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RSN: "Forget It, Jake. It's Chinatown." Just About Everywhere |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 17 May 2019 11:55 |
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Rosenblum writes: "China's range stretches from the ocean floor to the dark side of the moon."
The .2 billion China-funded Standard Gauge Railway is Kenya's largest post-independence infrastructure project. (photo: AFP)
"Forget It, Jake. It's Chinatown." Just About Everywhere
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
17 May 19
 HANGA, Kenya – This dispatch got delayed; I was in no rush. Shanga (as in Shanghai) hasn’t been breaking news for 500 years. Today it is vital context as an American president plays dunces and dragons with China, which sees time in millennia, not four-year mandates.
Whatever Donald Trump might gain in trade talks, his public posturing spurs the ancient Middle Kingdom to ramp up its manifest destiny with economic, diplomatic and military expansion that began after the 2008 recession exposed weaknesses in Western dominance.
Plunder in a paradisiacal Swahili enclave on the Indian Ocean, which includes the ruins of Shanga and the fabled time-warp port of Lamu, is a telling example of China’s global quest for raw materials, food supplies and geopolitical clout.
Coral-block ruins still stand in the jungle here, built by shipwrecked Chinese sailors in the 1400s, well before Columbus happened upon America. The stranded seamen fathered children whose DNA can still be found in their progeny.
Back then, Admiral Zheng He ruled the waves with a fleet of 28,000 men in 300 ships, some 400 feet long. A giraffe he brought from the Swahili Coast intrigued the emperor. But China turned inward, leaving European powers to colonize Africa. Shanga faded away.
Today, the Chinese are back, bankrolling a $2.3 billion coal-fired power plant project on the mainland. Two Kenyan moguls cooked it up with help from a top politician whose rake-off is expected to fund a presidential run. This is an open secret, but reporters can’t nail down a paper trail.
Experts condemn the scheme. Kenya produces excess power, and all consumers pay a levy to subsidize unused capacity. The government is committed to developing alternative energy. The project would import coal and have to spend heavily on long-distance power lines.
Corruption is rife in Kenya; it has nearly as many white elephants as grey ones. But money aside, toxic smoke would foul the air and discharge would poison fish. Mangroves vital to ecological balance would be cut. And laidback Lamu, a U.N. World Heritage Site, would be lost.
Lamu holds fast to traditions that have vanished elsewhere. Life moves at donkey pace among twisting narrow lanes under white-washed minarets scented by cinnamon winds. Wooden dhows under muslin sails still ply the Indian Ocean as they have for seven centuries.
It has outlasted rule by Omanis, Turks, Portuguese and Zanzibaris. British colonizers built a concrete seafront to protect the old fort and merchants’ palaces, and they left the place to live as it always has. Hardy travelers blazed an overland trail in the 1960s. A glitzy jet-set crowd followed. Rich Europeans and minor royalty bought holiday homes.
Outsiders party in private behind carved doors and thick walls. Everyone wakes at dawn to muezzins wailing from two dozen mosques. Luxuries are simple: fish still flapping when they hit the grill, luscious papayas and mangos; bare toes on the beach, spectacular sunsets seen from rolling dhow decks.
Although environmentalist lawsuits have held off construction, dredging for the power plant and an adjacent port has already destroyed much of a rich coral reef. In the meantime, Chinese backers are in no hurry. They are playing a very long game.
China has major construction contracts in the Lamu Port and Lamu-Southern-Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSETT), a maybe-sometime $16 billion plan to run a pipeline, road and railway deep into East Africa to exploit landlocked oilfields and mineral deposits.
“That’s how they do it,” the Anglo-Kenyan owner of a resort north of Lamu told me. “We think about tomorrow. They think about the next hundred years.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese government and private enterprises in favor are scoring big-time.
The coal plant is just one of hundreds that China is unloading on developing countries as it shifts to cleaner power at home. With soft loans for other projects, Beijing has burrowed into Kenya so deeply that the former British colony now teaches Chinese in primary schools.
Grants and loans include no human-rights lectures. Proposals often come with briefcases stuffed with cash to enlist friends in high places. If the plant opens, it will employ 1,400 workers from China. That is normal procedure. For the new railway from Mombasa to Nairobi, the engineers’ manuals are in Chinese.
