Mornings on the Mall 02.16.18

Ron Hosko, Steve Kastenbaum and Gary Aldrich joined WMAL on Friday!

Mornings on the Mall

Friday, February 16, 2018

Hosts: Mary Walter and Vince Coglianese

Executive Producer: Heather Hunter

5am – A/B/C Grandmother Stops Another School Shooting Day Before Florida Massacre. BALTIMORE (WJZ) — One day before 17 people were killed in a Florida school shooting, a grandmother helped to stop another massacre in Washington state. According to police in Everett, Washington, the grandmother of Joshua Alexander O’Connor called 911 after finding disturbing journal entries that described how the 18-year-old was planning to attack his high school. “Officers were also told the grandson had a rifle stored in a guitar case. As officers reviewed copies of the journal, they were alarmed at the statements and detailed plans to shoot students and use homemade explosive devices at ACES High School,” a statement from Everett police read.

5am – D MUELLER NEWS:

• Bannon Again Refuses To Answer Questions. Contempt Finding May Be Next. (BuzzFeed) — Members of both parties expressed frustration that the former Trump adviser refused to answer queries beyond 25 questions preapproved by the White House. Congress appears increasingly likely to vote to hold former top White House strategist Steve Bannon in contempt after he once again refused to answer questions during an interview with the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Russia investigation. Members of the committee from both parties left a three-hour interview with Bannon on Thursday expressing frustration that he had refused to answer queries beyond a set of 25 questions that had been scripted and preapproved by the White House. Bannon refused to answer all other questions by claiming he was invoking executive privilege on behalf of President Donald Trump. “He would not go beyond those questions in any of his answers, and that’s frustrating to those of us on the committee, so we have further steps to take and we’ll be taking those,” Texas Rep. Mike Conaway, the Republican who has led the committee’s Russia investigation since Chair Devin Nunes stepped aside, told reporters after the interview. “I think the next step for the Congress to take is to initiate contempt proceedings,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the committee.
• Steve Bannon met with Mueller multiple times over the past week. (NBC) — WASHINGTON — Steve Bannon, who served as President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller over multiple days this week, NBC News has learned from two sources familiar with the proceedings. Bannon spent a total of some 20 hours in conversations with the team led by Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia as well as other issues that have arisen around the probe.

5am – E Transgender Woman Breast-Feeds Baby After Hospital Induces Lactation. (NY Times) — When a transgender woman told doctors at a hospital in New York that she wanted to breast-feed her pregnant partner’s baby, they put her on a regimen of drugs that included an anti-nausea medication licensed in Britain and Canada but banned in the United States. Within a month, according to the journal Transgender Health, the woman, 30, who was born male, was producing droplets of milk. Within three months — two weeks before the baby’s due date — she had increased her production to eight ounces of milk a day. In the end, the study showed, “she was able to achieve sufficient breast milk volume to be the sole source of nourishment for her child for six weeks,” according to the journal. Dr. Tamar Reisman and Zil Goldstein, a nurse practitioner, of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York, say the case illustrates that, in some circumstances, modest but functional lactation can be induced in transgender women who did not give birth or undergo surgery.

6am – A IMMIGRATION NEWS:

• All 4 immigration bills fail in the Senate — all procedural votes. (AXIOS) – The Senate took procedural votes Thursday afternoon on four immigration bills that had been presented this week, and none received the necessary 60 votes to move forward. Why it matters: Sen. McConnell wanted a deal made this week, but now the Senate is back to square one. Senators leave tomorrow for a week-long recess. At this point, nobody knows what will come next and DACA recipients still don’t have long-term protection.
• White House viciously tears into Republican Lindsey Graham and his Senate pals for ‘catastrophically drafted’ and ‘totally unworkable’ immigration legislation. (Daily Mail) — A senior official made Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham the target of the administration’s ire on Thursday, hurling insults at lawmaker in a call that the White House refused to fully put on the record. Graham was personally and repeatedly chastised as an ‘obstacle’ to achieving immigration reform in the United States by the official who hails from the same political party as the South Carolina Republican during an afternoon call with reporters.

