U.S. ARMY LOWERS RECRUITING GOAL; MORE SOLDIERS STAYING ON Democrats’ suit alleges conspiracy
Party accuses Trump’s 2016 election campaign, Russia,others of stealing thousands of emails, documents
Washington — The U.S. Army will not meet its mission to recruit 80,000 active duty soldiers this year and has officially lowered that goal. But Army leaders said the service has been able to encourage more experienced service members to stay on the job to satisfy a growing demand for troops. Army Sgt. Maj. Daniel Dailey said Friday that the updated goal will be 76,500. Six months into the recruiting year, the service has brought in just 28,000 new soldiers. Dailey said the goal is to grow the Army to 483,500, as approved by Congress, and it’s up to the Army whether to use more recruiting or re-enlistment. He said that retaining current soldiers has been more successful this year than in the past, with 86 percent staying on, compared with 81 percent in previous years.
New York — The Democratic Party sued Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks and Trump’s son and son-in-law Friday, accusing them of an intricate conspiracy to undercut Democrats in the 2016 election by stealing tens of thousands of emails and documents.
The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court seeks unspecified damages and an order to prevent further interference with computer systems of the Democratic National Committee.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement. He called
it an “act of unprecedented treachery.”
The Democrats accuse Trump and his associates of trading on pre-existing relationships with Russian oligarchs tied to President Vladimir Putin and of collaborating with Russia as it worked to undermine Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The president has said repeatedly there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. On Friday, his campaign scorned the lawsuit as “frivolous” and predicted it would be quickly dismissed.
“This is a sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional and nearly insolvent Democratic Party,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.
He said the campaign would seek to turn the tables on the Democrats,
using the legal discovery process to try to pry documents from the DNC including any related to a dossier detailing allegations of links between Trump and Russia. The dossier — a collection of memos — was written by an ex-British spy whose work was funded by Clinton and the DNC.
Requests for comment from the Russian Embassy in Washington were not immediately returned.
The Democrats’ lawsuit doesn’t reveal new details in the sprawling storyline of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives working on behalf of the Kremlin.
Instead it knits many of the threads that have emerged in public over the past two years to paint a picture of an alleged conspiracy between the Trump campaign, the Kremlin and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The DNC says the “brazen attack on American democracy” began with a cyberattack on DNC computers and phone systems in 2015, allowing the extraction of tens of thousands of documents and emails. WikiLeaks then blasted out many of the documents on July 22, 2016, shortly before Clinton was to be nominated — upsetting the Democrats’ national convention.
That added up to a “campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” the DNC lawyers write in the lawsuit.
That conspiracy violated the laws of the U.S., Virginia and the District of Columbia, the lawsuit says, and “under the laws of this nation, Russia and its co-conspirators must answer for these actions.”