Washington, D.C. August 25, 2018: “1. Internet access can be controlled or its use directed according to the server configuration, thus creating an excellent disinformation weapon. In previous times, a national media report that was deemed to be offensive or problematical to the government could be censored, or removed at governmental request. Now, however, the government cannot control the present Internet in the same manner in which it has previously controlled the public media.
2.The Internet permits uncensored and unfiltered versions of events, personalities and actions to be disseminated worldwide in seconds and the so-called “blogs,” chat rooms and websites are almost completely uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This unfortunate situation permits versions of events to find a far wider and far more instantaneous audience than the standard print and, to a lesser degree, the television mediums ever could.The Internet can be used to send coded messages that cannot be interdicted by any government or law-enforcement agency.
3.The Internet can be utilized to steal and disseminate highly damaging, sensitive government or business data.
4.The Internet permits anti-government groups or individuals with few resources to offset the efforts of far larger, and far better funded, government and its national media sources.
5.The Internet can be used to create serious disruptions of governmental agencies and the business communities.
The Internet can serve as an excellent tool for organizing groups of anti-government individuals into action.
The Internet can be used to expose government actions and military operations in advance of said actions.
The Internet is capable of hiding the identities of those launching attacks on the actions and personnel of various government agencies.
9.The Internet can materially assist an underfunded, anti-government group to raise money for continued operations.
10. The Internet can be utilized to locate and publicize the personnel of government agencies.
The Internet can be used as a tool to recruit new members for anti-government groups.
The Internet is capable of limiting the risk of identification of the members of anti-government groups.
The Internet, while impossible to control, is also an excellent recruiting ground for sympathetic or easily-convinced “bloggers” who will quickly disseminate official dissemination for pay or public acclaim.
By using controlled sources, it is easily possible to defuse delicate situations and divert public attention away from unwelcome issues.
15. The Internet can be utilized to create an atmosphere of fear or of compliance in furtherance of official policy.
The day the fence arrived, Gabe was sitting next to his tent, right at the heart of Los Angeles’ Skid Row. It was a chain link fence – about six feet tall – placed at the edge of the sidewalk, where it neatly enclosed Gabe, his neighbors, and the tented homes they have made for themselves on the streets of what is sometimes called the homeless capital of the country.
Local activists and police officers were called. Eventually, the chain-link fence was moved to free Gabe and his neighbors. It wouldn’t be the last of the fences.
As street homelessness continues to spiral upwards in Los Angeles, with just over 25,000 people living in cars, tents, and other makeshift shelters across the county, a new phenomenon is prompting frustration among the city’s homeless population: business owners fencing in portions of the sidewalk, seemingly to keep homeless people off them.
Google Maps images show that the streets that were part of the new gardening “beautification program” used to be occupied by the tents of people who have now had to move elsewhere. Local homeless people said they welcomed care being lavished on the area. But not at the expense of the people who used to live there.
The city is now investigating the “North Sea” gardening project. Miguel Nelson, a business owner who was partially responsible for it and who has recently opened an event space nearby, declined to comment.
On a busy street lined with industrial buildings and homeless encampments,Wesley Willis lives in a small tent across the street from one of these new fences. Earlier this week he stood looking out at the row of tents pitched alongside the fence, which was making much of the sidewalk inaccessible. His concern was not for himself.
The U.S. State Department on Friday said it would push for foreign postal carriers to pay the U.S. Postal Service more to deliver small parcels within the United States, taking up a longtime complaint by Amazon.com (AMZN.O), UPS (UPS.N) and others who have alleged the current system is unfair.
The State Department also said it would push foreign postal services to furnish data that would help customs officials detect opioids and other illegal shipments entering the United States. That task could also add to their costs.
If successful, the effort would benefit U.S. merchants and shippers who say they are undercut by foreign postal services’ access to low rates. U.S. shoppers could see higher bills for foreign goods ordered online.
The move may face pushback during meetings next month of the United Nation’s Universal Postal Union, from countries like China and Brazil, which already face price hikes for mail to Europe and the United States.
On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a memorandum on “terminal dues,” or rates one country’s postal service pays another for finishing an international delivery.
