Category Archives: News

Voter fraud commission may have violated law

The Hill reports: President Trump’s voter fraud commission may have violated the law by ignoring federal requirements governing requests for information from states, several experts on the regulatory process told The Hill.

Experts say the failure to submit the request to states through the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) violates a 1980 law known as the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA). They also say the failure could be significant, since states could argue it means they are under no obligation to respond.

“If the commission gets heavy-handed with them, it seems to me that the states are within their right to say, ‘No, we don’t have to respond because you didn’t go through [OIRA],’” said Susan Dudley, a former OIRA administrator who is now director of the GW Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon is confident that U.S. might be able to intercept an incoming North Korean nuclear missile

Reuters reports: Not everybody asserts as confidently as the Pentagon that the U.S. military can defend the United States from the growing threat posed by North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile capability.

Pyongyang’s first test on Tuesday of an ICBM with a potential to strike the state of Alaska has raised the question: How capable is the U.S. military of knocking down an incoming missile or barrage of missiles?

Briefing reporters on Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said: “We do have confidence in our ability to defend against the limited threat, the nascent threat that is there.”

Davis cited a successful test in May in which a U.S.-based missile interceptor knocked down a simulated incoming North Korean ICBM. But he acknowledged the test program’s track program was not perfect.

“It’s something we have mixed results on. But we also have an ability to shoot more than one interceptor,” Davis said.

An internal memo seen by Reuters also showed that the Pentagon upgraded its assessment of U.S. defenses after the May test.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on a multi-layered missile defense system, the United States may not be able to seal itself off entirely from a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile attack. [Continue reading…]

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How Trump could tweet his way into nuclear war with North Korea

Laura Rosenberger writes: North Korea’s apparent test of an intercontinental ballistic missile puts it closer to having the ability to hit the United States with a nuclear warhead. This is an extraordinarily dangerous development.

I worked on North Korea policy in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, at the State Department and on the National Security Council, so I know firsthand just how difficult the challenges posed by North Korea are to deal with. I know how constrained the policy options are, and I’m familiar with the many difficult choices involved in selecting from a menu of bad options. And I know the incredibly complicated coordination — both within our own government, and with our allies and partners — that is necessary to implement a strategy to handle it.

But President Trump’s reaction to North Korea’s missile test was to immediately reach for his phone and sound off with chest-thumping statements on Twitter. This is a very reckless reaction, and one that risks miscalculation by adversary and ally alike.


North Korea will parse every word of Trump’s Twitter statements to try to understand what they mean. That’s because North Korea uses its own propaganda mouthpieces in an intricate way to signal its intentions to both internal and external audiences. As a government official working on North Korea, I spent hours working with analysts poring over North Korean statements to understand Pyongyang’s thinking — whether and how it differs from past statements — and cutting through the bluster to identify the core point it was communicating. Its words are carefully chosen, and it uses different formulas to send different signals.

We know from watching Pyongyang’s reactions to previous U.S. statements that it read our words in a similar way. North Korean officials will look for clear signals of intention in Trump’s tweets. The problem is, it’s not clear that Trump has any idea what his intentions are. He is sending signals that foreign officials will attach meanings to — meanings he may not have intended and might not even realize he’s sending. [Continue reading…]

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Why there is no realistic option of a ‘surgical strike’ on North Korea

The New York Times reports: The standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program has long been shaped by the view that the United States has no viable military option to destroy it. Any attempt to do so, many say, would provoke a brutal counterattack against South Korea too bloody and damaging to risk.

That remains a major constraint on the Trump administration’s response even as North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, approaches his goal of a nuclear arsenal capable of striking the United States. On Tuesday, the North appeared to cross a new threshold, testing a weapon that it described as an intercontinental ballistic missile and that analysts said could potentially hit Alaska.

Over the years, as it does for potential crises around the world, the Pentagon has drafted and refined multiple war plans, including an enormous retaliatory invasion and limited pre-emptive attacks, and it holds annual military exercises with South Korean forces based on them.

But the military options are more grim than ever.

Even the most limited strike risks staggering casualties, because North Korea could retaliate with the thousands of artillery pieces it has positioned along its border with the South. Though the arsenal is of limited range and could be destroyed in days, the United States defense secretary, Jim Mattis, recently warned that if North Korea used it, it “would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

Beyond that, there is no historical precedent for a military attack aimed at destroying a country’s nuclear arsenal.

The last time the United States is known to have seriously considered attacking the North was in 1994, more than a decade before its first nuclear test. The defense secretary at the time, William J. Perry, asked the Pentagon to prepare plans for a “surgical strike” on a nuclear reactor, but he backed off after concluding it would set off warfare that could leave hundreds of thousands dead.

