Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Trump’s source: A greedy former judge citing an intel conspiracy theorist

The New York Times reports: Andrew Napolitano was a Superior Court judge in New Jersey until, frustrated by the constraints of his salary, he left the bench for more lucrative pastures: talk radio, a syndicated small-claims court TV series (“Power of Attorney”) and, eventually, Fox News, where he rose to become the network’s senior legal analyst.

It was in that basic-cable capacity this week that Mr. Napolitano managed to set off a cascading scandal, which by Friday had sparked a trans-Atlantic tiff between Britain and the United States while plunging President Trump’s close relationship with Fox News into new, murkier territory.

It was new ground for Mr. Napolitano, 66, who prefers being addressed as “The Judge” and once insisted that Fox News install bookshelves and wood-paneling in his newsroom office, the better to resemble a judge’s chambers.

But Mr. Napolitano’s unlikely leap into global politics can be explained by his friendship with Mr. Trump, whom he met with this year to discuss potential Supreme Court nominees. Mr. Napolitano also has a taste for conspiracy theories, which led him to Larry C. Johnson, a former intelligence officer best known for spreading a hoax about Michelle Obama. [Continue reading…]

Today, Johnson writes:

I spoke three months ago with a source that, if the source’s name was revealed, would be known and recognized as a reliable source of information. Based on that contact I reached out to friends in the intel community and asked them about the possibility that a back channel was used to get the Brits to collect on Trump associates. My sources said, “absolutely.”

There’s a mighty chasm between saying something’s possible and asserting that it happened. The very same source, if asked whether he had any evidence that such a back channel had indeed reached out to GCHQ, would have most likely followed his “absolutely,” with, “none whatsoever.”

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Donald Trump’s deceitful and misleading statements have consequences

John Cassidy writes: As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump led a charmed existence. Whatever he said, no matter how outrageous, it didn’t seem to hurt him. He could insult his Republican opponents, make misogynistic comments about female journalists, call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, describe Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, trot out blatant falsehoods by the dozen, encourage the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mail account—none of it proved damaging to his candidacy. As he famously remarked, it was as if he could go out and shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue “and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Now things have changed. He might never admit it, but Trump has belatedly discovered a basic principle of politics: words matter. They matter so much, in fact, that they can make or break a Presidency. That’s why every one of his predecessors—during the modern era, at least—has chosen his words carefully. It took a few weeks for it to become clear that President Trump, as opposed to candidate Trump, would be subject to this principle. But, at this stage, there can be no doubt about it. Virtually every day brings a fresh example of his own loose words coming back to hurt him.

Take the legal setback to the Administration’s revised travel ban, which was supposed to go into effect on Thursday. Derrick Kahala Watson, the federal judge in Hawaii who, on Wednesday, halted the measure on constitutional grounds, said that the public record “includes significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order.” Among other things, Watson cited a Trump campaign document that said, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” On Thursday, another federal judge, Theodore D. Chuang, of Maryland, issued a separate injunction against the revised ban. Citing statements from Trump and his advisers, Chuang said that they indicated the new executive order represented “the realization of the long-envisioned Muslim ban.” (My colleagues Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Jeffrey Toobin have more about both judges’ orders.)

It doesn’t stop there. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has pointed out, even a staunchly conservative judge who has taken the Administration’s side in the fight over the travel bans has criticized some of Trump’s public statements. Earlier this week, in a dissent from a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against the original ban, Judge Jay Bybee strongly condemned the President’s attacks on James Robart, the district-court judge in Seattle who originally halted the ban. (On Twitter, Trump had referred to Robart as “a so-called judge” and called his ruling “ridiculous.”)

“The personal attacks on the distinguished district judge and our colleagues were out of all bounds of civic and persuasive discourse—particularly when they came from the parties,” Bybee, who worked in the George W. Bush Administration, wrote. “Such personal attacks treat the court as though it were merely a political forum in which bargaining, compromise, and even intimidation are acceptable principles. The courts of law must be more than that, or we are not governed by law at all.” [Continue reading…]

Donald Trump could accurately assert: “I didn’t get where I am today by being honest.”

Like many people who believe in the supremacy of will power, he may believe that being faithful to ones own interests and objectives is all that matters.

Trump is consistent in his unwillingness to bend to the will of others. His America First policy is merely an inflation of his Trump First practice.

The idea that Trump might have the capacity to mend his ways — to see that his dishonesty no longer works — derives, perhaps, from a misreading of his pragmatism.

Trump isn’t bound to any ideology. At the same time, he exhibits no psychological flexibility whatsoever.

