Category Archives: Donald Trump

Facebook gave special counsel Robert Mueller more details on Russian ad buys than Congress

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook has handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller detailed records about the Russian ad purchases on its platform that go beyond what it shared with Congress last week, according to people familiar with the matter.

The information Facebook shared with Mr. Mueller included copies of the ads and details about the accounts that bought them and the targeting criteria they used, the people familiar with the matter said. Facebook policy dictates that it would only turn over “the stored contents of any account,” including messages and location information, in response to a search warrant, some of them said.

A search warrant from Mr. Mueller would mean the special counsel now has a powerful tool in his arsenal to probe the details of how social media was used as part of a campaign of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. Facebook hasn’t shared the same information with Congress in part because of concerns about disrupting the Mueller probe, and possibly running afoul of U.S. privacy laws, people familiar with the matter said.

A Facebook spokesman said the company continues to investigate and is cooperating with U.S. authorities. A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment on the investigation.

Last week, Facebook disclosed that it identified about 500 “inauthentic” accounts with ties to Russia that bought $100,000 worth of ads during a two-year period encompassing the presidential campaign. The company also found $50,000 in ad purchases linked to Russian accounts. The combined funds purchased more than 5,000 ads on Facebook, the company said.

The disclosure was Facebook’s first acknowledgment that Russians used its platform to reach U.S. voters during the presidential campaign. It came about two months after Facebook said it had no evidence of Russian ad purchases. [Continue reading…]

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Did Jared Kushner’s data operations help select Facebook targets for the Russians?

Chris Smith writes: The headlines were about Facebook admitting it had sold ad space to Russian groups trying to sway the 2016 presidential campaign. But investigators shrugged: they’d known or assumed for months that Facebook, as well as Twitter and other social-media platforms, were a tool used in the Kremlin’s campaign. “The only thing that’s surprising is that more revelations like this haven’t come out sooner,” said Congressman Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “And I expect that more will.”

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee. [Continue reading…]

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GOP Congressman sought Trump deal on WikiLeaks, Russia

The Wall Street Journal reports: A U.S. congressman contacted the White House this week trying to broker a deal that would end WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s U.S. legal troubles in exchange for what he described as evidence that Russia wasn’t the source of hacked emails published by the antisecrecy website during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The proposal made by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.), in a phone call Wednesday with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, was apparently aimed at resolving the probe of WikiLeaks prompted by Mr. Assange’s publication of secret U.S. government documents in 2010 through a pardon or other act of clemency from President Donald Trump.

The possible “deal”—a term used by Mr. Rohrabacher during the Wednesday phone call—would involve a pardon of Mr. Assange or “something like that,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. In exchange, Mr. Assange would probably present a computer drive or other data-storage device that Mr. Rohrabacher said would exonerate Russia in the long-running controversy about who was the source of hacked and stolen material aimed at embarrassing the Democratic Party during the 2016 election. [Continue reading…]

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Judge: Sessions can’t deny grant money for sanctuary cities

The Associated Press reports: Attorney General Jeff Sessions can’t follow through — at least for now — with his threat to withhold public safety grant money to Chicago and other so-called sanctuary cities for refusing to impose new tough immigration policies, a judge ruled Friday in a legal defeat for the Trump administration.

In what is at least a temporary victory for cities that have defied Sessions, U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber ruled that the Justice Department could not impose the requirements.

He said the city had shown a “likelihood of success” in arguing that Sessions exceeded his authority with the new conditions. Among them are requirements that cities notify immigration agents when someone in the country illegally is about to be released from local jails and to allow agents access to the jails.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the ruling a victory for cities, counties and states nationwide and “a clear statement that the Trump administration is wrong.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump advisers secretly met with Jordan’s king while one was pushing a huge nuclear power deal

BuzzFeed reports: In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, when his soon-to-be national security adviser Michael Flynn was reportedly pushing a multibillion-dollar deal to build nuclear reactors in Jordan and other Middle East nations, Flynn and two other top Trump advisers held a secret meeting with the king of Jordan.

