Voter Fraud Trial Underway: Did Obama Ever Qualify for 2008 State Ballot? (+video)

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The trial is underway for a former Democratic official and a Board of Elections worker who are accused of being part of a plot that has raised questions over whether President Obama’s campaign — when he was a candidate in 2008 — submitted enough legitimate signatures to have legally qualified for the presidential primary ballot.

The two face charges of orchestrating an illegal scheme to fake the petitions that enabled then-candidates Obama, and Hillary Clinton, to qualify for the race in Indiana.

Former longtime St. Joseph County Democratic Party Chairman Butch Morgan Jr. faces multiple felony conspiracy counts to commit petition fraud, and former county Board of Elections worker Dustin Blythe is charged with nine felony forgery counts and one felony count of falsely making a petition of nomination. The proceedings began Monday in South Bend.

Morgan is accused of being the mastermind behind the plot, by allegedly ordering Democratic officials and workers to fake the names and signatures that Obama and Clinton needed to qualify for the presidential race. Blythe, then a Board of Elections employee and Democratic Party volunteer, has been accused of carrying out those orders by forging signatures on Obama’s petitions.

Two former Board of Elections officials have already pleaded guilty to charges related to the scheme and could testify against Morgan and Blythe.

See Fox report from last year:

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GOP Leaders Again Claim that Constitution Shouldn't Apply to Alleged Bomber

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Photo Credit: isafmediaEven as the surviving 19-year-old Boston Marathon Bombing suspect was formally charged in a Massachusetts hospital room with federal terrorism offenses, some prominent GOP senators still insist that he should have been charged as an enemy combatant.

“I strongly disagree with the Obama Administration’s decision to rule out enemy combatant status for the suspect at this time,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted on Monday.

Graham and Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Rep. Peter King of New York had issued a joint statement on Saturday calling for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be held as an enemy combatant, which would have potentially given investigators more latitude to question him about other plots.

Dzhokhar suffered multiple gunshot wounds before being taken into custody on Friday, including a gunshot wound to the throat, which made it difficult for him to speak.

“It is clear the events we have seen over the past few days in Boston were an attempt to kill American citizens and terrorize a major American city,” according to the joint statement by GOP lawmakers. “The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans.

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Boehner Refuses Majority of GOP Caucus's Call for Select Committee on Benghazi

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Monday defended his handling of the investigation into last year’s attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi amid pressure from his rank-and-file members to form a select committee.

“The reason I haven’t called for a select committee yet is that I don’t think it’s risen to that level,” Boehner told Fox News on Monday. “I think the five committees that have jurisdiction over this matter are working closely together. They’re getting the job done.”

More than half of Boehner’s conference — 117 members as of Monday — have signed on to a resolution from Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) calling for the creation of a select committee to probe the events prior to the attack and the Obama administration’s response.

Boehner has asked the five committees of jurisdiction to give the conference a progress report on their investigations, The Hill reported last week.

“If, at some point, it’s necessary to have the select committee, I’ll be happy to do it,” he told Fox.

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A One-Way Ticket to Mars, Apply Now (+video)

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Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Step right up and prove why you should get a one-way ticket to Mars! Well, wait — you might want to know a little more about the venture first.

A Dutch company called Mars One began looking Monday for volunteer astronauts to fly to Mars. Departure for the Red Planet is scheduled for 2022, landing seven months later in 2023.

The space travelers will return … never. They will finish out their lives on Mars, representatives from the nonprofit said.

“It’s likely that there will be a crematorium,” said CEO Bas Lansdorp. “It’s up to the people on Mars to decide what to do with their dead.”

Still, the company said it has received more than 10,000 e-mails from interested would-be spacefarers.

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Boston Bombing Suspect's Wife 'Very Distraught,' Lawyer Says (+video)

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Photo Credit: John Clarke Russ

By Alan Duke. The wife of deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is “very distraught” and “cries a lot,” her lawyer told CNN Monday.

The FBI wants to interview Katherine Russell about her husband, but for now, agents only have been able to talk to attorney Amato DeLuca.

“She knew nothing about it at any time,” DeLuca told CNN’s Chris Lawrence, referring to the bomb plot.

Russell, 24, learned through news reports that the father of her 2-year-old daughter was suspected in the attack, DeLuca said. “That’s my understanding.”

Hearing that news devastated her, he added.

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How doctor’s daughter became the Muslim convert widow of Boston bomber: Terrorist husband ‘brainwashed’ her and she gave up her dreams of college to have his baby at 21

By Laura Collins. Katherine Russell, the widow of Boston bomb suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was ‘an all-American girl who was brainwashed’ by her extremist husband according to one schoolfriend.

Today MailOnline has gained the first glimpse and pictures of the early life of the woman who, according to those who knew her best, was ‘totally transformed’ by Tsarnaev.

At high school her personal motto was ‘Do something about it or stop complaining’. She dreamed of going to college and joining the Peace Corps.

She urged her friends to ‘lighten up and enjoy the small things,’ in life.

Instead she met Tsarneav, 26, a disenfranchised man who came to America from his troubled homeland of Chechnya who rapidly had her in his thrall. Read more from this story HERE.

