AP FACT CHECK: Trump and missions unaccomplished

Associated Press

AP FACT CHECK: Trump and missions unaccomplished

Jim Drinkard and Calvin Woodward, Associated Press   June 24, 2017

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has a way of presenting missions as accomplished even when they’re not.

So it was when he told Iowans he’s put farmers back at their plows, secured a historic increase in military spending and empowered home-builders to swing their hammers again. Those all remain aspirations, not achievements.

Trump is also known to propose something already in effect, as when he declared “the time has come” for a welfare moratorium for immigrants. President Bill Clinton signed such a moratorium into law in 1996.

A look at a variety of Trump’s statements from the public square over the past week:

TRUMP: “We’re thinking about building the wall as a solar wall so it creates energy and pays for itself. And this way, Mexico will have to pay much less money. And that’s good right? … Pretty good imagination, right? Good? My idea.” — in Iowa on Wednesday.

THE FACTS: His idea? Others came forward with such proposals back when he was criticizing solar power as too expensive.

The notion of adding solar panels to the wall he wants to build along the Mexico border was explored in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in March. Vasilis Fthenakis, director of the Center for Life Cycle Analysis at Columbia University, and Ken Zweibel, former director of the Solar Institute at George Washington University, concluded it was “not only technically and economically feasible, it might even be more practical than a traditional wall.”

They said a 2,000-mile solar wall could cost less than $1 billion, instead of tens of billions for a traditional border wall, and possibly become “wildly profitable.” The writers were studying a concept laid out by Homero Aridjis and James Ramey in the online World Post in December.

The idea also was proposed by one of the companies that submitted its design to the government as a border wall prototype. Las Vegas-based Gleason Partners proposed covering some sections of the wall with solar panels and said that selling electricity from it could eventually cover the cost of construction.

Trump repeatedly described solar power in the campaign as “very, very expensive” and “not working so good.”

TRUMP: “So, we’ve achieved a historic increase in defense spending.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: He hasn’t. He is proposing a large increase but Congress is still debating — and is nowhere near deciding on — more money for defense for 2018.

All that’s been achieved is a $25 billion increase for this year and there’s nothing remotely historic about that. The Pentagon has received annual budget increases equal to or greater than $25 billion seven times in the past 15 years alone.

TRUMP: “The time has come for new immigration rules which say that those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years. And we’ll be putting in legislation to that effect very shortly.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: A federal law passed in 1996 already has that effect. It bars most foreigners who enter the country on immigrant visas from being eligible for federal benefits like Social Security and food stamps for the first five years. States typically have the authority to determine eligibility for local programs. As for people in the country illegally, they are generally prohibited from those benefits altogether. Same with foreigners who are in the U.S. on non-immigrant visas.

TRUMP: Addressing why he raised the possibility that his Oval Office conversation with fired FBI Director James Comey might have been recorded: “When he found out that I, you know, that there may be tapes out there, whether it’s governmental tapes or anything else, and who knows, I think his story may have changed.” — Fox News interview aired Friday.

THE FACTS: There’s no evidence of any change in what Comey testified on June 8 before the Senate Intelligence committee. In that appearance — the only time Comey has publicly addressed the subject — his story was consistent. He said that on three occasions beginning in January he’d told the president that he was not then the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation on him as part of its work to probe Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election.

Since then, it has been reported that Trump is under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller over his May 9 firing of Comey and whether that or other actions by the president constitute obstruction of justice.

TRUMP: “You see what we’ve already done. Home-builders are starting to build again. We’re not confiscating their land with ridiculous rules and regulations that don’t make sense.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: Housing starts as tracked by the Census Bureau have actually fallen over the past three months. Trump seems a bit mixed up on deregulation. Some of the biggest constraints on home-builders come from local governments, rather than federal rules.

TRUMP: On cutting regulations to help farmers: “Farmers are able to plow their field. If they have a puddle in the middle of their field, a little puddle the size of this, it’s considered a lake and you can’t touch it. And if you touch it, bad, bad things happen to you and your family. We got rid of that one, too, OK?” — Iowa speech

THE FACTS: He didn’t get rid of the regulations he’s talking about. He signed an executive order in February directing the Environmental Protection Agency to review a rule protecting clean water. The rule can stop some farmers from using pesticides and herbicides. It’s still in place, pending the review.

TRUMP: “Former Homeland Security Advisor Jeh Johnson is latest top intelligence official to state there was no grand scheme between Trump & Russia.” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Johnson did not state that conclusion. He was homeland security secretary (not adviser) from December 2013 to January 2017. He was asked at a House Intelligence committee hearing Wednesday whether he knew of any evidence of collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign.

Johnson said he was not aware of any information beyond what’s been reported publicly and what the U.S. intelligence community has gathered. That is not a statement of belief that no collusion took place. Pressed on the matter, he said Comey probably had some information to go on when the FBI opened an investigation into possible collusion.

TRUMP: “Unemployment is at a 16-year low.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: Unemployment is indeed that low, at 4.3 percent.

TRUMP: “We are 5 and 0, as you know, in these special elections. And I think the Democrats thought it would be a lot different than that. 5-0 is a big — that’s a big margin.” — Fox News interview aired Friday.

THE FACTS: Wrong score. Right score: 4-1. Republicans won open House seats in Kansas, Georgia, Montana and South Carolina. Democrats held onto a seat in California.

Trump’s miscount wasn’t a one-time gaffe. It was also a line that roused supporters in his Iowa speech. “So, we’re 5 and 0. We’re 5 and 0,” he said to applause Wednesday night. “Five and 0. Five and 0,” he said at another point.

TRUMP: “Since I was elected, illegal border crossings — and this is without the wall, before the wall — have decreased by more than 75 percent, a historic and unprecedented achievement.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: That’s overblown, according to government figures about the Mexico border. The decrease in his first four full months in office is about 59 percent, still substantial but not more than 75 percent.

More than 56,600 foreigners have been caught crossing from Mexico illegally between February and May, down from 137,800 people in the same period during President Barack Obama’s last year in office.

The number of illegal crossings is not known because some people slip in undetected. Officials consider the number arrested to be representative of the broader trend of attempts to cross illegally.

In bragging that the numbers are down “without the wall,” Trump omits the fact that there already are roughly 650 miles of fencing along the nearly 2,000-mile long Mexican border.

TRUMP: “We’re working really hard on massive tax cuts. It would be, if I get it the way I want it, the largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America. Because right now, we are one of the highest-taxed nations in the world. Really on a large-scale basis, we are the highest tax nation in the world. … And I think it’s going to happen.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: The overall U.S. tax burden is actually one of the lowest among the 32 developed and large emerging-market economies tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Taxes made up 26.4 percent of the total U.S. economy in 2015, according to the OECD. That’s far below Denmark’s tax burden of 46.6 percent, Britain’s 32.5 percent or Germany’s 36.9 percent. Just four OECD countries had a lower tax bite than the U.S.: South Korea, Ireland, Chile and Mexico.

It’s not clear Trump will sign the largest tax cut in U.S. history. His administration has yet to settle on enough details of any planned overhaul to make that claim. To put the claim in context, President Ronald Reagan essentially cut taxes during his first term by slightly more than 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. For Trump to surpass that, his tax cut would essentially have to be more than $400 billion a year.

TRUMP: “We have Gary Cohn, who’s the president of Goldman Sachs. That’s somebody. He’s the president of Goldman Sachs. He had to pay over $200 million in taxes to take the job, right? … This is the president of Goldman Sachs, smart. Having him represent us. He went from massive paydays to peanuts. … But these are people that are great, brilliant business minds. And that’s what we need.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: Trump appears to be confusing taxes paid with stocks sold. Cohn and his family members held about $220 million in Goldman stock, which he had to divest in order to resolve possible conflicts of interest before becoming White House economic adviser. He would have had to pay taxes on any capital gains from the sale, but that sum would only be a fraction of the figure cited by Trump. Moreover, Cohn had to divest the stock in pieces, so the final tally from his sales is unclear, as the stock has declined from highs in March.

It’s also worth noting the president’s about-face praise for Wall Street. His campaign routinely criticized Goldman Sachs and its ties to Hillary Clinton, even using it as a villain in a political ad that included video of the bank’s chairman and CEO.

TRUMP: “You have a gang called MS-13. … They do things that nobody can believe. These are true animals. We are moving them out of the country by the thousands, by the thousands. … We’re getting them out, MS-13.” — Iowa speech.

THE FACTS: There is no publicly available evidence to support this claim about the violent gang. In recent weeks, federal authorities have arrested hundreds of suspected MS-13 gang members. Many of those arrested have been identified by the government as immigrants, but it is unclear if they have yet been deported. Any suspected gang members who are U.S. citizens cannot be kicked out of the country. The gang was formed decades ago in Los Angeles and has spread.

Overall arrests of immigrants in the country illegally have increased in recent months, but deportations have declined slightly, according to the most recently available government data.

SENATE DEMOCRATIC LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER, on Republican health care legislation: “They want to bring the bill to the floor, rush it in the dark of night, for a simple reason — they are ashamed of their bill. They don’t want anybody to see it, least of all the public. … They can’t even whisper what it’s about they are so, so ashamed of it.” — Senate speech Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Both parties resort to secrecy in Congress at times, especially when hard-fought legislation is at stake. When Democrats grappled with a conservative uproar over President Barack Obama’s health care bill, they held private meetings to iron out details and reach agreements to clinch the legislation’s approval. That said, they also held scores of hearings and staged many days of debate in 2009 and 1010. The Senate’s Republican leadership has held no hearings on its legislation, the contents of which are unknown. It’s unusual for such a major bill to be written from scratch behind closed doors then rushed through Congress in a few days.

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: “I like that line that says, you know, the Internal Revenue Code is twice as long as the Bible, with none of the good news.” — speech Tuesday to manufacturers.

HOUSE SPEAKER PAUL RYAN: “You know, there’s this old line about the tax code. Our tax code is about five times as long as the Bible but with none of the good news.” — speech to the same group Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Ryan has the ratio about right: The tax code runs nearly 4 million words, according to a 2013 government report, while the Bible has 700,000 to about 800,000, depending on the version and variations in translation. Pence understated the difference. Both got laughs.

A number of Republicans over the years have compared the size of the texts to make the point that Americans are under an unholy burden from the IRS.

Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Alicia A. Caldwell, Jill Colvin and Catherine Lucey contributed to this report.

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

EDITOR’S NOTE: A look at the veracity of claims by political figures

This, Right Here. This Is Where Obama Choked.

Esquire

This, Right Here. This Is Where Obama Choked.

The American people had damn near an absolute right to know this information.

