by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, politics
Wael Hana, an alleged co-conspirator indicted in a bribery scheme with New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, pleaded not guilty and was released on bail in federal court Tuesday.
Hana was arrested Tuesday morning at John F. Kennedy International Airport upon his return from Egypt, his attorney Larry Lustberg told reporters after the hearing. His wife and children remain in Egypt where they all live much of the year. Hana returned to the US to face the charges, Lustberg said.
Hana was charged in an indictment last week with Menendez and others and faces one count of conspiracy to commit bribery and one count of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, which carry maximum prison sentences of five and 20 years respectively.
Prosecutors allege that he facilitated an agreement to provide bribes to the senator and his now-wife in exchange for the senator’s influence in matters benefiting himself, the Egyptian government and others. The couple has denied wrongdoing.
Hana is being released on a $5 million personal recognizance bond and surrendered his travel documents. He’s also subject to GPS location monitoring and a curfew requiring him to be at his New Jersey home from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.
All of his shares in his company Capital Management EG will also be held as collateral for his release. Lustberg said Hana will try to run his halal business but whether the business will survive remains to be seen.
Hana is also banned from contact with co-defendants and case witnesses without attorneys present.
RELATED: Read the indictment against Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife
Prosecutors allege Menendez, who held significant influence as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agreed and sought to pressure a senior official at the US Department of Agriculture in an effort to protect a business monopoly granted to Hana by Egypt.
The Department of Agriculture in 2019 had contacted Egypt to object to it giving Menendez’s contact, Hana, monopoly rights related to supplying halal meat to the US.
“When Official-1 attempted to explain why the monopoly was detrimental to U.S. interests, MENENDEZ reiterated his demand, in sum and substance, that the USDA stop interfering with IS EG Halal’s monopoly. Official-1 did not accede to MENENDEZ’s demand, but IS EG Halal nevertheless kept its monopoly,” the indictment says.
According to the indictment, the senator’s wife, Nadine, facilitated meetings with Hana and Egyptian officials requesting military sales and financing.
Lustberg said Hana has been friends with Nadine Menendez for many years, long before she began dating the senator in 2018. The attorney also said he wouldn’t consider the New Jersey Democrat to be a friend of Hana and said he’s unaware if Hana has any connections with Egyptian intelligence.
The Egyptian businessman is due back in Manhattan federal court October 2.
This story has been updated with additional information.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, politics
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an emergency bid from Alabama, setting the stage for a new congressional map likely to include a second Black majority district to account for the state’s 27% Black population.
The one-line order reflects that the feelings on the court haven’t changed since June when a 5-4 Supreme Court affirmed a lower court that had ordered the state to redraw its seven-seat congressional map to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”
There were no noted dissents.
The justices’ action will have immediate consequences in Alabama and perhaps nationwide in the 2024 elections. There are currently six Republicans and one Democratic member of Congress from Alabama, but the changing makeup of the districts is likely to mean the state will pick up a new Democratic member of Congress.
Black voters lean Democratic in other states with redistricting battles underway as well.
The case has been closely watched because after the court’s June ruling, Alabama GOP lawmakers again approved a congressional map with only one majority-Black district, seemingly flouting the Supreme Court’s decision that they provide more political representation for the state’s Black residents.
The 5-4 opinion in June was penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, who drew the votes of fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh as well as the court’s three liberal justices.
The same three-judge panel, which had overseen the case before it reached the Supreme Court the first time, wrote that it was “disturbed” by Alabama’s actions in the case and invalidated the map, ordering a special master to draft new lines.
“We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires,” wrote the judges, two of whom were appointed by former President Donald Trump.
The three-judge panel declined to put its ruling on hold pending appeal.
Alabama raced to the Supreme Court and asked the court to freeze the lower-court ruling, arguing that its 2023 map passed legal muster even if it didn’t include a second majority-Black district.
The state argued it could distinguish the new map from the plan that was invalidated in June.
Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, argued that the new map kept communities of interest intact, unifying the so-called Black Belt of the state.
“The 2023 plan departed from existing district lines to unify the Black Belt, it split the minimum number of county lines necessary to equalize population among districts and it made the map significantly more compact through changes to each district,” Marshall argued.
Marshall argued the lower court had erred in requiring that a second majority-Black district be drawn.
“The court gutted the State’s discretion to apply traditional redistricting principles in 2023, by expressly refusing to defer to them when they didn’t yield the ‘right’ racial results,” Marshall said.
The state had acted the Supreme Court to act quickly by issuing a stay by October 1, so that elections preparations for 2024 could begin.
Challengers to the map, represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU and others, had urged the justices to reject the state’s bid arguing that the map in question dilutes the power of Black voters.
