How One Man Helped Burn Down North Korea
The story of one of the most effective and brutal spymasters in U.S. history, and the beginning of an infamous love affair with napalm.
By BLAINE HARDEN
It was long past time for Donald Nichols to go home. He had been spying in Korea for five years, rarely taking a day off, never returning stateside to see his family. His bosses in the U.S. Air Force had not seen an agent work so hard for so long. They called him a “one man war” and the “best intelligence operator” in the Far East. He “performed the impossible,” his commanding general said. Still, air force rules were clear: He must rotate back to the United States.
Nichols made his career by ignoring rules. A black-ops officer, he rarely wore a uniform and worked outside the chain of military command. As a captain, he did not take orders from colonels or majors. He reported directly to a general who gave him a long leash—lots of cash and his own secret base, his own army of spies and his own rules. Nick, as he was known to his men, didn’t look or behave like spies from books or movies. A seventh-grade dropout from South Florida, he was grossly overweight, drank Coca-Cola by the case and ate Hershey’s chocolate bars by the box. He told his men that he hated women. In his quarters at night, he organized clandestine sexual encounters with young South Korean airmen.
When he arrived in Korea in 1946, at the dawn of the Cold War, the peninsula was in chaos. The United States had arbitrarily cut Korea in half. The Soviet army had installed its puppet regime in the North. The U.S. Army had done the same in the South. There were border clashes, and a savage civil war broke out in the South. Americans back home paid no attention, but the fighting killed tens of thousands of Koreans. For Nichols, who was wildly ambitious and just 23 years old, it was a land of opportunity. He jumped into the thick of it, operating without supervision in a netherworld world of torture, mass killings and severed heads.
Then, in 1950, a global war started. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung—the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, the young tyrant now threatening the United States with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles—invaded South Korea, with the backing of Stalin. President Truman ordered U.S. troops to Korea and told his secretary of state, “We’ve got to stop the sons a bitches no matter what.” By then, Nichols had a network of spies across the peninsula. He spoke pretty good Korean. More than any American, he was ready for war.
Nichols would find most of the targets for America’s carpet bombing of North Korea—a savage, three-year operation that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. When the war was over, the bombing would resonate in the North as Yankee genocide. It would give three generations of dictators named Kim a reason to warn that the Americans will come again with bombs and fire and death. This is the narrative that still drives Kim Jong Un’s relentless push to acquire nuclear weapons that can hit U.S. cities.
The story of Donald Nichols—the most important spy Americans have never heard of—explains the origins of this continuing crisis, while shining a new and disturbing light on the role of the United States in the creation of a divided Korea.
***
In the summer of 1951, Nichols, once again, received orders to ship out of Korea. To cancel them, he did what he had been doing for years: he played his ace. He wrote a letter to his immediate supervisor and pointed out that he was a close personal friend of President Syngman Rhee, the obstreperous leader of South Korea. “I have developed sources,” Nichols wrote, “which are of considerable interest to commanders concerned.” Nichols argued, in effect, that he was too valuable to the war effort to be sent home. His commanders knew he was right.
When they allowed him to stay on, they added a sweetener, promoting him from captain to major. His command responsibilities also expanded. The Fifth Air Force, which ran the air war in Korea, put Nichols in charge of newly discovered “tremendous opportunities existing in the intelligence collection field.” These were dozens of small islands off the east and west coasts of North Korea, to which Nichols steadily gained access in 1951 and 1952. With his other bases on the peninsula, he used the islands to create a sprawling spy empire of 50 subdetachments. Collectively, they were known as NICK.
Thus began the most magnificent season of Donald Nichols’s career. In a major war of the 20th century, he became a principal—albeit secret—player among American spooks jockeying for power, funding and clandestine glory. There was army intelligence. There was the CIA. There was NICK.
The Korean War stalemated in 1951 and it became almost impossible to move agents back and forth across the dug-in front lines of the mainland war. Spies who parachuted into North Korea were almost always caught and killed. So the islands, by default, became the preferred conduits “for infiltration and exfiltration of friendly agents.” This meant, in addition to building and staffing his island bases, Nichols needed to recruit more North Koreans who were willing to return home to spy—or who could be pressured into doing so. They became the eyes and ears of Nichols’s operation, feeding him target information for the years-long carpet bombing of the North.
One North Korean whom Nichols forced to become a spy was Kim Ji‑eok.
Kim was nineteen in the second year of the war and living on a farm about ten miles west of Pyongyang. To avoid conscription into the Korean People’s Army, he had found a job with the state railways, but there was little work because so many tracks had been destroyed by American bombs. When the government forced Kim Ji‑eok to do farm labor instead, he feared the bombs and napalm that had destroyed 75 percent of Pyongyang and continued to fall in and around the capital. He thought his chances of surviving the war would be better if he could sneak south and find his aunt and uncle in Seoul. He hired a guide who promised to lead him through the front lines, but on a pitch-black night near the front in April 1952, the guide became lost and then disappeared. Kim walked on alone. At daybreak, he found himself on the west coast, where mudflats led toward small, rocky islands.
A U.S. patrol boat spotted him and took him to nearby Yongmae Island, which was controlled by the Americans. Kim believed he was lucky. “I thought the Americans would set me free,” he said. “I was expecting to meet my uncle.”
Instead, they handed him over to South Korean airmen who worked for Nichols. They fed him salty soup and kept him in a house with ten others who had fled North Korea. One by one, each was interrogated about why he wanted to live in South Korea and what he knew about North Korean military bases, particularly air bases, flight patterns, and airplane hangars. Apparently satisfied that he was not a spy, Nichols’s men transported Kim to the South Korean city of Inchon by boat and then by truck to the capital Seoul, where he was dropped off at a former girls’ school in a downtown neighborhood called Anguk-dong. Nichols had taken over the two-story, 19-room building and made it his headquarters. There, he commanded a spy detachment that—at its peak—included 52 U.S. Air Force officers, 178 South Korean Air Force officers and about 700 Korean agents and fighters.
Kim failed miserably at his first mission, an attempt to locate Mirim Airport, a military airfield near Pyongyang in North Korea. He knew nothing about military installations, and once his other group members had fled, he tried to get back to South Korea and eventually found his way back to an island controlled by Americans.
He turned himself in as a returning spy, and for reasons he did not understand, the South Koreans who worked for Nichols selected him for more spy training and transported him back to Nichols’s headquarters in Seoul. There he had a brief but unforgettable audience with the commander.
“Nichols was really fat, with a huge, bulging belly. The Koreans called him ‘Neko, Neko.’ In his office there were all these yellow dogs and they barked at me. I didn’t even sit down. There was an American pilot in the office. I learned he was going to take me to a training camp. For the trip, Nichols gave the pilot a bundle of money. I don’t know how much it was. Nichols did not talk to me.”
After two short flights and a boat journey, Kim arrived on Jebu, a west coast island where the South Korean air force operated a training camp. Most of the 60 trainees were volunteers from South Korea who would become noncommissioned officers in the air force. The rest were North Koreans or young men who did not belong to any military organization.
Kim had become an agent‑in‑training for a parachute drop. Nichols expected him to go back to North Korea and find useful bomb targets. His group of press- ganged spies, called Class C, was given American military uniforms without insignia, a pair of American-made military boots and C rations, the U.S. military meals intended for soldiers far from mess halls or field kitchens. But they were paid nothing and had no rank, serial number or identity card. “Officially, we did not exist,” Kim said.
From May until September 1952, his training consisted mostly of running, often with a parachute strapped to his back. He learned how to fold the parachute quickly and how to mark coordinates on a map. Once during training, he smiled while saluting and was severely beaten by Koreans who worked for Nichols. When he reported that he had a stomachache, the Koreans again beat him.
By September, Kim’s fellow Class C spies began leaving the island. They did not say good-bye or graduate. Every few days, a few of them simply disappeared. Kim suspected they had been selected for missions in the North. Rumors spread in the camp that South Korean instructors pushed terrified agents out of airplanes.
“I decided my best chance of living would be to escape,” Kim said.
With several others, he walked away at night across mudflats to the mainland. They found their way to the headquarters of the South Korean air force outside Seoul and, rather improbably, were allowed to tell their stories to General Kim Chung Yul, the air force chief of staff who had won his job with Nichols’s help. The general allowed the men to join the air force.
Kim Ji‑eok survived the war by working in a military hospital. After eight years in the air force, he found a job at a noodle restaurant owned by his aunt in Seoul—and that is where he was still working in 2015 when he told his story, at age 82.
“People call Nichols a hero, but I’m not so sure,” said Kim. “If he had sent me back again to North Korea, it would have been the end of my life.”
***
Agents like Kim Ji-eok were disposable tools. Nichols and his commanders used them to try to fix a uniquely American logistical problem: The Far East Air Forces had more bombers and more conventional bombs than it had North Korean targets. The Americans also had a near-inexhaustible supply of napalm.
The problem forced Nichols to rethink what it meant to be a special operations commander. In the first year of the war, he’d won promotions and medals by leading teams that broke codes and discovered vulnerabilities in Soviet tanks and fighter jets. By 1951, with the war stalled, his orders had changed. He was told to collect “information suitable for air target selection,” assess bomb damage and determine the “psychological effects of air power on the enemy.”
In American memory, napalm—the sticky gel that melts human flesh—is most closely associated with the Vietnam War. But the U.S. military did not fully appreciate how to use napalm until it dropped 32,000 tons of it on the Korean Peninsula. “Napalm was one of the ‘discoveries’ of the Korean War,” wrote J. M. Spaight, a British airpower expert in the 1950s. “[I]t was in Korea that its effectiveness as a stopping weapon was fully demonstrated. . . . But for [napalm] the United Nations force might have been bundled neck and crop out of Korea. . .”
A decade before Vietnam, Donald Nichols smelled victory in napalm’s flames. “Napalm Bombs have the greatest psychological effect on the people of North Korea, due to the lasting burning effect it has on whatever it comes in contact with,” he wrote in an air intelligence information report.
Nichols’s song of praise was part of an American military chorus in Korea, where operations analysts for the Fifth Air Force “heartily endorsed napalm as the best single antipersonnel weapon” in the war. General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, dispatched B‑29s with napalm over Pyongyang on January 3 and 5, 1951, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground.” Altogether, the United States dropped nearly twice as much napalm on Korea as it did on Japan in 1945, although less than a tenth of the 388,000 tons dropped in Southeast Asia between 1963 and 1973.
In the early days of the war in Korea, when American soldiers were outgunned and fleeing south, napalm was the great equalizer. Even a near miss could generate enough heat to ignite fuel inside a T‑34 tank. When Chinese forces surged south and attacked in human waves, napalm killed thousands and terrified many more. But the bulk of the napalm that the Americans dropped in the war was used strategically rather than tactically, which means it was used to set fire to cities, towns, and villages across North Korea.
As the war progressed, the American definition of what constituted a reasonable military target in North Korea kept expanding. At first, Truman believed that attacks on targets that were not “purely military” could provoke a larger war with the Soviet Union. The White House resisted an early air force proposal to do a “fire job”— using napalm—on North Korea’s five major industrial centers. But after the Chinese intervention on the side of North Korea, American restraint disappeared and the fire job began in November 1950. It continued throughout the rest of the war. Bombing targets, for napalm and conventional bombs, included nearly every man-made structure in North Korea, as well as most human or animal activities that could conceivably be interpreted from a war plane as suspicious.
As the target list expanded, so did the use of napalm, even to the point of exceeding its military utility, according to an air force survey of prisoners of war. The prisoners said that while they feared napalm, the most effective weapons were fragmentation bombs. “The Fifth Air Force’s preference for napalm as an antipersonnel weapon may not have been completely realistic,” the survey found.
Whether it was for napalm or conventional bombs, Nichols was under constant pressure throughout the war to locate more and more targets. When agents like Kim Ji-eok did manage to slip into North Korea and find something worth bombing or burning, they tried to slip away by walking across mudflats to an island where Nichols had a base. Not many made it. As Nichols’s operation moved into high gear, an acceptable loss rate for agents—caught and killed or simply bugging out—appears to have been 40 percent.
Nichols also killed his own spies if he believed they were double agents loyal to North Korea. To smoke them out, he orchestrated elaborate cons. One particularly theatrical operation occurred when Nichols was building his island empire, according to George T. Gregory, an air force major who served as an executive officer under Nichols. As Gregory tells the story, Nichols was aboard one of his boats, transporting agents to the mainland, when “blinding beams of searchlights suddenly bathed them in white.
“They were boarded and forced to line up with their hands behind their heads by the grim-looking men in North Korean navy uniforms,” Gregory wrote. “The North Koreans advised their captives that they were taking the ‘white foreigner’ [Nichols] with them, but would blow the ship and its crew of vile, traitorous South Koreans—American puppets—out of the water. Nichols was being led towards the enemy ship when one of the crewmen began screaming that he was a North Korean agent.”
Nichols had found his mole.
“The dummy Communist vessel, complete with North Korean Navy markings, sailor uniforms and Soviet guns, was planned and carried out by Nichols in its entirety,” Gregory wrote. Between 1951 and the end of 1952, Nichols doubled his production of air intelligence information reports, as the monthly total jumped from five hundred to about a thousand. “The increasing flow of reports made it necessary to work American personnel and indigenous translators and draftsmen in headquarters on frequent occasion at night and holidays,” according to a history of his unit.
The official air force history of the war describes Nichols as the “most important single collector” of air intelligence for the tactical bombing of North Korea. His reports pinpointed hand-grenade factories, freshly dug caves, radio stations, parking lots, food warehouses, ammunition dumps, print shops, a paper factory, a zinc factory, locomotives, Russian officer quarters, Chinese troop concentrations, and an underground clothing factory dug into the side of a mountain.