By Charles P. Pierce      June 23, 2017

It so happens that Friday is an official Ratfcking Holiday, and a very important one. It’s June 23 or, as we who celebrate it like to call it, Smoking Gun Day. It was 45 years ago to the day that H.R. Haldeman stopped by the Oval Office and, with a tape recorder whirring merrily away in a drawer, he and Richard Nixon discussed how to get the CIA to turn off the FBI’s investigation of Watergate because that investigation was moving into “some productive areas.” They talked about ripping scabs open, and “that whole Bay of Pigs thing,” and having Walters tell Gray not to go into this thing any further, period. “All I can conclude,” Patrick Buchanan reportedly said when this tape finally came to light, “is that the old man has been shitting us.”

So, in honor of the day, The Washington Post comes up with an amazing tale of the way ratfcking is done in the modern era. It begins with a top-secret communique delivered to President Barack Obama last August.

Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race. But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

The dynamite, she go boom.

At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a year. In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.

I seem to remember this remarkable coincidence.

The piece is too long, too well reported, and too detailed to summarize in block quotes, but what it makes sadly clear is that the culture of secrecy within the intelligence community worked invariably to empower the ratfcking, rather than to hinder it.

Over that five-month interval, the Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could “crater” the Russian economy.

All well and good. Go get ’em, tiger.

However, like so many things about the Obama administration, the response to what the Russians did was measured and allegedly proportional. (“I feel like we choked,” one official told the Post.) But, you may ask, what about the election that was going on at the same time the Obama administration was retaliating for Russian interference in its process?

They were concerned that any pre-election response could provoke an escalation from Putin. Moscow’s meddling to that point was seen as deeply concerning but unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election. Far more worrisome to the Obama team was the prospect of a cyber-assault on voting systems before and on Election Day. They also worried that any action they took would be perceived as political interference in an already volatile campaign. By August, Trump was predicting that the election would be rigged. Obama officials feared providing fuel to such claims, playing into Russia’s efforts to discredit the outcome and potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph.

This, right here. This is where they choked. The American people had damned close to an absolute right to the information their government already had. The most fundamental act of citizenship is the right to cast an informed vote. The idea that the Obama administration withheld the fact that the Russians were ratfcking the election in order to help elect a vulgar talking yam is a terrible condemnation of the whole No Drama Obama philosophy. Would Donald Trump have raised hell if the White House released what it knew? Of course, he would have. But, as it was, the American people went to vote with only about half of the information they needed to assess his candidacy. This was a terrible decision.

Before departing for an August vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, Obama instructed aides to pursue ways to deter Moscow and proceed along three main paths: Get a high-confidence assessment from U.S. intelligence agencies on Russia’s role and intent; shore up any vulnerabilities in state-run election systems; and seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders for a statement condemning Moscow and urging states to accept federal help.

Ah, yes. “Bipartisan support.” The brilliant snow-white unicorn pursued by that administration for nearly eight years. How did that work out? How did it ever work out?

On Aug. 15, Johnson arranged a conference call with dozens of state officials, hoping to enlist their support. He ran into a wall of resistance. The reaction “ranged from neutral to negative,” Johnson said in congressional testimony Wednesday. Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, used the call to denounce Johnson’s proposal as an assault on state rights. “I think it was a politically calculated move by the previous administration,” Kemp said in a recent interview, adding that he remains unconvinced that Russia waged a campaign to disrupt the 2016 race. “I don’t necessarily believe that,” he said.

Really, now. How did it ever work out?

The meeting devolved into a partisan squabble.

“The Dems were, ‘Hey, we have to tell the public,’ ” recalled one participant. But Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went further, officials said, voicing skepticism that the underlying intelligence truly supported the White House’s claims. Through a spokeswoman, McConnell declined to comment, citing the secrecy of that meeting. Key Democrats were stunned by the GOP response and exasperated that the White House seemed willing to let Republican opposition block any pre-election move.

So they choked a second time, scared out of what they should have done by Mitch McConnell, ace conniver. (What the hell did they expect? Patriotism?) I repeat: the American people needed to know this before they voted, spin and fauxtrage and punditry be damned. They had a right to factor the question, “Why does Putin want this guy to be president?” into their thinking in the voting booth.

When U.S. spy agencies reached unanimous agreement in late September that the interference was a Russian operation directed by Putin, Obama directed spy chiefs to prepare a public statement summarizing the intelligence in broad strokes. With Obama still determined to avoid any appearance of politics, the statement would not carry his signature.

It’s at moments like this that I wish he’d never given that speech in Boston in 2004. It froze him into a public persona and a political stance that made even justifiable partisan politics look like base hypocrisy. It is entirely possible that, at what we must now believe was a critical moment (if not the critical moment) of his presidency, the better angels of a president’s nature were the voices he should have avoided at all cost.

Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s a fascinating window into presidential decision-making on the fly, as well as a look at how intelligence is gathered and managed. The 2016 presidential election was corrupted at its heart, and we do not know yet how fully it was corrupted, and that’s the most lasting scandal of all.

Washington Post Article Follows Below.

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Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault

Washington Post    Exclusive

Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault

By Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous     June 23, 2017

Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.

                     Hacking Democracy

The White House debated various options to punish Russia, but facing obstacles and potential risks, it ultimately failed to exact a heavy toll on the Kremlin for its election interference.

Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a year. In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.

     SECRET CIA REPORT ARRIVES AT THE WHITE HOUSE

CIA Director John Brennan first alerts the White House in early August that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an operation to defeat or at least damage Hillary Clinton and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

The president instructs aides to assess vulnerabilities in the election system and get agencies to agree on the intelligence that Putin was seeking to influence the election.

Brennan calls Alexander Bortnikov, the director of Russia’s main security agency, and warns him about interfering in the U.S. presidential election.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s efforts to secure the U.S. voting systems run aground when some state officials reject his plan, calling it a federal takeover.

But at the highest levels of government, among those responsible for managing the crisis, the first moment of true foreboding about Russia’s intentions arrived with that CIA intelligence.

The material was so sensitive that CIA Director John Brennan kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, concerned that even that restricted report’s distribution was too broad. The CIA package came with instructions that it be returned immediately after it was read. To guard against leaks, subsequent meetings in the Situation Room followed the same protocols as planning sessions for the Osama bin Laden raid.

Read the declassified report on Russian interference in the U.S. election

It took time for other parts of the intelligence community to endorse the CIA’s view. Only in the administration’s final weeks in office did it tell the public, in a declassified report, what officials had learned from Brennan in August — that Putin was working to elect Trump.

Over that five-month interval, the Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyber-attacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could “crater” the Russian economy.

Inside Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s attack on American democracy

But in the end, in late December, Obama approved a modest package combining measures that had been drawn up to punish Russia for other issues — expulsions of 35 diplomats and the closure of two Russian compounds — with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic.

Obama also approved a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow. The project, which Obama approved in a covert-action finding, was still in its planning stages when Obama left office. It would be up to President Trump to decide whether to use the capability.

In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy. It was a case that took almost no time to solve, traced to the Kremlin through cyber-forensics and intelligence on Putin’s involvement. And yet, because of the divergent ways Obama and Trump have handled the matter, Moscow appears unlikely to face proportionate consequences.

Those closest to Obama defend the administration’s response to Russia’s meddling. They note that by August it was too late to prevent the transfer to WikiLeaks and other groups of the troves of emails that would spill out in the ensuing months. They believe that a series of warnings — including one that Obama delivered to Putin in September — prompted Moscow to abandon any plans of further aggression, such as sabotage of U.S. voting systems.

Denis McDonough Denis McDonough White House chief of staff. McDonough was one of the first few officials to discuss details of the intelligence. , who served as Obama’s chief of staff, said that the administration regarded Russia’s interference as an attack on the “heart of our system.”

“We set out from a first-order principle that required us to defend the integrity of the vote,” McDonough said in an interview. “Importantly, we did that. It’s also important to establish what happened and what they attempted to do so as to ensure that we take the steps necessary to stop it from happening again.”

But other administration officials look back on the Russia period with remorse.

“It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend,” said a former senior Obama administration official involved in White House deliberations on Russia. “I feel like we sort of choked.”

The post-election period has been dominated by the overlapping investigations into whether Trump associates colluded with Russia before the election and whether the president sought to obstruct the FBI probe afterward. That spectacle has obscured the magnitude of Moscow’s attempt to hijack a precious and now vulnerable-seeming American democratic process.

Beset by allegations of hidden ties between his campaign and Russia, Trump has shown no inclination to revisit the matter and has denied any collusion or obstruction on his part. As a result, the expulsions and modest sanctions announced by Obama on Dec. 29 continue to stand as the United States’ most forceful response.

“The punishment did not fit the crime,” said Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia for the Obama administration from 2012 to 2014. “Russia violated our sovereignty, meddling in one of our most sacred acts as a democracy — electing our president. The Kremlin should have paid a much higher price for that attack. And U.S. policymakers now — both in the White House and Congress — should consider new actions to deter future Russian interventions.”

The Senate this month passed a bill that would impose additional election- and Ukraine-related sanctions on Moscow and limit Trump’s ability to lift them. The measure requires House approval, however, and Trump’s signature.

This account of the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s interference is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former U.S. officials in senior positions in government, including at the White House, the State, Defense and Homeland Security departments, and U.S. intelligence services. Most agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

The White House, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

                       ‘Deeply concerned’

The CIA breakthrough came at a stage of the presidential campaign when Trump had secured the GOP nomination but was still regarded as a distant long shot. Clinton held comfortable leads in major polls, and Obama expected that he would be transferring power to someone who had served in his Cabinet.

The intelligence on Putin was extraordinary on multiple levels, including as a feat of espionage.

For spy agencies, gaining insights into the intentions of foreign leaders is among the highest priorities. But Putin is a remarkably elusive target. A former KGB officer, he takes extreme precautions to guard against surveillance, rarely communicating by phone or computer, always running sensitive state business from deep within the confines of the Kremlin.

The Washington Post is withholding some details of the intelligence at the request of the U.S. government.

In early August, Brennan John Brennan CIA director. Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office. alerted senior White House officials to the Putin intelligence, making a call to deputy national security adviser Avril Haines Avril Haines Deputy national security adviser and former deputy director of the CIA under Brennan. and pulling national security adviser Susan E. Rice Susan Rice National security adviser. Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow. aside after a meeting before briefing Obama along with Rice, Haines and McDonough Denis McDonough White House chief of staff. McDonough was one of the first few officials to discuss details of the intelligence. in the Oval Office.

Officials described the president’s reaction as grave. Obama “was deeply concerned and wanted as much information as fast as possible,” a former official said. “He wanted the entire intelligence community all over this.”

Concerns about Russian interference had gathered throughout the summer.

