Lawyer With Firm That Won Freddie Gray Settlement Is Next Obama Judge up for Senate’s OK

President Barack Obama has not been able to move his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, through the Senate but Republicans continue to advance the president’s lower court nominees.

The chamber on Monday is set to take up the nomination of Paula Xinis, a partner and senior trial attorney at Murphy, Falcon & Murphy—the Baltimore law firm that secured a $6.4 million settlement from the city of Baltimore in September in the wrongful death case of Freddie Gray.

If confirmed as a U.S. District Court judge for Maryland, Xinis, 47, could serve for life.

In April 2015, after being arrested for possessing an illegal switchblade, Gray, 25, received a spinal cord injury in the back of a police van and died a week later. Gray had a lengthy criminal record.

A medical examiner ruled Gray’s death a homicide. His death drew national attention after sparking riots, arson, and vandalism in West Baltimore as well as peaceful protests. Trials continue for the six police officers charged in the case.

Though Senate Republican leadership has vowed to stop any Supreme Court nominees, they’ve promised to evaluate each of Obama’s picks for federal circuit and district courts.

Obama nominated Xinis more than a year ago. She would be the second lower court nominee confirmed since Senate Republicans began their blockade of Supreme Court candidates after the Feb. 13 death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative.

Five months earlier, on Sept. 17, the Judiciary Committee by voice vote approved her for the District Court seat in Greenbelt.

The vote on Xinis by the full Senate coincides with the beginning of National Police Week. Xinis served as a complaint examiner for the District of Columbia’s Office of Police Complaints. From 2005 to 2011, Xinis issued six opinions, ruling against the accused officer in each case.

One case involved an arrest for disorderly conduct in 2011. After ignoring a police order to move along, a District man began cursing at officers outside a local supermarket. A witness reported that the man “became verbally abusive.” But Xinis upheld a charge of harassment against the officer, ruling that “the arrest was baseless.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., noting her employment with Murphy, Falcon & Murphy, questioned Xinis about such opinions during a Judiciary Committee hearing on July 15, 2015.

Xinis, also a former public defender, said her job was to review cases before her, adding that she has a reputation for open-mindedness and integrity, according to a live blog of the proceedings.

“Can you assure police officers in Baltimore and all over Maryland that might be brought before your court that they’ll get a fair day in court, and that your history would not impact your decision-making?” Sessions asked.

Xinis, of University Park, replied that a well-trained judge has no agenda, and she wouldn’t have one. [Her appearance begins at 29:15 in this committee video.]

Xinis joined Murphy, Falcon & Murphy in 2011 and made partner in 2013. As a trial lawyer in private practice, she has won several cases involving civil rights and police brutality. She won a $5 million settlement from Camden County, New Jersey, for an incident that occurred after a police dog attacked a suspect, causing neurological damage.

According to the New Jersey Law Journal, Xinis and a partnering lawyer collected $1.54 million in attorney fees.

In a profile, the American Society of Legal Advocates wrote of her criminal defense work:

Ms. Xinis is a tenacious, and meticulous advocate for her clients with 14 years of prior experience as an assistant federal public defender representing individuals charged with the most complex and serious federal crimes, including wire, mail and bank fraud, public corruption, trade embargo violations, bribery, tax evasion, as well as drug conspiracies and firearms offenses.

A spokeswoman for Murphy, Falcon & Murphy told The Daily Signal that the firm would not respond to questions about Xinis until after Monday’s vote.

Before passing the bar, Xinis received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia in 1991 and graduated from Yale Law School in 1997.

She began her legal career when she clerked in 1998 for Judge Diana Gribbon Motz on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Motz, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, personally recommended Xinis for the U.S. District Court bench in Maryland.

Democrats Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin, Maryland’s U.S. senators, have shepherded Xinis since Obama nominated her in March 2015. (For more from the author of “Lawyer With Firm That Won Freddie Gray Settlement Is Next Obama Judge up for Senate’s OK” please click HERE)

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The Deadly Crossing on the US-Mexico Border

Today on “Full Measure,” we have a report on “The Missing”—the hundreds of illegal immigrants who cross the border, never to be seen alive again. Their remains are found in remote desert areas.

For this story, I traveled to the Tucson, Ariz., morgue where advanced forensic science is used to identify the remains, and let loved ones know how the journey ended.

