John Kelly, there is no compromise with slavery
By Jill Filipovic
Was the American Civil War caused by seditious traitors who decided the hill they would die on was the one defending the racist enslavement of human beings, or was it that a simple inability to compromise led an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state? According to White House chief of staff John Kelly, it's the latter.
What terrifying revisionism -- and what a window into the Trump administration and the conservative ideology undergirding it.
"I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man," Kelly told Laura Ingraham, a conservative radio and television host, on her show last night. "He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it's different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand."
That last bit of his argument is familiar to anyone who has ever been sucked into a debate about, say, how in the heck anyone could have believed an admitted sexual predator with no political experience but a long history of racism and sexism would make a great president, or whether black lives matter enough that police officers should be held accountable for shooting unarmed African-Americans, or whether the government should be able to legally deny women the right to decide what happens in our own uteruses.
"Men and women of good faith on both sides" can agree to disagree, the argument often goes; better to understand each other and to compromise than to judge as right or wrong little things like basic human rights.
Kelly's argument shows the total moral bankruptcy of that position.
As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out on Twitter, there already were compromises on slavery. One of them, the three-fifths compromise, was written into the United States Constitution. And Kelly does sort of have a point: the Civil War was fought because neither side would compromise on slavery.
One side thought enslaving other humans was morally reprehensible and should be outlawed. The other claimed keeping darker-skinned human beings as chattels -- forcing them into a life of hard labor, beating them for the tiniest perceived infraction, raping them at will, tearing their children away to sell on the market -- was not only economically necessary, but natural, culturally vital, and God's stated will.
There was no compromise that could have worked. There were not, in fact, men and women of good faith on both sides acting out of conscience. There were men and women on one side fighting for absolute evil, an evil they believed in so fervently they were willing to undermine the country for it. The word for these people is "traitors," not "honorable men."
And it's not like they were simply people of their time who didn't know any better. The Civil War was fought, after all, because there were a whole lot of Americans who wanted to abolish the institution of slavery. Slaveholders and their supporters knew there was another option, but they were white supremacists who wanted slaves and believed black people were not deserving of human rights.
Debates drawn along these same fault lines (and remarkably similar electoral maps) churn on in the United States, and still, we hear the same excuses for those who do not support the full human rights of women and people of color. An alarming number of such people work in the Trump White House; others put Trump in the White House.
Now, as in the thoroughly dishonorable Robert E. Lee's day, the divide won't be bridged by an easy compromise, because what divides us isn't (or shouldn't be) up for negotiation: Are African-Americans people deserving of full human rights? Are women?
Here is our deepest modern shame: A century and a half after the Civil War, monuments to traitors remain, and we still live in a country that does not unanimously answer those questions in the affirmative.
October 31, 2017
Literally running for the doors....
Top Senate Republicans (literally) dodge questions on Trump aide indictments
By Ted Barrett
Top Senate Republicans tried to avoid questions about the legal woes ensnaring the Trump administration as they worked to keep the focus of a Monday news conference on the GOP agenda, specifically the confirmation of a batch of judicial nominees this week.
In one notable moment, Sen. Chuck Grassley literally squirmed out of the room just as reporters began asking questions about the legal problems.
"Anybody have any questions for Senator Grassley, or anybody else here, on this topic?" Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked reporters, making clear he didn't want questions about the indictments and guilty plea involving three of President Donald Trump's campaign aides to dominate the news conference.
When reporters pressed to get on-camera comment about the legal problems facing Trump campaign aides Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, the usually accommodating Cornyn tried to deflect, saying the issue wasn't in the Senate's "wheelhouse."
As multiple reporters shouted out, Grassley, who chairs the judiciary committee, which is investigating alleged Russian meddling in US elections, decided to slip out.
The lanky Iowa Republican tried to make a quick exit out a back door that was directly behind the podium. The problem was that several American flags on stands were set up behind the participants and blocked the large wooden door he needed to open to leave the room. So instead of quietly slipping away, he opened the door, banging into it as he did, and then tried to squeeze awkwardly out between the flags and the door, nearly knocking over several flags as he loudly departed.
Reporters called out to Grassley, but the agile 84-year-old got away, leaving Cornyn at the podium struggling to regain control of the room.
"If you will all hold on a second," Cornyn asked the reporters. "The special counsel is appointed by the Department of Justice and that's the person you need to ask the questions to."
Grassley's had briefly spoken to CNN reporters off camera earlier in the day when he also declined to comment on the specific ramifications of the legal actions, besides advising the President to "to let the special counsel do his work."
His office later — but before the news conference — released a statement on the indictment.
"As always, it's important to let our legal system run its course," Grassley said in a statement. "While we don't have any more information regarding the current status of the special counsel's investigation other than what has already been made public, it's good to see the Justice Department taking seriously its responsibility to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act. I've been raising concerns about lackluster enforcement of this foreign influence disclosure law for years now, regardless of administration or political party."
At the news conference, Cornyn was forced to take the podium after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ducked out of the news conference before the question-and-answer portion began. A McConnell aide said that leaving had been the leader's plan all along and that he would hold another news conference Tuesday after the weekly GOP policy lunch.
His plea seemed to fit an ongoing narrative on Capitol Hill since Trump became President. The media are often more focused on getting lawmaker's reactions to Trump's controversial tweets and unorthodox governing style than on the many legislative goals congressional Republicans are trying to achieve.
Cornyn eventually gave in to reporters' demands and answered a few questions on the special counsel probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the possibility of collusion. He said he didn't think the three aides' legal problems would prevent Trump from doing his job or prevent Congress from passing tax reform.
"In terms of Congress being able to do our job, I believe the investigations into Russian active measures are continuing apace," Cornyn said. "I don't see how the indictment changes the ability of the President to do his job. There is a process for this to go forward, and I trust it will happen."
By Ted Barrett
Top Senate Republicans tried to avoid questions about the legal woes ensnaring the Trump administration as they worked to keep the focus of a Monday news conference on the GOP agenda, specifically the confirmation of a batch of judicial nominees this week.
In one notable moment, Sen. Chuck Grassley literally squirmed out of the room just as reporters began asking questions about the legal problems.
"Anybody have any questions for Senator Grassley, or anybody else here, on this topic?" Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked reporters, making clear he didn't want questions about the indictments and guilty plea involving three of President Donald Trump's campaign aides to dominate the news conference.
When reporters pressed to get on-camera comment about the legal problems facing Trump campaign aides Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, the usually accommodating Cornyn tried to deflect, saying the issue wasn't in the Senate's "wheelhouse."
As multiple reporters shouted out, Grassley, who chairs the judiciary committee, which is investigating alleged Russian meddling in US elections, decided to slip out.
The lanky Iowa Republican tried to make a quick exit out a back door that was directly behind the podium. The problem was that several American flags on stands were set up behind the participants and blocked the large wooden door he needed to open to leave the room. So instead of quietly slipping away, he opened the door, banging into it as he did, and then tried to squeeze awkwardly out between the flags and the door, nearly knocking over several flags as he loudly departed.
Reporters called out to Grassley, but the agile 84-year-old got away, leaving Cornyn at the podium struggling to regain control of the room.
"If you will all hold on a second," Cornyn asked the reporters. "The special counsel is appointed by the Department of Justice and that's the person you need to ask the questions to."
Grassley's had briefly spoken to CNN reporters off camera earlier in the day when he also declined to comment on the specific ramifications of the legal actions, besides advising the President to "to let the special counsel do his work."
His office later — but before the news conference — released a statement on the indictment.
"As always, it's important to let our legal system run its course," Grassley said in a statement. "While we don't have any more information regarding the current status of the special counsel's investigation other than what has already been made public, it's good to see the Justice Department taking seriously its responsibility to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act. I've been raising concerns about lackluster enforcement of this foreign influence disclosure law for years now, regardless of administration or political party."
At the news conference, Cornyn was forced to take the podium after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ducked out of the news conference before the question-and-answer portion began. A McConnell aide said that leaving had been the leader's plan all along and that he would hold another news conference Tuesday after the weekly GOP policy lunch.
His plea seemed to fit an ongoing narrative on Capitol Hill since Trump became President. The media are often more focused on getting lawmaker's reactions to Trump's controversial tweets and unorthodox governing style than on the many legislative goals congressional Republicans are trying to achieve.
Cornyn eventually gave in to reporters' demands and answered a few questions on the special counsel probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the possibility of collusion. He said he didn't think the three aides' legal problems would prevent Trump from doing his job or prevent Congress from passing tax reform.
"In terms of Congress being able to do our job, I believe the investigations into Russian active measures are continuing apace," Cornyn said. "I don't see how the indictment changes the ability of the President to do his job. There is a process for this to go forward, and I trust it will happen."
Another ban bites the dust...
In defeat for Trump, judge blocks transgender military ban
Andrew Chung
A federal judge in Washington on Monday blocked President Donald Trump from banning transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, handing a victory to transgender service members who accused the president of violating their constitutional rights.
Trump announced in July that he would ban transgender people from the military in a move that would reverse Democratic former President Barack Obama’s policy of accepting them and halt years of efforts to eliminate barriers to military service based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The transgender service members sued in August to try to block the ban, which had not yet gone into effect, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted them an injunction halting enforcement of it until their case is resolved.
The service members asserted that Trump’s policy violated their rights to due process and equal protection under the law under the U.S. Constitution. Kollar-Kotelly said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their claim that the ban was unconstitutional because the administration’s reasons for it “do not appear to be supported by any facts.”
After his policy announcement on Twitter, Trump signed a memorandum in August that directed the military not to accept transgender people as recruits and halted the use of government funds for sex-reassignment surgeries for active-duty personnel unless the process was already underway.
The memo called on Defense Secretary James Mattis to submit a plan to Trump by Feb. 21 on how to implement the changes, and the Pentagon has created a panel of senior officials for that purpose. In the meantime, the current policy of allowing transgender people to serve remains in force.
Mattis in June already had delayed allowing transgender recruits to join the U.S. armed forces on July 1 as previously scheduled.
The judge tossed out the suit’s challenge to the sex-reassignment surgery directive, saying none of the plaintiffs had shown they would be impacted by that prohibition.
‘HUGELY IMPORTANT’
“This is a hugely important decision and confirms that transgender people can and should be able to serve in the military if they are qualified to do so,” said the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, Jennifer Levi.
“The court saw through the smoke screens that the government tried to throw up to hide what is actually going on here, which is straight-on bias and prejudice against transgender people,” added Levi, director of the transgender rights project for the anti-discrimination group GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.
The Justice Department said it was disappointed in the ruling and evaluating its next steps. Spokeswoman Lauren Ehrsam said the suit was premature because the “Defense Department is actively reviewing such service requirements, as the president ordered, and because none of the plaintiffs have established that they will be impacted by current policies on military service.”
Trump’s action appealed to his hard-line conservative supporters. The president in February also rescinded protections put in place under Obama for transgender public school students.
The judge’s action marked the latest legal setback suffered by Trump on policies he has pursued as president. Courts also have blocked Trump’s latest version of a travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries, and dealt him setbacks on policies on so-called sanctuary cities and environmental rules.
The service members who sued Trump, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and military leaders in August had been serving openly as transgender people in the U.S. Army, Air Force and Coast Guard. They said Trump’s ban discriminated against them based on their sex and transgender status.
They also said they relied on the 2016 policy put in place by Obama to reveal they are transgender and called Trump’s reversal unfair, arbitrary and a violation of their privacy rights.
The Trump administration argued that transgender people might harm military unit cohesion and that they suffer medical conditions that could limit their ability to perform duties or deploy.
The judge said the military previously commissioned a study that debunked concerns about unit cohesion, military readiness, or healthcare costs related to transgender troops. That report estimated there were 2,450 active-duty service members and 1,510 in the military reserves.
“In short, the military concerns purportedly underlying the president’s decision had been studied and rejected by the military itself,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
Other suits also have been filed against Trump’s ban.
Andrew Chung
A federal judge in Washington on Monday blocked President Donald Trump from banning transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, handing a victory to transgender service members who accused the president of violating their constitutional rights.
Trump announced in July that he would ban transgender people from the military in a move that would reverse Democratic former President Barack Obama’s policy of accepting them and halt years of efforts to eliminate barriers to military service based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The transgender service members sued in August to try to block the ban, which had not yet gone into effect, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted them an injunction halting enforcement of it until their case is resolved.
The service members asserted that Trump’s policy violated their rights to due process and equal protection under the law under the U.S. Constitution. Kollar-Kotelly said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their claim that the ban was unconstitutional because the administration’s reasons for it “do not appear to be supported by any facts.”
After his policy announcement on Twitter, Trump signed a memorandum in August that directed the military not to accept transgender people as recruits and halted the use of government funds for sex-reassignment surgeries for active-duty personnel unless the process was already underway.
The memo called on Defense Secretary James Mattis to submit a plan to Trump by Feb. 21 on how to implement the changes, and the Pentagon has created a panel of senior officials for that purpose. In the meantime, the current policy of allowing transgender people to serve remains in force.
Mattis in June already had delayed allowing transgender recruits to join the U.S. armed forces on July 1 as previously scheduled.
The judge tossed out the suit’s challenge to the sex-reassignment surgery directive, saying none of the plaintiffs had shown they would be impacted by that prohibition.
‘HUGELY IMPORTANT’
“This is a hugely important decision and confirms that transgender people can and should be able to serve in the military if they are qualified to do so,” said the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, Jennifer Levi.
“The court saw through the smoke screens that the government tried to throw up to hide what is actually going on here, which is straight-on bias and prejudice against transgender people,” added Levi, director of the transgender rights project for the anti-discrimination group GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.
The Justice Department said it was disappointed in the ruling and evaluating its next steps. Spokeswoman Lauren Ehrsam said the suit was premature because the “Defense Department is actively reviewing such service requirements, as the president ordered, and because none of the plaintiffs have established that they will be impacted by current policies on military service.”
Trump’s action appealed to his hard-line conservative supporters. The president in February also rescinded protections put in place under Obama for transgender public school students.
The judge’s action marked the latest legal setback suffered by Trump on policies he has pursued as president. Courts also have blocked Trump’s latest version of a travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries, and dealt him setbacks on policies on so-called sanctuary cities and environmental rules.
The service members who sued Trump, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and military leaders in August had been serving openly as transgender people in the U.S. Army, Air Force and Coast Guard. They said Trump’s ban discriminated against them based on their sex and transgender status.
They also said they relied on the 2016 policy put in place by Obama to reveal they are transgender and called Trump’s reversal unfair, arbitrary and a violation of their privacy rights.
The Trump administration argued that transgender people might harm military unit cohesion and that they suffer medical conditions that could limit their ability to perform duties or deploy.
The judge said the military previously commissioned a study that debunked concerns about unit cohesion, military readiness, or healthcare costs related to transgender troops. That report estimated there were 2,450 active-duty service members and 1,510 in the military reserves.
“In short, the military concerns purportedly underlying the president’s decision had been studied and rejected by the military itself,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
Other suits also have been filed against Trump’s ban.
Orangutan likes cheese on bottum...
 |
| So, this is the big news of the day at Fux News... Does Orangutan like cheese on top or bottom? He likes it in the bottom.. |
Very Bad News For Sessions...
GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS’S PLEA DEAL IS VERY, VERY BAD NEWS FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS
Marcy Wheeler
THE BIGGEST NEWS of Mueller Monday — the rollout of a money-laundering indictment against Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser, Paul Manafort and campaign aide Rick Gates, and the unsealing of a false-statements plea deal by another campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos — may involve someone not named explicitly in either indictment: Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
That’s because Sessions has repeatedly testified to the Senate that he knows nothing about any collusion with the Russians. (Though in his most recent appearance, he categorized that narrowly by saying he did not “conspire with Russia or an agent of the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”)
But the Papadopoulos plea shows that Sessions — then acting as Trump’s top foreign policy adviser — was in a March 31, 2016, meeting with Trump, at which Papadopoulos explained “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” It also shows that Papadopoulos kept a number of campaign officials in the loop on his efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin, though they secretly determined that the meeting “should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal,” itself a sign the campaign was trying to hide its efforts to make nice with the Russians.
Papadopoulos also learned, on April 26, that the Russians “have dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” A key part of Papadopoulos’s cooperation must pertain to what he told the Trump campaign about these emails. According to his complaint, he originally claimed he hadn’t told anyone on the campaign about the dirt on Clinton because he didn’t know if it was real. But as his plea makes clear, after being arrested, he “met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions.” There would be no reason for Papadopoulos to lie about the significance of the emails in January unless he did so to hide his discussions of them with the rest of the campaign.
That suggests the campaign knew, a month before Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Russian lawyer to get dirt on Clinton, that the Russians had already told Papadopoulos about dirt in thousands of stolen emails.
To be sure, Papadopoulos’s plea perhaps hurts Trump the most. After all, Trump was in the March 31 meeting too, along with Sessions. Trump personally intervened in the White House spin about the June 9, 2016, meeting, pushing the line — and the lie — that it pertained to adoptions rather than obtaining dirt on Clinton.
But unlike Trump, Sessions’s claims about such meetings came in sworn testimony to the Senate. During his confirmation process, Sessions was asked a key question by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.: “If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?”
“Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions responded. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”
The question, however, was about Sessions’s knowledge of such communications, and we now know he was in a meeting in which they were discussed.
More recently, on October 18, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Sessions a series of questions about his knowledge of interactions with Russians, including whether he had discussed emails with Russian officials since the campaign. To that question, Sessions said he “did not recall.”
Franken then asked, in an attempt to clarify the confirmation questions, “You don’t believe that surrogates from the Trump campaign had communications with the Russians?”
“I did not — and I’m not aware of anyone else that did. I don’t believe that it happened,” said the attorney general whose own department had, two weeks earlier, already gotten a guilty plea from a campaign surrogate describing such discussions with Russians.
Most curiously, Sessions seemed unable to answer what kind of communication he had had with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. “Have you been requested to be interviewed by the special counsel?” Leahy asked. “You’ll have to ask the special counsel,” the attorney general responded. While Sessions’s spokesperson later made it clear he hadn’t been approached for an interview, that says nothing about any discussions about the possibility of testimony.
It’s part of a pattern that began early for Sessions. He initially denied categorically meeting with Russians during the campaign, but was forced to walk that back when it emerged he had met at least twice with then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He then claimed that the meetings had focused purely on foreign affairs and his senatorial duties, a claim rebutted by Kislyak himself, who told his superiors that he spoke with Sessions about the 2016 campaign.
Marcy Wheeler
THE BIGGEST NEWS of Mueller Monday — the rollout of a money-laundering indictment against Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser, Paul Manafort and campaign aide Rick Gates, and the unsealing of a false-statements plea deal by another campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos — may involve someone not named explicitly in either indictment: Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
That’s because Sessions has repeatedly testified to the Senate that he knows nothing about any collusion with the Russians. (Though in his most recent appearance, he categorized that narrowly by saying he did not “conspire with Russia or an agent of the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”)
But the Papadopoulos plea shows that Sessions — then acting as Trump’s top foreign policy adviser — was in a March 31, 2016, meeting with Trump, at which Papadopoulos explained “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” It also shows that Papadopoulos kept a number of campaign officials in the loop on his efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin, though they secretly determined that the meeting “should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal,” itself a sign the campaign was trying to hide its efforts to make nice with the Russians.
Papadopoulos also learned, on April 26, that the Russians “have dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” A key part of Papadopoulos’s cooperation must pertain to what he told the Trump campaign about these emails. According to his complaint, he originally claimed he hadn’t told anyone on the campaign about the dirt on Clinton because he didn’t know if it was real. But as his plea makes clear, after being arrested, he “met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions.” There would be no reason for Papadopoulos to lie about the significance of the emails in January unless he did so to hide his discussions of them with the rest of the campaign.
That suggests the campaign knew, a month before Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Russian lawyer to get dirt on Clinton, that the Russians had already told Papadopoulos about dirt in thousands of stolen emails.
To be sure, Papadopoulos’s plea perhaps hurts Trump the most. After all, Trump was in the March 31 meeting too, along with Sessions. Trump personally intervened in the White House spin about the June 9, 2016, meeting, pushing the line — and the lie — that it pertained to adoptions rather than obtaining dirt on Clinton.
But unlike Trump, Sessions’s claims about such meetings came in sworn testimony to the Senate. During his confirmation process, Sessions was asked a key question by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.: “If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?”
“Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions responded. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”
The question, however, was about Sessions’s knowledge of such communications, and we now know he was in a meeting in which they were discussed.
More recently, on October 18, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Sessions a series of questions about his knowledge of interactions with Russians, including whether he had discussed emails with Russian officials since the campaign. To that question, Sessions said he “did not recall.”
Franken then asked, in an attempt to clarify the confirmation questions, “You don’t believe that surrogates from the Trump campaign had communications with the Russians?”
“I did not — and I’m not aware of anyone else that did. I don’t believe that it happened,” said the attorney general whose own department had, two weeks earlier, already gotten a guilty plea from a campaign surrogate describing such discussions with Russians.
Most curiously, Sessions seemed unable to answer what kind of communication he had had with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. “Have you been requested to be interviewed by the special counsel?” Leahy asked. “You’ll have to ask the special counsel,” the attorney general responded. While Sessions’s spokesperson later made it clear he hadn’t been approached for an interview, that says nothing about any discussions about the possibility of testimony.
It’s part of a pattern that began early for Sessions. He initially denied categorically meeting with Russians during the campaign, but was forced to walk that back when it emerged he had met at least twice with then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He then claimed that the meetings had focused purely on foreign affairs and his senatorial duties, a claim rebutted by Kislyak himself, who told his superiors that he spoke with Sessions about the 2016 campaign.
Corporate Lawbreakers
ALEC’s Corporate Sponsors Top Nation’s Lawbreaker List
Fourteen of the pay-to-play group’s biggest corporate funders are among the 100 worst federal violators since 2000.
BY DON WIENER
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has earned a reputation as a leading corporate influence group in recent years, with corporate lobbyists and legislators voting as equals in secret on scores of corporate bills to deregulate everything from the power and telecom industries to drug prices and health care.
Well, it’s no wonder. New research by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) shows that the pay-to-play lobby group’s biggest corporate funders are also among the nation’s biggest violators of the health, safety, consumer, worker and environmental protection laws ALEC seeks to dismantle.
Just 38 of ALEC’s for-profit corporate members have paid out a total of $16 billion in federal fines and penalties since 2000.
The calculation was made using Violation Tracker, a database of all federal regulatory violations compiled by Good Jobs First.
CMD’s analysis focuses on larger ALEC companies that have paid at least $10 million in federal fines and penalties between 2000 and 2017. On average, those companies each owed a total of $421 million over those years for violating laws managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Justice, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Occupational Health and Safety Administration and other enforcement agencies.
ALEC’s top violators racked up on average nearly triple in fines and penalties than similar US companies. By comparison, the non-financial corporations operating in the US in the Violation Tracker database with over $10 million in fines/violations paid out an average total of $146 million over the same period.
Fourteen of ALEC’s corporate leaders are in the top 100 of all non-financial violators in the US. Altogether, there are some 200,000 companies in the database.
The worst ALEC offenders by industry were pharmaceutical, energy, utility, railroad and telecom/cable companies. Those companies are also heavily represented among the leaders and principal funders of ALEC.
ALEC’s Top 10 Violators List
Rank Company Fines Paid
1. Pfizer $4.350 billion
2. TEVA Pharmaceuticals $1.757 billion
3. Eli Lilly $1.482 billion
4. Dominion Energy $1.250 billion
5. Novartis $939 million
6. Takeda Pharmaceuticals $875 million
7. ExxonMobil $715 million
8. Koch Industries $657 million
9. Chevron $578 million
10. AT&T $431 million
ALEC’s top 10 violators account for more than 80 percent ($13 billion) of the federal fines and penalties for all major ALEC lawbreakers.
Exxon provides a prime example of why repeat violators ally themselves with groups like ALEC in order to weaken regulations and influence public policy.
Exxon pumped more than $1.7 million into ALEC over a 17-year period as part of a written industry plan to use ALEC to sow uncertainty about climate science and undermine international climate treaties, as CMD detailed in a complaint to the IRS last fall. It used ALEC to promote Exxon’s legislative goals around cap-and-trade policies, fracking, the Keystone Pipeline and opposition to the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan, as CMD noted in its letter to the Senate regarding Rex Tillerson’s nomination.
Of the Top 10, Pfizer and Koch current have top representatives currently serving on ALEC’s corporate board (now called the Private Enterprise Advisory Council); Takeda Pharmaceuticals chairs its Health and Human Services Task Force; and Exxon-Mobil served on ALEC’s corporate board from 2007-16.
Virtually all of the 38 big violators currently have or have had seats on ALEC’s task forces, which allow them to vote for their custom-made bills alongside legislators who take back home to their statehouses, as well as to veto any “model” bills or amendments they don’t like, without the press or public present.
Fourteen of the pay-to-play group’s biggest corporate funders are among the 100 worst federal violators since 2000.
BY DON WIENER
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has earned a reputation as a leading corporate influence group in recent years, with corporate lobbyists and legislators voting as equals in secret on scores of corporate bills to deregulate everything from the power and telecom industries to drug prices and health care.
Well, it’s no wonder. New research by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) shows that the pay-to-play lobby group’s biggest corporate funders are also among the nation’s biggest violators of the health, safety, consumer, worker and environmental protection laws ALEC seeks to dismantle.
Just 38 of ALEC’s for-profit corporate members have paid out a total of $16 billion in federal fines and penalties since 2000.
The calculation was made using Violation Tracker, a database of all federal regulatory violations compiled by Good Jobs First.
CMD’s analysis focuses on larger ALEC companies that have paid at least $10 million in federal fines and penalties between 2000 and 2017. On average, those companies each owed a total of $421 million over those years for violating laws managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Justice, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Occupational Health and Safety Administration and other enforcement agencies.
ALEC’s top violators racked up on average nearly triple in fines and penalties than similar US companies. By comparison, the non-financial corporations operating in the US in the Violation Tracker database with over $10 million in fines/violations paid out an average total of $146 million over the same period.
Fourteen of ALEC’s corporate leaders are in the top 100 of all non-financial violators in the US. Altogether, there are some 200,000 companies in the database.
The worst ALEC offenders by industry were pharmaceutical, energy, utility, railroad and telecom/cable companies. Those companies are also heavily represented among the leaders and principal funders of ALEC.
ALEC’s Top 10 Violators List
Rank Company Fines Paid
1. Pfizer $4.350 billion
2. TEVA Pharmaceuticals $1.757 billion
3. Eli Lilly $1.482 billion
4. Dominion Energy $1.250 billion
5. Novartis $939 million
6. Takeda Pharmaceuticals $875 million
7. ExxonMobil $715 million
8. Koch Industries $657 million
9. Chevron $578 million
10. AT&T $431 million
ALEC’s top 10 violators account for more than 80 percent ($13 billion) of the federal fines and penalties for all major ALEC lawbreakers.
Exxon provides a prime example of why repeat violators ally themselves with groups like ALEC in order to weaken regulations and influence public policy.
Exxon pumped more than $1.7 million into ALEC over a 17-year period as part of a written industry plan to use ALEC to sow uncertainty about climate science and undermine international climate treaties, as CMD detailed in a complaint to the IRS last fall. It used ALEC to promote Exxon’s legislative goals around cap-and-trade policies, fracking, the Keystone Pipeline and opposition to the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan, as CMD noted in its letter to the Senate regarding Rex Tillerson’s nomination.
Of the Top 10, Pfizer and Koch current have top representatives currently serving on ALEC’s corporate board (now called the Private Enterprise Advisory Council); Takeda Pharmaceuticals chairs its Health and Human Services Task Force; and Exxon-Mobil served on ALEC’s corporate board from 2007-16.
Virtually all of the 38 big violators currently have or have had seats on ALEC’s task forces, which allow them to vote for their custom-made bills alongside legislators who take back home to their statehouses, as well as to veto any “model” bills or amendments they don’t like, without the press or public present.
Evidence....
Robert Mueller Releases Information Showing Trump Campaign Tried to Collude With Russia
Sorry, Donald Trump, here’s more evidence your crew schemed with the enemy.
DAVID CORN
On Monday morning, shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller announced the indictments of former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, President Donald Trump tweeted, “There is NO COLLUSION!” But soon after that, Mueller’s office released a “statement of offense” outlining one major instance of when the Trump campaign tried to collude with Russia as the Kremlin was mounting a covert operation against the 2016 election to benefit Trump.
This case involved George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, who has pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents investigating the Trump-Russia scandal.
In August, the Washington Post reported that Papadopoulos had tried to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Mueller’s statement reveals that Papadopoulos, often with the knowledge of campaign officials, attempted to forge a back-channel bond with Russian officials—and he did so after there were public indications the Kremlin was behind the hack-and-dump operation targeting the Hillary Clinton campaign. The statement also suggests that he hoped to obtain Clinton emails from the Russians.
Here’s what happened. In early March 2016, Papadopoulos, a former intern and researcher at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington who had briefly advised the presidential campaign of Ben Carson, learned that he would be a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign. He was living in London at the time. During a trip that month to Italy, he met a professor based in London who claimed to be well connected with Russian government officials. Papadopoulos thought that if he could cozy up to this person, it would boost his standing within the campaign.
Later, while back in London, he met with the academic, who brought along a Russian woman he introduced as a relative of Vladimir Putin. Afterward, Papadopoulos emailed his campaign supervisor that he had met with these two people and they had discussed setting up a meeting between the campaign and “the Russian leadership” to discuss US-Russia ties under a President Trump. The statement doesn’t identify the supervisor, but the Post reported in August that his supervisor was Sam Clovis, who was heading up the Trump campaign’s policy team. The supervisor replied that Papadopoulos should make no commitments but added, “Great work.”
Two weeks later, Papadopoulos attended a meeting in Washington with Trump and other national security advisers. He told the group he had connections that could arrange a tete-a-tete between Trump and Putin. In the following weeks, Papadopopulos kept in contact with the professor and the Russian woman and discussed a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government. He kept the campaign informed of his efforts.
In April, the professor introduced Papadopoulos through email to a person in Moscow who supposedly had close ties to officials within the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He then had a series of conversations with this person about establishing “the groundwork” for a meeting between the campaign and Russian government officials. At one point, they discussed Papadopoulos getting together in London with the Russian ambassador to discuss the next steps.
In late April, Papadopoulos’ efforts took a turn. The professor (who is not named in Mueller’s statement) told him he had just returned from Moscow where he had met with senior Russian officials and learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Clinton. This included, as Papadopoulos later told the FBI, “thousands of emails.” So at this time, Papdopoulos, as an official representative of the Trump campaign, was talking to a go-between with Russia about inside (and stolen) information on Clinton that Moscow possessed. The statement suggests but does not explicitly state that Papadopoulos was interested in how the campaign could benefit from this material. It also does not indicate whether these emails are related to the Democratic National Committee or John Podesta emails hacked by the Russians. It would not be until June 14, 2016, that the DNC hack would become public.
In early June, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort met with a Russian lawyer whom they were told was bringing them negative information on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government plot to help Trump. Here’s an interesting question: Had any of them been told that Papadopoulos had heard the Russians had emails related to Clinton?
Papadopoulos continued to communicate with campaign officials about arranging a meeting between the campaign and Russian officials. He informed the campaign that Putin was interested in hosting Trump. At one point, according to the statement, one campaign official emailed another, “We need to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.” Did that mean the campaign did not want to offend Putin by rejecting the offers Papadopoulos was relaying?
Still, the statement notes that from mid-June through mid-August 2016, Papadopoulos pursued an “off the record” meeting between one or more campaign representatives and “members of Putin’s office” and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On August 15, Papadopoulos’ supervisor told him, “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to the campaign “to make the trip, if it is feasible.”
By now, there was plenty of information in the public record attributing the hack of the DNC and other Democratic targets and the subsequent release of stolen emails and documents to Russian intelligence. Papadopoulos’ trip to meet the Russians never happened. But these communications show that while Putin was attempting to subvert a US election, Trump campaign officials were hoping to arrange a private meeting with Putin officials.
In the past few weeks, Papadopoulos on his LinkedIn page has asked for recommendations for a speaker’s bureau and a publisher—as if he has a story to tell. Mueller’s statement does indicate that the Trump campaign was attempting to create a secret connection with Putin’s office just as Russia was waging information warfare against the United States. Imagine how the Kremlin might have interpreted such warm and welcoming signals from the Trump campaign. This was not a knock-it-off message. It was a let’s-work-together message being sent to an adversary while it was assaulting US democracy.
The Manafort and Gates indictments may not be directly related to the question of Trump interactions with Russia. But the Papadopoulos statement is further evidence the campaign was looking to collude with Putin’s crew. As significant as the Manafort and Gates arrests are, the Papadopoulos statement is far more important for developing a public understanding of how Trump’s gang did scheme with the enemy.
Sorry, Donald Trump, here’s more evidence your crew schemed with the enemy.
DAVID CORN
On Monday morning, shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller announced the indictments of former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, President Donald Trump tweeted, “There is NO COLLUSION!” But soon after that, Mueller’s office released a “statement of offense” outlining one major instance of when the Trump campaign tried to collude with Russia as the Kremlin was mounting a covert operation against the 2016 election to benefit Trump.
This case involved George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, who has pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents investigating the Trump-Russia scandal.
In August, the Washington Post reported that Papadopoulos had tried to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Mueller’s statement reveals that Papadopoulos, often with the knowledge of campaign officials, attempted to forge a back-channel bond with Russian officials—and he did so after there were public indications the Kremlin was behind the hack-and-dump operation targeting the Hillary Clinton campaign. The statement also suggests that he hoped to obtain Clinton emails from the Russians.
Here’s what happened. In early March 2016, Papadopoulos, a former intern and researcher at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington who had briefly advised the presidential campaign of Ben Carson, learned that he would be a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign. He was living in London at the time. During a trip that month to Italy, he met a professor based in London who claimed to be well connected with Russian government officials. Papadopoulos thought that if he could cozy up to this person, it would boost his standing within the campaign.
Later, while back in London, he met with the academic, who brought along a Russian woman he introduced as a relative of Vladimir Putin. Afterward, Papadopoulos emailed his campaign supervisor that he had met with these two people and they had discussed setting up a meeting between the campaign and “the Russian leadership” to discuss US-Russia ties under a President Trump. The statement doesn’t identify the supervisor, but the Post reported in August that his supervisor was Sam Clovis, who was heading up the Trump campaign’s policy team. The supervisor replied that Papadopoulos should make no commitments but added, “Great work.”
Two weeks later, Papadopoulos attended a meeting in Washington with Trump and other national security advisers. He told the group he had connections that could arrange a tete-a-tete between Trump and Putin. In the following weeks, Papadopopulos kept in contact with the professor and the Russian woman and discussed a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government. He kept the campaign informed of his efforts.
In April, the professor introduced Papadopoulos through email to a person in Moscow who supposedly had close ties to officials within the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He then had a series of conversations with this person about establishing “the groundwork” for a meeting between the campaign and Russian government officials. At one point, they discussed Papadopoulos getting together in London with the Russian ambassador to discuss the next steps.
In late April, Papadopoulos’ efforts took a turn. The professor (who is not named in Mueller’s statement) told him he had just returned from Moscow where he had met with senior Russian officials and learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Clinton. This included, as Papadopoulos later told the FBI, “thousands of emails.” So at this time, Papdopoulos, as an official representative of the Trump campaign, was talking to a go-between with Russia about inside (and stolen) information on Clinton that Moscow possessed. The statement suggests but does not explicitly state that Papadopoulos was interested in how the campaign could benefit from this material. It also does not indicate whether these emails are related to the Democratic National Committee or John Podesta emails hacked by the Russians. It would not be until June 14, 2016, that the DNC hack would become public.
In early June, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort met with a Russian lawyer whom they were told was bringing them negative information on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government plot to help Trump. Here’s an interesting question: Had any of them been told that Papadopoulos had heard the Russians had emails related to Clinton?
Papadopoulos continued to communicate with campaign officials about arranging a meeting between the campaign and Russian officials. He informed the campaign that Putin was interested in hosting Trump. At one point, according to the statement, one campaign official emailed another, “We need to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.” Did that mean the campaign did not want to offend Putin by rejecting the offers Papadopoulos was relaying?
Still, the statement notes that from mid-June through mid-August 2016, Papadopoulos pursued an “off the record” meeting between one or more campaign representatives and “members of Putin’s office” and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On August 15, Papadopoulos’ supervisor told him, “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to the campaign “to make the trip, if it is feasible.”
By now, there was plenty of information in the public record attributing the hack of the DNC and other Democratic targets and the subsequent release of stolen emails and documents to Russian intelligence. Papadopoulos’ trip to meet the Russians never happened. But these communications show that while Putin was attempting to subvert a US election, Trump campaign officials were hoping to arrange a private meeting with Putin officials.
In the past few weeks, Papadopoulos on his LinkedIn page has asked for recommendations for a speaker’s bureau and a publisher—as if he has a story to tell. Mueller’s statement does indicate that the Trump campaign was attempting to create a secret connection with Putin’s office just as Russia was waging information warfare against the United States. Imagine how the Kremlin might have interpreted such warm and welcoming signals from the Trump campaign. This was not a knock-it-off message. It was a let’s-work-together message being sent to an adversary while it was assaulting US democracy.
The Manafort and Gates indictments may not be directly related to the question of Trump interactions with Russia. But the Papadopoulos statement is further evidence the campaign was looking to collude with Putin’s crew. As significant as the Manafort and Gates arrests are, the Papadopoulos statement is far more important for developing a public understanding of how Trump’s gang did scheme with the enemy.
Affect Your Income?
Here’s How the Trump Tax Plan Will Affect Your Income
KEVIN DRUM
The White House claims that its tax plan will result in a $4,000 wage increase for the average family. This is obviously preposterous, but there might be some wage gain. The question is how big it could be. Luckily, the highly respected Penn-Wharton Budget Model just released a simulator that allows you to choose different tax options and see what effect they have on things like GDP, wages, etc. I went ahead and chose all the options from the proposed Trump tax plan and got the results. Current policy is shown in gray. The changes due to Trump’s tax plan are shown in red:
Don’t worry: you haven’t gone color blind. There are no differences. The model predicts that if you implement the whole plan, total labor income won’t change by a penny.¹
But what about deficits? Here’s what the model says:
That’s a cumulative increase of $7 trillion in the federal deficit. So the bottom line is that the tax plan doesn’t increase either wages or GDP, but does increase the national debt by about $7 trillion. Why are we doing this again?²
¹This is total labor income and says nothing about how it’s distributed. It’s possible that median wages will go down while the wages of CEOs will go up. Or vice versa. All we know is that the model predicts a total macro effect of zippo.
²Because it does reduce taxes on capital income for the rich. This might not have any effect on economic growth, but it does put more money in the pockets of the already wealthy. That’s what wealthy Republican donors paid for in the past election cycle, and that’s what they’re going to get.
KEVIN DRUM
The White House claims that its tax plan will result in a $4,000 wage increase for the average family. This is obviously preposterous, but there might be some wage gain. The question is how big it could be. Luckily, the highly respected Penn-Wharton Budget Model just released a simulator that allows you to choose different tax options and see what effect they have on things like GDP, wages, etc. I went ahead and chose all the options from the proposed Trump tax plan and got the results. Current policy is shown in gray. The changes due to Trump’s tax plan are shown in red:
Don’t worry: you haven’t gone color blind. There are no differences. The model predicts that if you implement the whole plan, total labor income won’t change by a penny.¹
But what about deficits? Here’s what the model says:
That’s a cumulative increase of $7 trillion in the federal deficit. So the bottom line is that the tax plan doesn’t increase either wages or GDP, but does increase the national debt by about $7 trillion. Why are we doing this again?²
¹This is total labor income and says nothing about how it’s distributed. It’s possible that median wages will go down while the wages of CEOs will go up. Or vice versa. All we know is that the model predicts a total macro effect of zippo.
²Because it does reduce taxes on capital income for the rich. This might not have any effect on economic growth, but it does put more money in the pockets of the already wealthy. That’s what wealthy Republican donors paid for in the past election cycle, and that’s what they’re going to get.
Ruin Them...
We Found Cool Dinosaur Fossils in Utah and Now Trump Might Ruin Them
“The monument tells a story to scientists.”
MARY PAPENFUSS
Environmentalists and scientists were rattled last week following a report that President Donald Trump plans to scale back two of southern Utah’s national monuments. Not only would the project endanger sacred Native American sites and breathtaking Western vistas open to the public — but also some of the most important dinosaur fossils in the world.
Scientists worry that removing the land from federal protection and opening it up to coal mining will jeopardize critical fossils in the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
“My fear is that opening up the monument to energy extraction will threaten our ability to uncover the secrets that we know must still be buried in the monument,” Canadian paleontologist Scott Sampson told the Los Angeles Times.
In a phone call Friday with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Trump reportedly said he planned to follow the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante and the 1.2 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument, which could be reduced more than 90 percent. Carved-out areas would be open to both mining and oil drilling.
The decision is part of a review of monuments across the nation.
Zinke’s recommendation would open up the Kaiparowits Plateau in the Grand Staircase, which includes an incredibly rich collection of dinosaur fossils dating to the Cretaceous.
Earlier this month, a nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a 76 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus was airlifted from the plateau for further study at the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City.
The remarkable find — with many bones frozen in life-like movements — was discovered two years ago. It’s the most complete Tyrannosaurus fossil discovered in the American Southwest. Researchers believe it may be a rare fossil of the Teratophoneus curriei, a relative that predated the T. rex and stood about 12 feet tall.
Digs in the area have also uncovered other important fossils of unusual or new species of dinosaurs, like the duck-billed Crested Hadrosaur, horned Ceratopsians and the dome-headed Pachycephalosaur.
“These are things found only in Grand Staircase,” Randy Irmis, the paleontology curator at the Natural History Museum, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “These are world-class paleontological resources.”
Paleontologist Alan Titus, who discovered the Tyrannosaurus fossil, described the Kaiparowits Plateau as a 5,000-foot-thick “sequence of rocks that records the life and times of the dinosaurs during their swan song, the end of the age of dinosaurs” between 100 and 75 million years ago.
“The monument tells a story to scientists” about an ancient North American ecosystem “that we can’t see anywhere else,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s one of the last places where you can almost predictably come out and make new scientific discoveries year after year.”
The Grand Staircase has been federally protected since it was declared a monument 21 years ago by then-President Bill Clinton. “The empty spaces are filling up in the West. We have to imagine what the western landscape is going to look like in 50 years and try to anticipate, rather than wait for conflicts to happen,” Clinton said when he designated the area a monument.
No president in history has shrunk a national monument since the law creating the public lands — the Antiquities Act — was passed over a century ago in 1906.
Trump plans to travel to Utah in December to officially announce his decision to carve out sections of the Utah monuments, which is likely to trigger an immediate court challenge.
A video ad released Thursday by the National Wildlife Federation features Navajo Nation delegate Davis Filfred, who has spoken out against changes to the Bears Ears monument. In the video, he pleads with the president to leave national monuments intact.
“Not all monuments divide us. Some bring us together,” Filfred said. “If you destroy these monuments, our public land could be auctioned off. Our sacred tribal sites would be in danger.”
“The monument tells a story to scientists.”
MARY PAPENFUSS
Environmentalists and scientists were rattled last week following a report that President Donald Trump plans to scale back two of southern Utah’s national monuments. Not only would the project endanger sacred Native American sites and breathtaking Western vistas open to the public — but also some of the most important dinosaur fossils in the world.
Scientists worry that removing the land from federal protection and opening it up to coal mining will jeopardize critical fossils in the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
“My fear is that opening up the monument to energy extraction will threaten our ability to uncover the secrets that we know must still be buried in the monument,” Canadian paleontologist Scott Sampson told the Los Angeles Times.
In a phone call Friday with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Trump reportedly said he planned to follow the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante and the 1.2 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument, which could be reduced more than 90 percent. Carved-out areas would be open to both mining and oil drilling.
The decision is part of a review of monuments across the nation.
Zinke’s recommendation would open up the Kaiparowits Plateau in the Grand Staircase, which includes an incredibly rich collection of dinosaur fossils dating to the Cretaceous.
Earlier this month, a nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a 76 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus was airlifted from the plateau for further study at the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City.
The remarkable find — with many bones frozen in life-like movements — was discovered two years ago. It’s the most complete Tyrannosaurus fossil discovered in the American Southwest. Researchers believe it may be a rare fossil of the Teratophoneus curriei, a relative that predated the T. rex and stood about 12 feet tall.
Digs in the area have also uncovered other important fossils of unusual or new species of dinosaurs, like the duck-billed Crested Hadrosaur, horned Ceratopsians and the dome-headed Pachycephalosaur.
“These are things found only in Grand Staircase,” Randy Irmis, the paleontology curator at the Natural History Museum, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “These are world-class paleontological resources.”
Paleontologist Alan Titus, who discovered the Tyrannosaurus fossil, described the Kaiparowits Plateau as a 5,000-foot-thick “sequence of rocks that records the life and times of the dinosaurs during their swan song, the end of the age of dinosaurs” between 100 and 75 million years ago.
“The monument tells a story to scientists” about an ancient North American ecosystem “that we can’t see anywhere else,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s one of the last places where you can almost predictably come out and make new scientific discoveries year after year.”
The Grand Staircase has been federally protected since it was declared a monument 21 years ago by then-President Bill Clinton. “The empty spaces are filling up in the West. We have to imagine what the western landscape is going to look like in 50 years and try to anticipate, rather than wait for conflicts to happen,” Clinton said when he designated the area a monument.
No president in history has shrunk a national monument since the law creating the public lands — the Antiquities Act — was passed over a century ago in 1906.
Trump plans to travel to Utah in December to officially announce his decision to carve out sections of the Utah monuments, which is likely to trigger an immediate court challenge.
A video ad released Thursday by the National Wildlife Federation features Navajo Nation delegate Davis Filfred, who has spoken out against changes to the Bears Ears monument. In the video, he pleads with the president to leave national monuments intact.
“Not all monuments divide us. Some bring us together,” Filfred said. “If you destroy these monuments, our public land could be auctioned off. Our sacred tribal sites would be in danger.”
Teeming With Climate-Change Deniers
The Trump Administration Is Teeming With Climate-Change Deniers
His new NASA pick has alarmed Democrats and Republicans alike.
EMILY ATKIN
It became clear early in Donald Trump’s presidency that many of his top officials shared a common trait: They were climate deniers. Though “climate denial starts at the top,” the New York Times’ Coral Davenport wrote in March, it was trickling down into a variety of high-influence position: Vice President Mike Pence, who once called global warming a “myth” disproved by the fact that his home state once had a cold winter; then-senior advisor Steve Bannon, whose news site Breitbart remains one of the top destinations for climate misinformation; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who believes carbon dioxide is not a “primary contributor” to global warming; and Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who believes the same myth, saying in June, “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”
But that was just the beginning. Nine months into Trump’s presidency, he continues to nominate climate deniers to key spots in his administration. The latest denier of note is Trump’s nominee to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Oklahoma Congressman Jim Bridenstine. Though commonly thought of as solely a space exploration agency, NASA dedicates nearly a tenth of its budget to studying the earth’s climate from space. Scientists around the world use NASA’s space station and its 16 earth science satellites for climate research. NASA scientists monitor and predict changes in Arctic sea ice, as well as changes in the earth’s temperature and rainfall patterns due to carbon emissions. NASA is one of the few remaining government Twitter accounts that still tweets accurately about climate science.
And yet, Trump nominee Bridenstine—whose confirmation goes before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday—frequently spouts easily debunked climate misinformation. A former Navy pilot with no scientific background, Bridenstine has implied that a single snowy day disproves long-term global warming trends. He has used the tired red herring, “The climate has always changed.” He’s explicitly denied that carbon emissions have anything to do warming trends, saying perhaps the sun is instead to blame.
If confirmed, Bridenstine could move NASA away from one its core missions: studying changes to the planet. He once demanded an apology from President Barack Obama for “wasting money” on climate research, and this year he told E&E News that he’s “open to moving earth science out of NASA and into another federal agency.” But Bridenstine is far from the only science denier whom Trump has nominated or appointed in recent months. Here’s a look at the latest misinformers Trump has chosen to top spots in his administration, and how those nominees threaten to take anti-science far beyond basic environmental policy.
The White House has its own body for shaping climate policy, the Council on Environmental Quality, and earlier this month Trump nominated Kathleen Hartnett White to run it. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be one of the more outspoken climate deniers in his administration. The former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), she has called climate science a “kind of paganism” for “secular elites.” She has said excess carbon emissions are “beneficial,” an “essential nutrient for plant growth.” And she believes the United Nations’ efforts to reduce carbon emissions are a veiled attempt to create a “one-world state ruled by planetary managers.” During her six years as TCEQ chair, she was an outspoken advocate against federal regulations to limit ozone, a harmful air pollutant. She “rebuffed proposals to strengthen smog rules and repeatedly allowed large polluters to increase emission limits,” according to the Texas Observer. In her new position, Hartnett White would not only coordinate environmental policy efforts across the federal agencies, but also play a key role in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental reviews of big federal projects. Considering her focus on the moral case for developing fossil fuels—she once said the proliferation of coal helped end slavery—it seems likely she’ll streamline reviews of projects that could harm the climate.
