Read Karen J. Greenberg's Essay On Truth In Public Life & Understand Why This Blog Prefers The Sobriquet, The Lyin' King (LK), For The Current Occupant Of The Oval Office

Today, this blog features an essay that makes the case that the grounds for impeachment of The LK (Lyin; King) should be "Extreme & Repeated Malfeasance" in performance of his duties. The lamestream media should run a red color bar in every video segmant featuring The LK with a simple phrase: "This statement is UNTRUE." This should should have been the case for the more than 13,000 lies uttered since January 2017. If this a (fair & balanced) call for honesty and truth in our public affairs, so be it.

[x The Nation]
There’s A Philosophy Behind Trump’s Lies
By Karen J. Greenberg



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These days, witnessing the administration’s never-ending cruelty at the border, the shenanigans of a White House caught red-handed in attempted bribery in Ukraine, and the disarray of this country’s foreign policy, I feel like I’m seeing a much-scarier remake of a familiar old movie. The cast of characters and the headlines are different, but the thinking underlying it all is, in many ways, eerily reminiscent of what we as a nation experienced during the early years of the Global War on Terror, particularly when it comes to the interactions between the White House and the public. As then, so today, there is distrust, there are conflicting facts, and there is little in the way of a widely agreed-upon narrative about what’s happening, no less how to interpret those events.

The most blatant attack on facts comes in the form of the unabashed lying of President Donald Trump, who obfuscates and changes his many stories with impressive regularity. By this October, after almost 1,000 days in office, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s database, he had made 13,435 false or misleading claims. He had lied about immigration, the stock market, the impact his sanctions and tariffs were having on the American economy, US troop withdrawals from the Middle East, the size of his crowds, and even the weather, which, of course, is just the beginning of a far longer list.

Still, despite the breadth of his falsehoods, the president’s behavior has actually been anything but novel at a fundamental level. After all, President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, took this country to war based on an outright lie—that there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal in Iraq—a falsehood that cost the United States more than a trillion dollars and took staggering numbers of Iraqi and American lives, a war that has never really ended and is widely seen (as Trump and Bernie Sanders have both said) as the worst mistake in our history.

The corrosiveness of official lying has long been the subject of philosophers. Hannah Arendt, writing about the Pentagon Papers and the corrosive effects of falsehoods back in 1971, called “the right to unmanipulated factual information” basic, one “without which all freedom of opinion becomes a cruel hoax.” But it’s important to note that when it comes to the Trump presidency, there is so much more to the strategy of degrading public discourse and debasing the facts than anything as simple and straightforward as mere lying. Political scientist Kelly Greenhill has aptly termed Trump’s assault on the truth “extra-factual information,” pointing to “distraction, threat conflation, normalization, and repetition” as among the methods he employs to make facts anything but what they used to be.

For Trump, lying is but the tip of the iceberg and in this he reflects far more than his own predilections. He reflects as well our moment, our age. George Orwell, that prescient 20th-century observer, warned in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language” about one key aspect of such a lying mindset: the way “lack of precision” in language can pose a danger to society and to political stability.

When it comes to imprecision today, the dangers couldn’t be more real. In fact, the strategies employed in Washington to confuse and mislead the public have subtly eaten away at the country’s collective mindset, creating fertile ground for Trumpian-style lying to successfully take root. In many ways, the focus on Donald Trump’s blatant and persistent lying only serves to obfuscate other no less destructive methods of deceiving the public that preceded him into the White House and helped create the conditions that make the president’s lies so destabilizing.

Consider just six ways in which, in this century, imprecision and cloudiness have come to define American political discourse.

The Recasting of Language: The gutting of the customary uses of language and the substitution of new, imprecise replacements has, as Orwell warned, set the stage for lying and duplicity to multiply. Officials of the Bush administration, for instance, redefined basic legal terms specifically to circumvent the law. Instead of “prisoners” at their Guantánamo Bay detention center, they had “detainees.” Instead of “lawful enemy combatants,” they just had “enemy combatants,” a term without a commonly understood or precise definition that conveniently skipped the idea of lawfulness entirely.

In her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt reminded us how new “language rules” became part and parcel of the Nazi propaganda world in ways meant to confuse the public about the changing German reality. The forced imprisonment of Jews in concentration camps was, for instance, referred to as a “change of residence.” In The Death of Truth (2018), Michiko Kakutani reflects on Trump’s version of such an “assault on language,” his penchant, in particular, for “the taking of words and principles intrinsic to the rule of law and contaminating them with personal agendas and political partisanship.” As examples, she notes his use of words “to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean,” particularly the way he took the words of his accusers and robbed them of meaning by turning them back on the accusers themselves. For instance, Hillary Clinton “colluded” with Ukraine, not he with Russia (ditto, of course, for Hunter and Joe Biden). Words, in other words, become exactly what he cares to make of them.

