Category Archives: Entities

Following latest terrorist attack in UK, Trump remains silent

The Guardian reports: A man has died and eight others have been injured after a van ploughed into a group of people near a north London mosque in an attack police are treating as terrorism.

A 48-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Two people hit by the van were said to be “very seriously injured”.

The prime minister, Theresa May, who was woken to be told of the early morning attack in Finsbury Park, said in a statement from Downing Street that the “hatred and evil” of the kind seen in the attack would never succeed.

May said the attack had “once again targeted the ordinary and the innocent going about their daily lives – this time, British Muslims as they left a mosque, having broken their fast and prayed together at this sacred time of year”.

She added: “Today we come together, as we have done before, to condemn this act and to state once again that hatred and evil of this kind will never succeed.”

May said the attack on Muslims was “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the recent string of attacks apparently motivated by Islamist extremism, adding: “We will stop at nothing to defeat it.”

It is the fourth terrorist attack to hit the UK in the past three months. [Continue reading…]

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Tillerson’s latest blow in his on-going assault on the State Dept targets minorities and women

The Washington Post reports: Dozens of young minority and female State Department recruits received startling and unwelcome news last week: They would not be able to soon join the Foreign Service despite having been promised that opportunity. Their saga is just the latest sign that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s rush to slash the size of the State Department without a plan is harming diplomacy and having negative unintended effects.

The recruits, who are part of the State Department’s Rangel and Pickering fellowship programs, have already completed two years of graduate-level education at U.S. taxpayers’ expense plus an internship, often in a foreign country. The deal they struck with the federal government was that after completing their educations they would be given an inside track to become full-fledged U.S. diplomats abroad if they also satisfied medical and security requirements. In turn, they promised to commit at least five years to the Foreign Service.

These minority and female candidates already went through a competitive application process, meaning they are some of the best and brightest young graduates around. It also means they have other options. Young stars don’t join the State Department for the money or the glory; they want to serve and represent their country and are willing to make sacrifices to do it.

Many were shocked when they received a letter telling them they had one week to decide if they wanted to take a much less appealing job — stamping passports in a foreign embassy for two years — with the prospect but no guarantee of becoming a Foreign Service officer even after that.

“This is no way to treat our next generation,” one Foreign Service officer serving overseas told me. [Continue reading…]

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Memo shows Watergate prosecutors had evidence Nixon White House plotted violent attack on peaceful protesters

NBC News reports: Watergate prosecutors had evidence that operatives for then-President Richard Nixon planned an assault on anti-war demonstrators in 1972, including potentially physically attacking Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, according to a never-before-published memo obtained by NBC News.

The document, an 18-page 1973 investigative memorandum from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, sheds new light on how prosecutors were investigating attempts at domestic political violence by Nixon aides, an extremely serious charge.

NBC News is publishing the memo, and an accompanying memo about an interview prosecutors conducted with GOP operative Roger Stone, as part of special coverage for the 45th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.

A plot to physically attack Ellsberg is notable because the former Pentagon official has long alleged that Nixon operatives did more than steal his medical files, the most well-known effort to discredit him. [Continue reading…]

 

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The return of famine as a weapon of war

Alex de Waal writes: In its primary use, the verb ‘to starve’ is transitive: it’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase ‘man-made famine’ as if such events were unusual.

Over the last half-century, famines have become rarer and less lethal. Last year I came close to thinking that they might have come to an end. But this year, it’s possible that four or five famines will occur simultaneously. ‘We stand at a critical point in history,’ the head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the former Tory MP Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council in March, in one of his last statements before stepping down: ‘Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.’ It’s a ‘critical’ point, I’d argue, not because it is the worst crisis in our lifetime, but because a long decline – lasting seven decades – in mass death from starvation has come to an end; in fact it has been reversed.

O’Brien had no illusions about the causes of the four famines, actual or imminent, that he singled out in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. In each case, the main culprits are wars that result in the destruction of farms, livestock herds and markets, and ‘explicit’ decisions by the military to block humanitarian aid. In Nigeria, villages in the path of the war between Boko Haram and the army have been stripped of assets, income and food. As the army slowly reduces the areas under Boko Haram control, they are finding small towns where thousands starved to death last year. The counter-insurgency grinds on, and the specialists who compile the data fed into the blandly named ‘integrated food security phase classification’ (IPC) system, worry that in this year’s ‘hungry season’, approximately June to October, communities in the war zones will again move up the IPC scale: from level four (‘humanitarian emergency’) to five (‘famine’). Last year in Nigeria, the UN and relief agencies could say that they didn’t appreciate the full extent of the crisis. This year we have been given due warning.

