n ongoing investigation into “suspicious” activity in the back seat of a car involving an inmate trustee at the Fauquier County jail led to the Tuesday arrest of Teresa Jo Burchfield, the wife of an ethics attorney to President Donald Trump’s business organization.
Burchfield, 53, is married to Bobby R. Burchfield, a partner at Washington’s King and Spalding, who was appointed as an independent ethics advisor to the Donald J. Revocable Trust in January.
Burchfield, a longtime Republican attorney, served as counsel to President George W. Bush in the 2000 Florida recount.
Teresa Jo Burchfield was arrested Tuesday afternoon in a parking lot adjacent to the Fauquier County Adult Detention Center after deputies found her in the backseat of a car with an inmate/trustee at the jail, according to sheriff’s office Sgt. James Hartman.
Burchfield and the 23-year-old inmate were having sex in the car, according to a criminal complaint filed at Fauquier County General District Court.
"The defendant was caught in the backseat of her vehicle with an inmate...," Dept. J. B. Thorpe wrote in Burchfield's criminal complaint. "When the inmate exited the vehicle, he handed me a bag of brown pills (capsules), that he claims to be workout pills."
After the two were discovered, the inmate, Hartman said, was found in possession of cigarettes, clothes, vitamin supplements and other “unauthorized articles alleged to have been obtained from the female.”
The inmate was on trustee status at the time, meaning he was jailed on “minimal charges” and “authorized to perform work inside and outside of the detention center and sheriff’s office facilities,” Hartman said in a statement.
The inmate told deputies he had been meeting with Burchfield for about a month, court filings say.
The Sheriff’s Office declined to identify the inmate or describe his connection to Burchfield.
Burchfield was charged with willfully delivering unauthorized articles to a confined prisoner, a class 1 misdemeanor. She was released on $5,000 secured bond.
Attempts to contact Teresa Burchfield and Bobby Burchfield were not immediately successful Thursday morning.
Big news eh.
Surveillance aircraft that were monitoring an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) convoy stuck in the desert in eastern Syria have left the area at the request of Russian officials, the U.S.-led coalition said Friday.
“To ensure safe de-confliction of efforts to defeat ISIS, coalition surveillance aircraft departed the adjacent airspace at the request of Russian officials during their assault on Dawyr Az Zawyr,” the coalition said in a statement.
ISIS fighters and their family members have been stranded on eleven buses in the desert for more than a week.
The convoy showdown began last month, when ISIS struck a deal with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah — a chief ally of the Syrian government — for safe passage from an area near the Syrian border with Lebanon to ISIS-held territory in eastern Syria bordering Iraq. To get there, the original 17-bus convoy planned to travel through Syrian government-controlled territory.
The U.S.-led coalition, intent on making sure the convoy did not make it to the Iraqi border and link up with other ISIS fighters, cratered the road and destroyed a bridge with airstrikes. That forced six buses to turn back to Palmyra, a Syrian government-controlled city, and stranded the remaining 11.
A U.S. spokesman for the coalition told reporters Thursday that it has been striking ISIS fighters walking away from the convoy or trying to link up with the group, estimating that 85 ISIS fighters have been struck since the start of the standoff.
The coalition has not struck the convoy itself and has allowed food and water to get through, citing the women and children in the buses.
Col. Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the coalition, also said Thursday that the United States had used the so-called deconfliction line it uses to communicate with the Russians to try to separate the women and children from the ISIS fighters. But Dillon said that effort had “not gained any traction."
Syrian forces broke a three-year ISIS siege on Deir al-Zour in eastern Syria earlier this week. As part of that assault, pro-Syrian regime forces advanced past the ISIS convoy Friday morning, according to the coalition.
“From the start of this situation on Aug. 29, we have placed responsibility for the buses and passengers on the Syrian regime, who in conjunction with Lebanese Hezbollah brokered a deal with ISIS to move its terrorists into Iraq,” Brig. Gen. Jon Braga, director of operations for the coalition, said in a statement. “The regime’s advance past the convoy underlines continued Syrian responsibility for the buses and terrorists. As always, we will do our utmost to ensure that the ISIS terrorists do not move toward the border of our Iraqi partners.”
On September 5, the administration of Donald Trump formally announced that they won’t try to save Obama’s overtime rule, effectively killing a potential raise for millions of Americans. This disturbing development has largely slipped under the radar during a busy news week, marked by Trump’s scrapping of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Twenty-one states and a number of business groups sued the Obama administration last September, after the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the new rule, accusing the former president of overreach.
That lawsuit led to Amos Mazzant, a federal Obama-appointed judge in Texas, putting the rule on hold last November, shortly before it was set to become law. On August 31, Mazzant struck the rule down, and—less than a week later—Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to challenge the District Court’s decision. In a court filing, a DOJ lawyer said that the administration would not appeal.
