Category Archives: Entities

Justice Department declines Senate request to interview FBI officials over Comey firing

CNN reports: The Justice Department is preventing Senate investigators from interviewing two top FBI officials who could provide first-hand testimony over the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, the latest sign that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could be investigating the circumstances around the firing, officials tell CNN.

The previously undisclosed turf war comes as the Senate judiciary committee has not yet given assurances to the special counsel’s office that it could have unfettered access to the transcript of the interview it conducted last week with the President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., saying that the full Senate must first authorize the release of the information to Mueller’s team.

What appears to have irked the panel in particular is the refusal of the Justice Department to cooperate with a key part of its investigation. The leaders of the panel, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and the ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein, have repeatedly asked two senior FBI officials — Carl Ghattas and James Rybicki — to sit down for a transcribed interview to discuss the Comey firing as part of its inquiry into any improper interference with the FBI.

But the Justice Department has declined, citing “the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III to serve” as special counsel about Russian interference in the 2016 elections and “related matters.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. bans use of Kaspersky software in federal agencies amid concerns of Russian espionage

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. government on Wednesday moved to ban the use of a Russian brand of security software by federal agencies amid concerns the company has ties to state-sponsored cyberespionage activities.

In a binding directive, acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke ordered that federal civilian agencies identify Kaspersky Lab software on their networks. After 90 days, unless otherwise directed, they must remove the software, on the grounds that the company has connections to the Russian government and its software poses a security risk.

The Department of Homeland Security “is concerned about the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies, and requirements under Russian law that allow Russian intelligence agencies to request or compel assistance from Kaspersky and to intercept communications transiting Russian networks,” the department said in a statement. “The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security.” [Continue reading…]

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It’s time to talk to North Korea

Fred Kaplan writes: The complaint about the U.N. Security Council’s new sanctions against North Korea is that they aren’t strict enough to force Kim Jong-un to dismantle his nuclear program. But here’s the thing: Nothing is going to force him to do that.

It’s time to recognize that North Korea is a nuclear power—small and not fully tested but a nuclear power nonetheless—and that, as with other nuclear powers, the most effective ways to deal with it are through deterrence and diplomacy. Any other course is the stuff of delusions.

There are several reasons why Kim would be loath to give up his nukes. First, they are all he has. For a tiny, impoverished country amid several large, rich ones (“a shrimp among whales,” as Kim Il-sung, the country’s founder and Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, put it), nukes can stave off a wide range of threats. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is near defeat in Iraq. Now comes the hard part

The Washington Post reports: The collapse of the Islamic State in its most important Iraqi strongholds has brought a rare moment of hope for a country mired in war for most of the past four decades.

It is also a moment of peril, as Iraq emerges from the fight against the militants only to be confronted with the same problems that fueled their spectacular rise in 2014.

Old disputes between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds over territory, resources and power already are resurfacing as the victors of the battles compete to control liberated areas or jostle for political advantage in the post-Islamic State landscape.

They now are compounded by the mammoth task of rebuilding the towns and cities destroyed by the fighting, returning millions of displaced people to their homes and reconciling the communities that once welcomed the Islamic State’s brutal rule as preferable to their own government’s neglect and abuse.

Failure risks a repeat of the cycle of grievance and insurgency that fueled the original Iraqi insurgency in 2003, and its reincarnation in the form of the Islamic State after 2011, Iraqis and analysts say.

But it is a vast and potentially insurmountable challenge, laid bare on the traumatized streets of Mosul. In the relatively unscathed eastern part of the city, life has bounced back. Traffic clogs the streets, music blares from markets and stores are piled high with consumer goods that were banned or hard to find under Islamic State rule, such as cellphones, air conditioners and satellite dishes. [Continue reading…]

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Arms control experts urge Trump to honor Iran nuclear deal

The New York Times reports: Alarmed that President Trump may soon take steps that could unravel the international nuclear agreement with Iran, more than 80 disarmament experts urged him on Wednesday to reconsider and said the accord was working.