Russia experts had begun to see a troubling pattern of propaganda in which fictitious news stories, assumed to be generated by Moscow, proliferated across social-media platforms.

Officials at the State Department and FBI became alarmed by an unusual spike in requests from Russia for temporary visas for officials with technical skills seeking permission to enter the United States for short-term assignments at Russian facilities. At the FBI’s behest, the State Department delayed approving the visas until after the election.

Meanwhile, the FBI was tracking a flurry of hacking activity against U.S. political parties, think tanks and other targets. Russia had gained entry to DNC systems in the summer of 2015 and spring of 2016, but the breaches did not become public until they were disclosed in a June 2016 report by The Post.

Even after the late-July WikiLeaks dump, which came on the eve of the Democratic convention and led to the resignation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) as the DNC’s chairwoman, U.S. intelligence officials continued to express uncertainty about who was behind the hacks or why they were carried out.

At a public security conference in Aspen, Colo., in late July, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. noted that Russia had a long history of meddling in American elections but that U.S. spy agencies were not ready to “make the call on attribution” for what was happening in 2016.

“We don’t know enough . . . to ascribe motivation,” Clapper said. “Was this just to stir up trouble or was this ultimately to try to influence an election?”

                                    RUSSIA AND THE CONVENTIONS

GOP convention, July 18 to 21

Democratic convention, July 25 to 28

DNC information exposed

Trump staffers alter GOP platform on Ukraine

WikiLeaks publishes about 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, days before the party’s national convention. Julian Assange tells NBC there is “no proof” that the information his anti-secrecy group received came from Russia. U.S. officials say WikiLeaks received the data from Russia.

During the Republican National Convention, Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak speaks with Trump advisers J.D. Gordon and Carter Page. Gordon would later say he was part of the push to soften the GOP’s national security platform regarding U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian-backed separatists. Kislyak meets with Jeff Sessions at a panel at the convention hosted by the Heritage Foundation.

Brennan John Brennan CIA director. Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office. convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.

The unit functioned as a sealed compartment, its work hidden from the rest of the intelligence community. Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to intelligence from all three participating agencies.

They worked exclusively for two groups of “customers,” officials said. The first was Obama and fewer than 14 senior officials in government. The second was a team of operations specialists at the CIA, NSA and FBI who took direction from the task force on where to aim their subsequent efforts to collect more intelligence on Russia.

               Don’t make things worse

The secrecy extended into the White House.

Rice Susan Rice National security adviser. Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow. , Haines Avril Haines Deputy national security adviser and former deputy director of the CIA under Brennan. and White House homeland-security adviser Lisa Monaco convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond. At first, only four senior security officials were allowed to attend: Brennan John Brennan CIA director. Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office. , Clapper James R. Clapper Director of national intelligence and one of four senior administration officials to participate in meetings in of the Situation Room on how to retaliate against Russia. Clapper would eventually release the Obama administration’s first statement concluding Russia interfered in the election. , Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and FBI Director James B. Comey. Aides ordinarily allowed entry as “plus-ones” were barred.

Gradually, the circle widened to include Vice President Biden and others. Agendas sent to Cabinet secretaries — including John F. Kerry at the State Department and Ashton B. Carter at the Pentagon — arrived in envelopes that subordinates were not supposed to open. Sometimes the agendas were withheld until participants had taken their seats in the Situation Room.

Throughout his presidency, Obama’s approach to national security challenges was deliberate and cautious. He came into office seeking to end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was loath to act without support from allies overseas and firm political footing at home. He was drawn only reluctantly into foreign crises, such as the civil war in Syria, that presented no clear exit for the United States.

Obama’s approach often seemed reducible to a single imperative: Don’t make things worse. As brazen as the Russian attacks on the election seemed, Obama and his top advisers feared that things could get far worse.

They were concerned that any pre-election response could provoke an escalation from Putin. Moscow’s meddling to that point was seen as deeply concerning but unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election. Far more worrisome to the Obama team was the prospect of a cyber-assault on voting systems before and on Election Day.

They also worried that any action they took would be perceived as political interference in an already volatile campaign. By August, Trump was predicting that the election would be rigged. Obama officials feared providing fuel to such claims, playing into Russia’s efforts to discredit the outcome and potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph.

Before departing for an August vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, Obama instructed aides to pursue ways to deter Moscow and proceed along three main paths: Get a high-confidence assessment from U.S. intelligence agencies on Russia’s role and intent; shore up any vulnerabilities in state-run election systems; and seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders for a statement condemning Moscow and urging states to accept federal help.

The administration encountered obstacles at every turn.

Despite the intelligence the CIA had produced, other agencies were slower to endorse a conclusion that Putin was personally directing the operation and wanted to help Trump. “It was definitely compelling, but it was not definitive,” said one senior administration official. “We needed more.”

Some of the most critical technical intelligence on Russia came from another country, officials said. Because of the source of the material, the NSA was reluctant to view it with high confidence.

Brennan John Brennan CIA director. Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office. moved swiftly to schedule private briefings with congressional leaders. But getting appointments with certain Republicans proved difficult, officials said, and it was not until after Labor Day that Brennan had reached all members of the “Gang of Eight” — the majority and minority leaders of both houses and the chairmen and ranking Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees.

Jeh Johnson, the homeland-security secretary, was responsible for finding out whether the government could quickly shore up the security of the nation’s archaic patchwork of voting systems. He floated the idea of designating state mechanisms “critical infrastructure,” a label that would have entitled states to receive priority in federal cyber-security assistance, putting them on a par with U.S. defense contractors and financial networks.

On Aug. 15, Johnson arranged a conference call with dozens of state officials, hoping to enlist their support. He ran into a wall of resistance.

The reaction “ranged from neutral to negative,” Johnson said in congressional testimony Wednesday.

Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, used the call to denounce Johnson’s proposal as an assault on state rights. “I think it was a politically calculated move by the previous administration,” Kemp said in a recent interview, adding that he remains unconvinced that Russia waged a campaign to disrupt the 2016 race. “I don’t necessarily believe that,” he said.

Stung by the reaction, the White House turned to Congress for help, hoping that a bipartisan appeal to states would be more effective.

In early September, Johnson Jeh Johnson Homeland security secretary. Johnson is tasked with securing voting systems and arranges meetings with dozens of state officials. , Comey James B. Comey FBI director appointed by Obama. Comey was one of four senior officials to participate in meetings in the Situation Room on how to respond to Russia’s interference. Comey participates in a briefing for members of Congress on Russia’s activities, but the meeting dissolves into partisan bickering. and Monaco Lisa Monaco Homeland security adviser. Monaco briefs key members of Congress on the intelligence. arrived on Capitol Hill in a caravan of black SUVs for a meeting with 12 key members of Congress, including the leadership of both parties.

The meeting devolved into a partisan squabble.

“The Dems were, ‘Hey, we have to tell the public,’ ” recalled one participant. But Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went further, officials said, voicing skepticism that the underlying intelligence truly supported the White House’s claims. Through a spokeswoman, McConnell declined to comment, citing the secrecy of that meeting.

Key Democrats were stunned by the GOP response and exasperated that the White House seemed willing to let Republican opposition block any pre-election move.

On Sept. 22, two California Democrats — Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam B. Schiff — did what they couldn’t get the White House to do. They issued a statement making clear that they had learned from intelligence briefings that Russia was directing a campaign to undermine the election, but they stopped short of saying to what end.

Read: McConnell and other congressional leaders issue statement on Russia

A week later, McConnell and other congressional leaders issued a cautious statement that encouraged state election officials to ensure their networks were “secure from attack.” The release made no mention of Russia and emphasized that the lawmakers “would oppose any effort by the federal government” to encroach on the states’ authorities.

When U.S. spy agencies reached unanimous agreement in late September that the interference was a Russian operation directed by Putin, Obama directed spy chiefs to prepare a public statement summarizing the intelligence in broad strokes.

With Obama still determined to avoid any appearance of politics, the statement would not carry his signature.

On Oct. 7, the administration offered its first public comment on Russia’s “active measures,” in a three-paragraph statement issued by Johnson Jeh Johnson Homeland security secretary. Johnson is tasked with securing voting systems and arranges meetings with dozens of state officials. and Clapper James R. Clapper Director of national intelligence and one of four senior administration officials to participate in meetings in of the Situation Room on how to retaliate against Russia. Clapper would eventually release the Obama administration’s first statement concluding Russia interfered in the election. . Comey James B. Comey FBI director appointed by Obama. Comey was one of four senior officials to participate in meetings in the Situation Room on how to respond to Russia’s interference. Comey participates in a briefing for members of Congress on Russia’s activities, but the meeting dissolves into partisan bickering. had initially agreed to attach his name, as well, officials said, but changed his mind at the last minute, saying that it was too close to the election for the bureau to be involved.

“The U.S. intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” the statement said. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Early drafts accused Putin by name, but the reference was removed out of concern that it might endanger intelligence sources and methods.

The statement was issued around 3:30 p.m., timed for maximum media coverage. Instead, it was quickly drowned out. At 4 p.m., The Post published a story about crud comments Trump had made about women that were captured on an “Access Hollywood” tape. Half an hour later, WikiLeaks published its first batch of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

To some, Obama’s determination to avoid politicizing the Russia issue had the opposite effect: It meant that he allowed politics to shape his administration’s response to what some believed should have been treated purely as a national security threat.

Schiff said that the administration’s justifications for inaction often left him with a sense of “cognitive dissonance.”

“The administration doesn’t need congressional support to issue a statement of attribution or impose sanctions,” Schiff said in a recent interview. He said many groups inadvertently abetted Russia’s campaign, including Republicans who refused to confront Moscow and media organizations that eagerly mined the troves of hacked emails.

“Where Democrats need to take responsibility,” Schiff said, “is that we failed to persuade the country why they should care that a foreign power is meddling in our affairs.”

             ‘Ample time’ after election

The Situation Room is actually a complex of secure spaces in the basement level of the West Wing. A video feed from the main room courses through some National Security Council offices, allowing senior aides sitting at their desks to see — but not hear — when meetings are underway.

As the Russia-related sessions with Cabinet members began in August, the video feed was shut off. The last time that had happened on a sustained basis, officials said, was in the spring of 2011 during the run-up to the U.S. Special Operations raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

The blacked-out screens were seen as an ominous sign among lower-level White House officials who were largely kept in the dark about the Russia deliberations even as they were tasked with generating options for retaliation against Moscow.

Much of that work was led by the Cyber Response Group, an NSC unit with representatives from the CIA, NSA, State Department and Pentagon.

