When will these people get serious about the government corruption.
Democrats who are hoping that President Donald Trump will face harsh repercussions for paying settlements to women who allege relationships with him passed legislation on Thursday that requires them to make payments for sexual harassment with their own money.
Current law addressing sexual misconduct that was put in place in 1995 — ironically when Bill Clinton was in the White House — requires an accuser to get counseling, wait 30 days, and allowed accused lawmakers to use a slush fund of taxpayer money to pay off their accusers.
Part of the reason it took Congress all year to get this done is because the House wanted tougher punishments and more transparency when lawmakers sexually harass or discriminate against staff, while Senate Republicans, for some reason, insisted on watering down those provisions.
House lawmakers, for example, wanted to make members of Congress pay out of pocket for discrimination settlements too and wanted to provide legal representation to all accusers. But the Senate, which finally caved on requiring lawmakers to pay out of pocket for sexual harassment settlements, rejected both of those provisions and neither ended up in the final bill.
The passage of the bill, which President Donald Trump has to sign into law, is Congress’s response to the #MeToo movement launched last year, wherein women across the country accused men ranging from Hollywood moguls to media celebrities and members of the House and Senate of sexual harassment and worse.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) spearheaded the movement in Congress last year after announcing that she, too, had been the victim of sexual misconduct as a young congressional staffer. She was one of the main sponsors behind the House legislation, and she promised to push next session to put that chamber’s tougher terms back in place.
“Taxpayers should never foot the bill for Members’ misconduct,” Speier said in a statement provided to the Huffington Post. “And having spoken with many survivors, the process of going up against a lawyer for the institution and the harasser was as traumatic, if not more traumatic, than the abuse they suffered. … We are committed to offering victims the tools they need to pursue justice. We will address these issues in the next Congress.”
The law is not retroactive, so the members who have left their Congressional seats because of sexual misconduct charges will not be affected, including Blake Farenhold (R-TX), Patrick Meehan (R-PA), Trent Franks (R-AZ), John Conyers (D-MI), and Al Franken (D-MN).
The Daily Caller asked Speier why lawmakers paying off women who make accusations against them differs from what Trump is alleged to have done when his lawyer paid funds to women who claimed to have had a relationship with him.
“They’re totally unrelated,” Speier told The Daily Caller on Wednesday. She later explained, “One was to impact an election and the other was bad behavior within Congress.”
“When pressed further about the Congressional settlements being taxpayer money, as opposed to any money allegedly paid to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, Speier responded, “I’m the one who has carried the legislation to make sure that members are held accountable. These members are now gone. There’s no one left who was sexually harassing.”
This is how many on the left want most Universities to look
• Qatar gave $1 billion to elite American universities since 2011, according to Department of Education data.
• The Qatar Foundation is suing the Texas attorney general to prevent information about Qatari funding from becoming public.
• Universities are taking money from Qatar, a nation with a checkered human rights history, as students rally for social justice causes.
The nation of Qatar, a Sharia-law monarchy that has been accused of trying to influence other countries’ governments, gave $1 billion to elite American universities since 2011, according to Department of Education data.
Some universities have refused to discuss where strings are attached to that money. The Qatar Foundation, for example, filed a lawsuit against the Texas attorney general Oct. 12 to hide information about the $225 million Qatar has awarded to Texas A&M University since 2011.
The Qatar Foundation hired the politically connected powerhouse law firm Squire Patton Boggs for the suit, which was filed in response to a researcher’s public information request regarding the foreign funding.
The biggest recipient of Qatar’s educational funding, Georgetown University, repeatedly ignored requests from The Daily Caller News Foundation for basic information about the funding and whether it implicates academic independence.
Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have accused Qatar of meddling in other nations’ internal affairs as well as funding terrorism. Qatar also wields influence through its media group, Al Jazeera.
Top Foreign Funders of U.S. Universities, 2011-2016 (Source: Department of Education)
Country
Amount
Qatar
$1,024,065,043
England
$761,586,394
Saudi Arabia
$613,608,797
China
$426,526,085
Canada
$402,535,603
Hong Kong
$394,446,859
For a nation seeking sway over the U.S., Georgetown University would be a particularly tactical site of influence. Georgetown has received nearly $333 million from Qatar since 2011 — far more than any other U.S. school has received from any foreign nation.
