NEW YORK — A raging fire that tore through a 50th-floor apartment at Trump Tower killed a man inside and sent flames and thick, black smoke pouring from windows of the president’s namesake skyscraper.
New York Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the cause of Saturday’s blaze is not yet known but the apartment was “virtually entirely on fire” when firefighters arrived after 5:30 p.m.
“It was a very difficult fire, as you can imagine,” Nigro told reporters outside the building in midtown Manhattan. “The apartment is quite large.”
Todd Brassner, 67, who was in the apartment, was taken to a hospital and died a short time later, the New York Police Department said. Property records obtained by The Associated Press indicate Brassner was an art dealer who had purchased his unit in 1996.
Officials said four firefighters also suffered minor injuries. An investigation is ongoing.
Shortly after news of the fire broke, President Donald Trump, who was in Washington, tweeted: “Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!”
Asked if that assessment was accurate, Nigro said, “It’s a well-built building. The upper floors, the residence floors, are not sprinklered.”
Fire sprinklers were not required in New York City high-rises when Trump Tower was completed in 1983. Subsequent updates to the building code required commercial skyscrapers to install the sprinklers retroactively, but owners of older residential high-rises are not required to install sprinklers unless the building undergoes major renovations.
Some fire-safety advocates pushed for a requirement that older apartment buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers when New York City passed a law requiring them in new residential highrises in 1999, but officials in the administration of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani said that would be too expensive.
Nigro noted that no member of the Trump family was in the 664-foot tower Saturday.
Trump’s family has an apartment on the top floors of the 58-story building, but he has spent little time in New York since taking office. The headquarters of the Trump Organization is on the 26th floor.
Nigro said firefighters and Secret Service members checked on the condition of Trump’s apartment. About 200 firefighters and emergency medical service workers responded to the fire, he said.
Some residents said they didn’t get any notification from building management to evacuate.
Lalitha Masson, a 76-year-old resident, called it “a very, very terrifying experience.”
Masson told The New York Times that she did not receive any announcement about leaving, and that when she called the front desk no one answered.
“When I saw the television, I thought we were finished,” said Masson, who lives on the 36th floor with her husband, Narinder, who is 79 and has Parkinson’s disease.
She said she started praying because she felt it was the end.
“I called my oldest son and said goodbye to him because the way it looked everything was falling out of the window, and it reminded me of 9/11,” Masson said.
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WASHINGTON — President Trump responded Sunday to reports of a suspected chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma, blaming Syrian President Bashar Assad and his international allies for the apparent attack that left dozens dead and hundreds injured. In some of his most critical comments directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin to date, Mr. Trump threatened that there’s a “big price … to pay” for those backing the Assad regime.
Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…
Syrian opposition activists and rescuers said Sunday that a poison gas attack on the rebel-held town of Douma near the capital of Damascus killed at least 40 people. The alleged attack has been denied by the Syrian and Russian governments. Russia is Syria’s closest ally and has a major military presence in the country.
Reports of the latest attack which appeared to target civilians and young children could not be independently verified.
Mr. Trump called out Putin along with the leadership in Iran for backing Assad, who he referred to as “Animal Assad.” Mr. Trump ordered missile strikes on a Syrian airbase in response to another chemical attack in 2017.
First responders said they found families suffocated in their homes and shelters, with foam on their mouths. The opposition-linked Syrian Civil Defense were able to document 42 fatalities but were impeded from searching further by strong odors that gave their rescuers difficulties breathing, said Siraj Mahmoud, a spokesman for the group, which is known as the White Helmets.
“Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!” the president urged.
Mr. Trump later blamed his predecessor President Barack Obama for not taking action against the Assad regime earlier in the civil war.
If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!
It’s unclear what the administration’s next steps are with regard to responding to the attack. In response to a similar chemical attack in April of last year, Mr. Trump ordered a missile strike on a Syrian military target in Shayrat, about 50 miles due south of the village that was hit in a gas attack.
With regards to a counter response, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, “I wouldn’t take anything off the table.”
“The State Department put out a statement last night and the president’s senior national security cabinet has been talking with him and each other all throughout the evening and this morning,” Bossert added.
Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham told ABC in response to Mr. Trump’s tweets on Sunday that this was a “defining moment” for the president.
“He has challenged Assad in the past not to use chemical weapons,” said Graham. He added, “if it becomes a tweet without meaning then he’s hurt himself in North Korea, if he doesn’t follow through and live up to that tweet, he’s going to look weak in the eyes of and Russia and Iran.”
Graham urged Mr. Trump to “show a resolve that Obama never did to get this right.”
Federal law enforcement authorities are in the process of seizing Backpage.com and its affiliated websites.
The websites are being seized as part of an enforcement action by the FBI, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Internal Revenue Service, according to a notice that appeared Friday afternoon on Backpage.com.
The notice didn’t characterize or provide any details on the nature of the enforcement action.
Rep. Blake Farenthold, the Texas Republican accused of sexual harassment in a suit that led to an $84,000 taxpayer settlement to a former aide, resigned Friday after insisting for months that he would serve out his current term in Congress.
Farenthold’s decision was announced shortly before it became official, on the final day of the two-week congressional spring break.
“While I planned on serving out the remainder of my term in Congress, I know in my heart it’s time for me to move along and look for new ways to serve,” the Corpus Christi representative wrote.
Once again, President Trump has talked about rapists in Mexico, and left consternation and confusion in his wake.
At a Thursday afternoon event in Sulphur Springs, W.Va., Trump called for tighter control of the nation’s southern border and reminded his audience that when he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015 he had called Mexican immigrants “rapists.”
“Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough,’ and I used the word ‘rape,’” Trump recounted. “And yesterday, it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.”
The White House said Friday that it would move on with a plan to use 2,000 to 4,000 National Guard troops to patrol the Southwestern border, whether or not California chooses to go along.
“We’re going to continue to work with California and we’re hopeful that they’ll do the right thing,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.
California is the only state among the four along the border that is run by a Democratic governor, Jerry Brown. Sanders said the plan — which has only been outlined loosely — could still take shape with Guard troops from the other three states.
President Trump reached back to some of his most visceral campaign rhetoric against illegal immigration on Thursday as his administration released new figures showing a surge in March in the number of people caught crossing the border unlawfully.
As Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt finds himself consumed by scandal and speculation grows that his days in the Cabinet are numbered, President Trump signaled he plans to keep Pruitt around.
It has been a tough week for Pruitt. The EPA chief is under fire for accepting housing from the wife of a top energy lobbyist at far below market rates, giving immense pay raises to a pair of aides against the instructions of the White House, and flying first class around the country and the world at taxpayer expense. His reported taste for sirens and flashing lights, bulletproof cars and soundproof phone booths has also invited ridicule from critics.
But Trump is giving no signal he is prepared to part ways with Pruitt. As is his custom, the president is blaming the media for Pruitt’s troubles. On Friday morning, he took aim at news reports that Trump was contemplating naming Pruitt as attorney general.
President Trump will skip the White House Correspondents’ Assn.’s annual awards dinner for the second time since taking office, but he apparently will encourage his aides not to follow his lead as they did last year.
“The White House has informed us that the president does not plan to participate in this year’s dinner but that he will actively encourage members of the executive branch to attend and join us as we celebrate the First Amendment,” association president Margaret Talev, a reporter for Bloomberg News, said in a statement.
Talev said Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders would represent the administration at the head table at the April 28 event. The White House did not immediately comment. Presidents occasionally decline their invitations and usually send the vice president in their place but Huckabee’s designation suggests Vice President Mike Pence also will not attend.
The Trump administration on Friday announced new sanctions against seven Russian oligarchs, 12 companies and 17 senior government officials for a variety of acts, including what one official called “attacks to subvert Western democracies.”
“Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities,” Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said in a news release.
Mnuchin criticized the Russian government for engaging in “a range of malign activity around the globe, including continuing to occupy Crimea and instigate violence in eastern Ukraine, supplying the Assad regime with material and weaponry as they bomb their own civilians, attempting to subvert Western democracies, and malicious cyber activities.”
