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malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. NBC’s Keir Simmons reports for TODAY from London. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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Video"},{"format":"MPEG4","publicUrl":"//link.theplatform.com/s/2E2eJC/DzFb7_cYHbym?mbr=true","width":480,"height":270,"bitrate":264000,"duration":736,"durationISO":"PT12M16S","assetType":"Akamai Video"},{"format":"MPEG4","publicUrl":"//link.theplatform.com/s/2E2eJC/Ee0U4H3Jsue7?mbr=true","width":1280,"height":720,"bitrate":3295000,"duration":736,"durationISO":"PT12M16S","assetType":"Akamai Video"},{"format":"MPEG4","publicUrl":"//link.theplatform.com/s/2E2eJC/mlJNTUu_C1Oh?mbr=true","width":960,"height":540,"bitrate":1695000,"duration":736,"durationISO":"PT12M16S","assetType":"Akamai Video"},{"format":"MPEG4","publicUrl":"//link.theplatform.com/s/2E2eJC/woRtUPPoe7Vn?mbr=true","width":640,"height":360,"bitrate":895000,"duration":736,"durationISO":"PT12M16S","assetType":"Akamai Video"}],"captionLinks":{},"requiresCaption
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
katherineharron

Feds chased suspected foreign link to Trump's 2016 campaign cash for three years - CNNP... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 14 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • federal prosecutors investigated whether money flowing through an Egyptian state-owned bank could have backed millions of dollars Donald Trump donated to his own campaign days before he won the 2016 election
  • It represents one of the most prolonged efforts by federal investigators to understand the President's foreign financial ties, and became a significant but hidden part of the special counsel's pursuits.
  • The investigation was kept so secret that at one point investigators locked down an entire floor of a federal courthouse in Washington, DC, so Mueller's team could fight for the Egyptian bank's records in closed-door court proceedings following a grand jury subpoena.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • 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."
Javier E

Opinion | This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-mueller-ukraine-jan-6.html

trump reports analysis

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team.
  • Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.
  • The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor administration would be able to prosecute a former president,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.
  • The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential
  • Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight.
  • The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,”
  • All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain.
  • The Mueller report argues that viewing the president’s “acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified of what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just as the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.
  • The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect.
  • Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything
  • There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”
  • This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.
  • Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.
  • The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties
  • for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.
  • The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are probably inherent to the form
aidenborst

Robert Mueller to help teach law school class on Russia investigation - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics Trump history crisis Culture policy GOP Putin Russia election

shared by aidenborst on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Former special counsel Robert Mueller will help teach a University of Virginia Law School class on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the school announced Wednesday.
  • The course, titled "The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel," will be taught by three former senior members of Mueller's team and held over six sessions in the fall semester.
  • The school said the course will focus on "a key set of decisions made during the special counsel's investigation," starting with Mueller's appointment as special counsel and ending with a focus on "obstruction of justice, presidential accountability and the role of special counsel in that accountability."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Ultimately, Mueller found several examples of Russian efforts to sway the election for the Trump campaign but did not find evidence that the Trump campaign knowingly took part in the allegedly criminal conspiracy, according to his 448-page report released in April 2019.
  • In all, Mueller charged 34 people and three Russian companies with crimes. That included top Trump advisers: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, as well as two dozen Russians and the Russian companies.
  • Mueller, who began his career with the Department of Justice in 1976 as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco, will look to bring other prosecutors involved in his investigation into the classroom as well, the school said.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Mueller Summary Is a Big Win for America - 0 views

