Sharyl Attkisson

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READ: President Trump's impeachment trial memorandum

Today, President Trump's legal team filed a "trial memorandum" in the Senate impeachment proceedings. It lays out the president's arguments against the Democrats' case, and explains why he says none of the impeachment charges are impeachable offenses.

The Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate are an affront to the Constitution and to our democratic institutions. The Articles themselves—and the rigged process that brought them here—are a brazenly political act by House Democrats that must be rejected. They debase the grave power of impeachment and disdain the solemn responsibility that power entails. Anyone having the most basic respect for the sovereign will of the American people would shudder at the enormity of casting a vote to impeach a duly elected President. By contrast, upon tallying their votes, House Democrats jeered until they were scolded into silence by the Speaker. The process that brought the articles here violated every precedent and every principle of fairness followed in impeachment inquiries for more than 150 years. Even so, all that House Democrats have succeeded in proving is that the President did absolutely nothing wrong. All of this is a dangerous perversion of the Constitution that the Senate should swiftly and roundly condemn.

President Trump's trial memorandum, Jan. 20, 2020

Read the entire document by clicking the link below:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Trial-Memorandum-of-President-Donald-J.-Trump.pdf

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VIDEO: The State of the Swamp

The following is a transcript of my investigative report on the state of the swamp from Full Measure. Click on the link at the end of the transcript to watch the video report.

In just over two weeks, President Trump gives his State of the Union address. We thought it would be a good time to get a Full Measure State of the Swamp assessment. We went to two swamp-watching experts. The first Congressman Ken Buck a Republican we first interviewed a little over two years ago who blew the whistle on the swamp and party elites he says, "live like kings and govern like bullies.”

Sharyl Attkisson: Is what you describe— what some Americans might call ‘the establishment’?

Rep. Buck: Absolutely.

Congressman Ken Buck is a former federal prosecutor. He spoke with us in 2017 after writing“Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption is Worse than You Think.”

It exposed what he called pay-to-play corruption, backroom arm-twisting and Congressional positions for sale to who ever raises the most money. More than two years later, we set out to find what, if anything, has changed.

Sharyl: How much of the week on average do you think are members of Congress having to spend raising money?

Rep. Ken Buck: Oh, I think that we probably spend somewhere between a quarter and a half of our time raising money for reelection.

Sharyl: Has that been about the same in the years you've been here?

Rep. Ken Buck: Yeah, I think so.

Sharyl: In terms of a brief review, can you describe the process of “dialing for dollars"? What happens? How money is raised here?

Rep. Ken Buck: Sure. So we go over to the NRCC offices or I oftentimes call from my condo here in town. And a lot of the fundraising happens back in the district or there are events that are here. But literally there will be lists prepared for us to go over to the NRCC and call from lists.

The NRCC is the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is outfitted with the fundraising necessities: cubicles and telephones. Democrats have their own version both offices just steps from the Capitol.

Sharyl: Do you a quota as to how much the party expects you to raise?

Rep. Ken Buck: I do have a, I don't know if it's quota, but it's a hard and fast goal, I would say.

Sharyl: How much is yours?

Rep. Ken Buck: Mine right now is $275,000.

Sharyl: You have to raise and what time period?

Rep. Ken Buck: Over the two year cycle.

Sharyl: With fundraising limits, meaning you can only raise so much from a single person or entity, that must be hard.

Rep. Ken Buck: It's challenging.

Sharyl: Do you feel like you've fallen into the system? This was something you strongly objected to and criticized when we last spoke, now it sounds like you're operating quite well inside the system.

Rep. Ken Buck: Yeah, I still object to it. And my objection was always that there was an amount of money to pay to be on a committee or an amount of money to pay to be the chair or the Republican leader of a committee, and I still have strong objections to that. But in terms of raising money for my own reelection, I think everybody comes here knowing that if they want to get reelected, they're gonna have to raise a certain amount of money.

Larry Klayman is also a former federal prosecutor and longtime swamp-watcher. He head up Freedom Watch, a public interest group that investigates government corruption.