Georgetown is situated in the seat of power, near the State Department, and its experts are frequently cited by groups shaping policy. In fact, the Jesuit Catholic university trains many of the United States’ future diplomats at its Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Its website notes that “At SFS, you can study with former Secretaries of State” and access “connections to diplomats from just about every country, and of course, the seat of the U.S. government. Our location gives SFS the extraordinary opportunity for us to engage (and sometimes even influence) the debates that lead to real action.”
Thanks to the Qatari funding, Georgetown and its foreign service program has an entire outpost in Qatar. “Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) is an additional location of Georgetown University, based in Education City in Doha,” its website says. “The University offers a four year undergraduate program in international affairs leading to the Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (BSFS) degree.”
Students from VCU’s home campus visit the Imam Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab Mosque, the national mosque of Qatar. Source: VCU
The magnitude of liberal-leaning universities’ reliance on the foreign nation, a poster child for income inequality, provides a stark contrast. As U.S. college students clamor for university endowments to divest from fossil fuels, the schools take money from the oil-rich kingdom. As they rally for social justice causes, Qatar has a checkered human rights record.
Qatar has only 313,000 citizens, and 2.3 million foreigners dwelling there, many of them laborers serving the country’s elite, according to 2017 data.
“The tragedy of 1.7 million migrant workers trapped in Qatar defines modern day slavery,” the International Trade Union Confederation said in 2015.
Nepalese laborers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, according to The Guardian.
“We were working on an empty stomach for 24 hours; 12 hours’ work and then no food all night,” one said. “When I complained, my manager assaulted me, kicked me out of the labor camp I lived in and refused to pay me anything.”
In Washington, professors of Islamic issues have engaged in activism. Jonathan A. C. Brown, a convert to Islam and the director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, which Qatar rival Saudi Arabia funds, offered an Islam-based defense of slavery, concubinage and non-consensual sex.
“The Prophet of God had slaves. He had slaves. There’s no denying that,” he said in 2017 at an International Institute of Islamic Thought talk. “Was he — are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God? No, you’re not. I’ll answer your question for you.” (RELATED: Before Killing Of Journalist, Elite Universities Took $600M From Saudis)
Studying abroad forms a bond between U.S. students and Qatar and helps Qatari nationals learn about the U.S., according to marketing materials.
Top Recipients of Qatar-Affiliated Funding to Universities, 2011-2016 (Source: Department of Education)
Country
Amount
Georgetown University
$332,818,297
Northwestern University
$277,456,289
Texas A&M University
$225,455,141
Carnegie Mellon University
$71,456,401
Cornell University
$47,577,242
Virginia Commonwealth University
$40,117,185
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
$7,860,694
Harvard University
$7,693,947
Purdue University
$2,794,462
Arizona State University
$2,276,044
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
$1,223,630
Meanwhile, college students have adopted a fondness for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions to Israel movement.
The vast majority of funds from Qatar were contracts, the Education Department data shows, requiring Georgetown to do something in return for the money, unlike gifts.
Georgetown spokesman Matt Hill ignored questions from TheDCNF about the strings attached to such funds and whether they could influence curriculum and would not provide the contract governing them.
The dean of Georgetown’s Qatar campus is Ahmad Dallal, who the Middle East Forum describes as “a long-time and enthusiastic supporter of the State Department-designated terrorist group Hezbollah. Dallal, who chaired Georgetown’s Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies from 2003 to 2009, is also pro-Hamas, pro-Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, co-author of an Arabic textbook whose maps omit Israel, and signatory of a letter warning that Israel would engage in ‘ethnic cleansing’ at the start of the Iraq war.”
The Zachor Legal Institute, which opposes the movement to sanction and boycott Israel, submitted a Freedom of Information request in May to Texas A&M (TAMU), a state university, for “a summary of all amounts of funding or donations received” from Qatar and a long list of proxies.
The office of state Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled “the university must withhold the donors’ identifying information … the university must release the remaining information.”
Most of the money to TAMU were contracts, not donations.
The Qatar Foundation’s high-powered lawyers intervened, arguing the relevant portion of the attorney general’s ruling “requiring release of all remaining information other than donor identity is incorrect and without force or effect.”
They wrote:
This is an action to prevent disclosure of confidential financial information concerning the relationship between QF and Texas A&M University … QF operates programs dedicated to education, science, and community development. It is responsible for funding much of the development in Education City, a hub for higher education outside Doha. … In addition to TAMU, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Virginia Commonwealth University have all established campuses in Education City.
