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Prosecutors: Illegal hush-money paid at Trump’s ‘direction’
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department says that President Donald Trump directed illegal payments to buy the silence of two women whose claims of extramarital affairs threatened his presidential campaign, the first time prosecutors have connected Trump to a federal crime.
In a court filing, prosecutors said former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen arranged the secret payments at the height of the 2016 campaign “in
The filing stopped short of accusing the president of committing a crime. Whether a president can be prosecuted while in office remains a matter of legal dispute.
But there’s no ambiguity in Friday’s filing that prosecutors believe Cohen’s act was criminal and Trump was directly involved, a remarkable disclosure with potential political and legal ramifications for a president dogged by investigations. The payments are likely to become a target for House Democrats gearing up to investigate the president next year. It’s unclear whether Trump faces legal jeopardy over his role.
Federal law requires that any payments made “for the purposes of influencing” an election must be reported in campaign finance disclosures. The court filing Friday makes clear that the payments were made to benefit Trump politically.
In August, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, including campaign finance violations, and detailed an illegal operation to stifle sex stories and distribute hush money to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who had both claimed they had affairs with Trump. Trump has denied having an affair.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was paid $130,000 as part of a nondisclosure agreement signed days before the 2016 election and is currently suing to dissolve that contract.
Trump denied in April that he knew anything about Cohen’s payments to Daniels, though the explanations from the president and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, have shifted multiple times since then.
Another attorney for the president, Jay Sekulow, did not immediately return a call for comment.
After Friday’s filing, Trump tweeted: “Totally clears the President. Thank you!”
In August 2016, the National Enquirer’s parent company reached a $150,000 deal to pay McDougal for her story of a 2006 affair, which it never published, a tabloid practice known as catch and kill. In 2015, the company’s chairman met with Cohen and Trump and “offered help with negative stories” about Trump’s relationships with women by buying the rights to the stories, prosecutors said.
After McDougal contacted the Enquirer, the chairman of its parent company, American Media Inc., contacted Cohen about the story. After Cohen promised the company would be reimbursed, the Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000, according to court documents.
An audio recording released by Cohen in July appeared to capture Trump and Cohen discussing buying the rights to McDougal’s story from the Enquirer’s parent company. Trump’s lawyers have said the payments were never made.
Legal experts have said the issue of whether Trump violated the law would come down to whether Trump tried to influence the election and whether he knew it was legally improper.
Former Sen. John Edwards, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, was indicted in 2011 in connection with payments made on his behalf by a wealthy campaign donor to keep Edwards’ mistress quiet, which prosecutors argued amounted to illegal campaign contributions.
Edwards argued the payments were meant to keep his wife from learning about the affair — not to protect his campaign — and were therefore not political donations.
A jury acquitted the North Carolina Democrat of one charge and deadlocked on the rest in 2012. The Justice Department did not retry the case.
Michael Balsamo, The Associated Press
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RCMP to create fake online profiles to track Canadian ‘extremists’: docs
From LifeSiteNews
According to internal documents, the RCMP plans to conduct undercover surveillance on Canadians by creating fake online accounts and tracking what they consider ‘ideological extremists,’ which may include pro-family, pro-life and pro-freedom content.
Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), is planning to create fake online accounts to target Canadian “extremists.”
According to an internal strategy document, the RCMP plans to conduct undercover surveillance on Canadians by creating fake online accounts and tracking what they consider “ideological extremists,” which could include pro-family, pro-life and pro-freedom content.
“The RCMP’s lack of a covert online presence was previously highlighted in the OIR (Operational Improvement Review), which recommended that the RCMP develop its own online undercover program to assist with national security criminal investigations,” the RCMP internal document stated.
The document, obtained by an Access to Information request and shared with CBC News, reveals that the Federal Policing National Security is “currently taking steps to address this recommendation through proactive legend-building and backstopping personas, but this work needs to be prioritized and accelerated in order to meet future demand for online undercover activities.”
“Undercover police investigations, among many tools, remain an effective technique to thwart the commission of serious crime and resolve historic offences,” the plan continued. “The focus is on uncovering the truth, verifying facts and determining if someone is involved.”
