Trump enters the stage

The president’s posturing on the government shutdown over the funding of the border wall is comparable to three-card monte, where we cannot believe our eyes (and ears). He campaigned on the claim that Mexico would pay for the wall. Recently, he proclaimed that he would “own” the shutdown. Now he’s trying to shift the blame to the Democrats despite Republican control of the House and Senate. It seems to me that the Democrats are simply holding him accountable for his campaign representation that the wall would not be paid for with U.S. dollars.
Washington Post

TheHill
ADMINISTRATION
December 27, 2018 - 03:42 PM EST
The Memo: Trump puts isolationism at center stage

BY NIALL STANAGE
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President Trump’s embrace of isolationism has been a hallmark of his presidency.

It is now at the center of a foreign policy that will remove troops from Syria and cut the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in half.

The president’s “America first” instincts and his willingness to make public his differences with military commanders differentiate him from recent presidents and from many members of his own party.

During his visit with American troops stationed in Iraq on Wednesday, he emphasized his distrust of his own generals - who he characterized as repeatedly asking for more time to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

It was an unusual message for a commander in chief to give during an inaugural visit to troops in a combat zone after nearly two years in office.

"They said again, recently, ‘Can we have more time?’ " Trump said of his generals.

"I said, ‘Nope. You can’t have any more time. You’ve had enough time. We’ve knocked them out,’ " Trump told the soldiers in Iraq, according to pool reports.

The choice of words was particularly notable given two resignations in the last week that have rocked the Pentagon: Defense Secretary James Mattis and the administration’s special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk.

Mattis resigned in a letter that laid bare his differences with Trump over foreign policy, and that led to sighs of worry from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

McGurk’s departure came as a direct response to Trump’s decision to remove all troops from Syria, which the president justified in a Dec. 19 tweet that said ISIS had been defeated in the country.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he wrote in an assessment that is not shared by Mattis, McGurk or allies like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Trump went on to complain in his remarks in Iraq that other nations should be sharing the burden of U.S. military adventures, a theme that he had also sounded when speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Christmas Day.

In the Oval Office, he noted, “Right now, we are the policeman of the world and we’re paying for it. And we can be the policeman of the world, but other countries have to help us.”

Trump’s distrust of multilateralism is long-standing. It permeates his views on trade and environmental policy as well as military matters.

But it is particularly striking on matters of armed intervention. In one GOP presidential debate early in his 2016 run, Trump called the Iraq War “a big fat mistake” and accused the administration of then-President George W. Bush of having “lied” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Last August, while announcing - with obvious reluctance - that he would send another 4,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Trump took pains to point out that the U.S. “is not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.”

Trump loyalists point to the fact that he was elected in part as a disruptive force. His isolationist instincts were no secret; they were encapsulated in his “America First” slogan. Even as the battles over his foreign policies play out, the government is partially shut down over Trump’s demands that Congress fund a wall on the Mexican border.

The president’s allies say his instincts are broadly in line with an American public that has grown weary of the bloody conflicts that have consumed much of the past two decades. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began 17 years ago.

Yet Trump’s moves have alarmed plenty of Republicans, as well as Democrats, who fear that he could create new dangers.

Some fear an Islamic State resurgence once the U.S. leaves Syria, but others point to more nebulous risks. An abdication of the American willingness to be the “policeman of the world” creates a vacuum that global rivals such as China and Russia would be all too eager to fill, they say.

Mattis made a version of this argument in his resignation letter.

“While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” Mattis wrote.

The Defense secretary added: “It is clear that China and Russia … want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model … to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.”

Mattis’s resignation and the media coverage that focused on his differences with Trump appears to have sparked further fury on the president’s part.

Although Mattis originally intended to stay in his post until the end of February, Trump announced that he would in fact replace him at the end of the year with an acting Defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan.

Trump also complained on Twitter that Mattis had failed to see any problems with, as the president characterized it, the U.S. “substantially subsidizing the Militaries of many VERY rich countries all over the world, while at the same time these countries take total advantage of the U.S., and our TAXPAYERS, on Trade.”

Many Republicans are disconcerted by the president’s withdrawal from Syria, arguing that it could leave the door open for an ISIS resurgence just when it appeared that the radical organization was all but vanquished.

Graham called that decision a “disaster” and a “stain on the honor of the United States.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called it “a major blunder.”

But Trump is not for turning back.

“We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven’t even heard about,” he told reporters who traveled with him to Iraq. “Frankly, it’s ridiculous.”

Trump threatens to close ‘Southern Border entirely’ if Dems don’t fund wall
Key players in new fight over Trump tax returns

Poll: More Americans blame Trump for shutdown than Democrats
White House steps up shutdown blame game.

Identity Politics

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The Harvard Crimson

Why I Don’t Support Identity Politics Anymore
By Michelle I. Gao, Crimson Opinion Writer
January 24, 2018

I used to believe in identity politics because it told me: You and your experience matter. Your identity gives you authority. Your beliefs can’t be invalidated because your identity can’t be invalidated. This logical leap was empowering to take.

In the case of race, non-white people decided that their non-whiteness enabled them to speak with authority on topics of race. White people could only participate when they admitted that they were less worthy of speaking.

This kind of identity politics failed me when I went home. At the dinner table, I was ready to proselytize why we Asians, as people of color, needed to fight institutionalized racism and support minority movements like Black Lives Matter. I was armed with my experiences and the rhetoric of how America was built on a history of racism and white superiority.

But it was like I ran into a brick wall. The problem wasn’t that my parents didn’t know these things. They simply didn’t care much about them. They emphasized their own lived experiences as Asians instead—immigrating to America in the 1980s and creating new lives in a time of arguably more open racism than that of today. They didn’t have any reason to oppose whiteness and support black-led movements. White people weren’t any more racist to them than black people. The trajectories that other immigrants led proved that America was a land of opportunity, even for minorities.

Under the rules of identity politics, arguing with my parents about race became essentially impossible. I could never make progress if I kept staking my correctness on being Asian and my experiences living with that identity. My parents, who had the same marginalized identity, could do the same thing. We’d be at a standstill. Admitting that our beliefs were wrong would mean essentially yielding our identity, and nobody was willing to give that up.

I realized that I had lowered the standard of conversation by opening with appeals to our race. I was not giving reasons why we should act; I was merely arguing that external factors obligated us to act. But arguments following the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” make for halfhearted allyship at best.

The best solution was to deemphasize identity altogether. Appealing to my parents on the basis of race was unnecessary to the discussions I wanted to have. I wanted to make them care about what I saw as unjust killings of innocent people and unjust verdicts freeing culpable cops. But police brutality, at its core, is not about race. Why is it wrong for a police officer to shoot a man reaching for his wallet in his own car and then go free, for example? As Columbia professor Mark Lilla argues in his book “The Once and Future Liberal,” those acts are wrong because the victim is another citizen, another human. Humans do not deserve to be deprived of the benefit of the doubt and killed for ordinary acts. Similarly, humans deserve to be held accountable for their misdoings and wronging of others.

This kind of rhetoric would be a much more effective strategy for groups like Black Lives Matter, which need widespread support to effect change. It’s tragic that, though the statement “black lives matter” is so obviously valid, after several years, most Americans still don’t support the movement. But that’s because its most vocal members have made everything about race—citing their race as the reason why everyone must listen to them, instead of trying to convince people why they must be listened to. They make as many sweeping generalizations about race—who can speak, who can ask questions, who can understand, who must try to understand but will never understand anyway—as they accuse others of making. So, they shouldn’t be surprised when, instead of effecting change, they are now mired in cultural wars—the product of dissenters turning identity politics against them.

Identity politics makes people feel better about themselves at the expense of productive discourse. A person’s lived experience should never be invalidated. But no identity makes the beliefs that someone derives from their lived experience automatically more correct. This is not just a logical fallacy that should be avoided on principle. In practice, it is actually a hindrance to persuading others. In a time of such polarization, identity politics makes us close ranks with the like-minded when we need to reach out.

Michelle I. Gao ’21, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Weld Hall.

Copyright © 2018 The Harvard Crimson, Inc.

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Open Future
Can liberal democracies survive identity politics?
A book excerpt and interview with Francis Fukuyama, author of “Identity”

Open Future

Sep 30th 2018 | by A.L.
Almost two decades ago Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of liberal democracy. Today he’s seeing the system shattered in large part by identity politics—the subject of his latest book.

Identity politics describes when people adopt political positions based on their ethnicity, race, sexuality or religion rather than on broader policies. Though it started on the left, it has been more potent on the right: it fueled Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

How did it become one of the most powerful forces in contemporary politics? The Economist asked Mr Fukuyama about the ascent of identity politics and how societies can regain a sense of unity. The interview is followed by an excerpt from the book.


The Economist: Identity has always been a part of politics. Why is there suddenly so much talk about identity politics now?

Mr Fukuyama: Over the past decade, the main axis of politics in Europe and North America has been shifting. During most of the 20th century, the main divisions were based on economic issues surrounding how much the state should intervene to promote equality, versus how much freedom to permit to individuals and the private sector. Today politics increasingly centers around assertions of identity. There has been a widespread populist revolt against globalization, based partly on its unequal economic consequences, but also on the threats to traditional national identities arising from high levels of migration.

The Brexit leave voters were often willing to suffer bad economic consequences to their decision because they felt that protecting traditional British identity was more important to them. The populist nationalist regimes in Hungary feels it has more in common with Putin’s Russia than it does with liberal Germany, despite the ideological divide that used to separate it from the former Soviet Union. Many working class voters that used to support left-wing parties in Europe and the US have switched allegiance to new populist insurgents on identity grounds.

The Economist: You write in your book that “The rise of the therapeutic model midwifed the birth of modern identity politics.” What do you mean by that?

Mr Fukuyama: The modern concept of identity is built around self-esteem—that is, the idea that we have hidden selves that are undervalued by other people, leading to feelings of anger, resentment, and invisibility. By the mid-20th century, it was less priests and ministers to whom people turned for solace, but to psychiatrists seeking to raise people’s self-esteem. This therapeutic mission spread throughout society, to schools, universities, hospitals, and the social services offered by the state itself.

This therapeutic turn coincided with the great social movements of the 1960s, which increasingly saw low self-esteem linked to the marginalization of African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and the like. The fights that we have today over issues of race, gender, gender orientation, and the like, are often more over offended dignity than over material resources.

The Economist: Are liberal democracy (with its focus on individual liberties) and identity politics (with its focus on group rights) compatible?

