WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, whose experience and stability were widely seen as a balance to an unpredictable president, resigned on Thursday in protest of President Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 American troops from Syria.

Mr. Trump announced Mr. Mattis’s resignation in two tweets Thursday evening, and said the retired four-star Marine general turned Pentagon chief will leave at the end of February.

Officials said Mr. Mattis went to the White House on Thursday afternoon in a last attempt to convince Mr. Trump to keep American troops in Syria, where they have been fighting the Islamic State. He was rebuffed, and told the president that he was resigning as a result.

Hours later, the Pentagon released Mr. Mattis’s resignation letter, in which he implicitly criticized his commander in chief. Mr. Mattis said in the letter that he believes that the president deserves a defense secretary who is more in tune with his worldview.

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Judge Emmet G. Sullivan saw it coming.

The veteran jurist presiding over Michael Flynn’s sentencing had seen the filing by President Trump’s former national security adviser alleging that he was essentially tricked into lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. No doubt, he had seen Trump’s false claim that the FBI concluded that Flynn “didn’t lie,” yet “tremendous pressure” was being put on him.

And Sullivan likely had seen all the chatter in the Fox News echo chamber about the alleged “perjury trap” special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had set for Flynn — an attempt to discredit the entire investigation. If the judge accepted the recommendation from prosecutors not to sentence Flynn to prison time because of his cooperation, Flynn would be free to leave the courthouse and hold a news conference claiming he had been set up.

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A group of MSNBC political analysts feared President Donald Trump has become a “cornered badger” on political issues looming on the horizon.

During a Sunday discussion about the “wall,” the panel recalled the president’s “pride” in shutting down the U.S. government to score his $5 billion.

“So, what we’ve been hearing is rumors that maybe the president is going to accept to kick the can down the road and deal with the border wall funding in January,” claimed Victoria DeFrancesco, University of Texas professor. “The idea of a wall really isn’t necessary, in terms of quote/unquote fixing immigration. What’s needed is to rethink our asylum policy, how we can make it more efficient, how we did get more judges down there to hear the asylum cases, but the border wall is a waste of money. Trump knows it, but he also said he would do it. He’s going to have to find a way to wiggle out of it. If I were a betting woman, I would think he’ll kick it to January and keep kicking it down the road.”

MSNBC host Rev. Al Sharpton noted that undocumented immigrants crossing the border is actually down, but “you wouldn’t know it from the hysteria” doled out by the president on Twitter. Democratic strategist Emily Tisch Sussman was in emphatic agreement.

Read More Here: https://www.rawstory.com/2018/12/hes-thrashing-going-msnbc-analysts-blast-trump-tantrum-wall-funding/

The guilty plea Thursday of a woman accused of infiltrating the National Rifle Association on behalf of the Russian government has thrust the powerful conservative group into an uncomfortable spotlight as the organization appears to be facing declining donations and signs its fearsome political influence may be waning.

Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of Russia, admitting that she worked for more than two years to forge relationships with conservative activists and leading Republicans in the United States.

One of Butina’s main targets was the NRA — a group she identified in a 2015 memo as an organization that “had influence over” the Republican Party, according to court filings. Her relationships with the group, she wrote, could be used as the groundwork for an unofficial channel of communication to the next presidential administration.

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Cathleen London, MD received her medical degree from Yale University and did her residency in Family Medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and completed her pre-medical requirements at Stanford University. Prior to moving to Maine, she was an Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell School of Medicine in New York City for 5 years and before that had her own practice in Brookline, MA and was a Clinical Instructor for both Boston University and Tufts University schools of medicine. She has worked with Doctors for America serving as State Director. She is a member of PNHP.

She currently owns and operates a medical practice in Milbridge, Maine where she treats over 1,000 patients.

She has appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, HLN, NBC, local Fox, ABC as a medical contributor on numerous occasions and is currently the Women’s Delegate from Maine to the American Academy of Family Physicians. She is also on the Legislative Commission and Public Health Commission of the Maine Medical Association and serves on the Maine Democratic State Committee.

Dr. London has two sons and four rescue dogs. She runs, bikes and swims in her free time. 

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When federal prosecutors recommended a substantial prison term for President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, they linked Mr. Trump to the crimes Mr. Cohen had committed in connection with the 2016 presidential campaign.

What the prosecutors did not say in Mr. Cohen’s sentencing memorandum filed on Friday, however, is that they have continued to scrutinize what other executives in the president’s family business may have known about those crimes, which involved hush-money payments to two women who had said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.

After Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to breaking campaign finance laws and other crimes — he will be sentenced on Wednesday — the federal prosecutors in Manhattan shifted their attention to what role, if any, Trump Organization executives played in the campaign finance violations, according to people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s self-described fixer, has provided assistance in that inquiry, which is separate from the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

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Democrat Dan McCready withdrew his concession Thursday in a North Carolina congressional race that has been roiled by accusations of fraud.

In an interview with TV station WSOC, McCready also called on Republican rival Mark Harris “to tell the American people exactly what he knew and when he knew it.”

North Carolina election officials are investigating whether an operative working on behalf of Harris illegally collected incomplete ballots from voters in the state’s 9th District.

The state probe has delayed the certification of Harris’s race, and state officials could decide to call for a new election. Harris and McCready are separated by 905 votes, according to unofficial returns.

McCready had conceded defeat Nov. 7, about 24 hours after the polls had closed and long after Harris had declared victory.

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Mueller is about to have his say -- in a big way

(CNN)Throughout his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has imposed on his team an ironclad rule: nobody leaks and nobody speaks -- out of court, that is. But when it comes to official court filings -- indictments, plea agreements, sentencing memos -- Mueller has been loquacious and at times downright chatty, disclosing in compelling narrative fashion crucial details about his investigation and tantalizing clues about what might happen next.

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WASHINGTON — Just weeks after a bitterly fought election swept Democrats into power in Congress, a Republican president known for reaching across the aisle passed away. Leaders of both parties paid tribute to his civility and bipartisanship, saying the country could use more of that. And then within days of the burial, they went back to their partisan wars.

That was December 2006 and the president was Gerald R. Ford, but Washington seems almost certain to be repeating history now that George Bush has died. The political system has hit pause to honor a president of another era for being everything it no longer is.

The truce that essentially took effect over the weekend only underscores how much Washington and the nation have changed since Mr. Bush’s days. The kind of compromises that Mr. Bush cut with a Democratic Congress on deficits, taxes, civil rights and the environment during his four years in office seem almost impossible to imagine in the era of President Trump and the “resistance.”

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Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, admitted in court on Thursday that he had engaged in negotiations to build a tower in Moscow for Mr. Trump well into the 2016 presidential campaign, far later than previously known.

Mr. Cohen said he discussed the status of the project with Mr. Trump on more than three occasions and briefed Mr. Trump’s family members about it. He also admitted he agreed to travel to Russia for meetings on the project.

The revelations, which came as Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the project, were a startling turn in the special counsel’s investigation of Mr. Trump and his inner circle. Mr. Trump is referred to as “Individual 1” in the court documents.

Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea comes at a particularly perilous time for Mr. Trump, whose presidency has been threatened by Mr. Cohen’s statements to investigators.

Read More Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/nyregion/michael-cohen-trump-russia-mueller.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage