The Russian Connection: Will Congress Do Its Job?

It is a scandal that alleges the Trump campaign and transition team may have colluded with Russia over the American election, and then may have pledged the removal of new sanctions just imposed against Russia for tampering with our election. Yet House Republicans are content to act as accomplices by doing nothing.

Jason Chaffetz (R-Ut), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, issued 70 subpoenas in his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email — and issued them after the head of the FBI announced that no activity had reached the level of prosecutable malfeasance. Yet now that his own party is accused of secretly collaborating with the Russian government for reasons that need to be discovered, Chaffetz fends off any suggestion that his committee conduct oversight because with Gen. Mike Flynn’s resignation, “The situation has taken care of itself”.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Ca) was on the Trump transition team. He thinks it is the leaks that should be investigated, rather than whatever dealings Flynn and other contacts had with the Russians. “General Flynn didn’t break the law talking to the Russian ambassador”, he said. “In fact, that’s his job”.

It wasn’t his job or his right to do so during the transition, and it is extraordinary to hear a Congressman waive off an inconvenient law — the Logan Act that makes it a felony for a private citizen to conduct foreign policy for the United States. “Whoever recorded this, whoever recorded his phone call, unmasked it and leaked it, that’s clearly multiple violations”, is what he thinks should be investigated.

In fact, recording calls to or from U.S. phone numbers by the National Security Agency is legal if the other end of the call is outside the U.S. Embassies are the sovereign territory of the guest country; we speculate they are arguably considered outside the U.S. for surveillance purposes, and how Gen. Flynn’s phone calls to the Russian ambassador, if at the embassy, could be viewed legally.

Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md) made plain how the Republicans operate with a different set of rules when they are in the cross hairs: “Do you hear the silence?”, he asked. “This is the sound of House Republicans conducting no oversight of President Trump. Zero. That is what it sounds like when they abdicate their duty under the Constitution.”

There is at least an ongoing investigation in the Senate Intelligence Committee over Russian hacking and manipulation of our elections, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to want to dig deeper, saying it’s highly likely that the Senate will investigate the Flynn affair, and that it should be folded into that committee’s probes.

Democrats want an independent investigation, knowing full well that committee investigations operate far from view (were you aware the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating?) whereas a select committee or an independent inquiry in the mold of the 9/11 Commission operates in daylight. A critical point for Democrats is that Attorney General Sessions recuse himself, he having been so closely allied with Trump during his campaign. With the Republicans in control, none of what the Democrats want will go anywhere, of course, other than to make known how Republicans will be suppressing the uncovering of the Russian Connection if too little is done.

In the Senate, every committee has its own jurisdiction, but no committee has jurisdiction over all of this. That`s why select committees are formed, so that it can look at the CIA and the FBI and the military all in one setting.

But in the Senate, McConnell, who gets to decide, believes its intelligence committee will do a good enough job. He is as canny a politician as there ever was, and viewing the tumult and blunders of the Trump presidency, with thousands of candidates for jobs needing Senate approval not even proposed, might he like to see the committee do a very good job?

What do we mean? A select committee, and certainly an independent panel of the 9/11 Commission model, would take a long time to set up and get underway. One wonders if a reason McConnell prefers the committee already at work is that it could reach possibly irreparably damaging conclusions about the Trump presidency more quickly, and that could lead to impeachment if the high crimes and misdemeanors of collaborating with Russia in the U.S. elections are found, thereby removing this president sooner, before that much more damage is done. Hard to know what he is thinking.

Feb 22 2017 | Posted in Governance | Read More »

General Flynn and the Widening Russia Connection

Discoveries leading to the firing of Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser three weeks into his presidency have exposed a much wider story alleging extensive mystifying contacts with Russia by not just of his adviser, General Mike Flynn, but also of members of his campaign all across last year. Even if a case can be made that familiarization contacts with other countries by a candidate’s staff is sensible, there is the question of why only Russia.

The administration has tried to deflect attention away from the Russia connection to making it a problem of leaks. In his lengthy news conference two days after Flynn was discharged, President Trump put forth the baffling contradiction that “classified information was given illegally” to the media, implicitly endorsing the validity of the information, yet the reporting of the leaked information about “Russia is fake news; this is fake news put out by the media”. He continued his campaign to discredit the media as dishonest that is probably successful among those who don’t read or watch that media to know how much more persuasive its facts are compared to his tweets. They only hear his tirades to the media sitting before him about “This whole Russia scam that you are building so that you don’t talk about the real subject which is the leaks”.

the story so far

The daily revelations tumbling out from that media can make for a confused picture. The first job is to lay out the story:

On January 12th, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius revealed that on December 28th Gen. Flynn had called the Russian Ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, the day before President Obama was about to impose new sanctions on Russia and expel 35 of its diplomats in retaliation for Russia’s trying to influence the American elections.

Reuters followed the Post a day later to say there had been five phone calls between Flynn and Kislyak.

The timing was suspect. Was Flynn calling to assure the Russian that, once president three weeks forward, Trump would make the sanctions go away? And, looking back to December, wasn’t it curious that Putin uncharacteristically said he would not retaliate in turn against the sanctions? Trump had immediately tweeted, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!”.

The intelligence agencies — all 17 — were already entirely convinced that it was the Russians who had hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails, with President-elect Trump strangely refusing to accept their verdict and smearing their competence, reaching back 15 years to the Iraq War for his only evidence. Clearly he was shielding the Russians, claiming it could have been any country or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”. Now, with Trump elected, his national security adviser designate was secretly in contact with the Russian ambassador.

In the days immediately following the Post’s story, both Vice President Mike Pence and Press Secretary Sean Spicer assured the public that Flynn had not discussed the sanctions and was merely making arrangements for a phone call after the inauguration between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Then came the Washington Post’s February 10th bombshell reporting that acting Attorney General Sally Yates (Sen. Jeff Sessions was awaiting confirmation) had two weeks earlier, on January 26th, contacted the White House counsel to advise that an NSA intercept had recorded a phone call (one or more) between Gen. Flynn and the Russian ambassador and that Flynn had indeed discussed sanctions. It was a “heads-up”, as Spicer put it, that Vice President Pence’s contrary assurances to the public were therefore incorrect. Moreover, Flynn may have rendered himself vulnerable to blackmail.

Flynn, who had accepted the post of national security adviser to Trump, was already a controversial figure, not only for a sharp temper that brooked no dissent and a conspiratorial worldview, but for his unconventional connection to Russia. He had accepted an unexplained expenses-paid trip to the Kremlin in December, 2015, where he had even dined with Putin. The transcripts of the phone calls to the ambassador have not been released, but it is far from outlandish to suppose that private citizen Flynn was undermining the policy just enacted by the still-sitting president, Barack Obama.

When the Post story broke on the 10th, the President was asked questions aboard Air Force One:

Question: Mr. President what do you make of reports that General Flynn had conversations with the Russians about sanctions before you were sworn in?

Trump: I don’t know about it. I haven’t seen it. What report is that?

Question: (Repeated)

Trump: I haven’t seen that. I’ll look at that.

deciphering

In the two weeks between Yates contacting the White House and the Post exposé, Trump did not tell his vice president, leaving him to think he was right to tell the country that Flynn never discussed sanctions with the Russian envoy. What does that say about the president’s relationship with Pence? Three weeks after inauguration, has he already been cast adrift? He was certainly manipulated. Told the truth, the upright Pence might well have refused to advance the lie.

How are we to imagine that Gen Flynn was free-lancing — contacting the Russian ambassador on his own, without the knowledge of the president; indeed, without the instruction of the president to do so? Are we expected to think that Flynn did not tell the president what he and Kislyak had spoken about the moment Flynn hung up?

The White House counsel informed the president immediately about Sally Yates’ knowledge that Flynn had discussed sanctions. For the president that only meant that others now knew what he had clearly known all along.

As for Flynn, when only the phone calls had been revealed and not the content, it seems clear that the president hoped to ride that out, to let the matter die as just innocent calls around Christmas. He had no intention of firing Flynn. Why would he? He’d been key in the plot to mollify the Russians. Then along came Sally Yates.

out like Flynn

The White House tried to shift the narrative: Flynn was let go because he misled the vice-president. And the White House, with Spicer taking the lead, then shifted to making the real problem the leaks of sensitive information. Translation: we the public should never have learned of any of this.

It was Flynn who was hung out to dry for not telling Pence, not the president for keeping silent, of course. Flynn had equivocated, claiming that he couldn’t quite remember what he had talked about with Kislyak. There was nothing wrong, nothing illegal about his talking to the ambassador. That was “immediately determined” by the White House counsel, said Spicer.

Question: That is not a problem, that General Flynn discussed sanctions with the Russians?

Spicer: No, there is — as I — I can’t say it clearly enough. There was nothing in what General Flynn did in terms of conducting himself that was an issue. What it came down to, plain and simple, was him misleading the vice president and others and not having a firm grasp on his recollection of that.

Nothing illegal? It is an outright felony under the Logan Act for a private citizen, which Flynn was in December, to conduct foreign policy for the United States.

The New York Times reported the day after Spicer’s insistence that trust was the only issue that the FBI had questioned Flynn back in January, probably taking their cue from Ignatius’ Post reporting. The Washington Post has now reported that Flynn denied to the FBI that he had discussed with the Russian ambassador the lifting of sanctions. Lying to the FBI is a felony.

year-long contacts

Then came the New York Times story that blew the lid off any pretense the White House was trying to maintain. On February 14th, the Times reported:

” Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.” In his press conference two days later he said about “big, long front page story. It’s a joke”.

In this story, ” Putin Would Like You to Forget About Russia’s Election Hacks“, we had told of the FBI coming upon what they assumed to be Russian attempts to hack the Democratic National Committee, the Times being the source. The latest Times report says that it was that same intercepting work by the FBI and the intelligence agencies that had uncovered the DNC hacks that found the communications with Russian intelligence by Trump campaign staff and others.

The Times article says no evidence has been found of the campaign colluding with the Russians to affect the election, so far, but says the FBI is sifting through a “larger trove of information” and has obtained bank and travel records and conducted interviews.

David Ignatius, who broke the story of Sally Yeats warning the White House, said that the Post knows that FBI Director James Comey “was worried about her turning over this information, afraid that the White House would interfere with the FBI`s ongoing

investigation”. The bright side hints that, with a thorough and unflinching investigation, Comey may be out to resurrect his reputation after his harmful finger placed on the scale to Hillary Clinton’s detriment in the final days before the election; the dark side says Comey views Trump as someone whose power has already corrupted absolutely and would not stop short of trying to halt the investigation. He has just picked yet another Wall Streeter to conduct a “review” of the intelligence agencies.

fake news

We are witnessing two great newspapers doing some of the best and most important investigative reporting in years, reminding us of how indispensible is the press if we are ever to know the truth of what goes on in government. Meanwhile the idiot class yammers about fake news, believing a president who clearly wants to eliminate freedom of the press, and thinking that truth is to be found in his tweets.

