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Organizing for Action's digital ad campaign is focusing on heavily Latino districts and states represented by Senate and House Republicans. | Getty

By Kevin Robillard

04/21/17 12:27 PM EDT

Updated 04/21/17 12:54 PM EDT

The progressive group that grew out of former President Barack Obama's campaigns is making its first big move since Obama left office, targeting potential swing votes in Congress with digital ads ahead of a government funding fight over President Donald Trump's proposed border wall.

Organizing for Action's digital ad campaign is focusing on heavily Latino districts and states represented by Senate and House Republicans. The aim is to pressure members not to go along with the White House's demand for funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which the administration has said will cost $21 billion. (Senate Democrats estimate the actual cost is closer to $70 billion.)

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The Trump White House is pushing for the border wall in a new government funding bill, but Senate Democrats have said they can't support additional cash for one of the administration's biggest priorities. Government funding runs out next Friday, giving both parties little time to find a solution.

The group's ads, which will start appearing on Facebook on Monday, tell users to call their representatives and ask them "not to fund the administration's wall and deportation force." The ads target Nevada Sen. Dean Heller and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, the two Senate Republicans considered most vulnerable to Democratic challengers in 2018.

They'll also run in a slew of districts represented by House Republicans: Arizona Rep. Martha McSally; California Reps. Jeff Denham, David Valadao, Devin Nunes, Steve Knight, Ed Royce and Darrell Issa; Colorado Reps. Scott Tipton and Mike Coffman; Florida Reps. Brian Mast, Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Curbelo and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen; Pennsylvania Rep. Charlie Dent; and Texas Reps. John Culberson, Will Hurd and Pete Sessions.

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Hillary Clinton carried most of those districts in the 2016 election. Trump carried the districts of Nunes, Tipton, Mast, Diaz-Balart and Dent.

"This administration wants to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on a massive border wall and a cruel deportation force, but only Congress can actually appropriate that spending," Organizing for Action spokesman Jesse Lehrich said. "We want key members to know that if they vote to fund this discriminatory immigration agenda with their constituents' money, they'll be held accountable."

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Obama organizing group pressures GOP on border wall funding - Politico

Deadline

Obama Honchos Re-Invited To House Intel Committee's Public Hearing On Russia's Election Rannygazoo Deadline The House Intelligence Committee announced Friday it is re-scheduling its previously scrubbed public hearing at which members of Obama's administration had been set to talk about Russia's meddling in the presidential election. Expect TV news networks ... House intel committee invites Obama admin officials to Russia hearingsABC News House Intelligence Committee invites top Obama officials to testify on Russian investigationCBS News all 55 news articles »

The rest is here:
Obama Honchos Re-Invited To House Intel Committee's Public Hearing On Russia's Election Rannygazoo - Deadline

WASHINGTON The White House still doesnt have a top science adviser, but it has a science fair in the works.

A White House official said Friday that the science fair, an annual tradition started by former President Barack Obama in 2010, will continue under President Trump. No date has been finalized.

The news, first reported by CBS, comes ahead of a science-centric weekend in Washington. As part of the March for Science, thousands are expected to descend on the National Mall and at satellite marches around the country on Saturday to promote evidence-based policymaking and stress the importance of federally funded basic science research. While organizers have stressed that the event is nonpartisan, it is widely viewed as a rebuke of the current administration, whose policies on climate change and other issues have generated controversy.

Obamas final science fair in 2016 featured exhibits including a portable diagnostic test for Ebola, an ocean energy harvester, and a robot designed to clean up the New York City subway.

Ivanka Trump, the presidents daughter and one of his key advisers, has advocated alongside Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for increased youth engagement in STEM fields.

But other signs about Trumps commitment to science have been less comforting for the scientific community. His 2018 budget blueprint included a $5.8 billion cut from budget for the National Institutes of Health, and even congressional Republicans balked at his desire to cut an additional $1.2 billion from the still-unresolved 2017 budget.

Beyond funding, science advocates have expressed concern that the administration has not yet appointed a director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Obama announced the appointment of his top science adviser, traditionally the head of that office, in December 2008, before his inauguration. The presidents lone science and technology hire, according to the New York Times, is a former adviser to Silicon Valley tech mogul Peter Thiel who has played little role in presidential briefings.

One rumored candidate, Princeton physicist William Happer, has argued that higher atmospheric carbon levels would lead to higher farming productivity and provide a net societal benefit. Trumps meeting with prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also generated within the scientific community.

Republished with permission fromSTAT. This articleoriginally appearedon April 21, 2017

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Trump Plans White House Science Fair, Extending an Obama Tradition - Scientific American

Former CIA Director John Brennan

While the claims of collusion between Donald Trumps 2016 campaign and Russia seem to have dropped abruptly off the media radar, there is a new report of collaboration between a U.S. political campaign and foreign powers.

Butthe campaign was that of Hillary Clinton, and the chief architect was Barack Obamas CIA director, John Brennan, the report says.

One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election Hillarys, writes George Neumayr in the American Spectator.

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trumps candidacy, Newmayr wrote.

He used their phone intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.