***
American bombs and napalm destroyed more of North Korea, in relation to its resources, than all the combined air attacks on Japan during World War II, including the atom bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was the conclusion of the Far East Air Forces. The air force also believed that air attacks tipped the balance, forcing a crippled, traumatized enemy to the peace table. “We are pretty sure now that the Communists wanted peace, not because of a two-year stalemate on the ground, but to get airpower off their back,” General Otto P. Weyland, commander of the Far East Air Forces, said in 1954.
There were many who analyzed the bombing of North Korea and concluded that the air force had learned the wrong lessons. They found overwhelming evidence that bombing failed to stop “the forward movement of supplies” to North Korean and Chinese fighters.
Even Nichols, who won accolades for his success in identifying bomb targets, was among those who doubted the utility of the air-delivered devastation. “To a certain extent you could say we wasted our bombs on the roads, bridges, railroads, tunnels, etc.,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. “The enemy made a fool of us.”
The enemy did so by transporting fuel, ammunition, and food in the same way that ants transport food to their colonies—in small quantities distributed among a large number of disciplined and highly motivated individuals.
In the end, American bombs did not stop the war; Stalin did, by dying. After the dictator’s death on March 5, 1953, no one who mattered in the Soviet Union wanted to prolong the expensive bloodshed in Korea. Within days, the Soviet leadership moved to work with the Chinese and seek “the soonest possible conclusion” to the war. Peace talks with the Americans suddenly turned serious.
Stalin’s death was also a turning point for Nichols. His island empire stopped growing. By late May, the air force ordered him to remove his agents from islands off the east and west coasts of North Korea. By late July, the major combatants in the Korean War had signed an armistice. The thirty-eighth parallel was again the internationally accepted dividing line between the two Koreas and fighting stopped. Nichols would stay on in Korea, remain in command of a spy base, and continue to meet regularly with Syngman Rhee. But his spy career—and, as it would turn out, his life— had peaked. He was thirty.
October 02, 2017
Schumer points to Kansas
Schumer points to Kansas to criticize Trump’s tax plan
By PATRICK TEMPLE-WEST
In a warning shot to Republicans crafting landmark tax legislation, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday that Kansas’ experiment with tax cuts foreshadows what can happen if the GOP relies on “fake numbers” to support its effort.
Speaking on CBS’ "Face the Nation," Schumer rebutted assertions by the Trump administration that the president’s tax plan is not designed to cut taxes for rich Americans.
“It's completely focused on the wealthy and the powerful. Not on the middle class,” Schumer said.
The New York Democrat also attacked Republicans’ assertion that the tax plan won’t add to the deficit. Kansas’ 2012 tax cuts led to a budget deficit that forced the state to cut funding for schools and infrastructure, Schumer said. Facing a major budget deficit, Kansas lawmakers in June approved legislation that rolled back many of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts.
“This idea that cutting taxes on the wealthy, this trickle-down economics which the Republican Party loves, does not create growth,” Schumer said. “It never has."
He insisted that if Republicans want to get anywhere with Trump’s tax plan, they need to work with Democrats.
“They have to consult us,” he said. “They can't just put down a plan and say, ‘Bipartisanship is you guys come over and do what we want,’ when it's against our principles.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was dubious of the idea that the plan wouldn't overwhelmingly benefit the rich.
"For Trump to go on television that, oh, this doesn't benefit the wealthy is absolutely outrageous," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." "Of course, it benefits the wealthy. And of course it benefits large multinational corporations."
The 2016 presidential candidate added: "We are living in a moment of massive income and wealth inequality. The very, very rich are getting richer. Middle class is shrinking."
By PATRICK TEMPLE-WEST
In a warning shot to Republicans crafting landmark tax legislation, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday that Kansas’ experiment with tax cuts foreshadows what can happen if the GOP relies on “fake numbers” to support its effort.
Speaking on CBS’ "Face the Nation," Schumer rebutted assertions by the Trump administration that the president’s tax plan is not designed to cut taxes for rich Americans.
“It's completely focused on the wealthy and the powerful. Not on the middle class,” Schumer said.
The New York Democrat also attacked Republicans’ assertion that the tax plan won’t add to the deficit. Kansas’ 2012 tax cuts led to a budget deficit that forced the state to cut funding for schools and infrastructure, Schumer said. Facing a major budget deficit, Kansas lawmakers in June approved legislation that rolled back many of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts.
“This idea that cutting taxes on the wealthy, this trickle-down economics which the Republican Party loves, does not create growth,” Schumer said. “It never has."
He insisted that if Republicans want to get anywhere with Trump’s tax plan, they need to work with Democrats.
“They have to consult us,” he said. “They can't just put down a plan and say, ‘Bipartisanship is you guys come over and do what we want,’ when it's against our principles.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was dubious of the idea that the plan wouldn't overwhelmingly benefit the rich.
"For Trump to go on television that, oh, this doesn't benefit the wealthy is absolutely outrageous," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." "Of course, it benefits the wealthy. And of course it benefits large multinational corporations."
The 2016 presidential candidate added: "We are living in a moment of massive income and wealth inequality. The very, very rich are getting richer. Middle class is shrinking."
Catalan vote.
Catalan separatists claim victory in independence vote
Over 90 percent of people who voted said ‘Yes’ to independence, the regional authorities say.
By ZOYA SHEFTALOVICH
Catalan separatists claimed an overwhelming victory in the region’s independence referendum Sunday, which has been deemed illegal by Madrid.
The regional government announced early Monday that with 95 percent of votes counted, 2.26 million people cast a ballot, accounting for 42 percent of the 5.34 million eligible, 90.1 percent of whom voted ‘Yes’ to independence and 7.9 percent ‘No.’ The remainder of the votes were blank or null. The Catalan government claimed a further 700,000 people were prevented from voting.
“Catalonia has won its right to be a new republic, if this is what the parliament decides,” Regional Vice President Oriol Junqueras said at a press conference called to announce the result.
Spain’s 1978 constitution establishes the principle of the united sovereignty of the Spanish people, and most in the national parliament oppose the constitutional change required to allow self-determination for Catalonia. Most EU leaders have so far supported Madrid, unwilling to be seen to undermine Spain’s constitution.
“Europe must choose between shame or dignity,” said Catalonian Foreign Affairs Minister Raül Romeva at the Monday press conference, in a pointed message to EU capitals. “We expect an answer.”
On Sunday night, Catalan regional President Carles Puigdemont declared his followers had “earned the right to be an independent state.”
Over 90 percent of people who voted said ‘Yes’ to independence, the regional authorities say.
By ZOYA SHEFTALOVICH
Catalan separatists claimed an overwhelming victory in the region’s independence referendum Sunday, which has been deemed illegal by Madrid.
The regional government announced early Monday that with 95 percent of votes counted, 2.26 million people cast a ballot, accounting for 42 percent of the 5.34 million eligible, 90.1 percent of whom voted ‘Yes’ to independence and 7.9 percent ‘No.’ The remainder of the votes were blank or null. The Catalan government claimed a further 700,000 people were prevented from voting.
“Catalonia has won its right to be a new republic, if this is what the parliament decides,” Regional Vice President Oriol Junqueras said at a press conference called to announce the result.
Spain’s 1978 constitution establishes the principle of the united sovereignty of the Spanish people, and most in the national parliament oppose the constitutional change required to allow self-determination for Catalonia. Most EU leaders have so far supported Madrid, unwilling to be seen to undermine Spain’s constitution.
“Europe must choose between shame or dignity,” said Catalonian Foreign Affairs Minister Raül Romeva at the Monday press conference, in a pointed message to EU capitals. “We expect an answer.”
On Sunday night, Catalan regional President Carles Puigdemont declared his followers had “earned the right to be an independent state.”
What the fuck????
Trump dedicates golf win to hurricane victims
By BRENT D. GRIFFITHS and DARREN SAMUELSOHN
President Donald Trump dedicated the nation's victory in Presidents Cup golf Sunday afternoon to victims of recent hurricanes in Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida.
"On behalf of all the people of Texas, and all of the people of — if you look today you will see what’s happening and how horrible it is, but we have it under really great control, Puerto Rico and the people of Florida that have really suffered over this last short period of time with the hurricanes, I want to just remember them," Trump said during the trophy presentation.
The Presidents Cup is one of the marquee events on the PGA Tour. The tournament pits teams of U.S. golfers against international competitors and was held this year at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, near Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty — and also not far from where Trump claimed to have seen footage of thousands of Muslims cheering on Sept. 11, 2001.
In his remarks Sunday, Trump also touted the play of the American team, which routed the international squad and clinched victory in just the third match of the day. “To team USA, that was unbelievable playing,” he said of the squad captained by Steve Stricker.
After returning to Washington, Trump emphasized to reporters that the federal government's response to Puerto Ricans in need is going "really well."
"We're doing really well on Puerto Rico," Trump told reporters, according to a pool report. "Tremendous progress being made. We're getting the roads open, we're getting a lot of things done — really at a record clip."
Trump, who has spent the weekend stewing on Twitter over coverage of Puerto Rico, stressed that his administration has the situation "under really great control," as the U.S. territory continues to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Trump has chafed at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz and others who have said that the administration could be doing more to speed up recover efforts.
After previously saying that Puerto Ricans should not trust "fake news" coverage of the recovery, Trump added Sunday that people who fail to recognize the administration's progress are "politically motivated ingrates."
Trump’s attendance at the Presidents Cup is the first for a sitting president since Bill Clinton at the 2000 tournament near Washington, D.C.
The U.S president serves as honorary chair of the Presidents Cup and is always invited to the tournament, which pits American male professional golfers against a team of top international players, except Europeans.
Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton attended the opening of the tournament Thursday in Jersey City. That’s a rare moment for any sporting event: the last time more than one former president attended a Presidents Cup was in 2005, with Clinton and George H.W. Bush, according to Golfweek.
Trump has long had a deep connection with professional golf. He’s been spotted on the course over the last year with some of the sport’s most famous players, including Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. In February, Trump invited South African professional Ernie Els to join in a round with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The president’s name is also attached to 12 courses in the U.S. and five more abroad. Two of those courses are among the most iconic in the world: the “Blue Monster” Doral links in Miami, and Turnberry in Scotland, which has hosted four British Open tournaments.
Before he’d even launched his presidential campaign, Trump had secured the rights to host two major professional tournaments that ended up coinciding with his first term in the White House. In July, Trump became the first sitting president to ever attend a U.S. Women’s Open, which was held at his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. And Eric Trump attended in May at Trump’s private club in Northern Virginia when the private club hosted the Senior PGA Championship.
Trump’s Bedminster golf course will also be the site for the PGA Championship in 2022.
While Trump this month has sparked a political firestorm with his tweets and comments critical of NFL players who have been protesting during the national anthem, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan insisted to reporters that Trump’s appearance at the tournament wouldn’t be about politics.
“The name of this event is named after the highest office in the land, and you’ve heard me say really over the course of a year how we’ve always respected the office of the presidency, so when we extended that invitation…and when he accepted, we were really excited to know that he’d accepted that role and was contemplating coming out here, and we’re excited to have him out here, we really are,” Monahan said, according to Golfweek.
By BRENT D. GRIFFITHS and DARREN SAMUELSOHN
President Donald Trump dedicated the nation's victory in Presidents Cup golf Sunday afternoon to victims of recent hurricanes in Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida.
"On behalf of all the people of Texas, and all of the people of — if you look today you will see what’s happening and how horrible it is, but we have it under really great control, Puerto Rico and the people of Florida that have really suffered over this last short period of time with the hurricanes, I want to just remember them," Trump said during the trophy presentation.
The Presidents Cup is one of the marquee events on the PGA Tour. The tournament pits teams of U.S. golfers against international competitors and was held this year at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, near Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty — and also not far from where Trump claimed to have seen footage of thousands of Muslims cheering on Sept. 11, 2001.
In his remarks Sunday, Trump also touted the play of the American team, which routed the international squad and clinched victory in just the third match of the day. “To team USA, that was unbelievable playing,” he said of the squad captained by Steve Stricker.
After returning to Washington, Trump emphasized to reporters that the federal government's response to Puerto Ricans in need is going "really well."
"We're doing really well on Puerto Rico," Trump told reporters, according to a pool report. "Tremendous progress being made. We're getting the roads open, we're getting a lot of things done — really at a record clip."
Trump, who has spent the weekend stewing on Twitter over coverage of Puerto Rico, stressed that his administration has the situation "under really great control," as the U.S. territory continues to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Trump has chafed at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz and others who have said that the administration could be doing more to speed up recover efforts.
After previously saying that Puerto Ricans should not trust "fake news" coverage of the recovery, Trump added Sunday that people who fail to recognize the administration's progress are "politically motivated ingrates."
Trump’s attendance at the Presidents Cup is the first for a sitting president since Bill Clinton at the 2000 tournament near Washington, D.C.
The U.S president serves as honorary chair of the Presidents Cup and is always invited to the tournament, which pits American male professional golfers against a team of top international players, except Europeans.
Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton attended the opening of the tournament Thursday in Jersey City. That’s a rare moment for any sporting event: the last time more than one former president attended a Presidents Cup was in 2005, with Clinton and George H.W. Bush, according to Golfweek.
Trump has long had a deep connection with professional golf. He’s been spotted on the course over the last year with some of the sport’s most famous players, including Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. In February, Trump invited South African professional Ernie Els to join in a round with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The president’s name is also attached to 12 courses in the U.S. and five more abroad. Two of those courses are among the most iconic in the world: the “Blue Monster” Doral links in Miami, and Turnberry in Scotland, which has hosted four British Open tournaments.
