Marian Sanda sentences to dead

Iranian lawmaker places $3m bounty on Donald Trump

An Iranian lawmaker has offered a $3 million reward to anyone who assassinates President Trump adding that the Islamic republic could avoid threats if it had nuclear weapons, according to a report.

“On behalf of the people of Kerman province, we will pay a $3 million reward in cash to whoever kills Trump,” Ahmad Hamzeh told the 290-seat parliament, according to Reuters, which cited the state-run ISNA news outlet.
He did not say if his idea of putting a price on the president’s head had any official backing from Iran’s clerical rulers.
Tensions have steadily ramped up since Trump pulled Washington out of Tehran’s nuclear agreement with world powers in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on the country. The standoff sparked tit-for-tat military strikes this month.
The city of Kerman is the hometown of revered military commander Qassem Soleimani, whose killing in a drone strike ordered by Trump on Jan. 3 in Baghdad prompted Iran to launch missiles at US targets in Iraq.

“If we had nuclear weapons today, we would be protected from threats … We should put the production of long-range missiles capable of carrying unconventional warheads on our agenda. This is our natural right,” Hamzeh was quoted as saying.
Tehran insists it has never sought nuclear weapons and never will, saying its nuclear work is for research purposes and to master the process to generate electricity.
The 2015 nuclear accord was designed to increase the time Iran would need to obtain enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb if it wanted one from about two or three months.
Under the deal, Iran received sanctions relief in return for curbing its nuclear activities. But in response to Washington’s withdrawal from the pact and pressure from its sanctions, Iran has gradually rolled back its commitments to the deal.
Tehran recently announced it was scrapping all limits on its uranium enrichment work, potentially shortening the so-called “breakout time” needed to build a nuke.
After its latest move to step away from compliance with the nuclear accord, Britain, France, and Germany triggered a dispute mechanism in the pact, starting a diplomatic process that could lead to reimposing UN sanctions. (New York Post)

Hillary Clinton: Bernie Sanders Is Just a Career Politician and ‘Nobody Likes Him’

The 2016 candidate tore into Sanders, saying he’s wildly unpopular in Congress and accusing him of using Trumpian tactics.

 

Hillary Clinton has taken herself off the sidelines of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination with a brutal condemnation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, his campaign team, and his supporters.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote the upcoming Hulu documentary, Hillary, Clinton laid into her 2016 Democratic primary rival who she has previously accused of contributing to her eventual election defeat to Donald Trump. Clinton said Sanders and his team have relentlessly attacked Democratic women, and she threw her support behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has faced abuse for claiming Sanders told her during a private meeting that a woman couldn’t win the election.
Clinton’s stinging attack came the day after Sanders was forced to apologize to former Vice President Joe Biden because his campaign had promoted an overzealous op-ed by one of his surrogates accusing Biden of having a “big corruption problem.”
The Hollywood Reporter was interviewing Clinton about the upcoming Hulu documentary and read her a quote from one of the scenes: “[Sanders] was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
Asked if that assessment still stood, Clinton said yes and then went further. She refused to say whether she would endorse him if her party chose him as its 2020 candidate, but made it clear that she hoped that wouldn’t happen.
Clinton and Sanders fell out in a big way during the 2016 campaign but she was not expected to intervene so powerfully in the current race. In her 2017 book, What Happened, Clinton argued that Sanders’ attacks against her during the primary contributed to Trump’s shock victory. She wrote that Sanders resorted to “innuendo and impugning my character” because he was unable to criticize her effectively on policy, which she believes caused her “lasting damage” when it came to November 2016.
Clinton has now told the Hollywood Reporter that the entire Sanders 2020 operation is a problem.
“It’s not only him, it’s the culture around him,” she said. “It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture—not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it.”
Clinton went on to accuse Sanders of giving his supporters tacit approval to go after female nominees such as Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris by giving them “a wink.” She appeared to discourage people from voting for Sanders on that basis, saying: “I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.”
Clinton became particularly heated when asked about Warren’s claim that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t win the presidency.
Sanders denied that he had said it during last week’s televised debate and Warren initially tried to diffuse the situation, saying, “Bernie is my friend, and I’m not here to try to fight with Bernie.”
Warren’s irritation boiled over at the end of the debate, however, and she confronted Sanders on stage, thinking the cameras were no longer rolling. CNN eventually released a recording that showed her facing him down over the denial. “I think you called me a liar on national TV,” she said.
Clinton obviously shared Warren’s frustration. She said it was nonsense to say a woman couldn’t win since she won the primaries in 2016 and got around three million more votes than Trump later that year. Then she turned on Sanders once again, claiming his campaign had “gone after Elizabeth [Warren] with a very personal attack on her” after her disclosure.
“If it were a one-off, you might say, ‘OK, fine,’” said Clinton. “But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me. I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a president who’s going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we’ve seen from this current administration.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Clinton said she had talked to Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and “practically everybody” who either has run for the Democratic nomination or is still running. When asked if Sanders was excluded from that, she confirmed, by a nod of the head, that he wasn’t.
Asked what advice she’s given, Clinton said she told the female candidates: “You can run the best campaign, but you’re going to have to be even better than your best campaign to overcome some of the unfairness that will be directed at you as a woman.”
Sanders has declined to comment.