The early options they discussed were ambitious. They looked at sector-wide economic sanctions and cyber-attacks that would take Russian networks temporarily offline. One official informally suggested — though never formally proposed — moving a U.S. naval carrier group into the Baltic Sea as a symbol of resolve.

What those lower-level officials did not know was that the principals and their deputies had by late September all but ruled out any pre-election retaliation against Moscow. They feared that any action would be seen as political and that Putin, motivated by a seething resentment of Clinton, was prepared to go beyond fake news and email dumps.

The FBI had detected suspected Russian attempts to penetrate election systems in 21 states, and at least one senior White House official assumed that Moscow would try all 50, officials said. Some officials believed the attempts were meant to be detected to unnerve the Americans. The patchwork nature of the United States’ 3,000 or so voting jurisdictions would make it hard for Russia to swing the outcome, but Moscow could still sow chaos.

“We turned to other scenarios” the Russians might attempt, said Michael Daniel, who was cyber-security coordinator at the White House, “such as disrupting the voter rolls, deleting every 10th voter [from registries] or flipping two digits in everybody’s address.”

The White House also worried that they had not yet seen the worst of Russia’s campaign. WikiLeaks and DCLeaks, a website set up in June 2016 by hackers believed to be Russian operatives, already had troves of emails. But U.S. officials feared that Russia had more explosive material or was willing to fabricate it.

“Our primary interest in August, September and October was to prevent them from doing the max they could do,” said a senior administration official. “We made the judgment that we had ample time after the election, regardless of outcome, for punitive measures.”

The assumption that Clinton would win contributed to the lack of urgency.

Instead, the administration issued a series of warnings.

CIA director John Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office—delivered the first on Aug. 4 in a blunt phone call with Alexander Bortnikov Director of the FSB, the post-Soviet successor to the KGB. CIA Director John Brennan is one of the first to warn Bortnikov over Russia’s election interference in a telephone call. Brennan said Bortnikov denied it but told him he would pass on his message to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China. Accompanied only by interpreters, Obama told Putin that “we knew what he was doing and [he] better stop or else,” according to a senior aide who subsequently spoke with Obama. Putin responded by demanding proof and accusing the United States of interfering in Russia’s internal affairs.

In a subsequent news conference, Obama alluded to the exchange and issued a veiled threat. “We’re moving into a new era here where a number of countries have significant capacities,” he said. “Frankly, we’ve got more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively.”

There were at least two other warnings.

On Oct. 7, the day that the Clapper-Johnson statement was released, National security adviser Susan Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow… summoned Sergey Kislyak, Russian ambassador to the United States since 2008, a career diplomat not considered especially close to Putin, to the White House and handed him a message to relay to Putin.

Then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange. The message noted that the United States had detected malicious activity, originating from servers in Russia, targeting U.S. election systems and warned that meddling would be regarded as unacceptable interference. Russia confirmed the next day that it had received the message but replied only after the election through the same channel, denying the accusation.

As Election Day approached, proponents of taking action against Russia made final, futile appeals to Obama’s top aides: McDonough Denis McDonough White House chief of staff. McDonough was one of the first few officials to discuss details of the intelligence. , Rice Susan Rice National security adviser. Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow. and Haines Avril Haines Deputy national security adviser and former deputy director of the CIA under Brennan. . Because their offices were part of a suite of spaces in the West Wing, securing their support on any national security issue came to be known as “moving the suite.”

One of the last to try before the election was Kerry. Often perceived as reluctant to confront Russia, in part to preserve his attempts to negotiate a Syria peace deal, Kerry was at critical moments one of the leading hawks.

In October, Kerry’s top aides had produced an “action memo” that included a package of retaliatory measures including economic sanctions. Knowing the White House was not willing to act before the election, the plan called for the measures to be announced almost immediately after votes had been securely cast and counted.

Kerry signed the memo and urged the White House to convene a principals meeting to discuss the plan, officials said. “The response was basically, ‘Not now,’ ” one official said.

Election Day arrived without penalty for Moscow.

                           The ‘tabledrop’

Despite the dire warnings, there were no meltdowns in the United States’ voting infrastructure on Nov. 8, no evidence of hacking-related fraud, crashing of electronic ballots or ma­nipu­la­tion of vote counts.

The outcome itself, however, was a shock.

Suddenly, Obama faced a successor who had praised WikiLeaks and prodded Moscow to steal even more Clinton emails, while dismissing the idea that Russia was any more responsible for the election assault than “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

“The White House was mortified and shocked,” said a former administration official. “From national security people there was a sense of immediate introspection, of, ‘Wow, did we mishandle this.’ ”

At first, there was no outward sign of new resolve.

After his failed pre-election bid, Kerry returned with a fallback proposal, calling for the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference and make recommendations on how to protect future elections.

The panel would be modeled on the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, producing a definitive report and making recommendations that led to the overhaul of U.S. intelligence agencies.

“The idea was that if you think doing something aggressive is too inflammatory, then we shouldn’t have a problem getting to the truth about what happened,” said an administration official familiar with the Kerry plan. Trump was expected to oppose such a plan, but setting it in motion before he was sworn in would make it “harder and uglier politically” for him to block.

Supporters’ confidence was buoyed when McDonough Denis McDonough White House chief of staff. McDonough was one of the first few officials to discuss details of the intelligence. signaled that he planned to “tabledrop” the proposal at the next NSC meeting, one that would be chaired by Obama. Kerry was overseas and participated by video-conference.

To some, the “tabledrop” term has a tactical connotation beyond the obvious. It is sometimes used as a means of securing approval of an idea by introducing it before opponents have a chance to form counterarguments.

“We thought this was a good sign,” a former State Department official said.

But as soon as McDonough introduced the proposal for a commission, he began criticizing it, arguing that it would be perceived as partisan and almost certainly blocked by Congress.

Obama then echoed McDonough’s critique, effectively killing any chance that a Russia commission would be formed.

McDonough declined to comment on the principals’ committee meeting on the commission or any other sensitive matters but acknowledged that he opposed the idea, in part because he believed it would be premature to do so before U.S. intelligence agencies and Congress had conducted their investigations.

                         ‘Demoralized’

Several officials described the post-election atmosphere at the White House as somber. “It was like a funeral parlor,” according to one official who said that work on Russia and other subjects slowed as officials began to anticipate the damage to Obama’s policies and legacy.

Others disputed that characterization, saying that the NSC carried on with no interruption or diminution of focus. “Nobody got paralyzed by grief,” a high-ranking official said. “We all did our jobs.”

Rice Susan Rice National security adviser. Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow. declined to comment on White House deliberations or other sensitive matters but said that the administration always planned to respond to Russia, regardless of the outcome of the election. “We felt it was on our watch and that we had to do something about it. It was our responsibility,” Rice said.

Whatever the case, work on Russia did not resume in earnest until after Thanksgiving, in part because Obama made his last foreign trip.

Rice again ordered NSC staffers to finalize a “menu” of punitive measures to use against Moscow. The list that took shape was a distillation of ideas that had been circulating for months across three main categories: cyber, economic and diplomatic.

Again, the discussion ran into roadblocks.

Spy agencies wanted to maintain their penetrations of Russian networks, not expose them in a cyber-fusillade.

Treasury Department officials devised plans that would hit entire sectors of Russia’s economy. One preliminary suggestion called for targeting technology companies including Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based cyber-security firm. But skeptics worried that the harm could spill into Europe and pointed out that U.S. companies used Kaspersky systems and software.

Several senior administration officials called for imposing sanctions on Putin personally or releasing financial records or other information that would embarrass him. Some objected that the latter proposal would send the wrong message — the United States would be engaging in the same behavior it was condemning. In any case, it was not clear how long it would take U.S. spy agencies to assemble such a Putin dossier.

“By December, those of us working on this for a long time were demoralized,” said an administration official involved in the developing punitive options.

Then the tenor began to shift.

On Dec. 9, Obama ordered a comprehensive review by U.S. intelligence agencies of Russian interference in U.S. elections going back to 2008, with a plan to make some of the findings public.

A week later, in one of Obama’s final news briefings, he expressed irritation that such a consequential election “came to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks.” He scolded news organizations for an “obsession” with titillating material about the Democrats that had dominated coverage.

Then he unloaded on Moscow. “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us,” he said. “They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country. Their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.”

It was a rare outburst for Obama, one that came amid a wave of internal second-guessing, finger-pointing from members of the defeated Clinton campaign, and the post-election posturing of Putin and Trump.

There was another factor at work, however.

Obama’s decision to order a comprehensive report on Moscow’s interference from U.S. spy agencies had prompted analysts to go back through their agencies’ files, scouring for previously overlooked clues.

The effort led to a flurry of new, disturbing reports — many of them presented in the President’s Daily Brief — about Russia’s subversion of the 2016 race. The emerging picture enabled policymakers to begin seeing the Russian campaign in broader terms, as a comprehensive plot sweeping in its scope.

Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser, said that the DNC email penetrations were initially thought to be in the same vein as previous Russian hacking efforts against targets including the State Department and White House.

“In many ways . . . we dealt with this as a cyber-threat and focused on protecting our cyber infrastructure,” Rhodes said in an interview. “Meanwhile, the Russians were playing this much bigger game, which included elements like released hacked materials, political propaganda and propagating fake news, which they’d pursued in other countries.”

“We weren’t able to put all of those pieces together in real time,” Rhodes said, “and in many ways that complete picture is still being filled in.” Rhodes declined to discuss any sensitive information.

Obama’s darkened mood, the intelligence findings and the approaching transfer of power gave new urgency to NSC deliberations. In mid-December, as Cabinet members took turns citing drawbacks to various proposals for retaliating against Russia, Rice Susan Rice National security adviser. Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow. grew impatient and began cutting them off.

“We’re not talking anymore. We’re acting,” she said, according to one participant.

Rice moved swiftly through a list of proposals that had survived months of debate, a menu that allowed principals to vote for what one participant described as “heavy, medium and light” options.

Among those in the Situation Room were Clapper James R. Clapper Director of national intelligence and one of four senior administration officials to participate in meetings in of the Situation Room on how to retaliate against Russia. Clapper would eventually release the Obama administration’s first statement concluding Russia interfered in the election. , Brennan John Brennan CIA director. Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office. , Kerry John Kerry Secretary of state. Kerry tries to get the administration to confront Russia several times. and Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Rice challenged them go to the “max of their comfort zones,” a second participant said.

Economic sanctions, originally aimed only at Russia’s military intelligence service, were expanded to include the FSB, a domestic successor to the KGB. Four Russian intelligence officials and three companies with links to those services were also named as targets.

The FBI had long lobbied to close two Russian compounds in the United States — one in Maryland and another in New York — on the grounds that both were used for espionage and placed an enormous surveillance burden on the bureau.

