Story 1: Dirt Desperate Democrats in Questioning Michael Cohen — Rehash Old Stories and Lies About Trump That Are Not Crimes — More False Accusations With No Evidence — No Evidence of Trump/Russian Collusion — No Love Child — No Porn Videos — No Drug Use — No Crimes — No Golden Showers — No Credibility — No Impeachment — Videos —
Michael Cohen questioned by Rep. Jim Jordan about Donald Trump: raw video
WATCH: Michael Cohen hearing ends in a heated exchange over racism
Tucker: DC never stops being shocked at ‘bad man’ Trump
Michael Cohen: President Trump is a racist, conman and cheat
Elijah Cummings’ stunning closing remarks at Cohen hearing
Cummings: It appears Trump committed a crime in office
Gutfeld on media coverage of Hanoi and Cohen
Michael Cohen and Rep. Jim Jordan clash during hearing
Cohen wipes away tear during Cummings’ closing statement
Racism accusation sparks fury at Cohen hearing
WATCH: Cohen says if Trump loses 2020 election, there won’t be a ‘peaceful transition of power
Elijah Cummings’ stunning closing remarks at Cohen hearing
Elijah Cummings: ‘200 Years From Now, People Will Be Reading About This Moment’ | MTP Daily | MSNBC
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Michael Cohen speaks out after his sentencing: ‘I have my freedom back’
Turley: Potential Trump Campaign Finance Violations ‘Very Serious,’ But Difficult to Prove
Mark Levin slams Michael Cohen’s plea deal
Former FEC chairman Bradley Smith talks campaign finance law
Mark Levin: Legal precedent is on Trump’s side
Michael Cohen reveals Trump is being probed for ‘OTHER wrongdoing or illegal act’ by Manhattan federal prosecutors – and accuses Don Jr. of being part of criminal conspiracy too
Michael Cohen revealed that President Trump is being investigated for ‘other wrongdoing’ although he refused to divulge details
‘This topic is actually something that’s being investigated right now by the Southern District of New York,’ Cohen said when asked about a Trump meeting
‘I’ve been asked by them not to discuss and not to talk about these issues,’ he added because of their ongoing investigation
Cohen also implicated Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, as part of the conspiracy to offer hush money payments to women during the 2016 campaign
One of Cohen’s eight guilty felony pleas was to campaign finance violations tied to the payoff to Daniels
PUBLISHED: 19:18 EST, 27 February 2019 | UPDATED: 20:28 EST, 27 February 2019
Michael Cohen revealed on Wednesday that President Donald Trump is being investigated for ‘other wrongdoing’ although he refused to divulge details because of the ongoing investigation.
He made his comments during his nearly 5 hours of testifying before the House Oversight and Reform Committee – his second out of three appearances this week on Capitol Hill and the only one before cameras.
Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, revealed the last time he had contact with Trump or one of his team was ‘within two months’ of the April 2018 FBI raid on Cohen’s home, office and hotel suite.
Michael Cohen revealed that President Trump is being investigated for ‘other wrongdoing’ although he refused to divulge details
President Trump is in Vietnam for his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi asked Cohen what he was told during that contact.
Cohen declined to offer details.
‘Unfortunately, this topic is actually something that’s being investigated right now by the Southern District of New York and I’ve been asked by them not to discuss and not to talk about these issues,’ Cohen replied.
The Southern District of New York was the lead prosecutor in Cohen’s case and is probing Trump’s business dealings.
‘Is there any other wrongdoing or illegal act that you are aware of regarding Donald Trump that we haven’t yet discussed today?’ Krishnamoorthi inquired.
‘Yes,’ Cohen responded. ‘And again, those are part of the investigation that’s currently being looked at by the Southern District of New York.’
Cohen also implicated Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, as part of the conspiracy to offer hush money payments to women during the 2016 campaign.
He revealed the president’s son signed a check to fund illegal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, potentially placing Trump Jr. in legal trouble.
One of Cohen’s eight guilty pleas was to campaign finance violations tied to the payoff to Daniels.
A ‘hush money’ payment to Daniels during the 2016 race with funds originating from a home equity line of credit Cohen obtained – at Trump’s direction, he claimed – was part of the money Trump repaid in a series of $35,000 checks to Cohen that continued during his first year in office.
Cohen provided two checks to the House Oversight and Reform Committee as evidence.
One check provided to the committee was signed by Trump himself in August 2017, more than six months into his administration, and issued from what Cohen says is the president’s personal account.
The other is from the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust – and signed by both Donald Trump Jr. and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg.
A Trump Organization official told DailyMail.com on Wednesday that Donald Trump Jr. was unaware when he signed the check that it was part of a repayment plan for Cohen’s hush-money outlay.
Cohen said Wednesday that the money ‘was declared to be a retainer for services’ although ‘there is no retainer agreement.’
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna drilled down on the payments, saying they were the ‘smoking gun’ showing ‘garden variety financial fraud’ at the president’s business.
Khanna asked Cohen whether Trump was aware of the scheme
Rep. Ro Khanna (center) asked Michael Cohen about payoffs to Stormy Daniels
Cohen talked about Donald Trump Jr’s involvement in payments to Daniels
Cohen told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that as a lawyer for Daniels (right) threatened to go public with her claims of a sexual affair more than a decade earlier, Trump (left, in Vietnam on Wednesday) ordered him to find a way to funnel the payment to her via that attorney
Michael Cohen offered financial documents to the committee and said he did not know if the president’s taxes were under audit
Cohen has provided members of Congress with two checks, one signed by the president and the other by his son Donald Jr, which he says was reimbursement for payments meant to keep Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal quiet; President Trump’s check was written after he had been president for more than a half-year
The Donald Trump Jr.-signed check was dated in March 2017, and was drawn on a family Trust; A Trump Organization official told DailyMail.com on Wednesday that Trump Jr. was unaware when he signed it that it was part of a repayment plan for Cohen’s hush-money outlay
Cohen replied in the affirmative.
‘Are you telling us, Mr. Cohen, that the president directed transactions in conspiracy with Allen Weisselberg and his son, Donald Trump Jr., as part of a criminal conspiracy of financial fraud?’ Khanna followed up. ‘Is that your testimony today?’
‘Yes,’ Cohen said.
Cohen did decline to say whether he believed Trump Jr. was being investigated by federal prosecutors.
Cohen also indicated Trump could have committed financial fraud when he faced questioning from freshman Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
He revealed additional details on how Trump provided insurance companies with financials that exaggerated his assets and wealth but wanted to reduce his real estate taxes – and if the president lied on insurance and IRS forms to make this happen, that would be fraud.
Ocasio-Cortez stayed on financial issues for nearly all her questioning as she laid the groundwork for the committee to continue and expand its investigation of the president’s business empire.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quizzes Michael Cohen on Trump’s finances
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questions to Michael Cohen laid the groundwork for additional subpoenas on Trump’s businesses and taxes
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kept her questions focused on the Trump’s financial issues
‘Where would the committee find more information on this? Do you think we need to review his financial statements and tax returns in order to compare them?,’ she asked.
‘Yes, and you would find it at the Trump Org,’ Cohen told her.
She also set up the possibility of the committee using its subpoena power to obtain the president’s tax records and other financial documents.
Ocasio-Cortez inquired if it ‘would it help for the committee to obtain federal and state returns from the president and his company to address that?’
Cohen says Trump behaved ‘much like a mobster would do’
By COLLEEN LONGtoday
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, testifies before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON (AP) — He carried out the boss’ wishes. He understood “the code.” He was blindly loyal — but now he’s considered a rat.
Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen spoke at length Wednesday about his life in the president’s inner circle, but the most vivid descriptor came in just six words. Trump ran his operation “much like a mobster would do,” Cohen said.
In Cohen’s scathing testimony at a House committee hearing, he repeatedly described Trump, the onetime head of a family business, like a mob boss minus the body count: quick to bully and expecting others to do his dirty work. Cohen described himself as a consigliere, telling lawmakers he did Trump’s bidding for years, intimidating maybe 500 people and lying to scores, including the first lady. But Trump never directly told him to do it, he said.
“He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders,” Cohen said. “He speaks in a code, and I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.”
Cohen is facing a three-year sentence for lying to Congress in 2017 and other charges. He came back to Capitol Hill this week, worrying for his family’s safety, but claiming he would no longer lie for his former boss and was ready to spill.
Trump has denied the allegations against him and called Cohen a liar. Even as he’s done so, he’s used mob speak.
“Remember, Michael Cohen only became a ‘Rat’ after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started,” Trump tweeted in December. “They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEY’S OFFICE,” he wrote, referring to the raid on Cohen’s office that touched off the now-disbarred lawyer’s eventual guilty plea.
During the hearing, Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly even likened Cohen to Joe Valachi, an American gangster known as the “first rat” whose 1960s testimony before Congress lead to the eventual dismantling of organized crime.
“This Congress historically has relied on all kinds of shady figures who turned,” Connolly said.
It’s hardly the first time Trump’s orbit has drawn mob comparisons.
In his book “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” former FBI director James Comey said he got the sinking feeling that Trump’s operation functioned like the mob. Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe spun a similar story, and a former agent and former federal prosecutor tweeted Wednesday that Trump’s tactics as detailed by Cohen sure felt a lot like the mafia.
There’s even a “Godfather: Part II” reference in the indictment by the special prosecutor investigating Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Trump confidant Roger Stone told an associate to pull a “Frank Pentangeli” before a House committee, the indictment says. In the film, Pentangeli, an associate of the Corleone crime family, lies to protect the family during congressional testimony.
___
Associated Press Writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
Plea bargaining in the United States is very common; the vast majority of criminal cases in the United States are settled by plea bargain rather than by a jury trial.[1][2] They have also been increasing in frequency—they rose from 84% of federal cases in 1984 to 94% by 2001.[3] Plea bargains are subject to the approval of the court, and different States and jurisdictions have different rules. Game theory has been used to analyze the plea bargaining decision.[4]
The constitutionality of plea bargaining was established by Brady v. United States in 1970,[5] although the Supreme Court warned that plea incentives which were sufficiently large or coercive as to over-rule defendants’ abilities to act freely, or used in a manner giving rise to a significant number of innocent people pleading guilty, might be prohibited or lead to concerns over constitutionality.[6]Santobello v. New York added that when plea bargains are broken, legal remedies exist.[7]
Several features of the American justice system tend to promote plea bargaining. The adversarial nature of the system puts judges in a passive role, in which they are completely dependent upon the parties to develop the factual record and cannot independently discover information with which to assess the strength of the case against the defendant. The parties thus can control the outcome of the case by exercising their rights or bargaining them away. The lack of compulsory prosecution also gives prosecutors greater discretion. And the inability of crime victims to mount a private prosecution and their limited ability to influence plea agreements also tends to encourage plea bargaining.[8] Prosecutors have been described as monopsonists.[9]
Plea bargaining has existed for centuries; in older legal systems convictions were at times routinely procured by confession, and laws existed covering such criminal confessions, although by the 18th century inducements had been forbidden in English Law to prevent miscarriage of justice.[10] Accordingly, early US plea bargain history led to courts’ permitting withdrawal of pleas and rejection of plea bargains, although such arrangements continued to happen behind the scenes.[10] A rise in the scale and scope of criminal law led to plea bargaining’s gaining new acceptance in the early 20th century, as courts and prosecutors sought to address an overwhelming influx of cases:[10]
[F]ederal prosecutions under the Prohibition Act terminated in 1930 had become nearly eight times as many as the total number of all pending federal prosecutions in 1914. In a number of urban districts the enforcement agencies maintain that the only practicable way of meeting this situation with the existing machinery of the federal courts … is for the United States Attorneys to make bargains with defendants or their counsel whereby defendants plead guilty to minor offenses and escape with light penalties.[3][10]
However, even though over 90% of convictions were based upon plea bargaining by 1930, courts remained reluctant for some time to endorse these when appealed.[10]
Modern history (c. 1950 onward)
The constitutionality of plea bargaining and its legal footing were established by Brady v. United States (1970).[5] The U.S. Supreme Court warned, in the same decision, that this was conditional only and required appropriate safeguards and usage—namely that plea incentives so large or coercive as to overrule defendants’ abilities to act freely, or used in a manner giving rise to a significant number of innocent people pleading guilty, might be prohibited or lead to concerns over constitutionality.[6] Previously, the Court had held in United States v. Jackson that a law was unconstitutional that had the effect of imposing undue fear in a defendant (in that case, the fear of death) to the point it discouraged the exercise of a constitutional right (the 6th Amendment covering the right to a jury trial), and also forced the defendant to act as an unwilling witness against himself in violation of the 5th amendment.[11] The Court stated that:
[T]he plea is more than an admission of past conduct; it is the defendant’s consent that judgment of conviction may be entered without a trial—a waiver of his right to trial before a jury or a judge. Waivers of constitutional rights not only must be voluntary but must be knowing, intelligent acts done with sufficient awareness of the relevant circumstances and likely consequences.[12]
The ruling distinguished Brady from other prior cases emphasizing improper confessions, concluding: “we cannot hold that it is unconstitutional for the State to extend a benefit to a defendant who in turn extends a substantial benefit to the State and who demonstrates by his plea that he is ready and willing to admit his crime and to enter the correctional system in a frame of mind that affords hope for success in rehabilitation over a shorter period of time than might otherwise be necessary.” It laid down the following conditions for a plea to be valid:[13]
Defendant must be “fully aware of the direct consequences, including the actual value of any commitments made to him”
Plea must not be “induced by threats (or promises to discontinue improper harassment), misrepresentation (including unfulfilled or unfulfillable promises), or perhaps by promises that are by their nature improper as having no proper relationship to the prosecutor’s business (e. g. bribes)”
Pleas entered would not become invalid later merely due to a wish to reconsider the judgment which led to them, or better information about the Defendant’s or the State’s case, or the legal position.