Before he’d even launched his presidential campaign, Trump had secured the rights to host two major professional tournaments that ended up coinciding with his first term in the White House. In July, Trump became the first sitting president to ever attend a U.S. Women’s Open, which was held at his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. And Eric Trump attended in May at Trump’s private club in Northern Virginia when the private club hosted the Senior PGA Championship.
Trump’s Bedminster golf course will also be the site for the PGA Championship in 2022.
While Trump this month has sparked a political firestorm with his tweets and comments critical of NFL players who have been protesting during the national anthem, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan insisted to reporters that Trump’s appearance at the tournament wouldn’t be about politics.
“The name of this event is named after the highest office in the land, and you’ve heard me say really over the course of a year how we’ve always respected the office of the presidency, so when we extended that invitation…and when he accepted, we were really excited to know that he’d accepted that role and was contemplating coming out here, and we’re excited to have him out here, we really are,” Monahan said, according to Golfweek.
GOP budget disasters....
Dueling GOP budgets head for collision in quest for tax reform
Senate Republicans released their long-awaited budget blueprint for the upcoming fiscal year, paving the way for a tax overhaul without Democratic buy-in.
By SARAH FERRIS
House and Senate Republicans stand poised to wage war over their dueling versions of a budget resolution that would unlock the GOP's long-desired tax reform.
Senate Republicans rolled out their fiscal 2018 budget on Friday, and the two chambers' choices couldn’t look more different. The House budget would require a tax plan that does not add to the deficit, while the Senate edition would allow tax writers to add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.
One key element the two budget resolutions do share is the special power to write a tax reform bill that requires just a simple majority vote to advance in the Senate. If they fail, Republicans give up their shot at a tax overhaul without the need for Democratic support — which may mean no tax reform at all.
The high-stakes battle over that budget divergence will come to a head during the next few weeks, as both the House and Senate aim to pass their budgets and then steam toward a compromise.
Rep. Steve Womack, who is rumored to be in line as the next Budget Committee chairman, says tax reform will be the “ultimate test for leadership,” riddled with policy differences that will challenge lawmakers to consider the legislative long game. That starts with fundamental disagreements over the content of the differing budgets that would jump start the tax debate by giving a green light to the separate reconciliation process.
“There will be a myriad of reasons why people will have certain issues that they want to bring forward. To some, it will be the cuts on the mandatory side that were advanced by our ‘18 budget resolution. To others, it will be the potential adding to the deficit and the potential consequences for long-term debt,” Womack (R-Ark.) told POLITICO.
Already, it appears some of the House’s fiscal hawks will be more willing this time to cede on their fundamental demands for deficit neutrality and sizable spending cuts. The House's ambitious fiscal agenda is jam-packed with spending cuts and program overhauls.
Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said it’s his “sense of the conference at this point” that many fiscal conservatives will be more conciliatory than usual during budget negotiations. Republicans are under intense political pressure to begin work writing their tax reform.
What makes it easier, Sanford said, is that the budget resolution is a largely symbolic document that already falls short of the ideal many Freedom Caucus members desire. Even in the House’s conservative outline, most of the difficult cuts wouldn’t take place for several years.
“The budget is just a tattered document,” Sanford said. “At this point, it is what it is — which is maybe a vehicle for tax reform.”
Budget negotiations are even trickier in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) can only lose a handful of votes. Already, McConnell has had to personally intervene in tax-related disputes among members threatening to hold up the Senate’s budget.
“I’ll tell you what the budget resolution will be — whatever the Senate can pass,” Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) said last week. “A lot of people have a hard time understanding that.”
Laying out ultimatums, warns Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), will greatly impede conference negotiations on a final, bicameral product.
“I hope the House realizes what the Senate realizes — and that is the American people are very impatient with us right now,” Kennedy said. “Everybody's not gonna be happy. But I don't wanna see somebody say, ‘Well, because you didn’t do this, I’m taking my toys and going home.’”
In the House, GOP leaders have from the start tried to push the lower chamber’s budget resolution toward a final product the Senate would be more willing to accept.
Last spring, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) convinced House Budget Chairman Diane Black (R-Tenn.) to trim the initial goal of $500 billion in mandatory cuts to about $203 billion. And Ryan urged lawmakers during a closed-door conference meeting to remain flexible on final budget instructions and specific tax cuts.
“Don’t draw any red lines. Don’t say,‘ I’ve got to have this, I’ve got to have that,’” Rep. Tom Cole said Ryan instructed lawmakers.
Under the House budget, any tax reconciliation bill would have to include the $203 billion in mandatory cuts achieved largely by cutting safety net programs. That prompted some GOP moderates to warn of the political optics of cutting food stamps or Medicaid to pay for corporate tax breaks.
The House budget also lays out strict parameters to prevent a tax plan from adding to the deficit, even short-term. And that language has given heartburn to Budget panel members like Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), who almost voted against the resolution because he was afraid it doesn’t provide tax writers with enough funding flexibility to achieve desired cuts.
The final budget agreement, Renacci notes, will likely emerge “a little more flexible” due to Senate input.
The House’s fiscal conservatives have already conceded that they expect to lose some battles over the final budget resolution.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the House Freedom Caucus, said he supports the Senate’s calls for adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years because it “allows for us to be very aggressive on tax cuts." But the North Carolinian is firm on his insistence that the final product can’t simply be a “shell” for reconciliation.
For fiscal hawks like Meadows, concessions to achieve tax reform could be ugly marks on otherwise pristine records of opposing bills that don’t meet all of their deficit-reducing demands.
House Republicans will likely be forced to abandon calls for roughly $200 billion in mandatory cuts — the most ever proposed by a budget committee through reconciliation. They’ll also be expected to sign on to a budget that breaks the party’s cardinal rule: Achieving balance within 10 years.
Due to the tight time frame for tax reform, the House Budget Committee is hoping the Senate will be more likely to adopt some of the lower chamber’s ideas, “rather than finding a middle ground on every single provision,” one House GOP aide said.
“If they want to do $1.5 trillion, then maybe the compromise is they look at mandatory spending,” the aide said.
Senate budget writers have assumed offsets of their own, giving the Energy and Natural Resources Committee the task of finding at least $1 billion over a decade — projected savings expected to result from opening up oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Senate Republicans released their long-awaited budget blueprint for the upcoming fiscal year, paving the way for a tax overhaul without Democratic buy-in.
By SARAH FERRIS
House and Senate Republicans stand poised to wage war over their dueling versions of a budget resolution that would unlock the GOP's long-desired tax reform.
Senate Republicans rolled out their fiscal 2018 budget on Friday, and the two chambers' choices couldn’t look more different. The House budget would require a tax plan that does not add to the deficit, while the Senate edition would allow tax writers to add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.
One key element the two budget resolutions do share is the special power to write a tax reform bill that requires just a simple majority vote to advance in the Senate. If they fail, Republicans give up their shot at a tax overhaul without the need for Democratic support — which may mean no tax reform at all.
The high-stakes battle over that budget divergence will come to a head during the next few weeks, as both the House and Senate aim to pass their budgets and then steam toward a compromise.
Rep. Steve Womack, who is rumored to be in line as the next Budget Committee chairman, says tax reform will be the “ultimate test for leadership,” riddled with policy differences that will challenge lawmakers to consider the legislative long game. That starts with fundamental disagreements over the content of the differing budgets that would jump start the tax debate by giving a green light to the separate reconciliation process.
“There will be a myriad of reasons why people will have certain issues that they want to bring forward. To some, it will be the cuts on the mandatory side that were advanced by our ‘18 budget resolution. To others, it will be the potential adding to the deficit and the potential consequences for long-term debt,” Womack (R-Ark.) told POLITICO.
Already, it appears some of the House’s fiscal hawks will be more willing this time to cede on their fundamental demands for deficit neutrality and sizable spending cuts. The House's ambitious fiscal agenda is jam-packed with spending cuts and program overhauls.
Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said it’s his “sense of the conference at this point” that many fiscal conservatives will be more conciliatory than usual during budget negotiations. Republicans are under intense political pressure to begin work writing their tax reform.
What makes it easier, Sanford said, is that the budget resolution is a largely symbolic document that already falls short of the ideal many Freedom Caucus members desire. Even in the House’s conservative outline, most of the difficult cuts wouldn’t take place for several years.
“The budget is just a tattered document,” Sanford said. “At this point, it is what it is — which is maybe a vehicle for tax reform.”
Budget negotiations are even trickier in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) can only lose a handful of votes. Already, McConnell has had to personally intervene in tax-related disputes among members threatening to hold up the Senate’s budget.
“I’ll tell you what the budget resolution will be — whatever the Senate can pass,” Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) said last week. “A lot of people have a hard time understanding that.”
Laying out ultimatums, warns Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), will greatly impede conference negotiations on a final, bicameral product.
“I hope the House realizes what the Senate realizes — and that is the American people are very impatient with us right now,” Kennedy said. “Everybody's not gonna be happy. But I don't wanna see somebody say, ‘Well, because you didn’t do this, I’m taking my toys and going home.’”
In the House, GOP leaders have from the start tried to push the lower chamber’s budget resolution toward a final product the Senate would be more willing to accept.
Last spring, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) convinced House Budget Chairman Diane Black (R-Tenn.) to trim the initial goal of $500 billion in mandatory cuts to about $203 billion. And Ryan urged lawmakers during a closed-door conference meeting to remain flexible on final budget instructions and specific tax cuts.
“Don’t draw any red lines. Don’t say,‘ I’ve got to have this, I’ve got to have that,’” Rep. Tom Cole said Ryan instructed lawmakers.
Under the House budget, any tax reconciliation bill would have to include the $203 billion in mandatory cuts achieved largely by cutting safety net programs. That prompted some GOP moderates to warn of the political optics of cutting food stamps or Medicaid to pay for corporate tax breaks.
The House budget also lays out strict parameters to prevent a tax plan from adding to the deficit, even short-term. And that language has given heartburn to Budget panel members like Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), who almost voted against the resolution because he was afraid it doesn’t provide tax writers with enough funding flexibility to achieve desired cuts.
The final budget agreement, Renacci notes, will likely emerge “a little more flexible” due to Senate input.
The House’s fiscal conservatives have already conceded that they expect to lose some battles over the final budget resolution.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the House Freedom Caucus, said he supports the Senate’s calls for adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years because it “allows for us to be very aggressive on tax cuts." But the North Carolinian is firm on his insistence that the final product can’t simply be a “shell” for reconciliation.
For fiscal hawks like Meadows, concessions to achieve tax reform could be ugly marks on otherwise pristine records of opposing bills that don’t meet all of their deficit-reducing demands.
House Republicans will likely be forced to abandon calls for roughly $200 billion in mandatory cuts — the most ever proposed by a budget committee through reconciliation. They’ll also be expected to sign on to a budget that breaks the party’s cardinal rule: Achieving balance within 10 years.
Due to the tight time frame for tax reform, the House Budget Committee is hoping the Senate will be more likely to adopt some of the lower chamber’s ideas, “rather than finding a middle ground on every single provision,” one House GOP aide said.
“If they want to do $1.5 trillion, then maybe the compromise is they look at mandatory spending,” the aide said.
Senate budget writers have assumed offsets of their own, giving the Energy and Natural Resources Committee the task of finding at least $1 billion over a decade — projected savings expected to result from opening up oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
He likes to be humiliated....
Should Rex Tillerson Resign?
The president has yet again humiliated his secretary of state. Here’s why it probably doesn’t matter whether he stays or goes.
By AARON DAVID MILLER and RICHARD SOKOLSKY
In our combined 50-plus years at the State Department, neither of us ever witnessed as profound a humiliation as a sitting president handed his secretary of state Sunday morning.
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” the president tweeted. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”
Even if they’re playing good cop-bad cop, this is a shocker: Donald Trump is basically announcing that any negotiations with North Korea are worthless. This not only undercut Tillerson personally, but also undermines U.S. interests and the secretary of state’s sensible decision to talk to the North Korean regime. To make matters worse, all of this is occurring while Tillerson is in Beijing to prepare for the president’s trip to China next month—so the president kneecapped his own top diplomat in front of America’s chief rival in Asia.
Is this the final straw for Tillerson? The secretary of state clearly has not helped himself. Through his budget cuts, his focus on departmental reorganization at the expense of appointing assistant secretaries, his reliance on a tiny inner circle of outsiders and his maladroit use of the press, Tillerson has isolated himself within his own department. The Beltway foreign policy blob has already written him off as the worst secretary of state in history, and clearly others are hovering (U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley says she doesn’t want the job, but if you believe that, or if John Bolton make similar protestations, we have an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal to sell you).
But in all fairness, the former ExxonMobil chief has never been empowered by his president. He’s been undercut repeatedly by this White House—see Kushner, Jared—and by Trump personally, even (especially) when he’s making the right diplomatic moves. And there’s no sign that any one of the vultures circling around Tillerson would be able to change or transcend this dynamic.
So for those of you calling for Tillerson to resign after Trump’s latest humiliation, we suggest you lie down and wait quietly until the feeling passes. Sunday’s tweets—and the past nine months, frankly—are exhibits A-Z that in Trump land, it might not matter whether Tillerson resigns or who replaces him. Here’s why:
***
Who speaks for America?
