ANCHORAGE - U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Friday declared a public-safety emergency in rural Alaska and pledged $10.5 million in federal funds to combat some of the nation's worst rates of sexual assault, child abuse and other violent crimes.
Barr's announcement followed a visit to Alaska last month, where the country's top law enforcement official was told about extraordinary high rates of rape and domestic violence and a lack of police officers.
About a third of Alaska Native villages lack local law-enforcement services, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice announcing the federal money.
"I witnessed firsthand the complex, unique, and dire law enforcement challenges the State of Alaska and its remote Alaska Native communities are facing,” Barr said in the statement.
Rural Alaska communities, with largely Native populations and mostly without outside road access, have long been plagued by violent crime. For various legal and financial reasons, local and state responses to rural crime have been limited.
Village public safety officers, residents of the small Native communities scattered over remote parts of Alaska, are managed by the Alaska State Troopers.
Alaska tribes do not have the legal authority to establish police forces, a product of the sweeping 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that restricted tribal powers, Native leaders told Barr in May. Establishing tribal police would require another act of Congress, the Native leaders said.
State-funded rural law enforcement has been hindered by Alaska's long-running fiscal problems. The state is dependent on oil revenues that are dwindling and has cut back services over the years.
On Friday, just after Barr declared the public-safety emergency, Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced deep cuts he was making by veto to the fiscal 2020 budget passed by the state legislature. Among them was a $3 million cut Dunleavy made to the village public safety officer program.
Of the emergency funding announced by Barr, $6 million is to support the state's village public safety officer program and to help pay for mobile detention facilities.
Another $4.5 million will be paid by the end of July for 20 officer positions, equipment and training for Native grantees, the Justice Department said.
Barr also announced plans for some longer-term responses, including some funding for child protection.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump is defending his unprecedented decision to give his Justice Department chief unfettered access to the country's deepest foreign intelligence secrets amid an outcry from the spy community and a veiled warning from the US intelligence czar.
The president said Attorney General Bill Barr needed unilateral power to declassify any top secret material to get to the roots of the 2016-2018 investigation into whether his election campaign colluded with Russia.
Barr "will be able to see how this hoax, how the hoax or witch hunt started, and why it started," Trump said.
"It was an attempted coup or an attempted takedown of the president of the United States. It should never ever happen to anybody else, so it's very important."
But politicians and former intelligence community leaders said Trump and Barr are threatening to expose the country's most protected sources of secrets on Russia to mount a political attack on a legitimate investigation that exposed a serious threat to the United States.
REOPENING THE RUSSIA MEDDLING INVESTIGATION
The brief order issued late Thursday tells the heads of each of the bodies of the intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency, to support Barr in his review of what he has called suspected improper "spying" on Trump by the FBI and intelligence bodies.
It also gives Barr the power to access and declassify any information he views necessary, which could extend to the top-secret sources of information that intelligence chiefs used to conclude that Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over a concerted effort to sway the election on Trump's behalf in 2016.
The same information led to the investigation of Trump by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose final report in April detailed numerous acts of possible collusion, but concluded none amounted to criminal conspiracy.
Critics said Trump and Barr, who has become one of the president's staunchest defenders, were playing fast and loose with intelligence for political reasons.
"The president has granted sweeping declassification powers to an attorney general who has already shown that he has no problem selectively releasing information in order to mislead the American people," said Senator Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"People risk their lives to gather the intelligence material that President Trump and Attorney General Barr are so eager to politicize."
'REALLY BAD IDEA'
Former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin called for Congress to thwart the move.
"Giving Barr declassification authority for this investigation is a really bad idea," he said on Twitter.
"The agencies can cooperate but must retain their legal responsibility for protecting sources."
Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence who oversees the various intelligence branches, stepped carefully, but also made clear that Barr should not play loose with the country's secrets.
"I am confident that the Attorney General will work with the intelligence community in accordance with the long-established standards to protect highly-sensitive classified information that, if publicly released, would put our national security at risk," he said.
'DANGEROUS ABUSE OF POWER'
Barr himself has stunned law enforcement and intelligence officials with his willingness to question whether there was a genuine foundation for the investigation into Russian election meddling and into the many suspect contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
The investigation was launched in mid-2016 after campaign advisor George Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat in London that Russians had offered dirt on Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
The subsequent investigation, which included authorized national security wiretaps, found a concerted effort by Russia to develop contacts, exchange information and negotiate deals, from a Trump real estate project in Moscow to the lifting of sanctions on Russia.
Those acts and episodes have all been made public in detail in congressional testimony and Mueller's report.
But Trump continues to insist that the investigation had no foundation and that the spying on his advisors was illegal, the product of a menacing "deep state."
Former CIA officer Evan McMullin warned that Trump's move "is truly a dangerous abuse of power."