Climate denial is also ascendant at the Department of Agriculture, which is worrisome given the vulnerability of American farms to a changing climate. Under Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who was confirmed in late April, USDA employees have been instructed to avoid the term “climate change” altogether, in favor of more vague terms like “weather extremes,” according to The Guardian. Trump’s nominee for the USDA’s top scientific post, conservative radio host and non-scientist Sam Clovis, has said climate science is a “nonsensical” attempt by progressives to achieve “perfect weather” worldwide. And Bill Northey, who was recently confirmed as the USDA’s undersecretary for farm production and conservation (a new position dedicated to dealing with “domestic agricultural issues”), has said he has “no idea” what’s causing climate change. So as farmers in America cope with increased drought and other weather extremes, it’s unlikely global warming will be one of the “domestic issues” Northey considers.
Other recent Trump picks engage in denial by omission. John Rood, a former Lockheed Martin senior vice president, was appointed in June as undersecretary of defense for policy—the Defense Department’s number-three official, who shapes the Pentagon’s policy agenda. Rood appears to have made no documented statements on climate change, despite widespread agreement throughout the Pentagon that global warming is a national security threat. And the public knows little about the climate positions of AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers, nominated to head one of America’s premier climate change research agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “One of the big unknowns about Myers is his position on climate change,” The Washington Post reported this month. “He has made no known public statements on the politically charged issue.”
The sheer number of deniers now occupying top positions across the government makes clear that climate denial, whether explicit or implicit, is a job requirement in the Trump administration—and one that’s valued more highly than having the knowledge and experience required for the position. This fact, in the case of Trump’s NASA pick, has alarmed Democrats and Republicans alike. “Rep. Bridenstine’s denial of fundamental scientific facts and long record of bigoted and hateful statements run counter to [NASA’s] legacy,” Washington Senator Patty Murray wrote in a letter last week to the Senate Commerce committee. Florida Senator Marco Rubio also expressed concern about the nomination. “It’s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it’s at a critical juncture in its history,” Rubio told Politico, adding that he’d prefer someone who has “respect of the people who work there from a leadership and even a scientific perspective.”
The same could be said about any of the Trump picks named in this article. But Rubio, whose hometown of Miami is slowly sinking into the sea, has been more sanguine about Trump’s other climate-denying nominees, including Pruitt. As it turns out, Rubio’s concern about Bridenstine has nothing to do with the congressman’s refusal to accept climate science; his concern is only that the Kennedy Space Center, located in Cape Canaveral, not be adversely affected by a controversial administrator. “I just think it could be devastating for the space program,” he told Politico. “Obviously, being from Florida, I’m very sensitive to anything that slows up NASA and its mission.” And here we have the problem in black and white—or red and blue. The rise of climate denial on the right long predates Trump; with picks like Bridenstine, he is merely doing the bidding of a Republican Party that asserts, to quote one senator, “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.” That senator was Marco Rubio.
His new NASA pick has alarmed Democrats and Republicans alike.
EMILY ATKIN
It became clear early in Donald Trump’s presidency that many of his top officials shared a common trait: They were climate deniers. Though “climate denial starts at the top,” the New York Times’ Coral Davenport wrote in March, it was trickling down into a variety of high-influence position: Vice President Mike Pence, who once called global warming a “myth” disproved by the fact that his home state once had a cold winter; then-senior advisor Steve Bannon, whose news site Breitbart remains one of the top destinations for climate misinformation; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who believes carbon dioxide is not a “primary contributor” to global warming; and Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who believes the same myth, saying in June, “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”
But that was just the beginning. Nine months into Trump’s presidency, he continues to nominate climate deniers to key spots in his administration. The latest denier of note is Trump’s nominee to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Oklahoma Congressman Jim Bridenstine. Though commonly thought of as solely a space exploration agency, NASA dedicates nearly a tenth of its budget to studying the earth’s climate from space. Scientists around the world use NASA’s space station and its 16 earth science satellites for climate research. NASA scientists monitor and predict changes in Arctic sea ice, as well as changes in the earth’s temperature and rainfall patterns due to carbon emissions. NASA is one of the few remaining government Twitter accounts that still tweets accurately about climate science.
And yet, Trump nominee Bridenstine—whose confirmation goes before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday—frequently spouts easily debunked climate misinformation. A former Navy pilot with no scientific background, Bridenstine has implied that a single snowy day disproves long-term global warming trends. He has used the tired red herring, “The climate has always changed.” He’s explicitly denied that carbon emissions have anything to do warming trends, saying perhaps the sun is instead to blame.
If confirmed, Bridenstine could move NASA away from one its core missions: studying changes to the planet. He once demanded an apology from President Barack Obama for “wasting money” on climate research, and this year he told E&E News that he’s “open to moving earth science out of NASA and into another federal agency.” But Bridenstine is far from the only science denier whom Trump has nominated or appointed in recent months. Here’s a look at the latest misinformers Trump has chosen to top spots in his administration, and how those nominees threaten to take anti-science far beyond basic environmental policy.
The White House has its own body for shaping climate policy, the Council on Environmental Quality, and earlier this month Trump nominated Kathleen Hartnett White to run it. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be one of the more outspoken climate deniers in his administration. The former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), she has called climate science a “kind of paganism” for “secular elites.” She has said excess carbon emissions are “beneficial,” an “essential nutrient for plant growth.” And she believes the United Nations’ efforts to reduce carbon emissions are a veiled attempt to create a “one-world state ruled by planetary managers.” During her six years as TCEQ chair, she was an outspoken advocate against federal regulations to limit ozone, a harmful air pollutant. She “rebuffed proposals to strengthen smog rules and repeatedly allowed large polluters to increase emission limits,” according to the Texas Observer. In her new position, Hartnett White would not only coordinate environmental policy efforts across the federal agencies, but also play a key role in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental reviews of big federal projects. Considering her focus on the moral case for developing fossil fuels—she once said the proliferation of coal helped end slavery—it seems likely she’ll streamline reviews of projects that could harm the climate.
Climate denial is also ascendant at the Department of Agriculture, which is worrisome given the vulnerability of American farms to a changing climate. Under Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who was confirmed in late April, USDA employees have been instructed to avoid the term “climate change” altogether, in favor of more vague terms like “weather extremes,” according to The Guardian. Trump’s nominee for the USDA’s top scientific post, conservative radio host and non-scientist Sam Clovis, has said climate science is a “nonsensical” attempt by progressives to achieve “perfect weather” worldwide. And Bill Northey, who was recently confirmed as the USDA’s undersecretary for farm production and conservation (a new position dedicated to dealing with “domestic agricultural issues”), has said he has “no idea” what’s causing climate change. So as farmers in America cope with increased drought and other weather extremes, it’s unlikely global warming will be one of the “domestic issues” Northey considers.
Other recent Trump picks engage in denial by omission. John Rood, a former Lockheed Martin senior vice president, was appointed in June as undersecretary of defense for policy—the Defense Department’s number-three official, who shapes the Pentagon’s policy agenda. Rood appears to have made no documented statements on climate change, despite widespread agreement throughout the Pentagon that global warming is a national security threat. And the public knows little about the climate positions of AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers, nominated to head one of America’s premier climate change research agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “One of the big unknowns about Myers is his position on climate change,” The Washington Post reported this month. “He has made no known public statements on the politically charged issue.”
The sheer number of deniers now occupying top positions across the government makes clear that climate denial, whether explicit or implicit, is a job requirement in the Trump administration—and one that’s valued more highly than having the knowledge and experience required for the position. This fact, in the case of Trump’s NASA pick, has alarmed Democrats and Republicans alike. “Rep. Bridenstine’s denial of fundamental scientific facts and long record of bigoted and hateful statements run counter to [NASA’s] legacy,” Washington Senator Patty Murray wrote in a letter last week to the Senate Commerce committee. Florida Senator Marco Rubio also expressed concern about the nomination. “It’s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it’s at a critical juncture in its history,” Rubio told Politico, adding that he’d prefer someone who has “respect of the people who work there from a leadership and even a scientific perspective.”
The same could be said about any of the Trump picks named in this article. But Rubio, whose hometown of Miami is slowly sinking into the sea, has been more sanguine about Trump’s other climate-denying nominees, including Pruitt. As it turns out, Rubio’s concern about Bridenstine has nothing to do with the congressman’s refusal to accept climate science; his concern is only that the Kennedy Space Center, located in Cape Canaveral, not be adversely affected by a controversial administrator. “I just think it could be devastating for the space program,” he told Politico. “Obviously, being from Florida, I’m very sensitive to anything that slows up NASA and its mission.” And here we have the problem in black and white—or red and blue. The rise of climate denial on the right long predates Trump; with picks like Bridenstine, he is merely doing the bidding of a Republican Party that asserts, to quote one senator, “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.” That senator was Marco Rubio.
Now isn't that wonderful...
This Officer Shot an Unarmed Black Man. Now She Can Legally Say She Didn’t.
A court ruling last week “essentially makes it as if it never happened.”
By Brandon Ellington Patterson
Former Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer Betty Shelby scored a second legal win last week, when a judge agreed to remove from the public record all documents related to her trial in the shooting death of 43-year-old Terrance Crutcher. Shelby was acquitted in May of manslaughter charges stemming from an encounter with Crutcher in September 2016.
Video footage showed her shoot Crutcher, whose car was stalled in the middle of the highway, as he backed away from her and other officers who were trying to engage him. Attorneys for Shelby argued in court that she shot Crutcher after he attempted to reach into an open car window. (A toxicology test found traces of PCP in Crutcher’s system.)
Under Oklahoma law, the judge’s decision to expunge her record means Shelby can legally deny the shooting ever occurred, and all records related to the incident will remain under court seal. I talked to Tulsa civil rights attorney J. Spencer Bryan to further discuss the law and its implications in such cases.
What is expungement?
Under state law, anyone prosecuted for but acquitted of a crime can petition a judge to have the case wiped from their record. If a judge is convinced that a person’s privacy or other interests outweigh the public benefit of reviewing the materials in question, he or she can order that all or part of them—including arrest records, police reports, or other documents filed with the court during the course of a criminal prosecution—be sealed.
The records are kept by the court for 10 years, after which they may be destroyed. Only a judge can grant access to an outside party, such as a police agency, prosecutor’s office, or news outlet. “It essentially makes it as if it never happened,” Bryan says. “It won’t appear on the docket. You can’t go find it. You can’t pull any documents from it. You can’t look to see when things were even filed. The entirety of the case file would be placed under seal and locked away never to be seen again.”
I searched for Shelby’s case in Tulsa County’s courts database and found nothing. Now she—and all criminal justice agencies involved in the Crutcher case—can legally deny that the shooting ever happened.
Will the shooting follow her to her next police gig?
Not through a court records search or criminal background check. Any prospective employer would have to go through her for information related to the case. Things could get sticky, Bryan says, if Shelby denied the shooting occurred in such a situation. But assuming she acknowledged it, the department still would need to petition a judge if it wanted to check the accuracy of her statements.
A few weeks before retiring from the Tulsa PD, Shelby took a volunteer gig at the Roger’s County Sheriff’s Office—that was in August, the same month a Washington Post special investigation found that, since 2006, more than 450 officers fired for misconduct have been reinstated or hired by other police departments. Expungements in use-of-force cases, Bryan says, facilitate these transitions.
In other cases, officers facing internal reviews have quit before their departments could issue a decision against them—thus maintaining a clean record—and then joined another department. Such was the path charted by former Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014. Loehmann had quit his job at another department after his superiors initiated a process to fire him for poor performance. He later joined the Cleveland PD after failing to disclose the review on his application.
Could the shooting be used against her in a future court proceeding?
Unlikely. Even if you could convince a judge to unseal the records, the trial judge would almost certainly not allow a jury to see them, Bryan says: “It just adds another layer of hiding an officer’s history from the public, which is routinely exposed to that officer.” An individual or an attorney pursuing a civil rights claim against Shelby (as Crutcher’s family is) faces the same obstacles.
How often does this happen?
Bryan says this is the first he’s heard of an officer seeking an expungement after being acquitted of a crime in Oklahoma, but he’s “sure” cops have done it in lower-profile cases. Most states have a process whereby criminal defendants who have been acquitted, had a case dismissed, or have completed probation can have their record expunged, he says. It’s unclear whether any states give police officers special treatment.
What about cops whose use of force was deemed justifiable in an internal review?
In Tulsa, “if there was information contained in the police file, you wouldn’t be able to get it unless you filed a lawsuit and then subpoenaed those records or requested them,” Bryan told me. Many police departments have rules built into their union contracts or in a separate “police officer’s bill of rights” that limit public access to internal records about officers. Some union contracts also mandate that police records related to investigations of an officer be destroyed after a certain number of years. So officers whose misconduct never makes it court are already largely shielded from public scrutiny.
Can’t people just Google Shelby?
Of course, and they’ll find tons of media reports. But the details will be harder to verify now. And a search might not be as fruitful for an officer whose misconduct was not widely covered, Bryan says. Google can potentially tell you that an incident occurred, but it won’t give you access to sealed court documents.
A court ruling last week “essentially makes it as if it never happened.”
By Brandon Ellington Patterson
Former Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer Betty Shelby scored a second legal win last week, when a judge agreed to remove from the public record all documents related to her trial in the shooting death of 43-year-old Terrance Crutcher. Shelby was acquitted in May of manslaughter charges stemming from an encounter with Crutcher in September 2016.
 |
| Shot and killed an unarmed man. |
Video footage showed her shoot Crutcher, whose car was stalled in the middle of the highway, as he backed away from her and other officers who were trying to engage him. Attorneys for Shelby argued in court that she shot Crutcher after he attempted to reach into an open car window. (A toxicology test found traces of PCP in Crutcher’s system.)
Under Oklahoma law, the judge’s decision to expunge her record means Shelby can legally deny the shooting ever occurred, and all records related to the incident will remain under court seal. I talked to Tulsa civil rights attorney J. Spencer Bryan to further discuss the law and its implications in such cases.
What is expungement?
Under state law, anyone prosecuted for but acquitted of a crime can petition a judge to have the case wiped from their record. If a judge is convinced that a person’s privacy or other interests outweigh the public benefit of reviewing the materials in question, he or she can order that all or part of them—including arrest records, police reports, or other documents filed with the court during the course of a criminal prosecution—be sealed.
The records are kept by the court for 10 years, after which they may be destroyed. Only a judge can grant access to an outside party, such as a police agency, prosecutor’s office, or news outlet. “It essentially makes it as if it never happened,” Bryan says. “It won’t appear on the docket. You can’t go find it. You can’t pull any documents from it. You can’t look to see when things were even filed. The entirety of the case file would be placed under seal and locked away never to be seen again.”
I searched for Shelby’s case in Tulsa County’s courts database and found nothing. Now she—and all criminal justice agencies involved in the Crutcher case—can legally deny that the shooting ever happened.
Will the shooting follow her to her next police gig?
Not through a court records search or criminal background check. Any prospective employer would have to go through her for information related to the case. Things could get sticky, Bryan says, if Shelby denied the shooting occurred in such a situation. But assuming she acknowledged it, the department still would need to petition a judge if it wanted to check the accuracy of her statements.
A few weeks before retiring from the Tulsa PD, Shelby took a volunteer gig at the Roger’s County Sheriff’s Office—that was in August, the same month a Washington Post special investigation found that, since 2006, more than 450 officers fired for misconduct have been reinstated or hired by other police departments. Expungements in use-of-force cases, Bryan says, facilitate these transitions.
In other cases, officers facing internal reviews have quit before their departments could issue a decision against them—thus maintaining a clean record—and then joined another department. Such was the path charted by former Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014. Loehmann had quit his job at another department after his superiors initiated a process to fire him for poor performance. He later joined the Cleveland PD after failing to disclose the review on his application.
Could the shooting be used against her in a future court proceeding?
Unlikely. Even if you could convince a judge to unseal the records, the trial judge would almost certainly not allow a jury to see them, Bryan says: “It just adds another layer of hiding an officer’s history from the public, which is routinely exposed to that officer.” An individual or an attorney pursuing a civil rights claim against Shelby (as Crutcher’s family is) faces the same obstacles.