Sharyl: What would you tell the public, is the state of what we may think of as the Washington DC swamp, today?

Larry Klayman: It's a club, it's like the National Football League. You have the American Conference and you have the National Conference, but they're all part of the same conference, the same league. They protect each other because they're making a tremendous amount of money, they're acquiring great power.

Sharyl: I've heard that from a lot of people President Trump came into office promising to "drain the swamp.” Has he had success or has the swamp gotten the better of him?

Larry Klayman: The swamp has been trying to swallow him up. No, he has not had success and I commend him for trying to do that. What I like about the president is he will say what's on his mind. You may not always like what he says, but he doesn't pull any punches, and that's quite rare. The problem is, is that around him are people who want to take him down, even in the White House. The poor guy's been fighting for his survival now for going on three years. So, there's a lot of things he's tried to do about cleaning up the swamp, but it seems that the swamp has got him more than he's got the swamp.

Sharyl: Let's say President Trump is not re-elected. Where do you see the state of the swamp going?

Larry Klayman: I think it'll go crazy.

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Sharyl: What if President Trump is elected to a second term?

Larry Klayman: It's really hard to gauge what's going to happen, but I hope that somehow he breaks through and does hold the swamp accountable. I hope that this Republican establishment on Capitol Hill, in fact even people in the White House, will start to back him up. Look, he's not perfect, Sharyl. I have to say, I don't think he committed an impeachable offense with regard to the Ukraine. Having just been cleared of the Russian collusion investigation, it had to have been one of the stupidest things to do, excuse the slurring of the words on stupid, to then try to influence Ukraine to then investigate Biden. I don't think it was impeachable, I don't think he committed a crime, but he handed them, the Democrats, a gift.

Sharyl: Frankly, many Republicans are not on Trump's side.

Klayman: Well, they've never wanted him there because he breaks up the money train, he breaks up the power train.

Sharyl: President Trump came in promising to try to drain the swamp. Has there been any draining of the swamp here on Capitol Hill?

Rep. Ken Buck: I think the president's done a good job with the folks that he has put in place on this cabinet and I think he's done a good job in other ways. But in terms of the legislative branch, it has been largely unaffected by the president's policies.

Sharyl: Has anyone ever sidled up to you and said things like, "Tone it down a little bit, Ken”? Any fellow members of the Republican Party or any leaders, "Go along, get along?"

Rep. Ken Buck: Sure. Absolutely. And along the same lines I've had people come up to me and say, "Ken, you're absolutely right. I just can't help you with this."

Sharyl: How do those conversations go when someone kind of tells you to go along?

Rep. Ken Buck: Well, those are short conversations.

Sharyl: Is there anything to be said about the power of one? Do you feel like you personally have been able to make any sort of difference in terms of the swamp, as we know it, here in Washington DC?

Rep. Ken Buck: No.

Sharyl: Easy to answer?

Rep. Ken Buck: There's no need to explain that. There are so many people that like the system the way it is and thrive in the system the way it is that it's impossible.

Buck says above all else, he hopes he’s been able to make more Americans aware that the system is broken.

Click on the link below to watch the story on Full Measure:

http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/state-of-the-swamp

Fight improper government surveillance. Support Attkisson v. DOJ and FBI over the government computer intrusions of Attkisson's work while she was a CBS News investigative correspondent. Visit the Attkisson Fourth Amendment Litigation Fund. Click here.

READ: President Trump's response to Democrats' impeachment case

The following is from President Trump's response to the Democrats' impeachment case.

Read the entire document by clicking the link below:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Answer-of-President-Donald-J.-Trump.pdf

Fight improper government surveillance. Support Attkisson v. DOJ and FBI over the government computer intrusions of Attkisson's work while she was a CBS News investigative correspondent. Visit the Attkisson Fourth Amendment Litigation Fund. Click here.

VIDEO: The real story behind California wildfires and blackouts

The following is a transcript of this week's investigative cover story on Full Measure. Watch the video by clicking on the link at the end of the transcript.

