How Many Books Will Trump Try To Censor Before The Election?

Trump isn't suing [UPDATE: oops!]  his niece and isn't that worried about the harrowing and salacious book, Too Much and Never Enough, that's being released next month (July 28). (Pre-sales drove it into the best seller list already.) But he-- or at least Barr on his behalf-- is suing his former national security advisor, John Bolton, to prevent the release of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened. It's not salacious but from what I'm hearing it is absolutely devastating.

Martha Raddatz taped an interview with Bolton for ABC News this Sunday. It's supposed to be top secret but an old friend of mine who did watch it (the whole show, not this), on the down low-- and who is not given to hyperbole, told me that it will be "the most damning report in American politics ever." Oo; can't wait.


In fact, at least in part, we don't have to. Some of the best parts started leaking out today. Writing for the Washington Post earlier, Josh Dawsey noted that, according to Bolton, during a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi "Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 U.S. election, telling Xi during a summit dinner last year that increased agricultural purchases by Beijing from American farmers would aid his electoral prospects... [having] turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win." Bolton further wrote that "I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise." Maybe it was just a coincidence, but Trump gave Xi the thumbs up on China's policy of building concentration camps for the Uighurs... Bolton says he was so alarmed by Trump’s determination to do favors for autocrats such as Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with William Barr in 2019.





Too bad the DNC isn't as nimble and quick on its feet as the Lincoln Project appears to be. I guess the DNC is too busy undermining progressives to bother with Trump, though.

ABC New reported yesterday that the Trumpist Justice Department's 27page filing "also requests that a judge order Bolton to take any actions 'within his power' to stop the publication of his book as it's currently drafted and 'retrieve and dispose' of any copies that may have been sent out to third parties. The DOJ additionally requests for Bolton to be ordered not to further disclose information he wrote about in the book or release details 'in any form or media... without first obtaining written permission. The United States is not seeking to censor any legitimate aspect of Defendant's manuscript; it merely seeks an order requiring Defendant to complete the prepublication review process and to take all steps necessary to ensure that only a manuscript that has been officially authorized through that process-- and is thus free of classified information-- is disseminated publicly,' the filing says."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, Bolton's lawyer Chuck Cooper said White House attempts to accuse Bolton of violating his non-disclosure agreement were merely an attempt to "censor Bolton."

"This last-minute allegation came after an intensive four-month review, after weeks of silence from the White House, and-- as Mr. Eisenberg admits in his letter-- after press reports alerted the White House that Mr. Bolton's book would be published on June 23," Cooper said. "This is a transparent attempt to use national security as a pretext to censor Mr. Bolton, in violation of his constitutional right to speak on matters of the utmost public import."

The filing Tuesday offers insight into the process behind the pre-publication review, acknowledging that the National Security Council's senior director for records Ellen Knight had completed her review of the book and "was of the judgment that the manuscript draft did not contain classified information."

The next person to take up the review was a deputy legal adviser for the NSC Michael Ellis, who according to the filing "was concerned that the manuscript still appeared to contain classified information, in part because the same administration that the author served is still in office and that the manuscript described sensitive information about ongoing foreign policy issues."

The DOJ alleges in the filing that in its current form, the manuscript "contains certain passages, some up to several paragraphs in length-- that contain classified national security information."

"In fact, the NSC has determined that information in the manuscript is classified at the Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret levels," the filing says.

In the event the judge rejects the request from the DOJ, both Bolton and his publisher could still face potentially significant financial and even criminal jeopardy, legal experts argue, by moving forward in publishing a book that the White House claims contains classified information.

Reacting to the filing Tuesday, attorney Mark Zaid, an expert in national security law who has previously represented multiple individuals through the pre-publication review process, noted the suit stops short of what would have been a more extraordinary step in filing for an injunction to halt publication of the book altogether.

"This is a routine civil action for breach of contract for (Bolton) violating his non-disclosure agreement, which his own lawyer has admitted he did," Zaid said. "Absent something extraordinary happening, Bolton should be prepared to take out his check book and may never see a dime in profit. The lawsuit also asserts Bolton has released classified information which potentially subjects him to criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act."

"I think that Bolton faces real risk to the extent he publishes material that a reasonable person could describe as classified," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "Presumably, he has taken care to scrub the book of anything that could plausibly be described as classified information, but we have that this administration that takes extraordinarily broad view of its classification power."

