The government of the self-proclaimed president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, can be called elusive: everyone talks about it, but no one can prove that it really exists, that's what political scientist and Latin American relations expert Arantxa Tirado told Sputnik.

Tirado lived in Venezuela in 2011 and since returning to her native Spain, she has been back to Venezuela four times and has had strong ties to the country for the last 15 years.

During her last trip in February of this year, Tirado admitted that she felt how the economic blockade and crisis had hit the people of Venezuela, so the atmosphere was different from what she was used to.

There was hyperinflation and she faced difficulties when buying certain products outside the CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production) programme, through which the government guarantees priority foods and products for the people.

After it claimed no such document existed, the Justice Department just unearthed a letter Matt Whitaker delivered to the Utah U.S. attorney directing a review of how the department handled the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One issues.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote the letter on Nov. 22, 2017 for Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber. Matt Whitaker, who was Sessions' chief of staff at the time, emailed the letter to Huber that day, writing, "As we discussed." He also sent Huber a copy of a letter the Justice Department's Congressional affairs chief sent to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 13 of that year.

The existence of a letter documenting Sessions' directive that the DOJ revisit probes of Trump's top political foe is a surprise because a department lawyer said in court last year that senior officials insisted it didn't exist. The liberal nonprofit American Oversight obtained the letter through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request they filed on Nov. 22, 2017--the same day Whitaker emailed Sessions' letter to Huber.

The request asked for documentation of the directions Sessions gave Huber about the review of the Clinton investigations. After DOJ failed to produce any written directions, American Oversight sued.

And on Nov. 16, 2018, Senior Counsel in the Office of Information Policy Vanessa Brinkmann, who handles FOIA Requests, said a lawyer in Sessions' office told her no such letter existed. That lawyer spoke with Huber and Whitaker, she said in a declaration filed in federal court, and then told her that "when the Attorney General directed Mr. Huber to evaluate these matters, no written guidance or directives were issued to Mr. Huber in connection with this directive, either by the Attorney General, or by other senior leadership office staff."

That wasn't correct. On Wednesday of last week, a DOJ lawyer told American Oversight that they had found the document that kicked off Huber's work.

The letter, which American Oversight provided to The Daily Beast, is consistent with what the DOJ's chief of legislative affairs has told Congress: that Huber is scrutinizing the sale of a Canadian uranium mining company with interests in the United States to Rosatom, a Russian state-owned company. Republicans have long alleged that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declined to oppose the deal because of contributions to the Clinton Foundation.

The DOJ hasn't brought any charges related to the foundation or the transaction. Some Hill Republicans and conservative media commentators have long argued this is because the Department hasn't sufficiently investigated it. They have called for the appointment of a special counsel to scrutinize the transaction.

Sessions didn't bite. Instead, he directed Huber to review what the Department had done regarding the matter. Huber's work has drawn significant interest but-unlike Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian influence during the 2016 election-there is scant public information about what fruits, if any, it has borne.

Some Republicans say Huber's work is too little, too late. Democrats, meanwhile, argue it's evidence of the Trump administration weaponizing law enforcement to target its political rivals.

"'Lock her up' was wrong at campaign rallies, and it's even worse coming from the Department of Justice," said Austin Evers, who heads American Oversight. "Even after this long, it's still deeply shocking to see the black and white proof that Jeff Sessions caved to President Trump's worst authoritarian impulses and ordered a wide-ranging investigation of his political opponents based on demands from Congress instead of the facts and the law."

"It strains credulity to believe that the Justice Department didn't know about this letter when they swore under penalty of perjury that it didn't exist-you don't exactly forget about a formal directive to investigate Hillary Clinton signed by Jeff Sessions," he added.

"The fact that they only 'found' it the same week Matthew Whitaker was heading for the exit makes it hard to see DOJ's previous denial as anything but a deliberate attempt to conceal the extent to which President Trump's authoritarian demands were being put into action. The authoritarian instinct in the Trump administration needs to be investigated. Sessions and Whitaker shouldn't escape accountability by skipping town."

Reached for comment, a DOJ spokesperson said Huber's review is still underway.
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote the letter on Nov. 22, 2017 for Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber. Read it here at Documentcloud.org. [LINK]

Electrical systems in Venezuela have been targeted by another cyberattack, President Nicholas Maduro has said. Caracas has accused the US of "sabotage", while US officials blame local corruption and mismanagement for the blackout.

After a failure at the Guri hydroelectric power plant left much of the country without power on Thursday night, Venezuelan authorities managed to restore power to "many parts" of the country. However, the country's grid took another hammering on Saturday, with many of the restored systems knocked out once again, the country's embattled president said.

According to Maduro, the systems had been nearly 70 percent restored when "we received another attack, of a cybernetic nature, at midday... that disturbed the reconnection process and knocked out everything that had been achieved until noon."

We discovered that they were carrying out high-tech... attacks against the power systems.

Additionally, "one of the sources of generation that was working perfectly," was also sabotaged, he added, accusing domestic "infiltrators of attacking the electric company from the inside."

President Donald Trump on Friday said Democrats have become an "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish" party after they overwhelmingly passed a House resolution Thursday rejecting not just anti-Semitism but hate and racism across the board.