Feb 16 2017 | Posted in World | Read More »

Shouldn’t We Be Concerned About the President’s Behavior?

You know about Donald Trump’s claims of millions of illegal votes costing him the popular vote. You’ve heard him insist those were record crowds at his inaugural. And you may be aware of the embarrassing speech at CIA that he called a home run. Since then, a blizzard of actions by Trump and his administration has already displaced those events in the headlines, but before they vanish, we think we should delve into these episodes because they exhibit such abnormal behavior that they arouse the fear that America has elected as its president someone with acute mental disabilities.

Vote eerily and vote often

Winning the presidency by the Electoral College was not enough. For Trump, obsessed with winning, Hillary Clinton having taken the brass ring of the popular vote was infuriating. The world is aware of this tweet of November 27:

Three million is the number Trump then adopted, a number that would wipe out Hillary Clinton’s 2.8 million popular vote lead. At times the number became five million. Three days after his inauguration he would actually say to congressional leaders, “Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote”. Five days after, he vowed in a pair of tweets there would be an investigation.

In his birther campaign against Obama, Mr. Trump told Meredith Viera, host of a morning television show, that he had investigators in Hawaii, “people that have been actually studying” putative birth records “and they cannot believe what they’re finding”. Nothing further was ever heard, of course; the technique was to sow doubt in gullible minds.

The same pattern has immediately recurred in the illegal voter fantasy. A “conservative activist” named Gregg Phillips, who has a website named VoteStand, told CNN’s Chris Cuomo one morning that he has the proof of the millions of illegal votes. He has proof but would not provide it. When will you?, asked Cuomo. “As soon as we get done with the checks. We’re going back in and checking. We know the numbers are right. We’re going back in and checking”. Cuomo sent that packing with, “Either you know or you don’t”.

Trump tweeted Phillips:

The “investigation” may belong to Gregg Phillips. Neither Congress nor FBI will go near this fantasy that Trump created to tell to himself, and he has shown that he doesn’t let go of anything. So we can probably expect him to announce “proof” at some point. The basis can only be what Trump has already fastened on: people registered to vote in more than one state, and deceased people still on the voter rolls.

It seems absurd to have to explain that away, but that’s his premise. People can remain on a state’s voter list when they move if there is no local procedure that connects a town’s property records with voter rolls. It’s not a problem because how many people would travel to their second state just to vote, possibly to a far distant state. Similarly, town election boards may not learn of deaths. But who are these individuals, and how many are there, that dig into those death records to find someone to impersonate, and do so at risk of a $10,000 fine and 5 years in jail? Trump is claiming millions of us are doing exactly that. Beyond consideration of what each of these millions of people would have to do is the question of who or what secretly organized this massive corruption? Who recruited these millions? As Republican operative Michael Steele said, “That is a level of coordination that is beyond anything ever done in this country”.

If he does persevere with his investigation, it cannot come up with proof of actual voting, so it will have no more than counts of people registered in two states or numbers of deceased in this or that locale. He’ll claim the potential of “massive voter fraud” awaits. “We must do better”, he tweeted. “Depending on results we will strengthen up voting procedures!”.

Some therefore argue that Trump is making his extravagant claim simply to lay the groundwork for Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact even stricter laws to prevent voting by black, Latinos and students. And surely come 2018 we can expect to hear the conservative wing reciting “registered in two states and deceased still on the rolls” as justification for new laws without any reference to people actually voting fraudulently.

But that is not what’s driving Donald Trump. Listen to what he said to David Muir of ABC News in an interview at the White House five days after the inauguration when he laid bare what seemed to be demons raging in his mind:

Muir: “Do you think that talking about millions of illegal votes is dangerous to this country without presenting the evidence?”
Trump: “No, not at all. Not at all. Because many people feel the same way that I do and…”
Muir: “You don’t think it undermines your credibility?”
Trump: “No, not at all because they didn’t come to me. Believe me, those were Hillary votes. And if you look at it, they all voted for Hillary. They all voted for Hillary. They didn’t vote for me.”

All three to five million. Not one for Trump.

Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

A famous book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, came to mind when the newly minted President Trump went to lengths to create for himself the delusion of record-breaking crowds at his inauguration and argued that the media showing dispositive photos to the contrary was madness.

“This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”. That was White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer trying to straighten out the media the day after. That is what led Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, that Sunday on “Meet the Press”, to utter the language’s new trope, “alternative facts”, as explanation of what Spicer had provided. But they were just running errands at the insistence of Trump, trying somehow to paint over the boss’s erratic and disturbing behavior:

“They say I had the biggest crowd in the history of inaugural speeches. … We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.”
— Jan. 21, remarks at the CIA

“Wow, television ratings just out: 31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!”
— Jan. 22, tweet

“I looked out, the field was — it looked like a million, million and a half people. … The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed.”— Jan. 25, interview with ABC News

Aerial photography doesn’t lie. A million and a half? There was nothing of the sort. The crowd reached to nowhere near the Washington Monument. That Trump’s approval ratings were, at 37% according to Quinnipiac, the lowest since ratings began, whereas Obama’s approval was at 78% when he took the oath in 2099 — that made plain that Trump’s attendance would be far lower, as much as 80% lower said media reports. One could simply see where on the Mall the crowd petered out.