In South Sudan, the government and the rebel armies have fought much less against each other than against the civilian population. In the summer of 2016, evidence from aid agencies showed nutrition and death rates in the region that met the UN criteria for determining that a food crisis has reached famine levels. Fearing that declaring famine would antagonise the South Sudanese government, already paranoid and cracking down on international aid agencies (aid workers were being robbed, raped and murdered), the UN prevaricated. By February, even veterans of South Sudan’s horrendous famines of the 1980s were saying that this was as bad as anything in their experience, perhaps worse. The UN duly declared a famine.

Yemen, however, is the biggest impending disaster. Don’t be fooled by pictures showing hungry people in arid landscapes: the weather had nothing to do with the famine. More than seven million people in Yemen are hungry; far more are likely to die of starvation and disease than in battles and air raids. The military intervention led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has strangled the country’s economy. [Continue reading…]

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How Michael Flynn’s disdain for limits led to a legal quagmire

The New York Times reports: Michael T. Flynn was a man seething and thwarted. In the summer of 2014, after repeatedly clashing with other Obama administration officials over his management of the Defense Intelligence Agency — and what he saw as his unheeded warnings about the rising power of Islamic militants — Mr. Flynn was fired, bringing his military career to an abrupt end.

Mr. Flynn decided that the military’s loss would be his gain: He would parlay his contacts, his disdain for conventional bureaucracy, and his intelligence career battling Al Qaeda into a lucrative business advising cybersecurity firms and other government contractors. Over the next two years he would sign on as a consultant to nearly two dozen companies, while carving out a niche as a sought-after author and speaker — and ultimately becoming a top adviser to President Trump.

“I’ve always had that entrepreneurial spirit,” Mr. Flynn said in an interview in October 2015. In the military, he added, “I learned that following the way you’re supposed to do things isn’t always the way to accomplish a task.”

But instead of lofting him into the upper ranks of Beltway bandits, where some other top soldiers have landed, his foray into consulting has become a legal and political quagmire, driven by the same disdain for boundaries that once propelled his rise in the military. His business ties are now the subject of a broad inquiry by a special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump associates. That investigation now includes work Mr. Flynn did for Russian clients and for a Turkish businessman with ties to that country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. [Continue reading…]

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Why Republicans won’t work for the Trump administration

The Washington Post reports: The array of legal and political threats hanging over the Trump presidency has compounded the White House’s struggles to fill out the top ranks of the government.

Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey last month and the escalating probe into Russian interference in the presidential election have made hiring even more difficult, say former federal officials, party activists, lobbyists and candidates who Trump officials have tried to recruit.

Republicans say they are turning down job offers to work for a chief executive whose volatile temperament makes them nervous. They are asking head-hunters if their reputations could suffer permanent damage, according to 27 people The Washington Post interviewed to assess what is becoming a debilitating factor in recruiting political appointees. [Continue reading…]

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Russia renewed unused Trump trademarks in 2016

The New York Times reports: Amid a broadening investigation of Russian contacts with his associates and his own role in trying to stop it, President Trump fired off another angry tweet this past week repeating his assertion that he has no business interests in Russia.

But while no Trump Tower graces the Moscow skyline, the Russian authorities recently made sure that another piece of valuable property — the intellectual kind — bearing the same name remained safely in Mr. Trump’s portfolio.

Last year, while hacking Democrats’ emails and working to undermine the American presidential election, the Russian government also granted extensions to six trademarks for Mr. Trump that had been set to expire. The Trump trademarks, originally obtained between 1996 and 2007 for hotels and branding deals that never materialized, each had terms that were coming to an end in 2016.

Despite their inactivity, the Trump Organization sought extensions for the trademarks from Rospatent, the Russian government agency in charge of intellectual property. In a series of approvals starting in April 2016 and ending in December, Rospatent granted new 10-year terms for the trademarks, the agency’s records show.

Four of the approvals were officially registered on Nov. 8 — Election Day in the United States. [Continue reading…]

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A U.S. aircraft has shot down a Syrian government jet over northern Syria, Pentagon says

The Washington Post reports: A U.S. strike aircraft shot down a Syrian government fighter jet shortly after it bombed U.S.-backed Syrian fighters in North Syria, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday.

