Tag Archives: Trump Administration

White House supports renewal of spy law without reforms: official

A surveillance camera is pictured atop the border fence separating the United States and Mexico in El Paso, U.S. January 17, 2017. REUTERS/Tomas Bravo

By Steve Holland and Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration supports renewing without reforms a key surveillance law governing how the U.S. government collects electronic communications that is due to expire at the end of the year, a White House official said on Wednesday.

“We support the clean reauthorization and the administration believes it’s necessary to protect the security of the nation,” the official said on customary condition of anonymity.

The law, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), has been criticized by privacy and civil liberties advocates as allowing broad, intrusive spying. It gained renewed attention following the 2013 disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Portions of the law, including a provision known as Section 702, will expire on Dec. 31, 2017, unless Congress reauthorizes them.

Section 702 enables two internet surveillance programs called Prism and Upstream, classified details of which were revealed by Snowden’s leaks.

Prism gathers messaging data from Alphabet Inc’s Google , Facebook Inc , Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and other major tech companies that is sent to and from a foreign target under surveillance. Upstream allows the NSA to copy Web traffic flowing along the internet backbone located inside the United States and search that data for certain terms associated with a target.

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have said reforms to Section 702 are needed, in part to ensure the privacy protections on Americans are not violated. The U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee met Wednesday to discuss possible changes to the law.

Though FISA is intended to govern spy programs intended for foreigners, an unknown amount of communications belonging to Americans are also collected due to a range of technical and practical reasons.

Such collection has been defended by U.S. intelligence agencies as “incidental,” but privacy groups have said it allows for backdoor seizures of data without proper judicial oversight.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Dustin Volz, writing by Dustin Volz; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Andrew Hay)

New Trump travel order expected in coming days, Pence says

DAY 19 / FEBRUARY 7: Vice President Mike Pence was called in to break a Senate vote tie that threatened to defeat the confirmation of billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump plans to finalize a new order limiting travel to the United States in the coming days, his vice president said on Wednesday, after federal courts blocked the administration’s earlier travel ban.

A White House source had previously said the new order was likely to be announced on Wednesday.

More than two dozen lawsuits were filed in U.S. courts against the Jan. 27 travel ban, which temporarily barred entry to the United States for people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, as well as halting the U.S. refugee program.

The ban was suspended by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in a case brought by Washington state. The Trump administration then said it would produce a new order.

“They’re putting out the finishing touches on that executive order. It should be out in the next few days,” Vice President Mike Pence told CBS program “This Morning.”

The original order triggered chaos at airports as people, including legal residents known as green card holders, were temporarily blocked from entering the country and federal agencies tried to interpret the new guidelines.

The administration has said it is likely the new directive will exclude legal permanent residents, making it harder for opponents to challenge the ban. [L2N1GD20P]

Pence did not elaborate on the revised directive.

The Associated Press, citing unidentified U.S. officials, reported late on Tuesday that the new order will remove Iraq from the list of countries whose citizens face a temporary travel ban.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Frances Kerry)

U.S. seeks end to U.N. rights council’s ‘obsession’ with Israel

Israeli policemen remove a pro-settlement activist during an operation by Israeli forces to evict residents from several homes in the Israeli settlement of Ofra, in the occupied West Bank, February 28, 2017. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is reviewing its participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council, seeking reform of its agenda and an end to its “obsession with Israel”, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday.

Washington has long argued that the Geneva forum unfairly focuses on Israel’s alleged violations of human rights, including war crimes against Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The United States “remains deeply troubled by the Council’s consistent unfair and unbalanced focus on one democratic country, Israel”, Erin Barclay, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, told the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Barclay said that no other nation had a whole agenda item devoted to it and that “this obsession with Israel” threatened the council’s credibility.

Barclay questioned whether focusing on Israel was a sensible priority, adding that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government was bombing hospitals while North Korea and Iran deny millions of their people of freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly and expression.

“In order for this Council to have any credibility, let alone success, it must move away from its unbalanced and unproductive positions,” Barclay said.

