By Nicole Chavez, CNN

Hours before his arrest, Cesar Sayoc was playing music sets at a Florida strip club.

Few there were aware of his political views.

“He was a nice guy,” Stacy Saccal, the club’s general manager, told CNN affiliate WPTV. “He would make jokes, just funny.”

At least four times a week over the last two months, the 56-year-old parked his white Dodge van plastered with stickers supporting President Donald Trump and depicting some of Trump’s critics with targets over their images near the Ultra Gentlemen’s Club in West Palm Beach. Sometimes he would work as a DJ and others as a bouncer.

He is a bodybuilder and former male dancer

Sayoc, of Aventura, Florida, is a bodybuilder who worked as a male dancer for several years and most recently as a pizza driver.

On his LinkedIn account, Sayoc described himself as a choreographer and booking agent for male strippers and burlesque shows.

On Twitter, he said he is a “Current Booking Agent/Sales/Marketing/Promotions/Project Mgr Live Events” at Seminole Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Florida.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida, Seminole Gaming and Hard Rock International said there was “no evidence” the suspect is or was a member or was employed by any of the three groups.

They also said they could not immediately “verify if he is or was an employee of a vendor company.”

A cousin, Lenny Altieri, said Sayoc went to good schools and was well-educated. “Brains and common sense are not synonymous,” he said.

Sayoc attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte from 1983 to 1984 but did not graduate, the school’s communications office said. He was an undeclared major who played on the soccer team.

He also went to Brevard College in North Carolina, a school spokeswoman said. He enrolled at Brevard in fall 1980 and attended classes there for three semesters but didn’t graduate.

He used to deliver food for a pizza restaurant in Fort Lauderdale until he quit in January. He said he had gotten a job driving a hazardous waste truck in North Carolina, manager Debra Gureghian said.

He appeared to be living in his van

He appears to have been estranged from his family for several years.

A 2012 bankruptcy filing in Florida indicated that Sayoc “lives with his mom, owns no furniture.” The 46-page filing, signed by Sayoc in June 2012, lists total assets of $4,175 and liabilities of $21,109.

But an attorney representing Sayoc’s family said he has not visited his mom’s condo in Aventura for at least three years.

His mother and sisters had urged him to seek medical treatment because he struggled with “a lack of comprehension of reality,” attorney Ronald S. Lowy said.

“He thinks there’s nothing wrong with him,” Lowy said in a telephone interview, shortly after meeting with the suspect’s family on Friday.

He said Sayoc’s mother, who underwent surgery Friday, “can’t understand his behavior or views.”

Lowy, the family attorney, said Sayoc’s father is Filipino and his mother is Italian. He said Sayoc was not politically active when he met him.

It appears that he was kicked out by his parents and had been living in the white Dodge van where he was found Friday, a law enforcement official said.

Investigators believe that Sayoc made the pipe bombs in that van, two law enforcement sources said. Inside that vehicle were soldering equipment, stamps, envelopes, paper, a printer and powder, the sources said.

He has a lengthy criminal history

Sayoc’s past is marked by encounters with law enforcement.

Court records show he had been arrested at least nine times, mostly in Florida, for accusations of grand theft, battery, fraud, drug possession and probation violations.

In 2002, he was arrested after Miami police said he threatened to bomb a power company saying “it would be worse than September 11th.”

“The defendant contacted a rep (from) Florida Power and Light Co. … by telephone and threatened to blow up FPL,” a Miami Police Department report about the incident said.

The caller “threatened to blow up the building if FP&L turned off his light,” the report said.

He pleaded guilty to the offense, records show, and was sentenced to one year of probation.

In 2014, he was arrested and later pleaded guilty to stealing copper pipes at a Home Depot, records show.

‘A model employee’ despite views on minorities, former boss says
Gureghian, general manager of New River Pizza and Fresh Kitchen in Fort Lauderdale, said Sayoc was open with her about his views. He calls himself a white supremacist and dislikes gays, African-Americans, Jews and anybody who isn’t white, she said.

