Month: July 2021

This appears to be quite a story and I’d imagine there’s even more to it than what they know.

Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.

The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.

The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiationof surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.Story continues below advertisement

Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to the list and shared it with the news organizations, which did further research and analysis. Amnesty’s Security Lab did the forensic analyses on the smartphones.

The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials — including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list.

Among the journalists whose numbers appear on the list, which dates to 2016, are reporters working overseas for several leading news organizations, including a small number from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London and Al Jazeera in Qatar.

The targeting of the 37 smartphones would appear to conflict with the stated purpose of NSO’s licensing of the Pegasus spyware, which the company says is intended only for use in surveilling terrorists and major criminals. The evidence extracted from these smartphones, revealed here for the first time, calls into question pledges by the Israeli company to police its clients for human rights abuses.

The media consortium analyzed the list through interviews and forensic analysis of the phones, and by comparing details with previously reported information about NSO. Amnesty’s Security Lab examined 67 smartphones where attacks were suspected. Of those, 23 were successfully infected and 14 showed signs of attempted penetration.

For the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the phones had been replaced. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. However, unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty’s detective work. Three Android phones showed signs of targeting, such as Pegasus-linked SMS messages.

Amnesty shared backup copies of dataon four iPhones with Citizen Lab, which confirmed that they showed signs of Pegasus infection. Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that specializes in studying Pegasus, also conducted a peer review of Amnesty’s forensic methods and found them to be sound.Story continues below advertisement

In lengthy responses, NSO called the investigation’s findings exaggerated and baseless. It also said it does not operate the spyware licensed to its clients and “has no insight” into their specific intelligence activities.

NSO describes its customers as 60 intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies in 40 countries, although it will not confirm the identities of any of them, citing client confidentiality obligations. The consortium found many of the phone numbers in at least 10 country clusters, which were subjected to deeper analysis: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Citizen Lab also has found evidence that all 10 have been clients of NSO, according to Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow.

Forbidden Stories organized the media consortium’s investigation, titled the Pegasus Project, and Amnesty provided analysis and technical support but had no editorial input. Amnesty has openly criticized NSO’s spyware business and supported an unsuccessful lawsuit against the company in an Israeli court seeking to have its export license revoked. After the investigation began, several reporters in the consortium learned that they or their family members had been successfully attacked with Pegasus spyware.

The Guardian took a look at Tucker Carlson’s favorite right wing “populist”:

Viktor Orbán’s government has deployed a new weapon in its war on the media in Hungary, according to forensic analysis of several mobile devices, using some of the world’s most invasive spyware against investigative journalists and the circle of one of the country’s last remaining independent media owners…

The Pegasus project, a collaborative investigation run by the French nonprofit journalism organisation Forbidden Stories, has reviewed leaked records that suggest a wide range of people in Hungary were selected as potential targets before a possible hacking attempt with the sophisticated Pegasus spyware, sold by the Israeli company NSO Group. In a number of cases, forensic analysis confirmed devices had been infected with Pegasus.

The leaked data includes the phone numbers of people who appear to be targets of legitimate national security or criminal investigations.

However, the records also include the numbers of at least 10 lawyers, an opposition politician and at least five journalists.

The phones of two journalists at the Hungarian Pegasus project partner, the investigative outlet Direkt36, were successfully infected with the spyware, including Szabolcs Panyi, a well-known reporter with a wide range of sources in diplomatic and national security circles.

Forensic analysis of his device by Amnesty International stated conclusively it had been repeatedly compromised by Pegasus during a seven-month period in 2019, with the infection often coming soon after comment requests made by Panyi to Hungarian government officials.

Pegasus enables the attacker to view all content on a phone, including messages from apps with end-to-end encryption, photographs and GPS location data. It can also turn the device into an audio or video recorder. NSO has claimed the spyware is only meant for use against serious criminals and terrorists.

Panyi thinks some in the Orbán government believe independent journalists are part of a conspiracy against them. “I think there’s widespread paranoia and they see much more in our motives and our networks than there actually is,” he said.

“We are not aware of any alleged data collection claimed by the request,” said a Hungarian government spokesperson in response to detailed questions about the targeting of Panyi and others.

NSO Group said it “does not have access to the data of its customers’ targets”, cast doubt on the significance of the leaked data and said it would “continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action”.

Previously, Orbán’s spokesperson Zoltán Kovács has publicly attacked Panyi, accusing him of “Orbánophobia and Hungarophobia” and describing him as “deep into political activism”.

Since Orbán became prime minister in 2010, Hungary has fallen from 23rd to 92nd in the World Press Freedom Index. Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders put Orbán on its Enemies of Press Freedom list, the first time an EU leader has featured.