In a joint statement, the experts said the 2015 agreement, negotiated by the Obama administration and the governments of Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, was a “net plus for international nuclear nonproliferation efforts.”

Because of the monitoring powers contained in the agreement, they said, Iran’s capability to produce nuclear weapons had been sharply reduced. They also said the agreement made it “very likely that any possible future effort by Iran to pursue nuclear weapons, even a clandestine program, would be detected promptly.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly assailed the agreement — a signature achievement of his predecessor — describing it as “a terrible deal” and a giveaway to Iran. [Continue reading…]

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Will Donald Trump destroy the presidency?

Jack Goldsmith writes: Donald Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors. We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” James Madison wrote in one of the Federalist Papers during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. He was right, but he never could have imagined Donald Trump.

At this point in the singular Trump presidency, we can begin to assess its impact on American democracy. The news thus far is not all bad. The Constitution’s checks and balances have largely stopped Trump from breaking the law. And while he has hurt his own administration, his successors likely won’t repeat his self-destructive antics. The prognosis for the rest of our democratic culture is grimmer, however. Trump’s bizarre behavior has coarsened politics and induced harmful norm-breaking by the institutions he has attacked. These changes will be harder to undo.

Trump, in short, is wielding a Soprano touch on American institutions. “I’m fucking King Midas in reverse here,” Tony Soprano once told his therapist. “Everything I touch turns to shit.” [Continue reading…]

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White House weighs lowering refugee quota to below 50,000

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is considering reducing the number of refugees admitted to the country over the next year to below 50,000, according to current and former government officials familiar with the discussions, the lowest number since at least 1980.

President Trump promised during his 2016 campaign to deny admittance to refugees who posed a terrorist threat. In his first days in office he took steps to radically reduce the program that resettles refugees in American cities and towns, capping the number admitted at 50,000 as part of his executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. That was less than half the 110,000 refugees President Barack Obama said should be admitted in 2016.

But in recent weeks, as the deadline approached for Mr. Trump to issue the annual determination for refugee admissions required by the Refugee Act of 1980, some inside the White House — led by Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser for policy — have pressed to set the ceiling even lower. [Continue reading…]

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Supreme Court lets Trump bar refugees in boost for travel ban

Bloomberg reports: The U.S. Supreme Court reinforced President Donald Trump’s travel ban, saying he can bar thousands of refugees from entering the country while the justices prepare to hear a broader challenge to the policy.

The high court put on hold a federal appeals court ruling that had said Trump couldn’t apply his travel ban to refugees once a resettlement agency had promised it would provide basic services for them. About 24,000 refugees are covered by those agreements.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Oct. 10 on Trump’s travel order, which imposed a 90-day ban on people entering the U.S. from six mostly Muslim countries and a 120-day ban on refugees. The policy is designed to give officials time to assess vetting procedures. Lower courts have said Trump overstepped his authority and unconstitutionally targeted Muslims. [Continue reading…]

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If Trump wants to unravel Obama’s legacy, he could start with Burma

Ishaan Tharoor writes: President Trump has made no secret of his desire to dismantle the achievements of President Barack Obama, be they domestic reforms on health care, an executive order governing the status of undocumented youth, a landmark international agreement on climate change or the deal inked between world powers and Iran over its nuclear program.

Many of Trump’s efforts to unravel Obama’s legacy, though, have stalled. More often than not, they have also proved widely unpopular among the public, according to a slate of opinion polls. But there’s one hot spot where Trump could probably walk back the effects of Obama’s foreign policy with little condemnation: Burma. [Continue reading…]

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Russia sought a broad reset with Trump, secret document shows

BuzzFeed reports: In the third month of Donald Trump’s presidency, Vladimir Putin dispatched one of his diplomats to the State Department to deliver a bold proposition: The full normalization of relations between the United States and Russia across all major branches of government.

The proposal, spelled out in a detailed document obtained by BuzzFeed News, called for the wholesale restoration of diplomatic, military and intelligence channels severed between the two countries after Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria.

The broad scope of the Kremlin’s reset plan came with an ambitious launch date: immediately.