The meeting — details of which have never been reported — is the latest in a series of secret, high-stakes contacts between Trump advisers and foreign governments that have raised concerns about how, in particular, Flynn and senior adviser Jared Kushner handled their personal business interests as they entered key positions of power. And the nuclear project raised additional security concerns about expanding nuclear technology in a tinderbox region of the world. One expert compared it to providing “a nuclear weapons starter kit.”

On the morning of Jan. 5, Flynn, Kushner, and former chief strategist Steve Bannon greeted King Abdullah II at the Four Seasons hotel in lower Manhattan, then took off in a fleet of SUVs and a sedan to a different location.

People close to the three Trump advisers say that the nuclear deal was not discussed. But a federal official with access to a document created by a law enforcement agency about the meeting said that the nuclear proposal, known as the Marshall Plan, was one of the topics the group talked about. [Continue reading…]

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Russia laundering probe puts Trump Tower meeting in new light

Bloomberg reports: More than the White House was at stake when Donald Trump Jr. met at Trump Tower last summer with a top lawyer for Moscow’s regional government.

The attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had a client with another pressing matter — a U.S. criminal investigation into possible Russian money laundering.

Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. after an email promised him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, has been depicted as an activist working to repeal human-rights sanctions against Russia.

But when she stepped into Trump Tower, Veselnitskaya was also representing a client ensnared in a long-running U.S. investigation into an alleged web of Russian money-laundering. That criminal inquiry, opened by federal prosecutors in New York in 2013 and previously unreported, is still active, according to people familiar with the probe. There was no mention of an ongoing criminal inquiry when the U.S. settled a related civil lawsuit against Veselnitskaya’s client in May.

The outline of the criminal investigation, stretching from Switzerland to Cyprus, is laid out deep within the 734 filings in the civil case. Several countries have supplied documents to the U.S., as have Deutsche Bank AG, Citigroup Inc. and other global banks that aren’t targets. U.S. prosecutors in the case are seeking to track parts of more than $200 million they say left Russia after a massive fraud, and to identify who was involved in the scheme. [Continue reading…]

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The loneliest president

Michael Kruse writes: “ISOLATED?” read the subject line.

“Friend,” Donald Trump wrote recently to supporters in a fundraising email. “The fake news keeps saying, ‘President Trump is isolated.’ … They say I’m isolated by lobbyists, corporations, grandstanding politicians, and Hollywood. GOOD! I don’t want them,” he fumed, employing italics for emphasis.

Sent on August 28, two days after Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, Trump’s defiant appeal acknowledged the mounting perception that nearly eight months into his first term—and in the aftermath of his racially divisive response to the violence in Charlottesville—he’s never been politically more lonely. He’s at odds with Congress—including leaders and members of his own party—and his deal-making with Democrats is angering some of his most ardent conservative supporters. He’s been abandoned and censured by art leaders, business leaders and world leaders. His Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is bleeding bookings. And he’s losing favored aides due to the actions of his own chief of staff, General John Kelly, who restricts access to the president with the diligence of a border guard. Last week, the New York Times described Trump as a “solitary cowboy,” reminding readers he once called himself “the Lone Ranger.”

His critics might see his growing isolation as a product of his political inexperience—an aversion to the norms of the legislative process, a penchant for topsy-turvy management. But as unprecedented as this might be in the annals of the West Wing, it’s merely a continuation of a lifelong pattern of behavior for Trump. Take away the Pennsylvania Avenue address, the never-ending list of domestic and international crises, and the couldn’t-be-higher geopolitical stakes—and this looks very much like … Trump throughout his entire existence. Isolated is how he’s always operated. [Continue reading…]

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After London explosion, Trump criticizes Britain’s counterterrorism approach — for all the wrong reasons

The Washington Post reports: President Trump criticized Britain’s counterterrorism approach in several tweets on Friday morning, following a suspected terrorist attack in London that injured at least 22 people on a subway train.