Uncertain Numbers: Numbers, which otherwise might seem so precise, have similarly been used to create a sense of imprecision in Washington. A short trip down memory lane should remind us of some of the ways in which vagueness and imprecision were instrumental parts of the War on terror in particular. For Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, numerical precision of a distinctly imprecise sort provided an effective means of refusing to offer any meaningful information to the media on the administration’s illegal acts. He had, for instance, a penchant for referring to the number of detainees at Guantánamo in approximate rather than specific terms. “More than 150,” for instance, sounded innocuously close to precise, but also served his purpose—creating a lack of transparency around the administration’s War on Terror.

The detention of migrants at the border in the Trump years echoes Rumsfeld’s refusal to share real numbers, but has gone even further in creating a kind of numerical imprecision around reality itself. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has, for instance, been strikingly obstructionist when it comes to announcing the numbers of migrants in its custody. Last July, for instance, Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan claimed that fewer than 1,000 children had been separated from their parents. As it turned out, he wasn’t even close to accurate. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions alone, 2,800 families had been separated in this fashion. Only recently, a suit brought by the ACLU led to the release of government statistics showing that an additional 1,500 families had, in fact, experienced such separations.

Willful Ignorance: Hiding or ignoring facts has been yet another tactic integral to the deception of these years. The Bush administration, for instance, purposely disregarded then–CIA Director George Tenet’s comments about the striking lack of certainty regarding the presence of nuclear and biological weaponry in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Instead, they relied on false claims about the presence of WMDs in Iraq as the premise for invading that country.

Sometimes, Bush officials quite deliberately put their heads in the sand rather than face reality. For example, when the first accounts of the grim abuse of Iraqi captives at the American prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were reported by CBS News (and later even by Fox News) in 2004, according to journalist Andrew Cockburn, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith “sent an urgent memo round the Pentagon warning officials not to read [such reports], or even discuss [them] with family members.”

More recently, upon the release of the Mueller report, President Trump expanded on this strategy, applying it to himself when he boasted that “I have not seen the Mueller report. I have not read the Mueller report. I won. No collusion, no obstruction.”

Unabashedly choosing to bury his head in the sand in a similar fashion, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told the media that he wouldn’t read the transcripts of witnesses at the initial closed Congressional impeachment proceedings when they were made public. “I made up my mind.… There’s nothing there.” Several Republican senators, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, have similarly said that they won’t be watching the House impeachment hearings, claiming they have “better things to do.”

Withholding Evidence: In addition to ignoring facts and embracing ignorance, withholding evidence has been one obvious path to blunting awareness. From the first Abu Ghraib photos to today’s military commissions at Guantánamo, evidence of torture has, for instance, been purposely withheld or misrepresented. Likewise, the Trump administration has consistently withheld documents and records about its migrant detention system and the methods used in it, as illustrated by a determination to claim absolute immunity for officials refusing to testify in Congress on the subject. Similarly, ICE has refused to release records of the agency’s surveillance and data-collection methods, including the use of facial-recognition software at the border. It’s no surprise then that the White House has employed the same tactic—not allowing officials of all sorts to testify before Congress—in the ongoing impeachment hearings. As the whistle-blower in the Ukraine quid pro quo bribery scandal has informed us, White House lawyers were directed “to remove the electronic transcript [of Trump’s phone conversation with the Ukrainian president] from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials.”

The Destruction of the Record: A fifth tactic meant to confuse and enable governmental lying in these years has been the destruction of the facts themselves. Worse than linguistic sloppiness, omissions, and willful ignorance has been the actual destruction of potentially incriminating documents. (We, of course, only know about examples of this that have come to light.) The Bush administration pioneered such tactics. We know, for instance, that Jose Rodriguez, director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, destroyed tapes of sessions with War on Terror prisoners in Agency “black sites” around the world in which so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (acts of torture) were used. Prosecutor John Durham, who is now tasked by Attorney General Barr with looking into the origins of the Mueller Russia investigation, was asked by Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey and then Obama Attorney General Eric Holder to look into the destruction of those tapes, only to conclude that there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue charges.

Under Trump, a strategy of destroying government records has evolved into one of not creating such records to begin with. In 2017, for instance, the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a suit charging the Trump administration with violating the Presidential Records Act (PRA) by using an encrypted application designed to delete the contents of the president’s e-mail messages. This May, the two groups, along with the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, filed a complaint against the White House for violating the PRA and the Federal Records Act by failing to create records of conversations with foreign leaders. Last month, the plaintiffs intensified their efforts by asking a judge for an immediate injunction to require the White House to preserve the records of all calls with foreign leaders.

Spreading Conflicting Facts: Trump and his team have added a new layer of confusion to all of this by making the spreading of contradictory stories a normal part of everyday life in Washington. The impeachment hearings are a case in point. Potential administration witnesses say one thing one day, only to contradict it without blinking soon after. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, for instance, said that there had indeed been a “quid pro quo” in Trump’s dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, only to retract his statement hours later. Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union who became a key figure in the Ukraine negotiations, first claimed that there was “no quid pro quo,” only to later revise his testimony. “I now recall” otherwise, he acknowledged, in a supplemental declaration issued three weeks later. Military aid had, in fact, been withheld pending a Ukrainian agreement to investigate Hunter Biden and Burisma.

