Carbon dioxide hits a level not seen for 3 million years. Here’s what that means for climate change — and humanity.
Scientists are sounding the alarm over the potential for catastrophic changes to our environment.
By Denise Chow May 14, 2019
Coal smoke and steam vapor pour out of the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant overlooking the Ohio River at dawn in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images file
In the latest bit of bad news for a planet beset by climate change, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has climbed to a level last seen more than 3 million years ago — before humans even appeared on the rocky ball we call home.
On Saturday, sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii indicated that concentrations of the greenhouse gas — a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels — had reached 415 parts per million (ppm), meaning that for every 1 million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 415 were of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun, and higher levels are associated with higher global temperatures and other effects of climate change, such as rising seas and unusual weather patterns.
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen an average of 2.5 ppm per year over the past decade, reaching 400 ppm in 2013 — and the level appears likely to go higher from here.
“We’re racing toward a state very different from the kind humans evolved in and that civilization developed in,” said Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
The last time levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were this high came during the Pliocene Epoch, which extended from about 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago. During that period, average sea levels were about 50 feet higher than they are today and forests grew as far north as the Arctic, said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University. “Earth was a very different place,” he said. “You would hardly recognize the land surface, and my gosh, we don’t want to go there.”
But there is evidence to suggest the planet is headed in that direction. If the current trajectory continues, levels of CO2 could hit 500 ppm within 30 years, a number that could mean an increase in global temperatures of at least 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
“At the present pace, we could reach that well within a lot of people’s lifetimes,” Keeling said of the grim milestone ahead.
Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are commonly represented on a graph known as the Keeling Curve, named for Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, who began taking daily measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1958 from atop the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The curve shows a steep climb, owing to human-caused climate change.
As the planet inches toward 500 ppm, scientists are sounding the alarm over the potential for catastrophic changes to our environment. “None of these specific numbers are really thresholds in the sense that anything particular happens when we cross them,” Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, told NBC News MACH in an email. “But as we go through them, we are putting our foot on the accelerator of climate change, and impacts and damage will continue to rise.”
But it’s hard to say exactly what these changes will bring, or when. Some things, like the loss of vegetation and sea-ice coverage, will grow increasingly visible in the short term. Other things, like the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, occur more slowly. “But these impacts are going to persist for a very long time,” said Dana Royer, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “Once that happens, we can’t really reverse it.”
Even if moving to renewable energy and other measures help stanch the steady flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, our descendants will likely be saddled with the negative consequences of our artificially elevated levels of CO2.
“We’re not going to see the full consequences of 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide today,” Jackson said. “It’ll take a thousand years of people — 30 generations of people — to pay the price of what we’re doing today.”
Why We Took Trump Off The Forbes 400 During His Decade Of Tax Losses
By Dan Alexander, Forbes Staff May 8, 2019
Donald Trump appeared alone on the cover of Forbes magazine for the first time on May 14, 1990. The story inside offered a devastating look at his finances. FORBES
Donald Trump listed $1.2 billion of losses on his tax filings from 1985 to 1994, according to a blockbuster report released by the New York Times Tuesday. Those were high-flying years for Trump, then a young, brash businessman getting more headlines-per-square-foot than any other developer. In 1985, Trump appeared by himself on the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people for the first time, after inventing a fake persona to lie about a transfer of wealth from his father.
Forbes fell for that ruse—taking Fred Trump off the list and listing Donald alone. But five years later, wepublished an explosive story, uncovering the trouble brewing inside Trump’s empire. Leaning on nonpublic documents, Forbes writers Richard L. Stern and John Connolly identified the same sort of profitability problems that are still making headlines 29 years later. Forbes took Donald Trump off its list for the first time that year, explaining that a “decline in Atlantic City gaming revenues, unmasking of misstated asset values, declining real estate values and massive debt may have put The Donald within hailing distance of zero.”
Here, Forbes republishes the 1990 magazine story, putting it online for all to read:
By Richard L. Stern and John Connolly
WHAT IS DONALD TRUMP really worth? His estranged wife, Ivana, would like to know. So would his creditors, who are many. The public, fascinated with Trump’s exploits and his bigger-than-life personality, relishes the guessing game. This we can say with confidence: His net worth is nothing like the $3 billion Business Week magazine estimated three years ago and has dropped considerably from our own 1989 estimate of $1.7 billion.
Forbes has obtained nonpublic documents submitted by Trump to a governmental body. In it, he lists his assets and liabilities as of May 31, 1989. The documents — which have been amended to include some more recent acquisitions — claim a net worth for Donald Trump, after deducting all debts and mortgages, of $1.5 billion.
Fake German heiress sentenced to 4-12 years behind bars
Jim Mustian May 10, 2019
Fake German heiress sentenced to 4 to 12 years behind bars.
NEW YORK (AP) — Anna Sorokin, the German con artist who passed herself off as a wealthy heiress to swindle banks, hotels and even close friends as she lived out a high-society, Instagram-ready fantasy in New York, was sentenced Thursday to four to 12 years in prison.
The 28-year-old, who had played with her own tabloid image during the trial by wearing stylish dresses to court, looked despondent as the verdict was announced. She pressed her hand to her face and squeezed her eyes shut, appearing to hold back tears.
Judge Diane Kiesel said Sorokin had been “blinded by the glitter and glamour of New York City” as she turned to fraud to finance a life she could never afford. But the judge turned down a request by Sorokin’s lawyers to sentence her to the time she has already spent in jail awaiting trial.
“I am stunned by the depth of the defendant’s deception,” Kiesel said, adding that she hoped to send a message to Sorokin’s internet following “that her behavior is unacceptable.”
“Certainly she didn’t think about the people she scammed,” the judge added.
The sentencing capped a spectacular case that drew international attention and tabloid headlines. Netflix and HBO are both working on shows based on Sorokin’s audacious efforts to finagle her way into the Manhattan socialite scene.
She was convicted last month on multiple counts of larceny and theft and has been in custody since her October 2017 arrest— time behind bars that will be credited toward her sentence. The judge also ordered Sorokin to pay nearly $200,000 in restitution and a $24,000 fine.