nymag.com/...-is-a-big-win-for-america.html

report trump system

shared by Javier E on 01 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Firstly, I’m relieved as an American that a serious and dogged prosecutor deemed it impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president of the United States had knowingly conspired with a foreign government to undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election
  • Second, we were able to hold an independent inquiry into a serious question of electoral malfeasance and see it to a conclusion, without Mueller being fired, or the inquiry blocked, or stymied
  • More to the point, in what was an inevitably fraught political moment, Robert Mueller conducted himself impeccably.
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  • In a world of endless distraction, Mueller kept his focus. It is hard not to see the inquiry as an epic cultural and moral clash between the honorable American and the irredeemably ugly one; between the war-hero public servant and a draft-dodging liar and thug; between elegant, understated class and fathomless, bullhorn vulgarity
  • if Trump is charged or accused of anything, he has the identical reflex. Always deny. Always lie. Always undermine. Never concede. Accuse your opponents of doing exactly what they accuse you of. Even if you’re innocent
  • Above all, I’m grateful Mueller did not find a clear-cut case of provable treasonous criminality either on the president’s part or his family’s. The reason I’m relieved is that, however grave the crime, Trump would almost certainly have gotten away with it
  • ere was always a real danger that this entire ordeal would end with an obviously proven high crime and misdemeanor, a thereby unavoidable impeachment process, and then an inevitable failure to convict in the Senate. And so Trump would become an openly criminal president, a walking inversion of the rule of law, leverage impeachment into his reelection, and our slide into strongman politics would have accelerated still further.
  • In a liberal society, it really does matter more that the rules are fair than that any side wins. Mueller walked that line — and did not fall off it, as, for example, James Comey did.
  • When we get to read the report — and the detail in the narrative will matter a lot — we’ll find out more. I suspect it will be more damning than most Republicans now believe, but less definitive than many Democrats hope. Which is, to my mind, a pretty sweet spot — at least compared to all the alternatives.
  • The beauty of day care for old and young is that it works perfectly for both. Seniors have the time and patience for kids that harried parents often don’t. And young children often delight in the company of the old and can learn from them.
  • there is an odd equality to the relationship between the very young and the very old that I felt in that sleepless bedroom. Each get to see in one another the end and the beginning of life. That gives each perspective and respect as well as mutual curiosity — and the time to explore it.
  • In a saner world, this would be at the center of our politics: the simple repair of human bonds, broken by capitalism and modernity and loneliness. But we can make it saner
  • I have to say I’m happy that Jussie Smollett will not be going to jai
  • There are too many young black men in jail already, and if a plea deal can help someone avoid time in a case where no one was actually hurt, unless you count beating yourself up, great.
  • what makes absolutely no sense is that Smollett is still refusing to accept responsibility and apologize for the hoax. In fact, he still appears to be outright lying.
anonymous

Polar opposites Trump and Mueller barrel toward a showdown - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US trump crisis culture policy politics

shared by anonymous on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump and Robert Mueller may be contemporaries but are temperamental opposites, divided most deeply by their respective contempt and reverence for the institutions of US government.
  • The raging, conspiratorial attacks on Twitter escalated a strategy orchestrated by Trump and polemicist allies in conservative media to discredit Mueller's eventual findings, to taint his probe as a Democratic plot and to unite Republican voters behind the President to secure his hold on office.
  • Mueller may be unique in this riotous political era. Most people identified by Trump as enemies -- rival political candidates, Democratic congressional leaders or critics in the arts and the media -- feel they have no choice but to defend their reputations.
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  • Another possible reason for Trump's ire was revealed by The New York Times Tuesday in a report that said Mueller was looking into whether Trump's demands on Jeff Sessions in early 2017 to rescind his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation and subsequent pressure on the attorney general to resign played into the obstruction case.
  • A CNN/SSRS poll this month showed that 44% of voters approve of how Mueller is handling the investigation -- down four points from March. Only 17% of GOP voters approve of the special counsel now, down from 29% in March.
  • So Trump hopes to build a wall against impeachment -- by making it impossible for GOP lawmakers to defy the sentiments of their voters and by coalescing in any impeachment proceedings.
  • So it's no wonder the Trump attacks are fueling suspicions that the President does indeed have something to hide.
  • That suspicion also points to the great unknown of the entire showdown between the President and the special counsel.
izzerios