Gureghian said Sayoc told her that lesbians like her and other minorities should be put on an island. And though he liked her, he told her she would burn in hell, she told CNN.

Even though she hated his political leanings, Gureghian said she didn’t fire him because he did his job and there were no complaints.

“He was a model employee,” she said, adding that she “can’t understand” how he would allegedly send mail bombs.

He posted anti-Muslim memes and slammed politicians
To some of his colleagues, Sayoc was not particularly involved in politics, but his social media accounts and his van tell a different story.

In 2016, Sayoc registered to vote as a Republican in Florida, and a Facebook video showed him in a “Make America Great Again” hat at a Trump rally.

He was prolific on his two Facebook accounts and three Twitter feeds, often posting provocative photos and memes attacking liberals.

He took on Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, the Democratic nominee in the Florida governor’s race, more than 80 times in October alone.

In other posts, Sayoc shared conspiracy theories, memes and articles slamming former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in 2016.

On September 20, in response to a Trump tweet, Sayoc posted a self-shot video of himself at what appears to be a Trump rally.

The text of the tweet threatened former Vice President Joe Biden and former Attorney General Eric Holder, both of whom were targeted by improvised explosive devices discovered this week.

“Go Trump Trump Trump hey Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. And Eric Himpton Holder Sr. Stick your BS all crap you talk where sun doesn’t shine. We will meet your threats right to your face soon. Not option we will see you soon. Hug loved ones real close we aren’t ones,” the tweet read.

But he spoke about bombs only twice on Twitter and the context of those posts isn’t entirely clear.

“Bomb squad here,” read the first tweet posted Sept. 9.

“Unconquered Seminole Tribe Bomb squad,” read a second tweet posted minutes later.

Sayoc also posted virulently anti-Muslim memes and published the address of billionaire investor and Democratic donor George Soros and photos of the homes of some others who later received bombs.

As recently as Wednesday, Sayoc posted a tweet that was critical of Soros, former President Barack Obama and others. A package to Soros had two days earlier.

And about two weeks ago, Sayoc tweeted at a political analyst.

“We will see you 4 sure. Hug your loved ones real close every time you leave you home,” the tweet said in part.

Rochelle Ritchie reported it as abuse, but Twitter said it wasn’t a violation of its rules.

A Facebook representative told CNN that the company had removed Sayoc’s account Friday.

The rep said that several of Sayoc’s previous posts had violated Facebook’s community standards and had been removed before his arrest but that none of his posts reported to or discovered by Facebook contained violations of its rules severe enough to remove the account entirely.

Sayoc was not previously known to the Secret Service, law enforcement sources said.

CNN’s Jason Hanna, Evan Perez, Scott Glover, Steve Almasy, Ray Sanchez and Paul P. Murphy contributed to this report.

By Caroline Kelly | CNN Newsource

Former President Barack Obama made a thinly veiled jab at President Donald Trump on Friday evening, saying it was wrong to use a position of power for attacking others as “enemies of the people and then suddenly pretending that you’re concerned about civility.”

“I would like to think that everybody in America would think it’s wrong to spend all your time from a position of power vilifying people, questioning their patriotism, calling them enemies of the people and then suddenly pretending that you’re concerned about civility,” he told a cheering crowd.
Trump has repeatedly called the media “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.”

Following the discovery of multiple packages sent to people whom the President has spoken against as political enemies, as well as a suspicious package in CNN’s New York bureau at the Time Warner Center on Wednesday, Trump tweeted Thursday that “a very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News.”

Obama said Friday, “It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say you don’t try to punish political opponents or threaten the freedom of the press just because you don’t like what they say.”

Obama was in Michigan campaigning for Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen Whitmer. He urged attendees to consider political events of the recent past, including Republicans’ attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and a voting record that contradicts recent claims that the GOP has always protected individuals with pre-existing conditions.

Obama made similar comments at a Milwaukee rally earlier in the day when he stumped for Wisconsin Democrats, including Sen. Tammy Baldwin and gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers, and made a few jabs at Trump.