Here’s an exchange I had with Dr. Gregory Hess, the Pima County medical examiner:

HESS: “Since about 2001, we’ve had the largest number of undocumented border crosser deaths for any single jurisdiction in the U.S. and so we’ve had a lot of experience with examining these kinds of remains.”

ATTKISSON: “How successful are you at identifying these unknowns?”

HESS: “It’s actually pretty good. We’ve had about 2,500 unidentified remains since 2001, of people we believe to be foreign nationals. We’ve identified [about] 1,700 of those. So it’s about 65%.”

ATTKISSON: “That’s pretty amazing, right?”

HESS: “Yeah, it’s pretty good. But that still leaves us with [about] 900 individuals that we have not identified. And essentially the odds of us identifying someone are directly proportional to the conditions of the remains when they come in, and whether or not they have any personal effects with them.”

HESS: “Just because somebody has personal effects doesn’t mean that it’s that person, because people travel under aliases quite frequently, and they may have just flat out false IDs.”

ATTKISSON: “So what is the key when you’re able to identify somebody that was carrying a fake identity? What’s the key to figuring out who that was?”

HESS: “Finding family. Because if you have a family, you can compare a family reference sample to the remains that we have to determine if they’re related.”

ATTKISSON: “Does it ever make you sad? The idea that this, someone’s life boiled down to this and nobody even knows when they died?”

HESS: “Sure. But you know for us, it’s more of an objective, kind of clinical perspective, because this is what we do. So we try to, you know approach it professionally and try to get this person identified.”

I also spoke to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Cmdr. Paul Beeson:

“We are of course very concerned about human life. And we’re going to do everything we can to preserve and protect human life. We have a number of programs in place to respond in those instances when migrants get into trouble when they cross through some of these desert environments. Ultimately, the smuggling organizations and these people make these decisions to cross in these areas. They put themselves at risk, the smuggling organizations put them at risk.”

(For more from the author of “The Deadly Crossing on the US-Mexico Border” please click HERE)

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Wendy’s Announces Major Change in Response to $15 Minimum Wage

The Wendy’s fast-food restaurant chain announced Thursday it will be including self-serving kiosks in its 6,000 plus locations by the end of this year.

The move comes in the wake of two of the nation’s most populous states, California and New York, passing $15 mandatory minimum wage laws.

Wendy’s president Todd Penegor reported that the chain’s company owned stores (making up 10 percent of the total) are seeing between a 5 to 6 percent increase in labor costs, driven by minimum wage hikes and the need to offer competitive wages to “access good labor,” according to Investor’s Business Daily.

According to the news outlet, McDonald’s has also been testing self-service kiosks.

Last year, Seattle became the first major city in the country to mandate a $15 minimum wage, which is being phased in over the next few years, as is the case in New York and California.

The new law appears to have already hit the Emerald City’s restaurant industry the hardest, due to the tight profit margins (around 4 percent) that are standard. Multiple restaurants have closed or changed their staffing or hours.

“Some restaurants have tacked on a 15 percent surcharge to cover the higher wages. And some managers are no longer encouraging customers to tip, leading to a redistribution of income. Workers in the back of the kitchen, such as dishwashers and cooks, are getting paid more, but servers who rely on tips are seeing a pay cut,” according to Fox News.

Anthony Anton, president and CEO of Washington Restaurant Association stated, “It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.”

Private businesses, unlike government entities (which, in theory, can always raise taxes or borrow), must make more than they spend in order to pay the rent, make payroll, keep the lights on, pay their business taxes, and, heaven forbid, have some left over for the owners and investors who are taking the risk and putting in the long hours.

Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney said of the $15 minimum wage on Fox and Friends Friday, “This is a failed policy. It is a destroying jobs, and it is hurting young people, in particular.”

According to the Heritage Foundation, over half of all minimum wage earners are between the ages of 16 and 24, and two-thirds of the employees who start at the minimum wage gain a pay raise within in a year. (For more from the author of “Wendy’s Announces Major Change in Response to $15 Minimum Wage” please click HERE)

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9 Powerful House Members Unite and Endorse Trump

Nine chairmen from the U.S. House of Representatives have endorsed Donald Trump for president.

The chairmen are Steve Chabot (Small Business), Michael Conaway (Agriculture), Jeb Hensarling (Financial Services), Candice Miller (House Administration), Jeff Miller (Veterans’ Affairs), Tom Price (Budget), Pete Sessions (Rules), Bill Shuster (Transportation and Infrastructure), and Lamar Smith (Science, Space and Technology).

