Puerto Rico’s governor denied allegations of obstruction of justice late Monday as the main opposition party demanded she be investigated and hinted at a possible impeachment process in what could be the latest round of political upheaval for the U.S. territory. In a brief statement, Gov. Wanda Vázquez for the first time acknowledged an alleged investigation that the island’s Department of Justice is supposedly conducting against her, saying she was never told about it. The details of the alleged investigation were not immediately clear.

Iran's hardline lawmakers plan to summon the president for questioning, a move that could ultimately lead to impeachment, media reported on Monday, amid growing discontent over the government's economic policies. Iranians' daily struggle to make ends meet has become harder since the reimposition of U.S. sanctions in 2018, and the economy has been further damaged by rising inflation, growing unemployment, a slump in the rial and the coronavirus crisis. A motion to question President Hassan Rouhani was signed by 120 lawmakers out of 290 and handed to the presiding board of the assembly, Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

Donald Trump’s nomination of two justices seemed to have tilted the balance decisively but recent rulings have raised eyebrowsFor all the ominous twists of Donald Trump’s presidency, his placement on the US supreme court of two deeply conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, inspired a special kind of foreboding for many liberals.With three conservatives already sitting on the court, the creation by Trump of a seemingly impregnable, five-vote conservative supreme court majority appeared to pose a generational threat to essential American rights and freedoms.But as the first full term with the two Trump “supremes” draws to a close, a curious development has taken hold. Last month, the court handed down a trio of rulings that clashed directly with Trump’s agenda on the hot-button issues of abortion, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights – angering the president, tentatively pleasing progressives and leaving many court watchers to scratch their heads.There never was any doubt about the kind of supreme court that Trump and his sponsors set out to build. But suddenly there is doubt everywhere about how close – or far – their project has come to success.“I’ve referred to this past month at the supreme court as Blue June,” said Josh Blackman, a conservative court analyst and professor at the South Texas College of Law. “It seems as if almost all the big cases went to the left, and it’s made conservatives blue – that is, sad.”First Gorsuch wrote an opinion destroying the Trump administration’s argument that a 1964 law prohibiting employment discrimination “because of sex” does not apply to homosexual or transgender employees. “Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender,” Gorsuch wrote. “The answer is clear.”Then Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W Bush appointee, found that the government had failed to make its case for ending a program protecting so-called Dreamers – undocumented immigrants who arrived to the US as children.“Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” Trump tweeted after the decision was released.Roberts struck again later in the month, vacating a Louisiana anti-abortion law on the grounds that the supreme court had vacated an identical law in Texas just four years earlier, before the arrival of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.Roberts’ defection eliminated the law in a narrow 5-4 ruling.Daniel Goldberg, legal director at the progressive Alliance For Justice, called the victory on abortion surprising, but not because it demonstrated some unforeseen liberal bent on the part of the justices.“You know what surprises me, is that it wasn’t 9-0,” said Goldberg. “What does it say that four justices were completely willing to ignore precedent just four years old?“The response to these decisions just epitomizes how extreme the conservative legal movement is in this country.”Legal analysts cautioned the recent unexpected rulings were not signs of real moderation, and they said the court had moved unmistakably to the right under Trump.Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were willing to expose about 700,000 Dreamers to deportation, and both justices argued in favor of upholding the Louisiana abortion law, which was seen as posing an existential threat to the landmark Roe v Wade decision. Even in tipping that case to the left, Roberts emphasized that he was not doing so on the merits.