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What We Know, and Don't Know, About the Firing of Andrew McCabe |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47809"><span class="small">Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare</span></a>
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Monday, 19 March 2018 08:55 |
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Excerpt: "Anyone who is confidently pronouncing on the merits of Andrew McCabe's firing Friday night is venturing well beyond the realm of known facts."
Retiring FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. (photo: Eric Thayer/Reuters)
What We Know, and Don't Know, About the Firing of Andrew McCabe
By Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare
19 March 18
 nyone who is confidently pronouncing on the merits of Andrew McCabe’s firing Friday night is venturing well beyond the realm of known facts.
We certainly understand the instinct to rally to McCabe’s defense at a time when the president is issuing triumphant tweets and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is declaring him a “bad actor.” McCabe’s dismissal comes as part of a broader purge of the senior FBI leadership and specifically targets a man who behaved with extraordinary courage and dignity in the wake of James Comey’s firing last year. It is only natural for those repulsed by the president’s broader interactions with the FBI to assume the worst.
But on McCabe’s innocence or culpability for some infraction that might justify his dismissal, we will reserve judgment—and we caution others to as well. It is simply not clear at this stage whether or not the record will support his dismissal.
At this stage, all that is available are a general, high-level picture of the process that played out—and the broadest sense of the parameters of the dispute between McCabe and the Justice Department leadership that led to his dismissal. The public has no details. It has no specific facts. We have the broad suggestion that McCabe was not truthful with Justice Department investigators but no sense of what he said or what the specific truth was.
Here’s what we know:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced McCabe’s firing in a statement issued at 10 p.m. Friday, just 26 hours before McCabe’s planned retirement:
After an extensive and fair investigation and according to Department of Justice procedure, the Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) provided its report on allegations of misconduct by Andrew McCabe to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).
The FBI’s OPR then reviewed the report and underlying documents and issued a disciplinary proposal recommending the dismissal of Mr. McCabe. Both the OIG and FBI OPR reports concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor—including under oath—on multiple occasions.
The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability. As the OPR proposal stated, “all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.”
Pursuant to Department Order 1202, and based on the report of the Inspector General, the findings of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility, and the recommendation of the Department’s senior career official, I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective immediately.
A representative for McCabe stated that the deputy director learned of his firing from the press release, though the Justice Department disputes this.
The FBI takes telling the truth extremely seriously: “lack of candor” from employees is a fireable offense—and people are fired for it. Moreover, it doesn’t take an outright lie to be dismissed. In one case, the bureau fired an agent after he initially gave an ambiguous statement to investigators as to how many times he had picked up his daughter from daycare in an FBI vehicle. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against the agent when he appealed, finding that “lack of candor is established by showing that the FBI agent did not ‘respond fully and truthfully’ to the questions he was asked.”
Consider also that although Sessions made the ultimate call to fire McCabe, the public record shows that the process resulting in the FBI deputy director’s dismissal involved career Justice Department and FBI officials—rather than political appointees selected by President Trump—at crucial points along the way. To begin with, the charges against McCabe arose out of the broader Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. While the inspector general is appointed by the president, the current head of that office, Michael Horowitz, was appointed by President Barack Obama and is himself a former career Justice Department lawyer. As Jack Goldsmith has written, the inspector general has a great deal of statutory independence, which Horowitz has not hesitated to use: Most notably, he produced a highly critical 2012 report into the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” program. So a process that begins with Horowitz and his office carries a presumption of fairness and independence.
After investigating McCabe, Horowitz’s office provided a report on McCabe’s conduct to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which investigates allegations of misconduct against bureau employees. This office is headed by career Justice Department official Candace Will, whom then-FBI Director Robert Mueller appointed to lead the OPR in 2004. According to Sessions, the Office of Professional Responsibility agreed with Horowitz’s assessment that McCabe “lacked candor” in speaking to internal investigators.
Finally, Sessions’s statement references “the recommendation of the Department’s senior career official” in advocating McCabe’s firing on the basis of the OIG and OPR determinations. (The official in question appears to be Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools.)
So while Sessions made the decision to dismiss McCabe, career officials or otherwise independent actors were involved in conducting the investigation into the deputy director and recommending his dismissal on multiple levels.