The FBI was also responsible for generating the list of Russian operatives working under diplomatic cover to expel, drawn from a roster the bureau maintains of suspected Russian intelligence agents in the United States.

Cabinet officials were prompted to vote on whether to close one Russian compound or two, whether to kick out around 10 suspected Russian agents, 20 or 35.

Kerry laid out his department’s concerns. The U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Tefft, had sent a cable warning that Moscow would inevitably expel the same number of Americans from Moscow and that departures of that magnitude would impair the embassy’s ability to function.

The objections were dismissed, and Rice Susan Rice National security adviser. Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow. submitted a plan to Obama calling for the seizure of both Russian facilities and the expulsion of 35 suspected spies. Obama signed off on the package and announced the punitive measures on Dec. 29, while on vacation in Hawaii.

By then, the still-forming Trump administration was becoming entangled by questions about contacts with Moscow. On or around that same day that Obama imposed sanctions, Trump’s designated national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, told the Russian ambassador by phone that the sanctions would soon be revisited. Flynn’s false statements about that conversation later cast him his job.

The report that Obama had commissioned was released a week later, on Jan. 6. It was based largely on the work done by the task force Brennan John Brennan CIA director. Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office. had established and made public what the CIA had concluded in August, that “Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

It also carried a note of warning: “We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. election to future influence efforts worldwide.”

             Sanctions’ ‘minimal’ impact

The punitive measures got several days of media attention before the spotlight returned to Trump, his still-forming administration and, later, the initial rumblings of the Russia crisis that has become a consuming issue for the Trump White House.

But the package of measures approved by Obama, and the process by which they were selected and implemented, were more complex than initially understood.

The expulsions and compound seizures were originally devised as ways to retaliate against Moscow not for election interference but for an escalating campaign of harassment of American diplomats and intelligence operatives. U.S. officials often endured hostile treatment, but the episodes had become increasingly menacing and violent.

In one previously undisclosed incident on July 6, a Russian military helicopter dropped from the sky to make multiple passes just feet over the hood of a vehicle being driven by the U.S. defense attache, who was accompanied by colleagues, on a stretch of road between Murmansk and Pechenga in northern Russia. The attempt at intimidation was captured on photos the Americans took through the windshield.

An even more harrowing encounter took place the prior month, when a CIA operative returning by taxi to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was tackled and thrown to the ground by a uniformed FSB guard. In a video aired on Russian television, the U.S. operative can be seen struggling to drag himself across the embassy threshold and onto U.S. sovereign territory. He sustained a broken shoulder in the attack.

Though conceived as retaliation for those incidents, the expulsions were adapted and included in the election-related package. The roster of expelled spies included several operatives who were suspected of playing a role in Russia’s election interference from within the United States, officials said. They declined to elaborate.

More broadly, the list of 35 names focused heavily on Russians known to have technical skills. Their names and bios were laid out on a dossier delivered to senior White House officials and Cabinet secretaries, although the list was modified at the last minute to reduce the number of expulsions from Russia’s U.N. mission in New York and add more names from its facilities in Washington and San Francisco.

The compounds were even higher on the FBI’s wish list.

At one point in the White House deliberations, intelligence analysts used aerial images of the facilities to show how they had been modified to enhance their espionage capabilities. Slides displayed in the Situation Room showed new chimneys and other features, all presumed to allow for the installation of more-sophisticated eavesdropping equipment aimed at U.S. naval facilities and the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland.

Rice Susan Rice National security adviser. Rice orders the National Security Council to finalize a list of options to use against Moscow. pointed to the FBI’s McCabe Andrew McCabe Deputy FBI director. McCabe was among others in the Situation Room challenged by Rice to go to the “max of their comfort zones” in deciding retaliatory measures. and said: “You guys have been begging to do this for years. Now is your chance.”

The administration gave Russia 24 hours to evacuate the sites, and FBI agents watched as fleets of trucks loaded with cargo passed through the compounds’ gates.

When FBI agents entered the sites, they found them stripped of antennas, electronics, computers, file cabinets and other gear, officials said, their hasty removal leaving visible markings on floors, tables and walls.

Economic sanctions are widely seen as the United States’ most potent lever, short of military force. Russia’s economy is dwarfed by that of the United States, and nearly every major Russian institution and oligarch depends to some degree on access to U.S. and Western financial institutions, networks and credit.

Sanctions that the United States and Europe imposed on Russia in 2014 for its actions in Ukraine were damaging. Coinciding with a sharp drop in oil prices, those measures contributed to a 4 percent contraction in the Russian economy and sent its reserves plunging.

The election-related sanctions, by contrast, have had no such impact.

Officials involved in designing them said that the main targets — Russia’s foreign and military intelligence services, the GRU and FSB, and senior officials at those agencies — have few known holdings abroad or vulnerable assets to freeze.

“I don’t think any of us thought of sanctions as being a primary way of expressing our disapproval” for the election interference, said a senior administration official involved in the decision. “Going after their intelligence services was not about economic impact. It was symbolic.”

More than any other measure, that decision has become a source of regret to senior administration officials directly involved in the Russia debate. The outcome has left the impression that Obama saw Russia’s military meddling in Ukraine as more deserving of severe punishment than its subversion of a U.S. presidential race.

“What is the greater threat to our system of government?” said a former high-ranking administration official, noting that Obama and his advisers knew from projections formulated by the Treasury Department that the impact of the election-related economic sanctions would be “minimal.”

                     A U.S. cyber-weapon

The most difficult measure to evaluate is one that Obama alluded to in only the most oblique fashion when announcing the U.S. response.

“We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized,” he said in a statement released by the White House.

He was referring, in part, to a cyber operation that was designed to be detected by Moscow but not cause significant damage, officials said. The operation, which entailed implanting computer code in sensitive computer systems that Russia was bound to find, served only as a reminder to Moscow of the United States’ cyber reach.

But Obama also signed the secret finding, officials said, authorizing a new covert program involving the NSA, CIA and U.S. Cyber Command.

Obama declined to comment for this article, but a spokesman issued a statement: “This situation was taken extremely seriously, as is evident by President Obama raising this issue directly with President Putin; 17 intelligence agencies issuing an extraordinary public statement; our homeland security officials working relentlessly to bolster the cyber defenses of voting infrastructure around the country; the President directing a comprehensive intelligence review, and ultimately issuing a robust response including shutting down two Russian compounds, sanctioning nine Russian entities and individuals, and ejecting 35 Russian diplomats from the country.”

The cyber operation is still in its early stages and involves deploying “implants” in Russian networks deemed “important to the adversary and that would cause them pain and discomfort if they were disrupted,” a former U.S. official said.

The implants were developed by the NSA and designed so that they could be triggered remotely as part of retaliatory cyber-strike in the face of Russian aggression, whether an attack on a power grid or interference in a future presidential race.

Officials familiar with the measures said that there was concern among some in the administration that the damage caused by the implants could be difficult to contain.

As a result, the administration requested a legal review, which concluded that the devices could be controlled well enough that their deployment would be considered “proportional” in varying scenarios of Russian provocation, a requirement under international law.

The operation was described as long-term, taking months to position the implants and requiring maintenance thereafter. Under the rules of covert action, Obama’s signature was all that was necessary to set the operation in motion.

U.S. intelligence agencies do not need further approval from Trump, and officials said that he would have to issue a countermanding order to stop it. The officials said that they have seen no indication that Trump has done so.

Karen DeYoung and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

I worked on the EPA’s climate change website. Its removal is a declaration of war.

Washington Post, Outlook-Perspective

I worked on the EPA’s climate change website. Its removal is a declaration of war.

By Jason Samenow     June 22, 2017

This spring, political officials at the Environmental Protection Agency removed the agency’s climate change website, one of the world’s top resources for information on the science and effects of climate change.

To me, a scientist who managed this website for more than five years, its removal signifies a declaration of war on climate science by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. There can be no other interpretation. I draw this conclusion as a meteorologist with a specialization in climate science and as an independent voter who strives to keep my political and scientific views separate. I concede that this specific issue is personal for me, given the countless hours I spent working on the site. But it should be obvious to anyone how this senseless action runs counter to principles of good governance and scientific integrity.

Some 20 years in the making, the breadth and quality of the website’s content was remarkable. The site lasted through Democratic and Republican administrations, partly because its information mirrored the findings of the mainstream scientific community, including the National Academy of Sciences, other federal agencies and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It “presented the current understanding of the science and possible solutions in a fair and balanced way,” said Kerry Emanuel, a world-renowned atmospheric scientist at MIT and a political conservative.

The site’s overarching conclusion, informed by these scientific organizations and reports, was that recent warming is largely a result of human activities, specifically the burning of fossil fuels, which releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Yet Pruitt, a lawyer who has spent much of his career fighting climate change mitigation efforts, decided that he knows more than the thousands of scientists whose decades of work support this conclusion. These are his words about the impact of human activity: “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” Pruitt has championed the administration’s decision to exit the Paris climate agreement and called for a debate on the fundamentals of the issue, even though there’s virtually no disagreement about it among scientists. He then effectively cleansed  the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors, a steering committee for the agency’s research.

The EPA’s official line is that it is “updating” the climate change website to reflect its new “priorities” under Pruitt and Trump. It has archived the old site but put nothing in its place nor announced a timetable for “updating” it. Pruitt may not accept mainstream climate science conclusions, but if he wanted to promote his alternative views, a much more defensible and transparent action would have been to leave the site up while posting his perspective as well. Instead, one of the world’s best climate science sites has vanished.

In its heyday in the early 2000s, if you Googled “climate change” or “global warming,” the EPA’s site was the first hit. The site not only presented climate science , it was also a portal to data on warming’s effects and greenhouse gas emissions, along with guidance and tools to help people, municipalities and states reduce their carbon footprints. It included a vibrant kids’ site treasured by educators, featuring interactive teaching tools and videos, which was also taken down.

While the George W. Bush administration attempted to exert some control over the site, it was never so drastic. For example, when Bush’s political appointees filed into the EPA in 2001 — coinciding with when I began managing the site — updates to the website were put on hold for several months. For a while, we were permitted to update only one page a month, which first went through an onerous White House review process. As the site contained several hundred pages of content at that time, this was effectively a “let it rot” policy. But at least the site wasn’t trashed.

During Bush’s second term, the constraints on updating were lifted, and we resumed regularly posting new material. That carried on through the Obama administration (I left the EPA in 2010 to join The Washington Post).

To be perfectly clear, it is any administration’s prerogative to revise or archive Web pages that relate to policies and programs it is no longer pursuing. For example, Pruitt’s move to archive material on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan was totally justified; the Trump administration has shelved the policy.