According to the RCMP, violent extremism is divided into three categories: religiously motivated extremism, politicly motivated extremism, and ideologically motivated extremism.
Ideologically motivated extremis is further categorized into xenophobic violence, gender-driven violence, anti-authority violence, and “other grievance-driven and ideological motivated violence.” The last category includes environmental, animal rights, and “anti-abortion violence.”
While the RCMP’s move to monitor Canadians online is alarming, it is hardly the first time the government-run police force has spied on its citizens.
In 2022, the RCMP acknowledged it uses spyware to turn on or off the camera or microphone of a laptop or phone at will to eavesdrop on one’s conversations without the suspect even knowing it.
The same year, it was disclosed that Canadian Special Forces conducted surveillance flights over the trucker’s Freedom Convoy in February in a spy plane capable of eavesdropping on cell phone calls and tracking small movements, contrary to a military directive banning such flights.
Spying on and tracking Canadians for sharing pro-family and pro-freedom values could prove even more dangerous if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Online Harms bill, which would punish “hate speech” online, is passed.
Bill C-63 was introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome. Put forth under the guise of protecting children from exploitation online, the bill also seeks to expand the scope of “hate speech” prosecutions, and even desires to target such speech retroactively.
Furthermore, the RCMP, like the rest of Canada’s government-run organizations, appears to have been infiltrated by woke activists who label pro-family, pro-freedom, and pro-life causes as “extreme” and “dangerous.”
In 2022, the RCMP issued a 16-page guide suggesting people tell on those who show any signs of “anti-government” or “anti-LGBTQ2” opinions on the internet.
“Some people hold social or political beliefs that may be considered ‘extreme’ or outside mainstream ideologies. Although some ideas alone may be concerning to those around them, it is when a person uses or actively supports violence to achieve ideological, religious or political goals that the police have a role to play,” the guide said.
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Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis calls out Liberals for not supporting anti-church burning bill
From LifeSiteNews
Speaking about the ‘hundreds of churches’ that have been ‘set on fire across Canada’ in the last number of years, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis questioned why the Liberals seem completely unconcerned.
One of Canada’s most prominent pro-life MPs has called out the Trudeau government for its apparent lack of support for an anti-arson bill which aims to curb the rash of church burnings plaguing Christians in the country.
In an X post Monday, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis pointed out that under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, church burnings have shot up “100 percent,” and that the government does not seem to have expressed any “concern” at all.
“In the last several years, hundreds of churches and other places of worship have been set on fire across Canada. Under this Liberal government, these crimes have increased by over 100%,” wrote Lewis on X.
“Where is the concern or action from the Liberals regarding these attacks on Christian churches?”
Lewis’s post included a link to another X post from Conservative MP Marc Dalton, who posted a video on October 31 highlighting the recent rash of church burnings and how his bill, C-411, aims to stop this.
“Thank you @MarcDalton for bringing forward Bill C-411, the Anti-Arson Act, an important bill to protect places of worship and increase penalties on those who would target them,” wrote Lewis.
Bill C-411, or, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (arson — wildfires and places of worship), was introduced by Dalton in June.
The law, if passed, would create specific criminal offenses for setting fires to churches and for starting wildfires.
Dalton said in his video that there is a “serious problem in Canada that must be addressed” concerning Catholic and Christian churches being the target of arson.
He highlighted how since 2010, 592 churches have been the target of arson in Canada, with a large portion of these being concentrated to the last few years.
Dalton noted how Canada’s Criminal Code, as it stands, does not include specific protections against arson directed at religious institutions. C-411 aims to “change that,” said Dalton, noting that the bill would implement a minimum sentence of five years in jail for a first offense of this kind, and seven years for a repeat offense.
“This bill strengthens our criminal code and punishes these hateful arson attacks,” he said.
“Commonsense Conservatives stand for strict punishments against criminals who target places of worship.”
Since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, have been burned to the ground, vandalized or defiled in Canada.
The church burnings started in earnest after the mainstream media and the federal government ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the now-closed residential schools in Canada, particularly a school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
The anti-Catholic narrative that developed following these claims continues to this day, despite the fact that no bodies have actually been discovered.
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