Will Schumer And The Senate Democrats Go To The Wall To Stop An Illegitimate SCOTUS Appointment?

 

AOC: "We need to make sure that we mobilize on an unprecedented scale to ensure that this vacancy is reserved to the next president, and we must use every tool at our disposal."

Early yesterday, Alisyn Camerota hosted Jeffrey Toobin on CNN's New Day and I guarantee you, establishment Democrats did not like what they heard. She spoke with him about what the congressional Democrats can do if Trump and his enablers ramrod through an extreme-right Supreme Court justice. "Democrats are great about talking big," said Toobin, clearly referring to Chuck Schumer, "but we’ll see if he has the-- if he and the other Democrats have the guts to do anything. If they retake control of the Senate, will they really add the two seats on the Supreme Court? ... Because they’re weak and they’re wimps and they’re afraid. We think about Bush v. Gore and, which David [Boies] argued. In 2016, Al Gore said no street protests. This is just a legal process, while David saw in Tallahassee and Washington the Republican forces massing against them, literally on the streets. There is a difference to how Democrats and Republicans go about these fights, and we’ll see if Democrats learn anything from Republicans here. Yes, it’s interesting that Chuck Schumer said nothing is off the table, but that’s not a commitment to do anything."

The Democrats are not without weapons in this battle, just without leadership that  has the heart and the guts to wield them. Schumer should tell McConnell in no uncertain terms that if the Democrats win back the Senate in November, he will propose legislation to make Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia states, something the GOP dreads. It would probably pass but even if it doesn't, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott and Pat Toomey will put their reelections in jeopardy by voting against Puerto Rican statehood. Then there's the much discussed concept of going back to 9 judges (1837), although I have a tip for Schumer, In 1863, Congress passed a law establishing a Supreme Court with 10 justices. He should threaten 10 and then compromise on 9. It wasn't until 1869 that the 7-judge court was established.

Writing last week for the New Yorker Toobin himself reported on a less-discussed threat conservatives would find unpalatable. He wrote that Demand Justice, founded by Christopher Kang, who helped run judicial selection for Obama, and Brian Fallon, a former Schumer aide, "argue that the next President should not nominate any judicial candidates who come out of the world of corporate law. As Kang and Fallon, two insiders to the process, point out, even in Democratic administrations, there is a recurring pattern among nominees to the federal bench: 'A typical nominee might have an Ivy League degree and clerkships with one or more respected federal judges,' they write, in a new article in The Atlantic. 'But perhaps no qualification is more prevalent than prior work at a major private-sector firm, representing the interests of large corporations.' As they note, roughly sixty per cent of federal appellate judges come from corporate firms."

It would be hard to imagine Schumer backing anything like that-- not to mention Biden, but if it's part of an informal, off-the-record package of threats to throw at McConnell...

Toobin claims that "The moment is especially ripe for this proposal. The story of the Roberts Court is its embrace of corporate power. The court has consistently ruled against labor unions and for big-dollar campaign contributors, polluters, and other wealthy interests. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s appointees to the court, have embraced this agenda and appear likely to push the Court even more dramatically in this direction. Both showed a particular interest in limiting regulations during their time as circuit-court judges. Sheldon Whitehouse, a senator from Rhode Island, has been one of the few Democratic politicians to focus on this issue of corporate power in the courts; he’s even written a book about it. By 2021, it will be especially important to establish some sort of counterweight to this trend, because Trump will have made so many appointments, and because of the possibility of Supreme Court vacancies... Kang and Fallon write, 'There are plenty enough highly qualified individuals with other backgrounds-- civil-rights litigators, public defenders, and legal-aid lawyers-- that the next president can afford to make identifying new kinds of candidates a priority.'"

On Friday, the New Yorker published an essay by Jane Mayer, suggesting that McConnell cares more about keeping the GOP Senate majority than about putting another rightist on the Court. McConnell, she wrote, is as immune to shame as The Donald is. Norman Ornstein told her that "McConnell will do anything that serves his interests. We know that."

A former Trump White House official told her that "McConnell’s been telling our donors that when R.B.G. meets her reward, even if it’s October, we’re getting our judge. He’s saying it’s our October surprise."

But now that the moment is here, the calculation isn’t quite so simple. On Friday night, McConnell released a statement vowing that a Trump nominee “will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” While McConnell’s obstruction of Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, made him the bane of liberals, he has regarded it with pride as the single “most important decision I’ve made in my political career.” He and many others believe it handed Trump his victory by motivating the politically powerful evangelical bloc to vote for Trump, despite their doubts about him, because he promised to fill the Court vacancy with a social conservative. It’s entirely possible that the same scenario will play out again this November, with Trump and McConnell offering another enticing gift to evangelicals.

But McConnell is also what Ornstein calls “a ruthless pragmatist,” whose No. 1 goal has always been to remain Majority Leader of the Senate. He’s made the conservative makeover of the federal court system his pet project, but if he faces a choice between another right-wing Justice or keeping his control of the Senate, no one who knows him well thinks he’d hesitate for a moment to do whatever is necessary to stay in power. In fact, back in the summer of 2016, when it looked like Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton, far from being distressed at his party’s dim prospects, McConnell was savoring the probability of being the single most powerful Republican in the country, according to a confidant who spoke with him then.

The problem for McConnell now is that it may be impossible for him to both confirm a new Justice and hold on to his personal power as Majority Leader. A power grab for the Court that is too brutish may provoke so much outrage among Democrats and independents that it could undermine Republican Senate candidates in November. As he knows better than anyone, polls show that Republican hopes of holding the Senate are very much in doubt. If Joe Biden is elected, enabling a Democratic Vice-President to cast the deciding vote in the Senate, Democrats need only to pick up three seats to win a majority. And, at the moment, according to recent polls, Democratic challengers stand good chances against Republican incumbents in Maine, Arizona, and Colorado. Democrats also have shots at capturing seats in South Carolina and Iowa. [She's leaving out North Carolina, Montana, Alaska and Georgia.]

No one knows for sure how the politics of the Ginsburg seat will play out in close Senate races. But the issue likely puts some of the most endangered Republican candidates in very tough spots. In Maine, for instance, Susan Collins can’t afford to either alienate the Trump base by voting against a conservative Court pick or to alienate moderate Republican women, who don’t want a radically right-wing judiciary. Late on Saturday afternoon, Collins contradicted McConnell’s line, saying in a statement, “In fairness to the American people, who will either be re-electing the president or selecting a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the president who is elected on November 3rd.” Hours before the news of Ginsburg’s death on Friday, Lisa Murkowski, an independent-minded Republican senator from Alaska, said that she thought it was too late for a confirmation vote, telling a public-radio interviewer that “I would not vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee.”

Given those complications, Ornstein predicts, McConnell may “use some elements of delay.” McConnell conspicuously laid out no timetable when promising a Senate vote for Trump’s nominee. Ornstein speculates that he may hold off on a vote until after the election to provide cover for his members but, meanwhile, obtain private pledges of support from them. It would mean he’d have the votes to ram a confirmation through the Senate during the lame-duck period after the election, regardless of who has won the White House.

Senate watchers suggest that the first thing that McConnell probably did after learning of Ginsburg’s death was to call every member of his caucus, in order to make an assessment about whether it would help or hurt his members to force a Supreme Court confirmation vote. On Friday night, he also issued a thinly veiled warning to his caucus members to shut up, or, as he put it, “be cautious and keep your powder dry.” According to the Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the McConnell letter, he warned, “For those of you who are unsure how to answer, or for those inclined to oppose giving a nominee a vote... this is not the time to prematurely lock yourselves into a position you may later regret.”

Keeping the Republican senators in line was also among the top concerns McConnell had when Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died, in February, 2016. McConnell immediately coördinated with Leonard Leo, then the executive vice-president of the powerful conservative legal group the Federalist Society, to plot a path forward that would avoid what Leo reportedly called “a cacophony of voices.” To keep control, they came up with a plan. Although eleven months remained in the President’s second term, McConnell immediately announced he would block a vote for any Obama nominee because it was an election year, and so he argued, “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” The speciousness was breathtaking. Since the nation’s founding, the Senate had confirmed seventeen Supreme Court nominees in election years. Moreover, the “American people” had made a choice-- they had elected Obama. But, despite declaring themselves as conservatives who respect precedent, McConnell, in consultation with Leo, simply invented a new rule to cover their radical defiance of past precedents and accepted norms.

Facing the same kind of unconstrained power play by McConnell again, the Democrats have few procedural weapons at their disposal other than taking radical measures themselves. For more leverage, Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, a liberal group, says that if McConnell forces a confirmation vote before the election, Democrats need to threaten to expand the size of the Supreme Court if they win control of the White House and Senate in November. He believes there may be support for this even from unlikely moderate Democrats, if McConnell tries to strong-arm a vote. Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, who is ordinarily a mainstream Democrat, has said he could support enlarging the court as a tactic, if the Republicans force a confirmation vote. The Democratic senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, and Congressman Jerry Nadler, of New York, have also embraced the idea. Fallon also suggested that if a Trump nominee has yet to be confirmed after the election, and if Biden wins the White House, he, as President-elect, should name his own nominee, creating a scenario in which there are two nominees backed by opposing parties simultaneously duelling for confirmation. The Democratic members of the Senate, he argues, should decline to attend any courtesy calls, or confirmation hearings meanwhile, for any lame-duck Trump nominee.

ACB by Chip Proser

David Cole, the national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, also called on Democrats to fight rather than fold. He told me, “I think we should demand that the Senate respects her dying wish,” referring to a statement from Ginsburg released after her death by her granddaughter Clara Spera, which said, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new President is installed.” He argued that although what the Senate did to Garland “was wrong, if they have a shred of consistency, they should hold off until after the Inauguration. And if not, progressives should take to the streets.”

Ornstein foresees the potential for a historic political rupture if Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2016, and McConnell successfully seize a Supreme Court seat for a second time. “If McConnell gets away with this again, this will be a Court like none we have ever seen in our lifetime. We will be back to the pre-New Deal era,” Ornstein said, referring to one of the most conservative courts in the last century. He predicted, “If McConnell does this, it’s not just an act of hypocrisy, it’s one of the most dangerous breaches we’ve seen in our lifetime. There will be consequences. I think there would almost be revolution in this country.”

Does Trump Think He Can Make The FBI Investigation Into A Whitewash And Get Away With It?

Early this morning, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece by columnist Greg Sargent, Another Trump coverup? Former FBI agents question limits on probe of Kavanaugh that didn't dilly-dally around. "The White House," wrote Sargent, "appears to be playing all kinds of crafty rhetorical games to obscure the answer to a simple question: Has it deliberately placed limits on the scope of the FBI’s renewed background check into allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, or not?" It's the question everyone in the country following this story is asking. "You’ll be startled to hear that instead of providing clarity," Sargent's tongue stuck in his cheek, "White House officials have sown further confusion... Kellyanne Conway told CNN that, while the investigation will be 'limited in scope,' the White House is not setting those limits, which will be 'up to the FBI' to set. Conway pointed to President Trump’s weekend tweet saying the FBI should 'interview whoever they deem appropriate,' and insisted (somehow without dissolving into giggles at her own disingenuousness) that Trump respects the FBI’s 'independence.'"

Then they claimed the Senate-- or at least Republican senators-- suddenly have some kind of power to tell the FBI what to do, which is patently absurd. The White House and some GOP senators appear to have worked out a directive to make the scope of the investigation "as narrow as possible," although there is no paperwork on this. Apparently Kavanaugh's penchant for lying is off limits for the investigation, especially now that Flake indicated he would vote against confirmation if he's convinced the nominee lied to the Seante. Sargent questioned former FBI agents on the limits.

“It’s not an investigation if the FBI is going to accept the dictates of the White House in terms of who you can interview and who you can’t,” John Mindermann, a former FBI special agent who investigated the Watergate break-in, told me. Mindermann added that the idea of such a limited investigation is “ridiculous” and that if this holds, “it would be unprofessional, it would be grossly incomplete, and it would be unfair to the American public.”

...NBC News reports that limits imposed by the White House counsel on the FBI’s investigation preclude questioning former classmates who have contradicted Kavanaugh’s accounts of his drinking. Indeed, other former classmates who have tried to offer the FBI information about him tell the Times and the New Yorker that they haven’t been interviewed. Democrats have pointed out that Kavanaugh’s drinking should be examined because his minimizing of it goes to the core of his credibility, and at any rate, it appears central to the sexual assault allegations themselves.

Indeed, Mindermann told me that a “complete investigation” would include talking to more people “in all of the venues in which Kavanaugh interacted-- private school, parties, law school.” Mindermann added that if the FBI “did the job they should and can do, I would be very surprised if they did not find relevant, very significant additional information about Kavanaugh.”

“A complete background check investigation will not be possible without the ability to interview classmates and associates and anybody with knowledge of the circumstances in the time frame in question,” Dennis Franks, a former FBI agent with two decades of experience, added in an interview with me. “The circumstances in this matter deal with allegations of extensive drinking and behavior while intoxicated. This would normally be an issue that is addressed.”

...You’d think that for lawmakers making this enormously consequential decision about a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court, it would be better to have more information at their disposal rather than less. But it does not appear that the White House and Republican senators agree.

A Sunday Reuters poll by Ipsos showed 42% of Americans, primarily Democrats, believe sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh, while 27%, primarily Republicans, don't.

Of course Sargent isn't the only one trying to get to the bottom of the confusion surrounding the parameters of the FBI investigation. The New Yorker sent their own FBI-- Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow-- to find out. Is it true that the White House told the FBI they could only question 4 witnesses. Is this thing really just going to be a "whitewash?" Mayer and Farrow wrote that "The White House spokesman Raj Shah defended the process, and released a statement that placed responsibility for any limitations on the Senate. 'The scope and duration has been set by the Senate. The White House is letting the FBI agents do what they are trained to do,' his statement said. Shah accused Senate Democrats of merely wanting to 'further delay and politicize' the investigation rather than being genuinely concerned about its integrity." This is absurd. The Senate can't tell the FBI what to do; the White shouldn't... but could if Trump wants to.