As Sessions frames it, McCabe was dismissed for lacking candor when speaking to investigators on the matter of an “unauthorized disclosure to the news media.” McCabe denies these allegations. In a statement released to the media after his firing, McCabe wrote:
The investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has to be understood in the context of the attacks on my credibility. The investigation flows from my attempt to explain the FBI's involvement and my supervision of investigations involving Hillary Clinton. I was being portrayed in the media over and over as a political partisan, accused of closing down investigations under political pressure. The FBI was portrayed as caving under that pressure, and making decisions for political rather than law enforcement purposes. Nothing was further from the truth. In fact, this entire investigation stems from my efforts, fully authorized under FBI rules, to set the record straight on behalf of the Bureau, and to make clear that we were continuing an investigation that people in DOJ opposed.
The OIG investigation has focused on information I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As Deputy Director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the Director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter. It was the type of exchange with the media that the Deputy Director oversees several times per week. In fact, it was the same type of work that I continued to do under Director Wray, at his request. The investigation subsequently focused on who I talked to, when I talked to them, and so forth. During these inquiries, I answered questions truthfully and as accurately as I could amidst the chaos that surrounded me. And when I thought my answers were misunderstood, I contacted investigators to correct them.
The full inspector general report on the Clinton email investigation, which will presumably include information on McCabe’s conduct, is to be released later this spring. Without seeing the report, it’s impossible to know whose story reflects the truth here—Sessions’s or McCabe’s. But at the end of the day, the record will either support McCabe’s dismissal or it will not. On the merits, we should have the discipline to wait and see.
There are, however, at least two features of the action against McCabe that warrant consternation, even if McCabe himself behaved badly enough to justify the sanction. The first is the timing, which is hard to understand. The only factor we can fathom that might justify it is the notion that if McCabe in fact had acted very badly, the window to punish him and thus make an important statement to the bureau workforce was closing.
But we are unaware of prior cases in which authorities rushed through the merits against a long-serving official in a naked and transparent effort to beat the clock of his retirement. Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who is representing McCabe, described the process as follows:
The investigation described in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report was cleaved off from the larger investigation of which it was a part, its completion expedited, and the disciplinary process completed in a little over a week. Mr. McCabe and his counsel were given limited access to a draft of the OIG report late last month, did not see the final report and the evidence on which it is based until a week ago, and were receiving relevant exculpatory evidence as recently as two days ago. We were given only four days to review a voluminous amount of relevant evidence, prepare a response, and make presentations to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. With so much at stake, this process has fallen far short of what Mr. McCabe deserved.
Even allowing for a certain degree of lawyerly hyperbole in this account, the process described here seems highly irregular. McCabe, in his statement Friday, suggested one possible reason for the acceleration:
The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey's accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG's focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.
In an interview with the New York Times, McCabe said directly that his dismissal “is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness.”
We will refrain from speculating on the reason for the rush to fire McCabe before his retirement. But it is peculiar. Why, one wonders, could the Justice Department not have handled his misconduct—if there was misconduct—the way it usually does: by detailing it in the inspector general’s report and noting that the subject, who has since retired, would otherwise be subject to disciplinary action?
The timing seems particularly irregular in light of a second peculiarity unique to McCabe’s case—one probably singular in the history of the American republic: Trump’s personal intervention in the matter and public demands for the man’s scalp. Trump has not been shy about McCabe. He has tormented him both in public and in private, and he publicly demanded his firing on multiple occasions:
Trump developed an unwholesome conspiracy theory about McCabe’s wife, whom he told McCabe was a “loser.” He demanded to know whom McCabe had voted for. According to James Comey’s testimony before the Senate intelligence committee, Trump attempted to use what he believed to be McCabe’s corruption as some kind of a bargaining chip against Comey, informing the director that he had not brought up “the McCabe thing” because Comey had told him that McCabe was honorable.
While we cannot evaluate McCabe’s protestations of innocence at this stage, we can evaluate the truth of much of the rest of his statement:
For the last year and a half, my family and I have been the targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country. Articles too numerous to count have leveled every sort of false, defamatory and degrading allegation against us. The President's tweets have amplified and exacerbated it all. He called for my firing. He called for me to be stripped of my pension after more than 20 years of service.
