Politico reports: A decision by the Chinese government to grant President Donald Trump a trademark for his brand could be a breach of the U.S. Constitution, a senior Democratic senator warned Friday.
“China’s decision to award President Trump with a new trademark allowing him to profit from the use of his name is a clear conflict of interest and deeply troubling,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in a statement. “If this isn’t a violation of the Emoluments Clause, I don’t know what is.”
The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits federal officials — including the president — from accepting payments from foreign governments. Trump’s critics have argued that Trump’s opaque and byzantine business network could run afoul of this principle. [Continue reading…]
The conflicting messages coming out of the new US administration reflected policy chaos in a week when the national security adviser was forced to resign over his contacts with Russia, and factions inside the White House continue to vie for dominance.
In Bonn, the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, emerged from his first meeting with the new US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to describe the Trump administration’s Middle East policy as “confused and worrying”.
Ayrault pointed to Trump’s remarks in a joint appearance with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he explicitly abandoned the two decades-long US commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a final peace deal.
“I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like,” Trump said. “I can live with either one.”
After his meeting with Tillerson at the sidelines of a G20 meeting, Ayrault said: “I wanted to remind him after the meeting between Donald Trump and Netanyahu that in France’s view, there are no other options other than the perspective of a two-state solution and that the other option which Tillerson brought up was not realistic, fair or balanced.”
He did not give details about the option that Tillerson raised and the secretary of state did not take press questions, but he appears to have echoed Trump’s remarks suggesting other outcomes would be acceptable to the US. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: An investigation commissioned by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) bolsters its claim that Russian and Syrian forces were responsible for the deadly bombing last year of a hospital it was supporting in northern Syria.
Video and photographic images captured by medical staff, activists and members of the public were pored over by a UK-based research agency hired by the organisation to look into the attack, which took place on 15 February last year and claimed the lives of 25 people.
While Russia denied claims that its forces were responsible for the bombing of the Maaret al-Numan hospital in Idlib province, the aid group said that the digital material confirmed the attack was carried out by the Russians, working in tandem with the Syrian regime. [Continue reading…]
Ivan Krastev writes: What strikes any observer of the new wave of revolutionary politics is that it is a revolution without an ideology or a project. Protesting itself seems to be the strategic goal of many of the protests. Failing to offer political alternatives, they are an explosion of moral indignation. In most of the protests, citizens on the street treat politics not so much as a set of issues but as a public performance or a way of being in the world. Many protesters are openly anti-institutional and mistrustful toward both the market and the state. They preach participation without representation. The protest movements bypass established political parties, distrust the mainstream media, refuse to recognize any specific leadership, and reject all formal organizations, relying instead on the Internet and local assemblies for collective debate and decision making.
In a way the new protest movements are inspired by mistrust in the elites, empowered by mistrust in leadership, constrained by mistrust of organizations, and defeated by the protesters’ inability to trust even each other: “This is an obvious but unspoken cultural difference between modern youth protest movements and those of the past. […] Anybody who sounds like a career politician, anybody who attempts to use rhetoric, or espouses an ideology, is greeted with visceral distaste.”
Mistrusting institutions as a rule, the protesters are plainly uninterested in taking power. The government is simply “them,” regardless of who is in charge. The protesters combine a genuine longing for community with a relentless individualism. They describe their own political activism almost in religious terms, stressing how the experience of acting out on the street has inspired a revolution of the soul and a regime change of the mind. Perhaps for the first time since 1848 — the last of the pre-Marxist revolutions — the revolt is not against the government but against being governed. It is the spirit of libertarianism that brings together Egypt’s anti-authoritarian uprising and Occupy Wall Street’s anti-capitalist insurrection.
For the protesters, it is no longer important who wins elections or who runs the government, not simply because they do not want to be the government, but also because any time people perceive that their interests are endangered, they plan on returning to the streets. The “silent man” in Taksim Square, Istanbul, who stood without moving or speaking for eight hours, is a symbol of the new age of protests: He stands there to make sure that things will not stay as they are. His message to those in power is that he will never go home.
