Thursday Reads: If Only We Had A Woman President
Posted: March 22, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Jared Kushner, Jennifer Palmieri, misogyny, Roxanne Gay, Trump administration scandals 44 Comments
With the forecast calling for heavy snow, there were plenty of parking spots available, as well as very light traffic, so much so that a pedestrian could cross the street unimpeded on Beacon Street at 5:45 p.m., normally the height of rush hour. –Jim Davis/Globe Staff
Good Morning!!
The snowpocalypse never materialized in Boston, after we were told to expect up to 14 inches of the white stuff. I know it was bad in some places to the south of us. But not to worry, there’s another snow event coming this weekend. Meteorologist David Epstein explains:
I can tell you with a lot of certainty that it’s very frustrating for any meteorologist to miss a forecast, but it’s also humbling. It’s just a fact of the matter: The atmosphere is incredibly complicated and always will be.
Meteorologically, the storm never really got its act together because too much dry air ate away at the precipitation shield on the northern and western flank.
Whatever that means.
Of course, there are always computer models that we all use to guide us, but frankly, their performance hasn’t been as good in the past few weeks.
Although the models successfully understood a storm would form, they did a poor job of placing the precipitation within the storm. I suspect the unusual blocking pattern that we are in is throwing the models for a loop.
While the European model did a better job forecasting this system than other models, it also was way overdone. But in other recent storms, other models have outperformed the Euro, so it’s dangerous to just follow one model.
For example, if we had believed the NAM model on Wednesday morning, we would have forecast 10 to 15 inches of snow in Boston. This model accurately predicted the amount of snow seen in New York, but it arced the precipitation band way too far to the northwest.
Weather nerds (Dakinikat) can read the rest at The Boston Globe. The good news for us is that we didn’t get a lot more snow added to what was already on the ground. Now we look ahead to the next storm and hope for the weather trend to become more springlike soon.
At least the weather provides a distraction from the ongoing nightmare of the Trump “presidency.” The news of Trump family corruption is coming thick and fast these days; but before I get to some of that, here’s another distraction: two annoying old white men threatening to beat each other up.
Creepy Uncle Joe
ABC News: Biden says he would have ‘beat the hell out’ of Trump in high school for disrespecting women.
Former Vice President Joe Biden took fresh jabs at President Donald Trump on Tuesday while speaking at an anti-sexual assault rally, telling students at the University of Miami that he probably would have “beat the hell out” of Trump if they’d attended school together.
“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,'” Biden said. “They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'”
“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” Biden continued. “I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”
Naturally Trump responded on Twitter.
The Washington Post: Septuagenarian smackdown? Trump, Biden trade fighting words.
President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are in a rhetorical smackdown over who could clean the other’s clock in a brawl.
Biden, 75, made similar comments in the closing days of the 2016 campaign. He has kept open the possibility of a 2020 bid for president and is gearing up to play a big role campaigning for Democrats running in this year’s midterm elections.
Trump, 71, dismissed the prospect of a Biden run recently at the annual Gridiron Dinner with Washington journalists, calling him “Sleepy Joe” and saying he could “kick his ass.” Trump also attacked Biden on Twitter in 2016, calling him “Our not very bright Vice President.”
This is just plain embarrassing. Connor Friedersdorf reacts to Trump’s “bluster” at The Atlantic:
Donald Trump is an undignified lout who cannot master his own emotions enough to be anything better….
No recent president would’ve publicly degraded himself in this manner. Neither would a teenager of slightly above-average maturity. Yet Trump is unembarrassed, and unapologetic, for the damage he does to America’s reputation.
Americans have grown used to conduct of this sort because Trump engages in it so often. But bygone generations would be appalled by how he comports himself. And every instance of such behavior causes the world to look upon the U.S. the same way that most Americans look upon the real housewives of New Jersey.
Frankly, Biden isn’t much better. Why, oh why couldn’t we have a woman president? Speaking of which, did you see this exchange on Twitter yesterday? People were attacking a woman writer, Roxanne Gay–what else is new?–because she tweeted that Justice League was a bad movie. She responded:
https://twitter.com/rgay/status/976286682197778432
The attacks continued. But guess who really liked that tweet?
The attackers didn’t like Gay’s response to that either.
https://twitter.com/rgay/status/976526230567686144
Yes, people really did try to explain to her that Hillary isn’t president. Sigh . . . being a famous woman is really hard. Misogyny is utterly pervasive in this country.
Hillary’s former communications director Jennifer Palmieri has a new book coming out: Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World. Time Magazine has an excerpt: Inside the Last Days of the Hillary Clinton Campaign.
It’s the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 9. We are at the New Yorker Hotel and Hillary has just finished her concession speech. I decide to just nod and smile wistfully when supporters and reporters, men and women alike, laud Hillary’s concession speech. “Where was ‘this Hillary’ during the campaign?” they would lament. “Why didn’t we see this side of her when it mattered?”
Yes, I am sure you loved her concession speech, I thought to myself. Because that’s what you think is acceptable for a woman to do — concede.
Not just the right wing media . . .
Had I never left the Obama White House to be part of the campaign, I am sure I would have asked the same question. I probably would have printed out the transcript of her remarks, and pored over them, trying to isolate the essence of what she had said that made this speech so much more appealing than anything she had said during the campaign. And I wouldn’t have found it. Because I needed to have the experience of working for a female presidential candidate to understand that why we liked “this Hillary” so much better than “candidate Hillary.” Fundamentally it wasn’t about the words she used in her concession speech but what she represented. She was no longer a woman pushing to be president. She was a gracious loser putting the needs of her country above her own. It was the role of Hillary as an ambitious candidate that troubled us.
We think a woman shines best when she is selflessly putting others’ interest above her own. It is more flattering than seeking her own spotlight.
