Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

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

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisis

      by

      When the pandemic struck, George Packer moved his family out of the city and upstate into the countryside.The move forced one America’s most celebrated and decorated non-fiction writers, famous for his reporting, to sit still for once – and to contemplate what was happening to his country.The result is an extended essay, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, a meditation on the crippling division of the nation into irreconcilable political tribes, on to which Packer has added some reflections on the way out of the mire.“I felt immobilised as a reporter,” Packer said. “It seemed like an essay was the thing to do – just put down a bunch of thoughts that get stirred up when you’re sitting in one place for a long time, looking hard at yourself and your country. So it was a Covid book for sure, making the best of a bad situation.”In some ways it is a long epilogue to a previous work, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, for which Packer won the National Book Award in 2013. That was a deeply reported account of the shredding of the social fabric. Last Best Hope is a stock-taking two presidential terms later, after the rise and fall of Donald Trump, who the author sees as the inevitable symptom of the national unraveling.Instead of getting in his car and driving across the country, Packer ordered a small pile of essays which did what he was trying to achieve, a diagnosis of a nation in crisis. One was a pamphlet by Walt Whitman called Democratic Vistas, “a passionate, wonderful book”; another was Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, by the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1914.Packer also looked abroad, rereading George Orwell’s essay on wartime Britain, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, as well as Strange Defeat, a contemplation by French historian Marc Bloch of the chronic failings that gifted Hitler his easy conquest in 1940, published after its author was executed by the Nazis. Packer sees a parallel between France’s shock at being routed with the humbling of America in the face of Covid-19.Sitting alongside these shorter works in Packer’s rural retreat was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, an observation of the country and what made it different written by a French observer just over a half-century after its founding. Packer describes it as “a masterpiece of sociology and observation and political analysis”.He finished writing Last Best Hope at a point when the democracy de Tocqueville had described had barely survived a direct onslaught, the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol aimed at reversing the election result.“I think we dodged more than a bullet – a mortar round,” Packer said, noting that if Republican election officials in Georgia and Republican-appointed judges around the country had done the bidding of their president and party, and overturned the election, the battle would have spilled bloodily into the streets. And if Trump had not been so staggeringly inept in his handling of the pandemic, Packer believes he would have won easily.The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient“I’ve seen the foreshadowing of something I never expected to see, never imagined, which is the end of our democracy,” he said. “I lived through a lot of bad political periods, but that never seemed to be on the horizon.”On closer examination, American democracy might not have dodged the bullet, or the mortar round, after all. It may have been badly wounded.Packer says he sees the courts, and state election machinery, and all the institutions that just about held the line in 2020, as “a patient getting out of bed after a really long illness and having just the strength to walk across the room”. The analogy raises the question of whether the patient will have the will and the vitality to do the same in 2022 or 2024.“The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient at the moment,” Packer said. “They’re sneaking into the room and injecting toxins in the form of voter suppression laws and conspiracy theories and lies. So yeah, it’s a real question whether a democracy can survive if nearly half the country has embraced an anti-democratic worldview. That’s kind of the question we’re facing right now.”Real America, Just America … and moreOne of the side effects of Packer’s Covid-led move out of the city was that it brought him into proximity with people who saw the nation through a very different prism. He describes the night when he first sees Trump lawn signs in the yard of polite and friendly neighbours.“Five white letters stretched across a sign,” he writes. “The blaring shade of that red instantly told me what the five letters said.”His visceral reaction to Trumpists led to some introspection about the roots of those emotions and what they implied on a national scale.