Page 6 - Florida Sentinel 7-24-18

White House and Political News
Former Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen Meets With Reverend Al Sharpton
Rev. Sharpton is a news show host, civil rights activist and au- thor who has had a banner year that celebrated success across many of his endeavors met with Michael Cohen.
Family Reunifications: 450 Down, Roughly 1,900 To Go By Thursday
Washington--The Trump administration has reunited at least 450 families sepa- rated at the border with chil- dren 5 and older, including almost 100 just overnight.
But there are still roughly 1,900 who need to be reuni- fied or ruled ineligible by next Thursday, and a govern- ment attorney warned "some complicated issues" will pop up in the coming week.
Still, at a court hearing Friday afternoon, the judge who last month ordered the government to put back to- gether the families it had sep- arated at the border said he was very pleased with how things are going.
"I am just very impressed with the effort that is being made," U. S. District Judge Dana Sabraw told the at- torneys in the case. "It really does appear that there's been great progress and that -- at least for those class members who are eligible and easy, rel- atively speaking, to reunify, and that's a very significant number of the group -- that
The US government has to meet 4 big deadlines in 7 days on separated families
that is happening, and it's very promising."
After the Trump adminis- tration's widely criticized "zero-tolerance" immigration policy that resulted in thou- sands of family separations at the border, Sabraw ordered the government to reunite families it had separated, in- cluding those from before that official policy.
Some of the parents and children have spent months apart, shuffled to facilities all
over the country. Communi- cation has been difficult for many, with some parents of even young speaking to their kids only a handful of times at best.
But the pace of reunions has ramped up substantially this week, as officials scram- ble to meet the judge's dead- line.
Justice Department attor- ney August Flentje told the judge that even since an up- date filed Thursday evening, another almost 100 children had been reunited with their parents.
As of 7 a.m. ET Friday, there had been 450 reunifica- tions. That was in addition to the at least 58 children under 5 who were reunited in the first stage of the court's order.
But there are 2,551 chil- dren 5 and older in govern- ment custody likely to have been separated from their parents at the border who must be reunified by next Thursday's deadline, if they are found eligible.
As the Russia-Washington situation grows more convo- luted and scandalous by the day comes word that one of the NYC activist community’s most well-known advocates, the former Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen met with Rev. Al Sharpton, on Fri- day and had breakfast.
TheGrio does not know what was served at the meal, but the FBI has a recording of President Donald Trump and in which the two men prior to the 2016 election dis- cussed a payment to a former Playboy model who had an alleged affair with Trump, Rudy Giuliani told CNN.
Sharpton appeared to downplay the meeting, tweet- ing that he has known Cohen for two decades and Cohen often offered himself up as an intermediary when Sharpton and Trump had a beef.
“I’ve known @MichaelCo- hen212 for 20 years,” Sharp- ton tweeted Friday morning. “He was a Democrat. He used to broker meetings between Trump and I when we were fighting.”
Sharpton discussed the Friday breakfast meeting on MSNBC Friday night.
“I received a text from him
saying he wanted to meet,” Sharpton said. “We met at a public restaurant and we spoke for over an hour. He was very troubled and felt in many ways cast wrongly. And I feel that he was saying that he had been abandoned by Mr. Trump.”
Cohen gave the impres- sion he was going to divulge secrets related to Trump, Sharpton told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
“He kept saying to me over and over again, ‘Rev., I am going to do what is right for the country and what is right for my family,’ ” Sharpton said. “He was adamant that he was opposed to things that Mr. Trump was doing.”
Sharpton said he felt that Cohen’s outreach to him was meant to send a sig- nal to the president that Cohen was not on the side of the White House.
“Out of all the people he could reach out to, reaching out to me is sending a signal to Mr. Trump and I think, probably, to prosecutors that he was not one who would not deal with someone who has been fighting Donald Trump for decades on social justice issues,” Sharpton said.
NY Times: Trump Was Recorded Talking Of Paying Playboy Model
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer secretly recorded Trump discussing payments to a former Play- boy model who said she had an affair with him, The New York Times reported Friday. The president’s current per- sonal lawyer confirmed the conversation and said it showed Trump did nothing wrong, according to the Times.
Citing lawyers and others familiar with the recording, The Times said attorney Michael Cohen made the recording two months before Trump’s 2016 election. The newspaper said the FBI seized the recording during an April raid on Cohen’s of- fice amid an investigation into his business dealings.
People familiar with the investigation have told The Associated Press that the raid sought, among other things, any information on payments made in 2016 to former Play- boy model Karen McDou- gal, who says she had an affair with Trump in 2006. He denies it.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
The Wall Street Jour- n a l revealed, days before the election, that the National Enquirer — run by Trump supporter David Pecker — had paid $150,000 to silence McDougal. At the time, Trump campaign spokes- woman Hope Hicks said, “We have no knowledge of any of this.”
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told the Times the Republican president did dis- cuss the payments to Mc- Dougal with Cohen on the
less than two-minute-long recording, but that the pay- ment was never made.
Giuliani says Trump told Cohen that if he did make a payment, to do it by check so it could be docu- mented.
“Nothing in that conver- sation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in ad- vance,” Giuliani told the newspaper. “In the big scheme of things, it’s power- ful exculpatory evidence.”
Giuliani and Cohen haven’t immediately re- sponded to messages from The Associated Press. Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis declined to comment to the Times.
McDougal’s lawyer, Peter Stris, did not immedi- ately respond to a message.
Cohen, a self-described fixer for Trump for more than a decade, said last year that he “would take a bullet” for Trump. But Cohen told an interviewer earlier this month that he now puts “family and country first” and won’t let anyone paint him as “a villain of this story.”
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