A commemorative coin featuring U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has been struck by the White House Communications Agency ahead of their planned summit next month.

In a statement, deputy spokesman Raj Shah insisted that “the White House did not have any input into the design and manufacture of the coin.”

The coin depicts Trump and Kim, described as North Korea’s “Supreme Leader,” in profile facing each other in front of a background of U.S. and North Korean flags.

At the top of the front, the words “Peace Talks” are emblazoned, with the date “2018” beneath.

The back of the coin features a picture of the White House, Air Force One and the presidential seal.

Trump is scheduled to hold a landmark summit with the North Korean leader in Singapore on June 12, but Pyongyang has recently threatened to pull out over U.S. demands for “unilateral nuclear abandonment.”

The White House Communications Agency regularly issues commemorative or challenge coins to present to foreign guests, diplomats and members of the military.

A number of the coins are available for sale through the White House Gift Office.

“Since 2003, White House Communications Agency members have ordered a limited number of commercially designed and manufactured souvenir travel coins for purchase,” Shah explained.

“These coins are designed, manufactured and made by an American coin manufacturer. These souvenir coins are only ordered after a trip has been publicly announced.”
…

An upcoming report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog is expected to criticize senior FBI leaders for not moving quickly enough to review a trove of Hillary Clinton emails discovered late in the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the findings.

The FBI’s timing has been a sore point for Clinton supporters, who say then-director James Comey’s announcement of the new review less than two weeks before the Nov. 8, 2016, election contributed to her loss. The agency’s findings affirming its decision not to pursue criminal charges against Clinton were disclosed two days before the vote — too late, her supporters say, to undo the damage.

Some FBI officials knew in September 2016 of the emails on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop but the bureau did not obtain a warrant to review them until the following month. Clinton allies say the candidate’s name could have been cleared much faster if the FBI acted on the emails as soon as they knew of their existence.

An inspector general report examining a broad range of FBI actions during the Clinton email investigation will criticize officials, including Comey, for not moving fast enough to examine the email trove and for a weekslong delay in getting a warrant, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

A lawyer for Comey and spokespeople for the inspector general and the FBI all declined to comment Monday.

The report will likely revive scrutiny of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton case and the extent to which it helped shape the outcome of the presidential election. Its conclusions may cut against President Donald Trump’s repeated assertions that the FBI was working against him during the campaign and instead revive allegations that the bureau broke from protocol in ways that ultimately harmed Clinton.

The nonpolitical watchdog has been repeatedly pulled into the partisan arena amid demands to investigate FBI actions in the early stages of its probe of possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. 

On Sunday, the Justice Department asked the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, to expand his existing investigation to look into whether Trump associates were improperly monitored during the campaign for political reasons.

The report dealing with the Clinton emails arises from a wide-ranging investigation launched in January 2017. It has been examining actions including Comey’s decision to announce his recommendation against criminal charges at an FBI headquarters news conference and his decision months later to alert Congress that the probe had been reopened because of the discovery of email messages on Weiner’s laptop.

The report is also expected to criticize two FBI officials who exchanged derogatory text messages about Trump during the course of the Clinton investigation.

A draft of the report has been completed, and officials whose actions are scrutinized in it have been permitted with their lawyers to review it and respond to the findings. The final version is expected out next month.

A separate inspector general report from last month faulted former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for misleading investigators about his role in a 2016 news media disclosure about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. 

McCabe, who has denied wrongdoing, was fired because of those findings, and the inspector general has referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington for possible criminal prosecution.

Weiner is the former husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. His laptop was being analyzed by FBI investigators as part of a separate sexting investigation involving a teenage girl. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, is serving a 21-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to sending obscene material to a 15-year-old girl.

In his book released last month, “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey writes that he learned in early October — probably from McCabe — that Weiner’s laptop might hold a connection to the Clinton email investigation. He said he did not recall the conversation clearly and that it seemed like a “passing comment and the notion that Anthony Weiner’s computer might connect to … Hillary Clinton made no sense to me.”

Comey said it wasn’t until the morning of Oct. 27 when FBI officials asked his permission to seek a warrant for the Clinton emails, having determined that “hundreds of thousands of emails” from Clinton’s personal email domain existed on the computer and that there was no way Weiner would consent to a search of his entire laptop given the legal trouble he was in.

Some of the emails on the laptop had been forwarded by Abedin to Weiner to be printed out while others had been stored there after being backed up from personal electronic devices.

