Foreign Policy Update – USA Gov Policy

VENEZUELA

Venezuelans are suffering. The economy is in ruins. And, now interim President Juan Guaido’s chief of staff has been taken into custody on questionable charges that he had guns in his home. In an interview Secretary of State Michael Pompeo commented on the unstable situation in Venezuela. He reiterated that the American people stand with the people of Venezuela, who are going through horrific times. Pompeo pointed out that the Trump Administration is behaving in the opposite way of Obama’s during the green effort in Iran. He added that: “Instead of shunning the people, we have supported them. Instead of denying the rights of the people of Iran, we’re supporting the rights of the people of Venezuela. We’re committed to this; we’re going to stay the course.”

Washington is approaching Venezuela on several fronts. Pompeo said “There’s the political element, there’s the economic element. We are desperately trying to get humanitarian assistance to the people of Venezuela. We are committed to helping Venezuela, the region, deny Maduro the opportunity to engage in this thuggish behavior that has been so harmful to ordinary Venezuelans. We’re determined to achieve this outcome, and we’re optimistic that we can get there.”

The political turmoil in Venezuela is expanding as the country is experiencing hyperinflation with the majority of its citizens suffering from malnutrition and many starving, including children. The former Maduro regime has dug in and refuses to give up power. Maduro, who is supported by the military has refused to allow humanitarian aid to cross the border into the country and had led to armed skirmishes with aid convoys.

LEBANON/IRAN

Secretary Pompeo announced that he is in talks with Lebanese government officials about how Beirut can extricate itself from the grips of local Hizballah groups, which are supported by the regime in Iran. He added that there are serious risks to Lebanon and Israel if they permit Hizballah’s missiles in southern Lebanon. There also are “… risks of having Hizballah intertwined in the government” and other “…risks that it presents to the Lebanese people.” The US Government is pushing back against Iran on a number of fronts. Washington recently added a number of names from Iran to its list of terrorist-designated groups and individuals. There also will be another round of sanctions coming up in May 2019.

According to the Secretary, the government has designated “senior leaders inside the IRGC. “You’ve seen us designate financial institutions, financial agents engaged in moving illicit money in support of the Houthis, in support of Hamas, in support of Hizballah. This administration has taken serious efforts across a broad range of threats, a broad range of efforts to Iran to extend its reach. We’ll continue to do that in evaluating whether or not to sanction a particular Iranian entity,” he noted. Estimates suggest that Hizballah may have over 100,000 rockets and may be building tunnels into the Northern Galilee, as well as setting up a military infrastructure on the Golan Heights.

In remarks to the traveling press, during the Secretary’s recent Middle East trip, Pompeo commented that “The simple goal is to get Iran to behave like a normal nation: stop blowing up things around the world; stop fomenting terrorism; stop their assassination campaign in Europe; stop underwriting the Houthis, Hamas, Hizballah. Simple things – the same things we ask every nation in the world to do we’re asking of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

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CHINA

Secretary Pompeo recently stated that the trade war with China was started long before President Trump assumed office. He added that we’ve“…had decades of Chinese abuse where we couldn’t sell our wheat, couldn’t sell our cattle, we couldn’t sell our beans or our cotton into China without a massive tariff, and when we did, they would steal our intellectual property. Those were unacceptable outcomes. The trade war was started an awfully long time ago by China. President Trump’s trying to flip that. He’s trying to make it better. I’ve seen the discussions; I know we’re making progress. I’m hopeful there’ll be a deal with China before too long….”

NORTH KOREA

On Friday, March 22, President Trump unexpectedly announced via Twitter that he is cancelling the recently announced additional trade sanctions aimed at North Korea. His statement caught the Treasury Department off guard as the Treasury Department had only a day earlier announced the additions restrictions. This appears to be the President’s latest attempt to salvage the nuclear negotiations.

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Saturday, she presents key updates on U.S. foreign policy from the State Department.

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

What does the Reversal of Harvey Weinstein’s Conviction Portend for Donald Trump?

