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US Military Says It Has a "Light Footprint" in Africa. These Documents Show a Vast Network of Bases |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36655"><span class="small">Nick Turse, The Intercept</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 December 2018 14:09 |
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Turse writes: "The US military has long insisted that it maintains a 'light footprint' in Africa, and there have been reports of proposed drawdowns in special operations forces and closures of outposts on the continent, due to a 2017 ambush in Niger and an increasing focus on rivals like China and Russia."
AFRICOM soldiers. (photo: AFP)
US Military Says It Has a "Light Footprint" in Africa. These Documents Show a Vast Network of Bases
By Nick Turse, The Intercept
01 December 18
 he U.S. military has long insisted that it maintains a “light footprint” in Africa, and there have been reports of proposed drawdowns in special operations forces and closures of outposts on the continent, due to a 2017 ambush in Niger and an increasing focus on rivals like China and Russia. But through it all, U.S. Africa Command has fallen short of providing concrete information about its bases on the continent, leaving in question the true scope of the American presence there.
Documents obtained from AFRICOM by The Intercept, via the Freedom of Information Act, however, offer a unique window onto the sprawling network of U.S. military outposts in Africa, including previously undisclosed or unconfirmed sites in hotspots like Libya, Niger, and Somalia. The Pentagon has also told The Intercept that troop reductions in Africa will be modest and phased-in over several years and that no outposts are expected to close as a result of the personnel cuts.
According to a 2018 briefing by AFRICOM science adviser Peter E. Teil, the military’s constellation of bases includes 34 sites scattered across the continent, with high concentrations in the north and west as well as the Horn of Africa. These regions, not surprisingly, have also seen numerous U.S. drone attacks and low-profile commando raids in recent years. For example, Libya — the site of drone and commando missions but for which President Trump said he saw no U.S. military role just last year — is nonetheless home to three previously undisclosed outposts.
“U.S. Africa Command’s posture plan is designed to secure strategic access to key locations on a continent characterized by vast distances and limited infrastructure,” Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the AFRICOM commander, told the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, though he didn’t provide specifics on the number of bases. “Our posture network allows forward staging of forces to provide operational flexibility and timely response to crises involving U. S. personnel or interests without creating the optic that U. S. Africa Command is militarizing Africa.”
According to Adam Moore, an assistant professor of geography at the University of California in Los Angeles and an expert on the U.S. military’s presence in Africa, “It is getting harder for the U.S. military to plausibly claim that it has a ‘light footprint’ in Africa. In just the past five years, it has established what is perhaps the largest drone complex in the world in Djibouti — Chabelley — which is involved in wars on two continents, Yemen and Somalia.” Moore also noted that the U.S. is building an even larger drone base in Agadez, Niger. “Certainly, for people living in Somalia, Niger and Djibouti, the notion that the U.S. is not militarizing their countries rings false,” he added.
For the last 10 years, AFRICOM has not only sought to define its presence as limited in scope, but its military outposts as small, temporary, and little more than local bases where Americans are tenants. For instance, this is how Gen. Waldhauser described a low-profile drone outpost in Tunisia last year: “And it’s not our base, it’s the Tunisians’ base.” On a visit to a U.S. facility in Senegal this summer, the AFRICOM chief took pains to emphasize that the U.S. had no intension of establishing a permanent base there. Still, there’s no denying the scope of AFRICOM’s network of outposts, nor the growth in infrastructure. Air Forces Africa alone, the command’s air component, has recently completed or is currently working on nearly 30 construction projects across four countries in Africa. “The U.S. footprint on the African continent has grown markedly over the last decade to promote U.S. security interests on the continent,” Navy Commander Candice Tresch, a Pentagon spokesperson, told The Intercept.
While China, France, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates have increased their own military engagement in Africa in recent years and a number of countries now possess outposts on the continent, none approach the wide-ranging U.S. footprint. China, for example, has just one base in Africa – a facility in Djibouti.
According to the documents obtained by The Intercept through the Freedom of Information Act, AFRICOM’s network of bases includes larger “enduring” outposts, consisting of forward operating sites (FOSes) and cooperative security locations (CSLs), as well as more numerous austere sites known as contingency locations (CLs). All of these are located on the African continent except for an FOS on Britain’s Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. Teil’s map of Africa Command’s “Strategic Posture” names the specific locations of all 14 FOSes and CSLs and provides country-specific locales for the 20 contingency locations. The Pentagon would not say whether the tally was exhaustive, however, citing concerns about publicly providing the number of forces deployed to specific facilities or individual countries. “For reasons of operational security, complete and specific force lay-downs are not releasable,” said Commander Tresch.
