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      John Bolton chose not to brief Trump on Russia Havana syndrome suspicion

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      John Bolton chose not to brief Trump on Russia Havana syndrome suspicionFormer national security adviser tells podcast ‘we didn’t feel we would get support’ from president during Russia investigationDonald Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton, did not brief the president on suspicions Russia might be behind mysterious “Havana syndrome” attacks on US diplomats because he did not think Trump would support him.‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by foreign adversary, US intelligence saysRead more“Since our concern was that one of the perpetrators – maybe the perpetrator – was Russia,” Bolton said, “we didn’t feel we would get support from President Trump if we said, ‘We think the Russians are coming after American personnel.’”Bolton makes the startling admission in an interview for an episode of a podcast, The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome, hosted by the former Guardian journalist Nicky Woolf and released on Monday.Bolton was national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, a period of intense scrutiny on Trump’s relations with Russia, primarily via special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Mueller issued his report in April 2019. He did not prove collusion between Trump and Moscow in his 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton but the former FBI director did secure indictments of figures close to Trump and lay out extensive evidence of possible obstruction of justice.Trump angrily rejected allegations of wrongdoing and claimed to be the victim of a witch-hunt. But he also closely courted Vladimir Putin, even seeming, in Helsinki in July 2018, to side with the Russian president against his own intelligence agencies.“Havana syndrome” refers to the investigation of more than 1,000 “anomalous health incidents” involving diplomats, spies and other US government employees around the world. The first cases emerged in 2016.Symptoms have included brain injuries, hearing loss, vertigo and unusual auditory sensations. Speculation about directed energy weapons has persisted, though earlier this month an official report said “available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents”.Havana syndrome got its name because, as Bolton told The Sound, “the first reports came from Cuba [so] it would not be unreasonable to say the Cubans were doing it”.But, he said, “it becomes counterintuitive pretty quickly. If they wanted to keep the American embassy open, you wouldn’t attack it. That tended to show that it was some other government. And a government with more capabilities than we thought the Cubans had.”The Trump administration cracked down on Cuba anyway, returning it to the “state sponsor of terror” list, ending a diplomatic thaw begun by Barack Obama. Bolton, a famous rightwing foreign policy hawk, told The Sound he favoured taking that step anyway, regardless of the origin of the Havana syndrome attacks.He also said he and other national security staffers “felt that because it was possible – not certain, but possible – this emanated from a hostile foreign power and we had our ideas who that might be … we thought more needed to be done to consider that possibility and either find evidence to rule it in or rule it out”.If the attack theory was real, Bolton said, there was “no shortage of evidence that would point to Russia as … at least the top suspect”.Nonetheless, he said, he decided not to take that suspicion to Trump.“Who knows what he would’ve said,” Bolton said of his decision not to brief Trump on his suspicions about Russia and Havana syndrome.“He might’ve said, ‘Do nothing at all.’ I didn’t want to chance that, because I did feel it was serious.”Trump fired Bolton in September 2019. The following year, Bolton released a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he was highly critical of his former boss. Trump sought to prevent publication. Bolton has said he could run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 if it is a way to stop Trump, who he has called “poison” to the Republican party.Speaking to The Sound, Bolton suggested the decision not to brief Trump about suspicions about Russia damaged attempts to investigate the Havana syndrome mystery.“When you don’t have the ability to bring the hammer down and say, ‘Find the answer out,’ … it’s much easier for the bureaucracy to resist.”TopicsDonald TrumpJohn BoltonTrump administrationTrump-Russia investigationUS politicsUS national securityUS foreign policynewsReuse this content More

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      Three objects shot down by US jets may be ‘benign’ balloons, White House says