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement said it will seek to deport Sorokin to Germany following her release from state prison.
Moments before she was sentenced, Sorokin briefly addressed the court, saying, “I apologize for the mistakes I made.”
Her defense attorney, Todd Spodek, told a gaggle of reporters that Sorokin was “holding up OK.” He described the prison sentence as “expected” but said Sorokin will pursue an appeal.
“She’s a tough woman,” Spodek said, noting she has been at Rikers Island for more than 500 days.
Sorokin forged a new identity — Anna Delvey — and defrauded financial institutions and Manhattan celebrities into believing she had a fortune of $67 million (60 million euros) overseas that could cover her jet-setting lifestyle , high-end clothing and lavish hotel stays. She falsely claimed her father was a diplomat or an oil baron and falsified bank records. In fact, her father told New York magazine he’s a former trucker who runs a heating-and-cooling business.
Her ruse included an application for a $22 million loan to fund a private arts club, complete with exhibitions, installations and pop-up shops, prosecutors said. She was denied that loan but persuaded one bank to lend her $100,000 that she failed to repay.
In all, prosecutors accused her of stealing some $275,000, including a $35,400 bill she failed to pay for a plane she chartered to and from the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. She went to great lengths to ensure others paid her way, even as she had “not a cent to her name, as far as we can determine,” prosecutor Catherine McCaw said following Sorokin’s arrest.
“An ordinary person would just take coach,” McCaw told Kiesel at Thursday’s hearing. “The defendant did not want an ordinary life, and she was willing to steal in order to get that.”
The jury convicted Sorokin of four counts of theft of services, three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny.
Jurors acquitted her of two counts, including an allegation that she promised a friend an all-expenses paid trip to Morocco and then stuck her with the $62,000 bill. She was also found not guilty of one of the most serious charges in the indictment: attempting to steal more than $1 million from City National Bank.
Spodek argued that Sorokin had been “buying time” and always intended to settle her debts. He portrayed her as an ambitious entrepreneur and said she lacked criminal intent.
McCaw rejected that characterization, saying Sorokin showed “almost no remorse” throughout the proceedings. The prosecutor said Sorokin seemed to revel at the plight of her victims and showed more concern for her attire than the emotions of those she hurt.
Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses
Newly obtained tax information reveals that from 1985 to 1994, Donald J. Trump’s businesses were in far bleaker condition than was previously known.
By Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig May 7, 2019
Donald J. Trump in 1986, during a tumultuous period of his career marked by acquisition and collapse.Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images.
Times Investigation
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.
The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.
Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, journalists at The Times and elsewhere have been trying to piece together Mr. Trump’s complex and concealed finances. While The Times did not obtain the president’s actual tax returns, it received the information contained in the returns from someone who had legal access to it. The Times was then able to find matching results in the I.R.S. information on top earners — a publicly available database that each year comprises a one-third sampling of those taxpayers, with identifying details removed. It also confirmed significant findings using other public documents, along with confidential Trump family tax and financial records from the newspaper’s 2018 investigation into the origin of the president’s wealth.
The White House’s response to the new findings has shifted over time.
Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father
Several weeks ago, a senior official issued a statement saying: “The president got massive depreciation and tax shelter because of large-scale construction and subsidized developments. That is why the president has always scoffed at the tax system and said you need to change the tax laws. You can make a large income and not have to pay large amount of taxes.”
On Saturday, after further inquiries from The Times, a lawyer for the president, Charles J. Harder, wrote that the tax information was “demonstrably false,” and that the paper’s statements “about the president’s tax returns and business from 30 years ago are highly inaccurate.” He cited no specific errors, but on Tuesday added that “I.R.S. transcripts, particularly before the days of electronic filing, are notoriously inaccurate” and “would not be able to provide a reasonable picture of any taxpayer’s return.”
Mark J. Mazur, a former director of research, analysis and statistics at the I.R.S., said that, far from being considered unreliable, data used to create such transcripts had undergone quality control for decades and had been used to analyze economic trends and set national policy. In addition, I.R.S. auditors often refer to the transcripts as “handy” summaries of tax returns, said Mr. Mazur, now director of the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.
In fact, the source of The Times’s newly obtained information was able to provide several years of unpublished tax figures from the president’s father, the builder Fred C. Trump. They matched up precisely with Fred Trump’s actual returns, which had been obtained by The Times in the earlier investigation.
Mr. Trump built a business licensing his name, became a television celebrity and ran for the White House by branding himself a self-made billionaire. “There is no one my age who has accomplished more,” he told Newsweek in 1987, adding that the ultimate scoreboard was “the unfortunate, obvious one: money.” Yet over the years, the actual extent of his wealth has been the subject of much doubt and debate. He broke with four decades of precedent in refusing to release any of his tax returns as a presidential candidate, and until now only a few pages of his returns have become public. Last year’s Times investigation found that he had received at least $413 million in 2018 dollars from his father.
The new tax information does not answer questions raised by House Democrats in their pursuit of the last six years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns — about his recent business dealings and possible foreign sources of financing and influence. Nor does it offer a fundamentally new narrative of his picaresque career.
But in the granular detail of tax results, it gives a precise accounting of the president’s financial failures and of the constantly shifting focus that would characterize his decades in business. In contrast to his father’s stable and profitable empire of rental apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Trump’s primary sources of income changed year after year, from big stock earnings, to a single year of more than $67.1 million in salary, to a mysterious $52.9 million windfall in interest income. But always, those gains were overwhelmed by losses on his casinos and other projects.
The new information also suggests that Mr. Trump’s 1990 collapse might have struck several years earlier if not for his brief side career posing as a corporate raider. From 1986 through 1988, while his core businesses languished under increasingly unsupportable debt, Mr. Trump made millions of dollars in the stock market by suggesting that he was about to take over companies. But the figures show that he lost most, if not all, of those gains after investors stopped taking his takeover talk seriously.
