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“Trump is using the same approach he did to subvert the Mueller report: undermining the legitimacy of the messenger, assigning political motives to those who testify and relying on the Fox News firewall to serve up propaganda to his base,”

Earlier in the week Republicans attempted to censure Adam Schiff, chair of the House intelligence committee, for his handling of the impeachment inquiry, only for the Democratic majority to set the resolution aside. On Thursday Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee and a Trump loyalist, introduced a resolution condemning the inquiry as an unfair, secretive and designed to embarrass the president.

Taylor, a respected Vietnam war veteran with half a century of public service, also described an “irregular, informal policy channel” by which the Trump administration was pursuing objectives in Ukraine “running contrary to the goals of longstanding US policy”

about 30 House Republicans barged into the secure facility where the impeachment depositions are being taken and ordered pizza. The testimony of a Pentagon official was postponed by more than five hours. The members complained about lack of transparency as evidence is being given behind closed doors.

House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is a month old. Unlike Mueller it has moved at warp speed, subpoenaing witnesses, gathering testimony and building evidence against the president some say makes it inevitable he will be impeached by the House and put on trial by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Chief strategist Steve Bannon is long gone. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham has never given a formal briefing to reporters in the west wing. Trump does not have a permanent chief of staff, only Mick Mulvaney in an acting capacity. Earlier this month Mulvaney held a disastrous briefing in which he blurted out a confession of a quid pro quo with Ukraine, only to issue a retraction later.

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Public opinion does not favour removing Trump from office, Ruddy argued, so the White House should avoid a politically costly battle.

“We’re in a political payback system where everyone is trying to out up each other. If you look at the poll numbers, he’s actually holding up, although there’s a hardening of people who favour impeachment and removal. He’s not actually in a bad situation.”

Trump has openly encouraged Ukraine – and China – to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. With Taylor’s compelling evidence, it appears to be case closed. Some problems are unspinnable.

Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said the president’s exertion of pressure on the leader of Ukraine had been tantamount to blackmail and extortion.

It was such an abuse of power. I can’t think of a president who’s done anything more impeachable or worse than that. It’s indefensible and anyone who defends it is going to face some liabilities because it’s so egregious.”

He described the Republican fightback as “lawlessness, disorder and chaos. Undermining the process and smearing the witnesses and engaging in ‘whataboutism’ is the main strategy.

Republicans said little about the substance of the allegations.

Democrats are gearing up for televised hearings that could begin next month and feature dramatic and damaging testimony from the likes of former national security adviser John Bolton. Republicans are hamstrung by a torrent of revelations that makes today’s deniable rumour tomorrow’s smoking gun.

Trump retains two not so secret weapons to amplify his message: fiery rallies, which he is holding with greater frequency, and conservative media

More than half of Republicans whose primary news source is Fox said almost nothing could change their approval of Trump. For Republicans who get their news elsewhere, the figure is considerably lower.

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all.

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy

What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.

For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.

Yet CNN and MSNBC have shown zero hesitation in giving her a platform to lie because they see their job as giving government officials — even ones who lie — a platform.

And we know that false claims, if they’re repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they’re shared, something psychologists have called the “illusory truth” effect. Our brains, it turns out, tend to associate repetition with truthfulness. Some interesting new research, moreover, found that the more people encounter information the more likely they are to feel justified in spreading it, whether it’s true or not.

It’s worth noting that this polarization is asymmetric. The left overwhelmingly receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. Some of the reporting is surely biased, and probably biased in favor of liberals, but it’s still (mostly) anchored to basic journalistic ethics.

The fact is, Trump did what Democrats have accused him of doing. We know, with absolute certainty, that the president tried to get a foreign government to investigate a family member of one of his political rivals

The way impeachment has played out underscores just how the new media ecosystem is a problem for our democracy.

Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.

The political message was one that took longer to sink in. A transition plan implied some kind of basic institutional continuity, some respect for the norms of governance.

At the beginning, as at the end, the idea of an orderly transition of power was anathema to Trump.

Bannon told Christie that he was being fired with immediate effect “and we do not want you to be in the building anymore”. His painstaking work was literally trashed: “All thirty binders”, as Christie recalled in a self-pitying memoir, “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again”.

Arguably, these two things – building infrastructure and starting a military conflict – might just have got Trump re-elected. So why did he not do either of them?