They charged the state with “unabashedly” defying an opinion the justices issued just three months ago.
The lawyers likened the actions of the state to “our unfortunate history of States resisting civil rights remedies through laws and practices which, though neutral on their face, serve to maintain the status quo.”
Marshall, in a statement after the ruling, said Alabama “communities, local economies, and basic geography will be cast aside in the radical pursuit of racial quotas,” adding that there “should be nothing more offensive to the people of our great state than to be sidelined in 2023 by a view of Alabama that is stuck in 1963.”
In contrast, the organizations challenging the map heralded the decision as life changing “for the hundreds of thousands of Alabamians residing in the Black Belt who suffer from lack of healthcare access, job opportunities, and crumbling infrastructure.”
“We look forward to a new era in our state’s history, in which power is shared and Black voices are heard,” they said in a joint statement following the ruling.
This story has been updated with additional details.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, politics
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have cut a deal and are circulating a 79-page short-term spending bill to keep the government open past Saturday, according to a draft obtained by CNN.
Read the bill here:
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, politics
Cassidy Hutchinson warned Tuesday that her former boss Donald Trump would not have guardrails if he wins a second term as president, arguing that Trump’s violations of the Constitution after he lost the election in 2020 should be disqualifying from the White House.
“I think that Donald Trump is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview Tuesday.
Hutchinson’s new book, “Enough,” details the chaos and lawlessness at the end of the Trump administration, where she had a front row seat as a top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the former president’s efforts to overturn the election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Hutchinson, who came forward last year with damning testimony to the House committee that investigated January 6 about what was going on in the White House after the election, told Tapper that she worries the institutions of government will end up in an even worse place if Trump is elected again.
“The counts that Donald Trump is currently facing – he is facing counts of obstructing the Constitution – to me that is disqualifying. Donald Trump should be disqualified from being the president of the United States – to me that’s not a question,” Hutchinson said.
“We have to think: What would a second Trump term look like?” she asked. “Would these be the people that are running the government, the people that are currently facing indictments? Who would work for Donald Trump in the second term? That’s the question that we need to be asking or asking ourselves going into this election season.”
Meadows, Hutchinson’s former boss, is among a handful of Trump White House aides and advisers now facing criminal charges. Meadows, along with 18 other co-defendants including Trump, was indicted in the Fulton County district attorney’s sprawling racketeering case over efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. He has pleaded not guilty and is trying to move his case to federal court.
Hutchinson said that she feels sorry for Meadows being put in that situation because of his loyalty to Trump, adding she hopes that he’s “doing the right thing” and cooperating with the investigations into the former president.
“I hope that he would cooperate and uphold the oath that he swore, because he knows a lot more than I know about what happened during the November 2020 through January 2021 period,” Hutchinson said.
Meadows hired Hutchinson in 2020 after he took over as Trump’s chief of staff. In the book, she writes that Meadows told her early on that if he could “manage to keep (Trump) out of jail, I’ll have done a good job.”
“Especially in the Trump administration and in 2020, every day was a hair on fire day,” Hutchinson said when asked about Meadows’ comment. “We were swimming to stay afloat – but most of us were drowning.”
Hutchinson said she was disappointed with how Republican Party leaders reacted to Trump after the attack on the Capitol, especially House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom she writes she had developed a close relationship with while working in the White House legislative affairs office and then for Meadows.
“I still have a lot of respect for Kevin. I hope for the best for him as the speaker, especially as we see the chaos that’s happening on Capitol Hill right now,” Hutchinson said. “But I’m not confident he’s a good leader for the Republican Party because he’s a talking head for Donald Trump. Kevin hasn’t taken a strong stand on this, and I’m confident Kevin knows all of this is wrong.”
Hutchinson said she still considers herself a Republican, but that she doesn’t recognize the current version of the Trump-led Republican Party. Tapper asked Hutchinson about one of the key moments from the first GOP presidential debate last month, when the Fox News moderator asked the candidates to raise their hands if they would support Trump as the nominee, even if he were convicted of the crimes he’s been charged with.
Nearly all did so, outside of Trump critics Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas. In her interview with Tapper, Cassidy Hutchinson said she found the response disappointing and had hoped at the beginning of the debate that she would “sort of see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
“I had a lot of hope with Nikki Haley,” Hutchinson said. “I thought that she had very intelligent and well-fleshed-out answers on things. Even Mike Pence – I was really disappointed when I saw Mike Pence raise his hand.”
In the book, Hutchinson writes about her own personal struggle with Trump. She says she remained loyal to him even after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and she had planned to move to Florida until Meadows told her in the final week of the administration there wasn’t a job for her there.