Plea bargaining “is no more foolproof than full trials to the court or to the jury. Accordingly, we take great precautions against unsound results. […] We would have serious doubts about this case if the encouragement of guilty pleas by offers of leniency substantially increased the likelihood that defendants, advised by competent counsel, would falsely condemn themselves. But our view is to the contrary and is based on our expectations that courts will satisfy themselves that pleas of guilty are voluntarily and intelligently made by competent defendants with adequate advice of counsel and that there is nothing to question the accuracy and reliability of the defendants’ admissions”.
The ruling in Brady does not discuss “situation[s] where the prosecutor or judge, or both, deliberately employ their charging and sentencing powers to induce a particular defendant to tender a plea of guilty. In Brady’s case there is no claim that the prosecutor threatened prosecution on a charge not justified by the evidence or that the trial judge threatened Brady with a harsher sentence if convicted after trial in order to induce him to plead guilty.”
Santobello v. New York added that when plea bargains are broken, remedies exist; and it has been argued that given the prevalence of plea agreements, the most important rights of the accused may be found in the law of contracts rather than the law of trial procedure.[9]
Litigation is pending that could determine whether alleged victims of federal crime have a right to be informed by a U.S. Attorney before plea bargains are entered with a defendant.[14][15]
Federal system
The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are followed in federal cases and have been created to ensure a standard of uniformity in all cases decided in the federal courts. A two- or three-level offense level reduction is usually available for those who accept responsibility by not holding the prosecution to the burden of proving its case.
The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provide for two main types of plea agreements. An 11(c)(1)(B) agreement does not bind the court; the prosecutor’s recommendation is merely advisory, and the defendant cannot withdraw his plea if the court decides to impose a sentence other than what was stipulated in the agreement. An 11(c)(1)(C) agreement does bind the court once the court accepts the agreement. When such an agreement is proposed, the court can reject it if it disagrees with the proposed sentence, in which case the defendant has an opportunity to withdraw his plea.[16]
State systems
Plea bargains are so common in the Superior Courts of California that the Judicial Council of California has published an optional seven-page form (containing all mandatory advisements required by federal and state law) to help prosecutors and defense attorneys reduce such bargains into written plea agreements.[17]
In California, plea bargaining is sometimes used in proceedings for involuntary commitment for mental disorder. Some individuals alleged to be dangerous to self and/or dangerous to others bargain to be classified instead as merely “gravely disabled.”[18]
Controversy
The use of plea bargaining has inspired some controversy over issues such as its potentially coercive effect on incarcerated defendants, defendants who have been charged with more serious offenses than the facts warrant, and innocent defendants, all of whom might feel pressured to enter into a plea bargain to avoid the more serious consequences that would result from conviction.
A theory was put forth that an informal courtroom work group is secretly formed between judge, defense attorney and prosecutor, wherein the goal then becomes to speed cases through rather than to ensure that justice is served.[19]
Coercive effect
Plea bargaining is also criticized, particularly outside the United States, on the grounds that its close relationship with rewards, threats and coercion potentially endangers the correct legal outcome.[20]
In the book Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted (1991), author Martin Yant discusses the use of coercion in plea bargaining.[21]
Even when the charges are more serious, prosecutors often can still bluff defense attorneys and their clients into pleading guilty to a lesser offense.
As a result, people who might have been acquitted because of lack of evidence, but also who are in fact truly innocent, will often plead guilty to the charge. Why? In a word, fear. And the more numerous and serious the charges, studies have shown, the greater the fear. That explains why prosecutors sometimes seem to file every charge imaginable against defendants.
The theoretical work based on the prisoner’s dilemma is one reason why, in many countries, plea bargaining is forbidden. Often, precisely the prisoner’s dilemma scenario applies: it is in the interest of both suspects to confess and testify against the other suspect, irrespective of the innocence of the accused. Arguably, the worst case is when only one party is guilty—here, the innocent one is unlikely to confess, while the guilty one is likely to confess and testify against the innocent.
Judicial efficiency
The United States Supreme Court has recognized plea bargaining as both an essential and desirable part of the criminal justice system.[22] The benefits of plea-bargaining are said to be obvious: the relief of court congestion, alleviation of the risks and uncertainties of trial, and its information gathering value.[23]
However, in 1975 the Attorney-General of Alaska, Avrum Gross, ordered an end to all plea-bargaining;[24] subsequent attorneys-general continued the practice. Similar consequences were observed in New Orleans, Ventura County, California, and in Oakland County, Michigan, where plea bargaining has been terminated. Bidinotto found:[25]
…ending plea bargaining has put responsibility back into every level of our system: police did better investigating; prosecutors and lawyers began preparing their cases better; lazy judges were compelled to spend more time in court and control their calendars more efficiently. Most importantly, justice was served—and criminals began to realize that they could not continue their arrogant manipulation of a paper-tiger court system.
Another argument against plea bargaining is that it may not actually reduce the costs of administering justice. For example, if a prosecutor has only a 25% chance of winning his case and sending the defendant away to prison for 10 years, he may make a plea agreement for a one-year sentence; but if plea bargaining is unavailable, he may drop the case completely.[26]
Plea bargaining may allow prosecutors to allocate their resources more efficiently, such that they may direct more time and resources to the trial of suspects charged with serious offenses.[27]
Impact on average sentences
The shadow-of-trial argument asserts that in the aggregate, plea agreements merely reflect the outcome that would have transpired had the case gone to trial. For example, if the accused faces 10 years and has a 50% chance of losing in court, then an agreement will result in a five-year sentence, less some amount deducted for saving the government the cost of trial. Theoretically, the shadow-of-trial should work even better in criminal cases than in civil cases, because civil judgments are discretionary, while criminal judgments are often regulated by mandatory minima and sentencing guidelines, making sentences more predictable.
A counter-argument is that criminal sentencing laws are “lumpy”, in that the sentencing ranges are not as precise as the dollars-and-cents calibration that can be achieved in civil case settlements. Furthermore, because some defendants facing small amounts of prison time are jailed pending trial, they may find it in their interests to plead guilty so as to be sentenced to time served, or in any event to end up serving less time than they would serve waiting for trial.[28] Outcomes in criminal cases are also made less predictable by the fact that, while a plaintiff in a civil case has a financial incentive to seek the largest judgment possible, a prosecutor does not necessarily have an incentive to pursue the most severe sentence possible.[29]
Constitutionality
Some legal scholars argue that plea bargaining is unconstitutional because it takes away a person’s right to a trial by jury.[30] Justice Hugo Black once noted that, in America, the defendant “has an absolute, unqualified right to compel the State to investigate its own case, find its own witnesses, prove its own facts, and convince the jury through its own resources. Throughout the process, the defendant has a fundamental right to remain silent, in effect challenging the State at every point to ‘Prove it!'”[31] It is argued that plea bargaining is inconsistent with limits imposed on the powers of the police and prosecutors by the Bill of Rights. This position has been rejected by the nation’s courts.[32]
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources.(November 2012)
Federal Election Campaign Act
Other short titles
Campaign Finance Act
Long title
An Act to promote fair practices in the conduct of election campaigns for Federal political offices, and for other purposes.
Passed the House on November 30, 1971 (372-23, in lieu of H.R. 11060)
Reported by the joint conference committee onDecember 1, 1971; agreed to by the Senate onDecember 14, 1971 (Agreed, in lieu of S.Rept. 92–580) and by the House on January 19, 1972 (334-20, in lieu of H.Rept. 92–752)
Signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon onFebruary 7, 1972
In 1974, the Act was amended to place legal limits on the campaign contributions and expenditures. The 1974 amendments also created the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
The Act was amended again in 1976, in response to the provisions ruled unconstitutional by Buckley v. Valeo, including the structure of the FEC and the limits on campaign expenditures, and again in 1979 to allow parties to spend unlimited amounts of hard money on activities like increasing voter turnout and registration. In 1979, the FEC ruled that political parties could spend unregulated or “soft” money for non-federal administrative and party building activities. Later, this money was used for candidate-related issue ads, which led to a substantial increase in soft money contributions and expenditures in elections. This in turn led to passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (“BCRA”), effective on January 1, 2003, banning soft money expenditure by parties. Some of the legal limits on giving of “hard money” were also changed by BCRA.
In addition to limiting the size of contributions to candidates and political parties, FECA also requires campaigns and political committees to report the names, addresses, and occupations of donors of more than $200.
The FECA contains an express preemption clause. The FECA expressly preempts state and federal law with respect to federal elections.
In 1971, Congress consolidated its earlier reform efforts in the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), instituting more stringent disclosure requirements for federal candidates, political parties and Political action committees (PACs). Still, without a central administrative authority, the campaign finance laws were difficult to enforce.
Government subsidies for federal elections, originally proposed by President Roosevelt in 1907, began to take shape as part of the 1971 law, as Congress established the income tax checkoff to provide for the financing of Presidential general election campaigns and national party conventions. Amendments to the Internal Revenue Code in 1974 established the matching fund program for Presidential primary campaigns.
Following reports of serious financial abuses in the 1972 Presidential campaign, Congress amended the FECA in 1974 to set limits on contributions by individuals, political parties and PACs. The 1974 amendments also established an independent agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to enforce the law, facilitate disclosure and administer the public funding program. The FEC opened its doors in 1975 and administered the first publicly funded Presidential election in 1976.
In 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court struck down several key provisions of the 1974 amendments to the Act, including limits on spending by candidate campaigns, limits on the ability of citizens to spend money independently of a campaign, and limits on the amount of money a candidate could donate to his or her own campaign. Buckley v. Valeo also substantially narrowed the category of independent political expenditures subject to mandatory donor disclosure.
Congress made further amendments to the FECA in 1976 to conform the law with the ruling in Buckley v. Valeo. Major amendments were also made in 1979 to streamline the disclosure process and expand the role of political parties.
Story 2: President Trump Meets With Chairman Kim Who Refuses To Denuclearize — Trump Friendly Walk Away — Sanctions Stay on North Korea – China Is Major Violator of Sanctions — Impose Tariffs on Communist China Now! — Videos —
Special Report: President Trump Speaks After North Korea Summit
Trump Was Right to Walk Away From Kim Talks, Adm. Mullen Say
Trump speaks to press after one-on-onhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BShvYeyMm_Ye with Kim
Reporters at IMC react to results of Hanoi summit
North Korea Confirms Kim Jong Un Is Visiting China Ahead Of A Possible Second Trump Summit | TIME
China undermining North Korea sanctions?
