Barack Obama: January 2012

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Barack Obama: January 2012

Brewer Has History Of Getting Facts Wrong

Nick R. Martin | January 30, 2012, 5:40AM

Back in 2010 as she defended her state's harsh immigration law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) told a newspaper reporter that she was deeply hurt by the terrible names people were calling her. The worst, she said, were the comparisons to the Nazis.

"They are awful," she said. "Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that...and then to have them call me Hitler's daughter. It hurts. It's ugliness beyond anything I've ever experienced."

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Topics: Arizona, Barack Obama, Immigration, Jan Brewer, Mesa, Arizona, U.S.-Mexico Border

Jan Brewer

2nd Mayor Says Obama 'Wasn't Tense At All' During Brewer Encounter

Nick R. Martin | January 27, 2012, 11:32AM

Out of the three officials who met President Obama on an airport tarmac near Phoenix earlier this week, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) is now the only one who has characterized the president as anything other than cordial.

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Topics: Arizona, Barack Obama, Jan Brewer, Mesa, Arizona

Jan Brewer

Mayor Seems To Contradict Gov. Brewer's Story On Obama Run-In

Nick R. Martin | January 26, 2012, 5:23PM

President Obama didn't exactly walk away from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) during their disagreement on Wednesday on an airport tarmac near Phoenix, said one of the only people to witness the exchange up close. The president simply began talking to the other two elected officials who were there to greet him.

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Topics: Arizona, Barack Obama, Jan Brewer, Mesa, Arizona

Jan Brewer

Obama's Tarmac Tiff Was With Foe Partly Of His Own Making

Nick R. Martin | January 26, 2012, 1:41PM

We may never know exactly what President Obama said to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) during his trip to the state on Wednesday, but it's clear things didn't go well.

What was supposed to be a trip focusing on jobs and innovation a day after the State of the Union instead became a story about finger pointing and who said what to whom during a brief exchange on an airport tarmac.

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Topics: Arizona, Barack Obama, Immigration, Jan Brewer

Mike O'Neal

Kansas GOPer: I Didn't Mean Obama Should Die When I E-Mailed 'Let His Days Be Few And Brief'

Jillian Rayfield | January 20, 2012, 11:27AM

Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal

The Kansas Speaker of the House has apologized for an e-mail in which he prayed about President Obama, "let his days be few and brief," but insisted that he wasn't calling for him to die.

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Topics: Barack Obama, Kansas, Mike O'Neal

Zeituni Onyango

Three Years Later, ICE Still Probing Who Leaked Immigration Status Of President Obama's Aunt

Ryan J. Reilly | January 13, 2012, 3:30PM

Three years, two months and a week -- more than 1100 days -- after the 2008 presidential election, internal investigators at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are still probing who leaked the immigration status of then-Sen. Barack Obama's aunt Zeituni Onyango just three days before voters went to the polls.

Relevant files from ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility are "part of an ongoing investigation" and will not be disclosed, an ICE official wrote in a Jan. 11 response to TPM's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents related to the investigation.

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Topics: Barack Obama, ICE, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Zeituni Onyango

National Defense Authorization Act

Obama Administration Pushes Back On Liberal Criticism Over NDAA's 'Indefinite Detention'

Ryan J. Reilly | January 6, 2012, 9:30AM

President Barack Obama and Senior Adviser David Axelrod

The Obama administration thinks many in the liberal blogosphere are mistaken in their belief that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by the president on New Year's Eve authorizes the indefinite detention of citizens captured on U.S. soil.

Many progressive and libertarians have argued that the NDAA codifies the president's ability to detain a U.S. citizen captured on American soil until the war on terrorism is declared over. The administration believes that the NDAA doesn't specifically allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens, but concedes that it doesn't specifically ban the practice either.

A senior administration official maintained in an interview with TPM that the NDAA "changes nothing" about the legal question of whether the government could allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens captured in the United States.

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Topics: Barack Obama, Carl Levin, Counterterrorism, FBI, Guantanamo, Indefinite Detentions, Justice Department, National Defense Authorization Act, Obama Administration

FBI

Obama To Basically Ignore Congress' Terrorists-In-Military-Custody Mandate

Ryan J. Reilly | January 5, 2012, 5:44AM

Federal law enforcement officials had been worried about the "uncertainty" that a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would create for agents dealing with a terrorist attack because of the plethora of qualifiers that would send a terrorist suspect into military custody. But the signing statement issued by President Barack Obama on New Year's Eve appears to indicate that it should be business as usual as the administration develops implementation rules for the new provisions over the next 60 days.

Officials like FBI Director Robert Mueller had worried that Section 1022 of the NDAA "lacks clarity" about how law enforcement officials should handle a suspected terrorist at the time of arrest. That section required individuals who weren't citizens or lawful U.S. residents who have had ties to al-Qaeda, the Taliban or "associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners" to be placed into the military system -- facts that could be difficult to determine right off the bat ("They don't wear al-Qaeda hats," one law enforcement official official told TPM.)