Mr Fukuyama: It depends on the nature of the groups in question. Independence movements like those in Scotland, Quebec, and Catalonia may lead to the separation of a region and its emergence of a separate sovereign state, but the successor states will likely be liberal democracies protecting individual rights. In these cases democracy per se is not threatened, though the procedures that lead to separation must be democratic.

On the other hand, some cultural groups can themselves violate individual rights, as when a Muslim family in the West forces their daughter to marry someone she doesn’t want to, or doesn’t let her work. In such cases, the group right improperly (in my opinion) undermines the individual right. Liberal democracies have no choice but to take the side of individuals over groups if they are to remain true to their principles.

The Economist: You write that a “creedal national identity […] needs to be strongly reemphasized and defended from attacks by both the left and the right”. What is a “creedal national identity” and what would it look like in practise?

Mr Fukuyama: A creedal national identity is one based on a creed or idea, rather than on biology. An example of the latter is Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who has said that Hungarian national identity is based on Hungarian ethnicity. That is an exclusionary identity that makes no room for citizens who live in Hungary but are not Hungarian.

France and the United States, by contrast, had by the late 20th century developed creedal identities. In the French case it is the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity coming out of the French Revolution; one could become a French citizen if one was loyal to those ideals, regardless of race or ethnicity. The same for the United States, where following the Civil War we had come so see American identity as loyalty to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the principle of equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence.

In my view, contemporary liberal democracies that have become de facto multicultural must develop creedal, as opposed to blood-based national identities if they are to survive as democracies.

The Economist: Have identity politics pushed some voters away from progressive politics? And if so, how can their votes be won back without diminishing the plight of minorities?

Mr Fukuyama: At the core of Trump’s support were working-class white voters who felt the Democratic Party had become a party of minorities and professional women that no longer took their concerns, like job loss from outsourcing, seriously. The same can be said for European working class voters who deserted the left over the latter’s support for multiculturalism. It should be perfectly possible to win these voters back, based on an appeal to broad economic status rather than narrower support from a collection of special interest groups.

Inequality should be addressed by social policies like Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which provided health care to all people regardless of preexisting conditions, regards of race, gender, disability status, and the like. And it is important from progressives not to let patriotism become the exclusive property of the right, or to let justifiable sympathy for refugees morph into a disregard for enforcement of existing immigration laws.


Excerpt from “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2018), by Francis Fukuyama:

But perhaps one of the great drivers of the new American nationalism that sent Donald Trump into the White House (and Britain out of the European Union) has been the perception of invisibility. Two recent studies of conservative voters in Wisconsin and Louisiana by Katherine Cramer and Arlie Hochschild, respectively, point to similar resentments. The overwhelmingly rural voters who supported Republican governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin explained that the elites in the capital, Madison, and in big cities outside the state simply did not understand them or pay attention to their problems. According to one of Cramer’s interlocutors, Washington, D.C., “is a country unto itself…They haven’t got a clue what the rest

of the nation is up to, they’re so absorbed in studying their own belly button.” Similarly, a Tea Party voter in rural Louisiana commented, “A lot of liberal commentators look down on people like me. We can’t say the N-word. We wouldn’t want to; it’s demeaning. So why do liberal commentators feel so free to use the R- word [redneck]?”

The resentful citizens fearing loss of middle-class status point an accusatory finger upward to the elites, to whom they are invisible, but also downward toward the poor, whom they feel are undeserving and being unfairly favored.

According to Cramer, “resentment toward fellow citizens is front and center. People understand their circumstances as the fault of guilty and less deserving people, not as the product of broad social, economic, and political forces.” Hochschild presents a metaphor of ordinary people patiently waiting on a long line to get through a door labeled the american dream, and seeing other people suddenly cut in line ahead of them—African-Americans, women, immigrants—aided by those same elites who ignore them. “You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—invisible man and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward.”

Economic distress is often perceived by individuals not as resource deprivation, but as a loss of identity. Hard work should confer dignity on an individual, but that dignity is not recognized—indeed, it is condemned, and other people who are not willing to play by the rules are given undue advantages. This link between income and status helps to explain why nationalist or religious conservative groups have been more appealing to many people than traditional left-wing ones based on economic class. The nationalist can translate loss of relative economic position into loss of identity and status: you have always been a core member of our great nation, but foreigners, immigrants, and your own elite compatriots have been conspiring to hold you down; your country is no longer your own, and you are not respected in your own land. Similarly, the religious partisan can say something almost identical: You are a member of a great community of believers who have been traduced by nonbelievers; this betrayal has led not just to your impoverishment, but is a crime against God himself. You may be invisible to your fellow citizens, but you are not invisible to God.

This is why immigration has become such a neuralgic issue in many countries around the world. Immigration may or may not be helpful to a national economy: like trade, it is often of benefit in the aggregate, but does not benefit all groups within a society. However, it is almost always seen as a threat to cultural identity, especially when cross-border flows of people are as massive as they have been in recent decades. When economic decline is interpreted as loss of social status, it is easy to see why immigration becomes a proxy for economic change.

Yet this is not a fully satisfactory answer as to why the identity nationalist right has in recent years captured voters who had formerly voted for parties of the left, both in the United States and in Europe. The latter has, after all, traditionally had a better practical answer to the economic dislocations caused by technological change and globalization with its broader social safety net. Moreover, progressives have in the past been able to appeal to communal identity, building it around a shared experience of exploitation and resentment of rich capitalists:

“Workers of the world, unite!” “Stick it to the Man!” In the United States, working- class voters overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party from the New Deal in the 1930s up until the rise of Ronald Reagan; European social democracy was built on a foundation of trade unionism and working-class solidarity.

The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways. This is part of a larger story about the fate of modern liberalism, in which the principle of universal and equal recognition has mutated into the special recognition of particular groups.


Excerpted from “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment”. Copyright © 2018 by Francis Fukuyama. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. All rights reserved.


HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVESPublished 5 hours ago
House probe of FBI-DOJ’s alleged anti-Trump, pro-Clinton bias hits unceremonious end – with no repor
Rep. Gowdy reacts to Mueller probe filings
House Republicans unceremoniously ended their investigation into the way the FBI and the Department of Justice handled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and the bias allegations against President Trump.

The House probe was led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee and sought to look into allegations that the FBI and the DOJ were biased against Trump during the 2016 presidential election and favored Clinton’s candidacy.

Two Republicans chairing the committees – Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Robert Goodlatte, R-Va. – said in a letter Friday that the DOJ must appoint a special counsel to investigate the “seemingly disparate treatment” of the investigations into Clinton’s use of private emails and Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

Rep. Goodlatte: Comey is still playing games with usVideo

The letter came less than a week before the Republicans formally lose control of the House to Democrats, while both Gowdy and Goodlatte are retiring from politics.

The Democrats have long criticized the Republican-led probe as a distraction from Mueller’s Russia investigation, with U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, taunting Republicans for their unceremonious end of the probe.

“This is how the House Republican effort to undermine Mueller by ‘investigating the investigators’ ends. Not with a bang, but with a Friday, buried-in-the-holidays whimper, and one foot out the door,” he wrote in a tweet.

Adam Schiff
:heavy_check_mark:
@RepAdamSchiff
This is how the House Republican effort to undermine Mueller by “investigating the investigators” ends. Not with a bang, but with a Friday, buried-in-the-holidays whimper, and one foot out the door.

Jeremy Herb
:heavy_check_mark:
@jeremyherb
NEW: Gowdy and Goodlatte have sent a letter to AG Whitaker, IG Horowtiz and McConnell summarizing their investigation into FBI/DOJ and concerns about the handling of the Clinton and Trump/Russia probes.

But both Gowdy and Goodlatte reject criticism that their investigation undermined the Mueller probe.

“Contrary to Democrat and media claims, there has been no effort to discredit the work of the special counsel,” they said. “Quite the opposite, whatever product is produced by the special counsel must be trusted by Americans and that requires asking tough but fair questions about investigative techniques both employed and not employed.”

The lawmakers sent the letter to the Justice Department and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., saying that their investigation “revealed troubling facts which exacerbated our initial questions and concerns.” The House investigation didn’t produce a full final report of the panel’s findings.

Strzok texts raise questions about FBI actionsVideo
Republicans say top FBI officials were biased against then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, pointing to Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI official who was ousted from Robert Mueller’s team and later from the agency after his anti-Trump text messages with his colleague and lover Lisa Page were revealed.

STRZOK, PAGE AND THE FBI TEXTING SCANDAL EXPLAINED

The pair exchanged more than 50,000 text messages throughout the 2016 presidential election, with many of them expressing anti-Trump sentiments. In one message, Page asked Strzok if Trump could become president, prompting his reply: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Goodlatte and Gowdy also refer to the report by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog earlier this year that claims Strzok’s anti-Trump text messages raise questions about the agency’s bias, while fired FBI Director James Comey repeatedly broke the protocol.

The lawmakers also stress in the letter that the probe into Clinton’s use of emails was too lenient and cleared her of any wrongdoing without sufficient inquiry into the controversy.

The letter urges Congress to continue the investigation, saying that “while Congress does not have the power to appoint a special counsel, Congress does have the power to continue to investigate,” and notes that “the facts uncovered thus far” merit the continuation of the probe.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2018 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.

Note: this pronouncement creates an impression prima facea that the Mueller investigation should also be wrapped up. days before the Dem leadership commences in the House.

Exclusive: Russian Ex-Spy Pressured Manafort Over Debts to an Oligarch

Special Counsel Robert Mueller (right) is allegedly investigating ties between Victor Boyarkin (center), who worked for a Russian oligarch, and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (left). Boyarkin was captured in a rare photo, posted on Facebook, after a conference near Moscow in April 2018. Photo-illustration by TIME; source images: Manafort: Mandel Ngan—AFP/Getty Images; Boyarkin: Council on Foreign and Defense Policy; Mueller: Saul Loeb—AFP/Getty Images
A TIME investigation reveals a Russian ex-spy was a key link between Paul Manafort and a Putin ally

SIMON SHUSTER / RHODES, GREECE @SHUSTRY
December 29th, 2018
When the U.S. government put out its latest sanctions list on Dec. 19, the man named at the top did not seem especially important. Described in the document as a former Russian intelligence officer, he was accused of handling money and negotiations on behalf of a powerful Russian oligarch. The document did not mention that the man, Victor Boyarkin, had links to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump.

A months-long investigation by TIME, however, found that Boyarkin, a former arms dealer with a high forehead and a very low profile, was a key link between a senior member of the Trump campaign and a powerful ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his only interview with the media about those connections, Boyarkin told TIME this fall that he was in touch with Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in the heat of the presidential race on behalf of the Russian oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”

The former Russian intelligence officer says he has been approached by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Boyarkin’s response to those investigators? “I told them to go dig a ditch,” he says. Peter Carr, the spokesman for the Special Counsel’s Office, declined to comment. Through his spokesman, Manafort likewise declined to comment on his alleged connections with Boyarkin.