The growing North Korean nuclear threat, explained [Updated]
How America became a superpower
NO DEAL! Vietnam summit ends abruptly as Kim REFUSES Trump’s denuclearization demands, leaders fail to agree on lifting North Korean sanctions and abandon lunch and cancel signing ceremony
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un abruptly ended their summit in Hanoi early without signing a deal
He said the issue was Kim’s insistence that all sanctions get lifted in return for only giving up some nukes
Trump continued to tout his ‘warm’ relationship with Kim, but added ‘you have to be willing to walk away’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added that progress had been made ‘but we didn’t get all the way’
Planned lunch never happened
Kim’s state news agency KCNA said on Thursday: ‘Sincere and in-depth views were exchanged to bring about a comprehensive and groundbreaking outcome’
The talks came just hours after Michael Cohen’s bombshell testimony to Congress which damned his ex-boss as a racist and a liar
PUBLISHED: 18:52 EST, 27 February 2019 | UPDATED: 15:17 EST, 28 February 2019
Donald Trump’s talks with Kim Jong-un ended abruptly on Thursday as the president said he was forced to walk away after the North Korean dictator demanded that all sanctions be lifted in return for giving up only some of his nukes.
Trump said the final snag that caused the sudden breakdown was over sanctions – and Kim’s push to have all of them lifted in exchange for a concession Trump and his secretary of state could not live with.
‘Sometimes you have to walk away,’ Trump told reporters at a press conference in Hanoi that was abruptly moved up after a breakdown in talks.
The president expressed his hope that the two leaders would meet again, but acknowledged: ‘It might be soon, it might not be for a long time. I can’t tell you.’
Meanwhile, the president blasted longtime fixer Michael Cohen, saying he ‘lied’ after his former lawyer delivered bombshell testimony. The president mostly avoided the topic by calling on a series of members of the foreign press corps he did not recognize rather than White House reporters preparing to quiz him on the crimes Cohen claims he witnessed.
‘Person in the front go ahead,’ Trump said, calling on one of many members of the foreign press corps covering the event.
President Trump abruptly ended talks with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi on Thursday, telling reporters that the North Korean leader had demanded that all sanctions be lifted in return for only getting rid of part of his nuclear stockpile, so he walked away
Trump said that he remains on good terms with Kim and continued to tout the ‘enormous potential’ of North Korea, not notably said there were no plans for a next summit meeting.
Trump candidly revealed that Kim wanted the sanctions off, but was not willing to give up his array of nukes, missiles, and additional sites he only alluded to vaguely.
‘Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn’t do that,’ the president said. ‘They were willing to de-nuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted but we couln’t give up all of the sacntions for that.
‘We had to walk away from that particularly suggestion. We had to walk away from that,’ Trump said.
‘It was about sanctions. They wanted sanctions lifted but they weren’t willing to do an area that we wanted,’ Trump said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added: ‘We have been working for weeks to find a path forward so we could make a big step at this summit.
‘We made progress and even more progress when the two leaders met over the last 48, or 72 hours.
‘But we didn’t get all the way. We didn’t get something that made sense for the United States.’
The first signs of a rupture came when the White House suddenly made changes to the president’s schedule.
A planned lunch meeting never happened, although a table was set with a floral centerpiece and menus folded inside napkins.
Reporters on hand to cover it were told to move to another location.
Describing talks, which ran from a Wednesday dinner through mid-day Thursday, Trump said: ‘We spent pretty much all day with Kim Jong-un, who is – he’s quite a guy and quite a character. And I think our relationship is very strong.’
Both Trump and Pompeo said there was a willingness on both sides to keep talking, but revealed that no follow-up summit has been scheduled.
Trump said that in the meantime, Kim was ‘not going to do testing of rockets and nuclear. I trust him and I take him at his word.’
He indicated that Kim was willing to make concessions related to the Yongbyon facility where his regime enriches Plutonium, but it wasn’t enough.
‘That facility while very big, it wasn’t enough to do what we were doing. We had to have more than that,’ said Trump.
+48
Trump insisted that his relationship with Kim remains ‘warm’ and that he sees ‘great potential’ in North Korea, but added that sometimes ‘you have to be willing to walk away from a deal’ if it’s not the right one
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added that his team had been working with North Korea ‘for weeks’ to try and achieve a deal and that Trump and Kim made more progress towards a deal, but ‘we didn’t get all the way’
+48
President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un resumed their summit in Hanoi on Thursday morning local time – as Trump predicted a ‘fantastic success’ but Kim said it was ‘too early’ to say they would reach a deal
Trump once again asserted that he was in ‘no rush’ to make an agreement – following an early report by NBC that the US was prepared to back away from a demand that North Korea provide a full accounting of its nuclear weapons programs
Trump said that Kim was willing to dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear research facility if the US lifted sanctions, but said Kim was unwilling to make a deal on other facilities and weapons, forcing an end to the talks.
Trump’s remarks made clear there other sites the U.S. identified that Kim wanted to maintain.
‘We have that setup so we would be able to do that very easily. The inspections on North Korea will take place, and if we do something with them, we have a schedule setup that is very good. We know things … about certain places and certain sites. There are sites that people don’t know about that we know about. We would be able to do inspections we think very, very successfully,’ Trump said.
Some critics had raised alarms before the summit that Trump and Kim would reach a deal that did not allow for verification.
Asked whether it was premature to hold the summit now, Trump said he would ‘much rather do it right than do it fast’ and added that he ‘could have signed something today’ but didn’t feel it was the right deal.
But America and North Korea remain in a position ‘to do something very special’ together, he said.
The recognition that no joint statement had been reached came despite weeks of advance negotiation. A range of compromise gestures had been circulating for days in media reports.
The lack of agreement came after Trump repeatedly hailed a ‘special relationship’ between the two men, and stressed their personal bond as a reason progress might be possible.
After the two men’s historic summit in Singapore in June, they both signed a joint statement – although critics blasted it for failing to include a timetable or verification members in its undefined call for denuclearization.
On Thursday afternoon, Sanders suddenly told reporters traveling with the president before 1 pm local time that talks would wrap up within about half an hour, throwing the event’s schedule into turmoil.
She declined to say initial there would be a signing ceremony, though one had been on an earlier White House schedule. Only minutes before Trump was scheduled to face the press did she acknowledge that there would not be one.
But reporters who were on hand to cover it were relocated to buses – indicating that the event was most likely scrapped.
The public White House schedule had listed a ‘Joint Agreement Signing Ceremony’ with the chairman of the state affairs commission of DPRK, set for 2:05 pm local time.
Trump was to have fielded questions at 4 pm, right before leaving Vietnam, but it got moved up to 2 pm.
A planned lunch between the two men was scrapped so they could ‘keep negotiating,’ Bloomberg News reported.
The U.S. dollar and South Korean stock market both fell on the news that no deal had been reached.
The multiple signs of tension came after a public event hours earlier where the two leaders once again smiled for the cameras – and Kim even took a few questions from U.S. media and expressed openness toward a step in normalization of relations.
The North Korean dictator said he is open to the idea of a US liaison office in Pyongyang in a major development during the historic nuclear summit with President Donald Trump.
Kim revealed his stance on the issue – one of several negotiating points in Hanoi – when the absolute leader submitted to a few unscripted questions from American media members.
In another comment, he revealed his stated disposition on denuclearization – although without saying what it would take to get him there.
‘If I was not, I wouldn’t be here,’ he said in his native Korean, while seated alongside Trump.
The two world leaders resumed their summit in Hanoi on Thursday morning local time – as Trump predicted a ‘fantastic success’ but Kim said it was ‘too early’ to say they would reach a deal.
Trump once again asserted that he was in ‘no rush’ to make an agreement – following an early report by NBC that the US was prepared to back away from a demand that North Korea provide a full accounting of its nuclear weapons programs.
‘I think we’ll be together a lot over the years,’ Trump said. ‘I can’t speak for today but over a little bit longer term .. we’re going to have a fantastic success.’
Trump and Jong Un smile during a meeting at the second US-North Korea summit at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi
Trump listens as he meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Thursday in Hanoi
During an exchange with the media, a reporter asked Kim if he was ready for a U.S. liaison office in Pyongyang – considered a step toward normalization of relations. At first a North Korean aide tried to cut him off, but Trump – who has tangled with the press – intervened.
‘That’s actually an interesting question. I would like to actually hear that answer,’ Trump said.
Kim responded: ‘That is something that is welcomeable.’
Trump then said the idea was a ‘great thing.’
A reporter asked Kim in Korean if he was confident of an agreement. Kim responded in Korean: ”It’s too early to say. I would not say I’m pessimistic.’
‘I have a feeling that good results will come,’ Kim added.
Trump also predicted spending more time with the North Korean dictator.
‘And, I’m sure over the years we’ll be together a lot, and I think we’ll also be together after the fact, meaning after the deal is made. We had very good discussions last night at dinner, and the pre-dinner was very good. And, there were a lot of great ideas being thrown about,’ Trump said.
Trump once again called the relationship between the two men ‘very strong’.
‘So, I can’t speak necessarily for today, but I can say that this, a little bit longer term, and over a period of time, I know we’re going to have a fantastic success with respect to Chairman Kim and North Korea. They’re going to have an economic powerhouse.’
Trump predicted: ‘I think it’s going to be something very special.’
‘I am in no rush. We don’t want the testing, and we’ve developed something very special with respect to that,’ Trump said, without revealing details, as the two men moved toward an expected joint statement.
At one point after their first meeting Wednesday, the two men took a stroll by the hotel pool, with photographers ready to capture the moment
They walked along with two interpreters beneath palm trees as Kim greeted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and general and spy chief Kim Yong Chol
At one point after their first meeting Wednesday, the two men took a stroll by the hotel pool, with photographers ready to capture the moment.
They walked along with two interpreters beneath palm trees as Kim greeted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and general and spy chief Kim Yong Chol. Reporters covering the event passed National Security Advisor John Bolton, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, and Trump aide Dan Scavino, who didn’t appear to be joining the second meeting with staff.
Trump was back to trying his hand at diplomacy after the president’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen dominated headlines with his day of bombshell testimony against his former boss.
Cohen’s appearances have shadowed the president’s appearances, and Trump even tweeted to attack his longtime fixer as a ‘liar’ shortly before he delivered bombshell testimony in the Capitol claiming Trump participated in a criminal conspiracy involving the hush payment to Stormy Daniels.
Trump and Kim met for their second time at the French colonial-era Metropole hotel, where they had dined Wednesday night.
Reporters covering the event passed National Security Advisor John Bolton, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, and Trump aide Dan Scavino, who didn’t appear to be joining the second meeting with staff
Trump’s motorcade leaves the J.W. Marriot hotel during the second US-North Korea summit
The motorcade of Jong Un is driven in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Thursday, ahead of the second summit
Before they sat down, NBC reported the U.S. was no longer insisting as a negotiating position that North Korea provide a ‘full accounting of its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs’ – which would amount to a major concession.
Trump hailed ‘a very special relationship’ when he met Kim in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi on Wednesday and said he was satisfied with the pace of talks, despite some criticism they were not moving quickly enough.
‘Great meetings’ and a ‘Very good dialogue,’ Trump said on Twitter after dinner with Kim at the French-colonial-era Metropole hotel while the White House said the two planned to sign a ‘joint agreement’ after further talks on Thursday.
The White House has given no indication of what the signing ceremony might involve, although the two sides’ discussions have included the possibility of a political statement to declare the 1950-53 Korean War over, which some critics see as premature.
They have also discussed partial denuclearization measures, such as allowing inspectors to observe the dismantling of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, U.S. and South Korean officials say.
Summit day two: North Korea released this picture of Trump shaking hands with dictator Kim Jong Un on the first day of their talks in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Wednesday
All eyes watching: Michael Cohen’s
Greeting: Trump and Kim shake hands at the top of their meeting in Hanoi – which was followed by a ‘quick dinner’
U.S. concessions could include opening liaison offices or clearing the way for inter-Korean projects, but critics say Trump risks squandering vital leverage if he gives away too much, too quickly.
The Hanoi summit was Trump’s second with Kim since an inconclusive meeting in Singapore in June that produced much fanfare but little substance and there had been little sign of concrete progress since.
The U.S. president nevertheless appeared upbeat with Kim even as his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified at a congressional hearing in Washington, calling Trump a ‘conman’ who knew in advance about the release of stolen emails aimed at hurting his Democratic rival in the 2016 election campaign.
Facing mounting pressure at home over investigations into Russian meddling in the election, Trump has sought a big win by trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for promises of peace and development, a foreign policy goal that has confounded multiple predecessors.
Trump told Kim on Wednesday he felt the first summit was ‘very successful’. ‘Some people would like to see it go quicker; I´m satisfied; you´re satisfied, we want to be happy with what we’re doing.’
