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      Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too

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      Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”.Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a product of the Ivy League: the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard business school. He also did stints in the Obama administration and at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and United Healthcare.His book reads like Covid-porn for blue America. Unfortunately, he does not reflect on how the US reached this place.The saga of Albion’s Seed – English Protestants who slaughtered each other in the old country, overthrew the crown in a new land then waged a second civil war – does not figure in Slavitt’s calculus. Said differently, if kin can repeatedly raise arms against kin, the social fabric can never be taken for granted – especially not as demographics convulse. E pluribus unum has limitations.Slavitt sees Trump’s cruelty at the southern border but fails to acknowledge the grievances of those in flyover country. Brexit and Trump were not one-offs. They were inextricably related. Displacement exacts a price.Slavitt’s book is subtitled “The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response”. He lauds pandemic responses in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand and criticizes Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, governors of Texas and Florida.But he ignores the fact that cases and mortality rates in those two states were lower than in New York and New Jersey – states called home by coastal elites.To his credit, Slavitt does take to task Bill de Blasio, that hapless and tin-eared mayor, for urging New Yorkers to “go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants” as the pandemic took root.“The impact of New York’s delay was significant,” Slavitt writes.Similarly, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s performative Republican governor, is derided for her “freedom-first” strategy. But unlike De Blasio she remains popular in her state and her party. A DeSantis-Noem Republican ticket in 2024 is not out of the question. In the eyes of voters, Noem did something right – much like Andrew Cuomo in New York, now beset by allegations of sexual misconduct but apparently on the verge of dodging a political bullet.On the other hand, the New York Times reports that even in east Asia and the south Pacific, supposed world leaders in containing the coronavirus, the fight is not yet won. Variants and their dangers loom. Vaccinations lag.To quote the Times, “people are fed up” and asking: “Why are we behind and when, for the love of all things good and great, will the pandemic routine finally come to an end?”Patience is never in limitless supply. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Slavitt makes insufficient allowance for this very human quirk.Trump was callous and mendacious but he grasped what made folks tick. Despite Slavitt’s vilification of big pharma, in those countries that possessed sufficient capital and foresight, vaccine manufacturers came through. Markets can work, even if they result in asymmetries.As expected, Preventable catalogs Trump’s failings in granular detail: his false promises of Covid quickly disappearing, his embrace of medical quackery, his rejection of testing as a crucial weapon. Slavitt also reminds readers that Trump chucked his predecessor’s pandemic response playbook and gutted the supply of personal protective equipment, just for the sake of blotting out the past.Politicians are self-centered. Trump more so than others. According to Slavitt, he saw himself as the smartest person in the room and expected to be flattered accordingly. One way to win his attention was to compliment his parenting skills. But being the owner of a debt-laden company forced to pay for golf course upkeep with no one on the greens may have injected additional anxiety. The public was expected to feel Trump’s pain.Slavitt also describes Trump’s difficulty in coming to grips with the possibility of the pandemic costing him the election, and his decision to offload to the states the mission of combating Covid. The White House became the backdrop for a reality show while the Confederate flag emerged as a symbol of pro-Trump, “liberate the state” sentiment.Jared Kushner told Slavitt: “We’re going to put testing back to the states.” The White House “can’t be responsible”, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser explained. “Some [governors] don’t want to succeed. Bad incentives to keep blaming us.”As an administration insider told the Guardian in April 2020, Trump was “killing his own supporters”.And yet, not surprisingly, Slavitt struggles with the reality that Democratic nay-saying almost lost Biden the White House and Nancy Pelosi the speaker’s gavel. Voters yearned for hope and wanted to know their sacrifice mattered.Being told “we are in this together” when “we” are manifestly not is more than a problem with messaging. For example, Slavitt omits mention of Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and his infamous dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant in November as Covid cases mounted. On being found out, Newsom acknowledged: “We’re all human. We all fall short sometimes.” Whatever.Slavitt does upbraid the Fox News host Tucker Carlson for downplaying the dangers of Covid and recounts the inane pronouncements of Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded New York University law school professor, to a similar end. Slavitt calls Epstein “disconnected from reality and remarkably self-assured”.This week, the US death toll passed 600,000. The vaccine works only on the living. The world has experienced more deaths halfway through 2021 than in all of 2020.Slavitt ends his book wondering whether “the lessons of the past year might be forgotten”. Don’t rule that out. More