But those connections could be potentially important to the Special Counsel’s inquiry. They would mark some of the clearest evidence of the leverage that powerful Russians had over Trump’s campaign chairman. And they may shed light on why Manafort discussed going right back to work for pro-Russian interests in Eastern Europe after he crashed out of the Trump campaign in August 2016, according to numerous sources in the TIME investigation.

‘Our friend V’
When he joined the campaign in the spring of 2016, Manafort was nearly broke. The veteran political consultant had racked up bills worth millions of dollars in luxury real estate, clothing, cars and antiques. According to allegations contained in court records filed in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands, he was also deeply in debt to Boyarkin’s boss, the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was demanding money from Manafort over a failed business deal in Ukraine and other ventures.

Boyarkin says it fell to him to collect the debt from Manafort. “I came down on him hard,” he says. But the American proved elusive. In a petition filed in the Cayman Islands in 2014, lawyers for Deripaska, a metals tycoon with close ties to the Kremlin, complain that Manafort and his then-partner had “simply disappeared” with around $19 million of the Russian’s money.

When he reappeared in the headlines around April 2016, Manafort was serving as an unpaid adviser to the Trump campaign. He wanted his long-time patron in Moscow to know all about it.

In a series of emails sent that spring and summer, Manafort tried to offer “private briefings” about the presidential race to Deripaska, apparently, as one of the emails puts it, to “get whole.” Reports in The Atlantic and the Washington Post revealed those emails in the fall of 2017. Among the questions that remained unanswered was the identity of Manafort’s contact in Moscow, the one referred to in one of the emails as “our friend V.”

Even after TIME learned his full name in April, he proved a difficult man to find. His online presence amounted to digital scraps: one photo of him at a conference in Moscow, a few benign quotes in the Russian media from his years selling arms for state-linked companies, and some vague references in U.S. government archives to someone by that name, “Commander Viktor A. Boyarkin,” serving in the 1990s as an assistant naval attaché at the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. – a job sometimes used as cover for intelligence agents.

Only in early October was a TIME reporter able to track Boyarkin down. In the company of a senior Russian diplomat and two young assistants from Moscow, he attended a conference in Greece that was organized by one of Putin’s oldest friends, the former KGB agent and state railway boss Vladimir Yakunin. “How did you find me here,” was the question Boyarkin asked, repeatedly, when confronted about his ties to Manafort during a coffee break at that conference.

Once he agreed to discuss their relationship, it was mostly to confirm the basic facts, often with a curt, “Yes, so what.” (He did not respond to numerous requests for comment after his name appeared on the U.S sanctions list on Dec. 19.)

The outlines of Boyarkin’s career suggest a life spent at the intersection of Russian espionage, diplomacy and the arms trade. Having served at the Russian embassies in the U.S. and Mexico in the 1990s, dealing primarily in military affairs, he says he turned his focus to the arms trade in the early 2000s. His specialty was the export of small and medium-sized warships and other naval vessels that were produced in Soviet-era shipyards across Russia.

This business kept him in touch with military buyers from around the world, including in various parts of Africa. By the late-2000s, he had put this expertise in the service of Deripaska, whose global mining and metals empire often involved making deals with despots in the developing world.

But his range was broader than that. As Boyarkin tells it, his acquaintance with Manafort goes back to around 2006, the year Deripaska asked both of them to help redraw the map of Eastern Europe.

The Montenegro connection
Montenegro, a tiny Balkan nation on the Adriatic Sea, was an important testing ground for Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska. The oligarch had invested heavily in that country, buying control of a vast aluminum smelter in 2005 that accounted for roughly half of Montenegro’s exports and a sixth of its entire economy. The following year, he decided to support the Montenegrins’ drive to become an independent country. That meant breaking away from its more powerful neighbor, Serbia – and convincing the world to recognize Montenegro as an independent state.

To get this done, Deripaska offered the help of several of his advisers, including Manafort. “They were a good team,” says a senior official in Montenegro who was involved in that vote. “They helped get the support we needed from our international partners,” both in Russia and the West, says the official, who spoke to TIME on condition of anonymity. After the people of Montenegro voted by a margin slightly above 55% to declare independence from Serbia in May 2006, all the world’s major powers recognized the results.

Manafort has been open about his role in this campaign. “I have always publicly acknowledged that I worked for Mr. Deripaska and his company,” he said in a statement to reporters in the spring of 2017. “For example, one of the projects involved supporting a referendum in Montenegro that allowed that country to choose membership in the EU, a measure that Russia opposed.”

In fact, Moscow never tried to stop Montenegro’s independence, and Deripaska would not likely have supported it so robustly without approval from the Kremlin. (In 2007, he told the Financial Times, “I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.”)

“There was never any real resistance from Moscow [to the independence vote],” says the senior official in Montenegro, who was involved in lobbying for Russian support in the years before and after that referendum. The Kremlin, he says, was only too happy to have another potential ally in Eastern Europe – one that was heavily dependent on Russian investments. The arrangement suited Montenegro’s leaders just fine. “Better the Russians come here with suitcases of money than with columns of tanks,” says the official.

But their relationship with Deripaska quickly soured in much the same way it began—over money. After years of disputes over unpaid debts, the Russian billionaire sued Montenegro in 2014 for seizing the aluminum plant he controlled. The country then sped up its plans to join the NATO military alliance and integrate with the West.

The Kremlin wasn’t pleased. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in 2014 it would be “irresponsible” and “even a provocation” for another Balkan state to become a NATO member. According to investigators in Montenegro, Russian agents soon began plotting to unseat the nation’s leaders and install a government more friendly to Moscow. By coincidence, the dispute came to a head in the fall of 2016, at the same time as the U.S. presidential race.

About three weeks before the American elections, the people of Montenegro were due to hold a pivotal vote of their own. Depending on the outcome, the government would either shepherd the country into the NATO alliance the following year, or a new set of leaders would take power, most of whom wanted to change course and develop closer ties with Russia.

According to three sources in this opposition movement, known in Montenegro as the Democratic Front, they were counting on help from an American lobbyist who had worked in their country before – and who happened to be fresh out of a job in Washington. His name was Paul Manafort.

Enter Manafort
Having served for three months as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, Manafort was forced to resign in mid-August after his links to Russian interests in Ukraine became public. Still deep in debt, he reportedly went around pitching his services as a consultant in the months that followed to a wide variety of foreign leaders, from the Kurds in Iraq to the incoming president of Ecuador.

The TIME investigation found that Manafort was also in contact with politicians from his old stomping ground of Montenegro. Among them was Nebojsa Medojevic, one of the opposition leaders who were then campaigning to unseat the country’s pro-NATO leaders. His ties to Manafort were first reported to TIME by a former associate of Montenegro’s ruling clique, who said the American consultant had met with Medojevic to discuss a possible consulting deal in the fall of 2016.

At first the tip seemed implausible. Why would one of the world’s most prominent political advisers – still fresh from the chairmanship of the Republican presidential campaign – consider working with a group seen as pro-Russian upstarts in a Balkan nation of 600,000 people?

The senior Montenegrin official suggested an answer. “If Manafort got involved here in 2016, it would only be through the Russians,” he said.

At the time, Russian money was indeed flowing into Montenegrin politics. According to the sanctions list posted Dec. 19, Deripaska and Boyarkin were “involved in providing Russian financial support to a Montenegrin political party ahead of Montenegro’s 2016 elections.”

In more than a dozen interviews that TIME conducted this year, officials and political leaders in Montenegro confirmed that Deripaska and one other Russian oligarch bankrolled the pro-Russian opposition in 2016. Two of them said they heard Manafort’s name come up in strategy meetings for that opposition movement.

When asked about Manafort’s role, Medojevic, one of the leaders of this movement, confirmed that he had met with Manafort to discuss a potential partnership in the fall of 2016. He added that the meeting was a disappointment, and that no deal came out of it. In several follow-up conversations, however, he refused to talk about the meeting, saying that his contacts in the West were legitimate and urging reporters not to publish his initial comments.

For Medojevic and the rest of the opposition, the elections in Montenegro did not go smoothly. The day before the vote, a group of men was arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the government of Montenegro, assassinate its leader and seize power by force – all with abundant help from Moscow. The Montenegrin authorities later charged two agents of Russia’s military intelligence service with masterminding the alleged coup. Several of the leaders of the opposition in that country, including Medojevic, are currently on trial for charges that stem from the alleged coup attempt.

The following year, Montenegro’s parliament overwhelmingly ratified membership in NATO, as pro-Russian demonstrators protested outside. Russia’s foreign ministry said lawmakers were “trampling all democratic norms and principles.” Now, Montenegro is protected by Article 5 of the alliance, which calls for all members to support any state that comes under attack.

This summer, President Trump took issue with that protection. “Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people,” he said, after being asked by Fox News in July if the U.S. should come to Montenegro’s defense. “They are very aggressive people, they may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III.”

Known unknowns
It remains unclear whether Manafort actually provided any services in Montenegro in 2016. His lawyers deny he did any work for any Montenegrin politicians that year. Nor is it clear whether Manafort owes debts to Deripaska and, if so, how much. A court in Virginia convicted Manafort in August on eight charges of bank and tax fraud related to his lobbying work in Ukraine; he is due to be sentenced in February.

Boyarkin, for his part, denies having anything to do with Montenegrin politics. When TIME met him in Greece, he said he had not worked for Deripaska since the end of 2016. The U.S. government differs on that point; the Dec. 19 press release from the Treasury Department said Boyarkin “reports directly to Deripaska and has led business negotiations on Deripaska’s behalf.”

Those negotiations, involving mining deals in Africa and factories in Europe, were of secondary concern to U.S. investigators when they contacted Boyarkin last year, he says. They wanted to know about his links to Manafort, and the “private briefings” he had offered to Boyarkin and his boss. “They asked about all of that, yes,” the operative recalls. Once again, he says he told them to get lost.

—With reporting by Jovo Martinovic/Podgorica, Montenegro and Tessa Berenson/Washingto

© 2018 You.com USA, LLC, d/b/a TIME. All Rights Reserved

POLITICO Magazine

LAW AND ORDER

A Holiday Mystery: Why Did John Roberts Intervene in the Mueller Probe?
We’re about to find out why the chief justice of the Supreme Court decided to get involved in the special counsel’s investigation.