How Trump Twisted Iran Intel to Manufacture the ‘Four Embassies’ Threat

 

There were definitely questions [at the time, internally] about whether he had just made it up on the spot,” recalled one White House official.
Asawin Suebsaeng  > White House Reporter
Erin Banco > National Security Reporter
When President Donald Trump publicly claimed earlier this month that he had seen intel showing Iran’s now-deceased top military leader Qassem Soleimani was plotting attacks on “four [American] embassies,” senior officials in Trump’s national security apparatus shook their heads. They weren’t sure exactly why the president leaned on that particular talking point, and scrambled in the following days to formulate answers to a barrage of questions from the media on exactly what the president had meant. Other officials wondered aloud whether the president had misrepresented the intelligence.
“There were definitely questions [at the time, internally] about whether he had just made it up on the spot,” recalled one White House official.
It turns out Trump—technically—didn’t get his eyebrow-raising claim out of nowhere, The Daily Beast has learned. According to three sources familiar with the matter, the president had simply seized on a small part of what he’d heard in private briefings, exaggerated that aspect of the intelligence, then began sharing the inflated intel to the American public during his post-Soleimani victory lap.
In doing so, President Trump generated yet more confusion and discord among the national security brass that had already struggled to sell the American people on its case for the strike that just brought Iran and the United States to the precipice of all-out warfare. For weeks the Trump administration had struggled to get on message in talking about why the U.S. decided to strike Soleimani and what it would do in the future to manage any diplomacy with Tehran. Trump’s embassy claim didn’t help, officials said.

“There were definitely questions about whether Trump had just made it up on the spot.”

— White House official

The White House did not comment on the record for this story.
Shortly before he began announcing to the media and rally-goers that the Iranian general was planning assaults on multiple U.S. embassies, the president received briefings at the White House from both national security officials and communications staffers. The purpose of some of these meetings were to prepare Trump on how best to talk to the press regarding his administration’s justifications for killing Soleimani.
The president received a briefing shortly before he entered the Roosevelt Room Jan. 9 and said Iran was “looking to blow up our embassy.”
According to two people familiar with this briefing, Trump was told the pre-strike intelligence showed that Iran could lash out against American assets in the region. The president was again told this in a subsequent briefing that day, one of these sources added. However, embassies were a part of a long list of American outposts and bases potentially under threat from Iran but sources familiar with those internal briefings do not remember the number four ever being specified, and they certainly do not recall any imminent danger to those embassies.
When administration officials briefed Trump, they mentioned possible targets for Iranian assaults; they were not discussing intel on what anyone in the regime was actively plotting against U.S. interests, the sources noted.
However, the moment he heard the word “embassies,” Trump immediately chimed in, interrupting the meeting to grill his briefers on that issue, according to one U.S. official. From there, he began to treat this possible threat as a near-certain danger. Trump received another intelligence briefing shortly before his interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham Jan. 10 where he repeated the claim that Iran probably would have attacked four embassies.
When the president started publicly trotting out his claims of “four embassies,” national security aides were dumbfounded. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that Trump’s “four embassies” talking point clashed with intelligence assessments from Trump’s own officials. CNN also reported that security officials at the State Department weren’t even notified of an imminent danger to any specific set of four American embassies.

“The president seized on a small part of what he’d heard in private briefings, exaggerated that aspect of the intelligence, then began sharing the inflated intel during his post-Soleimani victory lap.”

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper himself admitted during an interview on the CBS Sunday show Face the Nation that while “the president said that he believed that it probably could have been attacks against additional embassies,” Esper personally “didn’t see [a specific piece of evidence] with regard to four embassies.”