Tucker loves the guy because he is in favor of the “traditional family” to be supported by the government so women will stay home and have more white children. (I’m not making that up.) Trump’s cult would love an American Orbán. He knows how to do what’s necessary to protect their “status.” Tucker does too.

It appears that the GOP’s most precious constituency has laid down the law to its minions:

A Republican senator who’s helping to negotiate a bipartisan infrastructure proposal said Sunday that the group is no longer looking at toughening enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service as a way to pay for the massive bill.

“Well, one reason it’s not part of the proposal is that we did have pushback. Another reason is that we found out that the Democrats were going to put a proposal into the reconciliation package, which was not just similar to the one we had, but with a lot more IRS enforcement,” Sen. Rob Portman told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked about Republican opposition to the idea.

“That created quite a problem because the general agreement is that this is the bipartisan-negotiated infrastructure package and that we will stick with that,” added Portman, a lead Republican negotiator in the group who said he has been working with the White House on the legislation.

The comments from the Ohio Republican mean that the group of lawmakers will have to continue looking for ways to pay for the costly infrastructure package, the latest version of which suggested that an additional $100 billion could be collected by the IRS over the next 10 years simply by beefing up enforcement and making sure the government is collecting what taxpayers actually owe — also known as closing the “tax gap.”

A Democratic aide confirmed to CNN on Sunday that Republicans and Democrats in the bipartisan group have agreed to scrap the enhanced IRS enforcement provision after conservatives pushed back it, endangering the group’s ability to get a deal ahead of a procedural vote scheduled for Wednesday to advance the legislation.

Yeah, I don’t believe this idea that they “heard” the Democrats were going to put in an IRS provision in their reconciliation bill defied the bipartisan agreement. The Democrats obviously agreed to take out the provision so the Republicans didn’t have to deal with they angry benefactors. It’s possible some of them were feeling heat too, of course, but presumably they will have to put this into their reconciliation bill anyway in order to give the nervous centrists the excuse that this is all “paid for.”

I don’t know if this means the topline number of the bipartisan deal will have to come down or if they’ll find some other form of revenue. And, needless to say, the reconciliation deal is hardly solid. Emperor Manchin will have something to say about that. And he probably got an earful at his fundraisers with Texas oil and gas millionaires this weekend. But we’ll just have to continue to watch this negotiation unfold. Anything can happen.

San Francisco, 1918 — prior to being completely overwhelmed

I’ve spent the past year reading a small library of books re: pandemics. Two, so far, stand out.

The Premonition by Michael Lewis tells the story of those public health officials and researchers who saw 2020 coming but, for one reason or another, were sidelined. Trump and trumpism were a major factor, of course (likely8 the major factor) but by the time 2020 rolled around, Lewis makes a convincing case that the CDC was already dysfunctional and there was no federal agency that could respond effectively to the early days of a pandemic before the virus veered out of control.

A character-driven book that is all but impossible to put down, you will long remember Charity Dean, the assistant director of the California Department of Public Health when Covid struck. A perfect made-for-Hollywood heroine (at least, as Lewis portrays her).

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry is easily the most frightening book I’ve ever read — all the more horrible because it’s true. The 1918 pandemic began in Kansas, wreaked much of its havoc around the world in 12 short weeks in the fall of 1918 and was responsible for roughly 500,000 to 850,000 deaths in the US (estimates range between 50 million and 100 million deaths worldwide). In short, 1918 was a far greater calamity than even 2020. The book goes into extensive detail about what happened and how American researchers back then raced desperately to understand what caused influenza and figure out how to fight it.

At least as disturbing as the immediate death toll from the 1918 pandemic were the mental health consequences which had a profound affect on world history. Woodrow Wilson — who, at least as portrayed in this book, was an appallingly bad president — contracted influenza during the WW I peace discussions in Paris. His personality changed. Before getting sick, he was adamantly opposed to the draconian punishments France wanted to mete on Germany. After recovering from his influenza, Wilson essentially acceded to the French demands. The awful terms of this accord seeded a dangerous combination of economic hardship and profound resentment in Germany, both of which directly led to the rise of extremism in the fragile democracy and the eventual takeover of the government by the Nazis.

The Great Influenza is painful to read but it is very well written. For insight into what the world went through back then, and for putting into perspective what we just experienced, it is, I believe, an essential read. I’m very glad I read it and hope you will, too.

They can’t be any clearer if they put on white hoods and started burning crosses:

The Texas Senate on Friday passed legislation that would end requirements that public schools include writings on women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement in social studies classes.