Trump said authorities “must be proactive” and that attacks in Britain had been conducted by “sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard,” using a synonym for London’s Metropolitan Police. It is unclear whether Trump was tweeting about previous attackers, or about whoever was behind Friday’s incident. British Prime Minister Theresa May later commented on those remarks by Trump, saying that it was not “helpful for anybody to speculate on … an ongoing investigation.”

May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, was more blunt in his criticism, writing: “True or not — and I’m sure he doesn’t know — this is so unhelpful from leader of our ally and intelligence partner.” [Continue reading…]

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North Korea launches another missile, escalating crisis

The New York Times reports: North Korea fired another ballistic missile over Japan on Friday, a direct challenge to the United States and China just days after a new sanctions resolution adopted by the United Nations Security Council that was intended to force the country to halt its accelerating nuclear and missile tests.

The missile was not aimed at the Pacific island of Guam, which President Trump had warned could prompt a military response after North Korea threatened to fire missiles into the sea near the island last month.

Instead, it blasted off from near the Sunan International Airport north of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and flew about 2,300 miles directly east, flying over northern Japan and falling into the Pacific Ocean, according to the South Korean military. That is a slightly greater distance than between the North Korean capital and the American air base in Guam, and American officials, scrambling to assess both the symbolism and importance of the test, said it was clearly intended to make the point that the North could reach the base with ease. [Continue reading…]

David Wright writes: Guam lies 3,400 km from North Korea, and Pyongyang has talked about it as a target because of the presence of US forces at Anderson Air Force Base.

This missile very likely has low enough accuracy that it could be difficult for North Korea to use it to destroy this base, even if the missile was carrying a high-yield warhead. Two significant sources of inaccuracy of an early generation missile like the Hwasong-12 are guidance and control errors early in flight during boost phase, and reentry errors due to the warhead passing through the atmosphere late in flight. I estimate the inaccuracy of the Hwasong-12 flown to this range to be likely 5 to 10 km, although possibly larger.

Even assuming the missile carried a 150 kiloton warhead, which may be the yield of North Korea’s recent nuclear test, a missile of this inaccuracy would still have well under a 10% chance of destroying the air base. [Continue reading…]

Ankit Panda writes: Friday’s trajectory also had similarities to the last Hwasong-12 launch. One of the features of the August 29 trajectory that was immediately notable was how it crossed over Japanese territory roughly in the vicinity of the Tsugaru Strait, which separates the Japanese islands of Hokkaido and Honshu. The only major Japanese urban center to fall under the missile’s trajectory was Hakodate in Hokkaido. The trajectory almost appeared to have been designed to allow North Korea to test its missiles to a longer range while overflying as little of Japan’s territory as necessary. The launch was no doubt still provocative, but the provocation was more muted than it would have been had North Korea simply overflown Honshu, near the population-defense Kanto region, for example.

North Korea repeated this azimuthal approach with Friday’s launch. One important difference was that the missile this time flew to a range of 3,700 kilometers. That suggested this was North Korea’s first test attempt of the Hwasong-12 IRBM to full-range at a trajectory close to what’s known as the minimum energy trajectory—the most efficient trajectory that allows for a maximization of the missile’s range. Remember: North Korea basically told us it was going to do this. We’d been warned. With two tests along this trajectory, we should have a much better idea of what is likely to become a regular-use missile corridor for North Korean long-range testing.

The second test along this trajectory without any attempt at interception or any reaction from Japan and the United States beyond rhetoric will likely not serve to deter North Korea from future launches. Pyongyang will keep using this trajectory for long-range missile tests, fully aware that the two allies are likely incapable of or unwilling to attempt interception. The Hwasong-14 intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) will likely be the next to see flight-testing along this trajectory. [Continue reading…]

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Trump signals he will choose approach on Iran that preserves nuclear deal

The New York Times reports: President Trump kept the Iran nuclear deal alive on Thursday as a critical deadline lapsed, a sign that he is stepping back from his threat to abandon an agreement he repeatedly disparaged. He is moving instead to push back on Iran’s ambitions in the Middle East in other ways.