This is increasingly the norm and not just in relation to the impeachment hearings either. Only recently, for instance, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters that China and the United States had reached an agreement about reducing tariffs, only to be contradicted within hours by the president’s senior trade adviser, who swore that no such agreement existed. And so it goes in Washington as 2019 comes to an end.

THE NEW NORM IN WASHINGTON

Of course, neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump invented such methods of compromising truth and facts, but in recent years this has become something like the new norm. Through the centuries, as Orwell and Arendt made clear long ago, the connection between the integrity of language, the validity of facts, and the strength of any country has been acknowledged. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian Wars thousands of years ago, associated the gutting of language with the dissolution of the state. “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally.… moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.”

Historically, the degradation of words has gone hand in hand with the undermining of stability for which the accepted meaning of things remains essential. Armed with the integrity of words, knowledge can be shared among a citizenry, otherwise chaos becomes the order of the day. In his farewell to the nation, George Washington, himself an admirer of the classical thinkers, tied such diffusion of knowledge, the means by which the government could “give force to public opinion,” to the strength of the republic.

Today, in Donald Trump’s Washington anything goes, linguistically speaking. Sadly, words are more important than we as a nation seem to believe. They are the bedrock on which facts are built and facts are the bedrock on which nations stand in order to make decisions. The Trump administration has little respect for the integrity of words, no respect for educating the public with the facts, and every intention of clouding the space between fact and fiction, certainty and uncertainty.

Perhaps the best strategy for finding our way forward is to hold one another accountable, first and foremost, for the very words we use. ###


Karen J. Greenberg is director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (2009), Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (2016), and, forthcoming, Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink (January 2020). Greenberg received a BA (history) from Cornell University (NY) and a PhD (history) from Yale University (CT). She also is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.]

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Roll Over, Thomas Jefferson — Sir Tim Berners-Lee Has Rung A Virtual Firebell In A Darkening 21st Century

We expect much from public utilities (water, electricity, natural gas, sanitation, and so on) and we must not lose sight of the importance of the Internet and the World Wide Web as public utilities. Abuse and misuse of the Web threaten the existence of the integrity in elections and political campaigns. This is a vital concern for government at all levels and for the viability of our democracy. If this is a (fair & balanced) public service announcement, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
I Invented The World Wide Web — Here’s How We Can Fix It
By Tim Berners-Lee


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My parents were mathematicians. My mother helped code one of the first stored-program computers — the Manchester Mark 1. They taught me that when you program a computer, what you can do is limited only by your imagination. That excitement for experimentation and change helped me build the World Wide Web.

I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the world of open source software are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the web.

However, the reality is much more complex. Communities are being ripped apart as prejudice, hate and disinformation are peddled online. Scammers use the web to steal identities, stalkers use it to harass and intimidate their victims, and bad actors subvert democracy using clever digital tactics. The use of targeted political ads in the United States’ 2020 presidential campaign and in elections elsewhere threatens once again to undermine voters’ understanding and choices.

We’re at a tipping point. How we respond to this abuse will determine whether the web lives up to its potential as a global force for good or leads us into a digital dystopia.

The web needs radical intervention from all those who have power over its future: governments that can legislate and regulate; companies that design products; civil society groups and activists who hold the powerful to account; and every single web user who interacts with others online.

We have to overcome the stalemate that has characterized previous attempts to solve the problems facing the web. Governments must stop blaming platforms for inaction, and companies must become more constructive in shaping future regulation — not just opposing it.

I’m introducing a new approach to overcome that stalemate — the Contract for the Web.

The Contract for the Web is a global plan of action created over the past year by activists, academics, companies, governments and citizens from across the world to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone.

The contract outlines steps to prevent the deliberate misuse of the web and our information. For example, it calls on governments to publish public data registries, so that they are no longer able to conceal from their own citizens how their data is being used. If governments are sharing our data with private companies — or buying data broker lists from them — we have a right to know and take action.

The contract sets out ways to improve system design to eradicate incentives that reward clickbait or the spread of disinformation. Targeted political advertising is giving political parties the ability to subvert the debate. We need platforms to open their black boxes and clearly explain how they’re minimizing or eliminating risks their products pose to society. In my view, governments should impose an immediate ban on targeted political advertising to restore trust in our public discourse.

Crucially, the contract also contains concrete actions to tackle the negative — even if unintended — consequences of platform design. For example, why on an exercise app should women have to worry that their precise jogging routes are shared by default with other users? Perhaps because they were designed by people not thinking about the safety needs of women. We need a tremendously more diverse work force in our technology industries to make sure their products serve all groups. And companies should release reports that meaningfully demonstrate their progress toward those diversity goals.

To make the online world a place worth being in, we must all use the Contract for the Web to fight now for the web we want.

Governments must support their citizens online and ensure that their rights are protected through effective regulation and enforcement. Companies must look beyond next-quarter results and understand that long-term success means building products that are good for society and that people can trust them.