The leaders exchanged views at dinner with the aim of achieving comprehensive and ground-breaking results from their summit, Kim’s state news agency KCNA said on Thursday.
‘Sincere and in-depth views were exchanged to bring about a comprehensive and groundbreaking outcome,’ it said.
The two men had met in the Vietnamese capital in front of a bank of six flags from each nation, for the first meeting for the pair since their historic summit in Singapore in June.
‘It’s an honor to be with Chairman Kim. It’s an honor to be together,’ said Trump, who repeatedly praised his counterpart.
The admiration may be mutual. In one remark, Kim praised Trump’s ‘courageous decision’ to open dialogue, according to how his translator recounted it.
In introductory remarks, Trump did much of the talking – and one again dangled the promise of prosperity for North Korea, and addressed critics who noted their initial joint statement was vague and hard to measure.
‘It’s great to be with you. We had a very successful first summit,’ Trump said. ‘I felt it was very successful. Some people would like to see it go quicker. I’m satisfied, you’re satisfied. We want to be happy with what we’re doing.’
‘I thought the first summit was a great success, I think this one hopefully will be equal or greater than the first,’ the president added.
As he has repeatedly, Trump pointed to personal chemistry with the reclusive leader of the family-led one-party dictatorship – although his secretary of state says North Korea is still a nuclear threat, having tested a hydrogen bomb and months ago conducted a skein of missile tests.
‘We made a lot of progress and I think the biggest progress was our relationship is really a good one,’ Trump said.
The two leaders smiled as they were seated before dinner
People walk past a TV broadcasting a news report on a meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, in Seoul, South Korea, February 27, 2019
Trump repeatedly hailed the personal relationship between the two men
Trump complemented a New York Times photographer in one of many asides to Kim
In a spat with the White House, two reporters who had earlier asked Trump questions were not permitted to witness the start of dinner
Dangling economic enticements that he hopes will persuade Kim to give up nuclear weapons his nation has been developing for years, Trump said: ‘I think that your country has tremendous economic potential. Unbelievable. Unlimited,’ Trump said, seated across from Kim.
Both men smiled before cameras as they exchanged a handshake.
A reporter asked Trump about former lawyer Michael Cohen’s bombshell testimony in Congress that calls Trump a ‘conman.’ Trump shook his head and didn’t respond.
That may not have gone over well with the White House staff. At a subsequent photo-op, two wire service reporters were excluded, including the one who had asked about Cohen, whose bombshell testimony touched on Stormy Daniels, a Trump Moscow tower project, and Wikileaks.
According to a statement issued by White House press secretary Sarah Sanders: ‘Due to the sensitive nature of the meetings we have limited the pool for the dinner to a smaller group, but ensured that representation of photographers, tv, radio and print Poolers are all in the room. We are continuing to negotiate aspects of this historic summit and will always work to make sure the U.S. media has as much access as possible.’
For that event, the two men were seated at a round table with a floral centerpiece. Their meal had not yet been served.
Once again, Trump talked up their bond.
‘Our relationship is a very special relationship,’ the president said.
After Kim spoke in Korean, a translator said: ‘They have exchanged very interesting dialogue with each other.’
That prompted a joke from Trump. ‘If you could have heard that dialogue. What you would pay for that dialogue … It was good.’
Then Trump stepped in again. ‘We’re going to have a very busy day tomorrow and we’ll probably have a pretty quick dinner.’
‘And a lot of things are going to be solved I hope. It’ll lead to really a wonderful situation long term. And our relationship is a very special relationship,’ the president said.
Earlier Trump said: ‘It’s great to be with you. We had a very successful first summit. I felt it was very successful. Some people would like to see it go quicker. I’m satisfied, you’re satisfied. We want to be happy with what we’re doing.’
Complimenting their host country, Trump said: ‘It’s an honor to be with Chairman Kim. It’s an honor to be together in really a country, Vietnam, where they’ve really rolled red carpet. And they’re very proud to have us.’
Minutes earlier, as they first met, the two men engaged in brief remarks, then looked ahead toward press photographers with serious expressions on their faces. Eventually they smiled.
Trump and Kim dinedalong with top aides. Trump said the meal would be a ‘pretty quick dinner’
Trump review the guard of honor during a meeting with Vietnamese President Nguyen Phu Trong ahead of the US-North Korea summit in Hanoi
President Donald Trump waves a Vietnam flag as he meets with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, waving an American flag
DOWN TO BUSINESS: Trump touted a deal for Vietnam to purchase planes. The U.S. trade deficit with the nation has grown by $5 billion since Trump visited two years ago
‘Thank you very much,’ Trump told reporters.
Trump began his Hanoi stay by meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the president of Vietnam, lavishing praise upon Vietnam for its ‘thriving’ economy and holding out the local economy as a model for North Korea to pursue.
He announced a deal to have Vietnamese airlines purchase U.S.-made planes – even as it continues to ship billions worth of sneakers and shrimp to U.S. ports. Other agreements would bring the total value of the agreements to $21 billion, according to an administration official.
Trump also called the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam an ‘example’ of what can become of North Korea if it gives up its nuclear weapons. Trump also posed in front of a statue of the nation’s revolutionary founder Ho Chi Min.
Later, Trump smiled and held a Vietnamese flag as he met with the country’s prime minister, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and inked a series of agreements.
Trump referenced ‘my friend’ KimJong Un and cited North Korea’s economic potential
The president also attacked his predecessor for failing to solve the North Korea problem, which has bedeviled U.S. policymakers for decades
Per capita income in Vietnam is nearly double that in North Korea, $2,400 compared to $1,300, achieving 7 per cent growth and with robust foreign investment and growing trade with the U.S.
South Korea is much farther along the development path, with per capita income of $26,000.
The president is relying on his brand of personal diplomacy to try to score a breakthrough here with Kim, after failing to see progress on denuclearization after a vague letter reached after the Singapore summit.
He has previously said they fell ‘in love’ at their Singapore summit, and has repeatedly stressed that the hermetic regime could become wildly successful if it modernizes and relinquishes its nuclear weapons.
His bid to establish camaraderie with Kim comes despite dark signals that continue to emerge out of the closed society he governs.
Kim forced his uncle to watch colleagues get blown apart with anti-aircraft guns before his own death, according to a defector.
Kang Cheol-Hwan said he was told by eye witnesses that two men who worked with Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, were killed by firing squad.
The two men were brought in front of a barrage of eight anti-aircraft guns and had lumps of iron stuffed into their mouths before their deaths.
PUBLISHED: 05:40 EST, 28 February 2019 | UPDATED: 14:01 EST, 28 February 2019
President Trump left the Hanoi summit early, but analysts say the talks with Kim Jung Il were not necessarily a failure
Donald Trump summoned the world’s media to Hanoi for a meeting with Kim Jong Un, travelled the long way around the world to get there, and dangled an “AWESOME” future before the North Korean leader. And they did not agree anything.
That may not be such a bad thing, analysts say — but reaching a deal will take a long time.
Trump and Kim’s Singapore summit — the first-ever encounter between the leaders of two countries on opposite sides of the technically still unfinished Korean War — made global headlines last year.
The agreement they signed, though, was short on specifics, with Kim committing only to a vague promise to “work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.
Subsequent progress stalled with the two sides disagreeing over what that means, and ahead of the Hanoi meeting analysts expected them to put meat on the bones of the text.
In the event, there was more bonhomie in the Vietnamese capital — a venue chosen partly to symbolise the possibility of a good post-war relationship with the US — but even less in the way of tangible outcomes, with no communique emerging from the summit.
Trump told reporters Kim wanted all sanctions imposed on the North over its weapons programmes lifted before it made any further moves over its Yongbyon nuclear plant and other covert sites, and he had decided to walk away.
“I’d much rather do it right than do it fast,”he added.
At a surprise late-night briefing North Korea’s foreign minister insisted that Pyongyang had only wanted partial sanctions relief in exchange for Yongbyon’s closure, and that its position was “invariable”.
The optics of the stand-off looked poor. But analysts pointed to the meeting as part of a long process, and potentially a necessary one.
“These talks were not a failure,” said David Kim of the Stimson Center.
“Think of the Trump-Kim relationship like a Korean drama,” he went on. “We are just beginning to watch the long love story unfold.”
It would be filled with “excitement, disappointment and utter heartache”, but “the bond between Kim and Trump will remain steadfast to the end.
“As long as both ‘lovers’ remain committed to their relationship, we can expect more positive outcomes in the future.”
– Third date? –
Trump has previously said he and Kim “fell in love” over an exchange of letters, and while no third summit with Kim had been agreed, the White House said working-level talks would continue.
But in his New Year speech, a key political set-piece in the North, Kim said Pyongyang would seek a “new way” to defend its interests if Washington did not offer concessions in return for the steps it has already taken — a missile and nuclear test moratorium, and what it says is the destruction of facilities it no longer needs.
That raises the prospect of Kim turning to neighbour and ally China for succour.
+3
Trump told reporters Kim wanted all sanctions imposed on the North lifted, and he had decided to walk away
In and before Hanoi, Trump repeatedly said the North could become an “economic powerhouse” if it gave up its weapons.
The two discussed liaison offices — a vital initial step in normalising relations — and Ankit Panda of the Federation of American Scientists said there were “multiple credible reports an end-of-war declaration was on the table.”
But those were “never the ‘corresponding measures’ North Korea sought”, he added.
Pyongyang will once again have been able to portray itself as Washington’s equal, and Kim as Trump’s — the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried a front-page picture Thursday that showed the US president appearing to bow slightly as the pair shook hands.
Former CIA analyst Soo Kim noted that Trump had insisted several times he was in no rush to complete a deal and that with the North not yet prepared to take the steps Washington wanted, the US president “so far looks at ease with this decision”.
But, she told AFP: “This outcome is likely not what the Kim regime had banked on. So it remains to be seen whether after the rug has been pulled from underneath, North Korea will bite again at another opportunity.”
– Waning Moon –
The no-result from Hanoi leaves South Korean President Moon Jae-in — who seized on last year’s Winter Olympics in his country to broker talks between Pyongyang and Washington — in a bind.
Moon had intended to unveil an inter-Korean economic co-operation plan on Friday, said former CIA staffer Kim, the 100th anniversary of a movement against Japanese colonial rule — one issue on which North and South Koreans are in total agreement.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has been left in a difficult position by the no-result in Hanoi
Now suggestions of a Kim Jong Un trip to Seoul are likely to go on the back burner, and she said it “remained to be seen” whether Moon would be able to pursue his inter-Korean rapprochement so quickly.
Christopher Green, senior advisor at International Crisis Group, said the outcome was unexpected, “but I don’t think it’s a disaster and it doesn’t end the dialogue process”.
“There will have to be some re-booting and I would expect after a period of relative quiet that lower level talks will begin again,” he added.
But while Trump has his eye on next year’s US presidential election — and is said to want a Nobel Peace Prize — Kim is the third generation of his family to rule the North and undoubtedly expects to remain in power for decades.
And Ri said the North’s stance would “never” change in any future negotiations.
“These talks will take a long time and will far outlive this presidency,” said David Kim.
http://www.crs.gov | 7-5700
Updated January 29, 2019
North Korea’s Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Programs
Overview North Korea has made rapid advancements in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Since Kim Jong-un came to power in 2012, North Korea has conducted over 80 ballistic missile test launches. In 2016, North Korea conducted two nuclear weapons tests and 26 ballistic missile flight tests on a variety of platforms. In 2017, North Korea test launched 18 ballistic missiles (with five failures), including two launches in July and another in November that many ascribe as ICBM tests (intercontinental ballistic missiles). It last conducted a nuclear test in September 2017. The North Korean leader pledged to work toward “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” in the U.S.-DPRK Singapore Summit statement. In its 2019
assessment to Congress, the DNI said that “North Korea is
unlikely to give up all of its nuclear weapons and
production capabilities, even as it seeks to negotiate partial
denuclearization steps to obtain key US and international
concessions.”
Despite the absence of any missile launch activity or
nuclear tests in 2018, previous tests and official North
Korean statements suggest that North Korea is striving to
build a credible regional nuclear warfighting capability that
might evade regional ballistic missile defenses. Such an
approach likely reinforces their deterrent and coercive
diplomacy strategy—lending more credibility as it
demonstrates capability—but it also raises serious questions
about crisis stability and escalation control. Congress may
further examine these advances’ possible effects on U.S.
policy.
