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Manafort Is Treated Worse Than Capone Was, Trump Suggests

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Latest on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the trial of onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (all times local):

12:33 p.m.

President Trump is invoking one of the nation’s most notorious criminals in venting about the treatment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort as he begins trial.

Trump, in the midst of an angry tweet storm Wednesday about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, asked the public “who was treated worse,” 1920s gangster Al Capone or Manafort.

The president called Manafort “a Reagan/Dole darling” and questioned why Manafort was in solitary confinement before being convicted.

Manafort is currently standing federal trial for tax evasion and bank fraud.

Trump suggested that Manafort was being treated worse than Capone, whose first name he spelled incorrectly. Capone, dubbed “Public Enemy Number One,” was convicted of tax evasion.

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11:15 a.m.

An FBI agent who participated in the raid last year on Paul Manafort’s Virginia condo is testifying on the second day of the trial for the former Trump campaign chairman.

Special Agent Matthew Mikuska told jurors on Wednesday that the FBI knocked multiple times on the door of Manafort’s condo before entering with a key after no one answered. He says agents spotted Manafort inside after they entered.

A prosecutor showed Mikuska and the jury a series of invoices, including for home improvement work, that were seized by the FBI during the August 2017 raid.

Testimony is expected to continue after the morning recess.

Manafort is on trial on charges of bank fraud and tax evasion.

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10:15 a.m.

The judge in the trial of onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is telling prosecutors not to use the word “oligarch” to describe wealthy Ukrainians who paid millions to Manafort for his work as an international political consultant.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III says oligarch has a “pejorative” meaning and using it isn’t relevant to the bank fraud and tax evasion charges against Manafort.

The judge also is cautioning lawyers for special counsel Robert Mueller that the term could imply that Manafort was associating with “despicable” people and therefore guilty himself.

In Ellis’ words: “That’s not the American way.”

Ellis notes that wealthy Democratic donor George Soros or one of the conservative Koch (kohk) brothers could qualify as oligarchs.

Ellis’ comments on the second day of Manafort’s trial weren’t made in front of the jury.

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10 a.m.

President Donald Trump says his attorney general should put an end to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Trump is making his views known in a series of tweets as the trial of his onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, enters its second day in a Virginia courtroom. He’s on trial for bank fraud and tax evasion charges.

The president says Attorney General Jeff Sessions “should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further.”

But Sessions stepped aside last year from overseeing Mueller’s inquiry, and it’s Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who’s taken over that duty.

Trump is trying to distance himself from Manafort, who led Trump’s efforts to secure the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. Trump tweets that Manafort “He worked for me for a very short time.”

Manafort was the campaign chairman for about five months in 2016.

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12:20 a.m.

Federal prosecutors say onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort considered himself above the law as he funneled tens of millions of dollars through offshore accounts. And government lawyers are alleging that this money paid for some of Manafort’s personal expenses such as a $21,000 watch and a $15,000 jacket made of ostrich.

That’s some of what came up during the first day of Manafort’s trial in Virginia on bank fraud and tax evasion charges.

The prosecution is laying out the evidence gathered by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. It’s the first trial arising from Mueller’s investigation into potential ties between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.

Manafort’s defense lawyer describes his client as a hugely successful international political consultant who left the details of his finances to others.

Trump Calls on Sessions to End Mueller’s Russia Probe

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump called Wednesday for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to put an end to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, a day after Trump’s former campaign chairman went on trial.

Taking to Twitter to complain about the ongoing Russia investigation, Trump said Sessions “should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further.”

The relationship between Sessions and the president has been strained for more than a year, since the attorney general recused himself from investigations relating to the 2016 election because of Sessions’ role on the Trump campaign. Mueller’s team is accountable to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Tuesday marked the first day of Paul Manafort’s trial on charges of tax evasion and bank fraud brought by Mueller’s team, charges that stemmed from Manafort’s consulting work for Ukraine, for which he allegedly received millions he did not report to the U.S. government.

Seeking to distance himself from his ex-campaign chairman, Trump said, “He worked for me for a very short time.”

But Manafort’s involvement in the Trump campaign spanned six months, and he led efforts to secure the GOP nomination for Trump in 2016.

Trump said the charges against Manafort “have nothing to do with Collusion.” Potential coordination between Russian government agents and the Trump campaign is still a matter of investigation by Mueller’s team, which is also investigating potential obstruction of justice by the president. Trump called claims of collusion “a Hoax.”