Thursday’s congressionally imposed deadline, to renew an exemption to sanctions on Iran suspended under the 2015 deal, was significant because had the president reimposed economic punishments on Iran, he would have effectively violated the accord, allowing Tehran to walk away and ending the agreement. But Mr. Trump was convinced by top Cabinet members and aides that he would also blow up alliances and free Iran to produce nuclear weapons material.

The move was more consequential than the decision the president faces in October about whether to recertify to Congress that Iran is in compliance with the deal, which has no effect on the nuclear agreement itself.

Though Mr. Trump insisted that he has not settled on an overall Iran strategy and that he would announce one next month, administration officials said they were already trying to refocus on using military and economic leverage to counter Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East.

The approach, which aides said Mr. Trump came to reluctantly in a series of National Security Council meetings, is part of a pattern that has emerged in the president’s attempts to keep his campaign promises. Falling short in some cases, including on his hard line on immigration, Mr. Trump has portrayed the outcome as consistent with his stated objectives. [Continue reading…]

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South Korea creating a special military unit to assassinate Kim Jong Un

Amulya Shankar reports: A few days after North Korea tested its sixth nuclear missile — and a few days before Pyongyang fired an intermediate-range missile over Japan into the northern Pacific Ocean on Friday, its longest-ever such flight — South Korea announced its plans to create a special military “decapitation unit” with the goal of assassinating Kim Jong Un, which would be established by the end of the year.

It is a difficult balancing act, pitting South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s preference for a diplomatic solution against his nation’s need to answer an existential question: How can a country without nuclear weapons deter a dictator who has them?

Killing a foreign leader is obviously a covert operation — so why would South Korea reveal its plans so publicly?

“The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong Un fear for his life,” said Shin Won-sik, a three-star general who was the South Korean military’s top operational strategist before he retired in 2015.

It’s a form of deterrence that doesn’t involve nuclear weapons, says Isaac Stone Fish, a journalist and Asia Society fellow.

“It’s a way for South Korea to say to North Korea, ‘Hey, we really mean business here.’”

“We can now build ballistic missiles that can slam through deep underground bunkers where Kim Jong Un would be hiding,” Shin said. “The idea is how we can instill the kind of fear a nuclear weapon would — but do so without a nuke. In the medieval system like North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s life is as valuable as hundreds of thousands of ordinary people whose lives would be threatened in a nuclear attack.”

Moon was elected in May on a platform of diplomacy and engaging with the North. This shift in policy could be a sign that South Korea believes that President Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive “fire-and-fury” rhetoric isn’t deterring North Korea from its weapons testing. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S. has to accept North Korea as a nuclear power

Alon Ben-Meir writes: To prevent further escalation of the conflict, the United States needs to eventually accept the new reality of a nuclear North Korea just as it had come to terms with both India and Pakistan as nuclear powers, which created mutual deterrence and brought an end to the conventional wars between the two countries.

Indeed, the real threat to the United States and its allies does not emanate from North Korea’s possession of a nuclear arsenal, but from the development and deployment of ICBMs mounted with miniaturized nuclear warheads that could reach not only U.S. allies, but the U.S. mainland itself.

To remove this threat, the United States should negotiate directly with North Korea and reach an agreement that would freeze further development of such technology, which China would certainly support.

North Korea may well accede through negotiations to this demand, as they can still claim to be a nuclear power and receive the recognition and respect of the international community which they desperately crave.

