|
FOCUS: Trump's Summit Spectacle Was Just a Momentary Distraction From His Bigger Problems |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 18 June 2018 10:54 |
|
Rich writes: "What is going to dawn on Trump now is that in television terms the summit was only a limited series while the Mueller inquiry, and its many attendant subplots, is an open-ended series with no season finale yet in view."
Working it while he can. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump's Summit Spectacle Was Just a Momentary Distraction From His Bigger Problems
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
18 June 18
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the Trump-Kim summit, the G7 debacle,
and the president’s public feud with Robert De Niro.
 onald Trump says he developed a “special bond” with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and declared the summit a success despite few tangible results. Did Trump get what he wanted?
Yes. But the shelf life of this “win” is likely to expire in about a week. Let’s be precise here about what Trump wanted. His goal was not to enhance American security by achieving complete and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea — a cause that his Potemkin summit arguably set back rather than advanced. The goal instead was entirely personal. He thought that by staging a big television show hyped by cliff-hanger developments along the way he would achieve a miracle of prime-time counterprogramming: The summit in Singapore would drown out the rising drama of the Mueller probe in Washington. And he was correct — it did. For the moment.
What is going to dawn on Trump now is that in television terms the summit was only a limited series while the Mueller inquiry, and its many attendant subplots, is an open-ended series with no season finale yet in view. Trump has already milked the Kim story for all that he could. Now that the summit is over, he can no longer create artificial suspense by threatening to cancel it or suggesting he might walk out if Kim wasn’t to his liking. He can no longer bask in its photo ops. He can no longer brag about his ability to take the measure of a new acquaintance in less than a minute (“My touch, my feel — that’s what I do” is how he described this process, which apparently he has also applied to non–world leaders like Stormy Daniels).
The end credits have rolled, and Trump must now return to signing pardons and executive orders rather than summit documents. Meanwhile, the North Korean dictator owns the rights to make any sequels. Kim can launch another missile test and make Trump look like a dupe. Or he can indefinitely deflect, stall, or simply ignore any American requests for verification that he will “work toward” denuclearization (as the weak and unenforceable language in the one-page joint agreement had it). Trump gave up all his cards in Singapore, and not only does he have no national security achievements to show for it, but he will soon have no selfish political gains to show for it either. North Korea will vanish into the ever-churning news-cycle ether by next week. Its fading memory will not derail the scandals at home, and will not be a factor in the midterms. Americans don’t cast their votes on foreign-policy issues short of cataclysms like long-running, blood-drenched quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq.
This won’t stop Trump from repeatedly trying to hawk the summit as a great achievement in world peace. He values a Nobel almost as much as an Emmy. Still, for all the throwing around of the word historic this week, what’s most historic about the event is how closely it seems to emulate Munich. Upon returning to England from his meeting with Hitler in September 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain used triumphant language much like that we find in Trump’s Twitter feed today. “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine …[It is] symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again … I believe it is peace for our time.” Hitler invaded Poland six months later.
Then again, Trump’s fawning over Kim actually exceeds Chamberlain’s deference to Herr Hitler. The grandiose four-minute propaganda film he gifted to the murderous North Korean dictator to celebrate their “very special bond” is Springtime for Kim as Leni Riefenstahl might have made it, minus the tap dancing.
On his way to Singapore, Trump faced withering criticism from western allies for his refusal to sign the joint statement produced by last weekend’s Group of 7 meeting and for insults he tweeted at Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. Have Trump’s antics begun to disrupt America’s closest alliances?
As everyone in the Western (and much of the Eastern) world has already observed, we now have an American president who admires the world’s most brutal strongmen over America’s allies. As if it weren’t enough to insult the Group of 7 last week, Trump also dissed South Korea by failing to tell its leaders in advance of his plan to end the annual joint South Korean–American military exercises. Every move Trump has made and continues to make since entering the White House is so aligned with Vladimir Putin’s interests that there’s no longer any ambiguity to the charge that he is acting as a Russian agent. Whether he has been paid to do so, is being blackmailed to do so, or is simply a useful idiot is one of the mysteries we must hope Robert Mueller will unravel.