A reporter for The Nation who said he spent the whole day on the Mall despite the drizzle, wrote:

” I saw the empty stands that were supposed to be filled with throngs of Trump supporters…the surprisingly sparse smatterings of red baseball caps as well as my conversations with local souvenir salespeople who were overloaded with ‘Make America Great Again’ merchandise that wasn’t moving. It was obvious. The people just weren’t there.”

The Washington Post reported that on the morning after he was sworn in, Trump pressured the director of the National Park Service to locate more photos of the crowd. They were already framed and on the walls of the White House by that ABC interview five days after the inauguration. On the way out, Trump showed them to the ABC crew. His mania to change the facts and create a bigger crowd was on full display:

Trump: “Here’s a picture of the crowds. Now the audience was the biggest ever, but this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes.”
Voice Over: “Just before we leave the President tells us he wants to show us just one more image.”
Trump: “One thing this shows is how far they go over here. Look how far this is. This goes all the way down here, all the way down.”

the dicey dossier

Donald Trump has dumbfounded Americans with his courtship of Vladimir Putin and worrisome and repeated rejection of the 17 intelligence agencies’ conclusion that it was Russia that had hacked Democratic computers. When CNN revealed the existence of a suspect Russian dossier on Trump containing bizarre conduct by prostitutes and BuzzFeed released the full 35 pages (Trump has now sued them), the President blamed the intelligence community for leaking the dossier, even though the material had been floating about Washington for weeks and could have been given to the press by a multitude. That lead to this splenetic accusation:

So when he finally agreed with their assessment that Russia was the perpetrator of the hacks and went to CIA headquarters the first day after his inauguration to make amends, he could hardly have expected a cordial reception. Yet his appraisal of his appearance there would prove glaringly otherworldly.

He talked while standing before their Memorial Wall, where only stars are shown to represent those who have lost their lives in the service of their country — 117 of them — because the identity of many cannot be revealed. One CIA veteran called the wall “emotional ground zero for the people at the agency”. One-third of the stars on that wall are for CIA lives lost after 9/11. Here’s a link to his talk. It pays to give it a quick read. Excerpts:

“But I want to say that there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. There’s nobody. And we really appreciate what you’ve done in terms of showing us something very special. And your whole group, these are really special, amazing people. Very, very few people could do the job you people do. And I want to just let you know, I am so behind you. And I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted, and you’re going to get so much backing. Maybe you’re going to say, please don’t give us so much backing. (Laughter.) Mr. President, please, we don’t need that much backing. (Laughter.) “

That’s the extent his talk would be about the CIA; right off, it had become more about him. He now branched into the “tremendous percentage” of votes the military had given him, how together they would defeat ISIS as if it would be the agency’s mission and with no other mission mentioned, the “good” guys and “fantastic” guys he had chosen for his cabinet and for them. In Mike Pompeo for CIA director, “you will be getting a total star”.

You’re going to be getting a total gem. He’s a gem. (Applause.) You’ll see. You’ll see. And many of you know him anyway. But you’re going to see. And again, we have some great people going in. But this one is something — is going to be very special, because this is one, if I had to name the most important, this would certainly be perhaps — you know, in certain ways, you could say my most important. You do the job like everybody in this room is capable of doing. And the generals are wonderful, and the fighting is wonderful. But if you give them the right direction, boy, does the fighting become easier. And, boy, do we lose so fewer lives, and win so quickly. And that’s what we have to do. We have to start winning again.

That’s a sampling of the incoherence typical of the whole speech, which then wandered off to subjects far afield from the CIA. We heard about the importance of academics, an uncle who was an MIT professor — “an academic genius — and then they say, is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart persona”. We heard about how young he feels, how many campaign stops he made per day “in front of 25,000, 30,000 people, 15,000, 19,000”, how America had stopped winning, how if we’d kept Iraq’s oil there would be no ISIS, his running war with the media who “are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth” (laughter and applause)… “because I love honesty”. And then his inaugural address:

Did everybody like the speech? (Applause.) I’ve been given good reviews. But we had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I say, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, the field was — it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, Donald Trump did not draw well. I said, it was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. In fact, when I first started, I said, oh, no. The first line, I got hit by a couple of drops. And I said, oh, this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it. But the truth is that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sunny. And then I walked off and it poured right after I left. It poured.

Then on to Churchill — “He doesn’t come from our country, but had a lot to do with it, helped us, real ally” — how he thinks he holds the record for how many times he has been on the cover of Time magazine, way more than Tom Brady…and so on.

If you are wondering how agency people could applaud Trump after what he had said about them, a CBS News report said that he had brought along his own cheering section and placed them in the front rows. The CIA people were sullen. He was talking to a key intelligence agency that will be essential for him to discover whatever is discernible in a secret and dangerous world, yet almost none of his talk was about the serious work of CIA. Ask yourself, if you were to give a talk before the CIA, is this what you would have talked about?

And now we get to what is most troubling — his need to believe that everything he does is “fantastic”, his inability to know that he had just delivered the rambling mess of a disorderly mind. Muir of ABC asked the President about his CIA speech:

“That speech was a home run. That speech, if you look at Fox…see what Fox said, it was one of the great speeches [emphasis added]. They showed the people applauding and screaming. People loved it, they loved it. They gave me a standing ovation for a long period of time. They never even sat down, most of them during the speech. There was love in the room.”

According to a transcript on ABC’s website that went beyond what was aired, Trump had added, “In fact, they said it was the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl and they said it was equal”. Applause in the CIA lobby equal to the applause of a stadium of people, that is. As for the standing ovation, he had failed to invite the audience to take their seats, so they remained standing the whole time.