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Source: Boston Bomb Suspect Says Brother was Brains Behind Attack (+video)

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Photo Credit: Ninian Reid

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators his older brother Tamerlan was the driving force behind last week’s attack and that no international terrorist groups were behind them, a U.S. government source said Monday.

Preliminary interviews with Tsarnaev indicate the two brothers fit the classification of self-radicalized jihadists, the source said. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, has said his brother — who was killed early Friday — wanted to defend Islam from attack, according to the source.

The government source cautioned that the interviews were preliminary, and that Tsarnaev’s account needs to be checked out and followed up on by investigators.

And a federal law enforcement official told CNN that while investigators have seen nothing yet to indicate the suspects were working with anyone else, a lot of work remains before they can say confidently that no others were involved. That official would not comment on any motive or specifics on what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has communicated to officials.

The 19-year-old has been charged with using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death. He was heavily sedated and on a ventilator at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, but was “alert, mentally competent and lucid” during the brief initial court appearance at his bedside on Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler found.

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FBI May Have the Wrong Man: No Ricin Evidence Found in Home, Computer or Car of Suspect

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Photo Credit: Dave Robinette

Investigators haven’t found any ricin in the house of Mississippi man accused of mailing poisoned letters to President Barack Obama, a U.S. senator and a local judge, according to testimony Monday from an FBI agent.

Agent Brandon Grant said that a search of Paul Kevin Curtis’ vehicle and house in Corinth, Miss., on Friday did not turn up ricin or ingredients for the poison. A search of Curtis’ computers has found no evidence so far that he researched making ricin.

“There was no apparent ricin, castor beans or any material there that could be used for the manufacturing, like a blender or something,” Grant testified. He speculated that Curtis could have thrown away the processor. Grant said computer technicians are now doing a “deep dive” on the suspect’s computers after initially finding no “dirty words” indicating Curtis had searched for information on ricin.

Through his lawyer, Curtis has denied involvement in letters sent to Obama, Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, and a Lee County, Miss., judge. The letters, bearing a Memphis, Tenn., postmark, were detected beginning April 15.

Curtis’ lawyer said in court that someone may have framed Curtis, suggesting that a former co-worker with whom Curtis had an extended exchange of angry emails may have set him up.

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Democratic Bonanza: Immigration Reform to Change Voting Landscape for Generations

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Photo Credit: AP

The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.

Beneath the philosophical debates about amnesty and border security, there are brass-tacks partisan calculations driving the thinking of lawmakers in both parties over comprehensive immigration reform, which in its current form offers a pathway to citizenship — and full voting rights — for a group of undocumented residents that roughly equals the population of Ohio, the nation’s seventh-largest state.

If these people had been on the voting rolls in 2012 and voted along the same lines as other Hispanic voters did last fall, President Barack Obama’s relatively narrow victory last fall would have been considerably wider, a POLITICO analysis showed.

Key swing states that Obama fought tooth and nail to win — like Florida, Colorado and Nevada — would have been comfortably in his column. And the president would have come very close to winning Arizona.

Republican Mitt Romney, by contrast, would have lost the national popular vote by 7 percentage points, 53 percent to 46 percent, instead of the 4-point margin he lost by in 2012, and would have struggled even to stay competitive in GOP strongholds like Texas, which he won with 57 percent of the vote.

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Rand Paul & Boehner Disagree on Whether to Delay Immigration Bill Due to Bombings

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Congressional advocates of comprehensive U.S. immigration legislation were diverted into a sometimes testy debate on Monday over whether the measure should be delayed because of questions arising from the Boston Marathon bombing allegedly carried out by two immigrant brothers.

The idea of holding up the legislation gained some ground with the support of U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a prominent Republican who in the past supported immigration reform. However, the highest-ranking Republican in Washington, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said he saw no reason for the bombings to delay the debate.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican sponsor whose continued support is crucial to the bill’s survival, took a middle-ground position, saying in a statement that he disagreed with “those who say that the terrorist attack in Boston has no bearing on the immigration debate” but he added that immigration reform could and should address any “flaws” exposed by the attack in Boston.

Rubio’s remarks came as some conservative commentators and lawmakers continued to seize on the Boston bombings as evidence that an immigration bill should move more slowly in Congress.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who was captured Friday night and charged on Monday in the deadly marathon bombing, was a naturalized U.S. citizen. His brother, Tamerlan, 26, who died after a shootout with police early Friday, also was in the country legally and had applied for U.S. citizenship. The brothers had immigrated to the United States a decade ago with their family, which is from Chechnya.

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Hill’s Newest Earmarks: Sequester Exemptions

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Photo Credit: AP

Sequestration exemptions are shaping up to be Washington’s newest version of earmarks.

Agencies, companies and other groups are on the hunt for Capitol Hill allies with the juice to save their pet issues from the full force of the across-the-board cuts. Some have already been successful.

The campaigns are just one example of Washington slipping back into business-as-usual, where powerful players are open to satisfying special interests, even on sequester — which wasn’t supposed to play favorites.

“This parochial interest nature of Congress is re-emerging in, I think, an unseemly way,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“We’re moving into some dangerous territory if we just allow every member to pick areas that they think ought to be changed,” added Sen. Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who made a name for himself in the House by ridiculing earmarks in appropriations bills.

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