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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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At a point early in Alison Klayman’s insightful new documentary, “The Brink,” Steve Bannon gushes over the architectural and organizational planning behind the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where 50,000 Jews were exterminated. His emphasis on the planning and details are reflective of what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil,” which could easily be the subtitle of the new film hitting theaters on Friday.
It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of Bannon’s daily life and peripatetic schedule from October 2017—mere weeks after he was fired by Donald Trump—through the November midterm elections. At first glance, we get what we might expect: the shuffling, unkempt figure familiar from news footage. What we don’t expect is the sheer mediocrity of his intellect. Sometimes amusing, sometimes irascible, when unchallenged, Bannon speaks with full-throated brio and a firm grasp of anecdotes and figures (often made up). But the moment he is met with pushback, he obviously and not very credibly resorts to evasion. Still, for someone who was often called Trump’s brain, a thin base of knowledge and a loose grasp of facts might be expected.
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In “The Brink,” Bannon’s big professional push is two-pronged. First, he’s focused on establishing his 501(c)4, https://citizensoftheamericanrepublic.org/ (COAR) (Citizens of the American Republic), an organization that aims to boost Republican turnout despite Bannon having no formal ties with the party. Second, he’s founding The Movement with the goal of unifying nationalist, mostly racist, organizations across Europe. At an international convention scheduled for January (that didn’t end up taking place), participants were to hammer out a plan for the EU parliamentary election in May that would tip the whole continent to the right.
One of the movie’s most memorable scenes has Bannon meeting in a hotel room with alt-right leaders from throughout the continent. Present are Flemish Parliament member Filip Dewinter, an overt admirer of the SS, along with Sweden’s Kent Ekeroth of the Swedish Democrats, a party rooted in white nationalism, and Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, of the right-wing populist group Brothers of Italy. They do little more than express frustration, generally holding their tongues in the presence of Klayman’s camera. Then, in later encounters, Bannon denies meeting some of them, brushing questions off with a Trumpian answer: “We were at the same dinner event one time, but I don’t know him.”
A federal judge in Washington ruled late Thursday that the Trump administration’s push to make health insurance plans available outside the Affordable Care Act that avoid the requirements of the health-care law was illegal, calling the efforts “clearly an end-run around the ACA.”
The 43-page ruling, submitted by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates of the District of Columbia, blocks new rules from the Trump administration overseeing “association health plans,” which would allow small businesses to combine their forces to offer plans outside the ACA that would be both less expensive and provide fewer health protections.
“The final rule is clearly an end-run around the ACA,” Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote in the Thursday ruling. “Indeed, as the president directed, and the secretary of labor confirmed, the final rule was designed to expand access to AHPs to avoid the most stringent requirements of the ACA.”
It marks the second significant legal defeat in as many days on the issue for President Trump, who not only recently revived his administration’s efforts to undo and replace President Barack Obama’s signature achievement but also vowed to make health care a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, an Obama appointee of the District of Columbia, blocked the administration’s plans for some Medicaid recipients in Kentucky and Arkansas to be subject to work requirements https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/federal-judge-blocks-medicaid-work-requirements-in-kentucky-and-arkansas/2019/03/27/34dab2c8-50a8-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html?utm_term=.a3aad5e0525c (in exchange for health benefits), The Washington Post’s Amy Goldstein reported.
Alex Jones Sandy Hook Deposition
In the world of conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones and Wolfgang Halbig fueled each other’s darkest tendencies.
Soon after the Dec. 14, 2012, mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Jones, the right-wing provocateur, began spreading outlandish theories that the killing of 20 first graders and six educators was staged by the government and victims’ families as part of an elaborate plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms.
Many of the most noxious claims originated in the mind of Mr. Halbig, a retired Florida public school official who became fixated on what he called “this supposed tragedy” at Sandy Hook. Court records and a previously unreleased deposition given by Mr. Jones in one of a set of defamation lawsuits brought against him by the families of 10 Sandy Hook victims show how he and Mr. Halbig used each other to pursue their obsession and promote it across the internet.
Over several years, Mr. Jones gave Mr. Halbig’s views an audience by inviting him to be a guest on Infowars, his radio and online show. Infowars gave Mr. Halbig a camera crew and a platform for fund-raising, even as Mr. Halbig repeatedly visited Newtown, demanding thousands of pages of public records, including photos of the murder scene, the children’s bodies and receipts for the cleanup of “bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45 to 60 gallons of blood.”
Given practical support and visibility by Mr. Jones, Mr. Halbig harassed families of the victims and other residents of Newtown, and promoted a baseless tale that Avielle Richman, a first-grader killed at Sandy Hook, was still alive.
The deposition and its details about Mr. Jones’s operation and his interactions with Mr. Halbig was made public on Friday, days after Avielle Richman’s father, Jeremy Richman, killed himself in Newtown’s Edmond Town Hall, where Avielle Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to brain science that the family established in their daughter’s name, had an office.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report detailing his investigation of President Trump and Russia’s election interference will be delivered to Congress by mid-April, Attorney General William P. Barr said Friday in https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/attorney-general-william-barr-s-letter-to-congress-detailing-plans-to-deliver-the-mueller-report/?noteId=c274535f-fcb1-41e0-b822-b3370c87fe2c&questionId=b7a4f866-f989-4fa8-9a0f-e3630c3e6b10&utm_term=.f1feb13da14d (a letter) to lawmakers offering important new details about how the document will be edited before its public release.
“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr wrote.
Barr’s new letter lays out a timeline for the next steps of the hotly-debated process by which Justice Department officials are sharing the nearly 400-page report.
In the letter, Barr said he does not plan to submit the report to the White House for review.
“Although the president would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review,” Barr wrote.
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In the Friday letter, Barr said he will also redact any information that would “potentially compromise sources and methods” of intelligence collection, and any information that would “unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.”
In the new letter, Barr also disputes the characterization that https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-attorney-general-barr-s-principal-conclusions-of-the-mueller-report/?utm_term=.8488de340c23 (his earlier notice to Congress) was a “summary” of the Mueller report.
“My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report,” Barr wrote. “As my letter made clear, my notification to Congress and the public provided, pending release of the report, a summary of its “principal conclusions” — that is, its bottom line. The Special Counsel’s report is nearlyl 400 pages long (exclusive of tables and appendices) and sets forth the Special Counsel’s findings, his analysis, and the reasons for his conclusions. . . . I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”
In the letter, Barr also offered to testif
