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      Birchers review: how the Republican far right gave us Trump and DeSantis

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      Out of sight but not forgotten, the John Birch Society is a husk of its old self. Still, its penchant for conspiracy theories courses in the veins of the American right. A mere 37% of Republicans believe Joe Biden beat Donald Trump legitimately. “January 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime,” says Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News.Back in the day, the society trashed Dwight D Eisenhower and his successor as president, John F Kennedy. That Ike and JFK were war heroes made no difference. They were suspect. Eisenhower attempted to navigate around the Birchers. Kennedy used them as a foil. Dallas, where JFK was assassinated, was a Bircher hotbed.“Birchers charged that President Eisenhower abetted the communists, distributed flyers calling President John F Kennedy a traitor, and repudiated Nato,” Matthew Dallek writes in his in-depth examination of the society’s rise, fall and continued relevance.Dallek, a professor at George Washington University, is the son of Robert Dallek, a legendary presidential biographer. Under the subtitle How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Dallek’s book is quick-paced and well researched. However troubling, it is a joy to read.Dallek argues convincingly that despite the end of the cold war, amid which the Birchers were born, its antipathies and suspicions continue to animate and inflame, a reality Trump and his minions remember and Democrats forget at their peril.Dallek looks at how the Birchers’ ideas came to pollenate and populate the Republican party. It didn’t happen randomly or suddenly. The society never disappeared and nor did its ideas and resentments. The “quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq” coupled with the “financial crisis and Great Recession” breathed fresh currency into isolationism, nativism and scorn for elites.Founded in 1958, at a secret meeting in Indianapolis led by Robert Welch, the candy manufacturer, the group took its name from a missionary and intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communists in China. Birch’s Christianity and the circumstances of his death were central to the society’s message.Original members included Fred C Koch, founder of Koch Industries and father of Charles and David, the hard-right political activists and billionaire donors.“In the 1930s [Fred Koch] had helped build oil refineries, first in Stalin’s Soviet Union and then in Hitler’s Germany, and his brushes with both regimes shaped his cold war philosophy,” Dallek writes.“In the USSR, he knew people who had been purged by Stalin … In contrast, he liked what he saw when he inspected his refineries in Nazi Germany.”Fascism came with the trappings of prosperity. These days, the Koch-funded Quincy Institute takes a dim view of US and western assistance to Ukraine.The John Birch Society is now obscure yet basks in undreamed-of success. Instead of railing against fluoridated water and embracing laetrile (an apricot derivative) as a cancer cure, the Birchers’ intellectual heirs dump on the Covid vaccine, roll the dice on polio and worship ivermectin as a miracle drug.Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and Trump mini-me, is all in with his nonstop attack on modernity and vaccination. Trump no longer reminds voters of Operation Warp Speed, the great success in combating the latest plague.The mortality gap between precincts populated by red and blue America says plenty, but Republican animus to vaccine mandates appears baked in. Fringy need not mean down and out. Just look at Ginni Thomas and her husband, Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice.Ginni Thomas, a longtime far-right activist entangled in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election up to and including January 6, grew up nestled in comfort. As Dallek points out, many in the Birchers’ ranks possessed a firm foothold in the middle and upper-middle classes.“A childhood neighbor recalled that Ginni Thomas’s parents were active in a losing 1968 referendum campaign in Omaha to ban putting fluoride in the water supply,” Dallek notes.“My Republican parents, who knew them well, certainly considered them Birchers,” the journalist Kurt Andersen recalls.Dallek reminds us of the bookstores opened by the society and the role played by female Birchers. Phyllis Schlafly, the great hard-right crusader, was a Bircher as well as a Harvard grad. She opposed the Voting Rights Act, wrote Barry Goldwater’s 1964 manifesto and successfully opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner, a non-Birch conservative and the mother of William Buckley, the founder of the National Review, encouraged an acquaintance to establish a society chapter. Buckley eventually – and circuitously – came to stand against the Birchers. Welch heaped praise on his mom.Race was always near the surface. The society attacked Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court decision which held that de jure racially segregated schools were unequal and unconstitutional. The Birchers, as Dallek recounts, branded the decision “procommunist”.Even now, Brown sticks in the craw on the right. Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump supreme court appointee, refers to Brown as inviolate super-precedent but Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network both attack its underpinnings.Decisions such as Brown, they wrote after the confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh, another Trump-picked conservative justice, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.“May”? Let that sink in.Another Republican primary is upon us. Trump again leads the way. The furor over his dinner with Ye, the antisemitic recording artist formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, recedes. DeSantis loses ground. Authenticity and charisma matter. The governor parrots Trump and Carlson on Ukraine, flip-flopping in the process.Yet no other Republican comes close. The John Birch Society is still winning big.
      Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Trump says the Queen, Diana and Oprah Winfrey ‘kissed my ass’ in letters

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      Queen Elizabeth II, Diana, Princess of Wales, Richard Nixon, Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton and other correspondents will be shown to have “kissed my ass”, Donald Trump said on Tuesday, promoting a forthcoming book of their letters.Letters to Trump will contain 150 missives from figures also including Kim Jong-un and Ronald Reagan. Drawn from Trump’s life before and after he ran for president, the book is due to be published next month.“I think they’re going to see a very fascinating life,” Trump told the far-right Breitbart News of what readers might expect.“I knew them all – and every one of them kissed my ass, and now I only have half of them kissing my ass.”His son Donald Trump Jr told Breitbart his father had corresponded with “some of the most interesting people in the world” but “it’s amazing how quickly their adoration of him changed when he ran for office as a Republican.“Letters to Trump shows you exactly how they felt about him and how phony their newfound disdain truly is.”Trump has not announced a deal to write a conventional memoir of a presidency which ended in disgrace and a second impeachment after the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. His reputation has not improved out of office.Running for the Republican nomination in 2024, Trump remains under the threat of criminal indictments including a reportedly imminent New York charge related to hush money paid to a porn star. He is also under investigation for retaining classified material, reportedly including letters from Kim Jong-un.Trump continues to claim his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 was the result of electoral fraud, the lie that incited the Capitol attack.Far-right support courted by Trump, meanwhile, includes devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that leading Democrats are members of a cannibalistic, paedophilic cabal.QAnon followers also believe John F Kennedy Jr, the son of President John F Kennedy, did not die in a plane crash in 1999 and will soon come to their aid.Trump shared with Breitbart a letter in which JFK Jr, then a magazine publisher, thanked Trump for visiting his office to “discourse on politics, New York, men and women”.Trump said JFK Jr was a friend, “even though we were of a different persuasion”.The Kennedy family is one of the most powerful in the Democratic party. In fact, Trump was a Democrat too for a while.Trump said: “I believe [JFK Jr] would have run for the Senate and that he would have been president someday. He was a handsome guy. He was a fantastic guy. He had the ‘it factor’ and he would have gone to the top of the world in the Kennedy family.”Trump’s admission that many correspondents no longer flatter him was telegraphed in the first report on the new book, by Axios last week.Axios said an Oprah Winfrey letter from 2000 says: “Too bad we’re not running for office. What a team!” Thanking Trump for compliments, the TV host says: “It’s one thing to try and live a life of integrity – still another to have people like yourself notice.”According to Axios, Trump writes: “Sadly, once I announced for president [in 2015], she never spoke to me again.”Letters to Trump will sell for $99 unsigned or $399 signed. It follows another pricey tome, Our Journey Together, a primarily visual account of Trump’s time in the White House.Trump published his picture book after blocking plans for a White House photographer to publish a book of her own. More

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      It’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism review: Bernie Sanders, by the book

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      ReviewIt’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism review: Bernie Sanders, by the bookThe Vermont senator and former presidential candidate offers a clarion call against the American oligarchsThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has a predictably unsparing view of the effects of “unfettered capitalism”: it “destroys anything that gets in its way in the pursuit of profits. It destroys the environment. It destroys our democracy. It discards human beings without a second thought. It will never provide workers with the fulfillment that Americans have a right to expect from their careers. [And it is] propelled by uncontrollable greed and contempt for human decency.”Has Bernie Sanders really helped Joe Biden move further left?Read moreThe two-time presidential candidate makes his case with the usual horrifying numbers about the acceleration of inequality in America: 90% of our wealth is owned by one-tenth of 1% of the population; the wealth of 725 US billionaires increased 70% during the pandemic to more than $5tn; BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street now control assets of $20tn and are major shareholders in 96% of S&P 500 companies.Sanders recites these statistics with religious fervor, and poses fundamental questions for our time: “Do we believe in the Golden Rule? [or] do we accept … that gold rules – and that lying, cheating, and stealing are OK if you’re powerful enough to get away with it?”Bernie believes (and I strongly agree) that it’s long past the time when we should be paying at least as much attention to American oligarchs as we do to those surrounding Vladimir Putin. Our homegrown plutocrats “own” our democracy.“They spend tens of billions … on campaign contributions … to buy politicians who will do their bidding. They spend billions more on lobbying firms to influence governmental decisions” at every level. And “to a significant degree”, the oligarchs “own” the media. That is why our prominent pundits “rarely raise issues that will undermine the privileged positions of their employers” and “there is little public discussion about the power of corporate America and how oligarchs wield that power to benefit their interests at the expense of working families”.We were reminded this week of how this system works. Joe Biden released a budget with perfectly modest proposals for tax increases, like a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest Americans and a seven-percentage-point raise in the corporate tax rate to 28%, which would still leave it seven points lower than it was before Donald Trump gutted it with his gigantic tax giveaways.Instantly, experts owned and operated by the billionaires started spewing their familiar bilge, like these moving words from the Cato Institute: “Higher tax rates on the wages of a narrow segment of the United States’ most productive executives and business leaders will have strong disincentives against their continued work and other negative behavioral effects that translate into a less dynamic, slower growing economy.“Higher taxes on investment income target the financial rewards to successful entrepreneurs who undertake risks and persevere through failure to build high return businesses that provide welfare enhancing goods and services to people around the world.”Sanders quotes one of the most prescient Americans of the mid-20th century, from 1944: “As our industrial economy expanded [our] political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”The name of that dangerous revolutionary: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Several decades before that, Theodore Roosevelt similarly bemoaned the “absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting” which “has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power”.There is something extremely refreshing about an author who assumes it should be obvious that billionaires should not be allowed to exist – and has perfectly reasonable proposals about how they should be eliminated. At the height of the pandemic, Sanders proposed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, which would have imposed a 60% tax on all the wealth gained by 467 billionaires between 18 March 2020 and January 2021.“But why stop at one year?” he now asks. After all, the 1950s were economic boom times in America – and under a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, “the top tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was around 92%. America thrived. Unions were strong. Working-class Americans could afford to support themselves and buy homes on a single income.” And the richest 20% controlled a measly (by current standards) 42.8% of the wealth.Bernie Sanders: ‘Oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? They run the US as well’Read moreSanders’ 99.5 Percent Act would only touch the top 0.5% of Americans. “But the families of billionaires in America, who have a combined net worth of over $5tn, would owe up to $3tn in estate taxes.” He would accomplish this with a 45% tax rate on estates worth $3.5m and a 65% rate on those worth more than $1bn.There is much more here, including a convincing case for Medicare for All and an excoriation of a for-profit healthcare system which spends twice as much per citizen as France or Germany and still manages to leaves tens of millions of Americans un- or underinsured, all while nourishing an obscene pharmaceuticals business in which profits jumped by 90% in 2021.I first toured the castles of the Loire Valley as a teenager in the company of the family of my uncle, Jerry Kaiser, a 60s radical and a very early opponent of the war in Vietnam. As we absorbed the opulence of one chateau after another, Jerry had only one question: “What took them so long to have a revolution?”The noble purpose of Bernie Sander’s powerful new book is to get millions of Americans to ask that question of themselves – right now.
      It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is published in the US by Crown
      TopicsBooksBernie SandersUS politicsDemocratsUS SenateUS CongressUS economyreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trust the Plan review: How QAnon – and Trump – unhinged America

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      ReviewTrust the Plan review: How QAnon – and Trump – unhinged AmericaWill Sommer of the Daily Beast paints a troubling picture of a conspiracy theory showing few signs of declineDonald Trump is out of office but QAnon holds sway. Last September, Trump posted an image of himself with a Q lapel pin and the words “The Storm is Coming”. A few months later, Liz Crokin, a QAnon promoter, spoke at Mar-a-Lago and posed with the former president. In one photo, the pair flashed a “thumbs up” sign.Why are Republican Senators flirting with QAnon conspiracies? Politics Weekly America podcastRead moreQAnon is the latest great American conspiracy theory. Its key beliefs: a secret cabal “controls global governments”, the 2020 election was stolen, Hollywood and liberal elites crave the blood of children in bid to sustain their youth. You read that right. QAnon is rife with stories of “mole children”, stashed away in caves for the delectation of the rich and powerful.“The suspicious 2019 jailhouse death of wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein … prompted new public interest in the idea of powerful elites abusing children,” Will Sommer writes.With his first book, the Daily Beast reporter jumps into this steaming cauldron of conspiracy and distrust. He emerges to offer a close examination of the rise and continued presence of QAnon on the American political landscape.Detailed and impeccably researched, Trust the Plan is essentially a crash course on a volatile and vocal segment of the US population. It is unlikely Sommer will win hearts and minds. Trust the Plan is essentially written for blue (Democratic) America. But it is eye-opening, nonetheless.Sommer has spent considerable time among QAnon adherents. At a May 2021 conference in Texas, they treated him suspiciously and accused him of trespassing. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” an elderly woman scolded. The walk of shame stuck with him. Sommer takes QAnon seriously – as do Republicans, as should Democrats.QAnon followers are largely young, male and lack a college degree. They are disaffected but not oblivious. For them, the Great Recession left its mark. Marriage and stability became luxury goods. Life expectancy and birth rates receded. Covid turned the world on its head.QAnon is sufficiently amorphous to adapt to changing facts and realities. It can muster the devotion and fanaticism of a religious group. The dream never dies.QAnon logos and banners loomed large on January 6, in the prelude to and the aftermath of insurrection. QAnon adherents did not know what to make of Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president who that day refused to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. Some hated him, others thought he was one of them. Gallows with his name on appeared. Trump didn’t care.Michael Flynn and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump loyalists on the national political stage, count themselves among the ranks of QAnon. Other politicians, like Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, and Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, would prefer not to talk about it – but know QAnon is a source of Republican votes as well as Trump shock troops.The politicians prevaricate. McCarthy once said there was no place for QAnon within the Republican party. Three months after that, as Sommer puts it, “he suffered a bout of selective amnesia”.“I’m not sure what that is,” DeSantis told one reporter. In March 2022, he appointed Esther Byrd to Florida’s board of education. She had tweeted her support for the insurrection and the Proud Boys. She flew the QAnon flag on her family boat.George Soros and Hillary Clinton, familiar boogeymen to the right, feature in QAnon lore. One early internet post from “Q”, the anonymous instigator of the conspiracy, read: “Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7.45am-8.30am EST on Monday – the morning on 30 October 2017.”Clinton remains free. Trump flogs Soros in fundraising emails. Meet the new antisemitism: a lot like the old version.Some QAnon adherents contend that John F Kennedy Jr, oldest son of the 35th president, is still alive. Why is complicated but some say he is actually Q. They believe he faked his death in 1999 to avoid the cabal, which his father failed to do. Sommer describes how dozens of the faithful flocked to Dallas in 2022, convinced JFK Jr and a passel of other deceased celebrities would return. Suffice to say, they were disappointed.Sommer also shows how the Covid pandemic breathed life into QAnon just as the movement was flailing. Adherents were losing interest. The “storm”, the moment in QAnon lore when the wicked are punished and Trump emerges resplendent in triumph, appeared to be slipping away. The chatrooms and social media accounts that doubled as QAnon conduits were narrowing.Belief in QAnon has strengthened in US since Trump was voted out, study findsRead moreBut Covid’s reach, its origins in China and the US government’s response played into the movement’s distrust of institutions and simple fear of foreigners. And worse. Sommer records how QAnon adherents defiantly flaunted Covid public health rules, then died.The fact that Covid mortality rates diverged between red and blue America was not a game changer. Recent revelations about US intelligence and whether the coronavirus came from a lab leak stand to bolster the fury. That the powers that be have been less than candid is disappointing but no surprise. Anger should be expected.Forty percent of Republicans and three in eight Democrats believe the central claims of QAnon to be “very” or “somewhat” accurate. As he watches the 2024 primary calendar, Trump stokes and internalizes it all. Already, he is lobbing the words “pedophile” and “groomer” towards his main challenger, DeSantis.Recent polls show Trump solidifying his lead. White evangelicals lacking a college degree are a key voting bloc. Trump is playing to his strength.Sommer suggests answers to the emergence of QAnon. He acknowledges that direct confrontation is not the way to go. With organized religion in retrograde, amid a growing national malaise, the fury may be here for some time.
      Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America is published in the US by HarperCollins
      TopicsBooksQAnonDonald TrumpUS politicsThe far rightPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

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      The Courage to be Free review: Ron DeSantis bows and scrapes to Trump

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      ReviewThe Courage to be Free review: Ron DeSantis bows and scrapes to TrumpOn the page, the Florida governor doesn’t show much courage about the man he must beat to be the Republican nomineeThe latest polls place Ron DeSantis and Joe Biden in a footrace for 2024. Florida’s 44-year-old Republican governor leads the octogenarian president by a whisker. More Americans like DeSantis than otherwise. Whether he can capture the Republican nomination, however, remains an open question. He has not yet declared his candidacy and trails Donald Trump in hypothetical matchups. Then again, no one else comes close.DeSantis praises Trump for ‘enhancing my name recognition’ in new bookRead moreSaid differently, Trump and his legacy remain forces for any Republican to reckon with. Nikki Haley, an announced candidate for the GOP nomination, can barely mention his name. She wants to supplant her ex-boss by eliding him. A bold strategy.DeSantis is patient. He will probably wait to announce until late spring, when the Florida legislature adjourns. For the moment, he expects us to be content with The Courage to Be Free, a memoir-cum-288-page-exercise in sycophancy and ambition tethered to a whole lot of owning the libs.It is a mirthless read, lacking even the gleeful invective of Never Give an Inch, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s own opening shot on the road to 2024. Predictably, DeSantis berates the left as unpatriotic and ruinous, all while prostrating himself before his former patron.