One of Kavanaugh's Yale classmates offering evidence that wasn't even looked into said "I thought it was going to be an investigation but instead it seems it’s just an alibi for Republicans to vote for Kavanaugh."

On Sunday, a second Yale classmate, Charles Ludington, released a statement accusing Kavanaugh of blatantly mischaracterizing his college drinking during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Ludington said that Kavanaugh often grew “belligerent and aggressive” when drunk, and that he had planned to share his information with the F.B.I. “I can unequivocally say that in denying the possibility that he ever blacked out from drinking, and in downplaying the degree and frequency of his drinking, Brett has not told the truth,” Ludington wrote. “I felt it was my civic duty to tell of my experience while drinking with Brett, and I offer this statement to the press. I have no desire to speak further publicly, and nothing more to say to the press at this time. I will however, take my information to the F.B.I.” The Times reported that Ludington, a professor at North Carolina State University, said that the F.B.I.’s D.C. field office had told him to go to the Bureau’s Raleigh, North Carolina, field office on Monday if he wished to speak with agents. Ludington said that he intended to do so and “tell the full details of my story.” A lawyer representing Kavanaugh did not respond to a request for comment about Ludington’s statement.

According to the Times, the four witnesses approved by the White House for interviews by the F.B.I. are Judge; P. J. Smyth, another high-school friend of Kavanaugh’s; Leland Keyser, a high-school friend of Ford’s; and Ramirez. (Lawyers for Smyth and Keyser have issued statements saying that their clients will coöoperate with the investigation, though Keyser’s told CBS that she will tell the F.B.I. that she does not know Kavanaugh or remember the party where Ford’s alleged assault took place. Keyser has also stressed, however, that she believes Ford and does not refute her testimony.)

Leah Litman, an assistant professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, said the severe restrictions on the scope of the investigation made it “a joke.” She asked, “What kind of an investigation into an assault that happened under the influence of alcohol doesn’t include investigating the accused’s use of alcohol?” She said, “Usually, the F.B.I. investigators aren’t told who to call and who not to.” She said that Rasor should be interviewed, given her past relationship with Judge. “If Mark Judge is on the ‘approved’ list of witnesses, and they are interviewing him, there is no reason not to interview Rasor, who has testimony that is very relevant to his credibility, and the testimony that he would offer,” she said.

...Democratic officials with experience overseeing F.B.I. background investigations disputed that there was anything procedurally routine thus far in the F.B.I.’s renewed investigation into Kavanaugh. Robert Bauer, who served as the White House counsel to President Obama, said that he had overseen numerous F.B.I. background investigations and never seen one so circumscribed. “The F.B.I. should have the latitude to determine what is necessary in a credible, professional inquiry,” he said. “The issue on the table is, Did he or didn’t he engage in the conduct that Dr. Ford alleged?” To reach the answer, he said, “The F.B.I. needs to utilize its expertise to investigate. But instead the White House has dictated a restricted investigative plan. So it’s contaminated at the core.”

From the Trump Code

UPDATE: Trump Yields... Maybe

The White House now claims they've authorized the FBI to expand its abbreviated investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh by interviewing anyone it deems necessary as long the review is finished by the end of the week... The new directive came in the past 24 hours after a backlash from Democrats, who criticized the White House for limiting the scope of the bureau’s investigation into President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court. The FBI has already completed interviews with the four witnesses its agents were originally asked to talk to." A thorough investigate might take 8 days, not seven. Or it might take 2 weeks instead of one-- or a month. The FBI should determine that, not someone determined to burn-rush a drunken asshole onto the Court.

Apart From His Actions In The White House, Trump Is An Illegitimate "President"

If Russian agents hacked into voting machines in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina and Florida to hand Trump the 2016 election-- as I'm certain they did-- the proof won't be released for 75 years-- if ever. Chances are good, most of us won't be around to see it (which is the idea) so instead, we have to focus on how the Kremlin worked with the Trump campaign to influence voters. Early Monday morning Jane Mayer did just that for the New Yorker with a review of a book by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President-- What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know. In her review, How Russia Helped Swing The Election For Trump, Mayer helps to explain why Trump is an illegitimate "president."

The U.S. intelligence community," wrote Mayer, "is prohibited from investigating domestic political affairs. James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, told me, 'We try not to spy on Americans. It’s not in our charter.' He emphasized that, although he and other intelligence officials produced-- and shared with Trump-- a postelection report confirming an extensive cyberattack by Russia, the assessment did not attempt to gauge how this foreign meddling had affected American voters. Speaking for himself, however, he told me that 'it stretches credulity to think the Russians didn’t turn the election.' Ordinarily, Congress would aggressively examine an electoral controversy of this magnitude, but the official investigations in the House and the Senate, led by Republicans, have been too stymied by partisanship to address the ultimate question of whether Trump’s victory was legitimate. Although the Senate hearings are still under way, the Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard Burr, a Republican, has already declared, 'What we cannot do, however, is calculate the impact that foreign meddling and social media had on this election.' Even the Clinton campaign has stopped short of attributing its loss to the Russians. Joel Benenson, the campaign’s pollster, told me that 'a global power is fucking with our elections,' and that 'every American should be outraged, whether it changed the outcome or not.' But did the meddling alter the outcome?" That's the question Mayer-- and Kathleen Hall Jamieson-- seek to get to the bottom of.

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers-- whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”-- and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania... [I]n 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”

...Jamieson notice[d] something odd about the three debates between Trump and Clinton. As she told me, “The conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton had done pretty well.” According to CNN polls conducted immediately after the debates, she won all three, by a margin of thirteen per cent or greater. But, during the period of the debates, Jamieson and others at the Annenberg Center had overseen three telephone surveys, each sampling about a thousand adults. In an election that turned more than most on judgments of character, Americans who saw or heard the second and third debates, in particular, were more likely than those who hadn’t to agree that Clinton “says one thing in public and something else in private.” Jamieson found this statistic curious, because, by the time of the first debate, on September 26th, Clinton’s reputation for candor had already been tarnished by her failed attempt to hide the fact that she’d developed pneumonia, and by the revelation that, at a recent fund-raising event, she’d described some Trump supporters as “deplorables”-- a slur that contradicted her slogan “Stronger Together.” Other Annenberg Center polling data indicated to Jamieson that concerns about Clinton being two-faced had been “baked in” voters’ minds since before the first debate. Clinton “had already been attacked for a very long time over that,” Jamieson recalls thinking. “Why would the debates have had an additional effect?”

After insuring that the surveys had been properly conducted, Jamieson analyzed whether this change in a voter’s perception of Clinton’s forthrightness predicted a change in his or her candidate preference. To her surprise, she found that it did: as she put it to me, there was a “small but significant drop in reported intention to vote for her.” This statistic, too, struck Jamieson as curious; she knew from years of scholarship that Presidential debates, barring major gaffes, typically “increase the likelihood that you’re casting a vote for, rather than against,” a candidate.