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto forcefully criticized President Trump in a public address Thursday, calling Trump’s recent attacks on Mexico “offensive and unfounded.”
In his strongest rebuke yet of Trump, Peña Nieto said he will not tolerate threats to Mexico’s dignity or sovereignty and said the U.S. president should focus on domestic policy issues instead of lashing out at its southern neighbor.
Peña Nieto spoke one day after Trump, citing rising crime in Mexico, signed an order to deploy National Guard troops to the southern border. Also this week, Trump has threatened to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if Mexico doesn’t do more to stop immigrants from reaching the United States.
President Trump said Thursday that he did not know his personal lawyer had made a $130,000 payment days before the 2016 presidential election to a pornographic movie actress who had accused Trump of engaging in a consensual affair.
Asked whether he was aware of the payment to Stormy Daniels, Trump offered a one-word response: “No.” He spoke during an Air Force One flight from an event in West Virginia to Washington.
It was not clear from the brief comments when Trump became aware of the payment to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. He said reporters would have to ask his attorney, Michael Cohen, why Cohen made the payment.
NIPAWIN, Saskatchewan (AP) _ Canadian police said early Saturday 14 people were killed and 14 people were injured after a truck collided with a bus carrying a junior hockey team to a playoff game in Western Canada.
Police say there were 28 people, including the driver, on board the bus of the Humboldt Broncos team when the crash occurred around 5 p.m. Friday on Highway 35 in Saskatchewan.
“We can now confirm fourteen people have died as a result of this collision,” The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a release early Saturday.
“The other fourteen people were sent to hospitals with a variety of injuries; three of these people have injuries that are critical in nature.”
No names were released, and police would not say whether players or coaches were among the dead. There was no mention of the truck driver.
The team president said parents from across Western Canada were rushing to the scene as they struggled to cope with the tragedy.
“It’s one of the hardest days of my life,” said Kevin Garinger. “There have been multiple fatalities _ our whole community is in shock, we are grieving and we will continue to grieve throughout this ordeal as we try to work toward supporting each other.”
Michelle Straschnitzki, who lives in Airdrie, said her 18-year old son Ryan had been taken to a hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “We talked to him, but he said he couldn’t feel his lower extremities so I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “I am freaking out. I am so sad for all of the teammates and I am losing my mind.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted his sympathies.
I cannot imagine what these parents are going through, and my heart goes out to everyone affected by this terrible tragedy, in the Humboldt community and beyond. https://t.co/2cIn2CTy08
The team was on its way to play in Game 5 of a semi-final against the Nipawin Hawks.
Darren Opp, president of the Hawks, said a semi T-boned the players’ bus.
“It’s a horrible accident, my God,” he said. “It’s very, very bad.”
Opp said the coaching staff and players from the Hawks were waiting to help.
“They are sitting in the church just waiting to hear any good news,” he said. “I’ve got 50 phone calls at least saying `what do you want?’
“There’s uncles and moms and dads waiting to hear whether their sons and nephews are OK.
“It’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible.”
Pastor Jordan Gadsby at the Apostolic Church in Nipawin said more than a hundred people had gathered at the church _ including parents and grandparents of the players who were on the bus.
“Lots of them are waiting for information,” he said. “Some of the families have gotten information and have gone to be with their kids. Some of them are waiting to hear if their kids are alive.”
Garinger said the Broncos are a close-knit team from the small city of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, which has a population of about 6,000.
Garinger said he still didn’t know the fate of one of the players living in his home.
“We don’t know who has passed and we don’t expect to know right away,” he said. “We know that the coroner and their office needs to do their work and let families know.”
Garinger said all the team can do now is help the players and their families any way they can.
“We just need to try to support each other as we deal with this incredible loss to our community, to our province, to our hockey world.”
Kevin Henry, a coach who runs a hockey school in Prince Albert, said he knows players on the team.
“This is I would think one of the darkest days in the history of Saskatchewan, especially because hockey is so ingrained in how we grow up here,” he said.
STARS air ambulance said it sent three helicopters to the scene.
The Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League is a junior `A’ hockey league under Hockey Canada, which is part of the Canadian Junior Hockey League. It’s open to North American-born players between the ages of 16 and 20.