The vote ended a week of Democratic infighting over whether the resolution should also mention Islamaphobia and other forms of bigotry following comments criticized as anti-Israel made by freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.

Trump called the vote "disgraceful" as he left the White House to tour tornado damage in Alabama.

"The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They've become an anti-Jewish party," Trump said, later repeating himself to emphasize his point.

"As members of Congress and Americans we have a solemn, urgent responsibility to fight to end the scourge of bigotry, racism and hatred in our country," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during debate on the resolution.


The measure passed 407-23, with 23 Republicans voting against it.

Ukrainian servicemen shot and killed their commander, Sergei Sobko, in the aftermath of being forced to commit war-crimes for a Ukrainian media public relations spectacle. The killing happened immediately after an incident where the commander was scolding the troops in his command for drinking alcohol. This was announced by the official representative of the operational command of the DPR, Eduard Basurin.

According to Basurin, it happened on March 6th in the 128th separate mountain-assault brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where the lieutenant at night allegedly discovered that a group of soldiers were drunk. The soldiers may have been engaged in heavy drinking as a coping mechanism to deal with the unit's increasingly problematic activities at least since the end of February.

"There was a negative reaction to a remark of the platoon commander, and during the verbal skirmish, two sergeants used firearms and shot their commander at close range," Basurin told Russian media.

Update: Though some parts of Venezuela's power grid have reportedly begun to come back online after the country was plunged into nation-wide darkness beginning Thursday evening, the mass blackout crisis continues, which Caracas has blamed on US-orchestrated saboteurs.

To prevent further "sabotage" Venezuela's Defense Ministry has vowed in an official statement via state TV social media channels to deploy armed forces to protect the national electricity system for the duration of the power outage.

"All the security agencies, civil protection and the nation's integral defense system are deployed to protect and help the people across the country," a statement said, via Bloomberg. This as official accusations against Washington for conducting what Maduro previously called a US "electricity war" have become even more strident.

Anti-establishment parties across the EU are expected to receive a surge in popularity at the ballot box, as a poll released Saturday indicates voters tired of the Brussels status quo could lead to a doubling in Eurosceptic MEPs.

Conducted by the German newspaper Bild between late February and early March, the poll surveyed over 9,500 voters in six countries on their voting intentions in May's elections for the EU Parliament. In three countries - France, Italy, and Poland - anti-establishment right-wing parties came out on top, confirming a growing Eurosceptic shift among EU voters.

Parties expected to benefit from this shift in voter sentiment include Marine Le Pen's National Rally party, which could secure 23 percent of the vote in France. In Italy, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini's League Party is set to win 33 percent. Both right-wing parties are members of the Eurosceptic Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group, which expects to increase its number total of MEPs from 37 to 67 in the 705-seat Parliament.

As Venezuela's nationwide crippling power outage goes into days, rather than hours, the suspicion grows that the South American country has been hit with a mass attack by the United States.

When US President Donald Trump and other senior White House officials earlier bragged that "all options are on the table" for Washington's regime change objective in Venezuela, it has to be assumed now that one of those options included a devastating cyber sabotage of the country's power infrastructure.

For its part, the government of President Nicolas Maduro is convinced that the US is waging an "electrical war" and is behind the latest power outages. Washington and its anointed Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaido claim that the disruption is the result of "incompetent management" of the country by Maduro's socialist government.

Corporate media criticism of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is to be expected, but RT's Lee Camp was taken aback by MSNBC's suggestion that the senator should embrace capitalism because... his father fled the Nazis.

The news network assembled one of its panels to dissect a speech that the popular presidential candidate gave about his people-over-profits platform - and the resulting commentary was far too predictable. Political analyst Rick Tyler argued that the big "lesson" Sanders should have learned, considering his Polish father was a refugee who escaped Nazi occupation, is that "a prosperous capitalist society works for people."

To which Camp replied: "Really? I would think the takeaway would have been, 'Nazis f***ing suck!'"

He also noted that Sanders was being scolded essentially for choosing healthcare-for-all over "unfettered capitalism" - a policy stance that clearly doesn't sit well with MSNBC's corporate ownership.

He is a scoundrel, but he was never a Kremlin operative.

Paul Manafort, the clandestine agent of Russia at the heart of the Trump campaign's "collusion" scand - oh, wait.

Have you ever noticed what Paul Manafort's major crime was? After two years of investigation, after the predawn raid in which his wife was held at gunpoint, after months of solitary confinement that have left him a shell of his former self, have you noticed what drew the militant attention of the Obama Justice Department, the FBI, and, ultimately, a special counsel who made him the centerpiece of Russia-gate?

According to the indictment Robert Mueller filed against him, Manafort was an unregistered "agent of the Government of Ukraine." He also functioned as an agent of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's president from 2010 to 2014, and of two political parties, the Party of Regions and its successor, the Opposition Bloc.

Manafort was not an unregistered agent of Russia. Mueller never alleged that Manafort was a clandestine operative of the Kremlin. He worked for Ukraine, not Putin. Indeed, for much of his time in Ukraine, he pushed his clients against Putin's interests.