Nuclear Tests
On September 3, 2017, North Korea announced that it had
tested a hydrogen bomb (or two-stage thermonuclear
warhead) that it said it was perfecting for delivery on an
intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea has tested a
nuclear explosive device five other times since 2006.
According to U.S. and international estimates, each test
produced underground blasts that were progressively higher
in magnitude and estimated yield. According to the North
Korean test announcement, the country had achieved
“perfect success in the test of a hydrogen bomb for
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).” In early 2018,
North Korea announced that it had achieved its goals and
would no longer conduct nuclear tests and would close
down its test site. It dynamited the entrances to two test
tunnels in May prior to the Trump-Kim summit. Kim Jong
Un told Secretary Pompeo in an October meeting that he
“invited inspectors to visit the Punggye Ri nuclear test site
to confirm that it has been irreversibly dismantled.” Such an
inspection has not yet occurred.
Nuclear Material Production
North Korea continues to produce fissile material
(plutonium and highly enriched uranium) for weapons.
North Korea restarted its plutonium production facilities
after it withdrew from a nuclear agreement in 2009, and is
operating at least one centrifuge enrichment plant at its
Yongbyon nuclear complex. During the September 2018
North-South Pyongyang Summit, the North stated its
willingness to “permanently disable” the Yongbyon
facilities if the United States took “corresponding
measures.” U.S. officials have said that it is likely other
clandestine enrichment facilities exist. Open-source
reports, citing U.S. government sources, in July 2018
identified one such site at Kangson.
There is no public U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)
consensus of North Korea’s fissile material stockpiles.
News reports in August 2017 said that one component of
the IC, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), had
estimated a stockpile of up to 60 nuclear warheads.
Nongovernmental open source estimates are based on
material production activities at the Yongbyon site as well
as past stockpile estimates. Some experts believe that North
Korea could have potentially produced enough material for
13-21 nuclear weapons, and that North Korea could now
potentially produce enough nuclear material for an
additional 7 warheads per year.
Doctrine
North Korean statements, taken at face value, appear to
describe North Korea’s nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to the
U.S. “nuclear war threats.” In his 2017 New Year’s address,
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stated that the North had
“achieved the status of a nuclear power,” and promised to
continue to “build up our self-defense capability, the pivot
of which is the nuclear forces, and the capability for
preemptive strike … to defend peace and security of our
state.” Kim also said at the 2016 Workers’ Party Congress
that North Korea “will not use a nuclear weapon unless its
sovereignty is encroached upon by an aggressive hostile
force with nukes.” The statement also said that the “nuclear
weapons of the DPRK can be used only by a final order of
the Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army
(Kim Jong Un) to repel invasion or attack from a hostile
nuclear weapons state and make retaliatory strikes.”
The U.S. intelligence community has characterized the
purpose of North Korean nuclear weapons as intended for
“deterrence, international prestige, and coercive
diplomacy.” In its 2019 assessment to Congress, the DNI
said that “North Korean leaders view nuclear arms as
critical to regime survival.”
North Korea’s Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Programs http://www.crs.gov | 7-5700
Warheads and Delivery Systems
According to the U.S. intelligence community, the prime
objective of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is to
develop a nuclear warhead that is “miniaturized,” or
sufficiently lighter and smaller to be mounted on long-range
ballistic missiles. One of the most acute near-term threats to
other nations may be from the medium-range Nodong
missile, which could reach all of the Korean Peninsula and
some of mainland Japan. Outside the intelligence
community, U.S. officials have articulated conflicting
assessments of North Korea’s ability to produce a nuclear
warhead for its intercontinental-range missiles. The
intelligence community believes that North Korea has an
ICBM capability, but that neither North Korea nor the
United States knows whether that capability will work.
A December 2015 Department of Defense (DOD) report, as
well as the intelligence community’s 2018 worldwide threat
assessment, said that “North Korea is committed to
developing a long-range nuclear-armed missile that is
capable of posing a direct threat to the United States.” The
DOD report outlined two hypothetical ICBMs on which
North Korea could mount a nuclear warhead and deliver to
the continental United States: the KN-08 and the
Taepodong-2, which was the base rocket for the Unha-2
space launch vehicle. North Korea has paraded what are
widely considered mock-ups or engineering models of the
KN-08 and KN-14 ICBMs. In 2016, the intelligence
community assessed that “North Korea has already taken
initial steps toward fielding this [ICBM] system, although
the system has not been flight-tested.” In July 2017, the
DPRK conducted what most have now assessed as two
ICBM tests.
In December 2012, North Korea launched an Unha-3 to
deliver a satellite into space. The DOD noted that although
this space launch vehicle “contributes heavily to North
Korea’s long-range ballistic missile development,” the
country did not test a reentry vehicle (RV), and absent an
effective RV, “North Korea cannot deliver a weapon to
target from an ICBM.” North Korea launched the Unha-3
again in February 2016, placing a satellite into earth orbit.
Some observers assert that the Unha-3 could be used as an
ICBM, but no other country has deployed a space launch
vehicle as a nuclear-armed ICBM or developed an ICBM
from the technology base of a space launch program alone.
Recent static engine tests of a large rocket engine in late
2016 and early 2017 suggest to some progress in their
ICBM program, and to others progress in developing a
larger space launch vehicle.
North Korea has demonstrated limited but growing success
in its medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) program and
its submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test
program. Moreover, North Korea appears to be making
some progress in moving slowly toward solid rocket motors
for its ballistic missiles. Solid fuel is a chemically more
stable option that also allows for reduced reaction and
reload times. Successful tests of the Pukguksong-2 (KN-15)
solid fuel MRBM in 2017 led North Korea to announce it
would now mass produce those missiles.
Since the June 2018 Singapore Summit, reports have
surfaced showing the dismantlement of a rocket engine test
stand at the Sohae satellite launch complex. Although the
test stand could be rebuilt, some observers see this as a
positive development toward denuclearization while others
have suggested the stand was no longer needed for liquidfuel engines, as North Korea may be opting instead to test
and deploy solid rocket motors for their missiles. There
have also been reports that North Korea may now be
producing liquid-fueled ICBMs at another facility outside
the North Korean capital, but other experts point out
developments there are not yet clear. Other observers note
that closing a test stand would not prevent mass production
of current designs.
Mobile ballistic missiles, which North Korea is developing,
and other measures also reduce U.S. detection abilities.
These things together suggest that their test program may
be more than just for show or to make a political
statement—that it may be intended to increase the
reliability, effectiveness, and survivability of their ballistic
missile force. North Korea has increased ballistic missile
testing in recent years. These tests have demonstrated
growing success and, coupled with increased operational
training exercises, suggest a pattern designed to strengthen
the credibility of North Korea’s regional nuclear deterrent
strategy.
A recent focus in North Korea’s ballistic missile test
program appears to be directed at developing a capability to
defeat or degrade the effectiveness of missile defenses, such
as Patriot, Aegis BMD, and THAAD, all of which are or
will be deployed in the region. Some of the 2016 missile
tests were lofted to much higher altitudes and shorter ranges
than an optimal ballistic trajectory. On reentry, a warhead
from such a launch would come in at a much steeper angle
of attack and at much faster speed to its intended target,
making it potentially more difficult to intercept with missile
defenses. North Korea has demonstrated in 2017 the ability
to launch a salvo attack with more than one missile
launched in relatively short order. This is consistent with a
possible goal of being able to conduct large ballistic missile
attacks with large raid sizes, a capability that could make it
more challenging for a missile defense system to destroy
each incoming warhead. Finally, North Korea’s progress
with SLBMs might suggest an effort to counter land-based
THAAD missile defenses by launching attacks from
positions at sea that are outside the THAAD system’s radar
field of view, but not necessarily outside the capabilities of
Aegis BMD systems deployed in the region.
Taken together, North Korea’s progress in nuclear testing,
its declared standardization of warhead designs and
potential to put those warheads on MRBMs, increased
confidence in the reliability of its short-range missile, and
efforts seemingly designed to degrade regional ballistic
missile defense systems suggest that North Korea may be
building a credible regional nuclear warfighting and ICBM
nuclear deterrent capability.
Mary Beth D. Nikitin, mnikitin@crs.loc.gov, 7-7745
IF10472
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The U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
Trump and GOP promised economic growth much better than Obama’s. That’s not what happened
Throughout the 2016 campaign and since, the president and his party have vowed to kick-start tepid Obama-era economic growth.
New government data show that Trump, too, has failed to reach the 3 percent promised land, according to one major metric.
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis measured 2018 growth at 2.9 percent, matching the peak Obama enjoyed in 2015.
For the rest of the president’s term, economic forecasters agree, that number will decline.
GDP grew at 2.6% in Q4—Here’s what five market experts are watching now
President Donald Trump’s central claim about his economic policies officially crashed into reality on Thursday.
Throughout the 2016 campaign and since, the president and his party have vowed to kick-start tepid Obama-era economic growth. Specifically, they insisted tax cuts and deregulation would return growth to its post-World War II average of 3 percent — a level, candidate Trump said derisively, that President Barack Obama became “the first president in modern history” never to reach in a single year.
New government data on Thursday morning show that Trump, too, has failed to reach the 3 percent promised land, according to one major metric. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis measured 2018 growth at 2.9 percent, matching the peak Obama enjoyed in 2015.
By that measure, the economy grew 3.1 percent. But Obama, too, reached 3 percent growth on a four-quarter basis four different times.
Where Obama failed to enjoy 3 percent annual growth was on the BEA’s official annual number. His 2015 peak was 2.9 percent, like Trump’s for 2018. Thursday’s preliminary 2.9 percent figure could later be revised, although economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics said the most likely direction would be down.
For the rest of the president’s term, economic forecasters agree, that number will decline.
“2018 will be the high-water mark for growth in the Trump administration,” Zandi predicted. He expects the decade-old economic expansion will shrink to 1.1 percent growth in 2020, with a better-than-even chance of recession.
The Next Recession: Mark Zandi says corporate debt could cause ‘reckoning’ in 2020
For the 21stcentury economy, 2.9 percent represents strong performance in any event. Not since 2005, during George W. Bush’s presidency, has America seen a full-year expansion of 3 percent or more. Moreover, 2018 marked the second consecutive year that growth accelerated by six-tenths of a percentage point from 1.6 percent in Obama’s final year in office.
GOP’s hollow campaign pledge
Economically, that falls short of the upgrade Team Trump pledged. Politically, it demonstrates the hollowness of a core GOP campaign theme.
The theme hardly originated with Trump. Announcing his presidential candidacy in 2015, then-frontrunner Jeb Bush blamed Democratic policies for “the slowest economic recovery ever” and identified the solution as tax cuts and deregulation.
“There is not a reason in the world why we cannot grow at a rate of 4 percent of year,” Bush declared.
Obama’s economic advisers cited two big reasons: sluggish worker productivity and shrinking labor supply as baby boomers retire. Those factors, they argued, limited potential growth to a long-term average of 2 percent.
Trump, with characteristic grandiosity, dismissed that argument and outbid Bush. “We think it could be 5 or even 6” percent, he said.
His economic advisers remained more cautious. But they cast sustained growth of 3 percent or more, driven by new, productivity-boosting business investment, as the floor beneath their strategy for making Americans better off and protecting the federal budget.
“The foundation for the plan is 3 percent growth,” budget director Mick Mulvaney told Congress. “In fact, that IS Trumponomics.”
Women have returned to the labor force and it’s helping drive wages higher
‘Abracadabra,’ Obama
Growth ticked up in 2017 to 2.2 percent, though that rate fell below what the Congressional Budget Office had forecast before Trump’s election. As the president took steps toward deregulation, Republican allies in Congress called tax cuts critical to achieving their 3 percent goal.
The tax cuts passed in December 2017. And when growth surged to 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, the White House declared victory.
“We’re on track to reach the highest annualized growth in 13 years,” the president assured reporters.
“Remember when Obama said you need a magic wand to make that happen?” Donald Trump Jr. told Breitbart. “Well ‘abracadabra,’ Obama. We’re doing it.”
In fact, growth in a single quarter had topped 4.2 percent four different times during the Obama administration. A broad range of analysts had forecast that a deficit-financed tax-cut would stimulate short-term boost beginning in 2018.