There are many peculiarities about how foreign policy is made (or not) in the Trump administration. Trump is the first president in our memory who has not at least gone through the motions of making it clear that his secretary of state is the sole repository of authority and the administration’s public voice on foreign policy. Not every secretary of state carries the same influence with the president. But never have the world and Washington faced a situation where there was no single go-to address (below the president, of course) to understand what U.S. foreign policy is, who’s articulating it and who to turn to for guidance or direction in trying to interpret it.
In Trump land, either by design or default, a cacophony of multiple voices are not just competing for the president’s time, attention and favor in private (which is very normal)—they’re actually carrying out the policy and shaping it publicly (which is not so normal). Kushner, for instance, grabbed or was given the primary lead on the Arab-Israeli issue and has played a major role in shaping U.S. interactions with China and Saudi Arabia. Gary Cohn seems to have the lead on Trump’s climate policy, such as it is. Wilbur Ross is playing an unusually substantive diplomatic role for a commerce secretary. Foreign capitals listen closely to Pentagon chief James Mattis, whose pronouncements are often interpreted as brushbacks of the president. And over at the U.N., the hawkish Haley has emerged as the nation’s loudest voice on foreign policy, largely by speaking unscripted about everything from Syria to Iran to North Korea.
And then of course there’s Trump, the ultimate blooming flower who in tweets, phone calls and speeches makes his own foreign policy on the fly, frustrating and confounding his top advisers. On issues from Qatar to North Korea to Iran, Trump contradicts his own secretary of state or ignores what is almost always his sound advice—for example: urging the United States to stay in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord, taking a hard line on Russia, advocating negotiations and dialogue to defuse the mounting crisis with North Korea, advocating for continued U.S. adherence to the Iran nuclear deal, taking a neutral position in the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and reassuring jittery allies, from South Korea and Japan to our NATO partners, that America still has their back.
The painful reality is that should Tillerson depart, his successor would likely confront the same series of problems, and a president who is unwilling to send a clear signal on where his secretary of state stands in the foreign policy pecking order. There are three keys to success for a secretary of state: opportunities abroad to exploit; the negotiating and political skills to do it; and, most important, the backing of the president. Sure, Tillerson has made some rookie mistakes and unforced errors in running the State Department. But his credibility and effectiveness have largely been undermined by his treatment by Trump.
A world in chaos
No matter how capable a secretary of state may be, success also turns on a cooperative world. Without the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, there would have been no opportunity for Henry Kissinger to demonstrate his formidable mediation skills and to produce three disengagement agreements within 18 months. Had Iraq not invaded Kuwait, James Baker would have been deprived of the opportunity to pull off the Madrid peace conference. Sure, secretaries of state can make some of their own luck. But the truly big diplomatic breakthroughs really do require consequential changes in the neighborhood first; then, a talented negotiator backed by a willful president can exploit them.
Sadly, the world in which America operates today has many serious problems, but almost none that offer opportunities for transformative or heroic outcomes. Even successful transactional outcomes, such as managing the Iranian nuclear issue, seem improbable. The cruel reality is that Tillerson has inherited a set of extraordinarily difficult problems that can only be managed and not solved. Just as Tillerson has reportedly come to hate his job, his successor would come to see going to the office—or the White House—the same way most people feel about a trip to the dentist.
Take a look around: From North Korea, where only somebody completely unhinged from reality would be talking about military options and denuclearization of Kim Jong Un’s regime; to managing an aggressive and crafty Vladimir Putin with a president who either has a blind spot for or is beholden to Russia; to an Israeli-Palestinian conflict trapped between a two-state solution too important to abandon but too hard to implement and a clueless president who likens a deal to buying and selling real estate in New York City; to a divided Europe that finds Trump mercurial, erratic and incomprehensible (and that’s on a good day); to an Iran that is expanding its influence in the Middle East and sitting atop a potential nuclear program one screwdriver’s turn away from a weapon while the president seems bent on making this problem infinitely worse.
These are forbidding challenges. Even if you had a secretary of state in a class of a Kissinger or a Baker, we’re far from certain the outcomes of any of these problems could be shaped in a way that were determinative, let alone favorable to the United States. We don’t have a secretary of state of this caliber, and we’re not going to get one if Tillerson leaves. What we do have is a president who has compounded the degree of difficulty of even managing these issues and created longer odds for whoever sits on the seventh floor at Foggy Bottom.
A hollowed-out Foggy Bottom
Those who are calling for Tillerson’s scalp miss another important point: The State Department, institutionally, is only a shell of its former self, and it’s not just because a few good men and women have bolted over the secretary’s reform and reorganization plans. The problems run much deeper than what the department’s org chart looks like. Over the past couple of decades, dozens of missions and authorities have steadily migrated from State to other agencies of the federal government, or disbanded altogether. More recently, the Defense Department has been given increased authorities—to go along with its massive resources, which State cannot match—to run its own security assistance programs, seriously encroaching on State’s statutory authorities for controlling the allocation of resources to help other countries train and equip their forces. Adding to the loss of the department’s clout has been the Balkanization of U.S. foreign assistance, as more and more domestic agencies run their own boutique foreign aid programs. Whether Tillerson stays or goes, these missions, authorities and programs are long gone—and they ain’t coming back.
Even more importantly, the State Department is no longer primus inter pares in the foreign policy and national security cosmos, and it has been this way for some time. No matter who is in the Oval Office, the National Security Council staff and the president’s national security adviser now run all the most sensitive foreign policy issues out of the White House. Foreign economic and foreign trade policy, though larded with foreign policy implications, are also managed either out of the White House, in the Treasury Department or elsewhere. Mattis and the Pentagon are the big dog on the block, running three major wars and a host of lesser military operations with a budget that makes State’s puny appropriations look like chump change. The war on terror, the preoccupation with homeland security and keeping out what the White House considers undesirables, and the need for actionable intelligence to prosecute all these enterprises has moved DHS and the intelligence community toward the top of the national security food chain. And above all this sits a president who has shown nothing but contempt and lack of understanding for the State Department, its mission and the dedicated men and women who work there.
***
So, belittle poor Secretary Tillerson if you must; close your eyes and make a wish that after T. Rex we’ll get another secretary who has the vision of Dean Acheson, the toughness of George Shultz, the diplomatic panache of Kissinger or the political and tactical instincts of Baker. But it’s magical thinking to believe that Tillerson’s successor could fundamentally alter the downward trajectory of the State Department or do much more to fix the world’s problems. As long as Donald Trump is president, more likely than not, the Department of State is going to remain closed for the season.
The president has yet again humiliated his secretary of state. Here’s why it probably doesn’t matter whether he stays or goes.
By AARON DAVID MILLER and RICHARD SOKOLSKY
In our combined 50-plus years at the State Department, neither of us ever witnessed as profound a humiliation as a sitting president handed his secretary of state Sunday morning.
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” the president tweeted. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”
Even if they’re playing good cop-bad cop, this is a shocker: Donald Trump is basically announcing that any negotiations with North Korea are worthless. This not only undercut Tillerson personally, but also undermines U.S. interests and the secretary of state’s sensible decision to talk to the North Korean regime. To make matters worse, all of this is occurring while Tillerson is in Beijing to prepare for the president’s trip to China next month—so the president kneecapped his own top diplomat in front of America’s chief rival in Asia.
Is this the final straw for Tillerson? The secretary of state clearly has not helped himself. Through his budget cuts, his focus on departmental reorganization at the expense of appointing assistant secretaries, his reliance on a tiny inner circle of outsiders and his maladroit use of the press, Tillerson has isolated himself within his own department. The Beltway foreign policy blob has already written him off as the worst secretary of state in history, and clearly others are hovering (U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley says she doesn’t want the job, but if you believe that, or if John Bolton make similar protestations, we have an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal to sell you).
But in all fairness, the former ExxonMobil chief has never been empowered by his president. He’s been undercut repeatedly by this White House—see Kushner, Jared—and by Trump personally, even (especially) when he’s making the right diplomatic moves. And there’s no sign that any one of the vultures circling around Tillerson would be able to change or transcend this dynamic.
So for those of you calling for Tillerson to resign after Trump’s latest humiliation, we suggest you lie down and wait quietly until the feeling passes. Sunday’s tweets—and the past nine months, frankly—are exhibits A-Z that in Trump land, it might not matter whether Tillerson resigns or who replaces him. Here’s why:
***
Who speaks for America?
There are many peculiarities about how foreign policy is made (or not) in the Trump administration. Trump is the first president in our memory who has not at least gone through the motions of making it clear that his secretary of state is the sole repository of authority and the administration’s public voice on foreign policy. Not every secretary of state carries the same influence with the president. But never have the world and Washington faced a situation where there was no single go-to address (below the president, of course) to understand what U.S. foreign policy is, who’s articulating it and who to turn to for guidance or direction in trying to interpret it.
In Trump land, either by design or default, a cacophony of multiple voices are not just competing for the president’s time, attention and favor in private (which is very normal)—they’re actually carrying out the policy and shaping it publicly (which is not so normal). Kushner, for instance, grabbed or was given the primary lead on the Arab-Israeli issue and has played a major role in shaping U.S. interactions with China and Saudi Arabia. Gary Cohn seems to have the lead on Trump’s climate policy, such as it is. Wilbur Ross is playing an unusually substantive diplomatic role for a commerce secretary. Foreign capitals listen closely to Pentagon chief James Mattis, whose pronouncements are often interpreted as brushbacks of the president. And over at the U.N., the hawkish Haley has emerged as the nation’s loudest voice on foreign policy, largely by speaking unscripted about everything from Syria to Iran to North Korea.
And then of course there’s Trump, the ultimate blooming flower who in tweets, phone calls and speeches makes his own foreign policy on the fly, frustrating and confounding his top advisers. On issues from Qatar to North Korea to Iran, Trump contradicts his own secretary of state or ignores what is almost always his sound advice—for example: urging the United States to stay in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord, taking a hard line on Russia, advocating negotiations and dialogue to defuse the mounting crisis with North Korea, advocating for continued U.S. adherence to the Iran nuclear deal, taking a neutral position in the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and reassuring jittery allies, from South Korea and Japan to our NATO partners, that America still has their back.
The painful reality is that should Tillerson depart, his successor would likely confront the same series of problems, and a president who is unwilling to send a clear signal on where his secretary of state stands in the foreign policy pecking order. There are three keys to success for a secretary of state: opportunities abroad to exploit; the negotiating and political skills to do it; and, most important, the backing of the president. Sure, Tillerson has made some rookie mistakes and unforced errors in running the State Department. But his credibility and effectiveness have largely been undermined by his treatment by Trump.
A world in chaos
No matter how capable a secretary of state may be, success also turns on a cooperative world. Without the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, there would have been no opportunity for Henry Kissinger to demonstrate his formidable mediation skills and to produce three disengagement agreements within 18 months. Had Iraq not invaded Kuwait, James Baker would have been deprived of the opportunity to pull off the Madrid peace conference. Sure, secretaries of state can make some of their own luck. But the truly big diplomatic breakthroughs really do require consequential changes in the neighborhood first; then, a talented negotiator backed by a willful president can exploit them.
Sadly, the world in which America operates today has many serious problems, but almost none that offer opportunities for transformative or heroic outcomes. Even successful transactional outcomes, such as managing the Iranian nuclear issue, seem improbable. The cruel reality is that Tillerson has inherited a set of extraordinarily difficult problems that can only be managed and not solved. Just as Tillerson has reportedly come to hate his job, his successor would come to see going to the office—or the White House—the same way most people feel about a trip to the dentist.
Take a look around: From North Korea, where only somebody completely unhinged from reality would be talking about military options and denuclearization of Kim Jong Un’s regime; to managing an aggressive and crafty Vladimir Putin with a president who either has a blind spot for or is beholden to Russia; to an Israeli-Palestinian conflict trapped between a two-state solution too important to abandon but too hard to implement and a clueless president who likens a deal to buying and selling real estate in New York City; to a divided Europe that finds Trump mercurial, erratic and incomprehensible (and that’s on a good day); to an Iran that is expanding its influence in the Middle East and sitting atop a potential nuclear program one screwdriver’s turn away from a weapon while the president seems bent on making this problem infinitely worse.
These are forbidding challenges. Even if you had a secretary of state in a class of a Kissinger or a Baker, we’re far from certain the outcomes of any of these problems could be shaped in a way that were determinative, let alone favorable to the United States. We don’t have a secretary of state of this caliber, and we’re not going to get one if Tillerson leaves. What we do have is a president who has compounded the degree of difficulty of even managing these issues and created longer odds for whoever sits on the seventh floor at Foggy Bottom.
A hollowed-out Foggy Bottom
Those who are calling for Tillerson’s scalp miss another important point: The State Department, institutionally, is only a shell of its former self, and it’s not just because a few good men and women have bolted over the secretary’s reform and reorganization plans. The problems run much deeper than what the department’s org chart looks like. Over the past couple of decades, dozens of missions and authorities have steadily migrated from State to other agencies of the federal government, or disbanded altogether. More recently, the Defense Department has been given increased authorities—to go along with its massive resources, which State cannot match—to run its own security assistance programs, seriously encroaching on State’s statutory authorities for controlling the allocation of resources to help other countries train and equip their forces. Adding to the loss of the department’s clout has been the Balkanization of U.S. foreign assistance, as more and more domestic agencies run their own boutique foreign aid programs. Whether Tillerson stays or goes, these missions, authorities and programs are long gone—and they ain’t coming back.