Last year, while Jamieson was trying to determine what could have caused viewers’ perception of Clinton’s character to fall so consequentially, the Washington Post asked her to write an op-ed addressing whether Russian operatives had helped to elect Trump. Jamieson agreed to do so, but, she admitted to me, “I frankly hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”

Jamieson is scrupulously nonpartisan in her work. Beth Myers, who helped lead Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and worked with Jamieson on a bipartisan project about Presidential debates, told me, “If Kathleen has a point of view, I don’t know what it is. She’s extraordinarily evenhanded. She is fair and fearless.” Anita Dunn, a Democratic adviser to Barack Obama, agrees. She, too, worked with Jamieson on the Presidential-debates project, and she studied with her as an undergraduate. Jamieson, she says, “is constantly pointing out what the data actually shows, as opposed to those of us who just assert stuff.”

Jamieson began her study of the 2016 election with an open mind. But, in the fall of 2017, as she watched the House and the Senate hold hearings on Russia’s social-media manipulations, and reviewed the sampling of dozens of Facebook ads released by the House Intelligence Committee-- all paid for by Russians during the Presidential campaign-- she developed suspicions about the reasons behind Trump’s victory. Before the hearings, Facebook’s chairman and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, had maintained that the amount of Russian content that had been disseminated on social media was too small to matter. But evidence presented to the Senate committee revealed that material generated by the Kremlin had reached a hundred and twenty-six million American Facebook users, leading Senator Dianne Feinstein to call the cyberattack “cataclysmic.”

House Democrats later released not only the ads but also their “targeting data”-- the demographics and the geographic locations of users receiving them-- which indicated to Jamieson “whom the Russians were going for.” Among other things, she could discern that the Russians had tried “to minimize the vote of African-Americans.” Bogus Kremlin-sponsored ads that had circulated online-- including one depicting a black woman in front of an “african-americans for hillary” sign-- had urged voters to tweet or text rather than vote, or to “avoid the line” and “vote from home.”

Jamieson’s Post article was grounded in years of scholarship on political persuasion. She noted that political messages are especially effective when they are sent by trusted sources, such as members of one’s own community. Russian operatives, it turned out, disguised themselves in precisely this way. As the Time first reported, on June 8, 2016, a Facebook user depicting himself as Melvin Redick, a genial family man from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, posted a link to DCLeaks.com, and wrote that users should check out “the hidden truth about Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other leaders of the US.” The profile photograph of “Redick” showed him in a backward baseball cap, alongside his young daughter-- but Pennsylvania records showed no evidence of Redick’s existence, and the photograph matched an image of an unsuspecting man in Brazil. U.S. intelligence experts later announced, “with high confidence,” that DCLeaks was the creation of the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence agency.

Academic research has also shown that political messages tend not to change the minds of voters who have already chosen a candidate; they are most likely to persuade undecided voters. And in 2016 an uncommonly high percentage of voters liked neither candidate and stayed undecided longer than usual. By some counts, about thirty-seven million Americans-- fifteen per cent of the electorate-- were still undecided in the final weeks before the election.

Jamieson argues that the impact of the Russian cyberwar was likely enhanced by its consistency with messaging from Trump’s campaign, and by its strategic alignment with the campaign’s geographic and demographic objectives. Had the Kremlin tried to push voters in a new direction, its effort might have failed. But, Jamieson concluded, the Russian saboteurs nimbly amplified Trump’s divisive rhetoric on immigrants, minorities, and Muslims, among other signature topics, and targeted constituencies that he needed to reach. She noted that Russian trolls had created social-media posts clearly aimed at winning support for Trump from churchgoers and military families—key Republican voters who seemed likely to lack enthusiasm for a thrice-married nominee who had boasted of groping women, obtained multiple military deferments, mocked Gold Star parents and a former prisoner of war, and described the threat of venereal disease as his personal equivalent of the Vietcong. Russian trolls pretended to have the same religious convictions as targeted users, and often promoted Biblical memes, including one that showed Clinton as Satan, with budding horns, arm-wrestling with Jesus, alongside the message “ ‘Like’ if you want Jesus to win!” One Instagram post, portraying Clinton as uncaring about the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, depicted a young American widow resting her head on a flag-draped coffin. Another post displayed contrasting images of a thin homeless veteran and a heavyset, swarthy man wearing an “undocumented unafraid unapologetic” T-shirt, and asked why “this veteran gets nothing” and “this illegal gets everything.” It concluded, “Like and share if you think this is a disgrace.” On Election Day, according to CNN exit polls, Trump, despite his political baggage, outperformed Clinton by twenty-six points among veterans; he also did better among evangelicals than both of the previous Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

In her Post article, Jamieson wrote that it was “hard to know” if Russian propaganda and dirty tricks-- including the steady release of hacked e-mails, starting with Democratic National Committee correspondence that was leaked just before the Party’s convention-- had made a decisive difference in 2016. Nevertheless, she argued, the “wide distribution” of the trolls’ disinformation “increases the likelihood” that it “changed the outcome.”

After the article’s publication, she returned to her sabbatical project on the debates, with a newly keen eye for Russian trolls and hackers. After reviewing the debate transcripts, scrutinizing press coverage, and eliminating other possibilities, Jamieson concluded that there was only one credible explanation for the diminishing impression among debate viewers that Clinton was forthright: just before the second debate, WikiLeaks had released a cache of e-mails, obtained by Russian hackers, that, it said, were taken from the Gmail account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They included excerpts from speeches that Clinton had given to banks, for high fees, and had refused to release during the campaign. The speeches could be used by detractors to show that, despite her liberal rhetoric, she was aligned with Wall Street. The hacked content permeated the discourse of the debates, informing both the moderators’ questions and the candidates’ answers. All this, Jamieson writes, gave legitimacy to the idea that Clinton “said one thing in public and another in private.”

During the second debate, on October 9th, before 66.5 million viewers, one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz, relayed a question submitted by a voter: Did Clinton think that it was acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced”? The question referred to a leaked passage from one of Clinton’s previously unreleased paid speeches; Russian hackers had given the passage to WikiLeaks, which posted it two days before the debate. In the speech, Clinton had cited Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln as an example of how politicians sometimes need to adopt different public and private negotiating stances. The point was scarcely novel, but the debate question-- which took her words out of context, omitted her reference to the movie, and didn’t mention that Russian operatives had obtained the speech illegally-- made Clinton sound like a sneaky hypocrite. When Clinton cited Lincoln” in order to defend the statement, Trump pounced.

“She got caught in a total lie!” Trump said. “Her papers went out to all her friends at the banks-- Goldman Sachs and everybody else. And she said things, WikiLeaks, that just came out. And she lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln!”

