People hold a sign as they take part in a joint LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter march on the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City on June 28, 2020.Eduardo Munoz / Reuters
It’s hard to imagine how things can worse but I think a lot of us are having a hard time imagining how things can get better as well. But in the midst of all this chaos, there is a rise in optimism among Blacks and Latinos which I find to be just amazing … and truly wonderful:
Amid the continuing coronavirus pandemic, a suddenly uncertain economy and mass protests against racial injustice in the United States, dissatisfaction about the current state of the country has reached record highs. But according to a new Pew Research Center poll, a key group — Black and Latino Americans — are also significantly more optimistic than they were last year that life will be better for future generations than it is now.
The Pew survey, which was conducted between June 16 and 22, found that a third of Black Americans — 33 percent — now say that future generations will be better off. While that’s far from a majority, it’s almost double the share who said the same in September 2019.
There was a smaller jump in optimism among Latinos, with 26 percent saying that future generations will be better off, compared with just 16 percent who said the same last fall.
The shifts come after the death of George Floyd sparked mass protests against police violence, racial profiling and injustice in law enforcement. Other public surveys since the protests began have found that some of the core messages of the demonstrations — including the belief that police are more likely to use deadly force in encounters with Black suspects — have quickly gained traction with the American electorate at large.
Among all white Americans, optimism for future generations remains unchanged since September 2019, with 22 percent expressing hope both then and now that future generations will be better off.
But there has been significant change among whites when partisan affiliation is considered. The share of white Democrats who say life will be better for future generations has doubled since last year from 12 percent to 24 percent, while the share of white Republicans who say the same has decreased from 30 percent to 21 percent.
I don’t know if it will be but I do know that it won’t be if people don’t believe it’s possible. This is very good news. Let’s hope we don’t drop the ball.
During a tense exchange on Capitol Hill, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Tuesday blasted the nation’s top public health experts for their lack of optimism during the unprecedented, highly lethal, and surging coronavirus pandemic.
“We need to not be so presumptuous that we know everything,” the Kentucky Republican said during an impassioned plea to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions about the need for schools to reopen. He went on to call America’s public health community “fatally” arrogant.
“Perhaps our planners might think twice before they weigh in on every subject,” Paul added. “Perhaps our government experts might hold their tongue before expressing their opinion.”
Paul specifically berated Dr. Anthony Fauci—the public face of the White House’s coronavirus response and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—for his recent statements on spectator sports, herd immunity, and other subjects. Though Fauci had couched his words in caveats, he said that “it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall” and that, even with a working vaccine, herd immunity might be difficult to accomplish if Americans aren’t willing to take it.
But Paul said such statements have caused “undue fear” in pockets of the country and cautioned the public not to trust the words of top infectious disease professionals in the country, saying, “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best for everyone.”
“We just need more optimism,” Paul added.
In response, Fauci told the committee that his words often get twisted in the media and that, “I feel very strongly we need to do whatever we can to get the children back to school.”
But minutes later, he also said that the country could begin seeing 100,000 new cases a day “if things don’t turn around,” telling the committee, “It could get very bad.”
How’s that for optimism?
And Rand Paul is a ghoul who literally wants people to die. He’s a doctor. He knows what he’s doing. And it is grotesque.
Biden held a press conference today. He gave a good speech about the pandemic and took a bunch of questions. He sounded good.
Trump and his campaign, meanwhile, seem to have decided they can win by contrasting their very stable genius with Biden and saying Biden has dementia.
One of Trump's main campaign messages is that Biden can barely talk (last week: "Whenever he does talk, he can't put two sentences together"), so it's perhaps worth noting that Biden is very much uttering coherent sentences at this press conference.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. unloaded a barrage of criticism on President Trump on Tuesday over his response to Covid-19, his refusal to wear a mask, his handling of intelligence on Russians targeting American troops and even his cognitive capability during a rare news conference where Mr. Biden repeatedly drew distinctions with his November opponent.
In a speech in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden said that “we need a president,” not a “cheerleader,” as he laced into Mr. Trump’s approach to the virus. “Mr. President, this is not about you,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s about the health and well-being of the American public.”
He said Americans had not made sacrifices so that the president “could ignore the science and turn responsible steps like wearing masks into a political statement.”
Before the speech, the Biden campaign released an updated plan for fighting the coronavirus, given “the current circumstances we face as a result of President Trump’s persistent failures.”
The plan said that “minutes after he is declared the winner of the election,” Mr. Biden would call Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and ask him to work for Mr. Biden just as he has worked for past presidents.
“Dr. Fauci will have full access to the Oval Office and an uncensored platform to speak directly to the American people — whether delivering good news or bad,” the plan said.
The plan addresses issues like improving testing and tracing, supplying personal protective equipment, developing a vaccine and reopening the economy. In his speech, Mr. Biden encouraged the president “to adopt this plan in its entirety.”
Mr. Biden, the former vice president, has made only sporadic in-person appearances since the pandemic upended Americans’ daily routines, and his campaign is refraining from holding rallies with large crowds that are typically a staple of the campaign trail.
He has repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump over his response to the crisis, and this month, he laid out an eight-part plan for reopening the economy.
“Statewide lockdowns that so many Americans lived under for months were intended to buy us time to get our act together,” Mr. Biden said in his remarks. “Instead of using that time to prepare ourselves, Donald Trump squandered it.”
Trump just said "my father is German, was German. Born in a very wonderful place in Germany." Fred Trump was born in New York. pic.twitter.com/U6eWYPzjrJ
— Tommy moderna-vaX-Topher (@tommyxtopher) April 2, 2019
This man has no room to criticize anyone for misspeaking:
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday claimed Trump hadn’t been briefed on the intelligence that Russia placed bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But when pressed on whether the intel appeared in Trump’s written President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, she declined to directly respond.
There appears to be a reason for that. The Washington Post and others have confirmed that the information has indeed appeared in the PDB. The Post reports that two sources say “the intelligence was considered significant and credible enough that it was included in the President’s Daily Brief.” The New York Times is also reporting that information appeared in the PDB in late February. The Associated Press reported that it appeared in the PDB as far back as early 2019. And GOP lawmakers who were briefed Monday at the White House also appeared to grant that the info was probably in the PDB. “I believe it may have been,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) told NBC News.
The first thing to note here is the semantic game the White House appears to be playing. They’re suggesting that the President’s Daily Brief document doesn’t itself constitute a “briefing” — despite having “brief” in its name — but that a briefing must be done orally.
That’s quite the parse. And as longtime Times national security reporter David Sanger notes, it’s not how this works.
But aside from that, it’s worth distilling the White House’s apparent defense down to its basest form, which is that Trump may have actually been provided the intelligence, but he didn’t actually consume it.
And that makes complete sense, given everything we know about Trump and his approach to both detailed intelligence and — more importantly in this moment — to intel about Russia specifically.
Trump reads twitter ad that’s it. And half the time it seems that he only reads half of the posts he re-tweets. And he already knows everything anyway so what’s the point?
Still, this seems like an odd defense. If the best they can do is say that the president doesn’t read his daily briefing so it isn’t his fault if he doesn’t know what’s in it, well …
Jennifer Rubin discusses the latest Russia scandal and points to the real culprits in this dumpster fire of a presidency.
Republicans’ tougher language rings hollow in light of their attitude toward Trump’s past betrayal of American interests. The Times reports:
Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Trump’s tweet suggesting he had not been made aware of the reports was “a very concerning statement.”“Anything with any hint of credibility that would endanger our service members, much less put a bounty on their lives, to me should have been briefed immediately to the commander in chief and a plan to deal with that situation,” he said.
Very concerned. Deeply troubled. Unfortunately, they were not concerned when it really mattered as to whether Trump had betrayed U.S. interests by holding back aid to Ukraine in the middle of a hot war against Russia. Trump, it seems, is willing to give a hand to Russian fighters — just not Americans.
Sen. Marco Rubio’s threat of “vigorous oversight” is laughable given the Florida Republican’s disinclination to do anything regarding Trump’s serial scandals — from Ukraine, to alleged efforts to enlist China to help his reelection, to hiding notes taken during meetings between Trump and Putin.