Countless side benefits accrue. For instance, Chinese operators have devastated local crab populations to send back home, unhindered by coast guard patrols.
In earlier days, China offered occasional aid for political purposes. About 50,000 Chinese built the 1,160-mile TAZARA Railway to link Zambia’s copper belt to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, skirting white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. When it opened in 1975, a band played, “Seas Belong to the Helmsman.”
I drove the new road from Kigali, Rwanda, to the Congo border in 1968. Chinese work gangs did the grunt work and kept to themselves. Signs near villages warning motorists to slow down showed the figure of a pedestrian: a man wearing a coolie hat and pigtail.
It is a different world now. China’s range stretches from the ocean floor to the dark side of the moon. Analysts at Stratfor reckon its global reach, including the Belt and Road Initiative and other projects touching 130 countries, could cost more than $8 trillion. That is about what America squandered on the Iraq war and its aftermath.
The dangers are obvious if a global power exerts influence ranging to suzerainty over independent states. America has often overstepped over the years. But at least it attempted to defend civil liberties, a free press, human rights and political dissent. China, not so much.
If push comes to shove, there is the military aspect. This year is the centennial of China’s humiliation after World War I, when the United States and European allies forced it under the thumb of Japan. Xi paraded elite troops and convincing hardware in Beijing to make a point.
On the 70th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, Xi boarded a destroyer to review the fleet, including a nuclear submarine with ballistic missiles that could take out a sizeable city. “The ocean connects us all,” he said, “a community with a shared future.”
Up the coast in Djibouti, China built a naval base near the once-sleepy French Foreign Legion post, not far from America’s Camp Le Monnier. Then a Chinese company contracted to run Djibouti’s port so that all ships entering the harbor pass under Chinese scrutiny.
In recent CNBC interviews, Tom Friedman and Steve Bannon were in rare accord: A hard line is essential because China steals shamelessly and cheats on trade agreements. Beyond soybeans, Boeings and consumer goods, this is about high technology affecting national security.
But Bannon then asserted, “We’ve got all the cards.” If a trump card in bridge means what I think it does, that’s the trouble. China might be forced to show a weaker hand to a boasting, swaggering opponent. But it will find a way to settle the score, in spades.
Over the past year, Trump has tweeted about China 133 times. Chinese leaders have said very little. But an anchorman on state-run TV recently made things clear: “If you want to talk, our door is wide open. If you want to fight, we’ll fight you to the end.”
China would suffer, but it can take it. What if it declares a consumer boycott on American products? As The Economist noted, “Forecasting models scarcely capture the alarm that would spread through markets if the world’s two biggest economies engage in a full-blown trade war.”
Most anyone in Shanga or Shanghai would suggest that saving face on both sides requires meeting in secret, without TV or tweets, to slug it out over terms that each can define as victory. That, alas, is hardly Donald Trump’s style.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Banks Have Been Ripping Off Americans for Too Long. I Have a Plan to End It |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46728"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, CNN</span></a>
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Friday, 17 May 2019 10:35 |
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Sanders writes: "The Federal Reserve recently reported that about half of Americans have virtually no wealth at all, with four in 10 unable to afford a $400 emergency expense. That means that if their car breaks down or their child gets sick, they have to charge those expenses to a credit card."
Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
Banks Have Been Ripping Off Americans for Too Long. I Have a Plan to End It
By Bernie Sanders, CNN
17 May 19
 he Federal Reserve recently reported that about half of Americans have virtually no wealth at all, with four in 10 unable to afford a $400 emergency expense. That means that if their car breaks down or their child gets sick, they have to charge those expenses to a credit card.
And when they do that, they get ripped off — big time. Despite the fact that banks can borrow money from the Fed at less than 2.5%, the median credit card interest rate — which is the rate most new cardholders receive — is now over 21%. Last year, Wall Street banks made $113 billion in credit card interest alone, up by nearly 50% in just five years, and accelerating, according to an analysis of FDIC data. In other words, while working class Americans pay outrageously high interest rates, Wall Street banks get rich.