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      Three objects shot down by US jets may be ‘benign’ balloons, White House saysFlying objects could be commercial- or research-linked but US military admits first shot at object over Lake Huron missed Three unidentified objects shot down by US fighter jets since Friday may turn out to be balloons connected to “benign” commercial or research efforts, a White House official said on Tuesday.The US has not found any evidence to connect the objects to China’s balloon surveillance program nor to any other country’s spy program, national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters.‘Significant’ debris from China spy balloon retrieved, says US militaryRead more“We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the [People’s Republic of China’s] spying program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts,” he said.Instead, a “leading explanation” may be that the objects were operated privately for commercial or research purposes, Kirby said, though no one has stepped forward to claim ownership.The unidentified object shot down by a US fighter jet over northern Canada on Saturday was a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it”, according to a Pentagon memo to US lawmakers obtained by CNN.The details about the mysterious object – one of three shot down by the US in an eight-day period after a suspected Chinese spy balloon traversed the US mainland and was brought down over the Atlantic Ocean on 4 February – come amid growing frustration over a lack of information from Joe Biden’s presidential administration.The object shot down over Alaska on Friday was the “size of a small car”, the memo states. It also warns against drawing hasty conclusions: “It should not be assumed that the events of the past few days are connected.”The object shot down over Lake Huron on Sunday was previously described as an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it.“These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon, and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on,” a national security council spokesperson told CNN.Also on Tuesday, Gen Mark Milley, the US’s highest ranking military official, acknowledged at a briefing in Brussels that the first attempt to shoot down the object over Lake Huron missed.The first missile “landed harmlessly” in the water while a second missile successfully downed the object, Milley said.“We’re very, very careful to make sure that those shots are in fact safe,” Milley said, according to the Associated Press. “And that’s the guidance from the president. Shoot it down, but make sure we minimize collateral damage and we preserve the safety of the American people.”US senators received a classified briefing about the objects on Tuesday. The briefers included an assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs as well as Gen Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, according to Politico.The information vacuum has fueled speculation about the origins of the unidentified flying objects detected and shot down over Deadhorse, Alaska; Yukon, Canada; and Lake Huron, Michigan, since Friday.At a press briefing on Monday, administration officials defended Biden’s decision to shoot down the objects and also attempted to bat back at least one strand of the conspiracy theorizing inspired by the spate of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.“I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no – again, no – indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said at a briefing on Monday. “I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that – all of you knew that – and it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.”Pressed on whether political pressure played into the decision to shoot down the objects, Kirby said: “There were very good reasons to do it … These were decisions based purely and simply on what was in the best interests of the American people.”The three objects shot down during the three-day period beginning Friday did not pose any threat to people on the ground, Kirby said, and were not sending communication signals.However, their altitude – significantly lower than the Chinese balloon from earlier – meant that they did pose a “very real potential risk to civilian air traffic”.TopicsUS newsUS politicsChinaUS national securityUS militarynewsReuse this content More

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      China has been spying on US and allies via balloon for years, White House says

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      China has been spying on US and allies via balloon for years, White House saysSurveillance program dated back to at least the Trump administration, which was oblivious to it, says John Kirby China has been operating a high-altitude balloon program spying on the US and its allies for many years, the White House said on Monday as it answered questions about a series of mysterious objects shot down by the US military over an eight-day period in North American airspace.The surveillance program, according to John Kirby, the US national security council spokesperson, dated back to at least the administration of Donald Trump, which he said was oblivious to it.What do we know about the four flying objects shot down by the US?Read more“It was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it,” Kirby said.“We detected it, we tracked it. And we have been carefully studying to learn as much as we can. We know that these PRC [People’s Republic of China] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”The briefing took place amid growing criticism of the Biden administration for not revealing everything it knew about the unprecedented and extraordinary sequence of events beginning with the downing of a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast on 4 February.Biden, Kirby said, directed a broad assessment of China’s intelligence capabilities when he took office. In response to recent events, Kirby said Biden had also now directed an interagency team “to study the broader policy implications for detection, analysis and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks”.Kirby was unable to offer new details about the three most recent objects, including the missile strike on Sunday on an unidentified “octagonal” flying object above Lake Huron, Michigan, and other high-altitude objects shot down over Yukon, Canada, on Saturday and Deadhorse, Alaska, the day before.But he said that authorities would know more once debris had been recovered from remote locations and analyzed. He said all three were much smaller and at a lower altitude than the Chinese spy balloon, but their origin, composition and purpose remained unknown.