Author: PolitCens

Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, on Thursday promised to show how Trump cheated in the 2016 election with Russian help in an upcoming book titled “Disloyal, A Memoir.”
 
“Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything — and I mean anything — to ‘win’ has always been his business model and way of life,” Cohen writes in the book’s foreword, which was published online on Thursday.
 
The 3,700-word foreword does not reveal anything new about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, and it was not clear if the book would.
 
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller last year concluded that Russia waged a major campaign to help Trump to victory in 2016.
 
Mueller did not find evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but he did detail extensive contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives.
 
Cohen worked closely with Trump for years before turning against him, most publicly in testimony to Congress last year prior to Trump’s impeachment.
 
Cohen said he knows where Trump’s metaphorical “skeletons” are buried because he buried them.
 
White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern responded by attacking Cohen’s credibility.
 
“He readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales. It’s unfortunate that the media is exploiting this sad and desperate man to attack President Trump,” Morgenstern said.
 
Trump has called Cohen “a rat,” and a liar, and Cohen said he faced repeated death threats from Trump supporters.
 
Cohen, 53, is serving a three-year sentence for tax evasion, false statements and campaign finance violations, the last related to payments to silence women who alleged affairs with Trump before the 2016 presidential election.
 
Cohen was released to home confinement in May given the risks of catching COVID-19 in prison, but then was briefly imprisoned again last month.
 
A federal judge last month ruled Cohen had been subjected to retaliation for planning to publish his book, and ordered him released again.
 
A lawyer for Cohen declined to comment.  
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False claims that Kamala Harris is not legally eligible to serve as U.S. vice president or president have been circulating in social media posts since 2019, when she first launched her Democratic primary campaign.  
On Thursday, after Harris was selected by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to serve as his running mate, President Donald Trump elevated the conspiracy while speaking to reporters from the White House podium.
 A look at the claim:The Claim: Harris is ineligible to serve as vice president or president because her mother is from India and her father is from Jamaica. Trump said he “heard” the California senator doesn’t meet the requirements, adding, “I have no if idea that’s right.”  The Facts: That’s false. Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, according to a copy of her birth certificate, obtained by The Associated Press.  
Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, and her father, an economist from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.  
Since she was born on U.S. soil, she is considered a natural born U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment, and she is eligible to serve as either the vice president or president, Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, told The Associated Press Thursday.  
“Full stop, end of story, period, exclamation point,” Levinson said.  
There is “no serious dispute” in the legal community around the idea that someone born in the U.S. can serve as president, said Juliet Sorensen, a law professor at Northwestern University.  
“The VP has the same eligibility requirements as the president,” Sorensen said. “Kamala Harris, she has to be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and a resident in the United States for at least 14 years. She is. That’s really the end of the inquiry.”  
Trump was asked directly about the social media posts by a reporter Thursday. “I heard today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said in response.
The false claims first started circulating on social media in 2019, during Harris’ presidential campaign, and they were revived against last week, days ahead of her selection as Biden’s running mate. Facebook posts falsely said she would not be eligible to take over for Biden, because her parents were both immigrants.  
“I can’t believe people are making this idiotic comment,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor of constitutional law, told The Associated Press at the time. “She is a natural-born citizen and there is no question about her eligibility to run.”
Trump was a high-profile force behind the so-called “birther movement” — the lie that questioned whether President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was eligible to serve. Only after mounting pressure during his 2016 campaign did Trump disavow the claims.
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“I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement in this country, although I am a woman, and equally proud of that… I am the candidate of the people of America.”Those were the words the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, Shirley Chisholm, uttered in her 1972 announcement that she was running for president, using the campaign slogan “Unbought and Unbossed.” The move was highly unusual and unlikely to succeed. But Chisholm was unusual, and her bid for the presidency is cited by many women of color who enter politics as inspiration for their own careers.In announcing her presidential run last year, California Senator Kamala Harris included nods to Chisholm’s leadership, using the slogan “For the People” and a red-and-yellow color scheme that echoed some of Chisholm’s campaign materials. Harris is now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate.Paving the wayGlynda Carr, president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, a political action committee dedicated to promoting Black women in politics, said Thursday in a statement that Harris “stands on the shoulders of the late great Shirley Chisholm and her ‘unbought and unbossed leadership.’ Congresswoman Chisholm and many other Black women political leaders have paved the way for this moment and for Black women to step into their power and take democracy into their own hands.”Carr went on to praise Harris for being a trailblazer and breaking “a major barrier, much like Shirley Chisholm did 48 years ago.”Born in 1924, Chisholm spent her early years living in Barbados with her grandmother. She was extremely bright, and it was clear early on that she had things to say. The New York Times quoted her as saying, “Mother always said that even when I was 3, I used to get the 6- and 7-year-old kids on the block and punch them and say, ‘Listen to me.”‘When she attended Brooklyn College, she excelled at debate. Some of her instructors suggested she consider politics.But Chisholm first went into education, as a teacher and then as an educational consultant for New York City’s Bureau of Child Welfare. But in the 1950s she began joining political clubs, where she pushed for more involvement by women and people of color in the nation’s discourse. She is known as a fighter both for both civil rights and the feminist movement.Fighting sexism and racismShe won a seat in the New York state legislature in 1965 and served three years. Then, with the lines of her local congressional district redrawn to ensure more representation of her neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Chisholm secured a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first black woman to do so. In winning her seat, she beat out a male rival who had once mocked her as being only a “little schoolteacher.”In Congress, Chisholm fought sexism and racism. In a 2004 documentary on her life, “Chisholm ’72 – Unbought & Unbossed,” Chisholm describes being taunted by a white male member of Congress who could not accept the fact that she made the same salary as he. Chisholm was characteristically unapologetic, recounting the incident with a touch of glee.Reelected six times, she used her seven terms in Congress to help found the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Women’s Political Caucus, strengthen the nation’s food program for the poor, and speak out with blunt honestly about what she felt were the ills of the American political system.When assigned to the Agriculture Committee during her first term in office, she complained, saying the focus of the committee had nothing to do with her urban constituents. Her obituary in The New York Times quotes her as saying at the time, “Only nine black people have been elected to Congress, and those nine should be used as effectively as possible.”When Chisholm announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 1972, she knew she probably wouldn’t get the nomination. But Chisholm campaign worker Jo Freeman said, in her written history of the campaign, that Chisholm ran “to give a voice to the people the major candidates were ignoring.”Chisholm also spoke of her candidacy as a means of paving the way for future candidates. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table,” she advised her followers, “bring in a folding chair.”Presidential Medal of FreedomChisholm won no national primaries, and the Democrats lost the election to Republican Richard Nixon, who resigned two years later in a political scandal. But Chisholm cemented her name in history as the woman whose campaign opened minds and doors for other women of color in politics.Chisholm died in 2005. Ten years later, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.To date, 47 Black women have served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Only two, including Kamala Harris, have served in the U.S. Senate.Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics says in 2019, women of color made up 8.8 percent of all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 4 percent of the Senate.Among the nation’s 7,383 state legislators, 7.3 percent are women of color.And in the nation’s 100 largest cities, 10 women of color serve as mayors, including in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.    
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