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Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States announces that “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Ad Policy The attorney general of the United States is a civil officer.
If he has lied under oath to the Senate, that act demands impeachment.
After news reports published last Wednesday made it clear that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had deceived the Senate regarding his interactions with Russian officials, there were immediate demands that the attorney general recuse himself from investigations into issues relating to those lies and that he resign as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.
Sessions announced Thursday afternoon that he would recuse himself from any examination of Russian involvement with President Trump’s campaign.
But he gave no indication that he would consider the next necessary step of removing himself as attorney general.
Sessions has made his position clear.
This lawless attorney general is not going to do the right thing, so Congress must consider the prospect of impeachment.
The founders anticipated such circumstance.
This is why they outlined an impeachment process.
Here’s why: The Washington Post has revealed that during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Sessions was a close counselor and top surrogate for Donald Trump, he spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.
Sessions acknowledges the meetings now.
But when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee as Trump’s nominee for attorney general in January, Senator Al Franken asked how Sessions might handle revelations that individuals associated with the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russian government.
Sessions replied: “I’m not aware of any of those activities.
I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians.” This was not the only denial from Sessions.
According to The Washington Post: In January, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Sessions for answers to written questions.
“Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties.
Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.
Sessions responded with one word: “No.” We now know that was not the case.
And, unless Sessions is far too absentminded to continue to serve as attorney general (a circumstance that no one seriously entertains at this point), then we have been handed evidence that this man engaged in a blatant attempt to deceive the very Senate that was charged with determining whether he would take charge of the Department of Justice.
Sessions and his aides were busy making excuses Wednesday night and Thursday morning, claiming that he spoke with the ambassador in his capacity as a senator rather than as a Trump surrogate—and that the Russian ambassador was one of many foreign officials with whom he met as “a senior member of the Armed Services Committee.” So what?
The issue isn’t whether Sessions spoke with the ambassador.
Nor does it matter whether he did so as a senator or as a Trump surrogate.
He was both.
What matters is what Sessions told fellow senators when he was asked straightforward questions.
He volunteered, “I did not have communications with the Russians.” He replied “no” to a direct inquiry about whether he had such communications.
If these were not overt lies they were, at the very least, legalistic attempts by Sessions to deceive colleagues who were charged by the Constitution with a duty to provide advice and consent regarding his nomination to serve as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.
Of course, Sessions had to recuse himself from inquires into inquiries into allegations that the Russians meddled in the 2016 election.
As New York Representative Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, explained, “[The] revelation about then-Senator Sessions’s contact with Russia’s ambassador removes all doubt that he must recuse himself from any investigation of Russia’s interference in last year’s election.
He should do so without delay.
The President should also appoint a special prosecutor to handle this matter whose work must complement a thorough investigation by a bipartisan commission.” Ready to Fight Back?
Sign Up For Take Action Now Even Republicans who have been slow to hold the Trump administration to account were calling for recusal.
House Oversight and Government Reform committee chair Jason Chaffetz tweeted: “AG Sessions should clarify his testimony and recuse himself.” The decision by Sessions to recuse himself addressed concerns about his personal involvement tainting specific investigations.
But it did not address the issue of Sessions’s lying to the Senate.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi proposed a more appropriate response to the revelations regarding Sessions; declaring that “after lying under oath to Congress about his own communications with the Russians, the Attorney General must resign.
Sessions is not fit to serve as the top law enforcement officer of our country and must resign.
There must be an independent, bipartisan, outside commission to investigate the Trump political, personal and financial connections to the Russians.” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer agreed.
So did Senator Elizabeth Warren, who said: “We need a special prosecutor totally independent of the AG.
We need a real, bipartisan, transparent Congressional investigation into Russia.
And we need Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who should have never been confirmed in the first place—to resign.
We need it now.” True enough.
But Sessions is not about to resign.
And his record does not offer any indication that he intends to start telling the truth.
The founders anticipated such circumstances, which is why they wrote a constitution that outlined an impeachment process.
The catch-all phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” was intended to give guardians of the republic leeway for holding presidents, vice presidents, and cabinet members to account.
An impeached official is not charged by a prosecutor and tried in the courts; nor is he or she jailed or fined if found guilty.
An impeached official is charged by the House of Representatives, tried by the Senate, and removed from office if convicted.
The signers of the Constitution did not intend that this tool would be used only by the opposition party; the intent was that all members of the House and Senate might rise above partisanship and ideology when it came time to defend the American experiment.
And, while no one is naive about the level of partisanship in today’s Washington, no one should make excuses for House members or senators who fail to rise above it.
Jeff Sessions disrespected the basic premises of that experiment and disregarded the Constitution.
He did so in pursuit of a position: that of attorney general of the United States.
He obtained that position under false pretenses.
It is now time to relieve him of his responsibilities as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.
The tool, impeachment, is at the ready.
It should be employed by all members of Congress who believe that constitutionally defined oaths must be upheld.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s postal service was hit by Wannacry ransomware last week and some of its computers are still down, three employees in Moscow said, the latest sign of weaknesses that have made the country a major victim of the global extortion campaign.
