“After the ‘Unite the Right’ rally organized by white supremacists rocked Charlottesville, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe complained that the demonstrators ‘had better equipment’ than the state’s police forces. However, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) detail sophisticated, military-grade weapons Virginia police received from the Department of Defense (DOD) under its controversial 1033…

“There is no legitimate law enforcement purpose for this warrant. We know very well that its real purpose is to chill speech, silence dissent, and make people afraid to speak out.”

“We have repeatedly warned that President Trump’s beating of the war drum with Iran, even if confined to rhetoric, in addition to new Congressional sanctions and zero diplomatic outreach, could only produce negative consequences. Iran’s parliament has now voted to increase spending on its ballistic missile program and the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] in…

“The corporate lobby and Republican congressional leaders oppose the changes to NAFTA necessary to stop job offshoring, create good jobs and raise wages. Instead, they seek to double down on the old trade model and revive the TPP by adding to NAFTA elements of the TPP deal that Trump opposed.”

“The racists who have begun coming to Charlottesville to campaign for governor, garner attention, threaten violence, engage in violence, and commit murder are almost all from outside Charlottesville, and extremely unwelcome here. Charlottesville is a slightly left-of-center, Democratic Party area. Most people don’t rally for good causes or against bad ones. Most people don’t want…

News conference speakers will include: * CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou * Former State Department official Matthew Hoh * Christie Edwards, Chair of the ASIL Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict and an advisor to the Center for Civilians in Conflict on international humanitarian, human rights, and gender issues. * David Swanson, World Beyond…

“The Justice Department’s crackdown on leaks wrongly targets and punishes national security whistleblowers, who have no meaningful internal channels for dissent or meaningful protection from retaliation. The crackdown is a backdoor way of attacking journalists on whom the public relies to be informed about government misconduct.”

“By voting in new sanctions against Russia, Congress torpedoed the White House’s dream of rapprochement with the Kremlin. Yet its real target was not a foreign foe but an unpopular Republican president threatened by impeachment over alleged electoral manipulation. With the commander in chief dogged by perceived softness on Moscow and crippled by plummeting approval…

“Under U.S. law, the president’s executive order has to state an obvious falsehood, that there is ‘a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security’ of the United States caused by Venezuela.”