There’s already a powerful coalition backing the contract. The governments of nations such as France, Germany and Ghana have signed on to its principles. The tech giants Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Reddit sit alongside other specialists such as the search engine DuckDuckGo in committing to action. Many civil society organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders and AccessNow, have joined the growing movement, as well as individuals such as Representative Ro Khanna of California.

In endorsing the contract, governments and companies commit to taking concrete action across several issues. Some changes may take a long time: We are not expecting overnight transformation. But we will track their efforts, and if they fail to make progress, they will lose their status as a backer of the contract.

The contract is already being used to inform policy decisions, as a best-practice guide for government and company officials, and as a tool to help civil society advocate change, measure progress and hold governments and companies accountable.

But that alone is not enough. Our World Wide Web Foundation, together with its global partners, will work to mobilize people around the world. As elections approach, raise these issues with your political representatives and candidates. The best way to change the priorities and actions of those in power is to speak up.

Join our foundation, our partners and people around the world in the fight for the web. ###

]Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web and a co-founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. He is currently both a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at Oxford University (UK) and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received a BA first class (physics) from the Queens College at Oxford University, In 2017, he received the Turing Award (equivalent to the Nobel Prize in computing) from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).]

Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company




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Roll Over, Strunk And White — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) Was Correct When She Urged Her Caucus To Cease Describing The Treasonous Words Of The LK (Lyin' King) As Quid Pro Quo And Describe The LK's Words In Plan English: Bribery Or Extprtion (Impeachable Charges)

The New Yorker's Mary Norris offers a droll lecture on the hyperbolic use of Latin phrases rather than plain English in today's public discourse. If this is a (fair & balanced) consideration of the use of a Latin phrase for dishonest purposes, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
A Quid-Pro-Quo Mystery
By Mary Norris


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adamant alive body book buy called class confused crucial dead dictionary elegant else English friends gas--that knew language Latin letter Mary meaning met Morris Mystery phrase pointed post pretty pro published quid quidnunc quo reasons religious remember Robinson Rome Roxana signed something student sung sure Tempus term Village writer written

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Recently, a young man in a class I was teaching informed me that I was one of thirty-three writers who had signed a letter to the editor of the Times clarifying the meaning of “quid pro quo” and protesting its use as a synonym for criminality in the impeachment hearings. I did not remember signing the letter, but I wished I had. The letter was an eloquent plea for “precise and forceful language”—the gist of it was that the Latin “quid pro quo” is a neutral term meaning “this for that” and does not adequately describe criminal behavior. Written by Roxana Robinson, a past president of the Authors Guild, the letter was signed by thirty-two other writers—all women, many of them local (Brooklyn, Long Island), most of them writers of fiction—and it was effective. After its publication, on November 8th, Nancy Pelosi directed Democrats to stop referring to the U.S. President’s exchange with the Ukrainian President (“do us a favor, though”) as a quid pro quo and to call it by its real name: “bribery” or “extortion.”

Much of the commentary on “quid pro quo” has focused on its Latin origins and suggested that its wide circulation might spark an interest in dead languages. One of the reasons I was pretty sure I had not signed the letter is that I have never studied Latin. Growing up Catholic, in the fifties and sixties, I couldn’t help imbibing a little Church Latin. I knew “Ora pro nobis” (“Pray for us”), the numbing response to a litany of the saints—which, come to think of it, may be worth repeating. I made what sense I could of the syllables of “Ecce sacerdos magnus” (“Behold a high priest”), sung when the bishop visited; it sounded like “Hey, chase a chartreuse mongoose.” And I am familiar with the conventional prose flourishes (i.e., e.g., and n.b.) and the standard academic abbreviations (ibid., op. cit.), as well as with the copy-editing term “stet,” for “let it stand,” and the religious publishing term “imprimatur,” for “let it be printed.” “De gustibus” I know from the catalogue for Macy’s cooking classes, and I remember a bar in the East Village called Tempus Fugit. But that’s about it. The legal terms baffle me. Habeas corpus? What is that? Do you have the body? Whose body? Why? Is the body dead or alive? I don’t know.

So I turned to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which has a section at the back headed “Foreign Words & Phrases.” Salto mortale is there: an Italian phrase for “deadly jump, dangerous or crucial undertaking.” Also Vade retro me, Satana—the Latin for “Get thee behind me, Satan”—and Qui s’excuse s’accuse, which is French for “He who excuses himself accuses himself.” All of these seem freshly relevant. But “quid pro quo” was not there. Our language has a lot of Latin in it, and once speakers of English have got hold of a Latin word and use it frequently enough, it is, ipso facto, English. “Quid pro quo” can be found under “Q” in the dictionary proper, between “quidnunc” and “quids in.” It is derived from New Latin, meaning that it was not current in ancient Rome; its first recorded use was in 1539, when Latin was the lingua franca of scientific writing. The word’s literal meaning is “something for something,” and it is defined as “something given or received for something else.” It forms its plural in the usual English way: “quid pro quos,” like gin-and-tonics.