The Pentagon said the shoot-down came hours after Syrian government-backed forces attacked U.S.-backed fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the village of Ja’Din. As the attack unfolded, the U.S. military used a deconfliction channel to communicate with the Syrian government to stop the skirmish, according to the Pentagon statement.

U.S.-led jets stopped the fighting by flying close to the ground and at low-speed in what is called a “show of force,” the Pentagon said.

Roughly two hours later, despite the called-for stand down and the U.S. presence overhead, a Syrian Su-22 jet attacked the Syrian Democratic Forces, dropping an unknown number of munitions on the U.S.-backed force. A U.S. F/A-18 promptly shot the Syrian aircraft down “in accordance with rules of engagement and in collective self-defense of coalition partnered forces,” the Pentagon statement said. [Continue reading…]

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France polls: Macron’s party wins clear parliamentary majority

BBC News reports: French President Emmanuel Macron’s party has won a clear parliamentary majority, results show, weeks after his own presidential victory.
With nearly all votes counted, his La République en Marche, alongside its MoDem allies, won more than 300 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.

The winning margin is lower than some expected, with turnout down from 2012.

The party was formed just over a year ago, and half of its candidates have little or no political experience.

The result has swept aside all of the mainstream parties and gives the 39-year-old president a strong mandate in parliament to pursue his pro-EU, business-friendly reform plans. [Continue reading…]

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We shall overcome

Rebecca Solnit writes: The resistance is an oft-used shorthand for all the forms of opposition, though many of them are institutions – the judiciary, the states, cities – that would probably not embrace the term. But they are opposing, overturning, and interfering. In several cases this spring, state courts and the Supreme Court have ruled against gerrymandering and other forms of discrimination against voters of color and voting rights.

The Ninth Circuit court ruled against the travel ban this week, one of several interventions against it in the courts. And 17 state attorney generals filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court against the ban. Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit this week accusing Trump of violating the emoluments clauses by accepting foreign income through his businesses, the subject of myriad lawsuits and complaints filed by Crew (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington).

On June 12, a judge granted a temporary reprieve to Dreamer Jessica Colotl, whose deportation protection had been revoked. More than 2,000 mayors, governors, college presidents, and other leaders have signed a pledge “to declare that we will continue to support climate action to meet the Paris Agreement.”

Democrats in the legislative branch of government has been mocking Trump, from the proposed Covefefe Act (it’s an acronym for Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically For Engagement, but also a joke about a peculiar tweet of Trump’s including that word, or nonword) that would ban him from deleting tweets on the grounds that they’re presidential records to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s videotaped parody of Trump’s cabinet meeting in which all members dutifully praised him. (Writers J.K. Rowling called Trump out for his pettily vindictive response to killings in London. Even Smirmoff Vodka got a dig in with an ad that said “we’d be happy to talk about our ties to Russia under oath.”)

Senator Kamala Harris has gone after Attorney General Jeff Sessions hard (despite male senators who keep trying to hush her up). Congresswoman Maxine Waters is demanding impeachment. And Congress is holding hearings about the Trump administration’s relationship with the Russian government and its coverups.

Last week fired FBI director James Comey ripped the president to shreds as a liar, a creep, and an incompetent manipulator of truth and staff, and since then things have gotten worse for the administration. The Russia scandal could contaminate Pence, as well as Trump, Jared Kushner, and Sessions.

In the media, Rachel Maddow of liberal MSNBC has beat Fox to the number one spot in cable-news prime time. Fox is in disarray, with its star Bill O’Reilly forced out after a series of sexual-harrassment charges. Brilliant organizing by the Twitter-based group Sleeping Giants has pushed advertisers to abandon Sean Hannity’s show after the Fox host pushed conspiracy theories about the death of Seth Rich, despite Rich’s parents pleas to desist.

Breitbart has lost nearly 90% of its advertisers in another Sleeping Giants victory. Teen Vogue has become a feminist beacon, and other women’s magazines have developed superb political coverage. Newspapers, notably the revamped Washington Post, are doing a superb job investigating and exposing the administration.

The bombshells revelations that dropped one after another in May will long be remembered, perhaps as when the Trump administration fell too far to pick itself up. This month already Forbes exposed the Trump family for figuring out how to skim a profit off donations for children with cancer. USA today revealed that in the past year, “about 70% of buyers of Trump properties were limited liability companies – corporate entities that allow people to purchase property without revealing all of the owners’ names. That compares with about 4% of buyers in the two years before.”