Is he alright? You decide.

Feb 15 2017 | Posted in Policy | Read More »

Trump Team’s Offhand Approval Leads to First Military Blunder

“On January 6th there was an interagency deputies meeting. The deputies recommended at that time that they go ahead. It was so easily approved it was sent straight up” to then-President Obama. That was Press Secretary Sean Spicer saying that the Trump team had ok’d an assault on an al Qaeda outpostDuring Raid What Was President Doing? Feb. 24: He never went to the situation room to observe the attack. Huffington Post worked back the timeline to find that during the 50-minute firefight which cost the life of a Navy SEAL and wounded four other SEALs, the President was tweeting. He wanted so tell us about an interview on The Brody File that night that we should all ‘Enjoy!’
    

in Yemen that had been thoroughly planned and ok’d by Obama’s team.

“Not what happened,” was Colin Kahl’s tweeted response to Spicer’s apparent attempt to shift blame. Kahl is now a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He was deputy assistant to President Obama and national security adviser to Vice-President Biden. Most important, he was in the room January 6th.

In a television interview , Kahl related that months ago the Pentagon had asked the White House for expanded authority to conduct raids against the deadly affiliate in Yemen , al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a group that has sought in at least three instances to detonate bombs hidden aboard American commercial jetliners. All of those plots were thwarted, but AQAP is presumed to be developing further plots. In that deputies meeting, said Kahl,

The Pentagon basically outlined their request for a general set of authorities that would allow them to [conduct raids] and also to put some additional forces into the field, but they did not brief a single specific raid, they did not brief a target, a compound or what we call a con op — a concept of operation — and the deputies made no decision . Basically, since we were so close to the end of the Obama administration that the recommendation by the deputies was to simply provide the information to the Trump team so that they could run a deliberate process and that recommendation went forth to President Obama who agreed that he wasn’t going to jam Trump in the last week of his presidency with a major escalation in Yemen, that this was something the new president had to own and conduct a process for.

There was no process. The raid cost the life of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William (Ryan) Owens, 36, of Peoria, Illinois. Three others in SEAL Team 6 were wounded in a 50-minute dawn firefight. The Trump administration at first claimed no civilians died but had to work that back as those in the town reported at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13, had been killed. A Defense Department spokesman said that commandos had seen several women “run to pre-established positions as though they’d been trained to be ready and trained to be combatants.” As for children. towns people displayed “grisly photographs of bloody children purportedly killed” by the raid. Among them was the 8-year old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who Obama had killed by drone strike in 2011. Photos of her, alive and dead, are being circulated on social media to inflame the Arab world.

The al Qaeda militants knew the Americans were coming. It’s believe the noise of low-flying drones gave them away. “They kind of knew they were screwed from the beginning,” one former SEAL Team 6 official said about
The Osprey tiltrotor aircraft
the troops. Marine helicopter gunships and Harrier jets had to be called in.The unplanned air assaults are what are believed to have caused the civilian deaths. One of the MV-22 Ospreys, an aircraft capable of horizontal and vertical flight, that was to rendezvous with helicopters coming from the fight carrying the wounded, suffered a “hard landing” that injured two more troops and damaged the aircraft enough that it couldn’t take off. One of the Marine jets destroyed the $75 million aircraft with a GPS-guided bomb to prevent its capture by the militants.

President Trump called what you just read “a successful raid”. It hadg killed an estimated 14 AQAP members, although that was not the raid’s objective. Spicer said it was “a successful operation by all standards”. Before the importance of whatever was taken could be known, Trump called it “important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world”. Four days after the raid a military official said that analysts had only just begun to work their way through the materials. That was the mission: the capture of computers, thumb drives and cell phones. What was actually captured has not been mentioned.

what’s on the menu: yemen

The setting for how the mission was approved to go forward is what has caused the most alarm. A plan that had never been approved by the Obama administration was never examined by the major parties in the Trump administration. It was simply decided on as a group ate dinner at the White House. It was never reviewed in the Situation Room where a military plan can be examined in detail with written exposition, maps, visuals, nor seated at the dinner was the full complement of those who should learn of a significant military operation, its odds for success, its worth versus its risks. Nor could their views be heard.

Present were Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, national security adviser Michael Flynn, CIA director Mike Pompeo. Also present presumably to offer their opinions were Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Stephen Bannon, the former head of the alt-right web organ Breitbart News who has somehow emerged as President’s Trump’s strategic adviser — or Rasputin as some would have it. Bannon’s qualification is that he had once been in the Navy.

harm’s way done this way

In the interview earlier mentioned, Colin Kahl laid out how missions such as that undertaken in Yemen are decided on (one thinks of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, as example):

We ran a very careful process where basically in a situation room senior officials from all the different departments and agencies … we’d all sit around and basically discuss pressing issues of national security. When our military is involved in combat operations , or counter terrorism operations, if they request an expansion of authority so that they can do more — put more boots on the ground, take a more active role in a combat situation — that’s precisely what we debate around the table. The deputies then make a set of recommendations … to the cabinet, who then make a set of recommendations to the president, who oftentimes convenes a National Security Council meeting to discuss it. That’s how we ran the process. That’s not how Trump ran the process.

