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      Hatchet Man review: Bill Barr as Trump loyalist – and fairly typical AG

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      BooksHatchet Man review: Bill Barr as Trump loyalist – and fairly typical AGElie Honig excoriates the man who ran interference over Russia. He might have considered attorneys general gone before

      I Alone Can Fix It review: Trump as wannabe Führer
      Lloyd GreenSun 18 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 18 Jul 2021 02.01 EDTIn his 22 months as attorney general under Donald Trump, Bill Barr played blocking back and spear-catcher for the 45th president.Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarmingRead moreOnly when Trump tried to steal the election did Barr grow a conscience. Otherwise, he was a close approximation to Roy Cohn, Trump’s notorious and long-dead personal attorney. Cohn and Barr even attended the same high school and college. But in the end, much as Trump ditched Cohn as he lay dying of Aids, Trump discarded Barr.Elie Honig surmises that Barr’s quest for power and desire to turn the clock back on secular modernity girded his disdain for democratic norms and legal conventions that came to stand in his way.Honig is an ex-prosecutor who became a CNN commentator. His first book, subtitled “How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department”, catalogs Barr’s misdeeds across 288 pages, interspersed with flashbacks to Honig’s career as an assistant US attorney in the southern district of New York.Honig successfully prosecuted more than 100 members and associates of organized crime, including bosses and members of the Gambino and Genovese families. More recently, he drew a comparison between such “mafia cases” and Trump’s Goodfellas-tinged lexicon.“Calling somebody who provides information to law enforcement a ‘rat’ is straight up mob boss language,” Honig tweeted in late 2018.Suffice to say, the author’s anger toward Barr is real and Hatchet Man is thorough. Barr’s transgressions are laid out in black and white.In March 2019, less than two months after succeeding Jeff Sessions, Barr released his own preview of Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow – a preview notably untethered to fact. Later, Barr put his fingers on the scale in connection with the sentencing of Roger Stone and the early release of Paul Manafort. For a self-professed law-and-order AG, who also served under George HW Bush but who had never prosecuted a criminal case, these were unusual steps, to say the least.The federal bench came to question Barr’s credibility. In an opinion tied to the release of a memo related to Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, US district judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote that both Barr and the Department of Justice had been “disingenuous”.The Biden administration is appealing against the ruling. Preserving presidential authority takes precedence over the public’s right to know. Buffing DoJ’s halo can be left for another day.Another of Barr’s gambits, seeking to toss Michael Flynn’s guilty plea (for lying to the FBI while national security adviser) before he received a pardon, became a lightning rod. US district judge Emmett Sullivan questioned Barr’s legal gymnastics.“In view of the government’s previous argument in this case that Mr Flynn’s false statements were ‘absolutely material’ because his false statements ‘went to the heart’ of the FBI’s investigation, the government’s about-face, without explanation, raises concerns about the regularity of its decision-making process,” Sullivan observed.Yet as Trump-era books go, Hatchet Man fails to sizzle. It is short on news and does not entertain. Those with first-hand knowledge did not share it with Honig. Rather, his book is a lament and a prayer for an idealized version of Main Justice that seldom ever was.The power to prosecute and defend is a potent weapon and politics weighs in the balance. John F Kennedy tapped Bobby Kennedy, his brother, as attorney general. Richard Nixon placed John Mitchell, his law partner, in the job. Alberto Gonzales, George W Bush’s counsel since his days as Texas governor, held on until he was forced out. His tenure was a hot mess. The usual question for attorneys general is not whether they are “political” but rather “how political” they are.Under Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch declined to recuse herself from the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use while attempting to steer James Comey from the shadows where he tried to do his work. The FBI director criticized Lynch’s attempt to recast the investigation as a “matter”.Seeing the hand of the Clinton campaign in this kerfuffle over semantics, Comey wrote that the FBI “didn’t do ‘matters’” and “it was misleading to suggest otherwise”.At the other end of the spectrum stands Edward Levi, attorney general under Gerald Ford. Appointed to clear the Augean stables after the Nixon years, Levi was a rarity. A University of Chicago professor, he named an independent counsel to investigate a mere rumor that Ford had received illegal contributions from maritime unions. A six-month investigation found no wrongdoing – and may have torpedoed Ford’s bid for a full term in power.Honig lauds Lynch’s trial experience. Levi’s grandson, Will Levi, was Barr’s chief of staff. It’s a small world, after all.An entire chapter of Hatchet Man, meanwhile, is devoted to Barr’s decision to inject the government into a defamation lawsuit brought against Trump by the writer E Jean Carroll.Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from TrumpworldRead moreIn 2019, Carroll wrote that Trump sexually assaulted her more than two decades before. Trump said she was “totally lying” and that he knew “nothing about her”.After Carroll requested a DNA sample, Barr removed the lawsuit to federal court and claimed Trump’s comments were made within the scope of his official duties. Honig calls the government’s arguments “specious”. A federal trial judge agreed.Not surprisingly, the Trump administration appealed. More surprisingly, Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, has declined to drop that appeal. In the words of one commentator: “There’s nothing new about the justice department protecting the executive branch and the president.”Honig writes that the DoJ “must enact new, on-the-books policies out of the ditch” Barr dug, in an attempt to restore post-Watergate norms. Call that wishful thinking. What ails the department is what ails America: division and political warfare. Another piece of legislation or a well-crafted executive order is not about to change that.
      Hatchet Man is published in the US by Harper
      TopicsBooksWilliam BarrUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS domestic policyPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

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      Biden targets big tech in executive order aimed at anti-competitive practices

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      Biden administrationBiden targets big tech in executive order aimed at anti-competitive practices‘Capitalism without competition is exploitation’, president said while denouncing era of business monopolies Kari PaulFri 9 Jul 2021 17.07 EDTLast modified on Fri 9 Jul 2021 17.51 EDTJoe Biden has signed an executive order targeting anti-competitive practices across the economy that could have major ramifications for America’s largest tech companies. Friday’s order is the latest of Biden’s actions on anti-trust issues, which have pleased progressives pushing for more action on corporate power – particularly among big tech companies – for years.‘Capitalism without competition is exploitation,’ says Biden as he signs order – liveRead moreMore than a dozen federal agencies will be affected by the order, which includes 72 actions and suggestions meant to “promptly tackle some of the most pressing competition problems across our economy”, the White House said.At a White House signing ceremony, Biden denounced the current era of business monopolies. “Rather than competing for consumers they are consuming their competitors; rather than competing for workers they are finding ways to gain the upper hand on labor,” he said.“Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation.” The latest actions aimed at big techThe tech measures suggested in the order include restoring net neutrality, re-examining problematic mergers, pushing for rules against excessive corporate surveillance, prevention of unfair termination fees from internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T, and “right to repair” laws.Biden has called for increased scrutiny of mergers by the leading tech companies, “with particular attention to the “acquisition of nascent competitors, serial mergers, the accumulation of data, competition by ‘free’ products, and the effect on user privacy”.This could affect prior mergers that were initially approved but have recently come under renewed scrutiny from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), including the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook in 2012.The measures targeting big tech acquisitions come weeks after Biden nominated the anti-trust scholar Lina Khan to the FTC, signaling a renewed effort to target big tech firms.It also encourages the FTC to limit farm equipment manufacturers’ ability to restrict the use of independent repair shops or do-it-yourself repairs – such as when tractor companies block farmers from repairing their own tractors.In the order, Biden also encourages the Federal Communications Commission to restore net neutrality, measures that are intended to prevent internet service providers from preferring some content and websites over others, which were rolled back in 2017 under the Trump administration.However, internet freedom advocates say many of the measures that Biden has encouraged the FCC to take cannot move forward until the administration nominates a fifth commissioner, as the four-person board has been deadlocked in recent years.Evan Greer, the director of the digital rights organization Fight for the Future, said the administration needs to quickly nominate a commissioner who “doesn’t have ties to the telecom industry and will stand up to the internet service providers, who supports reinstating net neutrality, and who will expand broadband access for everyone”.“The executive order has a lot of great words, but we need to see some action for those words to mean anything,” she said.Other industries affectedThe order does not only take aim at the tech space – Biden’s efforts to rein in corporate power also extend to his infrastructure plans, as he has called on major companies to pay their “fair share” in taxes to help fund his proposals.Discussing the need to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans, Biden said on Wednesday: “I’m not trying to gouge anybody, but, I mean, just get in the game.”The order will ban or limit non-compete agreements to make it easier to change jobs and raise wages in certain industries, allow rule changes that would pave the way for hearing aids to be sold over the counter at drugstores, and ban excessive early termination fees by internet companies.In the airline industry, the administration is requiring companies to provide clear, upfront disclosures about add-on fees and making it easier for customers to get refunds.The order urges easing the process of switching banks by requiring banks to allow customers to take their financial data with them to another company.It includes several provisions that could affect the agricultural industry. It calls on the US Department of Agriculture to consider issuing new rules defining when meat can use “Product of USA” labels. Democratic lawmakers and union leaders cheered the order.Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate judiciary subcommittee on competition policy, said that Biden’s executive order needed to be buttressed by congressional action.“Competition policy needs new energy and approaches so that we can address America’s monopoly problem,” Klobuchar said. “That means legislation to update our antitrust laws, but it also means reimagining what the federal government can do to promote competition under our current laws.”The Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsBiden administrationUS domestic policyJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma

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      BooksNightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how bad things got – and how they could have been worseLloyd GreenSat 3 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 3 Jul 2021 02.21 EDTAs the world wakes from its pandemic-induced coma, Bloomberg rates the US as the best place to be. More than 150 million Americans have been vaccinated; little more than 4,100 have been hospitalized or have died as a result of breakthrough infection.Trump contempt for White House Covid taskforce revealed in new bookRead moreThe vaccines worked – but too late to save more than 600,000 Americans who have died. More than 500,000 were on Donald Trump’s watch.“This would have been hard regardless of who was president,” a senior administration official confided to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. “With Donald Trump, it was impossible.”Abutaleb is a health policy writer for the Washington Post. Paletta is its economics editor. Together, they supply a bird’s-eye narrative of a chaotic and combative response to a pandemic that has subsided but not disappeared in the west. Elsewhere, it still rages.At almost 500 pages, Nightmare Scenario depicts an administration riven by turf wars, terrified of losing re-election and more concerned about the demands of Trump and his base than broader constituencies and realities. It was always “them” v “us”. Sadly, this is what we expected.Under the subtitle “Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History”, Abutaleb and Paletta confirm that life in the Trump White House was Stygian bleak. Trump was the star. Pain and insecurity were the coins of the realm.Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, laboured in constant fear of Trump and competitors inside the government. After taking a hard line against flavoured e-cigarettes early on, to Trump’s dismay, Azar never recovered. The pandemic simply deepened his personal nightmare.When Covid struck, he was all but a dead man walking. Then the White House Covid taskforce, headed by Mike Pence, neutered his authority. Think of it as a one-two punch. True to form, Trump told a taskforce member Azar was “in trouble” and that he, Trump, had “saved him”.Azar was forced to take on Michael Caputo, an acolyte of Roger Stone, as spokesman. Eventually, Caputo posted a Facebook video in which he claimed “hit squads [were] being trained all over this country”, ready to mount an armed insurrection to stop a second Trump term. Caputo embarked on a two-month medical leave. His “mental health … definitely failed”.Not surprisingly, Trump lost patience with Pence’s taskforce. It failed to deliver a magic bullet and he dismissed it as “that fucking council that Mike has”. For the record, in April 2020 Pence remarked: “Maybe I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, but I think the country is ready to reopen.” For all of his obsequiousness, Pence could never make Trump happy.Instead, Peter Navarro, Scott Atlas and Stephen Moore emerged as Trump’s go-to guys. Predictably, mayhem ensued.Navarro suggested his PhD in economics made him an expert in medicine as well. He jousted with Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984 – seemingly for giggles.Atlas was a radiologist whose understanding of infectious diseases was tangential. As for Moore, he played emissary for a libertarian donor base distraught by shutdowns and mask mandates.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore intoned. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.” Trump’s own authoritarian streak seems to have escaped him.Moore also referred to Fauci as “Fucky”, and advised state-based “liberation” movements against public health measures that served as precursors and incubators to the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January this year.Going back to 2019, Moore was forced to withdraw from consideration for the board of the Federal Reserve after the Guardian reported on his bouts of alimony-dodging, contempt of court and tax delinquency.With one major exception – financing and developing a vaccine – the Trump administration left Covid to the states. Hydroxychloroquine never saved the day, though Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered a bunch of it from India to sate Trump’s ego. Six days after the 2020 election, the National Institutes of Health issued a statement that insisted: “Hydroxychloroquine does not benefit adults hospitalized with Covid-19.” Trump was callous and mendacious before the pandemic. Yet even as he embraced medical quackery, bleach injections and self-pity, he presided over unprecedented vaccine development, the medical equivalent of winning the space race and the cold war at once.Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all tooRead moreWhen Trump signed off on Operation Warp Speed in May 2020, “he thought vaccines were too pie in the sky”, Abutaleb and Paletta report. When Trump learned the first contract executed under the program was with AstraZeneca, from the UK, he growled: “This is terrible news. I’m going to get killed.”Boris Johnson would “have a field day”, he said. Things didn’t work out that way.Right now, countries that relied on Chinese vaccines are experiencing a death spike in the face of the Delta variant. In the Seychelles, almost seven in 10 are fully vaccinated – yet deaths per capita are currently running at the highest rate in the world.Added to Chinese opacity surrounding its role in the outbreak, the limits of vaccine diplomacy and technology are apparent. From the looks of things, Trump has left multiple legacies, some more complex and alloyed than others. But things could have been worse.TopicsBooksCoronavirusInfectious diseasesPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump called White House Covid taskforce ‘that fucking council’, book says

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      Amid chaos at the White House as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, Donald Trump took to referring derisively to the Covid taskforce chaired by his vice-president as “that fucking council that Mike has”.The revelation about the president’s contempt for his key advisory body is one among many in a new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, which is published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Previous revelations from the book have included that Trump wanted to send infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay and that he mused about John Bolton, his national security adviser, being “taken out” by Covid.Authors Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, both Washington Post reporters, also report in depth on how the extraordinary influence of “outside consultants” to Trump, including the controversial Stephen Moore, relentlessly undermined the work of the president’s scientific advisers.The book is a deeply reported account of the beginning of a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 in the US and a federal response hamstrung by incompetence and infighting.Trump’s derisive term for his task force, the authors write, was “a signal that he wished it would go away” and “didn’t want anyone to exert leadership”.“Many on the task force didn’t want the responsibility either, fearful of the consequences.”Under the chairmanship of Vice-President Mike Pence – who is shown resisting his own appointment to replace the outmatched health secretary, Alex Azar – the task force was led by Dr Deborah Birx, a US Army physician widely praised for her role in the fight against Aids but whose star waned under Trump.Abutaleb and Paletta portray Birx as a confident leader unafraid to challenge powerful men, but also someone who “overplayed her hand” when she decided to praise and flatter Trump as a way to manage him.Of an interview Birx gave to the rightwing Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she praised Trump’s “ability to analyse and integrate data”, the authors write: “It was the kind of sycophancy one expected from Pence or [treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin, not a government scientist.”The authors also say Birx worked well with Pence and was admired by fellow workers, though by April 2020, chief of staff Mark Meadows was deriding the task force as “useless and broken”.Birx served until the end of the Trump administration in January this year. Unlike her fellow task force member Anthony Fauci, now chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, she did not remain in public service.Abutaleb and Paletta also report that in March, as cases spiraled and the US death toll passed 1,000, unofficial adviser Stephen Moore, Trump’s “emissary [from] the conservative establishment … strode into the Oval Office to convince the president” to end shutdowns and get the economy moving.Moore is an economist who in 2019 was nominated by Trump to the board of the Federal Reserve, only to withdraw after outlets led by the Guardian reported controversies in his past.He told Abutaleb and Paletta Trump’s controversial and soon dropped promise to reopen the US economy by Easter was “the smart thing to do”, because “the economic costs of this are mounting and there’s not a lot of evidence that lockdowns are working to stop the spread”.Lockdowns to stop the spread of Covid-19 remain in use around the world.Moore is also quoted attacking Fauci, a common target for conservative ire over subjects including mask-wearing and the origins of Covid in China.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore says. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.”Moore also says conservative activists he advised as they staged protests against lockdowns and masks – and who he famously claimed were successors of the great civil rights protester Rosa Parks – asked: “What’s wrong with this fucking Fauci? Sometimes they’d call him Fucky, not Fauci.” More