Suicide Risk May Rise as Heat Increases

A new study suggests that hot weather’s adverse effects on some people can include a heightened suicide risk. While the rise is numerically small today, the increase in extreme heat expected later this century could have starker consequences.

Californian scientists have looked at 50 years of records to establish a link between higher-than-usual temperatures and suicide rates in the United States and Mexico.

They found that a 1°C rise above average temperatures could be linked to a tiny increase – just 0.68% – in suicides in the US and by 2.1% south of the border. The rise is small. But it means that if the pattern of heat extremes predicted under all global warming scenarios continues to 2050, then there could be an additional 21,000 acts of suicide.

The same study, in Nature Climate Change, also identified a tendency to respond depressively: in such hot spells, people who used the social media platform Twitter were more likely to employ telltale words such as “lonely” or “trapped” or “suicidal”.

Scientists have already repeatedly established that heat extremes can be lethal,  and will multiply as the world warms, directly as a consequence of profligate human combustion of fossil fuels.

The Californian scientists looked at official death records county by county in the US from 1968 to 2004, and across municipalities in Mexico from 1990 to 2010. They then matched these with temperature records by day and by month for those locations.

They also checked 600 million Twitter updates that could be identified as coming from a particular place and combed them for evidence of what they call “depressive feelings.” And they found a link between temperature and low spirits, as well as between temperature and suicide rates.

If extended to temperatures likely by 2050, suicide rates could increase in the US by 1.4% and in Mexico by 2.3%. And that could add up to an extra 9,000 deaths at the very least, or as many as 44,000.

“Surprisingly, these effects differ very little based on how rich populations are or if they are used to warm weather,” said Marshall Burke, an economist at Stanford University.

“Suicide is one of the leading causes of death globally, and suicide rates in the US have risen dramatically over the last 15 years. So better understanding of the causes of suicide is a public health priority.”

Human impact

Dr Burke and one of his co-authors, Solomon Hsiang of Berkeley University, have repeatedly focused on the human consequences of climate change. Dr Burke has already established that even small reductions in global warming could deliver huge benefits to society.

Separately, Dr Hsiang has warned that global warming could bring poverty even worse than the 1930s Depression for many in the US, and that politicians were ignoring evidence of the sheer social cost precipitated by climate change, not least because rising temperatures make violence and social conflict ever more likely.

Working together, they have also warned that rising temperatures could be associated with lower incomes and productivity, and that with every shift in temperature, there is a link to levels of violence in conflicts worldwide.

“We’ve been studying the effects of warming on conflict and violence for years, finding that people fight more when it’s hot,” said Dr Hsiang. “Now we see that, in addition to hurting others, some individuals hurt themselves. It appears that heat profoundly affects the human mind and how we decide to inflict harm.”

And Dr Burke said: “Hotter temperatures are clearly not the only, nor the most important, risk factor for suicide. But our findings suggest that warming can have a surprisingly large impact on suicide risk, and this matters for both our understanding of mental health as well as for what we should expect as temperatures continue to warm.”

Israel’s Druze Minority Furious Over ‘Apartheid’ Law

Israel may never have been paradise for the some 20% of its citizens who are non-Jewish and Arabic-speaking. They did face de facto and sometimes even legal discrimination. But at least in the eyes of the law, they were full citizens.

After the passage last week of the “nationality” law, Israel is no longer multicultural. It is a country where national sovereignty lies solely in the hands of its Jewish citizens.

Among the Palestinian-Israelis with Israeli citizenship, only about 130,000 are Druze. This religious community was a medieval offshoot of the Ismaili branch of Shiite Islam, but Druze nowadays are viewed as doing their own thing. They do not have Friday prayer services, for instance.

Alone among the Palestinian-Israelis, the Druze serve in the military.

And therein lies the rub. Two Druze officers have resigned over the nationality law.

It is one thing to labor under a discriminatory government, as most Palestinian-Israelis do. But to serve in its armed forces and to risk one’s life, and that of one’s sons, is a different matter. And to take that risk for the sake of an unequal state that discriminates against you?

Hence, some of the more poignant protests that have come from parents who lost family members in wars. They say they were fighting for their ‘nationality’ but that now it isn’t theirs anymore.

They don’t belong to the sovereign nationality.

They say they will do whatever they can to ensure that their grandchildren don’t serve in the Israeli army.

Druze elders are petrified of this sentiment, and this movement, which threatens to turn their community into ordinary Palestinians, and they have commanded the Druze rank and file to stay out of politics and do their military service.

Israel benefited from being a multicultural country with a strong Jewish majority. There was always a tension between democracy and a tyranny of the majority, but it wasn’t unique and there was at least a little wriggle room for dissent in politics, the parliament, and the courts. It is now not even clear that Palestinian-Israelis have access to the Supreme Court for certain purposes that affect national sovereignty.

Israel is no longer a multi-cultural country, since sovereignty is explicitly vested solely in its Jewish citizens. And with that change, to what amounts to an apartheid state, Israel is losing the loyalty of the more conservative communities among the Palestinian-Israelis. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has turned them into Palestinians, without the hyphen. They are not stateless the way the latter are, but they aren’t full citizens either. The statelessness of the refugees and the Occupied has finally rubbed off on them.

Remains From N. Korea Arrived Without Identifications

WASHINGTON — When North Korea handed over 55 boxes of bones that it said are remains of American war dead, it provided a single military dog tag but no other information that could help U.S. forensics experts determine their individual identities, a U.S. defense official said Tuesday.

The official, who discussed previously undisclosed aspects of the remains issue on condition of anonymity, said it probably will take months if not years to fully determine individual identities from the remains, which have not yet been confirmed by U.S. specialists to be those of American servicemen.

The official did not know details about the single dog tag, including the name on it, or whether it was even that of an American military member. During the Korean War, combat troops of 16 other United Nations member countries fought alongside U.S. service members on behalf of South Korea. Some of them, including Australia, Belgium, France and the Philippines, have yet to recover some of their war dead from North Korea.

The 55 boxes were handed over at Wonsan, North Korea last Friday and flown aboard a U.S. military transport plane to Osan air base in South Korea, where U.S. officials catalogued the contents. After a repatriation ceremony at Osan on Wednesday, the remains will be flown to Hawaii where they will begin undergoing in-depth forensic analysis, in some cases using mitochondrial DNA profiles, at a Defense Department laboratory to attempt to establish individual identifications.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last week that the return of the 55 boxes was a positive step but not a guarantee that the bones are American.

“We don’t know who’s in those boxes,” he said. He noted that some could turn out to be those of missing from other nations that fought in the Korean War. “They could go to Australia,” he said. “They have missing, France has missing, Americans have. There’s a whole lot of us. So, this is an international effort to bring closure for those families.”

Vice President Mike Pence, the son of a Korean War combat veteran, is scheduled to fly to Hawaii for a ceremony, which the military calls an “honorable carry ceremony,” marking the arrival of the remains on American soil at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on Wednesday. This will mark a breakthrough in a long-stalled U.S. effort to obtain war remains from North Korea, but officials say it is unlikely to produce quick satisfaction for any of the families of the nearly 7,700 U.S. servicemen who are still listed as missing and unaccounted for from the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea provided the 55 boxes in a delayed fulfillment of a commitment its leader, Kim Jong Un, made to President Donald Trump at their Singapore summit on June 12. Although the point of the summit was for Trump to press Kim on giving up his nuclear weapons, their joint statement after the meeting included a single line on an agreement to recover “POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.”

North Korea had told U.S. officials more than once in recent years that it had about 200 sets of U.S. war remains, although none was “already identified.” It remains unclear whether the boxes provided on July 27 include all of the bones North Korea has accumulated over the years. In the past, the North has provided bones that in some cases were not human or that were additional bones of U.S. servicemen already identified from previously recovered remains.

The Pentagon estimates that of the approximately 7,700 U.S. MIAs from the Korean War, about 5,300 are unaccounted for on North Korean soil. Many were buried in shallow graves near where they fell on the battlefield; some others died in North Korean or Chinese-run prisoner of war camps.

Efforts to recover remains in North Korea have been fraught with political and other obstacles since the war ended on July 27, 1953. Between 1990 and 1994, North Korea unilaterally handed over 208 caskets to the U.S., which turned out to contain remains of far more than 208 individuals, although forensics specialists thus far have established 181 identities. In addition, a series of U.S.-North Korean recovery efforts, termed “joint field activities,” between 1996 and 2005 yielded 229 caskets of remains, of which 153 have been identified, according to the Pentagon.

The Trump administration, as part of the Singapore agreement, is pursuing discussions with North Korea on resuming those “field activities,” for which past administrations have paid millions of dollars in donated vehicles, equipment, food and cash at the request of the North Koreans. The U.S. official who discussed aspects of the return of the 55 boxes on condition of anonymity said the U.S. is considering the possibility of including South Korea in future searches for remains in North Korea. It’s not clear whether negotiations for such an arrangement are under way.