Trump’s vilification of Justin Trudeau is so over the top you have to wonder what else is fueling it beyond the ostensible trigger for presidential rage, a perfectly reasonable and mild press appearance standing up politely for his own nation’s interests. What worries me is that Trump has belatedly figured out that if you want to stage a wag-the-dog stunt to upstage your scandals, signing a phony peace treaty with North Korea won’t remotely do; successful wag-the-dog scenarios always involve ginning up a war. It would not be the strangest thing to happen during the Trump presidency if the fictional American-Canadian war in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut becomes Trump’s next move in his increasingly panicked effort to evade the special counsel. But a more serious and far more worrisome prospect is that Kim might take some action that humiliates the American president in the aftermath of his Mission Accomplished victory lap; no one can doubt that Trump would revert to “fire and fury” in a nanosecond.
Trump also attacked Robert De Niro, whose profanities at the Tony Awards inspired a standing ovation in the room. Do De Niro’s comments help support people opposing Trump, or are they simply more viral social-media noise?
Let’s face it, the Tonys audience, both in the theater and at home, contains very few members of the Trump base. (Though perhaps that is about to change: Liberty University, the Christian-right diploma mill run by Jerry Falwell, Jr., has announced a “multifaceted Bachelor of Fine Arts program in musical theatre” starting this fall.) However “viral” De Niro’s break with decorum and however illiterate Trump’s tweet (“to many” for “too many”) accusing De Niro of a “low IQ,” my guess is that this whole kerfuffle basically happened within the liberal echo chamber.
Half-forgotten in the Trump biography, by the way, is his own attempt to become a theater producer. He was billed above the title when he brought the comedy Paris Is Out!, about a middle-aged couple taking a fraught European tour, to Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre in 1970. Alas, it folded in three months. The Times critic Clive Barnes wrote that “the writing is deplorable” and that the play might only appeal strongly to a “great silent majority” who “are probably people who shouldn’t go to the theater,” like “Aunt Louise from Iowa.”
Even then Trump had a cynical sense of his target audience. If only his show had bucked the fake-news reviews, been profitable, and won a Tony or two, perhaps he would have stayed on Broadway for keeps. America might have been spared his presidency, and this year’s Tony nominees might have included a Trump revival of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
 |
|
The IG Report Says the FBI Is Deeply Flawed. I Know. |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 18 June 2018 08:48 |
|
Kiriakou writes: "Like many Americans, I followed news of the release of the FBI Inspector General's (IG) report last week closely. It's no secret that I hate the FBI."
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
The IG Report Says the FBI Is Deeply Flawed. I Know.
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
18 June 18
 ike many Americans, I followed news of the release of the FBI Inspector General’s (IG) report last week closely. It’s no secret that I hate the FBI. It’s no secret that they tried to entrap me into committing espionage by running an agent at me who offered me money in exchange for classified information. I refused, of course. They ended the operation because I kept reporting the contact back to the FBI. But it just shows you what kind of people they are. When I was at the CIA, we used to joke that entrapment was the only way the FBI could make a case. That ended up being true. And it’s not funny.
But something more important came out of that IG report. The IG revealed that the FBI leaks like a sieve. And all the while, they’re investigating “leakers” with an eye toward putting them in prison, even for the rest of their lives.
Here’s just one example: On page 458, the IG wrote, “We have profound concerns about the volume and the extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered during our review.” Why would FBI agents talk to the media? To blow the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality? Nope. The IG said they did it for meals, invitations to parties, tickets to sporting events, and golf outings. They also do it to make themselves feel important.
In 2011 I was working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. A prominent conservative journalist emailed me and invited me to lunch one day. I didn’t respond. But he was persistent and emailed me two more times. My boss finally authorized it: “Go ahead and accept,” he said. “I’m curious what he has to say.”
I went to lunch with him a couple of days later. At the end of lunch, his voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re under surveillance,” he said. I nearly panicked. “By whom?” “The FBI,” he told me. I couldn’t imagine why the FBI would be interested in me. The reporter said, “They think you’re the source for the John Adams Project.” I had no idea what the John Adams Project was, and I told him so. He said, “Wow. That’s not the response I was expecting.” He explained that the John Adams Project was a program at the ACLU to provide legal support for the Guantanamo detainees. I told him again that I didn’t know what he was talking about and that his source was wrong. “My source is in the FBI,” he responded. His source was leaking. As it turned out, the FBI’s investigation of me was classified at the “top secret” level. The existence of Robert Mueller’s “John Kiriakou Task Force” was equally highly classified. But an FBI agent had run to a reporter to tell him all about it.