Administrations around the world are figuring out how to work around the administration. The European Union and China are working on moving forward on addressing climate change, while cities and states throughout the USA have made their own commitment to honor the terms of the Paris climate agreement, despite Trump (whose pullout is symbolic, since it goes into effect after the next presidential election; many don’t expect him to serve out one term, let alone win another).

The environmental ministers of the Group of Seven nations are moving forward without EPA head and climate denier Scott Pruitt. The Guardian reported: “The greater “bang-for-buck” resulted from plummeting prices for solar and wind power and led to new power deals in countries including Denmark, Egypt, India, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates all being priced well below fossil fuel or nuclear options.” Trump celebrated coal as part of his backward-looing agenda, but India is cancelling plans to build coal-power plants while South Korea is shutting them down.

Britain rejected Theresa May’s rightwing politics in an election she called that shifted power to Labour; it followed on the heels of centrist Emmanuel Macron’s victory over far-right Marine LePen. Angela Merkel and Macron have made it clear they are happy to assume the mantle of leadership the US has dropped. Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, keeps trolling Trump online about the wall.

All of this is to say that there is tremendous opposition from many kinds of groups, institutions, and individuals, here and abroad. This doesn’t mean there isn’t suffering and loss. I’ve heard from great organizers who are heartbroken and exhausted; I know Muslims who are fearful; an undocumented woman whose father has been imprisoned by Ice. I am horrified by the defunding of programs to prevent Aids internationally, which could result in a million deaths. And the brutality is real.

I’ve also talked to everyday citizens become activists and longtime organizers who are doing extraordinary things, and who are exhilarated by the solidarity and the possibility – of what we have become together, and of what they themselves have become.

Taking action is the best cure for despair. I’ve listed a little of what officials in the judiciary and legislative branch are doing, the shifts in the media, the response overseas. But it’s the residents of the United States whose response will matter most in the end.

Civil society awoken and arisen is a power adequate to counter the power of an increasingly isolated, confused, frightened and bumbling administration. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s silence on Russian hacking says how much he cares about democracy

Politico reports: Democrats are uniting behind a simple message about Russian hacking during the 2016 election: Donald Trump doesn’t care.

Even as the president lashes out at the series of Russia-related probes besieging his administration, Democrats say Trump has yet to express public concern about the underlying issue with striking implications for America’s democracy — the digital interference campaign that upended last year’s presidential race.

The president missed a self-imposed 90-day deadline for developing a plan to “aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks,” stayed silent after Moscow-linked hackers went after the French election and publicly renewed his own skepticism about the Kremlin’s role in the digital theft of Democratic Party emails during the presidential race. Privately, the president questioned a senior NSA official about the truthfulness of the conclusion from 17 intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered with the election, according to The Wall Street Journal. On Capitol Hill, Trump and his team have declined to support a Republican-backed effort to hit Russia with greater penalties for its digital belligerence.

And while the White House received bipartisan praise for a cybersecurity executive order Trump signed in May, administration officials said the directive is aimed at broadly upgrading the government’s digital defenses, not thwarting future Russian election hacking.

Instead, Trump tapped a commission led by Vice President Mike Pence to investigate an issue that elections experts call vastly overblown — voter fraud, something the the president has baselessly alleged resulted in millions of illegal voters casting ballots for Hillary Clinton in November. [Continue reading…]

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In Trump-Russia investigation, Mueller follows the money

Business Insider reports: Robert Mueller in recent days has hired lawyers with extensive experience in dealing with fraud, racketeering, and other financial crimes to help him investigate whether President Donald Trump’s associates colluded with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

Mueller, who was appointed as special counsel last month to lead the probe into Russia’s election interference, is also homing in on money laundering and the business dealings of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, according to reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The developments indicate Mueller is taking a follow-the-money approach to the investigation that could leave Trump’s sprawling business empire hugely vulnerable.

Mueller has hired Lisa Page and Andrew Weissmann. Page is a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s organized-crime section whose cases centered on international organized crime and money laundering, and Weissmann is a seasoned prosecutor who oversaw cases against high-ranking organized criminals on Wall Street in the early 1990s and, later, against 30 people implicated in the Enron fraud scandal.