“I knew that a Trump endorsement would provide me with the exposure to GOP primary voters across the state of Florida,” he admits, discussing his campaign for governor in 2018. “I was confident that many would see me as a good candidate once they learned about my record.”It’s all about bowing and scraping.“Trump also brought a unique star power to the race. If someone had asked me, as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, to name someone who was rich, I – and probably nearly all my friends – would have responded by naming Donald Trump.”DeSantis was born in 1978. Growing up, he would have seen Trump’s fortunes plummet and his first marriage hit the skids.Apparently, 80s and 90s success stories – Steve Jobs of Apple, say, or Bill Gates of Microsoft – failed to cross DeSantis’s radar. These days, by contrast, the governor has a heap of scorn for the giants of tech. He depicts big tech as censorious, concentrated and “woke”. He reiterates his disdain for Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and George Soros, financier and liberal patron.DeSantis criticizes Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Civic Life for funding election operations. He contends that such private-public partnerships undermine public faith in electoral integrity and give Democrats a boost. He says nothing about Citizens United, the 2010 supreme court decision that set corporate money loose on US elections, other than to distinguish campaign donations from ballot mechanics. This weekend, at the Four Seasons hotel in Palm Beach, DeSantis will host a getaway for the deep-pocketed set.DeSantis also fails to examine the ties that bound the Mercer family – DeSantis donors and Trump stalwarts – with Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company then partly owned by the Mercer family, used Facebook to illegally harvest personal data. Steve Bannon, who would become Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, was a board member and officer. He denies personal culpability.The Mercers own Breitbart News, which Bannon once led. Parler, owned by Rebekah Mercer, allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection. In the run-up to the riot, the network emerged as a forum for violent threats, so much so that it warned the FBI of “specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol”.On the page, not surprisingly, DeSantis does not examine the January 6 attack. He does loudly take credit for a Florida law that would have regulated platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Here, again, he omits crucial details. Namely, federal courts found the law unconstitutional: it violated first-amendment free-speech protections.“Put simply, with minor exceptions, the government can’t tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it,” wrote Kevin Newsom, a Trump-appointed judge on the 11th circuit. “We hold that it is substantially likely that social media companies – even the biggest ones – are private actors whose rights the first amendment protects.”Florida is urging the supreme court to review the case. Adding to the drama, Trump filed an amicus brief. The high court awaits a submission from the justice department.True to form, DeSantis brands the “national legacy press” as the “pretorian guard of the nation’s failed ruling class” and seconds Trump’s claim that the “fake news media” is the “enemy of the American People”. Yet for all of this media-bashing in the name of supposed truth, the governor omits the role of Fox News in propagating fake news about the presidential election and defamation cases brought against the news channel.How Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’Read moreOff the page, on that issue, DeSantis is at least mildly subversive. Recently, he featured the attorney Elizabeth “Libby” Locke at a confab dedicated to attacking the press and gutting US libel law. Significantly, Locke is representing Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6bn defamation suit against Fox News arising from allegedly false reporting on the 2020 election. The case is set for an April trial in Delaware.“DeSantis hosting Dominion lawyer Libby Locke! He is showing his true colors!” So shrieked Mike Lindell, AKA the MyPillow guy and Trump adviser, on Twitter.DeSantis thinks he can have it both ways. Democrats would do well to take him literally and seriously. Last fall, he won re-election by a jaw-dropping 19 points, attracting more than two in five working-class minority voters and making serious inroads among African Americans.His book recounts all this. So far, the Democrats have offered little by way of response. At the polls, low taxes, plenty of sunshine and Jimmy Buffet’s greatest hits are a tough combination to beat.
      The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival is published in the US by HarperCollins
      TopicsBooksRon DeSantisDonald TrumpUS elections 2024RepublicansFloridaUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Untouchable review: Trump as ‘lawless Houdini’ above US justice