His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.

But there is a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea.

It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.

He left important leadership positions in government departments unfilled on a permanent basis, or filled them with scandalously unqualified cronies. He appointed people to head agencies to which they had been publicly hostile.

Beneath the psychodrama of Trump’s hourly outbursts, there was a duller but often more meaningful agenda: taking a blowtorch to regulation, especially, but by no means exclusively, in relation to the environment.

the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.

With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones

Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. That required the transformation of elective office into the relationship of a capricious ruler to his sycophantic courtiers.

Power is proven, not when the sycophants have to obey reasonable commands, but when they have to follow and justify the craziest orders.

Democracy is not just about voting – it is a system for the rational articulation of ideas about the public good. Trump set out to lay waste to that whole system, from the bottom up, poisoning the groundwaters of respect for evidence, argument and rationality that keeps it alive.

he knew how to tap into a hatred of government that has been barely below the surface of American culture since before the foundation of the US.

This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart.

CNN reported on Tuesday that associates in Trump's orbit, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, have approached the President to seek preemptive pardons.

The President has also been talking with advisers about preemptively pardoning several people close to him, including his children and son-in-law, the White House adviser Jared Kushner.

Donald Trump Jr., the President's son, was under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller for contacts he had with Russians, but was never charged. And Kushner provided false information about his foreign contacts when applying for his security clearance, but Trump issued him one anyway.

Nine individuals in Trump's orbit, including his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime friend Roger Stone, have been indicted or found guilty of crimes related to a constellation of alleged criminal conspiracies.

The pardoning discussions come on the heels of the President's decision to grant Flynn a full pardon, absolving him of charges related to lying to federal agents over his contact with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

It's not clear that investigators ever had concrete evidence of a relevant bank transfer from the Egyptian bank. But multiple sources said there was sufficient information to justify the subpoena and keep the criminal campaign finance investigation open after the Mueller probe ended.

Justice Department confirmed that when the special counsel's office shut down in 2019, Mueller transferred an ongoing foreign campaign contribution investigation to prosecutors in Washington. Some of CNN's sources have confirmed that the case, which Mueller cryptically called a "foreign campaign contribution" probe, was in fact the Egypt investigation.

The probe was confirmed this week by a Justice Department senior official who responded to CNN's queries: "The case was first looked at by the Special Counsel investigators who failed to bring a case, and then it was looked at by the US attorney's office, and career prosecutors in the national security section, who also were unable to bring a case. Based upon the recommendations of both the FBI and those career prosecutors, Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney, formally closed the case in July."

there could have been money from an Egyptian bank that ended up backing Trump's last-minute injection of $10 million into his 2016 campaign, according to two of the sources.

Yet neither the special counsel's office, nor prosecutors who carried on the case after Mueller, got a complete picture of the President's financial entanglements. Prosecutors in Washington even proposed subpoenaing financial records tied to Trump, before top officials finally concluded this summer they had reached a dead end, the sources said.

Mueller's primary task was to investigate Russian government attempts to interfere in the 2016 election, which had consumed the political and investigative conversations in the early days of Trump's presidency. But Mueller's mandate also allowed him to take on related criminal investigations, which in this case included another probe of potential foreign influence connected to the campaign.

Zainab Ahmad, a former international terrorism prosecutor, and Brandon Van Grack, a national security and counterintelligence specialist, co-led it, according to sources. Public records also show they focused on cases separate from other trial attorneys in the special counsel's office and had senior titles equivalent to other Mueller team leaders.

Mueller's team tried to understand both the $10 million contribution Trump gave to his campaign 11 days before the 2016 election and the Trump campaign's ties to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, according to sources and redacted interview records released from the Mueller investigation.

One official familiar with the work said some investigators believed the Egypt inquiry presented a more direct avenue for Mueller's team to examine Trump's finances, in part because it did not have an obvious tie to Russia.

Needing a final push before Election Day as the polls tightened in 2016, the Trump campaign was running low on cash. Trump's top campaign officials scrambled to convince Trump to inject money, according to memos of witness interviews from the investigation and contemporaneous news reports. Trump lagged well behind a pledge he made to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Trump wrote his campaign a $10 million check, publicly calling it a loan. Campaign finance records showed it as his single largest political contribution, by far, and not one the campaign would reimburse him for.