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      Jared Kushner agrees book deal for ‘definitive’ account of Trump presidency

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      Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump and a senior adviser in his administration, has secured a book deal to recount Trump’s presidency. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced that Kushner’s book will come out in early 2022. Kushner has begun working on the memoir, currently untitled, and is expected to write about everything from the Middle East to criminal justice reform to the pandemic. Financial terms were not disclosed.The signing of the Kushner deal comes amid a debate in the book industry over which Trump officials, notably Trump himself, can be taken on without starting a revolt at the publishing house. Thousands of Simon & Schuster employees and authors signed an open letter this spring condemning the publisher’s decision to sign up former vice-president Mike Pence. Broadside said on Tuesday: “His book will be the definitive, thorough recounting of the administration, and the truth about what happened behind closed doors.” He may find himself in competition with his father-in-law, who has insisted he is writing “the book of all books” – even though major figures in US publishing said on Tuesday that no big house is likely to touch a memoir by the 45th president.Kushner played a role in building ties between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco – the so-called Abraham Accords – and a criminal justice bill passed by Congress in 2018.He has also been the subject of numerous controversies, whether for his financial dealings and potential conflicts of interest or for the administration’s widely criticised handling of Covid-19, which has killed more than 600,000 Americans – the highest toll of any country. In April 2020, less than two months into the pandemic, Kushner labelled the White House response a “great success story”, dismissed “the eternal lockdown crowd” and also said: “I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”At a Simon & Schuster town hall in May, employees confronted CEO Jonathan Karp over the Pence deal. Karp responded that he felt the company had a mission to hear opposing sides of political debates.He also said he did not want to publish Trump – who issued his 2015 book Crippled America through the Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold Editions – because he didn’t think the former president would provide an honest account of his time in office. Trump issued a statement last week that he was “writing like crazy” and had turned down two offers “from the most unlikely of publishers,” a claim widely disputed within the industry. More

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      What is Ivanka Trump's legacy? Enabling her father's odious actions | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Ivanka Trump has wound up her time in the White House in the most fitting way possible: with a scandal about a $3,000-a-month toilet. Members of the Secret Service, it was recently reported, were banned from using any of the bathrooms in Jared Kushner and Ivanka’s Washington DC mansion and, instead, had to rent an apartment to relieve themselves in (although Jared and Ivanka have denied this). Talk about flushing taxpayers’ money down the drain.One imagines Ivanka did not plan to spend her final days in DC dealing with the fallout from a violent insurrection and battling embarrassing leaks about her loos. When she appointed herself special adviser to the president, Ivanka was a handbag and shoe saleswoman bursting with ambition. She was going to empower women everywhere! Little girls around the world would read about Saint Ivanka for decades to come. She would be a role mogul: her branded bags would fly off the shelves.Four years later, Ivanka’s clothing line has shut down and her personal brand has been damaged enough for a university to cancel her as a speaker. It seems she is persona non grata in New York and her dad has been banned from parts of the internet for inciting violence. By rights, Ivanka should be sobbing into her sheets wondering how everything has gone so wrong.But Ivanka is a Trump: narcissism and self-delusion are in her DNA. As DC braces for pre-inauguration chaos Ivanka has been blithely tweeting her “achievements” and retweeting praise in an attempt to convince us she has left an important legacy.According to her Twitter feed, one thing Americans should all be thanking Ivanka for is paid family leave, which has been one of her marquee issues. And, to be fair, if Ivanka is to be praised for anything, it’s for pushing Donald Trump to pass a bill giving federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental time off. Would that have happened without Ivanka? I don’t know. But she facilitated it. Does it make up for the many odious things Ivanka also facilitated? No.Another of Ivanka’s big projects was the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative, which aims to reach 50 million women in the developing world by 2025 and … well, I’m not sure exactly what’s supposed to happen then. The initiative is so buzzword-laden that it’s somewhat hard to understand. You get the impression Ivanka launched it via vague instructions to “empower women in powerful ways via strategic pillars of empowerment”.Ivanka has been very keen to turn the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative into part of her political legacy … But she got greedy and insisted on using her version of the billAnyway, all that empowering has paid off, according to a report W-GDP released last week: almost 12.6 million women worldwide have been equipped with the skills they need for economic advancement, thanks to Ivanka. Let’s be charitable and say W-GDP has done some good. The problem is, that good is massively outweighed by the Trump administration’s worldwide war on abortion: the administration imposed an harmful expansion of “the global gag rule”, which bans US federal funding international NGOs that provide abortion services or advocacy. Trump also did his best to try to destroy the budget for foreign aid.Still, Ivanka has been very keen to turn the W-GDP into part of her political legacy. Last year, she was behind the bipartisan launch of a bill formally authorising the programme so that it would live on after her dad left office. That could well have happened: Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator, initially lent Ivanka her support. But Ivanka got greedy and insisted on using her version of the bill. Shaheen abandoned her support, explaining that Ivanka’s version of the legislation focused too narrowly on women’s economic advancement, minimising issues such as education, healthcare and gender-based violence. Not so much “let them eat cake”, as “let them start cake-making businesses”. Last month, the bill was dropped and now the future of Ivanka’s biggest project is unclear.I don’t want to be unfair to her. She may not have empowered women the way she promised she would, but she did empower herself. Ivanka and Kushner have made a fortune while “serving” in the White House. And you know what they say about charity: it begins at home. More