I have to tell you that when I first joined Hillary’s campaign, I didn’t think it was going to be that hard or even that big of a deal to elect the first woman president. Let’s just say after having gone through this campaign, I have a different perspective.
Read the rest at the link.
Now let’s turn to the latest Trump administration scandals. This time it’s Jared Kushner in the Spotlight.
The Intercept: Saudi Crown Prince Boasted That Jared Kushner Was “In His Pocket.”
We’ve all heard about how Jared has been reading all that classified information in the PDB–the president’s daily brief. Well it looks like he may have shared some of it with his pal Mohammed bin Salman.
In June, Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman ousted his cousin, then-Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and took his place as next in line to the throne, upending the established line of succession. In the months that followed, the President’s Daily Brief contained information on Saudi Arabia’s evolving political situation, including a handful of names of royal family members opposed to the crown prince’s power grab, according to the former White House official and two U.S. government officials with knowledge of the report. Like many others interviewed for this story, they declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about sensitive matters to the press.
In late October, Jared Kushner made an unannounced trip to Riyadh, catching some intelligence officials off guard. “The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy,” the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported at the time.
What exactly Kushner and the Saudi royal talked about in Riyadh may be known only to them, but after the meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who have been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown. Kushner, through his attorney’s spokesperson, denies having done so….
On November 4, a week after Kushner returned to the U.S., the crown prince, known in official Washington by his initials MBS, launched what he called an anti-corruption crackdown. The Saudi government arrested dozens of members of the Saudi royal family and imprisoned them in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, which was first reported in English by The Intercept. The Saudi figures named in the President’s Daily Brief were among those rounded up; at least one was reportedly tortured.
Read the rest at The Intercept.
The New York Times: How 2 Gulf Monarchies Sought to Influence the White House.
A cooperating witness in the special counsel investigation worked for more than a year to turn a top Trump fund-raiser into an instrument of influence at the White House for the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to interviews and previously undisclosed documents.
Hundreds of pages of correspondence between the two men reveal an active effort to cultivate President Trump on behalf of the two oil-rich Arab monarchies, both close American allies.
Dave Granlund / politicalcartoons.com
High on the agenda of the two men — George Nader, a political adviser to the de facto ruler of the U.A.E., and Elliott Broidy, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee — was pushing the White House to remove Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, backing confrontational approaches to Iran and Qatar and repeatedly pressing the president to meet privately outside the White House with the leader of the U.A.E.
Mr. Tillerson was fired last week, and the president has adopted tough approaches toward both Iran and Qatar.
A bit more from the NYT piece:
Mr. Nader tempted the fund-raiser, Mr. Broidy, with the prospect of more than $1 billion in contracts for his private security company, Circinus, and he helped deliver deals worth more than $200 million with the United Arab Emirates. He also flattered Mr. Broidy about “how well you handle Chairman,” a reference to Mr. Trump, and repeated to his well-connected friend that he told the effective rulers of both Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. about “the Pivotal Indispensable Magical Role you are playing
George Nader with Trump
to help them.”
Mr. Nader’s cultivation of Mr. Broidy, laid out in documents provided to The New York Times, provides a case study in the way two Persian Gulf monarchies have sought to gain influence inside the Trump White House. Mr. Nader has been granted immunity in a deal for his cooperation with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to people familiar with the matter, and his relationship with Mr. Broidy may also offer clues to the direction of that inquiry.
Mr. Nader has now been called back from abroad to provide additional testimony, one person familiar with the matter said this week. Mr. Mueller’s investigators have already asked witnesses about Mr. Nader’s contacts with top Trump administration officials and about his possible role in funneling Emirati money to Mr. Trump’s political efforts, a sign that the investigation has broadened to examine the role of foreign money in the Trump administration.
The documents contain evidence not previously reported that Mr. Nader also held himself out as intermediary for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who met with Mr. Trump on Tuesday in the Oval Office at the beginning of a tour of the United States to meet with political and business leaders.
Rachel Maddow talked about this story at length last night, and she said the Special Counsel has called Nader back from abroad. But The Daily Mail is claims that Nader has fled: EXCLUSIVE: Mueller probe witness who met Jared Kushner and was ‘best friends’ with Steve Bannon flees the country after being revealed as a pedophile. Summary of the story:
- Robert Mueller co-operating witness George Nader has fled the United States for the United Arab Emirates, DailyMail.com reveals
- Nader, a convicted pedophile, was allegedly a paid adviser for the UAE’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Zayef and had close ties to the Trump administration
- He has been interviewed twice by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his probe into Russian meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign
- The Lebanese-born adviser was first stopped when he flew into Washington in January on his way to visit Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort
- Nader has been cooperating with investigators following the stop and his lawyer said he ‘truthfully answered questions’
- Investigators are interested in a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between bin Zayef, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon which Nader was at and may have brokered
- They also want to about a meeting he was at in the Seychelles, attended by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and UAE’s de-facto ruler Mohammed bin Zayed
One more Kushner scandal from the AP: NYC agency investigating more than a dozen Kushner buildings.
New York City’s buildings regulator launched investigations at more than a dozen Kushner Cos. properties Wednesday following an Associated Press report that the real estate developer routinely filed false paperwork claiming it had zero rent-regulated tenants in its buildings across the city.
The Department of Buildings is investigating possible “illegal activity” involving applications that sought permission to begin construction work at 13 of the developer’s buildings, according to public records maintained by the regulator. The AP reported Sunday that Kushner Cos. stated in more than 80 permit applications that it had zero rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it, in fact, had hundreds.
The false filings were made while Kushner Cos. was run by Jared Kushner, now senior adviser to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump. The false filings were all signed by a Kushner employee, sometimes by its chief operating officer. None were signed by Jared Kushner himself.
The false documents allowed the Kushner Cos. to escape extra scrutiny during construction at 34 of its buildings, many which showed a sharp decline in rent-regulated units following the work. Housing Rights Initiative, a watchdog group that uncovered the false filings, says that made it easier for the Kushner Cos. to harass the low-paying, rent-regulated tenants so they would leave, freeing up apartments for higher-paying tenants.
