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      Bob Woodward to publish Trump interviews detailing his ‘effort to destroy democracy’

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      Bob Woodward to publish Trump interviews detailing his ‘effort to destroy democracy’The investigative journalist’s new audiobook, The Trump Tapes, digs deep into the threat the former president poses to democracy Explaining his decision to publish tapes of his 20 interviews with Donald Trump, renowned journalist Bob Woodward said he had finally recognized the “unparalleled danger” the former president poses to American democracy.His three books on the Trump presidency, Woodward said, “didn’t go far enough”.The veteran reporter will release an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, on Tuesday. On Sunday, he published excerpts in an essay for the Washington Post, the paper for which he and Carl Bernstein covered the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974.‘A nutso proposition’: Robert Draper on Trump, Republicans and January 6 Read moreWoodward, 79, has chronicled every president since. His three Trump books – Fear, Rage and Peril, the last written with Robert Costa – were instant bestsellers.But by Woodward’s own admission, those books exercised reportorial caution when it came to passing judgment, even as they chronicled four chaotic years culminating in the January 6 Capitol attack.Woodward’s decision to pass judgment now did not meet with universal praise.Oliver Willis, a writer for the American Independent, a progressive outlet, pointed to recent criticism of reporters including Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, for allegedly holding important reporting for Trump books. Willis said Woodward essentially saying “Guys, I’m kind of feeling Trump might be a fascist” was a “perfect example of how ivory tower journalism fails to inform the public”.Pelosi says Trump not ‘man enough to show up’ to testify on January 6Read moreSeth Abramson, the author of three books on Trump, said: “I don’t know how it happened, but the Trump biographers who knew this for certain because of their research in 2016 and 2017 were outsold by Bob Woodward 10-to-1 despite him only coming to this conclusion now. A failure of media, or of publishing? Or both?”In the Post, Woodward elaborated on his change of mind.“There is no turning back for American politics,” he wrote. “Trump was and still is a huge force and indelible presence, with the most powerful political machine in the country. He has the largest group of followers, loyalists and fundraisers, exceeding that of even President [Joe] Biden.“In 2020, I ended Rage with the following sentence: ‘When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.’“Two years later, I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger. When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the [coronavirus] to racial injustice, it’s clear he did not know what to do. Trump was overwhelmed by the job.”In June 2020, Woodward said, he asked Trump if he had assistance in writing a speech about law and order amid national protests for racial justice.Trump said: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.”Woodward wrote: “The voice, almost whispering and intimate, is so revealing. I believe that is Trump’s view of the presidency. Everything is mine. The presidency is mine. It is still mine. The only view that matters is mine.“The Trump Tapes leaves no doubt that after four years in the presidency, Trump has learned where the levers of power are, and full control means installing absolute loyalists in key cabinet and White House posts.“The record now shows that Trump has led – and continues to lead – a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy.“Trump reminds how easy it is to break things you do not understand – democracy and the presidency.”Leftwing writers were not uniformly skeptical of Woodward’s motives. At the New Republic, Michael Tomasky said he hoped the tapes might influence voters in the looming midterm elections, in which a Republican party firmly in Trump’s grip is poised to take the House and perhaps the Senate.Tomasky wrote: “I hope against hope that the media frenzy that will attend this release will bring Trump back into focus as an issue in this election. There may be nuclear bombshells buried in the tapes that have been held back from the selective leaks.“One wonders whether Woodward is holding some newsy quotes until Tuesday.”Tomasky added: “Let’s hope so, anyway, because what has been striking in these recent weeks is the extent to which Trump has faded from the electoral conversation.”Republicans aiming to take House and Senate seats, governors’ mansions and important state posts will hope things stay that way.Trump is in legal jeopardy on numerous fronts, from investigations of the Capitol attack and attempts to overturn the 2020 election to a legal fight over his retention of White House records, criminal and civil suits concerning his business activities, and a defamation suit from the writer E Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her.Maggie Haberman on Trump: ‘He’s become a Charles Foster Kane character’Read moreThe former president denies wrongdoing and continues to float a third White House run. On Sunday, Woodward told CBS he regretted not pressing Trump about whether he would leave the White House if he lost in 2020.On the relevant tape, Woodward says: “Everyone says Trump is going to stay in the White House if it’s contested. Have you thought …”Trump interjects: “Well, I’m not – I don’t want to even comment on that, Bob. I don’t want to comment on that at this time. Hey Bob, I got all these people, I’ll talk to you later on tonight!”Woodward said: “It’s the only time he had no comment. And this, of course, was months before his loss. And I kind of slapped myself a little bit: Why didn’t I follow up on that a little bit more?”