Trump believes in his own innate capabilities with which, in his own imagining, he is so richly endowed he has no need to learn anything.

Without an interest in learning, he has no capacity to change.

If for most presidents, two overarching external conditions force adaptation — the prospect of a second presidential election and ties to their own political party — neither seems to apply to Trump.

He may well have no interest in trying to get re-elected and no fear of ruining the Republican Party.

The only situation in which I can imagine Trump becoming more reflective might be in isolation, staring at the gray wall of a prison cell.

Then again, it seems more likely that if ever faced with such a prospect he may well expire in his final fit of explosive rage.

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A Vermont mayor wanted to take in refugees. He lost his job

Slate reports: For the past year, the national drama over refugees has played out in miniature in the small city of Rutland, nestled in Vermont’s Green Mountains.

The mayor, Christopher Louras, hatched a plan in 2015 for Rutland to settle 100 refugees from Syria and Iraq. The initiative was publicly announced last March, and in September, Rutland was granted State Department approval. It was the right thing to do, supporters said. But Louras, a five-term mayor who was first elected as a Republican but is now an independent, made an economic case for the program.

“The benefits, economically and culturally, that we will recognize is exactly what the community needs at this time,” he told the Boston Globe in May. “As much as I want to say it’s for compassionate reasons, I realize that there is not a vibrant, growing, successful community in the country right now that is not embracing new Americans.”

On Tuesday, the backlash swept Louras from office. His opponent, city Alderman David Allaire, strongly criticized the secrecy surrounding the town’s decision to accept refugees. Announcing his candidacy in December, Allaire stressed that he was not anti-refugee. “I’m sure if this had been handled differently, you would not see the divide you see in this community right now,” he said at the time. “We are a thoughtful, helpful community.”

But the opposition group that supported Allaire, Rutland First, was more evidently against any refugee deal. In addition to local politics, its Facebook page shares content like the Sweden refugee video that prompted Donald Trump’s famous “last night in Sweden” outburst. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: A Florida man who attempted to set fire to a convenience store told deputies that he assumed the owner was Muslim and that he wanted to “run the Arabs out of our country,” according to the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff later said the store owners are actually Indian, appearing to make this the latest in a string of incidents targeting South Asians mistaken for people of Arab descent.

Around 7:40 a.m. Friday, police received calls that a white male was acting suspiciously in front of the Met Mart convenience store in Port St. Lucie, officials said.

Deputies arrived to find the store closed, with its security shutters intact — as well as a 64-year-old man named Richard Leslie Lloyd near a flaming dumpster.

“When the deputies arrived, they noticed the dumpster had been rolled in front of the doors and the contents were lit on fire,” St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara said in a statement posted on Facebook. “Upon seeing our deputies, the man put his hands behind his back and said ‘take me away.’ ”

Lloyd “told deputies that he pushed the dumpster to the front of the building, tore down signs posted to the outside of the store and lit the contents of the dumpster on fire to ‘run the Arabs out of our country,’ ” Mascara said. [Continue reading…]

The Rutland voters who thought that putting Rutland first required excluding 100 refugees and the Florida man who took the law into his own hands in trying to drive foreigners out of America, can be described as xenophobes, nativists or in several other ways. But beneath these multifaceted expressions of fear lies one simple emotion: cowardice.

Cowardice is what brought Trump to power and is what animates the fear and hatred that can now be found all across this nation.

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Why Wikileaks? Why now?

Fred Kaplan writes: Tuesday’s WikiLeaks release exposing thousands of detailed documents on CIA hacking tools is an unbridled attack on U.S. intelligence operations with little or no public benefit. It makes no claim or pretense that the CIA has used these tools to engage in domestic surveillance or any other illegal activity. Most whistleblowers who leak national security secrets take care to avoid revealing where the secrets come from — the “sources and methods” of the intelligence. These documents are about nothing but sources and methods. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: A longtime intelligence contractor with expertise in U.S. hacking tools told Reuters the documents included correct “cover” terms describing active cyber programs.

“People on both sides of the river are furious,” he said, referring to the CIA and the eavesdropping National Security Agency based in Fort Meade, Maryland. “This is not a Snowden-type situation. This was taken over a long term and handed over to WikiLeaks.” [Continue reading…]

In a press release, Wikileaks said: Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.

Names, email addresses and external IP addresses have been redacted in the released pages (70,875 redactions in total) until further analysis is complete. [Continue reading…]

The Atlantic reports: WikiLeaks appears to be shifting its strategy with its latest document dump. In the past, it has let the public loose on its leaked documents with little more than a few paragraphs of introduction, occasionally building search functions to let users sift through the largest dumps. The CIA leak, on the other hand, came with a detailed press release and analysis of the some key findings from the documents, written in a journalistic style.