If you use a credit card from a department store like Macy's or Kohl's, it's even worse. The average interest rate on a retail credit card is over 27%. That means if you buy a $500 refrigerator, you could likely owe an additional $136 in interest over a year's time.
And if you live in a low-income community without a bank or cannot get a credit card, what do you do when you need to borrow money? You may have to turn to a predatory payday lender where the average interest rate on an annual basis is a jaw-dropping 391% — meaning that you would pay $520 in fees for a loan of just $375.
Make no mistake about it. When banks and payday lenders charge these unconscionably high interest rates, they are not engaged in the business of making credit available. They are involved in extortion — squeezing working families that are already in financial distress down to the bone. That should not be happening in the United States of America.
Today's modern-day loan sharks are no longer lurking on street corners breaking kneecaps to collect their payments. They wear Armani suits and work on Wall Street, where they make obscene compensation packages and head financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and American Express.
If you read the tenets of the major religions throughout history, whether it is Christianity, Judaism or Islam, what you will find is a universal moral condemnation to usury.
In "The Divine Comedy," Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for people who charged usurious interest rates. Today, we don't need the hellfire and the pitchforks, we don't need the rivers of boiling blood, but we need a national usury law that caps interest rates on credit cards and consumer loans at 15%.
And that's exactly what the legislation I introduced with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do. Under our Loan Shark Prevention Act, we would make sure that no bank or store in America could charge an interest rate higher than 15%.
This is not a radical idea. According to a recent poll, 88% of Americans support a cap on credit card interest rates. Over 20 states in America have laws preventing credit card companies from charging outrageously high interest rates. In Alabama, the legal maximum interest rate is 8% and in Vermont it is 12%.
But, those state usury laws were obliterated by a 1978 Supreme Court decision known as Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. The Court ruled that banks can charge whatever interest rate they want if they moved to a state like Delaware or South Dakota that doesn't have a usury law, preempting other states' protections.
Under our legislation, not only will we cap credit card interest rates nationally at 15%, we will also empower states to pass and enforce interest rate caps that are below 15% by repealing this disastrous Supreme Court decision.
All over this country, people are buying their groceries with credit cards. Commuters are paying for gas to get to work on their credit cards. Young people are paying their college expenses with credit cards.
Given that reality, if we are going to create a financial system that works for all Americans, we have got to stop financial institutions from charging sky-high interest rates and fees.
We did not pick a 15% national usury rate out of a hat. Since 1980, credit unions in the United States, by federal law, have been prohibited from charging interest rates higher than 15%, except under extraordinary circumstances. It's time to apply that law to private banks as well.
Wall Street and its representatives on Capitol Hill will retort that the business of banking is expensive. The big banks, they will claim, must charge outrageous fees to consumers in order to stay afloat, even as they have benefitted from taxpayer bailouts, sit on trillions of dollars in assets and reap higher and higher profits from credit-card interest payments every year. The payday-loan apologists will similarly argue that their industry's insane interest rates are still better than illegal alternatives on the black market.
In my view, the solution is obvious. We must make sure that giant Wall Street financial institutions and payday lenders are not the only way Americans can gain access to banking services. We must provide affordable banking options to every person in this country by allowing the more than 30,000 post offices in America to offer basic financial services.
Today, the vast majority of postal services around the world allow their customers to do some form of banking. There are 1.5 billion people worldwide who bank with postal services. The American people should have this option as well, just as they have in the past. Starting in 1911, the US Postal Service offered banking services, and at its peak deposit levels in 1947, the Postal Service had more than 4 million people utilizing its financial services. It was phased out in 1967, an era in which financial crises did not regularly occur. The same logistical know-how that the Postal Service draws on to promptly deliver packages, large and small, anywhere in the country, can surely be used to launch and expand affordable checking, savings, wire-transfer, ATM and small-loan services across America.
The American people are sick and tired of being ripped off by the same financial institutions that they bailed out 10 years ago. We need to put an end to predatory lending and provide affordable banking options to all Americans.