6am – B OLYMPICS NEWS:

• Lindsey Vonn would like to compete against the men in skiing. (HotAir) — Olympic skiing sensation Lindsey Vonn has had a request in for some time now to be allowed to go up against the men. Her request has been refused thus far (though it’s under consideration by the International Ski Federation (FIS), but they won’t be deciding until the Spring. The International Olympic Committee doesn’t allow mixed-gender racing either, so we won’t know if she’ll get her chance for a while yet. But the crew at Fivethirtyeight, who always love a good statistical analysis, took up the challenge, ran the numbers and tried to determine if Vonn could actually prevail against the boys. And it turns out it’s possible… maybe. Vonn’s quest made us wonder: What would the Olympics look like if men and women skied against each other? We got results for four Alpine events in the Winter Olympics4 going back to 1948 and looked at the median speed5 for competitors in the men’s and women’s events in each year.
• Same-Sex Skating? USA Today Writer Goes the Full ‘Blades of Glory.’ (Newsbusters) — Martin Rogers is probably a nice man, and he seems sincere when he writes in USA Today, “Tolerance and understanding of the LGBT community still has some way to travel, but isn’t there enough of it for there to at least be a conversation about new Olympic events allowing two men and two women to skate in tandem?”

6am – C PENCE CONTROVERSY?? Mike Pence bought a Valentine’s Day gift for his wife at . . . CVS. (Washington Post) — Hey, isn’t that … Vice President Pence, on Wednesday night dropping by a retail spot known for its selection of gifts every woman loves? The Veep was spotted on Valentine’s Day making his way out of the CVS at Pennsylvania Avenue and 19th Street NW. And it seemed he hadn’t just made the drugstore run for a pack of gum. CBS White House reporter Jacqueline Alemany tweeted about the sighting and said onlookers “say he purchased a Valentine’s Day gift for his wife.” Alemany was not about to ruin things for the second couple before the romantic evening. “Don’t worry,” she wrote. “I won’t spoil what the contents of the gift are @SecondLady.”

6am – D/E MORE SCHOOL SHOOTING REACTION:

• Florida Shooting: Nikolas Cruz Confessed to Police That He Began Shooting Students ‘in the Hallways’
• White Nationalist Group Claims Florida Shooter, Then Says They Got Confused
• WASHINGTON POST ADMITS: No, there haven’t been 18 school shootings in 2018. That number is flat wrong.
• DNC Fundraises Off Florida Shooting
• MIKE LEE: Stopping shootings may ‘require an even more powerful source for help’ than government
• Megyn Kelly: ‘NRA is too powerful,’ ‘politicians are too weak’
• Donald Trump Addresses Florida School Shooting: ‘Answer Hate with Love, Answer Cruelty with Kindness’
• Obama calls for gun control after Florida shooting: We are grieving, but we are not powerless

6am – F Mitt Romney expected to announce bid for Utah Senate seat Friday. (Fox News) – Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is expected to announce his bid to run for the U.S. Senate seat in Utah on Friday. Romney was supposed to announce his campaign Thursday in a video posted online but pushed off the announcement “out of respect” for the high school shooting victims and their families in Parkland, Florida.

7am – A INTERVIEW – RON HOSKO – former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division and currently the ‎President at Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund

• The FBI Was Warned About A School Shooting Threat From A YouTube User Named Nikolas Cruz In September

7am – B/C PENCE VS THE VIEW:

• The View’s Non-Apology For Suggesting Vp Pence’s Faith Is A Sign Of ‘Mental Illness’
• ‘The View’ Cuts Off Meghan McCain During Condemnation Of Her Cohosts

7am – D INTERVIEW – STEVE KASTENBAUM – Correspondent in Pyeongchang, South Korea – recapped the latest at the Olympics and preview what’s ahead.