Mueller's office pressed witnesses to explain how the Trump-Sisi meeting in late 2016 came about. Ahmad, whose aims on the investigation were cloaked in secrecy, was repeatedly present in interviews touching on both Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign and the campaign's ties to Egypt.

In a session months later, Bannon was asked about Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign, according to another recent release of Mueller's interview memos.

Mueller asked the President, "Did any person or entity inform you during the campaign that any foreign government or foreign leader, other than Russia or Vladimir Putin, had provided, wished to provide, or offered to provide tangible support to your campaign?" Trump wrote back in his written answers that he had "no recollection of being told during the campaign" of support from a foreign government.

Soon enough, the bank was arguing it shouldn't have to give Mueller records because it was interchangeable with the foreign government that owned it. The US courts disagreed repeatedly, saying the company couldn't be immune from the Mueller team subpoena.  

When the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, heard arguments in the case in December 2018, security cleared journalists from an entire floor of the federal courthouse, allowing attorneys involved in the case to enter and exit the building and the courtroom without being seen.

The case even landed before the Supreme Court in early 2019. The high court ultimately declined the company's bid to block Mueller's subpoena in March 2019.  Even then, however, the standoff between US prosecutors and the Egyptian bank ended in a stalemate. 

In the end, it was the bank's word against the investigators. The court proceedings ended with prosecutors getting nothing more than what the bank was willing to turn over, and the bank was excused from hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that had accrued for defying the subpoena. It appeared to be a dead end -- and not justification enough for Mueller to keep his office open to finish this case alone.

In late March 2019, shortly after Mueller's investigation concluded, Howell, overseeing final court proceedings in the Egyptian bank's subpoena case,  asked a prosecutor point-blank if the investigation was over. "No, it's continuing. I can say it's continuing robustly," David Goodhand of the DC US attorney's office told the court.

Liu told prosecutors she didn't believe they had met the standard needed to seek the records. The investigation stagnated, but Liu didn't close the case. She declined to comment for this story.

It's unclear how much activity occurred after Liu rejected the subpoena request. Prosecutors who disagreed with her decision believed it was now impossible to resolve questions about Trump's 2016 campaign contribution. Liu told people in her office that if the investigation had produced enough evidence, Mueller would have made the decision to take additional steps, according to sources.

On paper, Mueller described the investigation with only three vague words: "Foreign campaign contribution."

They had a duty to speak up sooner. And they failed in that duty.

These efforts allowed both Trump’s supporters and his critics to comfort themselves with the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was trying to limit the damage to the country. His fans could say, “He’s just inexperienced but he has good people around him,” while the opponents could say, “He’s an execrable moron but reasonable people are in charge, and they’ll save us from the worst.”

But the price for this quiet custodianship (a form of opposition to Trump described in detail by Miles Taylor, now known as the author of the famous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times) is that the American people never really knew how much danger they were facing, at home and abroad, at any given moment.

Governments are more than just large organizations. They are a far more delicate web of norms and habits, and liberal democracies especially are built on informal agreements rather than black-letter law. Yes, we have tons of laws and administrative bumf that complicate our lives, but when it comes to the nature of our democracy, the Constitution manages to do it all in fewer than  5,000 words. Our basic rights as citizens take less than a page. The rest relies on us.

in the end, they have faith in the system. They see Trump as only one man, and the system as a bulwark of laws and regulations, people and committees, institutions and practices that will somehow kick in and prevent a catastrophe.

Esper, Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and many, many other people who crawled through the Shawshank sewer pipe that was the four years of the Trump administration needed to speak up the minute they were out. Instead, they teased their book bombshells or played coy games of slap and tickle on cable outlets.

And so when you know that the president is unhinged, when you know the country is in danger, when you know that plots are being hatched to subvert the Constitution, you have a duty to speak. This duty supersedes confidentiality, partisanship, or personal loyalty.

Think of all the people from whom we don’t have a full account of this mess, who did not speak up even as Trump was running for reelection or inciting an insurrection: Mattis, Tillerson, John Kelly, Robert O’Brien, H. R. McMaster, and many others.

