Fox News and Sean Hannity have, through their own brand of propaganda, successfully manipulated the president of the United States into taking action that the FBI has “grave concerns” about and that his own Justice Department described as “extraordinarily reckless.”
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee took an unprecedented vote this week to declassify a memo prepared by Republican staff of Chairman Devin Nunes that accuses the DOJ and FBI of abusing their authority to obtain a surveillance order from the FISA court. On Friday, Trump chose to release the document.
The Daily Beast reported that “Trump has been in regular contact with Hannity over the phone in recent weeks, as the Fox News prime-time star and Trump ally has encouraged the prompt release” of the memo.
“Hannity’s persistent advocacy reinforced Trump’s already growing determination to get that memo into the public realm,” the outlet said.
The president has now willfully ignored the director of the FBI (who he appointed) and his own deputy attorney general in favor of Hannity. Remember that the next time Trump and Republicans talk about being the political party that will restore law and order in America.
It’s worth noting that transcripts of the Intelligence Committee’s meeting revealed that when asked directly by one of his colleagues if “staff members that worked for the majority had any consultation, communication at all with the White House,” Nunes dodged the question, saying, “The chair is not going to entertain” that question.
There is also zero chance that Nunes would proceed with such a high-stakes maneuver without support, consultation and guidance from the White House.
I spent four years working as a senior adviser for a congressional investigative committee, and I can tell you that there is zero chance the chairman’s staff would proceed with something this controversial, volatile and unprecedented unless they had explicit direction from the chairman. In Congress and at the committee level, the staff is a direct extension of the chairman. There is also zero chance that Nunes would proceed with such a high-stakes maneuver without support, consultation and guidance from the White House.
It raises the question: Why was the White House so involved in orchestrating the release of this memo?
The answer lies in Trump’s No. 1 resource for intelligence: Fox News and his new consigliere, Sean Hannity.
On Monday night, the Fox News host declared the Nunes memo would expose “the biggest political scandal in American history” that “makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore.”
“We’re talking about potential crimes,” he said. “We’re talking about people being charged, going to jail. ... It’s a scary night.”
The right-wing hype machine has relentlessly stoked Trump’s enthusiasm to sign off on the release of this memo. The president seemed to take their hyperbolic descriptions of the Nunes memo at face value, and is portraying its release as the silver bullet that ends the Mueller investigation.
It’s obvious that Trump sees the Nunes memo as a means to discredit Mueller and remove Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. But in many ways, Trump’s embrace of the memo telegraphs how desperate he is to undermine Mueller.
These are not the actions of an innocent man.
Ironically, Fox News may have done Trump the bigger disservice by overstating the contents and impact of the Nunes memo. Anything short of the “biggest political scandal in American history” was going to be a huge letdown. They overplayed their hand and set an impossible standard to meet. Their irresponsible and sensational rhetoric has given Trump completely unrealistic expectations about the memo and how he can use it to attack Mueller.
With the memo now public, Trump has officially declared war on his own Justice Department and the FBI. He has laid the groundwork for a full-scale constitutional crisis that threatens to destroy the very fabric of our democracy.
CNN’s Brian Stelter observed Thursday night that Hannity was already trying to move the goalposts and redefine success by saying the memo is just the “tip of the iceberg” and represents just “10 to 15 percent of info that will be coming out in the days, weeks and months ahead.”
The Nunes memo is a Hail Mary pass. A desperate, last-ditch effort by Trump and his Fox News enablers to stop the Mueller investigation before it goes any further and inflicts any more damage.
With the memo now public, Trump has officially declared war on his own Justice Department and the FBI. He has laid the groundwork for a full-scale constitutional crisis that threatens to destroy the very fabric of our democracy. He is pushing the boundaries of executive authority in a way that the framers would have found distressing and unfathomable. Most concerning of all, he is doing all of this at the behest of Hannity and Fox News.
I used to think that Fox was following Trump’s lead. Now, it appears as if Trump is following Fox and Hannity’s lead ― and in the process, effectively surrendering the powers of the presidency to his own propagandists.
A father in Texas has been charged by authorities for selling his missing teenage daughter for sex. The girl, kept hidden in a separate location, he was later resuced when she made an escape to a McDonald’s restaurant and called the authorities.
TheDallas Morning News reported that 31-year-old Steve Marks was charged with “purchasing or selling a child for sex,” according to jail records. His wife, Lila Miller, has also reportedly been charged for her alleged involvement.
