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      Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new book

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      Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new bookScott Atlas resigned after four months but blames Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx for ‘headline-dominating debacles’ In a new book, former Trump adviser Scott Atlas blames Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for “headline-dominating debacles” about quack cures for Covid-19 – but omits to mention the chief proponent of snake-oil treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant, was the US president he loyally served.US hospitals prepare for influx of Covid patients as millions travel for ThanksgivingRead moreAtlas, a radiologist, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California, specializing in healthcare policy. He became a special adviser to Donald Trump in August 2020, five months into the pandemic, but resigned less than four months later after a controversial spell in the role.His book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop Covid from Destroying America, will be published on 7 December. Its publisher is Bombardier Books, an imprint of PostHill Press, a conservative outlet that will also publish a memoir by Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth press secretary.Speaking to Fox News, Atlas promised to “expose the unvarnished truth” about Trump’s Covid taskforce, including “a shocking lack of critical thinking about the science … a reckless abuse of public health and a moral failure in what should be expected from public health leaders”.Birx, an army physician, is a longtime leader in the fight against Aids. Fauci has served seven presidents as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Both were senior members of Trump’s Covid taskforce. Atlas’s book is replete with attacks on both.Describing the fight against Covid before he came to the White House, Atlas accidentally sideswipes Trump when he writes: “Birx and Fauci stood alongside the president during headline-dominating debacles in the Brady Press Room about using hydroxychloroquine, drinking disinfectant, ingesting bleach and using UV light to cure the virus. They were there as the sole medical input into the taskforce, generating the entire advisory output to the states.”Hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial, was touted as a Covid treatment by non-governmental voices including two billionaires, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.Fauci said repeatedly such claims should be treated with caution. But Trump himself proved an enthusiastic advocate, disagreeing with his senior scientist and asking the public: “What do you have to lose?”Trump even took the drug himself, before the Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency use authorization, citing concerns about side effects including “serious heart rhythm problems” and death.Atlas’s reference to “drinking disinfectant, ingesting bleach and using UV light” is to the events of a memorable White House briefing when again it was Trump’s pronouncements that went wildly awry – not those of his officials.On Thursday 23 April 2020, William Bryan, undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, discussed a study of effects on the coronavirus from sun exposure and cleaning agents – as applied to surfaces, not the human body.Trump said: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.“So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”As the Guardian reported, Birx “remained silent. But social media erupted in outrage.”Trump asked if sunlight might work, saying: “Deborah, have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?”Birx said: “Not as a treatment. I mean, certainly fever is a good thing. When you have a fever, it helps your body respond. But, I’ve not seen heat or light as a –”Trump interrupted: “I think that’s a great thing to look at. OK?”The president subsequently claimed to have been “sarcastic”.01:58In his book, Atlas treats Birx and Fauci’s work for a taskforce he says Trump “never once” met or spoke to with sarcasm, criticism and disdain.Seven doctors contract Covid after attending Florida anti-vaccine summitRead moreHe accuses Birx of “volatile behavior” and “interrupting all who challenged her” but says vice-president Mike Pence decided removing her was “simply not worth the risk to the upcoming election”.Among criticisms of Fauci, Atlas echoes Trump in complaining about his profile.“Dr Fauci kept on interviewing, of course,” Atlas writes, “positing the ever-present, potentially negative turn of events that never happened.”A year after Atlas’s resignation, more than 772,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.TopicsCoronavirusDonald TrumpAnthony FauciUS politicsPolitics booksRepublicansTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Kayleigh McEnany’s book claims don’t stand up to assurances that she didn’t lie