Even more importantly, the State Department is no longer primus inter pares in the foreign policy and national security cosmos, and it has been this way for some time. No matter who is in the Oval Office, the National Security Council staff and the president’s national security adviser now run all the most sensitive foreign policy issues out of the White House. Foreign economic and foreign trade policy, though larded with foreign policy implications, are also managed either out of the White House, in the Treasury Department or elsewhere. Mattis and the Pentagon are the big dog on the block, running three major wars and a host of lesser military operations with a budget that makes State’s puny appropriations look like chump change. The war on terror, the preoccupation with homeland security and keeping out what the White House considers undesirables, and the need for actionable intelligence to prosecute all these enterprises has moved DHS and the intelligence community toward the top of the national security food chain. And above all this sits a president who has shown nothing but contempt and lack of understanding for the State Department, its mission and the dedicated men and women who work there.
***
So, belittle poor Secretary Tillerson if you must; close your eyes and make a wish that after T. Rex we’ll get another secretary who has the vision of Dean Acheson, the toughness of George Shultz, the diplomatic panache of Kissinger or the political and tactical instincts of Baker. But it’s magical thinking to believe that Tillerson’s successor could fundamentally alter the downward trajectory of the State Department or do much more to fix the world’s problems. As long as Donald Trump is president, more likely than not, the Department of State is going to remain closed for the season.
Blockbuster Term??? Oh yea, the right wing side-show...
The Supreme Court’s Blockbuster Term
Get ready for the landmark decisions to start rolling in.
By RICHARD PRIMUS
The Supreme Court term that begins this week is set to be a blockbuster. There’s a reason: When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, the court hit the pause button on some of the most important issues it was facing. Either because the justices knew they would deadlocked, or because they preferred not to tackle important questions without a full bench, the court started ducking big cases, and we've now been through two cycles with relatively few landmark decisions.
That's about to end. Once Justice Neil Gorsuch took his seat, the court put one big case after another on the calendar, and the term that starts this week is set up to pack the punch of two to three normal Supreme Court terms. When you factor in the Trump administration’s tendency to provoke constitutional litigation, there’s no telling how explosive the new term could be.
Some of this term’s docket presents familiar culture-war issues: Prominent in that category is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which a Christian baker seeks legal vindication for his refusal to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple. The legal question is whether the First Amendment’s protection of religious free exercise permits a business to exempt itself from a generally applicable anti-discrimination law. (For those watching at home: Expect Justice Samuel Alito to ask whether Colorado could require Orthodox Jewish congregations to interview female as well as male rabbis for open clergy positions; expect Justice Elena Kagan to ask the bakery’s lawyer whether a business owner who reads the Bible to require racial segregation could refuse service to a black customer.)
Another case, Carpenter v. United States, asks whether and how the Fourth Amendment limits the government’s ability to track individuals’ locations by searching their historical cellphone records. Most Americans who carry smartphones leave electronic trails everywhere they take their phones. In the Carpenter case, law enforcement used that trail to show that robbery suspects were present at the scenes of a string of robberies. But criminals aren’t the only people who carry smartphones, and privacy advocates worry about letting the government know where everyone is all the time.
There’s also Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, in which the court is being asked, on First Amendment grounds, to overrule prior cases holding that public-sector unions can require employees at unionized workplaces to contribute financially to the unions. It’s a classic free-rider problem: Unions bargain for workers collectively, so each individual worker benefits from concessions that unions win from employers whether or not that worker paid dues, just as every American benefits from national defense whether or not he individually pays taxes. Labor law accordingly lets the unions make contributions mandatory, because if individual workers could opt out, the whole funding system could unravel, leaving the unions too poorly funded to be effective advocates for anyone. A case presenting this issue was set to be decided when Scalia died, and the strong conventional wisdom was that it looked bad for the unions. Now the case is back, and the calculus with Gorsuch looks no different: Janus is likely to be a serious blow to what remains of the effectiveness of public-sector unions across the country.
The biggest constitutional controversy of the Trump administration so far—the entry ban—could also find its way to the court. From January to June, cases challenging President Donald Trump's polarizing travel ban wound their way through the lower courts, with most courts ruling the ban unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court avoided any final decision on the question: In June, the court put the case of the 90-day ban on the calendar for October, knowing that the 90 days would run out before argument, thus making the issue moot. Now the ban as it existed last spring has indeed run its course, and the case has been formally removed from the court’s docket. But the Trump administration has wasted no time ordering a new version, one tweaked to make the order more defensible against the charge of anti-Muslim discrimination through the inclusion of North Korea and Venezuela on the list of affected countries. Litigation over the current version will surely retrace the path of the last version, and whether the Supreme Court will reach the merits this time is anybody’s guess.
But the most important developments of all this year could come in election law. In Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the court confronts Ohio’s effort to purge its voter rolls of voters who have not voted in recent elections. Ohio says it’s doing reasonable housekeeping, and the Randolph Institute says Ohio’s Republican secretary of state is deliberately rescinding the registrations of voters from demographic groups who lean Democratic, in violation of two federal statutes protecting the right to vote. Most momentously of all, Gill v. Whitford presents a challenge to Wisconsin’s system of districts for state legislative elections. Everyone knows that legislatures consider partisan motives when they draw districts, and historically the Supreme Court has been reluctant to police gerrymandering, except when the gerrymanders are racially motivated. But the court has also suggested that a sufficiently extreme partisan gerrymander could violate the Equal Protection Clause—if only it were possible to find some judicially manageable standard for determining how much partisan self-dealing is too much. As a combined result of greater polarization and improved information technology, the degree and effectiveness of partisan gerrymandering has increased enormously since the court’s prior landmark decisions in this area, and many observers think it possible that Justice Anthony Kennedy will finally say that enough is enough. If he does, his position is almost sure to be the position of the Court. Nobody thinks the Court will stop—or even could stop—all redistricting with partisan motives. But if it sets a new standard that prohibits extreme gerrymanders, states could be forced to redraw quite a lot of districts—and the resulting revolution in electoral politics could be as big as anything since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As significant as the court’s new term seems, though, the whole year could also feel like just a prelude to what might be coming next. Court-watchers speculate perpetually about retirements, and usually the speculation is overly eager. But it isn’t crazy to think that Kennedy might be on his last lap.
If he retires next summer, whoever replaces him will surely be to his right on constitutional law’s most divisive social issues: abortion and affirmative action. In the 1980s, when Kennedy became a justice, Republican appointees had a range of views on those issues. In the landmark 1992 decision Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which turned back the most serious challenge to Roe v. Wade, all five Justices who voted to uphold Roe were Republican appointees—as were three of the four who voted to overturn Roe. And in the 21st century, abortion and affirmative action have remained alive at the Supreme Court because two Reagan appointees—Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor before him—did not share their more doctrinaire colleagues’ views on those issues.
But today neither the Republican Party nor the conservative wing of the nation’s professional legal elite stands where it was 30 years ago. Starting with Justice Clarence Thomas’s appointment in 1991, every GOP-nominated justice has been fully committed both to the view that there is no constitutional right to abortion and to the view that race-based affirmative action is flatly unconstitutional. So if Trump gets another appointment next summer, the term that opens a year from now is almost certain to feature a court itching to overrule both Roe v. Wade and Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 O’Connor decision upholding a limited form of affirmative action. It would probably take a couple of years for litigation presenting the issues to reach the Supreme Court. But when the cases came, the court would almost surely erase the constitutional right to abortion and ban affirmative action in all public institutions—thus achieving two of the conservative movement’s highest aims in constitutional law. As big as the term now opening will be, it may be just the first shoe to drop.
Get ready for the landmark decisions to start rolling in.
By RICHARD PRIMUS
The Supreme Court term that begins this week is set to be a blockbuster. There’s a reason: When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, the court hit the pause button on some of the most important issues it was facing. Either because the justices knew they would deadlocked, or because they preferred not to tackle important questions without a full bench, the court started ducking big cases, and we've now been through two cycles with relatively few landmark decisions.
That's about to end. Once Justice Neil Gorsuch took his seat, the court put one big case after another on the calendar, and the term that starts this week is set up to pack the punch of two to three normal Supreme Court terms. When you factor in the Trump administration’s tendency to provoke constitutional litigation, there’s no telling how explosive the new term could be.
Some of this term’s docket presents familiar culture-war issues: Prominent in that category is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which a Christian baker seeks legal vindication for his refusal to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple. The legal question is whether the First Amendment’s protection of religious free exercise permits a business to exempt itself from a generally applicable anti-discrimination law. (For those watching at home: Expect Justice Samuel Alito to ask whether Colorado could require Orthodox Jewish congregations to interview female as well as male rabbis for open clergy positions; expect Justice Elena Kagan to ask the bakery’s lawyer whether a business owner who reads the Bible to require racial segregation could refuse service to a black customer.)
Another case, Carpenter v. United States, asks whether and how the Fourth Amendment limits the government’s ability to track individuals’ locations by searching their historical cellphone records. Most Americans who carry smartphones leave electronic trails everywhere they take their phones. In the Carpenter case, law enforcement used that trail to show that robbery suspects were present at the scenes of a string of robberies. But criminals aren’t the only people who carry smartphones, and privacy advocates worry about letting the government know where everyone is all the time.
There’s also Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, in which the court is being asked, on First Amendment grounds, to overrule prior cases holding that public-sector unions can require employees at unionized workplaces to contribute financially to the unions. It’s a classic free-rider problem: Unions bargain for workers collectively, so each individual worker benefits from concessions that unions win from employers whether or not that worker paid dues, just as every American benefits from national defense whether or not he individually pays taxes. Labor law accordingly lets the unions make contributions mandatory, because if individual workers could opt out, the whole funding system could unravel, leaving the unions too poorly funded to be effective advocates for anyone. A case presenting this issue was set to be decided when Scalia died, and the strong conventional wisdom was that it looked bad for the unions. Now the case is back, and the calculus with Gorsuch looks no different: Janus is likely to be a serious blow to what remains of the effectiveness of public-sector unions across the country.
The biggest constitutional controversy of the Trump administration so far—the entry ban—could also find its way to the court. From January to June, cases challenging President Donald Trump's polarizing travel ban wound their way through the lower courts, with most courts ruling the ban unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court avoided any final decision on the question: In June, the court put the case of the 90-day ban on the calendar for October, knowing that the 90 days would run out before argument, thus making the issue moot. Now the ban as it existed last spring has indeed run its course, and the case has been formally removed from the court’s docket. But the Trump administration has wasted no time ordering a new version, one tweaked to make the order more defensible against the charge of anti-Muslim discrimination through the inclusion of North Korea and Venezuela on the list of affected countries. Litigation over the current version will surely retrace the path of the last version, and whether the Supreme Court will reach the merits this time is anybody’s guess.
But the most important developments of all this year could come in election law. In Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the court confronts Ohio’s effort to purge its voter rolls of voters who have not voted in recent elections. Ohio says it’s doing reasonable housekeeping, and the Randolph Institute says Ohio’s Republican secretary of state is deliberately rescinding the registrations of voters from demographic groups who lean Democratic, in violation of two federal statutes protecting the right to vote. Most momentously of all, Gill v. Whitford presents a challenge to Wisconsin’s system of districts for state legislative elections. Everyone knows that legislatures consider partisan motives when they draw districts, and historically the Supreme Court has been reluctant to police gerrymandering, except when the gerrymanders are racially motivated. But the court has also suggested that a sufficiently extreme partisan gerrymander could violate the Equal Protection Clause—if only it were possible to find some judicially manageable standard for determining how much partisan self-dealing is too much. As a combined result of greater polarization and improved information technology, the degree and effectiveness of partisan gerrymandering has increased enormously since the court’s prior landmark decisions in this area, and many observers think it possible that Justice Anthony Kennedy will finally say that enough is enough. If he does, his position is almost sure to be the position of the Court. Nobody thinks the Court will stop—or even could stop—all redistricting with partisan motives. But if it sets a new standard that prohibits extreme gerrymanders, states could be forced to redraw quite a lot of districts—and the resulting revolution in electoral politics could be as big as anything since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As significant as the court’s new term seems, though, the whole year could also feel like just a prelude to what might be coming next. Court-watchers speculate perpetually about retirements, and usually the speculation is overly eager. But it isn’t crazy to think that Kennedy might be on his last lap.
If he retires next summer, whoever replaces him will surely be to his right on constitutional law’s most divisive social issues: abortion and affirmative action. In the 1980s, when Kennedy became a justice, Republican appointees had a range of views on those issues. In the landmark 1992 decision Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which turned back the most serious challenge to Roe v. Wade, all five Justices who voted to uphold Roe were Republican appointees—as were three of the four who voted to overturn Roe. And in the 21st century, abortion and affirmative action have remained alive at the Supreme Court because two Reagan appointees—Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor before him—did not share their more doctrinaire colleagues’ views on those issues.
But today neither the Republican Party nor the conservative wing of the nation’s professional legal elite stands where it was 30 years ago. Starting with Justice Clarence Thomas’s appointment in 1991, every GOP-nominated justice has been fully committed both to the view that there is no constitutional right to abortion and to the view that race-based affirmative action is flatly unconstitutional. So if Trump gets another appointment next summer, the term that opens a year from now is almost certain to feature a court itching to overrule both Roe v. Wade and Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 O’Connor decision upholding a limited form of affirmative action. It would probably take a couple of years for litigation presenting the issues to reach the Supreme Court. But when the cases came, the court would almost surely erase the constitutional right to abortion and ban affirmative action in all public institutions—thus achieving two of the conservative movement’s highest aims in constitutional law. As big as the term now opening will be, it may be just the first shoe to drop.
Again...
Shooting on Las Vegas Strip kills at least 50, wounds more than 200
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A gunman perched on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas casino unleashed a shower of bullets on an outdoor country music festival below, killing at least 50 people as tens of thousands of concertgoers screamed and ran for their lives, officials said Monday. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
More than 400 victims were taken to the hospital, authorities said.