      This article was amended on 24 October 2022 to correct a misspelling of Oliver Willis’s surname.
      TopicsBooksBob WoodwardUS press and publishingWashington PostNewspapersUS politicsUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the Post

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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the PostThe public editor and media columnist is fascinating and unsparing, particularly about the Times’ Trump-Clinton fiasco Margaret Sullivan has written a beguiling memoir which shares many of the virtues of the work that brought her national attention as public editor of the New York Times and then as a media columnist for the Washington Post. The virtues of her columns, excellent news judgment and old-fashioned common sense, are again on display.Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreEspecially in the early part of the book, Sullivan pats herself on the back quite a bit for breaking a glass ceiling by becoming one of the first woman editors of an important regional paper, the Buffalo News. But she is capable of self-criticism, especially for a painful mistake when her paper decided to publish the criminal backgrounds of the victims of a mass shooting. “The Black community was furious” because the paper had deepened “the pain of family and friends who were mourning their loved ones” – and “they were right”. Too often victims of police violence in Buffalo had been described as “no angel”.She quotes Goethe on the benefits of such a mistake: “By seeking and blundering, we learn.”The next phase of her career, when she identified the blunders of editors and reporters at the New York Times, then publicized them in her columns, is the most interesting part of the book.Sullivan quickly learned what I discovered many years ago, when I switched from writing about politicians and prosecutors for the Times to critiquing journalists for Newsweek: reporters have by far the thinnest skins of any public figures. It’s not surprising: a big reason many choose to become journalists is to give themselves a feeling of being in control, so they often feel discombobulated when they are the subject of an interview instead of its progenitor.To her credit, Sullivan offended the sports editor and the politics editor of the Times equally. She showed she had the right instincts with her first blogpost, calling for “rigorous adherence not just to the facts but to the truth, and away from the defensive performative neutrality that some were beginning to call false balance or false equivalence (‘Some say the earth is round; others insist it is flat’ or, more pertinently ‘Some say climate change is real and caused partly by human behavior; others insist it doesn’t exist’.)”She almost never had “a completely comfortable day” as public editor, which means she did a good job: “If the people I worked next to were happy with me, I felt guilty for being too soft on the institution … If they were upset with me – sometimes even furious” she worried she had been too harsh.One of her worthiest crusades was against the vast use of anonymous sources, especially in Washington stories. When Eric Schmitt, a national security reporter, was appointed to a committee on reporting practices, he was astonished to learn that readers’ “number one complaint, far and away, was anonymous sources”. A reader wrote to Sullivan: “I beseech the Times not to facilitate government acting like the Wizard of Oz – behind a curtain.”Although Sullivan was at the paper a decade after its worst modern anonymous sources fiasco – dozens of stories promoting the idea that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were real – she found practically nobody had learned any lessons.The practice was still “vastly overused … not just for ultra-sensitive reporting on the national security beat but also for all kinds of frivolous purposes – in gossipy entertainment pieces, in personality profiles, in real estate stories”. Sullivan inaugurated “AnonyWatch”, asking readers to send examples of anonymous sourcing.Some of the very worst journalism practiced by the Times during Sullivan’s tenure was its coverage of the 2016 election. The paper’s first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, assigned Amy Chozick to report on Hillary Clinton full-time in 2013. Another press critic, Tom Rosenstiel, pointed out it was probably a pretty bad idea to “perpetuate the permanent campaign” three years before the first primary.Chozick’s first big feature for the Sunday magazine was called Planet Hillary, illustrated by an image of Clinton’s face as “a fleshy globe”. Sullivan agreed with the reader who wrote, “The now-viral image is hideously ugly, demeaning, sexist and completely premature.”Times editors up to Abramson, who approved the image, “couldn’t understand the fuss”. To Sullivan it was an early warning that “when it came to covering Hillary Clinton, Times journalists often took things too far”.Things went steeply downhill in 2015 when the Times – and the Washington Post and Fox News – promoted a book by the Breitbart contributor Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: the Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.How Chozick chose to write about this crude propaganda? “Already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings ‘big news’ that will ‘shock people’ and make voters ‘question’ the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton”.Things got dramatically worse with the paper’s obsession with Clinton’s emails, and FBI director James Comey’s decision to put them back in the news a few days before the election. By then Dean Baquet was Times editor. He vastly overplayed Comey’s announcement with three big stories, including one by Chozick and Patrick Healey headlined “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation ‘Changes Everything’”.Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreSullivan observes that framing must have caused “rejoicing in the GOP camp”. It did.The Columbia Journalism Review reported that in six days, the Times “ran as many cover stories” about Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up the election.Comey shut down his investigation again. But the damage was done.The Times editorial page compensated a little bit for its news coverage by giving Clinton an enthusiastic endorsement. But as Sullivan points out, editorials rarely sway elections while “relentless front-page political coverage can, especially when it’s in the hugely influential New York Times”.“In this case,” she writes, “I believe it did.”
      Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
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      Trump Files a Defamation Suit Against CNN

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      The former president has a history of threatening, and occasionally filing, lawsuits against media organizations whose coverage he deems unfair.Former President Donald J. Trump sued CNN on Monday, claiming that the network defamed him and demanding $475 million in damages.Over the course of his business and political career, Mr. Trump has frequently threatened to sue media organizations over news coverage that he deems unfair or disrespectful. Although he rarely followed through, his attacks on the media became a staple of his political messaging and have often been cited in fund-raising entreaties in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections.In 2020, his re-election campaign sued The New York Times and The Washington Post over opinion articles that linked Mr. Trump to Russian interference in American elections. His suit against The Times was dismissed; the suit involving The Post is pending.Mr. Trump’s complaint against CNN was filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The lawsuit alleges a “campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander” that, Mr. Trump asserts, has recently escalated “as CNN fears the plaintiff will run for president in 2024.”The 29-page suit cites numerous times when CNN hosts and guests criticized Mr. Trump over his policies and his questioning of the 2020 presidential election result. It also laments that some guests have invoked Adolf Hitler and the history of Nazi Germany in criticizing Mr. Trump’s behavior. Among the on-air guests cited as having defamed Mr. Trump is the singer Linda Ronstadt.A CNN spokesman declined to comment.A footnote in the lawsuit shows that Mr. Trump’s representatives contacted CNN in July to give notice of prospective litigation and request that the network stop referring to Mr. Trump’s comments about the 2020 election as “lies.” According to the suit, CNN declined Mr. Trump’s request and replied, “You have not identified a single false or defamatory statement in your letter.”In 2019, Mr. Trump threatened CNN with a lawsuit over “unethical and unlawful attacks.” CNN called that threat “a desperate P.R. stunt.” A suit never materialized.In Monday’s suit, Mr. Trump’s lawyers justified their demand for $475 million in damages in part by alleging that CNN’s coverage has caused the former president to suffer “embarrassment, pain, humiliation and mental anguish.” More

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      Pulitzer Board Rejects Trump Request to Toss Out Wins for Russia Coverage

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      The board said it had found nothing to discredit the entries after reviewing the prize submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post.The board of the Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious award in journalism, on Monday rejected an appeal by former President Donald J. Trump to rescind a prize given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election and Russian ties to Mr. Trump’s campaign and members of his administration.The board said in a statement that two independent reviews had found nothing to discredit the prize entries, for which the two news organizations shared the 2018 Pulitzer for national reporting.The reviews, part of the formal process that the Pulitzers use to examine complaints about winning entries, were conducted after the board heard from Mr. Trump and other complainants.“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other,” the board said. “The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in national reporting stand,” the statement concluded.The winning entries included 20 articles from The Post and The Times on evidence of links between Russian interference and Mr. Trump’s campaign and administration, and efforts by Mr. Trump to influence investigations into those connections.Mr. Trump, who has pushed back against any implication that Russia helped him defeat Hillary Clinton, has repeatedly called for the prizes to be rescinded. In a letter in October, he said the coverage “was based on false reporting of a nonexistent link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.” On May 27, in a letter to Marjorie Miller, the administrator of the prizes, Mr. Trump threatened to sue for defamation if the awards were not rescinded.The Post and a spokeswoman for The Times declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Trump Campaign Owes $300,000 in Legal Fees After Another Failed NDA Case

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      The award stems from an arbitration claim that was dismissed in part because of the “vague and unenforceable” provisions of a nondisclosure agreement.Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign has been ordered to pay more than $300,000 in legal fees and expenses to a former employee who the campaign’s lawyers said had violated the terms of a nondisclosure agreement when she accused Mr. Trump of forcibly kissing her in 2016.The award, the culmination of an arbitration claim that was dismissed in November, represents the latest instance of Mr. Trump’s failure to use a nondisclosure agreement successfully against an ex-worker.The resolution of the claim, which Mr. Trump’s campaign filed in September 2019, came less than a year after he had lost similar efforts to enforce nondisclosure agreements against Jessica Denson, a former campaign worker, and Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House aide and a star on “The Apprentice.”Victor E. Bianchini, a retired federal judge, cited both of those cases in his decision on March 10, when he ruled in favor of Alva Johnson, a former campaign worker who in 2019 unsuccessfully sued Mr. Trump, claiming he kissed her on the mouth against her will during a campaign stop in August 2016.The Trump campaign “was invested in silencing other employees that were terminated or had somehow criticized the candidate in other ways,” Judge Bianchini wrote, adding that the campaign’s “demand for arbitration appears to have been principally motivated by upholding its NDA and curtailing any criticism of the candidate.”Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said the decision to award money to Ms. Johnson and her lawyers after a federal judge had dismissed her case was “pathetic and totally contrary to the rule of law and any reasonable sense of fairness.”“Anyone can see that Johnson’s blatant lies and bad faith conduct completely preclude her from profiting from her illicit conduct,” she said in a statement.After Judge Bianchini dismissed the arbitration claim in November, calling the agreement “vague and unenforceable” in its confidentiality provisions, Ms. Johnson’s lawyers made a motion demanding that the Trump campaign pay for legal fees and other expenses.The March 10 ruling ordered the Trump campaign to pay more than $303,000 for Ms. Johnson’s legal fees and expenses.Ms. Johnson, 46, said she was “really happy” with the decision.Mr. Trump’s lawyers “wanted to handcuff me for four years,” Ms. Johnson said in a brief interview on Friday. “They came after me pretty hard.”Her lawyer, Hassan Zavareei, said on Friday that the Trump campaign had tried to use the nondisclosure agreement “as a cudgel to silence what we view as important public speech by one of the few minority campaign workers.”In early 2019, Ms. Johnson, who is Black, filed a federal lawsuit against Mr. Trump, accusing him of grabbing her during a campaign stop in 2016 and kissing her as she tried to turn away.“I immediately felt violated because I wasn’t expecting it or wanting it,” Ms. Johnson told The Washington Post in February 2019.But a federal judge questioned her version of events after viewing a video of the encounter and ultimately dismissed the suit in June 2019.Judge William Jung of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida described the complaint as “political” and told Ms. Johnson she could file an amended lawsuit. She ultimately decided not to pursue the case, saying she had been threatened by Trump supporters and believed she would not be successful before Judge Jung, who was nominated to the bench in 2017 by Mr. Trump.Judge Bianchini said that he had viewed the video and had concluded that nothing “improper” appeared to have taken place.“No objective person could view the video of the encounter as anything even remotely supporting an accusation of battery, kissed, assaulted or anything else similar,” he wrote. “The federal judge saw it, and the arbitrator sees it.”Mr. Trump’s campaign could have filed complaints against Ms. Johnson for “malicious prosecution or defamation in an appropriate forum,” Judge Bianchini wrote.Instead, his campaign filed an arbitration complaint on Sept. 23, 2019, that said Ms. Johnson had breached a nondisclosure agreement with the campaign by “disclosing confidential information” and “making disparaging statements about Trump.”That agreement, Judge Bianchini wrote, has been “determined to be unconstitutional” in the cases of Ms. Denson, Ms. Manigault Newman and Mary Trump, Mr. Trump’s niece, who wrote a tell-all memoir about the family.Even if the motive of the campaign was not to silence Ms. Johnson, “the enforcement of the NDA was an inappropriate choice because of its unconstitutionality,” Judge Bianchini wrote.Alva Johnson sued Mr. Trump in 2019, claiming that he had pulled her to him during a campaign stop and forcibly kissed her. A judge later dismissed her complaint.Salwan