Yet even as 3rdquarter growth slowed to 3.4 percent, White House advisers reiterated their confidence. In July, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called the U.S. “well on the path” for four to five years of sustained 3 percent growth.
In December, top White House economist Kevin Hassett sounded the same note while acknowledging a slowdown in business investment. “We’re definitely going to be at 3 or above 3” for both 2018 and 2019, he told CNBC.
Thursday’s BEA data show otherwise. Growth kept falling in the fourth quarter, to 2.6 percent. The increase in business investment has continued to taper.
Having predicted growth of “substantially over 3 percent,” former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, has blamed Trump’s trade tariffs for offsetting the boost from the tax cut. But the White House and its allies lacked credible evidence for their growth claim to begin with.
“The 3 percent long-term projection was always a stretch in light of the demographic headwinds,” Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers for President Bush, told CNBC.
Justin Wolfers: Biggest risk to strong U.S. economy is Trump in the White House
That doesn’t mean the White House agenda won’t have long-term benefits. But Republican economist Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former Bush adviser and CBO director, says determining its impact will take years.
“The real question is how much the trend has improved: are we decelerating to 2.5 percent instead of 2.0 percent?” asked Holtz-Eakin. “The test of the Trump administration policies will be their impact on productivity growth, and the data are not yet in.”
Meantime, economists at CBO and the Federal Reserve have cut their forecasts for 2019 growth to 2.3 percent. For the long-term, both project growth below 2 percent.
Correction: This story was revised to correct a summary that should have said the Bureau of Economic Analysis measured 2018 growth at 2.9 percent, matching the peak Obama enjoyed in 2015. It also was updated to reflect other measures of GDP growth.
EMBARGOED UNTIL RELEASE AT 8:30 A.M. EST, Thursday, February 28, 2019
BEA 19-05
Gross Domestic Product, Fourth Quarter and Annual 2018 (Initial Estimate)
Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018 (table 1), according to the “initial” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 3.4 percent.
Due to the recent partial government shutdown, this initial report for the fourth quarter and annual GDP for 2018 replaces the release of the “advance” estimate originally scheduled for January 30th and the “second” estimate originally scheduled for February 28th. See the Technical Note for details.
The Bureau emphasized that the fourth-quarter initial estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see “Source Data for the Initial Estimate” on page 3). Updated estimates for the fourth quarter, based on more complete data, will be released on March 28, 2019.
The increase in real GDP in the fourth quarter reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), nonresidential fixed investment, exports, private inventory investment, and federal government spending. Those were partly offset by negative contributions from residential fixed investment, and state and local government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased (table 2).
The deceleration in real GDP growth in the fourth quarter reflected decelerations in private inventory investment, PCE, and federal government spending and a downturn in state and local government spending. These movements were partly offset by an upturn in exports and an acceleration in nonresidential fixed investment. Imports increased less in the fourth quarter than in the third quarter.
Current dollar GDP increased 4.6 percent, or $233.2 billion, in the fourth quarter to a level of $20.89 trillion. In the third quarter, current-dollar GDP increased 4.9 percent, or $246.3 billion (table 1 and table 3).
The price index for gross domestic purchases increased 1.6 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with an increase of 1.8 percent in the third quarter (table 4). The PCE price index increased 1.5 percent, compared with an increase of 1.6 percent. Excluding food and energy prices, the PCE price index increased 1.7 percent, compared with an increase of 1.6 percent.
Personal Income (table 8)
Current-dollar personal income increased $225.1 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with an increase of $190.6 billion in the third quarter. The acceleration in personal income reflected an upturn in farm proprietors’ income and accelerations in personal dividend income and personal interest income. Compensation of employees decelerated.
Disposable personal income increased $218.7 billion, or 5.7 percent, in the fourth quarter, compared with an increase of $160.9 billion, or 4.2 percent, in the third quarter. Real disposable personal income increased 4.2 percent, compared with an increase of 2.6 percent.
Personal saving was $1.06 trillion in the fourth quarter, compared with $996.0 billion in the third quarter. The personal saving rate — personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income — was 6.7 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with 6.4 percent in the third quarter.
Updates to third quarter GDI
For the third quarter of 2018, the percent change in real GDI was revised from 4.3 percent to 4.6 percent based on newly available tabulations from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program.
2018 GDP
Real GDP increased 2.9 percent in 2018 (from the 2017 annual level to the 2018 annual level), compared with an increase of 2.2 percent in 2017 (table 1).
The increase in real GDP in 2018 primarily reflected positive contributions from PCE, nonresidential fixed investment, exports, federal government spending, private inventory investment, and state and local government spending that were slightly offset by a small negative contribution from residential fixed investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased (table 2).
The acceleration in real GDP from 2017 to 2018 primarily reflected accelerations in nonresidential fixed investment, private inventory investment, federal government spending, exports, and PCE, and an upturn in state and local government spending that were partly offset by a downturn in residential investment.
Current-dollar GDP increased 5.2 percent, or $1.02 trillion, in 2018 to a level of $20.50 trillion, compared with an increase of 4.2 percent, or $778.2 billion, in 2017 (table 1 and table 3).
The price index for gross domestic purchases increased 2.2 percent in 2018, compared with an increase of 1.9 percent in 2017 (table 4). The PCE price index increased 2.0 percent, compared with an increase of 1.8 percent. Excluding food and energy prices, the PCE price index increased 1.9 percent, compared with an increase of 1.6 percent (table 4).
During 2018 (measured from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2018), real GDP increased 3.1 percent, compared with an increase of 2.5 percent during 2017. The price index for gross domestic purchases increased 2.1 percent during 2018, compared with an increase of 1.9 percent during 2017.
Source Data for the Initial Estimate
Information on the source data and key assumptions used for unavailable source data in the initial estimate is provided in a Technical Note that is posted with the news release on BEA’s Web site. A detailed “Key Source Data and Assumptions” file is also posted for each release. For information on updates to GDP, see the “Additional Information” section that follows.
* * *
Next release, March 28, 2019 at 8:30 A.M. EST
Gross Domestic Product, Fourth Quarter 2018
Corporate Profits, Fourth Quarter 2018
Story 1: Dirt Desperate Democrats of The Senate and House Intelligence Committees Questioned Convicted Felon Michael Cohen in Closed Sessions (No Evidence of Russian/Trump Collusion (Which Is Not A Crime) and House Oversight Committee in Open Session — Videos
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Michael Cohen testifies behind closed doors on Capitol Hill in first of three hearings
Cohen’s testimony Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee is taking place behind closed doors. On Wednesday, Cohen is testifying before the House Oversight Committee, which will be open. On Thursday, Cohen appears behind closed doors for a House Intelligence Committee interview.
As he entered the hearing room Tuesday, Cohen did not answer questions from reporters about why he should be trusted. As part of a deal with prosecutors, Cohen pleaded guilty to previously lying to Congress about Trump’s past business dealings in Russia, among other crimes.
The White House, in a statement Tuesday, sought to portray Cohen as a liar.
“Disgraced felon Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying to Congress and making other false statements,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said. “Sadly, he will go before Congress this week and we can expect more of the same. It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.”
Asked by reporters Tuesday what he hopes to hear from Cohen, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., replied: “Truth.” But Burr added that Cohen has got a questionable track record, when asked if he could believe Cohen or not.
Democrats said ahead of the hearing they want to press Cohen about Trump’s past business endeavors in Russia.
“Because we know that Donald Trump, during his campaign, said ‘I have no interest in Russia’ but that’s yet another one of his total lies,” Senate Judiciary Committee member Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said Monday.
Cohen worked for Trump’s business for years before Trump ran for president, serving as the president’s personal lawyer and counselor.
According to a recent memo sent out by committee staff, Cohen’s appearance before the House oversight panel will concern various financial issues related to the 2016 presidential campaign, including payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal that federal prosecutors in New York say were directed by Trump. The hearing will also examine whether Trump has complied with campaign finance and tax laws, his ties to the Trump International Hotel in Washington and “potential and actual conflicts of interest.”
A person with knowledge of Cohen’s planned testimony before the House Oversight Committee told the Wall Street Journal that Cohen will publicly accuse Trump of criminal conduct in relation to the hush-money payments.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Cohen will accuse Trump in his testimony of inflating or deflating his net worth at times to avoid property taxes.
Cohen will not be questioned about the ongoing investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller or the House and Senate Intelligence Committees into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Last week, a federal judge approved Cohen’s request to push back the date he is scheduled to report to federal prison by two months. Cohen’s attorneys had pushed for the postponement, saying he had recently undergone shoulder surgery and needed the extra time to complete physical therapy as well as his congressional testimony.
Cohen was originally scheduled to report to jail on March 6 to begin serving a three-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to campaign finance and other violations last year. He is now scheduled to report to jail May 6.
In December, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion and lying to Congress. He agreed to cooperate with prosecutors as part of a deal.
The charges against Cohen arose from two separate investigations – one by federal prosecutors in New York, and the other by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Both cases hold potential implications for Trump. Cohen’s admission in the former to breaking the law in making hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign to two women who claimed affairs with Trump has raised questions about whether prosecutors may eventually pursue charges against the president. Cohen said he did so at Trump’s direction.
Speaking in court in December before the judge issued the sentence, Cohen said “blind loyalty” to Trump led him “to take a path of darkness instead of light.”
Lanny Jesse Davis (born December 12, 1945) is an American political operative, lawyer, consultant, lobbyist, author, and television commentator. He is the co-founder and partner of the law firm of Davis Goldberg & Galper PLLC, and co-founder and partner of the public relations firm Trident DMG. From 1996 to 1998, he served as a special counsel to President Bill Clinton, and was a spokesperson for the President and the White House on matters concerning campaign-finance investigations and other legal issues.[citation needed]
In July 2018, Davis was hired by Michael Cohen, a former personal attorney to Donald Trump, to represent him as co-counsel in the Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal.[2] Davis later represented Cohen when he pleaded guilty to tax fraud, bank fraud, and violation of campaign finance laws on August 21, 2018.[3]
Davis was the treasurer for Joe Lieberman‘s Reuniting Our Country PAC.[10]
Attorney
Davis started his legal career as an associate at Patton Boggs in 1975 and became a partner in 1978. He served as special counsel to the President from 1996 to 1998, during which time he also was the spokesman for Clinton in issues regarding campaign finance investigations and other legal issues, including President Clinton’s impeachment trial.[citation needed]
After leaving the White House, Davis returned to Patton Boggs. There he worked as a lobbyist for the nation of Pakistan prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001.[11] In 2003, Davis became a partner in Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. There, he provides counseling to corporations and government contractors on crisis management. He left the firm in late 2009 to join McDermott Will & Emery, but separated from the firm seven months later to open his own company, Lanny J. Davis & Associates.[12][13]
In January 2012 Davis launched a new public affairs firm, Purple Nation Solutions. Davis also joined the Philadelphia-based law firm of Dilworth Paxson L.L.P. in March 2012, practicing out of the firm’s Washington office and focusing on “legal crisis management.”[15]
In October 2012 Davis was the subject of a CBS Sunday Morning segment where he took investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson behind the scenes into the world of lobbying, focusing on his work for eHealthInsurance.[16] In October 2013 Davis began acting as outside legal counsel to the Washington Redskins to help defend the organization’s nickname.[17] He also represented Kathleen Kane and Bo Dietl in his solo practice.[13]
In 2016, at the age of 70, Davis co-founded the law firm of Davis Goldberg & Galper with partners Adam Goldberg and Joshua Galper, stating that he needed to continue supporting his family but was too busy to handle his workload by himself.[13] In addition to co-founding Davis Goldberg & Galper, Davis started a new PR firm, called TridentDMG, in partnership with Eleanor McManus, who had worked with Davis since 2010 and previously served as a senior producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live.”[18]
Michael Cohen
Davis on MSNBC in 2018
In July 2018, Davis was hired by Michael Cohen, a former personal attorney to Donald Trump, to represent him as co-counsel in the Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal.[2] Davis encouraged Cohen to reveal that he and Trump had discussed a payment surrounding a different affair with model Karen McDougal. Davis later revealed that Cohen had secretly recorded the conversation with Trump, and he released a tape of the conversation to CNN, which played it on the air. On it, Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing how to make a payment for “all of that info regarding our friend David,” interpreted as meaning David Pecker, the head of American Media which publishes the National Enquirer.[19][20]
Davis continued to serve as Cohen’s attorney when Cohen came under federal criminal investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York,[3] and papers and other materials were seized from Cohen in April 2018 under a subpoena.[21][22] Davis helped Cohen to negotiate a plea bargain under which he agreed to plead guilty to several charges in return for leniency in sentencing. On August 21, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges: five counts of tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a financial institution, one count of willfully causing an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution at the request of a candidate or campaign.[23][24]
After Cohen’s guilty plea and conviction, Davis made several public comments, indicating that Cohen is ready to “tell everything about Donald Trump that he knows”,[25] and alluding to Cohen’s knowledge which could be used against Trump.[26] He later added that he believed Cohen would agree to testify before Congress, even without immunity.[27] He also rejected the possibility of a presidential pardon from Trump, saying that Cohen would “never accept a pardon from a man that he considers to be both corrupt and a dangerous person in the oval office.”[28]
Foreign government representation
In July 2009 Davis represented the Honduran Business Council and testified publicly before the House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee on its behalf. He criticized the deportation of former President Manuel Zelaya but also supported a reconciliation solution based on principles of the rule of law and due process.[29]
In 2010 Davis worked with the State Department’s West African Bureau and the U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea to assist in transitioning to a transparent democracy that protected due process and human rights. These efforts culminated in a speech Davis wrote for the President of Equatorial Guinea[30] that was ultimately endorsed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.[31]
For ten days in December 2010, Davis represented the Washington, D.C. Ivory Coast Embassy and Ambassador and worked closely with the State Department’s West African Bureau to facilitate a phone call from President Obama to the defeated president of Ivory Coast to try to persuade him to avoid bloodshed and make a peaceful exit from office. When the defeated Ivory Coast president refused to accept the phone call, Davis resigned.[32] On January 1, 2011, the official spokesman of the U.S. State Department, P. J. Crowley, publicly acknowledged that Davis’ role was “helpful”.[33]
Author and commentator
In 1999, Davis wrote a memoir about his work in the White House titled Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education. His most recent book, which appeared in 2006, is titled Scandal: How “Gotcha” Politics Is Destroying America. The book received praise from politicians and commentators across party lines, including Senators Evan Bayh and Lindsey Graham.
