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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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Now, to make matters worse, we have learned the U.S. expulsions are not quite what they were made out to be. On March 29, Russian state television reported that a U.S. official had quietly given the Kremlin an exemption: the Russians are welcome to replace those 60 who were expelled whenever they wish, thus effectively transforming what was supposed to be a harsh deterrent into a minor inconvenience.
“The doors are open,” the U.S. official is reported to have said. (The British, by contrast, explicitly closed off this option, thus limiting the size of the Russian diplomatic delegation for the foreseeable future.) A reporter followed up with the State Department, which confirmed the report.
Mister Sandman
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You may be forgiven for having missed Thomas Baker op-ed, “What Went Wrong at the FBI,” published in the Wall Street Journal on March 19. Eminently forgettable in its own right, the piece is worth noting because, in at least two ways, it highlights how much has changed since Donald Trump took office.
Baker, a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché, observes with concern that “Americans have grown increasingly skeptical since 2016” of the FBI. He is “troubled by this loss of faith” in what was “once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency”—a loss of faith caused by “lapses” apparently including the conduct of FBI agent Peter Strzok and the bureau’s “egregious” application for a FISA warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Baker seeks to explain the root cause of those lapses. The original sin, he writes, was “a cultural change that occurred in the wake of the 9/11 attacks”: the FBI “set out to become an ‘intelligence driven’ organization.”
Baker contends that the FBI should have remained purely a law enforcement agency, safe behind the “’wall’ between criminal and intelligence investigations.” This “cultural change” from law enforcement to counterintelligence is what explains all of the bureau’s current troubles ...
Stepping back from the particular pathologies in Baker’s op-ed, two broader points come into focus. First, this is a piece that, just a few years ago, would have been anathema to the Wall Street Journal’s editors and their political allies, calling as it does for a return to a pre-9/11, law-enforcement mentality at the bureau and significant limits on foreign intelligence surveillance. If Susan Rice had advanced such proposals in 2016, the Journal likely would have accused her of criminal negligence, if not treason. It is hard not to understand this shift as anything other than instrumental, reflecting a relatively consistent political perspective rather than a radical rethinking of counterintelligence policy.
Second, it is an op-ed almost wholly untethered from basic facts and law. Of course, our politics have never been perfectly accurate, and our politicians have never been perfectly honest. But it’s hard not to understand the publication of this piece as reflecting increased tolerance for magical argument in an era of increasingly routinized falsehood.
There is nothing new about efforts to advance facially neutral arguments, including arguments about the FBI and FISA, in support of a political agenda, such as defending a president of the United States. But such efforts are persuasive only when properly anchored in accuracy. Judged by that standard, Baker’s opinion does not deserve to be taken seriously, except perhaps as a disturbing sign of our times.
(CNN) Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told special counsel Robert Mueller in a classified August 2, 2017, memo that he should investigate allegations that President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was "colluding with Russian government officials" to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, prosecutors in the Russia probe revealed late Monday night.
Mueller was also empowered by Rosenstein to investigate Manafort's payments from Ukrainian politicians, a cornerstone of the Trump adviser's decades-long lobbying career that has resulted in several financial criminal charges so far.
The revelation of the August 2 memo comes amid a broader court filing from Mueller's prosecutors that offers a full-throated defense of their investigative powers and indictments thus far. In the filing, the special counsel's office argues that a federal judge should not throw out Manafort's case. Manafort has sought to have the case dismissed, arguing that the charges against him are outside of Mueller's authority.
In 2009, Turkey’s tax ministry imposed a $2.5 billion fine for alleged tax evasion on Dogan Yayin, a media conglomerate whose newspapers and television stations were critical of the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Under financial and political pressure, the company began unloading some assets and closing others. Last month, the billionaire Aydin Dogan sold his remaining media properties, including the influential Hurriyet newspaper and CNN Turk, to a group of Erdogan loyalists.
Modern authoritarians rarely seize critical newspapers or TV stations outright. Instead, they use state power to pressure critics and reward friends. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors at Harvard, wrote in their recent book “How Democracies Die,” President Vladimir Putin of Russia turned the tax authorities on Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of an independent television network, NTV, which was considered bothersome.
Gusinsky eventually signed NTV over to a government-controlled company. Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities accused Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovisión, a TV station frequently critical of the government, of illegal profiteering. In 2013, Zuloaga sold Globovisión to allies of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.
Now Donald Trump is going after Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.
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