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Trial of Policeman in Eric Garner Case Too Little, Too Late |
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Friday, 17 May 2019 08:11 |
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Taibbi writes: "Five years ago this July, a 43-year-old father and small-time street dealer, Eric Garner, was killed in explosion of unnecessary violence. Police officer Daniel Pantaleo, while an onlooker filmed his every move, wrapped an arm around Garner's neck and squeezed until Garner died, gasping, 'I can't breathe.'"
Gwen Carr, Eric Garner's mother, exits from police headquarters as a disciplinary hearing takes place for officer Daniel Pantaleo on May 13, 2019, in New York City. (photo: Kena Betancur/Getty)
Trial of Policeman in Eric Garner Case Too Little, Too Late
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
17 May 19
The long-awaited police trial of Daniel Pantaleo begins, but no matter what happens, it’s illusory justice
 ive years ago this July, a 43-year-old father and small-time street dealer, Eric Garner, was killed in explosion of unnecessary violence. Police officer Daniel Pantaleo, while an onlooker filmed his every move, wrapped an arm around Garner’s neck and squeezed until Garner died, gasping, “I can’t breathe.”
Garner’s death was subsequently ruled a homicide by the city medical examiner, and commissioner Bill Bratton said at the time of Pantaleo’s use of force: “As defined by the department’s patrol guide, this would appear to have been a chokehold.”
These two facts on their own — a death caused by human hands, the commissioner conceding a prohibited technique had been used — seemed to make an obvious case for a serious charge.
It didn’t happen. In a city famous for its prosecutors being able to “indict a ham sandwich,” District Attorney Dan Donovan of Staten Island failed to convince a grand jury to bring criminal charges against Pantaleo. Donovan was quickly rewarded for the non-indictment by being elected to congress.
Now, five years later, Pantaleo is back in the news. Having pulled a city check on desk duty all this time, he faces a “departmental” trial, which could result in loss of his job. It will be presented to the public as a prosecution, but it’s really a disciplinary hearing. The public may finally get some answers about the case, but these hearings rarely result in anything like justice.
Pantaleo is sitting before the NYPD’s Administrative Prosecution Unit. The APU is what’s known as an Administrative Law Court, meaning it’s an executive branch process, not a true court of law. This is the where the most serious internal discipline cases go to be heard.
In this case, the Civilian Complaint Review Board — the city agency charged with taking in and evaluating abuse complaints — brought the charges. Punishments range from “warning and admonishment, loss of vacation days, suspension without pay, dismissal probation, or termination from the NYPD.”
No matter what the court rules, the commissioner has the power to overturn the decision. This would probably not happen in a high-profile case like this one. But the norm is that few civilian complaints even make it to the point of being “substantiated,” and even in cases where punishments are recommended, the end result is usually underwhelming.
A study done years ago by police Inspector General Phillip Eure looked at 1,082 complaints alleging 1,128 chokeholds by police between the years 2009 and 2014. He found the CCRB fully investigated about 520 of those cases. Of those, the Board “substantiated” just ten complaints.
In those 10 substantiated complaints, the CCRB recommended the strongest possible discipline, departmental charges. But in all nine cases, the officer in question ended up either with no discipline at all, or a maximum of five days vacation docked.
In six of those nine, the commissioner personally overturned the ruling, including a case involving a fifteen year-old who was choked “while handcuffed to a metal bar within a Bronx precinct house… no discipline was imposed.”
At the hearing this week, Pantaleo’s lawyer, Stuart London, claimed his client was merely trying to “cuff” Garner, and was using an approved “seat-belt hold.” However, another witness, Inspector Richard Dee, head of training at the New York City Police Academy, said Pantaleo’s grip “meets the definition of a choke hold.”
Pantaleo’s defense is similar to the one “police sources” told the New York Post in the days after Garner’s death, that Pantaleo had used a “submission hold, “ not a “choke hold.” London reportedly tore the medical examiner’s finding of homicide in half during the hearing, calling it “worthless, completely worthless.” He blamed Garner for being in poor health, saying he was “was a ticking time bomb who set these factors in motion by resisting arrest.”
This is the defense commonly offered by police, that the asthmatic Garner essentially killed himself by refusing to move when ordered by Pantaleo and his partner Justin Damico.