Among the figures whose works would be dropped: Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream”speech and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would no longer make the curriculum cut.

The bill (S.B. 3), which was passed on a vote of 18 to 4, now is stalled because the House can’t achieve a quorum while a breakaway group of Democrats is out of the state. The special session is set to end on Aug. 6.

It would remove more than two dozen teaching requirements from a new law (H.B 3979) that bars the teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework exploring racism’s shaping of the country.

That law included a list of historic figures, events and documents required for inclusion in social studies classes. The Senate-passed bill would remove most mentions of people of color and women from those requirements, along with a requirement that students be taught about the history of white supremacy and “the ways in which it is morally wrong.”

The measure also would bar the teaching of the 1619 Project— a New York Times initiative exploring U.S. history starting at the date enslaved people arrived in the English colonies.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who presides over the Senate, said in a statement after the vote that “Senate Bill 3 will make certain that critical race philosophies including the debunked 1619 founding myth, are removed from our school curriculums statewide.”

“Parents want their students to learn how to think critically, not be indoctrinated by the ridiculous leftist narrative that America and our Constitution are rooted in racism,” Patrick said.

“What we’re doing with this bill, we’re saying that specific reading list doesn’t belong in statute,” said the bill’s author, state Sen. Bryan Hughes (R).

Instead, such requirements should be in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS,standards developed by the State Board of Education, he said.

“Not just politicians but teachers and parents and administrators have a say in that process,” he said.

The bill would prohibit teachers from being compelled to talk about current events or controversial issues, instructing those choosing to engage with students to discuss without “giving deference to any one perspective.”

Speaking on the chamber floor, state Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D) said the legislation amounts to “tying the hands of our teachers.”

“How could a teacher possibly discuss slavery, the Holocaust, or the mass shootings at the Walmart in El Paso or at the Sutherland Springs church in my district without giving deference to any one perspective?,” she said.

Apparently, they want teachers to be sure to fairly portray the “perspective” of slave-owners, Nazis and mass murderers. You know, so the kids that think critically.

I get the feeling way too many people are failing to take this seriously. These people are regressing to a time before the 1960s. And they’re proud of it.

Gene Shalit’s gonzo “Today Show” review (I wish I could find) sent me to the theater to see RoboCop when it first ran in theaters. Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 satirical cop film was on TV last night and holds up pretty well. RoboCop 2, the 1990 sequel by director Irvin Kershner, not so much.

It’s just a coincidence that that one of the TV ads from that sequel presaged a news story CNN ran the other day:

The burning heat of summer has us all reaching for sunscreens. But before you slather that product on your skin, first check to see if it is part of a voluntary recall by sunscreen brands Neutrogena and Aveeno.

The companies recently pulled several sunscreens from market shelves after independent testing had found they were contaminated with a cancer-causing chemical called benzene.

Those products (and others listed) are aerosol sprays. By the time of RoboCop‘s near-future, the ozone layer had been destroyed by aerosols, so Sunblock 5000 came instead in a handy blue-green cream. One pint slathered on and you were good for hours in the California sun. Unfortunately, the fictional product was not designed to combat the western heat 34 years later.

“On Monday, Billings could be as hot or hotter than Phoenix,” the Washington Post reports.

It has been at least 95 F in Boise, Idaho for a record 20 straight days. Las Vegas reached 117 F degrees last week, which the Washington Post describes as (emphasis mine) “its warmest temperature ever recorded,” adding:

A major concern on Sunday and Monday is the prospect of dry thunderstorms, from the Sierra Nevada mountain range northward through much of northern Nevada, eastern Idaho and central Montana. These storms could unleash cloud-to-ground lightning that ignites new blazes.

Wildfires, air quality alerts, and stinging eyes extend as far as Alberta where crops are baking in the heat:

Cherries have roasted on trees. Fields of canola and wheat have withered brown. And as feed and safe water for animals grow scarce, ranchers may have no choice but to sell off their livestock.

“It will totally upend Canadian food production if this becomes a regular thing,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.

A heat dome roasted Canada in late June, leading to hundreds of “sudden and unexpected” deaths, according to officials, and sparkedfear among Canadian farmers and climate experts. A village in British Columbia claimed the nation’s highest recorded temperature, clocking in just shy of 115 degrees. This weekend, another scorching wave is expected to return to the nation.

“We can’t farm like this, where there’s a giant disruption every year,” said Newman. “Or we’re going to have to really rethink how we produce food.”

Maybe sunscreen for crops?

That Republicans want to fall in line behind their candidates and Democrats want to fall in love with theirs is by now hoary political wisdom. But it speaks as much to different personality types as ideologies. On the right, to an authoritarian one.