According to documents relating to Mark’s arrest, he sold his daughter to a family in Elgin, Illinois, who planned to marry her to a 17-year-old male.
He sold her "so that the child would engage in sex acts and be involved in a common-law marriage to a male subject believed to be about three years older than the child," arrest warrants alleged.
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Steve Marks was charged with “purchasing or selling a child for sex,” according to jail records. His wife, Lila Miller, has also reportedly been charged for her alleged involvement. Rockwall County Jail
The family in Illinois did not pay the full price of $17,500 they had agreed to, and Marks allegedly made plans to sell the girl to another family, in Florida.
ABC affiliate WFAA8 reported that an investigation into the child’s disappearance began when the Texas Department of Protective Services reported her missing at the end of September 2017.
By January, authorities learned that Marks, who has seven children aged one to 14, was attempting to sell his daughter to the family in Florida.
When Marks was arrested, authorities questioned his own parents, Davy and Dorothy Marks, who both said they hadn’t seen the child in four months. During their interviews, Mark’s mother allegedly phoned her grandson, Miller Marks, at his home, where the child was being held to warn him.
As Miller Marks was leaving the home in Mesquit,e the child was able to escape and call 911 from a nearby McDonald’s, Fox News reported.
Miller, Davy and Dorothy Marks have all been charged with interference with child custody. Steven Marsk is being held at Rockwall County Jail on a million-dollar bond.
Rachael Denhollander was the first woman to publicly accuse former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar of sexual abuse. As she worked to find justice for herself and the doctor’s other victims, Denhollander began to turn a critical eye on a community that she depended on dearly for support ― her church.
Denhollander, an evangelical Christian, saw that Biblical teachings about grace and repentance were being weaponized against victims, pressuring them into offering an easy forgiveness to their abusers. At the same time, churches lacked accountability structures that treated victims with compassion and respect.
It soon became clear to her that when it comes to properly caring for survivors of sexual abuse, the church has a long way to go ― and experts HuffPost spoke to agree.
“Church is one of the least safe places to acknowledge abuse because the way it is counseled is, more often than not, damaging to the victim,” said Denhollander, who now works as a lawyer in Kentucky. “There is an abhorrent lack of knowledge for the damage and devastation that sexual assault brings. It is with deep regret that I say the church is one of the worst places to go for help.”
Denhollander was one of more than 150 survivors who shared statements in court during Nassar’s sentencing hearing. In her statement, Denhollander spoke about how her advocacy for sexual assault victims “cost me my church and our closest friends.”
Denhollander said one of the biggest struggles she faced was trying to come to terms with what happened to her from a spiritual perspective. She told Christianity Today that she initially wondered why God didn’t prevent the abuse, and if she was “stained” by it. Over the years, she came to realize that church teachings sometimes can be used to “mitigate and to minimize” victims’ suffering.
″[Christians] can tend to gloss over the devastation of any kind of suffering but especially sexual assault, with Christian platitudes like God works all things together for good or God is sovereign,” she told Christianity Today. “Those are very good and glorious biblical truths, but when they are misapplied in a way to dampen the horror of evil, they ultimately dampen the goodness of God.”
Ashley Easter, an advocate for abuse victims, told HuffPost she agrees the church is not always a safe place for victims to disclose abuse.
“Many churches hold poor interpretations of Scripture that imply the victim is somehow at fault for dressing or acting a certain way ‘immodestly,’ that speaking up about abuse is ‘gossip’ or ‘slander,’ and that forgiveness is moving on without demanding justice for the victims,” Easter told HuffPost. “These stances are a stark contrast from Jesus’ ministry to the marginalized.”
Many of these views about women are steeped in patriarchal biases. Christa Brown, an expert on church abuse scandals, told HuffPost that in evangelical communities, patriarchy is often seen as part of God’s plan. Some churches emphasize female submissiveness and male “headship,” the idea that men have final authority over women in the church, community and home.
These teachings aren’t always inherently destructive. But they can create an unequal power dynamic ― such as when a female survivor of assault brings her case to the male elders of a local church.
Meanwhile, other aspects of evangelical Christian theology, such as the emphasis on forgiveness of sin, can enable covering up sexual abuse. And often, Brown said, evangelical churches lack adequate accountability structures that would keep all of these problematic forces in check.
“The toxicity of this combination ― a lack of accountability structures and a patriarchal theology ― taints evangelical culture at its very core,” Brown told HuffPost.