In Washington, the struggle over access to Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial information has sharpened in recent days, amid partisan warfare over the findings in the Mueller report. On Monday, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said he would not deliver the tax returns to the Ways and Means Committee. And after vowing that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas” from House Democrats, the president has filed lawsuits against his banks and accounting firm to prevent them from turning over tax returns and other financial records.
In New York, the attorney general’s office is investigating the financing of several major Trump Organization projects; Deutsche Bank has already begun turning over documents. The state attorney general is also examining issues raised last year by The Times’s investigation, which revealed that much of the money Mr. Trump had received from his father came from his participation in dubious tax schemes, including instances of outright fraud.
The first of the two previous glimpses of the president’s tax returns came from his 1995 filings, pages of which were anonymously mailed to The Times in 2016. They showed that Mr. Trump had declared losses of $915.7 million, giving him a tax deduction so substantial that it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying federal income taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars of income for almost two decades. Several months later, the journalist David Cay Johnston was mailed pages of Mr. Trump’s 2005 returns, which showed that by then he had significant sources of income and was paying taxes.
THE ART OF LOSING MONEY
Mr. Trump spent $365 million in 1989 to buy a shuttle operation from Eastern Airlines. It never turned a profit.Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times.
The year was 1985, and Mr. Trump appeared to be on top of the world.
He was still riding high from the completion of his first few projects — the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Trump Tower and another Manhattan apartment building, and one Atlantic City casino. He also owned the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League.
As the year played out, he borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to fuel a wave of purchases, acquiring a second casino ($351.8 million), a Manhattan hotel ($80 million), the Mar-a-Lago property in Florida ($10 million), a New York hospital he intended to replace with an apartment building ($60 million) and an undeveloped expanse of railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan ($85 million), where he planned to construct an entire neighborhood, including a 150-story tower envisioned as the world’s tallest.
For the first time, Forbes’s ranking of the wealthiest Americans listed Mr. Trump individually, independent of his father — with an estimated net worth of $600 million that included the real estate empire Fred Trump still owned.
“What I have done is build the most beautiful buildings in the best locations,” Donald Trump told the magazine.
But what the newly revealed tax information makes clear is that, with his vast debt and other expenses on those properties, Mr. Trump’s fortunes were already on the way down.
His yearly carrying costs on the rail yards would rise to $18.7 million. He would not be able to convert Mar-a-Lago into a moneymaking club for another decade. The apartments on the hospital site would not be ready for sale, as Trump Palace, until 1990, and another residential project would be stalled for years. The football league would soon fold.
Because his businesses were generally created as partnerships, the companies themselves did not pay federal income taxes. Instead their results wound up on Mr. Trump’s personal ledger.
Beyond the $46.1 million loss that his core businesses logged in 1985, Mr. Trump’s tax information shows that he carried over $5.6 million in losses from prior years. The I.R.S. data on one-third of high-income tax returns that year lists only three taxpayers with greater losses.
In his letter, Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, took issue with comparing the tax returns of “a real estate developer to the returns of all taxpayers.” But most of the high-income taxpayers appeared, like Mr. Trump, to be business owners who received what is known as pass-through income. (That data does not include businesses, like most large corporations, that pay their taxes directly.)
The next years were a time of continued empire building. The information also documents, year by year, a time of gathering loss. Here is how it added up.
In 1986, he bought out his partners in Trump Tower and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. He bought an apartment building in West Palm Beach for $43 million. His business losses for the year: $68.7 million.
A Deal Maker in Financial Distress
Every year from 1985 through 1994, Donald J. Trump reported a negative adjusted gross income on his tax returns. That number grew as new losses were combined with those from prior years. The New York Times previously found that Mr. Trump declared an adjusted gross income in 1995 of negative $915.7 million.
1987: “I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need.”
1988: “If the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a dollar.”
1990: “It’s been good financially.”
Rich Harris and Andrew Rossback/The New York Times
About two weeks before the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, he spent $29 million on a 282-foot yacht. Months later he bought the Plaza Hotel for $407 million. He recorded $42.2 million in core business losses for 1987, and $30.4 million for 1988.
In 1989, he bought a shuttle operation from Eastern Airlines for $365 million. It never made a profit, and Mr. Trump would soon pump in more than $7 million a month of his dwindling cash to keep it airborne, New Jersey casino regulators, who closely monitored his finances in those years, found.
Mr. Trump’s business losses that year soared to $181.7 million.
Then came the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino, which opened in April 1990 saddled with more than $800 million in debt, most at very high interest rates. It did not generate enough revenue to cover that debt, and sucked revenue from his other casinos, Trump’s Castle and Trump Plaza, pulling them deep into the red.
As a result, 1990 and 1991 represented the worst years of the period reviewed by The Times, with combined losses of $517.6 million. And over the next three years, as Mr. Trump turned over properties to his lenders to stave off bankruptcy, his core businesses lost an additional $286.9 million.
The 10-year total: $1.17 billion in losses.
Mr. Trump was able to lose all that money without facing the usual consequences — such as a steep drop in his standard of living — in part because most of it belonged to others, to the banks and bond investors who had supplied the cash to fuel his acquisitions. And as The Times’s earlier investigation showed, Mr. Trump secretly leaned on his father’s wealth to continue living like a winner and to stage a comeback.
This is not to say that Mr. Trump never made money on a deal. One that turned out quite well came in 1985, when he bought the Hotel St. Moritz in Manhattan for $73.7 million. Mr. Trump has said he sold it for $180 million in 1989. His tax information showed long-term capital gains of $99.8 million, accounting for the vast majority of such gains in the 10 years reviewed by The Times.
But that rich payday was overwhelmed by his business losses, and Mr. Trump still paid no federal income taxes that year.
Some fraction of that ocean of red ink represented depreciation on Mr. Trump’s real estate. One of the most valuable special benefits in the tax code, depreciation lets owners of commercial real estate write down the cost of their buildings.
“I love depreciation,” Mr. Trump said during a presidential debate in 2016.
In “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump points to one of his Atlantic City casinos to illustrate the magic of depreciation. If the casino’s cost was $400 million, he says, he would be able to depreciate it at a rate of 4 percent a year, allowing him to shelter $16 million in taxable income annually.
But while this example is intended to show the benefits of depreciation, it also demonstrates that depreciation cannot account for the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses Mr. Trump declared on his taxes.
The tax code also lets business owners like Mr. Trump use losses to avoid paying tax on future income — a lucrative deduction intended to help troubled businesses get back on their feet. Mr. Trump’s losses over the years rolled into the $915.7 million free pass from income taxes — known as net operating loss — that appeared on his 1995 returns.
The newly revealed tax information sheds light on how those net operating losses snowballed. By 1991, they had grown to nearly $418 million, accounting for fully 1 percent of all the losses that the I.R.S. reported had been declared by individual taxpayers that year. And the red ink continued to accumulate apace.
Because Mr. Trump reported a negative adjusted gross income in each of the 10 years, he was not allowed to deduct any charitable contributions. So while he has boasted of making large donations at the time, the information obtained by The Times shows no such itemized deductions. Potential deductions could have been carried over to a future year, should Mr. Trump have reported a positive income.
A VULTURE’S APPETITE
Mr. Trump at his home in Greenwich, Conn., in 1987. “There is no one my age who has accomplished more,” he told Newsweek that year.Joe McNally/Getty Images
As losses from his core enterprises mounted, Mr. Trump took on a new public role, trading on his business-titan brand to present himself as a corporate raider. He would acquire shares in a company with borrowed money, suggest publicly that he was contemplating buying enough to become a majority owner, then quietly sell on the resulting rise in the stock price.
The tactic worked for a brief period — earning Mr. Trump millions of dollars in gains — until investors realized that he would not follow through. That much has been known for years. But the tax information obtained by The Times shows that he ultimately lost the bulk of the gains from his four-year trading spree.
The figures do not include an itemization of individual trades. But The Times was able to align the reported total gains with details on trades publicly documented by casino regulators at the time.
As with many things Trump, his adventures in the stock market were more image than substance, helped greatly by news reports quoting anonymous sources said to have knowledge of Mr. Trump’s actions. An occasional quote from an associate — including his stockbroker, Alan C. Greenberg — helped burnish the myth.
“He has an appetite like a Rocky Mountain vulture,” Mr. Greenberg, the legendary chairman of Bear Stearns, told The Wall Street Journal in 1987. “He’d like to own the world.”
In his actions, Mr. Trump was more like a peacock.
An early and profitable gambit came in February 1987, when Mr. Trump started buying stock in the company that owned United Airlines. That April, The Times reported that Mr. Trump was “believed to own 4.9 percent” of United and was “believed to have paid” about $50 a share.
Trump takeover speculation set off a rally in the stock. At the end of the month, Mr. Trump quietly sold nearly all his shares. The next day, The Journal reported that Mr. Trump’s gamble appeared to have netted him $55 million.
It was a gross exaggeration. New Jersey gaming regulators later determined that he had purchased only 2.3 percent of the company and gained $11 million, before interest and commissions.
The same tactic continued to work through 1988. Mr. Trump made a total of $57 million by briefly presenting himself as a takeover threat to, among others, Hilton Hotels, the Gillette razor company and Federated Department Stores, casino regulators found.
In all, from 1986 through 1989, Mr. Trump declared $67.3 million in gains from stocks and other assets bought and sold within one year.
By 1989, investors were less fooled by his moves. That September, he bought a large stake in American Airlines and announced a takeover bid.
“I’m very skeptical of everything this man does,” Andrew Geller, then an airline analyst at Provident National Bank in Philadelphia, told The Associated Press.
Mr. Trump was rebuffed, and the stock price fell sharply. Though at the time his losses were reported to be modest, the new tax return figures show that in 1990, the year he sold his American Airlines stake, Mr. Trump lost $34.9 million on short-term trades, wiping out half his gains from the previous four years.
He appears to have held only one other significant chunk of stock by decade’s close: a 27 percent stake in the Alexander’s department store company.
Mr. Trump had bought those shares for $67.9 million and held on, hoping to gain control of the company’s real estate with a partner. After climbing on the possibility of a takeover, the stock price slid.
Mr. Trump ultimately agreed to turn over that stock and most of his other assets — including the yacht, the Trump Shuttle and his stake in the Grand Hyatt — to his lenders. On the day in 1992 when he gave up the stock, it was trading at about $9 a share — which would represent a loss of $55.5 million.
And with that, Mr. Trump’s days as a market mover were over.
ONE HUGE PAYDAY
Mr. Trump in 1990 at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which opened that year with over $800 million in debt.Ángel Franco/The New York Times.
As would be expected for a business owner, the line on Mr. Trump’s tax returns showing regular wages and salary does not represent the bulk of his income. But one year stands out: 1988, when he recorded $67.1 million in salary — 90 percent of his total regular wages for the 10 years.
The figure appears to include a payment he received as part of a deal to buy the unfinished Taj Mahal casino from Merv Griffin, the talk show host turned businessman. Mr. Griffin’s company had agreed to pay Mr. Trump to manage construction of the casino, among other services, and the resolution of a bitter dispute between the two included Mr. Griffin’s company paying Mr. Trump $63 million to buy out that contract.
That windfall contributed to Mr. Trump’s making his biggest income tax payment of the 10 years reviewed by The Times. Even so, his overwhelming business losses meant that he paid only $1.4 million in alternative minimum tax that year.
The only other income tax he was required to pay in those years was $124,344 in 1987, also under the alternative minimum tax, which was created to make sure wealthy people could not avoid all income tax through loopholes and deductions.
AN INTEREST MYSTERY
Mr. Trump with his first wife, Ivana, and household staff at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images.
One number from Mr. Trump’s tax returns is particularly striking — and particularly hard to explain: the $52.9 million in interest income he reported in 1989.
Mr. Trump reported $460,566 in interest income in 1986. That number grew to $5.5 million the next year, and $11.8 million the next. Then came the outlier 1989.