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      Kayleigh McEnany’s book claims don’t stand up to assurances that she didn’t lieTrump’s fourth press secretary often relies on single sources and conservative talking points in new book In a new book, the former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany repeats her famous insistence that she never lied to reporters, in part because her education at “Oxford, Harvard and Georgetown” meant she always relied on “truthful, well-sourced, well-researched information”.Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme courtRead moreBut McEnany – who also studied law at the University of Miami – makes claims in her book which do not stand up to such assurances, for instance about Donald Trump’s support among the US military and about the severity of Covid cases among White House staff.McEnany was Trump’s fourth press secretary, after Sean Spicer, Sarah Sanders and Stephanie Grisham. With the arrival of For Such A Time As This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond, all four have written memoirs. Grisham, who published a gossip-filled book in October, is the only one to have turned on Trump.McEnany’s book will be published on 7 December by Post Hill Press, a conservative outlet. The Guardian obtained a copy.McEnany gave her first briefing as White House press secretary on 1 May 2020, restarting sessions abandoned by Sanders and Grisham.A reporter asked: “Will you pledge to never lie to us from that podium?”McEnany replied: “I will never lie to you. You have my word on that.”As the Guardian wrote then, “even on what proved an assured debut” McEnany “skated close to peddling dodgy information about Trump’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic (‘This president has always sided on the side of data’) and to allegations of sexual misconduct (‘He has always told the truth’)”.McEnany now works for Fox News. She has restated her claim, telling a conservative audience this June: “And then there was the question, ‘Will you ever lie to us?’, and I said without hesitation, ‘No’, and I never did, as a woman of faith.“As a mother of baby Blake, as a person who meticulously prepared at some of the world’s hardest institutions, I never lied. I sourced my information, but that will never stop the press from calling you a liar.”On the page, however, McEnany often relies on single sources, anecdotes and conservative talking points. As a result she is at least, in the famous words of Alan Clark, a former British minister, “economical with the actualité”.For instance, McEnany claims “it was no secret that the military supported Trump, overwhelmingly”, adding: “It was the job of the deep state to change that, and the press would willingly assist. They tried, but they failed.”According to conservative conspiracy theorists, the deep state is a body of bureaucrats and intelligence agents who worked to thwart Trump in office. Steve Bannon, once a senior Trump aide, did much to popularise the theory. He has said it is for “nut cases”.As evidence of press support for the deep state, McEnany cites a bombshell Atlantic report from September 2020 which said Trump spoke dismissively of veterans, including the late senator John McCain, and those killed in US wars, such as the son of his second chief of staff, John Kelly.McEnany writes: “As Forbes wrote just after the story published, ‘Military Households Still Back Trump Over Biden, Despite Bombshell Atlantic Report’.”The poll reported by Forbes showed Trump leading Joe Biden 52%-42% among military households.But it was taken in September 2020, two months before the presidential election. As reported by Military Times in November, exit polls showed a closer split, Trump up 52-45 overall but Biden leading 51-40 among younger veterans. The outlet noted that in 2016, exit polls showed Trump beating Hillary Clinton 60-34.McEnany also cites a conversation with “a US ranger” she says drove her home from the White House in September 2020.“President Trump loves our troops,” she told him. “That [Atlantic] story is completely false.”“You don’t have to tell me that ma’am,” she says the driver responded “confidently”, adding: “I know it. He was our savior after Obama.”McEnany also writes about how Covid-19 spread through a White House which showed scant regard for social distancing and masking.“Thankfully,” she writes, “everyone in the White House made a full and complete recovery, including me.”Trump also contracted Covid-19, spending time in hospital. McEnany does not mention the case of Crede Bailey, head of the White House security office.Bailey’s case was widely reported in December 2020. His family, Bloomberg News said, “asked the White House not to publicise his condition, and … Trump has never publicly acknowledged his illness”.McEnany was asked about Bailey at a White House briefing. She said: “Our heart goes out to his family. They have asked for privacy. And he is recovering, from what I understand. We are very pleased to see that. But he and his family will be in our prayers.”Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreOn a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for Bailey’s treatment, however, a friend wrote: “Crede beat Covid-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated.”In January, Bailey’s friend gave an update on his condition.“For now,” she wrote, “Crede is wheelchair bound with the occasional use of crutches. He will eventually get a prosthetic limb but that takes time and money as each prosthetic is individualised to the recipient. Once he receives the prosthetic there will be LOTS of rehabilitation physicians, physical therapists and occupational therapists in his future as he works to regain his independence and mobility.“… Crede’s medical team has said that he will never regain full lung capacity and it may lead to long-term breathing problems. He has suffered lasting damage to his heart and now has increased risk of heart failure or other complications and Covid-19 caused him to develop blood clots and weakened his blood vessels which contributes to long-lasting problems with the liver and kidneys. But enough of the negative!”TopicsTrump administrationPolitics booksUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court