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      Sorry, try Obama's house: Secret Service barred from using Ivanka Trump's bathrooms

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      The dying days of the Trump administration have been plagued by yet more scandal in the form of riots, Twitter bans and impeachment. Now the Washington Post has added another: water closet gate.
      In a multi-bylined article one of America’s top investigative news outlets has chronicled in leg-crossing detail the apparently extreme difficulty that the Secret Service detail assigned to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have had in finding a place to go to the bathroom.
      According to the Washington Post the president’s daughter and her top White House adviser spouse have apparently exiled the squad of men and women assigned to keep them from harm’s way from using the toilets in their sprawling Washington DC mansion.
      “Instructed not to use any of the half-dozen bathrooms inside the couple’s house, the Secret Service detail assigned to President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law spent months searching for a reliable restroom to use on the job,” the paper reported, citing neighbors and law enforcement official.
      It quoted one law enforcement official as saying: “It’s the first time I ever heard of a Secret Service detail having to go to these extremes to find a bathroom.”
      It added that Secret Service members in the couple’s detail who were desperate to relieve themselves had resorted to a porta-potty, as well as bathrooms at the homes of Barack Obama and Vice-President Mike Pence.
      The solution to the problem was not a cheap one. Since September 2017, the paper reported, the federal government rented the stricken Secret Service members a basement studio with a bathroom for the purposes of them going to the loo. The cost to taxpayers? Some $3,000 a month.
      A White House spokesperson denied the couple restricted agents from their home. But the Post stuck by its investigative guns, saying: “That account is disputed by a law enforcement official familiar with the situation, who said the agents were kept out at the family’s request.”
      The Post’s story is unlikely to endear Washington citizens – or indeed many other Americans – to Ivanka Trump and her husband as they leave office after four high-profile years in Donald Trump’s administration. Multiple reports have already gleefully detailed the couple’s likely rejection from the New York and Washington DC social circles in which they have previously moved.
      Not that the couple will lack for a place to call home. They have recently bought a $30m plot of land on an exclusive island in Florida nicknamed the Billionaire’s Bunker. More

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      Trump pardons debase the presidency further – and he can and will go lower | Lloyd Green