In return, North Korea will require the United States to end its belligerent policy that has been in place since the end of the Korean war; that the United States commits not to seek regime change, which was and still is the main motivator behind their pursuit of a nuclear shield; and that the United States end its war games with South Korea and gradually remove the sanctions. [Continue reading…]

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After Charlottesville, black Republican gives Trump a history lesson on racism

The New York Times reports: Tim Scott, the lone black Republican in the Senate, delivered a pointed history lesson on America’s 300-year legacy of racism to President Trump on Wednesday in response to what he called Mr. Trump’s “sterile” response to the riots in Charlottesville, Va., last month.

The president invited Mr. Scott, a conservative from South Carolina who had expressed disgust with Mr. Trump’s equivocal reaction to the white supremacist protests that left one woman dead, to the Oval Office for what Mr. Trump’s staff described as a demonstration of the president’s commitment to “positive race relations.” Both men described the interaction as positive and constructive, but Mr. Scott clearly had a point to make.

When a reporter asked the senator after the meeting if the president had expressed regret, a pained look flashed on Mr. Scott’s face. He paused for a few seconds and replied, “He certainly tried to explain what he was trying to convey.”

White House officials emailed reporters a photograph of Mr. Trump listening intently as Mr. Scott made a point, with both sitting in chairs often used for bilateral meetings with foreign leaders. The White House misidentified him as Tom Scott.

In his remarks to reporters, Mr. Scott made it clear he did not go to the White House for a photo op, but to decisively rebut Mr. Trump’s claim — to the president’s face — that “both sides,” racists and anti-racist protesters, were responsible for the violence that followed a torchlight protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

“My response was that, while that’s true, I mean I think if you look at it from a sterile perspective, there was an antagonist on the other side,” Mr. Scott said.

“However, the real picture has nothing to do with who is on the other side,” he said.

“It has to do with the affirmation of hate groups who over three centuries of this country’s history have made it their mission to create upheaval in minority communities as their reason for existence,” he continued. “I shared my thoughts of the last three centuries of challenges from white supremacists, white nationalists, KKK, Nazis. So there’s no way to find an equilibrium when you have three centuries of history versus the situation that is occurring today.”

Mr. Trump responded by repeatedly saying, “That makes sense,” and concluded the meeting by telling the senator, “Let’s keep talking.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump doubled down on blaming both sides for violence in Charlottesville — again

BuzzFeed reports: President Donald Trump again blamed the violence in Charlottesville on both sides on Thursday, when discussing a conversation with Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, the day prior.

On Thursday, on board Air Force One while returning from touring Hurricane Irma damage in Florida, Trump reinforced his previous controversial comments defending white supremacists by pointing to a sometimes violent group that opposes them, Antifa.

Trump told reporters he and Scott “had a great talk yesterday. I think especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what’s going on there. You have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also and essentially that’s what I said. Now because of what’s happened since then with Antifa. When you look at really what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people are saying and people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump may have a point.’”

Trump added, “I said there’s some very bad people on the other side also. But we had a great conversation. And he has legislation, which I actually like very much, the concept of which I support, to get people into certain areas and building and constructing and putting people to work. I told him yesterday that’s a concept I can support very easily.”

When told of Trump’s comments, Scott, of South Carolina, told BuzzFeed News that it’s unrealistic to think President Trump would have an immediate “epiphany” regarding race after their meeting. [Continue reading…]

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Trump humiliated Jeff Sessions after Mueller appointment

The New York Times reports: Shortly after learning in May that a special counsel had been appointed to investigate links between his campaign associates and Russia, President Trump berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an Oval Office meeting and said he should resign, according to current and former administration officials and others briefed on the matter.

The president blamed the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, on Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation — a move Mr. Trump believes was the moment his administration effectively lost control over the inquiry. Accusing Mr. Sessions of “disloyalty,” Mr. Trump unleashed a string of insults on his attorney general.

Ashen and emotional, Mr. Sessions told the president he would quit and sent a resignation letter to the White House, according to four people who were told details of the meeting. Mr. Sessions would later tell associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.

