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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back against any implication that Russia helped him defeat Hillary Clinton, has repeatedly called for the prizes to be rescinded.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 Trump threatened to sue for defamation if the awards were not rescinded.The Post and a spokeswoman for The Times declined to comment.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
      TopicsUS newsOpinionJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsUS press and publishingNew York TimesWashington PostcommentReuse this content More

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      The Trump Books Are Coming. Cue the War of the Excerpts.

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      As a handful of authors compete to recount President Donald J. Trump’s last year in office, Twitter is strewn with vividly reported snapshots of a monumental year in American history.WASHINGTON — The capital was just beginning to quiet down for the summer when the buzz over the books began: Several seeking to explain the final year of Donald J. Trump’s presidency are landing so closely together over the next month that publishers have hastily changed publication days to avoid mid-scoop collisions.It’s enough to give an author nightmares.“I literally just wake up every day waiting to find out that someone else has jumped in front of us, and some book that I had no idea was coming is going to be announced,” Michael C. Bender, the author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” said in an interview.Really, it is not the most unfounded fear. Mr. Bender is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. “Frankly,” his first book, will be published on July 13. But he fast-tracked its publication, originally slated for August, after his publisher snooped on Amazon and uncovered the release dates of two other Trump-related books this summer: “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” by Michael Wolff, and “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters at The Washington Post.What has ensued is a war of excerpts among writers who are realizing their juiciest material may not hold. Twitter is now strewn with the most unsettling moments from Mr. Trump’s last year in office. Vividly reported snapshots of a monumental year in American history are proliferating like cicada shells on city pavement.Mr. Bender’s book, in excerpts shared with CNN, Vanity Fair, Axios, The Daily Mail and others, lays bare the leadership failures of Mr. Trump and his team. “Frankly” is full of expletive-laden interactions, including one particularly colorful exchange between Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Mr. Trump’s immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, over the protests that roiled the country last summer.The drip-drip of material is the extreme version of a commonplace promotion strategy, intended to get Mr. Bender, a lesser-known writer than some of his competitors, maximum publicity. But others seeking to claim their territory are aggressively following suit: Jonathan Karl of ABC News, whose book does not come out until later this year, published his own excerpt in recent days in The Atlantic.David Kuhn, a literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management, said the cascade of Trump books could end up “cannibalizing each other.”“There’s so many different planets that have to align for a book to truly break out,” he said.But the reporters are betting frequent promotion in a crowded market will improve their fortunes.An excerpt from Michael Wolff’s “Landslide,” which will be published on July 27, is the cover story for New York magazine, and outlines a scene in which Mr. Trump told his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that he “didn’t mean it literally” that his supporters should march to the Capitol on Jan. 6.And more details of Mr. Trump’s illness from the coronavirus were shared before the publication on Tuesday of “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” by Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, journalists for The Post.Mr. Trump has invited some of the authors of books on his presidency to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., more than once.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesIn their book, Mr. Paletta and Ms. Abutaleb present gripping evidence that Mr. Trump received a strong cocktail of drugs — “Trump’s doctors threw everything they could at the virus all at once,” they write. Robert R. Redfield, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had prayed that a serious bout with the coronavirus would change Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic. It did not.“Nightmare Scenario” is focused on the federal government’s handling of the coronavirus — Ms. Abutaleb and Mr. Paletta do not examine the events of Jan. 6, for instance, and they did not interview Mr. Trump. Still, so many reporters covering the same material at the same time made for a crowded reporting process.“We definitely would hear from sources that they had gotten calls from other reporters,” Mr. Paletta said in an interview. “That was quite intimidating for us.”Some of the more decorated reporters in Washington’s press corps have chosen silence as a strategy as they complete books scheduled to be published this year.Little is known about when Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post may publish their book on Mr. Trump’s final days, but the best guess from agents and authors alike is that it will be in September. (Neither author replied to requests for comment.)The list of summer releases does not include titles coming next year from reporters for The New York Times. Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is working on a definitive account of the Trump presidency with his wife, Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. Maggie Haberman, a former Trump White House reporter and current Washington correspondent for The Times, is also working on a book about Mr. Trump. Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, national political correspondents, are writing a book on the presidential race between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Jeremy Peters, who covers the Republican Party for The Times, is working on a book that assesses the G.O.P.’s attempts to wrangle Mr. Trump.Mark Leibovich, a political correspondent for The Times, is working on a sequel to “This Town,” a book on Washington culture, that will touch on the Trump era.At the center of the publishing frenzy is the subject himself. Aware of the barrage of books about his presidency and lacking a book deal that could give his grievances another formal platform, Mr. Trump has tried a charm offensive. He has invited some writers to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., more than once, serving them steak and seating them in his estate’s great room, where the visiting journalists can be part of the political pageant that happens there each night.Mr. Trump, who keenly understands his own place in the news media ecosystem, has turned down only a few interview requests, including one from Mr. Woodward. Mr. Woodward’s 2020 book, “Rage,” included several interviews with Mr. Trump, who told Mr. Woodward he had downplayed the threat of the coronavirus pandemic.But Mr. Trump has quizzed other visiting journalists on the people they are talking to, the questions they are going to ask and the stories they plan to tell about his presidency.“We were really surprised by how much time he spent talking to us,” Mr. Rucker said. “And by, frankly, how interested he was in our book and the subjects we were covering. He very much wanted to be a part of trying to shape the historical narrative of his presidency.”(Given Mr. Trump’s history with reading books — he does not read them — Mr. Rucker does not expect that the former president will provide a full review.)As Mr. Bender readied another excerpt for publication — this time detailing the long-running animosity that existed between Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s counselor, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — he said Tuesday evening that the breakneck pace with which he has written and promoted his book mirrored the hectic nature of four years on the Trump beat.“When this is all done I want to ask my publisher how this is supposed to work,” Mr. Bender said. “Nothing about this has felt normal. Which is kind of the experience of covering Donald Trump in a nutshell.” More