“We assessed whether they posed any kinetic threat to people on the ground. They did not. We assessed whether they were sending communication signals. We detected none. We looked to see whether they were maneuvering or had any propulsion capabilities. We saw no signs of that,” he said.“[But] while we have no specific reason to suspect that they were conducting surveillance of any kind, we couldn’t rule that out.”He said all three were shot down in “an abundance of caution to protect the security, our security, our interest and flight safety”.The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, suggested on Monday the objects were part of a “pattern” of surveillance of the US and its allies by China and Russia, and an American air force commander said the US military had spotted Chinese spy balloons in the Middle East in “the recent past”.‘It’s surreal’: search for mystery flying object rocks quiet Canadian lakesideRead moreCanada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau echoed those comments, saying: “I think obviously there is some sort of pattern in there. The fact that we are seeing this in a significant degree over the past week is a cause for interest and close attention.Trudeau said that Canadian authorities had deployed “significant resources” to attempt to recover the object shot down over Lake Huron.The Florida Republican Marco Rubio, vice-chairperson of the US Senate intelligence committee, claimed that unidentified aircraft had operated “routinely” over restricted American airspace for years.“This is why I pushed to take this seriously & created a permanent [unidentified aerial phenomenon] taskforce two years ago,” he said in a tweet.In a press briefing on Sunday, a senior air force officer said he could not eliminate the possibility of extraterrestrial activity. “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything at this point,” Gen Glen VanHerck, head of North American airspace defense command (Norad), said.But at the briefing on Monday the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said that the objects did not come from outside Earth. “There is no indication of aliens or terrestrial activity with these recent takedowns. I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that,” Jean-Pierre said.Melissa Dalton, assistant secretary of defense, echoed VanHerck, saying: “We have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we’ve detected over the past week.”Beside aliens, CBS’s veteran national security correspondent, David Martin, on Sunday said officials also apparently could not rule out whether at least some of the unidentified aerial objects which had been shot down were so-called sky trash.“Sky trash includes balloons that are put up by governments, that are put up by corporations, that are put up by research institutes, and probably just by private individuals, and not for nefarious purposes, but just to collect scientific data,” Martin said on CBS’s Face the Nation.“In the past, the US just hasn’t paid much attention to those balloons, but this Chinese balloon was a game-changer. And now, certainly, the Biden administration does not feel it can simply let these other objects pass through American airspace.”The Connecticut congressman Jim Himes expressed frustration with the White House on Sunday in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.“I have real concerns about why the administration is not being more forthcoming with everything that it knows,” said Himes, who like Biden is a Democrat.“In an absence of information, people will fill that gap with anxiety and other stuff. So, I wish the administration was a little quicker to tell us everything that they do know.”Stoltenberg told reporters on Monday in Brussels that he suspected the incidents were part of an ongoing strategy of spying by Nato’s rivals.“What we saw over the US is part of a pattern where China and also Russia are increasing surveillance activities on Nato allies,” he said, urging member nations to maintain vigilance.Lt Gen Alexus Grynkewich, commander of US air forces central, appeared to back up Stoltenberg’s assessment, telling reporters on Monday that Chinese spy balloons were spotted transiting the Middle East in the recent past, according to foreignpolicy.com.Meanwhile, Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is reportedly weighing a meeting with his counterpart in China’s government, Wang Yi, at a three-day security conference in Munich scheduled to begin 17 February, according to Bloomberg. Blinken had postponed what would be the first visit to Beijing by a senior US diplomat since 2018 in response to the Chinese balloon’s intrusion.TopicsUS national securityUS militaryJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Mystery surrounds what exactly was object US jet shot down over Alaska

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      Mystery surrounds what exactly was object US jet shot down over AlaskaHigh-altitude object the size of a small car was downed on Friday but its owner and purpose have yet to be identified Questions remain a day after the US government said it shot down a high-altitude object the size of a small car along the north-eastern Alaskan coast on Friday afternoon.Though efforts by the navy, coast guard and FBI are under way to recover the object, officials had yet to identify its owner or purpose on Saturday.China ‘spy balloon’ wakes up world to new era of war at edge of spaceRead moreMeanwhile, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) confirmed to Canadian news outlet Global News that another “high-altitutde airborne object” has been detected over northern Canada Saturday. NORAD officials said that military aircraft are “currently operating from Alaska and Canada in support of [NORAD] activities”. American officials have not publicly commented on the airborne object seen near Canada.The separate object that was ultimately shot down near Alaska flying at an altitude of 40,000ft, about the same level as commercial planes, and was travelling at about 20 to 40 miles per hour before it was struck down. Officials say the object had flown over parts of Alaska but was heading toward the north pole before it was struck down. American radars first identified the object’s presence around 9pm Alaska time on Thursday evening. A US warplane ultimately shot it down about 1.45pm ET on Friday.Joe Biden briefly told reporters on Friday afternoon that the takedown of the object “was a success”, but the president did not offer any further details.At a White House press briefing on Friday, the national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said the US military brought the object down “out of an abundance of caution”. Once spotted, officials quickly deemed the object a threat to civilian air traffic and ordered Alaska airspace to be temporarily closed.Fox News reported Saturday that an unnamed but senior US official confirmed to the network that the object was not detected until it had entered American airspace.The object, shot down in territorial waters, was unmanned, officials said.The object’s destruction in Alaska came after a tumultuous week for the Biden administration, which ordered the military to shoot down a high-altitude balloon from China over the Atlantic Ocean on 4 February.Officials have yet to publicly give further descriptions of the object that was travelling over Alaska besides its size, altitude and speed. Still, officials have been speculating in various reports about the nature of the object.One official told ABC News that the object was “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and gave the “balloon-like” appearance of floating without “any sort of propulsion”. Another official from the Department of Defense told the New York Times that the object broke into pieces when it hit the frozen sea.After the Chinese balloon was shot down, images showed what appeared to be shreds of materials as it was fished out of the ocean.Brig Gen Pat Ryder of the Pentagon told reporters on Friday that officials “have located a significant amount of debris so far that will prove helpful to our further understanding of this balloon and its surveillance capabilities”.From the size comparison given by officials, the object that was flying over Alaska appears to be much smaller than the Chinese spy balloon. The confirmed balloon was described as being as big as two or three buses rather than a small car like the object over Alaska.The Alaska object was also flying at a lower altitude than the Chinese balloon, which had an altitude of 60,000ft – much higher than the level of commercial aircraft.The Republican senator Lisa Murkowksi of Alaska told NBC News on Friday that she was concerned about the threat posed by objects over her state’s airspace.“Quite honestly, the first line of defense is Alaska,” Murkowski said. “If it comes into Alaska airspace, if it comes into Alaska waters, we need to act.“We need to send the message and we need to be clear and unequivocal that we don’t tolerate this.”The appearance of the Chinese balloon over US airspace has caused a rift in the strained and delicate relationship between the Chinese and US governments. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, postponed an upcoming trip to Beijing, which would have been the first visit to the country by a top American diplomat since 2018.Blinken said the spy balloon was “an irresponsible act and a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law that undermined the purpose of this trip”.Chinese officials have apologized and maintain that the balloon was a “civilian airship” used for weather research that went off course due to limited self-steering capabilities and that its entry into US airspace was unintended.Meanwhile, US officials say the balloon was carrying equipment that was capable of intercepting and geolocating communications.It “was clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment onboard for weather balloons”, a senior state department official said on Thursday. “It had multiple antennas to include an array likely capable of collecting and geolocating communications.”US officials say the balloon was part of a fleet that has been used to collect intelligence in more than 40 countries on five continents. They maintain that balloons went into US airspace at least three times during Donald Trump’s presidency and twice so far during Biden’s.Despite the technology carried by the balloon, the Pentagon said the balloons do not give China any intelligence-collecting capacity beyond existing technology, such as satellites.TopicsUS national securityThe ObserverUS politicsAlaskanewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Hot air’: Marjorie Taylor Greene in State of the Union balloon stunt