Richard Downes, whose father, Air Force Lt. Hal Downes, is among the Korean War missing, says this turnover of remains, having drawn worldwide attention, has the potential to put the U.S. back on track to finding and eventually identifying many more.

Downes, 70, was 3½ when his father’s B-26 Invader went down on Jan. 13, 1952, northeast of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. His family was left to wonder about his fate. Downes, now executive director of the Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW/MIAs, which advocates for remains recovery, said he hopes the boxes that arrive in Hawaii on Wednesday prove to be a vanguard that leads to a fuller accounting for families.

“These 55 can set the stage for more to come,” Downes said.

Judge Orders Release of Immigrant Kids From Troubled Shelter

A judge has ordered the federal government to stop drugging immigrant children without proper consent and to remove them from a problem-plagued south Texas shelter.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee’s ruling Monday orders the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement to move immigrant children out of the Shiloh Treatment Center in Manvel, Texas, and into less restrictive housing unless a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist determines that a child “poses a risk of harm to self or others.”

The judge’s order, issued in a federal court in California as part of a long-running class-action case, affects about 25 immigrant children held at Shiloh, a collection of small buildings and trailers on rural land south of Houston with a troubled history.

Shiloh has contracted with the federal government to house immigrant children labeled as “special needs minors” since 2013. Last year, the most lucrative yet under its agreement, Shiloh collected $5.6 million.

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting first reported on the allegations of forced drugging at Shiloh last month. Children have described being held down and injected with psychotropic drugs, according to federal court filings.

It’s unclear whether children at Shiloh were part of a larger group separated from their parents at the border because they are not the only children in custody. Thousands of children who were detained after they arrived unaccompanied are also covered by a federal court case known as the Flores lawsuit.

Monday’s ruling came in that lawsuit, first filed against the government decades ago by immigration rights groups and settled in 1997. The attorneys came back to court about 18 months ago, alleging that the government was violating the settlement agreement by mistreating immigrant children.

Gee’s order found the government violated multiple parts of the Flores lawsuit agreement due to conditions at Shiloh and treatment of children

there.

“The level of security at Shiloh RTC in Manvel, Texas violates the Flores agreement because it is a locked facility with 24-hour surveillance and monitoring,” her order states.

She also cites statements from immigrant children as evidence that “Shiloh RTC’s staff engages in practices that are not necessary for the protection of minors.”

“For example, Julio Z. attests that a staff member at Shiloh RTC often refused to allow Julio and other class members to leave their living quarters to obtain drinking water,” the judge’s order states. When the boy tried to leave his room to get water, “the staff member responded by throwing Julio to the ground, injuring Julio’s elbow.”

From now on, the judge ruled, immigrant children cannot be medicated without either their parent’s permission or a court order, or without following Texas law on administering such drugs on an emergency basis.

The judge set an Aug. 10 deadline for attorneys in the case to work out details including housing arrangements for the Shiloh children.

In the meantime, the judge ordered Shiloh to stop denying children drinking water as a “security measure” and also said the children must be allowed to make private telephone calls.

The judge’s limitations on drugging immigrant children could also protect children at other shelters around the country.

“The judge’s decision is a bellwether,” said Carlos Holguín, general counsel for the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law, which investigated the drugging allegations.

“We can go and investigate other places where (the government) is keeping kids, and if they turn out to be like Shiloh, the order applies,” he said, noting that immigrant children also are being held in similar facilities in New York, Virginia and California.

Reveal’s investigation uncovered the fact that Shiloh’s psychiatrist practiced without board certification to treat children and adolescents for nearly a decade. Such certification is not required but attorneys for the government claimed the doctor had the special credential.

Attorney Holly Cooper, co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of California, Davis, said Reveal’s investigation “had everything to do” with Monday’s ruling by raising awareness of problems at Shiloh.

The ruling cheered local activists who held a “Shut Down Shiloh” rally last weekend in the nearby town of Pearland.

“I think you’d be hard pressed to find any parent who’d be OK with their children being given psychotropic drugs that they had not consented to,” said rally organizer Kendall Bousquet. “I think this is a great victory.”

As Reveal has reported, court records filed in April show that children at Shiloh have complained that they were dosed with drugs that make them dizzy, obese and incapacitated. Some children at Shiloh said they were held down and forcibly injected when supervisors thought they were misbehaving, records show. Other kids said they were told they would not see their parents unless they took the drugs.

Forensic psychiatrist Mark. J. Mills, who reviewed medical records from the lawsuit for Reveal, said it appeared Shiloh’s staff had been “trying to control agitation and aggressive behavior with antipsychotic drugs.”