...
This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally. It is part of this Administration's ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel's work.
Whether or not McCabe’s conduct has been above reproach, all of this is true. And to make matters worse, the firing occurred when Jeff Sessions’s own job is clearly on the line. Sessions, remember, was mulling McCabe’s firing even as Trump himself was mulling Sessions’s firing.
In other words, even if McCabe’s firing proves to be justified on the merits, the question is what could have possibly justified breaking it off from the larger probe and rushing it to completion and adjudication in time to beat the deadline of McCabe’s retirement—particularly in context of presidential demands for his removal and Trump’s broader assault on independent and apolitical law enforcement.
Trump’s reaction to the firing only accentuates this point. He tweeted Friday night:
In the end, such conduct necessarily taints the merits of the action against McCabe. Even if the Justice Department’s process proves pure as the driven snow and the case against McCabe proves compelling, who is going to believe—in the face of overt presidential demands for a corrupt Justice Department—that a Justice Department that gives the president what he wants is anything less than the lackey he asks for? The Justice Department career officials involved in this action know this. They know they are being made to look like lackeys, which may be reason to assume that they will have dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” in this instance—and that the facts against McCabe must be bad. But the politicization of law enforcement takes place either way—the latest and perhaps one of the most extreme instances of politicization in a chain of events that has embroiled the FBI in partisan politics since the beginning of the Clinton email investigation. If this action is the political attack that McCabe says it is, everyone involved is responsible for a terrible smear and a horrific abuse of a longtime public servant. But if the dismissal is absolutely justified and the public doesn’t believe that, the integrity of law enforcement suffers as well.
It is possible, after all, to politicize law enforcement by repeatedly propagating the lie that the law enforcement apparatus is already politicized.
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Trump Is Taking Out His Enemies and Turning Toward Robert Mueller |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Sunday, 18 March 2018 13:45 |
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Chait writes: "A history professor of mine once attempted to explain to our class why Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, when the virtual impossibility of a land invasion of a country as vast as Russia was already well known in 1941."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Washington DC, 2017. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Trump Is Taking Out His Enemies and Turning Toward Robert Mueller
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
18 March 18
history professor of mine once attempted to explain to our class why Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, when the virtual impossibility of a land invasion of a country as vast as Russia was already well known in 1941. The answer, he concluded, was that Hitler was put on earth to invade Russia. His loathing of Bolshevism, his twisted Darwinian mania for the acquisition of land and resources, and his fixation with his own military genius all led him to a decision that was both inevitable and impossible.
This is a good way to think about President Trump’s approach toward the Robert Mueller investigation. Trump is not a Nazi or a fascist, and I am not drawing any moral parallel between the two. The similarity, rather, lies in the way an apparently irrational decision can be made logical and necessary by a certain kind of twisted internal logic that can escape outsiders. I have long believed Trump is headed toward a confrontation with Mueller, and those who doubt he will finally take the plunge are making the mistake of judging Trump by the standards of a normal president and not his own demonstrated pathologies. The sacking of FBI staff member Andrew McCabe for alleged unauthorized leaking to the news media, and comments by Trump’s lawyer John Dowd calling for the firing or Robert Mueller add to an ominous drumbeat.
What are the forces and vectors pushing in this direction? Trump, of course, has been raging against the Department of Justice and the FBI since the campaign itself, when he demanded his opponent be locked up. He fired the FBI director for failing to demonstrate sufficient loyalty, he has repeatedly lashed the attorney general for his obviously necessary recusal from an investigation into the campaign he was part of, and he has repeatedly demanded that the same attorney general investigate his opponents.
Since the firing of James Comey, the staff members around Trump have managed to placate, delay, or contain some of these impulses. But nearly every reporter following the White House now agrees that Trump is moving into a new phase of his presidency. He is aware that he has surrounded himself with people who consider him a moron or are trying to save the country from his madness, and he is relentlessly casting them off.