While troops and outposts periodically come and go from the continent, and some locations used by commandos conducting sensitive missions are likely kept under wraps, Teil’s map represents the most current and complete accounting available and indicates the areas of the continent of greatest concern to Africa Command. “The distribution of bases suggests that the U.S. military is organized around three counter-terrorism theaters in Africa: the Horn of Africa — Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya; Libya; and the Sahel — Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso,” says UCLA’s Moore, noting that the U.S. has only one base in the south of the continent and has scaled back engagement in Central Africa in recent years.
Niger, Somalia, and Kenya
Teil’s briefing confirms, for the first time, that the U.S. military currently has more sites in Niger — five, including two cooperative security locations — than any other country on the western side of the continent. Niamey, the country’s capital, is the location of Air Base 101, a longtime U.S. drone outpost attached to Diori Hamani International Airport; the site of a Special Operations Advanced Operations Base; and the West Africa node for AFRICOM’s contractor-provided personnel recovery and casualty evacuation services. The other CSL, in the remote smuggling hub of Agadez, is set to become the premier U.S. military outpost in West Africa. That drone base, located at Nigerien Air Base 201, not only boasts a $100 million construction price tag but, with operating expenses, is estimated to cost U.S. taxpayers more than a quarter-billion dollars by 2024 when the 10-year agreement for its use ends.
Officially, a CSL is neither “a U.S. facility or base.” It is, according to the military, “simply a location that, when needed and with the permission of the partner country, can be used by U.S. personnel to support a wide range of contingencies.” The sheer dimensions, cost, and importance of Agadez seems to suggest otherwise. “Judging by its size and the infrastructure investments to date, Agadez more resembles massive bases that the military created in Iraq and Afghanistan than a small, unobtrusive, ‘lily pad,’” says UCLA’s Moore.
The U.S. military presence in Niger gained widespread exposure last year when an October 4 ambush by ISIS in the Greater Sahara near the Mali border killed four U.S. soldiers, including Green Berets, and wounded two others. A Pentagon investigation into the attack shed additional light on other key U.S. military sites in Niger including Ouallam and Arlit, where Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed in 2017, and Maradi, where SOF were sent in 2016. Arlit also appeared as a proposed contingency location in a formerly secret 2015 AFRICOM posture plan obtained by The Intercept. Ouallam, which was listed in contracting documents brought to light by The Intercept last year, was the site of an SOF effort to train and equip a Nigerien counterterrorism company as well as another effort to conduct operations with other local units. Contracting documents from 2017 also noted the need for 4,400 gallons per month of gasoline, 1,100 gallons per month of diesel fuel, and 6,000 gallons of aviation turbine fuel to be delivered, every 90 days, to a “military installation” in Dirkou.
While the five bases in Niger anchor the west of the continent, the five U.S. outposts in Somalia are tops in the east. Somalia is the East Africa hub for contractor-provided personnel recovery and casualty evacuation services as well as the main node for the military’s own personnel recovery and casualty evacuation operations. These sites, revealed in AFRICOM maps for the first time, do not include a CIA base revealed in 2014 by The Nation.
All U.S. military facilities in Somalia, by virtue of being contingency locations, are unnamed on AFRICOM’s 2018 map. Previously, Kismayo has been identified as a key outpost, while the declassified 2015 AFRICOM posture plan names proposed CLs in Baidoa, Bosaaso, and the capital, Mogadishu, as well as Berbera in the self-declared state of Somaliland. If locations on Teil’s map are accurate, one of the Somali sites is located in this latter region. Reporting by Vice News earlier this year indicated there were actually six new U.S facilities being constructed in Somalia as well as the expansion of Baledogle, a base for which a contract for “emergency runway repairs” was recently issued.
According to top secret documents obtained by The Intercept in 2015, elite troops from a unit known as Task Force 48-4 were involved in drone attacks in Somalia earlier this decade. This air war has continued in the years since. The U.S. has already conducted 36 air strikes in Somalia this year, compared to 34 for all of 2017 and 15 in 2016, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Somalia’s neighbor, Kenya, boasts four U.S. bases. These include cooperative security locations at Mombasa as well as Manda Bay, where a 2013 Pentagon study of secret drone operations in Somalia and Yemen noted that two manned fixed-wing aircraft were then based. AFRICOM’s 2015 posture plan also mentions contingency locations at Lakipia, the site of a Kenyan Air Force base, and another Kenyan airfield at Wajir that was upgraded and expanded by the U.S. Navy earlier in this decade.