Special counsel appointed in Russia probe - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by izzerios on 18 May 17 - No Cached
  • Justice Department on Wednesday appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election
  • Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to the position in a letter obtained by CNN. Attorney General Jeff Sessions previously recused himself from any involvement in the Russia investigation due to his role as a prominent campaign adviser and surrogate.
  • Mueller's appointment aims to quell the wave of criticism that Trump and his administration have faced since Trump fired FBI Director James Comey
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • "As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know -- there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity. I look forward to this matter concluding quickly
  • "I think it was the right thing to do and I believe they saw it as the right thing to do otherwise they're going to have a fight and it's not worth the fight,"
  • Demands intensified from Democrats on Capitol Hill for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel or prosecutor to oversee the case. Republicans on Tuesday night began to join those calls
  • "There's, frankly, no need for a special prosecutor. We've discussed this before," Spicer told reporters. "You have two Senate committees that are looking into this, the FBI is conducting their own review
  • Trump has called the FBI investigation into Russia a "hoax" and "taxpayer funded charade."
  • He added, "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!"
  • Attorney General John Ashcroft to reauthorize a warrantless domestic surveillance program that the Justice Department had ruled illegal, Mueller and Comey rushed to the hospital to prevent the Bush officials from taking advantage of Ashcroft.
  • Rosenstein said he believes a special counsel "is necessary in order for the American people to have full confidence in the outcome."
  • "In my capacity as acting attorney general, I determined that it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authority and appoint a Special Counsel to assume responsibility for this matter," Rosenstein said
  • "What I have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command," Rosenstein
  • Mueller was appointed FBI Director by President George W. Bush in 2001 and served until 2013
malonema1

Senate Judiciary Approves Bill To Protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-by-senate-judiciary-committee

US trump

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Four Republicans, including committee chairman and bill co-sponsor Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, voted with committee Democrats to advance the controversial legislation. The bill would allow Mueller or any future special counsel 10 days to apply for expedited judicial review if he or she were fired from an investigation. It would also require the attorney general to provide a report to Congress if a special counsel is appointed or removed and detailed information if the scope of an investigation is changed.
  • In a Fox News interview on Thursday, President Trump suggested he was closely watching the Mueller investigation and could intervene. "And you look at the corruption at the top of the FBI, it's a disgrace. And our Justice Department, which I try and stay away from, but at some point, I won't," said Trump.
millerco

Mueller Seeks White House Documents Related to Trump's Actions as President - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mueller-trump-russia.html

Us history Trump politics hillary clinton comey FBI spicer mueller investigation

shared by millerco on 21 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Mueller Seeks White House Documents Related to Trump’s Actions as President
  • Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, has asked the White House for documents about some of President Trump’s most scrutinized actions since taking office, including the firing of his national security adviser and F.B.I. director, according to White House officials.
  • Mr. Mueller is also interested in an Oval Office meeting Mr. Trump had with Russian officials in which he said the dismissal of the F.B.I. director had relieved “great pressure” on him.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The document requests provide the most details to date about the breadth of Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and show that several aspects of his inquiry are focused squarely on Mr. Trump’s behavior in the White House.
  • In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s office sent a document to the White House that detailed 13 areas in which investigators are seeking information.
  • Since then, administration lawyers have been scouring White House emails and asking officials whether they have other documents or notes that may pertain to Mr. Mueller’s requests.
  • One of the requests is about a meeting Mr. Trump had in May with Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, was fired.
  • That day, Mr. Trump met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, along with other Russian officials.
  • Mr. Trump had tweeted that Mr. Comey “was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!”
Javier E

Thanks to Mueller, 2020 won't be about 2016 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html

2020 election history trump

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Robert S. Mueller III’s report is a gift to the nation, which now knows what was already a reasonable surmise: that its chief executive’s unlovely admiration for a repulsive foreign regime, Vladimir Putin’s, is more a dereliction of taste and judgment than evidence that he is under that regime’s sway.
  • The report is an even larger gift to the nation because it might help stabilize the Democratic Party
  • What Mueller’s report makes possible is something like a normal presidential election in 2020.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • while Mueller investigated these activities, the accusation of 2016 collusion between professional Russian operatives and the ramshackle Trump campaign apparatus was already implausible because Russia could pursue its ends without coordinating its activities with a campaign rife with lowlifes and bottom-of-the-barrel Republican operatives.
  • Suppose he had been badly wounded by the repor
  • He then might have seemed so weakened that the Democratic nominating electorate could indulge its fancies, unconstrained by worries about electability.
  • An embarrassed nation aches for a president who is one thing: normal. Democrats, however, are looking weirder and weirder while cooking a bouillabaisse of indigestible ingredients
  • After Mueller’s report, the 2020 election will be about various normal issues — health care, the economy’s strength and the equity of its results, etc. — but above all it will be about this: Is the current tone of public life, which is set by the president, the best America can do?
  • Thanks to Mueller, the 2020 campaign will not be about the 2016 campaign. It will be about a post-Trump future — if unhinged Democrats can stop auctioning themselves to their party’s most clamorous factions, thereby making Trump seem to be what Mueller’s report does not say that he is: acceptable.
Javier E