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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court Linda Greenhouse does a fine job of raising the alarm about the conservative conquest and what it means for the rest of us – it’s a pity she does not also recommend ways to fight backLinda Greenhouse’s byline became synonymous with the supreme court during the 30 years she covered it for the New York Times. She excelled at unraveling complex legal riddles for the average reader. She also had tremendous common sense – an essential and depressingly rare quality among journalists.The Agenda review: how the supreme court became an existential threat to US democracyRead moreBoth of these virtues are on display in her new book, which chronicles “12 months that transformed the supreme court” after the death of the liberal lion Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the obscenely rapid confirmation of her conservative successor, Amy Coney Barrett.As others have pointed out, Barrett’s ascension was the crowning achievement of a decades-long project of the American right, to pack the highest court with the kind of people who delight in telling graduating students things like the proper purpose of a legal career “is building the kingdom of God”.Barrett is also the sixth Catholic appointed to the court. Another, Neil Gorsuch, was raised Catholic but now attends the church of his wife, who was raised in the Church of England.Greenhouse describes the Federalist Society as the principal engine of this foul project. Founded in the second year of the Reagan administration to change the prevailing ideology of the leading law schools, its 70,000 members have become the de facto gatekeepers for every conservative lawyer hoping to serve in the executive branch or the judiciary.Most students of the judiciary know that all 226 judges appointed by Donald Trump were approved by the Federalists. But until I read Greenhouse’s book I never knew that every one of the 500-plus judges appointed by the two Bushes also earned the Federalist imprimatur.“Its plan from the beginning was to … nurture future generations of conservative law students” who years later would form the pool from which “conservative judges would be chosen”, Greenhouse writes.She also adds the telling detail that makes it clear that this situation is even worse than it appears. After Gorsuch thanked a Federalist banquet “from the bottom” of his heart, after his confirmation to the supreme court, the then White House counsel, Don McGahn, told the same gathering it was “completely false” that the Trump administration had “outsourced” judicial selection to the Federalists.“I’ve been a member of the Federalists since law school,” said McGahn. “So frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”Greenhouse’s main subject is the impact on the law of the replacement of a celebrated progressive, Ginsburg, with the anti-abortion and anti-contraception Barrett. A meticulous examination of the most important cases decided during Barrett’s first term demonstrates how the new justice contributed to Chief Justice John Roberts’ determination to “change how the constitution” understands race and religion.The centuries-old wall between church and state is being eroded and government efforts to promote integration – or prevent resegregation – are under steady attack.Roberts’s opposition to important sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act goes all the way back to his service in Ronald Reagan’s justice department in the early 1980s. As chief justice he made his youthful scorn for the virtues of integration into the law of the land, writing a majority decision invalidating the plans of Seattle and Louisville to consider race to prevent resegregation of public schools. By a vote of 5-4 the court ruled the consideration of race violated the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.Roberts’s opinion declared that the school systems’ “interest in avoiding resegregation was not sufficiently ‘compelling’ to justify a racially conscious remedy”.For most of the country’s history, the establishment clause of the constitution has prevented the government from “endorsing or coercing a religious practice or viewpoint”, Greenhouse writes, while “the free exercise clause requires the government to leave believers free to practice their faith”.But Roberts and his allies have thrown things upside down, turning the free exercise clause “from its historic role as a shield that protected believers from government interference into a sword that vaulted believers into a position of privilege”.Greenhouse is a woman of convictions. Even as a reporter, she was famous for taking part in a march supporting abortion rights. In a previous book she bragged of contributions to Planned Parenthood. But none of her critics could ever find any evidence that her stories in the Times were slanted by her personal beliefs.That objective stance was entirely appropriate when she was a daily reporter. But book writing is different. After doing such a good job of describing the decades-long rightwing campaign to produce a court whose views are increasingly at odds with the majority of voters, Greenhouse doesn’t endorse any ideas about how to remedy the situation.Supreme Ambition review: Trump, Kavanaugh and the right’s big coupRead moreShe shows no enthusiasm for the idea of expanding the number of seats on the court, which was championed by Pete Buttigieg and others during the 2020 election, and she doesn’t even support the idea that 83-year-old Stephen Breyer should feel any pressure to retire during the current Congress, to make sure Joe Biden can appoint, and a Democratic Senate confirm, a liberal successor.Similarly, Greenhouse never suggests Ginsburg was wrong to stay in office until her death, rather than retire during Barack Obama’s time in office so that she wouldn’t be replaced by someone like Barrett.Unwilling to regulate dark money’s vicious role in our politics, and happy to eviscerate the most basic protections of the Voting Rights Act, the court is increasingly tethered to religious rightwing orthodoxy.Greenhouse does a superb job of describing how we got here. What she lacks is the passionate imagination we need to re-balance an institution which poses an urgent threat to American democracy.
