Gianforte apologizes to reporter after win
Republican multimillionaire Greg Gianforte won Montana’s sole U.S. House seat on Thursday despite being charged a day earlier with assault after witnesses said he grabbed a reporter by the neck and threw him to the floor.
Gianforte, a technology entrepreneur, defeated Democrat Rob Quist to continue the GOP’s two-decade stronghold on the congressional seat. Democrats had hoped Quist, a musician and first-time candidate, would be able to capitalize on a wave of activism following President Donald Trump’s election.
Instead, the win reaffirmed Montana’s voters support for Trump’s young presidency in a conservative-leaning state that voted overwhelmingly for him in November.
Gianforte was a strong favorite throughout the campaign, even after authorities charged him with misdemeanor assault on Wednesday. Witnesses said he grabbed Ben Jacobs, a reporter for the Guardian newspaper, and slammed him to the floor after Jacobs asked him about the Republican health care bill, a central issue in the election.
Gianforte dropped out of sight after he was cited by police and ignored calls Thurs- day by national Republicans for him to apologize to the reporter.
He emerged only at his victory celebration Thursday night. “Last night I made a mistake and I took an action I can’t take back and I am not proud of what happened,” Gianforte told the crowd. “I should not have responded the way I did and for that I am sorry.” British officials expressed confidence on Friday that they had rounded up the bulk of the Manchester bomber’s associates, and that their efforts to avert a follow-up attack appeared to be succeeding.
“We’ve got hold of a large part of the network behind Manchester bombing,” said Mark Rowley, the top counterterrorism official for the Metropolitan Police in London.
Eight men, ages 18 to 38, were in custody, and searches were still taking place at 12 locations in the Manchester area, the city’s top police official, Chief Constable Ian Hopkins, said at a news conference.
“There has been enormous progress with the investigation, but there’s still an awful lot of work to do,” he said.
The latest raids occurred Friday morning at a barbershop in the Moss Side neighborhood and at a pizza restaurant in St. Helens, a town about 22 miles west of Manchester.
Normal rhythms began to resume across Britain, even though the nation was on its highest level of alert — “critical,” meaning another attack could be “expected imminently” — and was to remain so at least through the weekend.
Public events, including the Great Manchester Run, a 10-kilometer race and half-marathon in the city that is scheduled for Sunday, will take place as planned. Hundreds of soldiers have been deployed to protect important sites around the country and to give relief to police forces.
Campaigning for the coun- try’s parliamentary election, suspended after the attack, has resumed, and with polls showing the race tighten- ing, the opposition Labour Party opened a line of criticism, asserting that Prime Minister Theresa May, who was previously the home secretary, and the govern- ing Conservative Party had made Britain more vulner- able by pursuing a bellicose foreign policy and by cutting security budgets at home. news site
It is rare that such rulings see the light of day, and the lengthy unraveling of issues in the 99-page document opens a window on how the secret federal court oversees surveillance activities and seeks to curtail those that it deems overstep legal authority.
The document, signed by Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, said the court had learned in a notice filed Oct. 26, 2016, that National Security Agency analysts had been conducting prohibited queries of data- bases “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the court.”
It said a judge chastised the NSA’s inspector general and Office of Compliance for Operations for an “institu- tional ‘lack of candor’” for failing to inform the court. It described the matter as “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”
The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and is a constitutional bedrock protection against intrusion.
Parts of the ruling were redacted, including sections that give an indication of the extent of the illegal surveil
which the NSA told the court in a Jan. 3 notice was partly the fault of “human error” and “system design issues” rather than intentional illegal searches.
The NSA inspector general’s office tallied up the number of prohibited searches conducted in a three-month period in 2015, but the num
of analysts who made the searches and the number of queries were blacked out in the ruling.
The NSA gathers communications in ways known as “upstream” and “downstream” collection. Upstream collectionoccurs when data are captured as they move through massive data highways — the internet backbone — within the United States. Downstream collection occurs as data move outside the country along fiber optic cables and satellite links.
Data captured from both upstream and downstream sources are stored in massive databases, available to be searched when analysts need to, often months or as much as two years after the captures took place.
The prohibited searches the court mentioned involved NSA queries into the upstream databanks, which are more likely to contain the emails and phone calls of people inthe United States.