- Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) resigned effectively immediately. Franks reportedly asked two female staffers about being surrogate mothers for him and his wife, and one of the two felt he retaliated against her after she refused.
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The House Ethics Committee cleared Devin Nunes (R-CA) over charges that he leaked classified information. The same committee announced that it’s investigating Blake Farenthold (R-TX) over “allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation involving a former female staff member.”
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The Department of Justice is investigating Planned Parenthood’s sales of baby body parts.
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A group of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees have taken to calling themselves “Dumbledore’s Army” as they rebel against Donald Trump and Mick Mulvaney. Robert Tracinsky explains that they’re really Dolores Umbridge:
Beyond that, it strikes me that the political left keeps getting these children’s allegories wrong. They borrow elements from Harry Potter or from the Star Wars series and remake them as the whole basis of their political identity—no, seriously, this is why the Left calls its opposition to the Trump administration “the Resistance,” which is taken from the most recent Star Wars movie. But they’re borrowing symbols of rebellion against overbearing authority—and using them in defense of overbearing authority.
Later:
The fact that these symbols—the rebels from Star Wars, the Harry Potter heroes—were created by people who would describe themselves as modern “liberals” just adds to the contradiction. It’s like all the people who flocked to the Hunger Games novels and movies, then complained that the Electoral College gives the Districts too much power to resist the edicts of the Capitol. They like to play around with symbols of the heroic fight for freedom and of individualistic resistance against authority, then turn around and impose rigid codes of conformity and demand a big, intrusive government staffed by exactly the kind of power-hungry bureaucrats they just told us they were against.
- Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats is making it more difficult for government officials to “unmask” people mentioned in intelligence reports for political purposes.
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During the 2017 presidential campaign, a high-level Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, met repeatedly with the author of the Trump dossier, Christopher Steele. After the election Ohr met with Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, the company that paid Steele to assemble the dossier. This was only just discovered despite several subpoenas from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that should have uncovered this information.
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Robert Mueller’s “right hand man,” Aaron Zebley, served as attorney for Justin Cooper, the IT guy who set up Hillary Clinton’s private email server and smashed her old Blackberries to bits.
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The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear another redistricting case, Benisek v. Lamone. In this case Maryland’s Democrat-led legislature is alleged to have re-drawn a congressional district to elect a Democrat to a seat held by an incumbent Republican.
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The Department of Defense is conducting the first audit in its history.
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A federal district court judge sentenced former Charleston, South Carolina police officer Michael Slager to 20 years in prison for killing Walter Scott during a traffic stop. Slager pleaded guilty to violating Scott’s civil rights by using excessive force.
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Ukrainian police caught Mikheil Saakashvili again, and this time his supporters weren’t around to free him.
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Japan plans to buy medium range missiles that can be launched from its fighter planes. The missiles are the Joint Strike Missile for its F–35s and the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile for its F–15s. Both are offensive weapons that could be used against North Korea, which is stirring controversy.
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Fifteen U.N. peacekeepers were killed and 53 were wounded in the Congo. The peacekeepers are from Tanzania, and the attackers were probably members of an Islamist rebel group, Allied Democratic Forces.
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A former officer of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Talal Silo, said thousands of ISIS fighters were allowed to leave Raqqa, Syria as the fight for the city wound down. American government officials dispute this claim.
Silo was the SDF spokesman and one of the officials who told the media in mid-October – when the deal was reached – that fewer than 300 fighters left Raqqa with their families while others would fight on.
However, he told Reuters in an interview that the number of fighters who were allowed to go was far higher and the account of a last-ditch battle was a fiction designed to keep journalists away while the evacuation took place.
He said a U.S. official in the international coalition against Islamic State, whom he did not identify, approved the deal at a meeting with an SDF commander.
