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A member of the House Intelligence Committee on Saturday said the panelshould requesttestimony about the GOP operation that allegedly sought Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonCapone-era lessons can show us how to confront Putin The Memo: Trump turns to a skeptical Chicago House Democrat calls for testimony on GOP email operation MORE's emails from Russian hackers last year.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) wants the committee, which oversees the House probe into Russian meddling in the election, toheartestimony fromMatt Tait. Tait is aU.K.-based security consultant who claims a Republican activist tried to recruit him last year as part of an operation to obtain and authenticate Clinton's emails.

Tait is also one of the only identified sources of knowledge on the operation left alive, since Peter Smith, theGOP operative heading the alleged operation, died afterpartially revealing his involvement.

"The House Intelligence Cmte should hear from Matt Tait ASAP," Castro wrote on Twitter, linking to Tait's account of his interaction with Smith'soperation.

The House Intelligence Cmte should hear from Matt Tait ASAP. The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians https://t.co/RW9GKmywW5

Castro, as a minority member of the committee, does not have the power to summon Taitbefore the panel, which is investigating both Russia's role in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Castro's call for lawmakers to speak with Tait comes as the intelligence panel prepares to interview a series of high-profile figures as part of its Russia probe, including former national security adviser Susan Rice and former Trump adviser Roger Stone.

Tait revealed in a blog post late Friday night that he was one of the anonymous sources in a Wall Street Journal report detailing Smith's efforts to connect with hacker groups in hopes thathe could obtain politically damaging emails that Clinton said she had deleted.

Smith listed several top members of the Trump campaign some of whom now work in the White House in a document aimed at recruiting investigators to help him in his search.

The Wall Street Journal noted that Smith claimed his operation was independent of the Trump campaign.

But in his poston Lawfare Blog on Friday, Tait said that he was among those that Smith tried to recruit and that he believedthe emailoperation was formed with the "blessing" of at least some Trump campaign officials.

What's more, he also said in the blog post that he warned Smith that the sources of the email leakshe was seeking were likely fronts for the Russian government. The GOP activist, he said, "didn't seem to care."

Read more:
House Democrat calls for testimony on GOP email operation - The Hill

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

ASSOCIATED PRESS | July 1, 2017, 6:25PM

| Updated 3 hours ago.

SANTA ANA A couple whose plane crashed and burst into flames on a Southern California freeway are recovering from their injuries.

KABC-TV (http://bit.ly/2tCnl1Y ) reported Saturday that the man who was piloting the aircraft is hospitalized in stable but guarded condition and his wife is in stable condition.

Fire officials earlier said the woman was his fiance.

They were the only people aboard a twin-engine Cessna 310 that crashed Friday morning on Interstate 405, just short of a runway at John Wayne Airport in Costa Mesa.

Before the crash, the pilot reported losing power in one engine.

The plane clipped a pickup, but nobody on the ground was hurt.

An off-duty firefighter pulled them from the fiery wreckage.

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Survivors of freeway plane crash are in stable condition - Santa Rosa Press Democrat

After weeks of staying on the sidelines of the Senate's Obamacare reform talks, President Trump dived into the debate this week with a characteristic mix of disciplined negotiating tactics and off-message detours.

Trump's increased role in promoting the healthcare legislation came as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell headed into a weeklong recess with his caucus fractured and the fate of his Obamacare repeal measure uncertain.

But the president's personal involvement has not come without its disruptions. Trump rankled GOP leadership Friday when he tweeted support for a healthcare strategy that would involve repealing Obamacare immediately and replacing it later with a new system an approach he had personally criticized in the past and one that is favored only by the most conservative members of Congress.

"Senate Republicans recognize that this a put-up or shut-up moment, and yet they are still gripped by inaction and are unable to do their job," said Ford O'Connell, a GOP strategist. "So, frankly, President Trump attempting to provide them cover to pass anything possible is certainly a welcome development."

O'Connell suggested the Republicans' inability to agree on a piece of legislation this week despite a full-court press from the Trump administration could demonstrate just how sharply the GOP is divided on healthcare.