By April, a top Russian cyber official, Andrey Krutskikh, would meet with his American counterpart for consultations on “information security,” the document proposed. By May, the two countries would hold “special consultations” on the war in Afghanistan, the Iran nuclear deal, the “situation in Ukraine,” and efforts to denuclearize the “Korean Peninsula.” And by the time Putin and Trump held their first meeting, the heads of the CIA, FBI, National Security Council and Pentagon would meet face-to-face with their Russian counterparts to discuss areas of mutual interest. A raft of other military and diplomatic channels opened during the Obama administration’s first-term “reset” would also be restored.

“This document represents nothing less than a road map for full-scale normalization of US-Russian relations,” said Andrew Weiss, the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, after reviewing the proposal provided by BuzzFeed News. [Continue reading…]

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Trump administration may make the Iran deal the Senate’s problem

J. Dana Stuster writes: The Trump administration continued laying the groundwork for decertifying Iran’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) last week. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on the nuclear agreement and broader U.S. policy toward Iran. Though she stressed that she was “not making the case for decertifying”—instead she said she was arguing that “should [Trump] decide to decertify, he has grounds to stand on”—it was hard to read Haley’s comments as any anything else.

Haley’s speech was mostly a rehash of criticisms leveled against the JCPOA at the time of its proposal in 2015. Like previous critics, Haley expressed frustration that the agreement deals with Iran’s nuclear weapons program in isolation from Iran’s other aggressive actions in the Middle East, raised concerns about inspectors’ ability to detect potential clandestine enrichment sites, and cited Iran’s record of sponsoring terrorism as a check against its credibility. None of this is new, and the counterarguments have been made well for years. But as President Barack Obama pointed out at the time, “You don’t make deals like this with your friends.” The agreement addressed the foremost U.S. security interest with regard to Iran: the rapid expansion of its uranium enrichment that could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Haley’s speech didn’t articulate an alternative for containing Iran’s nuclear program.

The JCPOA was an international agreement only made possible by the participation of a coalition that included Russia and China; that Washington, Moscow, and Beijing could all agree to the terms is still an incredible diplomatic achievement by itself. But those international partners to the agreement got short shrift in Haley’s speech, only coming up in the question and answer portion. “This is about U.S. national security. This is not about European security. This is not about anyone else,” she said, which the New York Times reports left “several European diplomats in the audience fuming.” [Continue reading…]

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White House spokeswoman: Justice Department ‘should certainly look at’ prosecuting Comey

The Washington Post reports: The Justice Department should consider prosecuting former FBI director James B. Comey for actions that “were improper and likely could have been illegal,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday.

“I think if there’s ever a moment where we feel someone’s broken the law, particularly if they’re the head of the FBI, I think that’s something that certainly should be looked at,” Sanders said.

She said that recommending such a prosecution is “not the president’s role,” and that the White House is not encouraging it.

“That’s the job of the Department of Justice, and something they should certainly look at,” Sanders said. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Bannon has a Nazi problem

Vanity Fair reports: Hunkered down for his first television interview since he left the White House, an unkempt Steve Bannon succinctly outlined the populist-nationalist mission of Breitbart News. “Our purpose is to support Donald Trump [and] to make sure his enemies know that there’s no free shot on goal,” he told 60 Minutes host Charlie Rose last week. Those enemies include a familiar list of Breitbart targets: establishment lawmakers like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the G.O.P. swamp; undocumented immigrants protected under DACA; the liberal media; White House “globalists” such as Gary Cohn, and so forth.

But the biggest danger to the president and to Breitbart may be their fellow travelers on what Bannon once called “the alt-right,” as became especially clear after Charlottesville. And Bannon was itching to distance himself from the white supremacists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis that have rallied under Trump and supported his agenda. “They’re getting off a free ride off Donald Trump. They’re getting a free ride,” he exploded, his eyes red, calling them a “small,” “vicious group” that “add[s] no value.” As he condemned them, though, he took a characteristic swipe at the media for continuing to blur the lines between racial extremists and his movement. “I don’t need to be—I don’t need to be lectured—by a bunch of—by a bunch of limousine liberals, O.K., from the Upper East Side of New York and from the Hamptons, O.K., about any of this.”

