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      The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj review – secrets and spies

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      The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj review – secrets and spies A murky alliance between intelligence agencies, among them the UK and US, is revealed in a scandalous tale of mistrust and misjudgment, including British teenager Shamima Begum being smuggled into Syria by a Canadian spy On the same spring day in 1946 that Winston Churchill made a speech coining the phrases “special relationship” and “iron curtain”, another historic event that would help to shape the next 75 years took place. A secret pact was signed between the UK and the US, a formal agreement to share intelligence in order to combat the Soviet threat.In time, as Canada, Australia and New Zealand signed on, too, that agreement would become known as Five Eyes – although it was not until 2010 that the alliance was made public. Five Eyes, much like the UK’s permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council and its leadership role in Nato, has allowed Britain to feel, post-Brexit, like it still has a seat at the top table. But, perhaps understandably for a secret alliance of intelligence agencies, little about its inner workings have ever been known.Richard Kerbaj, a former security correspondent for the Sunday Times and documentary-maker, has made a decent stab at lifting the curtain. He has persuaded many of those involved in Five Eyes to speak to him, and delved into national archives of all five nations to piece together an understandably partial history.It is a tale that reveals an alliance marred by mistrust, mistakes and misjudgments, one that likes to see itself as responsible for keeping its nations safe but has, at times, not only failed in that endeavour but has also contributed to global insecurity.Until the end of the cold war, the five nations were united in their attempts to defeat the Soviet Union. Part of that involved rooting out Soviet spies or turning Russian diplomats. This is the work that the Five Eyes has been happy to reveal. It has been less keen on shining a light on the darker role it has played.Intelligence agencies may like to see themselves as defensive outfits – preventing attacks, not carrying them out themselves. But over the past 70 years, British and American intelligence agencies have been responsible for a series of aggressive moves that have destabilised the Middle East, contributing to many of the geopolitical problems that still exist today.In the late 1950s, CIA chief Allen Dulles orchestrated the overthrow of a series of democratically elected governments from Iran to Guatemala. In Syria he oversaw “a series of conspiracies” to overthrow the government for committing the crime of refusing to join a western-led military alliance. As Kerbaj points out, “the CIA’s botched operation magnified the already growing anti-western sentiment in the Middle East”.In the early 1980s, the CIA and MI6 worked together to fund, support and arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to help them defeat the Soviet Union. One of the CIA’s “greatest recipients of funding and arms”, Kerbaj notes, was the leader of the Haqqani network, a group the director of national intelligence now deems to be a terrorist network whose leaders are on the US’s most wanted list.And then there is Iraq. This was a war supposedly based on intelligence, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that he was prepared to use them, and that he was willing to share them with terrorist groups such as al-Qaida. None of these theories were true. George W Bush and Tony Blair may have sold the war, but the material they used was created by members of Five Eyes.Not only that, those intelligence agencies were also responsible for some of the most egregious human rights abuses carried out by western powers. Torture was technically illegal, so they instead kidnapped suspected terrorists, flew them to countries with less stringent rules, allowed them to carry out the torture and even provided lists of questions to be asked once the suspects were deemed malleable. It was an American-led operation – Canadian, British and Australian citizens were sometimes the victims – but all members of Five Eyes knew it was happening. Indeed, there were numerous cases where British officials were accused of involvement.The programme, named “extraordinary rendition” rather than the more accurate “kidnap and torture”, would, as Kerbaj notes, “ultimately haunt the legacy of the Five Eyes”.The mistrust that has dogged the alliance from the start still exists today. Seventeen British nationals and citizens were held at Guantánamo but it was two years before the US agreed to release just five of them. Kerbaj reveals that Peter Clarke, former head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command, was urged by the US to imprison them on their return, something Clarke immediately dismissed. “None of the material they provided us with would have been admissible in court,” Clarke told Kerbaj.Arguably worse is the case of Shamima Begum, who left London in 2015, aged 15, to join Islamic State, and who has now been stripped of her British citizenship. Kerbaj reveals that Begum was smuggled into Syria by a Canadian spy, a fact the Canadians initially withheld from their supposed ally. Both the Canadian and British governments decided to keep this a secret. Begum’s lawyers hope this revelation will help her win the appeal against the decision to remove her citizenship, which takes place next month.Intelligence agencies tell us they keep us safe. And perhaps they do. But the stories Kerbaj tells reveal a different truth. From 2001 onwards, this is a story of failure – of missing warnings that could have prevented atrocities, of misusing intelligence to start a war, and of using its almost untrammelled power to terrorise its own citizens.Spot a problem in the Middle East and Five Eyes either didn’t see it coming, or inadvertently gave it a helping hand.And yet Kerbaj, oddly, comes to a different conclusion. After 15 chapters outlining the disasters and revealing the outrages, he ends with a parade of 14 former spy chiefs and prime ministers explaining why Five Eyes matters. No critics are quoted, nor does Kerbaj himself offer any alternative view. What he has gained in access he has lost in analysis.After 300 plus pages of scandal, Kerbaj blandly concludes: “The alliance remains vital in attempting to foresee and combat future threats.” It is a bizarre end to an, at times, brilliant book.TopicsPolitics booksThe ObserverHistory booksEspionageUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down Trump