Special counsel Robert Mueller (centers) leaves after a closed meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 21, 2017, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller (centers) leaves after a closed meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 21, 2017, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
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This week in the Russia investigations: Mueller sends the feds to meet some international arrivees; new sanctions on some powerful, wealthy Russians; and Mr. Zuckerberg goes to Washington.
Fade in:
A gleaming new Gulfstream 650 — or maybe it’s a Sukhoi business jet — sweeps in for a landing at Teterboro Airport, the suburban New Jersey entrepôt for elite fliers on their way to nearby Manhattan.
The sleek aircraft turns smartly off the runway and heads for the “executive passenger terminal,” where a row of black vehicles is parked and waiting as usual. But when the hatch folds down to permit passengers to deplane and make their short drive into New York, someone is standing in the way:
Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller himself might not be standing on the tarmac, but FBI investigators from his office have interdicted at least two wealthy Russians recently on their way into the United States, they report.
The special counsel’s office is apparently trying to establish whether powerful Russians who owe fealty to President Vladimir Putin — the oft-referenced “oligarchs” — may have funneled cash donations to President Trump’s campaign or his inauguration fund.
On Friday, the Treasury Department targeted some of those same oligarchs for a new round of sanctions, along with a number of other Russian government officials and entities — including the state weapons exporter. And here was the description Treasury gave of the conduct of one targeted Russian, gold baron Suleiman Kerimov:
“He is alleged to have brought hundreds of millions of euros into France – transporting as much as 20 million euros at a time in suitcases, in addition to conducting more conventional funds transfers – without reporting the money to French tax authorities.”
More money, more problems
That pattern of conduct, and the nature of the interdictions described by Scannell and Prokupecz, raise questions about how long this smuggling of cash might have gone on. The CNN story suggests investigators want to know whether it might have gone into Trump’s inauguration accounts — or whether it continues to this day.
Either way, their story suggests that one way Russia might have injected money into the American political system for the 2016 election and beyond was not via traceable and accountable electronic transfers, but the old-fashioned delivery of cold, hard cash.
Flying around stacks of cash is a time-honored way to get money into circulation in a distant place with no one in between learning about it — most of the time.
If Russian officials were shipping cash to the United States in 2016 for deposit in American bank accounts, which were then the apparently legitimate points of origination for payments to political campaigns or political action committees, it could have been a powerful and deniable source of influence.
Foreign contributions to U.S. elections are illegal. And people entering the United States must notify Customs and Border Protection if they’re bringing in currency or “monetary instruments” worth more than $10,000 — or it can be seized and those carrying it potentially could face civil or criminal penalties.
So much for all the “Miami Vice” drama — who are these latest Russians? What put the feds onto them? Where did the money they might have transported into the United States wind up? As usual, the news accounts fall short of the complete story and only Mueller and his team know for sure.
Citizen Zuckerberg
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going through a rough patch. He built one of the world’s most lucrative and powerful tech titans by accumulating and exploiting its users’ personal data — and now is being pilloried for accumulating and exploiting users’ personal data.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference on April 18, 2017, in San Jose, Calif.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference on April 18, 2017, in San Jose, Calif.
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Facebook (and Big Tech more broadly) used to be “the hot girl,” as business guru Scott Galloway called them. They were too appealing and too intimidating for public officials to treat seriously because of how much they wanted to be in their good graces.
Now, however, months of “techlash” have meant that members of Congress are pushing each other out of the way to be the first to take Zuckerberg down a peg, first in a Senate hearing on Tuesday afternoon and then on Wednesday morning in the House.
So Zuckerberg and Facebook have been working overtime to dump as much news overboard before he goes under the klieg lights. He told reporters in a news conference, for example, that more users’ data than previously realized had probably been swept up by Cambridge Analytica, the political shop associated with the Trump campaign.
And Zuckerberg also discussed a separate “dark web” scam in which hackers used Facebook’s search to compile profiles of users based on data they’d already gotten elsewhere.