“My attitude had something to do with my good luck,” he writes. “My life savings were doing pretty well. I was comfortable and was afraid, and this fearful security shut down my imaginative sympathy. No wonder they resented me as much as I despised them.”One of the central propositions in Last Best Hope is that the American political firmament has shattered into four rival narratives, crossing across the old red-blue divide. There is the Free America of small-government conservatives, who put the liberty of the individual above all; the Smart America of a smug, comfortable intellectual elite; the Real America of white Christian nationalism, the driving force behind populism; and there is Just America, built increasingly around identity politics and critical theory.His disdain for the latter, which he sees as both elitist and a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, is the main point of contention over his book on the left.“Just America embraces an ideology of rigid identity groups that keeps the professional class in its superior place, divides workers, and has little to do with the reality of an increasingly multiracial, intermarrying society,” Packer writes.His description of Black Lives Matter protesters in New York in the summer of 2020 as “disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year” has raised hackles, to say the least.Critics accuse Packer of underestimating the fury of Black Americans at having to live in constant fear of lethal police brutality, and their agency in driving the BLM movement and the Biden campaign, helping it succeed where Hillary Clinton failed. Packer argues that presents a distorted view of the underpinnings of Biden’s victory.“I take issue with the notion that – let’s call it – the ‘identity left’ carried Biden over the line,” he said. “I think a coalition of groups carried Biden over the line, including suburbanites, including Never-Trump Republicans, including working class, black and Latino voters who voted for Biden in the primaries, who got him the nomination, when they could have gone for someone more closely identified with the left.”Biden really does have a feel for workers and for labourHe sees Biden as occupying space outside his Four Americas grid, a throwback to an age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and of powerful, respected labour unions. Packer approves.“He really does have a feel for workers and for labour. And I think he understands that you don’t advance the cause of equality by speaking to Americans as if they are members of monolithic identity groups that are somehow in perpetual conflict with each other.”To the extent that Packer has a remedy for America’s ills it lies in the reaffirmation of that trait De Tocqueville identified in the 1830s: a commitment to equality. And that, he argues, can only be achieved by the unification of the working class.It all sounds a bit un-American. For decades, the overwhelming majority of the population identified as middle class, the class to which almost every aspiring politician still appeals. But that aspirational self-image has been ground down over decades by the rapacity of the global economy and the elites who are its beneficiaries.“They don’t have the dignity that society once conferred on them,” Packer said. “They’re just struggling, drowning, paid abysmal wages, with no union to represent them. And now they’ve disappeared altogether because we have one-click shopping. So the working class is something we never have to think about because we don’t see them.”The pandemic, however, brought the working class back into the spotlight, albeit temporarily. The “knowledge workers” and the opinion-forming elites stranded at home were suddenly reliant on the essential workers who kept virtually the whole economy going with services and deliveries.Just maybe, Packer says, this moment of renewed appreciation can be leveraged under Biden into a real improvement in living standards of this virtually invisible majority, from all four Americas.‘Pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas’Some of the prescriptions in the tail end of the book, for restoring equality and the “art of self-government”, come across as somewhat fanciful, like calling on Americans to turn off Twitter and Facebook and do a year of national service, so followers of the four narratives have to spend some time in each other’s company.“The last pages are full of pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas,” Packer admitted, bluntly. “I’m not a political operative so I don’t think it’s my job to figure out how to get it passed through Congress. But I did feel the need to lay down a direction – here’s the way we need to go.”The key word in the book’s title is “hope” and it recalls a much earlier book on the American condition by the bard of the working classes, Stud Terkel. Terkel’s book was Hope Dies Last. For Packer, it is a necessity as much as a conviction.“For one thing I have kids, and it’s just almost psychologically impossible not to hold out hope,” he said.He believes Biden’s administration has a window in which it can address some national divisions indirectly, by demonstrating the power of government to change people’s lives for the better.“It won’t happen with a speech or with an open hand or with a plea, because the divisions are so deep and corrosive. It almost has to happen unconsciously,” Packer concluded. “I think we’re actually be getting to go in that direction, very slowly, with a lot of dangerous obstacles ahead.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Michael Wolff to publish third exposé of Trump, covering last days in office

