Amid a new investigation of his Supreme Court nominee, U.S. President Donald Trump maintained his support for Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Saturday, saying that “hopefully, at the conclusion, everything will be fine.” 

Trump, speaking to reporters on the White House South Lawn prior to his departure for a political rally in nearby West Virginia, noted that the FBI “is all over, talking to everybody,” including women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, and “I would expect it’s going to turn out very well for the judge.” 

The president also accused opposition Democrats of acting terribly and dishonestly during the Kavanaugh confirmation process. He expressed anger about the leak of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Kavanaugh, which she sent to a congresswoman but had previously requested remain confidential. 

Despite what Trump told reporters, news reports indicated the White House might be limiting the scope of the FBI’s investigation — such as not permitting scrutiny of the claims of another woman, Julie Swetnick, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct at parties while he was a prep school student. 

But Trump administration officials denied they were restricting areas of inquiry.

“The scope and duration has been set by the Senate,” according to a statement by White House spokesman Raj Shah. “The White House is letting FBI agents do what they are trained to do.”

News reports said the FBI had contacted Deborah Ramirez, the second of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The Associated Press reported that Ramirez’s lawyer, John Clune, said she had agreed to cooperate with agents. 

Ramirez alleged in a report published Sept. 23 by The New Yorker magazine that Kavanaugh exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party and shoved his penis in her face, forcing her to touch it while pushing him away. She said the the assault occurred during the 1983-84 school year at Yale University, where they both were students.

The FBI was also following up on accusations by Ford, the first woman who accused Kavanaugh. Her story dated to 1982, when they were teenagers. She said he sexually assaulted her at a gathering at a home in suburban Washington. Kavanaugh has angrily denied the allegation.

Both told their stories to the Senate Judiciary Committee separately Thursday in lengthy hearings.

Trump ordered the new investigation Friday at the request of the Judiciary Committee. The consent for a fresh probe was a concession by the Trump administration and Republicans, who had strongly contended that Kavanaugh was thoroughly vetted numerous times. 

WATCH: Kavanaugh Moves Step Closer to Confirmation, But With a Hitch 

The Judiciary Committee voted Friday to send Kavanaugh’s nomination for the Supreme Court to the full Senate after securing a party-line vote in favor of the nod, but Arizona Republican Jeff Flake requested a delay in the floor vote and the additional investigation.

“This country is being ripped apart here, and we’ve got to make sure that we do due diligence,” Flake said.

Another Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said Friday that she agreed with Flake’s call for additional FBI investigation.

Republicans hold a slim 51-49 margin in the Senate. Kavanaugh needs at least 50 votes to have his nomination confirmed. Vice President Mike Pence would cast the deciding vote if the Senate was evenly split. If all Democrats vote against Kavanaugh, two Republicans would have to do the same to block his confirmation.

Kavanaugh said in a statement released by the White House that he would continue to cooperate with the FBI and the Senate.

“Throughout this process, I’ve been interviewed by the FBI, I’ve done a number of ‘background’ calls directly with the Senate, and yesterday, I answered questions under oath about every topic the senators and their counsel asked me. I’ve done everything they have requested and will continue to cooperate,” he said.

In another development Friday, a high school friend of Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, said he was willing to cooperate with any FBI investigation. Judge is likely to figure prominently in any inquiry by the FBI, because Ford contends he was present when Kavanaugh assaulted her at the suburban Washington party. Judge has denied being at any party with Ford when an attack took place.
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North Korea’s foreign minister said Saturday that his government would not denuclearize before it has sufficient trust in the United States.

“Without any trust in the U.S., there will be no confidence in our national security, and under such circumstances there is no way we will unilaterally disarm ourselves first,” Ri Yong Ho told the U.N. General Assembly.

“The DPRK government’s commitment to the denuclearization is solid and firm, however, it is only possible if the U.S secures our sufficient trust towards the U.S.,” the foreign minister said.

DPRK is the acronym for the country’s formal name.

Ri said this lack of confidence in Washington is the reason denuclearization discussions have stalled since the historic Singapore summit in June between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un.  

He warned that if both countries continue to harbor mistrust, the summit’s joint statement would suffer the same “fate of failure as all the previous agreements between the two countries.”

He noted that Pyongyang had taken “significant” goodwill steps, including stopping nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests (both are forbidden activities under existing U.N. Security Council resolutions) and dismantling the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, but had seen no corresponding response from Washington.

Critical of sanctions

The minister also said sanctions against his government only deepen the mistrust.

“The perception that sanctions can bring us on our knees is a pipe dream of the people who are ignorant about us,” Ri said.

President Trump has said that sanctions will remain in place against North Korea until complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization is achieved.

North Korea’s top diplomat did not mention Trump by name during his speech, nor did he offer him any praise or credit for the summit or warming of relations. Instead, he pointed to progress with South Korea – the leaders of the two countries have had three meetings – and said if the denuclearization issue were between them and not Washington, it would not be deadlocked.

By contrast, Trump in his remarks to the assembly on Tuesday, thanked Kim “for his courage and for the steps he has taken.” On Wednesday, he praised the isolated and reclusive North Korean leader again, saying he is “a man I have gotten to know and like.” Trump said the two would meet again in the “very near future” and expressed optimism that a deal could be reached.

North Korea’s foreign minister put much of the blame for the stalled momentum on U.S. domestic politics.

“Those in the political opposition in the U.S. make it their daily business to slander the DPRK claiming that we cannot be trusted, with the sole purpose of attacking their political opponent and they are forcing the administration to make unreasonable unilateral demands to our side, thereby impeding the smooth progress of the dialogue and negotiations.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Ri in New York and is planning to go to Pyongyang next month to continue discussions.