The stakes are even higher now. American officials believe North Korea has built as many as a dozen nuclear bombs — perhaps many more — and can mount them on missiles capable of hitting much of Japan and South Korea. [Continue reading…]

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‘Self-restraint’ is only thing stopping war with North Korea, U.S. general says

The New York Times reports: “Self-restraint” is all that is keeping the United States and South Korea from going to war with the North, the top American general in South Korea said on Wednesday. His comment came as the South’s defense minister indicated that the North’s first intercontinental ballistic missile had the potential to reach Hawaii.

The unusually blunt warning, from Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the commander of American troops based in Seoul, came a day after North Korea said it successfully tested the Hwasong-14, its first intercontinental ballistic missile.

Washington and its allies confirmed that the weapon was an ICBM and condemned the test as a violation of United Nations resolutions and a dangerous escalation of tensions.

Although doubt remained whether North Korea had cleared all the technical hurdles to make the Hwasong-14 a fully functional ICBM, the launch prompted the United States and South Korea to conduct a rare joint missile exercise off the east coast of the South on Wednesday. The drill involved firing an undisclosed number of ballistic missiles into the sea.

“Self-restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” said General Brooks, referring to the 1953 cease-fire that halted but never officially ended the Korean War. “As this alliance missile live-fire shows, we are able to change our choice when so ordered by our alliance national leaders. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. nuclear weapons safety and security (or lack of it) now kept secret

The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon has thrown a cloak of secrecy over assessments of the safety and security of its nuclear weapons operations, a part of the military with a history of periodic inspection failures and bouts of low morale.

Overall results of routine inspections at nuclear weapons bases, such as a “pass-fail” grade, had previously been publicly available. They are now off-limits. The change goes beyond the standard practice of withholding detailed information on the inspections.

The stated reason for the change is to prevent adversaries from learning too much about U.S. nuclear weapons vulnerabilities. Navy Capt. Greg Hicks, spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the added layer of secrecy was deemed necessary.

“We are comfortable with the secrecy,” Hicks said Monday, adding that it helps ensure that “as long as nuclear weapons exist, the U.S. will maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear stockpile.”

Critics question the lockdown of information.

“The whole thing smells bad,” said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists. “They’re acting like they have something to hide, and it’s not national security secrets.”

“I think the new policy fails to distinguish between protecting valid secrets and shielding incompetence,” he added. “Clearly, nuclear weapons technology secrets should be protected. But negligence or misconduct in handling nuclear weapons should not be insulated from public accountability.” [Continue reading…]

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Why almost every state is partially or fully rebuffing Trump’s voter fraud commission

The Washington Post reports: In a rare display of bipartisanship, officials in nearly every state have said they will partially or fully refuse to comply with President Trump’s voting commission, which has encountered criticism and opposition after issuing a sweeping request for voter data nationwide.

Even as some of the resistance centers on Trump and members of his commission, the broader responses from the states indicate a strong and widespread belief that local officials should be managing elections and that the White House’s request for volumes of information went too far.

“What it says is some Republicans actually still believe in federalism and that our constitution still governs the way states hold their elections,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime GOP strategist and frequent Trump critic, who called the resistance by Republican state-level officials “commendable.” He also pointed to the commission’s origins in Trump’s repeated — and unsubstantiated — claims that voter fraud is widespread and cost him the popular vote last year. [Continue reading…]

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Report calls for public inquiry into Gulf funding of British extremism

The Guardian reports: Foreign funding for extremism in Britain primarily comes from Saudi Arabia, but the UK government should set up a public inquiry into all Gulf funding sources, a report has said.

The report by the Henry Jackson Society also calls for the government to consider requiring UK religious institutions, including mosques, to be required to reveal sources of overseas funding.

The findings come as Theresa May faces pressure to publish the government’s own report into foreign funding of terrorism. The Home Office-led report was completed six months ago, and No 10 says ministers are still deciding whether to publish. MPs nervous of upsetting strategic relations in the Gulf have also decided not to publish a separate Foreign Office strategy paper on the region. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s lack of a North Korea strategy is drawing China and Russia closer

Isaac Stone Fish writes: In a dramatic change, the most shocking response to North Korea’s 3 July missile test – which some analysts think demonstrates Pyongyang’s ability to strike Alaska or Hawaii with a ballistic missile – came not from Donald Trump, but from Beijing and Moscow.

Trump’s Twitter response to the launch contained his typical combination of bluster, insult and prodding. “Does this guy have anything better to do with his life,” Trump said on 3 July, probably referring to the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, adding, “perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!”