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      Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down Trump The New York Times reporter presents a forensic account of the damage he has done to AmericaMaggie Haberman, the New York Times’ Trump whisperer, delivers. Her latest book is much more than 600 pages of context, scoop and drama. It is a political epic, tracing Donald Trump’s journey from the streets of Queens to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his Elba. There, the 45th president holds court – and broods and plots his return.Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump bookRead moreHaberman gives Trump and those close to him plenty of voice – and rope. The result is a cacophonous symphony. Confidence Man informs and entertains but is simultaneously absolutely not funny. Trumpworld presents a reptilian tableau – reality TV does Lord of the Flies.For just one example, Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, is depicted as erratic and detestable. Then there’s the family. Haberman reports how, after the 2016 election, Melania Trump won a renegotiated pre-nuptial agreement. Haberman also describes Trump repeatedly dumping on his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. If only he looked like Tom Brady and spoke in a deeper register. If only Ivanka had not converted to Judaism.The abuse gets absurd – even a kind of baroque. According to Haberman, at one 2020 campaign strategy meeting Trump implied Kushner might be brutally attacked, even raped, if he ever went camping: “Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”The reader, however, should not weep for Jared. In Haberman’s telling, he is the kid who was born on third base and mistakes his good fortune with hitting a triple. For his part, Kushner is shown trashing Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who was campaign chair and chief White House strategist but was forced out within months.Haberman catches Kushner gleefully asking a White House visitor: “Did you see I cut Bannon’s balls off?”To quote Peter Navarro, like Bannon now a former Trump official under indictment, “nepotism and excrement roll downhill”.As it happens, Bannon’s testicles grew back. Like Charlie Kushner, Jared’s father, he received a Trump pardon. Bannon also helped propagate the big lie that Trump won the election, stoking the Capitol attack.These days, Bannon awaits sentencing, convicted of contempt of Congress. He also faces felony fraud charges arising from an alleged border-wall charity scam. In Trump’s universe, there is always a grift.For Confidence Man, Haberman interviewed Trump three times. He confesses that he is drawn to her, like a moth to a flame.“I love being with her,” he says. “She’s like my psychiatrist”.The daughter of Clyde Haberman, a legendary New York Times reporter, is not flattered or amused. She sees through her subject.“The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists,” Haberman writes. “All present a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling.”Also, Trump and Haberman have not always had a rapport. When he was president, she would interview him and he would attack her. In April 2018, Trump tweeted that Haberman was a Clinton “flunkie” he didn’t know or speak with, a “third-rate reporter” at that. He called her “Maggot Haberman” and even contemplated obtaining her phone records to identify her sources.Trump is 76 but he remains the envious boy from a New York outer borough, face pressed against the Midtown glass. Haberman is not the only Manhattan reporter he has courted and attacked. In 2018, he threatened Michael Wolff for writing Fire and Fury, the Trump book that started it all. Later, he welcomed Wolff to Mar-a-Lago.Haberman vividly captures Trump’s lack of couth. For just one example, according to Haberman the president chose to enrich his first meeting with a foreign leader, Theresa May, by asking the British prime minister to “imagine if some animals with tattoos raped your daughter and she got pregnant”.Each of Trump’s three supreme court justices voted to overturn Roe v Wade. One might wonder how the young woman in Trump’s hypothetical would feel about that.Haberman also pierces Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. All that talk about an “audit” was a simple dodge, birthed on a campaign plane.In the run-up to Super Tuesday, the crucial day of primaries in March 2016, aides confronted Trump about his taxes. The candidate, Haberman writes, “thought for a second about how to ‘get myself out of this’, as he said. He leaned back, before snapping up to a sudden thought.01:13“‘Well, you know my taxes are under audit. I always get audited … So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit. ‘Cause I’ll never not be under audit.’”These days, the Trump Organization faces criminal tax fraud charges. Together with Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric, his children from his first marriage, Trump is also being sued for fraud by Letitia James, the New York attorney general.As a younger reporter, Haberman did two stints at the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship US tabloid. Murdoch’s succession plans – it’s Lachlan, he told Trump – appear in Confidence Man. So does Tucker Carlson, the headline-making Fox News host and kindred spirit to Vladimir Putin.Trump made up audit excuse for not releasing tax returns on the fly, new book saysRead moreAccording to Haberman, Carlson met Kushner and demanded Trump commute Roger Stone’s conviction for perjury.“What happened to Roger Stone should never happen to anyone in this country of any political party,” Carlson reportedly thundered, threatening to go public.Stone has since emerged as a central figure in the January 6 insurrection. Apparently, he has a thing for violence. For some Republicans, a commitment to “law and order” is elastic.When it comes to the attempt to overturn the election and the Capitol attack it fueled, Trump’s fate rests with prosecutors in Washington DC and Fulton county, Georgia.That old campaign chant from 2016, “Lock her up”? It carries its own irony.
      Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America is published in the US by Penguin Random House
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansUS elections 2016US elections 2020reviewsReuse this content More

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem Bill Keller, once editor of the New York Times, now with the Marshall Project, shows how the US came to imprison so many of its citizens, disproportionately Black and brown, and how such a gross injustice might yet be addressedThe statistics are familiar but remain startling: America’s incarceration rate per 100,000 is “roughly twice that of Russia’s and Iran’s, four times that of Mexico’s, five times of England’s, six times Canada’s” and nine times that of Germany. In addition, “parole and probation regulate the lives of 4.5 million Americans” – more than twice as many as are confined in prison.We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turnRead moreThese numbers come at the beginning of Bill Keller’s smart, short new book, in which he tries to explain how America became so addicted to mass incarceration, and how we might finally reform a system which houses a disproportionally Black and brown population.Keller is a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer for his first New York Times posting as a foreign correspondent, in Moscow as the Soviet Union collapsed. He went on to be executive editor and then a columnist, but in 30 years, criminal justice was never one of his specialties. That all changed when Neil Barsky, a journalist turned investor turned philanthropist, tapped Keller to be founding editor of The Marshall Project, an ambitious effort to produce great journalism about the “causes and consequences” of mass incarceration.Keller’s book highlights many of the best pieces by Marshall Project reporters, but he also uses plenty of his own reporting to illuminate this particularly dark side of American democracy.The “good news”: the incarcerated population has actually been in slow and steady decline, from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2020, including an unprecedented drop of 14% spurred by early releases because of Covid.America’s unfortunate exceptionalism on this subject is actually a fairly recent development. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the rate of incarceration mostly held steady at around 110 out of every 100,000 Americans. But it is nearly 500 today.Liberals and conservatives were equally responsible. A Democratic House speaker, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, sharply overreacted to the crack cocaine overdose of Len Bias, a Boston Celtics draftee, pushing through the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, “which imposed mandatory sentences, asset forfeitures and outlandishly severe sanctions on crack cocaine” favored by Black ghetto residents, while white consumers of powdered cocaine faced much more lenient penalties.As Keller writes, “Rehabilitation was denigrated on the right as coddling”. But a Democratic Senate judiciary committee chairman, Joseph R Biden of Delaware, made everything much worse by championing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only spurred a prison-building boom but also eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners enrolled in college courses. President Biden has acknowledged his mistake.It was President Reagan who inserted the profit motive into the prison business, allowing the Corrections Corporation of America to pioneer “the idea of privately run, for-profit prisons”. As Keller explains, “Since the new prison owners were paid the same way as hotel proprietors, by occupancy, they had no incentive to prepare prisoners for release.” Private prisons now house about 7% of state inmates and 17% of federal.Keller makes an unintentional argument for sending more Republicans to jail, by pointing out that three of the more unlikely advocates of prison reform are Republican officials who ended up in prison.Patrick Nolan was the minority leader of the California assembly when, in 1993, he was indicted on charges of racketeering and extortion. He served 25 months in a federal prison near San Francisco. When he was paroled, he was recruited by Charles Colson, a famous Watergate felon from Nixon’s White House who found religion “shortly before serving seven months himself in a federal prison”.Colson campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners. Nolan became director of a new Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation. Meanwhile, Bernard Kerik, Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner who then did three years in federal prison for tax fraud and other crimes, became an advocate for voting rights for ex-felons.It’s not all good news. By the end of Trump administration, Nolan had succumbed to a rightwing conspiracy theory that “billionaire George Soros was masterminding a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy to elect soft-on-crime prosecutors and bring down the entire criminal justice system”.Keller points to Norway and Germany as providing the best examples for systemic reform. While American prison guards rarely get more than a few weeks of training, Germans get two years of college courses in psychology, ethics and communication. American visitors to German jails are amazed to see unarmed guards “shooting baskets, playing chess, sharing lunch” and having conversations with prisoners.One reason Europe is so far ahead is its depoliticization of the criminal justice system: judges and district attorneys are appointed, not elected.A Fordham University professor, John Pfaff, has pointed out that in the US, during the 1990s and 2000s, “as violent crime and arrests for violent crime both declined, the number of felony cases in state courts” suddenly shot up. Because of political pressures, “tens of thousands more prosecutors” were hired, “even after the rising crime of the 1980s had stalled out”.A Question of Standing review: how the CIA undermined American authorityRead morePfaff attributed the racial inequality in numbers of prisoners to “an imbalance of political power – tough-on-crime prosecutors elected by suburban whites who see the community destruction of mass incarceration from a distance”.Keller reports the most effective ways to reduce the prison population are also the most obvious ones:
      Make low-level drug crimes “non-crimes”.
      Divert people into “mental health and addiction programs, or probation or community service”.
      “Abolish mandatory minimum sentences and encourage” judges to “apply the least severe punishment appropriate under the circumstances”.
      Give “compassionate release to old and infirm inmates” who don’t pose a real threat to the general population.
      The challenge is to get these common-sense ideas to prevail over the rhetoric of politicians who still rail against anyone who is “soft on crime” – the knee-jerk ideology which got us into this catastrophe in the first place.
      What’s Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration is published in the US by Columbia Global Reports
      TopicsBooksUS prisonsUS crimeUS domestic policyUS politicsPolitics booksRacereviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump made up audit excuse for not releasing tax returns on the fly, new book says

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      Trump made up audit excuse for not releasing tax returns on fly, book saysIn eagerly awaited book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times depicts scene on campaign plane in 2016 According to a new book, Donald Trump came up with his famous excuse for not releasing his tax returns on the fly – literally, while riding his campaign plane during the 2016 Republican primary.Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump bookRead moreEvery American president or nominee since Richard Nixon had released his or her tax returns. Trump refused to do so.In her eagerly awaited book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman describes the scene on Trump’s plane just before Super Tuesday, 1 March 2016.Trump, she says, was discussing the issue with aides including Corey Lewandowski, then his campaign manager, and his press secretary, Hope Hicks. The aides, Haberman says, pointed out that as Trump was about to be confirmed as the favourite for the Republican nomination, the problem needed to be addressed.Haberman writes: “Trump thought for a second about how to ‘get myself out of this’, as he said. He leaned back, before snapping up to a sudden thought.“‘Well, you know my taxes are under audit. I always get audited,’ Trump said … ‘So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit. ‘Cause I’ll never not be under audit.’”Haberman’s book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.She writes that Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who became a Trump surrogate after dropping out of the primary himself, “looked puzzled”, then told Trump there was no legal prohibition against releasing tax returns under audit.“‘But my lawyers,’ Trump said. ‘I’m sure my lawyers and my counsel will tell me not to.’ He then told his bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to coordinate with his assistant, Rhona Graff, once they landed.”It is not clear Trump received any legal advice before starting to use the excuse.“Almost immediately,” Haberman writes, Trump “began citing the claim that he couldn’t possibly release his under-audit taxes”.Trump’s tax returns remained at issue throughout his time in power.Haberman says “Republicans who knew Trump in New York” always said he would not release his tax records, “speculating that he was more worried that people would see the actual amount of money he made than he was about scrutiny into his sources of income”.Nonetheless, Trump’s refusal fueled endless speculation, particularly during the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Trump tax returns were eventually revealed by the New York Times, showing that he paid little federal tax.The paper said: “The tax returns that Mr Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public.“His reports to the [Internal Revenue Service] portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.”Now, Haberman’s book arrives less than two weeks after the New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced a civil lawsuit over Trump’s financial practices, alleging “staggering” fraud and seeking tough penalties against Trump, his company and his three oldest children.New York attorney general lawsuit accuses Trump of ‘staggering’ fraudRead moreHaberman describes numerous episodes from Trump’s picaresque New York business career.She writes: “Former employees said he followed unusual business practices, such as accepting cash for lease payments and maintenance services, recalling that one parking garage leaseholder for the General Motors building sent over the cash portion of the lease in dozens of gold bars.”Trump, Haberman says, “told aides he didn’t know what to do with [the gold] when the cardboard Hewlett-Packard box arrived” at Trump Tower.Ultimately, he “ordered” Matt Calamari – a bodyguard who became an executive vice-president in the Trump Organization – “to take them to his penthouse apartment.“A lawyer for Calamari declined to comment on the gold bricks incident; Trump called it ‘a fantasy question!’”TopicsBooksDonald TrumpChris ChristieUS taxationUS politicsUS elections 2016Politics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump book

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      Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump book Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman reveals racism, transphobia and ignorance from ex-president’s time in powerIn a meeting supposedly about campaign strategy in the 2020 election, Donald Trump implied his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, might be brutally attacked, even raped, should he ever go camping.Trump asked May at debut meeting why Boris Johnson was not PM, book saysRead more“Ivanka wants to rent one of those big RVs,” Trump told bemused aides, according to a new book by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, before gesturing to his daughter’s husband.“This skinny guy wants to do it. Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”According to Haberman, Trump then “made noises mimicking the banjo theme song from the 1972 movie about four men vacationing in rural Georgia who are attacked, pursued and in one case brutally raped by a local resident”.The bizarre scene is just one of many in Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.The book has been extensively trailed. Headlines drawn from it have concerned Trump’s racism (he thought Black White House staffers were waiters); his transphobia (he asked if a notional young questioner was “cocked or uncocked”); and his belligerent ignorance (he mistook a health aide for a military adviser because he wore uniform, and asked if he could bomb Mexican drug labs).Trump’s undiplomatic crudity has also been put on display. According to Haberman, he asked the British prime minister, Theresa May, to “imagine if some animals with tattoos raped your daughter and she got pregnant” and called Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, “that bitch”.In other shocking scenes, Trump is reported to have said he could not afford to alienate white supremacists because “a lot of these people vote”, and to have been called a fascist by John Kelly, his second chief of staff.Haberman also writes that when the liberal supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was battling cancer, Trump sarcastically prayed for her health and asked: “How much longer do you think she has?”Haberman even reports that Trump may have called a Democratic congresswoman, pretending to be a Washington Post reporter and angling for comments about himself.The story about Trump mocking Kushner’s suitability for outdoor pursuits, meanwhile, is of a piece with other scenes in which Trump is shown to mock and belittle his son-in-law.According to Haberman, Trump criticised Kushner for observing religious customs (“‘Fucking Shabbat,’ Trump groused, asking no one in particular if his Jewish son-in-law was really religious or just avoiding work”) and for being effete.“He sounds like a child,” Trump is said to have commented in 2017, after Kushner spoke to reporters following an appearance before a congressional committee.In a scene which echoes the former Trump aide Peter Navarro’s description of an abortive campaign coup against Kushner, Trump is also shown resolving to fire Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, by tweet – but being talked out of doing so.Trump’s political career has generated a stream of books by Washington reporters and tell-alls by ex-White House staffers. Nonetheless, Confidence Man is eagerly awaited, touted as “the book Trump fears most”.Haberman has covered Trump since his days as a New York property magnate, reality TV host and celebrity political blowhard. Known in some circles as “the Trump whisperer”, she was even seen taking calls from the then president in a documentary about the Times, The Fourth Estate, which was released in 2018.Having written countless scoops about the Trump White House, Haberman has continued to cover a post-presidency in which Trump has maintained control of the Republican party while seemingly plotting another campaign, having escaped being brought to account over the January 6 insurrection.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreLike other authors of Trump books, Haberman draws on interviews with the former president. As with other authors, Trump appears to have enjoyed the process. At one point, Haberman writes, he “turned to the two aides he had sitting in on our interview, gestured toward me with his hand, and said, ‘I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.’”But such comfort may have prompted Trump to reveal more than might have been advised.In one exchange that has excited widespread comment, Trump admitted taking classified material from the White House – a decision now the source of considerable legal jeopardy.In light of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on 8 August, some observers have questioned whether Haberman should have reported Trump’s admission immediately or even alerted the Department of Justice.Most of Haberman’s reporting, however, has been greeted with familiar glee, not least the opening salvo of her pre-publication campaign: a picture of presidential documents torn up and put down a toilet.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS press and publishingNew York TimesNewspapersnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican ex-congressman suggests colleagues ‘had serious cognitive issues’

