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President Donald Trump demanded Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation in May, after he learned that Robert Mueller had been appointed special counsel to investigate the Trump team’s Russia ties, the New York Times reported Thursday. The president and advisers including Sessions were reportedly discussing in May a replacement for former FBI chief James Comey, when Donald McGahn III received a call from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein informing him that Mueller had been appointed special counsel. Trump reportedly began berating Sessions, who had recused himself from the Russia investigation, telling the attorney general that appointing him was one of his worst decisions. He also reportedly called Sessions an “idiot” during the blowout and demanded he resign. The attorney general shortly afterwards turned in a short letter of resignation but, the Times reported, members of Trump’s inner circle including Vice President Mike Pence, then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and then-Chief of Staff Reince Preibus urged the president to reconsider, telling him a Sessions resignation would only further the narrative of White House chaos. | |
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Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, resigned from his senior fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy school on Thursday in protest of the organization’s hiring of Chelsea Manning. “I cannot be part of an organization... that honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information,” Morell said in a statement. “The Kennedy school’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence, an attempt that may encourage others to leak classified information as well.” The school announced yesterday that Manning has been hired as a visiting fellow for the academic year. The former U.S. Army soldier served seven years in prison for releasing confidential military and state department documents. President Obama commuted her initial 35-year sentence shortly before he completed his term. | |
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When asked about his Wednesday talk with Republican Sen. Tim Scott, President Trump told reporters that the two had “a great talk” and that, regarding the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, he told the senator that “you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also.” The president then continued to relitigate his equivocating comments about “both sides” leading to the death of an anti-racism protester at the event. “Now because of what’s happened since then with Antifa. When you look at really what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people are saying and people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump may have a point.’ I said there’s some very bad people on the other side also,” the president told reporters. Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, has criticized Trump on issues involving race in the past. After Trump said “fine people” were protesting on both sides in Charlottesville, Scott said the president's “moral authority is compromised.” | |
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Three female former Google employees are accusing the company of discriminating against women in pay and promotions, Reuters reported Thursday. The plaintiffs in the proposed class action lawsuit are a former Google software engineer, a former communications specialist, and a former manager. The lawsuit accuses Google of paying women at its California headquarters less than men for similar work, and assigning female employees jobs with fewer promotion opportunities. The U.S. Department of Labor is also currently investigating the company for sex bias. | |
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If you’re going to set a drama in ISIS-controlled Syria, as writer/director Peter Kosminsky does with The State, you have to make absolutely sure the action appears to be taking place in the war-torn region. Enter production designer Patricia Campbell, who oversaw creation of the various locales seen in the four-part National Geographic series—an undertaking complicated by the fact that Kosminsky’s saga plays out in many different types of areas. “We had war zones, to domestic interiors, to cafes, to hotel interiors,” says Campbell, who finally found what she was looking for in the southeastern Spanish city of Almeria. “It’s very arid, very barren, and actually looked very Syrian as well.” An even bigger obstacle, however, was finding credible props for the sets themselves, which were eventually located in Istanbul and brought to both Spain and to Wales, where the show’s interiors were filmed. “We tried to be as authentic as possible. We didn’t want to overstylize it because we were doing a fanciful recreation of people’s lives and events—not exactly a documentary but we tried to be as realistic as possible with our recreations of rooms and interiors.” Don’t miss a rare glimpse into the world of ISIS recruitment. The two-night miniseries event, The State, premieres Monday, 9/18 at 9/8c on National Geographic. View this cheat in a browser to see this video. | |
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President Trump’s senior adviser believes it’s “unrealistic” to expect her to advise and influence the president’s decisions. “Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me,” Ivanka Trump, who is also the president’s daughter, said in a new interview with the Financial Times. “That my presence in and of itself would carry so much weight with my father that he would abandon his core values and the agenda that the American people voted for when they elected him. It’s not going to happen. To those critics, shy of turning my father into a liberal, I’d be a failure to them.” Additionally, she said, being the voice of dissent would mean “I’m not part of the team.” Ivanka explained that she organized several weeks of meetings to convince her father to not abandon the Paris climate accord—but to no avail. The younger Trump instead said she should be judged by her accomplishments in the policy areas designated to her, such as gender equality in the workplace. | |
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The morning after privately dining with President Trump, Sen. Chuck Schumer was caught on a hot mic telling a colleague, “He likes us! He likes me anyway.” The Democratic leader continued: “Here’s what I told him: I said, ‘Mr. President, you’re much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes step left. If you have to step in one direction, you’re boxed.’” He additionally noted: “It’ll make us more productive, too.” Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced Wednesday evening that they’d reached an agreement with Trump to work on legislation protecting young undocumented immigrants in exchange for beefed-up border security. View this cheat in a browser to see this video. | |
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A cache of nearly 600,000 American voter records have been published online, researchers from the Kromtech Security Research Center discovered. The records had been compiled by a data-aggregating firm Targetsmart, which sells voter information to political campaigns. The records are usually kept private, but 593,328 of those records (believed to be the records of every registered voter in Alaska) were listed on a website that anyone could access without a password, the Kromtech researchers found. The records, which have since been pulled offline, contained personal information including an individual's household income, the issues they could be lobbied on, and the age ranges of their children. "We've learned that Equals3, an [artificial intelligence] software company based in Minnesota, appears to have failed to secure some of their data and some data they license from TargetSmart, and that a database of approximately 593,000 Alaska voters appears to have been inadvertently exposed," said Tom Bonier, Targetsmart chief executive told ZDNet. | |
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At least 15 soldiers were injured Thursday morning in an explosion on a training field at Fort Bragg, WRAL-TV reported. The wounded soldiers were all members of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and were taken by helicopter to Womack Army Medical Center. Further details, including their conditions, were not immediately available. | |
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Following a report from the Phoenix New Times uncovering that local Motel 6 locations in Arizona had been sending its customer lists to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the company announced Thursday it will stop the practice. More than 20 undocumented immigrants were arrested through this tactic, according to the newspaper. “This was implemented at the local level without the knowledge of senior management,” Motel 6 said in a statement. “When we became aware of it last week, it was discontinued.” | |
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