Do Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have any more cards to play? Or having gone ugly early — as public relations pros like to say — will Zuckerberg be in a position to simply play rope-a-dope and respond to his inquisitors with something like “We’ve discussed this already and we know we must do better, senator.”
It’s worth remaining skeptical about some of the hype involving whether this episode could cost Zuckerberg his job — he retains a great deal of control over Facebook.
All the same, listeners will have their ears peeled for some kind of new details that bear on the Russia imbroglio.
The Cambridge Analytica data-vacuuming narrative has embarrassed Facebook but so far there has been no clear connection between it and Facebook’s use by Russian influence-mongers in Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election. That was the subject of its own three-hearing mega-marathon last year.
But Zuckerberg is going to be answering questions in public for hours and hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, so until it happens there’s no way to know what he or the committee members might say.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained evidence that calls into question Congressional testimony given by Trump supporter and Blackwater founder Erik Prince last year, when he described a meeting in Seychelles with a Russian financier close to Vladimir Putin as a casual chance encounter “over a beer,” sources tell ABC News.
Well-connected Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, a key witness given limited immunity by Mueller, has been interviewed seven times by prosecutors on a wide range of subjects. He told investigators that he set up a meeting in the Seychelles between Prince and Russian sovereign wealth fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev, mere days before Trump was inaugurated, sources familiar with the investigation said this week.
Nader has submitted to three interviews with special counsel investigators and four appearances before a federal grand jury in Washington since agents stopped him at Dulles International Airport in January, served him with a grand jury subpoena and seized his electronic devices, including his cell phone. Documents obtained by Mueller suggest that before and after Prince met Nader in New York a week before the trip to the Seychelles, Nader shared information with Prince about Dmitriev, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News, which appears to be inconsistent with Prince’s sworn testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives investigative panel.
“I didn’t fly there to meet any Russian guy,” Prince told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in November. He testified that he travelled to the Seychelles for a meeting with United Arab Emirates officials about possible business opportunities, and they introduced him – unexpectedly – to Dmitriev.
The special counsel’s office declined to comment on this story when reached by ABC News.
As of late March, Mueller’s team has not asked Prince – whose sister Betsy DeVos serves as Trump’s Secretary of Education – to appear before the grand jury being used to investigate whether Trump campaign officials or transition aides colluded with Russian government operatives, according to one of Prince’s friends.
Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images, FILEKirill Dmitriev, chief executive officer of Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 19, 2017.
Prince told the House Intelligence Committee that his meeting with Dmitriev was a chance encounter “down in the bar” at the suggestion of “one of the brothers” of the United Arab Emirates’ leader Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nayhan.
“At the end, one of the entourage says, ‘Hey, by the way, there’s this Russian guy that we’ve dealt with in the past. He’s here also to see someone from the Emirati delegation. And you should meet him. He’d be an interesting guy for you to know, since you’re doing a lot in the oil and gas and mineral space,’” Prince told lawmakers under oath in his sworn testimony. “So, as I recall, I met him, this same guy I talked about, Kirill Dmitriev. Met him down in the bar after dinner, and we talked for 30 minutes over a beer, and that was it.”
Sources say Nader — who worked at the time for the Emirati leader, known as “MBZ” – tells a different story. According to multiple sources, the U.A.E., an important U.S. ally increasingly eager to be seen as a global powerbroker, wanted to bring a Russian close to the Kremlin together with someone Nader believed was a trusted confidant of members of the incoming administration.
Sources tell ABC News Nader met with Prince at New York’s Pierre Hotel a week before the Jan. 11, 2017 meeting in the Seychelles, and later sent Prince biographical information about Dmitriev, which, according to those sources, noted that Dmitriev had been appointed by Putin to oversee the state-run sovereign wealth fund.
Nader says he then facilitated and personally attended the meetings, including one between Prince and Dmitriev, at a resort owned by MBZ off the coast of East Africa, the sources told ABC News. One of the primary goals of the meeting, Nader told investigators, was to discuss foreign policy and to establish a line of communication between the Russian government and the incoming Trump administration, sources told ABC News.