How often does this happen?
Bryan says this is the first he’s heard of an officer seeking an expungement after being acquitted of a crime in Oklahoma, but he’s “sure” cops have done it in lower-profile cases. Most states have a process whereby criminal defendants who have been acquitted, had a case dismissed, or have completed probation can have their record expunged, he says. It’s unclear whether any states give police officers special treatment.
What about cops whose use of force was deemed justifiable in an internal review?
In Tulsa, “if there was information contained in the police file, you wouldn’t be able to get it unless you filed a lawsuit and then subpoenaed those records or requested them,” Bryan told me. Many police departments have rules built into their union contracts or in a separate “police officer’s bill of rights” that limit public access to internal records about officers. Some union contracts also mandate that police records related to investigations of an officer be destroyed after a certain number of years. So officers whose misconduct never makes it court are already largely shielded from public scrutiny.
Can’t people just Google Shelby?
Of course, and they’ll find tons of media reports. But the details will be harder to verify now. And a search might not be as fruitful for an officer whose misconduct was not widely covered, Bryan says. Google can potentially tell you that an incident occurred, but it won’t give you access to sealed court documents.
Splashed with cash
Google, Facebook will testify to lawmakers they’ve splashed with cash
By STEVEN OVERLY and NANCY SCOLA
When Google and Facebook testify before Congress on Russian election interference this week, they'll face committees filled with lawmakers who have collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from the companies.
Since 2009, Google and its employees have contributed to all but three of the 55 lawmakers who now sit on the Senate Judiciary, Senate Intelligence and House Intelligence committees, which are all holding hearings this week on Russian online disinformation, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Facebook and its employees gave to 40 of those lawmakers, the data show.
The widespread giving to members of both parties is part of the industry’s broader effort to gain a greater voice in Washington policy debates in recent years. Those relationships may now prove helpful as Google and Facebook, along with Twitter, confront the biggest political crisis in Silicon Valley's history. Company executives will be grilled this week about how Russia manipulated their platforms to influence last year’s election — and what steps they are taking to prevent future meddling.
"Russian interference in U.S. elections requires the undivided attention of lawmakers, despite the ubiquitous fundraising that comes with running for re-election," said John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency group. "When lawmakers oversee or regulate their donors, this represents, at minimum, a complication in their incentives."
The donations, totaling $1.6 million, are mere pocket change for the multibillion-dollar internet companies, but they highlight how the industry has become a growing source of funding for the political class.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a vocal tech industry advocate, raised the most funds from the trio of internet companies, pulling in $124,625 from the firms and their employees. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who represents the industry's Silicon Valley base, raised $118,906, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) raised $98,293. All three serve on the Intelligence Committee.
Wyden’s office said the contributions won't affect the senator's push for the tech industry to take responsibility for protecting the integrity of U.S. elections.
“Sen. Wyden has long stood for the principle that digital innovation, at its inception, could best flourish free of invasive regulations mean to benefit established special interests," said Keith Chu, a spokesman for the senator. "Today, however, it is clear the major digital platforms have a unique, urgent duty to police their platforms against misuses by actors hostile to U.S. interests, or attacks against core American values.”
Harris, who pursued privacy and consumer-protection cases against tech companies as a state law enforcement official, “continues to be an advocate for those values in the Senate, no matter the company or the industry,” her press secretary Tyrone Gayle said in a statement. Matt Wolking, a spokesman for Rubio, said: “When people choose to support Senator Rubio, they buy into his agenda, not the other way around.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a hearing Tuesday on both terrorist and Russian use of social media, featuring the general counsels of Facebook and Twitter and a security official from Google. On Wednesday, the Senate and House Intelligence committees will hold back-to-back hearings on Russian election meddling with the top lawyers from all three companies scheduled to testify.
The hearings mark the first time the tech companies will face questions in a public forum about their role facilitating "fake news" and Russian efforts to sow racial and social discord during the 2016 race. Much of the attention so far has focused on Russian-linked online political ads, but lawmakers have signaled they're planning to press the companies on a broader array of nefarious activities that occurred on their platforms.
Amid increasing congressional talk of regulating online political ads, Facebook and Twitter took preemptive steps last week to show they're capable of self-policing, unveiling a slate of new rules that require political advertisers to disclose more information about their campaigns and their targeted audience. The companies also provided new information about the extent of Russian activity on their platforms.
Google's political action committee and employees contributed the most of the three companies, shelling out $1.09 million to the committee members since 2009. Facebook and its people donated more than $502,855 to the lawmakers over the same period. Twitter and its employees were less active on the contribution front, donating $11,829 to eight members of the committees.
Google spokeswoman Riva Sciuto declined to comment on Google's PAC contributions, but said employees are free to make political contributions, adding they don't necessarily represent the views of the company. Facebook pointed to their published giving guidelines and did not comment further. Twitter declined to comment.
Much of the company money flowed to senators. Members of the Senate Judiciary panel, which oversees a number of tech policy matters, captured $741,969 in contributions. Senate Intelligence was close behind with $710,542, while members of House Intelligence scored $262,111. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) serve on both Senate panels.
Compared to more established industries like energy, banking or pharmaceuticals, Google and Facebook are relative newcomers to Washington’s giving game. Google first established a political action committee in 2006, with Facebook following in 2011 and Twitter in 2013. Since then, however, they’ve ramped up their giving each election cycle, spreading contributions across both chambers of Congress and both parties.
The Center for Responsive Politics data dates from 2009 through mid-October of this year, and includes contributions from company employees and PACs to candidates' campaigns and leadership PACs.
By STEVEN OVERLY and NANCY SCOLA
When Google and Facebook testify before Congress on Russian election interference this week, they'll face committees filled with lawmakers who have collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from the companies.
Since 2009, Google and its employees have contributed to all but three of the 55 lawmakers who now sit on the Senate Judiciary, Senate Intelligence and House Intelligence committees, which are all holding hearings this week on Russian online disinformation, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Facebook and its employees gave to 40 of those lawmakers, the data show.
The widespread giving to members of both parties is part of the industry’s broader effort to gain a greater voice in Washington policy debates in recent years. Those relationships may now prove helpful as Google and Facebook, along with Twitter, confront the biggest political crisis in Silicon Valley's history. Company executives will be grilled this week about how Russia manipulated their platforms to influence last year’s election — and what steps they are taking to prevent future meddling.
"Russian interference in U.S. elections requires the undivided attention of lawmakers, despite the ubiquitous fundraising that comes with running for re-election," said John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency group. "When lawmakers oversee or regulate their donors, this represents, at minimum, a complication in their incentives."
The donations, totaling $1.6 million, are mere pocket change for the multibillion-dollar internet companies, but they highlight how the industry has become a growing source of funding for the political class.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a vocal tech industry advocate, raised the most funds from the trio of internet companies, pulling in $124,625 from the firms and their employees. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who represents the industry's Silicon Valley base, raised $118,906, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) raised $98,293. All three serve on the Intelligence Committee.
Wyden’s office said the contributions won't affect the senator's push for the tech industry to take responsibility for protecting the integrity of U.S. elections.
“Sen. Wyden has long stood for the principle that digital innovation, at its inception, could best flourish free of invasive regulations mean to benefit established special interests," said Keith Chu, a spokesman for the senator. "Today, however, it is clear the major digital platforms have a unique, urgent duty to police their platforms against misuses by actors hostile to U.S. interests, or attacks against core American values.”
Harris, who pursued privacy and consumer-protection cases against tech companies as a state law enforcement official, “continues to be an advocate for those values in the Senate, no matter the company or the industry,” her press secretary Tyrone Gayle said in a statement. Matt Wolking, a spokesman for Rubio, said: “When people choose to support Senator Rubio, they buy into his agenda, not the other way around.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a hearing Tuesday on both terrorist and Russian use of social media, featuring the general counsels of Facebook and Twitter and a security official from Google. On Wednesday, the Senate and House Intelligence committees will hold back-to-back hearings on Russian election meddling with the top lawyers from all three companies scheduled to testify.
The hearings mark the first time the tech companies will face questions in a public forum about their role facilitating "fake news" and Russian efforts to sow racial and social discord during the 2016 race. Much of the attention so far has focused on Russian-linked online political ads, but lawmakers have signaled they're planning to press the companies on a broader array of nefarious activities that occurred on their platforms.
Amid increasing congressional talk of regulating online political ads, Facebook and Twitter took preemptive steps last week to show they're capable of self-policing, unveiling a slate of new rules that require political advertisers to disclose more information about their campaigns and their targeted audience. The companies also provided new information about the extent of Russian activity on their platforms.
Google's political action committee and employees contributed the most of the three companies, shelling out $1.09 million to the committee members since 2009. Facebook and its people donated more than $502,855 to the lawmakers over the same period. Twitter and its employees were less active on the contribution front, donating $11,829 to eight members of the committees.
Google spokeswoman Riva Sciuto declined to comment on Google's PAC contributions, but said employees are free to make political contributions, adding they don't necessarily represent the views of the company. Facebook pointed to their published giving guidelines and did not comment further. Twitter declined to comment.
Much of the company money flowed to senators. Members of the Senate Judiciary panel, which oversees a number of tech policy matters, captured $741,969 in contributions. Senate Intelligence was close behind with $710,542, while members of House Intelligence scored $262,111. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) serve on both Senate panels.
Compared to more established industries like energy, banking or pharmaceuticals, Google and Facebook are relative newcomers to Washington’s giving game. Google first established a political action committee in 2006, with Facebook following in 2011 and Twitter in 2013. Since then, however, they’ve ramped up their giving each election cycle, spreading contributions across both chambers of Congress and both parties.
The Center for Responsive Politics data dates from 2009 through mid-October of this year, and includes contributions from company employees and PACs to candidates' campaigns and leadership PACs.
6 key findings
6 key findings from Papadopoulos’ guilty plea in Russia probe
By CRISTIANO LIMA
George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, court documents revealed Monday.
The plea deal was entered by Papadopoulos, 30, in a closed Washington, D.C., courtroom earlier this month, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office. It was publicly disclosed Monday and offers evidence of a Trump campaign official coordinating with a Russia-linked official offering "dirt" that could allegedly influence the election.
Here are the key findings from the 14-page court filing:
Papadopoulos made “material false statements” to the FBI in a January interview
The former Trump foreign policy adviser lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation during an interview on Jan. 27, 2017. The meeting was held as part of their investigation into the Russian government’s effort to influence the 2016 campaign and whether there was “coordination” between foreign operatives and the Trump team, documents show.
He lied about meeting a professor with “substantial” ties to the Kremlin
Papadopoulos met with a professor from abroad who had “substantial” connections to Russian government officials on or around March 14, 2016. While Papadopoulos told federal authorities the meeting came prior to him joining Trump’s campaign, it in fact occurred in early March, documents show, after he joined the team. The meeting also came about because of the professor’s interest in Papadopoulos’ role with the Trump camp. They again discussed campaign-related matters on April 26, 2016, after Papadopoulos had been on the campaign team for more than a month.
Papadopoulos also lied to the FBI about the extent of his awareness of the professor’s Moscow connections, calling him “a nothing” who was “just a guy talk[ing] up connections or something,” when in reality he knew of his link to the Kremlin.
He discussed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and her “thousands of emails”
Papadopoulos admitted to authorities that the professor had told him that he possessed “dirt” on then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her “thousands of emails.” The professor also discussed the emails during their meeting in April after Papadopoulos had joined the campaign.
He met with someone described as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin”
During his meeting with the Kremlin-linked professor, Papadopoulos was introduced to a female Russian national who was described to him as a “relative” of the Russian leader. The court filing says she possessed “connections to senior Russian government officials.”
Papadopoulos tried to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin
Documents say Papadopoulos, “over a period of months,” sought to use the connections of the professor and the woman described as Putin’s relative to set up a summit between the campaign and the Russian government.
Following a March meeting with his two contacts, Papadopoulos told a "Campaign Supervisor" of the potential gathering and was told they would "work it through the campaign." The supervisor added, "Great work." Ultimately, the meeting between Russian leadership and the campaign did not take place.
The FBI says his lies and omissions “impeded” the investigation
Mueller’s team says that Papadopoulos, by providing false information and omitting details about his communications with Russian-linked contacts, hindered the FBI’s probe into Russian election interference and any coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, court documents revealed Monday.
The plea deal was entered by Papadopoulos, 30, in a closed Washington, D.C., courtroom earlier this month, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office. It was publicly disclosed Monday and offers evidence of a Trump campaign official coordinating with a Russia-linked official offering "dirt" that could allegedly influence the election.
Here are the key findings from the 14-page court filing:
Papadopoulos made “material false statements” to the FBI in a January interview
The former Trump foreign policy adviser lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation during an interview on Jan. 27, 2017. The meeting was held as part of their investigation into the Russian government’s effort to influence the 2016 campaign and whether there was “coordination” between foreign operatives and the Trump team, documents show.
He lied about meeting a professor with “substantial” ties to the Kremlin
Papadopoulos met with a professor from abroad who had “substantial” connections to Russian government officials on or around March 14, 2016. While Papadopoulos told federal authorities the meeting came prior to him joining Trump’s campaign, it in fact occurred in early March, documents show, after he joined the team. The meeting also came about because of the professor’s interest in Papadopoulos’ role with the Trump camp. They again discussed campaign-related matters on April 26, 2016, after Papadopoulos had been on the campaign team for more than a month.
Papadopoulos also lied to the FBI about the extent of his awareness of the professor’s Moscow connections, calling him “a nothing” who was “just a guy talk[ing] up connections or something,” when in reality he knew of his link to the Kremlin.
He discussed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and her “thousands of emails”
Papadopoulos admitted to authorities that the professor had told him that he possessed “dirt” on then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her “thousands of emails.” The professor also discussed the emails during their meeting in April after Papadopoulos had joined the campaign.
He met with someone described as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin”
During his meeting with the Kremlin-linked professor, Papadopoulos was introduced to a female Russian national who was described to him as a “relative” of the Russian leader. The court filing says she possessed “connections to senior Russian government officials.”
Papadopoulos tried to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin
Documents say Papadopoulos, “over a period of months,” sought to use the connections of the professor and the woman described as Putin’s relative to set up a summit between the campaign and the Russian government.
Following a March meeting with his two contacts, Papadopoulos told a "Campaign Supervisor" of the potential gathering and was told they would "work it through the campaign." The supervisor added, "Great work." Ultimately, the meeting between Russian leadership and the campaign did not take place.
The FBI says his lies and omissions “impeded” the investigation
Mueller’s team says that Papadopoulos, by providing false information and omitting details about his communications with Russian-linked contacts, hindered the FBI’s probe into Russian election interference and any coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Tax decision
White House 'close' on state, local tax decision, N.Y. rep says
By AARON LORENZO
Top Trump administration officials are nearing a decision on the federal deduction for state and local taxes in a tax overhaul, they told New York’s nine GOP House members late Monday.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn promised in a phone call with the lawmakers they would work on the issue throughout the day Tuesday, said Rep. Dan Donovan (R-N.Y.).
“They’re saying they’re close,” Donovan said.
But he wouldn't say whether he’d vote against tax legislation if it doesn't treat the longstanding deduction to his liking. Congressional Republican leaders previously proposed getting rid of it, with support from President Donald Trump.
More recently, in an effort to maintain support for their broader tax bill, House GOP leadership proposed keeping a deduction for property taxes but ending it for non-federal income and sales taxes.
Mnuchin and Cohn didn’t commit to fully preserving or eliminating the existing deduction, which matters in high-tax states like New York that funnel more tax revenue into federal coffers than they get back in benefits, Donovan said. They also didn’t commit to a compromise, either.
But Mnuchin's and Cohn’s New York ties – both have lived and worked there – give them a better understanding of the situation than others who have called for killing the deduction, Donovan said. The same is true of Trump, Donovan said.
“They understand how important it is to the nine of us and the people we represent,” he said.
All nine Republican House members from New York spoke on the call, Donovan said, adding that he and the others heard more about this issue from constituents than anything else over their past few days back in their districts.
By AARON LORENZO
Top Trump administration officials are nearing a decision on the federal deduction for state and local taxes in a tax overhaul, they told New York’s nine GOP House members late Monday.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn promised in a phone call with the lawmakers they would work on the issue throughout the day Tuesday, said Rep. Dan Donovan (R-N.Y.).
“They’re saying they’re close,” Donovan said.
But he wouldn't say whether he’d vote against tax legislation if it doesn't treat the longstanding deduction to his liking. Congressional Republican leaders previously proposed getting rid of it, with support from President Donald Trump.