"Barr will selectively release sensitive information, as he did with Mueller's report, to shape a favorable narrative for Trump and impede the intelligence community's ability to collect intel on foreign threats."
pmh/wd
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WASHINGTON - Defying the U.S. Congress, Attorney General William Barr will not attend a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday on his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report, said panel Chairman Jerrold Nadler, accusing Barr of being afraid to testify.
"Barr has just informed us that he will not attend tomorrow's hearing," Nadler, a Democrat, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday after a contentious Senate hearing earlier in the day where Barr defended his treatment of the report.
Nadler also said the Justice Department had not complied with his subpoena for Mueller's full report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election and underlying evidence from the probe.
Committee Democrats vowed to issue a subpoena to force Barr to testify, while Nadler held out hope that the attorney general would reconsider and show up when the hearing convenes at 9 a.m. (1300 GMT) on Thursday.
"We plan on subpoenaing him if he decides not to show up. He can run but he can't hide," Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries told reporters.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said in a statement that the panel had placed "unprecedented and unnecessary" conditions on Barr's testimony and called the questions posed by committee staff inappropriate. "The attorney general remains happy to engage directly with members," the statement said.
Barr's decision not to testify surfaced hours after the committee adopted a more aggressive format that would subject the attorney general to an extra hour of questions from committee lawyers, in addition to questions from Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the panel.
Nadler insisted that it was not the administration's place to determine the format for the hearing.
"He is terrified of having to face a skilled attorney," the chairman said of Barr. "Given how dishonest he has been ... I can understand why he's afraid of facing more effective examination."
The House Judiciary chairman also said he would consider a contempt citation against the attorney general in the next day or two, if the Justice Department continued to defy the subpoena for the unredacted report.
Nadler issued the subpoena on April 19, a day after Barr released a redacted version of the report, which also looked at whether President Donald Trump attempted to obstruct investigations after the 2016 election.
The Mueller report details a series of acts by Trump to impede the Russia probe but does not conclude whether those actions constitute the crime of obstruction. It found, however, that Trump and his campaign did not engage in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow.
Democrats contend that Barr misrepresented the contents of the Mueller report in a March 24 summary and during a subsequent news conference. They also allege that he may have provided misleading testimony to Congress about criticism he received from Mueller.
Some Democrats including Senator Mazie Hirono said on Wednesday that Barr should resign. Asked if he agreed, Nadler told reporters: "He's going to have to answer for apparently testifying untruthfully in both the Senate and the House, and that's certainly one option."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Special Counsel Robert Mueller complained in a letter to Attorney General William Barr that his four-page summary of Mueller's Russia report "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the investigation's conclusions, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
The Post said it reviewed a copy of Mueller's letter, which was written in late March after Barr released a summary on March 24 that said Mueller had found no evidence of collusion between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia.
Barr also said in the summary that Mueller had not reached a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice. Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had found the evidence insufficient to support such a charge.
Barr's four-page summary was released more than three weeks before a redacted version of Mueller's 448-page report was released to the public on April 18.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment to Reuters.
"The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions," Mueller wrote, according to the Post.
"There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations," the Post quoted Mueller as writing.
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WASHINGTON—Special Counsel Robert Mueller's long-awaited report on Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election will be released on Thursday, providing the first public look at the findings of an inquiry that has cast a shadow over Donald Trump's presidency.
Attorney General William Barr plans to release the nearly 400-page report detailing Mueller's 22-month investigation into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia and questions about obstruction of justice by the president.
Its disclosure, with portions expected to be blacked out by Barr to protect some sensitive information, is certain to launch a new political fight in Congress and on the 2020 presidential campaign trail, as Trump seeks re-election in a deeply divided country.
The release marks a watershed moment in Trump's presidency, promising new details about some of the biggest questions in the probe, including the extent and nature of his campaign's contacts with Russia and actions Trump may have taken to hinder the inquiry including his 2017 firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Mueller submitted the report to Barr on March 22. Two days later, Barr sent lawmakers a four-page letter saying the inquiry did not establish that Trump's 2016 campaign team engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia and that Mueller had not exonerated Trump of committing the crime of obstruction of justice. Barr subsequently concluded that Trump had not committed obstruction of justice.
A source familiar with the matter said the version of the report to be released on Thursday was "lightly redacted."
The release of the report may deepen an already bitter partisan rift between Trump's fellow Republicans, most of whom have rallied around the president, and his Democratic critics, who will have to decide how hard to go after Trump as they prepare congressional investigations of his administration.
Barr said he would hold a news conference at 9:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) on Thursday to discuss the report, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller as special counsel in May 2017.
Copies of the report will be delivered to Congress more than an hour later, between 11 a.m. and noon (1500-1600 GMT), a senior Justice Department official said. The delay in seeing the report sparked Democratic complaints that Barr, a Trump appointee, wanted to shape the public's views during his news conference before others had a chance to draw their own conclusions.