“He has been consistently not supportive of abortion rights,” said Gillian Metzger, a professor of constitutional law at Columbia University, of Roberts. “I would not read into his decision any signal that, if confronted with a new kind of abortion measure, or even potentially if confronted with an effort to really rethink reproductive rights generally, that Roberts would necessarily be a very sympathetic respondent.”The court has advanced other conservative causes this term, expanding presidential power and challenging the separation of church and state by releasing public funding for religious schools.In one case, the four most conservative justices, including Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, ruled in favor of forcibly reopening California churches, against the will of state officials, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, so that Christians could celebrate Pentecost. Again, with Roberts’ defection, they were overruled.Multiple analysts said Trump’s failure, despite having a sympathetic court, to deliver on his promises to dismantle Barack Obama’s healthcare law and roll back abortion rights, could lie partly with flaws in his own administration’s legal strategies.In a series of cases, Trump lawyers have advanced arguments that Roberts has found to be pretextual or beside the point, as when administration lawyers said they wanted to include a question about citizenship on the US census because they wanted better data to ensure protection of voting rights.Roberts, whose light touch as the presiding officer in Trump’s impeachment trial just seven months ago was seen as aiding Trump’s expeditious acquittal, doubted the argument. “Reasoned decision-making calls for an explanation for agency action,” he wrote. “What was provided here was more of a distraction.”A similar objection – not to say exasperation – was detectable in Roberts’ recent ruling to leave in place the Dreamers program. Lawyers defending immigrants in the case said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was trying to pretend that it might want to keep the program, but its hands were tied because parts of the program had been thrown out in court.Again, Roberts detected a note of disingenuousness. “An agency must defend its actions based on the reasons it gave when it acted,” he wrote. “This is not the case for cutting corners to allow DHS to rely upon reasons absent from its original decision.”“You see Roberts much more willing to push back on that side of the Trump administration, and so I would say that’s been a shift,” said Metzger. “Over time the Trump administration is losing a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.”Rulings remaining in the current term – there are eight outstanding cases – could include powerful conservative decisions that could yet erase any memory of the court’s recent moderation.In Trump v Mazars USA, the court is expected to rule on whether financial and accounting firms that have worked with Trump must hand over tax records subpoenaed by Congress, in what analysts say is a major test for the balance of powers in the US system of government.“Although Trump v Mazars is about the tax records, it’s actually about a more basic constitutional principle, which is whether or not Congress can take meaningful oversight of the executive branch,” said Metzger. “And if Congress cannot do that, then we really are moving much more towards an authoritarian presidential regime.”Just a few months after the last ruling of the term is issued, a much larger ruling will be handed down, with much broader implications, by some 140 million voters in the November presidential elections.If Democrat Joe Biden can defeat Trump, he appears likely to have the opportunity to appoint at least two justices, with the octogenarian liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, nearing retirement. The Democrats would have to win the Senate too to ensure a smooth confirmation process and preserve the court’s current ideological balance.“If the Democrats have the Senate, I think it’s very likely that Ginsburg retires immediately and Breyer retires the next year, two back-to-back,” said Blackman. “That wouldn’t affect the composition of the court, unless Justice [Clarence] Thomas becomes ill, so I think the court would more or less stay the same for a while.”But if they win a strong majority, Democrats could attempt to pass reforms to bring the court more in line with the popular will, by adding seats to the court or imposing time limits on justices.Whatever the election outcome, the last court term of Trump’s first term seems likely to be noted for its unpredictable twists.“This is a very strange term,” said Blackman. “I don’t remember one quite like it.”