The Spectator saidBrennans CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump.

An official in the intelligence community told the Spectatorthat Brennans retinue of political radicals didnt even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with Hillary for president cups and other campaign paraphernalia.

The Spectator cited a London Guardian report that the criminal leaks against Trump originated in the British press, including claims from Estonia that the Kremlin was funneling cash to the Trump campaign.

Any other CIA director would have disregarded such a flaky tip, recognizing that Estonia was eager to see Trump lose (its officials had bought into Hillarys propaganda that Trump was going to pull out of NATO).

The Guardian saidit was Britains spy agencies who alerted their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trumps campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives.

Britains intel network, the paper said, played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBIs Trump-Russia investigation.

The Spectator report documents that Brennan, to ensure that these flaky tips leaked out, then disseminated them on Capitol Hill.

All of this took place at the very moment Brennan was auditioning for Hillary. He desperately wanted to keep his job and despised Trump for his alleged Muslim ban, a matter near and dear to Brennans heart. Not only was he an apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood, but Brennans Islamophilia dates to his days in college, when he spent a year in Cairo learning Arabic and taking courses in Middle Eastern studies.

Said the Spectator: Were the media not so completely in the tank for Obama and Hillary, all of this political mischief would make for a compelling 2016 versions of All the Presidents Men. Instead, the public gets a steady stream of Orwellian propaganda about the sudden propriety of political espionage.

FrontPageMagazine pointed outthat onMarch 16, Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano accused GCHQ of working with the Obama administration to spy on Trump, citing unnamed sources.

The United States and United Kingdom are in fact parties to a multilateral intelligence cooperation pact. This five-way intelligence alliance among the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada is called Five Eyes (FVEY). It obligates the countries to work together in the area of signals intelligence (SIGINT). SIGINT is the gathering of intelligence related to communications between individuals (COMINT) and or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (ELINT).

FrontPageMagazine also cited the raft of subversives that Brennan brought into the CIA when he took over.

Not surprisingly, Brennan is one of the key reasons the Obama administration did so little to combat jihadists domestically. After Muslim lobbies supposedly put pressure on him, in 2011 Brennan purged all mentions of Islam and jihad from law enforcement counter-terror training materials. He assured those groups that the Obama administrations worse-than-useless Countering Violent Extremism program had been ideologically purified and pretended the miniscule white-supremacist movement was just as big a threat as head-cutting Muslim savages.

FrontPage Magazine continued: Former Marine John Guandolo, who worked in the FBIs Counterterrorism Division, identified Brennan as an enemy operative who converted to Islam. Brennan admitted he supported the Kremlin-funded Communist Party USA at the height of the Cold War, even voting for CPUSA presidential candidate Gus Hall in 1976. That fact alone should have instantly and permanently disqualified Brennan from all national security-related government posts.

Unmasking

Meanwhile, Trumpscontroversial claim that the Obama administration spied on his campaign and transition team has gained steam over the past two months.

House of War: Islams Jihad Against the World conveys what the West needs to know about Islam and the violent, expansionary ideology that seeks the subjugation and destruction of other faiths, cultures and systems of government

As WND reported, speaking on MSNBC on March 2, former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas inadvertently confirmed the former presidents administration spied on Trumps transition team for political purposes and that she helped leak the information.

I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more, she said. We have very good intelligence on Russia. So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues, and I knew they were trying to also get information to the Hill.

Thats why you have the leaking.

However, intelligence chiefs who have seen the classified information in question, including Obamas own former director of national intelligence, James Clapperand former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, said days later they had seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump team and the Russian government.

That meant Farkas objectivecould only have been to damage Trump politically.

Later, former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice who infamously was all over network television claiming the Benghazi terror attack was a response to anobscure video admitted she unmasked the identities of Donald Trump associates collected in foreign surveillance.

But two weeks earlier, she had denied any knowledge of such unmasking after it was revealed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.

The political use of intelligence assets apparently was in full operation during the waning days of the Obama presidency when Obama changed the rules to let intelligence agencies share with 16 other agenciespersonal information that was intercepted.

House of War: Islams Jihad Against the World conveys what the West needs to know about Islam and the violent, expansionary ideology that seeks the subjugation and destruction of other faiths, cultures and systems of government

Read this article:
Obama entangled in brand-new 'political espionage' scandal - WND.com

Question: "President Obama, when he was in office, he spent $33,000 a day for his expenses. . . . Our president now, at this time, his average is $3 million a day."

Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla.: "It's costing him $60,000 a day when he comes down for extra care, but Palm Beach said they're going to put an extra tax for that. President Obama spent, what was it, $97 million in his eight years. . . . He went to Hawaii a lot. He went to Africa quite a bit. He went around the world. . . . He went to Africa, and he took their kids and friends and all that. Ninety-seven-million dollars in eight years, man."- Exchange during a town hall in Palatka, Fla., April 11, 2017

Question: "I heard you say earlier that you didn't care what Donald Trump did on the weekend and, frankly, neither do I. Except, he wants me to pay for it. . . . Does this concern you at all?"