The Kushner Cos. said Wednesday that it is the victim of “politically motivated attacks.” It said it values and respects its tenants and operates under “the highest legal and ethical standards.”
I wonder if Jared and Ivanka are beginning to wish that Hillary had won?
There are more Trump scandals, but I have to wrap this up. What stories are you following?
Lazy Saturday Reads: St. Patrick’s Day Edition
Posted: March 17, 2018 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 43 Comments
Robert F. Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Day Parade after announcing his run for POTUS, 50 years ago today.
Good Morning!!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those who celebrate it.
Judging by his surname, Andrew McCabe is probably part Irish, but he’s most likely spending the day preparing to defend himself against the wannabe tin-pot dictator we’re stuck with thanks to Vladimir Putin and millions of ignorant white people who get their “information” from Fox News, InfoWars, and Russian trolls. I imagine McCabe is already thinking about writing a book like his former boss James Comey.
The New York Times: Andrew McCabe, a Target of Trump’s F.B.I. Scorn, Is Fired Over Candor Questions.
Andrew G. McCabe, the former F.B.I. deputy director and a frequent target of President Trump’s scorn, was fired Friday after Attorney General Jeff Sessions rejected an appeal that would have let him retire this weekend.
Mr. McCabe promptly declared that his firing, and Mr. Trump’s persistent needling, were intended to undermine the special counsel’s investigation in which he is a potential witness.
John F. Kennedy on St. Patrick’s Day 1960
Mr. McCabe is accused in a yet-to-be-released internal report of failing to be forthcoming about a conversation he authorized between F.B.I. officials and a journalist.
In a statement released late Friday, Mr. Sessions said that Mr. McCabe had shown a lack of candor under oath on multiple occasions.
Anyone with half a brain knows that this was a political firing, ordered by Trump.
Mr. McCabe was among the first at the F.B.I. to scrutinize possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. And he is a potential witness to the question of whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice. Mr. Trump has taunted Mr. McCabe both publicly and privately, and Republican allies have cast him as the center of a “deep state” effort to undermine the Trump presidency.
As a witness, Mr. McCabe would be in a position to corroborate the testimony of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, who kept contemporaneous notes on his conversations with Mr. Trump. Mr. Comey said Mr. Trump prodded him to publicly exonerate the president on the question of Russian collusion and encouraged him to shut down an investigation into his national security adviser.
Trump revealed his complicity in getting McCabe fired just before he could have retired with a full pension after more than 20 years in the FBI.
The Washington Post quotes McCabe’s lawyer:
Michael R. Bromwich, McCabe’s attorney, said that he had “never before seen the type of rush to judgment — and rush to summary punishment — that we have witnessed in this case.” He cited in particular President Trump’s attacks on McCabe on Twitter and the White House press secretary’s comments about him on Thursday — which he said were “quite clearly designed to put inappropriate pressure on the Attorney General to act accordingly.”
“This intervention by the White House in the DOJ disciplinary process is unprecedented, deeply unfair, and dangerous,” Bromwich said.
McCabe has become a lightning rod in the political battles over the FBI’s most high-profile cases, including the Russia investigation and the probe of Hillary Clinton’s email practices. He has been a frequent target of criticism from Trump.
Read McCabe’s full statement on his firing at HuffPost: Andrew McCabe’s Response To Being Fired Two Days Before His Retirement. An excerpt:
I have been an FBI Special Agent for over 21 years. I spent half of that time investigating Russian Organized Crime as a street agent and Supervisor in New York City. I have spent the second half of my career focusing on national security issues and protecting this country from terrorism. I served in some of the most challenging, demanding investigative and leadership roles in the FBI. And I was privileged to serve as Deputy Director during a particularly tough time.
281 years ago today, Boston hosted its first St. Patrick’s Day Parade; the nation’s longest-running public parade.
For the last year and a half, my family and I have been the targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country. Articles too numerous to count have leveled every sort of false, defamatory and degrading allegation against us. The President’s tweets have amplified and exacerbated it all. He called for my firing. He called for me to be stripped of my pension after more than 20 years of service. And all along we have said nothing, never wanting to distract from the mission of the FBI by addressing the lies told and repeated about us.
No more.
The investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has to be understood in the context of the attacks on my credibility. The investigation flows from my attempt to explain the FBI’s involvement and my supervision of investigations involving Hillary Clinton. I was being portrayed in the media over and over as a political partisan, accused of closing down investigations under political pressure. The FBI was portrayed as caving under that pressure, and making decisions for political rather than law enforcement purposes. Nothing was further from the truth. In fact, this entire investigation stems from my efforts, fully authorized under FBI rules, to set the record straight on behalf of the Bureau, and to make clear that we were continuing an investigation that people in DOJ opposed.
Read the rest at HuffPost.
Some notable Twitter responses: to Trump’s tweet:
FBI Director James Comey and the three colleagues he told about Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation have either been fired or reassigned. Business Insider:
Former FBI director James Comey told three top FBI officials about conversations he had with President Donald Trump before he was fired last May. All three officials have since been forced out of the bureau, or reassigned within it….
Comey told former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe; his chief of staff, James Rybicki; and FBI general counsel James Baker about his conversations with Trump.
McCabe was fired on Friday, one day before he was set to retire. His firing came amid an internal investigation into his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which found that he made unauthorized disclosures to the media about the probe while it was ongoing….
1958 New Orleans: “”Not even a heavy rain could dampen the spirit of the Corner Club on St. Patrick’s Day…”
Rybicki [was] resigned from the FBI in late January to accept a job in the corporate sector.