Georges/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesJudge Bianchini said he had noted in his November dismissal of the arbitration claim that he believed Ms. Johnson was “untruthful in her accusations” against Mr. Trump. In the March 10 ruling, he described how the video showed Ms. Johnson “offering her cheek” with her lips “in the air next to his cheek.”It was “understandable” that the Trump campaign would be upset at Ms. Johnson’s recouping costs in an arbitration that stemmed from a case that was ultimately dismissed, Judge Bianchini wrote.But blaming the arbitration on her “is misguided and incorrect,” he said in his ruling.Mr. Zavareei said that he rejected Judge Bianchini’s characterization of Ms. Johnson’s claims. Their validity should have been determined by a jury, not “two older white judges,” he said.“It’s our position that that is the sort of conduct that shouldn’t be accepted in any workplace,” Mr. Zavareei said. “She’s a worker in the campaign. She’s the only person who he touched and kissed.” More

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      FBI failed to act on tips of likely violence ahead of Capitol attack – report

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      US Capitol attackFBI failed to act on tips of likely violence ahead of Capitol attack – report
      Washington Post publishes wide-ranging report on Capitol riot
      ‘Roadmap for a coup’: inside Trump plot to steal the presidency
      Reuters in WashingtonSun 31 Oct 2021 15.32 EDTThe FBI and other key law enforcement agencies failed to act on a host of tips and other information ahead of 6 January that signaled a potentially violent event might unfold that day at the US Capitol, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.Republican Adam Kinzinger: I’ll fight Trumpism ‘cancer’ outside CongressRead moreAmong information that came officials’ way in the weeks before what turned into a riot as lawmakers met to certify the results of the presidential election was a 20 December tip to the FBI that supporters of Donald Trump were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to “overrun” police and arrest members of Congress, according to internal bureau documents obtained by the Post.The tip included details showing those planning violence believed they had orders from the president, used code words such as “pickaxe” to describe guns, and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session.On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, as a target, the Post said.Romney was later one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump on one charge of inciting an insurrection, leveled by the House of Representatives during a second impeachment of the former president.An FBI official who assessed the tip noted that its criminal division received a “significant number” of alerts about threats to Congress and other government officials. The FBI passed the information to law enforcement agencies in Washington but did not pursue the matter, the Post said.“The individual or group identified during the assessment does not warrant further FBI investigation at this time,” the internal report concluded, according to the Post. Trump seeking to block call logs and notes from Capitol attack panelRead moreThat detail was among dozens included in the report, which the newspaper said was based on interviews with more than 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings.A special congressional committee is investigating events which exploded into violence after a rally Trump held near the White House to rail against the results of the election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.Four people died on 6 January, one shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, one dying the next day. Four officers have since taken their own lives.More than 600 people have been charged with taking part in the violence.TopicsUS Capitol attackFBIUS politicsThe far rightWashington PostUS press and publishingUS crimenewsReuse this content More

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      Mueller Scrutinized an Unidentified Member of News Media in Russia Inquiry

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      The scrutiny was one of several new disclosures the Justice Department made about investigative actions involving the news media during the Trump years.WASHINGTON — The special counsel who investigated Russia’s 2016 election interference, Robert S. Mueller III, scrutinized “a member of the news media suspected of participating in the conspiracy” to hack Democrats and make their emails public, the Justice Department disclosed on Wednesday.The deputy attorney general at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, who was overseeing the Russia investigation, approved a subpoena in 2018 for the unnamed person’s phone and email records. He also approved seeking a voluntary interview with that person and then issuing a subpoena to force the person to testify before a grand jury, the department said.