More recently, in an effort to maintain support for their broader tax bill, House GOP leadership proposed keeping a deduction for property taxes but ending it for non-federal income and sales taxes.
Mnuchin and Cohn didn’t commit to fully preserving or eliminating the existing deduction, which matters in high-tax states like New York that funnel more tax revenue into federal coffers than they get back in benefits, Donovan said. They also didn’t commit to a compromise, either.
But Mnuchin's and Cohn’s New York ties – both have lived and worked there – give them a better understanding of the situation than others who have called for killing the deduction, Donovan said. The same is true of Trump, Donovan said.
“They understand how important it is to the nine of us and the people we represent,” he said.
All nine Republican House members from New York spoke on the call, Donovan said, adding that he and the others heard more about this issue from constituents than anything else over their past few days back in their districts.
Worst Explanation
Is This the Worst Explanation for Why Trump Won?
The creator of Dilbert wrote a book about the president’s powers of persuasion. I wasn’t persuaded.
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
If you’re worried that the Trump-vise crushing your American skull is losing its grip, I’ve got just the thing to tighten up the temples: Scott Adams’ Win Bigly.
For a mere $27, you can own this new book, a hymn to President Donald Trump as huckster, by the inventor of the cartoon Dilbert. Win Bigly is like an oxygen-free cubicle into which is piped a barking infomercial for the president. If you buy the book now, I’ll throw in a monthlong migraine absolutely free of charge.
Indeed, Win Bigly is a grind, a sales pitch that aims to convince readers, by applying max rhetorical pressure, of two twisted notions. First, that Trump is a high priest of seduction—a kind of political pickup artist with a game so masterful no voter can resist him. And second, that there’s something supremely admirable in pickup artistry, even when the pickup involves extortion, simian dominance moves and flat-out lies—the stuff that, in courtship terms, is closer to rape than seduction.
As Adams sees it, Trump didn’t win because historical odds had the Democrat losing after winning two prior presidential elections. He didn’t win because working-class men were suffering in Michigan. He didn’t win because of that felon he ran against, or because of voter suppression, or because of Russian influence operations. He was also not what the people wanted. He won because of his world-historical capacity for sales gibberish, and that is a good thing, if you ask Adams, because he loves the spectacle of a mesmeric businessman making chumps of his enemies.
Win Bigly is a hybrid of victory lap, self-help and ode to the confidence game. It’s a victory lap because Adams, to the bewilderment of Dilbert fans, came out during the election as an admirer of Trump as a master of persuasion’s dark arts. At first, he could pass it off as sympathy for the devil, but then it became clear that Adams had actual stars in his eyes. His rep now rested on a Trump triumph, so he was gunning for it. Although Adams styles himself as an “ultra-liberal,” as he says in the book, he has somehow convinced himself that Trump is no threat to his ideals. In Adams’ telling, Trump is just a wily old geezer—and a real riot once you know what he’s up to.
The lion’s share of Win Bigly is set during the 2016 election, which, as history has recorded, Trump won. (Small blessing: We don’t revisit Trump’s New York days as a self-styled deal maestro, whose thuggish offers-you-can’t-refuse in real estate were part and parcel of his moral, and then actual, bankruptcy.) But Adams’ choice to stick with the overparsed election is ill-conceived, too. As 65,844,954 American voters soundly snubbed Trump in favor of his opponent, it’s hard to claim that he is the irresistible Ryan Gosling of the girlish electorate.
Nonetheless, Adams makes a manful effort. He believes that he, like his hero, is powerfully persuasive. He finds it important to tell us over and over that he’s a “trained hypnotist,” and his watch-swinging tone of voice sure enough makes the reader believe she is supposed to be getting sleeeepy. As for Trump, here are his trove of superhero persuasion tricks, as glossed by Adams: Trump repeats himself; he asks directly to be believed; he keeps it simple; he’s ambiguous. He does everything but neg you to get you to succumb to his charms.
Adams’ aim with this book is not to unearth these techniques as a public service or a warning. Instead, he seems to want to redeem the rhetorical skills of the serpent, persuading readers to love the conman’s hiss, fangs and poison for their own sake. This means accepting Adams’ view of his readers and Trump voters as “moist robots”—or, “programmable entities”—who are both barely human and infinitely vulnerable to manipulation and suggestion. A hundred percent of Trump’s supporters are a basket of moist robots? Unlike “deplorable,” I doubt “moist robot” is going to go into any Trumpite’s Twitter handle anytime soon. Maybe when you’re a star, they let you do anything, but my first reaction to Adams’ attempted hypnosis in this book was to try to Mace it.
William Blake once said that John Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” He meant that Milton wrote the character of Satan so vividly he must have subconsciously adored him. Certainly there are always people who admire the swashbuckling rebel evil of the Ozzy Osbourne variety. A small subset of those of Satan’s party, however, are not amused spectators but aspiring sadists themselves, and Adams has somehow become one of those. Like Trump, he now seems to enjoy the pain of others. When observers expressed “anger, fear, disappointment and shock” at the outcome of the election that brought them up short, Adams saw their anguish as “a show of cognitive dissonance so pure and so deep that it was, frankly, beautiful.”
Why this new crusade for Adams? Well, if he’s to be believed, and he cautions us not to believe him for a second, he’s not out to get rich. He is already too Dilbert-rich. (Sound familiar? “I don’t need your money” is the first line of hokum of many cons, and surely a way to get into your pants … pockets.) Adams is also, he says, not partisan. In one of the weirdest passages in a weird book, he spells out the eccentric “ultra-liberal” policies he advocates, including that only women should decide abortion laws and that generous reparations for slavery should be underwritten by a 25 percent tax on the top 1 percent of the population. These rhetorical postures are meant to make Adams sound like he has no dog in the bygone 2016 race. Yet, he clearly does. He has made a second career as a moony Trump admirer. And Trump, so far, has said very little about reparations or female separatist voting blocs.
When a book feels like a psychic trap, often it’s because it is built on a tautology. Win Bigly is. Trump won the election because he’s a Master Persuader; the proof that he’s a Master Persuader is that he won the election. Round and round Adams goes, as if he is offering lordly wisdom about overmastering other people from Trump’s playbook. By book’s end, Adams has become a kind of cartoonish Goebbels—and not Goebbels meaning “Nazi,” but the historical Joseph Goebbels, famous for announcing he was the king of lies. Arguments, Goebbels believed, should be “crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect.” He also believed that “truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and instincts.” Oh look, here’s Adams’s subtitle: “Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” (Adams, for the record, has said he does not like being likened to Goebbels.)
In his own commitment to bypassing everyone’s intellect, Adams nearly always uses “persuade” without an object, as if one might be persuaded without being persuaded of something. The proof that someone is persuasive is that he has changed your mind, and yet Adams offers no proof that Trump’s rhetoric changed anyone’s mind. Registered Republicans voted overwhelmingly for him. Some Barack Obama voters who felt left behind by the Democratic Party voted for him. Those who favored the deportation of Mexicans and Muslims voted for him. Those with contempt for his female opponent voted for him. These reasons may be savory or not, but they are not the reasons of brainless chumps.
“Is this sort of framing unethical?” Adams asks in curiously small print in the book (which he reserves for his reprinted blog posts). Maybe, he says, when negotiating with a family member or a friend, but when bullying an adversary, anything goes. To Adams, as to Trump in Adams’s surmise, the American people are an adversary to be strong-armed into casting their votes for a fraud.
The book, which praises Trump with hyperbole usually reserved for Trump when he’s talking about himself, notably never makes a case for Trump as president of the United States. Adams admits his reasons for supporting Trump were careerist: Once he got himself into a lather about the candidate’s virtuosity, his professional standing rested on his being right about Trump’s victory. Anyway, as Adams makes clear, endorsing a candidate is only ever a pose, and Adams went through four of them. He first endorsed Hillary Clinton because he feared that her army of trolls would physically harm him if he didn’t. (“Clinton supporters have convinced me—and I’m 100 percent serious—that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump.”) He deciding that Clinton, with her tax plan, was trying “to rob my estate.” He endorsed Trump only to have that cost him speaking gigs and draw trolls on Twitter; scared again, he switched to Gary Johnson. But it seems he was still mad about his estate being robbed and those mean tweets, and he decided he needed to stand up to the “Hillbullies” using his indomitable powers of persuasion.
And so, Adams re-endorsed Trump. He nursed his contempt for Hillbullies. He savored his sense of himself as better at persuasion than everyone but maybe Trump. And then he wrote this sorrowful book.
The creator of Dilbert wrote a book about the president’s powers of persuasion. I wasn’t persuaded.
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
If you’re worried that the Trump-vise crushing your American skull is losing its grip, I’ve got just the thing to tighten up the temples: Scott Adams’ Win Bigly.
For a mere $27, you can own this new book, a hymn to President Donald Trump as huckster, by the inventor of the cartoon Dilbert. Win Bigly is like an oxygen-free cubicle into which is piped a barking infomercial for the president. If you buy the book now, I’ll throw in a monthlong migraine absolutely free of charge.
Indeed, Win Bigly is a grind, a sales pitch that aims to convince readers, by applying max rhetorical pressure, of two twisted notions. First, that Trump is a high priest of seduction—a kind of political pickup artist with a game so masterful no voter can resist him. And second, that there’s something supremely admirable in pickup artistry, even when the pickup involves extortion, simian dominance moves and flat-out lies—the stuff that, in courtship terms, is closer to rape than seduction.
As Adams sees it, Trump didn’t win because historical odds had the Democrat losing after winning two prior presidential elections. He didn’t win because working-class men were suffering in Michigan. He didn’t win because of that felon he ran against, or because of voter suppression, or because of Russian influence operations. He was also not what the people wanted. He won because of his world-historical capacity for sales gibberish, and that is a good thing, if you ask Adams, because he loves the spectacle of a mesmeric businessman making chumps of his enemies.
Win Bigly is a hybrid of victory lap, self-help and ode to the confidence game. It’s a victory lap because Adams, to the bewilderment of Dilbert fans, came out during the election as an admirer of Trump as a master of persuasion’s dark arts. At first, he could pass it off as sympathy for the devil, but then it became clear that Adams had actual stars in his eyes. His rep now rested on a Trump triumph, so he was gunning for it. Although Adams styles himself as an “ultra-liberal,” as he says in the book, he has somehow convinced himself that Trump is no threat to his ideals. In Adams’ telling, Trump is just a wily old geezer—and a real riot once you know what he’s up to.
The lion’s share of Win Bigly is set during the 2016 election, which, as history has recorded, Trump won. (Small blessing: We don’t revisit Trump’s New York days as a self-styled deal maestro, whose thuggish offers-you-can’t-refuse in real estate were part and parcel of his moral, and then actual, bankruptcy.) But Adams’ choice to stick with the overparsed election is ill-conceived, too. As 65,844,954 American voters soundly snubbed Trump in favor of his opponent, it’s hard to claim that he is the irresistible Ryan Gosling of the girlish electorate.
Nonetheless, Adams makes a manful effort. He believes that he, like his hero, is powerfully persuasive. He finds it important to tell us over and over that he’s a “trained hypnotist,” and his watch-swinging tone of voice sure enough makes the reader believe she is supposed to be getting sleeeepy. As for Trump, here are his trove of superhero persuasion tricks, as glossed by Adams: Trump repeats himself; he asks directly to be believed; he keeps it simple; he’s ambiguous. He does everything but neg you to get you to succumb to his charms.
Adams’ aim with this book is not to unearth these techniques as a public service or a warning. Instead, he seems to want to redeem the rhetorical skills of the serpent, persuading readers to love the conman’s hiss, fangs and poison for their own sake. This means accepting Adams’ view of his readers and Trump voters as “moist robots”—or, “programmable entities”—who are both barely human and infinitely vulnerable to manipulation and suggestion. A hundred percent of Trump’s supporters are a basket of moist robots? Unlike “deplorable,” I doubt “moist robot” is going to go into any Trumpite’s Twitter handle anytime soon. Maybe when you’re a star, they let you do anything, but my first reaction to Adams’ attempted hypnosis in this book was to try to Mace it.
William Blake once said that John Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” He meant that Milton wrote the character of Satan so vividly he must have subconsciously adored him. Certainly there are always people who admire the swashbuckling rebel evil of the Ozzy Osbourne variety. A small subset of those of Satan’s party, however, are not amused spectators but aspiring sadists themselves, and Adams has somehow become one of those. Like Trump, he now seems to enjoy the pain of others. When observers expressed “anger, fear, disappointment and shock” at the outcome of the election that brought them up short, Adams saw their anguish as “a show of cognitive dissonance so pure and so deep that it was, frankly, beautiful.”
Why this new crusade for Adams? Well, if he’s to be believed, and he cautions us not to believe him for a second, he’s not out to get rich. He is already too Dilbert-rich. (Sound familiar? “I don’t need your money” is the first line of hokum of many cons, and surely a way to get into your pants … pockets.) Adams is also, he says, not partisan. In one of the weirdest passages in a weird book, he spells out the eccentric “ultra-liberal” policies he advocates, including that only women should decide abortion laws and that generous reparations for slavery should be underwritten by a 25 percent tax on the top 1 percent of the population. These rhetorical postures are meant to make Adams sound like he has no dog in the bygone 2016 race. Yet, he clearly does. He has made a second career as a moony Trump admirer. And Trump, so far, has said very little about reparations or female separatist voting blocs.
When a book feels like a psychic trap, often it’s because it is built on a tautology. Win Bigly is. Trump won the election because he’s a Master Persuader; the proof that he’s a Master Persuader is that he won the election. Round and round Adams goes, as if he is offering lordly wisdom about overmastering other people from Trump’s playbook. By book’s end, Adams has become a kind of cartoonish Goebbels—and not Goebbels meaning “Nazi,” but the historical Joseph Goebbels, famous for announcing he was the king of lies. Arguments, Goebbels believed, should be “crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect.” He also believed that “truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and instincts.” Oh look, here’s Adams’s subtitle: “Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” (Adams, for the record, has said he does not like being likened to Goebbels.)
In his own commitment to bypassing everyone’s intellect, Adams nearly always uses “persuade” without an object, as if one might be persuaded without being persuaded of something. The proof that someone is persuasive is that he has changed your mind, and yet Adams offers no proof that Trump’s rhetoric changed anyone’s mind. Registered Republicans voted overwhelmingly for him. Some Barack Obama voters who felt left behind by the Democratic Party voted for him. Those who favored the deportation of Mexicans and Muslims voted for him. Those with contempt for his female opponent voted for him. These reasons may be savory or not, but they are not the reasons of brainless chumps.
“Is this sort of framing unethical?” Adams asks in curiously small print in the book (which he reserves for his reprinted blog posts). Maybe, he says, when negotiating with a family member or a friend, but when bullying an adversary, anything goes. To Adams, as to Trump in Adams’s surmise, the American people are an adversary to be strong-armed into casting their votes for a fraud.
The book, which praises Trump with hyperbole usually reserved for Trump when he’s talking about himself, notably never makes a case for Trump as president of the United States. Adams admits his reasons for supporting Trump were careerist: Once he got himself into a lather about the candidate’s virtuosity, his professional standing rested on his being right about Trump’s victory. Anyway, as Adams makes clear, endorsing a candidate is only ever a pose, and Adams went through four of them. He first endorsed Hillary Clinton because he feared that her army of trolls would physically harm him if he didn’t. (“Clinton supporters have convinced me—and I’m 100 percent serious—that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump.”) He deciding that Clinton, with her tax plan, was trying “to rob my estate.” He endorsed Trump only to have that cost him speaking gigs and draw trolls on Twitter; scared again, he switched to Gary Johnson. But it seems he was still mad about his estate being robbed and those mean tweets, and he decided he needed to stand up to the “Hillbullies” using his indomitable powers of persuasion.
And so, Adams re-endorsed Trump. He nursed his contempt for Hillbullies. He savored his sense of himself as better at persuasion than everyone but maybe Trump. And then he wrote this sorrowful book.
"I may have discussed Russia"
Carter Page: I may have discussed Russia in emails with Papadopoulos
By BRENT D. GRIFFITHS
Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, said he might have exchanged emails about Russia with a fellow adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the president's campaign and possible collusion with the Russian government.
"It may have come up, yeah," Page told MSNBC's Chris Hayes when asked whether he may have exchanged emails with George Papadopoulos and whether the two discussed Russia.
As he has in the past, Page repeatedly declined to provide direct answer to questions about his role on Trump's campaign.