A raid like this represents a significant escalation in the nature of our actions in Yemen. It’s not just the raid itself. it’s that there’s a broader set of authorities … you need to have not just the defense dept around the table, you also need your intelligence professionals so that they can vet the intelligence to make sure that they agree with the risk assessment the Pentagon is making. You also need the State Department at the table so that they can go through the political implications — what happens if civilians die? What are the implications for tribal relations in Yemen or diplomatic relations? You need the communicators in the room so that you know you’re on message and coordinated with your allies. You also need the legislative team in the room so that you can notify Congress. This is a deliberate process that you owe the president — a holistic assessment — and the problem is, even if you’ve got a bunch of smart capable people around a table at dinner like Secretary Mattis, who I think the world of, and Joe Dunford … who’s an amazing man, you need a fuller picture than those two gentleman can provide for the President to make a decision of this gravity.

hypocrisy

The raid is a reminder of the Benghazi raid by al Qaeda that caused the death of the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three others, two of whom were former Navy SEALs. A week-long attempt by the Obama administration to mask that al Qaeda had been the perpetrator expanded into a Republican attempt to blame the deaths directly on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who somehow should have been personally involved in safeguarding not an embassy, not even a consulate, but an outpost far from the Libyan capital (and a hotbed to which Amb. Stevens was foolhardy to visit on the anniversary of 9/11).

Republican-controlled committees in Congress conducted nine investigations and Fox News ran its version of the story like a tape loop daily that first year, always with the building on fire in the background, and continually rekindled the subject over a four year span. The reason, of course, was entirely political: to tar Clinton so as to prevent her from attaining the presidency. As it turned out, other Clinton foul-ups took care of that.

Our point? Here we have much the same story, but Republicans are still in control. The raid in which “almost everything went wrong”, a senior military official said to NBC News, should most certainly prompt an investigation, particularly to probe how the decision was made to go in, but with Republicans holding majorities in the committees, there’s no chance of one investigation much less nine. Trump’s fiasco will just fade away.

Obamacare: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Repeal

With control of both houses and a president to match in the White House, Republicans took first steps to sooth a seven-year itch: “The ‘Unaffordable’ Care
Act will soon be history!”, Donald Trump tweeted days before his inauguration.

But the dog that caught the bus soon became the cliché of the moment as Republicans began to realize they were not careful what they had wished for. After all the years since Obamacare was enacted, they have no “replace” to go along with “repeal”. How, then, can they sell their base on a repeal that cannot dare do anything of the sort? “Pulling the rug” from under the millions who now have the insurance they never had before would be political disaster.

Confusion reigns. House Speaker Paul Ryan had said that repeal and replace would be concurrent, “without a gap”, which means not for a while, there being no replace at the ready. But in early January Mr. Trump told the New York Times he expected a repeal vote “probably sometime next week” and “the replace will be very quickly or simultaneously, very shortly thereafter”. Ryan obligingly signaled a faster timetable: “Our legislating on Obamacare, our repealing and replacing and transitioning . . . will occur this year”. “We are completely in sync,” with the administration, Mr. Ryan said.

That Trump insists on a replacement health bill almost immediately must have come as a shock to House conservatives, who had been thinking replacement would likely take two years, and certainly should be held off until after the 2018 mid-term elections. And there are those, perhaps apprehensive that the Republican plan will prove unpopular, who think waiting until after the 2020 presidential election would be a good idea. Proof that no action was their plan were the 60 or so votes by the House to repeal, the last finally passed by the Senate and placed on Obama’s desk (for veto), but with no sign of replacement in sight.

unloved

The Affordable Care Act has been deeply unpopular for a number of reasons, not least of which was the commotion when increases in premium costs for 2017 averaging over 20% were announced last summer. This is likely a onetime hit as insurers ratcheted up prices to protect themselves from the loses that caused a couple of big providers to drop out last year. Obamacare gets all the blame, but the fact is that healthcare itself is what is expensive. High premiums and deductibles merely reflect that; American healthcare is more costly than anywhere else in the world.

With the threat that they could lose the health insurance they’ve acquired for the first time, people are coming to realize that Obamacare is not where the blame lies. For the first time since the law’s passage, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll says that more people now believe the Affordable Care Act was a “good idea” than those who think it bad — 45% of Americans to 41%.

death spiral

The Senate and House are resolute nonetheless. Both have both passed a resolution that started committees drafting repeal legislation designed for a process called “reconciliation”. The advantage for Republicans is that it’s a budget measure and therefore needs only a 51 vote majority by Senate rules and cannot be filibustered. The drawback is that only parts of the Affordable Care Act that involve money can be affected.

But those are the parts that will cripple the health law. Principal among them will be canceling the mandate that requires people to buy insurance or pay a penalty, ending the subsidies that make insurance affordable, and shutting off the expanded Medicaid funding for which over half the states signed on. Without the mandate’s penalty, the young and healthy won’t buy insurance. Without the subsidies, people will drop out by the millions. That leaves the insurance companies with the less healthy and more costly to pay for. Rates will therefore climb further, driving out all but those in poorest health who must keep their insurance no matter the price, causing insurers to raise premium costs yet again to pay for their care — and so on. The remaining insurance companies will abandon the program and taps will be played.

That scenario has been the Republican dream for all these years, but with no alternative to offer in its stead, the specter of backlash from ripping away the insurance that over 20 million Americans have finally been able to get, has revealed the dream to be a nightmare. Two things are apparent: first, that repeal will be missing in actions, merely symbolic, no more than a promissory note for when Republicans can put together a plan, which leaves them with some tough explaining to their base; and second, how are they going to get that plan past the 60 votes needed to surmount filibustering Democrats without making the plan so like Obamacare that enough Democrats will vote for it?