Homelessness, illegal immigration, the high cost of living and -- fires. As if one of our biggest states isn’t suffering enough, California residents have been told they now face forced blackouts that could come and go for years. That disaster traces directly to the power company Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E. We sent Lisa Fletcher to the Golden State to find out what’s behind the Disasters and Darkness.

In California, it was a season defined by infernos. And then, from the frightening light of fires, to an eerie enforced darkness.

A lot of families live in this Santa Rosa, California neighborhood - an hour's drive north of San Francisco. But on this night, the only sign of civilization is when a car's headlights come into view.

The darkness is intentional - the result of a mass power outage triggered by the area's main power company, Pacific Gas and Electric, known as PG&E.

Just up the road, in a Community Resource center set up by PG&E, Ken Courreges is sitting in a warmed tent, charging his phone from a strip powered by a generator.

Ken Courreges: It’s pretty scary, you know, it’s very boring, nothing to do. It’s frustrating, but I know that, you know, it’s for our own good.

Because the alternative could be worse. To explain, we travel 180 miles northeast to the rubble of Paradise, California, the site of the state's deadliest and most destructive wildfire.

It was November of 2018, flames blew through Paradise in less than 24 hours, torching over 31 square miles. It became known as the Camp Fire, killing 85 people and destroying nearly 19,000 homes.

According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the Fire was caused by electrical transmission lines owned and operated by PG&E.

PG&E supplies electricity and natural gas to 16 million people. Its system was built beginning over a century ago to carry water powered electricity from the Sierra Nevada Mountains in eastern California to the San Francisco Bay area. But its infrastructure is aging. It's still using some towers and equipment from the early 1900s to this day.

According to a 700-page investigation by the state, PG&E failed to inspect and maintain an aging electrical tower, citing issues with several parts of the tower that went unnoticed.

The investigation found that if PG&E had identified one worn piece of equipment - and replaced it - the Camp Fire could have been prevented.

It wasn't an isolated case.

PG&E equipment reportedly sparked 19 major blazes in 2017 and 2018. PG&E faced $30 billion in liability for those fires, plunging the utility into bankruptcy last year.

After the fire that destroyed Paradise, PG&E began taking drastic new measures, watching for risky weather conditions, humidity, wind speed and dry conditions on the ground. Rather than risk sparking, they cut power.

The first blackout, in October, impacted 2 million people. Santa Rosa suffered through 6 scheduled blackouts last fall.

Santa Rosa's Mayor is Tom Schwedhelm.

Mayor Tom Schwedhelm: When are things going to get back to normal? Cause I’m not comfortable saying this is the new normal. There’s gotta be a better way. We just haven’t figured it out yet.

The night we met him, the city was in the middle of a blackout. He was working late in his office, surveying outage maps and talking on the phone, but mainly listening.

Mayor Tom Schwedhelm: The gentleman I just talked to, he’s a senior citizen, his wife’s got dementia. He can't keep going through this.

Lisa: As a mayor of a community of nearly 200,000 it must be extremely frustrating.

Mayor Tom Schwedhelm: Some of the individuals I talk with today – it’s like I’m getting tired of throwing all of the food out of my freezer now.

PG&E's CEO Bill Johnson defended the choice to cut power in an emergency hearing called by California's Public Utilities Commission in October.

Bill Johnson: I have heard and read a lot of skepticism about our actions. I hear skepticism about whether it was necessary. Skepticism that we did this to save our own skin and not for public safety. The fact is that we did this for one reason only and that is safety. Lisa: Johnson says for safety, the blackouts will continue for up to 10 years, though they may become less frequent.

Bill Whalen: People's lives depend on electricity. It's not something that California can gloss over lightly.

Bill Whalen is an analyst at the Hoover Institution, a California think tank. He says one solution may be the most obvious - bury the power lines that run through dry high risk areas.

Bill Whalen: You have to convert from overhead because clearly every time it gets windy and you have overhead wires, you know you run the risk.