These are experienced political figures who know that the public needs to be grabbed by the lapels and made to listen to a compelling story. The too-late book excerpts, along with all the throat clearing, the circumlocutions, the carefully phrased “but I’d still support the nominee” escape hatches don’t cut it.

I was in a vulnerable position as a government employee, and from the first time I spoke up, people tried to get me fired from the Naval War College. Even with tenure, I could have been dismissed if I was found to violate the Hatch Act, the law prohibiting on-the-job politicking by federal employees.

I called my family together nearly six years ago and said that I could lose my job if I kept writing about Trump. All of them told me to keep writing, and we’d deal with whatever comes.

for more than five years, the demands to fire me came so often, as one administrator later told me, that after a while they didn’t even bother to inform me about them anymore.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be burdened with knowing the president was mentally unstable, that he wanted to fire missiles at Mexico, that he was planning to exit NATO, that he wanted to shoot unarmed protesters, that he wanted to invalidate a national election. That is a level of responsibility beyond anything I have ever experienced. This was Night of Camp David stuff, and I’m not sure what I’d have done.

But I’m reasonably certain I wouldn’t have kept it to myself until my agent told me I had a deal.

The growing appreciation for Mr. Putin was captured in recent polling from the Economist and YouGov, which showed he was viewed more favorably by Republicans than Mr. Biden. Another recent poll from Yahoo News and YouGov found that 62 percent of Republicans believed Mr. Putin was a “stronger leader” than Mr. Biden.

That sentiment was echoed in an informal poll online on Wednesday, when a QAnon influencer asked followers in the Patriot Voice group on Telegram if they trusted Mr. Putin. Nearly everyone who responded to the question said the same thing: yes.

Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist; Charles Coughlin, the American radio ranter; and even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf.”

Putin has followed that counsel to the letter, and he must have felt things were going well when he saw window-smashing rioters in the corridors of the U.S. Congress, Britain’s Brexit from the European Union and Germany’s growing dependence on Russian natural gas.

Alas, a competing sea-based empire of corrupt, money-grubbing individualists, led by the United States and Britain, thwarted Russia’s destiny and brought “Eurasia” — his term for the future Russian empire — low.

Dugin tells essentially the same story from a Russian point of view. Before modernity ruined everything, a spiritually motivated Russian people promised to unite Europe and Asia into one great empire, appropriately ruled by ethnic Russians.

In his magnum opus, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” published in 1997, Dugin mapped out the game plan in detail. Russian agents should foment racial, religious and sectional divisions within the United States while promoting the United States’ isolationist factions. (Sound familiar?) In Great Britain, the psy-ops effort should focus on exacerbating historic rifts with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, should be drawn in Russia’s direction by the lure of natural resources: oil, gas and food. NATO would collapse from within.

Putin has turned to the pages of Dugin’s text in which he declared: “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia,” and “without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”

So what comes next, should Putin manage to “resolve” Russia’s “problem” in Ukraine? Dugin envisions a gradual dividing of Europe into zones of German and Russian influence, with Russia very much in charge thanks to its eventual stranglehold over Germany’s resource needs. As Great Britain crumbles and Russia picks up the pieces, the empire of Eurasia will ultimately stretch, in Dugin’s words, “from Dublin to Vladisvostok.”

according to Dugin, China, too, must fall. Russia’s ambitions in Asia will require “the territorial disintegration, splintering and the political and administrative partition of the [Chinese] state,” Dugin writes. Russia’s natural partner in the Far East, according to Dugin, is Japan.

Dugin’s 600-page doorstop can be boiled down to one idea: The wrong alliance won World War II. If only Hitler had not invaded Russia, Britain could have been broken. The United States would have remained at home, isolationist and divided, and Japan would have ruled the former China as Russia’s junior partner.

With the Ukraine war entering its second month, few Indian newspapers and mainstream commentators have bluntly questioned the government’s decision to refrain from condemning Russia, except Subramanian Swamy, a senior member of Modi’s BJP who sometimes criticizes his own party’s foreign policy.