The Oval Office meeting, details of which have not previously been reported, shows the intensity of Mr. Trump’s emotions as the Russia investigation gained steam and how he appeared to immediately see Mr. Mueller’s appointment as a looming problem for his administration. It also illustrates the depth of antipathy Mr. Trump has had for Mr. Sessions — one of his earliest campaign supporters — and how the president interprets “disloyalty” within his circle of advisers. [Continue reading…]

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Why didn’t Trump build anything in Russia?

Julia Ioffe writes: Thirty years ago, in July 1987, Donald and Ivana Trump flew to the Soviet Union, apparently at the invitation of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, in order to scout locations for a Trump hotel in Moscow. “It was an extraordinary experience,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “We toured half a dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” He came away “impressed with the ambition of the Soviet officials to make a deal.”

And yet a deal was never struck, neither then nor in 1996, when the Moscow real-estate market really cranked up and Trump tried to bid on a renovation of Hotel Rossiya near the Kremlin. Nor did anything come to fruition in 2008 when Trump announced plans to build in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi; nor in 2013, when he visited Moscow and said he was going to build a Trump Tower there with the help of Russian mega-developer Aras Agalarov. In June 2015, shortly before declaring his presidential candidacy, Trump bragged to Bill O’Reilly that, “I was over in Moscow two years ago and I will tell you—you can get along with those people and get along with them well. You can make deals with those people. Obama can’t.” At the time, it has since been reported, Trump’s surrogates Felix Sater and Michael Cohen were actively pursuing another real-estate development on Trump’s behalf in Moscow, but, by winter of 2016, that project was moot, too.

The American president has often bragged about his ability to cut deals and about how well he gets along with the Russians. The press and investigators have speculated about the extent of his connections to the Russian business and political elite. And yet, Trump never actually built anything in Moscow. When the president said, shortly after his inauguration, “I don’t have any deals in Russia,” he wasn’t wrong.

The question is why. When just about every other major hotel chain in the world was able to build in Moscow and beyond, why didn’t Trump close a deal in Russia?

The absence of Trump real estate in Russia, it turns out, is a revealing reflection of the disconnect between the image Trump projects and the reputation he and his surrogates have established in Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Who helped the Russians?

David Remnick writes: I asked Clinton if she thought Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians. “I don’t want to overstate what we already know publicly, but I think the compilation of coincidence adds up to something more than public support,” she said, referring to Trump’s refusal to criticize Putin (“Why should I tell Putin what to do?”) and his encouragement of Julian Assange (“I love WikiLeaks!”).

She went on, “The latest disclosure by Facebook about the targeting of attack ads, negative stories, dovetails with my concern that there had to be some information provided to the Russians by someone as to how best to weaponize the information that they stole, first from the Democratic Committee, then from John Podesta. And the refusal of the Trump Administration officials, both current and former, to admit to their involvements with Russians raises a lot of unanswered questions.” Putin’s motives, she said, went well beyond destabilizing a particular campaign. “Putin wants to undermine democracy, to undermine the Atlantic alliance, to undermine the E.U., to undermine nato, and to resurrect Russian influence as much as possible beyond the borders,” she said. “So the stakes are huge here.”

If, as Clinton told me, the Russians had deployed a “new form of warfare” to upend American democratic processes, what should President Obama have done in the closing act of the campaign? At a summit in China, Obama told Putin to back off from any election tampering, and he talked about the issue at a press conference. But he did not raise the stakes. Figuring that Clinton would win, Obama was wary of being seen as tipping the election to her and confirming Trump’s constant assertions that the vote was rigged against him. When the C.I.A. first told Obama, in August, that the Russians had been meddling in the Presidential race, the agency shared the information with the Gang of Eight—the congressional leadership and the chairs and the ranking members of the intelligence committees. The Administration asked for a bipartisan statement of warning. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, adamantly refused, muffling for weeks any sense of national alarm.