“The current system of terminal dues distorts the flow of small packages around the world by incentivizing the shipping of goods from foreign countries that benefit from artificially low reimbursement rates,” the memo said.
It added that the U.S. Secretary of State “shall include recommendations for future action, including the possibility of adopting self-declared rates,” if insufficient progress is made with the Universal Postal Union.
Those companies and industry groups have sought White House meetings since last year to attack arcane postal agreements they say make it cheaper to air-mail goods to Los Angeles from Beijing than from New York.
Others say the issue is not so simple. USPS claims to save money on outbound shipments thanks to the Universal Postal Union’s exchange system, and rates for countries such as China have already been negotiated to rise by 2021 to a significant percentage of USPS’s costs, the same rate USPS pays other countries.
It was not clear if the memorandum followed recommendations, not yet made public, of the postal task force Trump set up this year to examine USPS’s business.
in fact: The U.S., of course, does not have an undefended or open border, though people manage to sneak past the defences. The Border Patrol, which has a budget of $14 billion, apprehended 415,816 people in 2016.
in fact: His proposed increase, of about 10 per cent, is not one of the largest in history, experts say. “Trump’s historical increase is actually quite average,” Laicie Heeley, a defense budget analyst at the Stimson Center think tank, told PolitiFact.
in fact: This claim about puddles has been a common Republican talking point, but it is not accurate. The Environmental Protection Agency has specifically excluded puddles from this regulation; a fact sheet on its website says, “THE CLEAN WATER RULE DOES NOT REGULATE PUDDLES.” While critics of the regulation argue that the law can still be read to cover puddles, it is just not true that the EPA decided that nearly every puddle is included.
in fact: There is no evidence for this claim.
in fact: These savings did not come after Trump got involved: Lockheed Martin had been moving to cut the price well before Trump was elected, multiple aviation and defence experts say. Just a week after Trump’s election, the head of the F-35 program announced a reduction of 6 to 7 per cent — in the $600 million to $700 million range. “Trump’s claimed $600 million cut is right in the ballpark of what the price reduction was going to be all along,” wrote Popular Mechanics. “Bottom line: Trump appears to be taking credit for years of work by the Pentagon and Lockheed,” Aviation Week reported, per the Washington Post.
in fact: Trump is taking credit for investments he was not responsible for. GM did not offer any indication that it made its new investment of $1 billion because of Trump, and independent automotive analysts said it was unlikely Trump was a major factor; GM invested $2.9 billion last year, before Trump was elected. The parent company of Chrysler said Trump had no influence on its newly announced $1 billion investment in Michigan and Ohio, telling ThinkProgress, “This plan was in the works back in 2015.” Further, all of these companies were maintaining a major presence in the U.S. before Trump was elected.
Trump has repeated this claim 10 times.
in fact: The Democrats are not responsible for the holdup here: Trump is. At the time, he had two open cabinet slots: labour secretary and agriculture secretary. One delay was the result of his controversial choice for labour secretary, Andrew Puzder, withdrawing from consideration. The other delay, in confirming Sonny Perdue as secretary of agriculture, was the result of the administration not actually submitting the Perdue nomination to the Senate.
in fact: The leaders of the FBI and NSA, as well as Republican leaders in Congress with access to intelligence, said there is no evidence that this occurred. In September, the Justice Department said in a court filing that it had no evidence to support the claim.
Donald Trump’s presidency, it has been widely observed, bends the laws of time. Scandals that would have dogged other presidents for years tend to be here today, gone tomorrow. Fifteen minutes of fame is now likely to count for no more than 15 seconds.
But even by the standards of the Trump universe, this week has been a blur. And at its heart was a single, devastating hour on Tuesday 21 August that effectively turned the president of the United States into an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime.
Interviewer Chuck Todd put his hand on his forehead and said: “This is going to become a bad meme!” And it did.
At the White House on Monday, Trump hosted an event to highlight success stories of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. He said that a border patrol agent, who is Latino, “speaks perfect English” as he beckoned him to the stage. He also misstated the acronym for US Customs and Border Protection at least eight times, referring to it as “CBC”, as in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
So far, so Trumpian – fairly typical of this extraordinary presidency. But then came, to use primary election parlance, Super Tuesday. At around 4.30pm, in courtrooms 200 miles apart, a pair of Trump associates delivered a one-two punch that stunned the White House and revived whispers of impeachment.