The FBI subsequently obtained a warrant, and though Comey said he was told there was no chance the email review would be done before the election, he announced on Nov. 6 that, “Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”
…

A teenager who started a massive fire in the northwestern U.S. state of Oregon has been ordered to pay nearly $37 million in restitution over the next decade.

The 15-year-old admitted earlier this year that he threw two fireworks in Eagle Creek Canyon on Sept. 2. The fast-spreading fire caused evacuations, an extended shutdown of a major interstate highway, and devastation to a major outdoor tourist attraction.

A district judge on Monday ordered the teen to set up a payment plan to reimburse the victims, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Oregon Department of Transportation, $36,618,330.24 to cover the costs of firefighting, repair and restoration to the gorge, and damage to homes.

The restitution is solely the responsibility of the teen, and not his parents, who are immigrants from Ukraine.

Last week, defense attorneys called for a “reasonable and rational” penalty, calling the $37 million sought an “absurd” amount for the child.

The judge said if the teen makes agreed-to payments, completes probation and doesn’t commit other crimes, he can stop after 10 years.

The teenager was also sentenced to community service and had to write more than 150 letters of apology to those affected by the fire that burned 194 square kilometers.

The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area attracts more than 3 million tourists a year and holds North America’s largest concentration of waterfalls.
…

When police arrested more than 200 anti-Trump protesters on Inauguration Day 2017, it touched off a long-term battle of wits and wills.

On one side: a Justice Department that has sought to incarcerate scores of people over a violent protest that smashed downtown storefront windows and set a limousine ablaze.

On the other side: an intensely coordinated grassroots political opposition network that has made Washington the focus of a nationwide support campaign, offering free lodging for defendants, legal coordination and other support.

The stand-off entered a home stretch last week when a trial began for four people, the first in a series of group trials for 58 defendants that should last the rest of the year. Charges include property destruction and conspiracy to engage in a riot.

The trial represents a fresh start for prosecutors, who were forced to abandon most of their charges after a serious defeat last year. For the opposition — a network of activists and organizations loosely grouped as the Defend J20 Resistance movement — the new trial represents a chance to kill the government’s case.

Defendants and their supporters have framed the case as an indiscriminate police round-up followed by a concerted Justice Department effort to criminalize legitimate dissent. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff sought to neutralize that point in her opening statement.

“This is Washington, D.C.,” she said. “We know protest and we know dissent. But this wasn’t a protest. This was violence and destruction.”

This nationwide opposition network has been a visible presence since the trial of the first six defendants began in the fall.

Tapping into fundraising efforts around the country, defendants were reimbursed for their housing in Washington. Activists packed the courtroom, some serving as media liaisons, while others prepared meals for the defendants and their supporters.

“That support is absolutely essential to our ability to actually have a resistance,” said Michelle Macchio, an Asheville, North Carolina, resident who was part of that first defendant group. “We had to disrupt our lives. Some of us were paying rent back home, some of us had school, some of us had jobs. I was away from home for two months.”

‘The resistance’

Movement members refer to themselves as “the resistance,” a term that predates President Donald Trump’s election by decades. Sam Menefee-Libey, a local organizer and member of an activist collective called the DC Legal Posse, says Defend J20 is the inheritor of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movement that coalesced in Europe and first made headlines in America during massive protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and later in the Occupy movement. J20 stands for Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.

“Every 3-5 years there’s a new wave and new faces come in,” Menefee-Libey said. “There was a big surge after Trump was elected. There’s more people than we’re used to and it’s sustaining far longer.”

The movement focuses far more on street-level action than on winning elections. Under Trump it has begun to unify and cross-pollinate with other movements like Black Lives Matter and immigration advocates.

In supporting the inauguration protesters, social media campaigns have encouraged callers to flood the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Justice Department. Activists recently held a small rally headlined by Chelsea Manning to urge the government to drop all charges.

While defendants have secured their own lawyers, the Defend J20 movement helped organize a unified trial strategy. This included persuading defendants — sometimes over the objections of their lawyers — not to accept plea bargains.

Setback for government

They claim their unified strategy has already paid off. The trial of the first set of the original 160 defendants was supposed to start in early 2018. But when an unexpected hole in the court schedule opened in November, a group of defendants, including Macchio, volunteered to go on trial first.  The defendants and movement organizers presumed that prosecutors had set up the schedule in order to begin with other defendants — those who could be more easily linked to the violence.

“They were forced to prosecute people who they didn’t have any evidence of doing property damage,” said Kris Hermes, a veteran legal activist who served as a media liaison on that first trial. “They wouldn’t have preferred to try these cases in this order.”

