United States Government

"President Trump may not know a lot about the Framers, but they certainly knew a lot about him."

"The US Atomic Energy Commission, created by Congress in 1946, grew into a uniquely powerful, mission-oriented bureaucracy. One of its main goals was the creation of a flourishing commercial nuclear power program. By the late 1950s, the AEC began to acquire frightening data about the potential hazards of nuclear technology. It decided, nevertheless, to push ahead with ambitious plans to make nuclear energy the dominant source of the nation's electric power by the end of the century. The AEC proceeded to authorize the construction of larger and larger nuclear reactors all around the country, the dangers notwithstanding. The AEC gambled that its scientists would, in time, find deft solutions to all the complex safety difficulties."

"On Christmas Eve, two FBI agents arrived at Olden Manor and seized control of Oppenheimer's remaining classified papers. That same day, Oppenheimer received the AEC's letter of formal charges, dated December 23, 1953. ... The inclusion of Oppenheimer's opposition to the Super reflected the depth of McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty, it redefined the role of government advisers and the very purpose of advice. The AEC's charges were not the kind of narrowly crafted indictment likely to bring conviction in a court of law. This was, rather, a political indictment and Oppenheimer would be judged by an AEC review panel appointed by the chairman of the AEC, Lewis L. Strauss."

"Now, six years after the Commission had assumed responsibility for the nation's atomic energy commission, industry was becoming restive over the delay in realizing the commercial applications of nuclear power. While most of the nation was preoccupied with the election campaign during autumn 1952, a clamor for a greater role in the development of atomic energy was rising among power equipment manufacturers and the electric utility industry."

"Programs that reduce child poverty help even in years when poor or near-poor parents gain and, of course, are critical in bad times, since sooner or later booming job markets also bust."

"Even before Donald Trump’s election, only one-sixth of eligible families with kids received assistance for childcare and a paltry one-fifth got housing subsidies. Yet his administration arrived prepared to put programs that helped some of them pay for housing and childcare on the chopping block. No point in such families looking to him for a hand in the future. He won’t be building any for them. Whatever “Make America Great Again” may mean, it certainly doesn’t involve helping America’s poor kids. As long as Donald Trump oversees their race into life, they’ll find themselves ever farther from the starting line."

"Americans raised in poor families do markedly less well compared to those from middle class or affluent homes—and it doesn’t matter whether you choose college attendance, employment rates, or future household income as your measure. And the longer they live in poverty the worse the odds that they’ll escape it in adulthood; for one thing, they’re far less likely to finish high school or attend college than their more fortunate peers. [...] Yet childhood circumstances can be (and have been) changed—and the sorts of government programs that conservatives love to savage have helped enormously in that process."

"The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well. Unlike poor countries (sometimes run by leaders more interested in lining their pockets than anything else), what excuse does the United States have for its striking levels of child poverty? [...] The conservative response to all this remains predictable: You can’t solve complex social problems like child poverty by throwing money at them. Besides, government antipoverty programs only foster dependence and create bloated bureaucracies without solving the problem. It matters little that the success of American social programs proves this claim to be flat-out false."

"Our own history and that of other wealthy countries show that child poverty is anything but an unalterable reality. The record also shows that changing it requires mobilizing funds of the sort now being wasted on ventures like America’s multitrillion-dollar forever wars."

"Worse, Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country's alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do. The costs and benefits of governing are considered in purely financial terms, as if the US Treasury were his personal piggy bank. To him, every dollar going out was his loss, while every dollar saved was his gain. In the midst of obscene plenty, one person, using all the levers of power and taking every advantage of his disposal, would benefit himself and, conditionally, his immediate family, his cronies, his sycophants; for the rest, there would never be enough to go around, which was exactly how my grandfather ran our family."

"Before COVID-19, nearly 700 people died everyday because of poverty and inequality in this country. The frontlines of this pandemic will be the poor and dispossessed - those who do not have access to healthcare, housing, water, decent wages, stable work or - and those who are continuing to work in this crisis, meeting our health care and other needs. It should not have taken a pandemic to raise these resources. In June 2019, we presented a Poor People’s Moral Budget to the House Budget Committee, showing that we can meet these needs for this entire country. If you had taken up this Moral Budget, we would have already moved towards infusing more than $1.2 trillion into the economy to invest in health care, good jobs, living wages, housing, water and sanitation services and more. This is not the time for trickle-down solutions. We know that when you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. There are concrete solutions to this immediate crisis and the longer term illnesses we have been battling for months, years and decades before. We will continue to organize and build power until you meet these demands. Many millions of us have been hurting for far too long. We will not be silent anymore."

"The Trump administration has, for good measure, rewritten the eligibility rules for such programs in order to lower the number of people who qualify. The supposed goal: to cut costs by reducing dependence on government. (Never mind the subsidies and tax loopholes Trump’s crew has created for corporations and the super wealthy, which add up to many billions of dollars in spending and lost revenue.)"

"With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor or a $400 emergency away from being poor. [...] We cannot return to normal. Addressing the depth of the crises that have been revealed in this pandemic means enacting , expanding social welfare programs, ensuring access to water and sanitation, cash assistance to poor and low income families, good jobs, s and an annual income and protecting our democracy. It means ensuring that our abundant s are used for the general welfare, instead of war, walls, and the wealthy."

"Even with the immense growth of governmental levels in recent decades, the fact remains that five out of every six jobs in this country are still in the private sector. Simple arithmetic tells us this is the place to look for new jobs and for better jobs. This is where the people have been laid off and where they must first go back on the payroll. I don't need to say that twice here in Michigan, where automobile workers and all the other jobs that depend upon them have been especially hard hit. The good news, however, is that the United States automobile industry is turning around. And in the first 20 days of 1976, new car sales were up 37.2 percent over 1975. But even the most sincere proponents of Federal public works and public service job programs don't contend that the cure for unemployment in the American automobile industry is to build Federal factories to make Federal cars. I doubt that the United States Government could make a Model T for less than $50,000."

"Our basic premise is that money and jobs are not the final answer to the black man’s problems. Without in any sense denying the overwhelming reality of poverty, we must affirm that the basic goal is not “,” as some have called the anti-poverty and other federal programs, but the inclusion of black people at all levels of decision-making. We do not seek to be mere recipients from the decision-making process but participants in it. [...] It is our hope that the day may soon come when black people will reject because they have understood that these programs are geared to pacification rather than to genuine solutions. We hope that the rising level of consciousness may bring a rejection of such doles. This will strike many readers as fantastic, but they might recall that once in India, Gandhi rejected relief food shipments from England precisely because he saw them as tools of pacification."

"If the traditional was clearly in the ranks of a liberal-progressive orientation, calling for more effective national governmental action, some advocates of Black Power could easily conclude that such action had reached its limits: Once the national government removed the legal barriers to advancement, the task was then up to blacks themselves to devote more of their energies and resources to helping themselves. They needed to engage more in “self-help” and seek to develop organizations and institutions that would rely less on government “handouts” and more on their own intra-communal efforts. After all, wasn’t this the way other groups had made it in the society? As many blacks received advantages in education and jobs, they should “reach back” and help their less fortunate sisters and brothers. And do so without the constant complaining about the lack of governmental economic assistance. They should stop seeing themselves as perpetual victims, and take more initiative on their own to assume responsibility for alleviating their plight."

"UDN Grand Rounds are open to the public. Presentations from UDN sites and cores describe the clinical phenotype and multidisciplinary, personalized diagnostic evaluation of one or more UDN participants. Students, trainees, advocates, and others are welcome to attend, ask questions, and offer insights on cases. CME credits are available at no charge for attendees."

"Approximately 25–30 million individuals in the United States are living with a rare disease. ... Many children with rare diseases remain undiagnosed throughout life, leading to excess medical care, expensive diagnostic odysseys, and frustration for patients and their families. ... Advances in genomic technology have allowed for more comprehensive genetic analyses of patients with rare diseases. In an effort to better characterize patients with rare and undiagnosed diseases, the National Institutes of Health launched a single-site project, the Undiagnosed Diseases Program, to improve our understanding of the etiology of these disorders. Following initial success, the program expanded to encompass additional clinical and research institutions, thus establishing the Undiagnosed Diseases Network. ... The UDN is a network of investigators across 13 institutions designated to serve public need by bringing expertise in clinical diagnostics, translational research, and multi-omics technologies to solve medical mysteries ..."

"Diagnosis at the edges of our knowledge calls upon clinicians to be data driven, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative in unprecedented ways. Exact disease recognition, an element of the concept of precision in medicine, requires new infrastructure that spans geography, institutional boundaries, and the divide between clinical care and research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund supports the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) as an exemplar of this model of precise diagnosis. Its goals are to forge a strategy to accelerate the diagnosis of rare or previously unrecognized diseases, to improve recommendations for clinical management, and to advance research, especially into disease mechanisms. The network will achieve these objectives by evaluating patients with undiagnosed diseases, fostering a breadth of expert collaborations, determining best practices for translating the strategy into medical centers nationwide, and sharing findings, data, specimens, and approaches with the scientific and medical communities. Building the UDN has already brought insights to human and medical geneticists."

"Undiagnosed diseases are defined as constellations of findings that remain refractory to medical diagnostic approaches. Undiagnosed diseases affect approximately 30 million Americans and include (a) rare diseases that are difficult to identify, (b) atypical presentations of known disorders, and (c) yet to be described diseases ... Undiagnosed diseases typically manifest with objective findings, which are clinically measurable on physical examination or through medical testing and these provide tangible targets for further diagnostic approaches (e.g. dysmorphic facies, abnormal biochemical profiles, physical exam demonstrating weakness or abnormal gait). Approximately 80% of rare and undiagnosed disorders have a genetic basis ..."

"The factory farm industry and its armies of lobbyists wield great influence in the halls of federal and state power, while animal rights activists wield virtually none. This imbalance has produced increasingly oppressive laws, accompanied by massive law enforcement resources devoted to punishing animal activists even for the most inconsequential nonviolent infractions — as the FBI search warrant and raid in search of “Lucy and Ethel” illustrates. The , of course, has always protected and served the interests of industry. Beginning when most of the nation was fed by small farms, federal agencies have been particularly protective of [[w:Agriculture in the United States|agricultural] industry. That loyalty has only intensified as family farms have nearly disappeared, replaced by industrial factory farms where animals are viewed purely as commodities, instruments for profit, and treated with unconstrained cruelty. [...] Though it receives modest attention, this revolving door spins faster, and in more blatantly sleazy ways, when it comes to the USDA and its mandate to safeguard animal welfare. The USDA is typically dominated by executives from the very factory farm industries that are most in need of vibrant regulation. For that reason, animal welfare laws are woefully inadequate, but the ways in which they are enforced is typically little more than a bad joke. Industrial farming corporations like Smithfield know they can get away with any abuse or “mislabeling” deceit (such as misleading claims about their treatment of animals) because the officials who have been vested with the sole authority to enforce these laws — federal USDA officials — are so captive to their industry. Courts have repeatedly ruled that private individuals, animal rights groups, and even state authorities have no right to sue to enforce animal welfare laws, because the “exclusive authority” lies with the U.S. government, which has no real interest in actually enforcing those laws. [...] In sum, with industry insiders dominating the sole agency (USDA) with the authority to regulate factory farms, animals that are captive, abused, tortured, and slaughtered en masse have little chance, even when it comes to just applying existing laws with a minimal amount of diligence. The politics of the U.S. — including the fact that a key farm state, Iowa, plays such a central role in presidential elections — means there are massive forces arrayed behind factory farms, and very few in support of animal welfare."

"Who do you think should be responsible, within the federal government, to counter disinformation? ...As to who should be the coordinating points within the federal government on how to deal with disinformation?"

"As a former CIA officer, I want to focus on something I think both sides of the political aisle can agree on. That is, how do we prevent Russian intelligence and other adversaries from doing this again? ...[A]fter overseeing counterintelligence operations for 12 years as FBI director, and then investigating what the Russians have done in the 2016 election, you've seen tactics, techniques, and results of Russian intelligence operations. Our committee made a recommendation that the FBI should improve its victim notification process when a person, entity, or campaign has fallen victim to active measures of tack. Would you agree... with this?"

"One of the most striking things in your report is that the , not only undertook a social media campaign in the U.S., but they were able to organize political rallies after the election. Our committee issued a report insight on saying that Russian active measures are growing with frequency and intensity, and including their expanded use of groups, such as the IRA. And these groups pose a significant threat to the United States and our allies in upcoming elections. Would you agree with that?"

"On October 31st, 2016, Slate published a report suggesting that a server at Trump tower was secretly communicating with Russia's . And I quote, "akin to what criminal syndicates do." Do you know if that story is true?"

"[Y]ou've been asked many times this afternoon about collusion, obstruction of justice, and impeachment, and the Steele dossier... I don't think your answers are going to change if I ask you about those questions. So I'm going to ask about a couple of press stories, because a lot of what the American people have received about this, have been... press stories, and some of that has been wrong and... some of... those press stories have been accurate. On April 13, 2018 McClatchy reported that you had evidence Michael Cohen made a secret trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential election. I think he told... one of the Committees here in Congress that was incorrect, is that story true?"

"So did you not investigate these allegations which are suggestive of potential Trump-Russia..."

"You... alluded to making sure... all the elements of the federal government should be working together. Do you have a suggestion on a strategy to do that, to counter this disinformation?"

"[D]id any member of the Special Counsel's office staff travel overseas as part of the investigation?"

"[The following questions remained unanswered by Robert Mueller, for reasons given in his introductory comments.] [4.] Did the Special Counsel's office undertake any efforts to investigate and verify, or disprove allegations contained in the Steele dossier? [5.] The reason I'm asking for the American public that's watching. ...[T]he Steele Dossier formed part of the basis to justify the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. As we know, it was used to obtain a FISA warrant on . This is why I'm asking these questions. Did your office undertake any efforts to identify Steele's sources or subsources? [6.] Were these tasks referred to any other agencies? [7.] Did your office consider whether the Russian government used Steele's sources to provide Steele with disinformation?"

"[The following questions remained unanswered by Robert Mueller, for reasons given in his introductory comments.] [8.]I'm going to ask to which countries? [9.] Did they meet with foreign government officials? [10.] Did they meet with foreign private citizens? [11.] Did they seek information about a U.S. citizen, or any U.S. citizens?"

"[The following questions remained unanswered by Robert Mueller, for reasons given in his introductory comments.] [1.] Was the Steele dossier one of those documents that was reviewed? [2.] I'm just asking a process question. Have you read the Steele dossier? [3.] You were tasked as Special Counsel to investigate whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign associates to interfere with the 2016 election... [T]he FBI... has relevant documents and information related to the opening of the CIA investigation. Were you and your team permitted to access all of those documents?"

"[A]s Special Counsel did you review documents related to the origin of the investigation into the Trump campaign?"

"[W]as there any limitation in your access to documents related to the counterintelligence... investigation?"

"Thank you for answering on the record. These are important questions for the American public and we're hopeful that the I.G. is able to answer these questions."

"...In your investigation, did you think this was a single attempt by the Russians to get involved in our election, or did you find evidence to suggest they'll try to do this again?"

"Days after you appointment, texted... [technical communication problems] There's a quote attributed to Peter Strzok. He texted about his concern that there is... "no big there there in the Trump campaign investigation." Did he or anyone else who worked on the FBI's investigation tell you that, around 10 months into the investigation, the FBI still had no case for collusion?"

"[T]his was your work. ...[Y]our office is the only one who had information regarding this. It had to come from your office. Putting that aside... [D]id you do anything about it?"

"Is the Inspector General report correct that the text messages from Peter Strzok and Lisa Page's phones, from your office, were not retained after they left the Special Counsels Office?"

"We have 25 examples here of where you did not do a good job. Not you, sir. I'm not accusing you at all, but where your office did not do a good job protecting this information. ...Do you know who anonymously made claims to the press that Attorney General Barr's March 24th letter to Congress had misrepresented the findings of your report?"

"[Y]ou sent a letter, dated March 27th, to Attorney General Barr, in which you claim the Attorney General's memo to Congress did not fully capture the context of your report. You stated earlier today that response was not authorized. Did you make any effort to determine who leaked this confidential letter?"

"[G]iven these examples, as well as others, you must have realized that leaks were coming from someone associated with the Special Counsel's office. What I'd like to ask..."

"Did you ask the department to authorize your office to investigate the origin of the Trump Russia investigation?"

"I'm just trying to understand the process. Does expanding the scope come from the acting Attorney General, or , or does it come from you, or can it come from either?"

"And was that ever denied?"

"I want to take a moment to re-emphasize something that my friend Mr. Turner has said. I've heard many people state, no person is above the law. And many times recently, they add, not even the President, which I think is blazingly obvious to most of us. ...I agree with this statement that no person is above the law. But there's another principal that we also have to defend, and that is the presumption of innocence. And I'm sure you agree with this principle, though I think the way that your office phrased some parts of your report, it does make me wonder... For going on three years, innocent people have been accused of very serious crimes, including treason. Accusations made, even here today. They have made their lives disrupted, and in some cases destroyed by false accusations, for which there is absolutely no basis, other than some people desperately wish that it was so. But your report is very clear. No evidence of conspiracy. No evidence of coordination. And I believe we owe it to these people, who have been falsely accused, including the President and his family, to make that very clear. Mr. Mueller, the credibility of your report is based on the integrity of how it is handled. And there's something that I think bothers me and other Americans. I'm holding here in my hand a binder of 25 examples of leaks that occurred from the Special Counsel's office—from those who associated with your work—dating back to as early as a few weeks after your inception... and continuing up to just a few months ago. All of these... have one thing in common. They were designed to weaken or embarrass the President, every single one. Never was it leaked that you had found no evidence of collusion. Never was it leaked that the Steele dossier was a complete fantasy, nor that it was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. I could go on and on. Mr. Mueller, are you aware of anyone from your team having given advance knowledge of the raid on Roger Stone's home to any person or the press, including CNN?"

"Did you ask the Department [of] Justice to expand the scope of the Special Counsel's mandate related to August 2, 2017 or August 20, 2017 scoping memoranda?"

"[D]oes your report contain any evidence that President Trump was enrolled in the Russian system of , as a member of this Committee once claimed?"

"[D]id you ever make a request to expand your office's mandate... at all?"

"[Y]ou're right, it is a cloud, and it's an unfair cloud for dozens of people. But to my point, are you aware of anyone providing information to the media regarding the raid on Roger Stone's home, including CNN?"