Cohen’s plea bargain statement could be exhibit A if Democrats win the House of Representatives in November and launch a campaign to impeach the president, though the party continues to play down such talk. And Cohen’s lawyer embarked on a media tour saying his client was eager to sing like a canary for Mueller.
But the day from hell was far from done. The Republican congressman Duncan Hunter and his wife were indicted on corruption charges, namely converting more than $250,000 in campaign money to pay for personal expenses, including dental work, fast food, golf outings and holidays and trips for their family and nearly a dozen relatives.
In 2016, Hunter was the second member of Congress to endorse Trump for president. Earlier this month the first, Chris Collins of New York was indicted for insider trading. The third? Jeff Sessions, now Trump’s out-of-favour attorney general.
And with irony clearly dead, Trump’s supporters chanted “Lock her up!” – an old refrain about his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton.
And then, in one more dose of humiliation, the candidate Trump endorsed for governor of Wyoming, Foster Friess, lost the Republican primary to the state treasurer, Mark Gordon.
The day was a vivid illustration of a news cycle operating at hyperspeed. Bob Shrum, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, drew comparisons with Watergate – particularly the “Saturday Night Massacre”, when Richard Nixon fired the special prosecutor and accepted the resignations of the attorney general and his deputy – and the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001.
Shrum added: “But we now just go from one stunning story to another. Instead of Alpha to Omega, it’s Cohen to Omarosa,” – a reference to the reality TV star turned White House aide whose gossipy memoir already feels like an aeon ago.
Then there was Wednesday. At 8.44am, Trump tweeted: “If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” He described Manafort as “a brave man” who took the rap and suggested that the fact 10 of his charges were undecided was proof of a “witch hunt”.
He also claimed that he did not find out about the payments until “later”, contradicting earlier statements. For the first time, the Washington Post’s factchecker said the president was lying rather than merely misleading or false. “The president’s statement was a lie – and the people speaking for him repeated it,” the Post commented.
Not for the first time, perhaps seeking affirmation, on Wednesday night he turned to Fox News. There he saw a spurious Tucker Carlson report pushing a white nationalist conspiracy theory that white farmers in South Africa are being persecuted and murdered in Zimbabwe-style land grabs. Trump tweeted his outrage and promised to consult the state department, whose own human rights report on South Africa had made no mention of the issue.
On Thursday there was no let-up. It emerged that David Pecker, chairman of American Media Inc, which owns the pro-Trump National Enquirer, had been granted immunity to provide information about Cohen and Trump’s involvement with payments to the two women who allege sexual affairs. The Associated Press added fuel to the fire by reporting that the Enquirer kept such secrets locked in a safe, lending it extraordinary power.
Meanwhile Trump traded verbal blows with Sessions, whom he said he had only appointed because of his campaign support. On Friday morning he kept going with tweets, urging the attorney general to investigate Hillary Clinton and Democrats in the interests of balance. “Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!” Speculation that Sessions will be fired intensified – again, a public feud that in any other era would have dominated headlines.
But instead attention turned back to Trump’s legal crisis as the Wall Street Journal reported that Allen Weisselberg, his longtime financial gatekeeper, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Cohen. There was an ominous sense that the walls are finally closing in on the president.
But as ever during Trump’s wild weeks, there were things being missed or not receiving sufficient information. Buried under the news avalanche: the White House released a greenhouse gas emissions plan that could boost output from coal-fired power plants rather than push them towards closure. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, moved closer to confirmation as he appeared to get the nod of approval from the Republican senator Susan Collins.
Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted: “i understand the focus on politics here at home, but 1) NK is not denuclearizing; 2) Venezuela is on the precipice; 3) a crisis with/over Iran is brewing; 4) climate change is worse sooner than predicted; 5) US relations w China and Russia are at post-Cold War nadir. just sayin’”.
The worst week yet of the Trump presidency? It faces stiff competition from his responses to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki. Indeed, with this man in the White House, every week feels like a lifetime.