“something terrific”

Tom Price, a doctor and the new Secretary of Health & Human Services, has been a Georgia representative since 2005. He’s used his time in the House to develop a plan as far back as 2009. Not just a plan but a fully developed bill which he has reintroduced several times. He has been conferring with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Republicans have looked to governors and industry for recommendations. Several, Republican governors included, have voiced concerns to lawmakers about the damage of abruptly scrapping the 2010 law. All are scurrying to finally come up with a plan after seven years of merely having “a lot of ideas” as Ryan said in December.

President Trump will himself present a plan presumably fitting the “something terrific” prediction made shortly after he announced his candidacy. “Lower numbers, much lower deductibles”, he now says. “We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” he told The Washington Post in an interview. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us… It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better”. He has offered no details. It may well be that Trump is simply appropriating Price’s and other work and declaring it as his own.

Whatever its provenance, it won’t come as a surprise. The Republicans’ intentions have been in the open for some time and shake down as follows:

 Gone is the mandate that requires people to buy insurance.

 Gone are the subsidies, paid in varying amounts depending on income, that made insurance affordable for 80% of those who’ve bought on the ACA exchanges.

 Gone — from Prices’ plan at least — is the provision for the young to be covered by their parents’ policies until age 26, but Trump has said he wants that retained.

 Gone is any requirement for larger businesses to provide health insurance for employees.

 Gone is federal funding paid to the states for expanding Medicaid eligibility.

All mention of Republican plans boast these two features:

 Instead of subsidies, individuals and families will be given credits against their annual taxes to be used for buying insurance.

 Individuals and families will be encouraged to deposit untaxed income into Health Savings Accounts to be drawn upon for day-to-day health care costs.

As with the ACA, persons with pre-existing conditions will be able to buy policies, except under Price’s plan, there are conditions. To qualify, an enrollee must have “at least 18 months of continuous creditable coverage immediately preceding the enrollment date”. (Given this rule, how and where did applicant find such coverage?) Once entered on, a policy cannot be cancelled, but there remains the question of whether insurers will again be free to impose the annual or lifetime caps that were banned under Obamacare.

There has been repeated mention of high-risk pools, seemingly for the very ill who do not qualify under the continuous coverage rule just mentioned. But nothing specific about how this would work has been spelled out.

Medicaid funding would be replaced by block grants which would give state legislatures and governors funds to do with as they please. Disbursed into 50 states, oversight of how the money is actually spent will be difficult.

but will this work?

Questions await answers:

How will a health savings account benefit a family that doesn’t earn money enough to set aside? What then prevents that privilege from being regressive, with the greater a family’s income meaning the more it is able to set aside without paying taxes, whereas those with too little income to set aside get no benefit at all?

Will the tax credit be an outright payment to the over 40% of Americans who make so little in income that they pay no income taxes from which to deduct a credit? That seems to be what Trump is talking about when he says, “if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it [is] not going to happen with us”.

But either a payment or a deduction from taxes takes place at tax time a year after the year when the insurance had to be bought. Those with money can finance that purchase up to a year in advance of the tax credit. But money received a year later does no good for those who needed the outright payment a year earlier.

Will either the payment or the credit be issued only upon proof of purchase of insurance? Otherwise, it is a pointless giveaway.

Even if the credits are the equal of the full cost of typical policies — very unlikely — the credit is nevertheless only a deduction reducing the amount of income that is taxed, and no matter one’s bracket, the tax savings will come to far less than the cost of the insurance. When Republican planners translate these ideas into actual numbers, won’t they find themselves telling people that their insurance will cost a good deal more than under the Obamacare subsidy scheme?

access?

In his Senate hearing, Price repeatedly spoke of people having “access” to health insurance. “Access” would seem to mean not just that anyone can buy health insurance, but that everyone will receive the credit for buying insurance. Recall that Trump said, “Insurance for everybody”. Added proof of this grand design is that the credit will not be geared to income, unlike Obamacare which disqualifies those with higher incomes. It will be based on age, with higher credits for the older. Age being the criterion means it will be offered to everyone above a certain age. But “access” only means it will be offered. After hearing “access” once too often, Bernie Sanders interrupted with, “I have access to buy a ten million dollar house, but I don’t have the money”.

So the question is how big will the credits be relative to realistic health insurance costs? The Republicans have always bridled at the overly elaborate minimally acceptable insurance plans the the ACA prescribes. We can expect their basic plans to be skimpy. The Republican tendency is also to restrict government payout in social programs, suggesting that the credits will offer less money than the Obamacare subsidies. The portents are therefore “much less expensive” policies that Trump has described, but skeletal, with less coverage, and less help paying for it. How will that be the “something terrific” that Trump has promised his supporters?

cost unknown

The Republican plan is all cost. Gone will be the penalty revenue from those who elect not to buy insurance. Gone will be the surcharge tax on high earners. Gone will be the taxes on certain industries such as medical device makers. Gone as well will be the tax on insurance companies in return for the added business Obamacare brought them. With no unified plan having been worked out, the Congressional Budget Office is unable to begin estimating the cost. It has only dealt with the costs of repeal without replacement. So Republicans may be in for a rude and very public jolt when they expose their plan to the accountants.

The money to fund more generous credits is there, but lawmakers won’t go near it. It can be found by putting a tighter lid on the entirely untaxed benefits employees receive from businesses that pay for their health insurance. Employees would give up some of their grossly preferential benefits to help others who are left to buy their own insurance. But businesses, unions and conservatives are against, saying it’s a new tax. Well yes, it is. It’s a tax on income that would begin to match what others must pay on theirs. It would begin to treat people more equitably rather than prejudicially.