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      With hours to spare before Christmas, Donald Trump has delivered pardons to Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charlie Kushner, a passel of war criminals and a bent congressman or two. There is no reason to believe our “law and order” president’s pardon binge is over. Too many people in his immediate orbit remain exposed to future prosecution, including the president himself.Come noon on 20 January 2021, Trump and his inner circle will be private citizens again. Devoid of legal immunity, stripped of the air of invincibility, they become fair game for federal and local law enforcement alike. The potential for prison hovers over them like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.Cyrus Vance, Manhattan’s district attorney, is circling Trump and his business. Eric Trump has testified at a court-ordered deposition conducted by New York’s attorney general. As for federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York, they labeled Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in the case of Michael Cohen. The statute of limitations has not expired.And then there is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. According to reports, he remains on the radar of federal law enforcement in connection with possible election law violations, and doesn’t like it one bit. On Wednesday Giuliani lashed out, calling investigators “secret police” and accusing them of toadying to Joe Biden, the president-elect. Trump has gone so far as to unequivocally claim authority to pardon himself, something Nixon refused to doIn case anyone needs reminding, once upon a time Giuliani was the No3 lawyer at the justice department and US attorney for the southern district. Back then, he was viewed as one of the good guys. As it happens, he prosecuted Marc Rich, the recipient of an infamous pardon from Bill Clinton. But as the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson repeatedly remarks, everything Trump touches dies.The list doesn’t end with Rudy. The justice department and the Federal Election Commission may soon want to talk to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about his role in the Trump re-election campaign.Reportedly, Kushner was a driving force in establishing a shell company, American Made Media Consultants, which made shrouded payments to Trump family members and friends. Indeed, Kushner purportedly directed Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, John Pence, the vice-president’s nephew, and the campaign’s chief financial officer to serve on the shell company board.Think of it as the Trump Organization 2.0. Or the deep campaign.In the end, AMMC spent nearly half of the campaign’s war chest, with payments going to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend, and Lara Trump, who is now contemplating a Senate run in North Carolina. Suffice to say, the legality of this opaque arrangement is unclear.Three House Democrats have requested investigations by the Department of Justice and the FEC. Without a pardon, Jared’s fate will rest in the hands of a Biden DoJ. Said differently, Hunter Biden is not the only person with a troubled road ahead.The constitution confers the pardon power upon the president, and the circumstances of its use speak volumes about the occupant of the Oval Office. Whether a president may pardon himself has yet to be legally tested.Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment by the House and almost certain conviction in the Senate. In August 1974, he left office without pardoning himself or those convicted in the Watergate scandal. Instead, Gerald Ford issued a pardon to his former boss.Trump is no Nixon. In so many ways. The 45th president has gone so far as to unequivocally claim authority to pardon himself, something Nixon refused to do.By any measure, Trump has set a new standard for debasing the presidency. As he stares at an ignominious exit, the ex-reality show host has even managed to make Clinton’s pardon of Rich look quaint. And that takes effort.Yet unlike the Clinton pardon of Rich, a fugitive financier, which sparked a review by James Comey and a barrage of Republican condemnation, among the GOP in Congress Trump’s pardons have elicited little more than a yawn. With the exception of Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who called the pardons “rotten to the core”, they have been met with a collective shrug. None of this should come as a surprise. Trump has recreated the GOP in his image. Republicans know he commands the party’s base, and they stand one primary away from oblivion. In the end, what’s a pardon between friends? More

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      Donald Trump's latest wave of pardons includes Paul Manafort and Charles Kushner

