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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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(CNN) US authorities are investigating whether recently published emails that purport to detail the business dealings of Joe Biden's son in Ukraine and China are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort targeting the former vice president's campaign, a US official and a congressional source briefed on the matter said.
The conservative-leaning New York Post claimed in a series of articles this week that it obtained "smoking-gun" emails about Hunter Biden and his dealings in Ukraine. CNN has not determined the authenticity of the emails.
President Donald Trump and his allies have used this topic to smear the Bidens over the past year and seized on the recent articles to attack Biden in the final weeks of the presidential election. The specific new allegations touch on the same topics as the Kremlin's ongoing disinformation campaign against the Bidens, which the US intelligence community said this summer was intended to weaken Biden's candidacy against Trump.
The FBI is leading the investigation, the official and congressional source said. NBC was first to report the inquiry.
The probe is part of a larger investigation into Russian disinformation that dates back to before the impeachment inquiry last fall. The alleged disinformation campaign is aimed at tying the former vice president to his son's dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, according to US officials familiar with the matter.
The New York Post says it obtained the emails through two Trump confidants: His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Giuliani has openly coordinated with a known Russian agent to promote disinformation about the Bidens. The Washington Post reported Thursday the White House, and Trump personally, were warned in 2019 that Giuliani "was being used to feed Russian misinformation" to the President. Separately, Bannon was recently charged by the Justice Department with orchestrating a million-dollar fraud scheme and accused of deceiving thousands of donors to his nonprofit.
In a Fox News interview Friday, Giuliani said Trump never mentioned the warning to him and that he hasn't been told by US intelligence officials that he is peddling Russian disinformation.
Several experts on foreign disinformation quickly warned that there were major red flags about the articles published by the New York Post, including Giuliani's involvement, the changing stories about how the emails were obtained, and the digital metadata of images posted by the newspaper.
When the next history of the CDC is written, 2020 will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in its 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death.
With more than 216,000 people dead this year, most Americans know the low points of the current chapter already. A vaunted agency that was once the global gold standard of public health has, with breathtaking speed, become a target of anger, scorn and even pity.
How could an agency that eradicated smallpox globally and wiped out polio in the United States have fallen so far?
ProPublica obtained hundreds of emails and other internal government documents and interviewed more than 30 CDC employees, contractors and Trump administration officials who witnessed or were involved in key moments of the crisis. Although news organizations around the world have chronicled the CDC’s stumbles in real time, ProPublica’s reporting affords the most comprehensive inside look at the escalating tensions, paranoia and pained discussions that unfolded behind the walls of CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. And it sheds new light on the botched COVID-19 tests, the unprecedented political interference in public health policy, and the capitulations of some of the world’s top public health leaders.
Senior CDC staff describe waging battles that are as much about protecting science from the White House as protecting the public from COVID-19. It is a war that they have, more often than not, lost.
Employees spoke openly about their “hill to die on” — the political interference that would prompt them to leave. Yet again and again, they surrendered and did as they were told. It wasn’t just worries over paying mortgages or forfeiting the prestige of the job. Many feared that if they left and spoke out, the White House would stop consulting the CDC at all, and would push through even more dangerous policies.
To some veteran scientists, this acquiescence was the real sign that the CDC had lost its way. One scientist swore repeatedly in an interview and said, “The cowardice and the caving are disgusting to me.”
Collectively, the interviews and documents show an insular, rigorous agency colliding head-on with an administration desperate to preserve the impression that it had the pandemic under control.
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Senorman
Member
This is my district. I just voted for Bush.
Boebert just got her GED in the past year. Plus, she has been arrested multiple times and has failed to appear for at least three court dates. That doesn’t sound like a law in order platform to me.
Only one rule remains valid about US politics in the age of Donald Trump: whenever it seemingly can’t shock any more, it does. Election campaign season is gripped by once unimaginable fears of violence, sabotage and a possible refusal by Trump to cede power if he loses.