The dynamic recurred in the third debate, on October 19th, which 71.6 million people watched. When Trump accused Clinton of favoring “open borders,” she denied it, but the moderator, Chris Wallace, challenged her by citing a snippet from a speech that she had given, in 2013, to a Brazilian bank: “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.” Again, there was no mention of the fact that the speech had been stolen by a hostile foreign power; Wallace said that the quotation had come from WikiLeaks. The clear implication of Wallace’s question was that Clinton had been hiding her true beliefs, and Trump said to him, “Thank you!” His supporters in the audience laughed. Clinton said that the phrase had been taken out of context: she’d been referring not to immigrants but to an open-bordered electric grid with Latin America. She tried to draw attention to Russia’s role in hacking the speech, but Trump mocked her for accusing Putin, and joked, “That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders.” He then warned the audience that, if Clinton were elected, Syrians and other immigrants would “pour into our country.”

The fact-checking organization PolitiFact later concluded that Trump had incorrectly characterized Clinton’s speech, but the damage had been done. Jamieson’s research indicated that viewers who watched the second and third debates subsequently saw Clinton as less forthright, and Trump as more forthright. Among people who did not watch the debates, Clinton’s reputation was not damaged in this way. During the weeks that the debates took place, the moderators and the media became consumed by an anti-Clinton narrative driven by Russian hackers. In Cyberwar, Jamieson writes, “The stolen goods lent credibility” to “those moderator queries.”

As Jamieson reviewed the record further, she concluded that the Russian hackers had also been alarmingly successful in reframing the American political narrative in the crucial period leading up to the second debate. On Friday, October 7th, two days before it took place, three major stories landed in rapid succession. At 12:40 p.m., the Obama Administration released a stunning statement, by the Department of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence, accusing the Russian government of interfering in the election through hacking. This seemed certain to dominate the weekend news, but at 4:03 p.m. the Washington Post published a report, by David Fahrenthold, on an Access Hollywood tape that captured Trump, on a hot mike, boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Then, less than half an hour later, WikiLeaks released its first tranche of e-mails that Russian hackers had stolen from Podesta’s account. The tranche contained some two thousand messages, along with excerpts from the paid speeches that Clinton had tried to conceal, including those that would be mentioned in the subsequent debates. (Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has denied working with the Russian government, but he manifestly despises Clinton, and, in a leaked Twitter direct message, he said that in the 2016 election “it would be much better for GOP to win.”)

If the WikiLeaks release was a Russian-backed effort to rescue Trump’s candidacy by generating a scandal to counterbalance the Access Hollywood tape and the intelligence report on Russian interference, Jamieson writes, it worked splendidly. The intelligence community’s report faded from the headlines; that Sunday morning, none of its authors were invited on any major talk show. Instead, the programs breathlessly discussed the “pussy” tape and the Clinton campaign’s e-mails, which were portrayed as more or less exposing both candidates as liars. Jamieson notes, “Instead of asking how we could know that the Russians were behind the hacking, the October 9 Sunday show moderators asked what effect the disclosures would have on the candidates’ respective campaigns and what the tape and speech segments revealed about the private versus public selves of the contenders.” If not for WikiLeaks, she writes, the media discourse in those crucial days likely would have remained locked on two topics advantageous to Clinton: Russian election subversion and Trump’s treatment of women.

Jamieson also argues that, in most hotly contested elections, the candidates blunt each other’s messages, which results in fairly balanced media coverage. In 2016, she believes, Russia’s involvement upset this equilibrium. She asks readers to imagine how different the 2016 election might have been if Trump’s campaign had also been hacked, disgorging the e-mails of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr. Among other things, this would have exposed correspondence about the notorious June, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, and Trump’s payoffs to a pornographic actress and to a Playboy model. Documents that Trump has kept concealed, such as his tax returns, also might have come to light. Instead, Jamieson writes, throughout the autumn of 2016 a steady stream of content stolen from the Clinton campaign-- which the press generally described as coming from WikiLeaks, rather than from Russia-- “reweighted the news environment in Trump’s favor.”

...Joel Benenson, the Clinton pollster, was stunned when he learned, from the July indictment, that the Russians had stolen his campaign’s internal modelling. “I saw it and said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” he told me. Among the proprietary information that the Russian hackers could have obtained, he said, was campaign data showing that, late in the summer of 2016, in battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, an unusually high proportion of residents whose demographic and voting profiles identified them as likely Democrats were “Hillary defectors”: people so unhappy with Clinton that they were considering voting for a third-party candidate. The Clinton campaign had a plan for winning back these voters. Benenson explained that any Clinton opponent who stole this data would surely have realized that the best way to counter the plan was to bombard those voters with negative information about Clinton. “All they need to do is keep that person where they are,” he said, which is far easier than persuading a voter to switch candidates. Many critics have accused Clinton of taking Michigan and Wisconsin for granted and spending virtually no time there. But Benenson said that, if a covert social-media campaign targeting “Hillary defectors” was indeed launched in battleground states, it might well have changed the outcome of the election.

Benenson said, “We lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin-- three states of our Blue Wall-- by about eighty thousand votes. Six hundred and sixty thousand votes were cast in those three states for third-party candidates. Winning those three states would have got us to two hundred and seventy-eight electoral votes.” In other words, if only twelve per cent of those third-party voters were persuaded by Russian propaganda-- based on hacked Clinton-campaign analytics-- not to vote for Clinton, then Jamieson’s theory could be valid.

Benenson said that, when he first learned about the theft, he “called another consultant on the campaign and said, ‘This is unreal.’ ” The consultant reminded him that, in focus groups with undecided voters in the fall of 2016, “we’d hear these things like ‘I really hate Trump, but Hillary’s going to murder all these people’-- all sorts of crazy stuff.” Benenson admitted that many Americans had long disliked the Clintons, and had for years spread exaggerated rumors of their alleged misdeeds and deceptions. But he wonders if some of those conspiracy-minded voters hadn’t been unknowingly influenced by Russian propagandists who were marshalling the Clinton campaign’s own analytics.

Philip Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute, in England, agrees that the Russian interference could have been decisive, but he is less convinced that the stolen analytics were key. He told me, “It’s plausible, but the Russians wouldn’t have needed the Clinton campaign-- they could just as easily have targeted the network of Bernie Sanders supporters.”

“Did we make mistakes?” Benenson asked, about the Clinton campaign’s performance. “Sure.” But, he said, he believes that Russian interference in the 2016 election was “the biggest threat to democracy we’ve ever had in this country, other than the wars we’ve had to fight.”

...It is now understood that Russia’s influence was far larger than social-media companies originally acknowledged. Facebook initially claimed that Russian disinformation posted during the campaign had likely reached only ten million Facebook users; it subsequently amended the figure to a hundred and twenty-six million. Twitter recently acknowledged that it, too, was deeply infiltrated, hosting more than fifty thousand impostor accounts.

James Clapper told me, “It’s hard to convey to people how massive an assault this was,” and added, “I think the Russians have more to do with making Clinton lose than Trump did.” Yet he remains cautious about saying that this is provable. So does Albright, of the Tow Center. He has accumulated a huge quantity of data documenting Russian meddling, but he believes that it remains “difficult to quantify what the impact was on the outcome.” He told me that Russian interference “provoked outrage, created discontent with social systems such as police and safety, pushed certain urban and disadvantaged communities to feel marginalized, and amplified wedge issues beyond authentic reach through social media, which then magnified media coverage of certain issues.” He went on, “That’s an impact. But to translate that into voting patterns is very difficult.” Michael Hayden, the former director of the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., is also agnostic. He has called the Russian attacks “the most successful covert influence operation in history,” but concludes that, although Russian hackers may have, as he put it, “put their thumb on the American electoral scale,” there’s simply “no telling the impact. . . . It’s not just unknown, it’s unknowable.”