SWAT officers using explosives stormed the gunman's hotel room and found he had killed himself, authorities said.
There was no immediate word on the motive for the attack. The U.S. Homeland Security Department said there was no "specific credible threat" involving other public venues in the U.S.
Country music star Jason Aldean was performing Sunday night at the end of the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival in front of a crowd of 22,000 when the gunman opened fire from inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino.
The gunman was identified as Stephen Craig Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada.
SWAT teams quickly descended on the concert and the casino, and officers used explosives to get into the hotel room where the suspect was inside, authorities said.
"What we are going to try to do as best we can is to get our first responders back on their feet and responding and conducting a proper investigation to ensure that we have the safety of this community at heart," Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said.
Aldean was in the middle of a song when the shots came rapidly: Pop-pop-pop-pop. Video of the shooting then showed Aldean stopping and the crowd getting quiet as if it were unsure of what had just happened.
The gunman paused and then fired another volley, the muzzle flashes visible from the casino, as more victims fell to the ground while others fled in panic. Some hid behind concession stands, while others crawled under parked cars.
Kodiak Yazzie, 36, said the music stopped temporarily when the first shots began and the tune even started up again before the second round of pops sent the performers ducking for cover and fleeing the stage.
"It was the craziest stuff I've ever seen in my entire life," Yazzie said. "You could hear that the noise was coming from west of us, from Mandalay Bay. You could see a flash- flash- flash- flash."
As the bullets ran rampant, thousands in the crowd fled in every direction. Couples held hands running through the dirt lot. Faces were brushed with shock and confusion, tears and screams. Some were bloodied and others were carried out by fellow concert-goers.
Monique Dumas from British Columbia, Canada, said she was at the concert, six rows from the stage, when she thought she heard a bottle breaking, and then a burst of popping sounds that may have been fireworks.
She said as she made her way out, it was "organized chaos" as everyone fled. "It took four to five minutes and all that time there was gunfire."
In addition to Paddock, police said they located a woman who may have been his roommate — Marilou Danley, 62. Lombardo said they believe this was a "lone wolf" attack.
"It's a devastating time," Lombardo said.
Police shut down the usually busy Las Vegas Boulevard and authorities across the state and federal ranks converged on the scene as dozens of ambulances ferried those struck by gunfire. Nearby Interstate 15 and flights at McCarran International Airport were briefly closed.
Hospital emergency rooms were jammed with victims delivered by ambulance. Others loaded the wounded into their cars and drove them to hospitals.
Jose Baggett, 31, of Las Vegas, said he and a friend were in the lobby of the Luxor hotel-casino — directly north of the festival — when people began to run, almost in a stampede.
He said people were crying and as he and his friend started walking away minutes later, they encountered police checkpoints where officers were carrying shotguns and assault rifles.
"There were armored personnel vehicles, SWAT vehicles, ambulances, and at least a half-mile of police cars," Baggett said.
Among those killed were two off-duty police officers who were attending the concert. Two on-duty officers were wounded, including one who underwent surgery and was upgraded to stable condition, police said.
Hours after the shooting, Aldean posted on Instagram that he and his crew were safe and that the shooting was "beyond horrific."
"It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night," Aldean said.
President Donald Trump tweeted: "My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you!"
Before Sunday, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history took place in June 2016, when a gunman opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people
Sunday's shooting came more than four months after a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people. Almost 90 people were killed by gunmen inspired by Islamic State at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal in November 2015.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A gunman perched on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas casino unleashed a shower of bullets on an outdoor country music festival below, killing at least 50 people as tens of thousands of concertgoers screamed and ran for their lives, officials said Monday. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
More than 400 victims were taken to the hospital, authorities said.
SWAT officers using explosives stormed the gunman's hotel room and found he had killed himself, authorities said.
There was no immediate word on the motive for the attack. The U.S. Homeland Security Department said there was no "specific credible threat" involving other public venues in the U.S.
Country music star Jason Aldean was performing Sunday night at the end of the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival in front of a crowd of 22,000 when the gunman opened fire from inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino.
The gunman was identified as Stephen Craig Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada.
SWAT teams quickly descended on the concert and the casino, and officers used explosives to get into the hotel room where the suspect was inside, authorities said.
"What we are going to try to do as best we can is to get our first responders back on their feet and responding and conducting a proper investigation to ensure that we have the safety of this community at heart," Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said.
Aldean was in the middle of a song when the shots came rapidly: Pop-pop-pop-pop. Video of the shooting then showed Aldean stopping and the crowd getting quiet as if it were unsure of what had just happened.
The gunman paused and then fired another volley, the muzzle flashes visible from the casino, as more victims fell to the ground while others fled in panic. Some hid behind concession stands, while others crawled under parked cars.
Kodiak Yazzie, 36, said the music stopped temporarily when the first shots began and the tune even started up again before the second round of pops sent the performers ducking for cover and fleeing the stage.
"It was the craziest stuff I've ever seen in my entire life," Yazzie said. "You could hear that the noise was coming from west of us, from Mandalay Bay. You could see a flash- flash- flash- flash."
As the bullets ran rampant, thousands in the crowd fled in every direction. Couples held hands running through the dirt lot. Faces were brushed with shock and confusion, tears and screams. Some were bloodied and others were carried out by fellow concert-goers.
Monique Dumas from British Columbia, Canada, said she was at the concert, six rows from the stage, when she thought she heard a bottle breaking, and then a burst of popping sounds that may have been fireworks.
She said as she made her way out, it was "organized chaos" as everyone fled. "It took four to five minutes and all that time there was gunfire."
In addition to Paddock, police said they located a woman who may have been his roommate — Marilou Danley, 62. Lombardo said they believe this was a "lone wolf" attack.
"It's a devastating time," Lombardo said.
Police shut down the usually busy Las Vegas Boulevard and authorities across the state and federal ranks converged on the scene as dozens of ambulances ferried those struck by gunfire. Nearby Interstate 15 and flights at McCarran International Airport were briefly closed.
Hospital emergency rooms were jammed with victims delivered by ambulance. Others loaded the wounded into their cars and drove them to hospitals.
Jose Baggett, 31, of Las Vegas, said he and a friend were in the lobby of the Luxor hotel-casino — directly north of the festival — when people began to run, almost in a stampede.
He said people were crying and as he and his friend started walking away minutes later, they encountered police checkpoints where officers were carrying shotguns and assault rifles.
"There were armored personnel vehicles, SWAT vehicles, ambulances, and at least a half-mile of police cars," Baggett said.
Among those killed were two off-duty police officers who were attending the concert. Two on-duty officers were wounded, including one who underwent surgery and was upgraded to stable condition, police said.
Hours after the shooting, Aldean posted on Instagram that he and his crew were safe and that the shooting was "beyond horrific."
"It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night," Aldean said.
President Donald Trump tweeted: "My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you!"
Before Sunday, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history took place in June 2016, when a gunman opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people
Sunday's shooting came more than four months after a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people. Almost 90 people were killed by gunmen inspired by Islamic State at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal in November 2015.
Iran’s Foreign Minister
Iran’s Foreign Minister Has Some Things He Wants to Say to Donald Trump
Javad Zarif blasts the president’s 'insulting' U.N. speech and vows never to renegotiate the nuclear deal.
By SUSAN B. GLASSER
Despite President Donald Trump’s threats to blow it up, the Iran nuclear deal still has a “better than 50” percent chance of surviving the next year, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif told POLITICO in an extensive interview detailing how his country will—and won’t—respond to Trump’s extraordinary campaign against the agreement the American president calls “an embarrassment to the United States.”
Zarif called Trump’s harsh attack on Iran in his recent U.N. speech “the most insulting statement that had ever been made by any U.S. president against Iran since the Revolution.” But he said it has backfired, isolating the United States and undermining its credibility “as a reliable negotiating partner” on the world stage, and he vowed not to renegotiate the nuclear deal. If Trump tried to unravel it, Zarif said in the interview for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs, Iran would consider everything from “walking away from the deal to somehow accommodating Europe.”
Spend an hour with Zarif, the American-educated diplomat who brokered the agreement two years ago with Barack Obama’s administration and five other major world powers, and it’s clear that he thinks Iran bested Trump at the U.N. over the last couple weeks.
After all, Trump publicly widened the rift with European allies even as his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson failed to persuade them privately—or even make a coherent case – for blowing up the nuclear accord, potentially doing long-term damage to the U.S. ability to cut deals with any number of global bad actors. “The Europeans have made it very clear to us and to the United States that they intend to do their utmost to ensure survival of the deal,” Zarif said, using some of his strongest public language yet for a series of backstage meetings that made clear what a striking gap Trump has opened up between the Americans and their closest allies.
Zarif’s stinging comments about Trump’s efforts come at a key decision point on Iran for the president and Tillerson. While the Iran deal crisis has been publicly overshadowed in recent days by the president’s war of words with nuclear-armed North Korea, it has provoked a major behind-the-scenes battle pitting an increasingly isolated Tillerson against other Trump advisers ahead of an October 15 deadline for the president to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal—or send the issue back to Congress.
Tillerson, whom Trump publicly smacked down on Twitter Sunday over his efforts to open back-channel talks with the North Koreans, has waged a lonely fight against “decertification” of the Iran deal as well, according to several of those I spoke with who have been briefed on the internal debates and expect the president to overrule the secretary on this too.
“Tillerson is still trying to convince Trump,” said a key outside adviser to the White House. Another source briefed on the deliberations in the Pentagon and State Department said Tillerson had support there but not in the White House—and even those who disagree with decertification “are now adjusting to the reality it is going to happen.” They are “negotiating over the wording” Trump will use, this source said, and the framing of the decision, which is likely to be accompanied by the rollout of what the White House is billing as a “major new strategy” to combat malign Iranian influence across the Middle East.
In the interview, Zarif acknowledged that Trump has now created the expectation that he will refuse to recertify the nuclear deal – while noting pointedly that Trump could still flip-flop on this, just as he has in so many other cases. “This would not be the first time that President Trump or other presidents have walked back from positions that they have taken during the campaign,” he said.
Decertification by itself would not rip up the deal and Zarif noted that the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress could decide—as it has in the past—not to take any action following through on Trump’s rhetoric. Doing nothing would effectively leave the deal in place, Zarif argues, and besides is essentially what he calls an “internal” U.S. affair, since technically the nuclear accord is a U.N. Security Council resolution and not a congressional one anyway. “It’s up to Congress to adopt any decision, or not to adopt any decision, and I believe in the past a Republican Congress had this idea to let the nuclear agreement stay, as did our parliament,” Zarif said. “It had decided in the past not to take action; it can decide again.”
Throughout the lengthy conversation in the wood-paneled reception room of the faded Upper East Side mansion that serves as Iran’s U.N. headquarters, Zarif was unsparing in his critique of Trump. At various points, he bemoaned the American president’s “posturing,” called out his “alternative facts” as “publicity stunts,” lamented his “insulting” words and his “disappointing” position, worried about his “frightening” showdown with North Korea, and agreed with those who argue that Trump’s overheated rhetoric has now made it easier rather than harder for Iran to command sympathy in the international arena.
“Now, look at the message that you are sending to the world,” Zarif says. “It would make it tougher for anybody to believe and rely upon the United States—anybody, not just North Korea. You’ve seen U.S. allies saying that the United States is not a reliable partner.”
But it was equally striking what Zarif did not say. There was no Kim Jong Un-like retaliatory rhetoric, no “Death to America”-type rants so familiar from past Iranian leaders. Instead, both Zarif and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were relatively restrained in their immediate response to Trump’s U.N. speech – Rouhani chose only to add three sentences to his U.N. address that did not mention Trump by name while warning of the hot-headed actions of a “rogue newcomer,” and Zarif tweeted that it was “unworthy of a reply.”
As much as anything, their response seemed to reflect Zarif’s determination not to undercut the strong position the Iranians believe Trump has placed them in. “They think Trump has played into their hands the way he has gone after the deal,” said another former U.S. official who has spoken with Zarif in recent days.
At one point, I asked him whether Iran would also walk away from the deal if Trump went ahead with his threat to do so.
“No, no, no,” Zarif said, at least not right away, what with Europe indicating it will stick with it and with Congress yet to act. “We will wait.”
***
Ever since becoming President Rouhani’s foreign minister four years ago, Javad Zarif—a fluent English speaker whose international relations training came at the same Colorado graduate school that also turned out future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—has been the West’s favored Iranian interlocutor.
He and Rouhani, who was just reelected to another presidential term, are seen as Iran’s leading moderates, and both have staked their jobs on the survival and success of the nuclear deal they struck with the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Germany in 2015. Zarif today remains the “unflappable,” “unflustered,” “smart and charming” but also persnickety and at times even “petulant” negotiator who haggled with the Americans over every detail, as a onetime aide to his negotiating partner, former Secretary of State John Kerry, described him to me the other day.
But he is also seen as “the master of reading what people here – in his mind -- ought to hear,” said another former senior U.S official whose brief included Iran. “He is smart, worldly and comes across as eminently reasonable.”
There’s just one problem, the official said: “Too bad he doesn’t make Iran’s policies, especially in its region.”
That view is widespread in Washington, where most analysts consider hardliners associated with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards the true decision makers in Iran. Even supporters of the Iran nuclear deal find Zarif at times a frustrating adversary – and most debate in the U.S. foreign policy circles of both parties tends to be over how to punish Iran’s bad behavior, not whether it exists.
