Fox News Reporter Snaps Back As Trump Demands Her Firing For Confirming War Dead Story
Mary Papenfuss September 5, 2020
A Fox News reporter staunchly defended her work Saturday after President Donald Trump demanded she be fired for confirming parts of The Atlantic’s bombshell story revealing the president’s insults about military service members.
“I can tell you that my sources are unimpeachable,” Fox News’ national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin said on-air (in the video above). “I feel very confident with what we have reported at Fox.”
She didn’t confirm “every line” of the report, but did confirm “most of the descriptions and the quotes in that Atlantic article … so I feel very confident in my reporting,” Griffin said. She also discovered as part of her reporting that Trump had once said that including “wounded guys” would not be a “good look” at a Fourth of July parade honoring the military, according to a source.
The Atlantic article cited multiple accounts of shocking incidents when Trump denigrated military service members, including referring to fallen war heroes as “losers” and “suckers.” It also revealed details of the president’s refusal to visit the graves of America’s war dead at Aisne-Marne Cemetery while he was in France in 2018. Trump has denied everything.
Griffin said she wasn’t able to confirm the “suckers” and “losers” portion of the Atlantic report about dead military heroes. But a source did confirm that Trump once said that anyone who served in the Vietnam War was a “sucker.”
While reporters at other news operations confirmed the Atlantic report, Trump singled out Griffin because a hit from Fox News, which is usually supportive of the president, is particularly damaging for him.
Trump cited a Breitbart article pointing out that Griffin had failed to confirm the “most salacious” (“suckers” and “losers”) details of the Atlantic story, written by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump called a “slimeball.” The president also declared that Fox News was “gone.”
Fox News was confused about where it stood on the story Friday. News hosts bashed the story before it was confirmed (by Griffin), then it was bashed again, then reconfirmed. News hosts also attacked the use of anonymous sources by The Atlantic, but then used anonymous sources to attack — and confirm — the story.
At least seven of Griffin’s colleagues — and a Republican congressman — supported her after the president’s tweet and after being bashed by Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway for using anonymous sources.
Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger also spoke up for Griffin on Saturday, calling her “fair and unafraid.”
Twitter critics are calling on two retired Marine Corps generals — former Defense Secretary James Mattis and ex-White House chief of staff John Kelly — to speak out about the Atlantic article.
Former NATO supreme commander and Navy Admiral James Stavridis tweeted Friday that the men’s “lack of denial” speaks volumes.
Goldberg begins his article with Trump declining to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018:
In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” [The Atlantic]
Goldberg’s report is “quite shocking,” LaPorta told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday night. “I actually didn’t believe it — which is why I started reaching out to sources. … Belleau Wood is one of those things that is sort of hammered into young Marines as they’re going through boot camp. I mean, Marine Corps folklore comes out of Belleau Wood, the idea the German army called Marines ‘Teufel Hunden,’ which translates into ‘Devil Dog.’ That’s where we get that name from.”
Goldberg told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday he thinks Pentagon officials are mostly baffled at Trump’s attitude toward military heroes. “I think he’s genuinely confused by service,” Goldberg said. “I think the volunteer force in particular kind of confuses him, because why would you ever possibly put your life at risk for a salary of $64,000 a year? It doesn’t make any sense, is my point, in his worldview.” Watch below.
Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’
The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.
Jeffrey Goldberg September 3, 2020
Donald Trump greets families of the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017. CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)
Trump’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)
When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults, and members of the Bush family have publicly opposed him. But his cynicism about service and heroism extends even to the World War I dead buried outside Paris—people who were killed more than a quarter century before he was born. Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990’s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)
On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)
Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.
Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.
What the Republican Party actually stands for, in 13 points
David Frum, Staff writer at The Atlantic August 25, 2020
SHUTTERSTOCK / PAUL SPELLA / THE ATLANTIC
Republicans have decided not to publish a party platform for 2020.
This omission has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult.
This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. I’m about to list 13 ideas that command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans.
Once you read the list, I think you’ll agree that these are authentic ideas with meaningful policy consequences, and that they are broadly shared. The question is not why Republicans lack a coherent platform; it’s why they’re so reluctant to publish the one on which they’re running.
1) The most important mechanism of economic policy—not the only tool, but the most important—is adjusting the burden of taxation on society’s richest citizens. Lower this level, as Republicans did in 2017, and prosperity will follow. The economy has had a temporary setback, but thanks to the tax cut of 2017, recovery is ready to follow strongly. No further policy change is required, except possibly lower taxes still.
2) The coronavirus is a much-overhyped problem. It’s not that dangerous and will soon burn itself out. States should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible, and accept the ensuing casualties as a cost worth paying—and certainly a better trade-off than saving every last life by shutting down state economies. Masking is useless and theatrical, if not outright counterproductive.
3) Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about. If it’s worth worrying about, it’s certainly not worth paying trillions of dollars to amend. To the extent it is real, it will be dealt with in the fullness of time by the technologies of tomorrow. Regulations to protect the environment unnecessarily impede economic growth.
4) China has become an economic and geopolitical adversary of the United States. Military spending should be invested with an eye to defeating China on the seas, in space, and in the cyberrealm. U.S. economic policy should recognize that relations with China are zero-sum: When China wins, the U.S. loses, and vice versa.
5) The trade and alliance structures built after World War II are outdated. America still needs partners, of course, especially Israel and maybe Russia. But the days of NATO and the World Trade Organization are over. The European Union should be treated as a rival, the United Kingdom and Japan should be treated as subordinates, and Canada, Australia, and Mexico should be treated as dependencies. If America acts decisively, allies will have to follow whether they like it or not—as they will have to follow U.S. policy on Iran.
6) Health care is a purchase like any other. Individuals should make their own best deals in the insurance market with minimal government supervision. Those who pay more should get more. Those who cannot pay must rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.
7) Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among Black Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.
8) Anti-Black racism has ceased to be an important problem in American life. At this point, the people most likely to be targets of adverse discrimination are whites, Christians, and Asian university applicants. Federal civil-rights-enforcement resources should concentrate on protecting them.
9) The courts should move gradually and carefully toward eliminating the mistake made in 1965, when women’s sexual privacy was elevated into a constitutional right.
10) The post-Watergate ethics reforms overreached. We should welcome the trend toward unrestricted and secret campaign donations. Overly strict conflict-of-interest rules will only bar wealthy and successful businesspeople from public service. Without endorsing every particular action by the president and his family, the Trump administration has met all reasonable ethical standards.
12) The country is gripped by a surge of crime and lawlessness as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticism of police. Police misconduct, such as that in the George Floyd case, should be punished. But the priority now should be to stop crime by empowering police.
13) Civility and respect are cherished ideals. But in the face of the overwhelming and unfair onslaught against President Donald Trump by the media and the “deep state,” his occasional excesses on Twitter and at his rallies should be understood as pardonable reactions to much more severe misconduct by others.
So there’s the platform. Why not publish it?
There are two answers to that question, one simple, one more complicated.
The simple answer is that President Trump’s impulsive management style has cast his convention into chaos. The location, the speaking program, the arrangements—all were decided at the last minute. Managing the rollout of a platform as well was just one task too many.
The more complicated answer is that the platform I’ve just described, like so much of the Trump-Republican program, commands support among only a minority of the American people. The platform works (to the extent it does work) by exciting enthusiastic support among Trump supporters; but when stated too explicitly, it invites a backlash among the American majority. This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country. And for those purposes, the platform will succeed most to the extent that it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message.
The challenge for Republicans in the week ahead is to hope that President Trump can remember, night after night, to speak only the things he’s supposed to speak—not to blurt the things his party wants its supporters to absorb unspoken.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring America Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
The US is in a water crisis far worse than most people imagine
Erin Brockovich August 24, 2020
When I was a little girl, my father would sing songs to me all the time about water. Sometimes, we would be playing down at the creeks and he would make up little tunes: “See that lovely water, trickling down the stream, don’t take it for granted, someday it might not be seen.”
My dad worked for many years as an engineer for Texaco and later for the Department of Transportation. Before he died, he told me that in my lifetime water would become a commodity more valuable than oil or gold, because there would be so little of it. Sadly, I believe he was right.
Our water has become so toxic that towns are issuing emergency boil notices and shipping in bottled water to their residents. In 2016, as I started research for my new book Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It, members of our very own US Congress had their water shut down in Washington due to unsafe lead levels.