Referencing Republicans’ fixation on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server, Obama said, “They didn’t care about emails.“

“And you know how you know? If they did, they’d be up in arms right now as the Chinese are listening to the President’s iPhone that he leaves in his golf cart,” he added, a reference to a New York Times report. “It turns out, I guess it wasn’t that important.”

In what has become a tight governor’s race, Evers has been leading over 2016 Republican presidential candidate and current Gov. Scott Walker in most polls. Baldwin leads several polls by double digits.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is slated to visit Wisconsin on Tuesday to campaign for state Democrats at rallies in Madison and Milwaukee.

By Niara Savage

In early August, immediately following the release of the video footage depicting the killing of Daniel Hambrick at the hands of Officer Andrew Delke, the Nashville Fraternal Order of Police defended the acts of the officer.

James Smallwood, the president of the FOP justified the officer’s actions, and placed blame on  Hambrick, stating that he is “confident that Mr. Hambrick would be alive,” had he followed the officer’s commands.

Smallwood also stated that Delke “acted reasonably” in using deadly force, because Hambrick could have “twisted his body around,” or “reached across his body,” to fire a weapon.

Importantly, the video of the shooting does not depict Hambrick taking aim at the officer, but instead depicts Hambrick fleeing, while Officer Deleke pursues him.

When charges of criminal homicide were brought against Officer Delke in late September, the FOP released another statement, in which Smallwood criticized the release of the video depicting the shooting of Daniel Hambrick. Smallwood claimed that the video was released out of context, and provided only “a partial narrative of events.”

According to Smallwood, a statement from the very officer charged who was charged with criminal homicide in the shooting, should have been released at the same time as the video in order to provide “enhanced transparency and essential context,” to the video.

Smallwood did not comment on the apparent conflict of interest Officer Delke may have faced, had he been responsible for providing context to the video of him shooting a man in the back.

Furthermore, Smallwood called the District Attorney’s decision to go before a 2nd judge to obtain a signed arrest warrant against Officer Delke a “desperate,” “politically inspired rush to judgement,”referring to the action as “judge shopping.”

Smallwood went on to call Hambrick a “convicted felon,” something Delke had no way of knowing at the time he pulled the trigger.

In addition, Smallwood called the charge against Delke, “a charge against all police officers,” before insinuating that bringing charges against police officers makes everyone “less safe.”

When the Nashville Voice reached out to the FOP, which continues to call officer Delke “an outstanding police officer with an excellent record,” we were directed to their lawyer.

25 OCT 18 08:35 ET By Faith Karimi, CNN

    (CNN) — With every intercepted pipe bomb, fear spread from New York to Washington, Florida, Delaware and California. The devices stashed in manila envelopes and mailed nationwide targeted top Democrats two weeks before the midterm elections.

The bombs found this week were intended for at least seven officials, includingHillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters. Law enforcement officials said they believe they’ve tracked down another suspicious package sent to former Vice President Joe Biden, and the FBI says additional packages may have been mailed to other locations.

Another device was discovered early Thursday at an office in New York associated with actor Robert De Niro.

None of the bombs detonated and no one was injured. Here’s a breakdown of what we know:

The packages had a similar return address

The pipe bombs were sent to a mix of office and residential addresses, and appeared to target some of the people President Donald Trump criticizes frequently. The five packages discovered Tuesday and Wednesday had a similar return address: That of Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but with her last name misspelled. There is no information to suggest she sent the packages.

Barack Obama: The package sent to the former president was intercepted in Washington, D.C., during routine mail screening procedures, the Secret Service said.

Bill and Hillary Clinton: The package was addressed to their residence in Chappaqua, New York, and was intercepted Tuesday night by the Secret Service during routine mail inspection.

Eric Holder: The package was addressed to the former attorney general, but sent to the Florida office of Schultz, whose return address was on the package.

Maxine Waters: One package was sent to the Democratic congresswoman’s office in Washington and a second package addressed to her was found at a postal facility in Los Angeles. It matches the description of those sent to the other officials.