While it is popular for Europeans to compare the current global protest wave with the revolutions of 1848, today’s protests are the negation of the political agenda of 1848. Those revolutions fought for universal suffrage and political representation. They marked the rise of the citizen-voter. The current protests are a revolt against representative democracy. They mark the disillusionment of the citizen-voter. The current protests function as an alternative to elections, testifying that the people are furious; the angry citizen heads to the streets not with the hope of putting a better government in power but merely to establish the borders that no government should cross. [Continue reading…]
Anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-globalization, anti-interventionism — the problem with centering any movement around opposition is that almost in obedience with the laws of physics, the end result will be inertia.
The logical conclusion of insistently saying no is that we end up going nowhere.
The successful movements of the last century have instead always been centered on positive goals — women’s rights; civil rights; marriage equality, and so forth.
Likewise, the most effective forms of resistance against the socially corrosive agenda of the Trump presidency are not simply anti-Trump; they are affirmations — for immigrants, for Muslims, and for women.
To build a better world, we have to unite around the things we support and not simply the things we oppose.
What Trump is counting on is that his opponents remain locked in an oppositional posture in which we will eventually tire and thereafter fall into torpor and silence.
The Washington Post reports: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn denied to FBI agents in an interview last month that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States before President Trump took office, contradicting the contents of intercepted communications collected by intelligence agencies, current and former U.S. officials said.
The Jan. 24 interview potentially puts Flynn in legal jeopardy. Lying to the FBI is a felony offense. But several officials said it is unclear whether prosecutors would attempt to bring a case, in part because Flynn may parse the definition of the word “sanctions.” He also followed his denial to the FBI by saying he couldn’t recall all of the conversation, officials said.
Any decision to prosecute would ultimately lie with the Justice Department. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: President Donald Trump dodged and then dismissed lingering questions about his relationship with Russia during his long-winded news conference on Thursday — first describing recent reports on the scrutiny as “fake news,” then saying he has no knowledge of campaign associates contacting the country before the election.
“No, nobody that I know of,” Trump said.
Trump did not, notably, say definitively that his campaign had no contact with Russian officials, but vaguely offered that he had no knowledge that it had. [Continue reading…]
Benjamin Haas writes: After his inauguration, President Donald Trump didn’t take long to boast of his purported political support from the military. In his speech to the CIA – given in front of the Memorial Wall that honors CIA employees who have died in the line of duty – he claimed that “the military gave us tremendous percentages of votes. We were unbelievably successful in the election with getting the vote of the military.”
As a former Army officer, I know that new officers and enlistees take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” not a particular president or party. Therefore, Trump’s comments struck me as jarringly improper. So when I learned that Trump would speak to soldiers at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida last week, I wondered whether he would echo the claim he’d made at the CIA or demonstrate that he’d learned his lesson.
Just a few lines into his speech, Trump answered my question: “We had a wonderful election, didn’t we? And I saw those numbers, and you liked me, and I liked you. That’s the way it worked,” Trump declared.
There are two problems with Trump’s statements. First, they are misleading at best, false at worst. Second – and more importantly – politicizing the military risks undermining the public’s trust in the armed forces, an institution that enjoys greater public confidence than any other in the country. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: Harry van Bommel, a left-wing member of the Dutch Parliament, had persuasive allies in convincing voters that they should reject a trade pact with Ukraine — his special “Ukrainian team,” a gleefully contrarian group of émigrés whose sympathies lay with Russia.
They attended public meetings, appeared on television and used social media to denounce Ukraine’s pro-Western government as a bloodthirsty kleptocracy, unworthy of Dutch support. As Mr. Van Bommel recalled, it “was very handy to show that not all Ukrainians were in favor.”
Handy but also misleading: The most active members of the Ukrainian team were actually from Russia, or from Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, and parroted the Kremlin line.
The Dutch referendum, held last April, became a battering ram aimed at the European Union. With turnout low, Dutch voters rejected the trade agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, delighting Moscow, emboldening pro-Russia populists around Europe and leaving political elites aghast.
It is unclear whether the Ukrainian team was directed by Russia or if it was acting out of shared sympathies, and Mr. Van Bommel said he never checked their identities. But Europe’s political establishment, already rattled by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of President Trump in the United States, is worried that the Netherlands referendum could foreshadow what is to come. [Continue reading…]
Shibley Telhami writes:Four polls during the election year revealed extraordinary, progressive and unexpected shifts that cannot be explained by events during that year. Attitudes toward “Muslim people” became progressively more favorable from 53 percent in November 2015 to 70 percent in October 2016.