Taxpayers can receive interest income from a variety of sources, including bonds, bank accounts and mortgages. High-yield bonds, though less common today, were popular with institutional investors in the 1980’s. And to make $52.9 million in interest, for example, Mr. Trump would have had to own roughly $378 million in bonds generating 14 percent a year.
Hard data on most of Mr. Trump’s business life is hard to come by, but public findings from New Jersey casino regulators show no evidence that he owned anything capable of generating close to $52.9 million annually in interest income.
Similarly, there is no such evidence in a 1990 report on Mr. Trump’s financial condition, prepared by an accounting firm he hired at his bankers’ request and based on his most current tax returns and audited financial statements.
Mr. Trump’s interest income fell almost as quickly as it rose: He reported $18.7 million in 1990, and only $3.6 million in 1992.
At his nadir, in the post-recession autumn of 1991, Mr. Trump testified before a congressional task force, calling for changes in the tax code to benefit his industry.
“The real estate business — we’re in an absolute depression,” Mr. Trump told the lawmakers, adding: “I see no sign of any kind of upturn at all. There is no incentive to invest. Everyone is doing badly, everyone.”
Everyone, perhaps, except his father, Fred Trump.
While Donald Trump reported hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for 1990 and 1991, Fred Trump’s returns showed a positive income of $53.9 million, with only one major loss: $15 million invested in his son’s latest apartment project.
Barr Is Wrong: Mueller Was Dead Right on Trump and Obstruction
By Rebecca Roiphe, The Daily Beast May 7, 2019
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is expected to testify before the House Judiciary Committee as early as next week. What will he answer when asked about perhaps his most controversial decision: to decline to reach a conclusion on whether President Trump criminally obstructed justice?
Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Counsel to the President Emmet Flood have made it clear that they consider this a fundamental failure on Mueller’s part. Mueller will likely explain that given the unique position of the president in the American constitutional system, his choice was not only defensible but also necessary.
In a newly revealed letter sent a day after the Mueller Report’s release, Flood argued to Barr that because the decision to charge is a fundamental aspect of a prosecutor’s job, Mueller’s failure to do so constituted a political act, dangerous and inappropriate for the Department of Justice, a body that is supposed to apply the law to fact in an even-handed and nonpartisan way. Barr echoed this argument in the hearing before the Senate last week, claiming that it fell to him to decide whether the evidence in the Mueller Report constituted criminal obstruction of justice. That, he explained, is the one role of prosecutors: to investigate and decide whether to prosecute. Because Mueller supposedly failed in this aspect of his mandate, Barr himself had to fill in.
Flood and Barr are wrong, because they, unlike Mueller, fail to understand that the special counsel’s job is different from that of ordinary prosecutors in a fundamental way. As Mueller explained in his report, the Office of Legal Counsel within DOJ has concluded that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution, stating “under our constitutional plan… only the Congress by the formal process of impeachment, and not a court by any process should be accorded the power to interrupt the Presidency or oust an incumbent.” Mueller took this seriously and adapted the normal prosecutorial function to facilitate this constitutional requirement.
The Constitution gives Congress the authority to hold the president accountable by impeaching him for treason, bribery, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Historically, this term has not been limited to or even defined by the penal code. It is a term of art that most historians believe denotes a serious abuse of power. By declining to determine whether or not Trump committed criminal obstruction, Mueller left it to the constitutionally appropriate branch to decide whether the conduct outlined in his report amounted to such an abuse.
But Congress cannot impeach and the American public cannot judge the president’s conduct without an accounting of the facts. So, the question remains, how to ensure that Congress can draw on the service of professional prosecutors to determine the facts necessary to carry out its constitutional obligation?
Our system of government has struggled to answer this question. In 1978, shortly after the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted the Ethics in Government Act, which created a congressional independent counsel whose job it was to investigate crimes by top executive officials. This post was held by Ken Starr, among others. The Supreme Court upheld this law but Congress nonetheless let it sunset amid concerns that the independent counsel was unaccountable to the American people. The special counsel regulations, pursuant to which Mueller was appointed, were a compromise, an effort to enlist an independent prosecutor in uncovering improper acts by top executive officials while maintaining checks on his work through limited oversight by the attorney general.
The special counsel regulations thus provide that an attorney general or his deputy can appoint a special counsel when the department itself has a conflict of interest and when the public interest so requires. The regulations go on to state that the special counsel must comply with DOJ policy and in his judgment, report periodically to the attorney general. As such, a special counsel is insulated from political influence but not unmoored entirely from accountability.
The role of the special counsel is to uncover facts in a neutral way so that the country can have faith in the outcome of the investigation and, if appropriate, Congress can deliberate on whether the evidence constitutes an impeachable offense. Where evidence falls in a gray zone in which prosecutorial judgment must be called upon, a conclusion that the evidence supported criminal obstruction would not bear on Congress’s ultimate work, as the impeachment inquiry is independent of whether a prosecutor deems he has sufficient evidence to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor would it be of any practical moment, as no actual charges could have been brought against the president by virtue of his office. And as Mueller explained, the facts did not allow him to exonerate Trump of obstruction charges. Despite all this, Barr felt the need to weigh in anyway.
No doubt if Mueller had engaged in what OLC called the “unavoidably political act” of rendering judgment on Trump’s criminal obstruction, the president and his allies would have accused Mueller of partisanship, by virtue of his drawing gratuitous conclusions. Pundits and politicians would have echoed Trump’s rhetoric and insisted that Mueller was engaged in a “witch hunt.” By declining to reach a conclusion on obstruction, Mueller managed to avoid such accusations and preserve the legitimacy of his investigation and the DOJ in general without depriving Congress of the information it needed to fulfill its constitutional duty.
Mueller’s understanding of the unique constitutional status of a president as the subject of prosecutorial investigation becomes obvious when we consider his report’s other major finding: the evidence did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians. That aspect of the investigation looked at many members of the campaign other than the president. And there was no constitutional bar to Mueller’s deciding whether those persons should be prosecuted. But the obstruction question related to the president alone, mandating a different approach.
Instead of following Mueller’s lead in preserving the investigation’s constitutional role, Barr unnecessarily plunged the Department of Justice into a political firestorm by opining on the question of criminal obstruction.