By NELSON W. CUNNINGHAM December 30, 2018
A mysterious grand jury subpoena case has been working itself through the D.C. courts since August. Doughty reporting by Politico linked the grand jury case to special counsel Robert Mueller. Some of us, connecting the dots, wondered whether Mueller’s antagonist in this secret subpoena battle might be President Donald Trump himself. Speculation heightened two weeks ago when the D.C. Circuit cleared an entire floor of reporters assembled for the oral argument, in order to protect the identity of the litigants.

Four days later, the D.C. Circuit judges burst the speculative bubble with a decision that halfway revealed the identity of the party litigating against the government: not Trump, but an unnamed corporation (“the Corporation”) owned by an unnamed foreign state (“Country A”). Although the case is still plenty mysterious (What foreign state? What records of what transactions? Why the hard-fought litigation?), the evident fact that Trump was not directly involved in the litigation seemingly drained further proceedings of direct suspense. Mueller watchers headed off for the holidays.

Story Continued Below

And then, last week, on the Sunday before Christmas, Chief Justice John Roberts personally intervened in this matter.

That’s right: The chief justice of the United States himself issued an order on a Sunday, in this very case. If you think that’s highly unusual, you’re right. And the action he took was equally unusual. At least for the moment calling into question the unanimous decisions of the courts below, the chief justice blocked the District Court’s order requiring the foreign corporation to comply with the grand jury subpoena, until the government’s lawyers could respond to the Corporation’s briefings.

So now, in abrupt fashion, Mueller’s investigation has suddenly reached the Supreme Court, and with the personal attention of the chief justice, no less.

Story Continued Below

What does this all mean? Let’s try to unpack it.
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This month’s three-page summary D.C. Circuit decision revealed a fairly dry set of legal issues that just might conceal a juicy core. The dry issues involved matters of jurisdiction and statutory interpretation fathomed only by elite appellate lawyers, but the potentially juicier underlying issues hinted of fascination: Somewhere, a corporation (a bank? a communications firm? an energy company?) owned by a foreign state (Russia? Turkey? Ukraine? United Arab Emirates? Saudi Arabia?) had engaged in transactions that had an impact in the United States and on matters involved in the special counsel’s investigation.

Intriguingly, the decision revealed that a regulator from Country A had filed a submission claiming that compliance with the subpoena would cause the Corporation to violate Country A’s law. So whoever Country A is, this matter captured its officials’ attention and prompted them to send filings to a faraway country to block the subpoena. Why does Country A care? And, what is it trying to hide?

Story Continued Below

So, from the D.C. Circuit’s decision we learned that a foreign government was actively involved in blocking Mueller’s investigation. That fact is intriguing enough. In the ordinary course, that should have been the end of it. The state-owned Corporation filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, which receives roughly 7,000 petitions a year but acts in fewer than 200 of them. There was unanimity below — all four judges (the District Court judge and the three Circuit Court judges) had agreed that the Corporation and Country A’s legal claims of sovereign immunity and of contrary foreign law were without merit. There was little reason for judicial watchers to expect anything beyond a quiet return to the grand jury and further proceedings there. We headed off for the holidays.

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And then came Roberts’ surprise Sunday decision. He is the “circuit justice” for the D.C. Circuit, meaning he is the justice assigned to receive emergency and other petitions arising from that circuit. Under Supreme Court rules, the circuit justice may act without consulting his or her colleagues to dispose of routine rulings. So, we should not read too much into the fact that it is the chief justice in particular who acted here.

Story Continued Below

But we can read a good deal into his decision to intervene at all. Although every judge below agreed there was ultimately no merit to the Corporation’s legal claims, Roberts evidently harbors some doubt. Something in the Corporation’s papers caught his attention. So rather than consigning this appeal to the discard pile with thousands of others, he has blocked the lower courts’ decisions until he can receive the government’s briefs defending those decisions. Those papers must be filed no later than New Year’s Eve. Once he receives the full briefing, he can reject the Corporation’s appeal or he can advance the matter to the full court for consideration.

Story Continued Below

Until then, we can only wonder at the remarkable circumstance that the chief justice of the United States has personally intervened, at the request of a foreign government through its corporate entity, in Mueller’s investigation. Only two days before, court observers noted that in a high-profile asylum decision, Roberts had sided with his four liberal colleagues against the Trump administration. Many observers took that as evidence that Roberts was carefully seeking to preserve the court’s institutional neutrality, integrity and balance.

Story Continued Below

What are we to make of his pre-Christmas intervention on behalf of Country A and the Corporation, and against Mueller’s office? We may know soon. Mueller’s office filed its submission early, on Friday evening. We’ll keep our eyes glued to the docket.

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Nelson W. Cunningham has served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York under Rudolph Giuliani, general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee under then-chair Joseph R. Biden, and general counsel of the White House Office of Administration under Bill Clinton. He is now president of McLarty Associates, an international strategic advisory firm based in Washington.

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Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani responds to the latest news on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigationVideo
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani responds to the latest news on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation
Rudi Giuliani weighs in on the future of the Mueller probe.

In a wide-ranging interview Sunday on “Fox & Friends,” President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani suggested that key evidence of anti-Trump bias has been deleted in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, and charged that Democrats rejected legislation that would have “absolutely prevented” the murder of California police officer Ronil Singh by an alleged illegal immigrant early Wednesday.

The suspect in the slaying, Gustavo Perez Arriaga, had known gang affiliations as well as two past DUI arrests. Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson this weekend argued that the murder “could’ve been preventable,” saying that California law had prevented authorities from sharing information about Arriaga’s DUI arrests with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“This could’ve been prevented by just a reasonably sensible policy,” Giuliani said. “Democrats … voted against legislation that would have absolutely prevented this by focusing on gang members. He should’ve been taken in for being a drunk driver. … There was special legislation to focus on gang members. Most of the Democrats voted against it. Almost every Republican voted for it. Had that legislation been in place, this murder may very well not have happened.”

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In September 2017, the Criminal Alien Gang Member Removal Act, which would have given authorities the ability to take immigration enforcement action against suspected gang members even if they have not been convicted of a crime, passed the House along party lines but did not receive further Senate consideration.

Giuliani added that “this is going to keep happening,” and pointed to Democrats’ previous support for enhancing border wall funding.

Illegal immigrant arrested in the murder of California police officer Ronil Singh had been previously arrested for DUIVideo
“This thing about a wall is totally crazy – they all voted for it,” Giuliani said. “She [House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi] was in favor of it; now she says it’s immoral. So I hope she went to confession. I mean, she’s a Catholic.”

Fox News has learned that behind the scenes this weekend, several senators are discussing a new potential compromise to end the ongoing partial federal government shutdown. One bipartisan proposal is to provide $5.7 billion in funding for the border wall, as well as a congressional reauthorization of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for those brought to the U.S. illegally as children, along with some other immigration provisions.

There has also been talk about a special allowance for some classes of Central American refugees to be granted a more robust asylum status.

Separately, Giuliani openly cast doubt on Mueller’s official explanation for why the phones belonging to two of his former top deputies were completely wiped just days after they were fired for their anti-Trump bias. Giuliani also reiterated his previous assertions that Trump would not sit down for a one-on-one interview with Mueller, citing what he called the “unethical or grossly negligent behavior” of special counsel prosecutors.

MUELLER RECORDS OFFICER TOTALLY WIPES ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT’S PHONE, CAN’T REMEMBER IF IT HAD TEXTS ON IT

In a comprehensive report issued earlier this month, the Department of Justice’s internal watchdog blamed a technical glitch for a swath of missing text messages between anti-Trump ex-FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – and revealed that government phones issued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office to Strzok and Page had been wiped completely clean after Strzok was fired from the Russia probe.

Strzok – who in August 2016 texted Page about an “insurance policy” in the event Trump won the election and who secretly discussed a “media leak strategy” concerning the Russia probe – was removed from Mueller’s team in late July 2017 after the FBI discovered he had been sending anti-Trump text messages. He sent many of those messages to Page, with whom he was engaged in an extramarital affair.

“All those texts from Strzok and Page – deleted?” Giulani asked. “After they find out that Strzok is texting that he hates Trump, that he’s going to get him and stop him – and that if he can’t stop him, he has an ‘insurance policy’ to get him out of office. I believe Mueller is the insurance policy to get him out of office. I’m not just saying that – Strzok was his first investigator.”

The DOJ’s Inspector General (IG) said that, with help from the Department of Defense, it was able to uncover thousands of missing text messages written by Strzok and Page and sent using their FBI-issued Samsung phones from December 15, 2016, through May 17, 2017, “as well as hundreds of other text messages outside the gap time period that had not been produced by the FBI due to technical problems with its text message collection tool.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller may submit Russia investigation report to attorney general as early as February 2019Video
But when the IG went looking for the iPhones separately issued to Strzok and Page by the Mueller team, investigators were told that “[Strzok’s] iPhone had been reset to factory settings and was reconfigured for the new user to whom the device was issued.”

The records officer at the special counsel told the IG that “as part of the office’s records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok’s DOJ issued iPhone” on September 6, 2017, and “determined it contained no substantive text messages” before it was wiped completely – just weeks after Strzok was fired from Mueller’s team for anti-Trump bias and sending anti-Trump text messages.

INSIDE STRZOK AND PAGE’S ‘MEDIA LEAK STRATEGY’ AT THE FBI

“The person who determined what to eliminate was Mueller’s records officer, who says there was nothing of interest there,” Giulani said. “It’s hard to believe Strzok and Page suddenly decided, ‘We’re not going to text anymore about Donald Trump.’ They seemed to be obsessively and compulsively texting about him. I don’t know what kind of lovers they were if they were texting about that all the time. It’s ridiculous.”

Still, while he questioned why Strzok and Page’s Mueller-issued phones were wiped, Giuliani did not dispute the FBI’s contention that a technical glitch had affected Strzok and Page’s separate FBI-issued Samsung phones.

“Texts only last… for a little while… not like emails,” Giuliani said. "I do this work, cybersecurity work. Texts are hard to get. That’s legitimate.”

How press botched Flynn hearing
How press botched Flynn hearing
Media expected no jail time for ex-aide.

Giuliani added that it was likely that Strzok, in fact, had been using his Mueller-issued phone to discuss topics like the FBI’s tactics in the investigation of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Explosive court documents released earlier this month revealed that, in January 2017, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pushed Flynn not to have an attorney present during the questioning that ultimately led to his guilty plea on a single charge of lying to federal authorities.

“Just maybe, it would be very embarrassing if he was saying the same things while working for the holier-than-thou special counsel – ‘we’re framing Flynn, we’re not gonna tell him he has the right to counsel,’” Giuliani said.