Uncharacteristically, WikiLeaks appears to have gone out of its way to redact sensitive information and withhold malicious code from the CIA documents it made public. That’s a slight departure from previous leaks, which were wholly unfiltered. [Continue reading…]

Given that it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between Wikileaks the organization and Julian Assange the individual, I have my doubts that the massive number of redactions and carefully crafted press release should necessarily be attributed to a shift in strategy on the part of Wikileaks/Assange. This may in fact be the way the leaks were delivered: pre-packaged.

In other words, the leaker(s) were just as concerned about how this information got out as they were with its contents — and that begs the question (as posed by @pwnallthethings): why use Wikileaks?

If, as the source is alleged to claim, the goal here is to generate public debate, why use such a flawed messenger — a messenger widely viewed as operating in the service of the Russian intelligence.

The source’s choice of going through Wikileaks suggests they were opting for a suitably malleable conduit and wanted to reach a target audience that thinks little or cares less about Julian Assange’s agenda.

Journalists are hamstrung (or to put it less kindly, incredibly easy to manipulate) in this situation. The key questions are about the source of leaks and the agenda being pursued, yet these are at this time matters of pure conjecture. The alternative to speculation is to focus on the content and get distracted by smart TV vulnerabilities etc.

Yet the source/Wikileaks is in large part teeing this up for political debate and casting the CIA as a rogue intelligence agency — a narrative that surely plays well inside the White House.

As is often the case, Donald Trump’s current silence is much more telling than his tweets.

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The trouble with Trump’s latest plan to give voice to xenophobic bigotry

Katelyn Fossett writes: Last Tuesday, as Donald Trump unveiled the name of a new government office dedicated to tracking and publishing crimes committed by immigrants, one could hear the literal gasps of Democrats assembled in the House of Representatives to hear the president’s first joint address to Congress.

“I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American victims,” Trump said. “The office is called VOICE—Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.”

He then went on to highlight the suffering of “four very brave Americans whose government failed them”—people whose loved ones had been killed by immigrants. It’s a technique Trump used throughout the 2016 campaign and at his convention, one his advisers believe was crucial to his ultimate victory in November.

Now that Trump is president, singling out immigrants as a uniquely criminal group is central to his plans to roll back decades of what he sees as a bipartisan failure to protect the United States from an invasion of illegal aliens. And VOICE is at the heart of those efforts.

The executive order Trump issued on Jan. 25, two days before his now-replaced travel ban, mandated that the Department of Homeland Security, which houses VOICE, begin publishing weekly statistics on crimes by immigrants: “To better inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions, the Secretary shall utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.” One clear goal is to aid Trump’s pledged crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities, which refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

Critics pounced. Some likened it to Nazi Germany propaganda that singled out crimes by Jews. But lost in the debate was a discussion of how the list would get made—and if it would even tell us anything useful.

Set aside the fact that studies show that immigrants tend to commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens, or that urban police forces worry their tip lines will dry up if immigrants are scared to come forward. The less obvious problem with Trump’s list is that it will focus largely on nonviolent offenders, painting an entire group as public safety threats for offenses that are more likely to be traffic violations than rape and murder. [Continue reading…]

Supporters of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies seem to think they can deflect accusations of racism by insisting that the individuals facing deportation or who have already been sent to Mexico are merely suffering the consequences of failing to comply with the law.

But if driving while under the influence of alcohol is sufficient justification to expel someone from the United States, millions of Americans should be sent into exile.

By their own admission, on average each year drivers admit that they have driven when having had too much to drink about 120 million times. But only 1 percent of these incidents result in arrest.

The xenophobes want to paint immigration as a law and order issue when in truth it is racism pure and simple.

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Vice President Pence’s deep state

At a time when the White House obsesses about and promotes the idea that it is under threat from a Deep State of the kind that as a meme Glenn Greenwald has vigorously promoted, one of the many flaws in this narrative is the lack of a Deep-State-approved replacement for Trump if the “coup” was to succeed.

In reality, Trump’s replacement spends most of his time standing right at his side and perhaps more so than any other, Mike Pence is preparing not for the possibility but rather the likelihood that before long he will become president.

Josh Rogin writes: The role and influence of the vice president, not enshrined in any law, is determined in any administration by three things: his direct relationship with the president, his building of a personal portfolio of issues, and the effectiveness of his team. When it comes to foreign policy, Vice President Pence is quietly succeeding on all three fronts.

