With White House stung
by Cohen accusation,
Trump fires back
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump accused his former lawyer Michael Cohen of lying under pressure of prosecution Wednesday as his White House grappled with allegations that the president had orchestrated a campaign cover-up to buy the silence of two women who claimed he had affairs with them.
Confronting mounting legal and political threats, Trump took to Twitter to accuse Cohen of making up “stories in order to get a ‘deal’” from federal prosecutors. Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight charges, including campaign finance violations that he said he carried out in coordination with Trump. Behind closed doors, Trump expressed worry and frustration that a man intimately familiar with his political, personal and business dealings for more than a decade had turned on him.
Yet his White House signaled no clear strategy for managing the fallout. At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted at least seven times that Trump had done nothing wrong and was not the subject of criminal charges. She referred substantive questions to the president’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, who was at a golf course in Scotland. Outside allies of the White House said they had received little guidance on how to respond to the events in their appearances on cable news. And it was not clear the West Wing was assembling any kind of coordinated response.
Trump himself publicly denied wrongdoing, sitting down with his favored program “Fox &Friends” for an interview set to air Thursday. In the interview, he argued, incorrectly, that the hush-money payouts weren’t “even a campaign violation” because he subsequently reimbursed Cohen for the payments personally instead of with campaign funds. Federal law restricts how much individuals can donate to a campaign, bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires the disclosure of transactions.
Cohen had said Tuesday he secretly used shell companies to make payments used to silence former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election.
New drone shots show isolated Amazonian tribe in Brazil
RIO DE JANEIRO — New aerial images give a rare glimpse of an isolated tribe in Brazil’s Amazon, showing 16 people walking through jungle as well as a deforested area with a crop.
In a clip released Tuesday night, one of the tribespeople appears to be carrying a bow and arrow.
Brazil’s agency for indigenous affairs, Funai, said it captured the drone shots during an expedition last year to monitor isolated communities, but only released them now to protect their study.
Researchers monitored the tribe in Vale do Javari, an indigenous territory in the southwestern part of the state of Amazonas. There are 11 confirmed isolated groups in the area – more than anywhere else in Brazil.
The agency has been studying the community in the images for years, but this was the first time it was able to catch it on camera.
Republicans — and some Democrats — reject impeachment talk
WASHINGTON — The day after President Donald Trump was implicated in a federal crime, members of both parties dismissed talk of impeachment, with some Democrats expressing fears Wednesday about such a politically risky step, and Republicans shrugging off the accusations or withholding judgment.
The legal entanglements surrounding Trump — the guilty plea by former lawyer Michael Cohen and the fraud conviction of one-time campaign chairman Paul Manafort — delivered a one-two punch that left lawmakers struggling for an appropriate response ahead of the midterm campaigns.
Trump’s strongest supporters echoed his “no collusion” retorts, suggesting that, absent any evidence that he worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election, there is just no high-crimes-and- misdemeanors case for impeachment.
Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to tamp down expectations from their liberal base of taking on the president for fear that impeachment talk will cause GOP voters to rally around Trump in November.
The dynamic underscored the political difficulty of impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, especially for Republicans who have been reluctant to criticize the president but now face a new chapter in what has been a difficult relationship.
Mexican man charged in Iowa slaying worked under fake name
BROOKLYN, Iowa — A Mexican man charged with killing an Iowa college student worked on a dairy farm for years under a false name just a few miles from where the young woman was allegedly abducted while running last month, his employer said Wednesday.
Cristhian Bahena Rivera was a good employee who showed up on time to take care of the cows and got along well with his co-workers, said Dane Lang, manager of Yarrabee Farms in Brooklyn, Iowa.
The 24-year-old kept coming to work after Mollie Tibbetts disappeared July 18, and “nobody saw a difference” in his demeanor, Lang said. His colleagues were stunned Tuesday to learn that he was not only the suspect in Tibbetts’ death, but that he had a different real name than what he went by on the farm, he said.
From wire sources
“Our employee is not who he said he was,” Lang said at a news conference at the farm. “This was shocking to us.”
When Rivera was hired in 2014, he presented an out-of-state government-issued photo identification and a matching Social Security card, he said. That information was run through the Social Security Administration’s employment-verification system and checked out, he said.
For many young investors, the stock market’s only gone up
NEW YORK — Meet the generation of investors who haven’t known a bear market.
The U.S. stock market has been on the upswing for nine and a half years, during which a cohort of younger investors has never dealt with a 20 percent drop in the S&P 500 — the classic definition of a bear market. Such a decline has historically happened on average every four or five years.
That’s nice for these 20- and 30-somethings, and their retirement accounts, but it raises the question: What will they do when the next downturn inevitably arrives? How they respond will be crucial because this generation bears a heavier responsibility for paying for their own retirement, as pensions go extinct and Social Security’s finances weaken.
Few analysts are predicting an imminent downturn for the S&P 500, which finished Tuesday within 0.8 percent of its record, but they’re much less confident about 2019 or beyond due to rising interest rates and other market challenges. The fear is that inexperienced investors will panic at their first taste of a bear market and sell their stocks, which would lock in their losses.
For young investors with decades to go before retirement, conventional wisdom says the best bet is to ride through and wait for a recovery. The average bear market brings a loss of nearly 40 percent for the S&P 500, but it typically lasts less than two years, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.
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US Sen. Warren posts 10 years of her tax returns online
BOSTON — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has posted 10 years of her tax returns online.
The decision to release the federal and state returns on Wednesday came a day after the Massachusetts Democrat called for sweeping anti-corruption laws in Washington. It’s also another possible signal that Warren may be laying the groundwork for a run for president in 2020.
A bill crafted by Warren would require the IRS to release tax returns for congressional candidates from the previous two years and during each year in office. It also would create a lifetime ban on presidents, members of Congress and other officeholders from working as lobbyists.
Warren’s 2017 federal returns show the former Harvard University law professor and her husband Bruce Mann, who still works as a Harvard Law School professor, reported an adjusted gross income of $913,000. The returns listed their total tax as $268,484 and their total payments as $302,227. The couple was eligible for a refund of almost $34,000.
Although she’s frequently mentioned as a possible White House contender, Warren has said she’s focused on her Senate re-election campaign this year. She first won election in 2012 by defeating then incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown.
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