Prior to Trump’s surprising election, Bannon’s Breitbart pursued, essentially, a no-enemies-on-the-right policy, with a disparate group of believers in its big tent. For years, as Breitbart cultivated a scurrilous following of anti-Islamists, anti-immigrants, and Internet trolls with questionable Photoshop skills and even more questionable taste, Bannon defended his collection of deplorables as people who were simply united by their hatred of the establishment, whatever it was at any given moment. In August 2016, Bannon called Breitbart “the platform of the alt-right,” yoking his site to an ugly strain of American politics at the expense of his own allies. “I’ve talked to people who work with him, and they said, ‘They don’t know why he said that,’” said Morton Klein, echoing several other Bannon associates I’ve spoken to over the past several months. He rolled with it, however, and tended to dismiss complaints about some of the constituencies as political correctness. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Bannon says he talks to Donald Trump every two to three days

The Wall Street Journal reports: Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon speaks with President Donald Trump every two to three days, he told a private lunchtime gathering Tuesday in Hong Kong, some three weeks after the adviser left his administration job.

Mr. Bannon said he most recently spoke with Mr. Trump the previous night for an hour, according to two people who attended the closed-door meeting with the former presidential adviser. The gathering, at a Grand Hyatt hotel restaurant, included a group of about 20 money managers.

Mr. Bannon wasn’t immediately reachable for comment.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Tuesday she was aware of two conversations between Mr. Bannon and the president. Of the former chief strategist’s comment that the two speak every two to three days she said, “Certainly not that frequently.” [Continue reading…]

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Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?

Andrew Cockburn writes: Meeting with the leaders of NATO countries in May, President Trump chastised them sternly for their shortcomings as allies. He took the time, however, to make respectful reference to the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, whom he had just visited at the start of his first overseas trip as president. “I spent much time with King Salman,” he told the glum-looking cluster of Europeans, calling him “a wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly.”

Some might find this fulsome description surprising, given widespread reports that Salman, who took the throne in January 2015, suffers from dementia. Generally seen wearing a puzzled look, the king has been known to wander off in the middle of conversations, as he reportedly did once while talking with President Obama. When speaking in public, he depends on fast-typing aides whose prompts appear on a discreetly concealed monitor.

Whatever wisdom Trump absorbed from his elderly royal friend, the primary purpose of his trip to Riyadh, according to a former senior U.S. official briefed on the proceedings, was cash — both in arms sales and investments in crumbling American infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, and tunnels. The Trump Administration is “desperate for Saudi money, especially infrastructure investments in the Rust Belt,” the former official told me. An influx of Saudi dollars could generate jobs and thus redound to Trump’s political benefit. As a cynical douceur, the Saudis, derided by Trump during his campaign as “people that kill women and treat women horribly,” joined the United Arab Emirates in pledging $100 million for a women’s-empowerment initiative spearheaded by Ivanka Trump. A joyful president took part in the traditional sword dance and then helped launch a Saudi center for “combating extremism.”

This was not the first time the Saudis had dangled the prospect of massive investments to leverage U.S. support. “Mohammad bin Salman made the same pitch to the Obama people,” the former official told me. “ ‘We’re going to invest all this money here, you’re going to be our great economic partner, etc.’ Because the Trump Administration doesn’t know much about foreign affairs, they were really seduced by this.” [Continue reading…]

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After U.S. compromise, Security Council strengthens North Korea sanctions

The New York Times reports: The United Nations Security Council on Monday ratcheted up sanctions yet again against North Korea, but they fell significantly short of the far-reaching penalties that the Trump administration had demanded just days ago.

While the sanctions were described in Washington and other capitals as the most extensive yet, in the end they amounted to another incremental increase of pressure on the country, even after it detonated its sixth and most powerful nuclear device.