Inside an administration that is characterized by several power centers, Pence must navigate complex internal politics while serving a president who has an unconventional view of foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world. Pence, a traditional hawk influenced heavily by his Christian faith, is carefully and deliberately assuming a stance that fits within the president’s agenda while respecting the prerogatives of other senior White House aides who also want to play large foreign policy roles, according to White House officials, lawmakers and experts.

But Pence’s growing influence on foreign policy is increasingly evident. The vice president was deployed to Europe last month to reassure allies that the United States will stay committed to alliances such as NATO, despite President Trump’s calls for Europeans to pay more for common defense. During Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit, Trump announced that Pence and his Japanese counterpart would lead a new dialogue on U.S.-Japan economic cooperation.

“The vice president seems to be building on his foreign affairs experience, finding a niche in that arena,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who served with Pence in Congress. “He brings a level-headed steady hand to the foreign policy of the administration. He’s also building up his own team.”

Inside the White House, Pence is in the room during most of the president’s interactions with world leaders. He receives the presidential daily brief. As head of the transition, he was instrumental in bringing several traditionally hawkish Republicans into the top levels of the administration’s national security team, including Director of National Intelligence-designate Dan Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. [Continue reading…]

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Why Trump doth protest too much

It’s easy to dismiss a lot of Trump’s behavior — especially his Twitter rants — as expressions of petulance from a man who never developed the emotional maturity of an adult.

But it’s become clear that nothing triggers him more predictably than the story that won’t go away — his campaign’s ties to Russia.

Why protest so much if there’s truly nothing there? Why scramble desperately for distractions if a simple resolution would come from a full airing of all the facts?

Trump behaves not like a man with nothing to fear, but on the contrary as one terrified of what will sooner or later be revealed.

Perhaps former NSA intelligence analyst John Schindler knows why:

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Greenwald, Limbaugh, Hannity, Drudge, Assange all use same ‘deep state’ formula to push back against Russia story

The first step in dismissing someone’s concerns is to brand them as hysterical.

Trump’s ties to Russia, the hacking of the DNC, Trump administration officials lying about their communications with Russians, a global disinformation campaign that is undermining democracy and empowering right-wing authoritarian leaders and parties across the West — the attention being directed at all of this, is, some observers claim, all part of an “anti-Russia frenzy” that is being stoked in order to topple the Trump presidency.

The new coalition of left and right that has brought together Trump supporters and nominal Trump opponents, seem to be agreed on this: the best way of addressing the story of Russian interference in American democracy is to ignore Russia.

After all, if for decades you have been obsessed about the enemy in Washington, how can all this Kremlin talk be seen as anything other than another sinister plot spawned by the American masters of the Deep State?

Apparently the term Deep State is new to some on the right, but it’s popularization by Glenn Greenwald is serving the Trump camp well.

 

For those who are eager to counteract the effects of the unremitting flow of Russia-related stories involving team Trump, the latest piece of ammunition has been provided by Michael Tracey whose supposed deconstruction of the story cycle is being hailed as a “must read.”


I don’t think Greenwald gets directions from Moscow, but if he did, they would be very concise: keep doing what you’re already doing.

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Sessions is flagrantly lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador

The New York Times reports: Democrats escalated their demands late Wednesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions recuse himself from overseeing an investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government after a disclosure that Mr. Sessions himself spoke with the Russian ambassador last year, seemingly contradicting his testimony at his confirmation hearing.

And some Democrats went further, suggesting that Mr. Sessions had perjured himself and demanding that he resign.

“Sessions is not fit to serve as the top law enforcement officer of our country and must resign,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. “There must be an independent, bipartisan, outside commission to investigate the Trump political, personal and financial connections to the Russians.”

But the Trump administration rejected the accusations as partisan attacks, and Mr. Sessions said in a statement issued shortly before midnight that he had not addressed election matters with the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak.

“I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign,” Mr. Sessions said. “I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports, “Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.”

This is the definition of obfuscation.

Sessions claims to have a clear recollection of what was not spoken about yet doesn’t recall the actual content of the conversations.

Moreover, his denial of discussing “issues of the campaign” is narrowly circumscribed.

When he says, “I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign,” he appears to be referring to the prearranged purpose of such meetings since it’s reasonable to assume that such officials would not show up unannounced.

Once face to face, however, whether the conversation in parts then pertained to the campaign, that’s a possibility Sessions leaves open and also conveniently obscures with his blanket failure of recollection.

This morning, he continued attempting to weasel his way out of the corner he’s in, mindful perhaps that even inside the Trump administration — but outside the Oval Office — publicly exposed liars can be forced to resign.