To be sure, by handing over the lightly redacted results of Mueller’s investigation to Congress, Barr served the purpose of the Constitution and special counsel regulations. But, by making his own call on criminal obstruction, Barr made a serious error. These regulations were specifically designed to remove the investigation of high executive officials from political appointees who may have a conflict of interest. Any decision by such appointees would lack credibility. The public would assume they were politically motivated. Barr is precisely such a political actor. His proximity to Trump makes any decision regarding the facts or law of the investigation suspect. By weighing in on an irrelevant point of law, Barr has done much to undermine the purpose of the special counsel and reverse the careful work of Mueller to uphold his mandate and the Constitution itself.
‘Every Day He’s Obstructing Justice.’ Pelosi Issues Impeachment Warning as White House Escalates Fight
Shannon Pettypiece May 7, 2019
Every Day He’s Obstructing Justice. Pelosi Issues Impeachment Warning as White House Escalates Fight
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned that the Trump administration’s defiance of subpoenas could be an impeachable offense, even as the top White House lawyer instructed his predecessor not to comply with a subpoena from House Democrats.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone said in a letter Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee that President Donald Trump may want to assert executive privilege over the documents the panel is seeking from former counsel Don McGahn.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department is pushing back against a separate subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee for the full, unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Trump and his Republican allies are trying to move past the Mueller probe, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling it “case closed” in a floor speech Tuesday.
But Pelosi made clear that Democrats plan to press their multiple investigations of the president, accusing Trump of “goading” House Democrats into trying to remove him from office.
One of the articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon was based on ignoring subpoenas from Congress, the speaker said Tuesday during an event at Cornell University.
“That could be part of an impeachable offense” against Trump, Pelosi said. “Every day he’s obstructing justice by saying this one should testify, that one shouldn’t testify.”
The Trump administration has been rebuffing House Democrats’ demands for testimony and documents, with Trump saying last month that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas.”
Questioning McGahn took on additional importance since the former White House counsel provided Mueller a detailed account about Trump’s attempt to have the special counsel removed from his post. The White House gave McGahn permission to speak with Mueller.
The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn last month with a Tuesday deadline to comply with the records request. Cipollone told the committee to redirect its subpoena to the White House. His letter said White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney instructed McGahn not to hand over the records.
A lawyer for McGahn, William Burck, said he told his client to honor the White House request, unless the committee and Trump administration reach an agreement.
Attorney General William Barr missed a separate deadline on Monday to comply with the Judiciary panel subpoena for the the full Mueller report on Russian election-meddling and the Trump campaign. After committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler scheduled a vote to hold Barr in contempt, the Justice Department agreed to hold further talks Tuesday on the dispute.
The House is justified in seeking the full Mueller report “in order to exercise all of the powers of Congress, including impeachment,” Pelosi said at Cornell.
Pelosi said following “the facts and the law” will lead Congress to the correct action to take in response to Trump’s actions documented in the Mueller report. She said any case against Trump must be built not only in congressional committees, but also in the court of public opinion.
“He is just trying to goad us into impeachment, and wherever you go, I say to my colleagues — whatever it is, be ready,” the California Democrat said.
Why Mnuchin Doesn’t Want You to See Trump’s Tax Returns
Timothy L. O’Brien May 7, 2019
Mnuchin Refuses to Release Trump Tax Returns.
Surprising absolutely no one, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin thumbed his nose at the House of Representatives on Monday evening and decided not to turn over President Donald Trump’s business and personal tax returns after weeks of saying he just needed a little more time to think about it. In a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, Mnuchin, citing guidance he received from the Justice Department, said the committee’s request for Trump’s returns “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose” and he was “therefore not authorized” to release them. With that, Mnuchin said he was “informing” Neal that Treasury “may not lawfully fulfill the Committee’s request.”
If it wasn’t clear before, then it is now: Trump’s White House has decided to wage war on the principles of transparency and oversight, arguing in a series of recent confrontations with the law enforcement community and Congress that the executive branch has the authority and independence to decide for itself whether it has to respond to – and even recognize – checks on its power.That muscularity surfaced during Attorney General William Barr’s Senate testimony last week, when he fended off hours of questions about how he oversaw the disclosure and interpretation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his Russia-Trump investigation. In response to questions about whether Trump had tried to impede or derail Mueller’s probe, and had therefore obstructed justice, Barr at one point said presidents had the power to upend any federal investigation – and to make up his or her mind whether the underlying reasons for a probe were robust enough for it to continue.
“The president, who has constitutional authority to supervise proceedings – if in fact a proceeding was not well-founded, if it was a groundless proceeding, if it was based on false allegations, the president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course,” Barr said.
In short, if the president doesn’t like a federal investigation, even if it’s about him or her, and makes a case that it’s being conducted in bad faith, then they can stop it. (This might recommend all future presidents to take to Twitter, perhaps, to poison public sentiment about any probe involving the Oval Office.) It’s no shock, then, that Barr’s Justice Department gave Mnuchin the legal argument he needed to keep Trump’s tax returns under wraps.
Trump’s private attorneys are on board with these arguments too. In a lawsuit last week that they filed on behalf of Trump, his three eldest children, and his company against Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corporation, they argued that neither company should comply with Congressional requests for the Trump family’s financial records because doing so violated the family’s financial privacy and exceeded Congress’s constitutional mandate. And how does the lawsuit define Congress’s mandate? It claims legislators can only legislate and therefore don’t have constitutional authority to engage in oversight or investigations of the presidency. Congress can only take actions that are tied to existing legislation, the lawsuit asserts.
That, of course, is also Mnuchin’s argument. In the language of the Trump family’s lawsuit, none of this is about legislation, it’s all about partisan politics. Investigations of the president, the lawsuit says, are taking place only to “ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage,” and “no grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one.” That’s remarkably similar to Barr’s repeated observation about the origins and goals of the Mueller probe, one he emphasized during his press conference on April 18 when he released the report: “The president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.”