Rick Perlstein spoke with “The Majority Report” last week about his June 30 article on the authoritarian roots of the Capitol riot. The occasion was his June 30 article in New York magazine. Perlstein found a gem from 1981 in Advertizing Age. The magazine had named Reagan chief strategist Richard Wirthlin its Adman of the Year, Perlstein writes:

Wirthlin began his work in 1979 with an exhaustive “Survey of Voter Values and Attitudes,” in which he discovered that Reagan supporters “obtain high scores on … authoritarianism — and a low score on egalitarianism.” It continued, “Eastern European ethnic groups living in large cities … follow the same pattern, and hence were a prime target for conversion.” Thus Reagan launched his nomination campaign with “highly visible visits to such neighborhoods.”

A Wirthlin assistant was then quoted: “Reagan decided to stop the practice because he considered it exploitative.” In fact, Reagan made constant campaign stops in white ethnic neighborhoods, and God knows his appeal to authoritarians never sagged. The crucial point is that a Reagan associate even thought to claim Reagan put the kibosh on the enterprise. There’s an old saying: Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Meaning, those who say one thing and do another are at least acknowledging that right and wrong exist. If you want to understand the evolution of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, that’s the whole rancid enchilada.

It’s always been about building a political base of authoritarians. But at least Republicans used to be sheepish about it. Donald “They’re Rapists” Trump was but a milestone in the Republican Party’s long journey toward dropping the pretense altogether. January 6, 2021, was another. Build your party’s power by actively seeking out thugs, and of course things eventually get out of hand.

I warned a new congressional candidate Saturday that voter registration in the district is a misleading measure of the relative Democrat-Republican strength here. There are still many Reagan Democrats left over from the Civil Rights Era when southern Democrats moved toward the Republican Party. Many simply never switched party identification.

The T-party explosion after Barack Obama’s election was, for all it’s pretensions to economic conservatism, as much about race as the image of Obama as a bone-in-nose witch doctor made clear.

Vaccine resistance in 2021 has some of those undertones. Some among the Republican faithful would rather not have the vaccine at all if those people get it too. But it is also a measure of manliness and faithfulness to Trump to face Covid unprotected.

Resistance to getting a “Fauci ouchie” is also defiance of another Democrat in the Oval Office and obediance to Donald Trump, supposed president in exile. His followers will die for him, at least in their own minds, and until face-to-face with the reality or else a double lung transplant.

Michael C. Bender described the allure Trump rallies have for his followers:

In Trump, they’d found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work. His rallies turned arenas into modern-day tent revivals, where the preacher and the parishioners engaged in an adrenaline-fueled psychic cleansing brought on by chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded loyalists …

“The whole place is erupting, everyone is screaming, and your heart is beating like, just, oh my God,” Kiczenski told me. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime.”

“It’s their Woodstock,” Digby tweeted. But perhaps more like Brother Love’s Salvation Show. Without the love, and where salvation comes through sacrificing oneself for Him even if it means the destruction of the country.

“We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage,” 56-year-old Saundra Kiczenski from Michigan told Bender. “We were just there to overthrow the government.”

They won’t just fall in line but fall in battle.

“What Democrats have been slow to understand is that this is an insurgency against democracy with parliamentary and paramilitary wings, ” Perlstein writes.

The paramilitary wing of the party mobbed the Capitol seeking traitors to lynch. Meanwhile, the parliamentary wing, represented by the majority of the Republican members of the House and Senate who voted not to certify Biden’s electoral votes, raised a clenched fist. Together, these two wings compose the right-wing model of governance — and at this model’s heart lies the citizen as bearer of violent threat.

You build an authoritarian movement and of course things eventually get out of hand.

And the predictable result of disinformation and cynical, nihilistic politicians putting their cult before all is a heartbreaking tragedy:

We’ve been talking about how the Delta variant is more transmissible and how it’s hitting the unvaccinated harder. Now, it’s happening to some of our youngest here in Arkansas. 

Angela Morris’ daughter, Caia Morris Cooper, is fighting for her life at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. 

She said the hardest part about watching her child suffer is that the entire thing was preventable.

“It’s very hard to see her in this situation. It’s very hard not knowing if she’s really going to come home anymore or not,” Morris said. “It’s heartbreaking. I wish I would’ve made better choices for her.”

She has spent the last 12 days inside Arkansas Children’s Hospital watching her 13-year-old breathe with the help of a ventilator.

Morris said it started with only flu-like symptoms.