A man walks out of a branch of Russian Post in Moscow, Russia, May 24, 2017.
REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov Wannacry compromised the post office’s automated queue management system, infecting touch-screen terminals which run on the outdated Windows XP operating system, one of the workers said.
Terminals were still blank in some parts of Moscow this week but it was not clear exactly how many branches had been affected.
A spokesman for Russian Post, a state-owned monopoly, said no computers were infected, but some terminals were temporarily switched off as a precaution.
“The virus attack did not touch Russian Post, all systems are working and stable,” he said.
Other institutions in Russia have said they were infected by the virus, highlighting Moscow’s readiness to show it too is a frequent victim of cyber crime in the face of allegations from the United States and Europe of state-sponsored hacking.
The Interior Ministry, mobile operator MegaFon (MFON.MM) and state rail monopoly Russian Railways all reported infections, with employees locked out of their computers and the creators of the virus demanding ransoms of $300 to $600.
The Russian central bank said on Friday the virus had also compromised some Russian banks in isolated cases.
That the infected post office terminals ran on Windows XP - which Microsoft stopped supporting in 2014 - points to the widespread use of outdated software in Russia, which experts say left the country disproportionately vulnerable to the attack.
Of 300,000 computers infected worldwide, 20 percent were in Russia, according to an initial estimate by cybersecurity researchers last week.
Globally, few ransoms have been paid after many victims found they could restore their systems from backups.
The post office outages also illustrate what investigators say is a common misconception about Wannacry: infected computers are more likely to be part of antiquated systems not deemed important enough to update with the latest security patches, rather than machines integral to the company’s core business.
“Many companies in Russia use outdated unpatched systems and older anti-malware solutions,” said Nikolay Grebennikov, vice president for R&D at data protection company Acronis.
“In big companies upgrades are hard to perform and avoided because of budget and scale.” SCRUTINY Russia’s relationship to cyber crime is under intense scrutiny after U.S. intelligence officials alleged that Russian hackers had tried to help Republican Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency by hacking Democratic Party servers.
Moscow has denied the allegations.
Investigators are yet to track down Wannacry’s criminal authors, saying they likely used a hacking tool built by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and leaked online in April.
It has not previously been reported that the Russian postal service, which employs more than 350,000 people, had been hit by the virus.
“The head guys rang on Thursday and said we had to turn off the terminals immediately.
They said this extortion virus had infected them,” a worker at a branch in northwest Moscow said, declining to be identified discussing internal company matters.
“They rang again yesterday and said we could turn them back on.
We did that, but you can see they still don’t work.” Employees at a second post office confirmed the electronic queuing system was broken but said they did not know why.
Two sources at Russian Railways said the company had suffered a “huge” cyber attack and a small number of computers were infected without damaging any important files.
The extent of the damage had been limited, one of the sources said, because a lot of computers were turned off at the end of the working week.
“We were lucky it was a Friday night,” he said.
Megafon, which is Russia’s second biggest mobile operator, declined to comment on how the virus had got into its system.
It said the virus had caused a temporary outage of its customer support services.
“Our sales points suffered worst of all because Windows, which had the exploited vulnerability, is more widely used in retail,” a company statement said.
COMPUTER PIRACY The frequent use of pirated software in Russia also helped spread the Wannacry infection, investigators said, as unlicensed products do not receive security updates.
Reuters has found no evidence any of Russian companies infected with the Wannacry virus were using unlicensed software.
But computer piracy is a long-standing issue for technology companies in Russia, one which has as become increasingly acute as the country’s economic slump and falling earnings make licensed products prohibitively expensive.
A woman walks past a branch of Russian Post in Moscow, Russia, May 24, 2017.
REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov Data compiled by the BSA Software Alliance trade group shows 64 percent of software products in Russia were pirated in 2015 - a black market industry worth $1.3 billion - compared to a global average of 39 percent.
“Piracy is still wide spread in Russia, especially if we are talking about home users,” Grebennikov said.
“This is because of poverty.
If an operating system costs say 500 rubles, people would buy it.” Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system currently costs around 8,000 rubles ($140.92) in Russia, around a fifth of the average monthly wage of 39,000 rubles.
Online, the same product can be illegally downloaded for free.
Stanley “Boom” Williams decided to enter the 2017 NFL Draft after a productive three year career at Kentucky.
Williams rushed for 1,170-yards and seven touchdowns in the 2016 season.
He boasted an impressive 6.8 yards per carry and posed a threat to hit a home run every time he touched the ball.
Now, he’s joining the Bengals as an undrafted free agent after going undrafted this weekend.
Williams could be an effective back in the league if he’s able to stay healthy.
At 5’7”, 190 pounds, Williams has always had issues with durability.
His small stature also presents issues when pass-blocking and running between the tackles.
However, Williams’ athleticism and ability to break off the big run makes him deserving of a chance to make the roster in Cincinnati.