By a happy coincidence for the two countries, the launch occurred during Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow. Hours before the launch, the Chinese Communist party secretary told Russian media that Sino-Russian strategic ties “are at the best point in history”, and the launch offered the two sides an occasion to demonstrate their closeness.

In a joint statement, China and Russia’s foreign ministries warned the situation on the Korean peninsula was so tense “it could lead to an armed conflict”. And it chastised the “relevant parties” – Trump, as well as Kim – to “refrain from provocative actions and warlike remarks”.

The striking thing about their statement is not only the language – mild when compared with Trump’s tweets, but surprisingly strident from China’s normally staid foreign ministry – but that Moscow and Beijing took the unusual step of issuing one together. [Continue reading…]

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Did North Korean missile test trigger Trump’s ‘red line’?

VOA reports: In January, Donald Trump drew what appeared to be a “red line” for North Korea: testing a ballistic missile that could reach parts of the United States with a nuclear warhead.

“It won’t happen!” insisted then President-elect Trump in a statement he posted on Twitter.


Except early Tuesday, it did happen, according to North Korean state television, which reported Kim Jong Un “personally observed” the test of the Hwaseong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile.

The North’s claims were bolstered by the U.S. military, which tracked the missile for 37 minutes, and independent analysts, who estimated its range at 6,500 kilometers (4,000 miles) — far enough to reach Alaska, and an apparent violation of Trump’s “red line” warning.

In international geopolitics, a “red line” signifies an unequivocal threat; it could also be described as “a line in the sand.” Breaking the limit set by the “red line” would incur the full fury of the state that issued the threat.

The successful test of an ICBM (generally defined as a rocket with a range of more than 5,500 kilometers, or 3,400 miles) would represent a major challenge for Trump, who has warned the U.S. is willing to act alone to stop the North Korean nuclear threat. [Continue reading…]

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South Koreans more scared of Trump than North Korea, says Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans

ABC News (AU) reports: Despite North Korea announcing it has successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, South Koreans consider Donald Trump to be a bigger threat to their security than Kim Jong-un, according to former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans.

“Kim Jong-un’s behaviour is often rather idiosyncratic, it’s also often very ugly but I don’t think anybody thinks he’s nuts,” he told 7.30.

“It’s very clear that South Koreans are more worried about Donald Trump than they are about the North Koreans in terms of what might trigger an actual conflict in which they’d be caught up and devastated.”

While he believes a deliberate nuclear strike by either the US or North Korea is unlikely, Mr Evans said he was worried about how the US President may respond to future provocations. [Continue reading…]

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Investigators explore if Russia colluded with pro-Trump sites during U.S. election

The Guardian reports: The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.

The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.

Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories. [Continue reading…]

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Kim Jong Un has nukes, now he has an ICBM, and he will use them to threaten the U.S.

Jeffrey Lewis writes: North Korea wanted a nuclear weapon that could reach the United States for a very simple reason: Kim Jong Un and his cronies in Pyongyang watched as the United States assembled a massive invasion force against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, then used airpower to aid the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. The latter was especially frightening for the North Koreans, because Gaddafi had abandoned his WMD programs in a disarmament deal and was then offered up by the Bush Administration as an intermediary who would vouch to North Korea that the U.S. keeps its promises.

The deal ended with Gaddafi’s gruesome death on camera. North Korea doesn’t plan to wait around like Saddam or Gaddafi. Instead, once a war starts, North Korea plans to hit U.S. forces in South Korea and Japan with everything it has, including nuclear weapons, hoping to shock the United States and blunt an invasion. U.S. officials often dismiss that possibility by saying it would be suicide for Kim. But Kim is counting on nuclear-armed ICBMs that can target the United States to ensure that Trump realizes that suicide would be mutual.

Trump doesn’t have the slightest idea what to do about this. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, having said we are done talking about North Korea, said nothing. But then again, I am yet to be convinced Tillerson is actually alive and this isn’t some reboot of the Weekend at Bernie’s franchise set at the State Department. Nope, there is no plan.

To the extent that there is any coherent Trump approach, one might infer from his tweets that he believes his new friend, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, will bail him out like his Korea policy was an underwater condo development. But Xi’s interest is transactional and it isn’t clear to me that China is worse off if North Korea can threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. Moreover, if Beijing had so much sway over North Korea, Kim wouldn’t have sent to two assassins to rub VX in the face of his half-brother living under Chinese protection.