Davis has also served as a frequent political commentator on television, radio, and newspapers. He writes for The Hill‘s online Pundits Blog.
In 2006, through opinions expressed in The Wall Street Journal (August 8, 2006) and on Fox News, Davis strongly supported longtime friend Joseph Lieberman in his losing bid against Ned Lamont for the Democratic Party nomination for the post of U.S. Senator from Connecticut. He then continued to support Lieberman when he ran and won the General Election as an Independent.[citation needed]
In 2008, Davis supported Senator Hillary Clinton in her race for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC as a surrogate for her. After Clinton conceded, Davis went on to support Barack Obama.[34]
In 2008, Davis questioned the United States’ response to the conflict between Russia and Georgia and advised present and future U.S. leaders to consider the point of view of the Russian leaders before unilaterally supporting the government of Georgia in the conflict.[35]
Currently, Davis appears weekly on three radio programs: America’s Morning News Radio Show with John McCaslin, WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall, and Andy Parks Live. He was a participant in the D.C.’s Funniest Celebrity competition in 2011.[36]
Opinions and criticism
Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and columnist for Salon, criticized Davis in 2009 for Davis’s perceived failure to disclose his clients. Greenwald asserted his clients included dictatorships and opponents of unions and health care reform.[37]
According to Salon columnist Justin Elliot, Davis “specializes in lobbying for controversial corporate and foreign clients, particularly those seeking Democratic representation in Washington“.[38] He has “built a client list that now includes oligarchic coup supporters in Honduras, a dictator in Equatorial Guinea, for-profit colleges accused of exploiting students, and a company that dominates the manufacture of additives for infant formula“, as well as an “Ivory Coast strongman whose claims to that country’s presidency have been condemned by the international community and may even set off a civil war”. Among his clients are “Ivory Coast leader and flagrant human rights violator Laurent Gbagbo” and “Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the longtime dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea.”[38]“Just as Davis was assuring the American press that his client, Gbagbo, opposed violence, Gbagbo’s forces were in fact mounting a campaign of organized violence against the opposition”.[39] The latter representation has earned him criticism from human rights groups, who claim that he “appears to be engaged in little more than a whitewashing exercise designed to rehabilitate the image of the Obiang regime on the international stage”.[40] Similar criticisms were aired in an acerbic exchange with Jon Lovett in The Atlantic.[41]
At the time of the events in the Ivory Coast, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley issued the following statement: “Lanny did open another alternative channel of communications for us, and was providing the right advice to his client. President Gbagbo has declined to engage our ambassador, Phillip Carter. Absent that avenue, Lanny became another route to encourage President Gbagbo to leave. Unfortunately, every indication is that his client wasn’t heeding his advice.”[33]
Christopher Michael “Chris” Cillizza (/sɪˈlɪzə/; born February 20, 1976)[1] is an American political commentator for CNN. Prior to joining CNN, he wrote for The Fix, the daily politicalweblog of The Washington Post, and was a regular contributor to the Post on political issues, a frequent panelist on Meet the Press, and was an MSNBC political analyst. Cillizza is also co-host of The Tony Kornheiser Show.[2][3] In April 2017, Cillizza began working for CNN, including writing and onscreen appearances.
After working as a novelist and later an intern for conservative writer George Will,[11] Cillizza began his career in journalism. He initially desired to work as a sports writer, but decided that sports “would be less fun” than politics.[11] At The Cook Political Report He later worked on Roll Call prior to joining The Washington Post.[12] For the Cook Report he covered gubernatorial races and southern House races. He wrote a column on politics for Congress Daily. During his four years at Roll Call, which he joined in June 2001, he reported on campaign politics from the presidential to the congressional level, finishing his time at Roll Call as the paper’s White House correspondent.[13]
His freelance work has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Washingtonian, and Slate.[14] He has also been a guest on CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC.[13] After multiple guest appearances on the network, he was named an MSNBC Political Analyst, a position he resigned when he accepted a position at CNN.[15] He is also a frequent panelist on Meet the Press.
The Fix
Cillizza founded the blog The Fix in 2005 and wrote for it on a regular basis until he joined CNN in 2017.[16] The blog’s focus was American electoral politics, with Cillizza commenting on gubernatorial, Congressional and presidential elections. He hosted the weekly Fix live chat. Cilizza also oversaw a monthly trivia contest called “Politics and Pints” at the Washington, D.C. bar Capitol Lounge.[17]
Media
From 2007 to 2008, Cillizza was a co-host of the MySpace/MTV Presidential Dialogues, which hosted John McCain, Barack Obama, and others in a live-streamed, interactive Presidential event series. Cillizza and fellow The Washington PostcolumnistDana Milbankappeared in a series of humor videos called Mouthpiece Theater, hosted by The Washington Post. An outcry followed a video in which, during a discussion of the White House “Beer Summit“, they chose new brands for a number of people, including “Mad Bitch Beer” for Hillary Clinton. Both men apologized for the video and the series was canceled.[18]
In July 2012, Broadway Books (a division of Penguin Random House) released his book, The Gospel According to the Fix.[19] Written in a blog-like format,[20] it contains lists such as “The 10 Best/Worst Negative Ads”, as well as coverage of the “deep personal hatreds that politics provoke” and predictions for the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.[21]
Since 2014, Cillizza has served a regular co-host of The Tony Kornheiser Show.[2][3]
CNN
On April 3, 2017, Cillizza joined CNN as a “political reporter and digital editor-at-large,” contributing online and on television.[16][22]
On June 28, 2017, CNN Politics announced the launch of “The Point with Chris Cillizza.” According to the official press release, the new “multiplatform brand” will include “daily columns, on-air analysis, an evening newsletter, [a] podcast, and the launch of trivia night events in Washington, DC.”[23][24]
Reception
Columbia Journalism Review has described Cillizza’s informal, “everyman” style as being popular with readers, but extremely unpopular with other journalists and media experts.[11] Media critic Jay Rosen has compared his approach to infotainment which turns political analysis into gamesmanship detached from real-world implications.[25][11] Examples of his unserious approach to politics cited in the Columbia Journalism Review including a “second-by-second” analysis of a handshake between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron[26]and an article about the relationship between Jeff Sessions and the President,[27] among others.[11] Former CNN host Soledad O’Brien has also described Cillizza’s work as facile.[28][29]David Weigel has criticized Cillizza for focusing on arbitrary predictions rather than factual analysis.[30] Cillizza, along with Mark Halperin and Ron Fournier, was cited by Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas as one of the inspirations for their parody political pundit Carl Diggler.[31]
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Impeach Donald Trump
Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.
On january 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.
Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.
This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing.
“The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” the late senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain lamented last summer. “The president has not risen to the mantle of the office,” the GOP’s other recent nominee, the former governor and now senator Mitt Romney, wrote in January.
The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency. He has failed to disclose or divest himself from his extensive financial interests, instead using the platform of the presidency to promote them. This has encouraged a wide array of actors, domestic and foreign, to seek to influence his decisions by funneling cash to properties such as Mar-a-Lago (the “Winter White House,” as Trump has branded it) and his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Courts are now considering whether some of those payments violate the Constitution.
More troubling still, Trump has demanded that public officials put their loyalty to him ahead of their duty to the public. On his first full day in office, he ordered his press secretary to lie about the size of his inaugural crowd. He never forgave his first attorney general for failing to shut down investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and ultimately forced his resignation. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Trump told his first FBI director, and then fired him when he refused to pledge it.
Trump has evinced little respect for the rule of law, attempting to have the Department of Justice launch criminal probes into his critics and political adversaries. He has repeatedly attacked both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. His efforts to mislead, impede, and shut down Mueller’s investigation have now led the special counsel to consider whether the president obstructed justice.
As for the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, Trump has repeatedly trampled upon them. He pledged to ban entry to the United States on the basis of religion, and did his best to follow through. He has attacked the press as the “enemy of the people” and barred critical outlets and reporters from attending his events. He has assailed black protesters. He has called for his critics in private industry to be fired from their jobs. He has falsely alleged that America’s electoral system is subject to massive fraud, impugning election results with which he disagrees as irredeemably tainted. Elected officials of both parties have repeatedly condemned such statements, which has only spurred the president to repeat them.
These actions are, in sum, an attack on the very foundations of America’s constitutional democracy.
The electorate passes judgment on its presidents and their shortcomings every four years. But the Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment.
Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe. But the United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.
That is precisely backwards. It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits—to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system—accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.
The fight over whether Trump should be removed from office is already raging, and distorting everything it touches. Activists are radicalizing in opposition to a president they regard as dangerous. Within the government, unelected bureaucrats who believe the president is acting unlawfully are disregarding his orders, or working to subvert his agenda. By denying the debate its proper outlet, Congress has succeeded only in intensifying its pressures. And by declining to tackle the question head-on, it has deprived itself of its primary means of reining in the chief executive.
With a newly seated Democratic majority, the House of Representatives can no longer dodge its constitutional duty. It must immediately open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.
Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections. Despite this clear rebuke of Trump—and despite all that is publicly known about his offenses—party elders remain reluctant to impeach him. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, has argued that it’s too early to talk about impeachment. Many Democrats avoided discussing the idea on the campaign trail, preferring to focus on health care. When, on the first day of the 116th Congress, a freshman representative declared her intent to impeach Trump and punctuated her comments with an obscenity, she was chastised by members of the old guard—not just for how she raised the issue, but for raising it at all.
In no small part, this trepidation is due to the fact that the last effort to remove an American president from office ended in political fiasco. When the House impeached Bill Clinton, in 1998, his popularity soared; in the Senate, even some Republicans voted against convicting him of the charges.
Pelosi and her antediluvian leadership team served in Congress during those fights two decades ago, and they seem determined not to repeat their rivals’ mistakes. Polling has shown significant support for impeachment over the course of Trump’s tenure, but the most favorable polls still indicate that it lacks majority support. To move against Trump now, Democrats seem to believe, would only strengthen the president’s hand. Better to wait for public opinion to turn decisively against him and then use impeachment to ratify that view. This is the received wisdom on impeachment, the overlearned lesson of the Clinton years: House Republicans got out ahead of public opinion, and turned a president beset by scandal into a sympathetic figure.