He became a target of Republican criticism for his role in helping craft a memo that exonerated Hillary Clinton in the investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state. He answered questions from members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees earlier in January concerning his work on the Clinton investigation and on Comey’s claims that Trump asked him to pledge his loyalty before firing him in May 2017…
In January Foreign Policy reported that Trump ordered a smear campaign against people in the FBI who could testify against him in Mueller’s probe: Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses.
President Donald Trump pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific employees were likely to be witnesses against him as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.
In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, recently fired FBI Director James Comey disclosed that he spoke contemporaneously with other senior bureau officials about potentially improper efforts by the president to curtail the FBI’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s efforts constituted obstruction of justice.
1975 St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast, Boston
Not long after Comey’s Senate testimony, Trump hired John Dowd, a veteran criminal defense attorney, to represent him in matters related to Mueller’s investigation. Dowd warned Trump that the potential corroborative testimony of the senior FBI officials in Comey’s account would likely play a central role in the special counsel’s final conclusion, according to people familiar with the matter.
In discussions with at least two senior White House officials, Trump repeated what Dowd had told him to emphasize why he and his supporters had to “fight back harder,” in the words of one of these officials.
Click on the link to read the rest.
This morning Dowd called for the Special Counsel’s investigation to be shut down. The Daily Beast:
President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, told The Daily Beast on Saturday morning that he hopes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will shut down the Mueller probe.
Reached for comment by email about the firing of former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, sent The Daily Beast the text of Trump’s most recent tweet on the subject, which applauded the firing. Then he wrote that Rosenstein should follow Sessions’ lead.
“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier,” Dowd then wrote.
Barack and Michelle Obama on St. Patrick’s Day, date unknown
He told The Daily Beast he was speaking on behalf of the president, in his capacity as the president’s attorney.
Dowd also emailed the text below, which is an annotated version of a line from a well-known 20th century play:
“What’s that smell in this room[Bureau}? Didn’t you notice it, Brick [Jim]? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room[Bureau}?… There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity[corruption]… You can smell it. It smells like death.” Tennessee Williams — ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’
Wow.
More stories to check out:
The Washington Post: Could getting Andrew McCabe fired come back to bite Trump?
The Guardian: Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.
The Washington Post: Facebook bans Trump campaign’s data analytics firm for taking user data.
Paul Rosenzweig at Lawfare: The Trump Malignancy and the Book That Will Not Be Written.
Vanity Fair: Mueller’s Calculated Strike Against The Trump Org Shows His Strategy is Working.
Politico: FEC probes whether NRA got illegal Russian donations.
Miami Herald: FIU says it knew about crack on bridge, and state’s Transportation Department did, too.
The Guardian: Secretive religious charity run by top US housing officials raises questions.
New York Daily News: Infamous hacker who gave up whistleblower Chelsea Manning to the FBI dies in Kansas.
Tech Times: Early Humans Mated With Neanderthal Relative Denisovans At Least 2 Times.
What stories are you following today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: March 15, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 36 Comments
Honesty Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye, Wales
Good Morning!!
Someone in the White House was able to get Trump to agree to make a joint written statement on the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Great Britain. Business Insider reports: Trump, May, Merkel and Macron issue joint statement blaming Russia for Sergei Skripal poisoning.
LONDON — The leaders of United States, Britain, France and Germany have released a joint statement condemning Russia for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in England last week.
Donald Trump, Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel all agreed that there was “no plausible alternative explanation” than that Russia was to blame for the attack.
The leaders called on Russia to “live up to its responsibilities as a member of the UN Security Council,” adding that Russia’s actions “threaten the security of us all.”
The statement marks a significant ramping up of tensions with Russia and comes as members of the NATO council meet to discuss the crisis.
It also follows several days worth of diplomacy by May following an initial reluctance from the French and US government’s to publicly attribute the incident to Russia.
On Wednesday May announced that 23 Russian diplomats would be expelled from the UK following the attack.
Trump still has not personally spoken about the attack, and he’ll probably get a message of support to Putin somehow. After all, he can’t be caught badmouthing his boss in public. Read the full statement at the BI link.
The Strand, New York City
Yesterday Peter Baker wrote about Trump’s refusal to speak out against Putin at The New York Times: Trump, Pressured to Criticize Russia for Poisoning, Leaves Comment to Aides.
ST. LOUIS — Britain’s tough response in holding Russia responsible for a poisoning attack on its soil increased the pressure on President Trump to join with a NATO ally in taking action, even as he has been reluctant to retaliate for Moscow’s intervention in the 2016 election in the United States.
Mr. Trump, who was visiting Missouri on Wednesday, has not personally addressed the attack since London assigned blame to Russia and left it instead to aides to express public solidarity with Prime Minister Theresa May after she expelled 23 Russian diplomats, canceled high-level contacts and vowed to impose more sanctions.
“This latest action by Russia fits into a pattern of behavior in which Russia disregards the international rules-based order, undermines the sovereignty and security of countries worldwide, and attempts to subvert and discredit Western democratic institutions and processes,” the White House said in a written statement. “The United States is working together with our allies and partners to ensure that this kind of abhorrent attack does not happen again.”
But for whatever reason, Mr. Trump avoided saying so personally in public, much as he has generally avoided condemning Russia for its election meddling. He has allowed top advisers to denounce Moscow for its interference in American democracy, but when it comes to his own Twitter posts or comments, he has largely stuck to equivocal language, seemingly reluctant to accept the consensus conclusion of his intelligence agencies and intent on voicing no outrage or criticism of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, for whom he has expressed admiration.
Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice
At Bloomberg, Eli Lake writes that Trump can’t get away with this shit much longer: Time’s Up: Trump Can’t Have It Both Ways on Russia.
From arming Ukraine to appointing hawkish generals like James Mattis, John Kelly and H.R. McMaster, a case could be made that Trump’s soft rhetoric on Russia was not reflected in his government’s tough measures against this adversary. After all, U.S. forces killed Russian mercenaries that attacked a U.S. base in Syria. Watch what the government does, not what the president says. (And as for those allegations of Russian support for the Trump campaign, the president has good reasons to distrust the retired intelligence chiefs who keep impugning him. A few of them endorsed his opponent.)