Libya, Tunisia, and Djibouti
Teil’s map shows a cluster of three unnamed and previously unreported contingency locations near the Libyan coastline. Since 2011, the U.S. has carried out approximately 550 drone strikes targeting al Qaeda and Islamic State militants in the restive North African nation. During a four-month span in 2016, for example, there were around 300 such attacks, according to U.S. officials. That’s seven times more than the 42 confirmed U.S. drone strikes carried out in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan combined for all of 2016, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based nonprofit news organization. The Libya attacks have continued under the Trump administration, with the latest acknowledged U.S. drone strike occurring near Al Uwaynat on November 29. AFRICOM’s 2015 posture plan listed only an outpost at Al-Wigh, a Saharan airfield near that country’s borders with Niger, Chad, and Algeria, located far to the south of the three current CLs.
Africa Command’s map also shows a contingency location in neighboring Tunisia, possibly Sidi Ahmed Air Base, a key regional U.S. drone outpost that has played an important role in air strikes in Libya in recent years. “You know, flying intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones out of Tunisia has been taking place for quite some time,” said Waldhauser, the AFRICOM commander, last year. “[W]e fly there, it’s not a secret, but we are very respectful to the Tunisians’ desires in terms of, you know, how we support them and the fact that we have [a] low profile…”
Djibouti is home to the crown jewel of U.S. bases on the continent, Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion outpost and AFRICOM’s lone forward operating site on the continent. A longtime hub for counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia and the home of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF–HOA), Camp Lemonnier hosts around 4,000 U.S. and allied personnel, and, according to Teil, is the “main platform” for U.S. crisis response forces in Africa. Since 2002, the base has expanded from 88 acres to nearly 600 acres and spun off a satellite outpost — a cooperative security location 10 kilometers to the southwest, where drone operations in the country were relocated in 2013. Chabelley Airfield has gone on to serve as an integral base for missions in Somalia and Yemen as well as the drone war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “United States military personnel remain deployed to Djibouti, including for purposes of posturing for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations in the vicinity of the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and to provide contingency support for embassy security augmentation in East Africa,” President Donald Trump noted in June.
Cameroon, Mali, and Chad
AFRICOM’s strategic posture also includes two contingency locations in Cameroon. One is an outpost in the north of the country, known as CL Garoua, which is used to fly drone missions and also as a base for the Army’s Task Force Darby, which supports Cameroonian forces fighting the terrorist group Boko Haram. Cameroon is also home to a longtime outpost in Douala as well as U.S. facilities in Maroua and a nearby base called Salak, which is also used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for training missions and drone surveillance. In 2017, Amnesty International, the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture, and The Intercept exposed illegal imprisonment, torture, and killings by Cameroonian troops at Salak.
In neighboring Mali, there are two contingency locations. AFRICOM’s 2015 posture plan lists proposed CLs in Gao and Mali’s capital, Bamako. The 2018 map also notes the existence of a CSL in Chad’s capital N’Djamena, a site where the U.S. began flying drones earlier this decade; it’s also the headquarters of a Special Operations Command and Control Element, an elite battalion-level command. Another unidentified contingency location in Chad could be a CL in Faya Largeau, which was mentioned in AFRICOM’s 2015 posture plan.
In Gabon, a cooperative security location exists in Libreville. Last year, U.S. troops carried out an exercise there to test their ability to turn the Libreville CSL into a forward command post to facilitate an influx of a large number of forces. A CSL can also be found in Accra, Ghana, and another CSL is located on a small compound at Captain Andalla Cissé Air Base in Dakar, Senegal. “This location is very important to us because it helps mitigate the time and space on the continent the size of Africa,” said AFRICOM commander Waldhauser while visiting the Senegalese capital earlier this year.
Only one base lies in the far south of the continent, a CSL in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, that is run by the Army. To its north, CSL Entebbe in Uganda has long been an important air base for American forces in Africa, serving as a hub for surveillance aircraft. It also proved integral to Operation Oaken Steel, the July 2016 rapid deployment of troops to rescue U.S. personnel after fighting broke out near the American Embassy in Juba, South Sudan.