Trump may not be systematically breaking through the protective ring that has surrounded him, because he is barely capable of doing anything in a systematic fashion. But in fits and starts he is lurching in the same basic direction. He is doing the things his aides told him he could not do, or refused to carry out. Imposing tariffs was a major step in asserting his autonomy. Firing Rex Tillerson in humiliating fashion was another. The case that he would leave Mueller alone relied on the assumption that Trump would stay contained forever. That assumption is crumbling.
It is also notable that Trump’s recent behavior displays a reckless disregard for even his own self-preservation. In his legal battle with Stormy Daniels, Trump is opening himself to legal discovery that may expose campaign finance violations or other misdeeds. He not only demanded the firing of McCabe, he proceeded to taunt his victim.
The legal merits of the case for firing McCabe are not fully known to the public. It is possible McCabe stepped out of line when briefing reporters on a story that made the Clinton campaign look bad. The publicly known factual contours of the episode make this seem highly unlikely. Almost certainly, Sessions fired McCabe because Trump hated McCabe and wanted to punish him and to discredit one of Comey’s corroborating witnesses. Trump’s end zone dance will help McCabe make that case, which he can press in a wrongful termination lawsuit, and which will also open up for discovery more of Trump’s interactions with Sessions.
Trump is exposing himself to legal danger for the fleeting satisfaction of a tweet. Can there be any doubt he would take the risk of firing a Mueller?
It is notable as well that Trump has successfully lined up most of his party apparatus behind him for any confrontation. The House Republicans closed their Russia “investigation,” which was obviously intended all along to provide a pretext for declaring Trump innocent. Conservative media has been hammering the message for months that Trump has done nothing wrong, and that all the criminal misbehavior exists on the side of the investigators.
All this effort has been expended either in support, or in studiously ignoring the existence, of Trump’s deep-rooted contempt for the rule of law. Whether or not McCabe filled out all the necessary memos when talking to a reporter, how fully the FBI disclosed its source material for its FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page, or any other legal claims upon which Trump’s defenders have rested their case, are beside the point. Trump believes law enforcement should operate for his benefit, punishing his enemies and protecting his friends. He admires strongmen. His contempt for democratic norms is characterological. The notion that his own government would investigate him is as unfathomable to Trump as his being called to the carpet by a Trump Organization secretary. Trump is going to go after Mueller at some point because there is no other way for Trump’s febrile mind to make sense of the world.
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These Russian Elections Follow an Old Soviet Tradition |
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Sunday, 18 March 2018 13:31 |
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Dobrokhotov writes: "To understand what the upcoming Russian elections are about, one needs only take a look at the ballot. It would be clear even to those who do not speak Russian. The candidate, who will win, is already marked clearly on the ballot."
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Alexnei Nikolosky/Getty)
These Russian Elections Follow an Old Soviet Tradition
By Roman Dobrokhotov, Al Jazeera
18 March 18
It is almost a one-man election and the turnout is important.
 o understand what the upcoming Russian elections are about, one needs only take a look at the ballot. It would be clear even to those who do not speak Russian. The candidate, who will win, is already marked clearly on the ballot.
This document presents almost perfect symmetry. Above President Vladimir Putin, there are three relatively "conservative" candidates; and below Putin - a group of relatively "liberal" candidates. Just one thing spoils that symmetry - the box with the name of communist candidate Maxim Suraykin - but he cannot be left out. He is the candidate of a second communist party, which had to be created because there had to be more than one party taking the votes of the pensioners, who by habit, vote for the communists. That sizeable vote had to be broken down.
For these elections, candidates were carefully picked so that they cover all segments of society. There is the provocateur-populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky; there's the conservative "patriot" Sergey Baburin; two communists - Pavel Grudinin and Suraykin (what is funny is that both are "capistalist" owners of businesses); there's the liberal Boris Titov, who is supposed to represent the interests of private business; and there are two "radical liberals" - for the older voters - Grigory Yavlinsky (who first ran as a president 22 years ago) and for the youth - Ksenia Sobchak (a controversial reality TV host and the daughter of Putin's former boss).