Trump posted the news to his Facebook page.

In a statement the chairmen wrote, “We stand on the precipice of one of the most important elections of our lifetime,” highlighting the importance of the election.

Warning of the dangers of electing Hillary Clinton as president to continue President Obama’s progressive policies the representatives contend, “This great nation cannot endure eight more years of Democrat-control of the White House. It cannot afford to put Democrats in charge of Congress. It is paramount that we coalesce around the Republican nominee, Mr. Donald J. Trump, and maintain control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.”

Fearing more economic uncertainty, they added, “Any other outcome is a danger to economic growth,” adding electing a Democrat, “puts our national security in peril, enshrines ObamaCare as the law of the land, entraps Americans in a cycle of poverty and dependence, and undermines our constitutional republic.”

Just as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan stated earlier in the week, the representatives call on the Republican Party to unify. “There is a path to winning in November, and it comes through unity,” the statement said. “To solidify this partnership, we endorse Mr. Trump as the Republican nominee for President and call upon all Americans to support him.”

Trump responded to the endorsement by stating, “It is tremendous to be working with these leaders and their colleagues on winning solutions that will really move us forward. A strong House Republican Majority is imperative to fixing the problems facing America and making our country better and stronger than ever before.”

If the endorsement is any indicator of a movement of unity within the party, it appears establishment leaders are rallying around the presumptive Republican candidate. The chairmen join a long list of politicians who’ve recently vocalized their support for Trump, the desire to appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court and to undo many of the policies seen as executive overreach by Obama. (For more from the author of “9 Powerful House Members Unite and Endorse Trump” please click HERE)

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‘Life Is Horrible’: Syria’s Christians Fear Total Genocide

Only a handful of mostly sick or elderly Christians remain in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, and Syrian Christians fear the forces that have brought that city’s population of Gospel followers to the brink of extinction could do the same for the entire nation.

An estimated dozen Christian families are still in the northern city, forced under threat of execution to convert, pay an “infidel” tax or go into hiding. Forbidden from leaving, they also face death from attacks directed at ISIS by Damascus, Russia and the U.S.-led Western coalition.

“We are trying to help them escape or stay safe, in hiding,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, executive director of Syrian Christians for Peace. “Their life is horrible. The people of Raqqa are being forced to live like it was 1,400 years ago.”

The plight of Christians in Raqqa is the eye of a storm that threatens to engulf all of the embattled nation whose ties to Christianity are as old as the faith itself. Terror, bombings and systematic persecution designated as genocide by the U.S. has left the close-knit community of Syrian Christians fearing for their future.

“We are facing terrorist action in the whole geography of Syria,” the Rev. Ibrahim Nseir, pastor of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon and the Presbyterian Church in Aleppo, told FoxNews.com from the conflict-torn city. “They are destroying our churches, killing and kidnapping Christians, stealing our homes and our businesses.” (Read more from “‘Life Is Horrible’: Syria’s Christians Fear Total Genocide” HERE)

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Report: GOP Mega-Donor to Give Trump up to $100 Million

Billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson is reportedly willing to give Donald Trump as much as $100 million for his presidential campaign — a purported record-setting amount for the wealth casino magnate.

Adelson pledged the amount to Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, during a meeting last week in New York, two GOP sources told The New York Times, which first reported the story.

Trump will indeed need the support. Much of the billionaire businessman’s success in the primary race came from his ability to fund his own campaign and tell voters that he is not beholden to corporate, Wall Street or lobbyists’ interests.

However, his own wealth and small-donor contributions would be no match for those of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic machine behind her if the front-running Clinton becomes Trump’s general election opponent.

Trump has since being declared the presumptive nominee on May 3 met with Washington Republicans to begin coordinating fundraising efforts for his general election bid and those of other Republican candidates on November ballots. (Read more from “Report: GOP Mega-Donor to Give Trump up to $100 Million” HERE)

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Trump Just Delivered a Bombshell About Rubio’s Future

Donald Trump is denying the information about his VP search that Ben Carson reportedly gave the Washington Post, saying specifically that Marco Rubio is not being considered . . .

In his response to the article on social media, Trump didn’t mention any of the other potential VP contenders by name, saying only that Rubio and “most others mentioned” are not being vetted for the position. (Read more from “Trump Just Delivered a Bombshell About Rubio’s Future” HERE)

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Petraeus’ Profoundly Silly Islamophobia Article

Retired U.S. Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus wrote an article entitled “David Petraeus: Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists.”