Even attitudes toward Islam itself (generally more unfavorable than attitudes toward Muslims) showed significant improvement: favorable attitudes went from 37 percent in November 2015 to 49 percent in October 2016, reaching the highest favorable level since 9/11.
This kind of large shift does not normally take place in one year unless there are extraordinary events taking place. In fact, there were some consequential events that would have led one to expect the opposite shift: terrorism in the name of Islam in San Bernardino and Orlando, as well as a heated campaign year during which the Republican candidates, and many of their supporters, voiced much anti-Muslim rhetoric.
So, how are these kind of shifts possible in a single year?
One hint comes from the partisan divide on these issues. Almost all the shifts came from Democrats and independents, not Republicans. Among Democrats, the shift was significant enough to impact overall results. Favorable attitudes toward Muslims improved from 67 percent to 81 percent. Favorable attitudes toward Islam went from 51 percent to 66 percent. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: Geert Wilders is approaching the Dutch election bolstered by the shock victory of a like-minded campaign in the United States, and with something of his worldview reflected in Donald Trump’s White House.
Trump’s order barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States — currently blocked by the U.S. courts — echoes Wilders’ calls for countries across the West to stop all immigration from “Islamic countries,” which he has been advocating in speeches since at least 2014.
Now, Wilders’ U.S. contacts are pushing for a meeting with Trump in the hopes that it would give the Dutchman a new platform for his outspoken challenge to the European Union from within one of its founding states. For their part, Trump supporters see Wilders’ campaign as the next step — following the U.K.’s Brexit vote and the election of Trump — of a populist revolt that is shaking up the world order.
“I have sent those messages to the inner circle and encouraged that they communicate with Mr. Wilders,” Congressman Steve King, an Iowa Republican, told POLITICO in a phone interview. “It’s important for the Trump administration and for this White House team to be engaged in an effort to restore Western civilization.” [Continue reading…]
“Good try,” Mr. Johnson said to fill the silence, as others in the room nervously chuckled.
The reporters were brought back into the room at the end of the meeting, and this time a shouted question — How would the turmoil in Washington affect the trans-Atlantic alliance? — was directed at the normally voluble Mr. Johnson. This time even he was silent.
As the reporters were leaving, however, Mr. Johnson was heard to ask: “Are we still being recorded?”
To which Mr. Tillerson, whose two-week tenure has not included a single news conference, press availability or routine briefing, replied, “They never give up.”
Later, during his meeting with Mr. Lavrov, — the first face-to-face high-level encounter between Russian and Trump administration officials — the news media pool was ushered into a small room to witness Mr. Lavrov give his usual flowery introduction. “I would like to congratulate you once again,” Mr. Lavrov said to Mr. Tillerson.
Invariably in such meetings when one side gives introductory remarks, the other side does as well. But as soon as Mr. Lavrov was finished, State Department press aides asked reporters — including a bewildered-looking Russian news crew — to leave.
While the reporters were herded out, Mr. Tillerson said: “Thank you, Mr. Lavrov, it’s a pleasure to see you.” And then he stopped. Just as the reporters reached the door, Mr. Lavrov was heard to ask Mr. Tillerson, “Why did they shush them out?”
After the meeting, Mr. Tillerson gave his statement calling on Russia to honor its commitments to Ukraine, but took no questions. [Continue reading…]
BuzzFeed reports: He was found just before 7 a.m. on Election Day, lying on the floor of the Russian Consulate on the Upper East Side.
The man was unconscious and unresponsive, with an unidentified head wound — “blunt force trauma,” in cop parlance. By the time emergency responders reached him, he was dead.
Initial reports said the nameless man had plunged to his death from the roof of the consulate. As journalists rushed to the scene, consular officials quickly changed the narrative. The anonymous man had not fallen dozens of feet from the roof of the consular building, they said, but rather had suffered a heart attack in the security office, and died.
By the time the man’s body left the morgue the next day, Donald J. Trump was president-elect of the United States. It was the culmination of a sensational, bitterly divisive political campaign that US intelligence agencies would later say Russia actively sought to manipulate and skew in Trump’s favor. With the election results, the world had turned upside down, and the death of the man at the consulate quickly faded from view.
Police officers said the death of Sergei Krivov — his name revealed here publicly for the first time — looked natural, and listed the case as closed.