On Monday, in fact, President Donald Trump, in an exchange with reporters, argued his view that "every conversation with me as president highly classified," garnering significant skepticism among those who have previously been involved with such pre-publication reviews.

"That is not something that any Executive Branch has responsibly said let alone any court has ever said," said Joshua Geltzer, a visiting law professor at Georgetown who previously served as the NSC's senior director for counterterrorism. "That legal theory would get them laughed out of court."

But, Geltzer noted that it's true the president does have broad classification authorities. And in the event that a judge were to agree that the book contained classified material after its publication, Bolton could face potential prosecution under the Espionage Act-- though such cases are rare.

However, Bolton's most imminent legal danger, according to Zaid, could be the open violation of his non-disclosure agreement as alleged by DOJ in the Tuesday filing.

"Bolton is in serious trouble with at least a breach of contract, which is literally a hands-down winner for the government," Zaid said. "Bolton has an obligation before publication to receive approval from the government-- a lack of approval breaches his contractual obligation and that has nothing to do with whether or not there's one word of classified information in the book."

The problem is that Trump-- and Barr-- insist that by exposing Trump as an ignorant and foolish old man-- he once asked Bolton, for example, if Venezuela was ever part of the U.S.-- national security has been breached. He also asked if Finland, which he visited and where he had his infanmous meeting with Putin, is part of Russia. He insists he is the state, the way Louis XIV used to do.

White Evangelicals Are Embracing Concentration Camps As Revenge For Their Petty Grievances And Resentments And Because They Feel Mocked And Scorned

Babies in Cages by Nancy Ohanian

Death camps are different from concentration camps; they're worse. But concentration camps are bad enough. If Trump was setting up concentration camps what would you do about it? What are you doing about the concentration camps? Silence, beloved brothers and sisters, is not golden... it's complicity. Our country is complicit in his crimes against humanity, his crimes against these women and children.

What about Trump's evangelical supporters? They may bear more responsibility than other Americans. Do the concentration camps make them uncomfortable? From what I'm reading... not at all, not at all. Yesterday The Atlantic published The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity-- Support for Trump comes at a high cost for Christian witness by Peter Wehner. Their leaders are reveling in Trumpism. Wehner began with a quote from noted evangelical huckster Ralph Reed: "There has never been anyone who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump. No one!" And evangelicals are fighting for him too. They believe the concentration camp regime "is spiritually driven" and that "God’s hand is on Trump, this moment and at the election... Donald Trump is God’s man." He's kidnapping children and putting them up for adoption. "God has chosen him and is protecting him." These people want an authoritarian asshole. They welcome fascism and the end to democracy. "Jerry Falwell Jr.: "Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys.’ They might make great Christian leaders but the United States needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!"


Late last night, writing for the NY Times, Thomas Edsall pointed out how the "give-us-our-orders" evangelicals fit into Trump's plans for reelection. "Alex Gage, head of TargetPoint Consulting, a Republican firm specializing in voter mobilization, found that 'anger is a much stronger motivation' than recounting the beneficial things a politician has done. Trump has aligned himself with two overlapping, declining constituencies that are clearly motivated by a combination of anger, resentment and anxiety-- white evangelical Christians and whites without college degrees. If Trump is to win re-election next year, he must raise the stakes for these two sets of voters so that they turn out in unprecedented numbers. Demonizing immigrants and other minorities is crucial to this strategy."

Between 65 and 70% of white evangelicals approve of him-- 25 points higher than the national average. "The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump," wrote Wehner, "by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing developments of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades-- and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency-- insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of “family values” so eager to give a man with a sordid personal and sexual history a mulligan?"

Part of the answer is their belief that they are engaged in an existential struggle against a wicked enemy-- not Russia, not North Korea, not Iran, but rather American liberals and the left. If you listen to Trump supporters who are evangelical (and non-evangelicals, like the radio talk-show host Mark Levin), you will hear adjectives applied to those on the left that could easily be used to describe a Stalinist regime. (Ask yourself how many evangelicals have publicly criticized Trump for his lavish praise of Kim Jong Un, the leader of perhaps the most savage regime in the world and the worst persecutor of Christians in the world.)

Many white evangelical Christians, then, are deeply fearful of what a Trump loss would mean for America, American culture, and American Christianity. If a Democrat is elected president, they believe, it might all come crashing down around us. During the 2016 election, for example, the influential evangelical author and radio talk-show host Eric Metaxas said, “In all of our years, we faced all kinds of struggles. The only time we faced an existential struggle like this was in the Civil War and in the Revolution when the nation began … We are on the verge of losing it as we could have lost it in the Civil War.” A friend of mine described that outlook to me this way: “It’s the Flight 93 election. FOREVER.”