PG&E has committed to burying the power lines in Paradise and the other areas that were burned by the Camp Fire in 2018. PG&E wouldn't agree to an on camera interview but told us burying power lines is "not a solution that can further reduce the risk of wildfire in the near term" because they can still be impacted by things like floods, earthquakes, and equipment issues.

And it's too expensive. From a cost perspective, burying all 81,000 miles of its power lines at $3 million per mile would cost quadrillions.

Bill Whalen: Every time you press PG&E they cry foul, they say they don’t have enough money. But yet they somehow make money to lobby the state. They spend ambitiously on lobbying.

We asked PG&E how much it has spent on lobbying in the past decade. The utility would only say it files all appropriate disclosures. According to the watchdog "Open Secrets," PG&E spent more than $10 million on lobbying last year alone. PG&E adds that's paid by shareholders, not customers, and it "holds itself to high standards of public disclosure and compliance with the law."

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According to published reports, PG&E paid its top 5 executives roughly $17 million in bonuses from 2012 to 2017. That includes a pay boost in 2015 - the same year a fire caused by PG&E equipment killed 2 people.

In August, a bankruptcy judge denied the company's new plans to pay at least $11 million in executive bonuses.

Also last fall, hours before the first blackout, PG&E treated its top customers to a wine tasting weekend in Sonoma. The utility apologized for insensitivity.

Back in Santa Rosa, the cost of the outages are adding up for restaurant owner Lorena Anaya and her husband.

Lisa: Any sense of what the outages have cost you in total?

Lorena Anaya: I think it’s around 16 to 18,000.

Lisa: What does that $16 or 18 mean?

Lorena Anaya: It hurts. It hurts really. And not only for us, but for our employees -They’re our family and it hurts us that they don’t even get paid either. So it’s really hard.

To keep the power flowing, they had to buy a generator for $1,200.

Lorena Anaya: I hope PG&E figures it out because we can’t – they say this is going to continue for 10 years. My business won’t be here in 10 years if they keep doing this. And I’ve been here 24 years.

Lisa: It’s a part of you.

Lorena Anaya: Yes. So it hurts.

The fire season in California is starting earlier and ending later each year. In 2019, there were more than 7,000 fires, destroying almost 400 square miles and killing 3 people.

In the Golden State, it's going to be a long battle to keep the lights up -- and the risk of disaster down.

PG&E says the blackouts are working. This month, CEO Bill Johnson wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal - saying PG&E had no deadly wildfires in 2019...and had a 25% reduction in sparks associated with PG&E equipment in high risk areas. Though - it's hard to prove a negative and know exactly which areas could have produced a spark.

Click on the link below to watch the video of Lisa Fletcher's investigative report:

http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/disasters-and-darkness

Fight improper government surveillance. Support Attkisson v. DOJ and FBI over the government computer intrusions of Attkisson's work while she was a CBS News investigative correspondent. Visit the Attkisson Fourth Amendment Litigation Fund. Click here.

POLL: Majority says Trump will emerge stronger after impeachment trial

The vast majority of respondents say President Trump will emerge stronger after his upcoming impeachment trial.

That's according to the latest unscientific poll at SharylAttkisson.com.

Eighty-eight percent (88%) said Trump will remain in office and be in a stronger position than before.

Only 1% said they think he will remain in office but be weaker.

Read the full results below. Meantime, be sure and vote in our latest poll at SharylAttkisson.com on the home page. Look for the black box in the right sidebar or scroll way down on the mobile site!

How do you think President Trump's impeachment will end?

<1% He is removed

1% He stays but is weaker

88% He stays but is stronger

10% No difference

1% Don't know/don't care

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Japan highlights Fukushima nuclear disaster recovery in 2020 Olympics

  • Japan plans to highlight former radiation hot spots for Olympic torch relay and games

The Japanese government plans to lift the mandatory radiation-related evacuation order for the town of Futaba in northeastern Japan--just in time to prepare for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games torch relay.