The drugging of the children was medically inappropriate and “like the old Soviet Union used to do,” he said.

Shiloh’s longtime operator, Clay Hill, hasn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. On its website, Shiloh has posted a statement saying that it has been investigated repeatedly and found innocent of wrongdoing.

“The children have been found to be properly cared for and treated,” the statement says. “Shiloh Treatment Center has a specific treatment purpose within the federal system. It does not participate in border actions.”

But the company’s statement failed to mention a host of serious issues at both Shiloh and a companion facility operated by the same ownership.

A companion facility, Daystar, was shut down by state regulators in 2010 after four children died while being forcibly restrained by the staff. In 2014, a Houston Chronicle report on alleged child abuse at the center led two members of Congress – Republican Pete Olson and Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee – to demand that Shiloh be shut down.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services continued sending children and funds to Shiloh – more than $19 million after the lawmakers called for its closure, according to federal payment records.

Olson said he was heartened by the court’s ruling.

“For five years, I have repeatedly asked Shiloh and ORR for information about allegations of patient abuse,” he said in a statement. “For five years, I have run into a wall of silence.

“The court’s decision points out the dysfunction between ORR, the state of Texas and the Shiloh employees. Enough is enough.”

The Office of Refugee Resettlement didn’t respond to a request for comment. In court filings, attorneys for the agency have said they are abiding by the Flores agreement and federal law related to treatment of immigrant children.

It’s unclear whether the judge’s order means any children will remain housed at the facility after the immigrant children are moved. Texas officials said Monday there are no children in state custody at Shiloh. However, they have not said whether the facility holds children from other states.

Reveal reporter Aura Bogado and Reveal reporter and producer Neena Satija contributed to this story.

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

A Look at Some of Trump’s Under-the-Radar Appointees

In 2015, March Bell was Republican staff director and chief counsel for a House panel that investigated Planned Parenthood. The mission: to find out if Planned Parenthood, a system of more than 600 reproductive care clinics across the country, was profiting off donated fetal tissues. The investigation was kicked off by undercover videos from anti-abortion activists that were heavily doctored and edited.

After 15 months of investigation and $1.6 million in taxpayer dollars, the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives found no evidence of wrongdoing but nonetheless recommended that the National Institutes of Health stop funding Planned Parenthood. Later, a Texas grand jury cleared the nonprofit of misconduct after the state attempted to defund it. Texas prosecutors did, however, indict two of the anti-abortion activists who shot the undercover videos.

Now, Bell, a former Department of Justice attorney, is a senior adviser and chief of staff in the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services. He started in the Trump administration in March 2017 and took on the additional adviser title in April 2018. The exact details of Bell’s new position have not been made public.

Bell is just one in the latest group of appointees for whom ProPublica obtained information through a Freedom of Information Act request. Since April, 34 people have been appointed to political jobs within the Trump administration, and another 35 have transferred to other government agencies or taken on new jobs, according to the data we obtained.

Worried about his anti-abortion background, Democrats have argued that Bell’s role on the congressional Planned Parenthood investigation would make him an inappropriate choice for the Office for Civil Rights. In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, six congressional Democrats said they believe that Bell was in close contact with anti-abortion activists who provided the doctored videos of health care providers, received materials not shared with Democratic members of the panel, and “reportedly said that the ultimate goal of the Select Panel was to weaken Planned Parenthood.”

“Given the ethical question surrounding Mr. Bell’s conduct and actions during the Select Panel’s investigation, we respectfully request that, at the very least, Mr. Bell be recused from any case pending before OCR pertaining to fetal tissue or abortion services,” the letter continued. “It is clear that Mr. Bell is not an impartial investigator on those topics, and we do not believe he can be trusted to fairly adjudicate any related cases.”

A spokesperson for the Office for Civil Rights wrote in an email that Bell was cleared prior to his appointments by HHS ethics attorneys. “He was also advised that he was not legally required to recuse himself from work on matters related to his work on the Select Panel because he had no financial conflict of interest or duty to recuse under the federal ethics rules,” the spokesperson wrote. “HHS employees do not have ethics recusal obligations under the federal ethics laws for work performed as employees of Congress, as both positions are federal government jobs. Nevertheless, more than a year ago after he first arrived at HHS, out of an abundance of caution, Mr. Bell recused himself from all enforcement matters related to his work on the Select Panel’s investigation to alleviate any optics concerns by members of the public or Congress.”