      by

      Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump, focusing on the final days of his presidency, will be published in July under a provocative title: Landslide.Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college – a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016.Trump has pursued the lie that Biden’s victory was the result of electoral fraud – a speech on the subject fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January, leading to a second impeachment trial.Though Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night he “didn’t win” and wished Biden well, he also said the election was “unbelievably unfair”.Wolff published his first Trump tell-all in January 2018, rocking the White House when the Guardian broke news of the book, Fire and Fury.Trump sought to block publication, calling Wolff “a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book”. The reading public ignored him: the explosive exposé sold 1.7m copies in its first three weeks.In 2019 Wolff published Siege, which looked at a “presidency under fire”, tackling topics including Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow.Wolff no longer enjoyed unfettered West Wing access but he did produce a bombshell, again first reported by the Guardian: that Mueller’s team had prepared and shelved an indictment of the president, on three counts of obstruction of justice.Wolff said he obtained the documents from “sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”. The special counsel rejected his claim, a spokesman saying: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”Amid such controversy, and with competitors having flooded the shelves with reportage on the chaotic Trump presidency, Siege did not sell as well as Fire and Fury.Like its predecessor, Siege used Steve Bannon as a major source. By then, however, the far-right provocateur was no longer a White House strategist or even, thanks to his cooperation for Fire and Fury which enraged the president, a major figure in Trumpworld.On Thursday, Wolff’s publisher said he had interviewed the former president. It also said Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, would focus on his “tumultuous last months at the helm of the country”.Out on 27 July from Little, Brown in the UK and Macmillan in the US, the book is based on what the publishers called “extraordinary access to White House aides and to the former president himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world”.Trump has claimed to be writing “the book of all books” himself. In a statement last week, he claimed he had “turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers”, adding: “I do not want a deal right now. I’m writing like crazy anyway, however.”After major publishers said they would not touch a Trump memoir, he insisted “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses have made very substantial offers which I have rejected”.“That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future,” he said. “… If my book will be the biggest of them all … does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money?”Possibly to Trump’s chagrin, those who served him in office have found publishers eager to release their memoirs – and to pay a lot of money to do so.Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has a “seven-figure”, two-book deal – despite a staff rebellion at Simon & Schuster.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has a deal for a “definitive” account of the Trump presidency. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint at HarperCollins, has said the book will come out in early 2022. The price of the deal was not disclosed.Last November, shortly after Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, Barack Obama published the first volume of a projected two-part memoir that was sold to Penguin Random House with books by his wife, Michelle Obama, for a reported $65m. The former president’s book, A Promised Land, sold strongly.Another former president, Bill Clinton, has moved into fiction. The President’s Daughter – his second thriller, in this case about a president who also happens to be a former Navy Seal – is again written with James Patterson. This week, it debuted at No1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers list. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      US ends Trump-era asylum rules for immigrants fleeing violence

      by

      The US government on Wednesday ended two Trump administration policies that made it harder for immigrants fleeing violence to qualify for asylum, especially Central Americans. Attorney general Merrick Garland issued a new policy saying immigration judges should cease following the Trump-era rules that made it tough for immigrants who faced domestic or gang violence to win asylum in the United States. The move could make it easier for them to win their cases for humanitarian protection and was widely celebrated by immigrant advocates. “The significance of this cannot be overstated,” said Kate Melloy Goettel, legal director of litigation at the American Immigration Council. “This was one of the worst anti-asylum decisions under the Trump era, and this is a really important first step in undoing that.” Garland said he was making the changes after President Joe Biden ordered his office and the Department of Homeland Security to draft rules addressing complex issues in immigration law about groups of people who should qualify for asylum. The changes come as US immigration authorities have reported unusually high numbers of encounters with migrants at the southern border. In April, border officials reported the highest number of encounters in more than 20 years, though many migrants were repeat crossers who previously had been expelled from the country under pandemic-related powers. The number of children crossing the border alone also has been hovering at all-time highs. Many Central Americans arrive on the border fleeing gang violence in their countries. But it isn’t easy to qualify for asylum under US immigration laws, and the Trump-era policies made it that much harder. More than half of asylum cases decided by the immigration courts in the 2020 fiscal year were denials, according to data from the department of justice’s executive office for immigration review. Four years earlier, it was about one in five cases. In the current fiscal year, people from countries such as Russia and Cameroon have seen higher asylum grant rates in the immigration courts than people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the data shows. One of the Trump administration policies was aimed at migrants who were fleeing violence from non-state actors, such as gangs, while the other affected those who felt they were being targeted in their countries because of their family ties, said Jason Dzubow, an immigration attorney in Washington who focuses on asylum. Dzubow said he recently represented a Salvadoran family in which the husband was killed and gang members started coming after his children. While Dzubow argued they were in danger because of their family ties, he said the immigration judge denied the case, citing the Trump-era decision among the reasons. Dzubow welcomed the change but said he doesn’t expect to suddenly see large numbers of Central Americans winning their asylum cases, which remain difficult under US law. “I don’t expect it is going to open the floodgates, and all of a sudden everyone from Central America can win their cases. Those cases are very burdensome and difficult,” he said. “We need to make a decision: do we want to protect these people?” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans move to block inquiry into Trump DoJ’s secret data seizure