Jamieson quotes Hayden making this argument, but writes that she must respectfully disagree.

Cyberwar ” doesn’t simply document Russia’s hacking and social-media campaigns. It also pinpoints another, less well-known, instance of Russian sabotage, and Jamieson argues that this dirty trick, in combination with the actions of trolls and hackers, may have changed the course of the 2016 campaign. In her telling, James Comey’s decision to issue a series of damaging public pronouncements on Clinton’s handling of classified e-mails can plausibly be attributed to Russian disinformation. As evidence, Jamieson cites Comey’s own story, told in interviews and in his recent memoir, of what happened behind the scene.

Jamieson became curious as she watched Comey, on July 5, 2016, make the first of three public statements during the campaign about e-mails that Clinton had mishandled while serving as Obama’s Secretary of State. At a press conference, Comey announced his intention to recommend that the Justice Department not charge Clinton, but first he denounced her actions as “extremely careless.” Jamieson recalls wondering, “Why are you doing this?” She told me, “It was odd.”

Ordinarily, when the F.B.I. ends an investigation with no charges, it says nothing. In very high-profile cases, it sometimes issues a “declination” statement. But, even though Comey wasn’t the head of the Justice Department-- he was only the F.B.I. director-- he had unilaterally designated himself the spokesman for the entire investigation, and had called a live press conference without asking the permission of his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

As Jamieson worked on her manuscript, she noticed that Comey repeatedly hinted that his decision to preëmpt his boss was prompted, in part, by classified information, which, if leaked, would undermine the over-all integrity of the Clinton probe. In public, he mysteriously declined to be more specific about this intelligence, but claimed that it had compounded concerns already stirred by an impromptu private visit between Lynch and Bill Clinton, on June 27th, at an Arizona airport.

Six months after the election, the Washington Post broke a story that solved the mystery. At some point in 2016, the F.B.I. had received unverified Russian intelligence describing purported e-mails from Lynch to a member of the Clinton team, in which she promised that she’d go easy on Clinton. An unnamed source told the Post that the intelligence had been viewed as “junk.” Nonetheless, Comey has reportedly told aides that he let the disinformation shape his decision to sideline Lynch. Fearing, in part, that conservatives would create a furor if the alleged e-mails became public, he began to feel that Lynch “could not credibly participate in announcing a declination.” A subsequent report, by the Justice Department’s inspector general, described Comey’s behavior as “extraordinary and insubordinate,” and found his justifications unpersuasive.

Nick Merrill, a former Clinton-campaign spokesman, describes Comey’s actions as “mind-blowing.” He said of the intelligence impugning Lynch, “It was a Russian forgery. But Comey based major decisions in the Justice Department on Russian disinformation because of the optics of it! The Russians targeted the F.B.I., hoping they’d act on it, and then he went ahead and did so.”

In the fake Russian intelligence, one of the Clinton-campaign officials accused of conspiring with Lynch was Amanda Renteria [an unsuccessful congressional candidate]. She was shocked to learn of the allegations, and told me that, although she is friendly with a woman named Loretta Lynch-- a political figure in California-- she does not know the Loretta Lynch who was the Attorney General. Renteria said, “To me, it says that, in the new world of politics, even if something isn’t real, it can still move things. You aren’t living in the world of reality anymore.”

Comey declined to comment for this article, citing the classified nature of the intelligence in question. As with the other incidents described in Jamieson’s book, it is hard to assess precisely how much of a difference his damaging statements about Clinton made at the voting booth. But it certainly didn’t help her candidacy when, just ten days before the election, Comey-- reprising his self-appointed spokesperson role-- announced that the F.B.I. was reopening the investigation because more Clinton e-mails had been found. Seven days later, he made a third announcement, clearing her again. Adam Schiff, the Democratic representative who is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told me that, if you take Comey at his word that the fake intelligence drove his decision to publicly censor Clinton in the first place-- there are skeptics who suspect that Comey’s grandstanding moralism was a bigger factor-- then “it probably was the most measurable” and “the most significant way in which the Russians may have impacted the outcome of the election.”

Polls suggest the likely impact. According to the Web site FiveThirtyEight, at midnight on October 28, 2016, the day Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation, Clinton was ahead of Trump by 5.9 per cent. A week later, her lead had shrunk to 2.9 per cent. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, has noted that, during this time, coverage of the Clinton e-mail investigation dominated the news, “drowning out other headlines.” According to researchers at Microsoft, the Times ran as many front-page stories on the e-mails that week as it ran front-page stories about the candidates’ policy proposals in the final few months of the campaign. Silver concluded that all the talk about Clinton’s e-mails may have shifted the race by as much as four points, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida to Trump, and possibly North Carolina and Arizona, too.

"Philip Howard, the Oxford professor," wrote Mayer, "thinks that, if there was any collusion between the St. Petersburg trolls and the Trump campaign, Facebook’s internal data could document it, by revealing coördination on political posts. But, he says, Facebook has so far resisted divulging such data to researchers, claiming that doing so would be a breach of its user agreement. Even if this targeting information were released, though, questions would remain. Jamieson notes that postelection interviews are often unhelpful, since few voters are able to accurately recount what influenced their decision."

For all her findings Jameson vomits out the lame establishment truism that "Trump is the duly elected President of the United States" and refuses to admit-- without the evidence of actual tampering with the machines-- that Trump is an illegitimate, fake "president." Nor does she give us any insight into what kind of threat we're facing from Russian this midterm cycle. Will there be a Putin-Gate II. Trump seems pretty outspoken about a "red wave."

Trumpty Dumpty by Nancy Ohanian

Everyone Wants To Know How Much Longer It Will Take For Mueller To Present The Smoking Gun

Putin certainly hates the U.S.-- and, I can tell you from first-hand experience in Moscow and St. Petersburg, brainwashes students in his country to hate America-- but he sure loves his U.S. puppet, Comrade Trumpanzee. In an interview on heavily censored Russian TV Putin gushed about the clown he saddled America with: "I have no disappointment at all. Moreover, on a personal level he made a very good impression on me... It’s possible to negotiate with him, to search for compromises.” He was happy to announced about the U.S. that "it has demonstrated its inefficiency and has been eating itself up." Mission Accomplished!

So that brings us to how Putin forced Comrade Puppet to ditch Romney for Putinista Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. The report in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, cribbed primarily from Jane Mayer's piece on Christopher Steele in the New Yorker, was almost funny:

Weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Russia-backed online "trolls" flooded social media to try to block Mitt Romney from securing a top job in the incoming administration, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.