In January, under the leadership of director Roger Serevino and Bell, the Office for Civil Rights created the division of conscience and religious freedom, which extends anti-discrimination protections to medical providers who deny care to people on religious or moral grounds.

Sam Alberts was quietly appointed in October 2017 to oversee the Treasury Department’s implementation of a law that allows cuts in struggling multiemployer pension plans in order to save them from insolvency. Alberts, a partner at Dentons, an international corporate law firm, is an unpaid consultant and succeeds Ken Feinberg, who is best known for overseeing the 9/11 victims’ compensation fund.

Alberts’ appointment was not publicly disclosed until ProPublica made a Freedom of Information Act request. As a special master under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, Alberts works with the departments of Treasury and Labor and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. He can approve or deny requests to reduce benefits, such as retirement payments.

The law, passed in 2014 at the 11th hour before a government shutdown, has been criticized for the harm it could potentially do to retirees. Earlier this month, before a multiemployer pension plan committee in Ohio, thousands gathered to call for preserving or bailing out pensions for unionized workers.

Alberts has a long track record; he represented retirees in the Detroit bankruptcy in 2013 and provided restructuring advice to the government of Puerto Rico before it entered the equivalent of bankruptcy. Feinberg said he met Alberts once during a transition meeting and thinks the program is in good hands.

Alberts did not respond to a ProPublica request for a comment.

Alden Abbott was appointed acting general counsel for the Federal Trade Commission in April. Abbott is a classic example of the revolving door — he previously worked for the Federal Trade Commission for years and also worked for BlackBerry — who reached the Trump administration via a well-trod path: He most recently worked for the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative Washington think tank. Abbott has also held government positions in the Justice and Commerce departments, in private practice, and worked for a telecommunications industry trade organization. Abbott was previously a fellow for another conservative think tank, the Legatum Institute, which the Financial Times once called “the think-tank at the intellectual heart of ‘hard’ Brexit.”

Among the other new Trump administration hires:

Deborah Bergeron was appointed to be director of Head Start in April. She founded the American Tutoring Association (which is no longer active, according to a spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families) and served as the principal of Manassas Park High School in Northern Virginia.
Jonathan Berry is the principal deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Labor. A former lawyer for Jones Day, he was the chief counsel for Trump’s transition team and formerly served in the Department of Justice. He was also a legal adviser to the Mitt Romney campaign.
Arjun Garg, who used to be a trial attorney in the Department of Justice, is the general counsel for the Federal Transit Administration. He was hired in April. Last year, Garg represented the Trump administration in a suit filed against it by the city of Philadelphia. A judge ruled in the city’s favor, finding that the Justice Department’s attempts to withhold grants because of Philadelphia’s status as a sanctuary city were “arbitrary and capricious.”
Ryan McDormett is a confidential assistant in the Commerce Department’s Office of Executive Secretariat, which provides mostly administrative support. McDormett played an active role in supporting an immigration bill called “Sarah’s Law” in Iowa. The law was named after Sarah Root, who was killed in a car accident when a vehicle driven by an undocumented man struck her. The bill calls for the federal detention of illegal immigrants who have been accused of committing a violent crime. Sarah’s Law passed in the House in 2017 with the “No Sanctuary for Criminals Act” but has not advanced. McDormett and the Root family have met with President Donald Trump. Asked for comment, McDormett replied in an email, “You guys do not cover the administration in a fair and accurate manner. Thanks.”

For more on the administration’s appointees, visit Trump Town, our database of staffers and their backgrounds.

Judge Blocks Release of 3D-Printed Gun Blueprints

SEATTLE—A federal judge on Tuesday stopped the release of blueprints to make untraceable and undetectable 3D-printed plastic guns as President Donald Trump questioned whether his administration should have agreed to allow the plans to be posted online.

The company behind the plans, Austin, Texas-based Defense Distributed, had reached a settlement with the federal government in June allowing it to make the plans for the guns available for download on Wednesday.

The restraining order from U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle puts that plan on hold for now. “There is a possibility of irreparable harm because of the way these guns can be made,” he said.

Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson called the ruling “a complete, total victory.”

“We were asking for a nationwide temporary restraining order putting a halt to this outrageous decision by the federal government to allow these 3D downloadable guns to be available around our country and around the world. He granted that relief,” Ferguson said at a news conference after the hearing. “That is significant.”

Eight Democratic attorneys general had filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to block the settlement. They also sought the restraining order, arguing the 3D guns would be a safety risk.