Page and Papadopoulos both served as foreign policy advisers for the campaign. Trump also named both of them when he listed off those who were shaping his views on foreign policy during an interview with the Washington Post.
Page also said that he has not read legal documents unsealed on Monday that detail Papadopoulos' attempt to set up a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump.
Papadopoulos was arrested at Dulles Airport in July and has since served as a cooperating witness into Mueller's probe. As part of his deal, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents.
While not mentioned in the indictment, Page has come under the fire in the past for a trip he took to Russia during the campaign. Page has stressed that the trip had nothing to do with the campaign.
He added that his name will be cleared when more details about the Christopher Steele dossier are made public. The dossier, which was eventually published by Buzzfeed, contains a number of allegations about Page, Trump and other officials who may have colluded with Russia.
By BRENT D. GRIFFITHS
Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, said he might have exchanged emails about Russia with a fellow adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the president's campaign and possible collusion with the Russian government.
"It may have come up, yeah," Page told MSNBC's Chris Hayes when asked whether he may have exchanged emails with George Papadopoulos and whether the two discussed Russia.
As he has in the past, Page repeatedly declined to provide direct answer to questions about his role on Trump's campaign.
Page and Papadopoulos both served as foreign policy advisers for the campaign. Trump also named both of them when he listed off those who were shaping his views on foreign policy during an interview with the Washington Post.
Page also said that he has not read legal documents unsealed on Monday that detail Papadopoulos' attempt to set up a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump.
Papadopoulos was arrested at Dulles Airport in July and has since served as a cooperating witness into Mueller's probe. As part of his deal, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents.
While not mentioned in the indictment, Page has come under the fire in the past for a trip he took to Russia during the campaign. Page has stressed that the trip had nothing to do with the campaign.
He added that his name will be cleared when more details about the Christopher Steele dossier are made public. The dossier, which was eventually published by Buzzfeed, contains a number of allegations about Page, Trump and other officials who may have colluded with Russia.
Russia strikes again with troll attack...
Putin’s Pro-Trump Trolls Just Targeted Hillary Clinton and Robert Mueller
Russia strikes again as Congress grills Facebook, Twitter, and Google on lax oversight and disappearing data.
DENISE CLIFTON
Russian bots and trolls on Twitter have stayed plenty busy lately. In the days before charges against three former Trump campaign officials were unsealed on Monday, Russian influencers tracked by the Hamilton 68 dashboard were pushing stories on Twitter about “collusion” between Russia and Hillary Clinton—a narrative regarding a 2010 sale of uranium rights that has long since been debunked. According to the nonpartisan security research project, a week’s worth of tweets from late October turned up a wave of content with “some variation on a theme of corruption, collusion, cover-up by the Clinton-led State Department and/or the Mueller-led FBI,” as well as content attacking special counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey. And since Friday, when news reports made clear that the special counsel’s team was moving ahead with indictments, the dashboard began registering a sharp increase in attacks specifically against Mueller.
As such propaganda campaigns continue to infect social media, researchers face a daunting challenge in diagnosing their impact. Thanks to how Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other tech giants currently operate, the underlying data from social media platforms can easily become inaccessible. And the frustration extends to increasingly agitated congressional investigators, who will hear testimony from tech leaders on Tuesday and Wednesday concerning the Kremlin’s propaganda war on the 2016 election.
“You can launch a disinformation campaign in the digital age and then all evidence of that campaign can just disappear,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher in Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, which found that battleground states were inundated with fake news and propaganda from Russian sources in the days before Trump was elected.
Facebook recently removed access to thousands of posts by Russian-controlled accounts analyzed independently by Columbia University researcher Jonathan Albright. And while Albright told The Washington Post recently that those posts likely reached millions more than the 10 million people Facebook had originally estimated, Facebook is now set to tell Congress that Russian-linked content may have reached as many 126 million users. For its part, Google will testify that Russian agents uploaded more than 1,000 videos to YouTube.
Researchers say that links to fake news stories or YouTube videos may work one day and return an error message the next. Propaganda-spewing Twitter accounts may suddenly go dark—perhaps because the owners deactivated them, or perhaps because the accounts were flagged and the social network suspended them, as Twitter did this fall with 201 accounts discovered to be part of a Russian influence operation. Recode reported Monday that Twitter will tell Congress it has since found more than 2,700 accounts tied to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency.
Three senators recently introduced the bipartisan Honest Ads Act, which would require social-media companies to disclose the sources of political ads; a companion bipartisan bill also was introduced in the House. “If Boris Badenov is sitting in some troll farm in St. Petersburg pretending to be the Tennessee GOP, I think Americans have a right to know,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), one of the bill’s sponsors.
Last week Twitter made a pre-emptive move to open up more data about advertising, announcing a new Advertising Transparency Center that would show the sources for all ads posted on Twitter and reveal audience-targeting information. Twitter also said it will no longer accept advertising from RT and Sputnik, two Russian-media organizations that have spent $1.9 million on Twitter ads since 2011 and were identified by the U.S. intelligence community as key players in Russia’s 2016 election interference. On Friday, Facebook also announced plans to improve transparency for its ads ahead of the US midterm elections in 2018.
But researchers say these efforts don’t address the fact that propaganda is often spread through sock-puppet accounts or groups that produce authored posts rather than paid ads. For example, as Buzzfeed reported, the “TEN_GOP” Twitter account— which posed as the “Unofficial Twitter of Tennessee Republicans” but was revealed by Russian journalists to be operated by a Kremlin troll factory—had 136,000 followers before it was shut down. And the account was retweeted before the election by Trump multiple aides including senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, according to The Daily Beast. Many TEN_GOP posts appeared to be authored posts rather than ads, says Ben Nimmo, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who recently did a deep dive into reconstructing some of the TEN_GOP tweeting history. Twitter has said that none of the 201 Russian-linked accounts it closed were registered as advertisers on the platform.
A key challenge here is that user privacy has been baked into Twitter and Facebook’s platforms since their inception. “Their first instinct was to protect people’s privacy,” Nimmo says. “And then when a malicious Russian account is found, their instinct is to get rid of it. And then you don’t have it at all. There goes a lot of evidence.”
He adds: “The platforms are between a rock and a hard place. They have to balance protecting people from the minority of anonymous malicious users with protecting the privacy of the majority of users.”
Some researchers’ attitudes toward data and privacy have begun to shift as disinformation campaigns have hit social networks. “Two years ago, I would have been arguing that data retention is bad because of privacy reasons,” Bradshaw says. “Now, I would say that some data retention is good.”
But it’s not an easy equation to solve. Nimmo recalls how the social-media networks’ anonymous accounts were celebrated as an asset to democratic movements during the Arab Spring protests in 2010. “Pro-democracy demonstrators were using anonymous accounts to organize protests because then they were safe,” he says. “Now, malicious users have figured out they can hide behind anonymous accounts as well.”
Emilio Ferrara, a University of Southern California research professor whose work showed that 1 in 5 election-related tweets last fall were generated by bots, says Twitter’s instinct to remove propaganda may be understandable, but if it involves actually deleting data, that’s problematic. “There is no need to physically destroy such content in the company’s servers. It can be just hidden from the public interface, and records should be kept for auditing purposes,” he says. “Their implementation raises critical issues on accountability that social media service providers should be asked to address moving forward.”
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment to Mother Jones about what types of data might be preserved, but said that the company looks forward to discussing these issues on Capitol Hill.
Lisa-Maria Neudert, another lead researcher at Oxford, believes the social media companies, lawmakers and researchers should be working together as they investigate the Russian influence campaign. “It is a year after the US elections and slowly we are being spoon-fed with tiny chunks of data, and reveals about potential Russian election hacking,” she says. “These analyses need to speed up, and engage research and government. It seems to me, that just because they are occurring in a new sphere, online, they go unaddressed. Imagine a state had hacked our national TV channels for propaganda—there would be an uproar.”
For now, in order to protect research even when data disappears, Bradshaw says Oxford researchers have started capturing more screenshots from suspicious accounts. In the meantime, researchers can still make some painstaking headway with data that’s publicly available, Neudert says.
Ultimately, the question over what responsibility social-media companies should bear for disinformation may become a First Amendment debate. Leah Lievrouw, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who researches the intersection of media and information technologies, says the government could model regulation of the tech companies using rules that historically have governed the broadcast media or telecom industries—but she says that she sees an even higher bar for social-media companies, pertaining to the First Amendment.
“They want to avoid taking the responsibility of the cultural institutions they are,” Lievrouw says, noting that publishing and advertising companies set their own rules to safeguard the integrity of their content. “Come on, Facebook. You’re one of the big media grown-ups now.”
Russia strikes again as Congress grills Facebook, Twitter, and Google on lax oversight and disappearing data.
DENISE CLIFTON
Russian bots and trolls on Twitter have stayed plenty busy lately. In the days before charges against three former Trump campaign officials were unsealed on Monday, Russian influencers tracked by the Hamilton 68 dashboard were pushing stories on Twitter about “collusion” between Russia and Hillary Clinton—a narrative regarding a 2010 sale of uranium rights that has long since been debunked. According to the nonpartisan security research project, a week’s worth of tweets from late October turned up a wave of content with “some variation on a theme of corruption, collusion, cover-up by the Clinton-led State Department and/or the Mueller-led FBI,” as well as content attacking special counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey. And since Friday, when news reports made clear that the special counsel’s team was moving ahead with indictments, the dashboard began registering a sharp increase in attacks specifically against Mueller.
As such propaganda campaigns continue to infect social media, researchers face a daunting challenge in diagnosing their impact. Thanks to how Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other tech giants currently operate, the underlying data from social media platforms can easily become inaccessible. And the frustration extends to increasingly agitated congressional investigators, who will hear testimony from tech leaders on Tuesday and Wednesday concerning the Kremlin’s propaganda war on the 2016 election.
“You can launch a disinformation campaign in the digital age and then all evidence of that campaign can just disappear,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher in Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, which found that battleground states were inundated with fake news and propaganda from Russian sources in the days before Trump was elected.
Facebook recently removed access to thousands of posts by Russian-controlled accounts analyzed independently by Columbia University researcher Jonathan Albright. And while Albright told The Washington Post recently that those posts likely reached millions more than the 10 million people Facebook had originally estimated, Facebook is now set to tell Congress that Russian-linked content may have reached as many 126 million users. For its part, Google will testify that Russian agents uploaded more than 1,000 videos to YouTube.
Researchers say that links to fake news stories or YouTube videos may work one day and return an error message the next. Propaganda-spewing Twitter accounts may suddenly go dark—perhaps because the owners deactivated them, or perhaps because the accounts were flagged and the social network suspended them, as Twitter did this fall with 201 accounts discovered to be part of a Russian influence operation. Recode reported Monday that Twitter will tell Congress it has since found more than 2,700 accounts tied to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency.
Three senators recently introduced the bipartisan Honest Ads Act, which would require social-media companies to disclose the sources of political ads; a companion bipartisan bill also was introduced in the House. “If Boris Badenov is sitting in some troll farm in St. Petersburg pretending to be the Tennessee GOP, I think Americans have a right to know,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), one of the bill’s sponsors.
Last week Twitter made a pre-emptive move to open up more data about advertising, announcing a new Advertising Transparency Center that would show the sources for all ads posted on Twitter and reveal audience-targeting information. Twitter also said it will no longer accept advertising from RT and Sputnik, two Russian-media organizations that have spent $1.9 million on Twitter ads since 2011 and were identified by the U.S. intelligence community as key players in Russia’s 2016 election interference. On Friday, Facebook also announced plans to improve transparency for its ads ahead of the US midterm elections in 2018.
But researchers say these efforts don’t address the fact that propaganda is often spread through sock-puppet accounts or groups that produce authored posts rather than paid ads. For example, as Buzzfeed reported, the “TEN_GOP” Twitter account— which posed as the “Unofficial Twitter of Tennessee Republicans” but was revealed by Russian journalists to be operated by a Kremlin troll factory—had 136,000 followers before it was shut down. And the account was retweeted before the election by Trump multiple aides including senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, according to The Daily Beast. Many TEN_GOP posts appeared to be authored posts rather than ads, says Ben Nimmo, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who recently did a deep dive into reconstructing some of the TEN_GOP tweeting history. Twitter has said that none of the 201 Russian-linked accounts it closed were registered as advertisers on the platform.
A key challenge here is that user privacy has been baked into Twitter and Facebook’s platforms since their inception. “Their first instinct was to protect people’s privacy,” Nimmo says. “And then when a malicious Russian account is found, their instinct is to get rid of it. And then you don’t have it at all. There goes a lot of evidence.”
He adds: “The platforms are between a rock and a hard place. They have to balance protecting people from the minority of anonymous malicious users with protecting the privacy of the majority of users.”
Some researchers’ attitudes toward data and privacy have begun to shift as disinformation campaigns have hit social networks. “Two years ago, I would have been arguing that data retention is bad because of privacy reasons,” Bradshaw says. “Now, I would say that some data retention is good.”
But it’s not an easy equation to solve. Nimmo recalls how the social-media networks’ anonymous accounts were celebrated as an asset to democratic movements during the Arab Spring protests in 2010. “Pro-democracy demonstrators were using anonymous accounts to organize protests because then they were safe,” he says. “Now, malicious users have figured out they can hide behind anonymous accounts as well.”
Emilio Ferrara, a University of Southern California research professor whose work showed that 1 in 5 election-related tweets last fall were generated by bots, says Twitter’s instinct to remove propaganda may be understandable, but if it involves actually deleting data, that’s problematic. “There is no need to physically destroy such content in the company’s servers. It can be just hidden from the public interface, and records should be kept for auditing purposes,” he says. “Their implementation raises critical issues on accountability that social media service providers should be asked to address moving forward.”
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment to Mother Jones about what types of data might be preserved, but said that the company looks forward to discussing these issues on Capitol Hill.
Lisa-Maria Neudert, another lead researcher at Oxford, believes the social media companies, lawmakers and researchers should be working together as they investigate the Russian influence campaign. “It is a year after the US elections and slowly we are being spoon-fed with tiny chunks of data, and reveals about potential Russian election hacking,” she says. “These analyses need to speed up, and engage research and government. It seems to me, that just because they are occurring in a new sphere, online, they go unaddressed. Imagine a state had hacked our national TV channels for propaganda—there would be an uproar.”
For now, in order to protect research even when data disappears, Bradshaw says Oxford researchers have started capturing more screenshots from suspicious accounts. In the meantime, researchers can still make some painstaking headway with data that’s publicly available, Neudert says.
Ultimately, the question over what responsibility social-media companies should bear for disinformation may become a First Amendment debate. Leah Lievrouw, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who researches the intersection of media and information technologies, says the government could model regulation of the tech companies using rules that historically have governed the broadcast media or telecom industries—but she says that she sees an even higher bar for social-media companies, pertaining to the First Amendment.
“They want to avoid taking the responsibility of the cultural institutions they are,” Lievrouw says, noting that publishing and advertising companies set their own rules to safeguard the integrity of their content. “Come on, Facebook. You’re one of the big media grown-ups now.”
Orangutan starts to Twit... Or is a Twit.. Same thing...
Trump says Podesta resignation biggest story
From SFGate.com
The Latest on President Donald Trump and the Russia investigation (all times local): 10:20 a.m.
President Donald Trump is tweeting that the "biggest story" out of the charges announced Monday in the Russia investigation is the resignation of Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta from his eponymous firm.
Podesta, the elder brother of former Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta, announced that he would step aside from powerhouse Democratic firm 'The Podesta Group' after coming under investigation by Robert Mueller.
"The biggest story yesterday, the one that has the Dems in a dither, is Podesta running from his firm," Trump wrote in a two-part tweet. "What he know about Crooked Dems is....earth shattering. He and his brother could Drain The Swamp, which would be yet another campaign promise fulfilled. Fake News weak!"
Court papers unsealed Monday revealed an indictment against Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea by another adviser, who admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russian intermediaries.
8:45 a.m.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says he sees nothing wrong a former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump reaching out to a Kremlin-linked think tank.
Court papers unsealed on Monday revealed that George Papadopoulos who worked on the Trump campaign had reached out to a Russian he believed to have links to the Russian foreign ministry to arrange a meeting between the Trump team and Russian officials.
The Russian International Relations Council has confirmed contact with Papadopoulos, but said a meeting never took place. The council insisted that it was an independent advisory body and that it hosts many politicians at various public meetings.
Asked about the man mentioned in the indictment, Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday that he "does not see anything illegal" in the interaction.
