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WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump knew a man he named as a senior business adviser in 2010 had been convicted in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme, according to Associated Press interviews and a review of court records. Trump had worked with Felix Sater previously during the man's stint as an executive at Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate development firm that partnered with Trump on numerous projects after renting office space from the Trump Organization. But Sater's past was not widely known at the time because he was working as a government cooperator on mob cases and the judge overseeing...

A federal judge has asked the Obama administration to shield from public disclosure court records related to the once-secret criminal history of a former Donald Trump business partner. In an unusual order prompted by an unsealing request from The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan said that unless the Justice Department acts before April 18, he will decide whether to make the court files public under the assumption that federal prosecutors don't care. The case involves Felix Sater, a Trump business associate who pleaded guilty in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme in the late 1990s and cooperated...

Conflicts Of Interest: Supporters of suspending California's climate-change law submit signatures for a November ballot initiative. Among the initiatives' opponents is an administration energy official who stands to profit from its defeat. Opponents of California's draconian global warming law, Assembly Bill 32, on Monday submitted 800,000 signatures, almost double the amount required, to put an initiative to suspend the law on the November ballot. They believe, as we do, that AB32 will, when implemented, cost California, a state with 12.6% unemployment, more jobs in an already bleak economy, while raising energy prices and driving away more business with its unfriendly...

Washington (CNN)US authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN. The Justice Department investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks dates to at least 2010, when the site first gained wide attention for posting thousands of files stolen by the former US Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning. Prosecutors have struggled with whether the First Amendment precluded the prosecution of Assange, but now believe they have found a way to move forward.

Chelsea Manning said if given the chance to speak with former President Barack Obama, she would say thank you. In her first interview since her May 17 release from prison, Manning was in tears when asked by ABC News journalist Juju Chang what she would say to the president. “Thank you for giving the chance, that’s all I wanted,” said Manning. “That’s all I asked for was a chance. That’s it, and now this is my chance.” Manning, a transgender U.S. Army private, was arrested in 2010 for releasing over 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks. As Bradley Manning, she was sentenced...

A Texas court ruled Thursday to overturn the conviction of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who was found guilty of money laundering in 2010. According to KHOU 11 and the Associated Press, the Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the case's evidence was "legally insufficient to sustain DeLay's convictions," formally acquitting the former congressman on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

A federal judge is demanding to see a copy of a government-wide foreign-aid-policy order President Barack Obama issued three years ago which administration lawyers have argued is protected by executive privilege. The Obama administration acknowledges that the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development the president signed in 2010 is unclassified, but officials have steadfastly refused to make any portion of it public, even after a watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the document earlier this year. (The White House has released a fact sheet about the order.) On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle ordered...

**SNIP** So IRS staffers simply "were doing what people on Capitol Hill wanted them to do," Rove said “In 2010, Max Baucus . . . wrote a letter to the director of the IRS saying, ‘Go investigate these kinds of groups.’ We had Chuck Schumer, who has been stirring this around for a number of years, by 2012 he goes out and gives a similar tough letter to the head of the IRS saying, ‘Look at these groups,’ and gets six others to sign the letter.” The Schumer letter spoke of "abuse of the tax code by political groups focused...

Starting in the fall of 2010, ten leading Democrats - including Max Baucus, Chuck Schumer, and Al Franken - wrote the IRS demanding that the agency crack down on conservative groups. 500 conservative and Christian groups were illegally targeted by the Obama IRS starting in 2010. For twenty-seven months the Obama IRS refused to approve any Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status while at the same time the Obama IRS approved dozens of progressive applications. Now these same top Democrats are feigning outrage.

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about. Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.... Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page...

Government watchdog Judicial Watch has found a number of new emails belonging to former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton containing classified information and showing favors being done for a Russia connected organization through the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State. The emails were obtained through a lawsuit against the Department and a recent court order. "The new Abedin emails also reveal additional instances in which Clinton’s then- scheduler Lona Valmoro forwarded the former secretary of state’s detailed daily schedule to top Clinton Foundation officials. The new emails also reveal a number of favors that were requested and carried out," Judicial...