Nader — who Prince said in a 2010 lawsuit deposition had once represented his military contractor business in Iraq — was not mentioned in Prince’s congressional testimony despite Prince being asked by lawmakers who was present. Prince said only that Dmitriev’s wife was there but she left after a few minutes while they discussed terrorism and oil prices.
A spokesperson for Prince told ABC News on Thursday that “Erik has said all there is to say to the committee and has nothing further to add.” Prince has said that the Seychelles meeting was leaked to the news media last year in an illegal “unmasking” of his identity in U.S. signals intelligence intercepts.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images, FILEErik Prince, former Navy Seal and founder of private military contractor Blackwater USA, arrives to testify during a closed-door House Select Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Nov. 30, 2017.
Nader, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is an enigma in the nearly yearlong probe of the Trump presidential campaign‘s dealings with Russians linked to the Kremlin.
His background and credibility have come under attack as his name appeared in recent headlines. He has been arrested twice in the U.S., first in 1984 and again 1991, and convicted once, according to court records unsealed in March, for possession of pornographic videos featuring underage boys. He also reportedly served prison time in the Czech Republic in 2003 for similar crimes.
Nader’s lawyers at powerhouse firm Latham Watkins, which includes former Obama White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, have said unnamed individuals are dredging up the old criminal cases to discredit him as an important witness for Mueller. They declined to comment to ABC News on Nader’s interactions with the special counsel and Nader himself has refused to speak about the Russia probe.
Few in Washington remember George Nader, whose colorful biography reads like a spy thriller: his career has spanned the globe, and along the way he has been a hostage negotiator, arms broker, security operative and, now, an important witness for the former director of the FBI.
He’s even negotiated with the Kremlin. According to Al-Monitor, a news website covering the Middle East, Nader helped broker a $4.2 billion arms deal between Iraq and Russia in 2012.
Nader’s associates say he has embarked on countless sensitive diplomatic missions overseas and was once a special adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. He had easy access to the White House under Presidents Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton, according to former officials, and he visited the Trump White House last year despite his criminal record.
Nader posed with Trump for a picture and even helped arrange the new American president’s first major foreign trip to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last year, two top Trump advisers told ABC News.
“He has worked for the Israelis, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Shiites in southern Iraq,” said Mouafac Harb, a Lebanese former journalist who has known Nader for decades. “He’s typical of the kind of shady operatives you often see in the Middle East.”
Ron Sachs/AP Images, FILEGeorge Nader speaks at a Middle East Insight event in Washington, D.C. on March 18, 1999.
His 1991 federal conviction in Alexandria, Virginia, for being caught returning from Germany with videotapes in his luggage “depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct” highlights the conflicting chapters in his life.
Prominent foreign policy figures sent testimonials to the federal trial court judge in Virginia, including one friend who said Nader, a Lebanese Christian, “is risking his life” to help free a dozen American, British and other hostages held in Beirut in 1991, by leveraging his close ties to the Shi’a terrorist group Hezbollah. The letters to the judge were provided to ABC News last week by Nader’s legal team.
The judge in 1991 sentenced Nader to six months in a halfway house — well below mandatory sentencing guidelines at that time — and allowed him to travel to both Moscow and Beirut during his criminal proceedings, later citing Nader’s “extraordinary cooperation with the government in certain areas.”
The 1991 criminal case was ordered sealed for six months. Instead, it remained under seal for 26 years, until a judge opened the case file last month amid news reports about Nader cooperating with Mueller. Sources told ABC News the U.S. government did not want Nader’s secrets easily unearthed while he operated as a backchannel on sensitive matters.
“We used him because we needed all the channels we could get into the Syrian security establishment,” said a former top career American diplomat in Damascus, who was aware of Nader’s activities in the years following his 1991 conviction. “Nobody was looking for his child porn case. Nobody cared about that stuff at all back then. He was providing too invaluable a service to us.”
Nader, according to one former diplomat, has a rare and valuable skill.
“His stock in trade is access and influence,” the former diplomat said. “He finds a way to be valuable to people.”
But Nader had dropped off the radar of many former associates two decades ago, including those who worked in Washington for his “Middle East Insight” magazine, which held many foreign policy discussions hosted by Nader and televised on C-Span until it folded around the time of his criminal conviction.