The attacks on Mueller push us closer to the precipice - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html

trump justice legal system constitutional prosecution

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • we learned last week that Republicans are deepening their complicity in derailing Mueller’s investigation and burying the facts. The more Mueller imperils Trump, the more McCarthyite the GOP becomes.
  • The apotheosis of Republican congressional collusion with Trump’s efforts to hang on at all costs came at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. One Republican after another attacked Mueller and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as if the latter should be placed on a new compendium of subversive organizations.
  • Only recently, it was widely assumed that if Trump fired Mueller, many Republicans would rise up to defend our institutions. Now, many in the party are laying the groundwork for justifying a coverup. This is a recipe for lawlessness.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We also assumed that Mueller’s findings would be respected because of his deserved reputation for fairness and independence. Just last May, Newt Gingrich called him a “superb choice to be special counsel” and praised his “honesty and integrity.” Now, pro-Trump politicians feel free to contradict anything they said in the past and to dismiss what they once saw as legitimate authority if those who hold it threaten their power. This is a recipe for autocracy.
Javier E

The Making of the Fox News White House | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ng-of-the-fox-news-white-house

fox news trump propaganda culture politics

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.”
  • The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
  • Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.”
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
  • Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”
  • Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.
  • Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
  • Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.
  • Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. “Like, every day,” one said.
  • Ailes told Murdoch, “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful he’s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.”
  • In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises—an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm—but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power.
  • both men have tapped into anti-élitist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.
  • In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton
  • Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.
  • he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”
  • “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”
  • In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.
  • As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’ ”
  • Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.”
  • In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits.
  • Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.”
  • For all of Ailes’s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: “Fair and Balanced.
  • Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, “I want to elect the next President.”
  • Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. They’re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC.” (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign.
  • Ailes and Trump were friendly. “They spoke all the time,” a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of “Trump’s crazy behavior”; but Trump’s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes “nervous”: “He thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.”
  • in 2016 that the network’s executives “made a business decision” to give on-air stars “slack” to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O’Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly remained skeptical
  • Kelly kept pressing Trump: “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?” But he’d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump’s image as shamelessly unsinkable.
  • Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.
  • Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump’s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, and said that he’d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.
  • Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes’s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox’s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.
  • For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox’s critics say, is that it’s become a platform for Trump’s authoritarianism. “I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.” Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.
  • News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.
  • Murdoch “was gone a lot,” adding, “He’s old. He likes the idea that he’s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.”
  • Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.
  • ” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.
  • Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.
  • Shine became “an expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,” adding, “He was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.
  • some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, “He’s perfect for the White House job. He’s a yes-man.” Another Fox alumnus said, “His only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.”
  • Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. “We had a file on pretty much everyone,” the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about “putting hits” in the media on anyone who “got out of line.”
  • If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, “Shine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—and, if that didn’t work, he’d warn her it would ruin her career.”
  • Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”
  • Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.
  • Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch’s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”
  • Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company
  • In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.
  • The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN
  • “There may be innocent explanations.” But, he adds, “Trump famously said you’re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.” He says of Murdoch, “He’s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He’s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.”
  • Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that “Murdoch calls me every day.” She recalled that, “back when Trump was still speaking to me,” she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, “Do you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?” Coulter accepted Trump’s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox “within twelve hours.”
  • “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”
  • Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”
  • Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material.
  • Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected
  • Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that “nearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally” every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox’s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.
  • Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox’s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller’s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.
  • By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the “Uranium One” story, which Hannity called “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.” On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.” Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that “the corrupt, lying mainstream media” was withholding this “bombshell” from Americans, because it was “complicit” in a “huge coverup.”
  • other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia.
  • Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on “Fox & Friends” for years before joining CNN, in 2014
  •  ‘Fox & Friends’ was a fun show, but it was not a news show,” she says. “It regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger’s id on TV. He’d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.” She says that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the standards.”
  • Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism.
  • Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.
  • a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”
  • Judging from the timing of Trump’s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records “Fox & Friends” and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. “Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,” Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.
  • Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea “disturbing,” now calls such efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fo
  • White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals.
  • According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President’s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he’s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him
  • Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump’s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.
  • For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, “might as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,” adding, “It seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.”
  • “The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.
  • Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”
  • Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience’s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing
  • A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”
  • Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. “He always thought he did it the best,” a former senior White House official says. “But the problem is that you lose deniability. It’s become a trapeze act with no net, 24/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.”
  • “It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”
  • For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law.
  • Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”
  • “In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”
malonema1