Finally, what Republicans have outlined so far won’t get needed Democratic votes. Short of Republicans striking down the filibuster rule, Democratic votes will be essential for passage of the Obamacare replacement. If the Republican plan proves as austere as we describe, it will face a certain Democratic filibuster, which by then might be fully supported by an outraged public.

Psychiatrists Say Trump “Dangerous” and “Untreatable”

“Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president”, said John D. Gartner, both a practicing psychotherapist and an instructor of psychiatric residents at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Quoted in U.S. News just after the inauguration, his diagnosis is that the American President is possessed of not simply a narcissistic personality disorder, but is in the grip of “malignant narcissism”, a more serious level which they say is incurable.

One psychotherapist’s opinion does not necessarily make it so, especially with a “patient” viewed from afar, but others have come forth. Gartner
started an online petition titled “Mental Health Professionals Declare Trump is Mentally Ill and Must Be Removed” which so far has the signatures of more than 26,000 who declare themselves to be mental health professionals. The petition cites the 25th Amendment as the procedure for removing an incapacitated president from office.

Alarmed by Barry Goldwater’s seeming willingness to use nuclear weapons, psychiatrists spoke out during the 1964 campaign, but that brought about an ethics ruling by the American Psychiatric Association that the profession should no longer diagnose public figures or anyone without a personal examination. That notion is now in disrepute because with public figures, psychiatrists have far more behavioral evidence on view than the small window of 45-minute office sessions. So the professionals are now speaking out.

“Narcissism impairs his ability to see reality,” said Dr. Julie Futrell, a clinical psychologist quoted in New York’s Daily News. “The maintenance of self-identity is the organizing principle of life for those who fall toward the pathological end of the narcissistic spectrum.”

And it’s becoming a media topic. An article in USA Today about the constitutional options for removing a president from office is titled, “What if Trump loses his mind?”. The Daily News piece openly cites “the Madness of King Donald”, clearly a reference to King George III of Britain, who ruled for decades at the end of the 18th Century into the 19th and was considered mentally ill. Mark Shields and David Brooks both compared Trump to King George III on the PBS “NewsHour”, Brooks calling the president “a 5-year-old who has an ego that needs to be fed, and the Universe has to warp around his ego needs so he can feel good about himself”. None of them are experts; the point is that the subject is out in the open.

Nor is Barbara Res an expert. She was an executive vice president of the Trump Organization and author of “All Alone on the 68th Floor: How One Woman Changed the Face of Construction”. She emailed the Daily News after the above story ran to say that in 1982 one of her workers brought a New York Times article about narcissism to work. “To a person, we all agreed that the characteristics outlined in the article fit Donald to a “T”. Now, 35 years later, professionals are saying what we knew back then. Only now he is so much worse”.

The grandiosity of Trump’s exalted view of self that the psychiatrists see bursts forth regularly. “I think I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever”, he said in mid-summer, just when his erratic conduct had raised the issue. Strolling outside the White House with ABC’s David Muir days after his inauguration he said, “I can be the most presidential person ever, other than Lincoln”. In his speech the day he announced his candidacy he had said, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God has ever created”. In 2013 he tweeted:

Richard Green, a “communication strategist” who had been interviewing psychiatrists and psychologists about Trump, wrote in The Huffington Post that

“Virtually every mental health professional I interviewed told me that they believed, with 100% certainty, that Mr. Trump satisfied the DSM criteria of this incurable illness [narcissistic personality disorder or NPD] and that, as a result, he is a serious danger to the country and the world”.

The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard reference in the field, which lists nine criteria for diagnosing NPD, a list that can be found here. A person who satisfies any five of the criteria is deemed to have the disorder. He posts a letter that two professors of psychiatry and an assistant clinical professor had written to then-President Obama after the election recommending that Mr. Trump “receive a full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation”. It is tempting to suggest the same for the trio who think that Obama could have compelled such an exam, but their letter points out traits familiar to the lay citizen:

“His widely reported symptoms of instability — grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality — lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office.”

Ms Futrell further said:

“A narcissist’s defenses function to protect the person from the knowledge of what lies beneath, and as such, must not be challenged lest the walls come crumbling down. It is important to understand that the need to maintain the self-image is so great,… the severe narcissist bends reality to fulfill whatever fantasy about power, wealth, beauty, etc. s/he maintains.”

A careful and chilling exposition of the syndrome is provided by clinical psychologist Lynne Meyer (video, 4.29m). She says in part,

“It’s hard-wired way of…behaving in the world…and it actually has a deteriorating course, so he would just get worse. Usually someone with a narcissistic personality disorder is driven by self interest. They’re pretty destructive and can be untreatable. For the most part they are one of the most difficult personality disorders to treat, and the reason for that is because … they don’t take feedback…they’re not taking in reality.

“He doesn’t feel he needs daily briefings of what’s going on in the world … so there’s the grandiosity… followed by the fact that he’s smart. There’s the narcissism…. ‘I don’t need to learn anything. I know best’ and nobody gets to tell him anything.

He has found himself in a position where he is omnipotent, which is also very dangerous…The most important thing to be concerned about is the impulsivity. When he gets slighted and enraged, he will act out. He will have access to the nuclear codes, and with his level of impulsivity and instability, that is dangerous for the country and dangerous for the free world”.

Feb 5 2017 | Posted in Policy | Read More »