“Until his name appeared recently, I had no idea that Mr. Nader was even alive,” said one former writer at the magazine, who, like most of Nader’s associates, declined to be identified by name.
Following weeks of huge demonstrations calling for her ouster, the National Assembly impeached Ms. Park in December 2016 on charges of bribery and abuse of presidential power. In March of last year, the Constitutional Court upheld the assembly’s decision, making Ms. Park the first South Korean leader to be removed from office through parliamentary impeachment. She was arrested three weeks later.
At the center of the scandal that toppled Ms. Park’s government is the allegation that she and Choi Soon-sil, a longtime friend and confidant, collected or demanded large bribes from three big businesses, including Samsung, the country’s largest family-controlled conglomerate. Separately, the two women were accused of coercing 18 businesses into making donations worth $72 million to two foundations that Ms. Choi controlled.
The same court panel that handled Ms. Park’s case called her and Ms. Choi criminal co-conspirators when it sentenced Ms. Choi to 20 years in prison on Feb. 13 on bribery, extortion and other criminal charges.
Ms. Park has tearfully apologized to the public, cutting ties with Ms. Choi and insisting that she was not aware of many of her friend’s illegal activities. Her lawyers also appealed for leniency, arguing that the money collected from big businesses was not used for her personal gain. Some of the alleged bribes taken from Samsung were used to finance the equestrian pursuits of Ms. Choi’s daughter.
In Friday’s verdict, Ms. Park was convicted of collecting or demanding nearly $22 million in bribes from three of South Korea’s top business conglomerates, including Samsung, Lotte and SK. Separately, she was found guilty of coercing the three companies — and 15 other businesses — into making donations worth $72 million to two foundations controlled by Ms. Choi.
PhotoMs. Park in court in August. She has refused to attend hearings in her case since October. Credit
Pool photo by Kim Hong-Ji
The former president was also found guilty of abusing her power to help Ms. Choi and her associates win lucrative business contracts from big businesses, and of blacklisting artists, writers and movie directors deemed unfriendly to her government, excluding them from state support programs.
”The accused caused chaos in state affairs by abusing the power given to her by the people, and it is necessary to hold her responsible with a stern punishment so that similar things will not happen again,” the presiding judge, Kim Se-yoon, said in the nationally televised sentencing.
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Ms. Park’s removal from office — she was replaced as president by the liberal politician Moon Jae-in — represented a huge setback for her once-dominant conservative party. Locked away in jail, she has slowly receded from public discourse. Older conservatives who represent her most ardent supporters are deeply mistrustful of Mr. Moon, a progressive whom they regard as pro-North Korean, but who now enjoys public approval ratings hovering around 70 percent.
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Ms. Park’s scandal rekindled longstanding public anger over the extensive ties between the government and family-run conglomerates known as chaebol. The case also led to the arrest of Lee Jae-yong, the de facto head of Samsung.
Last August, Mr. Lee, the vice chairman of the smartphone-maker Samsung Electronics and the third-generation scion of the family that runs the Samsung conglomerate, was sentenced to five years in prison for offering $6.7 million in bribes to Ms. Choi and Ms. Park. He was released from prison in February after an appeals court reduced his sentence, but rulings by the judges on Friday could place him in new legal jeopardy.
The new president, Mr. Moon, has vowed to root out corrupt relationships between politicians and businesses that were at the center of the scandal.
Friday’s sentencing marked an ignominious end to Ms. Park’s career. A daughter of the former military dictator Park Chung-hee, she grew up in South Korea’s presidential Blue House and essentially served as her father’s first lady after her mother was assassinated by a pro-North Korean gunman in 1974. Her father’s 18-year dictatorship ended with his own assassination by his spy chief in 1979. Never married and childless, Ms. Park lived a reclusive life afterward.
Her fortunes changed amid the Asian financial crisis of 1998, when South Koreans, hankering for her father’s charismatic leadership, elected her to the National Assembly. She became a political boss and a conservative icon.