NBC News reports:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions denied meeting with any Russian officials during the course of the presidential election to talk about politics, he told NBC News in exclusive remarks early Thursday.

“I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign,” he said, “and those remarks are unbelievable to me and are false. And I don’t have anything else to say about that.”

When asked about the calls by Democrats to recuse himself from investigating any alleged ties between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government, Sessions added: “I have said whenever it’s appropriate, I will recuse myself. There’s no doubt about that.”

Since Sessions and his staff claim they’re having trouble piecing together the details about these conversations, perhaps the FBI can help them out through the findings of its counterintelligence investigation on contacts between Russian officials and Sessions.

At the end of the day, what may prove more consequential than the conversations themselves was that then-Senator Sessions, testifying under oath, purposefully misled his fellow Senators.

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Xenophobes can’t protect America; they just turn friends into foes

The Australian children’s author, Mem Fox, describes her treatment by immigration officials in Los Angeles International Airport. She writes: The way I was interviewed was monstrous. If only they had been able to look into my suitcase and see my books. The irony! I had a copy of my new book I’m Australian, Too – it’s about immigration and welcoming people to live in a happy country. I am all about inclusivity, humanity and the oneness of the humans of the world; it’s the theme of my life. I also had a copy of my book Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. I told him I had all these inclusive books of mine in my bag, and he yelled at me: “I can read!”

He was less than half my age – I don’t look 70 but I don’t look 60 either, I’m an older woman – and I was standing the whole time. The belligerence and violence of it was really terrifying. I had to hold the heel of my right hand to my heart to stop it beating so hard.

They were not apologetic at any point. When they discovered that one of Australia’s official gifts to Prince George was Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, he held out his hand and said: “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Ms Fox.” I was close to collapse, very close to fainting, and this nearly broke me – it was the creepiest thing of all.

I had been upright, dignified, cool and polite, and this was so cruelly unexpected, so appalling, that he should say it was a pleasure. It couldn’t have been a pleasure for him to treat me like that, unless he was a psychopath.

In that moment I loathed America. I loathed the entire country. And it was my 117th visit to the country so I know that most people are very generous and warm-hearted. They have been wonderful to me over the years. I got over that hatred within a day or two. But this is not the way to win friends, to do this to someone who is Australian when we have supported them in every damn war. It’s absolutely outrageous. [Continue reading…]

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) promotes itself as a military friendly employer and actively recruits veterans.

The numerous reports of zealous officials mistreating people who are viewed with suspicion primarily because they are not American, makes me wonder what proportion of these officials have traveled overseas for any other purpose than to engage in war.

If your only experience of the wider world has been the daily fear of getting blown up by an IED in Iraq or Afghanistan, then to be placed on “America’s frontline” is an invitation to turn the war-fighter’s fears into a permanent way of life.

 

While Trumpsters think they’re making America safer, the much more predictable effect of the climate of paranoia and xenophobia the White House is fueling is to turn the United States into one of the least desirable tourist destinations in the world.

The Guardian reports: Interest in travel to the US has “fallen off a cliff” since Donald Trump’s election, according to travel companies who have reported a significant drop in flight searches and bookings since his inauguration and controversial travel ban.

Data released this week by travel search engine Kayak reported a 58% decline in searches for flights to Tampa and Orlando from the UK, and a 52% decline in searches for Miami. Searches for San Diego were also down 43%, Las Vegas by 36% and Los Angeles 32%.

Though flight prices are holding firm (they usually take weeks rather than days to adjust to consumer trends), Kayak has identified a knock-on effect on average hotel prices. It found prices in Las Vegas are down by 39% and New York City by 32%.

It is the latest in a string of reports from the travel industry that suggests a “Trump slump”, with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) estimating that since being elected President Trump has cost the US travel industry $185m in lost revenue. [Continue reading…]

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Trump linked to a plan to topple Ukraine’s president and install a Trump-like Putin-friendly puppet, Andrii Artemenko

When it comes to theories about what kind of quid pro quo must have been involved in Vladimir Putin helping Donald Trump become president, the most commonly expressed view has been that Trump would reward Putin by lifting sanctions.

A report in the New York Times describes a plan for a much intricate unfolding of interests that would see Andrii V. Artemenko, “the Ukrainian lawmaker, who sees himself as a Trump-style leader of a future Ukraine,” ousting Ukrainian president, Petro O. Poroshenko.

The report says Artemenko:

has fashioned himself in the image of Mr. Trump, presenting himself as Ukraine’s answer to a rising class of nationalist leaders in the West. He even traveled to Cleveland last summer for the Republican National Convention, seizing on the chance to meet with members of Mr. Trump’s campaign.