      by

      Top Republicans are moving to block a Senate inquiry into the Trump justice department’s secret seizure of data from Democrats to hunt down leaks of classified information, fearing a close investigation could damage the former president.Trump, who is facing a mounting crisis of legal problems and political criticism, still wields huge power among Republicans, and has hinted recently at a return run for the White House.In fiery remarks, the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, criticized the rapidly expanding congressional inquiries as unnecessary and accused Democrats of embarking on “politically motivated investigations”.“I am confident that the existing inquiry will uncover the truth,” said McConnell. “There is no need for a partisan circus here in Congress.”The forceful pushback from McConnell shows his alarm about the latest aggressive move by Democrats to engage in retrospective oversight that could expose Trump for misusing the vast power of the federal government to pursue his political enemies.It also means Republicans are certain to lock arms to block subpoenas against Trump justice department officials, including former attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions. Democrats need at least one Republican member for subpoenas because of the even split between Democrats and Republicans on the panel.Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, suggested he would offer no such support. “Investigations into members of Congress and staff are nothing new, especially for classified leaks,” he said.The Republican criticism came as Democrats have stepped up investigations into the justice department for secretly seizing in 2018 data belonging to two Democrats on the House intelligence committee – and some of Trump’s fiercest critics.In the Senate, the judiciary committee chair, Dick Durbin, demanded in a letter that the attorney general, Merrick Garland, deliver a briefing and respond to a raft of questions into the seizures by 28 June. And the House judiciary committee chair, Jerry Nadler, said his panel would launch an investigation into the “coordinated effort by the Trump administration to target President Trump’s political opposition” as he weighed hauling in Barr and Sessions.The parallel investigations showed Democrats’ determination to seize the momentum, even as Republicans started rallying in opposition – for largely the same reasons that governed their motivation to sink a 9/11-style commission to examine the Capitol attack.Democrats also said that they would press ahead with their investigations concurrently with the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, whose office last week opened a separate inquiry.“I do think there has to be a congressional role to supplement whatever DoJ doesn’t turn over,” the congressman Eric Swalwell, one of the two House Democrats who had his records seized, told the Guardian.But in only requesting Garland’s appearance before the Senate judiciary committee – and not Barr or Sessions – Democrats revealed the power Senate Republicans wield to obstruct measures they fear could anger Trump and his base ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.The political roadblocks being laid down by Senate Republicans mean the most meaningful congressional investigation into the Trump justice department targeting Democrats is likely to come from the House judiciary committee.On account of Democrats’ majority in the House, Nadler does not suffer from the same problems besetting his colleagues in the Senate, and retains the ability to subpoena Barr and Sessions without Republican support.The judiciary committee did not outline concrete steps for their investigation. But Nadler intends to keep the threat of subpoenas hanging over the Trump attorneys general as he ratchets up pressure over the coming weeks, said a source familiar with the matter.The twin investigations by House and Senate Democrats follow the referral from the deputy attorney general, Lisa Mascaro, to the inspector general to launch a review, according to a senior justice department official.The inspector general probe came after the New York Times reported that the Trump administration used grand jury subpoenas to force Apple and one other service provider to turn over data tied to Democrats on the House intelligence committee.Although investigations into leaks of classified information are routine, the use of subpoenas to extract data on accounts belonging to serving members of Congress is near-unprecedented outside corruption investigations.Justice department investigators gained access to, among others, the records of Adam Schiff, then the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee and now its chairman; Swalwell; and the family members of lawmakers and aides. More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