But there is no justification for political interference with authoritative, carefully vetted scientific information. Neither the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration nor NASA has altered its online climate science content — which is not substantively different than material on the EPA’s site. They are not currently run by political appointees.

It is refreshing that governments in several cities, including Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, have published replica versions of the EPA’s now-defunct site to keep it alive.

Pruitt’s order to delete the site feels purely spiteful, as if he simply couldn’t abide knowing that the agency he leads was publishing information he doesn’t believe. But science is not about belief — it’s about evidence. And of all people, the head of the EPA should have the utmost respect for this evidence and its transparent communication. Pruitt’s choice to destroy carefully vetted scientific information rather than preserve it is a reckless and dangerous abdication of his responsibility.

Twitter: @CapitalWeather

Read more from Outlook and follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

Jason is the Washington Post’s weather editor and Capital Weather Gang’s chief meteorologist. He earned a master’s degree in atmospheric science, and spent 10 years as a climate change science analyst for the U.S. government. He holds the Digital Seal of Approval from the National Weather Association.

Business Insider

California is embarrassing the rest of the country with the amount of solar energy it’s producing

Business Insider UK    June 23, 2017  

California is the poster child for solar energy: in 2016, 13% of the state’s power came from solar sources. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, California is in the lead for the cumulative amount of solar electric capacity installed in 2016.

In fact, the California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California’s contribution.

The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides — it single-handedly has nearly half of the country’s solar electricity generating capacity. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, California reached a milestone: for a few hours, more than half the state’s power needs were sourced from solar energy. This put wholesale energy prices in the negative.

When there’s too much solar energy, there is a risk of the electricity grid overloading. This can result in blackouts. In times like this, California offers other states a financial incentive to take their power.

But it’s not as environmentally friendly as one would think. Take Arizona, for example. The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse gas emissions aren’t getting any better due to California’s overproduction.

California’s state goal is to get 50% of all its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Trumpcare fixes nothing

Yahoo News

Trumpcare fixes nothing

Rick Newman     June 22, 2017 

There are a lot of big problems with the US healthcare system. Costs and spending are way too high, with Americans shelling out far more per person on healthcare than other advanced nations and generally less for their money. Employers that provide insurance bear a huge cost burden their competitors in other countries don’t. The difficulty getting insurance outside an employer leads many workers to stay in jobs they’re not well-suited for, depressing economic dynamism and entrepreneurship. All told, an outdated and inefficient healthcare system is one reason economic growth in the US is chronically weak.

Congress is hard at work on sweeping healthcare legislation—that addresses none of these issues. Instead of aiming at the biggest problems affecting the most people, Republicans and Democrats are waging legislative war over a part of the system that affects only about 8% of everybody with healthcare. As for everybody else, well, if there are problems with cost or coverage, Congress doesn’t seem to be aware of that.

The battle over the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans are now trying to repeal, is, of course, a proxy war for bigger questions of government: Should Uncle Sam solve all big problems? Or have we gone too far in doling out benefits funded by wealthier taxpayers?

The latest move is a new Senate plan similar to one that passed the House in May, which President Trump praised. In general, Trumpcare, as the Republican approach is known, would rescind tax cuts passed in 2010 that help finance coverage for lower-income people who don’t get insurance from an employer. Trumpcare would also reduce the number of people who qualify for Medicaid, while killing the unpopular ACA requirement for nearly all Americans to have coverage. In general, fewer people would end up with health insurance and the government would be less involved in America’s healthcare system. If you’re a small-government conservative who won’t lose benefits under the GOP plan, you’re probably pleased.

Less popular than Obamacare

But the majority of Americans are not. The House bill introduced earlier this year is considerably less popular than Obamacare, which it is meant to replace, and the Senate version seems unlikely to win any new converts. The GOP approach is even less popular than the Wall Street bailouts of 2008 and 2009. AARP opposes Trumpcare because it would raise costs and reduce coverage for some people over 50. The American Medical Association is against it. The American Cancer Society is against it. Three Republican governors oppose it and none has come out in favor of it. It’s hard to think of another instance in which Congress pushed legislation opposed by so many constituents.

If Trumpcare passes and becomes law, America will still have an antiquated, dysfunctional healthcare system—with more uninsured people. The US spends about $9,450 per person each year on healthcare—150% more than the median for advanced nations. Yet the United States ranks 28th in life expectancy and infant mortality. Thirty-eight percent of adult Americans are obese, the highest rate by far among 36 advanced nations. There’s nothing in either the House or Senate bill meant to improve any of this.

If Trumpcare fails to pass in the Senate, and simply dies…. America will still have an antiquated, dysfunctional healthcare system, with no other plans on the books in Congress to do anything about it. In addition to lousy health outcomes, the American healthcare system distorts economic decisions affecting millions of ordinary families. Economists would like to see the “portability” of healthcare benefits, which means workers would get the same benefits for the same price, more or less, regardless of where they work. This would eliminate “job lock,” or the decision to stay in a job simply for the benefits, and allow more workers to start businesses or do something they’re more enthused about. Data is patchy on how widespread job lock is, but some estimates suggest it could affect 25% of the 156 million people who get healthcare through an employer. That’s 34 million Americans who might be more productive and more satisfied in a different job.

The enormous cost to employers

Another growing problem is age discrimination in the workplace, which has a lot to do with the higher cost of healthcare for older workers. Data on this is also incomplete, but many older workers who get laid off and can’t find work insist employers don’t want to hire them because of medical costs. Famed investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger addressed the burden healthcare costs put on companies at this year’s Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “Our manufacturers have a huge competitive disadvantage caused by the health system, because the manufacturers are providing medical care for all the employees,” Munger told Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer at this year’s event.

With healthcare costs rising much faster than ordinary inflation, companies that provide healthcare benefits have an enormous cost problem to manage. But don’t worry, they’re handling that by cutting back on the raises everybody gets. While basic wages have barely risen since 1970, when adjusted for inflation, real compensation—which includes healthcare and other benefits—has jumped by 60%. So if you’re wondering where your raise went, it went toward healthcare.

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was a flawed attempt to deal with some of these problems, by first extending coverage to more people. Over time, in theory, that ought to improve healthcare outcomes, as more people get better care. Obamacare critics are correct to point out that the law did nothing to lower healthcare costs for most people, and it actually hiked costs for many who buy individual plans and suddenly had to pay for new tiers of mandated care.

But killing the ACA isn’t going to make anything about the US healthcare system better, and it would probably lead to worse healthcare outcomes as more people lose coverage. There’s a chance it won’t pass, since even some Republicans are squeamish about bouncing people off insurance. That may be the best possible outcome, for now. But all the other problems will still be there. Somebody should tell Congress.

The National Memo

Smart, Sharp, Funny, Fearless

Like House Bill, Senate Trumpcare Version Would Deprive Millions Of Coverage

Steven Rosenfeld, June 22, 2017    Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a summary of the latest Obamacare repeal legislation late Wednesday, ending a Washington waiting game after secret drafting sessions, but depicting a bill that will have dire consequences for much of America.

McConnell’s summary tries to put a softer spin on the Republicans’ most strident attack on health safety nets in decades. It preserves most of the features of the House-passed bill, which repeals Obamacare, shrinks future Medicaid funding by a quarter and rewards the rich with tax cuts. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the House bill would leave 24 million Americans without health care while increasing insurance costs and reducing coverage for almost everyone apart from healthy young adults.

Unlike the House, the Senate bill phases in the cuts to federal health spending over the next few years, instead of immediately pulling the carpet out from millions of Americans who were resting a little easier because they had some measure of health security. It will “rejigger” Obamacare subsidies for lower-income people buying private insurance, while gradually limiting their eligibility.

That’s the takeaway as first reported by the Washington Post. On Thursday morning, McConnell is to meet with “wary senators,” the Post reported, adding he will likely tinker with the bill’s details to try to get to 51 votes to pass it.

“The bill largely mirrors the House measure that narrowly passed last month but with some significant changes,” the Post said. “While the House legislation pegged federal insurance subsidies to age, the Senate bill would link them to income as the ACA [Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare] does. The Senate proposal cuts off Medicaid expansion more gradually than the House bill, but would enact deeper long-term cuts to the health-care program for low-income Americans. It also removes language restricting federally subsidized health plans from covering abortions, which may have run afoul of complex budget rules.”

It’s likely many nasty details will come to light as interest groups, health policy experts, Senate Democrats and their staff parse the legislative language, as opposed to McConnell’s talking points.

In many respects, McConnell’s revisions are not a surprise. They resemble the anti-Obamacare bill he shepherded in late 2015, which included closing government health care exchanges, scrapping subsidies for premiums, repealing Medicaid expansion in 30 states, ending tax penalties for people who don’t buy insurance and employers who don’t offer it, repealing its taxes on businesses, individuals and medications, and eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood. Variations of those features have been resurrected in the new Senate bill, although there is new language giving states some flexibility in how they will draw down their Medicaid spending. The brunt of that may not take effect until 2020. But the end result is the same: Republicans have used the rallying cry of repealing Obamacare not just to gut the law, but to structurally change and shrink Medicaid and give wealthy people a tax cut.

The Senate GOP Isn’t Fixing Health Care. It’s Waging Class War.

The Nation

The Senate GOP Isn’t Fixing Health Care. It’s Waging Class War.

A draft bill released Thursday offers tax cuts to the rich at the expense of the poor and the elderly.

By Zoe Carpenter    June 22, 2017

After a writing process unprecedented in secrecy and speed, Republican leaders in the Senate have released a draft of a bill intended to repeal Obamacare. In short, the bill doesn’t do that: It just makes Obamacare worse. And while the basic structure of Obamacare survives—albeit in withered form—the Senate bill radically reshapes the traditional Medicaid program, which covers 59 million Americans.

The Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” follows the regressive contours of the House bill: It’s a tax cut for the rich paid for by gouging coverage for the poor and the elderly. One of the most significant tax cuts is on investment income earned by people making more than $200,000 a year. That giveaway—which, tellingly, was omitted from the summary of the bill—is made more egregious by the fact that it’s retroactive (with an effective date of December 2016), a detail that serves no purpose other than funneling extra cash to wealthy investors. Pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and other corporations also benefit from tax cuts in the bill. (By the way, the 13 men responsible for writing it received an average of $214,000 in campaign contributions from insurance and pharmaceutical companies between 2010 and November of last year.)

To pay for those tax cuts, the bill cuts deeply into Medicaid. Senate Republicans have tried to give the appearance of having “more heart” (to use President Trump’s phrase) than their colleagues in the House. So instead of cutting off federal money for the expansion all at once, as the House bill did, the Senate version gradually cuts off the money over several years. But that “glide path” is meaningless in eight states—Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Washington—where automatic triggers will end the expansion immediately if federal funding declines. The Senate’s phaseout is actually crueler than the House bill, because it affects people who are currently enrolled in the expansion, not just those who would become eligible in the future.