All of which makes it more than a little jarring to talk about the politics of the Iran deal with Zarif in the midst of this latest crisis: He is the man in the middle of the international efforts to save the deal he cut, but appears to hold little sway over most of the other disputes that Washington and others have with his country, from the ongoing development of ballistic missiles that could eventually be used to deliver a nuclear warhead to backing for the murderous regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and support for Shiite proxy militias across the region.
On the one hand, Zarif clearly has a strong case to make for his grievance about Trump’s questioning of the nuclear deal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly certified that Iran is complying with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the nuclear deal is formally known. Even Trump officials such as Tillerson and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford have publicly acknowledged in recent days that Iran is not only in “technical compliance” but that undoing the deal now would, as Dunford put it in congressional testimony,, undercut future diplomacy with North Korea and others.
“It makes sense to me that our holding up agreements that we have signed, unless there is a material breach, would have an impact on others’ willingness to sign agreements,” Dunford said, in a little-noticed rebuke of the president last week.
But if Zarif is on solid ground on the letter of the nuclear deal itself, he’s much shakier when it comes to defending Iran’s actual behavior.
Trump and American foreign policy hands in both parties view Iran as a destabilizing factor in the Middle East, allied with Russia and other problematic allies like Syria’s Assad. Didn’t he regret the enormous death toll in the Syrian civil war, I asked Zarif, where Iranian fighters and proxy militias have fought alongside Russians to keep Assad in power even as nearly half a million Syrians have been killed and millions more have been displaced from their homes?
Zarif would hardly answer, instead deflecting blame on those who failed to consider conditions for peace talks he laid out four years ago.
And what about Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people, a repeatedly documented fact even after Assad cut a deal with the international community to supposedly remove those weapons?
Iran, a victim of major chemical attacks by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces during Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, has long spoken out against the use of such weapons in other contexts. But in this, Zarif merely restated Iran’s talking points, demanding a U.N. investigation and blaming “the United States and its allies” who “prevented” it.
He did not say, in our interview or in others he held over the last couple weeks, why Iran is still developing longer-range ballistic missiles—only that doing so does not violate the technical language of the nuclear agreement.
And more broadly, he left me uncertain as to why he would not consider negotiations with Trump at all—given that Iran also has many grievances, including what it sees, with some legitimacy, as less-than-robust U.S. compliance with those aspects of the deal that are supposed to offer economic benefits to Iran.
“I think they don’t quite know what to do with Trump other than just basically say no to everything,” said one of the former U.S. officials who has spoken to Zarif in recent days.
***
In the end, the fight over the Iran deal may well depend on how correctly Zarif, his country’s designated America-whisperer, reads America’s volatile new president.
And he claims to have a pretty good fix on the place.
“I predicted Trump’s victory,” he tells me after we finished recording the podcast. He went on to recount how he had to overrule his staff at the Iranian Foreign Ministry after they prepared analyses of the 2016 election that only accounted for a Hillary Clinton victory. He also said he warned Mexico’s foreign minister at the time that she was making a mistake by planning for a Clinton win.
How did you know Trump would score such a stunning upset?, I asked Zarif.
“It’s my job,” he said.
Javad Zarif blasts the president’s 'insulting' U.N. speech and vows never to renegotiate the nuclear deal.
By SUSAN B. GLASSER
Despite President Donald Trump’s threats to blow it up, the Iran nuclear deal still has a “better than 50” percent chance of surviving the next year, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif told POLITICO in an extensive interview detailing how his country will—and won’t—respond to Trump’s extraordinary campaign against the agreement the American president calls “an embarrassment to the United States.”
Zarif called Trump’s harsh attack on Iran in his recent U.N. speech “the most insulting statement that had ever been made by any U.S. president against Iran since the Revolution.” But he said it has backfired, isolating the United States and undermining its credibility “as a reliable negotiating partner” on the world stage, and he vowed not to renegotiate the nuclear deal. If Trump tried to unravel it, Zarif said in the interview for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs, Iran would consider everything from “walking away from the deal to somehow accommodating Europe.”
Spend an hour with Zarif, the American-educated diplomat who brokered the agreement two years ago with Barack Obama’s administration and five other major world powers, and it’s clear that he thinks Iran bested Trump at the U.N. over the last couple weeks.
After all, Trump publicly widened the rift with European allies even as his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson failed to persuade them privately—or even make a coherent case – for blowing up the nuclear accord, potentially doing long-term damage to the U.S. ability to cut deals with any number of global bad actors. “The Europeans have made it very clear to us and to the United States that they intend to do their utmost to ensure survival of the deal,” Zarif said, using some of his strongest public language yet for a series of backstage meetings that made clear what a striking gap Trump has opened up between the Americans and their closest allies.
Zarif’s stinging comments about Trump’s efforts come at a key decision point on Iran for the president and Tillerson. While the Iran deal crisis has been publicly overshadowed in recent days by the president’s war of words with nuclear-armed North Korea, it has provoked a major behind-the-scenes battle pitting an increasingly isolated Tillerson against other Trump advisers ahead of an October 15 deadline for the president to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal—or send the issue back to Congress.
Tillerson, whom Trump publicly smacked down on Twitter Sunday over his efforts to open back-channel talks with the North Koreans, has waged a lonely fight against “decertification” of the Iran deal as well, according to several of those I spoke with who have been briefed on the internal debates and expect the president to overrule the secretary on this too.
“Tillerson is still trying to convince Trump,” said a key outside adviser to the White House. Another source briefed on the deliberations in the Pentagon and State Department said Tillerson had support there but not in the White House—and even those who disagree with decertification “are now adjusting to the reality it is going to happen.” They are “negotiating over the wording” Trump will use, this source said, and the framing of the decision, which is likely to be accompanied by the rollout of what the White House is billing as a “major new strategy” to combat malign Iranian influence across the Middle East.
In the interview, Zarif acknowledged that Trump has now created the expectation that he will refuse to recertify the nuclear deal – while noting pointedly that Trump could still flip-flop on this, just as he has in so many other cases. “This would not be the first time that President Trump or other presidents have walked back from positions that they have taken during the campaign,” he said.
Decertification by itself would not rip up the deal and Zarif noted that the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress could decide—as it has in the past—not to take any action following through on Trump’s rhetoric. Doing nothing would effectively leave the deal in place, Zarif argues, and besides is essentially what he calls an “internal” U.S. affair, since technically the nuclear accord is a U.N. Security Council resolution and not a congressional one anyway. “It’s up to Congress to adopt any decision, or not to adopt any decision, and I believe in the past a Republican Congress had this idea to let the nuclear agreement stay, as did our parliament,” Zarif said. “It had decided in the past not to take action; it can decide again.”
Throughout the lengthy conversation in the wood-paneled reception room of the faded Upper East Side mansion that serves as Iran’s U.N. headquarters, Zarif was unsparing in his critique of Trump. At various points, he bemoaned the American president’s “posturing,” called out his “alternative facts” as “publicity stunts,” lamented his “insulting” words and his “disappointing” position, worried about his “frightening” showdown with North Korea, and agreed with those who argue that Trump’s overheated rhetoric has now made it easier rather than harder for Iran to command sympathy in the international arena.
“Now, look at the message that you are sending to the world,” Zarif says. “It would make it tougher for anybody to believe and rely upon the United States—anybody, not just North Korea. You’ve seen U.S. allies saying that the United States is not a reliable partner.”
But it was equally striking what Zarif did not say. There was no Kim Jong Un-like retaliatory rhetoric, no “Death to America”-type rants so familiar from past Iranian leaders. Instead, both Zarif and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were relatively restrained in their immediate response to Trump’s U.N. speech – Rouhani chose only to add three sentences to his U.N. address that did not mention Trump by name while warning of the hot-headed actions of a “rogue newcomer,” and Zarif tweeted that it was “unworthy of a reply.”
As much as anything, their response seemed to reflect Zarif’s determination not to undercut the strong position the Iranians believe Trump has placed them in. “They think Trump has played into their hands the way he has gone after the deal,” said another former U.S. official who has spoken with Zarif in recent days.
At one point, I asked him whether Iran would also walk away from the deal if Trump went ahead with his threat to do so.
“No, no, no,” Zarif said, at least not right away, what with Europe indicating it will stick with it and with Congress yet to act. “We will wait.”
***
Ever since becoming President Rouhani’s foreign minister four years ago, Javad Zarif—a fluent English speaker whose international relations training came at the same Colorado graduate school that also turned out future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—has been the West’s favored Iranian interlocutor.
He and Rouhani, who was just reelected to another presidential term, are seen as Iran’s leading moderates, and both have staked their jobs on the survival and success of the nuclear deal they struck with the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Germany in 2015. Zarif today remains the “unflappable,” “unflustered,” “smart and charming” but also persnickety and at times even “petulant” negotiator who haggled with the Americans over every detail, as a onetime aide to his negotiating partner, former Secretary of State John Kerry, described him to me the other day.
But he is also seen as “the master of reading what people here – in his mind -- ought to hear,” said another former senior U.S official whose brief included Iran. “He is smart, worldly and comes across as eminently reasonable.”
There’s just one problem, the official said: “Too bad he doesn’t make Iran’s policies, especially in its region.”
That view is widespread in Washington, where most analysts consider hardliners associated with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards the true decision makers in Iran. Even supporters of the Iran nuclear deal find Zarif at times a frustrating adversary – and most debate in the U.S. foreign policy circles of both parties tends to be over how to punish Iran’s bad behavior, not whether it exists.
All of which makes it more than a little jarring to talk about the politics of the Iran deal with Zarif in the midst of this latest crisis: He is the man in the middle of the international efforts to save the deal he cut, but appears to hold little sway over most of the other disputes that Washington and others have with his country, from the ongoing development of ballistic missiles that could eventually be used to deliver a nuclear warhead to backing for the murderous regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and support for Shiite proxy militias across the region.
On the one hand, Zarif clearly has a strong case to make for his grievance about Trump’s questioning of the nuclear deal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly certified that Iran is complying with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the nuclear deal is formally known. Even Trump officials such as Tillerson and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford have publicly acknowledged in recent days that Iran is not only in “technical compliance” but that undoing the deal now would, as Dunford put it in congressional testimony,, undercut future diplomacy with North Korea and others.
“It makes sense to me that our holding up agreements that we have signed, unless there is a material breach, would have an impact on others’ willingness to sign agreements,” Dunford said, in a little-noticed rebuke of the president last week.
But if Zarif is on solid ground on the letter of the nuclear deal itself, he’s much shakier when it comes to defending Iran’s actual behavior.
Trump and American foreign policy hands in both parties view Iran as a destabilizing factor in the Middle East, allied with Russia and other problematic allies like Syria’s Assad. Didn’t he regret the enormous death toll in the Syrian civil war, I asked Zarif, where Iranian fighters and proxy militias have fought alongside Russians to keep Assad in power even as nearly half a million Syrians have been killed and millions more have been displaced from their homes?
Zarif would hardly answer, instead deflecting blame on those who failed to consider conditions for peace talks he laid out four years ago.
And what about Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people, a repeatedly documented fact even after Assad cut a deal with the international community to supposedly remove those weapons?
Iran, a victim of major chemical attacks by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces during Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, has long spoken out against the use of such weapons in other contexts. But in this, Zarif merely restated Iran’s talking points, demanding a U.N. investigation and blaming “the United States and its allies” who “prevented” it.
He did not say, in our interview or in others he held over the last couple weeks, why Iran is still developing longer-range ballistic missiles—only that doing so does not violate the technical language of the nuclear agreement.
And more broadly, he left me uncertain as to why he would not consider negotiations with Trump at all—given that Iran also has many grievances, including what it sees, with some legitimacy, as less-than-robust U.S. compliance with those aspects of the deal that are supposed to offer economic benefits to Iran.
“I think they don’t quite know what to do with Trump other than just basically say no to everything,” said one of the former U.S. officials who has spoken to Zarif in recent days.
***
In the end, the fight over the Iran deal may well depend on how correctly Zarif, his country’s designated America-whisperer, reads America’s volatile new president.
And he claims to have a pretty good fix on the place.
“I predicted Trump’s victory,” he tells me after we finished recording the podcast. He went on to recount how he had to overrule his staff at the Iranian Foreign Ministry after they prepared analyses of the 2016 election that only accounted for a Hillary Clinton victory. He also said he warned Mexico’s foreign minister at the time that she was making a mistake by planning for a Clinton win.
How did you know Trump would score such a stunning upset?, I asked Zarif.
“It’s my job,” he said.
Mueller has no comment
Robert Mueller has no comment
The special counsel avoids the public eye and swears others to secrecy — even as Trump allies accuse him of leaking.
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN
Robert Mueller is rarely seen and almost never heard. He doesn’t frequent popular restaurants, appear on television or even issue statements. When he meets in person with President Donald Trump’s lawyers, he does not visit the White House where reporters might notice. He instead summons them to the conference rooms of his southwest Washington D.C. office, whose specific location is among his many well-guarded secrets.
In those meetings and others, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election strictly limits the number of outsiders who can attend. Militant about leaks, the former FBI director swears participants to a secrecy that they have honored to a remarkable degree. Reporters have long considered him among Washington’s toughest nuts to crack: “You’d be embarrassed to ask Bob Mueller for a leak,” said the veteran journalist Steven Brill, who has written extensively about media coverage of special counsels. “It’d be like asking him to watch a porn movie with you.”
Occasionally a savvy Washingtonian scores a chance sighting. When public relations professional Eddie Gonzalez saw the Russia investigator walking alone near Capitol Hill on a mid-September weekday afternoon, he suppressed an instinct to chase Mueller down for a selfie, he said. But a hotel restaurant worker did score a picture with him this spring, which her son posted on Twitter. Mueller grinned for that photo, slightly. But when a CNN crew chased him down a Senate hallway in June — “The president thinks it’s a ‘witch hunt.’ Is there any way you can respond to that?” — the poker-faced G-man just stared ahead and kept walking.