Even less credible is Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who never met a pseudo-scandal about President Barack Obama that did not rivet him nor a legitimate one about Trump that did. He has now decided that it is very troubling indeed to see Trump turning a blind eye toward Russian aggression. The Hill reports:
“I’ve been hearing from military families in Nebraska constantly for the last 36 hours, and they’re livid,” he said. “This is a story about the targeting of American men and women in uniform. This is about putting crosshairs on the backs of people who are fighting for our freedom. This is not about short-term politics.”Sasse said Congress “is broken” and needs to pull together to “get to the bottom of two questions.”“Who knew what when inside the administration? Did the commander in chief know? If not, why the heck not? What’s going on in that process?” he said.
Sasse has known for years that the “process” is nonexistent in this White House, has had the benefit of former national security adviser John Bolton’s revelations and has heard the overwhelming evidence of impeachable conduct during Trump’s Senate trial. Now, we are expected to believe that Sasse really, really wants to know what is going on?
Senate Republicans can read the polls. They know Trump is sinking fast and — suddenly! — have decided as members of an equal branch that they should be investigating Trump’s gross malfeasance. If they really want to be taken seriously, they would:
Call Bolton to testify;
Admit gross error in exonerating Trump on Ukraine;
End support for his reelection;
Call for his resignation.
Do not hold your breath. There is zero chance they will do anything like that — or even seek to enforce subpoenas if Trump again stonewalls. They know there is no good explanation for Trump’s conduct, so now they want the voters to know they really, really do not like Trump siding with Russia. This is 3½ years too late. They have helped create a monster in the Oval Office, someone willing to betray U.S. interests for his own personal or political ends. Without their continued support, Trump would not be in office, still endangering American national security.
The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.
The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S.
“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,” she said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.”
[…]
While the outbreaks in New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore have been of different magnitudes and followed different trajectories, officials in all three countries now quickly respond to every new infection in order to stamp out what remains of the outbreak, Schuchat said. The U.S. stands in stark contrast as it continues to report over 30,000 new infections per day.
“This is really the beginning,” Schuchat said of the U.S.’s recent surge in new cases. “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking around the country that, hey it’s summer. Everything’s going to be fine. We’re over this and we are not even beginning to be over this. There are a lot of worrisome factors about the last week or so.”
The sheer size of the U.S. and the fact that the virus is hitting different parts of the country at different times complicates the public response here compared with other countries, Schuchat said. South Korea, for example, was able to concentrate their response on the southern city of Daegu, for a time, and contact tracers were quickly deployed when new cases were later found in the capital Seoul.
“What we have in the United States, it’s hard to describe because it’s so many different outbreaks,” Schuchat said. “There was a wave of incredible acceleration, intense interventions and control measures that have brought things down to a much lower level of circulation in the New York City, Connecticut, New Jersey area. But in much of the rest of the country, there’s still a lot of virus. And in lots of places, there’s more virus circulating than there was.”
The coronavirus has proven to be the kind of virus that Schuchat and her colleagues always feared would emerge, she said. She added that it spreads easily, no one appears to have immunity to it and it’s in fact “stealthier than we were expecting.”
“While you plan for it, you think about it, you have that human denial that it’s really going to happen on your watch, but it’s happening,” she said. “As much as we’ve studied [the 1918 flu pandemic], I think what we’re experiencing as a global community is really bad and it’s similar to that 1918 transformational experience.”
With the current level of spread, Schuchat said the U.S. public should “expect this virus to continue to circulate.” She added that people can help to curb the spread of infection by practicing social distancing, wearing a mask and washing their hands, but no one should count on any kind of relief to stop the virus until there’s a vaccine.
“We can affect it, but in terms of the weather or the season helping us, I don’t think we can count on that,” she said.
That explains this:
Dr. Fauci to @SenWarren: "We are now having 40,000+ new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn this around. So, I am very concerned."
Fauci: "I am also quite concerned about what we are seeing evolve right now in several states … they need to follow the guidelines that have been very carefully laid out with regard to [reopening] checkpoints … in some, they're going too quickly & skipping over some." pic.twitter.com/C4iwL4mFtW
The state of play: Over the past week, widespread panic and pessimism have set in.
Early optimism about a booming economic comeback has dampened because of new coronavirus outbreaks across the country.
Early hopes that Trump’s return to rallies would bring back momentum has dampened because of the Tulsa rally debacle — and because advisers have recognized that Trump’s elderly base is more fearful of the virus than previously realized.
Trump, relentlessly, keeps committing egregious self-defeating acts — the latest being tweeting a video in which an elderly supporter chants “white power.”
Did they really think he was popular? He’s never been popular. Iguess they just assumed they could keep it close enough to steal it.
Downsizing, right-sizing, fast-tracking, offshoring, “shareholder value,” and just-in-time everything took a toll on teams I worked with for years. My father had a series of companies (and jobs) bought out from under him in the 1970s and 1980s while he still had younger siblings in the house. It taught me not to trust corporations farther than I could throw them.
This economy’s trajectory wrung out any pride of accomplishment years ago. I bailed out officially in 2019, although an economic downturn meant mid-2018 was pretty much the end. There had been 10 years to recover from the financial collapse of 2008. I am a Boomer.
The Week’s Zoe Fenson assesses her place in an economy she serves but does not serve her. The path her parents followed into adulthood has all but vanished. Her millennial cohort is “squeezed by a machinery that was set in motion long before we were born.” The Washington Post dubbed hers “the unluckiest generation in U.S. history.”
When my peers and I began taking our first steps into a quaking workforce, we were told that the recession into which we’d just launched would be the defining economic experience of our lives. Only now, more than a decade into our independent adult lives, are many of us even beginning to achieve some semblance of job security or financial independence. And just a few months into a global pandemic, we are right back where we started. Many of my peers are losing jobs or having our savings depleted. Once in a generation has come around for us twice.
Add the demands of children, concerns for the health of aging parents, and their own bodily wear and tear to economic shutdown and unparalleled U.S. leadership failure in response to the pandemic. Pax Americana has become “Rest in Peace” for 130,000 Americans. And we’re not even through the first viral wave. Fenson’s generation faces a future nothing like the America they were sold.
We are grappling with the enormous urgency to act — to protect ourselves and each other, to hold our country accountable for the blood on its hands — while also picking ourselves back up from repeated economic and political body blows. We are simultaneously too young to give up, and too old to start fresh. So where do we go from here?
Capitalism carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, Karl Marx believed. But a worker-planned, self-managed economy is not coming to replace it. The connected world is too noisy and unruly for the orderly collective action Marx imagined. What, then?
E.J. Dionne wonders if predictions that Barack Obama’s election was a harbinger of a generational torch being passed were not wrong, but merely premature. Change is still coming, just delayed by the backlash of an older generation:
But there is another way to look at those 2008 predictions: They were not wrong, they were just premature. As a result, a 77-year-old Democratic presidential nominee may be the unlikely instrument of a new generational alignment.
Why now and not in 2008? The most important reason is the obvious one: The backlash against Trump is the driving factor in this election so far — and there could be no better representative of the politics of the past than the current occupant in the White House. He is stubbornly out of touch with the country’s attitudes on many questions, and especially so on racial justice.
The generational cohort celebrated in Obama’s victory is now more dominant in the electorate. More than 6 in 10 eligible voters this year will be under 55 years-old. This is not the America of 2008:
Three things are true: (1.) The post-boomer generations are more diverse than the rest of the electorate. (2.) Younger whites are more liberal than their elders on matters of racial justice — as a Washington Post-Schar School poll showed this month — and on social issues. (3.) The share of millennials who vote will be higher than in Obama’s elections simply because they are older than they were in 2008 or 2012.
But demographics are not destiny. Post-Boomers still need to vote to grasp the power that is theirs for the taking. Trump’s weakness does not make Biden an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Generational realignment alone does not remake a dysfunctional economy. Biden shows no signs of having the vision for that even if he wins the presidency. But winning the White House in a pandemic-driven, economic and social crisis, he might listen to those who do if he has the political space to act.
Hope for that lies in increasing the influence of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive women elected with her, especially at the state level. It lies in growing the influence of system critics such as Rutger Bregman and Anand Giridharadas. And perhaps in Biden giving Warren the backing to enact the plans she ran on for bringing accountability back to Washington, D.C. and to a modern form of capitalism that has metastasized since Marx critiqued it. There have been capitalist acts committed between consenting adults since before Hammurabi. Perhaps the fault lies not in the system but in ourselves.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
Imagine if the National Transportation Safety Board investigated America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Coping with a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face. To minimize death and damage, leaders and citizens must orchestrate a huge array of different resources and tools. Scientists must explore the most advanced frontiers of research while citizens attend to the least glamorous tasks of personal hygiene. Physical supplies matter—test kits, protective gear—but so do intangibles, such as “flattening the curve” and public trust in official statements. The response must be global, because the virus can spread anywhere, but an effective response also depends heavily on national policies, plus implementation at the state and community level. Businesses must work with governments, and epidemiologists with economists and educators. Saving lives demands minute-by-minute attention from health-care workers and emergency crews, but it also depends on advance preparation for threats that might not reveal themselves for many years. I have heard military and intelligence officials describe some threats as requiring a “whole of nation” response, rather than being manageable with any one element of “hard” or “soft” power or even a “whole of government” approach. Saving lives during a pandemic is a challenge of this nature and magnitude.
It is a challenge that the United States did not meet. During the past two months, I have had lengthy conversations with some 30 scientists, health experts, and past and current government officials—all of them people with firsthand knowledge of what our response to the coronavirus pandemic should have been, could have been, and actually was. The government officials had served or are still serving in the uniformed military, on the White House staff, or in other executive departments, and in various intelligence agencies. Some spoke on condition of anonymity, given their official roles. As I continued these conversations, the people I talked with had noticeably different moods. First, in March and April, they were astonished and puzzled about what had happened. Eventually, in May and June, they were enraged. “The president kept a cruise ship from landing in California, because he didn’t want ‘his numbers’ to go up,” a former senior government official told me. He was referring to Donald Trump’s comment, in early March, that he didn’t want infected passengers on the cruise ship Grand Princess to come ashore, because “I like the numbers being where they are.” Trump didn’t try to write this comment off as a “joke,” his go-to defense when his remarks cause outrage, including his June 20 comment in Tulsa that he’d told medical officials to “slow the testing down, please” in order to keep the reported-case level low. But the evidence shows that he has been deadly earnest about denying the threat of COVID-19, and delaying action against it.
“Look at what the numbers are now,” this same official said, in late April, at a moment when the U.S. death toll had just climbed above 60,000, exceeding the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. By late June, the total would surpass 120,000—more than all American military deaths during World War I. “If he had just been paying attention, he would have asked, ‘What do I do first?’ We wouldn’t have passed the threshold of casualties in previous wars. It is a catastrophic failure.”
As an amateur pilot, I can’t help associating the words catastrophic failure with an accident report. The fact is, confronting a pandemic has surprising parallels with the careful coordination and organization that has saved large numbers of lives in air travel. Aviation is safe in large part because it learns from its disasters. Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board go immediately to accident sites to begin assessing evidence. After months or even years of research, their detailed reports try to lay out the “accident chain” and explain what went wrong. In deciding whether to fly if I’m tired or if the weather is marginal, I rely on a tie-breaking question: How would this look in an NTSB report?
What an interesting way of looking at this.
He points out just how complicated aviation really is, which is true, although we never think much about it. And while crashes do happen, the fact is that the US has a stellar safety record. So what would the NTSB find if it were to investigate the catastrophic pandemic crash?
I’ll jump to the answer before laying out the background: This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.
The background he lays out is fascinating and terrifying. The pilot was an egotistical moron who didn’t know how to fly a plane and everyone else was incompetent.
He looks at the early warning system that should have given the US plenty of time to prepare for the virus. But because of the rank malfeasance of the Trump administration none of it happened. In fact, the US was counted upon to take the led in a global pandemic and by abdicating our duty, we made it worse for everyone;
From the sky you see only the natural features that separate countries and continents—mountains, water—and not the political demarcation lines. The system that makes flying safe has done so by means of a thoroughgoing, borderless internationalism.
Controllers and flight crews around the world are supposed to be competent in the same spoken language—English—and use the same formulaic instructions that serve as an unambiguous code. For instance: Aviation English prescribes “tree” as the pronunciation for three, in part because the th– sound can be difficult for non-native speakers. Controllers around the world say “Climb and maintain 4,000 feet” rather than “Climb to 4,000 feet,” because to could be misheard as two. Controllers in Paris sequencing a Korean Air plane to land between ones from Lufthansa and Aeromexico at Charles de Gaulle Airport must be sure that all the nationalities involved will follow the same procedures in the same way.
In cases of disease outbreak, U.S. leadership and coordination of the international response was as well established and taken for granted as the role of air traffic controllers in directing flights through their sectors. Typically this would mean working with and through the World Health Organization—which, of course, Donald Trump has made a point of not doing. In the previous two decades of international public-health experience, starting with SARS and on through the rest of the acronym-heavy list, a standard procedure had emerged, and it had proved effective again and again. The U.S, with its combination of scientific and military-logistics might, would coordinate and support efforts by other countries. Subsequent stages would depend on the nature of the disease, but the fact that the U.S. would take the primary role was expected. When the new coronavirus threat suddenly materialized, American engagement was the signal all other participants were waiting for. But this time it did not come. It was as if air traffic controllers walked away from their stations and said, “The rest of you just work it out for yourselves.”
From the U.S. point of view, news of a virulent disease outbreak anywhere in the world is unwelcome. But in normal circumstances, its location in China would have been a plus. Whatever the ups and downs of political relations over the past two decades, Chinese and American scientists and public-health officials have worked together frequently, and positively, on health crises ranging from SARS during George W. Bush’s administration to the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks during Barack Obama’s. As Peter Beinart extensively detailed in an Atlantic article, the U.S. helped build China’s public-health infrastructure, and China has cooperated in detecting and containing diseases within its borders and far afield. One U.S. official recalled the Predict program: “Getting Chinese agreement to American monitors throughout their territory—that was something.” But then the Trump administration zeroed out that program.
“We had cooperated with China on every public-health threat until now,” Susan Shirk, a former State Department official and longtime scholar of Chinese affairs at UC San Diego, told me. “SARS, AIDS, Ebola in Africa, H1N1—no matter what other disputes were going on in the relationship, we managed to carve out health, and work together quite professionally. So this case is just so anomalous and so tragic.” A significant comparison, she said, is the way the United States and the Soviet Union had worked together to eliminate smallpox around the world, despite their Cold War tensions. But now, she said, “people have definitely died because the U.S. and China have been unable to cooperate.
I will just point out that Trump’s parochial, nationalist, “populism” made this happen but the backward thinking of many isolationist types of both left and right contributed. We can pretend we live on out own island and needn’t deal with international institutions but that won’t make it true.
Anyway, that’s just a taste of this fascinating article. There’s much more and it’s devastating…
This piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker about the Mueller investigation is a must, must read. I think this gets to the crux of its thesis:
The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.” Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.” According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed.
In fact, the opposite is true. Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report. In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller—he should be thanking him.
I have to say that I’m sort of embarrassed that I put as much faith in Mueller’s reputation for straight-arrow, integrity as I did. I assumed that he and his team would be as appalled by what we were seeing in broad daylight and when they found whatever was hidden, and there was plenty, that they would not hesitate to “do the right thing.”
But “do the right thing, is open to interpretation. And apparently, he was restricted in his mandate from the start and didn’t ever push the boundaries:
At the first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Russia investigation, on June 3, 2020, Graham opened the proceedings by saying, “It’s important to find out what the hell happened.” He wanted to know whether, when Mueller was appointed, there was any evidence that Trump’s campaign had been colluding with the Russians. McCabe’s briefing of Mueller, along with a subsequent meeting between Mueller and Rosenstein—neither of which has been previously reported—begin to address Graham’s question. These meetings demonstrate that, from the beginning, Mueller was instructed to conduct a narrow, fact-based criminal investigation.
After McCabe’s briefing, Mueller, Zebley, and Quarles went to the Justice Department for an introductory meeting with Rosenstein. Rosenstein wasn’t as familiar with the evidence as McCabe and his team were, but he had a broader piece of advice for Mueller. Now that he was Mueller’s boss, it could be interpreted as a command. “I love Ken Starr,” Rosenstein said, according to people present. (Starr was the independent counsel who oversaw the Clinton Whitewater investigation; Rosenstein had been a prosecutor on the Arkansas portion of that inquiry.) “But his investigation was a fishing expedition. Don’t do that. This is a criminal investigation. Do your job, and then shut it down.”
In other words, far from authorizing a wide-ranging investigation of the President and his allies, the Justice Department directed Mueller to limit his probe to individuals who were reasonably suspected of committing crimes. Temperamentally as well as professionally, Mueller was inclined to follow this advice. The very notion of a criminal investigation lasting more than eight years, as the Whitewater case had, was repellent to him, as was Starr’s seemingly desperate search to find something to pin on his target. Persistent news leaks from Starr’s office and Starr’s frequent sessions with reporters in the driveway of his home, in suburban Virginia, were also anathema to Mueller, who began his inquiry by imposing a comprehensive press blackout.
Perhaps that would have made sense in another era with a thoroughly corrupt imbecile for a president who was 100% clueless about the constitution and democratic norms and wouldn’t have cared if he wasn’t. But common sense showed that Trump was a rogue president from the start and a grave danger to the country.
According to Toobin, they determined right at the outset that there were possible criminal charges against Flynn, Papadopoulous and Manafort and that was it. And Mueller never intended to go beyond that.
Mueller did not use the F.B.I. information as a catalyst for a deeper examination of Trump’s history and personal finances. Nor did he demand to see Trump’s taxes, or examine the roots of his special affinity for Putin’s Russia. Most important, Mueller declined to issue a grand-jury subpoena for Trump’s testimony, and excluded from his report a conclusion that Trump had committed crimes. These two decisions are the most revealing, and defining, failures of Mueller’s tenure as special counsel.
Dear God. Why did they bother?
In a way, I’m a little bit more sympathetic to Barr after all this. If the investigation was never intended to go any further than these small potatoes probes then all the secrecy just lent a whole lot more drama to the whole thing than was necessary. Just as Starr’s wide-ranging probe created an atmosphere of impending doom for the president, Mueller’s secrecy ended up doing the same thing. Jesus.
And then there is the report.
Mueller had uncovered extensive evidence that Trump had repeatedly committed the crime of obstruction of justice. To take just the most prominent examples: Trump told Comey to stop the investigation of Flynn (“Let this go”). When Comey didn’t stop the Russia investigation, Trump fired him. Trump instructed his former aide Corey Lewandowski to tell Attorney General Sessions to limit the special-counsel investigation. Most important, Trump told Don McGahn, the White House counsel, to arrange for Mueller to be fired and then, months later, told McGahn to lie about the earlier order. (Both Lewandowski and McGahn declined to help engineer Comey’s firing.)
The impeachment proceedings against Nixon and Clinton were rooted in charges of obstruction of justice, and Trump’s offenses were even broader and more enduring. Moreover, Mueller’s staff had analyzed in detail whether each of Trump’s actions met the criteria for obstruction of justice, and in the report the special counsel asserted that, in at least these four instances, it did. But Mueller still stopped short of saying that Trump had committed the crime.
Mueller’s team faced a dilemma. If Mueller had brought criminal charges against Trump, the President would have had the chance to defend himself in court, but, in light of the O.L.C’s opinion, Mueller could not charge Trump. So Mueller decided not to say whether Trump committed a crime, because he was never going to face an actual trial. The report stated, “A prosecutor’s judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.” In other words, in a gesture of fairness to the President, Mueller withheld a final verdict.
That still left the issue of what Mueller should say about Trump’s conduct. His judgment was announced in what became the most famous paragraph of the report:
Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
Nothing in Mueller’s mandate required him to reach such a confusing and inconclusive final judgment on the most important issue before him. As a prosecutor, his job was to determine whether the evidence was sufficient to bring cases. The O.L.C.’s opinion prohibited Mueller from bringing a case, but Mueller gave Trump an unnecessary gift: he did not even say whether the evidence supported a prosecution. Mueller’s compromising language had another ill effect. Because it was so difficult to parse, it opened the door for the report to be misrepresented by countless partisans acting in bad faith, including the Attorney General of the United States.
Toobin goes into how Barr manipulated the results of the report and Mueller’s displeasure. We knew about this, of course, but it’s still stomach churning to read it.
He concludes:
Barr was able to dismantle the Mueller report only because the special counsel and his staff had made it easy for him to do so. Robert Mueller forfeited the opportunity to speak clearly and directly about Trump’s crimes, and Barr filled the silence with his high-volume exoneration. Mueller’s investigation was no witch hunt; his report was, ultimately, a surrender.
The vaunted Mueller team was outmaneuvered at every stage by ..(checks notes) … Jay Sekulow, John Dowd, Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr.
Good God.
There’s much more interesting detail in the piece and I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