“We Have Increased the Firepower”
In May, responding to questions about measures taken after the October 2017 ambush in Niger, Waldhauser spoke of fortifying the U.S. presence on the continent. “We have increased, which I won’t go into details here, but we have increased the firepower, we’ve increased the ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] capacity, we’ve increased various response times,” he said. “So we have beefed up a lot of things posture-wise with regard to these forces.” This firepower includes drones. “We have been arming out of Niger, and we’ll use that as appropriate,” Waldhauser noted this summer, alluding to the presence of armed remotely piloted aircraft, or RPAs, now based there.
AFRICOM did not respond to multiple requests to interview Waldhauser.
After months of reports that the Defense Department was considering a major drawdown of Special Operations forces in Africa as well as the closure of military outposts in Tunisia, Cameroon, Libya and Kenya, the Pentagon now says that less than 10 percent of 7,200 forces assigned to AFRICOM will be withdrawn over several years and no bases will close as a result. In fact, U.S. base construction in Africa is booming. Air Forces Africa spokesperson Auburn Davis told The Intercept that the Air Force recently completed 21 construction projects in Kenya, Tunisia, Niger and Djibouti and currently has seven others underway in Niger and Djibouti.
“The proliferation of bases in the Sahel, Libya, and Horn of Africa suggests that AFRICOM’s counterterrorism missions in those regions of the continent will continue indefinitely,” UCLA’s Adam Moore told The Intercept. Hours after Moore made those comments, the Pentagon announced that six firms had been named under a potential five-year, $240 million contract for design and construction services for naval facilities in Africa, beginning with the expansion of the tarmac at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
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RSN: Climate Change Response Pits Trump Against US Government |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 December 2018 12:57 |
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Boardman writes: "'I don't believe it' is not, by definition, a rational argument supported by evidence. It's a statement of faith, not susceptible of proof or rebuttal, and as such is useless to effective governance."
Floodwaters brought on by tropical storm Harvey in Houston on 28 August 2017. (photo: David Phillip/AP)
Climate Change Response Pits Trump Against US Government
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
01 December 18
I don’t believe it.
– Donald Trump, November 26th, referring to the 1596-page Fourth National Climate Assessment, released by the White House at 2 p.m. on Black Friday, November 23rd, the day after Thanksgiving.
  don’t believe it” is not, by definition, a rational argument supported by evidence. It’s a statement of faith, not susceptible of proof or rebuttal, and as such is useless to effective governance. “I don’t believe it” is the empty opposite of the Fourth National Climate Assessment that is part of a continuing, multi-disciplinary, real-world examination of climate change that began in 1990 (more on this under-publicized report later). Produced by the 13 government agencies that comprise the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the Assessment is the latest report in a thirty-year climate watch that has seen steady, unchanging trends toward catastrophic global impact. Climate change is a dynamic process, driven by human activity that humans have done little to mitigate for a generation. Climate change is happening, it is irreversible, but there is still time to mitigate its worst effects, to save lives, to preserve habitat, to adjust economies, to sustain a somewhat civilized world.
“I don’t believe it” is Donald Trump’s response to all of this. Researchers in the Trump administration are forbidden – forbidden! – from even mentioning climate change, never mind developing strategies to cope with its varied impacts. Sorry about that, Puerto Rico. Sorry about that, Houston and North Carolina. Sorry about that, California. Sorry about that, everyone.
“I don’t believe it” has a corollary in White House practice: “I don’t want you to believe it.” The White House considered suppressing the report, but that would require overt law-breaking, since the National Climate Assessment is mandated by Congress. The White House reportedly considered editing or censoring the report, but feared that would make things worse (as it had when a Bush administration oil executive falsified an earlier climate report). So the White House went with a traditional subterfuge, releasing the Assessment when it would be least likely to get significant news coverage – at 2 p.m. on a Friday, not only a traditional black hole for bad news but super-shopper Black Friday after Thanksgiving as well. For a report that signaled the inevitably of an uninhabitable planet within decades, unless the U.S. and others make major changes of public policy, the story has received rather muted attention.
As one Trump advisor summed up the dishonest White House approach, adding a touch of conspiratorial paranoia:
We don’t care. In our view, this is made-up hysteria anyway…. Trying to stop the deep state from doing this in the first place, or trying to alter the document, and then creating a whole new narrative — it’s better to just have it come out and get it over with. But do it on a day when nobody cares, and hope it gets swept away by the next day’s news.