The expiration date on this Janus-faced approach to Russia has arrived. The specific moment was on Tuesday after Trump had fired his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One, Trump couldn’t bring himself to endorse the findings of the British government that Russia poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the U.K. He hedged. “As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be,” he said.
Trump here is either deliberately or accidentally playing into Russia’s disinformation campaign. Since the attack last week, when the former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with a neurological toxin developed by the former Soviet Union, Russia’s propaganda networks have flooded their airwaves with speculation about a false flag.
Selexyz Dominicanen, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Give Moscow credit. They know how to troll. One voice that keeps cropping up on the matter is Russian lawmaker Andrei Lugovoi. He says he can’t rule out that the whole thing was a provocation from the British themselves. Lugovoi has some experience when it comes to poisoning: A British public inquiry in 2016 concluded he was one of the men who irradiated former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London.
As Trump repeatedly says, “We’ll see what happens.” Let’s not forget that Trump still refuses to impose the sanctions on Russia that were overwhelmingly approved by Congress.
Apparently people in the administration other than Trump are realizing they can’t keep playing footsie with Russia in public. This just broke at Politico: U.S. imposes new sanctions on Russian entities over 2016 election meddling.
The Treasury Department on Thursday slapped new sanctions on two dozen Russian entities and individuals for interfering in the 2016 election and conducting a series of damaging cyberattacks.
“The administration is confronting and countering malign Russian cyber activity, including their attempted interference in U.S. elections, destructive cyberattacks, and intrusions targeting critical infrastructure,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “These targeted sanctions are a part of a broader effort to address the ongoing nefarious attacks emanating from Russia.”
Shakespeare and Company, Paris
Mnuchin added that Treasury is planning to impose additional sanctions “to hold Russian government officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilizing activities by severing their access to the U.S. financial system.” [….]
Thursday’s sanctions go after the individuals that special counsel Robert Mueller indicted last month for participating in a sweeping plot to use online trolls to inflame social divides and undermine faith in U.S. institutions during the 2016 election.
The sanctions target the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that Mueller’s team alleged was responsible for the extensive online trolling effort, that court documents say was years in the making, involving millions of dollars and potentially hundreds of individuals.
So that’s interesting. Again, we’ll see what happens.
You probably heard about Trump’s disgusting performance at a private fund-raiser in St. Louis last night in which he bragged about making up “facts” in a meeting with Canada’s Justin Trudeau. The Washington Post reports:
President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech Wednesday that he made up information in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S. ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether that was true.
Atlantis Books, Oía, Santorini, Greece
“Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,’ ” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio of the private event in Missouri obtained by The Washington Post. “Nice guy, good-looking guy, comes in — ‘Donald, we have no trade deficit.’ He’s very proud because everybody else, you know, we’re getting killed.
“… So, he’s proud. I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know. … I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid. … And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong, Justin.’ He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case, I feel differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check, because I can’t believe it.’
‘Well, sir, you’re actually right. We have no deficit, but that doesn’t include energy and timber. … And when you do, we lose $17 billion a year.’ It’s incredible.”
That last bit isn’t true either.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative says the United States has a trade surplus with Canada. It reports that in 2016, the United States exported $12.5 billion more in goods and services than it imported from Canada, leading to a trade surplus, not a deficit.
You can read the entire repulsive transcript at the WaPo. It just a bunch of stream-of-consciousness nonsense. And this *thing* is supposedly the president of the U.S. {Gagging}
I have a lot more stories to recommend, so I’ll give yo the rest in link dump fashion.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires
The Atlantic: Telling the Truth About CIA Torture.
The Daily Beast: ‘She Should Be in Jail’—Rights Groups Rally to Stop Torture Overseer Turned Trump CIA Pick Gina Haspel.
Axios: In Trumpworld, nobody knows anything.
Just Security: How Trump Might Replace Sessions with Pruitt as Attorney General.
The Post and Courier: Dylann Roof’s sister arrested for carrying weapons to school on day of national walkout.
CNN: Another Trump attorney involved in Stormy Daniels case.
Politico: BuzzFeed maneuver could free Stormy Daniels to speak on Trump.
CNN: Is North Korea’s silence on the Trump-Kim summit a worry?
Vox: The real problem with the New York Times op-ed page: it’s not honest about US conservatism.
Politico: Extreme secrecy surrounds Comey book manuscript.
NOTE: The bookstore photos are from an article at the Literary Hub: THE 10 MOST FAMOUS BOOKSTORES IN THE WORLD. See more photos and read about the bookstores there.
So . . . what stories are you following today?
Tuesday Reads: A Blizzard of News
Posted: March 13, 2018 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 52 Comments
Boston Common at Twilight, Frederick Childe Hassam, 1885-86
Good Morning!!
It’s March 13, and we’re under a blizzard warning here in Greater Boston while using a local moving services fort myers fl service. The winds are gusting at 60mph; and I can’t see out my windows right now–all I see is white. It’s a good day to hunker down and read a good book. I’ve got a copy of Russian Roulette, by Michael Isakoff and David Corn, on my Kindle, so I’m all set (The hardcover appears to be sold out on Amazon). Yahoo News has a new revelation from the book: Papadopoulos says that Trump personally encouraged him to arrange meeting with Putin, new book reports.
George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign and potentially a key witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, told federal investigators that before the election, Donald Trump personally encouraged him to pursue a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a new book being published Tuesday.