Congressional Democrats have urged President Donald Trump to reverse the decision to publish the plans. Trump said Tuesday that he’s “looking into” the idea, saying making 3D plastic guns available to the public “doesn’t seem to make much sense!”

Trump tweeted that he has already spoken with the National Rifle Association about the downloadable directions a Texas company wants to provide for people to make 3D-printed guns. The guns are made of a hard plastic and are simple to assemble, easy to conceal and difficult to trace.

“We don’t agree with President Trump very much,” Washington state Assistant Attorney General Jeff Rupert told Lasnik, “but when he tweeted ‘this doesn’t make much sense,’ that’s something we agree with.”

After a yearslong court battle, the State Department in late June settled the case against Defense Distributed.

The settlement, which took gun-control advocates by surprise, allowed the company to resume posting blueprints for the hard-plastic guns at the end of July. Those plans were put on hold by the Seattle judge’s decision.

During the hearing in Seattle, Eric Soskin, a lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department, said they reached the settlement to allow the company to post the material online because the regulations were designed to restrict weapons that could be used in war, and the online guns were no different from the weapons that could be bought in a store.

Since the weapons “did not create a military advantage,” he told the judge, “how could the government justify regulating the data?”

But Rupert said a restraining order would keep the plans away from people who have learned about the technology and want to use it to get around gun laws.

Hours before the restraining order was issued, Democrats sounded the alarm, warning about “ghost guns” that can avoid detection and pose a deadly hazard.

The company’s website had said downloads would begin Wednesday, but blueprints for at least one gun — a plastic pistol called the Liberator — have been posted on the site since Friday. A lawyer for the company said he didn’t know how many blueprints had been downloaded since then.

Outrage over the administration decision is putting gun control back into the election-year political debate, but with a high-tech twist.

The president seemed to express surprise. He said on Twitter he was looking into the idea of a company providing plans to the public for printing guns, and he said it “doesn’t seem to make much sense!”

Democrats agreed and said Trump had the power to stop it.

Some Republicans also expressed concern.

“Even as a strong supporter of the Second Amendment — this is not right,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski tweeted, linking to a news story on the guns.

The NRA said in a statement that “anti-gun politicians” and some members of the news media wrongly claim that 3D printing technology “will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms.”

In truth, “undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA’s political arm. A federal law passed in 1988 — crafted with NRA support — bars the manufacture, sale or possession of an undetectable firearm.

Trump spokesman Hogan Gidley made much the same point, saying the administration supports the law against wholly plastic guns, including those made with a 3D printer.

But Democrats called the law weak and said gun users can get around it by using weapons with a removable metal block that the gun doesn’t need in order to function.

Democrats filed legislation that would prohibit the publication of a digital file online that allows a 3D printer to manufacture a firearm. Democrats also filed a separate bill to require that all guns have at least one non-removable component made of metal so they can be discovered by metal detectors.

People can use the blueprints to manufacture plastic guns using a 3D printer. But industry experts have expressed doubts that criminals would go to the trouble, since the printers needed to make the guns can cost thousands of dollars, the guns themselves tend to disintegrate quickly and traditional firearms are easy to come by.

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Associated Press writers Catherine Lucey in Washington and Lisa Marie Pane in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this story.

Administration Was Warned on Dangers of Family Separations

WASHINGTON—A Department of Health and Human Services official told senators Tuesday that his agency had warned the Trump administration that separating families would be dangerous for children. But some of the government’s top immigration officials used a Senate hearing to largely defend how the policy has been implemented, with one comparing family detention centers to “a summer camp.”

One official told the Senate Judiciary Committee that while the Trump administration was developing its immigration policies, Health and Human Services officials said they were worried “about any policy which would result in family separation due to concerns we had about the best interests of the child.” Commander Jonathan D. White of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a branch of HHS, said they were uncertain their department had enough resources to handle large numbers of detained immigrants.

“There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,” White said.

Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., what response HHS officials got from administration policymakers, White said, “The answer was there was no policy which would result in separation of children from family units.” White is a career official at HHS who has served in three administrations.

White’s remarks came as the Judiciary committee questioned officials about what has become an election-year liability for the Republicans and the White House — President Donald Trump’s separation of migrant children from detained families. Trump dropped the policy more than a month ago under fire from Democrats and Republicans alike. But of more than 2,500 children who were initially separated from parents and guardians, hundreds remain in federal custody including more than 400 whose parents left the U.S. without them.

Lawmakers and journalists who have visited some detention facilities around the country and migrants themselves have reported poor conditions. The top members of the Judiciary committee — Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. — have asked inspectors general of two federal agencies to investigate reports by news organizations that immigrants at some centers have suffered alleged sexual and other forms of abuse.