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      ‘Hot air’: Marjorie Taylor Greene in State of the Union balloon stuntRepublican extremist appears to reference Chinese surveillance dirigible by parading halls of Congress with white balloon Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared to tee up a State of the Union stunt on Tuesday, patrolling the halls of Congress with a large white balloon in reference to Republican criticism of Joe Biden over his handling of a flight over US territory by a Chinese surveillance dirigible.Now the Chinese ‘spy balloon’ is down, the question is: what was it for?Read more“Just an innocent white balloon everybody,” the Georgia extremist said, hours before Biden’s address to Congress, attempting to keep aloft the balloon saga which ended when it was shot down off the Carolinas on Saturday.Greene did not discuss the Pentagon disclosure that three Chinese balloons passed over the US during the presidency of Donald Trump, only for the Trump administration to fail to spot them.Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters earlier improvements to surveillance under Biden “enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect”.Greene’s promenade with a balloon prompted widespread criticism.Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat, said: “She has to do something with all that hot air.”But Greene is nothing if not a dedicated conspiracy theorist and controversialist. Elected in 2020, she was ejected from committees for threatening behaviour in 2021 but last month restored to key panels as an ally of Kevin McCarthy, the new Republican speaker.President Biden: “Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority.”Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Liar!” pic.twitter.com/OFUglFuBxC— CSPAN (@cspan) February 8, 2023
      US officials have explained that Biden wanted to shoot the balloon down three days before it was eventually popped with a missile, but was persuaded not to order the operation while it was over land, and might cause injury or destruction on the ground when brought down.China claims the balloon was for civilian meteorological research. Its downing stoked a confrontation with Beijing, as Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, cancelled a trip for talks.McCarthy – who has recently praised Greene – reportedly told Republicans not to plan any stunts in response to Biden’s speech.Greene did not have her balloon with her in the chamber. But she did make her mark when Biden accused Republicans of threatening social security and Medicare.“Liar!” Greene was seen to shout.TopicsState of the Union addressJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump documents: Congress offered briefing on records kept at Mar-a-Lago

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      Trump documents: Congress offered briefing on records kept at Mar-a-LagoLawmakers may not be satisfied given subsequent discoveries involving Joe Biden and Mike Pence US officials have offered to brief congressional leaders on their investigation into classified documents found at Donald Trump’s Florida residence, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.Ted Cruz wants two-term limit for senators – and a third term for himselfRead moreA briefing could come as soon as this week but may not meet demands from lawmakers who want to review documents taken not just from Mar-a-Lago but also from the Delaware home and former Washington office of Joe Biden and the Indiana home of Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence.Six months after agents at Mar-a-Lago conducted an unprecedented search of a former president’s home, the Biden White House faces bipartisan pressure to share what it found. Separate special counsels are investigating documents found in the possession of Trump and Biden.Officials have declined to answer most questions about what they found at Mar-a-Lago, citing the ongoing criminal investigation and a separate “risk assessment” of possible damage to intelligence sources.Mike Turner, who chairs the House intelligence committee, told NBC’s Meet the Press the administration told him it would brief this week.“This administration needs to understand we do have national security urgent matters,” the Ohio Republican said. He also called on the White House to brief him on the Chinese balloon shot down off the Carolinas on Saturday.He said: “What’s interesting is that the moment this balloon became public, I got a notice not from the administration that I’m going to get a briefing on this balloon, but they have to rush to Congress now to talk to us about Donald Trump’s documents.”Three people familiar with the matter confirmed a briefing was offered to the “gang of eight” – the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and both intelligence committees. The people spoke on condition of anonymity. Any briefing is not expected to include direct access to documents, the people said.Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, asked for that access in a letter to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, and the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines.It was unclear if the administration will discuss the Biden and Pence records. Turner told NBC records linked to Biden and Pence would be included but two sources said the briefing was expected to focus on Trump.The director of national intelligence and Department of Justice declined to comment.The justice department says around 300 documents with classified markings, including at the top-secret level, were recovered from Mar-a-Lago last August. FBI agents executed a search warrant after evidence led them to believe Trump and his representatives had not returned all classified files.Material taken included around 13,000 government documents, about 100 bearing classification markings. Some material was so sensitive justice department prosecutors and FBI investigators required additional security clearance.A special counsel, Jack Smith, is investigating whether to bring charges against Trump or anyone else. Prosecutors have said they are investigating possible violations of criminal statutes including willful retention of national defense information and obstruction. A grand jury in Washington has been hearing evidence and prosecutors have interviewed Trump associates.Trump has claimed the materials were declassified and that he had the power to do so just by thinking – a claim his lawyers have not repeated. They tried to have an independent arbiter conduct a review of the documents. A federal appeals court said Trump’s team was not entitled to that assessment.TopicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS SenateUS politicsUS national securitynewsReuse this content More