John Brennan: The “live explosive device” was delivered by courier to CNN’s offices in New York. The former CIA director frequently appears on CNN. The NYPD said an envelope containing white powder also was found as part of the device’s original packaging.

Joe Biden: Authorities believe they’ve found a suspicious package addressed to the former vice president, law enforcement officials told CNN Thursday morning. Two law enforcement sources on Wednesday told CNN’s Josh Campbell and Brynn Gingras the package was misaddressed and returned to sender.

George Soros: A suspicious package found Monday appeared to be an explosive device targeting the billionaire investor, philanthropist and Democratic donor. It was rendered safe in Bedford, New York, a law enforcement source told CNN.

Robert De Niro: Around 4:45 a.m. Thursday, police responded to areport of a suspicious package received at a nonresidential building in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood, NYPD Lt. Thomas Antonetti said. The package was addressed to actor Robert De Niro, a vocal critic of Trump, and has markings similar to the other pipe bomb packages recently mailed nationwide, two law enforcement sources told CNN.

They came in similar packaging

The devices sent to Soros, Brennan and the Democratic officials appeared to be pipe bombs, said Bryan Paarmann, FBI special agent in charge of the counterterrorism division in New York.

An initial examination shows they are are rudimentary but functional, andhave similar construction. At least one contained projectiles, including shards of glass, a law enforcement official told CNN. The bombs were unstable and could have been set off just by handling, sources said.

The packages sent to all but Biden are in manila envelopes with bubble wrap interior, the FBI said. Each package had six American flag Forever stamps on the envelope.

The bomb maker wanted to create fear, expert says

The bombs were likely meant to be found and create panic, explosives experts say.

The devices had suspicious-looking packaging, and at least one had a timer that can be bought for a few dollars online and should be easily detected when mailed or delivered.

Ryan Morris, founder of Tripwire Operations Group, a company that provides explosives training to law enforcement and military officials, said that by examining images of two devices — the one found Monday at Soros’ home and the one sent to CNN’s New York offices on Wednesday — it looked like they were real devices that would cause serious bodily injury or death.

“Whoever is doing this is just trying to elicit a fear or disrupt something,” Morris said. “There are a multitude of more sophisticated methodologies that would have worked if they really wanted this to work.”

Trump blamed his opponents

Despite a chaotic day of what appeared to be an attempted large-scale attack on prominent Democratic figures, Trump pointed the finger at his opponents and the news media for the turbulent national political environment.

“Any acts or threats of political violence are an attack on our democracy itself. No nation can succeed that tolerates violence or the threat of violence as a method of political intimidation, corrosion or control, we all know that,” he said Wednesday night.

He said it’s the news media’s responsibility to set the national political tone. Then he resumed his attacks on Democrats, including one falsely claiming they are allowing immigrants to enter the county illegally.

Thursday morning, the President tweeted that the media is to blame for much of the anger in society.

“A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” Trump tweeted. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description.”

“Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!” he continued.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

By Gregory Krieg, | CNN Newsource

A pair of young volunteers for Democrat Stacey Abrams’ campaign for Georgia governor stood under umbrellas on a sloping suburban street in Decatur, a 15-minute drive east of Atlanta, chewing over Georgia’s premier political contest — and one of the country’s most watched.

Olivia Volkert and Quinn Mulholland, both 22-year-old recent college grads, had their fliers stacked, talking points ready and an app in hand that pointed them to potential supporters’ doors. They explained why this time around — with this Democratic candidate — feels so different.

“First and foremost, she’s an African American woman running for governor in Georgia. That speaks for itself,” Volkert said.

“I also think,” Mulholland added, “that there’s something to be said for the novelty of having a Democrat in the South running as an unapologetic progressive. You don’t really often see that, so I think it’s something that excites Democrats across the country.”

They called it a “new playbook” — a rejection, Volkert said, of “the centrist, middle-of-the-road approach didn’t work for Jason Carter.”

Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, challenged Gov. Nathan Deal in 2014. He ran what’s long been the textbook campaign for Georgia Democrats and, as has become their custom, lost.

Abrams, they said, is going another route.