George Papadopoulos
Papadopoulos’s account to Mueller — as reported in “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,” by Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones’ David Corn — contradicts the public accounts of what took place at a critical meeting of Trump’s foreign policy team on March 31, 2016. It was at that meeting that Papadopoulos first informed Trump and the then candidate’s other foreign policy advisers that he had contacts in Britain who could arrange a summit between the GOP candidate and Putin.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Papadopoulos told Mueller’s investigators that Trump encouraged him, saying he found the idea “interesting,” according to the book, which cites sources familiar with his questioning by Mueller’s investigators.
Trump looked at Sessions, as if he expected him to follow up with Papadopoulos, and Sessions nodded in response, the authors write. Sessions has said he has “no clear recollection” of the exchange with Papadopoulos. A White House official said that others at the meeting remember it differently than Papadopoulos.
More turnover in the Trump administration: Rex Tillerson has been fired, to be replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo. MSNBC and CNN are reporting that Tillerson learned about it from Trump’s tweet, but the Washington Post says he was told on Friday (see story below).
Some twitter reactions:
https://twitter.com/matthewamiller/status/973543017339609088
The Washington Post: Trump ousts Tillerson, will replace him as secretary of state with CIA chief Pompeo.
President Trump has ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and plans to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him as the nation’s top diplomat, orchestrating a major change to his national security team amid delicate negotiations with North Korea, White House officials said Tuesday.
Trump last Friday asked Tillerson to step aside, and the embattled diplomat cut short a trip to Africa on Monday to return to Washington.
Tension between Trump and Tillerson has simmered for many months, but the president and his top diplomat reached a breaking point over the past week, officials said.
The reason for the latest rift was unclear. A spokesman for Tillerson said the secretary of state “had every intention of staying” in his job and was “unaware of the reason” for his firing.
Pompeo is much more of “a hawk” according to Mark Landler of The New York Times last November: Replacing Tillerson With Pompeo Would Supplant a Moderate With a Hawk.
For all his political and bureaucratic stumbles, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has been a steady voice of moderation in how the Trump administration engages with the world.
That voice will be lost if, as expected, President Trump replaces Mr. Tillerson at the State Department with Mike Pompeo, a hard-line former Republican congressman who has brought an avowedly political edge to the Central Intelligence Agency, where he is the director.
Mr. Pompeo, a West Point graduate best known for savaging Hillary Clinton’s response to the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, when she was secretary of state, has called for the Iran nuclear agreement to be ripped up, played down talk of Russia’s interference in the 2016 electionand suggested that regime change in North Korea would be a welcome development.
Those views have put him in good stead with Mr. Trump, whom White House aides said has come to value Mr. Pompeo’s pungent opinions and hard-charging style during his presidential daily briefings. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has publicly undermined Mr. Tillerson while the secretary of state has responded with thinly veiled contempt….
“Pompeo has done nothing but talk about how we need to take the gloves off,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “There’s no reason to believe he would change his views if you put him in charge of the State Department.”
Mr. Pompeo’s hard-edge views, as the nation’s chief diplomat, might reinforce, rather than restrain, Mr. Trump’s instincts. That could further stiffen American policy toward Iran, where Mr. Tillerson, along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, urged Mr. Trump not to scrap the nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama.
As for Gina Haspel, whom Trump has nominated to replace Pompeo at the CIA, Matthew Rosenberg wrote at The New York Times on Feb. 2, 2017: New C.I.A. Deputy Director, Gina Haspel, Had Leading Role in Torture.
As a clandestine officer at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand….
Gina Haspel
The elevation of Ms. Haspel, a veteran widely respected among her colleagues, to the No. 2 job at the C.I.A. was a rare public signal of how, under the Trump administration, the agency is being led by officials who appear to take a far kinder view of one of its darker chapters than their immediate predecessors.
Over the past eight years, C.I.A. leaders defended dozens of agency personnel who had taken part in the now-banned torture program, even as they vowed never to resume the same harsh interrogation methods. But President Trump has said repeatedly that he thinks torture works. And the new C.I.A. chief, Mike Pompeo, has said that waterboarding and other techniques do not even constitute torture, and praised as “patriots” those who used such methods in the early days of the fight against Al Qaeda.
Ms. Haspel, who has spent most of her career undercover, would certainly fall within Mr. Pompeo’s description. She played a direct role in the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition program,” under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.
There’s more at the link.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump’s personal assistant John McEntee was
escorted out of the White House on Monday, two senior administration officials said. The cause of the firing was an unspecified security issue, said a third White House official with knowledge of the situation.
The WSJ article is behind a paywall; here’s a bit more from Political Wire:
“President Trump’s personal assistant, John McEntee, was escorted out of the White House on Monday… The cause of the firing was an unspecified security issue,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. McEntee was removed from the White House grounds on Monday afternoon without being allowed to collect his belongings… He left without his jacket.”
Interesting. Politico reports that McEntee will now work on Trump’s reelection campaign: Trump body man Johnny McEntee leaving White House for campaign.
Johnny McEntee
President Donald Trump’s personal aide and body man John McEntee — known within the West Wing simply as Johnny — is leaving the White House and taking a position on Trump’s re-election campaign, the campaign announced Tuesday.
McEntee is the latest member of Trump’s original inner circle, which included communications director Hope Hicks and bodyguard Keith Schiller, to leave the White House.
An administration official confirmed that McEntee was abruptly escorted out of the White House on Monday, but did not know why. Another official said he would be mailed his belongings.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that McEntee’s departure was triggered by a security issue.
The move comes at a time of intense turbulence within the West Wing and throughout the administration. Trump announced Tuesday morning that he was putting forward CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and also said he is considering CNBC pundit and outside economic adviser Larry Kudlow to succeed outgoing National Economic Director Gary Cohn.
Read more about McEntee at Politico. Meanwhile, I just found out what the “security issue” is.
OK. Then why is Kushner still working the White House? Oh yeah–nepotism.
Of course yesterday’s big news was that the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee decided to shut down their Russia investigation without bothering to notify the Democrats on the committee. Jonathan Chait: House Republicans Conclude Pretend Russia Investigation, Declare Trump Innocent.