Among the many questions journalists should have posed around the April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun allegations is the question of how we can trust any of the samples by the OPCW when clearly there was no chain of custody: the area is controlled by Al-Qaeda or groups affiliated, groups which have a vested interest in fudging results.
Following the April 2018 White House accusation that the Syrian government used sarin in Douma, and in spite of Damascus’ insistence on an OPCW investigation, FUKUS bombed Syria, including Damascus’ densely-inhabited Barzeh district, destroying a site which was involved in production of cancer treatment components, but not chemical weapons.
Al Green cuts a distinctive figure around the Capitol. He is, for starters, the only male member of the House of Representatives with a ponytail. He expresses himself with a kind of baroque humility; to the question “How are you?” he invariably responds, “Better than I deserve.” (Elaborating, if asked, he says that he is a “recovering sinner.”) He is unusual, too, because, while most politicians call attention to their triumphs and hide their failures, Green reserves a place of honor in his congressional office for two reminders of crushing, if perhaps temporary, legislative defeats. Last year, Green—who, since 2005, has represented a district centered on Houston—sponsored the first vote in the House of Representatives on the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On December 6th, the House rejected Green’s initiative to bring impeachment up for debate by a vote of 364–58. The following month, the House rejected a similar attempt by Green, this time by a vote of 355–66.
Notwithstanding the lopsided results, Green has placed copies of each of the resolutions in portfolios embossed with the gold seal of the House. The December resolution is paired with a list of the members who voted for it—they are called “THE FIRST 58.” The January resolution faces a page containing the names of its supporters, who are called “THE HISTORIC 66.” Green sent identical copies of the portfolios to all the congressmen who voted with him.
Today, the impeachment of Donald Trump exists on the brink of plausibility. The sine qua non of an impeachment investigation, to say nothing of actual votes to charge and remove the President, is a Democratic takeover of the House in the November elections. Such a change now looks better than possible, maybe even probable. At the same time, the President appears to be in ever-greater legal peril from dual investigations, one led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the other by federal prosecutors in New York. In April, F.B.I. agents raided the offices of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, and removed telephones and business records. Cohen has not been charged with a crime, but the prospect of a case against him, with the chance that he might plead guilty and reveal everything he knows, represents a substantial risk for the President. In Washington, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, and Rick Gates, who worked on Trump’s campaign and in his White House, have both already pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mueller and agreed to coöperate with his investigation. The full extent of Mueller’s findings is not known, raising the possibility that more legal and political damage to the President is yet to come. While Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, may or may not be correct that Mueller believes he lacks the legal authority to indict the President, the possibility of impeachment clearly exists—if Congress has the evidence, and the will, to proceed.
Still, a powerful grassroots movement has formed in support of impeachment, a political cousin of sorts to the recent pushes for women’s rights and gun control. According to Quinnipiac, seventy-one per cent of Democrats already favor impeachment. To proponents, a nearly fifty-fifty split among the voting public at this early date, before Mueller has reported his findings, is significant. In primaries for the 2018 elections, some prominent Democrats, such as Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, who is running for governor, made support for impeachment a major part of their platforms. Tom Steyer, a San Francisco billionaire, has since last year been running television advertisements supporting impeachment, and has generated a mailing list of more than 5.2 million people. Steyer is now on a thirty-city speaking tour. For the moment, he and his followers are outcasts from the Washington consensus. But their passion, and the mounting evidence against the President, raises the question of whether the drive for impeachment is more likely to result in Trump’s removal from office or in a Democratic civil war.
For roughly the first two centuries of the American republic, there was an informal taboo on advocating for impeachment, even among a President’s most outspoken critics. Only one Presidential impeachment proceeding occurred during this period: in 1868, Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House but remained in office after being acquitted in the Senate by a single vote. The nominal ground for impeachment involved his dismissal of a member of his Cabinet, but impeachment cases are always about the politics of the moment as much as the evidence before Congress. Johnson’s case represented a final act of the Civil War. Though he was Abraham Lincoln’s Vice-President and successor, Johnson was a Democrat, and he resisted the Republican Reconstruction in the South. Republicans used impeachment as a form of revenge, which only reinforced the taboo.