It was far from clear that the additional penalties would accomplish what the Trump administration said was its goal: To force North Korea to halt its nuclear and ballistic missile tests and reopen some kind of negotiation toward eventual nuclear disarmament.

The North has claimed that last week’s detonation, in an underground site, had proven it could build a hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than ordinary atomic weapons. It is still unclear how far along the road to a hydrogen bomb the country has gone.

Although the resolution won backing from all 15 council members, the weakened penalties reflected the power of Russia and China. Both had objected to the original language calling for an oil embargo and other severe penalties — with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia declaring last week that such additional sanctions would be counterproductive and possibly destabilizing. [Continue reading…]

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What happens if Brexit negotiations don’t work?

The Atlantic reports: It’s been nearly three months, and three rounds, since Brexit negotiations began, and the parties aren’t far from where they started. The European Union’s Chief Brexit Negotiator Michel Barnier closed the last round of negotiations on August 31 by announcing that neither side had made “any decisive progress” on any of the key issues surrounding the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the bloc. His British counterpart, David Davis, was only slightly more optimistic: “We’ve seen some concrete progress. … There remains some way to go.”

Expectations for the third round weren’t high from the start; Barnier opened the talks by admitting: “To be honest, I’m concerned.” The last round, like the one preceding it, aimed at reaching some sort of breakthrough on the three major divorce issues surrounding the U.K.’s exit from the bloc—issues, such as citizens’ rights, the U.K. financial settlement, and the fate of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, that the EU insists must be addressed before the parties can move on to discussing trade and their future relationship.

It’s a lofty goal, but one both sides anticipated they could reach by October. Now, the EU isn’t so sure. “The current state of progress means we are quite far from being able to say sufficient progress has taken place—not far enough for me to be able to say to the European council that we can start to discuss the future relationship,” Barnier said.

British negotiators have argued that issues like the Irish border are inextricably linked to both sides’ future relationship, and that making progress on one necessitates making progress on the other. The U.K. isn’t exactly wrong, said Steven Peers, a professor of law at the University of Essex. “The sequencing makes things actually technically very awkward,” he told me. “There are things we can’t discuss in advance of knowing what’s going to happen in the future. It’s just not feasible to do that.”

But no resolution doesn’t mean no Brexit, and with the U.K.’s March 2019 exit date from the EU quickly approaching, neither side has the luxury of endlessly debating the timeline—especially if they want to come to an agreement on the three major divorce issues and finalize a trade deal before the two-year negotiating period concludes. So what would happen if no resolution is reached? Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a senior fellow at the independent research institute U.K. in a Changing Europe, told me one possible scenario is a “cliff edge” or hard Brexit, in which both parties resolve the three major divorce issues, but fail to achieve a trade agreement. Failure to do either, he told me, would lead to chaos. [Continue reading…]

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Pope blasts climate change doubters: cites moral duty to act

The Associated Press reports: Pope Francis has sharply criticized climate change doubters, saying history will judge those who failed to take the necessary decisions to curb heat-trapping emissions blamed for the warming of the Earth.

Francis was asked about climate change and the spate of hurricanes that have pummeled the U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean recently as his charter plane left Colombia on Sunday and flew over some of the devastated areas.

“Those who deny this must go to the scientists and ask them. They speak very clearly,” he said, referring to experts who blame global warming on man-made activities.

Francis said scientists have also clearly charted what needed to be done to reverse course on global warming and said individuals and politicians had a “moral responsibility” to do their part.

“These aren’t opinions pulled out of thin air. They are very clear,” he said. “Then they (leaders) decide and history will judge those decisions.”

Francis has made caring for the environment a hallmark of his papacy, writing an entire encyclical about how the poor in particular are most harmed when multinationals move into exploit natural resources. During his visit to Colombia, Francis spoke out frequently about the need to preserve the country’s rich biodiversity from overdevelopment and exploitation.

For those who have denied climate change, or delayed actions to counter it, he responded with an Old Testament saying: “Man is stupid.”

“When you don’t want to see, you don’t see,” he said.

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