Asked whether he expects Mueller’s final investigative report to be issued in February, Giulani suggested he isn’t holding his breath.

HOW THE FBI INCORRECTLY SUGGESTED TO FISA COURT IT HAD MORE EVIDENCE THAN IT REALLY DID TO SURVEIL TRUMP AIDE

Journalists watch as Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his annual state of the nation address in Manezh in Moscow, Russia, on March 1, 2018. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
Journalists watch as Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his annual state of the nation address in Manezh in Moscow, Russia, on March 1, 2018. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
“Oh gosh, almighty – first he was coming out in March, then in May – we’re now in fourth degree of separation from the non-crime of collusion,” Giulani said. “We went to the non-crime of obstrution of justice, that didn’t work out for them. Then he moved on to campaign contributions, which by the way are not violative of the campaign finance law. And then they’re looking at now the Russia tower. They should go to Moscow. There is no tower. It didn’t get built. It didn’t get beyond a nonbinding letter of intent, which is like a wish.”

Giuliani maintained that Trump was “as surprised as I was” about the WikiLeaks disclosures of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 presidential campaign, and emphasized that the underlying emails were not doctored.

What hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign, Giuliani said, was that the emails revealed that her campaign had received illicit inside information from the DNC to help her secure the nomination.

“The thing that really got Hillary, is not that it was revealed, but that it was true – she really was cheating on the debates, she really was getting the questions from Donna Brazile beforehand, she really did screw Bernie Sanders – every bit of that was true.”

He added a personal message to Mueller: “My ultimatum is ‘put up or shut up, Bob.’ I mean, what do you have? There are those who believe you don’t have anything on collusion. And, by the way, even if you did it’s not a crime – so what the heck are you doing? Do you have anything that shows the President of the United States was involved in a conspiracy to hack the DNC with Russia? Of course you don’t. If you do, put out a report, or give it to the Justice Department, let them review it, make sure it’s not classified or whatever, put out a report. We’re ready to rebut it. I’ve had the report ready for two months.”

Fox News’ Chad Pergram contributed to this report.

Joseph Goebbels would turn green with envy over the propaganda machine that the Republican right wing has built. FOX, Sinclair, Limbaugh, right-wing radio, Social Media, Preachers on TV, Republicans in Congress, talking points of the day, fake think tanks, conspiracy theories… the list goes on and on. They take their cues from each other and run with the same lies to reach as many people as possible in the shortest time possible.

The Republican party CAN NOT exist without lies, fear, and hate. When was the last time you saw a Republican run for office without, caravans coming toward the border, children with Ebola mixed with ISIS members coming, Democrats are going to take away your Medicare, Socialized medicine, Flashing red terrorist warning lights from Homeland Security…? The last time I can remember a Republican trying to run a half honest campaign was John McCain. He will be remembered for the time he pulled the microphone from that propagandized lady who called Obama a Muslim and said “No Ma’am”, and won the respect of many Americans, and lost the minds of most Republicans.

Greg Sargent has a series of tweets today that are aimed at Trump’s lies, but I think this can be applied to the propaganda the Republican party has been using for decades to build the real mindless cult of followers that allows them to attack our democracy with such ferocity.

  1. As Trump ends the year with a flood of lies about his wall, we need to recapture a core truth about this presidency. Trump isn’t “twisting the truth” or “stubbornly refusing to admit error.”Trump is engaged in *disinformation.*This is a different thing entirely.

  2. The WaPo and NYT fact-checkers have now posted their year-end pieces. They are notable.

Via @glennkesslerwp, Trump has now passed the 7,500 mark in falsehoods and distortions as president:

  1. Meanwhile, @YLindaQiu points to a pattern in which Trump regularly converts his falsehoods into “alternative facts” through “sheer force of repetition.”

This is the essence of the matter.

  1. Why does Trump lie all the time about everything, even the most trivial, easily disprovable matters? The frequency and the audacity of Trump’s disinformation is the whole point of it — to wear you down. More and more of the lies slip past, undetected and uncorrected.

  2. Others have pointed this out to great effect. See @sarahkendzior or @jayrosen_nyu or @brianbeutler or @drvox. I tried to give this topic the ambitious treatment it deserves in my book, “An Uncivil War.” I don’t know if I succeeded, but I tried.

Greg Sargent
:heavy_check_mark:
@ThePlumLineGS
· 11h
Replying to @ThePlumLineGS and 6 others
6) Once Trump’s lying is understood as concerted and deliberate disinformation, it becomes clear that the frequency and audacity of it is the whole point.

Those are features of the lying. They are central to declaring the power to say what reality is:https://www.amazon.com/Uncivil-War-Democracy-Disinformation-Thunderdome/dp/0062698451/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546170708&sr=8-1&keywords=an+uncivil+war

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Greg Sargent
:heavy_check_mark:
@ThePlumLineGS
7) The other crucial half of this is to destroy the credibility of the institutional press.

Previous presidents have tangled with the media. But Trump’s ongoing casting of the press as the “enemy of the people” is in important respects something new:https://www.amazon.com/Uncivil-War-Democracy-Disinformation-Thunderdome/dp/0062698451/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546170708&sr=8-1&keywords=an+uncivil+warpic.twitter.com/qX2dHIFnBF

2,607
4:15 AM - Dec 30, 2018
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:sunglasses: When people dig up old Trump tweets contradicting current claims and say “LOL there’s always a tweet,” this misses the point.

Trump is openly and unapologetically declaring that norms of consistency and standards of interplay with the institutional press do not bind him.

  1. I don’t know how conscious this is for Trump. But his background conditioned him for it. His Reality TV past (reality is created via force of personality) fused with Steve Bannon’s love of totalitarian propaganda to create what we’re seeing now:

  2. There’s a reason Bannon immediately recognized in Trump a kindred spirit.

Both are authoritarian populists and as such share devotion to the awesome possibilities of disinformation.

Greg Sargent
:heavy_check_mark:
@ThePlumLineGS
· 11h
Replying to @ThePlumLineGS and 7 others
11) All these things led @jayrosen_nyu to declare early that the media is embroiled in a “public battle," the “fight of its life.”

We’ve struggled for the right footing.

But we’ve endured situations like this before. Historically, the media has adapted: amazon.com/Uncivil-War-Demo … ncivil+war

View image on Twitter

Greg Sargent
:heavy_check_mark:
@ThePlumLineGS
12) I believe the press is undergoing a generational institutional adjustment, and that Trump’s corruption of our politics w/disinformation is failing.

My book tries to tell this story with history/scholarship in an effort to reckon w/it seriously. FINhttps://www.amazon.com/Uncivil-War-D … ncivil+war

2,181
4:33 AM - Dec 30, 2018
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An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome…
In An Uncivil War, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent sounds an urgent alarm about the deeper roots of our democratic backsliding—and how we can begin to turn things around between now and 2020…

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George Orwell tried to warn future generations of the danger of propaganda.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Ronald Reagan referred to nuclear-tipped missiles as “Peacekeepers”. Dick Chaney said we can’t wait until we see the mushroom clouds, exposed the identity of a CIA agent, and planted false stories in the NYT… Deception, misinformation, fear…, these have been but a few of the tools of propaganda that the Republicans have been using for decades.

During the disastrous presidency of GWB, we Democrats were screaming BUSH! BUSH! BUSH!, when I think we should have been screaming REPUBLICANS! REPUBLICANS! REPUBLICANS!. Even Republicans blamed Bush for his disaster, knowing full well he did exactly what they wanted him to do but the right wing propaganda machine could convince enough Americans that he was the exception to conservatism rather than the rule.

There are thousands of Trumps, McConnells, and Ryans rising up to manipulate the propagandized cult base and use the propaganda machine in order to gain the power that they seek to change the rules so their power can never be challenged. This is who the manipulators of the Republican party are and have been for many decades.

The members of our 4th estate, who have the biggest microphones, are failing us. The “both side-ism” and the fear of being part of the “liberal media” has made them cower in submission and become an additional tool for the propagandists to spread their lies to the masses.

We will need to walk a fine line between supporting the freedom of speech that is part of the concrete foundation of democracy and crushing the right wing propaganda machine that is replacing that foundation with the sands of authoritarianism. The path to restoring truth in America is uncertain, but the understanding of the founding fathers that, democracy can not exist without an informed public.

This is why become hyperbole cake to be a repressed idea to fool parties into an ideally fixed double entendre, the Russians getting some wrenched up idea that they are owned some thing, as ethereal to believe in some actual economic leverage to guarantee some payoffs.

Not realising the blindness of forfeiture backed up by a history of bankruptcy.

As hypo and hyper reality extend, to enclose the sensible, the what is=what is may transform that problem.

At that point the synthetic problem of changing what is to what should be, may no longer serve as a measurable contradiction between opposites, simulated as such, and/or familiar to similar.

Given the possibility that nature will up end human intentionality, the equation of the above quote may itself loose relevance.

Then interpretation itself may deemphasize personhood~identify by the variance between situation and context, by ever more largely spaced intervals.

If not, then life itself will cease to operate except by way of exclusive sophistry and propaganda.

AI will then would be neutralized as of consisting of untrusted intent, and a newer and more profound dark ages will commence.

Therefore, this evolutionary trait, of squeezing reality between hyper and hyporeality must be compensated by other means, albeit synthetic.
In this day and age, deceptive misrepresentation can only be supported within and without limited
spatial-temporal descriptipn.

AI needs to compensate by reversely engineered processes, to change its contradictory functions, to assimulate,
reductive programs.

That is the problem with Trumpism, its REDUCTIVE without a limit or a compensatory program.

It does not recognise it’s logical antithesis and tries to de- differentiate into a repressive ambiguity, leaving political dynamics in tact, hoping that the necessary reactions can be later manipulated.

We are heading incredibly toward larger perimeters of conflict.

It is then the larger concern of existential leaps, that socially consciousness will have to be concerned with.

Arminius, if he was still around would need to look at the burst of bubbles.

RUSSIA chose Donald Trump and ran him as President as Moscow thought he would be the most advantageous candidate, a former agent of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has claimed.

VLADIMIR Putin is targeting Belarus in his bid to create a Greater Russia reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, the Belarus president warned today.

FORMER advisor to President Trump has admitted that there are genuine concerns over Russia’s shock plan to use a “doomsday device” that would create a 300-ft radiation tsunami wave - powerful enough to wipe out major US cities.

now have we a need to experience bubbles bursting from the foam to see collusion not only between national ambitions, privy to personal debt, and philosophical cynicism?
How about the Russian development of hyperweapons which can not be stopped by the latest antimissle technology? How does that fare with Reagenites and Trumpists and ideologically loaded and short sighted optimists weaned on progressive pragmatism, weighed by naustalgic isolationism and the myth of American hegemony and manifest Destiny?

central question remains unanswered, and it’s one that could hold the key to what happens over the next few months: What did FBI officials know in the summer of 2016 that dissuaded them from telling Trump they were investigating his top aides?