      Justice on the Brink is published in the US by Random House
      TopicsBooksUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsPolitics booksReligionreviewsReuse this content More

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      Chris Christie: Trump knows better about election lies – or is just ‘plain nuts’

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      Chris Christie: Trump knows better about election lies – or is just ‘plain nuts’Former New Jersey governor’s new book bound to put him at odds with former president as 2024 approaches Chris Christie’s comeback tour will continue next week with publication of a book, Republican Rescue, in which the former New Jersey governor seeks to present himself as the face of the party after Donald Trump, and a plausible contender for the presidential nomination in 2024.Trump defended rioters who threatened to ‘hang Mike Pence’, audio revealsRead moreSuch efforts have already seen the one-time presidential candidate clash with Trump, who did not take kindly to Christie warning in a speech in Nevada last weekend: “We can no longer talk about the past and the past elections – no matter where you stand on that issue, no matter where you stand, it is over.”In a statement, Trump, who is likely to run again in 2024, claimed Christie was “absolutely massacred by his statements that Republicans have to move on from the past, meaning the 2020 election fraud”.Christie then told Axios, in an interview due to run on Sunday, he was “not going to get into a back-and-forth” with the longtime friend he helped prepare for debates with Joe Biden and who nearly made him White House chief of staff.But Christie’s book seems guaranteed to anger Trump further. In a copy obtained by the Guardian, Christie writes that Republicans “need to renounce the conspiracy theories and truth deniers, the ones who know better and the ones who are just plain nuts”.The former governor does not say if he thinks Trump knows better about his claims of electoral fraud, or is one of those who is “nuts”.But he adds: “We need to give our supporters facts that will help put all these fantasies to rest, so everyone can focus with clear minds on the issues that really matter. We need to quit wasting our time, our energy and our credibility on claims that won’t ever convince anyone or bring fresh converts onboard.”Condemning the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-right Georgia congresswoman who has expressed support for conspiracy theories, Christie says Trump indulges such figures because he likes “anyone who says nice things about him”.Discussing the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that high-profile Democrats are involved in satanic child abuse, Christie writes that such beliefs “would be ridiculous” if they were not “so sad”.The FBI considers QAnon a potential terrorist threat. Trump, however, has said its followers share his concern about crime, “love our country” and “like me very much”.Told last year that QAnon supporters believe he is “secretly saving the world” from a “satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals”, Trump said: “I haven’t heard that but is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?”“Many in our society,” Christie writes in Republican Rescue, “use these wild, untrue conspiracy theories to advance their political agendas.”Christie left office in New Jersey under the cloud of the Bridgegate payback scandal and with historically low approval. Regardless, he continues to tout his pugnacious Jersey persona – a political proposition roundly rejected by Republican voters in the presidential primary in 2016 – writing that “everyone knows I never pull my punches” and “I call things as I see them”.Some observers, however, question Christie’s sincerity in his stand against Trumpism, given his longstanding closeness to Trump.Eric Boehlert, author of the Press Run newsletter, wrote critically on Friday about a CNN special, Being Chris Christie, due for broadcast on Monday.“Today,” Boehlert wrote, “Christie is promoting himself, with the help of CNN, as a brave truth-teller who’s standing up to Trump and his Big Lie about the 2020 election … but Christie may have had the longest delayed conversion to the anti-Trump crowd of any Republican in America.“Just last year Christie helped Trump prep for a presidential debate. After watching Trump get impeached, Christie still jumped at the chance to be near the center of power to help the maniac get re-elected … Days after helping with Trump’s prep, where everyone was unvaccinated and unmasked, Christie was hospitalised with Covid.”In his book, Christie describes both his role in Trump’s debate prep and the bout with Covid which sent him to intensive care.On the debate stage, in Cleveland, Trump notoriously refused to condemn the far-right Proud Boys, instead telling them to “stand back and stand by”.The New Jersey columnist Charles Stile said then Christie’s defence of Trump’s words “served to remind us of his own trajectory” as a “one-time truth-telling, center-right darling of the GOP [who] embraced his role as a trusted adviser in Trump’s orbit”.Another Jersey columnist, Alan Steinberg, called Christie “a person of irrepressible ambition, without limits or guard rails … and an essential component of that ambition is an obsessive quest to be relevant”.Republican Revival will be published on Tuesday.TopicsBooksChris ChristieDonald TrumpUS elections 2024RepublicansUS politicsPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Both/And review: Huma Abedin on Clinton, Weiner and a political life

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      BooksBoth/And review: Huma Abedin on Clinton, Weiner and a political lifeThe close aide to Hillary Clinton has written a tale spliced with pain but blind to her boss’s weak spots

      Abedin: Kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assault
      Lloyd GreenSun 7 Nov 2021 02.00 ESTLast modified on Sun 7 Nov 2021 02.02 ESTIn 2015, Hillary Clinton’s brains trust deliberately elevated the stature of the “extreme” Republican contenders, the “pied pipers”, Donald Trump included. On election night in 2016, Clintonworld stared into the abyss.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read more“It was sheer disbelief,” Huma Abedin writes in her new memoir. “More like shock.”Clinton, Abedin as campaign vice-chair and other aides failed to grasp that Trump was spearheading a movement, his mien his message. Clinton branded half of his supporters “deplorables”.Not surprisingly, in her memoir Abedin shows a blind spot to Clinton family shortcomings. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, for example, “it seemed very likely” to her that it “was untrue”. Somehow, an intern who rose to become one of Hillary’s closest confidantes forgot that even before Lewinsky, Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct had almost throttled his White House ambitions. Bill and Hillary even appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to salvage his viability.“I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” Hillary said.Not surprisingly, as Hillary’s so-called “second daughter”, Abedin has a problem coming to grips with an immovable likability deficit that cost her boss both times she ran for president.“Why was HRC not likeable?” Abedin asks. “This was particularly difficult to understand for those who knew her, since as far as we were concerned that was a quality she had in abundance.”Others have plumbed such waters – and found Clinton wanting. Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, for example, a Pulitzer Prize winner, portrayed Hillary sporting a “foul mouth” and being loathed by the agents who protected her. After members of her Secret Service detail overheard Chelsea Clinton calling them “pigs”, Leonnig wrote, the first daughter was reminded that their job was to “stand between you, your family and a bullet”.Chelsea reportedly responded: “Well, that’s what my mother and father call you.”Abedin does not discuss how, out of office, Hillary scooped up windfalls in the commodities market and easy millions in Wall Street speaking fees, all while doing her best impersonation of Mother Teresa.Clinton’s second run for president tarnished her image. In December 2017, a Gallup poll pegged her favorability at 37%. But unlike Mandy Grunwald, an adviser to both Clintons, Abedin refuses to admit that Hillary has foibles.According to Grunwald, Clinton could sound like she “DOESN’T think the game is rigged” against normal Americans, mustering only recognition that the “public thinks so”. Said differently, Clinton conveyed obliviousness to the Great Recession of 2008-09, its casualties and anxieties.In April 2015, nearly half of the US self-identified as working- or lower-class. Between November 2007 and late 2016, white Americans in that bracket lost more than 700,000 jobs.Abedin describes sitting with Clinton in Iowa, watching Trump “ramble incoherently about himself”. She captures Clinton saying: “I just don’t get it.” Similarly, Abedin mocks Bernie Sanders’ call for a “revolution” and glosses over the fact that Clinton only beat the Vermont senator to clinch the nomination in early June 2016, more than a week after Trump wrapped up the Republican nod.“With each contest, she methodically racked up the number of delegates she needed to secure the nomination,” Abedin writes. That’s pure spin. It was supposed to be a coronation. They didn’t plan on winning the Iowa caucuses by a razor-thin margin or getting walloped in New Hampshire, where Clinton won on her first go-round.A youth-driven movement helped propel Sanders’ rise. Aspiration and grievance counted. The bankers had gotten their bailouts. Sanders supporters were staring at a future bleaker than their parents had known. Clinton had gone from the “beer track” candidate of 2008 to the pick of the wine drinkers, the coastal establishment. And yet, according to Abedin, defeat by Trump still came as a bolt from the blue.Both/And lets the reader play voyeur and counselor too. Abedin delivers the skinny on her courtship by, marriage to and traumatic estrangement from the former congressman Anthony Weiner. She shares that they attended couples’ therapy, and that he possessed darker secrets than she first thought.She also describes how an unnamed senator shoved his tongue down her throat and pinned her against a couch while the pair were in his apartment for late-night coffee. Abedin writes that she repressed memories of the event until they came rushing back amid Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, when the supreme court nominee was accused of, and denied, sexual assault.Asked by CBS if the senator had committed a sexual assault, Abedin paused.“Did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment?” she told Nora O’Donnell. “I didn’t, it didn’t feel that way. I was in an uncomfortable situation with a senator and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreThis does not appear to be the final word. Members of the Senate worry about who else the unnamed senator may have abused. Philippe Reines, a former Clinton aide, says it is up to Abedin “alone to decide what to share, with whom, how and when”.Abedin’s eye for style asserts itself throughout her memoir – even as she deals with how her husband made damaging headlines. In May 2011, she woke up in Buckingham Palace and surveyed the room. Her “long, fitted gown for the evening’s white-tie dinner hung on the bathroom door”. An “elegant chestnut-brown writing desk” stood at the “foot of the bed”. The same weekend, Weiner alerted his pregnant wife to his sexting habits. Weiner went to prison but he and Abedin are not completely estranged.Both/And is also a story of Abedin’s life before and outside politics. She tells of being born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of spending most of her youth in Saudi Arabia, a father and mother who held doctorates, of family ties in the Middle East, the subcontinent and the US. It is the strongest part of the book, a tale of an immigrant, of an upward arc.
      Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds is published in the US by Scribner
      TopicsBooksHuma AbedinHillary ClintonUS politicsAnthony WeinerPolitics booksDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Misfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet

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      BooksMisfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet The NPR reporter has written an important book about the moral bankruptcy which put the powerful and merciless gun group on the back footCharles KaiserSat 6 Nov 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 6 Nov 2021 02.02 EDTTim Mak has written a sprawling tale of the greed, incompetence and narcissism which has dominated the National Rifle Association throughout Wayne LaPierre’s 30 years as its leader. Abetted by his wife, Susan, LaPierre has allegedly used his members’ dues to fund a billionaire’s lifestyle.‘We have to break through that wall’: inside America’s battle for gun controlRead moreThe LaPierres’ wedding in 1998 was a near miss: he almost ran from the altar, until she and the priest changed his mind. Mak calls this “emblematic” of “a man driven by fear and anxiety over all other forces … his reaction to these emotions is usually to flee and hide”.These qualities, Mak writes, have made LaPierre “prey” to an endless series of conmen, throughout his leadership of America’s most-feared lobbying group.“Pushed and prodded” by his wife to discover “money’s alluring glow”, Mak writes, LaPierre saw his salary balloon from $200,000 in the mid-1990s to $2.2m in 2018. According to the investigation of the New York attorney general, which has done the most to expose serial excesses at the NRA, between 2013 and 2017 the black cars, private jets and hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive clothing led to $1.2m in reimbursed expenses.Between 2013 and 2018, companies used to book the LaPierres’ private planes received an astonishing $13.5m. There were trips to Lake Como, Budapest and the Bahamas. Just the hired cars for trips to Italy and Hungary cost $18,000. LaPierre spent $275,000 on suits at a single Beverly Hills emporium, including $39,000 on one day in 2015. To disguise such excesses, the bills were sent to an outside vendor which the NRA reimbursed.Mak also does a good job of describing how every mass shooting has pushed the NRA ever further right, transforming it from advocacy group for gun rights into a fully fledged player in the culture war, especially after the massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012.Mak offers a particularly depressing account of how the NRA chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, was personally involved in negotiations over the Manchin-Toomey bill, a Senate measure which would have modestly increased background checks if, as Mak points out, not enough to have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre, since that gunman used guns legally obtained by his mother.In any case, after months of negotiation the NRA double-crossed both sponsors, made sure the bill failed to get the 60 votes it needed to pass the Senate, then dropped its A-ratings for Manchin and Toomey to D and C respectively.The NRA’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal was substantial. Maria Butina, eventually convicted as a Russian spy, used “relationships within the NRA to build an informal channel of diplomatic relations with Russia”. Her efforts included a famous public exchange with Donald Trump during his first campaign, in which he expressed his affection for Vladimir Putin and promised to improve relations as president.The NRA spent $30m to help to elect Trump, more than his own fundraising super pac. Ironically, NRA membership dues fell after Trump entered the White House. The organization lost its most lucrative fundraiser when Barack Obama left office.Power struggles and a ‘personal piggy bank’: what the NRA lawsuit allegesRead moreThe great unravelling began on 6 August 2020, when the New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA entirely. She accused LaPierre of using the organization for 30 years “for his financial benefit, and the benefit of a close circle of NRA staff, board members, and vendors”.Six months later, the NRA filed for bankruptcy. But despite endless infighting, Wayne LaPierre remains in charge. And because Trump was elected, with the NRA’s help, the supreme court now includes three justices appointed by him – at least two of whom seemed eager in arguments this week to demolish most of the remaining state restrictions on carrying concealed weapons, in New York and six other states.The passions of gun owners – and the fear they have instilled in a majority of public officials – remain dominant forces in American politics despite the greed and incompetence of their leaders chronicled so thoroughly in this important book.