Senate panel approves bill to protect special counsel - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics policy

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • The legislation, which would give Mueller and other special counsels the ability to challenge their firings in court, still has little chance of becoming law — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed not to put it on the floor, House Republicans have shown no interest in the measure and Trump would be unlikely to sign it.
  • Democrats said they were alarmed at an initial draft of Grassley's amendment — which would have required the attorney general to report to Congress about changes to the special counsel's scope — would open up the investigation to potential political interference.
  • emocrats said they were alarmed at an initial draft of Grassley's amendment — which would have required the attorney general to report to Congress about changes to the special counsel's scope — would open up the investigation to potential political interference.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • While Republicans have said the legislation is not about Mueller's investigation, Trump's flirtation with firing the special counsel or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who supervises Mueller, loomed over the hearing.
  • The resolution stated the feeling among several Republicans on the panel that the bill was unconstitutional — stating that it would "weaken the separation of powers in the name of political expediency" — while stating that Mueller "should be permitted to finish his work in a timely fashion."The amendment failed on a 5-16 vote.
johnsonel7

Devin Nunes: Mueller prosecutors should face criminal charges over Russia 'dirt' tipster - 0 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...arges-over-russia-dirt-tipster

history politics Papadopoulos Russia Mueller

shared by johnsonel7 on 27 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A leading Republican said he will make a criminal referral to the Justice Department concerning special counsel Robert Mueller’s case against Trump adviser George Papadopoulos in connection to Russia “dirt” tipster Joseph Mifsud.
  • “Remember the whole story that Papadopoulos needed to be really treated badly and sentenced to some time because he really stopped the FBI from being able to find Joseph Mifsud?” Nunes asked Laura Ingraham. “Well, it ends up that's not true. That’s not what the 302s say. The 302s actually say that Papadopoulos was actually trying to help the FBI, and they're the ones that said that Mifsud was going to be in the United States.”
  • Mueller’s team argued in its August 2018 sentencing memorandum for Papadopoulos that “his lies were material to the investigation,” and “his lies to the FBI in January 2017 impeded the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.” Mueller’s team claimed that Papadopoulos’s lies “substantially hindered” its ability to “effectively question” Mifsud when the FBI located him in Washington. The team also claimed Papadopoulos’s lies “undermined” its ability to “challenge” Mifsud or even “detain or arrest him” while he was in the U.S.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Mueller’s 2019 report mentioned Mifsud 89 times and claimed that “Papadopoulos’s false statements … hindered investigators’ ability to effectively question Mifsud when he was interviewed in the lobby of a Washington, D.C., hotel on February 10, 2017.” Mueller does not call Mifsud an agent of Russia but stated that Mifsud had "connections to Russia" and noted he "traveled to Moscow in April 2016" and "met with high-level Russian government officials" before telling Papadopoulos in London about the Clinton "dirt."
Javier E

Ex-KGB Agent Says Trump Was a Russian Asset. Does it Matter? - 0 views

nymag.com/...utin-kompromat-unger-book.html

trump asset russia putin

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • If something like the most sinister plausible story turned out to be true, how much would it matter? Probably not that much
  • I have merely come to think that even if we could have confirmed the worst, to the point that even Trump’s supporters could no longer deny it, it wouldn’t have changed very much. Trump wouldn’t have been forced to resign, and his Republican supporters would not have had to repudiate him. The controversy would have simply receded into the vast landscape of partisan talking points — one more thing liberals mock Trump over, and conservatives complain about the media for covering instead of Nancy Pelosi’s freezer or antifa or the latest campus outrage.
  • One reason I think that is because a great deal of incriminating information was confirmed and very little in fact changed as a result. In 2018, Buzzfeed reported, and the next year Robert Mueller confirmed, explosive details of a Russian kompromat operation. During the campaign, Russia had been dangling a Moscow building deal that stood to give hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to Trump, at no risk. Not only did he stand to gain this windfall, but he was lying in public at the time about his dealings with Russia, which gave Vladimir Putin additional leverage over him. (Russia could expose Trump’s lies at any time if he did something to displease Moscow.)
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.
  • Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.
  • Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.
  • Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”
  • To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump
  • This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.
  • A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
  • If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.
  • He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.
  • there was a reasonable chance — I loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.
  • Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”
  • During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)
  • In 2018, I became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump
  • Here is what I wrote in that controversial section:
rerobinson03