At the Miami Book Fair last weekend, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago, Roxana Robinson, a slim, pale, elegant woman, talked about the letter over dinner with some friends. She had written it “at white heat,” she said. She remained adamant about the subject and gave an example: “You drive and I’ll buy the gas—that’s a quid pro quo.” The signatories were gathered from a female fiction-writers’ network.

I had puzzled briefly over the student’s assertion that I signed the letter. I don’t take Ambien, so I was pretty sure that I hadn’t signed it in my sleep while raiding the refrigerator. It was also unlikely that my signature had been forged. The student beavered into his laptop to find the letter online and show it to me. He scrolled down the list of names—Rachel Cline, Barbara Fischkin, Susan Merrell—and pointed to Mary Morris. Mystery solved. “That’s not me,” I said. Mary Morris is a Brooklyn-based writer who was published long before I was. She is not to be confused with the New England writer Mary McGarry Morris. I have met Mary Morris and friended her on Facebook, and even I sometimes get confused when I see a post by her and wonder when I wrote a book about tigers.

But the student was adamant. “It’s only one letter off,” he said. Did I mention that this was a class on proofreading? ###

[Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and was a query proofreader at the magazine for twenty-four years. She has written columns for the magazine's "The Talk of the Town" and for The New Yorker online, on topics ranging from her cousin Dennis Kucinich to mud wrestling in Rockaway within the New York City borough of Queens. She is best known for her pieces on pencils and punctuation. Norris is the author of Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (2019) and Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (2015). She received a BA (English) from Rutgers University (NJ) and an MA (English) from the University of Vermont.]

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The Next POTUS (46) Should Award The Presidential Medal Of Freedom To Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, And Michael Steele, Creator Of THE Dossier

The conspiracy theories abound in 2019, but never take your eye from the real source of our troubles: Russian prsident Vladimir Putin and his willing and obedient ASSet, The LK (Lyin' King) who has never told the truth about Russia and Russian intentions in his entire miserable life. With a few tax cuts and questionable judicial appointments has managed to transform the R-party into Russian fellow-travelers from virulent Russophobes. This is so bizarre that it is unbelievable and sadly, very real. If this is a (fair & balanced) case of treason (a high crime in terms of impeachment), so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
The Inside Story Of Christopher Steele’s Trump Dossier
By Jane Mayer


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For nearly three years, President Trump has spun an alternate reality in which he was not helped and tainted by Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign but, rather, his political opponents and his accusers were. During a rambling fifty-three-minute live phone interview with “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump insisted again that the plot to block his election and bring him down once he was installed in the White House was “perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

On Tuesday, two of the President’s most prolific accusers plan to disrupt the narrative by telling their own story. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the co-founders of the Washington-based private-investigative firm Fusion GPS, which has mined deep veins of muck on Trump for years, at the behest of his various political enemies, will try to throw the book at Trump with the publication of Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump (2019).

Fusion was the firm that hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to research Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. After nearly three years without a word from Steele, while the so-called pee tape and his other sensational findings sparked furious controversy, the former MI 6 spy speaks directly and on the record about his own part for the first time in the book, an advance copy of which was given to The New Yorker.

Whether Simpson and Fritsch’s score-settling, tell-all account will change any minds remains to be seen, but they present a mountain of evidence that Trump’s dealings with corrupt foreign players—particularly those from the former Soviet Union—are both real and go back decades. Steele’s dossier has been debated, denounced, derided, and occasionally defended almost since the moment it was first published, in January, 2017, by BuzzFeed News, against Steele’s wishes. Although Carl Bernstein helped to break the news of its existence on CNN, his friend and Watergate-reporting partner Bob Woodward dismissed it almost instantly as “garbage.” During impeachment-hearing testimony last week, the former White House national-security adviser Fiona Hill, one of America’s foremost experts on Russia and a professional acquaintance of Steele’s, described the dossier as “a rabbit hole” and suggested that Steele may have been “played.” But the authors defend Steele’s work, and their own, arguing that it has proved “strikingly right.”

As the authors tell it, they became obsessed with Trump almost accidentally. Their involvement in his campaign began as a business proposition. In the past, they had worked mostly for corporate clients, but in 2012 they had also done some political-opposition research on the Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. (They declined to disclose their client.) So, in 2015, as Trump gained momentum, but before he clinched the nomination, Simpson and Fritsch again decided to look for political work. After firing off a quick e-mail to a big conservative donor they knew who disliked Trump, they were hired. They don’t identify that donor but note, helpfully, that he arranged for them to contract their opposition-research assignment through the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site known to be funded by Paul Singer, a New York hedge-fund magnate. Once Trump secured the nomination, however, the GOP donor fled.