It’s not just Trump, though—the Obama Administration didn’t know what to do, either. The idea that the United States could work through China or use cyber-attacks to halt North Korea’s missile program was just a collective exercise in denial that our effort to prevent a nuclear-armed North Korea was an abject failure. For eight damned years, I kept hearing about strategic patience in one form or another.

While I think we did have a chance to pick some different outcome in the mid-1990s, the window for denuclearization closed a long time ago. If Kim Il Sung once calculated that he could trade nuclear weapons he had not built for international recognition of his bizarre little dictatorship, his grandson has clearly decided that real nuclear weapons are a lot better than promises on paper. That is our new reality. [Continue reading…]

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Tensions with North Korea could get ‘out of control’, China tells UN

AFP reports: China’s ambassador to the United Nations has warned of “disastrous” consequences if world powers fail to find a way to ease tensions with North Korea which he said could “get out of control”.

Ambassador Liu Jieyi made the remarks a day after US president Donald Trump spoke by phone with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the threat posed by North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests.

“Currently tensions are high and we certainly would like to see a de-escalation,” Liu told a news conference at UN headquarters as China takes over the security council presidency in July.

“If tension only goes up … then sooner or later it will get out of control and the consequences would be disastrous,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Forty-one states have refused Kobach’s request for voter information

CNN reports: Forty-one states have defied the Trump administration’s request for private voter information, according to a CNN inquiry to all 50 states.

State leaders and voting boards across the country have responded to the letter with varying degrees of cooperation — from altogether rejecting the request to expressing eagerness to supply information that is public.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which President Donald Trump created by executive order in May, sent a letter to all 50 states last Wednesday requesting a bevy of voter data, which he notes will eventually be made available to the public.

The order came months after Trump claimed without evidence that millions had voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. When states began to express concerns about the legality of his administration’s efforts to investigate voter fraud, Trump called them out on Twitter on Saturday, questioning whether they were hiding something. [Continue reading…]

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Justice Department’s corporate crime watchdog resigns, saying Trump makes it impossible to do job

International Business Times reports: One of the Justice Department’s top corporate crime watchdogs has resigned, declaring that she cannot enforce ethics laws against companies while, she asserts, her own bosses in the Trump administration have been engaging in conduct that she said she would never tolerate in corporations.

Hui Chen — a former Pfizer and Microsoft lawyer who also was a federal prosecutor — had been the department’s compliance counsel. She left the department in June and broke her silence about her move in a recent LinkedIn post that sounded an alarm about the Trump administration’s behavior.

“Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome,” Chen wrote. “To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.” [Continue reading…]

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Deportation a ‘death sentence’ to adoptees after a lifetime in the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Phillip Clay was adopted at 8 into an American family in Philadelphia.

Twenty-nine years later, in 2012, after numerous arrests and a struggle with drug addiction, he was deported back to his birth country, South Korea. He could not speak the local language, did not know a single person and did not receive appropriate care for mental health problems, which included bipolar disorder and alcohol and substance abuse.

On May 21, Mr. Clay ended his life, jumping from the 14th floor of an apartment building north of Seoul. He was 42.

To advocates of the rights of international adoptees, the suicide was a wrenching reminder of a problem the United States urgently needed to address: adoptees from abroad who never obtained American citizenship. The Adoptee Rights Campaign, an advocacy group, estimates that 35,000 adult adoptees in the United States may lack citizenship, which was not granted automatically in the adoption process before 2000.

Mr. Clay is believed to be just one of dozens of people, legally adopted as children into American families, who either have been deported to the birth countries they left decades ago or face deportation after being convicted of crimes as adults. Some did not even know they were not American citizens until they were ordered to leave. [Continue reading…]

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Tillerson ready to let Russia decide Assad’s fate

Foreign Policy reports: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres during a private State Department meeting last week that the fate of Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad now lies in the hands of Russia, and that the Trump administration’s priority is limited to defeating the Islamic State, according to three diplomatic sources familiar with the exchange.

The remarks offer the latest stop on a bumpy U.S. policy ride that has left international observers with a case of diplomatic whiplash as they try to figure out whether the Trump administration will insist that Assad step down from power. Nearly three months ago, Tillerson had insisted that Assad would have to leave office because of his alleged use of chemical weapons.

Tillerson’s assurances to Guterres signaled the Trump administration’s increasing willingness to let Russia take the driver’s seat in Syria, throwing geopolitics to the wayside to focus on defeating ISIS.

He also signaled that U.S. military action against Assad’s forces in recent months is intended to achieve only limited tactical goals–deterring future chemical weapons attacks and protecting U.S. backed-forces fighting the Islamic State in Syria–not weakening the Assad government or strengthening the opposition’s negotiating leverage. [Continue reading…]

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