“I really thought that since she stayed home a lot and when I went out, I always wore my mask. I really thought that she was going to be protected,” she said.

Morris said that she decided against vaccinations for both herself and Caia due to misinformation . 

“I just had a false sense of security that it was just like the flu and it wasn’t that serious. Obviously it is that serious and it was that serious. Now, I can see,” she said.

Caia is one of three patients at Arkansas Children’s Hospital on a ventilator and one of seven currently battling COVID-19.

Dr. Jessica Snowden, Arkansas Children’s Hospital Chief of Infectious Diseases, said they are seeing more sick children as the Delta variant surges in the state.

“This is looking more like what we saw this winter and less of what we had been seeing during the springtime,” Snowden said.

The various symptoms they’ve seen in children range from mild to severe, according to Snowden.

“We’ve had perfectly healthy children who end up in the hospital, in the ICU, with COVID-19 infection,” she said. “So it is definitely something that could impact anyone.” 

The age range is wide too, but Snowden said there’s one common denominator. 

“All of the children we have admitted who are seriously sick with COVID-19 are either too young to get vaccinated, or haven’t been vaccinated yet,” she said.

While her daughter continues to fight, Morris doesn’t want anyone else’s child in the same situation.

“I just want people to get their kids their shots. Everybody just needs to get the shot. It’s a much better route than the one we’re in,” she said.

If Trump and his assholes had gotten behind the vaccination program, if Facebook and the others had cracked down on disinformation, if Fox News had fired that sciopath Tucker Carlson and the rest of them, it is highly unlikely that this many people would be unvaccinated and uninformed.

I knew he was a typical, hardcore, right-wing, win-by-any-means-necessary, Christian hypocrite of the highest order. But this?

As a former professional partisan, I never thought I’d look back decades to my political beginnings and find the map that points to our current moment, when there is serious doubt whether the democracy we took for granted at the time will continue to exist. Despite all the posturing and gamesmanship and at times skullduggery back then, political opponents shared an understanding that the process enforced by our Constitution would prevail, no one would get everything they wanted every time, and the state of the union would remain strong. As it turns out, too many people like me stuck our heads in the sand, swallowed our doubts, let the unacceptable slide, convinced ourselves it was in the interest of the greater good, and never dreamed that we would look back and realize that a failure to say “Enough!” had led to our country’s biggest existential crisis since the Civil War.

I entered what as I now see as our long national unraveling during the Clinton impeachment, as an adviser to independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and over the next couple of decades as I remained personally and professionally dedicated to him. Only in the last three years, thanks to the hold of an unhinged liar and mega-grifter on my party and so it seems my old mentor, have I been able to recognize that Starr has been at the intersection of so many wrong turns our country has made. And now, as he attaches himself to a new presidential prospect and joins former Vice President Mike Pence at a Family Leadership Summit in Iowa this coming weekend, it has become clear to me that I am morally — indeed patriotically — obligated to speak up for the moral decency my old mentor continues to violate in the name of moral decency.

It is undeniably fitting that this account should turn on the cliché of the scarlet letter. For somehow Starr’s role as the nation’s parson always comes back around to sex. Perhaps his fascination was heightened early on by his involvement in the Packwood Diaries scandal, but most notably, of course, was his 1998 pursuit of former president Clinton over his sexual relationship with a White House intern, which was bookended by his recent impeachment foray, this time defending an adulterous President, who lies about so much more sin than that. And in between he zealously took up the cause of a Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual assault, Jeffrey Epstein, a Baylor University football player accused of rape and even a schoolteacher in suburban Virginia found guilty of molesting 5 young school girls. And even still, in 2021, he published his latest book extolling the virtues of intersecting religion and the judiciary. Starr is “all in” for ramming the most extreme of White conservative judges, experienced or not, that will decide human fates based on Christian beliefs into federal, life-tenured seats. Forget the separation of church and state! That’s not what the founding fathers intended according to him.

I can date the beginning of my own rebirth to July 9, 2018, the day Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice on the Supreme Court. I sent Starr a text saying, “You said to me 20 years ago, that Brett was ‘going places’ Clearly!” [punctuation sic] It was my first communication to Starr in memory that went unanswered, and I wondered if he picked up that my message had a bit of an edge. I had met Kavanaugh in 1998 when he was a 33-year-old member of then, Independent Counsel Starr’s team investigating Bill Clinton, and I was a 39-year-old strategic communications consultant hired to help prep Starr to present Congress with his legendary report detailing President Bill Clinton’s sexual interactions with a Monica Lewinsky. One day after a meeting at the independent counsel offices, I was alone in a conference room collecting materials when Kavanaugh entered. He began berating me and invading my personal space in a deranged fury that sent me into flight around the table.