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      Donald Trump has pardoned another 26 people in his second big wave of clemency actions since Tuesday, marking yet another audacious application of presidential power to reward loyalists.The US president pardoned his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his longtime adviser Roger Stone, and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.Stone, a longtime friend and associate, had his sentence for a series of charges related to the Russia investigation commuted by the president in July.In total, Trump pardoned or issued commutations to 29 people on Wednesday, including Margaret Hunter, the wife of Duncan Hunter, the former Republican representative of California, who was pardoned yesterday.Trump’s latest set of pre-Christmas pardons follows a brazen round of pardons and commutations granted on Tuesday. The president issued 15 pardons and five commutations to allies, including two figures who plead guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.On Tuesday, the president pardoned George Papadopoulos, a former adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to federal officials during the Russia investigation, and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer and son-in-law of the Russian billionaire German Khan. Van der Zwaan had pleaded guilty to similar charges.Papadopoulos and Van der Zwaan were the third and fourth people pardoned for charges in connection to the Russia inquiry. In November, Trump pardoned his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Russian official. The president, who has long derided the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as a “hoax”, has been expected to dole out pardons to those implicated in the inquiry.Tuesday’s rash of pardons was also bestowed upon four former Blackwater contractors who were convicted on charges related to a 2007 massacre in Iraq. The four men, part of a security convoy, fired indiscriminately at civilians, killing 14 people – including a nine-year-old child. The move drew harsh criticism, including from the families of those who were killed. Adil al-Khazali, whose father Ali was killed in the attack, said in response: “Justice doesn’t exist.”Under the US constitution, the president has broad, unilateral pardon powers, but pardons are traditionally reviewed by the justice department. Many of Trump’s pardons, however, seem to clash with department standards – and are instead bestowed as a means to reward allies or act on grudges. Only five of 65 pardons and commutations Trump issued before Wednesday were recommended by the justice department pardon attorney, according to a tally by the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith.Manafort, 71, was sentenced for convictions including unregistered lobbying, tax fraud, bank fraud and money laundering. Stone, 68, was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. “Mr President, my family & I humbly thank you for the Presidential Pardon you bestowed on me. Words cannot fully convey how grateful we are,” Manafort tweeted on Wednesday night.A presidential pardon does not shield someone from state charges, and the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, is still looking to prosecute Manafort for state crimes. Trump’s pardon “underscores the urgent need to hold Mr Manafort accountable for his crimes against the People of New York as alleged in our indictment, and we will continue to pursue our appellate remedies”, Danny Frost, a spokesman for Vance, told CNBC. A judge had previously blocked Vance from advancing his case, to protect Manafort from being prosecuted twice for the same crimes.A Trump lawyer reportedly offered pardons to Manafort and Flynn as they were approached by federal investigators – raising suspicions that the pardons were proffered in exchange for loyalty to Trump. The New York Times first reported the news in 2018. In his report following the investigation, Mueller wrote: “Many of the president’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, occurred in public view.”Adam Schiff, the Democratic representative of California who prosecuted the impeachment trial of Trump, said: “During the Mueller investigation, Trump’s lawyer floated a pardon to Manafort. Manafort withdrew his cooperation with prosecutors, lied, was convicted, and then Trump praised him for not ‘ratting’. Trump’s pardon now completes the corrupt scheme.”“Lawless until the bitter end,” Schiff tweeted.The congressman also noted that many serving time in federal prisons had been convicted of non-violent crimes and deserved a reprieve. “But who does Trump pardon? Those who lie, cheat or steal for him and his family,” Schiff said.Charles Kushner, 66, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to the Federal Election Commission. He also pleaded guilty to witness tampering, after he retaliated against his brother-in-law William Schulder, who was cooperating with federal investigators. Kushner was accused of hiring a sex worker to seduce Schulder, videotaping the encounter and sending the tape to Schulder’s wife – Kushner’s sister.Another twist: Kushner was prosecuted by Chris Christie, a former US attorney and New Jersey governor who has been a Trump loyalist.The executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said: “In pardoning Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, President Trump has made it clear that he believes the purpose of the pardon is to bail out rich white men connected to him. Trump has turned an instrument of mercy and justice into just another way for him to be corrupt.”Ben Sasse, a Republican senator of Nebraska, issued a more succinct statement in reaction to the pardons: “This is rotten to the core.”It is unclear whether the president will issue more pardons, which the White House has discussed handing out “like Christmas gifts”, Axios has reported. The White House, which daily shares the president’s public schedule with media, said that on Christmas Eve Trump will be in Florida and “as the Holiday season approaches, President Trump will continue to work tirelessly for the American People. His schedule includes many meetings and calls.” More

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      The Guardian view on US presidential pardons: go no further | Editorial