To reinforce distraction from news that affects every American for generations, the White House also chose to lie about it. The White House issued a statement on November 23rd that falsely claimed that “the report is largely based on the most extreme scenario.” The report included a range of scenarios. White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeated this lie on November 27th, falsely claiming the official U.S. government position on climate was “not based on facts.” Sanders also lied when she claimed that the National Climate Assessment process was not transparent. Sanders also made false environmental claims that are irrelevant to and a distraction from climate questions.
In a sense, it’s not news when Donald Trump and his followers double down on climate denial. These are veteran birthers, after all. But the scale of climate change is vast and daunting. The stakes in dealing with climate change are intimidatingly high: millions of lives, billions of acres, trillions of dollars. It’s enough to give the most careful, rational leader pause.
“I don’t believe it” is not an answer. It’s not a policy. It’s cowardice or worse.
At this point, the world is past the point of preventing climate change from doing serious damage. That damage is already happening. Bigger and more powerful storms, coastal and inland flooding, larger and more intense forest fires, water scarcity, lethal heat waves and more, all exacerbated by climate change, take more lives and property every year. The problem is global; political dithering is pandemic, reinforced by political corruption. We’ve known – or should have known – for at least thirty years that we have a problem we need to face. Exxon and other oil companies have known for fifty years or more that their profitability came at the cost of putting the planet at risk. Coal companies have always known that coal was unhealthy for people, if not the globe.
“I don’t believe it” is an abdication of leadership. “I don’t know” is what you say, whether you believe it or not, when your goal is to put a prohibitive tariff on solar panels, to slow the rush away from fossil fuels.
We didn’t have to get to this place, where our choices are all stark. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush initiated the U.S. Global Change Research Program. In 1990, Congress passed the Global Change Research Act, designed to develop and coordinate “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” From that rational beginning of intellectual integrity, we have drifted through one feckless presidency and Congress after another, squandering thirty years of opportunity to save ourselves from ourselves.
“I don’t believe it” seems to have become the national motto, sometimes expressed as “In God We Trust,” long since replacing e pluribus unum or any other aspirational goal. The reigning cultural stupidity of the United States, its suicidal cultural stupidity, was neatly encapsulated by Utah Republican senator Mike Lee on November 25th, when he expressed the widely shared mindlessness that passes for conventional wisdom on addressing climate change:
All the proposals I’ve seen so far that would address any of these issues would devastate the U.S. economy and have little or no benefit that is demonstrable from our standpoint. And so I have yet to see a proposal that would bring this about. I think if we’re going to move away from fossil fuels, it’s got to be done through innovation. And innovation can be choked out through excessive government regulation.
He doesn’t mention regulation like a tariff on solar panels. He has no proposal of his own. He’s not even sure fossil fuels are bad (“if we’re going to move away from fossil fuels”). For the foreseeable future the Mike Lees of the world, who hold positions of power everywhere, are content to let the planet creep toward further catastrophe rather than disturb the profit centers of their patrons. He may as well as have said, “I don’t believe it.”
While it is true that climate change is a global problem that needs a global solution, it is also true that the U.S. is the single largest contributor of greenhouse gases driving the problem. And the U.S. is led by people committed to creating ever more greenhouse gases until some uncertain future date when something unspecified will change their course. In February, the U.S. Energy Department reported that there was likely to be no decrease in U.S. carbon emissions for more than 30 years. That would mean the rest of the world would have to achieve zero carbon emissions, immediately, just to maintain the already damaging status quo.
Thirty years ago, Bill McKibben published “The End of Nature,” an early warning about what was then called “the greenhouse effect.” McKibben’s recent piece in the New Yorker of November 26th is a long, angry, despairing piece about our collective path to self-destruction:
The extra heat that we trap near the planet every day is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand [400,000] bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.
As a result, in the past thirty years we’ve seen all twenty of the hottest years ever recorded. The melting of ice caps and glaciers and the rising levels of our oceans and seas, initially predicted for the end of the century, have occurred decades early. “I’ve never been at … a climate conference where people say ‘that happened slower than I thought it would,’ ” Christina Hulbe, a New Zealand climatologist, told a reporter for Grist last year….
All this has played out more or less as scientists warned, albeit faster. What has defied expectations is the slowness of the response. The climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change thirty years ago.