About that: Street officers have to make tough judgment calls, and are often made the targets of complaints people should really be directing at higher-ups who order them to pile up arrests for statistics-hungry chiefs and politicians. But over the course of researching this case for a book that would be called I Can’t Breathe, I learned this case wasn’t one of those tough calls.
Garner was a huge, slow-moving, good-natured character. He was funny and well-liked on the street, where he was famous for being willing to argue for hours about things like sports statistics. People would come to the park just to try to wind him up about things for a laugh.
He did sell untaxed cigarettes, and did a pretty good business, with multiple employees selling for him. He organized regular car runs to states like Virginia to take advantage of a tax arbitrage created by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who raised consumption taxes here in the mid-2000s in part to pay for the 9/11 cleanup.
This activity made Garner known to police. However, he was not violent. Moreover, he was ill that morning and spent over an hour in a bathroom shortly before his death.
When he got out of the bathroom, he crossed Staten Island’s Tompkinsville Park, where a fight broke out. Garner broke up the fight before walking on to his usual spot on Bay Street, where he leaned up the wall. He was still panting from exhaustion when Pantaleo and his partner approached.
Commissioner Bratton would say the two detectives had been dispatched to the scene because they had been “directed by a superior officer to address specific conditions.” This was a fancy way of saying someone in the precinct had seen the slovenly-dressed Garner on the street on the way into work, and sent two plainclothes cops to go clear the corner.
If you watch the infamous cell footage shot by Ramsey Orta — who’s currently in jail upstate and testified by video this week — you can see Pantaleo and his partner Damico refusing to entertain any scenario except getting Garner into a car. I was told this was probably because a beat cop sent by a superior to clear a corner needs an arrest number to show he or she did what was told.
It is true Garner refused to obey an order. But his real “crime” that day wasn’t selling untaxed cigarettes. It was looking unkempt while standing on a street in a neighborhood police had been trying for a while trying to “clean.” A series of expensive condo towers had been put up on the other side of the park in recent years. Before then, police were rare in the area.
In other words, this was not the unavoidable kind of trouble officers face, but a dubious form of “order maintenance” that should never have escalated to the level of physical confrontation.
The two detectives never spoke to Garner like a human being, but instead led off with ultimatums and macho posturing. Other police in that neighborhood handled things differently, taking the time to get to know park characters and talk to them like grownups. “If it had been anyone else, Eric might have gone,” is how Garner’s friend, John McCrae, put it.
Without a doubt, this trial is a relief to Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, and other family members who waited this long to have something like a day in court. Still, the case is characteristic of how slowly (and ineffectually) the wheels of justice can turn.
Garner’s daughter Erica frequently complained, to me and to others, that Pantaleo was receiving city benefits and pay while she struggled to make her bills and take care of herself and her family. Erica had trouble coping in the years after her father’s death and believed it was not fair that Pantaleo had access to therapy and other help she didn’t.
She eventually fell ill and died young waiting for some kind of a break in the case. At the time of her death in December, 2017, she was still hoping that the Department of Justice would bring federal civil rights charges against Pantaleo.
That winter, in fact, there were rumors that just such a decision was coming. Erica was excited and beginning to feel optimistic, after a frightening autumn that saw her go into congestive heart failure shortly after the birth of a new son, Eric.
Erica never got to see this day because of a deal that had been made early on, in which the NYPD had decided not to proceed with internal charges against Pantaleo until the F.B.I. wrapped up its civil rights investigation.
The city last year finally gave up waiting for the feds and decided to move on with charges, which is why this APU trial is happening now. The Justice Department still has until July to file a case.
This means because the federal government took five years to make up its mind, Erica Garner had time to get frustrated by the slow pace of things, complain for years, get sick, and die, before she even got to see if the New York City Police department would stop paying the man who choked her father on video. Thinking of it with her in mind, no matter how the police court rules, it will probably be far too little, and certainly too late.
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What Congress Should Ask Robert Mueller When He Testifies |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50800"><span class="small">Joshua Geltzer, Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa, Just Security</span></a>
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Friday, 17 May 2019 08:11 |
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Excerpt: "Robert Mueller's time as special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and links to the Trump campaign was notable for many things, among those his silence."
