1/The important part is not in the headlines. Moon held a cabinet meeting at KIST, and Cho Kuk was there. Moon & Cho were pressuring KIST to say Cho Kuk's daughter did an internship there, when she didn't. Cho's daughter claimed she was an intern there…https://t.co/3HLgzX52J4
Democratic lawmakers in the United States, including some running for the White House, say there’s little in President Donald Trump’s diplomatic track to convince them that his meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (gihm jung oon) may lead to a nuclear breakthrough.
Trump is coming under criticism for what Democrats see as his affinity for authoritarian leaders such as Kim and they are skeptical that the Trump-Kim sit-down at the Demilitarized Zone may amount to anything more than a photo opportunity.
Sen. Chuck Schumer says “dictators seem to get elevated and people who believe in democracy not.”
Former Obama Housing Secretary Julian Castro, a presidential candidate, wonders why Trump appears keen to raise Kim’s profile when, according to Castro, Kim hasn’t abided by past commitments about the North’s weapons programs.
And Sen. Bernie Sanders, also a 2020 candidate, says he’s not opposed to sitting down with America’s adversaries, but he tells ABC’s “This Week” that “we need real diplomacy” and he hasn’t seen that under Trump
This is coming from the people who supported President Obama when he flew to Cuba with his whole family to hang out with the dictators there. I doubt President Trump’s engagement with North Korea is going to get them to denuclearize, but the claims from his critics sound more like “since Trump is for it, I must be against it” instead of any reasoned policy position.
I like Bernie but Christine Ahn is nearly pro-Pyongyang at this point in her activist career. Not the wisest choice for an informational video about the Korean Peninsula. So many scholarly voices out there that could’ve helped #TheBern. https://t.co/zrRDnFQyiZ
— Benjamin R. Young, PhD (@DubstepInDPRK) April 6, 2019
The Warmbier case is clearly taking a backseat to the larger US goal of trying to get North Korea to denuclearize:
Donald Trump took Kim Jong Un’s word that he knew nothing of the torture of an American college student while in North Korean custody, an about-face that sparked a bipartisan backlash back home on Thursday. The US president appeared to side with the reclusive leader about the 2017 case of Otto Warmbier, drawing outrage from incredulous Democrats who accused Trump of repeatedly aligning with tyrants. The 22-year-old Ohio native was returned to the United States in a coma and died shortly afterwards. A US judge concluded Warmbier was tortured by North Korean authorities. At the conclusion of his Hanoi summit with Kim, Trump told reporters he talked with Kim about the “horrible” Warmbier case. “He knew the case very well, but he knew it later,” Trump said, adding that “some really bad things” happened to Warmbier while he was detained. Kim “tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
Who knows how accurate this comment is, but it is of course making the rounds as a headline:
Inevitably, the book includes disturbing new detail about Trump’s subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin. During an Oval Office briefing in July 2017, Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea had test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile — a test that Kim Jong Un had called a Fourth of July “gift” to “the arrogant Americans.” Trump dismissed the missile launch as a “hoax,” McCabe writes. “He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”
Trading away our national security & that of our allies for a short-term political advantage. Which it is, because Pyongyang isn't disarming. https://t.co/YYEj7uqPwL
Via a reader tip comes news that Senator Diane Feinstein had a driver that worked for her for nearly 20 years that was a Chinese spy:
Senator Diane Feinstein
A staffer in U.S. Sen. DianneFeinstein’s San Francisco office was fired a few years back after being linked to Chinese spying in the Bay Area.
According to a Politico Magazine story on Silicon Valley espionage, the Feinstein staffer was suspected of providing political intelligence — but nothing classified — to his handlers, with one former intelligence official telling author Zach Dorfman that the suspected informant was “run” by officials based at the local Chinese Consulate.
A local source who knew about the incident confirmed to us that the FBI showed up at Feinstein’s office in Washington, D.C., about five years ago to alert the then-chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that her driver was being investigated for possible Chinese spying.
“Dianne was mortified,” said our source, who spoke to us only on condition he not be named.
Besides driving her around when she was in California, the staffer also served as gofer in her San Francisco office and as a liaison to the Asian American community, even attending Chinese Consulate functions for the senator. [SF Chronicle]
You can read more at the link, but the US media has definitely done a good job keeping this quiet. However, it has now come out and of course President Trump has jumped on this news since Senator Feinstein is a leading Democrat involved in investigating Trump over Russian spying.
I would not be surprised if there is more to this story then what is being reported:
The U.S. government deported a Mexican woman on Friday who had lived in the country illegally for nearly two decades despite efforts by lawmakers to keep her in Florida with her husband, a Marine Corps veteran, and her two American children.
Alejandra Juarez, 38, was joined by her family and her congressman, Darren Soto, at Orlando International Airport for tearful farewells before her flight back to Mexico.
Juarez sought to illegally enter the United States in 1998 and was ordered to be removed, precluding her future chances at getting a visa or becoming a citizen, according to Soto and media interviews Juarez has given.
She illegally re-entered the country in 2000, the same year she married Temo Juarez, a Mexico native who went on to serve in the war in Iraq with the U.S. Marines and is now a naturalized U.S. citizen.
After being discovered in the country during a 2013 traffic stop, she had been required to check in every six months with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. [Reuters]
You can read the rest at the link if you want to read all the anti-Trump stuff even though her deportation process began under the Obama administration.
I feel bad for the kids, but their parents had nearly 20 years to work on her immigration status which leads me to believe there is more to this story. With that said should illegal immigrant wives of US military servicemembers receive special immigration status? That is basically the argument being made here.
A pair of Democratic senators on Wednesday introduced an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that would stop President Trump from withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea without the Pentagon’s input.
The amendment “would help prevent the President from making a rash decision about troop reductions on the Korean Peninsula that negatively impacts our national security,” Sens. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) and Chris Murphy (Conn.) said in a joint statement.
Introduced for the Fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the provision would stop a withdraw “unless the U.S. Secretary of Defense certifies it is in our national security interest and would not significantly undermine the security of our allies in the region.” [The Hill]