As you might imagine, none of these candidates criticises Putin directly and generally, all of them avoid even saying his name. Earlier, the Kremlin used to experiment with "uncoopted" opposition representatives appearing on TV debates. For example, during the previous election season, Vyacheslav Maltsev, the candidate of PARNAS party, harshly criticised Putin on air. That ended with Maltsev having to flee abroad and some of his supporters facing criminal charges. Since then, they've not allowed anyone to directly criticise the president.
Paradoxically, this time, the biggest headache for the authorities, was not criticism from the opposition, but rather its absence, which resulted in many Russians losing interest in the elections. A few months ago, a poll conducted by Levada Center showed a possible turnout of 58 percent.
The only "uncoopted" candidate - Alexei Navalny - was barred from running (on the basis of a fraud conviction in a court case which the European Court on Human Rights ruled to be illegal). So the only "threat" to the regime right now is a low turnout, which would put in question the legitimacy of these elections. While the opposition called for a boycott of the elections, the Russian authorities have put great effort into bringing people to the polling stations.
One of the unexpected results of this situation is that the Kremlin tried to spark political tension. So, while in the past, the annexation of Crimea could only be discussed on state TV in a positive light, now one candidate - Sobchak - all of a sudden started questioning its legitimacy. For an outside observer, this might look like there is genuine political debate. But for those who've followed closely Russian politics, it is clear that this is just a show. Sobchak herself once called for the annexation and said Putin would go down in history for "bloodlessly taking back" Crimea. What is also interesting that she used to be blacklisted on state TV, but now all of a sudden she was given plenty of airtime.
The show turned especially dramatic in the days just before the elections. During the TV debates, Sobchak threw water on Zhirinovsky, who called her a "wh***". Days later, Zhirinovsky was interrupting her constantly, after which she burst into tears and walked off.
But scandalous performances on TV would not guarantee a higher turnout. So the authorities resorted to the good old methods - mobilising local administrations. That, of course, includes the organised transportation of state employees to the polling stations and the close monitoring of the number of votes. But this time, they are mobilising not only state institutions, but also large corporations - both public and private.
Turnout anxiety is a new phenomenon in Russia. Earlier the Kremlin cared only about how many votes Putin got and did not pay attention to how many people turned up at the polls. But now, the old Soviet tradition of chasing turnout numbers is back.
Formally, these elections don't really matter. They would be concluded even if Putin were the only person to vote. But today, when Russia finds itself in international isolation, Putin should be proving to the world that he has domestic legitimacy. That, of course, wouldn't have changed the way other countries see him, but would have allowed him to stabilise domestic affairs and show - both ordinary Russians and the elite - that the situation is under control.
But as the Soviet experience demonstrates - having control could be an illusion and could quickly collapse in times of economic crisis. As long as the Russian reserve still has some funds, this illusion will continue to be maintained.
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The Made-Up Story About How Big Sugar Shifted the Blame to Fat |
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Sunday, 18 March 2018 13:20 |
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Excerpt: "Over the last two decades a remarkable shift in focus has taken place in the nutrition field - we've gone from blaming fat for our expanding waistlines to fingering sugar instead."
'Narratives about industry meddling in scientific research can provide seductive explanations for twists and turns in science and policy.' (photo: Tony Cenicola/NYT)
The Made-Up Story About How Big Sugar Shifted the Blame to Fat
By David Merritt Johns and Gerald M. Oppenheimer, Slate
18 March 18
It’s certainly tempting to blame corporate bad guys, but the sugar industry didn’t cook up the low-fat diet.
 ver the last two decades a remarkable shift in focus has taken place in the nutrition field—we’ve gone from blaming fat for our expanding waistlines to fingering sugar instead. In the 1980s and 1990s the low-fat approach dominated dietary advice, with the premise that “fat makes you fat” and greasy cheeseburgers clog the arteries attaining the status of obvious truth. But with the surgeon general’s call to action about the nation’s “obesity epidemic” in 2001 and new studies suggesting fat restriction was hardly a magic bullet for public health, doubts crept in about our diets—raising a muddle of competing explanations about what had happened and what we should do.