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      Republican ex-congressman suggests colleagues ‘had serious cognitive issues’Paul Gosar and Louie Gohmert were eager to believe ‘wild, dramatic fantasies’, claims Denver Riggleman in new book The Republican congressmen Louis Gohmert and Paul Gosar adopted such extreme, conspiracy-tinged positions, even before the US Capitol attack, that a fellow member of the rightwing Freedom Caucus thought they “may have had serious cognitive issues”.White House switchboard called phone linked to January 6 rioter after attackRead moreDenver Riggleman, once a US representative from Virginia, reports his impression of his former colleagues from Texas and Arizona in a new book.The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th is published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained an early copy.Riggleman is a former US air force intelligence officer who lost his seat in Congress after he officiated a same-sex marriage. In his book, he describes fallout beyond his primary defeat, including someone tampering with the wheels of his truck, endangering the life of his daughter.“If I ever find the individual who did that,” he writes, “God help that person.”After leaving Congress, Riggleman worked for the House January 6 committee, members of which were reportedly angered by his decision to publish a book.Describing text messages surrendered to the committee by Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, Riggleman shows that on 5 November 2020, two days after election day and with the result not called, Gohmert touted his experience as an attorney and tried to join the White House team working to overturn Joe Biden’s win.“I’m in DC,” Gohmert wrote to Meadows. “Thinking I’ll head to Philadelphia to fuss. Would love to be there … at [White House] to be ear for discussions and advice if asked. Handled massive fraud case vs Texas biggest utility … so some legal experience. May I come over?”Meadows asked Gohmert to go on TV instead.But Gohmert remained in Trump’s orbit. On 20 December, along with Scott Perry (Pennsylvania), Andy Biggs (Arizona), Jody Hice (Georgia), Matt Gaetz (Florida), Mo Brooks (Alabama) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), he attended a White House meeting with Trump at which election subversion was discussed.According to testimony to the January 6 committee, Gohmert, Gaetz, Brooks, Greene, Perry and Biggs asked for pardons before Trump left office.On 6 January 2021, a crowd Trump knew to be armed but told to “fight like hell” breached Congress in an attempt to stop certification of the election. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides.Riggleman describes how in the aftermath of the attack, Gohmert and other Republicans continued to push conspiracy theories, claiming the attackers were leftwingers disguised as Trump supporters.Such claims have entered the Republican mainstream. So has the far right.Describing his own spell in Congress, between 2019 and 2021, Riggleman says he joined the hardline Freedom Caucus as a way to allay concerns among conservatives that he was insufficiently loyal to Trump.Once in, he says, he “began to understand that some of my colleagues had fully bought into even the more unhinged conspiracy theories I had been seeing out on the campaign trail”.Riggleman describes one meeting in which Gohmert “promoted a conspiracy theory related to master algorithms”, saying he “suspected there was a secret technology shadow-banning conservatives across all platforms”.Riggleman writes that others “nodded along”, though “of course, that’s crazy”. He says he said “something to that effect” during the meeting in question.In subsequent meetings, Riggleman “would come to see that Gohmert was one of a few colleagues who had gone deep down the rabbit hole.“Scott Perry, Jody Hice, Randy Weber and the caucus chairman, Andy Biggs, all said things that stunned me.”Gosar is a far-right provocateur whose many controversies include being censured for tweeting a video depicting violence against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent New York progressive.Riggleman says Gosar and Gohmert “seemed to be joined at the brain stem when it came to their eagerness to believe wild, dramatic fantasies about Democrats, the media and big tech.“I came to believe Gosar and Gohmert may have had serious cognitive issues.”Riggleman also calls Gosar “a blatant white supremacist”, describing him and the Iowa Republican Steve King “making a case for white supremacy over pulled pork and ribs”.“It was unbelievable,” Riggleman writes. “I had always bristled when I’d hear Democrats dismiss Republicans as ‘racists’. To me, it seemed like an easy insult that dodged policy discussions. Now, here I was behind the curtain, seeing that some of my colleagues really seemed to hold these awful views.”Describing his own farewell address, which he made a month before the Capitol attack, Riggleman claims to have been “the canary in the coalmine” regarding extremism in the Republican party.“On 10 December 2020,” he writes, “less than a month before the Capitol attack, I … railed against disinformation and ‘super-spreader digital viruses that create a fever of nonsense’ … I noted how QAnon promoters were linked with both the conspiracists who questioned the Covid pandemic and Trump’s Stop the Steal movement to overturn the election.“… Based on what I had been seeing, I warned that we were heading down a very dark road. No one listened.”TopicsBooksRepublicansThe far rightPolitics booksHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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      We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turn