The world may soon know the answer. Government officials and others familiar with the situation tell NBC News that Mueller is nearing the end stages of his investigation, and a report by the special counsel is expected to be submitted to the Justice Department as early as mid-February.

Appointed in May 2017, Mueller, a Republican, Vietnam combat veteran and career public servant who led the FBI after 9/11, assembled a team of veteran prosecutors. They called upon the fruits of secret U.S. intelligence gathering to lay bare, in two indictments, how Russian intelligence officers and agents used fake social media personas and illegal hacking to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.

Stay tuned in 2019. My prediction is, that well into his term, nothing drastic will happen.

A lot of.hanky panky happened after the JFK assassination and the lengthy investigation. And report of the Warren. commission still left very credible issues unresolved, in fact, so called conspiracy theories wrote down the report as vastly unexamined.

Political pressures have ominously bore the weight of public opinion against examined facts, which in today’s legal world can easily be ascribed to policy and security considerations.

The progressive information divide between the haves and the have nots can bring in addition the plausibility question by the mainstream.

Like it is said, ‘time heals all wounds’ and healing is pursuant to credibility factors.

The collision course here is primarily one of the economic collusion within what Gen.Dwight Eisenhower called the ‘military-industrial complex’.

Trumpism is a lite-motif between enormous , long standing policy reification.

The thought that Trump was forced to fill the role he currently suffers, at the threat of a gun, indebted as he was and still is to the various financial and political entities, may not be necessarily ruled out.

How good an actor he is, is yet to be determined, but it’s doubtful he cam measure up to Ronald Reagan , who actually was the president of the screen actor’s guild.

Now is Trump’s chance at a minor role of necoming Time’s Man of the Year, and /or, winner of the Noble Peace Prize, outgunning even Obama, whom he despises.

In one of his first tweets of the new year, President Donald Trump attacked retired four-star Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal after he criticized the President on Sunday.

“‘General’ McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “Last assignment a total bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!”

Trump was retweeting a post from Fox News’ Laura Ingraham sharing a story headlined “Media Didn’t Like McChrystal Until He Started Bashing Trump.”

Opinions

Mitt Romney: The president shapes the public character of the nation. Trump’s character falls short.
By Mitt Romney

January 1, 2019 at 8:00 PM

President Trump speaks during an interview with Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey in the Oval Office at the White House on Nov. 27. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah and the party’s 2012 nominee for president, will be sworn into the U.S. Senate on Thursday.

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December. The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a “sucker” in world affairs all defined his presidency down.

It is well known that Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination. After he became the nominee, I hoped his campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not. When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion. His early appointments of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, Kelly and Mattis were encouraging. But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

Related: [The Post’s View: The last lines of defense against Trump]

The world is also watching. America has long been looked to for leadership. Our economic and military strength was part of that, of course, but our enduring commitment to principled conduct in foreign relations, and to the rights of all people to freedom and equal justice, was even more esteemed. Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world. In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 84 percent of people in Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Sweden believed the American president would “do the right thing in world affairs.” One year later, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

This comes at a very unfortunate time. Several allies in Europe are experiencing political upheaval. Several former Soviet satellite states are rethinking their commitment to democracy. Some Asian nations, such as the Philippines, lean increasingly toward China, which advances to rival our economy and our military. The alternative to U.S. world leadership offered by China and Russia is autocratic, corrupt and brutal.

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.

To reassume our leadership in world politics, we must repair failings in our politics at home. That project begins, of course, with the highest office once again acting to inspire and unite us. It includes political parties promoting policies that strengthen us rather than promote tribalism by exploiting fear and resentment. Our leaders must defend our vital institutions despite their inevitable failings: a free press, the rule of law, strong churches, and responsible corporations and unions.

We must repair our fiscal foundation, setting a course to a balanced budget. We must attract the best talent to America’s service and the best innovators to America’s economy.

America is strongest when our arms are linked with other nations. We want a unified and strong Europe, not a disintegrating union. We want stable relationships with the nations of Asia that strengthen our mutual security and prosperity.

Related: [Jimmy Carter: How to repair the U.S.-China relationship — and prevent a modern Cold War]

I look forward to working on these priorities with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other senators.

Furthermore, I will act as I would with any president, in or out of my party: I will support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state, and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.

I remain optimistic about our future. In an innovation age, Americans excel. More importantly, noble instincts live in the hearts of Americans. The people of this great land will eschew the politics of anger and fear if they are summoned to the responsibility by leaders in homes, in churches, in schools, in businesses, in government — who raise our sights and respect the dignity of every child of God — the ideal that is the essence of America.

Read more:

Antony J. Blinken and Robert Kagan: ‘America First’ is only making the world worse. Here’s a better approach.

Jeff Flake: Republicans must move beyond the cult of Trump’s personality

Jennifer Rubin: A frightful portrait of a president out of control

George Will: This sad, embarrassing wreck of a man

Helaine Olen: 2018 is the year hope began to triumph over Trump’s nihilism

Attorneys Eric Dubelier, left, and Katherine Seikaly, right, representing Concord Management and Consulting LLC, leave federal court in Washington, Wednesday, May 9, 2018, after pleading not guilty on behalf of the company, which has been charged as part of a conspiracy to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
7’
Attorneys Eric Dubelier, left, and Katherine Seikaly, right, representing Concord Management and Consulting LLC, leave federal court in Washington, Wednesday, May 9, 2018, after pleading not guilty on behalf of the company, which has been charged as part of a … more >
‘Real Justice Department’ veteran emerges as Mueller’s top courtroom adversary
By Rowan Scarborough
A former federal prosecutor has emerged as special counsel Robert Mueller’s most persistent courtroom critic.

It’s not Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and now President Trump’s ubiquitous defender, or any of cable TV’s prosecutors-turned-pundits.

He is Eric A. Dubelier, a litigator for the Reed Smith law firm who knows international law and the D.C. playing field. He served eight years prosecuting cases as a Justice Department assistant U.S. attorney in Washington. He refers to his former employer as “the real Justice Department,” implying that Mr. Mueller’s team is something less.

His biting remarks have come in months of court filings and oral arguments. Mr. Dubelier has depicted Mr. Mueller as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring Justice Department guidelines.

He has accused Mr. Mueller of creating a “make-believe crime” against his Russian client, Concord Management and Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election.

So far, the federal judge presiding over the case has sided with Mr. Mueller.


Mr. Dubelier charges that the Mueller team violated the confidentially of Concord’s counter evidence while hiding documents Concord needs for its defense. The prosecutor wants to “whisper secrets to the judge,” Mr. Dubelier says, as Mr. Mueller is calculating the “short-term political value of a conviction” and not worrying about an appeals court defeat years later.

An example: In a Dec. 20 motion, Mr. Dubelier resurrected a botched case spearheaded by Mr. Mueller’s top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann.

Mr. Weissmann headed the Justice Department’s Enron task force nearly two decades ago. He won a conviction against the accounting firm Arthur Andersen for shredding the defunct energy firm’s financial documents.

Years later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. The 2005 decision effectively said that Andersen, by then out of business and its 28,000 employees gone, hadn’t committed a crime.

“Mr. Dubelier is exactly right on Mr. Mueller’s motives and tactics,” said Sidney Powell, whose book “License to Lie” exposes years of Justice Department scandals. “His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective.”

‘Made up a crime to fit the facts’

Concord Management and Consulting is an unlikely client. Legal observers opined that when Mr. Mueller brought charges against various Russians who hacked computers and trolled the 2016 election, no defendant would travel the nearly 5,000 miles to show up for trial.

No defendant has personally arrived. But Concord did appear quickly after the February indictment. Of 28 Russian individuals and firms charged with election interference by Mr. Mueller, only Concord has appeared in U.S. District Court, in this instance in the person of the aggressive Mr. Dubelier.

The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding disclosure of evidence. Disclosure, Mr. Dubelier argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Concord’s chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Concord is accused of an elaborate conspiracy with another Russian operation, the Internet Research Agency. The indictment accuses Concord of providing the troll farm $1.2 million monthly to defraud the U.S. The two firms set up fake personas and false Twitter accounts, Facebook ads and other social media posts mostly to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

In a separate case, Mr. Mueller brought charges in July against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic computers, stealing emails and funneling them to three websites for distribution.

Mr. Dubelier argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It’s done all the time, he says.

“When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say whatever he or she wants to say,” he said at an Oct. 15 hearing.

“That’s why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have,” Mr. Dubelier said. “And that’s the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they operate outside the parameters of the Department of Justice in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the Department of Justice in these cases for the past 30 years.”

Mr. Dubelier lost that argument with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, who rejected his bid to dismiss the case.

But he wasn’t done. There is an ongoing battle over Concord’s access to “sensitive” evidence that Mr. Mueller won’t let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin.

Mr. Dubelier has expressed exasperation.

“This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the client who is to be put on trial,” he said. “This has never happened before in reported case law because the notion is too ludicrous to contemplate.”

“What Mueller has turned over is often irrelevant to mounting a defense, such as promotion emails for airlines and personal naked selfie photographs,” Mr. Dubelier said in a December filing.

The special counsel is keeping most relevant information between himself and Judge Friedrich, excluding Mr. Dubelier.

Why no probe of dossier writer?

Mr. Mueller won the argument over “sensitive” material. He now wants to hold closed sessions with the judge over classified information — again, without Mr. Dubelier.

Mr. Dubelier responded in a Dec. 27 filing: “The Special Counsel has made up a crime that has never been prosecuted before in the history of the United States, and now seeks to make up secret procedures for communicating ex parte [meaning no defense counsel present] to the court which have never been employed in any reported criminal case not involving classified discovery.”

The defense attorney admitted his motion is “likely fruitless” because Judge Friedrich previously has ruled against Concord.

Many documents are in Russian, a culturally different language than English.

One Russian word, Mr. Dubelier says, “can be translated into the English words ‘chief,’ ‘boss’ or ‘chef’ — a distinction that is critically important since international media often refers to Mr. Prigozhin as ‘Putin’s chef.’”

On another matter, Mr. Dubelier is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery.

Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor’s request for a “firewall counsel” to review evidence for its national security implications.

Mr. Dubelier said he submitted evidence to the firewall lawyer only to see it fall into the hands of Mr. Mueller’s team, who began using it to further investigate Concord. “Surely a remarkable coincidence,” Mr. Dubelier said.