Had we simply “gone too far” with the low-fat emphasis, inadvertently placing a halo around carbohydrate-laden snacks and juices? Maybe the low-fat approach had never been based on adequate science? Could it be that the real devil in the American diet was actually sugar—a seductive toxin that had slipped into so many foods? Or what about the age-old idea that people were simply eating too much and moving too little? A storm of discordant advice swept through the nutrition field. Low-carb rebels duked it out in the press with their low-fat elders. Who was right? Who could be trusted? And who was to blame for our nutritional befuddlement?
In late 2016, there emerged an explanation that appeared to cut through the fog: It was the sugar industry. Researchers with the University of California announced they had unearthed secret archival documents showing that in the mid-1960s, the industry-backed Sugar Research Foundation had covertly paid top scientists at Harvard to conduct a literature review playing down the role of sugar in heart disease and pinning the blame on dietary fat instead.
Marion Nestle, a renowned nutrition professor and authority on corporate influence, suggested the findings were a “smoking gun.” As many as “five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry,” reported the New York Times. The story was like a chocolate kiss to the media’s sweet tooth for conspiratorial dramas: Big Sugar had cooked up the low-fat diet. Just this week, David Leonhardt, a Times op-ed columnist turned diet guru, assailed Big Sugar for having tricked us with “false” research and unveiled his own guide on “How to Stop Eating Sugar.” Leonhardt underscored that going sugar-free could be seen as “a political act: resisting the sugar industry’s attempts to profit off your body.”
But as we detailed last month in Science, our own examination of the historical events in question shows this alluring tale of industry meddling is based on a highly selective and profoundly flawed interpretation of the history. The long-deceased Mad Men–era Harvard scientists who stand accused of having been “paid off” to “shift the blame” to fat were, in fact, already on record in support of low-fat diets as a way to fight heart disease for nearly a decade before the sugar men came calling. In adopting this stance they were in sync with the dominant nutritional paradigm of the era: the idea that the fatty American diet, by raising cholesterol levels in the blood, was behind the epidemic of heart attacks that was killing so many middle-aged breadwinners. No blame-shifting was even required!
Moreover, the Harvard nutritionists were approached by the sugar industry based on the results of a landmark study they had just completed—and would soon publish in peer-reviewed journals—that appeared to confirm that eating a lot of butter and meat put the heart at risk and that consuming high-sugar diets had little effect. That study had been funded by the U.S. dairy industry, but the results wiped the smiles right off dairymen’s milk-mustached faces. When the sugar industry subsequently commissioned the Harvard men to conduct a literature review, it was simply an attempt to amplify their pre-existing, data-driven conclusions. There was no “smoking gun.” Bernard Lown, a cardiologist who worked in Harvard’s nutrition department during the 1960s (and later shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize with a Soviet physician for their advocacy on the prevention of nuclear war), told us that the claim that the sugar industry bought off his former co-workers was simply “an invention after the fact about what happened.”
So what explains the emergence of this shadowy narrative about Big Sugar? Certainly there is a rich tradition in contested areas of science of using bits and pieces of history to add urgency to one’s claims. Over the past 20 years, a wave of popular articles and books written by advocates of low-carbohydrate diets have cast an ensemble of scientific heroes and villains to explain the embattled history of nutrition. On the villainous side, there are the low-fat zealots, whose purported hubris and possible sympathies with the sugar industry led them to place too much faith in their own data. On the hero side, there are the handful of noble, independent scientists who courageously challenged the dietary fat paradigm and zeroed in on sugar instead. The major beneficiary of this nutritional lionization has been John Yudkin, a prominent British nutritionist who declared sugar to be Pure, White and Deadly in 1972 in a widely read popular book.
Among the most enthusiastic of the Yudkin revivalists has been Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist who believes sugar is a toxin and whose powerful 2009 lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” has become a viral sensation on YouTube. Lustig penned an introduction to the 2012 reissue of Yudkin’s sugar book (it had gone out of print), in which he refers to himself as a “Yudkin disciple” and Yudkin’s writings as “prophecy.” He laments Yudkin’s ill-fated struggles with the high priests of nutrition who bought into what Lustig calls the “propaganda of ‘low-fat’ ” and blames them for tossing Yudkin and his sugar hypothesis “under the proverbial bus.”