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      We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turn Andy Campbell has delivered a smart, well-written and brilliantly reported book about the street gang allied to Donald Trump and the GOP he commandsAndy Campbell has produced a smart, well-written and brilliantly reported book about another loathsome progeny of the most dangerous union of our time, the horror couple responsible for so many of the burgeoning threats to American democracy: Donald Trump and the internet.Proud Boys memo reveals meticulous planning for ‘street-level violence’Read moreIts subject is the Proud Boys, racist, beer-addled and violence-addicted street fighters who have become best friends with many of Trump’s warmest supporters, from Ann Coulter to Roger Stone.Coulter and Stone have both bragged about using these modern Brown Shirts as bodyguards. Stone even allowed himself to be filmed for a video in which he took the Proud Boys oath: “I’m a western chauvinist. I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”Coulter credited the group with saving her life when “2,000 antifa”, leftwing protesters, tried to shut down a speech at UC Berkeley. If she hadn’t invited 20 Proud Boys, she said, she “might not have made it to the campus at all”.The Proud Boys are “brawny, tattooed brutes”, Coulter cooed.As Campbell puts it, the Proud Boys have “proven that you can make it as a fascist gang of hooligans in this country, as long as you make the right friends”.The organization’s father is Gavin McInnes, 52, a child of Scots who moved to Canada. In Montreal in the early 1990s McInnes founded a magazine called Pervert, which in 1999 he and two others rebranded as Vice. He moved the magazine to New York a couple of years later, then left in 2008.In spring 2016, on his own talkshow, he declared his main priority: “I want violence. I want punching in the face. I’m disappointed in Trump supporters for not punching enough.”Not long after that, he “announced that he’d turned his audience into a gang”. He called them the Proud Boys.McInnes’s alliance with the GOP warmed up after he was invited to speak at the headquarters of the New York state Republican party in October 2018.Members were undaunted when their intended guest announced on Instagram that he planned to reenact an “inspiring moment … the political assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, the former leader of the Japan Socialist party, who was killed during a debate on live TV when a far-right ultranationalist rushed the stage and pushed a sword between his ribs”.Then he photoshopped an image of himself “with the eyes and clothing of the Japanese assassin”.Republicans loved it. On Facebook, they responded: “This Godfather of the Hipster Movement has taken on and exposed the Deep State Socialists and stood up for Western Values. Join us for an unforgettable evening with one of Liberty’s Loudest Voices.”After his speech, McInnes left the club with his sword. But Proud Boys “and their skinhead pals” attacked a handful of antifascist protesters after one knocked a MAGA hat from one of their heads.“They turned it into a pummeling,” a Huffington Post reporter remembered. “This was three people on the ground and people just kicking the shit out of them.”The two most violent attackers were each sentenced to four years in prison. The judge didn’t hesitate to draw the appropriate parallel to 1930s Germany. Mark Dwyer, of the New York state supreme court, said he knew what had happened then, “when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system. We don’t want that to happen in New York”.Regardless, the New York brawl became another opportunity for the Republican establishment to normalize fascist behavior. Immediately after the attack, Fox News quoted Ed Cox, the Republican state chairman (and son-in-law of Richard Nixon) as “calling on Democrats to cease inciting these attacks”.As Campbell writes, the event at the Republican club was “a jumping-off point for the GOP into what would eventually become a full embrace of domestic extremist violence”.Kelly Weill, a reporter who covers domestic extremism, explained, the Proud Boys “really embody the political violence the GOP needs just a little bit of a proxy for. They can’t personally be out there doing it, so they have the Proud Boys”.It only took two more years for the Proud Boys to get an official, nationally televised presidential imprimatur, after Joe Biden suggested during a 2020 debate that they were one of the groups Trump should have denounced long ago. Trump said: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”01:16Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, a former FBI informant and convicted felon who had become the Proud Boys chairman, described the effect of Trump’s declaration.“We got mentioned, and my life has not been the same since,” Tarrio told Campbell. “My phone started blowing up off the hook. I had 10 fucking news trucks at my house the next morning. I didn’t sleep for … two days.”The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreTrump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, who turned on his former boss after pleading guilty to charges related to tax evasion and lying to Congress, was sure the president made his statement on purpose.“If you look at who the Proud Boys really are,” said Cohen, “they’re an army. This is Trump’s army … and when he loses he’s going to use them to try and keep control of power.”Which of course is what happened. Proud Boys were some of the most active players when Trump urged the crowd in front of him on 6 January 2021 to march on the US Capitol.Thirteen months after the deadly attack, the Republican endorsement of fascist violence became official: the Republican National Committee unanimously approved a resolution which memorialized the Capitol attack as nothing more than “legitimate political discourse.”Campbell’s book provides an indispensable account of exactly how the Grand Old Party reached that disgraceful destination.