Attorney General Eric Holder says he has one regret: his department's court order for Fox News reporter James Rosen's emails labeling him a criminal "co-conspirator." The outgoing attorney general, who recently announced his retirement, addressed the controversial episode during the "Washington Ideas Forum" on Wednesday. Asked what decision he wishes he could do over, Holder said: "I think about the subpoena to the Fox reporter, Rosen." Holder was referring to a 2010 search warrant application seeking Rosen's emails. The Justice Department at the time was investigating who leaked information contained in a series of reports by Rosen in 2009 about...

A long-time aide to Hillary Clinton sought to map out her funeral — and Bill Clinton’s — in 2010 because “planning is best done when they are still with us,” according to an email released on Wednesday by Judicial Watch. Capricia Marshall, who was chief of protocol for the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, wrote to Huma Abedin, Doug Band and Cheryl Mills on Feb. 23, 2010, saying “everytime someone significant passes, I am flooded with requests” about the Clintons’ arrangements. “Planning is necessary and best done when they are still with us,” she wrote...

Online Armageddon "An Army of Davids" unites against a campaign of intimidation. Somewhere between the time in October 2010 he threatened to sue Patrick Frey and the decision last week to make a similar threat toward Ali Akbar, Brett Kimberlin crossed a Rubicon of desperation and burned the bridge behind him. In the past three weeks, Kimberlin and his allies have escalated their deceitful war against conservative bloggers to the point that it cannot be ignored, and must now be fought to a conclusion with the entire political world watching. A convicted perjurer and drug smuggler, Kimberlin became infamous as...

Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, was treated for a subdural hematoma, apparently due to a minor head injury, after being admitted to a Washington, D.C., hospital on Wednesday. His office said Reichert was admitted to George Washington University Hospital after feeling ill. Following an evaluation, doctors performed a procedure to treat a chronic subdural hematoma — collection of blood on the surface of the brain — that was likely the result of a minor head injury. The procedure was successful, and Reichert is expected to make a complete recovery, his office said. He's expected to be discharged in a few days.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Chinese government "systematically dismantled" CIA spying operations in China starting in late 2010 and killed or imprisoned at least a dozen CIA sources over the next two years, The New York Times reported Saturday. The newspaper cited 10 current and former U.S. officials, who described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. They spoke on condition of anonymity. The report said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to stem the damage, but were bitterly divided over the cause of the breach. Some investigators were convinced there was a mole within the CIA,...

WASHINGTON — The Chinese government “systematically dismantled” CIA spying operations in China starting in late 2010 and killed or imprisoned at least a dozen CIA sources over the next two years, The New York Times reported Saturday. The newspaper cited 10 current and former U.S. officials, who described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. They spoke on condition of anonymity. The report said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to stem the damage, but were bitterly divided over the cause of the breach. Some investigators were convinced there was a mole within the CIA, while...

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward. Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used...

The notion that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump was a John Brennan/James Clapper confection created in an unorthodox way, and defied logic, given that Hillary and her associates had far closer connections to Russia than Trump or his associates did. John Merline writes at Investor's Business Daily: THE CLINTON FAMILY BUSINESS [snip] Bill Clinton received half a million dollars in 2010 for a speech he gave in Moscow, paid by a Russian firm, Renaissance Capital, that has ties to Russian intelligence. The Clinton Foundation took money from Russian officials and oligarchs, including Victor Kekselberg, a Putin...

House leaders seek GAO probe of State Department failure to report Russian nuclear missile treaty violationsTwo senior House leaders on Friday requested an investigation by Congress’ General Accountability Office (GAO) into the State Department’s failure to report Russian violations of a 1987 nuclear missile accord.“It is clear from my subcommittee’s oversight that the administration did not fully disclose what it knew about Russian arms control violations when it was trying to get the New START treaty ratified,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces.“Its all-consuming drive to protect its Russia reset...