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A White House security specialist is seeking official whistleblower protection from the federal government after raising concerns about “unwarranted security clearances" for administration officials, including Jared Kushner, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The specialist, Tricia Newbold, filed the whistleblower complaint less than two weeks after she was suspended without pay for defying her supervisor, Carl Kline.
The complaint, which was obtained by NBC News, alleges Newbold raised concerns with Kline about a security clearance for an individual as early as July 2017. The complaint does not identify the person, but sources familiar with the situation told NBC News that it was Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser.
In the complaint, Newbold says Kline "repeatedly mishandled security files and has approved unwarranted security clearances."
The complaint says that on July 18, 2017, Newbold emailed Kline about “potential derogatory information” related to the individual that could impact his security clearance. At the time, Kushner had interim security clearance and his FBI investigation was ongoing, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Newbold’s complaint explains that standard procedure would be to call in the employee and discuss the negative information, which in this case had already been deemed to be “credible." Newbold’s complaint alleges that Kline refused to do so and instead suggested he “was going to wait until the [FBI] investigation was completed.”
Newbold says in the complaint that she “questioned why we were treating this individual any differently than we would any other individual.” The complaint claims Kline then shut down the discussion saying, “he would not address this matter further.”
Newbold’s complaint says she raised concerns with Kline again on the same individual, identified by sources as Kushner, on Aug. 21, 2017. The complaint states that Kline “advised I should ‘watch myself.’"
Months later, Kline approved top-secret clearance for Kushner, overruling the determination by Newbold and one other career White House security specialist, according to two sources familiar with the situation.
The 30-second ad is called "It Can Happen Here," and was to be targeted at Sean Hannity's viewers.
Fox News has rejected a national advertising buy for a 30-second spot that warns viewers about the potential dangers of American fascism after an ad sales representative said network leadership deemed it inappropriate, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
The spot doubles as a promotion of this year's Oscar-nominated documentary short A Night at the Garden, which recounts a 1939 Nazi rally in New York City, and a warning — "It Can Happen Here" — to Hannity's largely conservative viewers about the potential dangers of President Donald Trump's brand of populism.
In recent years, Chomsky has turned his prodigious mind to the existential threat of global warming, a “threat to the perpetuation of organized human life,” on par with nuclear war. Now, in an exclusive interview with National Observer on Jan. 22, Chomsky directly addresses the specific relationship between media and the climate crisis.
National Observer: In recent years, you have said a great deal about the severity of the climate crisis — and you’ve offered various examples of how the corporate media are oblivious to its scope.
How would you evaluate the general role of corporate media in relation to that crisis?
Do the kind of filters identified in your and Ed Herman’s propaganda model of the media help to explain corporate media’s shortcomings on global warming, or do other factors make global warming an especially difficult issue for journalism?
Noam Chomsky: Take a standard story. There are reports on what’s happening. So, if you look at the New York Times today, for example, there’s a pretty good article on the new discoveries on the melting of the polar ice caps which happens to be, as usual, more drastic than the (earlier) estimates; that’s been typical for a long time. And it discusses the probable impact on sea level rise, albeit conservatively, given how dramatic it has obviously been. So, there are regular articles that appear — it’s not that global warming is ignored.
On the other hand, if you look at a standard article on oil exploration, the New York Times can have a big front page article on how the U.S. is moving towards what they call energy independence, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia in fossil fuel production, opening up new areas, Wyoming, the Midwest, for fracking.
They do a long article, maybe 1,000 words — I have one particular example in mind — it will mention environmental consequences, it may harm the local water resources for ranchers, but literally not a word on the effect on global warming. And that happens in article after article in every outlet — the Financial Times, the New York Times, all the major newspapers.
So, it’s as if on the one hand, there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying look, ‘this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular coverage simply disregards it, and says, 'well, isn’t this wonderful, we won’t have to import oil, we’ll be more powerful,' and so on.
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And then of course you have innovations like talk radio and Fox, which are new. They are just really vicious propaganda systems, barely pretending to be anything else.