      We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism is published in the US by Hachette
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      The Long Alliance review: sure guide to Biden and Obama’s imperfect union

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      The Long Alliance review: sure guide to Biden and Obama’s imperfect union Gabriel Debenedetti masters the crosscurrents of the Democratic party as well as relations between two presidentsGabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine. His first book brings depth and context to the near-two-decade relationship between the 44th and 46th presidents. Under a telling subtitle, The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Debenedetti captures the two men’s closeness – and distance.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreThe Long Alliance emphasizes that the pair’s time in power together was not a buddy movie. Obama was the star. Biden played a supporting role until he too seized the brass ring, to send Donald Trump into exile.Obama was a first-term senator, just 47 years old, when he vanquished the Clintons, bulldozed John McCain and entered the White House. Biden’s trajectory was markedly different. Late in life, on his third quest for the presidency, he took down another septuagenarian amid a deadly pandemic.The union of Obama and Biden was always moored in intergenerational convenience. Obama was the agent of change, Biden a relic of an older time. Obama’s aides cast a wary eye toward the senator from Delaware. To Biden, politics was tactile. He did not readily inspire.Walloped by Obama in Iowa in 2008, Biden immediately withdrew. Over time, the two men bonded. There was greater warmth between them than between Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, let alone Bush and Dan Quayle. Obama always heard Biden out. On the other hand, the Obamas never invited the Bidens to the White House residence. Barack and Joe shared lunches, not dinners and movies with popcorn.Hiccups and speed bumps left marks. Biden got ahead of Obama on gay marriage. Hunter Biden made headlines with his schemes and hustles. Confronted with the younger Biden boy’s foray into Ukraine and the energy business, Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, expressed discomfort. Like Trump, Hunter’s fate now rests with federal prosecutors.Obama empathized with his vice-president. When Beau Biden, Biden’s older son, was dying, Obama offered a shoulder to lean on. He delivered a stirring eulogy. In their final days in office, Obama gave Biden the presidential medal of freedom. The honor, suffused with affection and tenderness, surprised its recipient. Biden’s successor as vice-president, Mike Pence, met a very different fate.Yet for all Obama’s smarts, he could get things terribly wrong. He failed to anticipate the magnitude of the backlash to the Affordable Care Act, the resonance of birtherism, abhorrent as it was, and the depth and breadth of the emerging national chasm beneath him. Democratic losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterms and the Tea Party with its tricorn hats presaged a sustained demand for a return to the past, the rise of Trump and a tolerance for autocracy within the Republican party.Obama also messed up by viewing Hillary Clinton as his rightful successor, if not his political heir. In 2008, competing against her for the nomination, he derided her as “likable enough”. In 2016, in hindsight, little had changed.Clinton lacked her husband’s capacity to emote and connect. Like Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, there was something awkward, off-putting, which she could not shake. Her comments on Trump’s “deplorables” hurt her much as Mitt Romney’s take on the “47%” did him in 2012. Looking back, Obama miscalculated – much as his brain trust would do in 2020 with Biden.Under Trump, Romney showed a deeper appreciation of where the US stood. It wanted a president not named Trump. A shot at normalcy. Nothing else.On the night of the 2018 midterms, Romney urged Biden to wage one more campaign. “You have to run,” Romney said in a call. Anti-Trump sentiment cost the Republicans the House but at the same moment Utah was sending Romney to the Senate.During the 2020 primaries, Obama and Biden stayed in touch. But until the former vice-president emerged as the presumptive nominee, his president’s endorsement was not forthcoming. Biden lost Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada. Heading to South Carolina, he was low on cash and short on delegates. There, the backing of James Clyburn, the House whip, together with the state’s Black voters, righted Biden’s ship. Debenedetti shows mastery of the tugs and crosscurrents that shape the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition.African Americans could be among the most socially conservative components of the party. They were not clamoring for open borders or Medicare for All. Obamacare stood as the legacy of the first Black president. Their patrimony was the cruel lash of slavery, not the Harvard faculty lounge or the yoke of the tsar. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders did not speak to them or for them.Obama aides badmouthed Biden in print and on TV. David Axelrod, a senior Obama campaign and White House hand, never cottoned to Biden, and Biden knew it. And yet, behind the scenes, Obama helped clear the field.In the end, Covid and the need for national leadership put Biden over the top. No other Democrat could have beaten Trump.The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-TrumpRead moreAs president, Biden’s record is uneven. The withdrawal from Afghanistan put a dent in his standing from which he has not recovered. In contrast, US support for Ukraine appears the product of thoughtful conviction. As for the economy, Biden’s efforts to placate his base may well have heightened inflation. Gas prices are coming down but the rest remains stubbornly up.Biden competes with Obama’s legacy and the ghost of FDR. The Democrats hold only 50 Senate seats, control on a knife-edge as the November election looms.“I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his,” Biden reportedly told one adviser, according to another big political book, This Will Not Pass by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, of the New York Times and CNN respectively.The two men still talk, though.
      The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama is published in the US by Macmillan
      TopicsBooksJoe BidenBarack ObamaBiden administrationObama administrationDemocratsUS elections 2020reviewsReuse this content More