___
8:30 a.m.
President Donald Trump says a campaign adviser who has admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russian intermediaries was a "low level volunteer" who was "proven to be a liar."
Trump on Twitter Tuesday sought to distance himself from George Papadopoulos: "Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar."
Court documents say Papadopoulos was approached by people claiming ties to Russia and offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails." Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about the conversations.
Court papers unsealed Monday also revealed an indictment against Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Trump said the allegations happened "long before" he joined the campaign. But the indictment details allegations stretching from 2006 to 2017.
___
7:30 a.m.
A personal lawyer for President Donald Trump says the president is not planning to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia probe. And, Jay Sekulow (SEHK'-yoo-loh) says, pardons for his former campaign aides facing federal charges "are not on the table."
Sekulow's comments to ABC's "Good Morning America" come a day after a former Trump aide admitted lying to the FBI about meeting with Russian intermediaries and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort pleaded not guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges.
Sekulow says: "The president has not indicated to me or to anyone else that I work with that he has any intent on terminating Robert Mueller."
On pardons, Sekulow says: "I have not had a conversation with the president regarding pardons. And pardons are not on the table."
___
6:50 a.m.
The Kremlin says Russia is not implicated by the first criminal cases against associates of President Donald Trump.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says that "so far Russia doesn't figure in any way in these charges which have been made" and that Russia hopes that they do not feed "hysteria."
Peskov adds that accusations of Russian meddling in the election remain "unfounded," and "we are observing (the situation) with interest."
Peskov also says that connections between former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and a man he believed to have links to the Russian Foreign Ministry did not prove any complicity by the Russian government.
___
3:10 a.m.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has sent a warning to individuals in President Donald Trump's orbit: If they lie about contacts between the president's campaign and Russians, they'll end up on the wrong end of federal criminal charges.
With the disclosure of the first criminal cases in his investigation, Mueller also showed that he will not hesitate to bring charges against people close to the campaign even if they don't specifically pertain to Russian election interference and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
Court papers unsealed Monday revealed an indictment against Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea by another adviser, who admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russian intermediaries.
From SFGate.com
The Latest on President Donald Trump and the Russia investigation (all times local): 10:20 a.m.
President Donald Trump is tweeting that the "biggest story" out of the charges announced Monday in the Russia investigation is the resignation of Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta from his eponymous firm.
Podesta, the elder brother of former Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta, announced that he would step aside from powerhouse Democratic firm 'The Podesta Group' after coming under investigation by Robert Mueller.
"The biggest story yesterday, the one that has the Dems in a dither, is Podesta running from his firm," Trump wrote in a two-part tweet. "What he know about Crooked Dems is....earth shattering. He and his brother could Drain The Swamp, which would be yet another campaign promise fulfilled. Fake News weak!"
Court papers unsealed Monday revealed an indictment against Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea by another adviser, who admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russian intermediaries.
8:45 a.m.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says he sees nothing wrong a former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump reaching out to a Kremlin-linked think tank.
Court papers unsealed on Monday revealed that George Papadopoulos who worked on the Trump campaign had reached out to a Russian he believed to have links to the Russian foreign ministry to arrange a meeting between the Trump team and Russian officials.
The Russian International Relations Council has confirmed contact with Papadopoulos, but said a meeting never took place. The council insisted that it was an independent advisory body and that it hosts many politicians at various public meetings.
Asked about the man mentioned in the indictment, Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday that he "does not see anything illegal" in the interaction.
___
8:30 a.m.
President Donald Trump says a campaign adviser who has admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russian intermediaries was a "low level volunteer" who was "proven to be a liar."
Trump on Twitter Tuesday sought to distance himself from George Papadopoulos: "Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar."
Court documents say Papadopoulos was approached by people claiming ties to Russia and offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails." Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about the conversations.
Court papers unsealed Monday also revealed an indictment against Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Trump said the allegations happened "long before" he joined the campaign. But the indictment details allegations stretching from 2006 to 2017.
___
7:30 a.m.
A personal lawyer for President Donald Trump says the president is not planning to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia probe. And, Jay Sekulow (SEHK'-yoo-loh) says, pardons for his former campaign aides facing federal charges "are not on the table."
Sekulow's comments to ABC's "Good Morning America" come a day after a former Trump aide admitted lying to the FBI about meeting with Russian intermediaries and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort pleaded not guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges.
Sekulow says: "The president has not indicated to me or to anyone else that I work with that he has any intent on terminating Robert Mueller."
On pardons, Sekulow says: "I have not had a conversation with the president regarding pardons. And pardons are not on the table."
___
6:50 a.m.
The Kremlin says Russia is not implicated by the first criminal cases against associates of President Donald Trump.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says that "so far Russia doesn't figure in any way in these charges which have been made" and that Russia hopes that they do not feed "hysteria."
Peskov adds that accusations of Russian meddling in the election remain "unfounded," and "we are observing (the situation) with interest."
Peskov also says that connections between former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and a man he believed to have links to the Russian Foreign Ministry did not prove any complicity by the Russian government.
___
3:10 a.m.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has sent a warning to individuals in President Donald Trump's orbit: If they lie about contacts between the president's campaign and Russians, they'll end up on the wrong end of federal criminal charges.
With the disclosure of the first criminal cases in his investigation, Mueller also showed that he will not hesitate to bring charges against people close to the campaign even if they don't specifically pertain to Russian election interference and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
Court papers unsealed Monday revealed an indictment against Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea by another adviser, who admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russian intermediaries.
Story sounds fishy... Are just really stupid or is this all a lie?
Woman in harrowing sea survival had beacon but didn't use it
Caleb Jones
Two Hawaii women who say they were lost at sea on a sailboat for months never activated their emergency beacon, the U.S. Coast Guard said, adding to a growing list of inconsistencies that cast doubt on their harrowing tale of survival.
The women previously told The Associated Press that they had radios, satellite phones, GPS and other emergency gear, but they didn't mention the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB.
A Coast Guard review of the incident and subsequent interviews with the women revealed that they had an EPIRB aboard their boat but never turned it on.
Jennifer Appel confirmed in an interview Tuesday that they had the beacon and did not use it. She said that in her experience, it should be used only when you are in imminent physical danger and going to die in the next 24 hours.
"Our hull was solid, we were floating, we had food, we had water, and we had limited maneuverable capacity," Appel said in Japan, where the U.S. Navy took them after they were rescued by a Navy ship. "All those things did not say we are going to die. All that said, it's going to take us a whole lot longer to get where we're going."
In retrospect, though, Appel said there were two times that she would have used it — once when she and Tasha Fuiava were off Hawaii around late June to early July, and a second time off Wake Island on Oct. 1.
"That's a lesson learned for me, because that was the best chance we had in the ocean to get help," Appel said of the Wake Island missed opportunity.
Previously, Appel and Fuiava had said they were close to giving up when the Navy rescued them last week, thousands of miles off course.
The EPIRB communicates with satellites and sends locations to authorities. It's activated when it's submerged in water or turned on manually. The alert signal sends a location to rescuers within minutes.
A retired Coast Guard officer who was responsible for search and rescue operations said that if the women had used the emergency beacon, they would have been found.
"If the thing was operational and it was turned on, a signal should have been received very, very quickly that this vessel was in distress," Phillip R. Johnson said Monday in a telephone interview from Washington state.
Johnson described the device as sturdy and reliable, but added that old and weak batteries could cause a unit not to function.
Appel and Fuiava also said they had six forms of communication that all failed to work.
"There's something wrong there," Johnson said. "I've never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time."
The two women met in late 2016, and within a week of knowing each other decided to take the trip together. Fuiava had never sailed a day in her life. They planned to take 18 days to get to Tahiti, then travel the South Pacific and return to Hawaii in October.
They set off on May 3 along with their two dogs and were rescued by the Navy last week, thousands of miles off course.
Key elements of the women's account are contradicted by authorities, and are not consistent with weather reports or basic geography of the Pacific Ocean. The discrepancies raised questions about whether Appel and her sailing companion, Tasha Fuiava, could have avoided disaster.
On their first day at sea, the two women described running into a fierce storm that tossed their vessel with 60 mph (97 kph) winds and 30-foot (9-meter) seas for three days, but meteorologists say there was no severe weather anywhere along their route during that time.
After leaving "we got into a Force 11 storm, and it lasted for two nights and three days," Appel has said of the storm they encountered off Oahu. In one of the first signs of trouble, she said she lost her cellphone overboard.
"We were empowered to know that we could withstand the forces of nature," Appel said. "The boat could withstand the forces of nature."
But the National Weather Service in Honolulu said no organized storm systems were in or near Hawaii on May 3 or in the days afterward. Archived NASA satellite images confirm there were no tropical storms around Hawaii that day. Appel expressed surprise that there was no record of the storm. She said they received a Coast Guard storm warning while sailing after sunset on May 3.
The pair said they thought about turning back, but the islands of Maui and Lanai didn't have harbors deep enough to accommodate their sailboat. At 50 feet (15 meters) long, the vessel is relatively small, and both islands have harbors that accommodate boats of that size. Plus, the Big Island — the southernmost island in Hawaii — has several places to dock.
Appel, though, said she modified her sailboat, called the Sea Nymph, by adding six tons of fiberglass to the hull to make it thicker and heavier and extend the keel to a depth of 8.5 feet to give the boat greater stability. Similar vessels typically have a keel of 5 to 7 feet, she said. The extra-long keel meant it couldn't get in to nearby harbors.
"Given the constraints of our vessel, we chose the appropriate action," she said.
Still, they pressed on.
Days later, after parts of their mast and rigging failed, they sailed up to another small island, still with a working motor, but decided against trying to land, believing the island was mostly uninhabited with no protected waters.
"It is uninhabited. They only have habitation on the northwest corner and their reef was too shallow for us to cross in order to get into the lagoon," Appel said.
But Christmas Island, part of the island nation of Kiribati, is home to more than 2,000 people and has a port that routinely welcomes huge commercial ships.
"We could probably nurse it down to the next major island in Kiribati," Appel said. "Then we'll be able to stop there and seek safe haven and get up on the mast and fix it."
The island has at least two airfields, and women had flares aboard to alert people on land. Plus, its widest point spans about 30 miles (48 kilometers), a day's hike to safety from even the most remote area.
When asked if the small island would have been a good place to land and repair their sails, Appel said no. "Kiribati, um, one whole half of the island is called shipwreck beach for a reason," she said.
Christmas Island has a place called Bay of Wrecks on its northeast side.
So, instead of stopping for help, they say they set a new destination about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away and a few hundred miles beyond their original target of Tahiti. They were headed to the Cook Islands.
"We really did think we could make it to the next spot," Appel said.
Then, they say, another storm killed their engine at the end of May.
The Coast Guard made radio contact with a vessel that identified itself as the Sea Nymph in June near Tahiti, and the captain said they were not in distress and expected to make land the next morning.
More than five months after they departed, they were picked up in the western Pacific about 900 miles (1,448 kilometers) southeast of Japan. The two women and their dogs were all in good health when picked up by the U.S. Navy.
Caleb Jones
Two Hawaii women who say they were lost at sea on a sailboat for months never activated their emergency beacon, the U.S. Coast Guard said, adding to a growing list of inconsistencies that cast doubt on their harrowing tale of survival.
The women previously told The Associated Press that they had radios, satellite phones, GPS and other emergency gear, but they didn't mention the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB.
A Coast Guard review of the incident and subsequent interviews with the women revealed that they had an EPIRB aboard their boat but never turned it on.
Jennifer Appel confirmed in an interview Tuesday that they had the beacon and did not use it. She said that in her experience, it should be used only when you are in imminent physical danger and going to die in the next 24 hours.
"Our hull was solid, we were floating, we had food, we had water, and we had limited maneuverable capacity," Appel said in Japan, where the U.S. Navy took them after they were rescued by a Navy ship. "All those things did not say we are going to die. All that said, it's going to take us a whole lot longer to get where we're going."
In retrospect, though, Appel said there were two times that she would have used it — once when she and Tasha Fuiava were off Hawaii around late June to early July, and a second time off Wake Island on Oct. 1.
"That's a lesson learned for me, because that was the best chance we had in the ocean to get help," Appel said of the Wake Island missed opportunity.
Previously, Appel and Fuiava had said they were close to giving up when the Navy rescued them last week, thousands of miles off course.
The EPIRB communicates with satellites and sends locations to authorities. It's activated when it's submerged in water or turned on manually. The alert signal sends a location to rescuers within minutes.
A retired Coast Guard officer who was responsible for search and rescue operations said that if the women had used the emergency beacon, they would have been found.
"If the thing was operational and it was turned on, a signal should have been received very, very quickly that this vessel was in distress," Phillip R. Johnson said Monday in a telephone interview from Washington state.
Johnson described the device as sturdy and reliable, but added that old and weak batteries could cause a unit not to function.
Appel and Fuiava also said they had six forms of communication that all failed to work.
"There's something wrong there," Johnson said. "I've never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time."
The two women met in late 2016, and within a week of knowing each other decided to take the trip together. Fuiava had never sailed a day in her life. They planned to take 18 days to get to Tahiti, then travel the South Pacific and return to Hawaii in October.
They set off on May 3 along with their two dogs and were rescued by the Navy last week, thousands of miles off course.
Key elements of the women's account are contradicted by authorities, and are not consistent with weather reports or basic geography of the Pacific Ocean. The discrepancies raised questions about whether Appel and her sailing companion, Tasha Fuiava, could have avoided disaster.
On their first day at sea, the two women described running into a fierce storm that tossed their vessel with 60 mph (97 kph) winds and 30-foot (9-meter) seas for three days, but meteorologists say there was no severe weather anywhere along their route during that time.
After leaving "we got into a Force 11 storm, and it lasted for two nights and three days," Appel has said of the storm they encountered off Oahu. In one of the first signs of trouble, she said she lost her cellphone overboard.
"We were empowered to know that we could withstand the forces of nature," Appel said. "The boat could withstand the forces of nature."
But the National Weather Service in Honolulu said no organized storm systems were in or near Hawaii on May 3 or in the days afterward. Archived NASA satellite images confirm there were no tropical storms around Hawaii that day. Appel expressed surprise that there was no record of the storm. She said they received a Coast Guard storm warning while sailing after sunset on May 3.
The pair said they thought about turning back, but the islands of Maui and Lanai didn't have harbors deep enough to accommodate their sailboat. At 50 feet (15 meters) long, the vessel is relatively small, and both islands have harbors that accommodate boats of that size. Plus, the Big Island — the southernmost island in Hawaii — has several places to dock.
Appel, though, said she modified her sailboat, called the Sea Nymph, by adding six tons of fiberglass to the hull to make it thicker and heavier and extend the keel to a depth of 8.5 feet to give the boat greater stability. Similar vessels typically have a keel of 5 to 7 feet, she said. The extra-long keel meant it couldn't get in to nearby harbors.
"Given the constraints of our vessel, we chose the appropriate action," she said.
Still, they pressed on.
Days later, after parts of their mast and rigging failed, they sailed up to another small island, still with a working motor, but decided against trying to land, believing the island was mostly uninhabited with no protected waters.
"It is uninhabited. They only have habitation on the northwest corner and their reef was too shallow for us to cross in order to get into the lagoon," Appel said.
But Christmas Island, part of the island nation of Kiribati, is home to more than 2,000 people and has a port that routinely welcomes huge commercial ships.
"We could probably nurse it down to the next major island in Kiribati," Appel said. "Then we'll be able to stop there and seek safe haven and get up on the mast and fix it."
The island has at least two airfields, and women had flares aboard to alert people on land. Plus, its widest point spans about 30 miles (48 kilometers), a day's hike to safety from even the most remote area.
When asked if the small island would have been a good place to land and repair their sails, Appel said no. "Kiribati, um, one whole half of the island is called shipwreck beach for a reason," she said.
Christmas Island has a place called Bay of Wrecks on its northeast side.
So, instead of stopping for help, they say they set a new destination about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away and a few hundred miles beyond their original target of Tahiti. They were headed to the Cook Islands.
"We really did think we could make it to the next spot," Appel said.
Then, they say, another storm killed their engine at the end of May.
The Coast Guard made radio contact with a vessel that identified itself as the Sea Nymph in June near Tahiti, and the captain said they were not in distress and expected to make land the next morning.
More than five months after they departed, they were picked up in the western Pacific about 900 miles (1,448 kilometers) southeast of Japan. The two women and their dogs were all in good health when picked up by the U.S. Navy.
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