The Attorney General concluded that TAMU could withhold information identifying ‘donors’ under section 552.1235. But the Attorney General stated that TAMU would be required to release all remaining information requested, which would include information related to payments made by QF to TAMU pursuant to a contract. In so doing, the Attorney General implicitly ruled that those payments were not ‘donations,’ and therefore not exempt from disclosure under the PIA … The information related to these grants and donations is also confidential commercial information and constitutes a trade secret.
The Qatar Foundation’s general counsel is Michael Mitchell, a former vice president of Ohio State University.
Marc Greendorfer, an attorney for the Zachor Legal Institute, responded to the Texas attorney general Nov. 8: “One of the Qatari entities that was the subject of our original request has taken the extraordinary step of taking the Texas Attorney General to court to suppress the information that we requested. Now, with the most recent attempt by TAMU to prevent public disclosure of information as to how Qatari entities are involved with a Texas public university, the intrigue grows, and we have to wonder what it is they are trying to keep from the public.”
TAMU and the Qatar Foundation did not return requests for comment.
The university operations by Qatar are just one prong in a massive public relations and influence push that includes millions to lobbyists and public relations firms in the U.S.
It is also not the only involvement of Squire Patton Boggs with Middle Eastern countries. The same law firm also has a $100,000-a-month contract with Qatar’s rival Saudi Arabia for the kingdom to retain former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Democratic Louisiana Sen. John Breaux.
According to Foreign Agent Registration Act disclosures, it worked directly with Saud al-Qahtani, the same aide who allegedly organized the killing of a
Trump should have investigated Hillary and all the corrupt Democrats. Don’t play nice with demons is my motto.
0:55
Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the likely next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said President Donald Trump might “face the real prospect of jail time” in light of charges against his personal attorney, Michael Cohen for illegal payments during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Schiff said, “There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time. We have been discussing the issue of pardons the president may offer to people or dangle in front of people. The bigger pardon question may come down the road, as the next president has to determine whether to pardon Donald Trump.”
In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with The Post, President Trump said Wednesday that if House Democrats launched probes into his administration — which he called “presidential harassment” — they’d pay a heavy price.
“If they go down the presidential harassment track, if they want go and harass the president and the administration, I think that would be the best thing that would happen to me. I’m a counter-puncher and I will hit them so hard they’d never been hit like that,” he said during a 36-minute Oval Office sitdown.
The commander-in-chief said he could declassify FISA warrant applications and other documents from Robert Mueller’s probe — and predicted the disclosure would expose the FBI, the Justice Department and the Clinton campaign as being in cahoots to set him up.
“I think that would help my campaign. If they want to play tough, I will do it. They will see how devastating those pages are.”
But Trump told The Post he wanted to save the documents until they were needed.
“It’s much more powerful if I do it then,” Trump said, “because if we had done it already, it would already be yesterday’s news.”
Trump revealed his playbook just as Democrats are set to take over House committeesin January where they are poised to investigate his potential business conflicts of interests, tax returns, Russia dealings and more.
With the GOP losing power in January, its congressional investigations into alleged Department of Justice misconduct in launching the Russia probe is expected to fizzle out.
In September, a group of Trump allies in the House – led by Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York – called on Trump to declassify scores of Justice Department documents they believe undercut the start of the Russia investigation and show bias against Trump.
The documents include Justice officials’ request to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and memos on DOJ official Bruce Ohr’s interactions with Christopher Steele, the author of a controversial dossier that alleged Trump ties with Russia.
Trump initially agreed to declassify the documents, including text messages sent by former FBI officials James Comey, Andrew G. McCabe as well as Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Ohr. Trump allies believe the revelations will show favoritism toward Hillary Clinton and a plot to take down Trump.
Trump then reversed course, citing the need for further review and concern of US allies.
Trump added Wednesday that his lawyer Emmet Flood thought it would be better politically to wait.
“He didn’t want me to do it yet, because I can save it,” Trump said.
The president also pushed back on the notion that all the Justice Department documents should eventually be released for the sake of transparency.
“Some things maybe the public shouldn’t see because they are so bad,” Trump said, making clear it wasn’t damaging to him, but to others. “Maybe it’s better that the public not see what’s been going on with this country.”
Meghan Murphy, a prominent feminist who was recently banned from Twitter for stating that men aren’t women, wrote an article for Quillette on Wednesday explaining how formerly “banal” facts have become “heresy — akin to terrorist speech.”
Murphy, who accused Twitter of “censoring basic facts and silencing people,” was permanently suspended from the social network last week for stating, “Women aren’t men,” and “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?”
This fraud is the problem since he is the CEO.