The cultural vacuity of American leadership is as stunning as is it self-willed. Confronted with an official U.S. government report, American leadership chooses to ignore three decades of conscientious, consistent, accumulating research that a real problem is getting steadily worse, choosing instead to ignore, deny, lie, and maintain the policy that feeds the crisis. This is beyond rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This is maintaining full speed ahead while betting that there are no icebergs.
No matter what happens next, the failed American leadership of the past thirty years has assured that we, and the rest of the world, will go on suffering unnecessary losses for a long time into the future. Perhaps the new Democrats in Congress will force the failed party leadership to adopt a “Green New Deal” and perhaps, in time, that can make some difference, though it’s too late to make much difference in time. But that’s one of the two grim choices we face: do something to reduce carbon emissions as quickly as possible and risk the possibly severe economic consequences.
The other choice is to follow current policy and risk almost certain, severe economic consequence – as well as severe ecological consequences – as well as severe consequences to human well being, health, and life. This is the path of Trump’s climate leadership, and it is fraudulent, irresponsible, and criminal.
Criminal? We have seen the carnage caused by climate change already. We know there will be more and worse to come unless we take efforts to mitigate the consequences. Trump shows no evidence that he knows the risk or cares about it, so how is that not criminal negligence on a global scale? Lock him up.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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: Donald Trump Gave Russia Leverage Over His Presidency |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6030"><span class="small">Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 December 2018 11:48 |
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Friedersdorf writes: "Shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he gave a combative press conference at which he was asked by a reporter, 'I was just hoping that we could get a yes or no answer on these questions involving Russia.'"
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Getty)
Donald Trump Gave Russia Leverage Over His Presidency
By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
01 December 18
A foreign adversary has possessed potentially damaging information about the president for an extended period of time.
 hortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he gave a combative press conference at which he was asked by a reporter, “I was just hoping that we could get a yes or no answer on these questions involving Russia. Can you say if you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with Russia during the course of the election?”
In reply, Trump lied to the American public. “Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia,” he said. “… I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”
That he lied has long been clear—all sorts of people with whom he dealt had extensive, well-documented dealings with Russia and Russians. But additional evidence that he lied was revealed Thursday during an appearance in federal court by his former attorney Michael Cohen, who admitted that he negotiated on Trump’s behalf to build a skyscraper in Moscow; that his efforts lasted until at least June 2016; that he briefed Trump and members of Trump’s family about the matter; and that he later lied to Congress, to avoid contradicting Trump’s political message.
Consider the implications. At the very beginning of Trump’s presidency, as soon as he lied in that press conference, Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence possessed the ability to unmask Trump as a liar to the American public, revealing damaging information to Congress and the public about which they had previously been ignorant. BuzzFeed’s account of the negotiations involving a potential Trump Tower in Moscow hints at the wealth of documentary evidence that the Russians would possess to back up their claims.
As it would turn out, that was merely the beginning of their leverage. In September 2017, Donald Trump Jr. gave sworn Senate testimony that may be contradicted by Thursday’s revelations, raising the prospect that the Russians have been in possession of evidence suggesting that the president’s son may have committed a felony. And once Cohen lied to Congress about the matter, the Russians were in a position to expose the unlawful behavior of Trump’s personal attorney.
Those particular bits of Russian leverage over Trump are gone now that Robert Mueller’s investigation has revealed the truth to Congress and the public. But there is so much that we still don’t know about the Trump Tower deal, the president’s role in negotiating it, and the reasons his inner circle took extraordinary legal risks to hide the truth about it.
“The Kremlin knows the answer to these questions,” says Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency lawyer, on a Lawfare podcast. “And unless the answers here are the most innocent possible explanations … if it’s anything other than that, the United States is in an incredibly dangerous position, because the United States is in a position where the American president is aware that a hostile foreign adversary potentially has devastating—politically devastating and potentially legally and criminally devastating, if not for him, then for members of his family or organization—that a hostile foreign adversary has that information on him, and those really are the kinds of conditions where your worst nightmare is about blackmail and influence.”
Perhaps the public will ultimately learn why Trump and some of his closest associates lied about business opportunities that they were pursing in Moscow during the 2016 election. But the mere fact that they did lie, for whatever reason, gave a powerful geopolitical adversary at least some leverage over an American president and his son. And Trump knew about the leverage as soon as he lied to the public about Russia, and again when he watched his son and his then attorney lie to Congress, raising the stakes to a matter of clear criminality. Elected officials have resigned in disgrace for less serious transgressions.
