Taliban-Russia bounty claims are ‘fake news’, says Trump
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Wednesday dismissed as “fake news” allegations that Russia had offered bounties for killing American troops in Afghanistan.
“The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” he tweeted ahead of a closed-door briefing on Wednesday for the so-called Gang of Eight House and Senate leaders on the issue.
The Gang of Eight is one avenue that Congress receives classified information from the executive branch. It includes Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House and Senate Minority Leaders Kevin McCarthy and Chuck Schumer, and the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Lawmakers who returned from a briefing at the White House on Tuesday said they learned nothing new about American intelligence assessments on the bounty issue.
The intelligence assessments were first reported by The New York Times, then confirmed to The Associated Press by American intelligence officials and others aware of the matter.
JUDGE HALTS BOOK BY TRUMP’S NIECE
A New York judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s niece from publishing a tell-all book that offers an unflattering portrait of the US president and his family.
Justice Hal Greenwald of the state supreme court in Poughkeepsie, New York, issued a temporary restraining order against Mary Trump and her publisher Simon & Schuster at the request of Robert Trump, the president’s brother. Robert Trump has said the scheduled July 28 release of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, would violate a confidentiality agreement tied to the estate of his father Fred Trump Sr, who died in 1999. Mary Trump is Fred Trump’s granddaughter.
Mary Trump and Simon & Schuster appealed Greenwald’s order.
Their lawyer Theodore Boutrous called the order a “prior restraint on core political speech that flatly violates the First Amendment” of the US Constitution. “This book, which addresses matters of great public concern and importance about a sitting president in an election year, should not be suppressed even for one day,” he said. Charles Harder, a lawyer for Robert Trump, called the defendants’ actions “truly reprehensible.”