The president steps over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he encounters them. Everyone in America saw it when he fired my boss. But I saw it firsthand time and time again.
Editor's Note: Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, was named acting director of the bureau after President Donald Trump fired his boss, Director James Comey, on May 9, 2017. McCabe would himself be fired less than a year later. In an exclusive adaptation from his book, The Threat, to be published next week by St. Martin’s Press, McCabe describes his encounters with President Trump and the steps taken to protect the FBI’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 elections—and into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russian actors.
After we agreed on a time to meet, the president began to talk about how upset he was that Comey had flown home on his government plane from Los Angeles—Comey had been giving a speech there when he learned he was fired. The president wanted to know how that had happened.
I told him that bureau lawyers had assured me there was no legal issue with Comey coming home on the plane. I decided that he should do so. The existing threat assessment indicated he was still at risk, so he needed a protection detail. Since the members of the protection detail would all be coming home, it made sense to bring everybody back on the same plane they had used to fly out there. It was coming back anyway. The president flew off the handle: That’s not right! I don’t approve of that! That’s wrong! He reiterated his point five or seven times.
I said, I’m sorry that you disagree, sir. But it was my decision, and that’s how I decided. The president said, I want you to look into that! I thought to myself: What am I going to look into? I just told you I made that decision.
The ranting against Comey spiraled. I waited until he had talked himself out.
Toward the end of the conversation, the president brought up the subject of my wife. Jill had run unsuccessfully for the Virginia state Senate back in 2015, and the president had said false and malicious things about her during his campaign in order to tarnish the FBI. He said, How is your wife? I said, She’s fine. He said, When she lost her election, that must have been very tough to lose. How did she handle losing? Is it tough to lose?
I replied, I guess it’s tough to lose anything. But she’s rededicated herself to her career and her job and taking care of kids in the emergency room. That’s what she does.
He replied in a tone that sounded like a sneer. He said, “Yeah, that must’ve been really tough. To lose. To be a loser.”
I wrote a memo about this conversation that very day. I wrote memos about my interactions with President Trump for the same reason that Comey did: to have a contemporaneous record of conversations with a person who cannot be trusted.
People do not appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability. Today we have a president who is willing not only to comment prejudicially on criminal prosecutions but to comment on ones that potentially affect him. He does both of these things almost daily. He is not just sounding a dog whistle. He is lobbying for a result. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them. Every day brings a new low, with the president exposing himself as a deliberate liar who will say whatever he pleases to get whatever he wants. If he were “on the box” at Quantico, he would break the machine.
Republicans are gleeful about the Green New Deal, which they see as a major political liability for Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/senate-to-vote-on-green-new-deal-says-mcconnell/2019/02/12/d4fe3216-57cc-49c1-a2ae-b38721ca1647_video.html?utm_term=.c0db30280393 (planning a vote) on the GND, on the theory that any Senate Democrat -- which includes several 2020 hopefuls -- who votes for it will self-immolate on the spot.
Many commentators have scowled in agreement with McConnell’s theory. But what’s discussed far less often is the politics of the big picture contrast that forms the backdrop of this debate: One pitting a Democratic Party that recognizes the scale of the global warming challenge and wants to do something about it, and a Republican Party that simply does not.
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The Green New Deal embodies two important aspects of the evolution of the climate movement: A belief that only a very bold, multi-faceted approach will now suffice; and an acknowledgement that the Republican Party is just unlikely to play any serious role in mitigating what now poses a dire threat to humanity’s future. A decade ago, Democrats tried to pass a more GOP- and market-friendly cap and trade plan, but it ran into a wall of GOP intransigence and fossil-fuel-industry-funded denialism.
Now the problem has gotten much worse, but the denialism remains. The fact that Democrats will try to respond to GOP trolling of the GND by going on offense against that denialism -- abandoning defensiveness or accommodation, and spotlighting the reality of today’s GOP -- itself shows that the GND is having some of its intended impact.