After I invoked “Judge Starr” a few times, a deflated Kavanaugh left, but I felt duty bound to report the incident to Starr. As my client, he needed to be informed about anything that might raise a red flag, and my pulse rate told me this was one. Starr reacted with seeming surprise, saying Brett was probably being protective of him, and moreover was destined for great things — possibly the Supreme Court. “Not if he treats women like that he won’t,” I replied. I then asked Ken to seek an apology from Brett on my behalf and was told, “I’m apologizing to you for him. This is it.” Hence my text to Starr in 2018 acknowledging his prediction.

As Kavanaugh’s confirmation process proceeded, I had no plans to come forward about that encounter. Though I found Christine Blasey Ford credible when she described being assaulted by Kavanaugh as a teenager, I wasn’t sure about the relevance of my experience, which, though quite aggressive and unsettling, was not physically violent and I did not suspect it was alcohol-fueled because at the time I didn’t know that Kavanaugh had been a well-known blackout drunk in college. It was only when I saw his snarling “refutation” of Blasey Ford that I realized that his almost feral belligerence in that conference room more than 20 years earlier had not been a one-off.

After a sleepless weekend of pacing, planning and crying out of sheer heartsickness over what was happening to my country, I submitted a statement describing the incident to two Democratic senators and two Republicans including Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator who had succeeded in postponing the vote on Kavanaugh until the FBI conducted an investigation into the mounting charges that were far more serious than mine. The next day, on Wednesday October 3, I texted a message to Starr via his now deceased good friend Tim O’Brien, a former ABC News reporter who had covered the Clinton impeachment. I knew O’Brien was with Starr and his wife, Alice, on an annual bike trip that a group of friends had been taking for years, this one to Croatia.

I had been on the bike trip through Tuscany in 2009. Early one evening while our spouses were at dinner elsewhere, Starr had stepped out from the shadows of the grounds of the inn where we were staying and called me over. After expressing his feelings for me, he pulled me into an embrace. This was the beginning of a fond, consensual affair that I had every intention of taking to the grave, even if it probably wasn’t an accident that I chose O’Brien of all my friends on that Croatia trip to send my text to during the Kavanaugh hearings. When I had drawn back from that first kiss in Italy, I noticed that O’Brien was looking at us from the balcony above. Though I can’t be sure O’Brien could see that Starr had taken my hand and placed it on his crotch, there can be little doubt that he saw the kiss Starr had initiated. And when I expressed to Ken my horror at having been observed, he had said, “It’s O.K., he understands.” Nine years later, I was reasonably sure O’Brien would relay my text message to Starr.

I look back on that text now with a bit of compassion for my naive faith in my political party’s better angels. “I would like for Ken and Alice to know that I pray for Brett to step aside and I hope Ken can look him in the eye and release him from this for the sake of his family and this country,” I wrote. “I had a problem with Brett 20 years ago. Ken knows… Murkowski, Coons, Flake and Hirono have a statement from me about what happened. The FBI is not involved. The press is not involved — yet… My God… Brett is not right. Do what you think is best.” I also left a voicemail with O’Brien in a trembling voice. I thought that if I could slow this crazy train for just a few days, more would come out about Kavanaugh and they would decide he just wasn’t worth it and move on. After all, there were other potential appointees in the queue, including Amy Coney Barrett.

That, of course, is not what happened, though Tim did indeed get my text, according to the “read” notification I received. And he returned my call — or rather left me a message saying he “saw” I called, never mentioning the text. But that callback came early the following week, and the vote to give Kavanaugh his life-long seat on the high court had already taken place the previous Saturday, October 6. Whether Starr had any coordination with the Kavanaugh team in Washington I don’t know — and in any case those advisers had bigger brush fires than me to put out, like the potential witnesses to the nominee’s alleged exposed penis at Yale.

I dealt with my dismay over Kavanaugh’s confirmation by going to North Dakota soon after to work for the reelection campaign of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a vulnerable, moderate Democrat made even more so by her principled vote against him.There, I met several women and men from all over the country who came because of Kavanaugh and like me, not all of them were Democrats. While Heitkamp was losing her seat on Election Day, November 6, my account of my 1998 encounter with Kavanaugh was the most read story on Slate.com. My editors had had to call Starr for comment, and I was stunned when I read his statement in print. His “I do not recall any mention of any incident involving Brett Kavanaugh” was surprising enough. But the ensuing embellishment went way beyond lawyerly parsing and into the realm of falsehood: “To the contrary, throughout his service in the independent counsel’s office, now-Justice Kavanaugh comported himself at all times with high professionalism and respect toward all our colleagues.”