At that point, Fusion switched clients and political parties, pitching its services to Marc Elias, the lawyer for the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. Clinton’s identity, too, was kept hidden, in this case behind the screen of Elias’s law firm, Perkins Coie. In the beginning, Clinton’s identity was also hidden from Steele, who knew only that Fusion was hiring him in the late spring of 2016, as a contractor, to investigate the tangled web of Trump’s ties to Russia for an unknown patron. Contrary to the conspiracy theories that the right later spread, Simpson and Fritsch write that they never met or spoke with Clinton. “As far as Fusion knew, Clinton herself had no idea who they were. To this day, no one in the company has ever met or spoken to her,” the book reads. As I reported, although Steele went to the FBI with his findings out of a sense of duty and, by the late summer of 2016, knew that the F.B.I. was seriously investigating Trump’s Russian ties, the communication channels were so siloed that the Clinton campaign was unaware of these facts. Far from conspiring in a plot, the Clinton team had no hard evidence that the FBI was investigating its opponent, even as its own opposition researcher was feeding dirt to the FBI. As one top Clinton campaign official told me when I wrote about Steele, “If I’d known the FBI was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the rooftops!”

Recent news reports have suggested that Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, in a forthcoming report, will also knock down some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Steele, including the false claim that his dossier prompted the FBI to investigate Trump. FBI officials have repeatedly said that their investigation was already under way when Steele tried to alert them. But Horowitz’s assessment, which is expected to be released publicly on December 9^th, also reportedly includes some criticism of Steele, and of the FBI’s relationship with him.

According to the Fusion GPS founders, the real story of their role in the Trump investigation was filled with missed cues and human foibles. They portray themselves as hardened gumshoes who became concerned and tried to do their civic duty and report “a crime in progress,” which has been spun by their detractors into a conspiracy.

Early on, Fusion’s probe of Trump was given a huge boost by Wayne Barrett, an investigative reporter for the Village Voice. Barrett, who was suffering from a terminal illness, bequeathed his voluminous files on Trump to the firm. His findings opened up Trump’s past dealings, including tax and bankruptcy problems, potential ties to organized crime, and numerous legal entanglements. They also revealed that Trump had an unusually high number of connections to Russians with questionable backgrounds. As his son Don, Jr., boasted in 2008, Russians “make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” (Trump denied having any business ties to Russia during his campaign, but, later, his former lawyer Michael Cohen admitted that Trump’s associates were trying to negotiate a deal for him in Moscow at the time. The business angle was one of the subjects on which Steele’s dossier was prescient.)

The more the Fusion team learned, the more alarmed it grew. By the spring of 2016, Simpson and Fritsch write, they were no longer just in it for the money. They were convinced they needed “to do what they could to keep Trump out of the White House.”

It was at this point that they turned to Steele, a former spy who had left his position as the head of MI 6’s Russia desk to co-found Orbis, a private-investigation firm in London, and whom they had known and trusted from previous engagements. Coincidentally, Simpson and Fritsch disclose that, just weeks before they tapped Steele, he had reached out to them regarding a different investigation. As I wrote in my Profile of Steele, he was working on behalf of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Simpson and Fritsch fill out this picture further. Deripaska, a hugely rich associate of Putin with a clouded reputation, had hired an American law firm, which had, in turn, hired Steele, to help them track down millions of dollars that the oligarch believed had been stolen from him by Paul Manafort, a former business associate of Deripaska who was about to become the manager of Trump’s Presidential campaign. So, from the start, Fusion, Steele, Russia, and Trumpworld were on a collision course.

Initially, Steele expected his work with Fusion to be a brief engagement. But his network of Russian sources turned up shocking information. Steele’s first report found that Russia had tried to cultivate Trump by dangling business ventures and had been accumulating blackmail material [Kompramat], including what later came to be known as the pee tape—ostensibly a recording showing prostitutes entertaining Trump by urinating on a hotel bed, at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton, in which the Obamas had previously slept. Following Steele’s first report, he and Fusion went back for what eventually became sixteen more, the sum of which collectively became known as Steele’s “dossier,” perhaps the most controversial opposition research ever to emerge from a Presidential campaign.

Despite the fact that the fabled pee tape has never surfaced and Trump immediately denied its existence, Simpson and Fritsch write that Steele remains confident that his reports are neither a fabrication nor the “hoax” of Trump’s denunciations. Trump’s defenders have claimed that Steele fell prey to Russian disinformation, and, therefore, it is he, not Trump, who has been a useful idiot for the Russians. But Steele tells the authors, “These people simply have no idea what they’re talking about.” He emphasizes that his network of sources “is tried and tested” and has “been proven up in many other matters.” He adds, “I’ve spent my entire adult life working with Russian disinformation. It’s an incredibly complex subject that is at the very core of my training and my professional mission.”

Steele points out that the most critical criteria for judging disinformation is “whether there is a palpable motive for spreading it”; the ultimate Russian goal in 2016, he argues, “was to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and therefore, the idea that they would intentionally spread embarrassing information about Trump—true or not—is not logical.”

Steele, according to Simpson and Fritsch, is equally dismissive of those who claim that the Russians spread disinformation in order to discredit him. “The stakes were far, far too high for them to trifle with settling scores with me or any other civilian,” he said. “Damaging my reputation was simply not on their list of priorities. But helping Trump, and damaging Hillary was at the very top of it. No one denies that anymore.”