McGahn to Testify About Trump's Efforts to Obstruct Russia Inquiry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gahn-trump-russia-inquiry.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The fact that Mr. McGahn is talking to Congress at all is significant after a multiyear legal battle by the Trump Justice Department to block a subpoena for his testimony. That dispute ended last month when the Biden Justice Department, House Democrats and a lawyer for Mr. McGahn reached a compromise.
  • Under that deal, Mr. McGahn’s appearance may yield little in terms of new revelations. He testified behind closed doors and will have up to a week to review a transcript for accuracy before it is made public. He also may be questioned only about his involvement in matters that are described in the publicly available portions of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.Still, Mr. McGahn is likely to be asked to respond under oath to Mr. Trump’s public denial of events that were described in the report based in part on what Mr. McGahn told Mr. Mueller’s investigators, including that Mr. Trump had ordered him to have Mr. Mueller fired — a step Mr. McGahn said he refused to take.
  • While those who did have the right to ask questions, Mr. McGahn was questioned primarily by committee staffers. He was accompanied by his lawyer, William A. Burck.
katherineharron

Fact-checking Trump's impeachment debate in the House - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Only 13 months after the House first impeached President Donald Trump, lawmakers were back on Wednesday voting to impeach Trump an unprecedented second time for a US president. During the debate on the resolution, which charges that Trump incited a violent insurrection against the government on January 6, some of Trump's allies were still using many of the same arguments they did a year ago to criticize Democrats and defend Trump's actions.
  • Rep. Tom McClintock said that Trump's remarks at the Washington, DC, rally that preceded the Capitol insurrection were overly confrontational and sometimes inaccurate
  • "But what did he actually say? His exact words were: 'I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.' That's impeachable? That's called freedom of speech," McClintock said.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Trump, for example, urged Republicans to stop fighting like a boxer "with his hands tied behind his back," saying, "We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we're going to have to fight much harder."
  • Trump alleged that there would be dire consequences if his supporters did not take immediate action -- saying that, if Biden took office, "You will have an illegitimate president. That's what you'll have. And we can't let that happen." And he said, "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
  • In sum: McClintock and other Trump allies are entitled to argue that all of these Trump comments are not impeachable, even that they are not incendiary. But he left a misleading impression when he posed the question, "but what did he actually say?" and did not mention the most contentious things Trump actually said.
  • "And I also want to thank my Democratic colleagues for finally joining Republicans in condemning mob violence after six months of refusing to acknowledge it."
  • Republicans are entitled to argue that Democrats should have issued such condemnations more forcefully or frequently, but it's just inaccurate to say or suggest they didn't issue the condemnations at all.
  • Mueller never said Trump did nothing wrong. In fact, Mueller's final report explains that there was strong evidence that Trump obstructed justice, on several occasions. But Mueller decided not to make a decision on whether to charge Trump, for many reasons, including Department of Justice policy that a president "cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office."
  • And according to figures released by the Justice Department, the investigation actually cost $32 million, not $40 million.
  • Jordan also said, as he has as far back as 2019, that the whistleblower who filed the primary 2019 complaint about Trump's dealings with Ukraine "worked for Joe Biden."
  • It's possible the whistleblower interacted with Biden in the course of their job duties in the government, but that's substantially different than working for Biden himself. The whistleblower's lawyers said in 2019 that "our client has spent their entire government career in apolitical, civil servant positions in the Executive Branch" and that "in these positions our client has come into contact with presidential candidates from both parties in their roles as elected officials -- not as candidates."
lilyrashkind

4 things to remember about Trump, Ukraine and Putin - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...trump-putin-ukraine