The operatives called the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, then a contender for secretary of state, a "two headed snake" and a "globalist puppet," promoted a rally outside Trump Tower and spread a petition to block Mr. Romney’s appointment to the top diplomatic job, according to a review of now-deleted social-media posts.

Pressed for a response that Putin had told Trump not to appoint Romney, Romney told the Deseret News that he dorsn't "know what the president's process was in determining his secretary of state, or why he chose to ask me to come in, or decided not to have me as his secretary of state. So, I really can't comment on the Steele dossier in that regard... I do believe it's pretty clear that I'm not a fan of Vladimir Putin's and I wouldn't be surprised if he's not a fan of mine either.

"So now let's turn to Betsy DeVos' blood-thirsty brother, Erik Prince, who owns Blackwater, the mercenary firm, Trump wants to outsource U.S. Army operations to. CNN reported yesterday that Mueller is closing in a Prince, who acted as a back-channel between Trump and Putin and that Prince is hosting, along with Oliver North, a fundraiser in Virginia for Putin's favorite congressman, Orange County crackpot-- and probably spy-- Dana Rohrabacher.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince will host a fundraiser this month for Russia-friendly Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, as Prince faces new questions over a 2017 meeting currently being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Prince and Rohrabacher have been friends and mutual supporters for years: Prince interned for the California congressman on Capitol Hill in 1990, and Rohrabacher vigorously defended Prince when Blackwater faced congressional scrutiny during President George W. Bush's administration.

The fundraising event, slated for March 18 at Prince's Middleburg, Virginia residence, is expected to be attended by GOP Reps. Tom Garrett Jr. and Dave Brat, and Lt. Colonel Oliver North, according to an invitation obtained by CNN. Tickets start at $1,000 for the general reception, although donors paying $2,700 will also be invited to attend a VIP event beforehand.

But the fundraiser comes at an uneasy moment for the longtime allies.

Prince, an associate of President Donald Trump, is confronting renewed questions regarding a January 2017 trip to the Seychelles islands, where he met with a Russian banker, Kirill Dmitriev and Emirati officials. Also in attendance was George Nader, a Middle East specialist with ties to Emirati leaders. Nader is now cooperating with Mueller's investigation, CNN has learned.

During an interview in November with congressional investigators, Prince denied that the Seychelles trip was part of an effort to establish a backchannel between the Trump transition and Russia. But Prince did not mention Nader's presence there, either, an omission that has raised concerns among some Democrats.

Rohrabacher, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been the target of attacks by Democrats and some Republicans for his unusually robust support for Russia. In the past, he has dismissed claims of Russia's human right violations as "baloney," publicly defended WikiLeaks and argued that the DNC was not hacked by Russia.

Rohrabacher met with the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, for a private interview in December 2017.

He is now preparing for a challenging reelection fight, with nine Democrats currently jockeying to replace him in his southern California district.

So... a couple of tangents here. First off, it now appears that Prince lied-- under oath-- the the House Intelligence Committee about his meeting with Russian agents in the Seychelles. In fact, a non-partisan watchdog group in Washington, Campaign for Accountability, is demanding that the House Intelligence Committee-- the madhouse chaired by pro-Russia lunatic Devin Nunes, refer Erik Prince to the Department of Justice for an investigation into whether he lied to the committee regarding his meeting with Russian fund manager Kirill Dmitriev. CfA Executive Director Daniel Stevens said, "Prince’s testimony, never credible on its face, is directly contradicted by numerous press reports."

On March 6, the New York Times reported that United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan convened a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles to bring together Dmitriev, a banker close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Prince, representing the Trump transition. Businessman George Nader, who once consulted for Prince’s former company, Blackwater, apparently introduced Prince to Dmitriev.

Prince’s attendance at the Seychelles meeting was first reported by the Washington Post. As a result, Prince was asked to testify before the HPSCI, which he did on November 30, 2017.

In November, Prince testified under oath and was warned before he began that lying could be a criminal violation. Nevertheless, Prince appears to have made numerous false statements. He claimed that his meeting with Dmitriev was incidental to the true purpose of his visit: developing business with the U.A.E. He claimed someone in the crown prince’s entourage, likely one of his brothers, simply suggested Prince meet with Dmitriev while he was there, but that no one introduced the two. Rather, he claims, he merely wandered to the bar and found Dmitriev on his own, identifying him after Googling his photograph.

Prince also claims he had no official or unofficial role in the Trump campaign or transition, yet admits to meetings in Trump Tower, writing policy papers, numerous conversations with Steve Bannon, and donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign.

18 U.S.C. § 1001 makes it a federal crime, punishable by up to five years imprisonment, to make a materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation in response to government investigations, including those of congressional committees.

Campaign for Accountability director Stevens pointed out that if, as Comrade Trumpanzee never ceases to remind the suckers who believe a word he says, "there was no collusion, then there is no reason for so many people who worked to install Trump in the White House to lie to those investigating the election. Americans deserve to know the whole truth about Russian efforts to subvert our democracy. Let the chips fall where they may."

This year's New Yorker Festival videos spotlight global troublemakers from Edward Snowden to Kim Dotcom to Larry David

"Edward Snowden: The game plan for the NSA leak"


New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer talks to the NSA leaker, somewhere in Moscow.

by Ken

As New Yorker features director Daniel Zalewski explains in his introduction to the interview with Kim Dotcom below, when he learned that this year's New Yorker Festival would attempt remotely connected virtual interviews with subjects unable to be onsite, he immediately thought of two people: former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, from somewhere in Russia; and Internet ultra-entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, from his compound in Auckland, New Zealand, where he has remained since the spectacular January 2012 raid U.S. authorities in cahoots with New Zealand law-enforcement troops launched the sort of raid normally associated with most-wanted terrorists to shut down Kim's file-sharing company, Megaupload.

I'm not going to say that you learn everything there is to know about a person by seeing the person tell his/her own story, but there's a good chance you're going to learn things, and see sides of the person, you won't get just from reading about him/her. Goodness knows, I've read and heard a great deal about Edward Snowden, for example, but looking at the clips of his festival interview with ace New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, well, this isn't really the person I had imagined. You'll hear him answer Jane's question as to why, when the leaking of all the classified material was so meticulously planned, the plan didn't include an exit strategy for him personally, and hearing him explain it, I'm prepared to believe that he really didn't think that what would happen to him, which was unknowable to him in any case, figured much in his thinking, especially since he thought of himself as such a small part of the total operation.

I was also fascinated to learn, given all the punditocratic assertions, often imprecations, of what each pundit unhesitatingly believes was in Snowden's head in undertaking the release of his massive document cache, they all have their heads up their butts. With all that bloviating about Snowden's qualifications to determine what documents should be made public, I was fascinated to hear that he never intended to be the judge of that -- this was the whole point of doing the document releases through established journalists. I don't know how many other clips there are besides this one from the Snowden interview, but just from this one I have a very different sense of the guy.


Live from New Zealand, meet Kim Dotcom, Hollywood's Public Enemy No. 1


New Yorker features director Daniel Zalewski gets an amazing story out of irresistibly charming Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom.

