Trans troops sue, say Don ban not legal
THE FBI STAGED a predawn raid on the Virginia home of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort last month, seizing documents and other materials under the direction of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Federal agents arrived with a search warrant, and without warning, at Manafort’s Alexandria house in the early hours of July 26, according to The Washington Post.
The raid came one day after Manafort met with the Senate Intelligence Committee for its investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
FBI agents left the house with unspecified records, according to The Post. Since Manafort had offered to turn over documents to congressional committees, the raid indicates investigators may have believed he was withholding other material.
A spokesman for Manafort confirmed the raid, and insisted that Manafort “has consistently cooperated with law enforcement and other serious inquiries and did so on this occasion as well.”
Manafort also has homes in New York City, the Hamptons and Florida. It was unclear if those have been raided as well.
The same day Manafort’s home was raided by the FBI, President Trump called for the firing of the acting FBI director and complained about Hillary Clinton not facing federal investigation.
“Why didn’t A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got ....... big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives. Drain the Swamp!” he tweeted.
He also abruptly announced on Twitter his ban on transgender military service, an unanticipated move that set off controversy consuming the day’s news cycle.
Manafort resigned as Trump’s second campaign leader in August 2016 after reports revealed he may have received an illegal $12 million from the Ukrainian government. He registered only last month as a foreign agent working for Ukraine. Manafort’s foreign financial ties remain under scrutiny and he has been looped into the federal and congressional probes into Russia’s meddling.
He’s denied wrongdoing.
Manafort was also involved — along with Donald Trump Jr. and the President’s son-inlaw Jared Kushner — in a secret June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who promised to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton. That meeting became a focus of the federal Trump-Russia probe after The New York Times exposed it in July. Kushner also spoke with the Senate about the meeting, and the Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday that Trump Jr. had turned over more than 250 pages of records. The Trump campaign has given the committee more than 20,000 pages.
The panel is hoping to book Kushner, Manafort and Trump Jr. for public testimonies.
Mueller has been leading the investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, and there have been signs in the past month that his work is intensifying.
Reports last week revealed Mueller had impaneled a grand jury to aid his probe. The grand jury had also issued subpoenas relating to the Trump Tower meeting. election any A GROUP of transgender service members filed suit against the Trump administration Wednesday, charging the President’s plan to boot them from the military is unconstitutional.
The National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders filed the federal suit on Wednesday on behalf of five active-duty transgender service members, identified in court documents only as Jane Doe 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Combined, they boast nearly 60 years of military service, according to a news release from their legal team.
“The directive to reinstate a ban on open service by transgender people violates both the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the groups said in the complaint.
President Trump said he consulted “generals and military experts” before announcing a ban on transgender service members on Twitter back in July — a notion the plaintiffs are skeptical about.
The suit came on the same day that a new report co-authored by current and retired professors at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., estimated the discharging of transgender troops would “cost $960 million in pursuit of saving $8.4 million a year.”