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      Never Give an Inch review: Mike Pompeo as ‘heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass’

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      ReviewNever Give an Inch review: Mike Pompeo as ‘heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass’ The former secretary of state wants to be president. His vicious memoir will sell, but he may not find buyers at the pollsMike Pompeo is prescient, at least. Back in 2016, as a congressman, he warned Kansas Republicans of the danger posed by Donald Trump. Pompeo lamented that the US had already endured more than seven years of “an authoritarian president who ignored our constitution” – meaning Barack Obama – and cautioned that a Trump presidency would be no different.Schiff calls Mike Pompeo ‘failed Trump lackey’ after classified records claimRead more“It’s time to turn down the lights on the circus,” he said.Pompeo is an ex-army captain who graduated first in his class at West Point. But in the face of Trump’s triumphs, he turned tail and sucked-up. Pompeo was CIA director then secretary of state. On the job, his sycophancy grew legendary.“He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass,” a former ambassador recalled to Susan Glasser of the New Yorker.Never Give an Inch is Pompeo’s opening salvo in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. On cue, he puckers up to Trump, the only declared candidate so far, and thanks Mike Pence, a likely contestant, for bringing him into the fold. But where others are concerned, Never Give an Inch doubles as a burn book.Pompeo strafes two other possible contenders: Nikki Haley, Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, and John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser.Trump, Pompeo says, branded Bolton a “scumbag loser”. Pompeo thinks Bolton should “be in jail, for spilling classified information”. The Room Where it Happened, Bolton’s tell-all book, evidently ruffled feathers. As for Pompeo’s own relationship with classified documents? “I don’t believe I have anything classified.” It’s not exactly a blanket denial.Turning to Haley, Pompeo dings her time as UN ambassador – “a job that is far less important than people think” – and her performance in that post.“She has described her role as going toe-to-toe with tyrants,” he observes. “If so, then why would she quit such an important job at such an important time?”Trump is largely spared criticism but his family isn’t. Ivanka Trump makes a dubious cameo. Jared Kushner is depicted as someone less than serious.Pompeo edited the Harvard Law Review. He can write. His memoir is tart and tight. Filled with barbs, bile and little regret, it is an unexpectedly interesting read. It is not the typical pre-presidential campaign autobiography. This one comes with teeth. Pompeo is always self-serving but never bland.He heaps praise on Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and has kind words for Volodymyr Zelenskiy.“I’m troubled by the evil that has befallen his country,” Pompeo writes of Ukraine, a year into the Russian invasion. He also says he is “encouraged” that Zelenskiy, a “onetime Jerry Seinfeld” has “turned into a kind of General Patton”.But while Pompeo deploys the word “authoritarian” more than a dozen times, he never does so in reference to Trump. Trump, remember, has lauded Vladimir Putin as “smart”; praised the Russian president’s war strategy as “wonderful” and “genius”; derided Nato as “dumb”; and unloaded on Joe Biden as “weak”.Pompeo, the brown-noser-in-chief, has zero to say about this.As for Netanyahu, Pompeo is silent on Trump’s reported “fuck him” for the Israeli leader. No Trump appointee has ever dared grapple with that breach of decorum.Pompeo is happy, of course, to blame Obama for alienating Viktor Orban from the US and western Europe, and to sympathize with the Hungarian leader’s efforts to “root his time in office in his nation’s history and Christian faith”. Pompeo’s loyalties are clear. In Hungary this week, Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s son, slammed George Soros, the “global elite” and “radical leftist” control of the media.Pompeo is a fan of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s defeated former leader, who he says “largely modeled his candidacy for president on President Trump”. Words written, presumably, before the mini January 6 in Brasília. Birds of a feather, etc.Pompeo also takes Pope Francis and the Catholic church to task over their relationship with China, and derides both the reformist Pope John XXIII and the liberation theology movement of the 1970s. In 2014, five decades after his death, John XXIII was canonized. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, blurbed Pompeo’s book.As expected, Pompeo basically ignores the insurrection Trump stoked and the attack on Congress it produced. He refers to “mayhem at the Capitol” on 6 January 2021 and targets the “left” for looking to exploit the day’s events, but says nothing of Trump’s concerted effort to subvert democracy and overturn an election.Pompeo knows the GOP base. Three in five Republicans believe voter fraud birthed Biden’s victory. The same number say Trump did nothing wrong on January 6. Not surprisingly, Pompeo omits mention of his own tweets that day or his appearance before the House January 6 committee.“The storming of the US Capitol today is unacceptable,” Pompeo tweeted. “Lawlessness and rioting here or around the world is always unacceptable. Let us swiftly bring justice to the criminals who engaged in this rioting.”Asked about the tweets by committee staff, he responded: “I stand by it.”He also told Liz Cheney, on the record: “I thought the courts and the certification that took place were appropriate … the vice-president [Pence] made the right decision on the evening of 6 January” to certify Biden’s win.None of this appears on the page. Instead, Pompeo gleefully recalls how Trump approved of his loyalty.How well is all this working? Pompeo may well sell books but fail to move the needle. Polls show him at 1% in the notional presidential primary, tied with the likes of Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, and Ted Cruz, the Senate’s own squeegee pest. Pompeo trails Haley and Pence.The appetite for a Pompeo presidency seems … limited. Like Ron DeSantis, he is grim and humorless. Unlike the governor of Florida, Pompeo has no war chest.
      Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love is published in the US by HarperCollins
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksMike PompeoTrump administrationDonald TrumpRepublicansUS elections 2024reviewsReuse this content More

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      Biden and Pence documents reveal US crisis of ‘overclassification’, expert says

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      AnalysisBiden and Pence documents reveal US crisis of ‘overclassification’, expert saysDavid Smith in WashingtonSystem whereby government classifies 50m documents a year threatens national security and democracy, says Jameel Jaffer Donald Trump was caught with classified documents and Democrats were outraged. Joe Biden was caught with classified documents and Republicans were outraged. Mike Pence was caught with classified documents and it became clear that there might be a bigger problem here.America has a crisis of “overclassification”, critics say. Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington has been overzealous in defining government secrets. Politicians and officials can too easily fall foul of this secrecy-industrial complex but the biggest losers are the American people denied democratic accountability.Pence discovery raises fresh questions over US handling of classified papersRead moreAmong the prominent voices calling for reform is Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York. Previously at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he fought court battles over landmark post-9/11 cases relating to national security and individual rights.Jaffer makes no excuses for former president Trump, who hoarded about 300 documents with classified markings at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and resisted justice department efforts to retrieve them. He regards the Biden and Pence cases as different because, as far as is known, they inadvertently left classified material at their respective homes in Delaware and Indiana and willingly turned it over to authorities.Jaffer would have expected the former vice-presidents to be more careful but argues that there is a more fundamental point: the failure of a process in which the government classifies about 50m documents every year – at a cost to taxpayers of approximately $18bn – while not declassifying them at anything like the same rate.“The bigger scandal here is not any particular episode involving the mishandling of classified information but rather the classification system itself, which is totally broken in ways that are bad not just for national security but for democracy,” Jaffer, 51, said this week by phone from Brooklyn, New York.“There’s too much information that’s classified. Too many people have access to the classified secrets. A lot of the information is classified for the wrong reasons because its disclosure would embarrass somebody or it would be inconvenient or would subject government officials to scrutiny that they would rather not have.”Special counsel investigations into Trump and Biden are just the tip of the iceberg.This week the National Archives wrote to representatives of living former presidents and vice-presidents requesting that they check their personal papers in case classified documents are still among them. Former officials from all levels of government discover they are in possession of classified material and turn them over to the authorities at least several times a year, the Associated Press reported.Why all the secrecy? One explanation is incentives. Classification can be useful for a government official seeking to conceal incompetence, preserve a bureaucratic monopoly on a particular set of facts or keep a rival government agency in the dark. Conversely there is no penalty for keeping information – however trivial or unnecessary – secret and no mechanism for declassifying in the public interest.One consequence of this runaway effect is that the national security bureaucracy suffers classification overload: when everything is secret, nothing is secret. Jaffer commented: “That has national security implications because it means that it’s harder to keep track of and protect the secrets that really do need to be secret.