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      A US president’s power to pardon and commute sentences for federal offences seems to explode America’s claims as a nation of laws and proper process. Donald Trump is no respecter of laws in any aspect of his life, so there is no surprise that he may now be gearing up to make extravagant use of the power before he is prised out of the White House in January.Two things should be remembered here. First, the pardon power does not extend to state laws, only federal ones. Second, other presidents have been here too. Barack Obama, who issued 212 pardons in eight years, granted 330 commutations on his very last day as president in 2017. At this stage of his own presidency, Mr Trump is a remarkably light pardoner and commuter. At the time of writing, he has issued a mere 28 pardons and 16 commutations, although all that could change soon.One explanation, and a difference between Mr Trump and his predecessors, is that a high proportion of his acts of clemency have directly involved his own allies and staff. The latest of these included commutation for his friend Roger Stone, and a pardon for his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, both of whom were convicted of obstructing the Robert Mueller investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign.As the end nears, Mr Trump may be planning to break new ground in other ways. He has sometimes mused that he can pardon himself, something no president has ever done and which many lawyers think is unconstitutional. But he is widely reported to be eyeing “pre-emptive” pardons to his children, Donald Jr, Eric and Ivanka, as well as to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. This week, it has been confirmed that the justice department is investigating an alleged “bribery for pardon” scheme at the White House. Any of these actions, never mind all three, would plumb new depths in Mr Trump’s four-year abuse of the presidency.Shocking though such possibilities are, there is an established legal argument for pardons. In this country, a royal pardon was issued in 2013 to the scientist Alan Turing, who took his own life after being convicted under anti-homosexuality laws in 1952. This leads to a wider moral point. “Pardon’s the word to all,” pronounces Cymbeline in the final scene of Shakespeare’s late play. The former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has described Cymbeline’s line as a moral clarion call. The ability to pardon a person helps to elevate human beings, the archbishop argued. The human capacity for compassion and reconciliation is, he has said, evidence of the hand of the divine.There is, though, nothing remotely divine or compassionate about Mr Trump. The legal power he wields should be used very sparingly, and only in line with a proper and transparent process. Mr Trump has no interest in such things. He may not be able to put himself beyond the law, but he can do massive damage along the way. That would indeed be unpardonable. More

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      Kushner heading to Saudi Arabia and Qatar amid tensions over Iranian scientist killing

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      White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week for talks in a region simmering with tension after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist.A senior administration official said on Sunday that Kushner is to meet the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the Saudi city of Neom, and the emir of Qatar in that country in the coming days. Kushner will be joined by Middle East envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook and Adam Boehler, chief executive of the US International Development Finance Corporation.Kushner and his team helped negotiate normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan since August. The official said they would like to advance more such agreements before Donald Trump hands power to president-elect Joe Biden on 20 January.US officials believe enticing Saudi Arabia into a deal with Israel would prompt other Arab nations to follow suit. But the Saudis do not appear to be on the brink of reaching such a landmark deal and officials in recent weeks have been focusing on other countries, with concern about Iran’s regional influence a uniting factor.Kushner’s trip comes after the killing on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran by unidentified assailants. Western and Israeli governments believe Fakhrizadeh was the architect of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.Days before the killing, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, travelled to Saudi Arabia and met with Prince Mohammed, an Israeli official said, in what was the first publicly confirmed visit by an Israeli leader. Israeli media said they were joined by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.The historic meeting underlined how opposition to Tehran is bringing about a strategic realignment of countries in the Middle East. Prince Mohammed and Netanyahu fear Biden will adopt policies on Iran similar to those adopted during Barack Obama’s presidency which strained Washington’s ties with its traditional regional allies. Biden has said he will rejoin the international nuclear pact with Iran that Trump quit in 2018 – and work with allies to strengthen its terms – if Tehran first resumes strict compliance.The senior administration official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, declined to give more details of Kushner’s trip for security reasons.The official said Kushner met at the White House last week with the Kuwaiti foreign minister, Sheikh Ahmad Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah. Kuwait is seen as critical in any effort to resolve a three-year rift between Qatar and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which comprise the GCC, cut diplomatic ties with Qatar in 2017 and imposed a boycott over allegations that Qatar supported terrorism, a charge it denies. More