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

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Pure insanity’: emails reveal Trump push to overturn election defeat

      by

      Donald Trump tried to enlist top US law enforcement officials in a conspiracy-laden and doomed effort to overturn his election defeat, a campaign they described as “pure insanity”, newly released emails show.The documents reveal Trump and his allies’ increasingly desperate efforts between December and early January to push bogus conspiracy theories and cling to power – and the struggle of bewildered justice department officials to resist them.“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, which released the emails on Tuesday.At least five times, the documents show, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, instructed justice department officials to investigate false allegations of voter fraud, including a conspiracy theory called “Italygate”, which claims electoral data was changed from Europe by means including military satellites and with the knowledge of the CIA.On 1 January Meadows, a fierce Trump loyalist, sent Jeffrey Rosen, then acting attorney general, a link to a YouTube video detailing the “Italygate” theory. Rosen forwarded the email to the then acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, who replied: “Pure insanity.”The documents also show that Trump pressured Rosen to make the justice department take up election fraud claims.But Rosen refused to arrange a meeting between officials and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has played a leading role in pushing the conspiracy theories. Meadows asked Rosen to help arrange a meeting with Giuliani, the emails show.Rosen wrote to a justice department colleague on 1 January: “I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”Meadows also sent an email to Rosen about alleged irregularities in Fulton county, Georgia, a state Joe Biden won narrowly. Rosen again forwarded the email to Donoghue and asked: “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to the message below.”Trump, through an assistant, sent Rosen an email on 14 December with documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan – a debunked allegation a federal judge had already rejected.Forty minutes later, Trump announced that William Barr, his second and loyal attorney general but who proved reluctant to back the claims of a stolen election, would resign and be replaced by Rosen.Two weeks later, on 29 December, Trump’s White House assistant emailed Rosen and other justice department lawyers a draft legal brief they were urged to file at the US supreme court.The department never filed the brief. Emails released by the House committee showed that Kurt Olsen, a Maryland lawyer involved in writing Trump’s draft brief, repeatedly tried to meet Rosen but was unsuccessful.The draft brief backed by Trump argued that changes to voting procedures by Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, made amid the coronavirus pandemic to expand mail-in voting, were unlawful. Biden won all those states.Similar arguments were made in a lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas and a Trump ally. The supreme court rejected that long-shot lawsuit in December.The House oversight committee has requested that former officials including Meadows and Donoghue appear for transcribed testimony. The committee previously requested Rosen’s testimony on 21 May.Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman, told MSNBC: “It would be more surprising if these emails were not sent. It’s really on brand for what Donald Trump was trying to do … to weaponise his own Department of Justice to overturn the will of the American voter. Frankly, we cannot allow this to pass without consequences.”Congress also is investigating the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters trying to stop the formal certification of Biden’s election victory.On Tuesday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said nearly 500 people had been arrested in connection with the attack.“The resolve and dedication with which the justice department has approached the investigation of the 6 January attack,” he said, “reflects the seriousness with which we take this assault on a mainstay of our democratic system, the peaceful transfer of power.“Over the 160 days since the attack, we have arrested over 480 individuals and brought hundreds and hundreds of charges against those who attacked law enforcement officers, obstructed justice and used deadly and dangerous weapons to those ends.” More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump spied on journalists. So did Obama. America needs more press freedom now | Trevor Timm