      Misfire is published in the US by Dutton
      TopicsBooksNRAUS gun controlNewtown shootingUS crimeUS politicsUS CongressreviewsReuse this content More

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      Huma Abedin says kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assault

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      BooksHuma Abedin says kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assaultClinton aide gives first interview for memoir Both/AndAbedin also discusses 2016 election and Anthony Weiner Martin Pengelly in New York@MartinPengellySun 31 Oct 2021 10.13 EDTFirst published on Sun 31 Oct 2021 08.11 EDTIn her first interview to promote her new book, Huma Abedin said she did not think an unnamed senator sexually assaulted her when he kissed her at his apartment, some time in the mid-2000s.Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin describes sexual assault by US senatorRead moreShe also said she would “take to her grave” her part in the emails investigation which cost Hillary Clinton dearly in the 2016 presidential election, which the candidate lost to Donald Trump, though she knew it was not all her fault.Abedin describes the incident with the senator in Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy and reported Abedin’s description of the kiss.After making coffee, Abedin writes, the senator sat next to her on the couch, “put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa.“I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased.”Abedin does not give clues to the senator’s identity.She also writes that memories of the kiss came back in 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court confirmation hearings, when the judge was accused of sexual assault. In Abedin’s description, Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was accused of “conveniently remembering” details. Kavanaugh denied the accusations and was confirmed to the court.The pressure group Rainn (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) defines sexual assault as “sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim”.Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Abedin said: “I did go back to a senator’s apartment, a senator who I knew and I was very comfortable with, and he kissed me in a very shocking way because it was somebody who I’d known and frankly trusted.”Her interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, asked: “Are you suggesting that senator assaulted you?”Abedin paused, and said: “I’m suggesting that I was in an uncomfortable situation with … I was in an uncomfortable situation with a senator and I didn’t know how to deal with it and I buried the whole experience.“But in my my own personal opinion, no, did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment? I didn’t, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like I needed to extricate myself from the situation. And he also spent a lot of time apologising and making sure I was OK and we were actually able to rebalance our relationship.”Earlier this week, Business Insider reported that senators from both parties expressed concern that the unnamed senator may have assaulted others.On CBS, Abedin was also asked what she thought Clinton most valued about her.“I think she would say her loyalty,” she said. “And I would say the same about her. I have tested that. Not intentionally, but I have tested it … I’ve made her life difficult with things that have happened in my personal life.”Abedin is estranged from her husband, the former congressman and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, who served time in prison for sending explicit text messages to a teenage girl.A laptop belonging to Weiner and Abedin became part of Clinton’s 2016 presidential election defeat, when the FBI seized it as part of investigations into Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state.“I think I’m going to take it to my grave,” Abedin told CBS. “It took me a while to reconcile that it was not all my fault.”She added: “I have reconciled – and it took me a while to reconcile – that it was not all my fault. I lived with that. I did. I don’t believe that anymore.“It’s more a sense of an ache in the heart, that it didn’t have to be. And also, my belief that [Clinton] would have been an extraordinary president, that she really would have, and what it meant for women and girls, not just in this country but around the world.”Asked why she wrote her book, Abedin said: “I think for most of my adult life, certainly in the last 25 years that I’ve been in public service or in the public eye, I have been the invisible person behind the primary people in my life. But what I realise is that if you don’t tell your story, somebody else is writing your history.”She also discussed Weiner and how she discovered his various infidelities. She and her husband, she said, were “just two severely broken, traumatised people”.Asked how their relationship was now, she said: “We’re good. He is my co-parent. And I learned the full truth, I processed it and moved on. I wish him well. He, I hope, wishes me well. I think he does.”Asked if she was still angry with Weiner, Abedin said: “I can’t live in that space anymore. I tried that. It almost killed me.”TopicsBooksHuma AbedinHillary ClintonAnthony WeinerUS politicsDemocratsUS SenatenewsReuse this content More

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      Master of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neither