When her good friend, former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, forcefully spoke out against Trump after January 6, Hutchinson said she initially felt upset with Farah Griffin, who is now a CNN political commentator, for being disloyal.
“Saying that now, with the hindsight and experience that I’ve had, sounds ludicrous,” Hutchinson said. “But I think that’s the important part of this transformation period for me. Because on the other hand when I saw her there, there was a little bit of envy. I was proud of her for doing what she felt she had to be doing, and for using her voice.”
Had she gone to Mar-a-Lago, Hutchinson said she doesn’t know if things might have turned out differently with her decision to testify.
“If I’m being completely candid and frank, I still felt that loyalty to him at the end of the administration. And I worry that if I had gone down to Florida, then that would have only grown, and I would not have come forward,” she said. “I would hope that I would have come forward to do the right thing still. But when you’re in that environment, it becomes a lot more difficult.”
In the spring of 2022, Farah Griffin played a key role in ultimately helping Hutchinson back channel with the January 6 committee for another interview, going to the committee’s vice chair Liz Cheney so that Cheney knew what questions to ask in a third deposition, when Hutchinson was still represented by a Trump-paid attorney.
“She came to me after her first two testimonies and said, ‘There’s more I need to say, I don’t know how to go about it,’” Farah Griffin said during a panel discussion Tuesday on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” “What we ultimately came up with is, I said, ‘What if I can take this information to Congresswoman Liz Cheney and see if she can call you back?’ And in the meantime, we can look at trying to get you representation pro bono.”
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who was a Republican on the January 6 committee and is now a CNN senior political commentator, said during the panel discussion that the plan they came up with was “a brilliant way to do it.”
Hutchinson felt the pull of Trump world when she initially was given a Trump-funded lawyer for her depositions before the January 6 committee last year. Eventually, she switched lawyers and came forward to speak about everything she saw, knowing that she was facing a fierce backlash from Trump and his allies for doing so.
Before she changed lawyers and went back to the January 6 committee, Hutchinson told Tapper that she remembered speaking with a Republican member of Congress, who told her to look in the mirror and ask whether she liked what she saw.
“And I hadn’t liked who I was, for a while,” she said. “I knew in that moment I had to correct course for myself and come back to the person I wanted to be and the person I saw myself becoming when I entered public service.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, politics
It was a shorter distance through US history from the White House to the Soviet Union or North Korea than to an autoworkers picket line in Michigan.
Presidents like to be the first to do something, particularly if it offers them an historic photo opportunity.
President Joe Biden added a presidential first when he joined an United Auto Workers picket line of a General Motors facility in Michigan on Tuesday.
In this case, Biden is happy to be seen as the labor-friendly president as he duels with former President Donald Trump for the pivotal support of union workers in Michigan and other key states.
Previous presidential firsts were wrapped in other events.
The first US president to visit the Soviet Union was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took part in the Yalta Conference in 1945 with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The goal was for the Americans, the Soviets and the British to organize post-war Europe. (Yalta, a resort town and part of Crimea, was invaded by Russia in 2014.)
No president would visit the Soviet Union again until Richard Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1972, when he and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev reached agreements, including to limit nuclear weapons.
Some firsts require physical travel. Harry Truman was the first president to travel, in a sense, into American living rooms. He gave the first televised presidential address in 1947 as he pitched the Truman Doctrine to the American people from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.
He argued in favor of large investments in a massive aid program for Greece and Turkey, which were dealing with displaced populations and food shortages. Read more from the National Archives. That effort resonates today as American lawmakers consider sending ever more aid to Ukraine.
Honorable mentions: In 1922, Warren Harding became the first president to be heard on the radio. In 2015, Barack Obama was the first president to post on Twitter, now known as X, although Trump clearly revolutionized the use of social media from the Oval Office.
Obama was also the first sitting president to appear on a late-night comedy program as president in 2016, although John F. Kennedy appeared on the Jack Paar show as a presidential candidate in 1960.
Presidents have traveled to war zones. Most recently, Biden traveled this year to Ukraine to show support for that country’s effort against Russia’s 2022 invasion.
These are largely controlled affairs, nothing like the time in July 1864 when Abraham Lincoln became the only known sitting US president to come “under direct fire from an enemy combatant,” according to the National Park Service.
Confederate troops were threatening Washington, and Fort Stevens was part of a network of fortifications meant to protect the nation’s capital. Lincoln climbed to the top of a parapet to watch the battle and was fired upon. The future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was on site as a young officer and, according to the Park Service, offered this advice to Lincoln: “Get down, you damn fool!”
A more typical example of a president visiting a war zone is pictured below. Lyndon B. Johnson, as president, visited troops deployed to Vietnam in 1966. Biden recently made his first presidential trip to Vietnam, which is still a communist country, and visited a memorial to John McCain, the late Republican senator who was held for years as a prisoner of war there.