The Obama administration’s rule would have raised the overtime salary threshold considerably. The threshold hadn’t been increased by any administration to adequately reflect wage growth or inflation, which means that many workers only see overtime pay if they make less than about $23,660 a year. Obama had scheduled that number to be bumped up to about $47,476 after reviewing 300,000 comments on the subject.
“The overtime rule is about making sure middle-class jobs pay middle-class wages,” former Labor Secretary Tom Perez told reporters on a call after the rule was announced in May 2016. “Some will see more money in their pockets … Some will get more time with their family … and everybody will receive clarity on where they stand, so that they can stand up for their rights."
While the overtime rule faced predictable opposition from Republicans and business groups, it also received backlash from some liberal advocacy organizations. In May 2016, U.S. PIRG, the popular federation of non-profit organizations, released a statement criticizing Obama’s decision. “Organizations like ours rely on small donations from individuals to pay the bills. We can’t expect those individuals to double the amount they donate,” said the group.
Critics of the statement pointed out that U.S. PIRG’s opposition suggests they have employees not being paid for overtime despite their low wages. The group was slammed by progressives for supporting a regressive policy when it benefited their economic interests.
The DOL claimed that the rule would mean a pay increase for about 4.2 million Americans, but the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) contends that the DOL’s figure is far too low. According to EPI, the DOL’s analysis fails to take the impact of George W. Bush’s overtime policies into account and relies heavily on statistics that were generated before he took power. EPI estimates that, because of changes to employee classifications in 2004, roughly 6 million workers had their right to overtime destroyed.
The EPI’s study of the overtime rule determined that about 12.5 million workers would have been impacted if it had been implemented. A wide range of workers would have potentially seen a pay increase, including 6.4 million women, 1.5 million African Americans and 2.0 million Latinos, the EPI concludes.
“Once again, the Trump administration has sided with corporate interests over workers, in this case, siding with business groups who care more about corporate profits than about allowing working people earn overtime pay,” Heidi Shierholz, who leads the EPI’s Perkins Project on Worker Rights and Wages, told In These Times.
The Trump administration’s move might be disappointing for workers’ rights advocates, but it’s hardly surprising. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump vowed to kill the overtime rule if elected. "We have to address the issues of over-taxation and overregulation and the lack of access to credit markets to get our small business owners thriving again,” he said in an interview. “Rolling back the overtime regulation is just one example of the many regulations that need to be addressed to do that.”
While many pundits have focused on Trump’s unrelenting series of failures and scandals, his administration has quietly waged a fairly successful war on labor. In addition to nixing one of Obama’s most notable policy achievements, the Trump administration is also poised to stack the National Labor Relations Board with a pro-business majority, has proposed major cuts to the Labor Department and has rolled back safety protections for workers.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that Trump’s Labor Department had created an office specifically designed to reconsider government regulations. The office will be run by Nathan Mehrens, the anti-union lawyer who is also in charge of the department’s policy shop.
Trump geared much of his campaign rhetoric toward the U.S. worker, vowing to dismantle exploitative trade agreements and bring back jobs. However, his administration has simply emboldened the anti-labor forces that have dictated economic policy for decades.
In a report for The Daily Beast, Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah comments on the findings of a new UC Berkeley report titled “Legalizing Othering: The United States of Islamophobia,” in which Yerushalmi figures prominently.
Yerushalmi may not be as “flamboyant” as others within the “movement,” Obeidallah writes, but has been effective all the same in his pairing of a legal background with virulently anti-Muslim writings.
A proponent of the right-wing Israeli settlement movement, Yerushalmi has been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for his bigoted views about Muslims as well as black people, immigrants and women. He’s argued that white people are “genetically superior” to black people, and provocatively stated that “there is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”
His blatant bigotry appears not to be a liability to the Republicans who embrace his ideology and use his legal rhetoric to propose and pass anti-Sharia law bills. He’s senior counsel of the American Freedom Law Center, a right-wing legal group that represented “national security experts” in a Supreme Court brief in defense of Trump’s Muslim ban. The AFLC also represents the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank that Trump cited in his initial calls for a “Muslim ban” while on the campaign trail in 2015.
Yerushalmi could even have been the forefather of the Muslim ban, because, as Obeidallah notes, he’s been “calling for a total ban on Muslim immigration to the United States years before Trump espoused that view.”
Just-departed chief White House strategist Steve Bannon referred to the firing of FBI director James Comey as perhaps the biggest mistake in modern political history, commenting in his first televised interview since leaving government.
Donald Trump’s ex-strategist and campaign manager insisted he will continue to support the president’s agenda against the pro-trade, pro-globalization Republican establishment they both deeply disdain.