This sorry state of affairs is also a vindication for Sarah Kendzior, one of the earliest writers to sound the alarm about how Trump would change America. Her trademark phrase is that the Trump administration is a “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government”. Such uncompromising language has won her fans, but also helped define her as a Cassandra, especially when many seemed willing to give a newly elected Trump the benefit of the doubt.
In an interview conducted before the president contracted coronavirus, Kendzior says an unwillingness to believe the worst is part of the problem. “If a mafia state has really taken hold, wouldn’t someone from our institutions do something about it? And the answer is no, they didn’t, but it’s the lack of that expected response that I think has led people to believe things are safer than they are, better than they are, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.”
What about “Hanlon’s razor” — never assume a conspiracy where mere incompetence will do? “That has to be thrown out,” she insists. “These are overtly malicious actors who confess their crimes.” Hence the title of Hiding in Plain Sight, published this year, her book chronicling four decades of Trump’s entanglement with international — especially post-Soviet — organised crime connected to political power.
Many authors have tried to explain how Trumpism could happen. What makes Kendzior’s book stand out is how she weaves Trump’s ascendancy into two other chronologies: the erosion of America’s institutions and the polarisation of its economy, told in part through her own life story.
Kendzior, who turned 30 the month Lehman Brothers collapsed, bears the scars of her generation. “I had begun my adult life at the tail-end of a dream, one that rapidly transformed into a nightmare of dashed expectations and diminished returns,” she writes. America’s failure to resist Trumpism owes a lot to this death of aspiration at the bottom, she argues, set against enrichment at the top.
Hiding in Plain Sight observes that back in 2000, she could be hired as a reporter on the New York Daily News straight out of college and be paid well enough to live on her own in New York. She then witnessed the onslaught of the internet on US newspapers. Ten years on, she writes, “my old Daily News job had been converted into an unpaid internship”.
The death of local journalism was instrumental in the deterioration of US politics. “If it’s your local community, you usually deal with the same set of facts,” Kendzior says, while “national propaganda outlets [create] a different kind of America, where we’re seeing past each other instead of seeing each other.”
Funding cuts led US universities to rely on insecure adjunct teaching jobs, and Kendzior gave up on academia after a PhD in anthropology about post-Soviet Central Asia. But that research taught her to recognise an autocrat: “We’ve seen [Trump] follow the textbook road to autocracy . . . Our institutions were very fragile and corrupt and the refusal to admit that led to the broader refusal to recognise how profoundly dangerous [Trump’s] installation was.”
That refusal is encouraged by the media and entertainment industries. Kendzior reserves particular scorn for The Apprentice, the reality TV show that was, in her telling, a dry run for autocratic propaganda. “Dictatorship is a branding operation,” she writes. “The Apprentice conditioned Americans to accept fraud as entertainment.”
Kendzior has a knack for a good phrase. She hosts a podcast called Gaslit Nation, named after the emotional manipulation used by abusers to make victims doubt their own sanity through aggressive lying. Her previous book was titled The View from Flyover Country, reflecting the American microcosm that is her hometown, St Louis, Missouri.
While she writes in her book as if America’s perdition is assured, in conversation she is less deterministic. But she takes as given that Trump will try to stay in power, and expects unrest as he casts doubt on the result. Her big fear is that even a Biden administration will want to “move on, keep the peace”. She blames Democrats for repeating this mistake after successive Republican misdeeds — Watergate, the Iran/Contras scandal, the Iraq war — which enabled the people responsible to “come back into power, like a Celebrity Apprentice of felons”.
Patience may now have run out: “Americans have spent a couple of decades not having a future — clawing our way into basic safety — and are staring into a future of climate change and disaster capitalism.” Even after a Biden victory, a reckoning with the “root problem” of institutional corruption is essential, she tells me. “Folks have had it, they’re not going to roll over.”
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