Many evangelical Christians are also filled with grievances and resentments because they feel they have been mocked, scorned, and dishonored by the elite culture over the years. (Some of those feelings are understandable and warranted.) For them, Trump is a man who will not only push their agenda on issues such as the courts and abortion; he will be ruthless against those they view as threats to all they know and love. For a growing number of evangelicals, Trump’s dehumanizing tactics and cruelty aren’t a bug; they are a feature. Trump “owns the libs,” and they love it. He’ll bring a Glock to a cultural knife fight, and they relish that.

... There's a very high cost to our politics for celebrating the Trump style, but what is most personally painful to me as a person of the Christian faith is the cost to the Christian witness. Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche-- might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective-- is troubling enough.

But there is also the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions. Don’t forget: Trump was essentially named an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual 1”) in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son.

While on the Pacific Coast last week, I had lunch with Karel Coppock, whom I have known for many years and who has played an important role in my Christian pilgrimage. In speaking about the widespread, reflexive evangelical support for the president, Coppock-- who is theologically orthodox and generally sympathetic to conservatism-- lamented the effect this moral freak show is having, especially on the younger generation. With unusual passion, he told me, “We’re losing an entire generation. They’re just gone. It’s one of the worst things to happen to the Church.”

Coppock mentioned to me the powerful example of St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, who was willing to rebuke the Roman Emperor Theodosius for the latter’s role in massacring civilians as punishment for the murder of one of his generals. Ambrose refused to allow the Church to become a political prop, despite concerns that doing so might endanger him. Ambrose spoke truth to power. (Theodosius ended up seeking penance, and Ambrose went on to teach, convert, and baptize St. Augustine.) Proximity to power is fine for Christians, Coppock told me, but only so long as it does not corrupt their moral sense, only so long as they don’t allow their faith to become politically weaponized. Yet that is precisely what’s happening today.

Evangelical Christians need another model for cultural and political engagement, and one of the best I am aware of has been articulated by the artist Makoto Fujimura, who speaks about “culture care” instead of “culture war.

According to Fujimura, “Culture care is an act of generosity to our neighbors and culture. Culture care is to see our world not as a battle zone in which we’re all vying for limited resources, but to see the world of abundant possibilities and promise.” What Fujimura is talking about is a set of sensibilities and dispositions that are fundamentally different from what we see embodied in many white evangelical leaders who frequently speak out on culture and politics. The sensibilities and dispositions Fujimura is describing are characterized by a commitment to grace, beauty, and creativity, not antipathy, disdain, and pulsating anger. It’s the difference between an open hand and a mailed fist.

Building on this theme, Mark Labberton, a colleague of Fujimura’s and the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, the largest multidenominational seminary in the world, has spoken about a distinct way for Christians to conceive of their calling, from seeing themselves as living in a Promised Land and “demanding it back” to living a “faithful, exilic life.”

Right-wing former GOP congressman assesses Trump

Labberton speaks about what it means to live as people in exile, trying to find the capacity to love in unexpected ways; to see the enemy, the foreigner, the stranger, and the alien, and to go toward rather than away from them. He asks what a life of faithfulness looks like while one lives in a world of fear.

He adds, “The Church is in one of its deepest moments of crisis-- not because of some election result or not, but because of what has been exposed to be the poverty of the American Church in its capacity to be able to see and love and serve and engage in ways in which we simply fail to do. And that vocation is the vocation that must be recovered and must be made real in tangible action.”

There are countless examples of how such tangible action can be manifest. But as a starting point, evangelical Christians should acknowledge the profound damage that’s being done to their movement by its braided political relationship-- its love affair, to bring us back to the words of Ralph Reed-- with a president who is an ethical and moral wreck. Until that is undone-- until followers of Jesus are once again willing to speak truth to power rather than act like court pastors-- the crisis in American Christianity will only deepen, its public testimony only dim, its effort to be a healing agent in a broken world only weaken.

At this point, I can’t help but wonder whether that really matters to many of Donald Trump’s besotted evangelical supporters.

Ralph Reed, a follower of Jesus? Give me a break. Falwell, Jr.? You're joking right? What makes Wehner imply they are? Must be something I don't understand.