But who was Krivov? And how did he really die? Three months after he was found dead, as tensions between the US and Russia reach a fever pitch, the New York City medical examiner isn’t sure he had a heart attack after all. [Continue reading…]
NPR reports: Across the U.S., protesters are calling for a “Day Without Immigrants” on Thursday. It’s a boycott calling for immigrants not to go to work, in response to President Trump’s immigration policies and his plan to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
The protest seems to have been organized by word of mouth through social media. It’s unclear how many people will actually participate, though reports suggest restaurants in Austin, Texas; Denver and New York City, as well as the Philadelphia region, plan to join in. But in Washington, D.C., a number of restaurants have already announced that they’ll close for the day in solidarity with immigrant workers. That includes five restaurants owned by celebrity chef José Andrés.
“It was a very easy decision,” Andrés tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “When you have employees that have been with you almost 25 years, and they come to you in an organized way and they tell you, ‘Don’t get upset but Thursday we are not coming to work,’ [the] next thing you ask is, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ So I decided to join them and support them — that’s what we’re doing.”
For Andrés, who came to the U.S. from Spain in 1991 and is now an American citizen, this is also personal. “It seems immigrants, especially Latinos, it seems we are under attack,” he says. “It seems we are part of the American dream, but somehow it seems that America is not recognizing what we are doing.” [Continue reading…]
Southern Poverty Law Center reports: After half a century of being increasingly relegated to the margins of society, the radical right entered the political mainstream last year in a way that had seemed virtually unimaginable since George Wallace ran for president in 1968.
A surge in right-wing populism, stemming from the long-unfolding effects of globalization and the movements of capital and labor that it spawned, brought a man many considered to be a racist, misogynist and xenophobe into the most powerful political office in the world. Donald Trump’s election as president mirrored similar currents in Europe, where globalization energized an array of extreme-right political movements and the United Kingdom’s decision to quit the European Union.
Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.
He kicked off the campaign with a speech vilifying Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He retweeted white supremacist messages, including one that falsely claimed that black people were responsible for 80% of the murders of whites. He credentialed racist media personalities even while barring a serious outlet like The Washington Post, went on a radio show hosted by a rabid conspiracy theorist named Alex Jones, and said that Muslims should be banned from entering the country. He seemed to encourage violence against black protesters at his rallies, suggesting that he would pay the legal fees of anyone charged as a result.
The reaction to Trump’s victory by the radical right was ecstatic. “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor,” wrote Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. “Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who edits a racist journal, said that “overwhelmingly white Americans” had shown they were not “obedient zombies” by choosing to vote “for America as a distinct nation with a distinct people who deserve a government devoted to that people.”
Richard Spencer, who leads a racist “think tank” called the National Policy Institute, exulted that “Trump’s victory was, at its root, a victory of identity politics.”
Trump’s election, as startling to extremists as it was to the political establishment, was followed by his selection of appointees with anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT and white nationalist sympathies. To lead his domestic transition team, he chose Kenneth Blackwell, an official of the virulently anti-LGBT Family Research Council. As national security adviser, he selected retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who has described Islam as a “malignant cancer” and tweeted that “[f]ear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” His designated CIA director was U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), who is close to some of the country’s most rabid anti-Muslim extremists.
Most remarkable of all was his choice as chief strategic adviser of Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, a far-right media outlet known for promoting the so-called “alternative right” — fundamentally, a recent rebranding of white supremacy for public relations purposes, albeit one that de-emphasizes Klan robes and Nazi symbols in favor of a more “intellectual” approach. With Bannon’s appointment, white nationalists felt they had a man inside the White House. [Continue reading…]
It was not the violation of this antique and ignored piece of anti-Jacobin legislation that has touched off the biggest foreign-policy scandal since Watergate.
Nobody would care if an incoming national security adviser had confidential conversations with an ambassador of a hostile foreign government before Inauguration Day, if it were believed that the conversations served a legitimate and disinterested public purpose.
But that is exactly what is doubted in this case.
To put the story in simplest terms:
1) Russian spies hacked Democratic Party communications in order to help elect Donald Trump.
2) Donald Trump welcomed the help, used it, publicly solicited more of it—and was then elected president of the United States.
3) President Obama sanctioned Russia for its pro-Trump espionage.
4) While Russia considered its response, its ambassador spoke with the national security adviser-designate about the sanctions
5) The adviser, Flynn, reportedly asked Russia not to overreact, signaling that the new administration would review the sanctions; Russia did not respond.