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      ReviewUntouchable review: Trump as ‘lawless Houdini’ above US justice Elie Honig offers a powerful indictment of the former president and those who have failed to bring him downThis book by a former federal prosecutor is subtitled “How Powerful People Get Away With It” but its overwhelming focus is Donald Trump and Merrick Garland, the most famous unindicted miscreant of modern times and the attorney general most responsible for the failure, so far, to prosecute any of his offences.People vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DARead moreElie Honig writes that a “staggering parade” of Trump’s henchmen have been indicted, convicted, imprisoned or all three: Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, Thomas Barrack, Elliott Broidy, Sam Patten, George Nader, Allen Weisselberg and – last but not least – the Trump Organization itself.And yet, somehow, “a lawless Houdini … stands at the epicenter of the carnage, untouched, undeterred, and, if anything, emboldened”.Honig thinks the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is still “the most likely to indict Trump” for his efforts to tamper with election results. But Honig makes a powerful case that “the prime opportunities to hold Trump criminally accountable for his actions have passed”, as federal and state prosecutors, especially Garland, “have fumbled away their best chances and inexcusably allowed years to lapse without meaningful action”.In the last four years, justice department leaders have zigzagged between extremes. First there was the wildly political and persistently dishonest William Barr, whose efforts to keep Trump safe ranged from keeping his name out of the indictment of Cohen for illegal hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, to Barr’s flatly false assertion that evidence developed by the special counsel Robert Mueller was “not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense”.Then came Garland, who is the opposite of Barr but who so far has managed to be nearly as helpful to Trump as his predecessor.“The problem,” Honig writes, “is in seeking to … restore political independence [for the justice department], Garland has gone too far …“It’s one thing to do the job without regard to politics. But it’s another to contort ordinary prosecutorial judgement to avoid doing anything that might even be perceived as political or controversial.”Honig prosecuted more than a hundred members of the mafia. He recounts several such cases, highlighting the similarities between the chiefs of famous families like the Luccheses and Gambinos and the man at the top of the Trump Organization.One way in which they operate the same way is to make sure subordinates lie to protect their boss, without being directly ordered to do so. For example, Cohen perjured himself when he said Trump’s efforts to build a tower in Moscow ended before the Iowa caucuses in 2016. They actually continued for months, into the “heart of the presidential campaign”.Honig writes: “Trump never said to Cohen, ‘I need you to lie for me.’ Instead, Trump openly lied in public about the timing of the Russia deal ‘for all to see’ – including Cohen.“Therein lies the beauty of being a boss. Trump never said the magic words that would have obviously given rise to criminal liability.”Honig also focuses on the dubious ethics of the former Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr, who bungled a chance to indict two of Trump’s children over the Trump Soho project, then did the same with an investigation of Trump himself.The lawyer for Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump was Marc Kasowitz. As the New Yorker, ProPublica and WNYC reported, Kasowitz gave Vance a $25,000 campaign contribution in January 2012 – just five months before meeting with Vance about the Trump kids’ case.Vance returned Kasowitz’s contribution just before his meeting with Kasowitz. Three months after the meeting, Vance dropped the case against the Trumps. Incredibly, just a few weeks after that, “Vance accepted a brand new, even larger campaign contribution from Kasowitz, who personally donated almost $32,000 and raised at least $18,000 more.” Five years later – only after the New Yorker had reported those additional contributions – Vance returned Kasowitz’s contribution again!“This much is beyond dispute,” Honig writes. “The sequence here looked terrible.”But no one comes out looking worse than Garland. Trump was protected while he was in the White House by a decades-old justice department memoranda which concluded it was impossible to indict a sitting president. After 21 January 2021, Trump lost that protection. But for many months, Garland did nothing concrete to take advantage.Honig offers the seven-count indictment he says he would have brought against Trump if he were the prosecutor in charge. It would include:
      Count 1: obstruction of justice. The Mueller report’s description of Trump’s firing of the FBI director James Comey and his attempts to fire special counsel Mueller provides overwhelming evident that “Trump obstructed justice”.
      Count 2: campaign finance violations connected to hush money paid to two of Trump’s alleged former girlfriends.
      Count 3: bribery, extortion, foreign election aid and witness retaliating and tampering, all of which were the subject of Trump’s first impeachment.
      Count 4: conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding and election interference – the subject of the second impeachment.
      Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nationRead moreHonig’s final conclusion: while “Garland plays by Marquess of Queensbury rules”, Trump is “a remorseless street brawler”. Garland could have brought criminal charges “but he didn’t, at least not in a timely manor … As many advantages as the system gave to Trump, and as aggressive and effective as he has been in explaining them, Garland still could have achieved some measure of justice, if he had just done his job.”This week brought the news that Jack Smith, the special counsel belatedly appointed by Garland to investigate Trump, had subpoenaed Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, as part of his investigation of the former president’s post-election activities.Perhaps the justice department will manage to defy expectations and return an indictment against Donald Trump. This powerful book, however, offers very little hope for that most desirable outcome.
      Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It is published in the US by Harper
      TopicsBooksLaw (US)US crimeUS politicsPolitics booksDonald TrumpJeffrey EpsteinreviewsReuse this content More

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      People vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DA

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      ReviewPeople vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DAProsecutor who helped convict John Gotti thinks Alvin Bragg let Trump slip from the hook. His memoir proves controversial Mark Pomerantz is a well-credentialed former federal prosecutor. As a younger man he clerked for a supreme court justice and helped send the mob boss John Gotti to prison. He did stints in corporate law. In 2021, he left retirement to join the investigation of Donald Trump by the Manhattan district attorney. Pomerantz’s time with the DA was substantive but controversial.Trump porn star payment a ‘zombie case’ that wouldn’t die, ex-prosecutor says in bookRead moreIn summer 2021, he helped deliver an indictment for tax fraud against the Trump Organization and Alan Weisselberg, its chief financial officer. At the time, Cy Vance Jr, the son of Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, was Manhattan DA. Pomerantz also interviewed Michael Cohen, Trump fanboy turned convicted nemesis, pored over documents and clamored for the indictment of the former president on racketeering charges.For Pomerantz, nailing Trump for his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who claims an affair Trump denies, didn’t pass muster. But that avenue of prosecution was a “zombie case” that wouldn’t die. It still hasn’t: a Manhattan grand jury again hears evidence.Pomerantz saw Trump as a criminal mastermind aided by flunkies and enforcers. He believed charges ought to align with the gravity of the crimes. But as Pomerantz now repeatedly writes in his memoir, Alvin Bragg, elected district attorney in November 2021, did not want to move against Trump. In early 2022, Bragg balked. In March, Pomerantz quit – and leaked his resignation letter.“I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the penal law,” Pomerantz fumed. “I fear that your decision means that Mr Trump will not be held fully accountable for his crimes.”Now comes the memoir, People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account. It is a 300-page exercise in score-settling and scorn. Pomerantz loathes Trump and holds Bragg in less than high regard. He equates the former president with Gotti and all but dismisses the DA as a progressive politician, not an actual crime-fighter.In a city forever plagued by crime and political fights about it, Bragg’s time as DA has proved controversial: over guns, trespassing, turnstile jumping, marijuana and, yes, the squeegee men.Bragg is African American. This week, a group of high-ranking Black officials protested against Pomerantz’s attacks. In response, Pomerantz called Bragg “respected, courageous, ethical and thoughtful” but said: “I disagreed with him about the decision he made in the Trump case.”In his resignation letter, Pomerantz wrote: “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice.”Trump, he now writes, “seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law”. That may conjure up images of Road Runner and Wile E Coyote but Pomerantz is serious. “In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organised crime family.”The Goodfellas vibe is integral to Trumpworld. In The Devil’s Bargain, way back in 2017, Joshua Green narrated how Trump tore into Paul Manafort, his then campaign manager, shouting: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?” It was if Trump was channeling Joe Pesci.With the benefit of hindsight, Pomerantz concludes that the US justice department is better suited to handle a wholesale financial investigation of Trump than the Manhattan DA. Then again, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, has a lot on his plate. An insurrection is plenty.Pomerantz’s book has evoked strong reactions. Trump is enraged, of course. On Truth Social, he wrote: “Crooked Hillary Clinton’s lawyer [Pomerantz says he has never met her], radically deranged Mark Pomerantz, led the fake investigation into me and my business at the Manhattan DA’s Office and quit because DA Bragg, rightfully, wanted to drop the ‘weak’ and ‘fatally flawed’ case. This is disgraceful conduct by Pomerantz, especially since, as always, I’ve done nothing wrong!”Really?In December, a Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization on 17 counts of tax fraud and the judge imposed a $1.6m fine. Alan Weisselberg pleaded guilty and testified against his employer. Trump and three of his children – Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric – are defendants in a $250m civil lawsuit brought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on fraud-related charges. That case comes to trial in October 2023, months before the presidential primary. Sooner than that will be the E Jean Carroll trial, over alleged defamation and a rape claim Trump denies.Significantly, state prosecutors say Pomerantz may have crossed an ethical line.“By writing and releasing a book in the midst of an ongoing case, the author is upending the norms and ethics of prosecutorial conduct and is potentially in violation of New York criminal law,” J Anthony Jordan, president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, announced.Never Give an Inch review: Mike Pompeo as ‘heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass’Read moreBragg accused Pomerantz of violating a confidentiality agreement. Pomerantz is unbowed. “I am comfortable that this book will not prejudice any investigation or prosecution of Donald Trump,” he states on the page. No formal ethics complaint has appeared.Pomerantz also offers a window on personalities that crossed his path. Cohen receives ample attention. Pomerantz lauds Trump’s former fixer for his cooperation but reiterates that Cohen pleaded guilty to perjury.His conduct left Pomerantz shaking his head. Cohen’s liking for publicity could be unsettling. So was his Oval Office tête-a-tête with Trump over the payment to Daniels. Pomerantz was disgusted. Trump and Cohen, he writes, defiled America’s Holy of Holies, its “sanctum sanctorum”.No harm, no foul. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, announced: “Mr Cohen will continue to cooperate with DA Bragg and his team, speaking truth to power – as he has always done.” On Wednesday, Cohen met the Manhattan DA for the 15th time. Pomerantz is gone. The show goes on.