But Steve Bannon made clear his view that Trump set in motion a damaging chain-reaction by firing the former FBI director this spring. He offered a no comment when asked whether the firing was supported by one of his political nemeses: Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“The media has reported I was adamantly opposed to that,” Bannon told a 60 Minutesinterview, in an exchange left out of Sunday’s broadcast.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that if James Comey had not been fired we would not have a special counsel . . . We would not have the Robert Mueller investigation. We would not have the Mueller investigation in the breadth that clearly Mr. Mueller is going.”
When asked about media reports that Bannon supposedly viewed the firing as the biggest mistake in political history, he at first called that slightly bombastic, then added a caveat: “Maybe modern political history.”
The tumult caused by the FBI director’s firing prompted Justice Department officials to name a special investigator. The investigator, Mueller, is now reportedly examining a range of alleged incidents including obstruction of justice and money-laundering, and numerous White House staff and presidential associates have hired lawyers.
Bannon was asked whether he agreed with some Trump allies who want to try firing Mueller. He said: “No, I do not.” When asked about media reports that Kushner pushed for Comey’s firing, he said: “You will have to find that out either through the media or through the investigation.”
Kushner is among the numerous rivals he clashed with in the White House.
In the 60 Minutes interview, he sought to settle scores with a few of them. He suggested economic adviser and Democrat Gary Cohn should resign, rather than complaining publicly about the way Trump handled the racial incident in Charlottesville.
He also accused the Republican Party’s leadership of trying to block Trump’s agenda.
The congressional wing of the party is more supportive of trade deals like NAFTA, more favourable to immigration, and less supportive of funding a wall with Mexico, than Trump is.
“The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election,” Bannon told the interviewer Charlie Rose.
“That’s a brutal fact we have to face . . . I think (Senate Leader) Mitch McConnell, and to a degree, (House Leader) Paul Ryan, they do not want Donald Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented. It’s very obvious.”
He suggested a current split over undocumented children could rip the party apart. He predicted a nationalist, populist movement will prevail in American politics — but it’s not yet clear whether it will be of a left-wing or right-wing variety.
Bannon said that depends on whether Republicans or Democrats take up the cause of trade-skepticism.
Republican infighting over the fate of immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children could be so vitriolic that the party loses control of the U.S. House of Representatives next year, Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, said in an interview airing on Sunday.
Bannon, whose far-right views on immigration, climate and trade helped shape Trump's presidential campaign and his first months in office, was fired by the Republican president last month in a push to end factional fights within the White House.
In an interview with the CBS program 60 Minutes, Bannon predicted Republicans could lose control in the House in the 2018 congressional elections because of a looming battle over what to do about 800,000 immigrants known as "Dreamers."
Trump said last week he would scrap a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that allowed the young immigrants to live and work in America.
Bannon supported ending the program, which had been put in place by Democratic former President Barack Obama.
Trump gave the Republican-controlled Congress six months to come up with an alternative, saying he would "revisit this issue" if lawmakers could not agree.
"I'm worried about losing the House now because of this," Bannon told CBS.
"If this goes all the way down to its logical conclusion, in February and March it will be a civil war inside the Republican Party," he said. "And to me, doing that in the springboard of primary season for 2018 is extremely unwise."
Republicans are divided over the Dreamers. Some believe they are illegal immigrants who are taking American jobs, while others say they contribute to the country and deserve compassion.
Bannon, who said he left the White House on his own terms, lashed out against "establishment" Republicans who have at times grappled with Trump, a real estate celebrity who had never before held elected office.
"The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election," Bannon said, saying it was an "open secret on Capitol Hill" that many Republicans did not support Trump's agenda, and singling out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan for criticism.
"They do not want Donald Trump's populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented," Bannon said.
He called Republican national security officials who had served in the George W. Bush administration "idiots," including former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
"I hold these people in contempt, total and complete contempt," Bannon said, blaming them for U.S. trade problems with China and involvement in Iraq.
"They're idiots, and they've gotten us in this situation, and they question a good man like Donald Trump," Bannon said.
I went into a Federal building recently to conduct some business. Imagine my surprise to see Obama's picture still looming large.Why Trump's Picture Is Missing From Federal Buildings
Since the Civil War, every president has sat for a portrait photograph to be taken by The Government Publishing Office. Traditionally, these portraits have been hung in the lobby of every federal building. Trump may be set to break that tradition, however. The Washington Post reports that federal buildings have not yet hung his portrait because he hasn't sat for his photograph yet — an odd oversight for a President who built his campaign off of name and face recognition.
I went into a Federal building recently to conduct some business. Imagine my surprise to see Obama's picture still looming large.
Warmed my heart for a moment.