Former special prosecutor Robert Mueller. (photo: Getty)
What Congress Should Ask Robert Mueller When He Testifies
By Joshua Geltzer, Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa, Just Security
17 May 19
 obert Mueller’s time as special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and links to the Trump campaign was notable for many things, among those his silence. Even as President Donald Trump talked and tweeted repeatedly about Mueller personally, the special counsel team, and their work, and even as the media covered Mueller’s every coming and going, Mueller let his work speak for itself.
That’s about to change. While the date hasn’t been set yet, odds are that Mueller will testify soon on the Hill. The three of us previously offered questions for Congress to pose to Attorney General William Barr when he testified before Congress. We now suggest the questions below for Congress to ask Special Counsel Mueller as he breaks his silence and offers congressional testimony. We offer these questions as an addition to the 60 questions posed by the 10 Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We believe there is very little overlap between the two lists, and we offer ours as a supplement.
Once again, we encourage readers to add to our list with questions of their own (by sending their suggestions to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
). We will add readers’ questions to the list with attribution, but let us know if you prefer anonymity.
I. Process
1. Before you submitted your report on March 22, 2019, did Attorney General William Barr or Rod Rosenstein inform you that they believed you had the authority or the responsibility to bring an indictment against the President if you concluded there was sufficient evidence to establish the President committed a crime? Did Mr. Barr or Mr. Rosenstein inform you that they believed you should indicate in your final report whether you would have brought an indictment of the President were it not for the Justice Department’s preexisting view that a sitting President cannot be indicted?
2. If you knew before you submitted your report on March 22, 2019 that, according to the Attorney General of the United States, you could and should indicate that a sitting President had acted criminally if you concluded that the President had indeed engaged in a crime, would you have included that determination in your report if you considered the evidence supported it?
3. Upon concluding your work and submitting your final report, did you anticipate the Attorney General reaching and publicly announcing a conclusion on whether the President had obstructed justice? Would you have recommended that the Attorney General do so?
4. Were you ever concerned that William Barr, Rod Rosenstein, or Matthew Whitaker were improperly sharing information about your ongoing investigation with the White House?
5. Your report states:
“On March 9, 2017, Comey briefed the ‘Gang of Eight’ congressional leaders about the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference, including an identification of the principal U.S. subjects of the investigation. … The week after Comey’s briefing, the White House Counsel’s Office was in contact with SSCI Chairman Senator Richard Burr about the Russia investigations and appears to have received information about the status of the FBI investigation.”
Were you concerned that Sen. Burr improperly provided information to the White House about the status of the investigation? Did you raise these concerns with Sen. Burr or his staff?
6. On April 9, 2019, Rep. Charlie Crist asked Attorney General Barr the following question:
“Reports have emerged recently, General, that members of the special counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24th letter, that it does not adequately or accurately, necessarily, portray the report’s findings. Do you know what they’re referencing with that?”
Did Attorney General Barr have knowledge what those reports were referencing? In your view, did your letter of March 27, 2019, to the Attorney General provide him with knowledge of what those reports were referencing?
7. Your March 27, 2019, letter to Attorney General Barr referenced an earlier letter you had already sent to Mr. Barr on March 25, 2019. How many letters or communications in writing did you send to Attorney General Barr raising concerns about either his 4-page letter dated March 24, 2019 or his decision not to release the summaries your Office apparently prepared for public release? Why send those letters?
8. Attorney General Barr’s letter to Congress on March 22, 2019, stated that there were no instances in which the Attorney General or Acting Attorney General rejected any proposed action by you. Is that statement accurate? Were there instances in which you did not propose an action primarily or in part because you believed the Attorney General or Acting Attorney General would not approve it? Does that include instances in which you believed they would not have approved it for reasons other than the preexisting Justice Department view that a sitting president cannot be indicted?
9. Attorney General Barr said that he offered you the opportunity to review his March 24, 2019 letter to Congress and you declined. Is that accurate? If so, why did you decline?
10. What role, if any, did Matthew Whitaker or Rod Rosenstein play in the decision of your office to make a public statement about the Buzzfeed report that claimed the President directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress? Why did your office respond to this news report and not do so for many others? What are the material differences between what Cohen told Congress on February 27, 2019 about the President’s telling him to lie and what Buzzfeed reported?