“I feel we sort of choked,” one senior Obama Administration official told the Washington Post. Another former Administration official said that national-security people were feeling, “Wow, did we mishandle this.” Clinton, in her book, gingerly “wonders” what the effect might have been had Obama gone on national television in the fall of 2016 “warning that our democracy was under attack.” I asked her whether Obama had failed—whether the issue should have been treated less as a narrowcasted political problem and more as a grave national-security threat.

“Well, I think that I’m very understanding of the position he found himself in,” she said. “Because I’ve been in that Situation Room, I know how hard these calls can be. And I believe that they struggled with this, and they were facing some pretty difficult headwinds.” She was less restrained in her description of the Senate Majority Leader’s behavior. “Mitch McConnell, in what I think of as a not only unpatriotic but despicable act of partisan politics, made it clear that if the Obama Administration spoke publicly about what they knew, he would accuse them of partisan politics, of trying to tip the balance toward me,” she said. “McConnell basically threatened the White House, and I know that was on the President’s mind. It was a predicament for him.” She also lambasted James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, who “refused to publicly acknowledge that there was an investigation, and, with the height of irony, said, ‘Well, you can’t do that so close to the election.’ ” (Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the investigation had not progressed to the point where disclosure would have been appropriate.)

All the same, I asked, did President Obama blow it?

Clinton paused, and spoke very carefully: “I would have, in retrospect now, wished that he had said something, because I think the American people deserved to know.”

In “What Happened,” Clinton, by way of demanding national resolve against a Russian threat, quotes a maxim attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “You take a bayonet and you push. If you hit mush, you keep going; if you hit steel, you stop.”

“Were we mush?” I asked about the Obama Administration’s response.

Now she did not hesitate. “I think we were mushy,” she said. “Partly because we couldn’t believe it. Richard Clarke, who is one of our nation’s experts on terrorism, has written a book about Cassandras,” unheeded predictors of calamity. “And there was a collective Cassandra out there—my campaign was part of that—saying, ‘The Russians are in our electoral system, the Russians are weaponizing information, look at it!’ And everybody in the press basically thought we were overstating, exaggerating, making it up. And Comey wouldn’t confirm an investigation, so there was nothing to hold on to. And I think that the point Clarke makes is when you have an initial occurrence that has never happened before, some people might see it and try to warn about it, but most people would find it unlikely, impossible. And what I fear is we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of what the Russians did.” [Continue reading…]

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Judge considers defying Trump over Arpaio pardon

John Banzhaf writes: Although President Donald Trump has issued a full pardon to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, and his lawyers have filed a motion seeking to have his conviction thrown out as a result, District Court Judge Susan Bolton has so far refused to grant the motion, and is in fact considering requests before her that she deny it.

In papers lodged with her last week, it was argued that “The president can’t use the pardon power to immunize lawless officials from consequences for violating people’s constitutional rights.” This contrasts with his lawyers’ arguments that “The president’s pardon moots the case, and it warrants an automatic vacatur of all opinions, judgments, and verdicts related to the criminal charge.”

The Justice Department supports his position, telling the judge on Monday that “the government agrees that the Court should vacate all orders and dismiss the case as moot.”

But although many commentators have argued that the President’s pardoning power is “unlimited,” and some have even worried that he might issue blanket pardons to all those being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to frustrate the investigation, she is reviewing contrary legal arguments.

These counter arguments contend that the president’s constitutional power to issue pardons “is limited by later-enacted amendments, starting with the Bill of Rights. For example, were a president to announce that he planned to pardon all white defendants convicted of a certain crime but not all black defendants, that would conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.”

Similarly, they argue, Trump cannot use pardons to undercut a court’s power to protect people from being denied their Due Process rights by immunizing otherwise unlawful acts like Arpaio’s. It contends that “the president cannot be allowed to weaponize the pardon power to circumvent the judiciary’s ability to enforce and protect constitutional rights.” [Continue reading…]

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