After Twitter made Murphy delete the posts, she made another post calling out Twitter, and was subsequently blacklisted.
“The statement that ‘Men aren’t women’ would have been seen as banal—indeed, tautological—just a few years ago. Today, it’s considered heresy—akin to terrorist speech that seeks to ‘deny the humanity’ of trans-identified people who very much wish they could change sex, but cannot,” declared Murphy in an article for Quillette, Wednesday. “These heretics are smeared as ‘TERF’—a term of abuse that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist—and blacklisted. On many Twitter threads, the term is more or less synonymous with ‘Nazi.’”
In her article, Murphy also described transgender identity as a “religious faith,” making it impossible to argue with.
“I was angry to have lost a Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers. I was angry to have lost a book deal. But I will recover,” she proclaimed. “I have countless supporters, and my career is far from over. Certainly, I don’t plan on shutting up.”
“But this isn’t just about me. It’s about a cultish movement that is flexing its muscle on campuses, in civic organizations, at public events, and in the back offices of social-media companies, to strike down anyone who dares point out that the gender emperor wears no clothes,” Murphy concluded. “It is about our ability to debate important issues and speak the truth in the public realm. It’s time for all of us—not just women and feminists, who are now taking the worst of it—to put their collective foot down and demand a return to sanity.”
Fox News Channel announced Wednesday it will support CNN’s lawsuit against the White House over the temporary suspension of White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s “hard pass” press credential, revealing the company will file an amicus brief in defense of the partisan network.
Fox News issued a statement accusing the White House of “weaponizing” Secret Service passes for reporters:
FOX News supports CNN in its legal effort to regain its White House reporter’s press credential. We intend to file an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court. Secret Service passes for working White House journalists should never be weaponized. While we don’t condone the growing antagonistic tone by both the President and the press at recent media avails, we do support a free press, access and open exchanges for the American people.
In a brief statement shared to Twitter, CNN thanked Fox News for backing its lawsuit against the White House.
NBC and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists told CNN that they will be joining the brief in support of the network.
NAHJ
✔@NAHJ
We spoke last night with the legal team of @acosta/@cnn and will also be joining an amicus brief in support of the correspondent and the network. #PressFreedom#MoreLatinosInNews
CNN Communications
✔@CNNPR
NBC News will support CNN and @Acosta. Thank you @NBCNewsPR@NBCNews! https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1062740096447901698 …
According to Axios, the following news outlets are also joining the brief: The Associated Press, Bloomberg, First Look Media, Gannett, the New York Times, Politico, EW Scripps, USA Today Network, Washington Post, Press Freedom Defense Fund, and National Press Club.
JUST IN: Numerous news outlets, including NBC News, issue joint statement saying they will file briefs “to support CNN’s and Jim Acosta’s lawsuit” against the Trump admin. over its decision to revoke Acosta’s press pass.
Statement from @CBSNews: “CBS News supports the White House Correspondents Association (@WHCA) and CNN’s legal effort to restore access for its White House correspondent.”
The administration stripped Acosta of his pass to enter the White House following President Donald Trump’s contentious news conference last week, where Acosta refused to give up a microphone when the president said he didn’t want to hear anything more from him.
In response to the lawsuit, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement: “this is just more grandstanding from CNN, and we will vigorously defend against his lawsuit.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association backed the lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C., district court.
“The president of the United States should not be in the business of arbitrarily picking the men and women who cover him,” said Oliver Knox, president of the correspondents’ group.
CNN said Acosta was given no warning of the action, and no recourse to appeal it. Acosta traveled to Paris to cover Trump’s visit there this weekend and, although given permission by the French government to cover a news event, the Secret Service denied him entrance, the company said.
“Without this credential, a daily White House correspondent like Acosta effectively cannot do his job,” CNN’s lawsuit said.
CNN asked for an injunction to immediately reinstate Acosta, as well as a hearing on the larger issue of barring a reporter.
Acosta has been a polarizing figure even beyond the distaste that Trump and his supporters have for him. The Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, editorialized last week that Acosta’s encounter with Trump at the news conference “was less about asking questions and more about making statements. In doing so, the CNN White House reporter gave President Donald Trump room to critique Acosta’s professionalism.”
In an opinion-editorial published Wednesday, Breitbart News senior legal editor Ken Klukowski argued President Trump will the lawsuit because the “Constitution does not allow a federal court to issue this kind of order to the White House,” while the “First Amendment does not protect” Acosta’s actions.