11. Many commentators, including highly experienced former federal prosecutors, were surprised by the timing of your end of the investigation while relevant litigation was ongoing and significant actors such as Julian Assange and Roger Stone could still, at least conceivably, flip and cooperate with your investigation, thus potentially yielding new investigations and even prosecutions. Please explain fully your reasoning for bringing the investigation to a close when you did.
II. Counterintelligence analysis
12. Upon your appointment, did you review the case opening documentation for the counterintelligence investigation into Russian election interference, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane? Can you explain the basis for the opening of that investigation? Do you believe it was a properly predicated investigation?
13. Do you believe that Congress, including the Gang of Eight, has been adequately informed by your team and other parts of the intelligence community with respect to any counterintelligence assessments of Americans who may have been acting wittingly or unwittingly on behalf of the Russian government? Do you believe Congress, including the Gang of Eight, has been adequately informed by your team and other parts of the intelligence community with respect to other counterintelligence information that has come out of your and related investigations into Russian interference in the American political process and public and private institutions? If not, what have been the obstacles to Congress being adequately informed?
14. Did your office ever provide any assessment of the extent to which President Trump is acting—wittingly or unwittingly—to advance the interests of the Russian Government; if so, has that assessment been provided in some form to Congress (and, if so, to which Members)? If your office did not make that assessment, are you aware of the FBI or others in the government having produced such an assessment at any point, and do you know if that has been provided in some form to Congress? Are you aware of any consideration, in your office or elsewhere in the administration, of mitigation measures to address concerns of Russian influence (witting or unwitting) in the Trump White House? If so, what came of that consideration?
15. On March 20, 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey stated in a public congressional hearing:
“I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”
The May 17, 2017 Order establishing your mandate stated:
“The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James B. Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017.”
Your report, however, suggests that the counterintelligence investigation may have been conducted by other parts of the Justice Department. Given the public statements made by the FBI Director and given the Justice Department’s order, please explain publicly whether you maintained control over the counterintelligence investigation and your role and relationship to it since you assumed the position of Special Counsel.
16. In your report, you note that your office considered whether to charge Carter Page under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for being an unregistered agent of Russia, but did not believe you had sufficient evidence to prove these charges beyond a reasonable doubt. You also indicate that Page was the subject of a FISA order, and that the FBI did meet the lower probable cause threshold for that order on four instances. Did you ever review the underlying materials for the FISA order? Would any of those materials have included the evidence you considered in deciding whether to charge Page criminally?
17. Are significant parts of the counterintelligence investigation, confirmed by then-FBI Director James Comey on March 20, 2017, still ongoing?
18. Over the entire course of your investigation, did you have unrestricted access to the FBI to direct the Bureau to pursue leads and other investigatory matters of interest? Did you have unrestricted access to the CIA to encourage similar efforts?
III. Obstruction
19. Volume 2 of your final report strongly indicates that, if President Trump engaged in criminal obstruction of justice, some of his personal lawyers were directly involved in those activities and could be criminally liable as well. What was your decision for not pursuing indictments of those lawyers for involvement in obstruction and witness tampering? Was your decision affected by the prospect of the President being included explicitly or implicitly as an unindicted co-conspirator?
20. Please describe your reasoning for including in your final report a comprehensive response to statutory and constitutional defenses to obstruction. It appears this reasoning would be relevant only in anticipation of an institution (such as Congress or future prosecutors) potentially pursuing criminal charges or other institutional actions (such as impeachment) against Mr. Trump during or after his presidency. Is that what you had in mind when including that response?
21. Your final report states:
“Although the events we investigated involved discrete acts …. it is important to view the President’s pattern of conduct as a whole. That pattern sheds light on the nature of the President’s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.”
Does that mean that a proper way to read the report is to consider not only whether each of the instances of potential interference independently constitutes a potential crime of obstruction but also whether the overall set of multiple instances (including, perhaps, instances that on their own would not suffice) would help to establish a case of criminal obstruction?