“Mobilize and excite the base and increase turnout among people who are actually Democrats,” is how Mulholland described it. “That really hasn’t been tried (here) before and I think it’s something that could become a national template if it works.”

That strategy is being tested in the Georgia governor’s race, which pits Abrams against the state’s Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who won his primary with the backing of President Donald Trump. Abrams and Kemp will face off for the first time Tuesday night in a debate.

A glance at Georgia’s political visitor log in 2018 would suggest the young canvassers were on to something.

Democrats considering presidential bids have been stalking the state for months, from the early stages of a primary that Abrams would capture in a landslide through to these final weeks of the general election.

If she emerges on Nov. 6 — or after a December run-off, should neither candidate in this neck-and-neck race score a majority next month — as the governor-elect, it would bolster a sense of Democratic viability in weakening Republican stronghold, transforming it in the eyes of political strategists into a 2020 battleground.

Abrams’ campaign, driven by a progressive policy agenda and political vocabulary, but leavened with friendly appeals to the state’s cautious business community, would be held up as an outline for how to win it.

National fights come home to Georgia

On the Republican side, Kemp is following a roadmap of his own.

His campaign has relentlessly sought to portray Abrams as an extremist, falsely accusing her of trying to drive undocumented immigrants to the polls, and describing the former state House minority leader as an agent of the far left.

He will likely continue that line of attack in Tuesday’s debate, which comes a day after Abrams’ participation in a 1992 protest that involved burning the Georgia flag, which at the time included the Confederate battle emblem, resurfaced in The New York Times.

In response to questions over his office’s handling of voter registrations, Kemp in a recent op-ed suggested — as he has throughout — that the concerns were ginned up by an Abrams campaign that had “felt a sudden loss of momentum.”

“Instead of hitting the road to connect with Georgia voters,” he wrote, “they manufactured a ‘crisis’ and asked left-wing allies to fan the flames.” (Abrams began an “early vote bus tour” on October 15, which will run on-and-off through Election Day.)

In an interview after she addressed an education summit at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Abrams recalled early skepticism over her campaign tactics transforming into an almost giddy curiosity over “how we made it work, especially in the Deep South,” after the primary.

“I’m an African American woman who is charting a very different path to doing this,” Abrams said. “I think people want to know: Will it work? But I also think they’re excited by the possibility it could work. Because it changes the conversation about how we have these debates, how we run these campaigns. It shows that there’s another way to win.”

Hours earlier, Ayanna Pressley, the Boston city councilor who is poised in 2019 to become the first African-American woman to represent Massachusetts in Congress, spoke alongside Abrams at digitalundivided, an incubator for minority women entrepreneurs, in downtown Atlanta.

“I’ve always rejected the notion that people don’t vote and don’t show up because they’re ignorant, indifferent, apathetic, don’t know any better,” Pressley said afterward. “People don’t participate because they haven’t been invited to. Because, in some states, it’s inconvenient to. There are real barriers.”

In the first week of in-person voting in Georgia, those hurdles — real and perceived — have dominated the headlines, amid reports that Kemp, the state’s chief elections officer, has effectively used a controversial state law as a tool for suppressing minority turnout.

His record over more than eight years in the job, during which the state purged more than a million “inactive” voters from its rolls has bred deep distrust among political opponents and activists, particularly in the communities Abrams had worked to energize this cycle.

Civil rights groups launched a pair of lawsuits in response, while Kemp and his office denied all suggestions of wrongdoing, accused Abrams of using the reports to excite her base and dismissed the hubbub as the work of “outside agitators,” a historically loaded term dating back to the Civil Rights era, while touting a new record number of registered voters.

But apart from a volley of fundraising shouts and a call for Kemp to resign as the state’s chief elections official, Abrams’ campaign has mostly outsourced those fights to the state party, which is running its own “voter protection” hotline, and advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, whose legal director on Tuesday called the law at the center of the suits “a literacy test reminiscent of Jim Crow.”