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up tensions with the West for the better part of the last decade -- he annexed Crimea, meddled in US elections, poisoned an ex-spy on British soil, and more. Nearly every step of the way, former President Donald Trump parroted Kremlin talking points, excused Russian aggression and sometimes even embraced it outright.
  • The GOP is the party of the Russia hawks. For a half-century, one of their central organizing principles was opposing the Soviet threat," Graff said, adding that Trump upended that history and made some Republicans go soft on Putin. "But in this last month, a lot of Republicans who became wishy-washy on Russia have come back to their natural position as Russia hawks."
  • Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort -- who had spent a decade advising Yanukovych in Ukraine -- collaborated in 2016 with a Russian spy on a secret plan for Trump to help Russia control eastern Ukraine, according to special counsel Robert Mueller's report. The proposal envisioned that Yanukovych would return to lead a Russian puppet state in eastern Ukraine. This pro-Russian rhetoric didn't always translate into policy for the Trump White House. For instance, his administration said sanctions would continue until Russia returned Crimea. But the rhetoric gave Putin an unexpected cheerleader in DC and created tensions within NATO.
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  • President Joe Biden has dramatically increased the flow of arms to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft systems, drones, rifles and other weapons. Importantly, it was Trump who first sent lethal aid, in a major reversal from the Obama administration, which refused to send offensive weapons to Ukraine during the early stages of fighting in the eastern Donbas region.But Trump has a checkered past on this topic. As a candidate, his position was unclear at best. Trump campaign aides intervened during the 2016 Republican National Convention to block language from the GOP party platform that called on the US to send lethal arms to Ukraine.
  • One of his 2016 campaign aides falsely claimed that "Russia did not seize Crimea." "Trump said that Crimea is Russian, because people speak Russian," said Elena Petukhova of Molfar, a Kyiv-based business intelligence firm, who called it an "absolutely pro-Kremlin" view. "According to this logic, the entire territory of the United States should belong to Great Britain."
  • Trump's biggest lie was about the 2016 election. He rejected the reality that Russia interfered to help him win. Instead, he falsely claimed it was Ukraine who meddled, and that he was the victim. These lies, which he repeated dozens of times, were a double boon to the Kremlin: they downplayed Russia's brazen attack on US democracy, while simultaneously smearing Ukraine.
  • This was a break from decades of warm US policy toward Ukraine, especially when dealing with leaders like Zelensky who tried to reorient the country toward the West. Former President George W. Bush praised the Ukrainian people in 2004 for protesting a rigged election, and Obama celebrated the 2014 revolution that ousted a Kremlin-friendly government in Kyiv. "When Trump muddies the water by praising Putin, or undermines Zelensky and spreads falsehoods about Ukraine, this has real implications for how this crisis plays out," said Jordan Gans-Morse, a Northwestern University professor who was a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine. "It shapes public opinion in ways that tie Biden's hands when he's a de facto wartime president."
  • This strong-arming by Team Trump forced Zelensky, in his first months in office, to navigate a surprisingly hostile relationship with the US, a supposed top ally in his fight against Russia. "Zelensky had more than enough on his plate when he came to power," Gans-Morse said. "The country was already at war with Russia. He's a political novice. And then, on top of that, the most powerful person in the world essentially extorted him, and he had to devote time and energy to deal with that. It's unclear what the full impact was, but it definitely tested Zelensky."
Javier E

Opinion | It's Not the Collusion, It's the Corruption - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mueller-report-corruption.html

trump crisis threat democracy report governance politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real
  • The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance
  • I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.
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  • The second force is Russia. If Trump is a threat to the institutional infrastructure, the Russians are a threat to our informational infrastructure.
  • The third force is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. They are a threat to our deliberative infrastructure. Any organization needs to be able to hold private conversations in order to deliberate
  • it shows that many of the Trumpists, the Russians and the WikiLeaks crowd all understood that they were somehow adjacent actors in the same project.
  • The Mueller report indicates that Trump was not colluding with Russia. But it also shows that working relationships were beginning to be built
  • that’s the report’s central importance. We are being threatened in a very distinct way. The infrastructure of the society is under threat — the procedures that shape government, the credibility of information, the privacy rules that make deliberation possible.
  • These forces are motivated by self-interest, but their common feature is an operational nihilism. They are trying to sow disorder at the foundation of society. The goal is not really to convert anybody to a cause; it is to create cynicism and disruption that will open up the space to grab what you want to grab.
  • They rig the system and then tell everybody, “The system is rigged!” And therefore, all values are suspended. Everything is permitted.
  • today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.)
  • It’s easy to recognize when you are attacked head-on. But the U.S. is being attacked from below, at the level of the foundations we take for granted.
  • In all societies there are rules defining good conduct, and there are supposed to be impartial, honest referees that enforce those rules and make sure the game is fair.
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