Top congressional Democrats called on Mueller to testify publicly in Congress about his investigation, criticizing Barr's roll-out of the report.
"We believe the only way to begin restoring public trust in the handling of the Special Counsel's investigation is for Special Counsel Mueller himself to provide public testimony in the House and Senate as soon as possible," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
The spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment.
Mueller's investigation, which Trump has called a "witch hunt," raised questions about the legitimacy of Trump's presidency and laid bare what the special counsel and U.S. intelligence agencies have described as a Russian operation to derail Democrat Hillary Clinton's candidacy and elevate Trump, the Kremlin's preferred candidate.
'POLITICAL HOAX'
Ahead of the report's release, Trump went on Twitter to renew his attack on the inquiry, writing, "The Greatest Political Hoax of all time!" and attacking Democrats and "Dirty Cops."
Jay Sekulow, a Trump lawyer, said the president's team will respond to the document's release "initially with a statement" and will decide on whether to release a rebuttal report "based on the developments of the day." A person familiar with the matter said such a rebuttal report would be about 30 pages long."
A Justice Department spokeswoman said Barr would elaborate on Justice Department communications with the White House over the past several weeks regarding the report and whether the White House invoked a legal doctrine called executive privilege that allows the president to withhold information about internal executive branch deliberations from other branches of government.
Barr plans to address whether executive privilege was invoked by the White House in the Russia report to be released on Thursday and also elaborate on Justice Department communications with the White House over the past several weeks, a Justice Department spokeswoman said on Thursday.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that White House lawyers held talks with U.S. Justice Department officials in recent days about the conclusions in Mueller's report, aiding them in preparing for its release.
Democrats are concerned that Barr, appointed by Trump after the president fired former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, could black out material to protect the president.
Some Democrats have spoken of launching impeachment proceedings against Trump in Congress, allowed under the U.S. Constitution to remove a president from office for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors," but top Democrats have been notably cautious.
Mueller charged 34 people and three Russian companies. Those who were convicted or pleaded guilty included figures close to Trump such as his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, personal lawyer Michael Cohen and national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Since Barr released the March 24 letter, Trump has claimed "complete and total exoneration," and condemned the inquiry as "an illegal takedown that failed." At a March 28 rally in Michigan, Trump said that "after three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead."
Justice Department regulations gave Barr broad authority to decide how much of Mueller's report to make public, but Democrats have demanded the entire report as well as the underlying investigative files. Barr is due to testify to Congress in public about the report in early May.
The Justice Department has been working for weeks to prepare the redactions, which will be color coded to reflect the reason material is omitted.
Barr said he would redact parts to protect secret grand jury information, intelligence-gathering sources and methods, material that could affect ongoing investigations and information that unduly infringes on the privacy of "peripheral third parties" who were not charged.
The release comes as both parties gear up for the November 2020 presidential election. Trump already has launched his campaign for a second four-year term, and a crowded field of Democrats has formed to seek the nomination to challenge him.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Additional reporting by David Morgan, Doina Chiacu, Andy Sullivan, Jan Wolfe, Nathan Layne, Karen Freifeld and Makini Brice; Writing by John Whitesides and Will Dunham, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Alistair Bell)
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - US Attorney General William Barr plans to issue a redacted copy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's nearly 400-page investigative report into Russian interference in the 2016 election by mid-April, he said in a letter to lawmakers on Friday.
"Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own," Barr wrote in the letter to the top Democrats and Republicans on the Senate and House Judiciary committees.
He said he is willing to appear before both committees to testify about Mueller's report on May 1 and May 2.
Mueller completed his 22-month investigation probe into whether President Donald Trump's campaign colluded with Russia on March 22.
On Sunday, Barr sent a 4-page letter to Congress that outlined Mueller's main findings. Barr told lawmakers that Mueller's investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in its election interference activities.
Mueller left unresolved the question of whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation. Barr said that based on the evidence presented, he concluded it was not sufficient to charge the president with obstruction.
He said his 4-page letter on Sunday "was not, and did not purport to be an exhaustive recounting" of Mueller's investigation and said he believes the public should be allowed to read it and judge for themselves.
"I do not believe it would be in the public's interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or release it in serial or piecemeal fashion," he wrote.
Lawmakers have since been clamoring for more details, with Democrats calling for a full release of the report and some lawmakers urging a deadline of April 2.
Barr said in his letter on Friday that certain information must be redacted before the report is released, including secret grand jury information, intelligence sources, and methods and information that by law cannot be public or might infringe on privacy.
He said Trump has the right to assert executive privilege on some materials but that "Trump has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me."
Because of that, he said, there are no plans for the Justice Department to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.
At a rally on Thursday in Michigan, Trump celebrated the end of the investigation and what he called "lies and smears and slander."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