But as president, Ms. Park was accused of being disconnected from the public and of mishandling the aftermath of a 2014 ferry disaster that killed more than 300 people, mostly teenagers. In 2016, the news media began reporting allegations of influence-peddling, igniting the scandal that consumed Ms. Park’s administration and sent huge crowds of demonstrators into the streets of Seoul every weekend for months on end.
Almost all of South Korea’s presidents have seen their reputations tarnished toward the end of their tenure or during their retirement because of corruption scandals involving them, their relatives or aides.
A spokesman for the current president, Mr. Moon, called Friday’s developments “heartbreaking.” Jun Hee-kyung, a spokeswoman for Ms. Park’s old conservative party, Liberty Korea, criticized the decision to broadcast the sentencing hearing, likening it to “a sports event.”
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump threatened a major escalation in trade tensions with Beijing on Thursday, saying he was considering imposing tariffs on an additional $100 billion in imports from China.
The move would triple the amount of Chinese goods facing levies when entering the U.S., up from the tariffs on $50 billion in imports from China that the president announced last week.
Before shooting three people and killing herself at YouTube’s headquarters, Nasim Najafi Aghdam raised complaints that are increasingly common among contributors to the world’s largest video site.
In a video she posted in January, Ms. Aghdam accused YouTube of limiting viewer traffic to some of her videos. On her personal website, she suggested that YouTube has paid her a lower amount of ad revenue than she deserves.
Several people protested after police shot and killed a man in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Wednesday. The man reportedly had bipolar disorder and was known in the area.
Kevin Hagen/AP
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Kevin Hagen/AP
Several people protested after police shot and killed a man in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Wednesday. The man reportedly had bipolar disorder and was known in the area.
Kevin Hagen/AP
Police officers in New York City fatally shot an unarmed black man who was pointing what appeared to be a gun at them on Wednesday, police said.
The object turned out to be a metal pipe with a knob on the end. The man reportedly suffered from mental illness including bipolar disorder.
Officers responded to three 911 calls at around 4:40 p.m. describing a man wielding “a silver firearm,” who was “pointing it at people on the street,” on a corner in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, the NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan told reporters.
Four of the five police officers who responded to the scene fired on the man after he took a “two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at the approaching officers,” Monahan said.
The man, identified by The New York Times as 34-year-old Saheed Vassell, was pronounced dead at Kings County Hospital.
Vassell’s father Eric Vassell told the Times his son had bipolar disorder and had been hospitalized multiple times in recent years.
Eric Vassell told the New York Daily News that his son refused treatment and had not taken medication for the condition in years.
“We were always worried for him. We would say should anything happen to him, we just have to do what we can do,” he told the newspaper.
Residents told news outlets that the younger Vassell was well-known in the neighborhood as “mentally ill but generally harmless.”
“All he did was just walk around the neighborhood,” 38-year-old Andre Wilson, who said he knew Vassell for 20 years, told the Daily News. “He speaks to himself, usually he has an orange Bible or a rosary in his hand. He never had a problem with anyone.”
“Every cop in this neighborhood knows him,” resident John Fuller told the Times, saying police should have been familiar with Vassell enough to not shoot him.
Three of the four officers who fired at Vassell were not in uniform, Monahan said. He told reporters they fired a total of 10 rounds at Vassell. None of them were wearing body cameras.
The New York Times spoke to witnesses, who said that “the police officers appeared to fire almost immediately after they got to the corner around 4:45 p.m. Some of the witnesses said they did not hear the officers say anything to the man before firing, while another witness said she heard the officers and the man exchange some words.”
Vassell had a 15-year-old son with former partner Sherlan Smith, 36. She told the Daily News: “He was a good father. He wasn’t a bad person. No matter how they want to spin it, he wasn’t a bad person. … Too many black people are dying at hands of police officers and it’s about time something be done.”
As many as 200 onlookers gathered at the scene, resident Shaya Tenenbaum told The Associated Press, and several of them shouted at police. Protesters carrying Black Lives Matter signs arrived later in the evening, the Times reports.
Members of the crowd “wept” at how the shooting fell on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
The police shooting of Stephon Clark, another unarmed black man, ignited protests in Sacramento that have lasted weeks.