There are several potential crimes in the IG report and in my own experience with the FBI. First, it’s a violation of the Espionage Act for any FBI agent to give classified information to a reporter. The US Code defines “espionage” as “providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.” “National defense information” is not further defined. So it can mean whatever a prosecutor wants it to mean. That’s how the FBI targeted Tom Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Jeffrey Sterling, and me, among others. It was to clamp down on dissent with an iron fist and to frighten any would-be whistleblowers with the possibility of prison and financial ruin.
As it turns out, though, FBI agents were doing the same thing, at the same time, with impunity. And by the way, information in exchange for a tangible benefit like invitations or tickets is bribery. It’s the very definition of corruption. All of these crimes are felonies.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. In a fight between Donald Trump and the FBI, we don’t have to pick a side. We can have a situation where there’s no good guy. I think this is one of those situations. Don’t think that this is an endorsement of the Trump administration or the criminals who staff it. It certainly isn’t. We’re supposed to be a country governed by the rule of law, where everybody at least ought to be treated equally. Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Mike Flynn, and the rest of them deserve what they’re getting. But the FBI is corrupt. The entire system is corrupt. There’s one version of the law for you and me and another version for the FBI. The Inspector General laid it all bare. Now let’s see if anybody does anything about it. Don’t hold your breath.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism
officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the
Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish
spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to
oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
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.
|
|
|
The White House's Complaints About the FBI Imply There's Ample Evidence of Collusion With Russia |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=24111"><span class="small">William Saletan, Slate</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 18 June 2018 08:47 |
|
Saletan writes: "You can argue that this standard for dismissing public employees, and certainly for jailing them, is too harsh. But let's indulge the president and others who advocate this standard, by applying it to them."
Robert Mueller. (photo: AP)
The White House's Complaints About the FBI Imply There's Ample Evidence of Collusion With Russia
By William Saletan, Slate
18 June 18
The White House’s complaints about the FBI imply there’s ample evidence of collusion with Russia.
 resident Trump and his attorneys used to demand a high standard for proving collusion. Words alone, they argued, weren’t enough. Trump and his aides might have met secretly with Russians, solicited campaign help, received campaign help, and done favors for Russia. But without proof that all these words and deeds were connected, they insisted, there was no basis for investigation.
We can now junk that argument, because Trump and his lawyers have shown they don’t believe it. They believe that corrupt words are sufficient to investigate, terminate, and jail a public official. That’s the standard they’re applying to FBI employees involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia investigation. And if it’s the right standard for other executive branch employees, it’s the right standard for the president.
On Thursday, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report on the Clinton investigation. The report says “several FBI employees who played critical roles in the investigation sent political messages … that created the appearance of bias.” One employee, Lisa Page, asked in an August 2016 text: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Another, Peter Strzok, replied: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” The report condemns these messages. But it repeatedly says “we found no evidence” that investigative or prosecutorial decisions were “based on improper considerations or influenced by bias.” The FBI, in a statement attached to the report by Trump’s handpicked director, Christopher Wray, agrees that “there was no evidence of bias or other improper considerations affecting the handling of the … investigation.”
Trump rejects this distinction between words and deeds. He says Strzok’s words are proof of corruption. “They were plotting against my election,” the president told Fox News on Friday. As to the lack of evidence that bias affected the investigation, Trump scoffed: “That one sentence of conclusion was ridiculous.”
Donald Trump Jr. made the same case in a Thursday night interview on Fox. So did Trump’s White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway, on Sunday. “Although people say that, ‘Oh, the actions weren’t biased,’ the people certainly were biased,” Conway told NBC’s Chuck Todd. In an exchange on Fox and Friends, Brian Kilmeade pointed out that “we just have words” from Strzok and Page. Kilmeade asked Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani: “Are words enough?” Giuliani replied: “Absolutely. I mean, words are the making of a conspiracy.” In an interview with Sean Hannity, Giuliani concluded that based on the IG’s findings, special counsel Robert Mueller “should be suspended,” and “Strzok should be in jail by the end of next week.”
You can argue that this standard for dismissing public employees, and certainly for jailing them, is too harsh. But let’s indulge the president and others who advocate this standard, by applying it to them. If conspiratorial words warrant imprisonment, or at least removal from office, what are we to make of the messages exchanged during the 2016 election between Trump, his son, his aides, and his Russian benefactors?
In March 2016, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort emailed a contact in Ukraine, asking how he could use his position to “get whole” with a Russian oligarch to whom Manafort owed money. In April 2016, a Russian agent told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton, in the form of “thousands of emails.” The next day, Papadopoulos told fellow Trump adviser Stephen Miller that he had “interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.”