Thank you, sir, for the clarification. Up until now, I had believed Barack Obama; that Islamic terrorism was caused by climate change.

Petraeus’ premise is that “inflammatory political discourse…against Muslims and Islam…including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion… will compound the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens… directly undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.”

Let us first dispel a universal myth and the fundamental flaw in Petraeus’ argument. There is no such thing as gratitude in foreign policy; only interests.

In every one of the “alliance” cases Petraeus cites: Sunni Muslims in al Anbar province, the Iraqi Shiite government, the Afghan Northern Alliance, the nation of Indonesia – all of them worked with the United States because of mutual interest, not happy talk.

NATO exists and operates on the basis of mutual interest and even after a decade of vitriol and their mutually exclusive ideologies, Hitler and Stalin still concluded the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Petraeus is concerned that political rhetoric will inhibit our ability to root out entrenched terrorist, like in Libya, which would not have become entrenched with terrorists except for the foreign policy malpractice of the Obama Administration and CIA Director Petraeus, arguably compounding “the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens.”

The Islamic State, ISIS, has made no secret of its intention to infiltrate Europe and the United States through “refugee” migration or other means for the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts.

In his Congressional testimony, FBI Director James Comey admitted that there is no way to screen the tens of thousands of Muslim refugees the Obama administration plans to accept into the US.

Yet Petraeus considers any effort to halt uncontrolled Muslim immigration as “blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion,” “demonizing a religious faith” or “toying with anti-Muslim bigotry.”

Petraeus employs all the familiar false propositions made popular by Democrat Party operatives, the liberal media, and, more recently, by the Republican establishment as a not-so-well-disguised repudiation of potential courses of action outlined by Donald Trump.

It reads less like a valuable contribution to the foreign policy literature than a left-wing academic polemic or an audition for a cabinet position in the Administration of Hillary Clinton.

Petraeus equates prudent self-defense measures to hate-speech and considers potential ISIS infiltration an acceptable risk in order for “moderate” Muslims to feel good about themselves.

And just exactly who are these “moderate” Muslims Petraeus wishes to appease?

Is it the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood Qatar, or Sunni Islamist Turkish President Erdogan to whom, collectively, the Obama Administration has recklessly outsourced our Middle East policy?

Petraeus knows full well that it is not an issue of religion, but recognition of the potentially deadly consequences of thousands of violent migrants from a volatile region entering the US en masse.

In the end, the Petraeus argument provides little more than the tired clichés of Islamophobia, that Muslim hostility to the West is caused by verbal slights or other affronts to Islam.

No one is advocating gratuitous insults, but unwarranted appeasement or other emotionally satisfying liberal gestures are, in reality, construed by Muslim leaders as a weakness to be exploited.

In the world of realpolitik, it is preferable to be liked. It is advantageous to be respected. In the absence of those, fear will do. (For more from the author of “Petraeus’ Profoundly Silly Islamophobia Article” please click HERE)

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Women Confront Hillary: ‘It’s About Rape, Stupid’

By Jerome R. Corsi. Katherine Prudhomme O’Brien, the New Hampshire state legislator who confronted Hillary Clinton in a town-hall rally in Derry, New Hampshire, during the state primary on Jan. 3, explained to WND in an exclusive telephone interview why she was so upset at reporters who defend Mrs. Clinton by suggesting she should not be blamed for her husband’s infidelity.

“This is about rape, not infidelity,” O’Brien insisted, explaining that at the Derry rally her goal was to confront Hillary about Juanita Broaddrick, a woman who went public in an interview with Dateline NBC that broadcast on Feb. 24, 1999, that Clinton had raped her decades earlier, in 1978, while Clinton was yet Arkansas attorney general.

The YouTube video of O’Brien’s encounter with Hillary at the Derry town-hall rally on Jan. 3 shows O’Brien standing to shout her question at Hillary as Hillary at first ignores her and then declares that she does not intend to call on O’Brien for a question, charging that O’Brien was being “very rude.”

“I asked myself what kind of a wife stays with a man who raped Juanita Broaddrick?” O’Brien asked.