This week, Swamy wrote an unusual op-ed in the Hindu newspaper condemning India’s neutrality as “tragic” and urging his government not to “crawl for the goodwill of Russia.” Even if the Indian right felt a “growing resentment” about liberal American lecturing on everything from the government’s promotion of Hinduism to its Ukraine policy, it was India’s duty to side with the West, Swamy said in an interview. “Whether we like the Russians or not, invading a sovereign nation in the 21st century in a 19th-century-style war is outrageous,”

This month on IndiaTV, a pro-government Hindi-language channel, the celebrity astrologer Acharya Indu Prakash presented an hour-long Ukraine special in which he predicted 96 percent good fortune for Biden and 99 percent for Putin. The likelihood of nuclear war, he calculated, stood at 37 percent.

After interpreting the divine probabilities, Prakash analyzed the earthly politics at play.

The invasion “was the last resort for Mr. Putin, he was left with no options,” Prakash told viewers. “Even now, attempts are being made to create this narrative that Putin is engaging in a bad war.”

Putin was acting with restraint even in the face of NATO expansionism, Prakash said. “Russia gave Ukraine warnings, Russia provided a safe humanitarian corridor for evacuation, Russia observed cease-fires and Russia tried its best to act with humanity,” he said. “This is what the movement of the planets say.”

As one Twitter wag noted, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is like Elmer Fudd buying a platform full of Bugs Bunnies.)

Trump and those like him managed to get a ticket in the swankiest carriage on the train, only to find themselves sitting alone. And if that’s how it’s going to be … well, the only answer is to derail the entire thing, from locomotive to caboose, and make everyone suffer.

As the British journalist Simon Kuper noted a few years ago, anti-system parties in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States are powered not by struggling workers, but by the “comfortably off populist voter” who has “never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations.”

These citizens think that the disconnect between material success and their perceived lack of status must be punished, and if that means voting for election deniers and conspiracy theorists, so be it.

There is one more example of such resentment, and it’s a lot less funny. Russia is an entire nation seized with a massive inferiority complex, and the Russian regime is giving vent to that resentment in the continual murder of Ukrainians

the brutality of the Russians on the battlefield against their Slavic kin is very much rooted in resentment: Why do you live in freedom? Why are you living better than us?

Researchers call this effect “the liar’s dividend,” and politicians have already tried to cast off unfavorable clips as AI-generated: Last month, Donald Trump falsely claimed that an attack ad had used AI to make him look bad.

“Deepfake” could become the “fake news” of 2024, an infrequent but genuine phenomenon that gets co-opted as a means of discrediting the truth

Steve Bannon’s infamous assertion that the way to discredit the media is to “flood the zone with shit.”

AI is less likely to create new dynamics than to amplify existing ones. Presidential campaigns, with their bottomless coffers and sprawling staff, have long had the ability to target specific groups of voters with tailored messaging

They might have thousands of data points about who you are, obtained by gathering information from public records, social-media profiles, and commercial brokers

“It is now so cheap to engage in this mass personalization,” Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University who studies misinformation and disinformation, told me. “It’s going to make this content easier to create, cheaper to create, and put more communities within the reach of it.”

That sheer ease could overwhelm democracies’ already-vulnerable election infrastructure. Local- and state-election workers have been under attack since 2020, and AI could make things worse.

Those officials have also expressed the worry, he said, that generative AI will turbocharge the harassment they face, by making the act of writing and sending hate mail virtually effortless. (The consequences may be particularly severe for women.)

past attacks—most notably the Russian hack of John Podesta’s email, in 2016—have wrought utter havoc. But now pretty much anyone—whatever language they speak and whatever their writing ability—can send out hundreds of phishing emails in fluent English prose. “The cybersecurity implications of AI for elections and electoral integrity probably aren’t getting nearly the focus that they should,”

Just last week, AI-generated audio surfaced of one Harlem politician criticizing another. New York City has perhaps the most robust local-news ecosystem of any city in America, but elsewhere, in communities without the media scrutiny and fact-checking apparatuses that exist at the national level, audio like this could cause greater chaos.

In countries that speak languages with less online text for LLMs to gobble up, AI tools may be less sophisticated. But those same countries are likely the ones where tech platforms will pay the least attention to the spread of deepfakes and other disinformation, Edelson told me. India, Russia, the U.S., the EU—this is where platforms will focus. “Everything else”—Namibia, Uzbekistan, Uruguay—“is going to be an afterthought,”

Most of us tend to fret about the potential fake video that deceives half of the nation, not about the flood of FOIA requests already burying election officials. If there is a cost to that way of thinking, the world may pay it this year at the polls.