Matthew Albence, an executive associate director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told the lawmakers that “the best way to describe” conditions at family detention centers was “like a summer camp.” He said the facilities undergo rigorous inspections and offer basketball and other forms of recreation, food and water around the clock and medical and dental care.

“We do not leave our humanity behind when we report for duty,” Carla L. Provost, acting chief of the U.S. border patrol told members of the committee.

At one point, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, asked whether they would want their children to stay in one of the government’s family detention centers.

“I think we’re missing the point,” answered Albence. “These individuals are there because they have broken a law.”

Joined by some Republicans, Democrats ridiculed Trump’s immigration policies as cruel and bungling. No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Richard Durbin of Illinois said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen should resign, saying someone “has to accept responsibility” for policies that show “the extremes this administration will go to.”

Grassley said Trump’s crackdown on people illegally crossing the border from Mexico was well-intentioned but has had unintended consequences. He said the administration has “mishandled” family separations.

The officials said they keep records of children in their custody and can document decisions by hundreds of detained parents to willingly leave the U.S. without their children, an assertion that has drawn skepticism from lawmakers. Some migrants separated from their children have said they did not understand what they were signing.

White called a family’s decision to leave children behind “a desperate last act of a parent” that he said is “unfathomable until you’ve walked in those parents’ shoes.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, defended the officials and said Congress was also to blame for the administration’s problems with handling the separated families. He said congressional critics “offer no plausible or workable solution at all.”

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego set a deadline of last Thursday to reunite the families. While he commended administration officials for reuniting many parents in its custody with their children, it faulted them for leaving hundreds of families still apart and warning that a better system must be in place.

Facebook Reports ‘Sophisticated’ New Efforts to Meddle in U.S. Politics

NEW YORK—Facebook said it has uncovered “sophisticated” efforts, possibly linked to Russia, to influence U.S. politics on its platforms.

The company said it removed 32 accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in “coordinated” political behavior and appeared to be fake. Nearly 300,000 people followed at least one of the accounts.

Facebook stopped short of saying the effort was aimed at influencing the U.S. midterm elections in November, although the timing of the suspicious activity would be consistent with such an attempt.

According to a Facebook official, the company this week briefed members of the House and Senate as well as officials at the Department of Homeland Security. The official declined to be named because the briefings were private. Facebook disclosed its findings after The New York Times reported on them earlier Tuesday.

The company said it doesn’t know who is behind the efforts, but said there may be connections to Russia. Facebook said it has found some links between the accounts it removed and the accounts created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency that it removed before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, called the disclosure “further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation.”

The earliest page was created in March 2017. Facebook says more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the fake pages. The most followed Facebook pages had names such as “Aztlan Warriors,” ”Black Elevation,” ”Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”

Facebook didn’t provide detailed descriptions of those pages. But the names it released are reminiscent of groups set up by Russian agents to draw in and manipulate Americans with particular ethnic, cultural or political identities ahead of the 2016 election. That effort targeted people with both liberal and conservative leanings.

Facebook says the pages ran about 150 ads for $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in U.S. and Canadian dollars. The first ad was created in April 2017; the last was created in June 2018.

The company added that the perpetrators have been “more careful to cover their tracks” than in 2016, in part because of steps Facebook has taken to prevent abuse over the past year. For example, they used virtual private networks and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. After it became clear that Russia-linked actors used social media to try to influence the 2016 U.S. election, Facebook has stepped up its efforts to ensure that what happened then does not happen again. But the disruptors are stepping up their efforts as well.

“We face determined, well-funded adversaries who will never give up and are constantly changing tactics,” Facebook said in a statement.

During a conference call Tuesday, Facebook executives declined to paint a broader nature of the pages, including whether they included a range of political positions. They also did not say whether any of the activity mentioned specific candidates or politicians, and were careful to say that Facebook is not “publicly” linking the activity to any group or government.

California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said more work needs to be done before the midterm elections. “Foreign bad actors are using the exact same playbook they used in 2016,” he said. They are “dividing us along political and ideological lines, to the detriment of our cherished democratic system.”

President Donald Trump has offered mixed message on Russian interference, at times even calling it a “hoax.” After appearing to question whether the Russians would try again to interfere earlier this month, he acknowledged last week in a tweet that the midterms were a likely target. But he said that Democrats, not his fellow Republicans, would be the ones targeted.

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Jalonick reported from Washington.