“It’s time for new leaders, new approaches to the governance of the country, new principles and new negotiators in international politics,” he wrote on Facebook on Jan. 27. “Our time has come!”

Mr. Artemenko said he saw in Mr. Trump an opportunity to advocate a plan for peace in Ukraine — and help advance his own political career. Essentially, his plan would require the withdrawal of all Russian forces from eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian voters would decide in a referendum whether Crimea, the Ukrainian territory seized by Russia in 2014, would be leased to Russia for a term of 50 or 100 years.

The Ukrainian ambassador, Mr. Chaly, rejected a lease of that kind. “It is a gross violation of the Constitution,” he said in written answers to questions from The Times. “Such ideas can be pitched or pushed through only by those openly or covertly representing Russian interests.”

The reaction suggested why Mr. Artemenko’s project also includes the dissemination of “kompromat,” or compromising material, purportedly showing that Mr. Poroshenko and his closest associates are corrupt. Only a new government, presumably one less hostile to Russia, might take up his plan.

The report says Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, delivered Artemenko’s plan to the White House — Cohen now denies this, but the New York Times stands by its story — where it was left on Michael Flynn’s desk.

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The slippery slope leading towards dictatorship

Thomas Jefferson (1787): “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

The Washington Post reports: Sen. John McCain spoke out Saturday in defense of the free press after President Trump lashed out against the news media several times over the past week, at one point declaring it “the enemy of the American People!”

Such talk, McCain (R-Ariz.) said on NBC News in an interview set to air Sunday, was “how dictators get started.”

“In other words, a consolidation of power,” McCain told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd from Munich. “When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press. And I’m not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I’m just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.” [Continue reading…]

On Saturday in Florida, Trump continued with his vilification of the press:

 

CBS News reports: Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, advised Americans to take President Trump’s attacks on the media “seriously,” following the president’s denunciations of the press as the “enemy.”

“There’s been a debate about when to take the president seriously,” CBS’ John Dickerson said in a “Face the Nation” interview with Priebus Saturday. “He recently tweeted that the press was the enemy of the American people. Should we take that seriously from him?”

“Well, I think you should take it seriously,” Priebus replied. “I think that the problem we’ve got is that we’re talking about bogus stories like the one in the New York Times, that we’ve had constant contact with Russian officials. The next day, the Wall Street Journal had a story that the intel community was not giving the president a full intelligence briefing. Both stories grossly inaccurate, overstated, overblown, and it’s total garbage.”

Sources told CBS News there is a “chill” in the flow of intelligence to the White House, both because of comments from the president about the intelligence community and anxiety over the handling of sensitive information about Russian interference in the 2016 election. [Continue reading…]

Thomas Jefferson (1823): “the only security of all is in a free press. the force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. the agitation it produces must be submitted to. it is necessary to keep the waters pure.”

Nate Cohn writes: Donald J. Trump won the presidential election as the least popular candidate in the polling era. He assumed the presidency with the lowest approval rating of any incoming president.

And his ratings have continued to fall. The question isn’t whether it’s bad for Mr. Trump and the Republicans, but how bad.

Usually, presidents ride high at the start of their terms. After one month, presidents average around a 60 percent approval rating. Even re-elected presidents with considerable baggage, like Barack Obama or George W. Bush, still had approval ratings around or over 50 percent.

The worst data for Mr. Trump comes from live interview telephone surveys like Pew Research and Gallup, which pin his approval rating among adults around 40 percent.

The most recent Gallup survey, the first conducted entirely after the resignation of Michael Flynn as national security adviser, has Mr. Trump’s approval rating down to 38 percent, with 56 percent disapproving (a differential of minus 18).

Mr. Trump’s ratings aren’t just bad for an incoming president. They’re bad for a president at any point in a term. [Continue reading…]

The ability of a loudmouth in the Oval Office to assemble a few thousand gullible supporters in Florida does not show that the force of public opinion is on Trump’s side. On the contrary, by employing the same power dynamics used by terrorists (drawing national and international attention to local events), Trump is merely using his ability to dominate media coverage as an instrument for amplifying the range of his desired influence.

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John McCain on the survival of the West

 

Many of those of us who have an interest in and experience of living in non-Western cultures have a distaste for what can sound like sanctimonious and domineering claims about Western superiority.

What is superior about a civilization that built its strength through subjugating others? The failings of the West are easy enough to discern from a passing glance over world history.

Nevertheless, the value of open societies is currently being undermined from within, not by people who are promoting better alternatives but on the contrary mostly by those whose cynicism has festered deep within the only societies they have ever known.