We are in a water crisis beyond anything you can imagine. Pollution and toxins are everywhere, stemming from the hazardous wastes of industry and agriculture. We’ve got more than 40,000 chemicals on the market today with only a few hundred regulated. We’ve had industrial byproducts discarded into the ground and into our water supply for years. This crisis affects everyone – rich or poor, black or white, Republican or Democrat. Communities everywhere think they are safe when they are not.
Each water system is unique, but some of the most toxic offenders include hexavalent chromium (an anticorrosive agent), PFOA (used to make Teflon pans), PFOS (a key ingredient in Scotchgard), TCE (used in dry cleaning and refrigeration), lead, fracking chemicals, chloramines (a water disinfectant), and more. Many of these chemicals are undetectable for those drinking the water. Many cause irreversible health problems and people in communities throughout the country are dealing with these repercussions.
Like a blood test for disease, you can only find what you test for. If you don’t order a specific test for one of these chemicals, you won’t know it’s there. And you can’t treat water unless you know what’s in it.
Now, I know what you might be thinking. What about the EPA, Erin? What about corporate remediation departments? Aren’t the experts handling it?
The short answer is no.
These issues start with tiny seeds of deception that add up over months and years to become major problems. Our resources are exhausted. Corruption is rampant. Officials are trying to cover their tracks. People are not putting the pieces together when it comes to the severity of this crisis. I’ve got senators and doctors calling me, asking me what to do.
As if poisoned water wasn’t a big enough issue, the last six years (2013–2019) have been the hottest years on record. As our climate changes, and we experience more droughts, floods, superstorms, melting glaciers and rising sea levels, we are seeing greater strains on our water supplies and infrastructure.
Superman is not coming. If you are waiting for someone to come save you and clean up your water, I’m here to tell you: no one is coming to save you. The time has come for us to save ourselves.
But before you despair, I want to remind you that we are in this together. No one person must – or can – fix it alone. No one senator, one community member, CEO, mom, or dad. We’ve got to work together.
Even in the movie that shares my name, we had a team working around the clock. I went door-to-door to talk with residents who had concerns and were asking good questions. We hosted community meetings. We worked with some of the best legal teams, researchers, and academics in California. It was not a one-woman or one-man job. We fought together.
I’ve noticed over the years that when I visit towns and work with people, the number one thing everyone seems to need is permission. They are looking for someone to tell them that it’s OK to move forward or speak out.
It’s not always easy. We’re taught from the time we’re young to ask for permission: permission to leave the dinner table, permission to use the bathroom during class. As we get older, we must get permits to build an addition onto the house. We sign permission slips for our kids to go on field trips. All these little acts add up and then we think: who am I to stand up at a city council meeting and ask a question? We all have these doubts and questions. In the end, I think that the permission we are seeking is more about support. We want to know that if we take action, it will be successful and that our community will stand by us.
Consider this your personal permission slip. Yes, you have permission to ask questions. Yes, you have permission to scrutinize your water professionals to see if they have the right credentials. Yes, you have permission to start a Facebook group to make more people aware of your cause. You have permission to stick up for yourself when it comes to your health, your family, your life.
The first action that you can take is to become part of what I hope will be the first-ever national self-reporting registry. This crowd-sourced map allows individuals and community groups to report and review health issues (cancer being the most prevalent) and community environmental issues by geographic area and by health topic. The research is intended to connect the dots between clusters of illness and environmental hazards in specific communities and regions of the country. If you or someone you know is sick or suffering, please report it.
None of us need a PhD or a science degree, or need to be a politician or a lawyer, to protect our right to clean water. We have the power together to fight for better enforcement of environmental safety laws, to push for new legislation, and to storm our city halls until our voices are heard and the water is safe for everyone to drink.
Michael Cohen records campaign ads against Trump: Don’t ‘believe a word he utters’
Dareh Gregorian, NBC News August 24, 2020
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, has recorded a series of anti-Trump ads that are scheduled to run during the Republican National Convention painting his former boss as a fraud.
“Later this week, he’s going to stand up and blatantly lie to you. I’m here to tell you he can’t be trusted — and you shouldn’t believe a word he utters,” Cohen, who was convicted in 2018 of federal crimes, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, says in the ad revealed Monday night.
Cohen, who is serving his three-year sentence in home confinement because of the coronavirus pandemic, says convention viewers will hear Trump “talk about law and order.”
“That’s laughable,” he says. “Virtually everyone who worked for his campaign has been convicted of a crime or is under indictment. Myself included.
“So when the president gets in front of the cameras this week, remember that he thinks we are all gullible, a bunch of fools,” he says.
The ad campaign was made by the Democratic group American Bridge 21st Century, which said it will release digital and TV ads throughout the week.
Cohen, once one of Trump’s most trusted employees, was sentenced in December 2018 for what a judge called a “veritable smorgasbord” of criminal conduct, including financial crimes an lying to congress. He was released in May as part of a nationwide program allowing federal inmates to be transferred to other prisons or confined to their homes because of the pandemic.
He was locked back up about a week after he tweeted that he was writing a tell-all book about Trump. A judge found last month that the decision was “retaliatory” and ordered Cohen released to home confinement.
The Senate’s Russia Report Implicates More Than Trump’s Campaign
Eli Lake August 18, 2020
(Bloomberg Opinion) — “This is what collusion looks like.”
That is how five Democratic senators, including vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, view the fifth and final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Their argument rests on new evidence, which they say shows that Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, “was directly connected to the Russian meddling through his communications with an individual found to be a Russian intelligence officer.”
It’s a devastating claim. The report itself, however, paints a more nuanced picture, though no less horrifying.
Start with the Russian intelligence agent. He is a 50-year old man named Konstantin Kilimnik. The committee refers to him as a “Russian intelligence officer.” But Kilimnik does not have an official role in any Russian intelligence service. Instead, he “is part of a cadre of individuals ostensibly operating outside of the Russian government but who nonetheless implement Kremlin-directed influence operations.” Those initiatives are often funded by oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s March 2019 report disclosed that Manafort funneled internal campaign polling and strategy documents to Kilimnik during the campaign. The Senate’s report fills in the blanks about their relationship.
Manafort has known Kilimnik since at least 2005, when Manafort began working as a consultant to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Kilimnik, in addition to being a kind of Russian spy, was also a close aide to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Manafort had numerous business dealings with Deripaska over more than a decade, including influence operations that targeted countries in Europe, Africa and other former Soviet republics such as Georgia.
By 2016, however, Manafort and Deripaska had had a falling out. Deripaska had sued Manafort for money he lost in a joint business venture. Instead of money — perhaps in lieu of payment — Manafort sent information to Deripaska, using Kilimnik as a go-between.
The Senate committee “was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik,” the report says. It does say that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, “both claimed that it was part of an effort to resolve past business disputes and obtain new work with their past Russian and Ukrainian clients.”
After Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in August 2016, he kept up his relationship with both Kilimnik and some Trump campaign officials, such as the presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kilimnik and Manafort schemed, for example cooking up a plan to persuade the president-elect to endorse a “peace plan” for Ukraine that would have cemented the gains won by Russia after its stealth invasion in 2014. Both men also communicated about how to counter the narrative that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election and discussed a communications strategy to pin the election interference on Ukraine.
The report does not conclude that Kilimnik was involved in the Russian intelligence operation to hack Democratic Party emails and then publicize them through Wikileaks and other Russian backed websites. Rather, it says it has “information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” It goes on to say: “While this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack-and-leak operation may have existed through Kilimnik, the Committee had limited insight into Kilimnik’s communications with Manafort and [redacted], all of whom used sophisticated communications security practices.”
Regardless of whether Kilimnik was involved in the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails, the larger point is that Trump’s former campaign manager was so close to a Russian spy. That’s something both parties should condemn.
At the same time, the report raises some deeper questions. According to the report, Kilimnik worked for the International Republican Institute, a congressionally funded, nominally nonpartisan organization, from 1995 to 2005. He has claimed that he ended his work for the Russian government before joining. He was fired from his post in 2005, after the institute learned that he was working with Manafort.
Nonetheless, Kilimnik was in “regular contact” with personnel serving in the political section of the U.S. embassy in Kiev until late 2016. To be sure, many U.S. diplomats were wary of him. But he was able in January 2017 to secure a visa to the U.S., where he met with Manafort.
If Kilimnik was a Russian spy for this entire period — and the report gives evidence that indeed he was — then why didn’t the FBI or CIA do more to protect the U.S. embassy, or for that matter the International Republican Institute, from Kilimnik’s schemes?
A similar problem arises with Deripaska, the long-time associate of Manafort who the report accuses of masterminding political-influence campaigns from Cyprus to Montenegro. Between 2014 and 2016, the FBI tried to recruit him as a source. The bureau was rebuffed, and he reportedly told the Kremlin about the approach.
The new report finds that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was contracted to produce the now-discredited dossier on the Trump campaign’s ties to the Kremlin, also had contracts with Deripaska — at the same time he was compiling his dossier on Trump. “The Committee found multiple links between Steele and Deripaska, including through two of Deripaska’s lawyers, and indications that Deripaska had early knowledge of Steele’s work,” the report says. “Steele had worked for Deripaska, likely beginning at least in 2012, and continued to work for him into 2017, providing a potential direct channel for Russian influence on the dossier.”
Steele’s dossier makes a number of allegations against Manafort that the FBI was never able to confirm. And yet it never mentions one damning and true fact about him: namely, Manafort’s longstanding ties to Deripaska.
Yet the FBI used that dossier to help obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, and pressed to include its findings in the annex of the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. After it became public in January 2017, the dossier also helped to shape the public narrative about Trump in the first two years of his presidency.
Finally: It’s worth noting that, for most of the last two decades, the two men most responsible for protecting America from Russian threats are Robert Mueller and James Comey, who together directed the FBI from 2001 to 2017. It’s a pity that the FBI only got around to doing something about people such as Kilimnik and Deripaska — not to mention opportunistic Americans like Paul Manafort — until after the 2016 election.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.
Trump abuses our national parks, and he’s doing it again at Mount Rushmore
Jonathan B Jarvis and Gary Machlis July 3, 2020
Trump to visit Mount Rushmore amid controversy
In the United States, parks have always been used as spaces for public protest, places for commemorating acts of resistance and the struggle for a more perfect union, and stages for presidents to call for national unity or celebrate civic purpose.
As his Mount Rushmore event scheduled for Friday makes clear, Donald Trump misunderstands and misuses all these precedents.
Consider the national park areas in Washington, especially those around the White House, which have been the sites of peaceful protests for generations. A women’s suffrage march in 1913 disrupted Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in the public park named Lafayette Square. The Reflecting Pool and Lincoln Memorial were the center of the peaceful 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when more than 250,000 demonstrators listened to Martin Luther King give his “I Have a Dream” speech.
In contrast, when Trump decided to use Lafayette Square as a photo opportunity last month, he had police and military personnel disperse peaceful protesters with flash grenades and pepper-ball munitions.
Throughout history, other US presidents have employed national parks to unify and inspire the American people. Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the 1903 commemoration of the Gateway Arch at Yellowstone national park, reminding the American people: “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”
In the summer of 1969, Richard Nixon spoke at the dedication of the Lady Bird Johnson Grove in Redwoods national park. Nixon, hardly a president with a flawless reputation, nevertheless talked of unity and pride in the country as he dedicated the grove to the wife of his former political opponent.
Trump neither comprehends nor takes seriously his responsibilities to his fellow citizens, and he can only envision our public spaces and historical parks as taxpayer-funded stage pageant backdrops for his political rallies and photo ops, which divide rather than unite.
Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
During his 2016 campaign for president, Trump traveled to the hallowed ground of Gettysburg national military park. At the site of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, he gave a speech that “curdled into bitter resentment”, as he railed against his perceived enemies, particularly the media, the government, the opposition party and the intellectual elite.
Last month, he held a Fox News town hall television interviewinside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are supposed to be prohibited. He was only able to stage this television show at Lincoln’s feet because David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior, specially relaxed the regulations governing use of our most sacred public monuments.
We must rescind the authority of the interior secretary to create exceptions for the partisan uses of national memorials
“I assume the show is a big show, right?” Trump asked.
It has become clear that we need clearer rules and restrictions on the use of force against peaceful protesters in public parks. We also need to hold national and local leaders to account when they exploit rather than protect parks. And we must rescind the authority of the interior secretary to create exceptions for overtly partisan uses of national memorials.
The locations of current tragedies of police brutality, including the 38th Street and Chicago Avenue intersection in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, should be commemorated as national historic landmarks – just as the 54 miles that peaceful civil rights demonstrators walked in 1965 are commemorated as the Selma to Montgomery Trail. Black lives matter.
This Friday, Trump travels to Mount Rushmore to watch fireworks over the park, reversing a moratorium on fireworks that has been in place for a decade because of concern about wildfires in the park’s 1,200 acres of forest and the surrounding Black Hills national forest. The National Park Service is managing a lottery for the 7,500 tickets to the event – with no social distancing, even as South Dakota faces over 6,000 active Covid-19 cases and the audience will include visitors from around the country.
Mount Rushmore, carved over the objections of the Sioux on the stones of their sacred Black Hills, has become a symbol of America. Love it or hate it, it should not be used for partisan politics. The nightly lighting ceremony is powerful theater, as the large halogen lights warm and then illuminate the carved images of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Trump knows this, and will probably use Mount Rushmore as a stage for a partisan political rally full of rancor, insults, and racial divisiveness.
It will probably take Trump’s handlers’ best efforts to prevent him, as the halogen lights warm, from having the spotlights move from Washington and Jefferson on to himself, and to prevent long, vertical, bright-red Maga banners from being unfolded as he begins his performance. His supporters will cheer, his opponents will shout, and the US national parks – often called America’s “best idea” – will be more tarnished from misuse.
Jonathan B Jarvis served 40 years with the National Park Service and was its 18th director
Dr Gary Machlis served as science adviser to the director of the National Park Service and is a professor of environmental sustainability at Clemson University
The opinions expressed here are those of the authors.
Conservative Rick Wilson: People Will Piss on Trump’s Grave Because of His “Treason”
Darragh Roche July 1, 2020
Rick Wilson is holding nothing back these days in his criticism of Donald Trump. The former Republican political strategist openly accused the President of treason.
Wilson spoke to The Daily Beast’s Molly Jong – Fast on Tuesday. He is a co-host for that news outlet’s New Abnormal podcast. Wilson didn’t pull any punches.
“The word traitor and the word treason in this country gets abused like crazy,” Wilson said.
“It’s true. But sometimes by you,” Jong-Fast said.
“But in this case, it’s not an abuse of the word,” Wilson replied.
He went on to suggest that Trump would end up being so disrespected that people would even target his final resting place.
“This is a guy who was already going down into the dustbin of history,” Wilson said.
“And now there’s going to be a line at his grave where they’re going to have to throw cat litter down. Because people are gonna piss on it for all time,” he said.
Russia Offered Afghans Bounty to Kill U.S. Troops, Officials Say
Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz June 27, 2020
WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.
The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.
Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.
The intelligence finding was briefed to President Donald Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.
An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.
Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news, and covert and deniable military operations.
American troops at Camp Shorabak in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Sept. 26, 2019. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
The Kremlin had not been made aware of the accusations, said Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “If someone makes them, we’ll respond,” Peskov said.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, denied that the insurgents have “any such relations with any intelligence agency” and called the report an attempt to defame them.
“These kinds of deals with the Russian intelligence agency are baseless — our target killings and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and we did it on our own resources,” he said. “That changed after our deal with the Americans, and their lives are secure and we don’t attack them.”
Spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA declined to comment.
The officials familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House delay in deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.
While some of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.
At a summit in Helsinki in 2018, Trump strongly suggested that he believed Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the U.S. intelligence establishment that it did. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and internal deliberations. They said the intelligence has been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this week — including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.
The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.
The revelations came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.
Moreover, as Trump seeks reelection in November, he wants to strike a peace deal with the Taliban to end the Afghanistan War.
Both American and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and baseless.
“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.
Though coalition troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked U.S. positions since a February agreement.
American troops have also sharply reduced their movement outside of military bases because of the coronavirus, reducing their exposure to attack.
While officials were said to be confident about the intelligence that Russian operatives offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants for killing Americans, they have greater uncertainty about how high in the Russian government the covert operation was authorized and what its aim may be.
Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the U.S. military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.
The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the GRU. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.
Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.
American intelligence officials say the GRU was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two GRU cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers, and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications.
In part because those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Trump’s favor, Trump’s handling of issues related to Russia and Putin has come under particular scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any criminal conspiracy with Moscow.
Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.
Though Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president, Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan government as well as anyone from the United States and at times have seemed to work at crosscurrents with U.S. efforts to bring an end to the conflict.
The disclosure comes at a time when Trump has said he would invite Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of Seven nations, but tensions between U.S. and Russian militaries are running high.
In several recent episodes, in international territory and airspace from off the coast of Alaska to the Black and Mediterranean seas, combat planes from each country has scrambled to intercept military aircraft from the other.