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Mueller's Steady Stream of Russia Revelations Is Driving Trump Crazy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 December 2018 09:31 |
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Rich writes: "The whole point of the incessant lying by Donald Trump and Manafort - and the apparent lying of Stone and Corsi as well - is to muddy as many waters as possible so any Mueller report will be drowned out by what Kellyanne Conway once labeled 'alternative facts.'"
Robert Mueller. (photo: James Berglie/TNS)
Mueller's Steady Stream of Russia Revelations Is Driving Trump Crazy
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
01 December 18
 ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Trump’s panic over Mueller, Mike Espy’s loss in Mississippi, and the deal Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta negotiated for multimillionaire and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The flurry of Mueller-related headlines this week have led some observers to speculate that the investigation’s “endgame may be in sight,” but news of Paul Manafort’s continued communications with the White House, Jerome Corsi’s leak of a Mueller draft document, and changes to Roger Stone’s story have muddied the waters. If Mueller is close to issuing a report, how will he cut through the noise?
The whole point of the incessant lying by Donald Trump and Manafort — and the apparent lying of Stone and Corsi as well — is exactly that: to muddy as many waters as possible so any Mueller report will be drowned out by what Kellyanne Conway once labeled “alternative facts.” Right now we only know bits and pieces of Mueller’s findings. (Nor do we know whether he is close to issuing a report or not.) But the thing about stories built on actual facts, as Mueller’s will be, is that they tend to be powerful and command attention because they add up. People like solid crime stories. And so even now, even amid all the current racket, at least one such story is emerging loud and clear: the bridge that connects the Trump campaign to the trove of Democratic emails stolen by the Russians and publicized by WikiLeaks to sabotage the Clinton campaign. Two of the biggest sources for this story are Stone and Corsi themselves. The more they try to portray their WikiLeaks ties as innocent — Corsi even gave a blabby interview to the less-than-friendly outlet of MSNBC on Wednesday — the more they poke holes in their own flimsy cover stories and incriminate the president. Not for nothing did Trump promote WikiLeaks’ email cache at least 164 times in the last month of the 2016 campaign, in the calculation of the journalist Judd Legum. Everything adds up.
It also adds up that Trump remains in the panic that has consumed him since he returned from his calamitous trip to rainy Paris nearly three weeks ago. He just keeps tweeting maniacally about his innocence and Mueller’s “witch hunt” even as heads to the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Mueller’s tale of his collusion with Russia gains traction by the moment. A Washington Post scoop overnight detailing profuse late-night phone calls between Stone and Trump at crucial junctures in 2016 suggests that it was Trump himself, not merely “the Trump campaign,” who had direct knowledge of Russia’s conspiracy to tip the election in his favor. Today has brought Michael Cohen’s surprise guilty plea in a Manhattan court, where he conceded he was lying to Congress when he claimed that Trump had stopped pursuing business deals in Russia in early 2016. Given that Trump has vehemently denied such dealings, Cohen’s revelation is another big chapter of the story. Who knows what additional plot twists will arrive tomorrow when Mueller’s prosecutors face off against Manafort’s lawyers in a federal courtroom — as ordered by a judge this week after Manafort broke his plea deal.
Mueller likely has many other stories to tell. As they become clearer, they are making Trump so nuts that he has given new meaning to the concept of protesting one’s innocence too much. First among them, no doubt, is the Trump Tower meeting with Jared, Donald Jr., Manafort, and Russians who apparently had nothing to do with the WikiLeaks story line. For those who are wondering why Trump doesn’t just go ahead and pardon Manafort and the rest, or have his new thug Attorney General Matthew Whitaker shut down Mueller, I suggest the answer is simple: Someone has gotten it through Trump’s head that such blatant moves will not prevent Mueller’s stories from getting out, not successfully protect all the president’s guilty men (and possibly women) from criminal exposure, and not necessarily be constitutional if the aim is to exchange pardons for silence. What Trump would succeed in doing instead is adding another chapter or two to still another Mueller true-crime tale, the one about obstruction of justice.
With his loss to Cindy Hyde-Smith in the runoff Senate election in Mississippi, Mike Espy joins Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams, and others in a wave of high-profile black candidates who lost closer-than-expected elections for major office in the South. Will their campaigns be a turning point for the region?
Closer than expected is a good thing, but the fact remains: Gillum, Abrams, and Espy all lost to white Republicans who played the race card with a vengeance. Ron DeSantis, who beat Gillum for the Florida governorship, said his opponent would “monkey this up” at the start of his campaign. Abrams lost her Georgia gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp, the state’s secretary of state, who literally had charge of an electoral process notorious for throwing impediments in the path of minority voters. Hyde-Smith not only cracked a joke about a public hanging but had a well-documented history of endorsing her state’s Confederate legacy.