Simpson and Fritsch acknowledge that several of Steele’s most sensational allegations remain unproven and that others were almost surely wrong, such as his sources’ claim that the Trump fixer Michael Cohen went to Prague during the summer of 2016 to pay off the Democrats’ e-mail hackers. But they argue that Steele was substantially right, and prescient, to see and try to warn America of Russia’s efforts to subvert the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.

They write that “a spy whose sources get it 70 percent right is considered to be one of the best,” and that, while reporters focussed on the most salacious details, they “tended to miss the central message,” about which they say Steele was largely correct. They note that, in his first report, in June, 2016, Steele warned that Russian election meddling was “endorsed by Putin” and “supported and directed” by him to “sow discord and disunity with the United States itself but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance”—six months before the US intelligence community collectively embraced the same conclusion. Steele also was right, they argue, that “Putin wasn’t merely seeking to create a crisis of confidence in democratic elections. He was actively pulling strings to destroy Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump,” an assessment the US intelligence community also came to accept. And they note that, as of September, 2019, U.S. officials confirmed that the CIA had “a human source inside the Russian government during the campaign, who provided information that dovetailed with Steele’s reporting about Russia’s objective of electing Trump and Putin’s direct involvement in the operation.”

Critics will likely take issue with this, as well as with some of the authors’ others claims, including their contention that others bear the brunt of the responsibility for the confidential dossier leaking, not them. Fusion GPS briefed scores of journalists on the dossier, including The New Yorker. Unable to confirm its contents, most, including me, chose not to write about it. But, just prior to the election, David Corn, Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, became the first to disclose its existence and, with Fusion’s help, to get a background interview with Steele. The Fusion team also gave an off-the-record briefing on the dossier to Ken Bensinger, the BuzzFeed News reporter who soon after obtained and published the first copy from another source.

Both Fritsch and Simpson were investigative reporters at the Wall Street Journal, and their skill at ferreting out juicy secrets from public records, particularly in difficult-to-navigate foreign countries, including Russia, turned the private-research firm they founded in 2010 into what they describe as “something of a public reading room” for journalists seeking dirt on Trump’s circle. In fact, it becomes evident that in the past few years they have thrown nearly as much chum to the media as the keepers have to the seals at the National Zoo, up the street from their Dupont Circle offices.

Their role as purveyors of anti-Trump tips, they reveal, did not end with Trump’s election. By then, they were so deeply convinced of the danger they thought Trump and Russia posed to democracy at home and abroad that they kept their band together and formed an independent nonprofit group devoted to providing further research to the media on the threat. To helm the nonprofit, the Democracy Integrity Project, they turned to Daniel Jones, a former aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee who has recently gained fame from the film “The Report,” in which Adam Driver plays Jones as he struggles to bust the CIA’s torture program. The Fusion and Orbis teams have joined Jones in the real-life sequel, in which they have been roaming the world, researching threats to democracy and alerting the media whenever they can.

All of this helps to explain Trump’s fixation on Steele, whose work he denounced yet again, in his phone interview with Fox on Friday, as “the phony, fake dossier, the disgusting fake dossier.” Republicans in Congress, too, continue to be obsessed with Steele. Last week, in the midst of his opening remarks in the congressional impeachment hearings, the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Devin Nunes, Republican of California, went off on a tangent that was almost unintelligible to anyone not steeped in Trumpworld’s alternative narrative, claiming that Democrats “got caught defending the false allegations of the Steele dossier, which was paid for by them.” And Republicans in Congress have dragged Simpson in to testify multiple times, as well as subpoenaed his firm’s bank records and caused him and his partners to fear financial ruin.

Some readers of Crime in Progress may begin to wonder if the special counsel Robert Mueller didn’t miss the mark. The authors praise Mueller for documenting more than a hundred and forty suspicious contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russians, and for criminally indicting thirty-four individuals, including six in Trump’s inner circle and a dozen Russian agents behind the hack of the Democrats’ e-mails and thirteen individuals and three companies tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency. But they criticize Mueller’s probe for failing to heed the main lesson of Watergate: to “follow the money.” Simpson and Fritsch note that “there is no indication in his report that the investigation looked at Trump’s taxes, his outstanding debts, his curious relationship with Deutsche Bank, or his long history of financing real estate projects with foreign cash of unknown origin—precisely the places where Russian influence efforts were most likely to surface.”

By now, most of the public attention has moved on from Trump’s Russian entanglements to those next door, in neighboring Ukraine. By getting their version of events out to the public, in advance of that of the Justice Department, the authors have performed a neat bit of publishing jujitsu. But the truth about Trumpworld is that no form of journalism is quite fast enough to keep up with every new development, because there is always another potential “crime in progress.” ###

[Jane Mayer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1995. Mayer is a graduate of Yale University (BA, history), where she was a stringer for Time magazine while bsed in New Haven, CT. Mayer has also contributed to the New York Review of Books and American Prospect and co-authored or written four books—Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (written with Jill Abramson), a study of the controversy-laden nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988 (1989) (written with Doyle McManus), an account of Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House. Mayer's third book is The Dark Side (2008) — addressing the origins, legal justifications, and possible war crimes liability of the use of interrogation techniques to break down detainees' resistance and the subsequent deaths of detainees under such interrogation as applied by the CIA — was a finalist for the National Book Awards. Her most recent book is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016). Mayer is the granddaughter of the late historian and biographer Allan Nevins.]

