“Did they think I was just going to roll over and die?: The Cohen vs.Trump battle ratchets up

What might Cohen know about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Don Jr., Kushner, Manafort, and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who promised to provide them with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton? “When Michael says that he wants the truth out there, and that the truth is not the president’s friend, he is not talking about marginal issues,” says a person close to Cohen. “He’s talking about core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe.”


Emily Jane Fox writes for Vanity Fair:


michael cohen 
It was early afternoon on Valentine’s Day when Michael Cohen’s cell phone rang as he sat in the office that he maintained in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Donald Trump was on the line. A day earlier, Cohen had given a statement to the Federal Election Commission acknowledging that he paid $130,000 to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to keep her mum about her alleged affair with then-candidate Trump. In the recent past, Cohen had publicly reiterated his loyalty to his client, telling me on the record that he would take a bullet for the president. But beneath the public proclamations, the two men hadn’t spoken much in the months after Trump’s inauguration. The Daniels affair, in some regard, provided a bizarre reunion. After The Wall Street Journal broke the story about the non-disclosure agreement, the president had begun calling again with some regularity. Now, according to someone familiar with the call, Trump wanted Daniels’s claims refuted. (The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Cohen and Trump are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth—street fighters, tough-talkers, hardly conflict-averse. Subsequently, their relationship has not been without traces of transaction and self-preservation. As The New York Times reported on Friday, Cohen pointedly taped his conversation with the president about payments made to Karen McDougal, a former Playmate who had alleged an affair with Trump. That recording, along with 11 others collected by New York prosecutors during an F.B.I. search of Cohen’s properties in April, is now at the center of an escalating public war between Cohen, the president, and their respective legal teams.

For months, friends and advisers have been telling Cohen that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and Rudy Giuliani, among other people in Trump’s inner circle, have been eroding his relationship with the president. People close to Cohen speculated over the weekend whether the release of the recording was part of such a strategy. The recording was deemed privileged by an appointed special master in the S.D.N.Y. investigation, meaning that it would not have seen the light of day if Trump and his lawyers had wanted it to remain private. Giuliani told me on Friday that the president’s legal team waived privilege on the recording (a detail that was confirmed by two people close to Cohen), which effectively allowed the government access to the conversation. Giuliani called it “powerful exculpatory evidence.”



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Russian hackers penetrate U.S. utilities’ control rooms

KACPER PEMPEL/REUTERS

Daily Beast summary of Monday’s Wall Street Journal story:

Russian hackers infiltrated the control rooms of major U.S. electric utilities last year and got to the point where they “could have thrown switches,” Department of Homeland Security officials said Monday.

Federal officials had previously warned of a few dozen victims in a massive Russian-backed cyber attack on utility companies last spring, but the DHS on Monday said “hundreds of victims” had fallen prey to a group of hackers tied to a state-sponsored group previously known as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, according to The Wall Street Journal.


The hackers are said to have broken into secure networks owned by utilities by using the credentials of actual employees, meaning some companies may have never discovered any traces of a breach. The attackers disguised themselves as “the people who touch these systems on a daily basis,” Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial-control-system analysis for DHS, was quoted as saying by the Journal. Federal officials say the hackers could have easily caused widespread blackouts—and they still could.


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Run for your lives – the warehouses are coming

Near new Amazon warehouses, Mansfield resident Beth Camp protests plans for more



Jan Hefler reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The first Amazon fulfillment center to open in New Jersey, four years ago, was greeted with excitement. Amazon, the online shopping giant, came into Robbinsville promising jobs and significant tax revenues and downplayed concerns there could be any adverse impact on the small town.

But within a year, Mayor Dave Fried was threatening to sue and shut down the facility, citing safety concerns. Amazon had projected that it would have 1,000 employees, but that number quickly quadrupled, clogging streets and neighborhoods that were already reeling from the onslaught of tractor-trailers rumbling through the town, he said.

Burlco warehouse map - Inquirer graphicNow, as two more Amazon centers and a few other mega-warehouses move south into Burlington County, the residents in the rural towns that would host their facilities are mobilizing. Uniting under the banner Northern Burlington CARES, or NBCares for short, the residents say Robbinsville is a cautionary tale, and they are demanding that developers take measures to minimize potential traffic problems ahead of time.

“Throughout Northern Burlington we’re becoming sandwiched in by all these warehouses,” said Michelle Rosenblum of Florence. “The problem is the cumulative impact of all these warehouses and increasing traffic and noise.”

The grassroots NBCares scored perhaps its first victory last week after waging a bitter legal battle against a developer in Mansfield Township, a predominantly agrarian community centered on the quaint village of Columbus.

The group announced Thursday that it reached a legal settlement with a developer who had proposed an 1.8 million-square-foot warehouse project that would have consumed 200 acres of farmland off the New Jersey Turnpike and I-295. Plans called for hundreds of tractor-trailers to leave the warehouse each day and thunder down a narrow, hilly, two-lane road lined with farms and about 20 homes that sit on wooded lots.



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EPA gears up for big PFAS meeting July 25 in Bucks County

[Editor’s Note: Last week we carried a Bucks County Courier Times story announcing that the EPA was planning a day-long community meeting on July 25 regarding chemical compounds that have polluted drinking water supplies near former military bases.  Following is more information on that meeting provided by the EPA]

WASHINGTON (July 20, 2018) — Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
released the full agenda for the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) community
engagement in Horsham, Pennsylvania at Hatboro-Horsham High School, 899 Horsham
Road, Horsham, Pennsylvania.

Following the historic National Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. in May and the
inaugural Community Engagement event in New Hampshire, this event allows EPA to hear
directly from Pennsylvania communities, Mid-Atlantic states, local, and tribal partners on how
to best help states and communities facing this issue.

“The input that EPA receives on July 25 will help us develop a plan for managing 
PFAS,” said EPA Regional Administrator Cosmo Servidio. “The upcoming community
engagement event will enable us to hear from citizens and communities directly about
their experiences with these chemicals in their community.”

The July 25 Community Engagement event will include a Working Session from 10:00 a.m.
to 2:45 p.m. and a Listening Session from 3:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Both sessions are open to the public and the press. Online registration is now closed.
Those who were unable to register online will be able to register or sign up to speak in person
at the event. Registration is not required to attend or speak.

Additional details will be posted on the PFAS Community Engagement website at:
https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-community-engagement-horsham-pa . Please check back at the
website leading up to the event. Citizens are also encouraged to submit written statements to
the public docket at https://www.regulations.gov/ enter docket number: OW-2018-0270.


Background
PFAS is a group of man-made chemicals that have been widely used in everyday products
since the 1940s. But PFAS compounds also can enter the environment, raising concerns
about the potential environmental and health risks.

Addressing PFAS is a national priority. At the National Leadership Summit in Washington,
D.C. in May, EPA announced a four-step action plan:
1. EPA will initiate steps to evaluate the need for a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for
PFOA and PFOS. We will convene our federal partners and examine everything we know
about PFOA and PFOS in drinking water.
2. EPA is beginning the necessary steps to propose designating PFOA and PFOS as
“hazardous substances” through one of the available statutory mechanisms, including
potentially CERCLA Section 102.
3. EPA is currently developing groundwater cleanup recommendations for PFOA and PFOS
at contaminated sites and will complete this task by fall of this year.
4. EPA is taking action in close collaboration with our federal and state partners to develop
toxicity values for GenX and PFBS by this summer.
EPA conducted a similar engagement with communities impacted by PFAS in New Hampshire
last month, and will be headed to Colorado and North Carolina in the coming weeks. These
community engagement events are critical to understand ways the Agency can best support
the work that’s being done at the state, local, and tribal levels. Using information from the
National Leadership Summit, community engagements, and public input provided by the
docket, EPA plans to develop a PFAS Management Plan for release later this year.

To learn more about PFAS, please visit: www.epa.gov/pfas

 

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Not so fast, Jersey City smokers and midnight tokers



Yesterday, we proclaimed: Light ’em up if you got ’em after Jersey City announced it had decriminalized marijuana.


Whoa, not so fast, the state said today.

In a letter to Municipal Prosecutor Jake Hudnut, Attorney General Giral Grewal said that Hudnut had no right to refuse criminal prosecution on all marijuana-related offenses.


Grewal says that the new policy is “void and has no effect.”

Bummer.


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Not on our New Jersey beaches, Butthead

Butthead, you have been warned: Smoking n New Jersey beaches will result in fines.


On the Long Branch boardwalk today, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill, S2534, that outlaws smoking on public beaches in the state.
The law, that goes into effect on Jan. 1, also extends the smoking ban to any state, county, and municipal parks. A first-time violation results in a $250 fine, followed by $500 for the second offense and $1,000 for any additional offense.
New Jersey already has smoking bans at its state-owned beaches and parks, and a handful of towns have enacted their own laws.
Buttheads, consider yourselves on notice.   

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