“All of this information was necessary to further the investigation of whether the member of the news media was involved in the conspiracy to unlawfully obtain and utilize the information from the hacked political party or other victims,” the department said.No member of the news media was charged with conspiring in the hack-and-dump operation, and the disclosure on Wednesday left many questions unanswered.It did not say why the person was suspected of participating in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election, or whether that person ever testified before a grand jury.Nor did it define “member of the news media” to clarify whether that narrowly meant a traditional journalist or could broadly extend to various types of commentators on current events. (For example, it has been known since September 2018 that Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist and political commentator, was subpoenaed that year.)A Justice Department spokesman declined to provide further clarity, and several former law enforcement officials who were familiar with the Mueller investigation did not respond to requests for information.The disclosure of the scrutiny of a member of the news media was contained in a revision to a report issued by the Trump administration about investigative activities that affected or involved the news media in 2018. The Trump-era version of that report had omitted the episode.The Justice Department under President Biden also issued reports on Wednesday covering such investigative activities in 2019, which the Trump-era department failed to issue, and in 2020. And it provided new details about leak investigations at the end of the Trump administration that sought records for reporters with CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.The report for 2019 disclosed another investigative matter apparently related to the special counsel’s office, which by then had issued its final report and closed down. During the prosecution of one of the people who was charged with “obstructing the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,” a U.S. attorney authorized subpoenaing an unnamed member of the news media for testimony, and that person agreed to comply.Prosecutors, however, ultimately did not call that person to testify at the trial. The report did not say whether any subpoena was issued, or whether obtaining one was merely approved. Nor did it say what the person would have testified about.It also did not say whether it was referring to the trial of Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime friend, which took place in 2019. Mr. Stone was charged, among other things, with obstructing one of Congress’s Russia investigations; he was convicted, but then pardoned by Mr. Trump.The 2019 report also glancingly discussed two previously unknown episodes in which the Justice Department investigated members of the news media for “offenses arising from news gathering activities” without saying what those allegations were.One section of the report briefly discussed an investigation into one member of the news media for such offenses. It said the attorney general had authorized prosecutors to use various legal tools to force companies to turn over communications and business records about the target. (The report did not name the attorney general; President Donald J. Trump appointed William P. Barr to the post in February 2019.)In that case, the report said, investigators used a “filter team” in an effort “to minimize the review of news media-related materials and safeguard any such materials.”Another section of the 2019 report discussed an investigation into “employees of a news media entity” for such offenses. It said the attorney general had authorized investigators to conduct voluntary interviews of “two members of the news media employed by a media entity” in connection with the matter, but provided no further details.In contrast to those sparse accounts, the Justice Department also released a detailed timeline of the leak investigations late in the Trump era into sources for reporters with CNN, The Post and The Times, all of which spilled over into the Mr. Biden’s presidency and which the Biden administration disclosed earlier this year.The leak investigations involving CNN, The Times and The Post were opened in August 2017, both involving stories published or aired in preceding months. The chronology did not explain why three years later, there was a sudden urgency to go after the reporters’ communications records.Mr. Barr approved requests to try to obtain a CNN reporter’s communications records in May 2020, the chronology shows. He approved going after the Times reporters’ materials in September 2020. And on Nov. 13, after Mr. Trump lost the presidential election, Mr. Barr approved a request to try to obtain the Post reporters’ communications records.The Justice Department successfully obtained call data — records showing who called whom and when, but not what was said — for the reporters at the three organizations. The chronology said the phone companies had been legally free to reveal that they had received subpoenas, although none did.While the department ultimately obtained some email records for a CNN reporter, Barbara Starr, it did not succeed in getting email records for the Times and Post reporters whose stories were under scrutiny. The Biden-era department ultimately dropped those efforts.Still, the fight over those materials — including the imposition of gag orders on some news media executives, and a delay in notifying the reporters that their materials had been sought and in some cases obtained — spilled over into the Biden administration. The chronology showed that in April Attorney General Merrick B. Garland approved extending a delay in notifying Ms. Starr about the matter.In July, at the direction of Mr. Biden, Mr. Garland barred prosecutors and F.B.I. agents from using subpoenas, search warrants and other tools of legal compulsion to go after reporters’ communications records or force them to testify about confidential sources — a major change in Justice Department policy from practices under recent previous administrations of both parties.At the request of Mr. Garland — who also ordered the production of the timelines — the Justice Department inspector general has opened an investigation into the decision by federal prosecutors to secretly seize the data of reporters, as well as communications records of House Democrats and staff members swept up in leak investigations. More

