Page 6 - Florida Sentinel 7-16-19

White House And Political News
Trump Team Says Video Clears Him Of Nonconsensual Kiss Claim; Other Side Says Not So Fast
Trump Tells Democrat Congresswomen During Racist Tweet: Go Back To Where You Came From
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP.
A video of an encounter between Donald Trump and a then campaign aide clears him of her claims that he kissed her without con- sent, lawyers for Trump say, while the woman’s attorney says otherwise.
said.”
“Now, whether or not
everybody would have felt vi- olated by that is an open question. But Alva was. And she testified exactly why she felt uncomfortable. She testi- fied that she didn’t really know how to react when it happened and that she was confused and uncomfort- able,” he wrote Thursday.
Johnson has said in in- terviews with the press that as Trump went to kiss her, she turned her head and his lips landed on the side of her mouth, humiliating her. As the Post reports, Johnson said when Trump’s infa- mous Access Hollywood recording came out with him bragging about groping and kissing women, she realized that is what he had done to her.
“I felt sick to my stom- ach,” Johnson told the Post. “That was what he did to me.”
Trump lawyer Charles Harder released a 15-sec- ond video to the media this week, saying it clearly shows Alva Johnson, then a Trump campaign worker, engaged in an “innocent in- teraction” with Trump at a 2016 campaign event.
PRES. TRUMP
Johnson filed suit against Trump earlier this year, accusing him of “bat- tery” by kissing her without permission at the event, and charging he paid her and other black staffers less than their white and male co- workers.
Johnson’s battery claim as “unmeritorious and frivo- lous.” The video, he argued, shows an “innocent interac- tion that is mutual — and not forcible.”
President Donald Trump, jumping into the middle of a feud among House Democrats, called out progressive congresswomen in xenophobic terms on Sun- day, saying, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
While he didn’t mention them by name in his series of tweets, Trump was presum- ably targeting some of the caucus’s best-known fresh- man women of color: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D- Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D- Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
“So interesting to see ‘Pro- gressive’ Democrat Congress- women, who originally came from countries whose govern- ments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept any- where in the world (if they even have a functioning gov- ernment at all), now loudly and viciously telling the peo- ple of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our gov- ernment is to be run,” the president wrote.
Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley were all born in the United States. Omar, a Somalian refugee, immigrated to the U. S. with her family in the early 1990s.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he added. “Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
Hours later, after dozens of assorted tweets and re-
tweets, the president circled back to attack again.
“So sad to see the Democ- rats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and un- bridled passion,” he wrote. “Whenever confronted, they call their adversaries, includ- ing Nancy Pelosi, ‘RACIST.’ Their disgusting language ..... and the many terrible things they say about the United States must not be allowed to go unchallenged.”
If the posts were intended to exploit simmering tensions within the Democratic Party after weeks of messy public infighting, however, they in- stead gave embattled House Democrats a common oppo- nent to rally against — the president himself.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been at odds with some of the most liberal members of her caucus, and other top Democrats fired back.
Pelosi said the president’s “xenophobic comments” were reaffirming his plan to make “America white again.” Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), the No. 4 House Democrat, said the comments were “a racist tweet from a racist pres- ident.”
Other House Democrats also quickly weighed in, de- fending their colleagues, and Ocasio-Cortez turned the focus back on Trump’s im- migration policies.
“Mr. President, the country I ‘come from,’ & the country we all swear to, is the United States,” she tweeted. “But given how you’ve de- stroyed our border with inhu- mane camps, all at a benefit to you & the corps who profit off them, you are absolutely right about the corruption laid at your feet.”
But as the Washington Post reports:
In a Wednesday court fil- ing, Harder brushed off
DeVos Sued Program That
One of the nation’s largest teachers unions filed suit Thursday against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, ac- cusing her agency of misman- aging a major program intended to provide student loan forgiveness to public serv- ice workers.
The American Federation of Teachers claims the Education Department has improperly rejected the applications of teachers seeking public service loan forgiveness and violated their constitutional right to due process.
AFT President Randi Weingarten and eight stu- dent loan borrowers who are teachers or work in public service jobs are named as plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed in federal court in Wash- ington, D. C.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which was passed by Congress in 2007, was designed to allow student loan borrowers who work in public service jobs to have their loans discharged after they make 10 years of payments. But relatively few borrowers have been able to obtain the benefit in recent years, as the Education De- partment has rejected roughly
Johnson attorney Has- san Zavareei says not so fast, telling the Post:
[...] the video “corrobo- rates exactly what Alva
Over Student Loan Forgiveness Denies 99 Percent Of Applicants
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has said that Congress, not the Education Department has caused more problems.
99 percent of applications. That's left tens of thousands of frustrated borrowers with stu- dent loans they thought would be forgiven after they worked a decade on the job.
The department has said that the applications are being rejected because borrowers have not met the eligibility re- quirements of the program.
The AFT’s lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of arbitrarily and capriciously re- jecting loan forgiveness appli- cations, failing to properly oversee the loan servicers it hires to administer the pro- gram and denying borrowers
the loan forgiveness benefit without due process.
“Instead of helping the mil- lions of Americans owed debt relief under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, DeVos has hurt and pauper- ized them,” Weingarten said in a statement. “And instead of working with lawmakers to im- prove the program that mil- lions of teachers, firefighters, nurses and first responders de- serve, DeVos has vandalized it.”
Education Department spokesperson Liz Hill said in an email that the department “doesn’t comment on pending litigation” but added that the agency “is faithfully adminis- tering the complex program Congress passed.”
DeVos has previously said that Congress, not the Educa- tion Department, has caused some of the problems by creat- ing a complicated set of re- strictions on which types of loans and loan repayment plans are eligible for public service loan forgiveness. The Education Department in De- cember created an online tool that was meant to help bor- rowers better understand whether they qualify for the program.
PAGE 6 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2019