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Roll Over, Herman Melville — Captain Ahab (Given Name Unknown) Pursued The Albino Whale (Full Of Blubber) & We Have Our Own Moby Dick (A Pasty White Lyin' King Who Is Mostly Blubber)

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) provides a post-mortem on the past week of hearings in the House Impeachment Inquiry. If this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration of political and general etymology, so be it.

PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg).

[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump’s White Whale
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

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Donald Trump is a rodomont. Not to mention a grobian. And, of course, a Sinon suffering from proditomania.

With Trump firmly lodged in our heads, it is understandable if we have all become a little conspiracy-minded.

Case in point: A few weeks ago, someone signed me up for A.Word.A.Day email from Wordsmith.org. Soon I began to detect a pattern.

Friday’s word was vulgarian, following close after bareknuckle. Others included rodomont (a vain boaster),grobian (a buffoonish person) and Sinon (one who misleads and betrays). Also chirocracy (a government that rules with a heavy hand) and froward (difficult to deal with or contrary).

Sound like anyone you know?

Since this is a town of fevered conspiracists now, theories abound about why the president went to Walter Reed military hospital last Saturday. But nobody here buys that it was a spontaneous desire to do Phase 1 of a physical.

As Trump himself said Friday about it, “A lot of things are a matter with me.” But we do know the name of one severe malady the president has: proditomania. A.Word.A.Day defined it as the feeling or belief that everyone is out to get you.

Trump believes that paranoia can be useful. He sees the world as vicious and life as a battle for survival.

As we draw closer to Trump getting a lump of coal in his Christmas stocking, with Nancy Pelosi implacably heading toward a holiday impeachment, his proditomania is revving up.

Even Steve Doocy looked a little bemused during Trump’s shambolic 54-minute call into “Fox & Friends” on Friday.

No matter how many experts — including the gloriously bracing Fiona Hill — explain that it is Russia that interfered with our elections and that Russia has been scheming to deflect blame to Ukraine, Trump keeps rambling about that DNC server.

“The FBI went in, and they told them, ‘Get out of here, we’re not giving it to you,’” he said on Fox. “They gave the server to CrowdStrike, or whatever it is called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. I still want to see that server.”

Trying to justify why he had ousted and smeared the ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, he claimed that she was “an Obama person” who had refused to hang his picture in the US Embassy in Kyiv. (A lawyer for Yovanovitch said the portrait had been hung immediately.)

“This was not an angel, this woman, OK?” Trump sneered, adding that when he complained that the dignified and well-respected former ambassador was being treated too gently, he was told: “Well, sir, she’s a woman. We have to be nice.”

It was peak Trump pique.

After climbing up in politics by putting down Barack Obama as an illegitimate president, Trump is so terrified of being seen as an illegitimate president that he acts out in ways that cause more people to see him as an illegitimate president.

His presidency began with him obsessing on his inauguration crowd size and carrying around his 2016 electoral map.

He can’t get past it and it’s intensifying, playing out on the world stage with national security implications. It’s debilitating to his presidency, and the rest of us are hostages to his insecurities.

As Hill succinctly noted about the inability in the Trump era to separate fictional narratives from objective realities: “Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned.”

Vladimir Putin hit the jackpot with Trump. He makes a perfect sucker for the former KGB spy.

“Thank God nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in the US elections,” Putin gloated Wednesday at an economic forum in Moscow. “Now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

The president seems like even more of a crackpot, given the New York Times story on Friday revealing that, even as Republican lawmakers vociferously defended the president, they received a briefing “that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election.”

Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg reported that the Kremlin succeeded in spreading discord among its adversaries and sluicing false claims about Ukrainian meddling into Republican talking points. A lot of Republicans have dirtied themselves defending Trump, and their party will not easily recover from perverting its values.

Trump is blustering about impeachment and wanting a Senate trial and calling Pelosi — who has his presidency in a vise grip — “totally incompetent” and “crazy as a bedbug.”

But those who know him believe that he’s genuinely unnerved and even hurt at the prospect of impeachment.

One of his tweets Thursday, as he headed toward being the third president to be impeached, seemed to reflect a rare hint of vulnerability. “I never in my wildest dreams thought my name would in any way be associated with the ugly word, Impeachment!” he wrote.

It recalls a prescient moment from September when the president’s former homeland security adviser, Thomas Bossert, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and warned that Trump had to let go of his conspiracy theory linking CrowdStrike, Ukraine and the DNC server.

“If he continues to focus on that white whale,” Bossert said, “it’s going to bring him down.”

But, like Ahab, Trump can’t ever let go. He’s hellbent on harpooning himself, chasing that which will sink him.

Seppuku. My word of the day. ###

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

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