22. Your final report divides the actions and motives of the President in the potential case of obstruction into “two phases”:
“[T]he actions we investigated can be divided into two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the President’s motives. The first phase covered the period from the President’s first interactions with Comey through the President’s firing of Comey. During that time, the President had been repeatedly told he was not personally under investigation. Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, however, the President became aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction-of-justice inquiry. At that point, the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation” (Vol. II, p. 7).
Is it accurate to say that, in your view, the President’s actions in phase two—after he was aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction-of-justice inquiry—were motivated by a desire to interfere with investigation of his potential underlying crime of obstruction?
23. You indicate in your legal analysis for obstruction that even in the absence of an underlying crime, an erroneous belief that the underlying conduct was criminal, or even a desire to conceal embarrassing information from becoming public, could nevertheless constitute “corrupt” intent. Did any of the evidence you uncovered suggest that these kinds of motives may have been driving the President’s actions?
24. What is Congress’ constitutional basis for investigating obstruction of justice by the President, and how would such an investigation be consistent with the separation of powers?
IV. Conspiracy
25. Leading election law experts (including Bob Bauer, Rick Hasen, and Paul S. Ryan) have criticized how your final report describes existing campaign finance law and believe it improperly provides an opening for mischief in the future—for example, (a) by suggesting that the law is unclear on whether a foreign government’s providing essentially opposition research is “a thing of value” and (b) by suggesting “coordination” required an agreement between the Trump Campaign and the Russians to be criminal, despite the absence of such a requirement in federal campaign finance law. How do you respond to these criticisms?
26. Was the legal analysis for campaign finance law in your report a product solely of personnel in your Office or other parts of the Justice Department as well? If other parts of the Justice Department, what role did they play in informing the analysis or working on drafts of it?
27. Would it have been a crime for candidate Trump to promote Russian interests in shaping the Republican primaries and public discourse in the general election or in offering Putin relief from U.S. sanctions in exchange for a highly lucrative real estate deal in Moscow? Did you consider exploring those activities as a potential crime? If these are concerning but perhaps not criminal activities, would you recommend other forms of scrutiny so the public can better understand any such quid pro quo?
28. What is the burden of proof that the Justice Department must meet to prove criminal conspiracy, and how does the Justice Department approach this standard in terms of deciding whether to bring charges? Based on the evidence you uncovered in the course of investigating conspiracy, do you believe your evidence would be sufficient to meet a lower burden of proof, for example, the civil standard of “preponderance of the evidence”?
29. What are the most plausible explanations for Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort’s repeatedly sharing internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a person the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence?
30. Your investigation was not able to establish, according to criminal law standards, whether George Papadopoulos informed the Trump campaign about the Russian government having derogatory information on Clinton in the form of emails and indications from the Russian government that it could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton. Do you believe that it’s more likely than not that Papadopoulos did inform the campaign?
V. Next Steps
31. Overall, what did you anticipate happening next when you submitted your final report? In particular, what did you think Congress would do with your findings regarding obstruction of justice, given the detailed nature of your findings and your view that it would be improper to opine on whether those findings constituted the commission of criminal activity by a sitting president?
32. Based on your investigation, what legislative reforms do you think may be needed to stop ongoing or future foreign government interference in U.S. elections? Would you recommend a federal requirement for campaigns to report any offer of assistance from a foreign government agent, with failure punishable as a crime? Would you recommend codifying a federal offense for knowingly trafficking in stolen property (perhaps specifically in the campaign context, or perhaps not), to include hacked emails and other electronic documents and communications? Would you recommend expansion of federal offenses for aiding and abetting violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? Would you recommend changes or official clarifications of campaign finance law rules on foreign national contributions to political campaigns? Do you think Congress should look into the rules and enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Lobbying Disclosure Act?
33. A provision of the Special Counsel regulations (28 CFR 600.4) provide for non-criminal remedies for wrongdoing discovered by the investigation. What, if any, such remedies did you consider might be appropriate? Did you make any recommendations to the Attorney General or Acting Attorney General under this provision?
34. If Congress wanted to determine for itself the strength of the case of obstruction or abuse of power, not necessarily according to criminal law standards of proof, who would be the most important potential witnesses for the public to hear from and for Congress to call on to testify?
35. What major investigative questions remain, and how would you recommend Congress playing a role in answering them?
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