House Republicans have barely even pretended to investigate Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections, and now even the bare pretense is coming to an end. The GOP majority is releasing a report that will declare no collusion took place between Russia and the Trump campaign. Indeed, the report will go even farther and insist Russia did not even want to help Trump win at all, contradicting the assessment of U.S. intelligence.
This outcome was completely predictable from the outset, when the committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes, snuck off to the White House late at night to produce an explosive but eventually debunked charge that Trump had been the victim of nefarious “unmasking” by Obama officials in 2016. Nunes continued to churn out explosive but false countercharges depicting the Russia investigation as a Deep State conspiracy against the completely innocent Trump campaign.
Read more sarcasm at New York Magazine. John Brennan reacted on Twitter:
One more before I wrap this up. Rick Wilson: The Walls Are Closing In on Trump.
The Fox and Trump media enterprise today launched into a spasm of complete ecstasy as the House Intelligence Committee declared their investigation of Russian interference in our elections and their contacts with and collaboration with the Trump campaign over, done, solved. In their alternate reality, they’re declaring the CASE CLOSED.
They might not want to get too far over their skis on this one because both the Senate and Bob Mueller are still taking this question seriously, as opposed to the clownish covering of Donald Trump’s ample ass by the Republicans on the House Intel Committee. Its chairman Devin Nunes and the committee itself are both hopelessly compromised. Nunes has done everything in his power to cover for the President, his staff, and their Russian contacts, and to elide Vladimir Putin’s stated intent and obvious actions.
When secret agent man Devin Nunes raced to the White House to break a phony story of illegal and inappropriate surveillance from a mysterious “whistleblower,” it turned out the super-secret intel he set his ass on fire to reveal came from… wait for it… the White House itself. Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, both employees of the White House, provided Nunes with top secret material outside the approved channels to push one of many of the White House’s endless variations on the “no collusion—no puppet, you’re the puppet” defense.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
What are you hearing? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread below.
Lazy Saturday Reads: The Endless Scream
Posted: March 10, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 30 Comments
Parody of Edvard Munch’s The Scream by Svetlana Petrova
Happy Saturday!!
Our formerly great country has sunk into ridiculousness. In a little over a year, Trump has turned us into a laughing stock around the world. I wonder if there is any way to come back from the disaster he has created. Somehow we have to keep hanging on, hoping that the midterm elections will deliver a blue wave and that Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors and investigators will dig up enough evidence to bring Trump down through impeachment, indictment, or resignation.
I want to begin with a potential disaster of Trump’s making that hasn’t gotten enough attention. Remember Trump’s decision to shrink the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah by 85 percent? Well, in the parts of the previously public land that Trump is turning over to oil companies, there has been an important scientific discovery. The Washington Post on Feb. 22: Spectacular fossils found at Bears Ears — right where Trump removed protections.
One of the world’s richest troves of Triassic-period fossils has been discovered in an area of Bears Ears National Monument that just lost its protected status, scientists announced Thursday. President Trump signed a proclamation in December that shrank the national monument by 85 percent.
The discovery of intact remains of crocodile-like animals called phytosaurs came to light this week when researchers announced it at the Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists conference at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah. Based on an initial excavation, the 70-yard-long site, its depth yet unknown, “may be the densest area of Triassic period fossils in the nation, maybe the world,” Rob Gay, a contractor at the Museums of Western Colorado, said in a statement.
In an interview, Gay, who led a team of researchers on last year’s expedition, called it the “largest and most complete bone bed in the state of Utah, and one of, if not the largest, anywhere in the United States.” He called the discovery of three intact toothy, long-snouted fossils from the period extremely rare, adding that the “density of bone is as high or greater than all the other Triassic sites in the country.”
The fossil bed is part of the Chinle Formation, ancient river and flood plain deposits that run through the center of the original monument President Barack Obama designated in December 2016. But that sedimentary rock also contains uranium, which made it more commercially attractive than other parts of Bears Ears.
In December, The Washington Post reported that the firm Energy Fuels Resources lobbied Interior Department officials to shrink the boundaries of the monument, in part to allow the company greater access to areas where it held uranium mining rights. Trump’s Bears Ears proclamation, which took effect Feb. 2, cut more than 1 million acres from its original 1.35-million-acre expanse. A separate proclamation reduced another national monument in Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante, by about 800,000 acres.
Please go read the rest. Something must be done to protect these important scientific finds.
This article in the Salt Lake City Tribune provides more background on this story: A search for an ancient crocodile in Utah’s Bears Ears leads to a major discovery of Triassic fossils. A brief excerpt from the end of the piece:
Conservationists have heavily promoted Gay’s discovery because it highlights what they say was the shortsightedness of President Donald Trump’s decision to shrink the Bears Ears monument, a move that is being challenged in court.
“While a discovery of this magnitude certainly is a welcome surprise, protecting such resources was the very purpose of Bears Ears National Monument,” said Scott Miller of the Wilderness Society, an environmental group.
“That President Trump acted to revoke protections for these lands is outrageous, and that he did so despite the Department of the Interior knowing of this amazing discovery is even more shocking,” Miller said. “I hope the courts will act quickly to restore protections for Bears Ears National Monument before any more fossils are looted from the area and lost to science.”
Whatever the outcome of the court case, however, the fossils will remain under the jurisdiction of the Paleontological Resources Protection Act, a 2009 law that carries criminal penalties for those who loot fossils from public lands.
More background on the court battle:
The Washington Post, Dec. 2017: Trump is being sued to stop him from shrinking Bears Ears national monument by 85 percent. Who will win?
Salt Lake City Tribune, Dec. 2017: Feds ask for Bears Ears lawsuits to be consolidated.
Salt Lake City Tribune, Feb. 2018: Tribes fight to keep Bears Ears lawsuit in D.C.