That's according to Japan Today.

Futaba is "co-host" to the defunct Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that had a major nuclear accident after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The plant's three nuclear cores largely melted in the first three days. High levels of radiation were leaked into the air and sea. Workers have been decontaminating the area ever since. Tokyo, Japan will host the 2020 Summer Olympics from July 24 to August 9.

Fukushima: Four damaged reactor buildings in 2011
Fukushima I by Digital Globe.jpg

The Olympic torch relay is said to be likely to pass through the town of Futaba, according to Japan Today. The evacuation order is expected to be lifted on March 4.

Another Japanese town that "co-hosts" the disabled nuclear plant, Okuma, is already on the map for the first day of the torch relay.

Organizers have made Fukushima the starting point for the Olympic torch relay.

Last March, Yoshiro Mori, the organizing committee's president, revealed that the relay would begin some 20 kilometers from the Fukushima plant at the J-Village national soccer training center, which was used as an operational base for handling the nuclear crisis...The Japan leg of the relay will begin on March 26, 2020, two weeks after the flame lighting ceremony in Greece, and will carry the torch across all 47 prefectures in the country over a period of 121 days.

Japan Today

Fukushima Prefecture aims to highlight on the global stage its reconstruction from the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

According to CNN and Greenpeace, "high-level radiation hot spots can be detected at a sports complex in Japan's northeastern Fukushima prefecture, where the 2020 Tokyo Olympics torch relay will kick off next year."

The Greenpeace study claims radiation levels around the 5,000 seat stadium, soccer field and hotel center "J-Village" were more than 1,700 times higher than before the disaster.

Using Greenpeace's calculations, people staying near the stadium could be exposed to a greater amount of radiation in just over a day than they would naturally experience in a year.

CNN

Read more in Japan Today by clicking the link below:

https://japantoday.com/category/2020-tokyo-olympics/olympics-tokyo-torch-relay-to-add-another-fukushima-reactor-town

Thank you to the thousands who are supporting the landmark case of Attkisson v. DOJ and FBI for the government computer intrusions.

Attkisson names former AG Rosenstein and others in govt. surveillance lawsuit

A government informant names former U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who is also former U.S. Attorney General, as the man who led a multi-agency federal task force that illegally surveilling journalist Sharyl Attkisson and other U.S. citizens between 2011 and 2013.

The new disclosures have allowed Attkisson to petition to re-file a lawsuit that was previously dismissed. The trial court judge objected to Attkisson suing "John Doe" federal agents, saying Attkisson should know the names of the agents. Attkisson countered that she had no meaningful opportunity to identify the agents with access to the government spyware found in her computer, because the Department of Justice and intelligence agencies refused to provide the discovery needed.

In a dissenting opinion to the original dismissal, Appellate Judge James Wynn, Jr. sided with Attkisson and wrote:

This court long has held that plaintiffs - like Attkisson - who state a plausible claim that unnamed defendants violated their constitutional or statutory rights are entitled to a meaningful opportunity to engage in discovery.

Dissenting opinion of Judge James Wynn, Jr.

The judge left open the option for Attkisson to refile if she could identify the agents. Now, with information from one of the government agents who conducted the illegal surveillance against her, Attkisson has done just that.

Attkisson was first targeted for surveillance by the government, according to one of the federal agents involved, because of her coverage of the "gun walking" operation, Fast and Furious.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr, asking for answers to the questions raised by Attkisson's lawsuit:

It is well past time that Attkisson, Congress, and the American public receive answers to questions that have remained outstanding for over six years.

Senator Ron Johnson in letter to Attorney General William Barr, Jan. 2020

Click on the link below to read more in DailyCaller.com:

https://dailycaller.com/2020/01/13/takala-rosenstein-attkisson/

Fight improper government surveillance. Support Attkisson v. DOJ and FBI over the government computer intrusions of Attkisson's work while she was a CBS News investigative correspondent. Visit the Attkisson Fourth Amendment Litigation Fund. Click here.