To be concerned about the future of Western democracies does not require overlooking their failings but simply recognizing that if they fail, what will follow will without doubt be much worse.

This isn’t a matter of conjecture. Look at the Middle East and the effects of the withdrawal of American power. This hasn’t opened the doors to self-determination. It has instead led to an ongoing and very bloody power struggle between competing autocratic powers.

What the retreat of the West facilitates both outside and inside the West is the rise of nationalism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia.

When Western power can be superseded by something better — something that better reflects global diversity — then it will indeed be time to dispense with the very concept of the West. But we haven’t got anywhere close to arriving at that point in history.

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Marching towards nowhere?

 

Ivan Krastev writes: What strikes any observer of the new wave of revolutionary politics is that it is a revolution without an ideology or a project. Protesting itself seems to be the strategic goal of many of the protests. Failing to offer political alternatives, they are an explosion of moral indignation. In most of the protests, citizens on the street treat politics not so much as a set of issues but as a public performance or a way of being in the world. Many protesters are openly anti-institutional and mistrustful toward both the market and the state. They preach participation without representation. The protest movements bypass established political parties, distrust the mainstream media, refuse to recognize any specific leadership, and reject all formal organizations, relying instead on the Internet and local assemblies for collective debate and decision making.

In a way the new protest movements are inspired by mistrust in the elites, empowered by mistrust in leadership, constrained by mistrust of organizations, and defeated by the protesters’ inability to trust even each other: “This is an obvious but unspoken cultural difference between modern youth protest movements and those of the past. […] Anybody who sounds like a career politician, anybody who attempts to use rhetoric, or espouses an ideology, is greeted with visceral distaste.”

Mistrusting institutions as a rule, the protesters are plainly uninterested in taking power. The government is simply “them,” regardless of who is in charge. The protesters combine a genuine longing for community with a relentless individualism. They describe their own political activism almost in religious terms, stressing how the experience of acting out on the street has inspired a revolution of the soul and a regime change of the mind. Perhaps for the first time since 1848 — the last of the pre-Marxist revolutions — the revolt is not against the government but against being governed. It is the spirit of libertarianism that brings together Egypt’s anti-authoritarian uprising and Occupy Wall Street’s anti-capitalist insurrection.

For the protesters, it is no longer important who wins elections or who runs the government, not simply because they do not want to be the government, but also because any time people perceive that their interests are endangered, they plan on returning to the streets. The “silent man” in Taksim Square, Istanbul, who stood without moving or speaking for eight hours, is a symbol of the new age of protests: He stands there to make sure that things will not stay as they are. His message to those in power is that he will never go home.

While it is popular for Europeans to compare the current global protest wave with the revolutions of 1848, today’s protests are the negation of the political agenda of 1848. Those revolutions fought for universal suffrage and political representation. They marked the rise of the citizen-voter. The current protests are a revolt against representative democracy. They mark the disillusionment of the citizen-voter. The current protests function as an alternative to elections, testifying that the people are furious; the angry citizen heads to the streets not with the hope of putting a better government in power but merely to establish the borders that no government should cross. [Continue reading…]

Anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-globalization, anti-interventionism — the problem with centering any movement around opposition is that almost in obedience with the laws of physics, the end result will be inertia.

The logical conclusion of insistently saying no is that we end up going nowhere.

The successful movements of the last century have instead always been centered on positive goals — women’s rights; civil rights; marriage equality, and so forth.

Likewise, the most effective forms of resistance against the socially corrosive agenda of the Trump presidency are not simply anti-Trump; they are affirmations — for immigrants, for Muslims, and for women.

To build a better world, we have to unite around the things we support and not simply the things we oppose.

What Trump is counting on is that his opponents remain locked in an oppositional posture in which we will eventually tire and thereafter fall into torpor and silence.

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In solidarity with fellow immigrants, no updates here for Feb 16 #DayWithoutImmigrants

NPR reports: Across the U.S., protesters are calling for a “Day Without Immigrants” on Thursday. It’s a boycott calling for immigrants not to go to work, in response to President Trump’s immigration policies and his plan to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

The protest seems to have been organized by word of mouth through social media. It’s unclear how many people will actually participate, though reports suggest restaurants in Austin, Texas; Denver and New York City, as well as the Philadelphia region, plan to join in. But in Washington, D.C., a number of restaurants have already announced that they’ll close for the day in solidarity with immigrant workers. That includes five restaurants owned by celebrity chef José Andrés.

“It was a very easy decision,” Andrés tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “When you have employees that have been with you almost 25 years, and they come to you in an organized way and they tell you, ‘Don’t get upset but Thursday we are not coming to work,’ [the] next thing you ask is, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ So I decided to join them and support them — that’s what we’re doing.”