In another pre-trial argument, Mr. Dubelier is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn’t British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti-Trump information from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the Justice Department for election interference just like the Russians?

Mr. Steele didn’t register under the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which Mr. Mueller has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the Concord team. Judge Friedrich rejected Mr. Dubelier’s argument of “selective prosecution.”

Mr. Mueller’s counter-motion boils down to this: Mr. Prigozhin is a criminal fugitive who blatantly interfered in the U.S. election and is not entitled to sensitive national security information he would share with the Kremlin intelligence.

In a new battleground, the Mueller team wants to show the judge top secret material to persuade her to keep it from the defense.

“Disclosure of such information could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security,” the Mueller filing stated.

Judge Friedrich ruled in June that Mr. Prigozhin is prohibited from viewing non-classified sensitive information that details how the government obtained evidence.

The Mueller team argued: “Discovery in this case contains sensitive information about investigative techniques and cooperating witnesses that goes well beyond the information that will be disclosed at trial … Information within this case’s discovery identifies sources, methods, and techniques used to identify the foreign actors behind these interference operations … the government has particularized concerns about discovery in this case being disclosed to Russian intelligence services.”

Mr. Mueller says that as long as Mr. Prigozhin, whom the U.S. sanctioned and then indicted for election interference, remains in Russia, he isn’t entitled to see sensitive evidence.

Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC.

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Tomorrow is the day Donald Trump’s presidency totally changes
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 8:16 PM EST, Wed January 02, 2019

Washington (CNN) Donald Trump may not realize it totally yet, but today was the last easy-ish day of his presidency.

By noon (or so) Thursday, Nancy Pelosi will become the new speaker of the House of Representatives – formalizing the Democratic majority her side won in last November’s election. And that will change everything.

Trump has sought to look on the bright side of divided control of government to date – insisting that maybe he will be able to make deals with the new Democratic majority in the House. “It really could be a beautiful bipartisan situation,” he said at a press conference the day after the 2018 election.

But the early returns are not promising. The federal government has been shut down for the past 12 days – and there’s little reason to believe that will change at any point soon. Trump has dug in on his demand for $5 billion to fund construction of his border wall. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, are equally dead-set on providing zero dollars for Trump’s wall.

View this interactive content on CNN.com
And this is only the beginning. Starting tomorrow, Democrats in the House will make Trump’s life a living hell. Efforts are already underway to bring a number of his Cabinet officials before Congress, to extricate his tax returns from his grip and to more deeply probe his business dealings both before and during his presidency.

Trump, a political neophyte prior to the 2016 race, has never had to deal with this sort of opposition before. Sure, Democrats have never been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But he never really needed Democrats to do much of anything, either. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate ensured Trump got his tax cuts and two Supreme Court picks. There was no real political penalty for his total unwillingness and inability to work with Democrats.

Those days are now over. Democrats can now do Trump real political damage using the official means of their House majority. While they may not be able to, say, force his tax returns into public view (the jury remains out on that), they can make sure the issue is front and center and create major distractions for a White House that has already shown it can distract itself very well, thank you very much.

Trump claims to understand this, likely with his self-professed titanic intellect. To me, that’s like when people who are about to have a baby say they are totally ready for it. As evidence, they point to their nursery being all set up, the Diaper Genie being up and running, and so on and so forth. Then the baby comes – and they realize, like every parent that has gone before them, that no amount of planning or bracing could fully prepare them for their new reality.

That’s Trump and the new Democratic House majority.

The Point: Look out: It’s going to be a mess.

View on CNN
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights

Showdown

The president is demanding more than $5 billion to build a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. House Democrats plan to advance legislation that would reopen key parts of the government but deny Trump any additional money for a wall, as one of their first acts after they take control of the chamber on Thursday.

But Trump told congressional leaders he will not sign the measure, said incoming House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who attended the meeting.

Anderson Cooper on ‘General Trump’ :

CNN’s Anderson Cooper had some home truths for Donald Trump after the president bragged he’d have made “a good general” during Wednesday’s bizarre Cabinet meeting.

“The world will never know General Trump, in part because the president never set foot in a combat theater until last week with his trip to Iraq,” said the host of “Anderson Cooper 360°.”

“The closest he came to serving in uniform was his teen years as a student in the New York Military Academy, which was a prep school. His parents sent him there to straighten out his behavior, apparently,” Cooper added.

Moments ago: President Trump spoke to reporters in the White House briefing room. He refused to take questions.

Sanders introduced President Trump, who talked about his border wall demand, and then both Sanders and Trump left the room, taking no questions from reporters.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar called the question-less appearance a “non-briefing.”

The US government is warning Americans that if they visit China they may not be able to return home
Benjamin Zhang Jan 3, 2019, 3:05 PM

Air China plane flags
The Chinese presidential Boeing 747-400. The State Department has released a travel advisory for China.Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
The US State Department has issued a travel advisory urging Americans to “exercise increased caution” when traveling to the People’s Republic of China.
The elevated travel advisory is out of concern that China may arbitrarily enforce local laws and detain US citizens without cause using exit bans.
Under these exit bans, US citizens may be detained or forced to stay in China for an indefinite period of time and may be subject to harassment and interrogation.
The China travel advisory is a level-two advisory, which urges increased caution.
Other countries or regions with a level-two advisory include Algeria, Antarctica, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Myanmar, and the United Kingdom.
The US State Department has issued a travel advisory urging Americans to “exercise increased caution” when traveling to the People’s Republic of China.

The State Department’s elevated travel advisory is out of concern that China may arbitrarily enforce local laws and detain US citizens without cause.

The advisory also indicates that US-Chinese citizens or Americans of Chinese heritage are especially vulnerable to “additional scrutiny and harassment.”

“Chinese authorities have asserted broad authority to prohibit US citizens from leaving China by using ‘exit bans,’ sometimes keeping US citizens in China for years,” the State Department said in its advisory.

Read more: The US is warning Americans about the dangers of traveling to China. Here’s what to know before you visit the country.

According to the advisory, China tends to use these exit bans in a coercive manner to “compel US citizens to participate in Chinese government investigations, to lure individuals back to China from abroad, and to aid Chinese authorities in resolving civil disputes in favor of Chinese parties.”

In addition, the State Department said Americans find out about these exit bans only when they try to leave China, and they aren’t notified how long the bans will last.

Read more: The government shutdown could spur more flight delays making travel a nightmare, air traffic controllers claim.

The advisory also said that Americans affected by exit bans have been “harassed and threatened” by authorities.

“US citizens may be detained without access to US consular services or information about their alleged crime,” the State Department said. "US citizens may be subjected to prolonged interrogations and extended detention for reasons related to “state security.”

“Security personnel may detain and/or deport US citizens for sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese government,” the agency added.

Read more: Here are all the countries not allowed to fly into the US

The new China travel advisory is a level-two advisory, which urges increased caution. A level-one advisory suggests travelers “exercise normal precautions,” while a level-three advisory urges Americans to “reconsider travel.” A level-four advisory recommends that Americans avoid traveling to a particular country.

Leaving for Asia tonight- Hanoi and Cebu. This may be my last correspondence. Try to write after arrival.

Safe travels.

Certain common aphorisms were never meant to be taken literally. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” is a particularly risky principle by which to live. A watched pot will indeed boil. Time does not heal all wounds. “Slow and steady” does not always win the race. President Trump added a new - and, for him, potentially dangerous - aphorism on Friday, when asked about impeachment. He said he was not at all concerned because “you can’t impeach somebody that’s doing a great job.”

The president was hopefully making an aspirational, not a literal, point - because a president can be entirely successful in office yet rightfully be impeached for committing “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Indeed, no matter how successful a president may be in various policies, the commission of any impeachable offense means, by definition, that he or she is not doing a “great job.”

Trump’s statement was unnerving not only because he has said it before but because he is entering the most dangerous period of his term so far. With Democrats now controlling the House of Representatives - and some already stating their intentions, intemperately or even profanely like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) - the White House is about to be hit with a torrent of document demands and subpoenas from a half-dozen committees.

Committee chairmen have promised to demand answers on Trump’s taxes, foreign business dealings, family charity and other areas beyond the still-ongoing Russia investigation. These moves reflect a strategy that not only targets Trump but is counting on Trump to be successful. They are relying on Trump’s self-description as a “counterpuncher” to supply the grounds of his removal. Yes, a president can counterpunch himself into impeachment.

Despite the filing of articles of impeachment on the first day of House Democratic control, there is not a strong basis for a single article at this time. Thus far, the strongest basis is the money paid to two women to silence them about alleged affairs with Trump before the election. Yet, while highly damaging, these allegations can be difficult to prosecute and occurred before Trump took office. An in-kind campaign contribution simply is not a strong stand-alone issue for impeachment.

Likewise, there still is no compelling basis to allege a crime based on obstruction or theories of collusion. That leaves Democrats with a House majority secured, at least in part, on promises of impeachment but without a clear, impeachable act.

Special counsel Robert Mueller could well supply the missing “high crime and misdemeanor,” of course, but the only other possible source is Trump himself. And, as he demonstrated during the James Comey debacle, Trump has the ability to do himself great harm by acting impulsively or angrily.

Thank You , Mowk

President Xi Jinping told a meeting of top brass China’s armed forces must strengthen their sense of urgency and do everything they can to prepare for battle. The news comes amidst escalating tensions between China and the US as well as American-backed Taiwan, with disputes between the two superpowers ranging from trade to the status of the island. Mr Jinping told a meeting of the top military authority that China faced increasing risks and challenges, and the armed forces must work to secure its security and development needs, reports the official Xinhua news agency.

Huh?

POLITICO

Supreme Court turns down mysterious Mueller subpoena fight
By JOSH GERSTEIN 01/08/2019 03:31 PM EST Updated 01/08/2019 06:08 PM EST
The U.S. Supreme Court
An unknown firm had asked the high court to block a federal judge’s contempt order and financial penalties for refusing to comply with a subpoena. | Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

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The Supreme Court has declined to intervene in a mysterious subpoena fight that apparently involved an unidentified foreign-government-owned company and special counsel Robert Mueller.

Last month, the unknown firm asked the high court to block a federal judge’s contempt order and $50,000-a-day penalty for refusing to comply with the subpoena, arguing that the company is immune from U.S. grand jury subpoenas. The company also insisted that complying with the subpoena would violate the law in the firm’s home country.

Story Continued Below

But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court turned down the company’s request to step into the dispute, at least for now. The order in the case came a little more than two weeks after Chief Justice John Roberts put a temporary freeze on the contempt order and the sanctions.