 
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The nation was riveted but divided by dramatic testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, the university professor accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were teenagers living in the DC area. The emotional debate could be a turning point in America’s cultural and political discussions, galvanizing the MeToo movement and mobilizing voters on both sides in midterm elections this November. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from Capitol Hill.
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President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, moved a step closer to confirmation Friday when he won a party-line endorsement from the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee. But uncertainty was introduced when a Republican senator insisted on a delay in the final Senate vote on Kavanaugh until the FBI can investigate an allegation of sexual assault brought by California professor Christine Blasey Ford. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has the latest from Washington.
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A federal judge Friday struck down a Kentucky law requiring abortion providers to sign advance agreements with hospitals and ambulance services for emergency patient care, in a ruling that keeps the state from revoking the license of its only remaining abortion clinic.

U.S. District Judge Greg Stivers in Louisville sided with the EMW Women’s Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood in challenging a law that threatened to make Kentucky the first U.S. state without a single legal abortion provider.

“This decision keeps open the doors of the only health center in Kentucky that provides safe and legal abortion care,” Planned Parenthood said in a statement.

Clinic files suit

The Louisville clinic filed suit last year claiming that Governor Matt Bevin, a self-described “unapologetically pro-life” Republican, was using the law unfairly to terminate its license, following a 2016 licensing battle that forced the shutdown of a Lexington clinic.

Planned Parenthood joined in the suit, asserting that the state was likewise blocking its application for a license to begin offering abortion services at a new clinic in Louisville.

Bevin has argued that requirements for clinics to keep so-called transfer and transport agreements, stipulated under a 1998 law, were meant to protect women should complications arise during abortion procedures.

But plaintiffs countered that hospitals were already legally bound to accept any patient in an emergency and that local fire and rescue departments will transport patients without such agreements.

Routine requirement becomes obstacle

Christie Gillespie, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, said the governor had in effect turned what had been a routine licensing requirement into an obstacle by putting pressure on hospitals to deny transfer agreements with abortion providers.

Planned Parenthood said the state threatened in March of 2017 to revoke EMW’s license by citing alleged technical deficiencies in its transfer and transport agreements that had been approved a year earlier.

Following a three-day trial last September, the judge ruled that the law and its requirements violated the plaintiffs’ substantive due process rights under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The opinion was accompanied by a permanent injunction barring enforcement of those restrictions.

There was no immediate comment from Kentucky’s governor on whether he would seek an appeal.

Supreme Court ramifications

The case could test interpretations of a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down parts of a Texas law requiring abortion clinics to meet hospitallike standards and for clinic doctors to have admitting privileges in nearby hospitals.

A requirement for admitting privileges in Louisiana was upheld Wednesday in a 2-1 ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Abortion has been a central issue in the U.S. Senate confirmation battle over President Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, a judicial conservative who abortion rights advocates worry could tip the high court in favor of further restrictions.
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Ashley Loring Heavyrunner disappeared from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in June 2017, one of thousands of indigenous women recorded missing in the United States and Canada in recent decades.

For professional cartographer Annita Lucchesi, a descendant of the Cheyenne Tribe, the loss was personal: Heavyrunner was her student at the Blackfeet Community College.

Now Lucchesi is putting together an atlas of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, seeking to map the geographic distribution of such cases.

“Mapping is an indigenous way of knowing,” Lucchesi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone from California. “It can yield really powerful results, especially for social issues that are hard to discuss, like missing and murdered indigenous women.”

​National estimates

A 2014 national report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimated 1,181 indigenous women disappeared or were murdered since 1980. In 2016, the U.S. National Crime Information Center reported 5,712 cases of missing native women.

Lucchesi is not satisfied with those official figures.

Authorities, she said, do not make public their standards for inclusion and might repeat cases when one person runs away from home multiple times.

Database, maps

She has already prepared a comprehensive database of missing or murdered indigenous women and sees the maps, which are part of her doctoral thesis, as a way for indigenous women to share their stories on their own terms.

“We need a good working number of cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in the U.S. and Canada,” she said.

As a U.S. citizen studying at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, Lucchesi understands the justice system on both sides of the border.

Personal experience

She has also experienced domestic violence personally, an ordeal she said spurred her to action.

“If I had been killed I would have wanted a movement to make sure this doesn’t happen to other women and girls,” she said.

More than 4 in 5 Native American women have experienced violence in their lifetime, according to the National Institute of Justice.

While the full atlas is a work in progress Lucchesi has mapped the 119 women whose names, drawn from her database, were carried by protesters during the 2018 Women’s Marches.

“Our stories are inherently tied to the land, so mapping our stories is not quite as big of a jump as people imagine it to be,” she said.
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A federal court Friday refused to immediately dismiss a lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of violating a constitutional anti-corruption provision by accepting foreign payments through his hotels and businesses without the permission of the U.S. Congress.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington said in a 58-page ruling that lawmakers who brought the suit had legal standing to sue the president for allegedly flouting the U.S. Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, which prevents federal officeholders from accepting presents and other benefits from foreign governments without the “consent” of Congress.

The lawsuit, filed in June 2017, is the third constitutional challenge to Trump’s business interests while in office, but it is notable because the plaintiffs are themselves members of Congress.

U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte in Greenbelt, Maryland, has allowed a similar lawsuit to move forward, but in December 2017 a judge in Manhattan threw out yet another case, which is now on appeal.

The members of Congress involved in the suit are all Democrats but also include Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. They are represented by the Constitutional Accountability Center, a Washington-based liberal legal organization.
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