      by

      The US Department of Justice is under increasing fire for the still-unfolding scandals involving the secret surveillance of journalists and even members of Congress in the waning days of the Trump presidency. Some of these actions were even initially defended by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice.In response to the growing scandal – and the scathing condemnations from the surveillance targets at the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN – the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has vowed the DoJ will no longer use legal process to spy on journalists “doing their jobs”. The Times, the Post and CNN are set to meet with the justice department this week to seek more information on what happened and extract further promises it won’t happen again.But mark my words: if Congress does not pass tough and binding rules that permanently tie the DoJ’s hands, it will happen again – whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.Promises are no longer enough. In many circles, these scandals are being portrayed as the Trump White House run amok. While some in the Trump justice department may have been motivated by political vengeance, the problem is far bigger than Donald Trump, William Barr or even the party in charge of the White House.As the reporter Charlie Savage detailed in an excellent piece in the New York Times over the weekend, administrations in both parties have spied on journalists with increasing abandon for almost two decades, in contravention of internal DoJ regulations and against the spirit of the first amendment. Many people already forget that before Trump was known as enemy number one of press freedom, Barack Obama’s justice department did more damage to reporters’ rights than any administration since Nixon.So yes, Garland needs to immediately put his “no more spying on reporters” vow into the DoJ’s official “media guidelines”, which govern investigations involving journalists. If he doesn’t, he or his successor could change their mind in an instant. But, why should we just “trust” Garland’s pinky promise to not investigate journalists and politicians without an ironclad law?Leaks of confidential and classified information to journalists are vital to our democratic system, yet the DoJ often diverts huge resources to root out their sources. If you want an example, look no further than ProPublica’s recent investigation into the American tax system and how the wealthiest billionaires in the country pay little to no taxes. The series of stories sparked outrage across the country as soon as it was published. Garland leapt into action, vowing an investigation … only, he promised to investigate the leaker – not the tax dodgers.The rise of internet communications has opened the floodgates to authorities’ ability to spy on journalists and root out whistleblowers; they can figure out exactly who journalists are talking to, where, when, and how long; and they can silence media lawyers with expansive gag orders that can leave them almost helpless to appeal. And as the pandemic has rendered in-person meetings even harder than before, people everywhere are more reliant on the communications infrastructure that can betray them at any time.For real safeguards, Congress needs to act. Perhaps the fact that multiple members of Congress itself, including the representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, have now been ensnared in the DoJ’s leak dragnet will make them more likely to move than in the past.The irony is Representative Schiff and Representative Swalwell have of course been some of Congress’s most ardent defenders of surveillance – even during the Trump administration. They fought against surveillance reform that would put in more safeguards at the DoJ on multiple occasions. In Representative Schiff’s case, despite literally being the co-chair of the “press freedom caucus”, he inserted a provision into an intelligence bill that would even make it easier for the government to prosecute reporters who published leaked classified information.Being the victim of unjust surveillance sometimes tends to make even the most devoted surveillance hawks soften their stance. If Garland is promising to bar the surveillance of journalists for the purpose of finding their sources, Congress can simply pass a law holding them to it. Anything else at this point is just empty rhetoric.But there is another issue looming large over this debate, one that many seem hesitant to talk about. Garland has said so far that the DoJ won’t spy on journalists unless they are engaged in a crime. Well, the DoJ is currently attempting to make newsgathering a crime, in the form of its case against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.Assange is, to say the least, not popular in Washington DC and in mainstream journalism circles. However, the actions described in the indictment against him, most notably the 17 Espionage Act charges, are indistinguishable for what reporters do all the time: talk to sources, cultivate their trust, request more information, receive classified documents, and eventually publish them.News outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post already know what a threat the case is to their reporters’ rights; they’ve said so in public. However, it’s vital that they say this to the attorney general’s face. Right now, there is little pressure on the DoJ to drop the Assange charges, despite the fact that virtually every civil liberties and human rights group in the US has protested against them.If Garland bars surveillance of journalists “doing their jobs” but secures a conviction that makes journalists’ jobs a crime, his promises will ultimately be worse than meaningless. More