Continuing demographic shifts may well make a difference in elections to come in Florida and Georgia. But not in Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, where the white majority is large, entrenched, and not likely to be challenged by an influx of new industry and its more diverse workforce anytime soon. But the bigger issue is how these races confirm the reality that the Republican Party has proudly and uninhibitedly come out of the closet as the standard-bearer for white supremacy in the Trump era.
This racial animus has deep roots, after all, in a GOP that first employed its race-baiting “southern strategy” a half-century ago under the aegis of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. In 1980, just 16 years after three civil-rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, Ronald Reagan chose that spot to deliver a “states rights” speech right after sewing up the presidential nomination. (Hyde-Smith took nearly 71 percent of the vote in Neshoba County, where Philadelphia is located.) George H.W. Bush ran as much against a previously obscure black criminal, Willie Horton, as he did against Michael Dukakis, and George W. Bush appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, who castrated the Voting Rights Act. Even now, the Republican-majority Senate is on the verge of confirming Thomas Farr as a federal judge in North Carolina. Farr was a protégé of the unabashedly racist Senator Jesse Helms, and an author of the 2013 North Carolina law so restrictive of minority voting rights that the federal court which overruled it three years later declared that it had targeted African-Americans “with almost surgical precision.”
Trump has made Jim Crow great again for his nearly all-white party. This is a banner it will likely fight under for years to come, no matter what Trump’s fate, as it tries to ward off its demographic fate.
A Miami Herald investigation into the 2007 “sweetheart plea deal” given to multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein found more than 80 women who say they were molested or abused by Epstein, many while in their teens, though Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to just two charges and “any potential co-conspirators” were granted immunity. The deal was negotiated with Trump’s current secretary of Labor, who was then a federal prosecutor in Florida; Epstein’s lawyers included Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr, and his friends famously included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. What does the Herald report add to what we already know about Epstein and his circle?
This is an astonishing if stomach-churning feat of investigative reporting by the Herald. If you read it in conjunction with the new Times investigation of Leslie Moonves, you will be sickened all over again by the quantity of sexual assault that not only took place in the highest echelons of American society but that was then successfully covered up by corporations, lawyers, and supposed law-enforcement authorities. In Epstein’s case, the Herald located not just forgotten victims among “a large, cult-like network of underage girls” but also uncovered, among other evidence, the full unredacted police investigation conducted in Palm Beach, where most (but not all) of Epstein’s crimes were carried out in a waterfront mansion.
What stands out is how Alexander Acosta, then Miami’s top federal prosecutor and now Trump’s secretary of Labor, presided over a sweetheart plea deal that both allowed Epstein to escape serious punishment and shut down an FBI investigation of additional crimes. (Epstein also was let off the hook in New York by the office of the DA Cyrus Vance.) The Herald presents a sordid picture of the powerful lawyers who ran Epstein’s defense, including Dershowitz and Starr. “Irony” is too weak a word to wield in talking about Starr, the pious Clinton pursuer who, in addition to fiercely advocating for the sex-criminal Epstein, looked the other way when a sexual-assault scandal unfolded at Baylor University while he was its president. In the Times’ new story, there is a comparable narrative about the high-powered lawyers CBS employed to investigate Moonves and ended up protecting him. It leaves you wondering what might have been covered up in CBS “investigations” of Charlie Rose and Jeff Fager as well.
Clinton and Trump’s see-no-evil friendships with Epstein are appalling. Surely one of the most chilling sentences in the Herald account is its reminder of how in 2002 Epstein flew Clinton and Kevin Spacey, among others, on a private jet as part of “a fact-finding AIDS mission in support of the Clinton Foundation.” As for Trump, you have to wonder if Acosta is Labor secretary — as well as a potential choice for attorney general — because of what he might know about what went on at Mar-a-Lago, from whose workers’ ranks, the Herald reports, Epstein plucked at least one victim.
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n Sunday morning hundreds of politicians, government officials and scientists will gather in the grandeur of the International Congress Centre in Katowice, Poland. It will be a familiar experience for many. For 24 years the annual UN climate conference has served up a reliable diet of rhetoric, backroom talks and dramatic last-minute deals aimed at halting global warming.