Also on Friday, writing for The Economist, Erasmus noted "the widening ideological and personal schism within the very group of citizens who should be a conservative president’s most natural supporters... white evangelical Christians, of whom 80% are thought to have voted for Mr Trump. Leading evangelicals are not just sparring over metaphysics, they are also trading insults. Think of the war of words that erupted after June 25th when Russell Moore, a distinguished theologian who heads the Ethics and Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, protested over the fate of migrant children on the Mexican border." Moore wrote that the plight of the kidnapped children at the southern border stuffed into Trump's concentration camps "should 'shock all our consciences' given that all 'those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion.'" Vicious Trumpist Falwell went on the attack against the man who runs the public-policy arm of America’s largest Protestant denomination immediately: "Who are you Dr Moore? Have you ever built an organisation of any sort from scratch? You’re nothing but an employee-- a bureaucrat." [An inheritor of great wealth, it is notable that Falwell never built anything except an alliance with Satan.] The neo-Nazi evangelicals on the far right fringe joined Falwell by claiming protesting the immigration crisis amounted to an unpatriotic slur on the U.S. Border Patrol.

As Soon As People With Guns Start Talking About Extermination, You Know There's A Serious Problem

Gun nuts will be in ecstasy when they read about civil unrest in western China's Xinjiang Province. The freedom fighters only had knives, axes and swords and were slaughtered by the governmental oppressors with automatic rifles. Many local Muslims want their own country but virtually all local Muslims don't want Beijing interfering with their faith. So they butchered 35 Han Chinese civilians with their knives and swords and then killed two Muslim Uighurs who collaborate with the Chinese as well as a prominent pro-government imam at a major mosque in the old Silk Road city of Kashgar.

This must be important because yesterday even the NY Times was reporting it. "It was a bloody week in China’s far west," the report, "with nearly 100 people killed in unrest that the authorities have characterized as terrorism but that Uighur advocacy groups have said is a consequence of a sweeping security crackdown aimed at silencing opposition to the government’s hard-line policies in the region."

The outbreak of violence in Xinjiang amid an overwhelming show of security appears to be the worst since 2009, when at least 200 people died during several days of ethnic rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi.

The state-run media on Sunday provided new details of the most serious episode, a clash on July 28 in Yarkand County, saying that 35 ethnic Han Chinese were killed and that 59 people described as terrorists were shot dead by the police.

The report, published by Tianshan, a news portal run by the Xinjiang regional government, said two Uighurs were also killed during what it described as a rampage by masked, knife-wielding assailants who attacked cars and passers-by in Yarkand, a predominantly Uighur municipality that sits astride the ancient Silk Road that once connected China to Central Asia and beyond.

In a separate episode, security forces in the nearby city of Hotan killed nine “terrorists” on July 27, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

It is unclear why the authorities waited nearly a week to disclose details of the confrontations in Hotan and Yarkand. The police have barred foreign journalists from the area, making it difficult to assess the government’s version of events.

Critics say that bloodshed, which included the assassination of a prominent Muslim cleric on Wednesday in the city of Kashgar, suggests that Beijing’s high-profile campaign to contain violence in the region may be aggravating tensions among the region’s Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority, some of whom complain of discrimination and restrictions on Islamic religious practices.

On Saturday, the region’s top Communist Party leaders convened a special meeting during which officials vowed to continue their yearlong security campaign, begun in May, that seeks to root out Islamic extremists who have been cast as the primary enemy of ethnic unity in Xinjiang.

During the meeting, Zhang Chunxian, the party secretary of Xinjiang, employed provocative language, vowing to “exterminate” what he said was a “savage and evil” army of separatists who the government contends are influenced, and in some cases directed, by overseas extremists. “We have to hit hard, hit accurately and hit with awe-inspiring force,” Tianshan quoted Mr. Zhang as saying. “To fight such evils we must aim at extermination; to cut weeds we must dig out the roots.”

The campaign includes a new identification card that Uighurs say restricts their ability to move freely through the region, and policies that discourage women from wearing veils.

Uighur exile groups have disputed Beijing’s version of the recent unrest, saying the government exaggerates the role of outside instigators and ignores the underlying issues that are fueling Uighur discontent. “China is distorting the real situation of the Uighur struggle,” Dilshat Rexit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress in Germany, said in an email. “This so-called charge of terrorism is a way for the government to avoid taking responsibility for the use of excessive force that causes so many casualties.”

So far, not even McCain, Graham and Ayotte have called for arming the Uighurs-- at least not publicly.