I plan to keep an eye on this story.
And now, back to current disasters. So many people are leaving the Trump administration that the White House staff has been reduced mostly to Trump family members and fanatical loyalists. More resignations and firings are apparently coming soon.
David Smith at The Guardian: ‘Hollowed out’ White House: Trump is on a dangerous path toward no advisers. In recent days, Trump has lost two important White House staff members–Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn– and it looks like more will be leaving soon.
There has never been such a rapid turnover of personnel in a US administration in modern times. If anything, the stampede to the exits appears to be accelerating, raising fears of a “brain drain” that will leave key jobs unfilled and make it ever harder to recruit new talent.
“One of the problems here is the White House is getting hollowed out and the number of people capable of doing things, of doing real things whether you agree or disagree ideologically, is getting smaller and smaller,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, told reporters. “So the mess-ups we’ve seen this past week, I think we’re going to see over and over and over again.”
Trump, who spent a decade as host of The Apprentice, has enjoyed pulling back the curtain to allow White House meetings to be televised. But he also appears to be copying the reality TV format of eliminating a member of his administration or cabinet on a weekly basis, leaving the audience in suspense: who’s next?
Multiple reports have suggested that it could be HR McMaster, the national security adviser whose style is said to grate with Trump, or Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state who has been repeatedly marginalised.
In addition, John Kelly, the chief of staff once seen as a stabilising force, has been under pressure over his handling of allegations of domestic abuse against his close aide Rob Porter. And Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, looks especially vulnerable after his security clearance was downgraded and the Russian collusion investigation closes in.
Click on the link to read the rest.
The Boston Globe: AP reports Trump wants to rely less on White House staff.
His staff hollowing out and his agenda languishing, President Donald Trump is increasingly flying solo.
Always improvisational, the president exercised his penchant for going it alone in a big way this week: first, by ordering sweeping tariffs opposed by foreign allies and by many in his own party, then hours later delivering the stunning news that he’ll meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The president has long considered himself his own best consultant, saying during the presidential campaign: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”
Trump has told confidants recently that he wants to be less reliant on his staff, believing they often give bad advice, and that he plans to follow his own instincts, which he credits with his stunning election, according to two people who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about private conversations.
Trump’s latest unilateral moves come at a moment of vulnerability for the president. Top staffers are heading for the exits, the Russia investigation continues to loom and Trump is facing growing questions about a lawsuit filed by a porn actress who claims her affair with the president was hushed up.
Is Trump deliberately imitating the brutal dictators he admires by centering decision-making in himself and his family? It sure seems that way, and it’s frightening. Links to check out on Trump’s latest snap decision–a meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un:
Politico: Trump’s bold stroke on North Korea dissolves into confusion.
The White House on Friday appeared to set tougher conditions for a meeting between President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, saying that the North must take “concrete steps” toward denuclearizing.
The White House also seemed to back away from the two-month timeframe laid out by South Korean officials on Thursday evening during a highly unusual press announcement in the White House driveway.
“Look, they’ve got to follow through on the promises they made,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a briefing Friday—raising the possibility that a meeting may never happen – even though the White House had touted it as a major achievement less than 24 hours earlier….
The North Korea announcement’s sudden roll-out, followed by confusion and then tons of caveats, also followed a pattern of policymaking in the Trump White House, in which pronouncements often come before detailed plans are concrete.
At issue Friday was the nature of what the North Koreans had promised. Sanders called “denuclearization” a precondition for any direct meeting between Trump and Kim. But experts called the prospect of North Korea dismantling its nuclear program before the start of talks totally unimaginable.
Yuki Tatsumi at HuffPost: It Only Takes One Trump Tweet To Fall Into North Korea’s Trap.
If the Trump-Kim summit happens, it would mark a real breakthrough in the increasingly dangerous situation that has threatened Northeast Asia for the last 25 years. But for now, for many reasons, it is too soon to be optimistic.
The offer Kim made to South Korean presidential envoy Chung Yi-Eung is almost too good to be true. The North Korean dictator committed to suspending nuclear and missile tests, and also reportedly showed understanding that “the routine joint military exercises between the Republic of Korea and the United States must continue.” Above all, Kim expressed his commitment to denuclearization.
The Trump White House has been quick to take credit for Kim’s softened stance, arguing it is the result of the administration’s steadfast efforts to exert maximum pressure on North Korea. It is certainly possible the White House is correct. It is possible that, faced with an American president who does not hesitate to talk about the “annihilation” of North Korea, Kim decided to cement his legacy as the leader who demonstrated his capacity to make his nation a nuclear state, but who agreed to denuclearize and led the country to peace with its old enemy ― and scored a meeting with a sitting U.S. president to boot.
On the other hand, Kim’s gesture could be an extremely cunning trap for the Trump administration, and if Trump falls into it, he could drive a lasting wedge between the U.S. and its allies in the region.
Japan for example. Business Insider: One of America’s closest allies could be the biggest loser if talks between Trump and Kim Jong-Un go south.
While President Donald Trump’s acceptance of an invitation to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un shocked the world on Thursday, no other nation could have been more alarmed than Japan.
The Japanese government received no warning of Trump’s decision, according to The New York Times. Trump is believed to have immediately accepted the invitation after South Korean officials briefed him at the White House. They, too, who were reportedly bewildered by his quick response.
After accepting the offer, Trump called Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and reassured him that the US would continue to exert maximum pressure on North Korea — a talking point that White House officials touted heavily on Friday in the hours after South Korean leaders announced the Kim Jong-Un invite in front of the White House.
Officials say that during Trump’s call with Abe the Japanese prime minister requested a meeting with the US president. Abe told reporters afterward that the US and Japan would be “together 100%” and that he would meet Trump in April.
Read more at the link.
At least we’ve finally reached the weekend and maybe we’ll have some time to recover from another week of news overload. What stories are you following?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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