Denhollander first went public with her accusations in The Indianapolis Star in September 2016.At the time, she and her husband were attending a church in Louisville, Kentucky. She claimed the church was “directly” involved in supporting a local pastor who had been accused of covering up child sex abuse. When Denhollander spoke up on behalf of survivors, it caused a rift between her and the leaders of her church. She said some elders even used her personal story of sexual abuse as a weapon against her, claiming that the assault had clouded her judgment as an advocate.
In the interview with Christianity Today, Denhollander made it clear that she feels the problem is bigger than one individual congregation. She believes the American evangelical church as a whole has to work much harder to appropriately respond to abuse allegations from survivors.
“The only reason I am able to have the support of these leaders now is because I am speaking out against an organization not within their community,” Denhollander said. “Had I been so unfortunate so as to have been victimized by someone in their community ... I would be massively shunned. That’s the reality.”
Easter told HuffPost she’s seen this pattern before in evangelical churches. Church leaders are more likely to support specific victims if the abuser has no ties to their own ministry. But when victims come forward about abuse by one of the church’s pastors or a popular ministry leader, the church’s first response is often to fully support the abuser and reject the victim, she said.
“This duplicitous double standard is an exercise in image management and not reflective of the heart of Jesus,” Easter told HuffPost in an email.
In January, an evangelical church in Tennessee was criticized afterit appeared to stand by a pastor accused of sexual abuse. Highpoint Church in Memphis initially indicated it had “total confidence in the redemptive process” that accused pastor Andy Savage had gone through after he allegedly assaulted a young woman years ago. After the pastor read out an apology during a church service, some members gave Savage a standing ovation.
It wasn’t until the church received backlash in the national media that leaders decided to put Savage on leave, and take other steps to re-evaluate the church’s policies on child safety.
Brown agrees that church leaders tend to respond poorly to abuse in their own communities.
“Having communicated with hundreds of clergy sex abuse survivors over the past decade, and based on my personal experience as well, I can say that Rachael’s statement is absolutely true in its assessment of how abysmally evangelical leaders would react if she had been victimized by someone within their own community,” Brown told HuffPost. “Rachael’s statement should serve as a challenge to evangelical faith groups to at least come up to speed with the basic norms of accountability structures.”
For Brown, this includes setting up centralized safe spaces within denominational bodies where survivors can take their complaints.
“What most evangelical groups now have is a system that tells abuse survivors to take their complaint to the local church ― i.e., the church of the accused pastor,” Brown said. “This is akin to telling bloody sheep that they should go to the den of the wolf who savaged them.”
Easter said that when victims come forward, churches need to open their doors and get outside professionals involved ― law enforcement, licensed counselors, justice attorneys for victims, and unbiased investigators.
“For the church to become a safe place for abuse survivors, it must repent of its sin of shielding perpetrators in their ranks,” she said. “The church needs to reevaluate its patriarchal shaming and silencing of victims and create an environment where abuse disclosure is encouraged and met with belief and compassion.”
China urged the United States to drop its "Cold War mentality" and not misread its military build-up, after Washington published a document on Friday outlining plans to expand its nuclear capabilities to deter others.
"Peace and development are irreversible global trends. The United States, the country that owns the world`s largest nuclear arsenal, should take the initiative to follow the trend instead of going against it," said China`s Ministry of Defence in a statement on Sunday.
The review of US nuclear policy has already riled Russia, which viewed the document as confrontational, and raised fears that it could increase the risk of miscalculation between the two countries.
The US military has put countering China and Russia, dubbed "revisionist powers", at the centre of a new national defence strategy unveiled earlier this month.
By expanding its own low-yield nuclear capability, the US would deter Russia from using nuclear weapons, say American officials.
China accused the United States of "presumptuous speculation" about China`s intentions, and said it has always adopted a restrained attitude towards the development of nuclear weapons and kept its nuclear forces to a minimum.
"We hope that the United States will abandon its Cold War mentality, earnestly assume its special disarmament responsibilities, correctly understand China`s strategic intentions and objectively view China`s national defense and military build-up...," the ministry said in the statement posted on its website.
It called on the US to work together with China and for their armies to become a stabilizing factor in Sino-U.S. relations and in the region.
apanese businessman Senji Nakajima is married and has two kids. But he has found a “plastic love.” He bought his sex doll, he named Saori, for a comfort while working away. But a few months later he said that he noticed that Saori had a real personality and that he started falling in love with her. He takes her shopping and they enjoy going for romantic walks and even bathes. He claims that their relationship is meaningful and that he is happy because his silicone love interest isn't “after only money.”