"The fact that Senate Republicans are still not able to reach a verbal consensus shows the limits of White House power and how deep the rift is on this issue within the GOP Senate caucus," he said.

Trump began his efforts to help McConnell scrape together the 50 votes necessary to pass the Better Care Reconciliation Act last weekend by calling a handful of Republican senators who expressed doubts about the bill shortly after its release.

After McConnell delayed a planned procedural vote on the measure amid wavering GOP support, Trump invited all 52 members of the Republican caucus to the White House on Tuesday and conducted what was later described as a productive meeting about the need to move forward on an Obamacare repeal plan.

And, by Wednesday, Trump was projecting optimism that his party would soon deliver a "big surprise" on healthcare.

Officials in the cabinet and West Wing worked behind the scenes this week to supplement the president's public promotion. Trump dispatched White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to build support for the healthcare bill.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price hosted a "listening session" for people affected by Obamacare in Utah and traveled to Dallas for another healthcare "listening session" with doctors on Monday, and he placed a pair of op-eds that the White House later promoted.

Just as he did when a similar Obamacare repeal plan was working its way through the House, Vice President Mike Pence has played a particularly active role in promoting the Senate's healthcare bill publicly and cobbling together support for it privately.

On Monday, Pence and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma hosted a "listening session" at the White House complex with "victims of Obamacare" many of them from Missouri, where major insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield recently exited the individual market and left thousands of people facing the possibility of having zero coverage options in 2018.

Pence journeyed to Capitol Hill Tuesday for the weekly Senate Republican lunch and hosted a handful of GOP lawmakers at his home later that evening for dinner, where the group was expected to discuss the healthcare legislation.

On Wednesday, Pence traveled to Cleveland, where he toured a manufacturing plant and delivered a speech aimed at selling the bill in a state where the Republican senator stands opposed to the GOP plan as it is written. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman has expressed concern about the legislation's cuts to the growth of Medicaid.

Pence returned to the Capitol on Thursday for meetings with skeptical Republicans including Sens. Ted Cruz, Susan Collins and Shelley Moore Capito and held talks with McConnell, which he documented on his Twitter feed.

But the Trump administration's efforts may not be enough to persuade seven of the nine Republican senators who oppose the bill to support it. With objectors ranging from centrists who see the legislation's cuts as too dramatic to conservatives who fear the bill leaves too much of Obamacare's regulatory framework intact, McConnell could struggle to reconcile the diverse concerns coming out of his caucus.

And Trump's journey off script on Friday could further complicate the negotiations.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a conservative critic of the bill whose vote is seen as one of the most difficult to win over in the Obamacare reform fight, quickly agreed with Trump's suggestion that Republicans should cleanly repeal the Affordable Care Act before setting to work on a replacement. While few others rushed to affirm or condemn the president's tweet, the mere mention of the conservatives' preferred approach to healthcare from the president could empower other opponents of the BCRA to resist McConnell's efforts at winning them over in the hopes that Trump would support a delay between the repeal and the replacement of Obamacare.

More here:
Trump wades into healthcare fight amid wavering Republican support - Washington Examiner

WASHINGTONA longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort.

The activist, Peter W. Smith, named the officials in a section of the document marked Trump Campaign. The document was dated Sept. 7, 2016. That was around the time Smith said he started his search for 33,000 emails Clinton deleted from the private server she used for official business while secretary of state. She said the deleted emails concerned personal matters. She turned over tens of thousands of other emails to the State Department.

As reported Thursday by the Wall Street Journal, Smith and people he recruited to his effort theorized the deleted emails might have been stolen by hackers and might contain matters that were politically damaging. He and his associates said they were in touch with several groups of hackers, including two from Russia they suspected were tied to the Moscow government, in a bid to find any stolen emails and potentially hurt Clintons prospects.

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Smiths purpose in listing the officials isnt clear. There is no indication in the document that he sought or received any coordination from the campaign officials or the campaign in general.

An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.