      People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Trump porn star payment a ‘zombie case’ that wouldn’t die, ex-prosecutor says in book

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      Trump porn star payment a ‘zombie case’ that wouldn’t die, ex-prosecutor says in bookMark Pomerantz writes of frustration of attempt to make hush money to Stormy Daniels a money-laundering case Donald Trump’s hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels is a “zombie case” that keeps coming back from the dead, a former New York prosecutor writes in a new book published as his former office once again considers filing criminal charges against the former president over the matter.Prosecutors likened Trump to mob boss and had to prove he wasn’t insane – bookRead morePeople vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account, will be published in the US on Tuesday. It has been extensively reported. The Guardian received a copy.Mark Pomerantz’s book has proved controversial, not least because it arrives as the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, continues to investigate Trump, empaneling a grand jury hearing evidence about the Daniels payment. Bragg and Pomerantz, who fell out over the investigation of Trump, have exchanged broadsides in the media.On the page, Pomerantz lists numerous matters on which he says New York prosecutors considered charging Trump, including his tax affairs, his relationships with financial institutions including Deutsche Bank and Ladder Capital, property deals in Washington and Chicago, and leases at Trump Tower in Manhattan.But he says the Daniels payment came to seem a viable way to take Trump on.Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. He denies it, but in 2016, as he ran for president, his then lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet.News of the payment broke in early 2018, when Trump was president. Trump was revealed to have reimbursed Cohen for the payment but only Cohen paid a legal price, his breach of election finance law contributing to a three-year prison sentence. Trump has never been charged.In his book, Pomerantz writes that he came to view the payment as a potential money-laundering offence.“If Clifford had gotten money by threatening to tell the world that she had slept with Donald Trump,” he writes, “that sounded like extortion to me. And if it was extortion, then maybe the hush money she received could be regarded as criminal proceeds, so action taken to conceal Trump’s identity as the source of the money was chargeable as money laundering.”This, Pomerantz writes, was “a new idea, and I got enthusiastic about it”. He shared his ideas with other investigators, he says, and “the return to life of the hush money facts as a potential basis for prosecution sparked a nickname for this part of the investigation … the ‘zombie’ case, because it was alive, and then it was dead, and now it had sprung back to life”.Pomerantz writes that he thought the “zombie case” was “very strong”, as the basic facts were “readily provable”. He describes Cohen’s willing cooperation and evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie about the payment in the Oval Office itself.In late February 2021, Pomerantz says, he sent a memo to the New York district attorney, then Cy Vance Jr, outlining the “zombie case” and its vital contention that the $130,000 Cohen paid Daniels was “‘dirty money’, or the proceeds of a crime”.He admits he was presenting “a somewhat awkward construct”, in part as he would have to prove Trump was a victim of blackmail.Cohen’s description of Trump’s reaction to Daniels’s claims helped. Pomerantz writes: “I asked what words did they use, and his answer was that Trump referred to it as ‘fucking blackmail’. That was more than sufficient for my purposes.”But Pomerantz says his “creative theorising smacked into [the New York district attorney’s] cautious and conservative culture”. Other investigators “balked” at his extortion theory, he writes, partially because it would be hard to prove Daniels had physically threatened Trump, as necessary under New York law.Pomerantz then focused on Daniels’s lawyer and extracting information from federal prosecutors in New York. But he said he came upon “a new legal problem” which returned the “zombie case” to its grave.Under New York law, he writes, the money Daniels received “had to qualify as ‘criminal proceeds’ when Cohen sent it; otherwise sending was not money laundering. If the money became criminal proceeds only when received, the crime of money laundering had not taken place.”And so the “zombie case” was dead again.Pomerantz describes a brief flutter back to life, when he and colleagues were “contemplating an indictment that featured false business records … which would bring the ‘zombie’ theory back from the dead once again”.But Bragg, who succeeded Vance as Manhattan district attorney, became a lightning rod for liberals when he was reported to have backed away from indicting Trump on any charge. Pomerantz resigned in February 2022, accusing Bragg of acting “contrary to the public interest”.On Sunday, discussing Trump’s tax affairs, Pomerantz told CBS: “If you take the exact same conduct, and make it not about Donald Trump and not about a former president of the United States, would the case have been indicted? It would have been indicted in a flat second.”Pomerantz also called Bragg’s decision not to indict Trump a “grave failure of justice”.Bragg told the New York Times Pomerantz “decided to quit a year ago and sign a book deal”.“I haven’t read the book and won’t comment on any ongoing investigation because of the harm it could cause to the case,” Bragg said.Bragg did secure a conviction against the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, on tax charges. Not long after that, the investigation of the Daniels payment was reported to be ongoing.Trump complained about “a continuation of the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time”.But Pomerantz’s “zombie” case has bounced back from the grave once again.In his book, Pomerantz says that if the hush money case is the only one the New York DA pursues against Trump, it will be “a very peculiar and unsatisfying end to this whole saga”, given that “persistent fraud … permeated [Trump’s] financial statements”.“That case involves serious criminal misconduct, [but] it pales in comparison to the financial statement fraud.”TopicsBooksDonald TrumpPolitics booksUS politicsUS crimeMichael CohenStormy DanielsnewsReuse this content More