"It is about protecting a merit-based system from political corruption and unlawful retaliation," Sen. Tammy Duckworth said.

Rep. Eric Swalwell to the Yahoo News "Skullduggery" podcast: Recent disclosures that the White House failed to act on intelligence showing that Russian operatives were paying bounties to kill American soldiers fully vindicates impeachment.

Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth said on Thursday that she would put a hold on the confirmation of over 1,000 military promotions until Defense Secretary Mark Esper provided assurances on the promotion of a former White House aide who testified in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who provided some of the most damaging testimony during an investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives into Trump's dealings with Ukraine, is up for a promotion to colonel.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who was an expert of Ukraine at the National Security Council, is expected to be promoted to full colonel.

Duckworth said her blockade on senior nominees would exempt Army Gen. Gustave Perna, nominated to lead the effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

After President Donald Trump said during his June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that increased testing was responsible for the surging number of infections, the condemnation of the inaccurate claim was swift. Six days later, during a Fox News town hall, Sean Hannity asked Trump about those remarks on increased testing. “Sometimes I jokingly say, or sarcastically say, if we didn’t do tests we would look great,” he replied. This seems to be a pattern. Two months earlier, the president had mused about the beneficial effects of injecting disinfectants into the body to combat COVID-19. After many health officials expressed their dismay, Trump repeatedly claimed that he was just being sarcastic.That same month, after he misspelled “Nobel Prize” in a tweet – writing it out as “Noble Prize” – he deleted the tweet before falling back on on a familiar excuse: sarcasm.What is it about sarcasm that makes it such a convenient excuse for people who are trying to distance themselves from what they’ve said?As I describe in my recent book on irony and sarcasm, most cognitive scientists and other language researchers think of sarcasm as a form of verbal irony. Both ways of speaking involve saying the opposite of what you mean. But the goals of irony and sarcasm are actually different.For example, if someone slowly intones “What beautiful weather!” on a cold and rainy day, it’s clear they’re speaking ironically about a disappointing state of affairs. In general, irony is used to provide commentary on unexpected and negative outcomes. Sarcasm, on the other hand, is most frequently used to disparage the actions of other people. If someone tells you that you’re a real genius after you forgot to meet them for an important appointment, they clearly don’t mean that you’re mentally gifted. Simply put, irony is commentary, but sarcasm is criticism.That seems straightforward enough. But in actual practice, the line between irony and sarcasm is blurry and confusing. Many people assert they are being sarcastic when they are in fact being ironic, as in commenting about the weather.The enlargement of the domain of sarcasm – at irony’s expense – is a linguistic shift that has been going on for some time. In fact, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg called attention to this phenomenon 20 years ago. So it’s hard to fault the president for conflating the two.Another element that makes sarcasm tricky to grasp has to do with saying the opposite of what is meant. The recipient of such a statement isn’t supposed to take it literally.For this reason, when we use verbal irony or sarcasm, we might employ cues to signal our nonliteral intent. We may, for example, speak in a tone of voice that’s slower, lower and louder than how we speak normally. Our pitch may swoop up or down. Ironic statements are also frequently accompanied by facial displays, such as a smirk or the rolling of the eyes.And that’s why, when being sarcastic over text or email, we’ll use emojis to relay nonliteral intent. Of course, even then, there’s no guarantee that the recipient will interpret the message correctly.President Trump does, at times, clearly make use of sarcasm. For example, at a December 2019 rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he said, referring to the House’s imminent decision to initiate impeachment proceedings, that the Democrats “also understand poll numbers, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with it.” He signals sarcasm by using absolute words like “sure” and “nothing” and by gesturing broadly with both hands. He also pauses to give his audience a moment to interpret his remark as the opposite of what he has said – that, in fact, “my high poll numbers have everything to do with impeachment.” The remark is sarcastic because there’s a clear target: the Democrats in Congress.But at both the Tulsa rally and his April press conference, the president’s controversial remarks didn’t have such accompanying verbal and nonverbal cues. He wasn’t being critical of anyone; he was simply asserting that testing leads to more infections, or asking what appeared to be sincere questions about the use of disinfectants to combat the virus. Chances are he literally meant what he said. As the president has repeatedly demonstrated, a claim of intended sarcasm can be used to walk back a remark that has been criticized or otherwise fallen flat. Thanks to our slippery understanding of the term, along with the way sarcasm can be easily missed, it can function like a “Get Out of Jail Free” card: The speaker can take a conversational mulligan and try to make things right.We’ve all said things that we later regretted and appealed to “just kidding” or “I was being sarcastic.” However, if we habitually reach for such excuses to absolve ourselves of linguistic sins, it becomes, like the little boy who cried wolf, less and less effective.Roger J. Kreuz is the author of:Irony and Sarcasm MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * What makes something ironic? * The rhetorical brilliance of Trump the demagogueRoger J. Kreuz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The intelligence finding that Russia was most likely paying a bounty for the lives of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan has evoked a strange silence from President Donald Trump and his top national security officials.He insists he never saw the intelligence, though it was part of the President's Daily Brief just days before a peace deal was signed with the Taliban in February.The White House says it was not even appropriate for him to be briefed because the president only sees "verified" intelligence -- prompting derision from officials who have spent