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      BooksMaster of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neitherMartin Indyk’s well-woven biography is sympathetic to the preacher of realpolitik condemned by many as a war criminal Lloyd GreenSun 31 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 31 Oct 2021 02.02 EDTAs secretary of state, Henry Kissinger nursed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war to a close. The disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel ultimately yielded a peace treaty. The Syrian border remains tensely quiet. Unlike Vietnam, in the Middle East Kissinger’s handiwork holds.Friendly Fire review: Israeli warrior Ami Ayalon makes his plea for peaceRead moreThe Sunni Arab world has gradually come to terms with the existence of the Jewish state. Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have diplomatic ties with Jerusalem. Relations with Saudi Arabia are possible.For Kissinger, student and preacher of realpolitik, peace was seldom an end in itself. His pivot to China was about boxing in the USSR. To him, the cold war and existing nation states were what mattered most. The Viet Cong earned a seat at the table because US troops were bogged down. The Palestinians were not so high on Kissinger’s agenda.Now comes Martin Indyk with a 688-page, well-woven history fittingly subtitled “Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy”. The book reflects the author’s admiration for and access to his subject.Kissinger last granted Indyk an interview at the age of 97. Now he’s 98. Indyk’s wife, Gahl Burt, once worked on Kissinger’s staff. Indyk himself is a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His gigs included ambassador to Israel and Middle East envoy. A former Australian national, he volunteered on a kibbutz. He checks many boxes.Master of the Game does convey a sense that Indyk wishes his own attainments equaled those of his subject. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1998 Wye River Memorandum between the Israelis and Palestinians quickly degenerated into the second intifada, flareups in Gaza and Hamas vying with the Palestinian Authority for power on the ground.In the Obama years, Israel emerged as a partisan flashpoint in the US, like abortion and taxes, to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment and Israel’s diplomatic corps but to the delight of the Republicans and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister.In Master of the Game, Indyk lays out the run-up to the October war of 1973, the responses of the US and the USSR, and Kissinger’s nearly two-year hopscotch between Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus.Indyk confirms what is widely known, that while Kissinger did not explicitly give Egypt the green light to attack Israeli-occupied Sinai, he was pleased with the outcome. The war and its aftermath presented the US with the opportunity to lure Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, even if Israel had to pay a price.The war Kissinger “had not expected at the moment”, writes Indyk, “would provide him with the opportunity to manipulate antagonisms”. Those, in turn, would help “begin the construction of what he intended to be a new, more stable American-led order in the Middle East”.Israeli combat deaths topped 2,600 – reportedly more than 1,000 in the war’s first five days. At the time, Kissinger noted that the latter figure would be proportionally equal to twice the number of US deaths in eight years in Vietnam. As a result, Kissinger coldly “assumed that when he needed Israel to accept a ceasefire it would have no choice but to do so”.Kissinger saw that a ceasefire would yield territorial concessions. He got that right but the pace was not necessarily to his liking. Disengagement arrived too quickly and then too slowly for him.In spring 1975, Gerald Ford announced the reassessment of America’s relationship with Israel. Months later, in early September, Egypt and Israel entered a second disengagement agreement, a precursor to the 1978 Camp David Accords hashed out by Jimmy Carter.While “Start-up Nation” has emerged as durable military power, Indyk yearns for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.After noting the Abraham Accords, agreements between Israel and Gulf states, Indyk contends that the “Trump administration actually made matters worse” by proposing a Palestinian entity “as a heavily circumscribed enclave within Israeli territory”. He also acknowledges that the accords took Israeli annexation of the West Bank off the table.As a Talmudic dictum goes, “avar zemano, batel korbano”. Loosely translated, the train has left the station. What applies to a sacrificial rite may pertain to politics. Even the peace process came with a sell-by date. Indyk admits that “the three presidents who succeeded Clinton” tried but failed to reach a lasting agreement, but while Jared Kushner failed to snag the deal of the century, his diplomatic achievement is tangible.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreIndyk also explores the competing tugs on Kissinger, a refugee, of loyalty, religion and ethnicity. Richard Nixon told Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, Kissinger was prone to “indulge Israel’s nationalist sentiments”. On the other hand, Israeli protestors outside Kissinger’s hotel once bellowed: “Jew boy go home.” The Jackson-Vanick amendment, which linked preferred trade status for the USSR to its performance on emigration, infuriated Kissinger.Kissinger has plenty of detractors. Against the backdrop of Nixon’s Vietnam policy, the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, genocide in Bangladesh and East Timor and a coup and invasion in Cyprus, he has been called a war criminal.On the right, the late Phyllis Schlafly dangled Kissinger’s otherness in the face of Ford’s bid for the nomination in 1976. She said Kissinger did not understand “typical American values” and claimed that the loyalty of the German-born and accented diplomat rested with a “supranational” order.Indyk writes: “When it came to managing violent middle eastern passions and preserving peace, history’s judgment should surely be that Henry Kissinger did well.”Reasonable people will freely differ.
      Master of the Game is published in the US by Knopf
      TopicsBooksUS foreign policyUS national securityUS politicsIsraelPalestinian territoriesMiddle East and North AfricareviewsReuse this content More