The New York Court of Appeals has upheld the ruling by the trial judge we closed yesterday’s article with. “Defendant argues that CPL 30.10 (4) (a) has only been applied to cases involving nonresidents,” the Court of Appeals stated. However, “[n]owhere does this provision distinguish between residents and nonresidents and we cannot read into the statute a limitation not adopted by the legislature…If the legislature intended this tolling provision to apply only to nonresidents or that courts should factor residency into a tolling analysis, it would have said so expressly.” (Citation omitted.) Further, “the statute [does not] contain any requirement that the tolling period apply once authorities know that a crime has been committed and, as with defendant’s proposed exclusion for New York residents, we reject defendant’s invitation to rewrite the statute to provide such limitation.” Thus, it is irrelevant whether Donald Trump was a resident of New York or not, nor does it matter whether or not the New York County District Attorney had any intention to charge the former President with a crime at the time the offense allegedly occurred. The time he spent outside New York stops the Statute of Limitations from running out. But what if Donald Trump (like Weinstein) had been in and out of New York during the time period in question? According to the Court of Appeals, “‘all periods of a day or more’ during a defendant’s absence from the state ‘should be totaled and toll the Statute of Limitations’…Logically, then, even a day’s absence counts.” (Citation omitted.) Thus, as we warned in May of last year, the prosecution of Donald Trump is not time-barred, based upon the extended time periods he spent outside of New York, serving his country as President of the United States. This issue, while significant, is only one ruling which could impact the Trump case. During the trial, we have witnessed several rulings which affect the former President’s ability to defend himself. For instance, in their opening statement to the jury, Prosecutors stated “This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up…[t]he defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election, then covered it up.” In fact, according to The Hill, “[a]lthough Trump faces charges of falsifying business records, prosecutors will tell jurors a story that ranges from sex to politics to accounting, attempting to convince them that Trump criminally covered up a hush money deal to influence the 2016 presidential election. The district attorney’s first oration to the jury echoed two of Trump’s other criminal cases, which revolve around his alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results after losing to President Biden. “It was election fraud – pure and simple,” [the prosecutor] said in his opening remarks.” Donald Trump is charged with falsifying his business records to disguise a “hush money” payment made to a woman who alleged he had an affair with her. That charge has been elevated to a felony based upon an intent to hide an underlying crime. The crime has never been adequately specified, but it appears to involve the violation of federal elections laws that enumerate the appropriate expenditure of campaign contributions. Now the Manhattan DA’s office is changing their theory by claiming the underlying crime is outright federal election fraud – an uncharged crime. Further, “[i]f Donald Trump takes the stand, prosecutors will be allowed to grill him under oath about several adverse rulings in his past civil cases, Justice Juan Merchan ruled…Prosecutors will be allowed to elicit testimony about Trump being found liable for fraudulently inflating his business assets in a suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. They will also be allowed to question him about defamatory statements he made about writer E. Jean Carroll. In a civil case last year, a federal jury determined that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a department store in the 1990s, and in two civil cases, Trump was found liable for defaming Carroll. Merchan also ruled that, if Trump testifies, prosecutors can ask him about fines he received for violating a gag order in the business fraud case when he verbally attacked the law clerk of the judge overseeing that case.” Even Politico had to concede that this was “a significant loss for the former president that will complicate his self-declared plan to testify in his own defense.” This ruling is much more than a “loss” that complicates Trump’s ability to testify in his own defense. In fact, if Judge Merchan maintains this position, and also lets stand the prosecutor’s attempts to use proof that Trump allegedly “subverted” the 2020 Presidential election, under the Court of Appeals’ ruling in the Weinstein case, permitting these prejudicial matters into evidence is most certainly reversible error. “Every person accused of a crime is constitutionally presumed innocent and entitled to a fair trial and the opportunity to present a defense, the Court of Appeals states in People v. Weinstein. “Under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged and, thus, allegations of prior bad acts may not be admitted against them for the sole purpose of establishing their propensity for criminality… It is our solemn duty to diligently guard these rights regardless of the crime charged, the reputation of the accused, or the pressure to convict.” In Harvey Weinstein’s case, “the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes because that testimony served no material non-propensity purpose. The court compounded that error when it ruled that defendant, who had no criminal history, could be cross examined about those allegations as well as numerous allegations of misconduct that portrayed defendant in a highly prejudicial light. The synergistic effect of these errors was not harmless. The only evidence against defendant was the complainants’ testimony, and the result of the court’s rulings, on the one hand, was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant’s character before the jury. On the other hand, […]