Did AG Sessions conspire, collude, obstruct, or perjure himself?

Russia’s ambassador to Washington told his superiors in Moscow that he discussed campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow, with Jeff Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, contrary to public assertions by the embattled attorney general, according to the Washington Post.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s accounts of two conversations with Sessions — then a top foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump — were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, which monitor the communications of senior Russian officials in the United States and in Russia. Sessions initially failed to disclose his contacts with Kislyak and then said that the meetings were not about the Trump campaign.

One U.S. official said that Sessions — who testified that he had no recollection of an April encounter — has provided “misleading” statements that are “contradicted by other evidence.” A former official said that the intelligence indicates that Sessions and Kislyak had “substantive” discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for U.S.-Russia relations in a Trump administration.

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Miami is now one of the safest cities in America

Just jumped on a plane to Miami, Florida. I bet you didn't know this--Miami, once labeled “Paradise Lost” by Time magazine because of a searing homicide rate fueled by a crippling drug trade, is now one of the safest major cities in the U.S. when it comes to gun related deaths.

According to the Miami Herald, of the 26 homicides over the first six months of this year in Miami, only 16 were due to gunfire, records obtained from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner and the city’s police department show.

Both numbers represent historic lows for a city that often racked up close to 300 homicides during the 1980s and which has seen those numbers drop by about 75 percent or more the past three years.

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President Trump tweets he has “complete” ability to pardon

President Donald Trump claimed in a tweet today that he has the “complete” ability to pardon, according to the Huffington Post.

Trump’s pardon claim came after The Washington Post reported that he had inquired with his lawyers about how pardons work and speculation he is considering pardons for aides, his family, and even potentially himself.

It’s unclear if he actually could legally pardon himself. The Constitution’s presidential pardon provision does not explicitly ban the president from doing so. But Elizabeth Holtzman, a former Democratic congresswoman who served on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal, argued in a Post op-ed this month that the president pardoning himself would undermine the entire constitution.

“A presidential self-pardoning power would seriously undermine the rule of law. If presidents could self-pardon, they could engage in monstrously wrongful and criminal conduct with impunity,” she wrote. “That would utterly violate the framers’ belief in a limited presidency and in the idea that no president is above the law.”

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DA candidate: Cutting health care 'jeopardizes public safety'

Larry Krasner, the Democratic candidate for Philadelphia district attorney, wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
In the name of health-care reform, politicians in Washington and Harrisburg [propose] . . . "curtailing important Obamacare protections and cutting back on Medicaid — threatens the lives of tens of thousands of Philadelphians."

It also jeopardizes public safety. When people are faced with chronic health problems or a life-threatening situation involving a family member, and have no options or support, they will act in desperation. When people are unable to afford treatment for behavioral health issues because they lack insurance, the criminal justice system often becomes the only societal structure that intervenes.

Under the American Health Care Act passed by the House of Representatives in May, 1.3 million Pennsylvanians would lose health insurance and 3,250 would die prematurely for lack of it, according to a statement from Marc Stier, director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate’s proposed Better Care Reconciliation Act would eliminate federal funding for the Medicaid expansion and impose caps on traditional Medicaid. That would cost Pennsylvania more than $30 billion in federal funding between 2020 and 2026 alone, says a Manatt Health / Robert Wood Johnson Foundation analysis.

Let’s look specifically at the impact these Medicaid cuts would have. Medicaid is not just a source of health care for millions of Americans, which allows them to remain productive and to take care of other family members. It is also the source of drug treatment and mental health services for the most vulnerable members of our population, including people reentering society from incarceration.

The Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act enables 160,000 more Philadelphians to receive mental health or substance-abuse treatment. According to the Mayor’s Office, almost 40,000 of them are using these services. Statewide, 140,000 people have used the Medicaid expansion for addiction treatment since 2015, the Wolf administration estimates. And nationwide, Medicaid expenditures on opioid-blocking medications such as naltrexone, which many low-income people rely on to kick their addiction, increased tenfold in 2016, according to an Urban Institute report. The demand for such treatment shows no signs of slowing down.

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Mangino analyzes Yurich trial for WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview on WFMJ-TV21 regarding the trial of Poland, Ohio doctor Joseph Yurich accused in a deadly boating accident two years ago on Berlin Reservoir.  A verdict is expected today.
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The Trace: 4 Out of 10 Self-Defense Handgun Owners Have Received No Formal Firearms Training

More Americans than ever before own firearms for protection, but the percentage of people who undergo formal training on how to use their weapons has flatlined, a new paper published in the journal Injury Prevention shows.

The research, conducted by Ali Rowhani-Rahbar and Vivian Lyons, epidemiologists at the University of Washington, along with public health experts at Northeastern and Harvard, finds that 61 percent of all gun owners reported receiving formal firearms training. The researchers say this a statistically insignificant increase over the 56 to 58 percent of gun owners who reported receiving training in 1994, the last time a comparable survey was conducted, reported The Trace.

Of gun owners who said they own a handgun for the sole purpose of protection, 57 percent said they had received formal training. Only 14 percent of those who live with a gun owner, but who do not own guns themselves, have received safety training, which the authors say is a troubling finding considering how often accidental shootings or suicides are committed with guns that belong to a parent, spouse, or roommate.

“Despite the presence of training programs all around the country, it looks like they are not reaching a larger fraction of gun owners than they were 20 years ago,” said Rowhani-Rahbar. “I was surprised to see that.”

The researchers based their analysis on data from the National Firearms Survey, considered the first nationally representative investigation in more than two decades into how and why Americans keep weapons. The survey was conducted online in 2015 on behalf of a research team from Harvard and Northeastern universities by GfK, a market-research company. It surveyed nearly 4,000 Americans and oversampled for veterans and gun owners.

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Report singles out federal prison in PA for poor treatment of mentally ill

The Office of the Inspector General for the US Department of Justice  issued a report on criticizing the Bureau of Prison's (BOP) treatment of inmates with mental illnesses. The report singles out  a prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, having a pending lawsuit against it, alleging that the institution mistreated prisoners and denied adequate mental health services. According to the report, the BOP is violating its own recently implemented policy by keeping prisoners with mental illness in solitary confinement for toolong and denying them medical treatment. The American Correctional Association recommends that solitary confinement cells be no smaller than 80 square feet, but those at Lewisburg are a mere 58.5 square feet.

 Prisoners who suffer from mental illness are confined with other afflicted inmates which often results in violent confrontations that cause serious injuries or death. The report also found that many who arrive at Lewisburg prison with mental disorders are denied treatment and medication. "We believe that the additional requirements established by the new policy, along with no increase in mental health staffing, resulted in institution mental health staffs reducing the number of inmates, who are required to receive more frequent mental health care." According to NPR, the BOP's acting director agreed to conduct a "comprehensive review" of Lewisburg prison and adopt the recommendations provided by the report.

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