Much of this narrative comes from Yudkin himself. In addition to articulating his case against sugar, Pure, White and Deadly tells a tale of what it’s like to be a researcher “who makes discoveries and holds opinions that a lot of people don’t like”—an “objective scientist” under attack by researchers committed to the low-fat paradigm and operatives of the sugar industry. This ballad of John Yudkin as tragic visionary has received wide press play in recent years, with one 2016 Guardian article arguing that the pattern of industry meddling and “unscientific” disregard for Yudkin’s ideas had amounted to a “sugar conspiracy.” “Yudkin correctly fingered the sugar and food industries for what they were, and still are,” wrote Lustig in his introduction to Yudkin’s book. “Those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it—especially in the face of persistent propaganda. And this book is history.”
And yet Yudkin’s book is not a work of history or a scientific document: It is a professional memoir and popular book on diet and nutrition. And while it is true, as Yudkin divulges, that his sugar theory aroused opposition from those who believed saturated fat was the culprit in heart disease, the image of him as a shunned prophet, preaching in the wilderness and hounded by agents of industry, leaves out the extent to which his research was disbelieved mainly because the evidence supporting it did not hold up to scrutiny. High-profile attempts to replicate Yudkin’s signature finding that heart attack sufferers tended to be heavy sugar users flat-out failed.
Present-day Yudkin disciples have also looked past the extent to which his research was richly supported by the food industry. In the late 1960s, the International Dairy Federation paid Yudkin to conduct sugar studies in pigs, rats, cockerels, and humans. He regularly took the stage at National Dairy Council press events in Europe and the U.S., promoting his sugar theory and the benefits of milk and butter. Stumping for butter during that period was like defending Coca-Cola today. Yudkin acknowledged in interviews that Big Butter gave him money “to distract attention from the dangers of their own products” yet insisted it was “a slur on the integrity of many nutritionists to imply that those who advise food manufacturers are inevitably tainted.”
Today Yudkin’s industry-friendly attitude looks naïve, or even a bit shady: Our subsequent experiences with deceit and denial at the hands of the tobacco industry and other “merchants of doubt” has shown how devious industries can be in using financial incentives to subtly shape the science. Yet in Yudkin’s heyday, industry-academy collaborations carried much less stigma—a vast cultural shift that present-day chroniclers of the purported misdeeds of industry-linked Harvard scientists have overlooked. When Yudkin told an audience of poultry producers in 1973 that “when you are deciding on your last course at the restaurant, remember—Cheese soufflé? YES! Chocolate soufflé? NO!” he was speaking as a researcher who would soon embark on a yolk-positive public relations tour that one reporter called “a counter offensive for the egg,” but he did not believe his scientific ideas were any less sound because of it.
Narratives about industry meddling in scientific research can provide seductive explanations for twists and turns in science and policy. The claim that Big Sugar helped cook up the low-fat diet has appealed to different constituencies for different reasons: scientists who think sucrose is an addictive toxin, public health watchdogs wary of Big Tobacco–style interference in nutrition, journalists drawn to juicy stories about corruption, nutritionists who once argued fat was the central dietary danger and have since felt the ground wobble beneath their feet.
But conspiratorial tales, when not grounded in strong evidence, can pose a real danger to our ability to make good public health policies and understand how science actually works. Stories about clandestine payoffs and corporate cover-ups by definition suggest that some scandalous truth was being hidden (e.g., sugar is the real devil, not fat!). The act of uncovering apparent greedy meddling can provide a powerful stimulant to action (e.g., the sugar industry tricked us—we won’t get fooled again!). Normal developments and detours in science and policy are recast as the product of dark industrial forces. The only lesson to be learned is to keep science at arm’s length from the profiteering of corporations. As we pinwheel from lipophobia to sucrophobia, any reckoning with the zigzags of nutrition science may seem like a distraction.
Avoiding these traps requires a commitment to evidence and an appreciation for the complexity of scientific research and its history. While we support efforts to impose taxes on soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages, we believe that the real enemies in modern nutrition are hyperbole and oversimplification. The fight against obesity need not rely on artificially sweetened renderings of the past.
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ina Haspel’s 