Prosecutors admitted from the start that they had no evidence proving these specific defendants had committed violence or vandalism. Most protesters had dressed in black and covered their faces. Prosecutors could only claim that the entire group was guilty of supporting and providing cover for the vandals.

All six were acquitted and the government eventually dropped charges against 129 other defendants.

It’s not clear whether the scheduling switch hurt the government’s case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined a request to interview prosecutors or senior officials about the issue. However, movement leaders believe their maneuver wrong-footed the prosecution.

“It was apparent they were super-frustrated with having to take these people to trial first,” said Jude Ortiz, head of the National Lawyers Guild’s Mass Defense Committee. “It’s a reasonable conclusion to draw that having to do that group first really messed up their strategy.”

Prosecutor Kerkhoff, in the current trial, pledged to convince jurors through a mountain of photographic and video evidence that the masked vandals on screen were among the four suit-clad defendants in the room.

“You will have a chance to be the detectives,” she said. “The defendants need to be held accountable for their choice to express themselves with violence and destruction.”

 
…

China’s state media are playing up what it says is a trade war truce and de-escalation in tensions after negotiators from Washington and Beijing agreed to hold off on tariffs and “substantially reduce” the U.S. trade deficit. However, economists and business leaders argue that there is more to managing the relationship than balancing imports and exports.

State media in China are focusing heavily on the argument that Beijing did not give any ground and adopting their own take on the deficit question — focusing instead the country’s pledge to boost imports from the United States.

An editorial in the China Daily entitled “Sino-US agreement benefits both countries and the world” said that: “For China, ‘significantly increasing’ imports of U.S. goods and services, such as agricultural and energy products, will help meet its development needs and the desires of Chinese consumers.”

The editorial added that, “despite all the pressure, China didn’t “fold” as U.S. President Donald Trump observed. Instead, it stood firm and expressed its willingness to talk.”

An editorial in the party-backed Global Times said that while many may have noted what the joint statement said about reducing the U.S. deficit, that does not mean that the U.S. has won the trade talks. Instead, the piece said it was more a matter of learning to right an imbalance in the two countries’ trade systems.

The editorial called the now averted trade war a “historic period of difficult adjustment,” adding that “as one of the largest trade surplus countries in the world, China has learned from this dispute with the US.”

On news commentary boards, online response to agreement was mixed. Some argued the agreement was a sign that China had won. One commentator said: “America is just a paper tiger, there’s no need to be afraid.” Another: “Washington is weak in the knees.”

Many were pleased to see the two countries cooperating, agreeing that the decision was a “win-win.”

Others were not as certain. “Be careful, Trump will go back on his word,” wrote one person.

Despite state media’s rosy outlook about the agreement and confidence China had won online, huge differences between the two economies remain.

Lu Suiqi, an associate professor in economics at Peking University noted the agreement is just an incremental one and follow through will be key.

He said the focus on talks instead of brinkmanship was a positive development but not a guarantee of smooth sailing ahead.

“If any party fails to make good on its implementation, there may be renewed differences. And if these differences are hard to resolve, there’s still the possibility of putting the trade war back on,” Liu said.

Explainer: What is a Trade War?

Philip Levy, senior fellow on the global economy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs told VOA the deal is not the worst outcome we could have had, it’s sort of the mediocre outcome many feared.

“This looks like they’re opting for some sort of managed trade solution that I don’t thing is good for either country, but it is better than a tariff war,” Levy said.

Much of what the statement said about longstanding trade differences was vague at best, some analysts note.

The joint statement said both sides agreed to encourage two-way investment and committed to creating a business environment for fair competition.

Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it has been promising and pledging to open up and many are growing tired of the talk. Over the past few years, a shift backwards toward a more central state-led economy has become more prominent.

And even as Chinese President Xi Jinping pledges to open up China’s economy further, he is asserting the party and state’s control and dominance over everything — including business.

Foreign companies’ frustration with rules in China that force the handover of sensitive technology and concerns about intellectual property persist. There is also concern about government subsidies in cutting edge industries and support for state-owned enterprises.

“There are fundamental questions about how a state dominated economy of that size fits into the global trading system. And I don’t think we’ve answered those questions,” said Levy.

Speaking at a gathering of former officials and business leaders in Beijing last week, Jeremie Waterman, the president of the China Center at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that for businesses, market access is a bigger concern than trade imbalances.

“The focus of U.S Chamber of Commerce and our members really is on resolving the systemic issues, not on near term efforts to address the trade deficit,” Waterman said.

He added that focusing on opening markets and not closing them is best because it would address longstanding concerns about access in China. It could also help with the deficit.

Joyce Huang and Ira Mellman contributed to this report.
…