The court’s order Tuesday offered no explanation for its decision and no justice publicly signaled any dissent. The high court did indicate that Roberts referred the issue to the full court and that the short-term stay he ordered last month was now dissolved.

Many details about the case have been shrouded in secrecy.

POLITICO first reported in October that the dispute appears to have links to Mueller after a POLITICO reporter at an appeals court observed a visitor request a copy of a sealed filing from the special counsel just hours after a deadline for such a submission in the ongoing legal fight.

In addition, an appeals court judge who indicated he was likely to recuse himself from any cases involving Mueller’s office stepped back from the dispute.

Although the case has traveled through three different levels of the federal court system, the publicly available court dockets do not specifically identify which prosecutors are handling the dispute or disclose whether they are attached to Mueller’s office.

An unusual degree of confidentiality continued to prevail when other appeals court judges held closed-door arguments in the grand jury fight last month. Reporters who gathered to try to spot lawyers entering or departing from the courtroom were banished from the floor where arguments were taking place.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals later released an order turning down the company’s appeal and revealing some more information about the legal dispute. The judges said the witness rebuffing the subpoena was actually a corporation owned by a foreign government, although they did not name the company, specify the country involved or say what information was being sought. It’s also unclear what records Mueller’s team might be seeking.

Story Continued Below

The three-judge panel then dismissed the company’s legal arguments for avoiding compliance with the subpoena.

The D.C. Circuit panel released an expanded but partially sealed ruling Tuesday explaining the court’s legal rationale. Most of the decision involves arcane issues related to the extent of immunity enjoyed by foreign governments and their offshoots.

However, the new opinion reveals the sanction that Chief Judge Beryl Howell imposed against the firm fighting the subpoena: $50,000 per day.

The high court’s action on Tuesday means the monetary sanctions against the firm are likely to kick in unless it complies with the demand for records. While the appeals court insisted the firm was liable for the penalty, the judges acknowledged some uncertainty about whether it could be collected.

“Whether and how that order can be enforced by execution is a question for a later day,” the D.C. Circuit opinion says.

On Monday, an unknown party that appears to be the firm filed another motion with the Supreme Court asking the justices to allow the filing of a sealed petition to grant review in the case, the high court’s docket shows.

However, it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will accept the case for argument since no justices publicly indicated they would have granted the stay that the company requested to block the contempt order and penalties imposed by the lower court rulings.

The order the Supreme Court issued Tuesday did not indicate how or whether the court had resolved the motions the company and prosecutors filed to put their various filings in the dispute under seal.

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U.S. Supreme Court Robert Mueller Supreme Court Justices Mueller Investigation

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Trump Appeals for Wall, Citing Misleading Statistics of Crisis and Crime Along Border
video
As the government shutdown grinds on, President Trump laid out his case for the border wall. Top Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were not convinced.
IMAGE BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Peter Baker
Jan. 8, 2019
WASHINGTON — President Trump doubled down on one of the biggest gambles of his presidency on Tuesday night with a televised appeal to pressure Congress into paying for his long-promised border wall, even at the cost of leaving the government partly closed until lawmakers give in.

Embarking on a strategy that he himself privately disparaged as unlikely to work, Mr. Trump devoted the first prime-time Oval Office address of his presidency to his proposed barrier in hopes of enlisting public support in an ideological and political conflict that has shut the doors of many federal agencies for 18 days.

In a nine-minute speech that made no new arguments but included multiple misleading assertions, the president sought to recast the situation at the Mexican border as a “humanitarian crisis” and opted against declaring a national emergency to bypass Congress, which he had threatened to do, at least for now. But he excoriated Democrats for blocking the wall, accusing them of hypocrisy and exposing the country to criminal immigrants.

“How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?” Mr. Trump asked, citing a litany of grisly crimes said to be committed by illegal immigrants. Asking Americans to call their lawmakers, he added: “This is a choice between right and wrong, justice and injustice. This is about whether we fulfill our sacred duty to the American citizens we serve.”

Democrats dismissed his talk of crisis as overstated cynicism and, with polls showing Mr. Trump bearing more of the blame since the partial shutdown began last month, betrayed no signs of giving in. The White House earlier in the day dispatched Vice President Mike Pence and others to Capitol Hill to try to shore up Senate Republicans, who are growing increasingly anxious as the standoff drags on.

In their own televised response on Tuesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, accused the president of stoking fear and mocked him for asking taxpayers to foot the bill for a wall he had long said Mexico would pay for.

“President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis and must reopen the government,” Ms. Pelosi said.

In taking his argument to a national television audience and on a trip to the Texas border he plans to take on Thursday, Mr. Trump hoped to reframe the debate. After spending much of the first two weeks of the shutdown cloistered in the White House, he has now opted to use the powers of the presidency to focus public attention on his ominous warnings about the border.

Yet privately, Mr. Trump dismissed his own new strategy as pointless. In an off-the-record lunch with television anchors hours before the address, he made clear in blunt terms that he was not inclined to give the speech or go to Texas, but was talked into it by advisers, according to two people briefed on the discussion who asked not to be identified sharing details.

“It’s not going to change a damn thing, but I’m still doing it,” Mr. Trump said of the border visit, according to one of the people, who was in the room. The trip was merely a photo opportunity, he said. “But,” he added, gesturing at his communications aides Bill Shine, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, “these people behind you say it’s worth it.”

Mr. Trump plans to head to the Capitol on Wednesday to attend a Senate Republican lunch and later will host congressional leaders from both parties to resume negotiations that so far have made little progress. Mr. Trump has insisted on $5.7 billion for the wall, while Ms. Pelosi said she would not give him a dollar for a wall she has called “immoral.”

In a nod to Democrats, Mr. Trump spent the first half of his talk on the humanitarian situation at the border before even mentioning the wall, expressing sympathy for those victimized by human smugglers. “This is a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul,” he said.

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Even so, he directly took on Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer. “The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized,” he said.

Mr. Trump has made the wall the singular focus of his presidency as he enters his third year in office. His promise to erect a “big, beautiful wall” along the border became perhaps the most memorable promise on the campaign trail this fall, eliciting chants from supporters of “build the wall,” and he has been frustrated by his inability to deliver on it.

But his alarming description of a “crisis” at the border has raised credibility questions. While experts agree there are serious problems to address, migrant border crossings have actually been declining for nearly two decades. The majority of heroin enters the United States through legal ports of entry, not through open areas of the border. And the State Department said in a recent report that there was “no credible evidence” that terrorist groups had sent operatives to enter the United States through Mexico.

At one point in his speech, he even suggested that Democrats had signaled that they would accept his wall if redesigned. “At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall,” he said, even though Democratic leaders have made clear they oppose the barrier regardless of the material.

Even so, Democrats, many of whom like Mr. Schumer voted in 2006 for 700 miles of fencing along the border, did not want to conduct the debate on Mr. Trump’s terms. Instead, they focused attention on the damaging effects of the shutdown, already the second longest in American history. About 800,000 government employees are either furloughed or working without pay, in addition to hundreds of thousands of contractors.

House Democrats planned to approve individual spending bills this week that were intended to reopen closed departments one at a time in hopes of putting Republicans on the defensive, but Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has said he would not put any bill on the floor without Mr. Trump’s explicit support.

Senate Democrats took to the floor on Tuesday to pressure Mr. McConnell and vowed to block consideration of other legislation until the government is reopened.

Mr. McConnell fired back, noting the 2006 legislation. “Maybe the Democratic Party was for secure borders before they were against them,” he said. “Or maybe they’re just making it up as they go along. Or maybe they are that dead-set on opposing this particular president on any issue, for any reason, just for the sake of opposing him.”

But two more Republicans, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, spoke out on Tuesday in favor of reopening the government while negotiations over border security continue. “I think we can walk and chew gum,” Ms. Murkowski told reporters.

Ms. Capito expressed frustration with the shutdown and “how useless it is,” indicating that she might support reopening the government while wall talks continue. “I mean, I think I could live with that, but let’s see what he says tonight,” she said before the speech.

That makes five Republican senators who have expressed such a position, which if combined with a unanimous Democratic caucus would make a majority to reopen the government if Mr. McConnell were to allow a vote.

Allies of the president warned fellow Republicans to stand with Mr. Trump. “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News after the speech.

The political nature of the fight was hard to miss. Just hours before he went on air, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign sent out a fund-raising email asking supporters to raise $500,000 by the time his speech began. On the other side, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination next year, offered his own response after Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer.

For all of the pyrotechnics of competing national speeches, it seemed like a political Kabuki dance that by the end of the evening had changed no minds in Washington.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the No. 5 House Democrat, who perhaps most succinctly summed up his party’s response: “We are not paying a $5 billion ransom note for your medieval border wall,” he wrote on Twitter, with a castle emoji. “And nothing you just said will change that cold, hard reality.”

If Democrats do not approve money for the wall, Mr. Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency and proceed with construction without Congress, a move that could provoke a constitutional clash with the legislative branch over the power of the federal purse. While some legal experts said the president has a plausible case given current law, it would almost surely generate a court challenge.

Even some Republicans warned against it. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said that although the law provides the president with emergency powers, “the administration should not act on a claim of dubious constitutional authority.” She added, “It should get authorization from Congress before repurposing such a significant sum of money for a border wall.”

The wall is popular with Mr. Trump’s base, but the public at large holds the president responsible for the shutdown, according to polls. In a Reuters-Ipsos poll, 51 percent of respondents said that Mr. Trump “deserves most of the blame,” up four percentage points from earlier in the crisis, while 32 percent pointed the finger at congressional Democrats.

Moreover, the public seems to have grown weary of the impasse. Seventy percent of registered voters in the latest The Hill-HarrisX poll favored a compromise, while just 30 percent said sticking to principles was more important than reopening the government.

The president’s use of the Oval Office for the speech stirred some debate, with critics asserting that a setting more typically used for occasions of war or other national security crises was being turned into a partisan platform. The subsequent joint statement by Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer was the first time opposition leaders were given national airtime to respond to a president in the Oval Office.

Not counting speeches to Congress, Mr. Trump had made only five formal addresses to the nation before Tuesday night, three of them in prime time and none from the Oval Office, according to Mark Knoller, a longtime CBS News journalist who tracks recent presidential history. Mr. Trump’s previous prime-time speeches were to introduce his two Supreme Court nominations and to announce his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

By contrast, President Bill Clinton gave 16 addresses to the nation over eight years, 14 of them from the Oval Office. President George W. Bush gave 23 such addresses, six from the Oval Office, and President Barack Obama gave 12, with three from his office.

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Michael Tackett, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson from Washington, and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York.

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