Defining Congressional oversight as legitimate only when it’s tied to legislation helps keep Congress off your back, obviously. But that doesn’t mean it’s the proper definition or that it’s in the broader, non-partisan public interest to define it as such. Effective oversight, as the Constitution’s framers clearly understood, involved separation of powers and checks and balances. Congress is empowered to monitor the presidency, and denying it any supervisory capacity beyond legislation leaves it hamstrung – intentionally.
Trump is the most financially conflicted president of the modern era. Unlike recent predecessors in the Oval Office, he has chosen not to voluntarily release his tax returns. That limits the public’s full understanding of the financial or business pressures that might inform his policy-making, an understanding that is basic to ethical and transparent governing. It’s the kind of situation that calls for aggressive Congressional monitoring. But in the era of Mnuchin, Barr and Trump, this view is unlikely to prevail unless legislators take the battle just as seriously as the White House does.
Post-apartheid South Africa is world’s most unequal country
Cara Anna, Associated Press May 7, 2019
World Bank: Post-apartheid South Africa is world’s most unequal country
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Perhaps nowhere in today’s South Africa is the country’s inequality on more dramatic display than in the neighboring Johannesburg suburbs of Sandton and Alexandra.
With its gleaming high-rises and lush estates, Sandton is known as Africa’s richest square mile. Alexandra, a onetime home to Nelson Mandela, is a squalid, cramped and crime-infested black township. Many of its residents stream into Sandton every day on a bridge over a highway to work in upscale shops or homes.
Angry protests flared in Alexandra last month, stoked in part by campaigning for Wednesday’s national election but mostly by the frustration that South Africa should look far different than the country of haves and have-nots that it has become. Many voters believe the ruling African National Congress has lost its way since Mandela won the first post-apartheid presidential election in 1994, and that belief threatens the ANC’s absolute majority grip on power.
The ANC has been shaken by widespread allegations of corruption that saw former President Jacob Zuma forced out a year ago, and many South Africans feel the party can no longer coast on its legacy of fighting the brutal system of apartheid.
Unemployment in the country of 56 million people soars past 25%. There are tire-burning protests almost every day over the lack of basic services like working toilets in mostly black neighborhoods. Whites still hold much of the wealth and private levers of power, while blacks trim their lawns and clean their homes.
“We find virtually no whites living below the middle class,” Fazila Farouk and Murray Leibbrandt with the Southern Africa Labor and Development Research Unit wrote last year. “Whites have, in fact, comfortably improved their economic status in post-apartheid South Africa because our economy channels such a big share of national income to the top 10%.”
Half of South Africans are in households with per capita income of 1,149 rand ($90) or less a month, they wrote, with little chance to change their fortunes despite working hard as maids or security guards.
“Put bluntly, they’re stuck,” Farouk and Leibbrandt concluded.
Thembeni Manana, an activist who works with the Greater Alexandra Chamber of Commerce, knows the feeling well, describing the inequality that residents of Alexandra feel when then cross the highway bridge into upscale Sandton.
“The air in Sandton is so fresh, you could swear they have air-cons outside,” Manana said, referring to the air-conditioned high-rises in the wealthy enclave. “When you come back to Alex, yo! A most disgusting smell! A sewer that’s overflowing, rats all over the road.”
The 28-year-old helped coordinate last month’s protests, saying that the challenges in righting the inequality are more than cosmetic, more than huddling through power outages in Alexandra while the Sandton skyline glows, unaffected.
“With us, we decided enough is enough. We want to challenge the system,” she added.
She delivered a rapid-fire list of demands: Schools in Alexandra should have a ratio of 30 children per teacher instead of 70. Street vendors should be allowed to supply grocery store chains, giving them access to the wider economy. Children should be able grow up with both parents in homes that have more than one room, allowing for privacy.
The World Bank says South Africa is the most unequal nation on the planet, a fact that former President F.W. de Klerk, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, called “the deepest national shame.”
It’s cutting criticism by someone who oversaw the end of a system that chilled much of the world by segregating its people by the color of their skin. Current President Cyril Ramaphosa, a Mandela protege, doesn’t shy away from the critique.
“Ours is still a deeply unequal country,” he acknowledged last month in marking 25 years since the end of apartheid .
South Africa’s “disturbing” wealth inequality is even more striking than its income disparity, and it threatens democratic values, according to a committee that explored the idea of a wealth tax. Such a tax might help but likely would not change the social relations that create inequality, said Aroop Chatterjee of the Southern Center for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
As Ramaphosa wages war on corruption within an ANC divided into the allies of Zuma, the former president, and those who want reform, public exasperation grows and populist movements simmer .
Grievances like those cited by Manana are not limited to Alexandra but exist in many of South Africa’s black townships, and Wednesday’s election likely will reflect the weariness of asking again and again for change.
While South Africa was famous for its long lines of voters in the first post-apartheid election 25 years ago, the sense of national apathy is an ominous sign for the ANC.
“I think people are just tired of voting,” Manana said.
“They realize the character of the political parties, only out to play during election time,” and then disappear until the next balloting five years later, she said.
Donald Trump Has Finally Found His Soulmate: William Barr
Timothy L. O’Brien, Bloomberg May 3, 2019
Donald Trump Has Finally Found His Soulmate: William Barr
(Bloomberg Opinion) — James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, took to the New York Times opinion pages on Wednesday to examine why seemingly top-drawer people lose their principles, courage, bearings and voices once they enter President Donald Trump’s orbit.
Comey published his column the same day Attorney General William Barr testified in the Senate about how he went about ingesting, publishing and spinning Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report. Barr ran interference for Trump throughout the hearing and the president’s apparent ability to co-opt Barr troubled Comey. The ex-FBI boss thinks Barr succumbed to Trump because the attorney general’s moral backbone has gone missing.
“Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from,” Comey wrote. “Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.”
That’s a fetching bit of analysis. But I think it’s wrong, at least in Barr’s case. He has all the inner strength he needs.