Mueller has also recruited James Quarles, who specialized in campaign-finance research for the Watergate task force, according to Wired; Michael Dreeben, considered by some to be “the best criminal appellate lawyer in America”; and Aaron Zebley, a former senior counselor in the DOJ’s National Security Division specializing in cybersecurity. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s business ties in Persian Gulf raise questions about his allegiances

The New York Times reports: President Trump has done business with royals from Saudi Arabia for at least 20 years, since he sold the Plaza Hotel to a partnership formed by a Saudi prince. Mr. Trump has earned millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates for putting his name on a golf course, with a second soon to open.

He has never entered the booming market in neighboring Qatar, however, despite years of trying.

Now a feud has broken out among these three crucial American allies, and Mr. Trump has thrown his weight firmly behind the two countries where he has business ties, raising new concerns about the appearance of a conflict between his public role and his financial incentives.

Mr. Trump has said he is backing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because Qatar is “a funder of terror at a very high level.” But his stance toward Qatar, which is host to the largest American air base in the region, has differed sharply from the positions of the Pentagon and State Department. The secretaries of defense and state have stayed neutral, urging unity against the common enemy of the Islamic State.

Mr. Trump is the first president in 40 years to retain his personal business interests after entering the White House. Other senior officials in the executive branch are required to divest their assets. Critics say his singular decision to hold on to his global business empire inevitably casts a doubt on his motives, especially when his public actions dovetail with his business interests. [Continue reading…]

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Under pressure from a Trump tweet, is Rod Rosenstein now obliged to recuse himself?

Noah Feldman writes: Is President Donald Trump trying to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein without actually firing him? That’s the logical inference from the president’s tweet Friday morning asserting that he’s being investigated for firing FBI Director James Comey by the person who told him to fire Comey, namely Rosenstein. The immediate effect of the tweet is to pressure Rosenstein to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Rosenstein will now have to do so — soon.


Whether Trump has thought it through or not, that will leave Rosenstein’s supervisory obligations in the hands of Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand. She’s a horse of a different color from career prosecutors such as Rosenstein, Comey and Mueller. Brand is more like Trump Supreme Court appointee Neil Gorsuch: a high-powered conservative appellate lawyer who clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court, worked in the George W. Bush administration, and is prominent in Federalist Society circles. Her attitude toward the investigation is likely to be a bit different from Rosenstein’s, more informed by the structure of presidential authority and less by unwritten norms of prosecutorial independence.

Even before Trump commenced his assault on Rosenstein for conflict of interest, it was becoming conceivable that the deputy attorney general would have to recuse himself from supervising Mueller. If Mueller is focused on the Comey firing as a potential obstruction of justice, he would want or maybe need to know the details of how Trump interacted with Rosenstein around that decision.

The facts of whether Trump had already decided to fire Comey before getting Rosenstein to write the memo justifying the firing are unclear and at least partially contested. That would make Rosenstein into an important witness for the Mueller investigation — which would in turn make it difficult for him to be the figure to whom Mueller is supposed to report. Rosenstein acknowledged something like this in a recent meeting, according to reporting by ABC News.

Nonetheless, without Trump’s Twitter barrage, Rosenstein could potentially have refused to recuse himself by saying that Mueller, not he, is doing the investigating. The Department of Justice regulations do after all say that “the Special Counsel shall not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the Department.”

Rosenstein could have asserted that although the regulations allow the attorney general (here Rosenstein because of Jeff Sessions’s recusal) to ask for explanations of the special counsel’s investigative process, and require periodic reports from the special counsel to the attorney general, he wasn’t going to be supervising Mueller’s investigation.

After Trump’s tweet, that course of action isn’t really available to Rosenstein. Trump not only made a concrete argument that Rosenstein has a conflict of interest, but also deepened that conflict by asserting that firing Comey was Rosenstein’s idea. If firing Comey was indeed obstruction of justice, then, according to Trump’s implicit logic, Rosenstein could be guilty of a crime of obstruction.

So Rosenstein will have to recuse himself. And that leaves Brand as the next highest Senate-confirmed official in the Department of Justice. [Continue reading…]

Before Trump’s tweet, I can see why Rosenstein might have felt he needed to recuse himself, but it seems like Trump has now provided a strong justification for Rosenstein to stay put.

By recusing himself, he would appear to be acceding to Trump’s pressure.