Any initial investigation of impeachment would fall to the House Judiciary Committee, and its chairman, in a Democratic Congress, would be Jerrold Nadler, from New York. Donald Trump and Jerry Nadler represent contrasting New York archetypes—the rapacious developer and the woolly-headed liberal. Not surprisingly, the two men have a history. They first clashed more than three decades ago, when Trump proposed a vast development on an old rail yard on Manhattan’s West Side.
The Clinton impeachment also played a role in Nadler’s campaign, last year, to become the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Democrats generally choose their committee leaders based on seniority. Even though Nadler was the longest-tenured Democrat, he was challenged for the leadership by Zoe Lofgren, who represents a district in Silicon Valley. Part of Lofgren’s pitch was her experience on the impeachment question. Not only did Lofgren, like Nadler, serve on the committee in 1998; she was also a young staffer for Representative Don Edwards in 1974, when she worked on the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon.
For Lofgren, the Nixon example looms large. “The American people at some kind of gut level understand the constitutional system,” she told me. “When a President lied about having an affair with a young woman, that was gross behavior, and the lie was arguably unlawful, but it had nothing to do with government. With Nixon, having an enemies list and using the elements of the federal government to destroy your enemies was about the abuse of government power. People got that. By the time the committee voted to impeach, in 1974, the country was on board.” In the nineteen-seventies there was also a core of moderate Republicans open to considering the evidence against Nixon. Seven of the seventeen Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted for at least one article of impeachment. Not a single Democrat on the committee voted in favor of Clinton’s impeachment.
Steyer, who is sixty, made his name in politics raising money for John Kerry and Barack Obama, and then became a climate-change activist. He has now positioned himself outside traditional political categories. It’s a strategy, albeit with very different goals, that Trump pursued in his political career. Bannon, expressing admiration for Steyer’s tactics, told me, “Steyer is a little bit the Steve Bannon of the left. The Democratic Party has not yet had its civil war. The populist movement on the left has not happened yet, but Steyer sees it coming, sees the anger behind it.” In Steyer’s remarks in Des Moines, he attacked both parties. “The political establishment does not like what we have to say here,” he told the crowd. “They say we are normalizing impeachment. We are not normalizing impeachment. If we ignore what Donald Trump has done, what we’re doing is normalizing his behavior.” Asked at one point about the last election, Steyer said, “Two people won the 2016 election: Bernie Sanders, who is not a Democrat, and Donald Trump, who is not a Republican.” Steyer also funds, to the tune of thirty-two million dollars, a voter-registration project aimed at young people, called NextGen America, that is ostensibly nonpartisan. Steyer is using impeachment much the same way Trump used issues like immigration: to show that he’s with the Party’s base, not with its elders.
In our conversations, Steyer showed that he had mastered the politician’s art of ducking the question of whether he’s running for President. “I believe that we are on a disastrous path,” he replied when I asked. “There is an absolute void of explaining to Americans what the real stakes are.” A question from the audience in Des Moines about Steyer’s Presidential ambitions drew a loud cheer from the attendees and a non-denial denial from Steyer. The only state where Steyer’s tour has conducted three events is Iowa, the site of the nation’s first caucuses.
In modern terms, one pole in the debate over impeachment was defined by Gerald Ford, during his days as a congressman, when he led a failed attempt to impeach the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, in 1970, for purportedly improper financial dealings. “An impeachable offense,” Ford said, “is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” At the other extreme from Ford’s almost tautological approach is the claim that only proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a President committed criminal offenses can justify an impeachment.
Nadler, for his part, declines to set markers for what might trigger an impeachment investigation if he assumes the House Judiciary Committee chairmanship in 2019, although he continues to express indignation at each new disclosure about Trump. He denounced the President’s threats against Mueller and introduced legislation to protect the investigation by the special counsel. He criticized the firing of Andrew McCabe. He sought an investigation of Cambridge Analytica for violating U.S. election regulations. He called for a formal resolution of censure against Trump for his remarks about Charlottesville. None of these proposals went anywhere in the Republican-controlled House.