7am – E Priebus dishes on White House chaos, Sessions’ near-resignation. (Fox News) — Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff who has kept a low profile since his ouster last summer, is speaking out on the chaos he witnessed in the West Wing in those early months – detailing the fiery infighting that consumed the Trump team after James Comey’s removal, and the scramble to avert Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation. “Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by 50,” Priebus said. The former Republican National Committee boss spoke to writer Chris Whipple for an updated version of his book, “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.” In an adapted passage in Vanity Fair, Priebus and other sources gave new details about what was happening behind the scenes after Trump ousted his FBI director, apparently against the wishes of Priebus and White House Counsel Don McGahn. The account says in the immediate aftermath, chief strategist Steve Bannon blew up at Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, who supported Trump’s decision to fire Comey and supposedly was angry the communications team was struggling to defend it. “There’s not a f—ing thing you can do to sell this!” Bannon reportedly shouted at Kushner. “Nobody can sell this! P. T. Barnum couldn’t sell this! People aren’t stupid! This is a terrible, stupid decision that’s going to have massive implications. It may have shortened Trump’s presidency—and it’s because of you, Jared Kushner!”

8am – A INTERVIEW – GARY ALDRICH – former FBI agent and author of “Unlimited Access : An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House”

• The FBI Was Warned About A School Shooting Threat From A YouTube User Named Nikolas Cruz In September (NY Times) — The F.B.I. is reviewing what steps the bureau took before the shooting when the agents received the initial information. The bureau conducted database reviews and open-source checks about the comment in September, Rob Lasky, the F.B.I. special agent in charge in Miami, said on Thursday. “There was no particular information about the particular time, location or further identifiers about the person who posted the comment,” Mr. Lasky said. “No additional information was found to positively identify the person who posted this comment. There was no connection found to South Florida.” Had agents sought a grand jury subpoena to obtain data from YouTube to identify the person behind the posting, it is not certain that prosecutors would have agreed to seek one based on the scant information available. Agents might have a hard time convincing prosecutors of an imminent threat because the post mentioned no time or location of a possible shooting. Even if agents had tied Mr. Cruz to the YouTube post, the authorities probably would have questioned him or his family and friends but would have been unable seize his gun without a court order.
• Did the Clinton White House ever fire staffers who had domestic violence problems? Former FBI Agent Gary Aldrich: Clinton WH Retained High Level Staffer With Domestic Abuse History (Daily Caller) — Former FBI agent Gary Aldrich recalled that a Clinton White House staffer with a history of domestic violence never resigned or was fired from his top-level post at the time. Aldrich, an agent with the bureau during the terms of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, joined SiriusXM Patriot 125 on The David Webb Show Thursday and told Kerry Picket: “You know, and as far as this current allegation goes, you, we had one fellow, I’ll never forget him, and in fact it was one of the reasons I decided to write my book was that he was working in the White House, a very sensitive high level position, and his background was that he had several marriages and he put one of his wives right into the hospital with physical abuse.”

8am – B IMMIGRATION NEWS:

• All 4 immigration bills fail in the Senate — all procedural votes. (AXIOS) – The Senate took procedural votes Thursday afternoon on four immigration bills that had been presented this week, and none received the necessary 60 votes to move forward. Why it matters: Sen. McConnell wanted a deal made this week, but now the Senate is back to square one. Senators leave tomorrow for a week-long recess. At this point, nobody knows what will come next and DACA recipients still don’t have long-term protection.
• White House viciously tears into Republican Lindsey Graham and his Senate pals for ‘catastrophically drafted’ and ‘totally unworkable’ immigration legislation. (Daily Mail) — A senior official made Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham the target of the administration’s ire on Thursday, hurling insults at lawmaker in a call that the White House refused to fully put on the record. Graham was personally and repeatedly chastised as an ‘obstacle’ to achieving immigration reform in the United States by the official who hails from the same political party as the South Carolina Republican during an afternoon call with reporters.

8am – C ENTERTAINMENT NEWS:

• Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux announce separation
• Amy Schumer reportedly marries chef Chris Fischer

8am – D/E Grandmother Stops Another School Shooting Day Before Florida Massacre. BALTIMORE (WJZ) — One day before 17 people were killed in a Florida school shooting, a grandmother helped to stop another massacre in Washington state. According to police in Everett, Washington, the grandmother of Joshua Alexander O’Connor called 911 after finding disturbing journal entries that described how the 18-year-old was planning to attack his high school. “Officers were also told the grandson had a rifle stored in a guitar case. As officers reviewed copies of the journal, they were alarmed at the statements and detailed plans to shoot students and use homemade explosive devices at ACES High School,” a statement from Everett police read.