Trump has zero interest in the completion of an investigation whose outcome is determined by the facts. On the contrary, he wants an investigation that gets wrapped up as swiftly as possible and exonerates him fully. In other words, Trump is sparing no effort to rig the investigation.

Trump’s pressure on Rosenstein is nothing less than the latest example of Trump’s relentless effort to obstruct justice. So rather than bowing to such pressure, Rosenstein should resist it.

Rosenstein effectively recused himself by appointing Mueller. So why should he need to recuse himself twice?

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White House officials want to expand war in Syria by pushing U.S. troops to confront Iranian-backed forces

Foreign Policy reports: A pair of top White House officials is pushing to broaden the war in Syria, viewing it as an opportunity to confront Iran and its proxy forces on the ground there, according to two sources familiar with the debate inside the Donald Trump administration.

Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council, and Derek Harvey, the NSC’s top Middle East advisor, want the United States to start going on the offensive in southern Syria, where, in recent weeks, the U.S. military has taken a handful of defensive actions against Iranian-backed forces fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Their plans are making even traditional Iran hawks nervous, including Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has personally shot down their proposals more than once, the two sources said.

The situation in southern Syria has escalated in recent weeks, after a U.S. warplane shot down an Iranian-made drone that had attacked U.S. forces on patrol with Syrian allies near an American outpost at al-Tanf. The drone attack came after two U.S. airstrikes on Iranian-backed Shiite militias, which had moved too close to the Americans’ garrison.

Despite the more aggressive stance pushed by some White House officials, Mattis, military commanders, and top U.S. diplomats all oppose opening up a broader front against Iran and its proxies in southeastern Syria, viewing it as a risky move that could draw the United States into a dangerous confrontation with Iran, defense officials said. Such a clash could trigger retaliation against U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Syria, where Tehran has armed thousands of Shiite militia fighters and deployed hundreds of Revolutionary Guard officers.

Mattis, Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Brett McGurk, the U.S. diplomat overseeing the anti-Islamic State coalition, all favor keeping the focus on pushing the Islamic State out of its remaining strongholds, including the southern Syrian city of Raqqa, officials said. “That’s the strategy they’ve signed off on and that’s where the effort is,” said one defense official.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The Pentagon has publicly asserted it has no intention to fight forces supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, unless provoked.

“The Coalition does not seek to fight Syrian regime or pro-regime forces but remains ready to defend themselves if pro-regime forces refuse to vacate the de-confliction zone,” U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said in a June 6 statement.

It’s not the first time Mattis and Dunford have found themselves having to push back against White House proposals for aggressive action they consider ill-conceived and even reckless. Earlier, the two opposed a tentative idea that would have sent a large U.S. ground force into Syria to oust the Islamic State instead of relying on local Syrian Kurd and Arab fighters backed by U.S. commandos. [Continue reading…]

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Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein acknowledges he may need to recuse himself from Russia probe, sources say

ABC News reports: The senior Justice Department official with ultimate authority over the special counsel’s probe of Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election has privately acknowledged to colleagues that he may have to recuse himself from the matter, which he took charge of only after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ own recusal, sources tell ABC News.

Those private remarks from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein are significant because they reflect the widening nature of the federal probe, which now includes a preliminary inquiry into whether President Donald Trump attempted to obstruct justice when he allegedly tried to curtail the probe and then fired James Comey as FBI director.

Rosenstein, who authored an extensive and publicly-released memorandum recommending Comey’s firing, raised the possibility of his recusal during a recent meeting with Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand, the Justice Department’s new third-in-command, according to sources.

Although Rosenstein appointed a special counsel to lead the federal probe, he still makes the final decisions about resources, personnel and — if necessary — any prosecutions.

In the recent meeting with Brand, Rosenstein told her that if he were to recuse himself, she would have to step in and take over those responsibilities. She was sworn-in little more than a month ago. [Continue reading…]

Eric Levitz writes: Brand boasts the quintessential résumé for a GOP Justice Department appointee. A graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was active in the arch-conservative Federalist Society, Brand clerked for Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy before joining a white-shoe law firm, lending a hand to Elizabeth Dole’s presidential campaign, and then taking a job in the George W. Bush administration.

During the Bush years, Brand first worked under White House counsel Alberto Gonzales (where she may have learned a thing or two about politicizing law enforcement), and then in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy.

Once Bush gave up steering America into epochal domestic and foreign policy crises for watercolor painting, Brand returned to the private sector. [Continue reading…]

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