The moment illustrated the strange dynamic of Mueller’s mission. He is leading a highly secretive investigation into a president who publicly criticizes the probe on a regular basis. It also underscored what former colleagues, fellow prosecutors and people close to the investigation call Mueller’s calculated effort, in the face of a president who has contemplated his firing, to make himself as small a part of the story as possible.
Even within his own investigation, Mueller takes steps to remain offstage. He deploys members of his team of 16 lawyers to question grand jury witnesses. When he does take meetings, he regulates their attendees carefully. During four trips to Capitol Hill this summer, he met only with the top-ranking members of committees leading Congress’s three Russia probes. A small handful of staffers were allowed to join, according to two Congressional officials, who said Mueller instructed attendees not to disclose the substance of the meetings. There is no evidence that they have.
People who know Mueller say he has relied on the same head-down style through his four decades in law enforcement, and is fiercely determined to avoid compromising his investigation by exposure to charges of leaking or politicization—accusations some Trump allies have already leveled.
“I play it by the book and I tell anyone who works with me you better play it by the book,” the Washington lawyer Lanny Davis recalls Mueller, then FBI director, telling him in a conversation when Davis served on a federal oversight board.
Mueller has spoken just once in public as special counsel: a late May address at his granddaughter's graduation from a Massachusetts prep school, delivered just twelve days after his appointment, which made no mention of Trump or Russia.
Mueller’s style stands in contrast to that of his successor as FBI director, James Comey, who publicly discussed his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server on multiple occasions last year during the heat of the presidential campaign.
Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh met regularly with reporters and granted a long on-the-record interview with The New York Times in October 1987, less than a year into his tenure. “There is just so much curiosity about what we're doing,” Walsh told the newspaper. “If I don't answer questions, the only other alternative I see is worse.”
But Mueller has thus far followed the path of the last special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who didn’t say a word in public until almost two years after his December 2003 appointment, and then only to announce the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements as a result of the probe into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.
Appearances can be deceiving, however: Kenneth Starr investigated President Bill Clinton for four years before going on the record with Brill to discuss his work as independent counsel, then revealing several undisclosed conversations his office had with reporters. Starr’s chief spokesman was also prosecuted after falsely denying that he leaked to the Times.
Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, is a Justice Department criminal division veteran who spends much of his day refusing to answer questions. In recent weeks Carr has declined to comment on everything from the scope and progress of Mueller’s investigation to the reason why his office address — relocated this summer from a publicly disclosed site near FBI headquarters — is now a secret.
Frustrating as it may be to reporters, political insiders and news junkies desperate for insight into Mueller’s investigation, legal experts say Mueller is playing his cards exactly right.
“It’s not the role of the prosecutor to be making comments about an ongoing grand jury investigation. It’s inappropriate. It’s unwise. It’s inappropriate legally. It’s unethical,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who served as deputy to Fitzgerald during the Plame investigation.
What’s more, Zeidenberg said, Mueller’s silence can help propel the investigation. “Keeping potential targets in the dark is a good thing,” he said.
Talking to the media in such a politically charged environment is also dangerous business, not just for a special counsel like Mueller—but for his subordinates as well.
Only one person was criminally prosecuted as a result of Starr’s probe: his own spokesman, Charles Bakaly. The cause was a January 1999 New York Times report that Starr believed he could indict a sitting president and attributed to “several associates of Starr.” Bakaly strongly denied that Starr’s office had leaked the story—but later admitted to assisting the Times reporter. (He was charged with lying in a sworn statement; a judge acquitted him.)
The episode may serve as a cautionary tale for Mueller: Clinton’s lawyers quickly filed a legal complaint about the Times story—one of several instances when the White House accused Starr of “illegal and partisan leaking.”
“There are consequences to all of this,” said Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr as the Clinton independent counsel, referring to the examples of both Comey and Bakaly. “If you speak out, boy I tell you, you’ve got to be real sure about what you’re doing and why. The default position to have is to have nothing to say.”
Mueller’s office says it follows Justice Department’s guidelines which prohibit comments on the “nature or progress” of a case beyond what has been publicly filed in court. “The Special Counsel’s Office has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct,” Carr told reporters in June.
Despite Trump’s public anger at Mueller’s investigation, his lawyers aren’t accusing the special counsel of foul play.
John Dowd, Trump’s lead outside attorney, said in an interview that he doesn’t think Mueller—whom he’s known for decades—talks to reporters, even on background.
“I don’t think Bob leaks at all,” Dowd said.
But some Trump allies see it differently.
Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman last month petitioned both the Justice Department and two federal judges to investigate what he calls “how new improper leaks are occurring nearly every single day from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.”
“You don’t get this level of detail on what’s going on in the investigation unless you’re leaking,” Klayman said in an interview.
“The leaks have to be coming from inside Mueller's team. So who’s leaking?” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the House impeachment against Clinton, asked on Fox News in July.
Others reject the premise that Mueller’s team is dishing on its work, noting that many of the stories about his probe could have come from people with whom he has interacted.
“I’ve seen almost nothing at all in any story in any newspaper that could not have come from somebody else,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Starr. “There’s very little evidence that this is Mueller—and if you read it closely in most instances it’s not.”
It’s a “dirty little secret” that defense attorneys can talk to reporters about any aspect of the investigation they’ve seen, said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who edits the blog Lawfare.
Some defense lawyers also speak on background with reporters, agreeing to provide quotes or information if it is attributed in a way that could point a finger back at prosecutors—or in this case, some suspect, at Mueller.
“Then [they] turn around and complain of prosecutorial leaking,” Wittes added—a tactic Starr’s office accused the Clinton White House of using during the Lewinsky investigation.
Rosenzweig noted that Mueller would be wise to avoid a war of words with Trump: “If you get into a public relations fight with the president the prosecutor loses,” he said.
But Rosenzwieg added there is little reason for Mueller to be defensive, noting that the attacks leveled against him so far seem to have done little damage.
“They haven’t gotten a lot of credibility and traction, so why waste time?” Rosenzweig said.
Mueller’s office declined to comment.
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The special counsel avoids the public eye and swears others to secrecy — even as Trump allies accuse him of leaking.
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN
Robert Mueller is rarely seen and almost never heard. He doesn’t frequent popular restaurants, appear on television or even issue statements. When he meets in person with President Donald Trump’s lawyers, he does not visit the White House where reporters might notice. He instead summons them to the conference rooms of his southwest Washington D.C. office, whose specific location is among his many well-guarded secrets.
In those meetings and others, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election strictly limits the number of outsiders who can attend. Militant about leaks, the former FBI director swears participants to a secrecy that they have honored to a remarkable degree. Reporters have long considered him among Washington’s toughest nuts to crack: “You’d be embarrassed to ask Bob Mueller for a leak,” said the veteran journalist Steven Brill, who has written extensively about media coverage of special counsels. “It’d be like asking him to watch a porn movie with you.”
Occasionally a savvy Washingtonian scores a chance sighting. When public relations professional Eddie Gonzalez saw the Russia investigator walking alone near Capitol Hill on a mid-September weekday afternoon, he suppressed an instinct to chase Mueller down for a selfie, he said. But a hotel restaurant worker did score a picture with him this spring, which her son posted on Twitter. Mueller grinned for that photo, slightly. But when a CNN crew chased him down a Senate hallway in June — “The president thinks it’s a ‘witch hunt.’ Is there any way you can respond to that?” — the poker-faced G-man just stared ahead and kept walking.
The moment illustrated the strange dynamic of Mueller’s mission. He is leading a highly secretive investigation into a president who publicly criticizes the probe on a regular basis. It also underscored what former colleagues, fellow prosecutors and people close to the investigation call Mueller’s calculated effort, in the face of a president who has contemplated his firing, to make himself as small a part of the story as possible.
Even within his own investigation, Mueller takes steps to remain offstage. He deploys members of his team of 16 lawyers to question grand jury witnesses. When he does take meetings, he regulates their attendees carefully. During four trips to Capitol Hill this summer, he met only with the top-ranking members of committees leading Congress’s three Russia probes. A small handful of staffers were allowed to join, according to two Congressional officials, who said Mueller instructed attendees not to disclose the substance of the meetings. There is no evidence that they have.
People who know Mueller say he has relied on the same head-down style through his four decades in law enforcement, and is fiercely determined to avoid compromising his investigation by exposure to charges of leaking or politicization—accusations some Trump allies have already leveled.
“I play it by the book and I tell anyone who works with me you better play it by the book,” the Washington lawyer Lanny Davis recalls Mueller, then FBI director, telling him in a conversation when Davis served on a federal oversight board.
Mueller has spoken just once in public as special counsel: a late May address at his granddaughter's graduation from a Massachusetts prep school, delivered just twelve days after his appointment, which made no mention of Trump or Russia.
Mueller’s style stands in contrast to that of his successor as FBI director, James Comey, who publicly discussed his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server on multiple occasions last year during the heat of the presidential campaign.
Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh met regularly with reporters and granted a long on-the-record interview with The New York Times in October 1987, less than a year into his tenure. “There is just so much curiosity about what we're doing,” Walsh told the newspaper. “If I don't answer questions, the only other alternative I see is worse.”
But Mueller has thus far followed the path of the last special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who didn’t say a word in public until almost two years after his December 2003 appointment, and then only to announce the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements as a result of the probe into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.
Appearances can be deceiving, however: Kenneth Starr investigated President Bill Clinton for four years before going on the record with Brill to discuss his work as independent counsel, then revealing several undisclosed conversations his office had with reporters. Starr’s chief spokesman was also prosecuted after falsely denying that he leaked to the Times.
Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, is a Justice Department criminal division veteran who spends much of his day refusing to answer questions. In recent weeks Carr has declined to comment on everything from the scope and progress of Mueller’s investigation to the reason why his office address — relocated this summer from a publicly disclosed site near FBI headquarters — is now a secret.
Frustrating as it may be to reporters, political insiders and news junkies desperate for insight into Mueller’s investigation, legal experts say Mueller is playing his cards exactly right.
“It’s not the role of the prosecutor to be making comments about an ongoing grand jury investigation. It’s inappropriate. It’s unwise. It’s inappropriate legally. It’s unethical,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who served as deputy to Fitzgerald during the Plame investigation.
What’s more, Zeidenberg said, Mueller’s silence can help propel the investigation. “Keeping potential targets in the dark is a good thing,” he said.
Talking to the media in such a politically charged environment is also dangerous business, not just for a special counsel like Mueller—but for his subordinates as well.
Only one person was criminally prosecuted as a result of Starr’s probe: his own spokesman, Charles Bakaly. The cause was a January 1999 New York Times report that Starr believed he could indict a sitting president and attributed to “several associates of Starr.” Bakaly strongly denied that Starr’s office had leaked the story—but later admitted to assisting the Times reporter. (He was charged with lying in a sworn statement; a judge acquitted him.)
The episode may serve as a cautionary tale for Mueller: Clinton’s lawyers quickly filed a legal complaint about the Times story—one of several instances when the White House accused Starr of “illegal and partisan leaking.”
“There are consequences to all of this,” said Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr as the Clinton independent counsel, referring to the examples of both Comey and Bakaly. “If you speak out, boy I tell you, you’ve got to be real sure about what you’re doing and why. The default position to have is to have nothing to say.”
Mueller’s office says it follows Justice Department’s guidelines which prohibit comments on the “nature or progress” of a case beyond what has been publicly filed in court. “The Special Counsel’s Office has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct,” Carr told reporters in June.
Despite Trump’s public anger at Mueller’s investigation, his lawyers aren’t accusing the special counsel of foul play.
John Dowd, Trump’s lead outside attorney, said in an interview that he doesn’t think Mueller—whom he’s known for decades—talks to reporters, even on background.
“I don’t think Bob leaks at all,” Dowd said.
But some Trump allies see it differently.
Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman last month petitioned both the Justice Department and two federal judges to investigate what he calls “how new improper leaks are occurring nearly every single day from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.”
“You don’t get this level of detail on what’s going on in the investigation unless you’re leaking,” Klayman said in an interview.
“The leaks have to be coming from inside Mueller's team. So who’s leaking?” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the House impeachment against Clinton, asked on Fox News in July.
Others reject the premise that Mueller’s team is dishing on its work, noting that many of the stories about his probe could have come from people with whom he has interacted.
“I’ve seen almost nothing at all in any story in any newspaper that could not have come from somebody else,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Starr. “There’s very little evidence that this is Mueller—and if you read it closely in most instances it’s not.”
It’s a “dirty little secret” that defense attorneys can talk to reporters about any aspect of the investigation they’ve seen, said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who edits the blog Lawfare.
Some defense lawyers also speak on background with reporters, agreeing to provide quotes or information if it is attributed in a way that could point a finger back at prosecutors—or in this case, some suspect, at Mueller.
“Then [they] turn around and complain of prosecutorial leaking,” Wittes added—a tactic Starr’s office accused the Clinton White House of using during the Lewinsky investigation.
Rosenzweig noted that Mueller would be wise to avoid a war of words with Trump: “If you get into a public relations fight with the president the prosecutor loses,” he said.
But Rosenzwieg added there is little reason for Mueller to be defensive, noting that the attacks leveled against him so far seem to have done little damage.
“They haven’t gotten a lot of credibility and traction, so why waste time?” Rosenzweig said.
Mueller’s office declined to comment.
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