Abrams the ‘extremist’ vs. Abrams the dealmaker

Like so many others in the party running in 2018, Abrams’ trail talk typically hinges on health care prescriptions. Unlike Kemp, she wants to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, a transition that would cover an estimated half a million uninsured people.

The campaign says the move would also create more than 50,000 jobs and function like a “law enforcement tool,” as Abrams argued in reference to the potential for new mental health funds.

Abrams, who established a reputation as a dealmaker during her time as a legislator, is confident she can wrangle support for expansion from Republican lawmakers, especially those from the rural counties where hospitals and doctors and either leaving or gone.

“I don’t expect to flip the (state) House and the Senate,” she said at The Carter Center, “but I expect to add some new friends.”

State Rep. Allen Peake, one of the GOP votes Abrams would likely need, is backing Kemp and said he expected the Republican to keep up the GOP’s winning streak. He doesn’t want to expand Medicaid or agree with Abrams’ “policies and the agenda that she intends to promote.”

Still, he readily described her as a friend and talked about meeting the future minority leader when they took office together as part of the same legislative class in 2007.

“It was clear that she was a very intelligent woman, in fact, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, quite frankly,” Peake said. He’s not surprised the national spotlight is shining on Abrams, and ambitious Democrats — like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who rallied with Abrams and Pressley last week — from around the country are heading south to stand by her side.

“The demographics in Georgia are continuing to evolve and with the growth of Atlanta we’re bringing more progressives into our state and so I think, from a national level, folks are seeing that maybe there’s a turn and shift potentially in Georgia in the future,” Peake said. “I’m not sure I buy that completely, but it is true that the demographics are shifting.”

Democrats have for years been counting on those evolving demographics to deliver them power in traditionally red states like Texas and Arizona. It hasn’t happened. Even as Georgia changes, a few things have remained constant. Republican rule has been one.

The GOP took over the governor’s mansion in 2003, assumed control of the state legislature in 2005 and have held on, without a break, ever since.

Through it all, for about a decade now, African-American voters as a percentage of the total electorate have been consistently in the 30% range, according to University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock.

“Abrams is really going to try to mobilize individuals who are registered but have sat out in previous elections,” Bullock said. “That’s what makes it such an interesting contest: she is taking a different approach to what has been done in the past.”

The class of 2020 can’t stay away

That novel pursuit, he added, extended to the campaign’s willingness — indeed, their desire — to campaign with and alongside members of the expected presidential primary class of 2020, a group headlined by national figures like Warren and fellow Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and former Vice President Joe Biden — all of them progressives, to varying degrees, hailing from blue states outside of the South.

“In the past, if Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, those kinds of folks, were going to come to Georgia, Democrats would’ve taken to the hills. They would have disappeared, not want to be within camera range of a shot of that,” Bullock said with a laugh. “So this is very different.”

On the final day of voter registration, Warren was greeted by hearty crowds in and around Atlanta. First at a rally at Clayton State University and then a phone bank launch a few minutes south in Jonesboro.

“I’m here this morning because I believe in Stacey Abrams,” Warren declared during the morning event, before turning to address the still fresh fight over new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, connecting in her speech the process that confirmed him to “a rigged system that rolls over women, rolls over African Americans, rolls over students, rolls over anyone who gets in there way.”

“It hurt,” Warren said. “But now it is time to turn our pain into power.”

Jeff Young, a 68-year-old retired patent attorney from Atlanta who called himself “a big fan” of Warren, applauded at every turn.

“I admire Stacey Abrams for wanting to have her here because Stacey Abrams hasn’t run away from her principles,” Young said before the event began. “We need a party that says we need a free market that admits its debt to society for its use of the nation’s resources,” he added, channeling an old Warren argument, “and I mean both natural resources and human resources.”

The Abrams campaign views the embrace as mutually beneficial. They believe that Georgia Democrats, a generation of whom have never seen their candidate win a big statewide election, seeing national stars on the ground, stumping for their candidate offers a stamp of validation — evidence that the momentum they feel is real and victory is possible.

“I want our friends to come from around the country,” Abrams said, “because you need people to believe things for you before you believe it for yourself.”