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      The media is lambasting Biden over Afghanistan. But he should stand firm | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      OpinionUS newsThe media is lambasting Biden over Afghanistan. He should stand firmBhaskar SunkaraThe president was right to withdraw the US from Afghanistan – and he’s being skewered for it

      I served with Nato in Afghanistan – it was a bloated mess
      Sun 29 Aug 2021 08.11 EDTLast modified on Sun 29 Aug 2021 08.12 EDTWhen Joe Biden, a conventional politician if there ever was one, said he was concluding the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan this month, in line with plans set in motion by the Trump administration, the response from the mainstream press was hostile. Following the Taliban takeover of the country, the tenor has only grown more hyperbolic.Joe Biden says new Kabul terror attack highly likely in next 24 to 36 hoursRead moreDuring the Trump years, publications like the New York Times and Washington Post presented themselves as the last defenses of freedom against creeping authoritarianism. The latter adopted a new slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness”, and spent millions on a Super Bowl ad featuring Tom Hanks extolling the importance of journalism as a profession.But for all this talk of “defending freedom”, the mainstream media has a history of reflexively defending militarism, foreign interventions and occupations. Biden – who dared fulfil a campaign promise and end America’s longest war – is learning this the hard way.As Eric Levitz recounts in New York Magazine, the media has created a public backlash against Biden, with outlets like the Times calling the withdrawal a humiliating fiasco. For the New York Times Editorial Board, the two-decade occupation of Afghanistan is described as a “nation-building project” that reflected “the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy”.Key to the media narrative is the echoing of “experts” on Afghanistan like former ambassador Ryan C Crocker, who wishes in another Times op-ed that instead of bolting after a couple of decades, US troops might have remained in Afghanistan for more than a half-century, as we’ve done on the Korean peninsula. Crocker regrets that “Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw all US forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure”.But as the writer Jeet Heer points out, the status quo was far from “affordable” for ordinary Afghans. The tragic figure of more than 2,000 dead US troops pales in comparison to the more than 200,000 Afghans killed since 2001. Indeed, prolonged civil war has put this year on pace to be the bloodiest for civilians as a failed US client state has overseen plummeting social indicators, widespread corruption and a total breakdown in public safety.The media had ignored the mounting chaos for years, only to laser-focus on it as a means to criticize Biden. They’ve ignored their own role in cheerleading a misguided “War on Terror” and pinned the blame for two decades of imperial hubris on the president who finally made good on promises to leave the country against the wishes of even some in his own party.What’s underlying much of the approach is a mainstream media fidelity to “expert” consensus. Many who presented themselves as fierce truth-tellers in the face of Trump hold the opinions of former intelligence and military officials in higher regard than that of a president democratically elected by 81.3 million people and pursuing a policy supported by 70% of Americans.Not only are corporate media pundits and talking heads wrong to advocate staying in Afghanistan, they’ve been wrong about generations of conflicts that ordinary people have opposed. Contrary to the popular imagination, opposition to wars from Vietnam to Iraq were spearheaded by workers, not the rich and the professional classes that serve them. It’s this general aversion to costly overseas conflict that the president should confidently embrace.Biden has never been a very good populist. For all his “Amtrak Joe” pretenses, he’s a creature of the Beltway, the ultimate establishment politician. It’s no surprise that his administration appears paralyzed in the face of criticism from its erstwhile elite allies. But unless he manages to push back against the narratives mounting against his administration, he’ll risk undermining his popular domestic agenda as well.Joe Biden did something good – and the media want to kill him for it. He should embrace their scorn and defend his actions to the American people.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
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