WASHINGTON – The White House will hold a press briefing Tuesday afternoon with press secretary Sarah Sanders.
The briefing is scheduled to start at 2 p.m., EST - you can watch it LIVE here on ClickOnDetroit.com.
Here are some other headlines from around Washington:
Trump accuses DOJ of being part of ‘deep state’
President Donald Trump accused the Justice Department Tuesday of being part of the “deep state” and urged prosecution against a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.
He also claimed that U.S. sanctions on North Korea were having a “big impact” and that he was responsible for preventing commercial aviation deaths in 2017.
Trump’s latest tweets pressed familiar arguments for the president, who is set to begin his first full year in office with the victory of tax legislation but the Russia investigation still hanging over his administration.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents,” Trump tweeted in an apparent reference to a report by the conservative Daily Caller.
“Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others,” he added.
As he remains shadowed by the special counsel’s Russia investigation, Trump has seized on recent revelations of anti-Trump behavior by some FBI officials, including some who once worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, to claim bias against him.
The president’s reference Tuesday to “Deep State Justice Dept” suggests that federal law enforcement is part of an entrenched bureaucracy that Trump and his supporters say didn’t want him to be elected and is actively working to undermine his presidency.
Trump’s reference to sailors likely referred to a Navy sailor convicted of taking photos of classified areas inside a submarine.
Trump’s blast at the Justice Department came after he returned to the White House from a holiday getaway to face legislative challenges, midterm elections and global threats. He issued confrontational tweets targeting Iran, which in recent days has been rocked by anti-government protests, and Pakistan.
“The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime. All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their ‘pockets.’ The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching!”
On Monday, Trump slammed Pakistan for “lies & deceit,” saying it had played U.S. leaders for “fools” by not doing enough to control militants.
“The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!” Trump said.
Pakistani officials, including Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif, said the country would make clear “the difference between facts and fiction.”
It was not immediately clear what prompted Trump to comment on Pakistan. The U.S. has long accused Pakistan of allowing militants to operate relatively freely in its border regions to carry out operations in neighboring Afghanistan. The U.S. said in August that it would hold up $255 million in military assistance for Pakistan until it cracks down on extremists threatening Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Monday the United States should be aware that his country’s nuclear forces are now a reality, not a future threat. To that, Trump said only: “We’ll see.”
At home, Trump is hoping for more legislative achievements after his success on cutting taxes. He plans to host Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin at Camp David next weekend to map out the 2018 legislative agenda.
Republicans are eager to make progress before attention shifts to the November midterm elections. The GOP wants to hold the House and Senate, but must contend with Trump’s historic unpopularity and some recent Democratic wins, including the pickup of a Senate seat in deeply Republican Alabama.
The White House has said Trump will come forward with his long-awaited infrastructure plan in January. Trump has also said he wants to overhaul welfare and recently predicted Democrats and Republicans will “eventually come together” to develop a new health care plan.
Ryan has talked about overhauling Medicaid and Medicare and other safety-net programs, but McConnell has signaled an unwillingness to go that route unless there’s Democratic support for any changes. Republicans will have just a 51-49 Senate majority — well shy of the 60 votes needed to pass most bills — giving leverage to Democrats.
Congress also has to deal with a backlog from 2017, including agreeing on a spending bill by Jan. 19 to avert a partial government shutdown. There’s also providing additional aid to hurricane victims, lifting the debt ceiling, extending a children’s health insurance program and extending protections for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Trump has said he wants money for a border wall in exchange for protecting those immigrants.
Iran’s top leader blames protests on meddling by ‘enemies’
Iran’s supreme leader on Tuesday blamed the protests roiling the country on “enemies of Iran” who he said were meddling in its internal affairs, as state television reported that overnight clashes between protesters and security forces killed another nine people.
The demonstrations, the largest seen in Iran since its disputed 2009 presidential election, have brought six days of unrest across the country and resulted in at least 21 deaths.
The protests began Thursday in Mashhad over Iran’s weak economy and a jump in food prices. They have since expanded to several cities, with some protesters chanting against the government and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hundreds of people have been arrested and a prominent judge on Tuesday warned that some could face the death penalty.
In comments posted to his official website, Khamenei appeared to blame foreign nations for at least exacerbating the unrest gripping Iran.
“In the recent days’ incidents, enemies of Iran utilized various means — including money, weapons, politics and intelligence apparatuses — to create problems for the Islamic system,” he said, in his first public remarks since the demonstrations began.
Khamenei said he would elaborate further in the coming days. Iranian leaders often accuse the United States, Israel and Britain of seeking to overthrow the clerically overseen government.
State TV reported that six people were killed during an attack on a police station in the town of Qahdarijan. It said the clashes were sparked by rioters who tried to steal guns from the police station.
State TV also said an 11-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed in the town of Khomeinishahr, while a member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was killed in the town of Najafabad. It says all three were shot by hunting rifles, which are common in the Iranian countryside.
The towns are all in Iran’s central Isfahan province, some 350 kilometers (215 miles) south of Tehran.
The semi-official Mehr news agency said an assailant using a hunting rifle killed a policeman and wounded three others in Najafabad.
President Hassan Rouhani has acknowledged the public’s anger over the flagging economy, which has benefited from his signature 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, but not in a way that has brought immediate gains for most Iranians.
Rouhani and others have warned that the government wouldn’t hesitate to crack down on those it considers lawbreakers. None of the protest rallies so far have received prior permission from the Interior Ministry, making them illegal.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday wrote on Twitter that “the people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime.”
“All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their ‘pockets,’” Trump wrote, apparently referring to the nuclear deal reached under his predecessor. “The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching!”
It is unclear what effect Trump’s string of tweets is having on the protests. Some have shared them online, but many in Iran distrust him because he has refused to re-certify the 2015 nuclear deal and his travel bans have blocked Iranians from getting U.S. visas.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi urged the U.S. president to stop tweeting and focus on his own country’s problems.
“It is better for him to try to address the U.S.′ internal issues like the murder of scores killed on a daily basis in the United States during armed clashes and shootings, as well as millions of the homeless and hungry people in the country,” Ghasemi said, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
In Tehran alone, 450 protesters have been arrested in the last three days, the semi-official ILNA news agency reported Tuesday. ILNA quoted Ali Asghar Nasserbakht, a deputy governor of Tehran, as saying security forces arrested 200 protesters Saturday, 150 Sunday and 100 Monday. So far, authorities have not released a nationwide figure for arrests.
The head of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court reportedly warned Tuesday that arrested protesters could potentially face the death penalty when they are put on trial.
“Obviously one of their charges can be Moharebeh,” or waging war against God, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Mousa Ghazanfarabadi as saying. Moharebeh is punishable by death in Iran. He was also quoted as saying some protesters will come to trial soon on charges of acting against national security and damaging public property.
Iran’s Revolutionary Court handles cases involving alleged attempts to overthrow the government.
The protests began over Iran’s economy, which has improved since the nuclear deal that saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the end of some international sanctions. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals to purchase tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Western aircraft.
That improvement has not reached the average Iranian, however. Unemployment remains high, and official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again. A recent increase in egg and poultry prices by as much as 40 percent, which the government has blamed on a cull over avian flu fears, appears to have been the spark for the protests.