“As we consider our future engagements, my government will be considering the Council’s actions with an eye toward reform to more fully achieve the Council’s mission to protect and promote human rights.”

The United States is currently an elected member of the 47-state Geneva forum where its three-year term ends in 2019.

There was no immediate reaction from the U.N. human rights office, but on Tuesday Council spokesman Rolando Gomez told a briefing: “The US been a very active and constructive partner in the Council for many years, spearheading a number of important initiatives, such as DPRK (North Korea), Iran, Syria, LGBT rights … and many issues that are certainly on the agenda today.”

He said that any country that wished to revoke its membership of the council would have to go through the General Assembly in New York.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles; editing by Richard Lough)

First planned North Korea-U.S. contact in Trump administration canceled: WSJ

The White House is seen from the South Lawn in Washington October 17, 2008. REUTERS/Larry Downing

SEOUL (Reuters) – Plans for the first contact between North Korea and the United States after President Donald Trump took office were canceled after the U.S. State Department denied a visa for the top envoy from Pyongyang, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

The talks, between senior North Korean foreign ministry envoy Choe Son Hui and former U.S. officials, were scheduled to take place on March 1 and 2 in New York but were called off after Choe was denied a visa, the Journal said.

It was not clear what led the State Department to deny the visa but North Korea’s test-firing of a ballistic missile on Feb. 12 and the murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s half brother in Malaysia may have played a role, the report said.

South Korean and U.S. officials have said they believe North Korean agents assassinated Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half brother of Kim Jong Un, on Feb. 13.

A U.S. State Department official denied so-called track two discussions had been scheduled.

“The U.S government had no plans to engage in track 2 talks in New York,” the official said, declining comment on individual visa cases.

A South Korean foreign ministry official declined to comment on the report of the canceled meeting in New York, saying the reported plan did not involve the U.S. or South Korean government.

The meeting in New York would have been the first time a senior North Korean envoy would visit the United States since 2011 and the first contact between U.S. and North Korean representatives since Trump took office.

Choe, director general for North American affairs at the North’s foreign ministry, has previously met former U.s. officials and academics, the last time in November in Geneva for informal discussions.

Trump said in a Reuters interview on Thursday that he was concerned about North Korea’s ballistic missile tests and “it’s a very dangerous situation”. Trump did not ruling out meeting Kim at some point in the future under certain circumstances but suggested it might be too late.

(Reporting by Jack Kim and Tony Munroe in SEOUL; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in WASHINGTON; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

Trump’s transgender move puts spotlight on Supreme Court case

FILE PHOTO - A bathroom sign welcomes both genders at the Cacao Cinnamon coffee shop in Durham, North Carolina, United States on May 3, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake/File Photo

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration’s move on Wednesday to rescind guidance allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice has raised the stakes for an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that could deliver a landmark decision on the issue.

The eight justices are due to hear oral arguments on March 28 on whether the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia can block Gavin Grimm, a female-born transgender high school student, from using the boys’ bathroom. A ruling is due by the end of June.

A key question in the case is whether a federal law, known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in education, covers transgender students. The Education Department under Democratic President Barack Obama said in guidance to public schools last May that it does, but the Republican Trump administration withdrew that finding on Wednesday.

The high court on Thursday asked the lawyers involved to file letters by March 1 giving their views on how the Trump action should affect consideration of the case.

Lawyers for Grimm say that the definition of sex discrimination in Title IX is broad and includes gender identity. The school board maintains that the law was enacted purely to address “physiological distinctions between men and women.”

If the Supreme Court rules that Title IX protects transgender students, the decision would become the law of the land, binding the Trump administration and the states.

“This is an incredibly urgent issue for Gavin and these other kids across the country,” said Joshua Block, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who represents Grimm.

The Trump administration’s announcement “only underscores the need for the Supreme Court to bring some clarity here,” he added.

The administration on Wednesday did not offer its own interpretation of Title IX, with the Justice Department telling the court only that it plans to “consider further and more completely the legal issues involved.”

The administration is not directly involved in the case.

Lawyers for both Grimm and the Gloucester County School Board have urged the court to decide whether Title IX applies to transgender students rather than taking a narrower approach by sending the case back to a lower court.