For Andrés, who came to the U.S. from Spain in 1991 and is now an American citizen, this is also personal. “It seems immigrants, especially Latinos, it seems we are under attack,” he says. “It seems we are part of the American dream, but somehow it seems that America is not recognizing what we are doing.” [Continue reading…]

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Michael Flynn’s deceptions present bigger problem than violation of the Logan Act

David Ignatius writes: Michael Flynn’s real problem isn’t the Logan Act, an obscure and probably unenforceable 1799 statute that bars private meddling in foreign policy disputes. It’s whether President Trump’s national security adviser sought to hide from his colleagues and the nation a pre-inauguration discussion with the Russian government about sanctions that the Obama administration was imposing.

“It’s far less significant if he violated the Logan Act and far more significant if he willfully misled this country,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a telephone interview late Friday. “Why would he conceal the nature of the call unless he was conscious of wrongdoing?”

Schiff said the FBI and congressional intelligence committees should investigate whether Flynn discussed with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December the imminent imposition of sanctions, and whether he encrypted any of those communications in what might have been an effort to avoid monitoring. Schiff said that if some conversations were recorded by U.S. intelligence agencies, “we should be able to rapidly tell if Gen. Flynn was being truthful” when he told Vice President Pence and other colleagues that sanctions weren’t discussed. [Continue reading…]

Flynn’s ongoing obfuscation around the content of his conversations would appear to be a delaying tactic driven by the fact that he doesn’t know how much more detail in his exchanges might soon be leaked.

It’s also, no doubt, a product of the reliable expectation that in a political climate flooded with too many controversies for the media to closely track, the Flynn story is likely to get overshadowed by yet another drama.

The 24/7 Trump soap opera is effective in both sickening and exhausting an audience that will soon transition from interminable distraction to mass catatonia.

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Salam Fayyad, Washington and Tel Aviv’s favorite Palestinian, does not meet Trump’s approval

Roger Cohen called him, “The most progressive and innovative Palestinian thinker on a Middle East peace settlement,” and Tom Friedman described him as belonging to “a new generation of decent Arab leaders whose primary focus would be the human development of their own people, not the enrichment of their family, tribe, sect or party,” but in the eyes of the Trump administration, Salam Fayyad is less noteworthy for the details of his résumé or the praise he has so often received across the Western political establishment than he is for the mere fact that he is a Palestinian.

It’s easy to imagine Trump’s response when he was informed that the UN is considering appointing Fayyad to head its mission in Libya. “A Palestinian? Not good.” And thus the dimwit sitting in the Oval Office directed his emissary at the UN to craft a statement voicing his displeasure.

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On Air Force One, Trump flies into the cloud of unknowing

Trump didn’t know about Flynn’s conversations about sanctions with Russia’s ambassador and neither did Pence. Flynn himself can’t remember, and the FBI and intelligence agencies listening in couldn’t decipher the true significance of what may or may not have been said. It’s all a deep, deep, mystery.

It’s Friday. Surely by Monday the media will also have forgotten about this story.

CNN reports: President Donald Trump said Friday afternoon he was unaware of reports that his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, may have spoken about sanctions with the Russian ambassador before the inauguration.

Trump, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, said he will “look into that.”

A US official confirmed to CNN late Friday afternoon that Flynn and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, did speak about sanctions, among other matters, during the call.

The context of Flynn’s side of the conversation wasn’t clear, even to the FBI and intelligence agencies that reviewed the content, and there’s nothing to indicate that Flynn made any promises or acted improperly in the discussion.

Flynn cannot rule out that he spoke to Kislyak about sanctions, an aide close to the national security adviser said earlier Friday.

Flynn, the aide said, has “no recollection of discussing sanctions,” but added that the national security adviser “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

Earlier Friday, a senior White House adviser told CNN that Vice President Mike Pence did not know that Flynn may have discussed sanctions in the December conversation and believes “it’s a problem.”

Three administration officials said Pence only knew what Flynn told him — that he had not talked about sanctions — before Pence stood before cameras last month and vouched for Flynn. One official said Pence was trying to “get to the bottom of it,” and two senior administration officials said Pence was “very intentional” in asking Flynn about his communication with the Russians before speaking to the media.

A source with knowledge of the situation told CNN the only reason Flynn hasn’t been fired is that the White House doesn’t want to look bad. Adding to Flynn’s problems, the source said, is that this latest revelation reflects poorly on Pence. [Continue reading…]

Indeed, it is of the utmost importance that Trump and those around him maintain their flawless reputations.

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