During the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, the Trump International Hotel in Washington charged the Secret Service more than $200,000 in taxpayer money, including a bill topping $30,000 for two days of use, according to expense documents obtained by NBC News. The documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request covering Secret Service expenditures, detail money the agency spent at the property from September 2016 to February 2018, which came to a total of $215,254. While the nature of the charges were not disclosed in the documents, the hotel five blocks from the White House has become a go-to venue for Trump and his supporters for various events, including a fundraiser the president attended Tuesday for his re-election campaign. These type of events inevitably require Secret Service detail and heavy use of the property and food services to accommodate and feed personnel.
NBC Washington
The state of Pennsylvania will begin sealing about 30 million criminal records Friday as part of the state’s Clean Slate law, which was passed last year. The law, which Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf says is the first of its kind in the nation, is designed to help minimize the damage of old low-level criminal convictions for nonviolent crimes—convictions that can make it difficult for people to get jobs as well as access to housing and education. In order to make that happen, the state plans to systematically scrub the state court database of more than half the charges on the books by next year.
Slate
The Justice Department declined on Friday to declassify any more information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act documents related to the surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Although the agency acknowledged in a court filing that one barrier to further transparency had expired, more obstacles remain following repeated pro-declassification statements from President Trump and the declassification authority he recently gave to Attorney General William Barr. After dueling memos from Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee in 2018, as well as Freedom of Information Act lawsuits from a number of media outlets and watchdog groups, the 412 pages of redacted Page FISA documents were released on July 21, 2018.
Washington Examiner
The federal government, corporations, cities and even medical facilities across the country are looking past the needs of blind Americans by failing to address problems with braille signage. CBS News has uncovered complaints to the Justice Department's Disability Rights section about missing or incorrect braille at a number of public facilities, including Albuquerque's bus system, restaurants in Kansas and Pennsylvania, and hospital and medical buildings in Chicago, among other locations. The records, spanning two years, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
CBS News
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