“It also breeds a kind of cynicism because people see, on the one hand, senior government officials going on about how sensitive these secrets are and, on the other hand, treating the documents in this kind of careless way.”Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveriesRead moreThere is a double standard, he added, between the way senior officials and junior employees are treated when they mishandle classified material. “That, too, is bad for national security because it demoralises intelligence community employees.”Rapacious classification also takes a toll on democracy. “A lot of the information that the public needs is unjustifiably kept out of the public domain and, as a result, public debate about important issues like foreign policy and war and counter-terrorism policy is impoverished or, even worse, distorted by needless secrecy.”Jaffer discovered this firsthand at the ACLU, which he had joined as a volunteer to advocate for people detained in raids in immigrant communities around New York in the weeks after September 11. Over the next 14 years he worked on cases relating to CIA black sites, the interrogation and torture of prisoners, indefinite detention, the drone campaign and warrantless wiretapping.He added: “The government made bad decisions in secret and, by the time the public learned of those decisions, it was too late to avoid some of the costs.”September 11 was a turning point after decades in which classification principally related to discreet wars overseas or the development of weapons, including nuclear weapons. The reaction to the attacks on New York and Washington changed the character of government secrets and brought them much closer to home.Jaffer commented: “After 9/11, a lot of this had much more direct implications for individual rights including the constitutional rights of Americans. There’s a difference between what is the government doing in south-east Asia and what is it doing here in New York City.“There’s a difference between keeping secret the specifications for a particular weapon and keeping secret the fact that you’re torturing prisoners in overseas black sites or engaged in dragnet surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and emails. Those are different kinds of secrets: they go to government policy, the scope of government power, the meaning of individual rights. The public has a much stronger interest in an informed public debate about those kinds of questions.”If the system is broken, what can be done to fix it? Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sought to encourage declassification with limited success. Jaffer would like to see an institution outside the executive branch – perhaps the judiciary – given the authority to make national security information public where the public interest outweighs the need for secrecy.“One foundational flaw in our national security system is that public interest balancing never happens. There is nobody who is tasked with considering the possibility that the government might have some interest in keeping something secret but the public interest in disclosure is greater.“There’s no public interest balancing in the context of the Freedom of Information Act. If you sue for national security information and the government says the information is classified, that’s the end of it. The judges don’t then say, well does it really need to be classified? But they should be empowered to do that. That would be an important reform.”The Espionage Act of 1917 is also long overdue a rewrite, according to Jaffer.In the 20th century only one person, Samuel Loring Morison, was convicted under the act for sharing information with the press (he was pardoned by Clinton in 2001). But after September 11, both Democratic and Republican administrations have used it aggressively to target journalists’ sources including Reality Winner, Terry Albury and Chelsea Manning.More recently the government has invoked the Espionage Act to go after a publisher: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, whose methods Jaffer likens to those of journalists reporting on national issues. “They communicate confidentially with their sources, protect their sources’ identities, solicit classified information, publish government secrets.“Those are the things that Assange is being prosecuted for and that national security journalists engage in all the time – and have to engage in order to do the work we want them to do. That’s why I see the Assange case as such a threat to press freedom.”Jaffer is not an absolutist who wants to put all information in the public domain. But nor does he accept that the leaking of government secrets is an existential threat.Biden claims ‘no regrets’ but classified papers case could come back to bite himRead more“The much bigger problem is not that sensitive things are being disclosed dangerously but rather that important information crucial to the public’s ability to understand government policy, and crucial to the democratic legitimacy of the government’s policies, is being withheld unjustifiably,” he said.“What we need is a bottom-up reform of the entire classification system including the Espionage Act. I don’t think this is a system that is serving us well. The fact that the system is so broken has very significant costs for our society, and it’s bad not just for public debate and for democracy but even for national security too.”TopicsUS national securityJoe BidenMike PenceDonald TrumpUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More