In the YouTube clip, the CNN reporter interviewing O’Brien was clearly antagonistic, agreeing with Hillary that suggesting O’Brien was a Republican operative who only heckled Hillary to embarrass her politically. (Read more from “Women Confront Hillary: ‘It’s About Rape, Stupid'” HERE)

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Bill’s Sex-Assault Victim Lashes out Over Hillary’s Terrorizing

By Jerome R. Corsi. CNN reporter Chris Cuomo recently turned antagonistic in an interview with GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump for branding Hillary Clinton the “enabler” of her husband’s sexual crimes, prompting Kathleen Willey, a Clinton assault victim, to write an open letter to Cuomo.

The interview, broadcast Monday when Donald Trump phoned in to CNN’s “New Day” show, allowed Cuomo to confront Trump over his statements that Hillary Clinton enabled her husband’s sexual crimes by concealing the details, intimidating or harassing the other party, and more.

“[People see this] as potential proof that you don’t have anything to offer as president. What is your thinking on this line of attack?” he asked.

“Well, this is a nice way to start off the interview,” Trump responded, turning the table on Cuomo. “You should congratulate me for having won the race. I thought, you know, there’d at least be some small congratulations. But I’m not surprised with CNN because that’s the way they treat Trump. They call it ‘The Clinton Network.’” (Read more from “Bill’s Sex-Assault Victim Lashes out Over Hillary’s Terrorizing” HERE)

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McCain Slips Provision to Draft Women Into NDAA

Pregnant, female, Navy SEALs was something many of us used to joke about as a way of exaggerating the absurd social engineering in the military. Yet, placing women in special operations and direct combat units has now become a reality under the Obama-led Pentagon. Sadly, not only have Republicans like John McCain refused to use their perches on the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate to block this social engineering, they are now codifying it with a provision that could lead to a mandatory draft of all women.

Earlier this week, I noted that the final House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contained a provision for the first time ever including young women in the requirement to register for Selective Service. However, this provision was only added because of a strategic mistake of the committee chairman who thought the members would vote down this absurdity. He was just trying to make a point. John McCain, on the other hand, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, deliberately placed that provision in his chairman’s mark of the NDAA, according to a Senate staffer.

I am further told by Senate staff that it is unlikely an amendment to strike this provision will even succeed on the floor of the Senate, which means a majority of that body now supports drafting women. The only hope to stop this is on the House floor. Have we gone mad as a society?

Any vestige of GOP opposition to Democrat social transformation is now gone. There is no floor. Battle lines that used to hold for decades are now plowed through by Democrats in a matter of one committee markup. A party that stands for nothing, indeed.

Update: A Summary of the NDAA from McCain’s office defends the provision to include women in Selective Service as follows: “Because the Department of Defense has lifted the ban on women serving in ground combat units, the committee believes there is no further justification in limiting the duty to register under the Military Selective Service Act to men.” Thus, McCain believes that because a few liberal social groups and Obama’s politically appointed generals want to include women in combat on a voluntary basis, the Senate should therefore require all women to potentially register for the draft. And instead of debating this earth shattering social transformation publicly in a standalone bill, McCain decided to slip in the provision to a 1,000-page bill authorizing all defense programs.

Another disturbing provision in this bill establishes an independent National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. The commission is tasked with, among other things, to “consider how to foster a sense of service and civic responsibility among the nation’s youth, improve military recruiting, and increase the pool of qualified applicants for military service and their propensity to serve.” While this provision sounds innocuous, some conservatives might be concerned that given McCain’s long record of support for Americorps and other public service programs, he will use this program to compel young adults (now including women) into some sort of public service.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who sits on the Armed Services Committee, was so vehemently opposed to this provision that he voted against the underlying bill. In a statement provided to Conservative Review, the Texas senator noted that although the committee adopted 12 of his amendments related to an array of foreign policy and national security issues, he could not “in good conscience vote to draft our daughters into the military, sending them off to war and forcing them into combat.” “I will continue my efforts to speak out against the effort to force America’s daughter into combat,” wrote the former presidential candidate in a statement.

Update: Sens. Mike Lee and Deb Fischer also voted against final passage. Sen. Lee called this provision “misguided and ill-advised” in a statement he released tonight. He also opposed the bill because it continues the program funding the Syrian rebels. “The bill authorizes the continuation of the Syria Train and Equip program, which was suspended last year after expending hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to train only four or five fighters and finance the purchase of weapons that were ultimately seized by Al Nusra, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate,” wrote Lee. “I firmly believe that the American counter-ISIS strategy must be reconsidered from the top-down and that we should not fund failing programs.” (For more from the author of “John McCain Slips in Provision to Draft Women in Defense Bill” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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