By contrast with Edward Snowden, Kim Dotcom was almost totally unknown to me. After watching the interview, where the German-born New Zealander chats so freely and easily and, seemingly, so unreservedly, I have the feeling that I know everything there could possibly be to know about him and his path to the founding of Megaupload, which plugged the need, then as now, for sharing really large files. Not surprisingly, not all the files that were transferred via Megaupload were legal, and to the Hollywood moguls in particular Kim became something like Public Enemy No. 1. (It turns out, by the way, that contrary to Daniel Zalewski's original understanding, Kim isn't under house arrest in New Zealand, though he was for a while. He just can't leave the country.)

However, Kim is quick to point out that quite a lot of the material on Megaupload is copyright-protected (and the avenging authorities, he notes, are often quite muddled about what is and what isn't protected); that in YouTube fashion the company was always quick to remove material upon complaint from a copyright holder; that the draconian raid was organized without any attempt to engage the company in any kind of dialogue about legal problems; and that the way the raid was conducted, large quantities of perfectly legal content was effectively destroyed. Kim's understanding of what brought the raid on was the prospect of President Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, for which large quantities of Hollywood cash would be sought. It's also his understanding that the operation was spearheaded by Vice President Biden, standing in for a squeamish president. Kim also has interesting things to say about the way in which Hollywood has made itself so vulnerable to unauthorized international distribution of its content, suggesting that there are other ways of organizing the financing of its products which would go along way toward eliminating this vulnerability.

Nevertheless, with minimal regard to legalities, the avenging U.S. feds have taken pretty much everything from Kim, and done everything they can to close off sources of funds -- including funds totally unrelated to Megaupload -- to prevent him from mounting any kind of defense against their efforts to silence him. He also believes that the breakup of his marriage is a direct result of the traumatic way his business was terminated.

Am I the only one who is utterly charmed by Kim? I feel like he's my new best friend, or at least I wish he were. His English, despite the unmistakable German accent, is effortlessly idiomatic, and he sure sounds like he has nothing to hide.

This is a long clip, but you should be able to pause it by clicking on it, then reclicking to restart.


"Larry David on writing Curb Your Enthusiasm and why he doesn't understand 'squirmish' people"


Meanwhile Larry David, in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick, is, well, Larry David.

And then there's Larry David. I love Larry David, and New Yorker editor David Remnick is a splendid audience. Could anybody but Larry be so upset to discover that a surprising number of Curb Your Enthusiasm viewers were made squeamish by portions of episodes? Larry says it never occurred to him that anything he writes could make people uncomfortable. Offended, sure. In Larry's mind that's pretty much a given. (In the clip we can see how pleased with himself he is even now by making the connection between "survivor" as in CBS's fake-survivalist series and "survivors" as in concentration-camp survivors, and I"m guessing there are still a lot of people who are just as offended as they were when the episode in question aired. So viwers who are offended, of course. But viewers who are made uncomfortable? This seems to make Larry feel really bad.

#

"I wish I could add a fond remembrance" (Jane Mayer on Reagan press sec'y Larry Speakes)

"I wish I could add a fond remembrance of Larry Speakes . . . . There have been plenty of accolades, and I'm sure there will be more. But it's worth a note about how Speakes treated reporters who strayed from the company line."

-- Jane Mayer, in a newyorker.com "News Desk" post,
"Crossing Larry Speakes"

by Ken

Is there such a thing as a good White House press secretary? In this day and age, maybe the interests of an administration and the media have diverged to the point that there can't be. You can think of the administration as either "just trying to get our story out" or running a propaganda machine, and either way it comes up against reporters who actually for the most part do let the administration get its story out and play a quite willing part in its propaganda machine and even so can't allow the administration to just have its way.

At the same time both sides understand, at least on some level, that an administration has an obligation to provide information to the American people, and this entails an obligation to provide information to the press. During the "Chimpy the Prez" Bush regime, whoever did the searching came up with a series of life forms for the job whom one would like to think would have come up "inconclusive" if they had been genetically tested for membership in the human race. By that standard, the Obama press secretaries can't help but be an improvement, but not all that much.

In her post on the late Larry Speakes, Jane Mayer, after saying, "I wish I could add a fond remembrance" of the guy ("who died Friday at the age of seventy-four, in his home state of Mississippi, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease") notes that he "served as Reagan's press secretary for several of the years when I covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal," then tells us something interesting about the White House at that time.

Every White House has its own approach to the press and, in many ways, the Reagan White House was far more accommodating than the Obama White House is, but that was because Reagan's successive chiefs of staff, including James Baker, Donald Regan, Howard Baker, and Ken Duberstein, all understood that they would get better coverage if they met regularly with reporters for background briefings, which they did, sometimes weekly.

But then there was Speakes, who --

reveled in cutting off access at the slightest infraction, leaning in to the microphone at the podium in the press room, in front of the curtain bearing the Presidential seal and, with a reddened face and a southern drawl, declaring to whatever reporter had challenged him too aggressively, "You are out of business."

He wasn't kidding about this.

Which, not surprisingly, brings to Jane's mind a story.

At one point, in an effort to document the elaborate and expensive staging of Reagan White House imagery, I convinced the Wall Street Journal to send me to the island of Grenada a week before the President was due to arrive to celebrate the glorious first anniversary of the U.S. rescue of American medical students from local Marxist forces on the tiny spice island. My boss in the Journal's Washington bureau at first sniffed at the proposed assignment and said, "I smell suntan lotion on this one." But those were the days of nearly unlimited news budgets, and he indulged me. Soon after I flew to Grenada, I watched as a seemingly endless procession of huge military cargo planes landed on the tiny island's airstrip, disgorging not just the usual Presidential limousines and ambulances but also equipment for paving the island's roads, for building bleachers and viewing stands, and piles and piles of American flags. By the time the President arrived, the island had been transformed into a Hollywood-worthy backdrop for television-news consumption, at serious public expense.

When the story ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Speakes was not amused. It was my turn to be told, "You are out of business!" My friends in the press corps kindly gathered up furniture and supplies from the rabbit-warren-like back room of the press area -- a desk, a chair, an inbox and an outbox, along with an assortment of pens and other junk -- placed them on the White House lawn, appended price tags, and held a "going-out-of-business sale" for me.

The merriment faded soon, however, when every appointment I had made to interview White House officials thereafter was mysteriously cancelled. I couldn't reach anyone in the building on the phone. I couldn't even get the Presidential travel schedule, which the newspaper needed to plan its coverage. My bosses were exasperated, not with Speakes, but with me, for having so little juice.

Eventually, Jane notes,

Speakes turned his ire on others. He particularly liked to pick on Lester Kinsolving, an annoyingly aggressive reporter for the conservative outlet WorldNetDaily, and Ben Taylor, a reporter for the Boston Globe whose Brahmin approach provided a perfect foil for a Mississippi good ole' boy like Speakes.

Then Jane delivers her kicker:

"The daily pettiness of it all, however, and the bullying, with its clear message that independent reporting would be punished, helped set the abysmally low standard that continues today for White House relations with the press."

#