More significantly, the Senate bill makes truly drastic changes to the entire Medicaid program, which helps not only low-income Americans but also the disabled and elderly people living in nursing homes. As currently structured, the federal government pays a share of a state’s Medicaid load, with no caps. The Senate bill would upend that structure and impose per-capita limits on the federal contribution. That would cut federal spending on the program by about 25 percent, which health-care experts believe would force states to cover millions fewer people. The Senate bill would also tie Medicaid spending to inflation, which generally increases at a slower rate than health-care spending. Ultimately, the cut to Medicaid could be more than $800 billion.

It’s hard to overstate how radical these changes to Medicaid are, both practically and politically. Although gutting Medicaid has long been a pipe dream for Paul Ryan, it’s not something most Republicans campaigned on. In fact, Trump promised while campaigning that he would not cut Medicaid if elected. The GOP has no mandate for so deeply altering the 52-year-old program, and it’s not something the party has tried to justify to the public. Instead, Republicans pretend it’s not happening. “Medicaid is not being cut from our perspective,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told reporters as he left a meeting on Thursday morning.

Republicans could make a more plausible argument that they have a mandate to repeal Obamacare, but again, their bill doesn’t even do that (thought it does repeal the individual mandate)—it just exacerbates the things people already don’t like about the individual exchanges. Like Obamacare, the Senate bill provides income-based subsidies in the form of tax credits, and recalculates them in a way that may help low-income people. But the bill shrinks the subsidies overall, and particularly for the elderly. It also sets up a new waiver process to allow states to scrap requirements that plans cover certain essential health benefits—meaning lots of people would end up paying more for skimpier coverage and higher deductibles.

A small handful of Republican Senators are reportedly preparing to announce their opposition to the bill later today. The GOP can afford only two defections. But the text released Thursday is only a discussion draft; party leaders will no doubt tinker and fiddle with the language in order to give the appearance of adding even “more heart.” The baseline for comparison, however, shouldn’t be this Senate draft, or the bill that passed the House. The question is whether the GOP legislation improves on Obamacare and current coverage. It doesn’t come close—unless, of course, you happen to believe that we provide too much help to the poor and elderly, and not enough tax cuts to the wealthy.

Which Republican senators will walk the plank for this terrible health-care bill?

Chicago Tribune

Which Republican senators will walk the plank for this terrible health-care bill?

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post    June 23, 2017

GOP Senate leaders are presenting to their members for the first time Thursday a concrete health-care plan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has done what Republicans (falsely) accused Democrats of doing during the Affordable Care Act— drafted a bill in secret, rushed it through and ignored concerns of stakeholders, including governors.

The process is so reckless that you do wonder whether this is all for show. “According to two Republicans in close contact with Senate GOP leadership granted anonymity to describe private conversations, McConnell is threatening to bring the bill to a vote next week even if he doesn’t have the votes to pass it,” The Post reports. “But some believe that message is aimed at trying to pressure Republicans to support the bill, rather than an absolute commitment. A McConnell spokeswoman declined to comment.”

Senators should be smarter than to be bulldozed or bluffed into voting for something that does not meet the president’s or their own goals and which they will barely have time to consider before a vote. Senators should keep in mind the following:

  1. The bill must be measured against the Affordable Care Act, not the House’s American Health Care Act bill. It’s the ACA their constituents will lose and which will be used to assess whether Trumpcare is more or less generous.
  2. Thirty-one states expanded Medicaid under the ACA. That works out to 20 GOP senators. They will be asked to vote for a rollback in coverage and thereafter a reduced level of support for beneficiaries, ending Medicaid’s status as an entitlement. If their state must reduce benefits or narrow coverage even further, senators voting for the bill will be held responsible. That includes senators in states Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 — Sens. Dean Heller, R-Nev., (the most vulnerable incumbent) and Cory Gardner, R-Colo. Both their governors have inveighed against the Senate and House approach and pleaded with lawmakers to work with governors.
  3. There are plenty of states in which the ACA substantially lowered the number of uninsured. The nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund found:

“[Nine] states experienced 10 to 13 percentage-point reductions in their adult uninsured rate from 2013 to 2015. Six of these states – California, Kentucky, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and West Virginia — sliced their uninsured rates by at least half over the two years. Some states that did not expand Medicaid as of the beginning of 2015 had declines of as much as 7 to 9 percentage points, including Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. The ACA’s premium subsidies and insurance marketplaces were available in every state, leading to the decline in uninsured rates in states without the Medicaid expansion.

“By the end of 2015, more than a third of states (17 states and D.C.) had adult uninsured rates below 10 percent, compared to six states and D.C. in 2014 and only Massachusetts and D.C. in 2013. Despite these gains, uninsured rates remained high in some states, including Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, where at least one of five adults was uninsured. Still, this marks an improvement over 2014, when 10 states had an adult uninsured rate of 20 percent or more, and 2013, when 22 states did.”

No matter how strenuously Republicans claim the number of covered adults doesn’t matter for the vast majority of Americans, coverage means access to health care, especially routine preventative care.

  1. While the Senate bill purportedly includes a restriction on Planned Parenthood funding, that likely will fall by the wayside in the reconciliation process
  2. A vote to deprive Americans of health care or limit it may make competitive seats into real pickup chances for Democrats in 2018. These include Heller in Nevada and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. It may also move safe seats into less-safe seats or seats that invite credible primary challengers. That group would include Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Deb Fischer, R-Neb.
  3. The bill is a huge wealth transfer from poor to rich. Cuts in benefits to low- and middle-income Americans will fund huge tax cuts for the very richest Americans. This will be fodder for opponents to claim that Republicans are phony populists, just another generation of right-wingers who favor the wealthiest among us.

Washington Post

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.

This Union Ironworker Has a Plan to Beat Paul Ryan

The Nation

This Union Ironworker Has a Plan to Beat Paul Ryan

A construction worker takes on the speaker of the House—and sparks fly.

By John Nichols   June 22, 2017

Randy Bryce thinks Paul Ryan is vulnerable to a challenge that offers voters a genuine, working-class alternative to the gold-plated speaker of the House. The union ironworker, who is challenging the most powerful Republican in Congress, is onto something. He recognizes that Ryan, a political careerist who had spent the better part of three decades as a Republican aide and congressman, represents southeastern Wisconsin’s first congressional district in name only.

The speaker of the House is still officially identified as Paul Ryan, R-Janesville. But everyone who is paying attention knows that the congressman serves as Paul Ryan, R–Wall Street.

“Let’s trade places. You can come work the iron, and I’ll go to DC.”—Randy Bryce to Paul Ryan

Bryce has never run for Congress before. He is one of several Democrats who are either running, or looking to run, against an incumbent who will be lugging Donald Trump’s political baggage in 2018. But the veteran union activist has gained lots of attention, and substantial support, since the launch of a strikingly well-framed challenge to Ryan that goes to the heart of the speaker’s vulnerabilities.

Bryce notes the fact of Ryan’s hyper-partisan allegiance to a president with a 36 percent approval rating by noting that, “Whether it’s healthcare or jobs, national security or education, our democracy or the environment—there’s not one issue where Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are headed in the right direction. It’s time for a change in Congress.”

But the essential element of Bryce’s challenge is an understanding that the deal-making work Ryan does to satisfy special-interest campaign donors in Washington is fundamentally different from the honest work Bryce does for a union wage as a member of Ironworkers Local 8 on job sites in Milwaukee and other southeastern Wisconsin cities. “Let’s trade places,” declares Bryce, in a video that went viral after he announced Monday. “Paul Ryan you can come and work the iron, and I’ll go to DC.”

That’s a working-class-versus-ruling-class argument that we need to hear a lot more of in American politics. And it is strengthened by Bryce’s determination to call out Ryan and other Republicans for serving Wall Street rather than Main Street—not just on the vital issue of health-care reform but on every issue.

Again and again, when it has come time to choose, Ryan has picked the side of the big banks and the investment houses, the insurance industry and the health-care profiteers that fund his campaigns over the best interests of a region that has been battered by Ryan’s policies. As Wall Street’s man on Capitol Hill, Ryan has steadily stacked the deck against Wisconsin workers, farmers, and small-business owners. In 2008, he rounded up Republican votes for the Wall Street bailout, which responsible conservatives recognized as crony capitalism at its worst. Ryan begged Republicans to back the bailout, warning that the United States might be “standing at the edge of this abyss” if Congress did not immediately steer tax dollars to the bankers who were crashing the economy.

The Wisconsin Republican has over the years appeared at Tea Party rallies and attempted to position himself as a champion of the movement’s opposition to DC deal-making. But when Congress gets to work on the big issues, Ryan backs the bailouts and policy shifts that steer tax dollars to big banks and the speculators. He also backs the trade deals that Wall Street wants but that have been devastating for Janesville.

The speaker’s hometown of Janesville has historically been a major manufacturing center. Now it has fallen on hard times. Like so many manufacturing communities in the Great Lakes region, it has been rocked by the outsourcing of US jobs. That’s not Ryan’s concern, however. Since his election to the House in 1998, Ryan has voted for free-trade pacts—including the extension of most-favored-nation trading status to China—that have been absolutely devastating to Janesville and other communities in his southeastern Wisconsin district.

In 2008—during the presidency of George W. Bush—General Motors announced that the sprawling plant that had been Janesville’s top employer for nine decades was closing. Thousands of jobs were lost. Unemployment soared. It has edged down since, but a lot of working families in Janesville and surrounding Rock County are still struggling.

How did Ryan respond to Janesville’s hard times? First he proposed schemes to shred the social safety net by gambling Social Security funds in the stock market and by undermining Medicare and Medicaid. Now, he proposes to undermine health-care protections for millions of Americans in order to fund tax cuts for the rich.

As Janesville and other communities that needed a congressman have taken hits, Ryan has risen in stature. He has run for vice president and now, as House speaker, he is second in the line of succession for the presidency. Ryan is a very powerful man. Yet he isn’t using that power to represent Janesville or Racine or Kenosha or the other communities of southeastern Wisconsin.

What connects the bailouts and the sellouts to trade with Ryan’s current attempt to leave 23 million more Americans without health care in order to fund a tax cut for the very rich is this speaker’s choice to serve the royals, the robber barons, the money changers of our time.

Paul Ryan has made a choice that reveals his values, which were forged in elite restaurants of Washington and Wall Street, where campaign donations are discussed and delivered with $350 bottles of wine.

