbearing age in the 1970's was 21 for women and 23 for men, while data from the Census Bureau show that the median childbearing age in 2018 was 28 for women and 30 for men. The number of women giving birth under the age of 35 has also steadily declined, with more women giving birth in their 30's and 40's.The annual rate of births per woman, which for 2018 was 59.1/1000 is known as the general fertility rate. A different metric, the total fertility rate, measures the likely number of children the average woman will have during her lifetime, if current fertility patterns hold.For 2018 the TFR stood at 1.73, according to a Pew study released in May. This means that women are having fewer than two children on average, below replacement level for the general population.
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| New toll road cuts Moscow-Saint Petersburg drive in half Posted: 27 Nov 2019 07:54 AM PST  President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday opened what has been billed as Russia's first modern motorway, almost halving the driving time between the two biggest cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The "Neva" toll road, running 669 kilometres (416 miles) and named after Saint Petersburg's main river, is Russia's first long-distance toll road. It boasts no traffic lights and a higher maximum speed limit of 130 kilometres per hour (81 miles per hour) versus 110 kph on other roads.
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| Trump Keeps Losing in Court. But His Legal Strategy Is Winning Anyway. Posted: 27 Nov 2019 11:30 AM PST  WASHINGTON -- Critics of President Donald Trump cheered Monday when a federal judge ruled that the former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify to Congress -- and scathingly labeled "fiction" the administration's arguments that top White House aides are immune from congressional subpoenas.Indeed, the outcome was the latest in a string of lower-court losses for Trump as he defends his stonewalling of lawmakers' oversight and the impeachment investigation. Other fights are playing out in the courts over Trump's financial records and grand-jury evidence in the Russia investigation.But from a realist perspective, Trump is winning despite losing.That is because it is now late November -- not May, when McGahn, on Trump's directions, first defied the subpoena, or even August, when the House asked the judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to enforce its subpoena.The proceedings before Jackson consumed nearly a third of the year as she took briefs, conducted oral arguments and then composed a 120-page opinion. And her ruling was merely the end of the first step.The Justice Department immediately filed an appeal and sought a stay -- virtually ensuring that the fight over McGahn will remain bogged down for the foreseeable future. (On Wednesday, Jackson placed a hold on her ruling to consider the stay motion.) And even if McGahn someday is forced to show up, a new cycle of litigation will inevitably start over whether specific information he might testify about is subject to executive privilege.Meanwhile, time is on Trump's side. The realistic window for Congress to consider impeaching him is closing, with the 2020 election less than a year away. If the overriding goal is to keep information from coming out while his term and potential reelection hang in the balance, the Trump legal strategy is succeeding despite all the adverse rulings."This is not about putting down markers for all time -- it's more about particular short-term objectives," said Martin Lederman, a Georgetown law professor who worked on executive-power issues as a lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.Like a football team up late in a game whose defense hangs back to prevent big plays while letting its opponent make shorter gains, Trump's legal team is looking to run out the clock, putting forth aggressive legal theories often backed by scant precedent. The strategy risks periodic bad headlines in the short term and could lead to definitive rulings that hamstring future presidents -- but it is demonstrably advantageous for consuming time.The theories include asserting that Congress lacks legitimate legislative authority to conduct oversight of whether government officials are engaged in wrongdoing, even though lawmakers have done so for generations; that impeachment investigators cannot gain access to grand-jury evidence, even though an appeals court permitted just that during Watergate; and that senior presidential aides are immune from subpoenas, even though a judge rejected that theory in 2008.House Democrats have turned to the courts at an unprecedented tempo in their clashes with Trump, and they went into court Tuesday to file yet another case -- this one challenging the administration's defiance of a subpoena for documents about its attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. But they are also growing disillusioned with the courts as a solution.The Democrat leading the investigation into the Ukraine affair, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, has made clear that lawmakers will move forward with weighing articles of impeachment rather than getting bogged down in courts. He used another sports metaphor, the tactic of boxers who lean against the ring ropes and trick their opponents into exhausting themselves by ineffectively pummeling them."We are not willing to go the months and months and months of rope-a-dope in the courts, which the administration would love to do," Schiff said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, explaining that he and his colleagues view their investigation as urgent because Trump has solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election. Because of that, Schiff said, they will not wait even for witness testimony and documents they would like to obtain.Indeed, in another major court development Monday that got far less attention than the McGahn lawsuit, the Supreme Court blocked an appeals court ruling that the House can subpoena Trump's financial records while the justices consider whether to hear the case -- alongside a similar case involving the Manhattan district attorney's push for such records.Both cases generated headlines when district court judges and then appeals courts ruled against the president. But if the Supreme Court does take the appeals, justices may issue no final judgment until the court's term ends in seven months.Trump suggested he instead had a more principled motive than running out the clock Tuesday, claiming in a series of tweets that he would be happy to let his current and former aides tell Congress what they know, and insisting that he is only blocking them from talking to ensure that "future Presidents should in no way be compromised.""I am fighting for future Presidents and the Office of the President," Trump said. "Other than that, I would actually like people to testify."His claim that he is blocking aides from disclosing what they know because he wants to strengthen the institution of the presidency over the long term echoes justifications of other presidents in previous disputes, like the George W. Bush administration's range of efforts to expand presidential power.The men who drove that Bush agenda -- Vice President Dick Cheney and his top lawyer, David S. Addington, a key leader on the administration legal team -- held long-standing ideological views about executive power, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard professor who led the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration.But "that is not true of Trump, I don't think," Goldsmith said, noting that Attorney General William Barr, who believes in stronger executive power as a lifelong principle, is an exception. Instead, the Trump administration's legal positions "seem like short-term tactical moves," Goldsmith said.Much of the line where Congress' power stops and the president's begins is blurry, with few definitive precedents. That ambiguity gives presidents freedom to maneuver. But, Goldsmith warned, if an aggressive president pushes an extreme theory all the way to the Supreme Court, it can risk a definitive ruling tying future presidents' hands.The danger for the institution of the presidency, Goldsmith said, is that "really aggressive assertions of executive power often end up creating bad executive power precedents."To be sure, Trump may also be hoping that the Supreme Court -- with its majority of five justices appointed by Republicans now including two by him -- could eventually rule for him, just as it ultimately voted, 5-4, to permit a watered-down version of his travel ban even though lower courts had blocked it.Many administrations have sometimes made privilege and immunity claims to fend off or delay congressional attempts to pry information out of the executive branch, Lederman noted. But prior presidents, unlike Trump, were willing to resolve disputes through negotiation and compromise long before they could reach the Supreme Court."If the Supreme Court justices decide they want to drag these disputes out, they can," Lederman said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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