Consider the Senate hearing. Barr was hardly a hostage unshackled to do battle for his master. He absorbed and beat back questions for hours, his jaw set, his gaze defiant, his demeanor alternating from bored to condescending, and his responses weighted and phrased to indicate that his answers were the only correct answers. His tolerance for questions about his motives, methodology and integrity was limited. When members of the House of Representatives got ready for their turn to grill him on Thursday, Barr simply blew them off.
He’s doing all of this, I suspect, because he believes in it (and because he came to the administration ready to do the handiwork that protected and enhanced the powers of the presidency). He has always favored an unfettered, imperial White House and has gone out of his way over the years to insulate the executive branch from prying eyes and congressional oversight.
Barr originally got an audition for the attorney general’s job after openly taking pot shots at the bona fides of the Mueller investigation. I imagine his interview with the president about filling Jeff Sessions’ shoes must have revolved around a willingness to go to bat for Trump. Barr knew what was expected of him, but he was already comfortably in his own philosophical zone. He proved it early on in his new job when he stood next to the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and told the world, on cue from Trump during a promotional stunt, that the president had the legal authority to declare an emergency on the U.S. southern border.
The roots of this run deep and pre-date Barr’s arrival in Trump’s White House. As Charlie Sykes noted in The Bulwark this week, Barr “has for 30 years been the go-to guy for protecting a president, covering up scandals, and obstructing investigations.” The late Times columnist William Safire labeled Barr “General Coverup” in 1992 when, as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, he failed to appoint an independent counsel to closely examine funding for Iraq’s then dictator, Saddam Hussein. Safire used the same label for Barr after he derailed an independent counsel’s probe of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Amid the recent controversy surrounding the Mueller report, Barr has proven adept at using the language of the law to present himself as an institutionalist mindful of process and an evidentiary approach. At the same time, he has ignored or misinterpreted evidence while running roughshod over process in an effort to control the narrative and public perceptions of the report.
Barr rushed to provide a summary of the Mueller probe when it landed on his desk in late March because, he claimed during Wednesday’s hearing, the “body politic was in a high state of agitation.” Perhaps. But his need for speed also allowed him to interpret a report that the general public had yet to see. Barr used that opportunity to actively misrepresent some of Mueller’s findings. Click here for a comparison between what Mueller actually said in certain sections of his report and how Barr cherry-picked the phrasing to cast them in often inaccurate and more favorable light.
When Barr testified before House and Senate committees in early April he was in possession of a letter from Mueller complaining that his summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel’s report. Barr didn’t mention the letter or its observations during the hearings — even though one congressman specifically asked him if Mueller’s team was concerned about the Barr summary.
Barr’s effort to control the narrative — rather than act like a process-oriented lawman — reasserted itself two weeks ago when he released a redacted version of the Mueller report. Before doing so he held an odd press briefing in which he repeatedly landed on one of Trump’s talking points (“No collusion!”) and revisited his original summary of the report. (And Barr still hadn’t disclosed the Mueller letter’s existence or observations.)
The hearing on Wednesday was also loaded with misdirection and stage management rather than the close adherence to the law that Barr kept emphasizing as paramount. This rundown from Lawfare’s Ben Wittes is a good, comprehensive overview of Barr’s conduct from someone who has previously gone out of his way to support his approach. “Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject,” Wittes observes. “Barr has consistently sought to spin his department’s work in a highly political fashion, and he has done so to cast the president’s conduct in the most favorable light.”
Barr was astute enough to try to turn the table on arguments like this during the hearing itself, even though the facts still weigh against him. “Two years of his administration have been dominated by the allegations that have now been proven false,” Barr said on Wednesday. “And, you know, to listen to some of the rhetoric, you would think that the Mueller report had found the opposite.”
It’s not true that all of the allegations leveled at Trump have been proven wrong. Possible obstruction of justice still looms large around all of this, for example. Barr no doubt knows this. But he’s playing a longer game. He’s in this to secure the priorities and the prerogatives of the executive branch, and that has nothing to do with the White House or Trump taking bites out of his soul. It’s just who William Barr is, and always has been.
To contact the author of this story: Timothy L. O’Brien at tobrien46@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion
James Comey: How Trump Co-opts Leaders Like Bill Barr
Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive this president.
By James Comey May 1, 2019
Mr. Comey is the former F.B.I. director.
Credit: Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times
People have been asking me hard questions. What happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the attorney general, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt?
How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like “no collusion” and F.B.I. “spying”? And downplaying acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president’s being “frustrated and angry,” something he would never say to justify the thousands of crimes prosecuted every day that are the product of frustration and anger?
How could he write and say things about the report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, that were apparently so misleading that they prompted written protest from the special counsel himself?
How could Mr. Barr go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and downplay President Trump’s attempt to fire Mr. Mueller before he completed his work?
And how could Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, after the release of Mr. Mueller’s report that detailed Mr. Trump’s determined efforts to obstruct justice, give a speech quoting the president on the importance of the rule of law? Or on resigning, thank a president who relentlessly attacked both him and the Department of Justice he led for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations”?
What happened to these people?
I don’t know for sure. People are complicated, so the answer is most likely complicated. But I have some idea from four months of working close to Mr. Trump and many more months of watching him shape others.
Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.
But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.
It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking. As a result, Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.
Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.
I must have agreed that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history because I didn’t challenge that. Everyone must agree that he has been treated very unfairly. The web building never stops.
From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.
Sure, you notice that Mr. Mattis never actually praises the president, always speaking instead of the honor of representing the men and women of our military. But he’s a special case, right? Former Marine general and all. No way the rest of us could get away with that. So you praise, while the world watches, and the web gets tighter.
Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear — things you have always said must be protected and which you criticized past leaders for not supporting strongly enough. Yet you are silent. Because, after all, what are you supposed to say? He’s the president of the United States.
You feel this happening. It bothers you, at least to some extent. But his outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now.
You can’t say this out loud — maybe not even to your family — but in a time of emergency, with the nation led by a deeply unethical person, this will be your contribution, your personal sacrifice for America. You are smarter than Donald Trump, and you are playing a long game for your country, so you can pull it off where lesser leaders have failed and gotten fired by tweet.
And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.
James Comey is the former F.B.I. director and author of “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.”