It wasn’t until 1906 that a sitting US president left US soil, when Theodore Roosevelt went to see construction of the Panama Canal.
Subsequent presidents have traveled quite a bit. Franklin Roosevelt was the first to cross the Atlantic on a plane while in office in 1943. The multiday journey involved traveling first to the Caribbean and then Brazil and then across the ocean to Gambia.
Nixon was the first US president to visit China, in what historians still view as a pivotal moment in world history.
As CNN’s Simone McCarthy noted last year for the 50th anniversary of the trip, it “would open the door for the formation of diplomatic relations between the world’s richest country and its most populous” and “also reshape the world order as it was known: shifting the power dynamics of the Cold War and playing a part in China’s transition from impoverished isolation to a new role as a growing global power broker and economic partner to the United States.”
Hopefully George W. Bush is the first and only president to visit the site of a major terror attack on US soil days after it is committed. But his appearance at Ground Zero in New York City on September 14, 2001, will always be the most important image of his presidency.
Nixon went to China. He went to the Soviet Union. He went to Vietnam. He did not go to Cuba, the communist country off the coast of Florida.
Obama, who sought to normalize US relations with Cuba, was the first US president to visit the island nation in 2016 since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
Trump later reversed elements of Obama’s Cuba policy.
Bush and Republican presidents before him, while hoping to count on the votes of anti-abortion activists, never visited the annual March for Life rally in person.
In 1988, Ronald Reagan called in. So did George W. Bush years later. Not Trump. He traveled outside the White House and made the short trip to the National Mall to address activists in 2020. So it is fitting that Trump nominated the three justices that gave social conservatives a controlling majority on the Supreme Court to end nationwide abortion rights and give states the ability to outlaw abortions.
There is some jeopardy in being the first president to do something. Trump played up his letter-writing relationship with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. His meeting with Kim in 2018 at a summit in Singapore was clearly an historic event. A year later, Trump and Kim shook hands over the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.
Previous presidents had only managed to look across the DMZ with binoculars. Trump’s relationship with Kim, however, failed to yield a lasting agreement when their final summit in Vietnam in 2019 fell apart.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, politics
President Joe Biden’s younger dog, Commander, bit another US Secret Service agent at the White House Monday evening, CNN has learned, the 11th known biting incident involving the 2-year-old German Shepherd.
“Yesterday around 8 p.m., a Secret Service Uniformed Division police officer came in contact with a First Family pet and was bitten. The officer was treated by medical personnel on complex,” USSS chief of communications Anthony Guglielmi told CNN in a statement.
The injured officer spoke with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on Tuesday and is doing OK, Guglielmi said.
Commander has been involved in at least 11 biting incidents at the White House and in Delaware, according to CNN reporting and US Secret Service email correspondence, including a November 2022 incident where an officer was hospitalized after the dog clamped down on their arms and thighs.
White House officials said in July that the Bidens were working through new training and leashing protocols for the family pet following the incidents.
Asked by CNN whether the new training had taken place or if any further action would be sought, Elizabeth Alexander, communications director for the first lady, said in a statement that “the First Family continues to work on ways to help Commander handle the often unpredictable nature of the White House grounds.”
“The President and First Lady are incredibly grateful to the Secret Service and Executive Residence staff for all they do to keep them, their family, and the country safe,” she continued.
Another of Biden’s dogs, Major, was involved in biting incidents at the White House. The German Shepherd later moved out of the White House, and Commander arrived at the White House in 2021.
The July email correspondence, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the conservative group Judicial Watch, reflected 10 incidents.
In one incident in October, first lady Dr. Jill Biden “couldn’t regain control” of the dog as it charged a member of Secret Service staff.
“I believe it’s only a matter of time before an agent/officer is attacked or bit,” the staff member warned in an email.
While Secret Service agents are not responsible for the handling of the first family’s pets, they can come into frequent contact with the animals.
“This isn’t a Secret Service thing. This is a this is a workplace safety issue,” CNN contributor and former USSS agent Jonathan Wackrow told CNN.
“There’s uniqueness here where it’s the residence of the president of the United States, but it’s also the workplace for hundreds, thousands of people. And you can’t bring a hazard into the workplace. And that’s what is essentially happening with this dog. One time you can say it’s an accident, but now multiple incidents, it’s a serious issue,” he added.
Wackrow called it a “significant hazard” for agents on duty at the White House residence.
“I’m sure that the Bidens love the dog. I’m sure that it’s a member of the family like every dog is, but you’re creating a significant hazard to those who support you – support the office of the president,” he said.
This story has been updated with a statement from the first lady’s communications director.