Randy Bryce has a different set of values, forged on the work sites of Wisconsin. “My values are my neighbors’ values, and we know that Washington has gotten way off track,” says the challenger. If Bryce keeps emphasizing how and why Paul Ryan steered things off track, he has a chance to change the political debate—and the values debate that must underpin it if anything is ever going to change—in Wisconsin and America.

‘What they’re basically saying is, in America it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because we are black,’ said Noah of the newly released dashcam video.

Daily Beast, Horrifying

‘It Broke Me’: ‘The Daily Show’ Host Trevor Noah’s Emotional Reaction to Philando Castile Dashcam Video

‘What they’re basically saying is, in America it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because we are black,’ said Noah of the newly released dashcam video.

Marlow Stern    June 22, 2017

On Friday, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter charges and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm in the shooting death of Philando Castile back on July 6, 2016, in St. Anthony, Minnesota.

Castile, a black man who was beloved by the children at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in nearby St. Paul, where he worked as a cafeteria supervisor—“He remembered their names. He remembered who couldn’t have milk. He knew what they could have to eat and what they couldn’t,” a teacher at the school told Time—was in the car with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her 4-year-old daughter when he was shot down by Yanez. Reynolds captured the aftermath on Facebook Live, in a streaming video in which she pleaded with police as Castile lay dying in the vehicle.

Yanez was acquitted in the shooting death of Castile despite the existence of audio and a dashcam video in which Castile can be heard calmly informing the officer that he had a firearm on his person—which he had a license to carry—and that he was “not pulling it out,” a plea echoed by Reynolds, only to have Yanez scream “DON’T PULL IT OUT!” before firing seven shots at Castile, with five of them hitting him, and two of the bullets entering his heart. On Wednesday, the dashcam video of Castile’s death was released.

“Honestly, I thought that I felt all that I could feel about this story—until I got home, and I watched a newly released video,” said host Trevor Noah on The Daily Show Wednesday night. “And if you’ve already watched this video, you don’t have to watch it again. I wouldn’t say anyone has to watch this video. But if you haven’t seen it, it is graphic, and you probably should watch it. And we’re going to play it for you now.”

Noah then played the highly disturbing dashcam video, in which you can see Officer Yanez at the side of Castile’s vehicle along with their exchange—which, at least from an audio standpoint, appeared to align with Reynolds’ testimony. After Castile informs Yanez that he has a weapon on his person and is not reaching for it, you see the policeman scream “DON’T PULL IT OUT!” before firing seven bullets at Castile. Reynolds has claimed that Castile was reaching for his ID.

“I wont lie to you. When I watched this video, it broke me. It just… it broke me,” said Noah, clearly distraught. “You see so many of these videos and you start to get numb, but this one? Seeing the child—that little girl—getting out of the car after watching a man get killed, it broke my heart into little pieces. I thought of every joke people make about, ‘Oh, the most confusing day in the ’hood is Father’s Day. People don’t know where their parents are. Haha. Black dads.’ That’s a black dad that’s gone. That’s a child that grows up not knowing what it’s like to have somebody in their life.”

“You know what’s the most painful thing? For years, people said that there’s a simple solution to a police shooting: Just give the police body cameras, film everything, and then there will be no question about what happened,” Noah continued. “Black people have been saying for years: Just give us an indictment. Just an indictment. Just get us in front of a jury of our peers—of our follow citizens. We’ll show them the video, the evidence, and they will see it, and then justice will be served. And black people finally get there, and it’s like… what? Nothing?”

“You hear the stories but you watch that and—forget race, are we all watching the same video? The video where a law-abiding man followed the officer’s instructions to the letter of the law, and then was killed regardless? People watched that video and then voted to acquit?”

“It’s one thing to have the system against you—the district attorneys, the police unions, the courts—that’s one thing. But when a jury of your peers—your community—sees this evidence and then decides that even this is self-defense? That is truly depressing. Because what they’re basically saying is in America, it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because we are black. And that’s the truth of what we saw with this verdict.”

Senate Republicans set to release health-care bill, but divisions remain

Washington Post, Power Post

Senate Republicans set to release health-care bill, but divisions remain

By Paige Winfield Cunningham, Juliet Eilperin and Sean Sullivan, June 21, 2017

Senate Republicans on Thursday plan to release a health-care bill that would curtail federal Medicaid funding, repeal taxes on the wealthy and eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood as part of an effort to fulfill a years-long promise to undo Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.

The bill is an attempt to strike a compromise between existing law and a bill passed by the House in May as Republicans struggle to advance their vision for the country’s health-care system even though they now control both chambers of Congress and the White House.

The Senate proposal largely mirrors the House measure with significant differences, according to a discussion draft circulating Wednesday among aides and lobbyists. While the House legislation would peg federal insurance subsidies to age, the Senate bill would link them to income, as the Affordable Care Act does. The Senate proposal would cut off expanded Medicaid funding for states more gradually than the House bill but would enact deeper long-term cuts to the health-care program for low-income Americans. It also would eliminate House language aimed at prohibiting federally subsidized health plans from covering abortions, a provision that may run afoul of complex Senate budget rules.

But on the eve of the bill’s release, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) faced the prospect of an open revolt from key conservative and moderate GOP senators, whose concerns he has struggled to balance in recent weeks. Republicans familiar with the effort said Senate leaders have more work to do to secure the 50 votes needed to pass the measure, with Vice President Pence set to cast the tiebreaking vote, from the pool of 52 GOP senators. No Democrats are expected to support the bill.

Republican aides stressed that the plan is likely to undergo more changes to secure the votes needed for passage, but there were major concerns Wednesday from senators on opposite ends of the GOP spectrum.

“My main concern is I promised voters that I would repeal — vote to repeal Obamacare. And everything I hear sounds like Obamacare-lite,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), whose state expanded Medicaid and has been pushing for a more gradual unwinding of that initiative than many conservatives prefer, said she is waiting to scrutinize what is released but has not seen anything yet that would make her drop her concerns with the proposal.

“Up to this point, I don’t have any new news — tomorrow we will see it definitively — that would cause me to change that sentiment,” she said.

Like the House bill, the Senate measure is expected to make big changes to Medicaid, the program that insures about 74 million elderly and lower-income Americans and was expanded in most states under the ACA. In effect, the revisions would reduce federal spending on the program.

The Senate measure would transform Medicaid from an open-ended entitlement to one in which federal funding would be distributed to states on a per-capita basis. The Senate measure would also seek to phase out the program’s expansion — although at a more gradual rate than the House version.

Yet the Senate bill is expected go further than the House version in its approach to cutting Medicaid funding in the future. In 2025, the measure would tie federal spending on the program to an even slower growth index than the one used in the House bill. That move could prompt states to reduce the size of their Medicaid programs.

That provision, a nod to conservative lawmakers led by Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), risks alienating moderates, including Capito and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who also represents a state that expanded Medicaid under the ACA. Some Republicans worry that such a move would force states to cut services or coverage, potentially leaving millions of low-income people without sufficient health care.

The growth rate that is applied to Medicaid spending going forward has major implications, said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “That inflater is critical, because it translates into billions of dollars over time,” she said.

Portman and Capito have also been pushing for the inclusion of a $45 billion fund to treat and prevent opioid addiction. As of early Wednesday afternoon, the opioid money was not included in McConnell’s proposal, according to a top GOP senator and Senate aide familiar with the discussions.

“I don’t think there is right now,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said when asked whether the legislation includes a distinct opioid fund. “It might have to be considered separately.”

But Portman and Capito, like all senators, will have a chance to introduce amendments to the bill when it heads to the Senate floor, which McConnell said is likely to happen next week. This process will allow senators to draw attention to the causes they have championed and potentially change the final bill.

Moderates who are on the fence about whether to support the Obamacare overhaul are likely to be pleased at the bill’s approach to insurance subsidies because they would be based on financial need, potentially preserving coverage for more people who got insurance under the ACA.

Subsidies are currently available to Americans earning between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Starting in 2020, that threshold would be lowered to 350 percent under the Senate bill — but anyone below that line could get the subsidies if they’re not eligible for Medicaid.

That provision, said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, would be “a real benefit to poor people in states that don’t expand Medicaid.”

In a move that will please the health-care industry, the draft also proposes repealing all of the ACA taxes except for its “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans in language similar to the House version. Senators had previously toyed with the idea of keeping some of the ACA’s taxes.

It would also eliminate Medicaid reimbursements for Planned Parenthood for one year. Federal law already prevents taxpayer funding to pay for abortions except to save the life of the woman or in the case of rape or incest. But some Republicans want to ban all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which also provides health services such as birth control, because their clinics provide abortion services.

Like the House measure, the Senate bill would eliminate two central requirements of the current health-care law: that individuals provide proof of insurance when filing their annual tax returns and that companies with 50 or more employees provide health coverage for their workers.

In a move that is critical to insurers, the Senate measure would continue to fund for two years cost-sharing subsidies that help 7 million Americans with ACA plans. House Republicans have challenged the legality of the $7 billion in subsidies — which help cover consumers’ deductibles and copays — in court, and insurers have warned that they will have to increase premiums dramatically next year unless the federal government commits to continuing the payments.

McConnell has told Republican senators that he wants to maintain protections for people with preexisting conditions under the law. But it was not clear to some lawmakers Wednesday what that would entail.

“I haven’t seen the draft yet. I like the idea of preexisting conditions being more firmly clarified,” Portman said.

Paul criticized GOP leaders for potentially keeping some of the ACA’s “most expensive regulations,” which he says are the primary drivers of higher premiums.

“It may well be that prices don’t come down at all,” he said.

But the Senate proposal may change rules for waivers that states can file with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that could allow them to potentially scale back some of these federal mandates.

While the details of McConnell’s proposal are expected to be made public Thursday, much of focus in recent weeks has been on the process used to draft the bill.

Democrats and even some Republicans have been critical of Senate GOP leaders for crafting the proposal behind closed doors without hearings and consideration of the legislation by the relevant committees.

Several GOP senators have expressed concern about moving quickly to a vote before they fully understand how it would impact health insurance markets and their constituents.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that in addition to reading the bill, “I’ll also want to get full input from constituencies in Wisconsin.”

Given that there may be just a week between the bill being posted and a final vote, he added, “I find it hard to believe we’ll have enough time.”

Amy Goldstein and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.

Paige Winfield Cunningham covers health policy and authors PowerPost’s daily tipsheet The Health 202. A St. Louis native, she graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois and started her journalism career as a county board reporter at the Naperville Sun.

Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post’s senior national affairs correspondent, covering how the new administration is transforming a range of U.S. policies and the federal government itself. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998. 

Sean Sullivan has covered national politics for The Washington Post since 2012.