That May, Trump Jr. met with a deputy governor of Russia’s central bank to open a communication channel between Russia and the campaign. Also that month, Trump’s friend Roger Stone—at the behest of Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo—met with a Russian who was offering dirt on Clinton. The meeting was documented in text messages, which Stone and Caputo later failed to disclose to investigators.
In June 2016, Trump Jr. received an email from Rob Goldstone, an intermediary for a Russian oligarch, offering “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. wrote back: “If it’s what you say I love it.” Six days later, Trump Jr., Manafort, and Jared Kushner met in Trump Tower with a Russian agent who was supposed to deliver the dirt. “So I believe you have some information for us,” Trump Jr. told her.
She didn’t provide the dirt. But five days after the meeting, the Washington Post reported that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee. The Trump campaign dismissed the report and said the DNC had faked the hack. Several weeks later, Trump aides intervened to block Republican platform language that challenged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On July 22, WikiLeaks began to publish emails from the DNC hack. Five days after that, at a press conference, Trump said of Clinton’s emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
On Aug. 8, Stone exchanged text messages with an agent for the DNC hackers. From August through October, the hackers and WikiLeaks repeatedly released material that Stone had publicly predicted. Trump spoke regularly with Stone and made the WikiLeaks material a centerpiece of his campaign. He praised and defended Russian President Vladimir Putin. WikiLeaks also exchanged direct messages with Trump Jr., offering campaign assistance and seeking an ambassadorship for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
After the election, Trump and his aides said none of this mattered. They argued that their conspiratorial words weren’t provably connected to what Trump had done for Russia or what Russia had done for Trump. “There was no further contact or follow-up of any kind,” Trump Jr.
said of his meeting at Trump Tower. “Zero happened from the meeting,” said the president. “No action was taken, no follow-up whatsoever,” said Conway. “There was absolutely no follow-up,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “Nothing happened as a result,” said Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow. To this day, Giuliani dismisses the meeting as meaningless on the grounds that “it led to nothing.”
These are lies. There were subsequent emails between Goldstone, Donald Trump’s personal assistant Rhona Graff, and Steve Bannon, explicitly written on behalf of the oligarch in whose name the June meeting was arranged. During the transition, Trump’s aides secretly met with Russian officials and secretly discussed easing sanctions. In February 2017, Trump asked then–FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation of these secret talks, saying, “I hope you can let this go.” When Comey failed to comply, Trump fired him. The next day, in a private meeting, Trump told Russia’s foreign minister: “I just fired the head of the FBI. … I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Now Trump is demanding that Russia be readmitted to the G-7, from which it had been evicted for invading and annexing part of Ukraine.
If the texts between Strzok and Page provide a molehill of evidence of corruption at the FBI, then the messages sent by Trump, Trump Jr., Manafort, Stone, Kushner, Caputo, Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and other Trump accomplices provide a mountain of evidence of collusion with Russia. There’s no universe in which “We’ll stop it” is incriminating but “I believe you have some information for us,” “I hope you can let this go,” and “I faced great pressure because of Russia—that’s taken off” aren’t. In fact, the main difference between Strzok and Trump is that in the IG report, Strzok says he wouldn’t have let bias affect his investigative decisions. Trump, his son, and his aides say just the opposite: that the only reason they didn’t use the dirt promised in the Trump Tower meeting is that the Russians didn’t deliver it.
Giuliani says Strzok’s texts warrant a hard look at everything he did afterward. “He was engaged in clearly very, very suspicious activity—these strange conversations about how he was going to stop Trump,” the former mayor argued Sunday on Face the Nation. “Who is to say,” Giuliani asked, that the subsequent Russia probe “wasn’t part of that effort? That needs to be investigated.”
Same to you, Rudy. Your client, his family, and his henchmen are up to their eyeballs in suspicious conversations that seem highly related to what he’s done for Russia and what Russia has done for him. By your standards, they should be in jail.
|
|
Now We Know the Outrageous Scale of the Trumps' White House Dividend |
|
|
Sunday, 17 June 2018 14:07 |
|
Abramson writes: "I'm feeling nostalgic for Hillary's Goldman Sachs speaking fees. Remember when we got our ethical knickers in a twist over Clinton's $225,000 (£170,000) Wall Street speeches?"
Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump. 'This week, Kushner's new financial disclosure records were released ... Their value ranged between $179m and $735m.' (photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images)
Now We Know the Outrageous Scale of the Trumps' White House Dividend
By Jill Abramson, Guardian UK
17 June 18
Donald, Ivanka and Jared’s money-grubbing during this presidency puts the Clintons in the shade
 ’m feeling nostalgic for Hillary’s Goldman Sachs speaking fees. Remember when we got our ethical knickers in a twist over Clinton’s $225,000 (£170,000) Wall Street speeches? Those worries seem positively quaint when compared with what’s happening now. At least Bill and Hillary put off their offensive buckraking until after they had left public office. The Trump family shows no such restraint. Why wait? Donald, Ivanka and Jared are getting theirs while serving in the White House. And, as with much scandalous behaviour in Washington these days, they insist their behaviour is perfectly acceptable.
All three are still connected to the highly profitable companies they operated in New York before Trump’s election in 2016. Since their arrival in Washington, the president and Javanka have been reaping profits from the various family businesses in tandem with their public service, while cynically pretending they have suspended their wheeling and dealing. But the president still monitors who stays at the Trump International Hotel down the street from the White House; Ivanka is still winning trademarks for her clothing line in the notoriously difficult to penetrate Chinese market; and Jared Kushner took in more money from his family real estate empire in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, than he did the previous year.
This week, Kushner’s new financial disclosure records were released, showing the considerable rise in his assets. Their value ranged between $179m and $735m, up from a range of $137m to $609m the previous year. (White House officials are required to report their assets in broad ranges). For Jared, it was a very good year, indeed.
Just last month came the happy news that Ivanka’s brand had won seven additional Chinese patents for items ranging from cushions to books. The new patents were issued at the same time that her father vowed to save ZTE, a major Chinese telecommunications company, from going bust – a rare and surprising move for a president who is a foreign trade hardliner. The New York Times noted: “Even as Mr Trump contends with Beijing on issues like security and trade, his family and the company that bears his name are trying to make money off their brand in China’s flush and potentially promising market.”
Then there is the president himself. His Trump International Hotel is doing brisk business, its lobby always full of White House favour-seekers, its pricey rooms often filled with industry executives and lobbyists. The hotel is siphoning business from other local hotels and convention centres, according to the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland, which have both filed lawsuits. They charge that Trump’s profits from the hotel violate the US constitution’s anti-corruption clauses. The Justice department, unsurprisingly, has defended the president’s continuing role as a hotelier, but a federal judge on Monday sharply criticised the department’s legal reasoning. The case is probably heading for the US supreme court.
All of this money-grubbing comports with everything we know about the Trump family, whose addiction to luxury and wealth is always on conspicuous display, whether on reality television or on the world stage. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, recently summed up the “Trumpian world-view” writing, “Trump takes every relationship that has historically been based on affection, loyalty, trust and reciprocity and turned it into a relationship based on competition, self-interest, suspicion and efforts to establish dominance.” Mainly, Brooks was talking about the G-7 debacle but his words apply perfectly to the family’s self-interest and flouting of ethical rules that have governed Washington for centuries. The Trump family’s ethical tin ear is hardly surprising, but their greed is disgusting nonetheless. The administration and its Republican lackeys blew a hole in the deficit with an enormous tax cut and now they are trying to tax almost all the programmes that help the poor and elderly get by. The false rationale: to bring down the deficit.
Despite the supreme court upholding Obamacare, the Justice department pledged its support for a radical rightwing lawsuit trying, once again, to gut the law’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, Ben Carson’s tenure at the department of Housing and Urban Development has been marked by Dickensian cruelty. He has proposed legislation to increase by 20% the monthly rent that the most impoverished families pay for public housing. He has also called for eliminating the childcare and medical deductions that poor families in public housing can subtract from their rent. Other Trump cabinet officials gratuitously milk taxpayers for items such as first-class travel, while gutting consumer financial protection.
Here is a modest proposal: Ivanka and Jared should consider contributing a portion of their gains from sweetheart real estate deals and Chinese favours to help restore funds for the few programmes that still contribute to the health and welfare of Americans in need.
It was only two years ago that we were fretting over the Clinton Foundation taking foreign money, Hillary’s paid speeches, and that private email server. Looking back, it seems like a golden period.
|
|
eparating children from their parents, as Trump, Sessions and their myrmidons are doing, is monstrous and has been characteristic of the biggest dictators of the modern era. Here are a few cases in case you don’t believe me:
