24 Oct 2023

Dane Mizutani: Forget USC quarterback Caleb Williams, Vikings shouldn’t be sellers at trade deadline

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You can kiss USC quarterback Caleb Williams goodbye.

That much the Vikings essentially guaranteed with an upset win over the San Francisco 49ers on Monday night. All of a sudden, the Vikings are 3-4 and right back in talk of the playoffs. They are seemingly in decent position to chase down the Detroit Lions in the NFC North.

That should make the decision pretty easy for Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah in the short term. After nearly a month of various reports indicating that the Vikings might be willing to go into tank mode, it’s now safe to assume they won’t be sellers at the trade deadline.

As a result, it’s no longer worth fantasizing about who the next franchise quarterback is going to be, and what it’s going to take to get him to Minnesota.

You can stop living and dying with how each win or loss is going to impact the chances of the Vikings garnering a high draft pick. Truthfully, they were never going to be bad enough to be in contention for Williams, North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye or any other blue-chip prospect in the 2024 draft. It was just fun to pretend for a couple of weeks.

There are some really, really bad teams in the NFL at the moment, and the Vikings aren’t in the same conversation. Not with the amount of talent they have on their current roster.

The only way the Vikings were ever going to get themselves in the conversation was if they instituted a fire sale.

That seemed like a legitimate possibility a couple of weeks ago after the Vikings placed star receiver Justin Jefferson on injured reserve. Nothing to that point suggested that better days were ahead as they pressed on without their best player. Even after the Vikings scored an ugly win over the Chicago Bears last weekend, it was fair to wonder if they were actually capable of stringing wins together.

The trade rumors continued to swirl.

Maybe the Vikings were going to try to convince veteran quarterback Kirk Cousins to waive his no-trade clause, though that always felt more like fodder for First Take rather than something that could actually happen.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA – OCTOBER 23: Camryn Bynum #24 of the Minnesota Vikings celebrates his game ending interception against the San Francisco 49ers at U.S. Bank Stadium on October 23, 2023 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Maybe the Vikings were going to trade star pass rusher Danielle Hunter to the highest bidder, which, considering all the options, seemed like the most realistic possibility.

Maybe the Vikings were going to seek out a desperate team that wanted to add a veteran presence like receiver K.J. Osborn ahead of a potential playoff push.

All of it should be off the table in the aftermath of the Vikings taking down the 49ers.

There are winnable games ahead, with the Vikings slated to play the Green Bay Packers, Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints and Denver Broncos over the next month.

It’s not absurd to think the Vikings could get extremely hot and rattle off a half-dozen wins in a row. Plus, they could be getting Jefferson back in a few weeks, which could make them a potentially dangerous team the second half of the season.

Now, there are inevitably going to be parts of the fan base that criticize the Vikings if they aren’t sellers at the trade deadline. Those people have already decided they have no problem neglecting the present as they set their sights on the future.

It’s the byproduct of a generation that grew up playing the video game Madden, where it is commonplace to simulate to the end of the season without any repercussions.

That’s not how it works in the real world. If the Vikings were to trade away a bunch of players after earning their most impressive win to date, they would run the risk of losing the locker room. This group has gotten itself back into the playoff race. It deserves to see how far it can take this thing.

Even if it costs the Vikings some draft positioning in the process.

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24 Oct 2023

Now freed, an Israeli hostage describes the ‘hell’ of harrowing Hamas attack

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JERUSALEM — Eighty-five-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz spoke of a “hell that we never knew before and never thought we would experience” as she described the harrowing Oct. 7 assault on her kibbutz by Hamas militants and the terror of being taken hostage into the Gaza Strip.

Lifshitz was the first of the four hostages released so far to speak of their experience, from the initial attack through the more than two weeks of captivity.

“Masses swarmed our houses, beat people and some were taken hostage,” said Lifshitz, speaking softly from a wheelchair as she briefed reporters on Tuesday at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, a day after Hamas released her and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper. “They didn’t care if they were young or old.”

Her 83-year-old husband, Oded, remains a hostage in Gaza.

Lifshitz, a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was among the more than 200 Israelis and foreigners seized after heavily armed Hamas militants broke through Israel’s multibillion-dollar electric border fence and fanned across southern Israel, overrunning nearly two dozen communities, military bases and a desert rave. More than 1,400 people died in the daylong killing rampage that followed.

Israel’s military has launched a devastating war on Gaza in an effort to crush Hamas and its airstrikes into Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack killed more than 5,000 people, according to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry. Lifshitz’s captors hustled her onto a motorcycle, removed her watch and jewelry and beat her with sticks, bruising her ribs and making it difficult to breathe, she said.

Once in Gaza, she walked several kilometers to a network of tunnels that she described as “looking like a spider web.” She reached a large room where 25 people had been taken but was later separated into a smaller group with four others.

The people assigned to guard her “told us they are people who believe in the Quran and wouldn’t hurt us.”

Lifshitz said captives were treated well and received medical care, including medication. The guards kept conditions clean, she said. Hostages were given one meal a day of cheese, cucumber and pita, she said, adding that her captors ate the same.

Lifshitz and her husband were peace activists who regularly drove Palestinian patients from Gaza to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. But in captivity, the hostages told their captors, “We don’t want to talk about politics,” she said.

Lifshitz and Cooper were the second pair of hostages to be released. On Friday, Hamas freed two Israeli American women from Evanston, Ill. Israel’s government has said returning all hostages safely is a top priority.

Israel overlooked warnings that something was afoot ahead of the attack, Lifshitz said.

“We were the scapegoat of the government,” she said. “They [Hamas] warned us three weeks before they taught us a lesson. A huge crowd arrived at the road. They burned fields. They sent incendiary balloons to burn the fields, and the army didn’t take it seriously.”

24 Oct 2023

US developing contingency plans to evacuate Americans from Mideast in case Israel-Hamas war spreads

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<p>By AAMER MADHANI and SEUNG MIN KIM (Associated Press)</p><p>WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House said Tuesday that “prudent contingency planning” is underway to evacuate Americans from the Middle East in case the Israel-Hamas war spreads into a broad regional conflict.</p><p>White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby stressed there are currently no “active efforts” to evacuate Americans from the region beyond charter flights the U.S government began operating earlier this month out of Israel.</p><p>“It would be imprudent and irresponsible if we didn’t have folks thinking through a broad range of contingencies and possibilities,” Kirby said. “And certainly evacuations are one of those things.”</p><p>The White House addressed the contingency plans amid growing concerns that the 18-day-old Israel-Hamas war could further escalate. The U.S. has advised Israel that postponing a possible ground invasion of Gaza could be helpful as the U.S. and other partners in the region try to secure the release of more than 200 hostages who were captured in the Oct. 7 attack on Hamas soil. The contingency planning was first reported by The Washington Post.</p><p>President Joe Biden and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke by phone on Tuesday about the deteriorating situation. It was the two leaders’ first interaction since before the Hamas attack on Israel.</p><p>Biden and the crown prince spoke about “efforts to deter state and non-state actors from widening the conflict between Israel and Hamas,” according to the White House. Biden administration officials have repeatedly warned Iran not to become involved in the conflict. U.S. forces in the region over the last few days have come under repeated attacks that the Pentagon has said were likely endorsed by Iran, which is the chief sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as groups in Iraq and Yemen.</p><p>“The two leaders agreed on pursuing broader diplomatic efforts to maintain stability across the region and prevent the conflict from expanding,” the White House added.</p><p>Biden said last week he believed that Hamas was motivated to attack Israel in part by a desire to stop that country from normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia.</p><p>“One of the reasons … why Hamas moved on Israel, is because they knew I was about to sit down with the Saudis,” Biden said at a campaign fundraiser. The U.S. president said he thinks Hamas terrorists launched their deadly assault on Oct. 7 because “guess what? The Saudis wanted to recognize Israel” and were near being able to formally do so.</p><p>An agreement would have been a feat of diplomacy that could have enabled broader recognition of Israel by other Arab and Muslim-majority nations that have largely opposed Israel since its creation 75 years ago in a territory where Palestinians have long resided.</p><p>But talks were interrupted after Hamas militants stormed from the blockaded Gaza Strip where Palestinians live into nearby Israeli towns.</p><p>Israel sealed off Gaza in response, and Biden told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that humanitarian aid into the territory wasn’t arriving fast enough.</p><p>Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been running out of food, water, fuel and medicine. The aid convoys allowed into Gaza so far have carried a fraction of what’s needed.</p><p>The president made his comments to reporters about the speed of aid flowing into Gaza after presenting science and technology awards to several Americans for exemplary achievements that have had a positive impact on the United States.</p><p>One of the recipients, Sheldon Weinbaum of the City College of New York, wore a “Stop War” button on his suit coat lapel as he received his medal from Biden.</p><p>Biden suggested the ceremony was a welcome break from the grim news coming out of the Middle East.</p><p>“This is a happy occasion,” Biden said at the start of the White House ceremony. “We need some more happy occasions.”</p><p>The war is the deadliest of five Gaza wars for both sides. The Hamas-run Health Ministry said at least 5,791 Palestinians have been killed and 16,297 wounded. In the occupied West Bank, 96 Palestinians have been killed and 1,650 wounded in violence and Israeli raids since Oct. 7.</p><p>“This is war. It is combat. It is bloody, it is ugly, and it’s going to be messy,” Kirby said. “I wish I could tell you something different. I wish that that wasn’t going to happen.”</p><p>___</p><p>Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war</p>

24 Oct 2023

Trump’s ex-lawyers become prosecutors’ star witnesses

by | posted in: Politics | 0

In two courtrooms 800 miles apart on Tuesday, a stark reality for former President Donald Trump became clearer than ever: If Trump is taken down in his myriad criminal and civil cases, it will likely be at the hands of his own former lawyers.

In the morning, Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to an election felony in Georgia and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors who have charged Trump and various allies with a racketeering conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election. She became the third Trump-affiliated lawyer in the past week to flip in the Georgia election case.

Then, in the afternoon, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, took the witness stand in Manhattan and told a judge how his former boss fraudulently inflated his net worth.

Trump’s lawyers have long served as a force field separating him from investigators and prosecutors targeting him. He and his allies have invoked attorney-client privilege to shield potential evidence, and Trump has even floated an “advice of counsel” defense in some of his criminal cases, arguing that he cannot be guilty because he was simply following the advice of his lawyers.

But as Trump’s legal troubles mount, prosecutors are increasingly turning his relationships with his lawyers against him.

Just last week, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro — two lawyers who helped advise Trump on his desperate last-ditch strategy to subvert the 2020 election — pleaded guilty in Georgia to aspects of the alleged scheme. In an ominous split screen for Trump, another architect of his effort — attorney John Eastman — retook the witness stand in a long-running disbarment trial in California, describing Oval Office meetings and phone conversations in the frenzied weeks before Jan. 6, 2021.

Ellis’ plea means nearly every high-level attorney who worked with Trump in that period has provided voluminous testimony to congressional investigators or prosecutors. The group includes campaign attorneys who have spoken with prosecutors and the House Jan. 6 select committee, as well as Trump’s two top White House lawyers from the final period of his presidency: Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin.

Ty Cobb, another White House lawyer from earlier in Trump’s administration who helped him navigate special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, said he is not surprised that many ex-members of Trump’s legal team have found themselves in legal trouble.

“He’s had lawyers abandon their ethics for him for decades,” he said. “And he puts enormous pressure on lawyers. That’s why Trump went through a lot of lawyers, in my own view.”

“Trump has no ability to be grateful,” he added. “Gratitude is something that does not exist in his narcissistic world. So, the fact that these people are sacrificing their lives, reputations, and careers, that will not register with him,” he said.

It’s not just Trump’s election-related cases that feature evidence supplied by his own lawyers. In New York, Cohen is a star witness for the government both in Trump’s ongoing civil fraud trial and in Trump’s pending criminal case stemming from hush money payments to a porn star. And in Florida, where Trump is facing federal charges for warehousing national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office, Trump attorney Evan Corcoran was ordered by a court to provide notes, recordings and testimony about Trump’s alleged efforts to obstruct the government from reclaiming the materials.

Trump and his current lawyers have already moved to distance the former president from figures like Ellis and Powell. Cohen, who turned on his former boss years ago, gets harsher treatment: a scathing, direct attack on his character.

“Well, he’s a proven liar, as you know. He’s a felon. He served a lot of time for lying and we’re just going to go in and see. And I think you’ll see that for yourself,” Trump said before court Tuesday morning. “He’s a liar trying to get a better deal for himself but it’s not going to work.”

What remains unclear: How damaging will these lawyers’ testimony actually be for Trump? Chesebro’s attorney Scott Grubman insisted Saturday that Trump doesn’t need to worry about his client’s testimony.

“I can say personally that I do not believe the state will call him to testify on their behalf,” Grubman told MSNBC’s Katie Phang. “If they do, and I’m wrong, Mr. Chesebro will be there, he will testify truthfully. If I were the state, I would not call him.”

Prosecutors in Georgia have not explicitly indicated that those who pleaded guilty had evidence to offer about Trump or whether they might be likelier to testify about others charged in the conspiracy, like Eastman or yet another Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Trump tried to suggest on his own social media site Sunday that Powell didn’t really work for him, despite his close consultation with her during the post-election period and his campaign’s public description of her as part of an “elite strike force” leading his battle to reverse his 2020 election loss.

“MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday, three days after Powell entered her plea deal in Georgia.

But just days after the 2020 election, Trump took to X, formerly Twitter, to tout Powell by name, along with Ellis, as part of “a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives!” And in December 2020, he considered appointing Powell special counsel to empower her to seize voting machines and investigate her fringe claims of voter fraud. Trump ultimately reversed course amid pushback from his White House staff.

As with Powell, the role of Trump’s lawyers in his criminal cases has also shined a light on the murky arrangements he and his campaign had with some of those who took on key leadership roles in Trump’s orbit.

For example, Eastman and Chesebro spent weeks facing questions about whether and when they actually entered into attorney-client relationships with Trump — if they ever in fact did. A federal judge in California ordered Eastman to produce evidence of his formal relationship with Trump, and he turned over an unsigned retainer agreement with Trump’s campaign that he said was subsequently put into effect.

Eastman has continued to cite attorney-client privilege to decline to answer certain questions posed by California investigators seeking to take away Eastman’s law license.

Before he took his plea deal, Chesebro had sought to block prosecutors from introducing key pieces of evidence by citing attorney-client privilege. But Georgia prosecutors contended that Chesebro had similarly not proven his formal affiliation with the Trump campaign or the scope of work Trump required of him. The judge in the case, Scott McAfee, ultimately rejected Chesebro’s effort for a different reason: The materials prosecutors intended to introduce against him would be disclosed under the “crime-fraud exception” to attorney-client privilege.

Now, all three lawyers pleading guilty in the Georgia case have agreed to surrender relevant documents to prosecutors — subject to privilege claims that judges may have to sort out.