Could he really have written that with a straight face after an older and presumably wiser Kavanaugh had just demonstrated the opposite of high professionalism and respect while auditioning for one of the highest offices in the land? Had, in fact, just repeated the very, explosive behavior of which I had accused him — both at the time it happened and in the Slate article? That Starr, this man I had for so long respected and at the time still did, had basically called me a liar in print made me begin to reexamine my entire association with him.

There was the time in January 2010 when I saw him in California — he was then dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law — and he asked me, if on my next visit to South Florida, I could extend myself to counsel a “very wealthy, very smart businessman who got himself into trouble for getting involved with a couple of underage girls who lied about their ages.” I confess I did not recognize Jeffrey Epstein’s name at the time, but I knew what statutory rape was and I couldn’t understand why Ken Starr would be involved with him. “Is this a church thing?” I asked. “Are you trying to ‘cure’ him? Why would you do this!” It did not occur to me that he might have been part of the legal team that executed a secret and egregious sweetheart deal for the convicted pedophile or that the stickler for details I knew Starr to be might be grossly undercounting the victims in question. “Everyone deserves representation, Judi,” he said, adding, “He promised to keep it above 18 from now on.” According to an alleged victim statement after the fact, the middle-aged, child molestor, Jeffrey Epstein, did not keep his sex with girls above the age of 18.

At my core during the Clinton impeachment I knew that what the Starr team was doing to a young woman not much older than 18 was wrong, yet I fell for Starr’s mantra, which he repeated in 2018 on NPR when he was promoting his book, “Contempt,” which in a nutshell is where he vaccilates between his deep disdain for the Clinton’s and whining about the reasons he’s not on the Supreme Court, “No one is above the law,” and “what we’re really talking about ultimately is obstruction of justice and the abuse of power.” Starr told me back then, “She brought this on herself, she should have cooperated.” Somehow, he managed to maintain his missionary image, down to making me smile by proposing cocktails: “Shall we have a sarsaparilla?”

Our affair ran its course after a year or so of occasional encounters and a steady exchange of affectionate texts and emails. No fireworks, no drama. I remained his adviser and supporter and he mine and we continued to talk frequently. Later, when I was living and working in Texas, I tried to help him weather his beleaguered tenure at Baylor and then in 2016, when he was fired as a result of a rape scandal involving the college football team, I ran interference for him as best I could. It was a an interview I watched in 2020 with one of Baylor’s aggrieved accusers that helped me understand how I could have been blind for so long to the pattern of misogyny coursing through Starr’s career. Describing a meeting with Starr about her ordeal, she said that he shed a tear along with her, made her feel heard, but did nothing to help get justice for her or the many other female students who came forward with allegations. Unless you count what he said in one interview, “We grieve for what happened. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t say it’s a new day. That’s the biblical perspective that we try to live up to here at Baylor University.” Shamelessly and effectively, he shoved rape allegations under the carpet in the name of Christianity.

It took me 20 years to pull my head out of the proverbial sand, but I can see clearly now all the harm Ken Starr has done from the 1990s and now beyond as he reaches for Mike Pence’s presumed coattails. Seeing him lend his practiced piety to a president who lies so much that he was considered by his previous lawyers to be a walking perjury machine along with his sanctimonious “Religious Liberty in Crisis” campaign that he is presently stumping around the country, has made my story suddenly feel urgent. It’s not just the hypocrisy, it’s the damage Starr’s sham moral authority has done to — our nation, to our people, and remember those children his client separated from their parents and put in cages at the border?

I don’t know if Ken will lie about sex with me. Presumably he would not lie about it under oath after having a president impeached for doing the same. But like Ken, I do believe in God, and surely God will be ready with a roster of “Would Judi be lying if she said…” queries such as he forced a sitting president to answer in front of the world. The inexplicably vulgar questions that were asked of a disgraced, red-faced Bill Clinton — about cigars and oral sex — were, of course, scripted by a young Brett Kavanaugh, who is now Starr’s legacy on the Supreme Court.

It is my fervent hope that every time Ken Starr enters a church, when he bows his head to pray, that he sees the faces of all the children and women who had been harmed and that he could have helped, but did not. In my own view, “He didn’t see them because they were invisible to him.” And perhaps one day the prophecy that Kavanaugh uttered in his confirmation hearings — “What goes around comes around” — will boomerang back on our mutual mentor as well before he harms us any further.

I’ll just leave that here for now.

Wow.

Doubtful. I suspect that if those two are among those who are still all in for MAGA. And, ironically, they are also no doubt among those who everyone is now lecturing us must be handled with kid gloves and treated very delicately because if they feel humiliated they won’t get the vaccine.

But some people are having second thought. This from Andrew McCarthy at National Review is really something:

If Republicans are going to have any chance of stopping the ruinous Democratic reign by winning in 2022 and 2024, they must stop relitigating the lost presidential election of 2020. Trump will never let that go, but Republicans have to.

Keep in mind: across the nation, down-ballot conservative Republicans significantly outperformed Trump — whereas in Georgia, Trump single-handedly cost Republicans the Senate seats they needed to stop Biden’s demolition of the economy and conveyor-belt appointment of woke-progressive judges and bureaucrats.

Donald Trump cannot win the presidency again. He is popular in a number of places, but poison in most others. The former president will never again have what he’d need to win a national election: the reluctant support of doubters who, for the sake of stopping Democrats, were willing to take a chance on his flawed character. Had it not been for Trump’s bizarre post-election performance, culminating in the disgraceful Capitol riot, congressional Republicans would be in a position to stop Democrats right now — we wouldn’t be looking at another three to six trillion dollars down the drain (along with a stealth amnesty plan, a potential federal takeover of elections, and anything else on the progressive wish-list that they can manage to slam past the Senate parliamentarian).

The reasons for Trump’s political rise and the many positive aspects of his presidency hold important lessons for Republicans. But those positive aspects mainly involved enabling conservative advisers and subordinates to implement policy — often against his instincts, which are not conservative. The future of the party has to be conservative. If the future is Trump, it will no longer be the conservative party, and it will be in the wilderness for a very long time.

Good luck with that. The GOP hasn’t been a conservative party for a very long time, if it ever was. (It’s mostly been a reactionary faction dedicated to protecting the wealthy by appealing to certain white voters with nationalist, racist demagoguery.) Today the party has completely organized itself around MAGA and the Big Lie.

And the rank and file is immersed in disinformation and conspiracies — and they are loving it. From the Michael Bender book:

Donald Trump soaked in the adoration as he commanded a rally stage inside a massive central Florida arena. I stewed in my seat and stopped taking notes.

It was the third summer of Trump’s presidency, and the event had been billed as the official kickoff of his reelection campaign. What unfolded, however, was effectively the exact same rally I’d already covered at least 50 times since 2016 as a White House and political reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Traditionally, a campaign launch marks an inflection point for a candidate to frame the race, offering a new message or a second-term agenda. But the only differences that day in June 2019 were cosmetic: The sound system was louder, the physical stage grander. Timeworn chants of “Lock her up” and “Build the wall” rippled through the arena, with Trump supporters echoing their favorite lines like childhood friends at a sleepover watching their favorite movie for the umpteenth time.

Then it struck me. The deafening roars and vigorous choruses from the capacity crowd at the 20,000-seat Amway Arena showed that Trump’s supporters were excited to watch a rerun. They’d stood in line for hours or camped overnight — enduring stifling humidity interrupted only by brief bursts of hard, heavy rain — to ensure a spot inside. Now I was rattled. I had let the rallies, which formed the core of one of the most steadfast political movements in modern American history and reordered the Republican Party, turn stale and rote. Why was Trump’s performance still so fresh and resonant for an entire arena of fellow Americans? I spent the next year and a half embedded with a group of Trump’s most hardcore rallygoers — known as the “Front Row Joes” — to try to understand what I’d overlooked. The answer wasn’t so much what I’d missed as what they had found. They were mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck with plenty of time on their hands — retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children — and Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer. The president himself almost always spent the night in his own bed and kept few close friends. But his rallies gave the Joes a reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married — and later divorced — by Trump’s second year in office.

In Trump, they’d found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work. His rallies turned arenas into modern-day tent revivals, where the preacher and the parishioners engaged in an adrenaline-fueled psychic cleansing brought on by chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded loyalists. Saundra Kiczenski, a 56-year-old from Michigan, compared the energy at a Trump rally to the feelings she had as a teenager in 1980 watching the “Miracle on Ice” — when the U.S. Olympic hockey team unexpectedly beat the Soviet Union.

“The whole place is erupting, everyone is screaming, and your heart is beating like, just, oh my God,” Kiczenski told me. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime.”

These super-spreaders give the word “Deadhead” a whole new meaning.

It would be sad if they all weren’t such roaring assholes. But, of course, that’s why they love Trump— and all the other squealing MAGA fans at these rallies. They have found their people. They are united in their love of playground bullying, juvenile insults and stupid conspiracy theories. The shocker is that there are so very many of them.