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.: "I wasn't critical of the last president or the president before that, for what they do in their off time. . . . I'm not going to tell the president where he can or cannot spend his weekends."- Exchange during a town hall in Mesa, Ariz., April 13, 2017

"I do wish that he would spend more time in Washington, D.C. That's what we have the White House for."- Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, answer at town hall in Wall Lake, Iowa, April 18, 2017

---

President Donald Trump's travels to his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida are a frequent topic at town halls hosted by members of Congress during the April recess. We've been asking readers to send us fact-checkable claims from their town halls, and some readers flagged claims about the cost of Trump's trips.

Flake and Ernst shared their opinions in response to constituents' questions. But Yoho's response involved claims that merit a fact check. Did Obama go to Africa "quite a bit" with his family and friends? How does the $97 million figure for Obama's travels compare with the $60,000-a-day figure for Trump's travels to Mar-a-Lago?

---

Presidential travel costs are not readily made public, so at the moment we just have snapshots of the total price tag. As you can imagine, presidential trips require elaborate planning and security measures, and the main costs involve transportation and Secret Service detail.

There were a lot of numbers in the exchange between the constituent and Yoho, so we'll explain each of them.

Obama's $97 million over eight years: This is an estimate by the conservative group Judicial Watch, which tallied Secret Service and Air Force costs incurred during the former first family's personal travels. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the group tracked trips that were "political, leisurely or otherwise unnecessary," including vacations to Martha's Vineyard and travels during the 2016 campaign as Hillary Clinton's surrogates.

Obama's $33,000 per day: This is $97 million, divided by eight years, divided by 365 days.

Trump's $3 million per day: The constituent appears to be referring to a number floating on the Internet for Trump's cost per trip to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. The figure, $3.6 million to be exact, comes from an October 2016 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report about Obama's February 2013 golf weekend to Palm Beach.

But as the Associated Press found, the trips are not directly comparable. Obama's February 2013 trip included a stop in Chicago, where he gave a speech before going to Florida for his golf weekend. That stop added costs to the total estimate.

Judicial Watch estimates Trump's Mar-a-Lago visits at closer to $1 million, when calculated just with the estimated costs for Air Force One and Secret Service. But there is no documented figure.

Trump's $60,000 per day: Yoho is describing how much it costs Palm Beach County every day to pay for local law enforcement to work overtime when Trump visits Mar-a-Lago. As Yoho says, the county wants to levy a special tax on the resort to pay for the overtime security costs.

That is only one piece of the total price of Trump's Mar-a-Lago visits, and it excludes Secret Service or Air Force costs. Moreover, some of Trump's trips to Mar-a-Lago are "working" trips, where he conducts some official business, such as hosting foreign dignitaries at his golf club. That means they're not directly comparable to the purely leisurely trips tallied under Obama's $97 million.

Fitton said some Mar-a-Lago trips can be justified and wouldn't necessarily indicate a misuse or abuse of presidential travel.

"His [Obama's] vacations to Hawaii cost millions of dollars," Fitton said. "The political problem with President Trump, and the accountability problem, is after a period of time, the cost will be difficult for him to be able to defend. It doesn't help that we don't know what the [total] costs are because the Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security [which oversees the Secret Service] haven't gotten their act together to turn them over to us."

The Washington Post reported that the unusually lavish lifestyle of Trump and his family is pushing the rate of his travel costs beyond his predecessors', and "could balloon into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a four-year term."

Did Obama go to Africa "quite a bit" with his friends and family? Not really.

Obama took three trips to seven African countries. That's seven out of 58 countries he visited as president through both terms. President Bill Clinton visited 10 African countries, and George W. Bush visited 11. Bush visited once with his wife and two daughters, and another time just with his wife.

Obama took his wife and daughters on his 2013 trip to three African countries, at an estimated price tag of tens of millions of dollars - possibly the most expensive of his tenure. The federal government provided all the resources, because the options in developing areas did not meet White House standards, The Post reported. That made the trip particularly costly. Clinton and Bush made similarly resource-intensive trips.

Yoho's staff did not provide a response or comment, but we will update this fact check if we receive one.

---

There was a lot of interest at recent town halls about Trump's travels to Mar-a-Lago, and how much they are costing taxpayers. Yoho, responding to a constituent with some inaccurate information, did not make an apples-to-apples comparison of Trump's and Obama's travels in the town hall. Yoho noted the daily cost of $60,000 for Trump's Mar-a-Lago trips, vs. Obama's $97 million in travel costs over eight years. But the $60,000 represents a fraction of the costs per trip; it's just the cost to the Palm Beach County government.

Some of Trump's Mar-a-Lago trips involve official work, whereas the Obama family trips counted in the $97 million figure are ones that a conservative group deemed "political, leisurely or otherwise unnecessary" to taxpayers. So the two figures are not directly comparable.

And while Obama's trips to Africa were costly (as were the Africa trips of Bush and Clinton), he didn't go "quite a bit" when you look at his Africa trips compared with the rest of his travels as president. We award Two Pinocchios to Yoho.

More here:
Fact Check: Are President Trump's trips to Mar-a-Lago similar to Obama's travels? - Chicago Tribune