Friday, May 17th
Last update07:12:50 AM GMT
Political Glance
The tangled affair now known as Watergate began 45 years ago, before most of today’s U.S. population had even been born. (The median age of Americans is about 38, so most people in the country were born in 1979 or thereafter.)
Thus for most people “Watergate” is a historical allusion—obviously negative in its implications, since it led to the only presidential resignation in American history, but probably hazy in its details.
Why did President Trump fire FBI Director James Comey? There is plenty of informed speculation, but we don’t know yet, and the answer will require further investigation. We do know two things: The explanations given by the White House are false, and the evidence points toward friction over the FBI’s Russia investigation.
The White House is pinning the decision to fire Comey on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. In interviews Tuesday night, White House spokespersons Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kellyanne Conway claimed that Trump had “no choice” but to act on Rosenstein’s memo, issued earlier in the day, which criticized Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
President Trump’s son, Eric, once told a golf writer that funding for Trump golf courses come from Russia, that writer recounted in a new interview.
James Dodson during an interview Friday with Boston’s WBUR described meeting Donald Trump in 2014 and being invited to play golf at the Trump National Golf Club Charlotte.
He said asked Donald Trump how he was paying for his courses, and the now-president “sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million,” Dodson said in the interview
In an Associated Press interview, President Donald Trump claimed more progress than he's achieved on his 100-day plan and showed he was not completely familiar with what he had promised in that "contract" with voters.
A look at some of his assertions in the interview conducted Friday and other statements he made over the past week:
TRUMP, on his 100-day plan: "I'm mostly there on most items." — AP interview
THE FACTS: He's not. Many have yet to be taken up.
Of 38 specific promises Trump made in his 100-day "contract" with voters, he's accomplished 10, mostly through executive orders that don't require legislation.
Candice Jackson has a keen eye for racism—when practiced against her, a white woman. Now, thanks to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, she may become one of the most powerful civil rights figures in America.
Last week, ProPublica reported that during her time at Stanford University as an undergrad in the mid-90s, the woman who has been nominated to be the deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education penned as series of op-eds for the conservative Stanford Review describing the “racism” she faced as a white person while attending Stanford, claiming that the university’s support for affirmative action amounted to promoting “racial discrimination.”
Britain’s spy agencies helped alert U.S. intelligence officials to possible links between President Trump's campaign and Russia after first noticing interactions in late 2015, The Guardian reported Thursday.
The report said Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) noticed suspicious interactions between Trump allies and known or suspected Russian agents in late 2015.
The information was picked up amid routine surveillance of Russian targets and was not part of a spying operation aimed at Trump's team, the Guardian said.
The Port Washington Chabad, a Jewish community center on Long Island’s Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The Chabad is an unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing: Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through it.
Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.
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