Over the course of five months in 2017, the Secret Service spent more than $250,000 at Trump properties and businesses, documents obtained by Property of the People, a nonprofit watchdog group, show.
Property of the People received the documents after filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The credit card transactions, which were made between Jan. 27 and June 9, totaled $254,020.94. Most of the charges were listed under the category "Trump National Golf Club."
There were several charges at Trump hotels, including his properties in Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas, where the agency spent more than $45,000 in March. The documents show there were also multiple charges of $10,000 or less made on the same day, likely at Mar-a-Lago; ProPublica reports that charges under $10,000 would allow the private club to sidestep government contracting rules.
These newly released documents provide more ammunition for people who say Trump, who upon becoming president did not divest from his businesses but instead passed control over to his eldest sons, is illegally profiting from the federal government, in violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause. Catherine Garcia
Former President Barack Obama delivered a very blunt message to Democrats on Thursday.
During a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in California's Silicon Valley, Obama said that in a primary, a candidate's "flaws are magnified," and the "field will narrow and there's going to be one person and if that is not your perfect candidate and there are certain aspects of what they say that you don't agree with and you don't find them completely inspiring the way you'd like, I don't care, because the choice is so stark and the stakes are so high that you cannot afford to be ambivalent in this race."
Those who are worried about the candidates need to "chill out," Obama said, and "gin up about the prospect of rallying behind whoever emerges from this process." There will be differences in style and policy, he acknowledged, but those are "relatively minor" relative to the "ultimate goal, which is to defeat a president and a party that has ... taken a sharp turn away from a lot of the core traditions and values and institutional commitments that built this country."
Earlier this month, Obama said the Democratic candidates needed to "pay some attention to where voters actually are" and not be "diluted into thinking that the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven't heard a bold enough proposal." Read more about Obama's remarks at CNN. Catherine Garcia
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is the federal agency that administers the country's naturalization and immigration system, and two of its newest leaders once worked at an organization that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
John Zadrozny and Robert Law worked with Ken Cuccinelli while he was still acting director of the agency. Cuccinelli is now the second-highest ranking official at the Department of Homeland Security, and Zadrozny, once his top aide, was promoted to acting USCIS chief of staff. Law, who was Cuccinelli's senior adviser, is now acting chief of policy. Zadrozny has pushed for slashing refugee admissions to zero, Politico reported this summer, while Law has publicly denounced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, saying those who support it favor "immigration anarchy."
Both Zadrozny and Law worked at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded in 1979 by anti-immigration activist John Tanton, who once declared that a "Latin onslaught" was coming. The group says its mission is to "reduce overall immigration to a more normal level," but the Southern Poverty Law Center says it is actually a hate group, citing its ties to "white supremacist groups and eugenicists" and people who have made racist remarks.
"These groups, which were basically outside of the mainstream, have been embraced by the Trump administration and their ideas are now policy, which is affecting millions and millions of people of color," the Southern Poverty Law Center's Heidi Beirich told CBS News. FAIR's president, Dan Stein, said the organization has "never had any issue with immigration, per se. All we've ever said is that it should be lawful and that the numbers need to be properly regulated." Catherine Garcia
Conservative author and provocateur Ann Coulter was greeted by more than 1,000 demonstrators who came out to protest her speech at the University of California, Berkeley, on Wednesday night.
Most of the protesters were students and young activists, and they linked arms in an attempt to block people from getting inside the building where Coulter was set to speak. A few hundred people were able to get inside the venue, The Guardian reports, and while the protesters were mostly peaceful, there were some skirmishes. One protester, a graduate student, said an attendee tried to choke him, and later a police officer grabbed him by the neck and called him a loser.
University officials said there were six or seven arrests, and all but one person was set to be cited and released. Coulter, who has called immigrant children separated from their parents "child actors," was there to espouse her anti-immigrant views, The Guardian reports. She was invited to speak by the Berkeley College Republicans, who paid for her appearance. The organization charged $45 to $75 for tickets; the group's president, Matt Ronnau, told The Guardian, "Hopefully, we get a lot of money."
In 2017, Coulter was set to speak at Berkeley, but canceled at the last minute, citing safety concerns. Earlier that year, there were fights in the streets after right-wing activist Milo Yiannopoulos was set to appear on campus. The university spent $800,000 on security for the Coulter event that was called off, The Guardian reports. Catherine Garcia