In a court filing on Thursday, the ACLU said that, regardless of the administration’s position, the court “can – and should – resolve the underlying question of whether the Board’s policy violates Title IX.”

The school board’s lawyers made similar comments in their most recent court filing, saying that the meaning of the federal law is “plain and may be resolved as a matter of straightforward interpretation.”

But the court could take a more cautious approach and send the case back to the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court’s April 2016 ruling in favor of Grimm relied on the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law.

Kyle Duncan, a lawyer representing the school board, said the court must at a minimum throw out the appeals court decision because “the entire basis for that opinion” was the no-longer extant Obama administration interpretation.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: PIVOTAL VOTE?

With the eight-justice court likely to be closely divided, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, conservative appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch, could end up casting the deciding vote if he is confirmed by the U.S. Senate in time. Otherwise, the court, which is divided equally between liberals and conservatives, could split 4-4, which would set no nationwide legal precedent.

Clues as to how the high court could rule can be gleaned from its decision last August to temporarily block the appeals court decision in Grimm’s case from going into effect. That emergency request from the school board did not require the justices to decide the merits of the case.

The vote in favor of the school board was 5-3, with Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal, joining the four conservative justices. Breyer made clear in a statement at the time that his vote would not dictate how he would approach the case if the court took the issue up.

That decision indicated that the court is likely to be closely divided at oral argument. Grimm’s hopes may rest in Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who voted against Grimm last summer but has sometimes sided with liberals in major cases, including several on gay rights.

But even lawyers closely following the case are not sure which way Kennedy could go.

“If I could predict that, I would be down in the casino,” said Gary McCaleb, a lawyer with conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which backs the school board.

For graphic on transgender rights and “bathroom bills”, click: http://tmsnrt.rs/2l529J9

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; editing by Noeleen Walder and Jonathan Oatis)

U.S. infrastructure legislation back on Congress’ radar

Senate Majority Leader

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s pledge to bring massive investments in U.S. infrastructure projects showed new signs of life on Friday after lying dormant for weeks, as leading Republican lawmakers said proposals from the administration could be in the offing.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, told reporters he expects to receive “some kind of recommendation on an infrastructure bill, a subject that we frequently handle on a bipartisan basis,” but gave no details or timing.

He has previously voiced concern over adding to budget deficits with a new injection of federal funds for road, bridge and other construction projects like the ones President Barack Obama secured from Congress in 2009, especially after a major highway funding law was enacted about a year ago.

Some Republicans and Democrats in Congress are increasingly criticizing Trump’s administration for being slow to get behind his legislative initiatives during the first month of his presidency.

Trump’s plans to create an infrastructure council led by two New York billionaire friends, developers Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth, have yet to be launched, a spokesman for LeFrak said.

During his presidential campaign, Trump said he would push for a $1 trillion infrastructure program to rebuild roads, bridges, airports and other public works projects. He said he wanted action during the first 100 days of his administration, which now seems unlikely.

The Republican president has talked about creating a tax credit to encourage private sector investment in many of these projects. But Democrats say that would fail to spur enough rebuilding and put taxpayers on the hook for a tax credit to wealthy developers, who they said would build toll roads that taxpayers would then have to pay to use.

Democrats want a more direct federal role in sparking a construction boom.

In an interview on Tuesday, Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said he had “no doubt that it (infrastructure investment) is a priority for the administration.”

Diaz-Balart chairs a House subcommittee that would control the flow of Washington money that might be needed to fund some of the public works projects.

Several lawmakers and aides speculated the initiative could be attached to tax reform legislation that Republicans want to advance this year, but no decisions have been made.

Writing an infrastructure bill involves seven or eight committees, there are complicated tax and spending questions at stake, and lawmakers are divided.

There are also questions over what would qualify as an infrastructure project, with rural areas, for example, clamoring for more broadband internet service.

Senator John Thune, a member of the Republican leadership who chairs the commerce and transportation panel which has a say on any bill, said he had little information on the content or status of legislation.