years working on the daily brief and say it is most valuable when filled with dissenting interpretations and alternative explanations.But it does not require a high-level clearance for the government's most classified information to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War.There have been new cyberattacks on Americans working from home to exploit vulnerabilities in their corporate systems and continued concern about new playbooks for Russian actors seeking to influence the November election. Off the coast of Alaska, Russian jets have been testing U.S. air defenses, sending U.S. warplanes scrambling to intercept them.It is all part of what Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, said Monday was "the latest in a series of escalations from Putin's regime."Yet missing from all this is a strategy for pushing back -- old-fashioned deterrence, to pluck a phrase from the depths of the Cold War -- that could be employed from Afghanistan to Ukraine, from the deserts of Libya to the vulnerable voter registration rolls in battleground states.Officially, in Trump's national security strategy, Russia is described as a "revisionist power" whose efforts to peel away NATO allies and push the United States out of the Middle East have to be countered. But the paper strategy differs significantly from the reality.There are at least two Russia strategies in this divided administration. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, usually so attuned to Trump, speaks for the hawkish wing: He came to the State Department podium a few weeks ago to declare that Crimea, annexed by Russia six years ago, will never be recognized as Russian territory.Then there is the president, who "repeatedly objected to criticizing Russia and pressed us not to be so critical of Russia publicly," his former national security adviser, John Bolton, notes in his recent memoir. A parade of other former national security aides have emerged, bruised, with similar reports.Yet the nature of intelligence -- always incomplete and not always definitive -- gives Trump an opening to dismiss anything that challenges his worldview."By definition, intelligence means looking at pieces of a puzzle," said Glenn S. Gerstell, who retired this year as general counsel of the National Security Agency, before the Russian bounty issue was front and center. "It's not unusual to have inconsistencies. And the President's Daily Brief, not infrequently, would say that there is no unanimity in the intelligence community, and would explain the dissenting views or the lack of corroboration."That absence of clarity has not slowed Trump when it comes to placing new sanctions on China and Iran, who pose very different kinds of challenges to U.S. power.Yet the president made no apparent effort to sort through evidence on Russia, even before his most recent call with President Vladimir Putin, when he invited the Russian leader to a Group of 7 meeting planned for September in Washington. Russia has been banned from the group since the Crimea invasion, and Trump was essentially restoring it to the G-8 over the objection of many of America's closest allies.The White House will not say whether he would have acted differently had he been aware of the Russian bounty for American lives."If you're going to be on the phone with Vladimir Putin, this is something you ought to know," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who managed the impeachment trial against Trump. "This is something you ought to know if you're inviting Russia back into the G-8."It is just the latest example of how, in Trump's "America First" approach, he rarely talks about Russia strategy other than to say it would be good to be friends. He relies on his gut and talks about his "good relationship" with Putin, echoing a line he often uses about Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator.So it is little surprise that after 3 1/2 years, there is often hesitation to bring Trump damning intelligence about Russia.And in this case, there was another element: concern inside the White House about any intelligence findings that might interfere with the administration's announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban.After months of broken-off negotiations, Trump was intent on announcing the accord in February, as a prelude to declaring that he was getting Americans out of Afghanistan. As one senior official described it, the evidence about Russia could have threatened that deal because it suggested that after 18 years of war, Trump was letting Russia chase the last U.S. troops out of the country.The warning to Trump appeared in the president's briefing book -- which Bolton said almost always went unread -- in late February. On Feb. 28, the president issued a statement that a signing ceremony for the Afghan deal was imminent."When I ran for office," Trump said in the statement, "I promised the American people I would begin to bring our troops home and see to end this war. We are making substantial progress on that promise."He dispatched Pompeo to witness the signing with the Taliban. And as Trump noted in a tweet over the weekend, there have been no major attacks on U.S. troops since. (Instead, the attacks have focused on Afghan troops and civilians.)Russia's complicity in the bounty plot came into sharper focus Tuesday as The New York Times reported that U.S. officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia's military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, according to officials familiar with the intelligence.The United States has accused Russia of providing general support to the Taliban before. But the newly revealed information about financial transfers bolstered other evidence of the plot, including detainee interrogations, and helped reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees.Lawmakers on Tuesday emerged from closed briefings on the matter to challenge why Trump and his advisers failed to recognize the seriousness of the intelligence assessment."I'm concerned they didn't pursue it as aggressively or comprehensively as they should have," said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who heads the House Armed Services Committee. "Clearly there was evidence that Russia was paying the bounties."The oddity, of course, is that despite Trump's deference to the Russians, relations between Moscow and Washington under the Trump administration have nose-dived.That was clear in the stiff sentence handed down recently in Moscow against Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, after his conviction on espionage charges in what the U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Sullivan, called a "mockery of justice."Even Russian state television now regularly mocks Trump as a buffoon, very different from its gushing tone during the 2016 presidential election.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company