February 18th, 2020

Hillary Clinton said she would not consider being Michael Bloomberg’s vice presidential candidate should the former New York City mayor win the Democratic Party’s nomination.

“Oh, no. I’m just waiting and watching as this plays out. I will support whoever the nominee is because I think, for all the reasons you can imagine, and here in Puerto Rico there are many, we need to have a new president for our country,”...

• The government is locked in a tug of war with local communities over migrants
• There's over 38,000 people in camps on Lesbos, Samos, Chios, Leros and Kos
• 300 protesters marched against plans to house asylum-seekers in Makrygialos

The appeals court reversed a lower court decision that denied a preliminary injunction against a law requiring voters to produce a photo ID at the polls. The ruling puts the voter ID law on hold until the underlying lawsuit challenging it is decided, likely blocking it for the November 2020 general election.

All those yogurt cups, plastic film, and takeout boxes we’re dutifully gathering every week because they're labeled as recyclable? A survey of every residential recycling facility in the U.S. found that they're mostly just getting trashed. And don’t even bother trying to save those plastic coffee pods. Only your water and soda bottles, and the thicker plastic that serves as packaging used for shampoo bottles and laundry detergent jugs, are functionally recyclable, according to a report from Greenpeace. While it’s possible to recycle other types of plastic, there’s no market for it and local recycling facilities wind up trashing it.

NFL greats including Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Charles Haley, and Jim Brown were on hand at the White House, expressing their support for DeBartolo, who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016... DeBartolo's guilty plea was in connection to his payment of $400,000 to former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards in exchange for a riverboat gambling license. He avoided prison, was fined $1 million and was suspended for a year by the NFL. But the episode effectively ended his NFL career.

A Chinese investment project in a remote mountainous part of Kyrgyzstan has been canceled over protests by local residents, resulting in the delay of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Belt and Road Initiative strategy.

While they’re still a “shall issue” state for concealed carry permits, they’ve otherwise gone full-on gun grabber... One such example out there right now is a bill that just made it through the state House...

Mr Zuckerberg appears to be engaged in some kind of mutual assistance arrangement with Donald Trump that will help him to get re-elected... Therefore, I repeat my proposal, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should be removed from control of Facebook. (It goes without saying that I support government regulation of social media platforms.)...

To the men and women of DOJ/FBI: do NOT resign, stay strong, in all your actions be true to the oath you have sworn, report wrongdoing. The era of Trump and Barr will pass-their slander, insults and corrupt acts will end. We - the American people - respect & believe in you.

— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) February 16, 2020

The media are framing the use of outside attorneys as Bill Barr working on behalf of President Trump to undermine current and former prosecutions. However, understanding the FISC order requiring the sequestration effort, the use of outsiders is absolutely necessary.

The same U.S. Attorneys, prosecutors and FBI agents who used evidence gathered from the FISA warrants cannot be the same attorneys, agents and prosecutors making decisions about what parts of the warrants were used to gather evidence and how each part of any case was assembled by the use therein. It is a simple matter of a conflict of interest...

Over the weekend, just days before jurors in the Harvey Weinstein case were set to begin deliberations, his lead defense lawyer, Donna Rotunno, wrote an opinion piece imploring them “to do what they know is right.” The article in Newsweek magazine infuriated the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and on Tuesday the lead prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi, called Ms. Rotunno’s behavior “inappropriate,” and tantamount to jury tampering. The judge ordered the defense team not to speak to the news media until after a verdict is reached.

Blagojevich, a Democrat, was convicted in 2011 by a federal jury in Chicago of attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated when President Obama was elected in 2008, among the 17 guilty counts against him. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison and has been serving his prison time at a Colorado federal prison since 2012. His date for expected release was 2024, factoring in two years of credit for good behavior.

In a 12-minute conference call with the defense and prosecution teams on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she will still hand down Stone's sentence at Thursday's hearing, but indicated she plans to defer the execution of the sentence until the court addresses Stone's request for a new trial... Prosecutors told Jackson they were in favor of moving forward with Thursday's sentencing as planned. But Seth Ginsburg, a lawyer for Stone, argued they should hold off until the motions before the court are fully addressed. "This issue goes to the heart of this case," Ginsburg said. "It should be resolved before any further proceedings are had."

"This is a reaction to the growing and increasingly central role of Rosneft in the affairs of Venezuela,” one senior administration official said, “with Rosneft now trading over half of the oil now coming out of Venezuela, and actively evading sanctions — engaging in ruses, engaging in deception."

It’s not surprising that the DOJ could find 1,100 far-left attorneys to sign the petition for AG Barr to resign. The Washington Times reported that DOJ employees donate to Democrats over Republicans by a ratio of 20 to 1... What’s also not surprising is that all the DOJ attorneys who signed the petition for former DAG Rod Rosenstein to create the fraudulent Mueller Special Counsel, also signed the petition for AG Barr to resign, with the exception of only two individuals.