Trending on WSJ.com:

James Freeman opinion piece: Could Trump really be draining the swamp?

GOP operative sought Clinton emails from hackers, implied a connection to Trump adviser Michael Flynn

See the rest here:
Republican activist referenced current Trump aides in his campaign to obtain Clinton emails - MarketWatch

Photo: James Kegley, Photographer

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post Writer's Group

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post Writer's Group

WASHINGTON - "Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare," President Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday. "Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S."

Fine, Mr. President, there's an easy way to prove your asserted knowledge: Have a news conference. Answer questions that aren't softballs tossed by your friends at Fox News.

In the age of Trump, some of the president's deviations from democratic and political norms slap you in the face. Attacks on federal judges for decisions that don't go his way. Attacks on news organizations for stories that portray him in a bad light. Misstatement piled on misstatement. Nepotism run amok. Transparency abandoned, from disclosure of tax returns to release of White House visitor records.

But other shifts, equally audacious and equally troubling, take a more subtle form. They unfold slowly until, perhaps too late, the change becomes blindingly apparent. So it is with Trump's dealings with the media, and the effective disappearance of public accountability. Authoritarianism does not announce itself. It creeps up on you.

The president has had a single formal news conference - in February, 168 days after his previous such encounter with the media. At this point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had held seven; George W. Bush three; Bill Clinton seven; George H.W. Bush 15.

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Like his predecessors, Trump has also answered a few questions at joint news conferences with foreign leaders - although Trump has had a smaller number of such events than his predecessors and, unlike them, has made a habit of directing questions to friendly conservative news outlets. Until, that is, Monday's joint appearance with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at which the leaders of the world's two largest democracies took zero questions.

And so, all the fuss over whether the regular White House press briefing will be televised misses the more fundamental point of presidential inaccessibility. The practice of live on-camera briefings is far better, but it's not as if this practice is chiseled in stone; it didn't start until the Clinton administration.

The medium is not the message - the message is. What's more important than video is having spokesmen capable of speaking with authority on the president's positions - not the relentless incuriosity of Trump's flacks, who seem never to have gathered his thoughts on topics from Russian hacking to climate change.

What's more important is having spokesmen who use the briefing as more than a platform for irresponsible media-bashing, such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders' magnificently ironic complaint about "the constant barrage of fake news directed at this president," followed by approvingly citing ("whether it's accurate or not, I don't know") an anti-CNN video by fake news huckster James O'Keefe.

And what's most important is the opportunity to question the president himself. A president automatically commands airtime; this president, through his Twitter feed, automatically commands attention. But publicity without accountability is the antithesis of democracy. Reporters questioning elected officials serve in this sense as surrogates for the public.

Remember back when Trump and his campaign were busy blasting Hillary Clinton for failing to hold a news conference.

As for other ways in which Trump has made himself accessible, or not? Well, he went 41 days between interviews - from May 13 with Fox News' Jeanine Pirro ("Your agenda is not getting out, because people are caught up on the (James) Comey issue, and ridiculous stuff") to June 23 with Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt (on Trump's bogus suggestion there might be tapes of Comey, she said, "It was a smart way to make sure he stayed honest in those hearings").

But Pirro and Earhardt looked like Woodward and Bernstein compared to "Fox and Friends'" Pete Hegseth, who pummeled Trump on June 25 with questions like "Who's been your biggest opponent? Has it been Democrats resisting, has it been fake-news media, has it been deep-state leaks?"

Wow. Who's a snowflake now?

This isn't journalism - it's a pillow fight. And the beauty of submitting to this faux-interviewing is its perfect circularity: Trump gets to make his remarks, coddled by Fox. Then White House press secretary Sean Spicer, with the cameras not rolling, gets to cite them as a shield against providing further information: "I believe that the president's remarks on 'Fox and Friends' this morning reflect the president's position."

Is this what our democracy has been reduced to? We in the media can't make Trump take our questions. But supinely accepting his silence threatens to normalize the distinctly abnormal.

Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.

See more here:
Marcus: A healthy democracy demands transparency - Houston Chronicle