Asked about McConnell’s comments, Thune said, “Maybe he knows more about it since he’s married to the secretary of transportation,” Elaine Chao.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; additional reporting by Herb Lash in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and James Dalgleish)

Pence says U.S. will stand firm with Europe, NATO

US Vice President Mike Pence

By Roberta Rampton and John Irish

MUNICH (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday brought a message of support for Europe from Donald Trump but failed to wholly reassure allies worried about the new president’s stance on Russia and the European Union.

In Pence’s first major foreign policy address for the Trump administration, the vice president told European leaders and ministers that he spoke for Trump when he promised “unwavering” commitment to the NATO military alliance.

“Today, on behalf of President Trump, I bring you this assurance: the United States of America strongly supports NATO and will be unwavering in our commitment to this transatlantic alliance,” Pence told the Munich Security Conference.

While Poland’s defense minister praised Pence, many others, including France’s foreign minister and U.S. lawmakers in Munich, remained skeptical that he had convinced allies that Trump, a former reality TV star, would stand by Europe.

Trump’s contradictory remarks on the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, scepticism of the 2015 deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and an apparent disregard for the future of the European Union have left Europe fearful for the seven-decade-old U.S. guardianship of the West.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on Twitter expressed his disappointment that Pence’s speech contained “Not a word on the European Union”, although the vice president will take his message to EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the opposition Democrats, said he saw two rival governments emerging from the Trump administration.

Pence, Trump’s defense secretary Jim Mattis and his foreign minister Rex Tillerson all delivered messages of reassurance on their debut trip to Europe.

But events in Washington, including a free-wheeling news conference Trump gave in which he branded accredited White House reporters “dishonest people”, sowed more confusion.

“Looks like we have two governments,” Murphy wrote on Twitter from Munich. The vice president “just gave speech about shared values between US and Europe as (the U.S. president) openly wages war on those values.”

The resignation of Trump’s security adviser Michael Flynn over his contacts with Russia on the eve of the U.S. charm offensive in Europe also tarnished the message Pence, Mattis and Tillerson were seeking to send, officials told Reuters.

U.S. Republican Senator John McCain, a Trump critic, told the conference on Friday that the new president’s team was “in disarray,” breaking with the American front.

The United States is Europe’s biggest trading partner, the biggest foreign investor in the continent and the European Union’s partner in almost all foreign policy, as well as the main promoter of European unity for more than sixty years.

Pence, citing a trip to Cold War-era West Berlin in his youth, said the new U.S. government would uphold the post-World War Two order.

“This is President Trump’s promise: we will stand with Europe today and every day, because we are bound together by the same noble ideals – freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law,” Pence said.

MUTED APPLAUSE

While the audience listened intently, Pence received little applause beyond the warm reception he received when he declared his support for NATO.

Ayrault, in a speech defending Franco-German leadership in Europe, lauded the virtues of multilateralism at a time of rising nationalism. Trump has promise ‘America First.’

“In these difficult conditions, many are attempting to look inward, but this isolationism makes us more vulnerable. We need the opposite,” Ayrault said.

Pence warned allies they must pay their fair share to support NATO, noting many lack “a clear or credible path” to do so. He employed a tougher tone than Mattis, who delivered a similar but more nuanced message to NATO allies in Brussels this week, diplomats said.

The United States provides around 70 percent of the NATO alliance’s funds and European governments sharply cut defense spending since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia’s resurgence as a military power and its seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea has started to change that.

Baltic states and Poland fear Russia might try a repeat of Crimea elsewhere. Europe believes Moscow is seeking to destabilize governments and influence elections with cyber attacks and fake news.

Pence’s tough line on Russia, calling Moscow to honor the international peace accords that seek to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, were welcomed by Poland.

“Know this: the United States will continue to hold Russia accountable, even as we search for new common ground, which as you know, President Trump believes can be found,” Pence said.

Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz said Pence’s speech “highlighted on behalf of President Trump that the U.S. supports NATO, Ukraine and Europe.

“They want to show the U.S. military potential,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Noah Barkin, Andrea Shalal, Vladimir Soldatkin, John Irish and Jonathan Landay; Writing by Robin Emmott; Editing by Janet Lawrence)