6) As president-elect and then president, Donald Trump has indicated that he seeks to lift precisely those sanctions caused by Russia’s espionage work on his behalf.
All of this takes place against the background of Donald Trump’s seeming determination to align U.S. foreign policy ever closer to Russia’s: endorsing the annexation of Crimea, supporting Russia’s war aims in Syria, casting doubt on the U.S. guarantee to NATO allies, cheering on the breakup of the European Union. [Continue reading…]
Ryan Goodman writes: In his debut on this past weekend’s Sunday morning shows, Stephen Miller, the President’s Senior Policy Advisor, repeated what to some was an alarming statement about the federal judiciary. Defending the White House’s immigration and refugee Executive Order against significant setbacks in federal court including a few days earlier the Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit, Miller said on Meet the Press:
I also want to be clear we’ve heard a lot of talk about how all the branches of government are equal. That’s the point. They are equal. There’s no such thing as judicial supremacy. What the judges did, both at the ninth and at the district level was to take power for themselves that belongs squarely in the hands of the president of the United States.
I posed the following question to some of the most highly respected constitutional law experts across the country, excluding current members of Just Security’s Board of Editors. I separately sent each person excerpts (see here) of transcripts of Fox News Sunday and Meet the Press, and posed the following query:
Some worry that at some point our country may face a constitutional crisis in which President Trump does not comply with a decision of the Supreme Court, whether in the immigration context or some other case. In view of that concern, how do you view Miller’s statements? You might say, for example, whether you think his views are part of a mainstream school of thought in constitutional law, are potentially limited to the immigration context, or represent a view that would support the President’s disregarding judicial orders from the federal courts or the Supreme Court in particular. Please feel free to address any one of those dimensions or another that you think this issue raises.
Throughout the answers below, the emphasis in the text (in bold) is provided by me, not the author of the statement.
1. Strong Rejection of Miller’s Statements as Expression of Attitude or Ideology
Professor Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard:
We can try to interrogate what Miller said by recourse to different legal schools of thought and the like, but I want to focus on a different plane and the one in which I believe Miller attempted to register his claim. I am concerned that, well beyond a purely theoretical and ignorant account of the role of an independent judiciary, Miller appears to be channeling President Trump’s underlying attitude, one doubtless not formulated in theoretical terms but baked into his personality and his sense of what it means to be a strong president. In that respect, Miller seemed to be engaged in a performance to earn the praise of his boss. The performance was consistent with the attitude Mr. Trump expressed in disparaging the supposedly “Mexican judge” Curiel back during the campaign, in calling U.S. District Court Judge Robart a “so-called judge,” and in saying the remarkably thoughtful 9th Circuit oral argument was “disgraceful” and “political” when it was as far from either as a judicial exchange dealing with a politically explosive issue could be. It is this gestalt—rather than a well formulated theory of the judiciary’s role—that may somedaythreaten the foundations of our constitutional democracy if not in this litigation under the Trump administration than in another.
The Wall Street Journal reports: With the Trump administration proving to be a leaky ship in its early days, one news outlet is launching an ad blitz to find the next Deep Throat.
The Gizmodo Media Group’s investigative team has taken to buying highly-targeted Facebook ads to steer potential leakers to a new website, TellOnTrump.com, which lays out a variety of secure methods to pass on sensitive information.
“One thing we know about Donald Trump is that there are a lot of things Donald Trump doesn’t want people to know about. If you’ve reached this page, you might have information about the conduct of Donald Trump or his administration that you’d like people to know about. Here’s how you can tell us,” the site explains.
The Univision Communications Inc.-owned media group, which operates sites like Fusion and the former Gawker Media sites like Gizmodo, Deadspin and Jezebel, started running ads on the social media platform within the last week that specifically target people who list certain government agencies as their employers. The ads don’t specify which news outlet is running the campaign, but the site which the ads point to clearly identifies the Gizmodo special projects desk.
“We are targeting people who are employed by federal agencies because we want them to know that if they see or know about something they think is newsworthy, we are here for them,” said John Cook, Gizmodo’s head of investigations.
Mr. Cook said Gizmodo is also working to purchase bus shelter ads near certain government agencies in Washington, D.C., encouraging people to contact them with information about the Trump administration. [Continue reading…]
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