Instead, Democrats intend to be a thorn in Trump’s side. House committees will conduct hearings into a wide range of issues, calling administration officials to testify under oath. They will issue subpoenas and demand documents, emails, and other information. The chair of the Ways and Means Committee has the power to request Trump’s elusive tax returns from the IRS and, with the House’s approval, make them public.
Other institutions are already acting as brakes on the Trump presidency. To the president’s vocal frustration, federal judges have repeatedly enjoined his executive orders. Robert Mueller’s investigation has brought convictions of, or plea deals from, key figures in his campaign as well as his administration. Some Democrats are clearly hoping that if they stall for long enough, Mueller will deliver them from Trump, obviating the need to act themselves.
But Congress can’t outsource its responsibilities to federal prosecutors. No one knows when Mueller’s report will arrive, what form it will take, or what it will say. Even if Mueller alleges criminal misconduct on the part of the president, under Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted. Nor will the host of congressional hearings fulfill that branch’s obligations. The view they will offer of his conduct will be both limited and scattershot, focused on discrete acts. Only by authorizing a dedicated impeachment inquiry can the House begin to assemble disparate allegations into a coherent picture, forcing lawmakers to consider both whether specific charges are true and whether the president’s abuses of his power justify his removal.
Waiting also presents dangers. With every passing day, Trump further undermines our national commitment to America’s ideals. And impeachment is a long process. Typically, the House first votes to open an investigation—the hearings would likely take months—then votes again to present charges to the Senate. By delaying the start of the process, in the hope that even clearer evidence will be produced by Mueller or some other source, lawmakers are delaying its eventual conclusion. Better to forge ahead, weighing what is already known and incorporating additional material as it becomes available.
Critics of impeachment insist that it would diminish the presidency, creating an executive who serves at the sufferance of Congress. But defenders of executive prerogatives should be the first to recognize that the presidency has more to gain than to lose from Trump’s impeachment. After a century in which the office accumulated awesome power, Trump has done more to weaken executive authority than any recent president. The judiciary now regards Trump’s orders with a jaundiced eye, creating precedents that will constrain his successors. His own political appointees boast to reporters, or brag in anonymous op-eds, that they routinely work to counter his policies. Congress is contemplating actions on trade and defense that will hem in the president. His opponents repeatedly aim at the man but hit the office.
Democrats’ fear—that impeachment will backfire on them—is likewise unfounded. The mistake Republicans made in impeaching Bill Clinton wasn’t a matter of timing. They identified real and troubling misconduct—then applied the wrong remedy to fix it. Clinton’s acts disgraced the presidency, and his lies under oath and efforts to obstruct the investigation may well have been crimes. The question that determines whether an act is impeachable, though, is whether it endangers American democracy. As a House Judiciary Committee staff report put it in 1974, in the midst of the Watergate investigation: “The purpose of impeachment is not personal punishment; its function is primarily to maintain constitutional government.” Impeachable offenses, it found, included “undermining the integrity of office, disregard of constitutional duties and oath of office, arrogation of power, abuse of the governmental process, adverse impact on the system of government.”
Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has lied or dishonored the presidency. The most serious allegations against him ultimately rest on the charge that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy. That is the situation impeachment was devised to address.
After the house impeaches a president, the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove him from office. Opponents of impeachment point out that, despite the greater severity of the prospective charges against Trump, there is little reason to believe the Senate is more likely to remove him than it was to remove Clinton. Indeed, the Senate’s Republican majority has shown little will to break with the president—though that may change. The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.
But this sort of vote-counting, in any case, misunderstands the point of impeachment. The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office. The country will benefit greatly regardless of how the Senate ultimately votes. Even if the impeachment of Donald Trump fails to produce a conviction in the Senate, it can safeguard the constitutional order from a president who seeks to undermine it. The protections of the process alone are formidable. They come in five distinct forms.The first is that once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered this, much to their chagrin. Johnson, the irascible Tennessee Democrat who succeeded to the presidency in 1865 upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, quickly found himself at odds with the Republican Congress. He shattered precedents by delivering a series of inflammatory addresses that dominated the headlines and forced his opponents into a reactive posture. The launching of impeachment inquiries changed that. Day after day, Congress held hearings. Day after day, newspapers splashed the proceedings across their front pages. Instead of focusing on Johnson’s fearmongering, the press turned its attention to the president’s missteps, to the infighting within his administration, and to all the things that congressional investigators believed he had done wrong.
It isn’t just the coverage that changes. When presidents face the prospect of impeachment, they tend to discover a previously unsuspected capacity for restraint and compromise, at least in public. They know that their words can be used against them, so they fume in private. Johnson’s calls for the hanging of his political opponents yielded quickly to promises to defer to their judgment on the key questions of the day. Nixon raged to his aides, but tried to show a different face to the country. “Dignity, command, faith, head high, no fear, build a new spirit,” he told himself. Clinton sent bare-knuckled proxies to the television-news shows, but he and his staff chose their own words carefully.
Trump is easily the most pugilistic president since Johnson; he’s never going to behave with decorous restraint. But if impeachment proceedings begin, his staff will surely redouble its efforts to curtail his tweeting, his lawyers will counsel silence, and his allies on Capitol Hill will beg for whatever civility he can muster. His ability to sidestep scandal by changing the subject—perhaps his greatest political skill—will diminish.
As Trump fights for his political survival, that struggle will overwhelm other concerns. This is the second benefit of impeachment: It paralyzes a wayward president’s ability to advance the undemocratic elements of his agenda. Some of Trump’s policies are popular, and others are widely reviled. Some of his challenges to settled orthodoxies were long overdue, and others have proved ill-advised. These are ordinary features of our politics and are best dealt with through ordinary electoral processes. It is, rather, the extraordinary elements of Trump’s presidency that merit the use of impeachment to forestall their success: his subversion of the rule of law, attacks on constitutional liberties, and advancement of his own interests at the public’s expense.
The Mueller probe as well as hearings convened by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have already hobbled the Trump administration to some degree. It will face even more scrutiny from a Democratic House. White House aides will have to hire personal lawyers; senior officials will spend their afternoons preparing testimony. But impeachment would raise the scrutiny to an entirely different level.
In part, this is because of the enormous amount of attention impeachment proceedings garner. But mostly, the scrutiny stems from the stakes of the process. The most a president generally has to fear from congressional hearings is embarrassment; there is always an aide to take the fall. Impeachment puts his own job on the line, and demands every hour of his day. The rarest commodity in any White House is time, that of the president and his top advisers. When it’s spent watching live hearings or meeting with lawyers, the administration’s agenda suffers. This is the irony of congressional leaders’ counseling patience, urging members to simply wait Trump out and use the levers of legislative power instead of moving ahead with impeachment. There may be no more effective way to run out the clock on an administration than to tie it up with impeachment hearings.
As Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered, once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. (Everett Historical; Charles Tasnadi; J. Scott Applewhite / AP)But the advantages of impeachment are not merely tactical. The third benefit is its utility as a tool of discovery and discernment. At the moment, it is often hard to tell the difference between wild-eyed conspiracy theories and straight narrations of the day’s news. Some of what is alleged about Trump is plainly false; much of it might be true, but lacks supporting evidence; and many of the best-documented claims are quickly forgotten, lost in the din of fresh allegations. This is what passes for due process in the court of public opinion.The problem is not new. When Congress first opened the Johnson impeachment hearings, for instance, the committee spent two months chasing rumor and innuendo. It heard allegations that Johnson had sent a secret letter to former Confederate President Jefferson Davis; that he had associated with a “disreputable woman” and, through her, sold pardons; that he had transferred ownership of confiscated railroads as political favors; even that he had conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. The congressman who made that last claim was forced to admit to the committee pursuing impeachment that what he possessed “was not that kind of evidence which would satisfy the great mass of men”—he had simply based the accusation on his belief that every vice president who succeeds to the highest office murders his predecessor.There was public value, though, in these investigations. The charges had already been leveled; they were circulating and shaping public opinion. Spread by a highly polarized, partisan press, they could not be dispelled or disproved. But once Congress initiated the process of impeachment, the charges had to be substantiated. And that meant taking them from the realm of rhetoric into the province of fact. Many of the claims against Johnson failed to survive the journey. Those that did eventually helped form the basis for his impeachment. Separating them out was crucial.The process of impeachment can also surface evidence. The House Judiciary Committee began its impeachment hearings against Nixon in October 1973, well before the president’s complicity in the Watergate cover-up was clear. In April 1974, as part of those hearings, the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed 42 White House tapes. In response, Nixon released transcripts of the tapes that were so obviously expurgated that a district judge approved a subpoena from the special prosecutor for the tapes themselves. That demand, in turn, eventually produced the so-called smoking-gun tape, a recording of Nixon authorizing the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation into Watergate. The evidence that drove Nixon from office thus emerged as a consequence of the impeachment hearings; it did not spark them. The only way for the House to find out what Trump has actually done, and whether his conduct warrants removal, is to start asking.That is not to say that impeachment hearings against Trump would be sober and orderly. The Clinton hearings were something of a circus, and the past two years on Capitol Hill suggest that any Trump hearings will be far worse. The president’s stalwart defenders are already attacking the integrity of potential witnesses and airing their own conspiracy theories; an attempt to smear Mueller with sexual-misconduct claims collapsed spectacularly in October. His accusers, meanwhile, hurl epithets and invective. In Congress, Trump’s most committed detractors might be tempted to follow the bad example of the Clinton impeachment, when, instead of conducting extensive hearings to weigh potential charges, House Republicans short-circuited the process—taking the independent counsel’s conclusions, rushing them to the floor, and voting to impeach in a lame-duck session. Trump’s opponents need to put their faith in the process, empowering a committee to consider specific charges, weigh the available evidence, and decide whether to proceed.Hosting that debate in Congress yields a fourth benefit: defusing the potential for an explosion of political violence. This is a rationale for impeachment first offered at the Constitutional Convention, in 1787. “What was the practice before this in cases where the chief Magistrate rendered himself obnoxious?” Benjamin Franklin asked his fellow delegates. “Why, recourse was had to assassination in wch. he was not only deprived of his life but of the opportunity of vindicating his character.” A system without a mechanism for removing the chief executive, he argued, offered an invitation to violence. Just as the courts took the impulse toward vigilante justice and safely channeled it into the protections of the legal system, impeachment took the impulse toward political violence and safely channeled it into Congress.Nixon’s presidency was marked by an upsurge in political terrorism. In just its first 16 months, 4,330 bombings claimed 43 lives. As the Vietnam War wound down and the militant left began to lose its salience, it made opposition to the president its new rallying cry. “Impeach Nixon and jail him for his major crimes,” the Weather Underground demanded in its manifesto, Prairie Fire, in July 1974. “Nixon merits the people’s justice.” But that seemingly radical demand, intended to expose the inadequacy of the regular constitutional order, ironically proved the opposite point. By the end of the month, the House Judiciary Committee had approved three articles of impeachment; in early August, Nixon resigned. The ship of state, it turned out, had the capacity to right itself. The Weather Underground continued its slide into irrelevance, and political violence eventually receded.The current moment is different, of course. Today, the left is again radicalizing, but the overwhelming majority of political violence is committed by the far right, albeit on a considerably smaller scale than in the Nixon era. Trump himself has warned that “the people would revolt” if he were impeached, a warning that echoes earlier eras. When Congress debated impeachment in 1868, some likewise predicted that it would provoke Andrew Johnson’s most ardent supporters to violence. “We are evidently on the eve of a revolution that may, should an appeal be taken to arms, be more bloody than that inaugurated by the firing on Fort Sumter,” warned The Boston Post.
The predictions were wrong then, as Trump’s are likely wrong now. The public understood that once the impeachment process began, the real action would take place in Congress, and not in the streets. Johnson knew that inciting his supporters to violence would erode congressional support just when he needed it most. That seems the most probable outcome today as well. If impeached, Trump would lose the luxury of venting his resentments before friendly crowds, stirring their anger. His audience, by political necessity, would become a few dozen senators in Washington.
And what if the Senate does not convict Trump? The fifth benefit of impeachment is that, even when it fails to remove a president, it severely damages his political prospects. Johnson, abandoned by Republicans and rejected by Democrats, did not run for a second term. Nixon resigned, and Gerald Ford, his successor, lost his bid for reelection. Clinton weathered the process and finished out his second term, but despite his personal popularity, he left an electorate hungering for change. “Many, including Al Gore, think that the impeachment cost Gore the election,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior member of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s team, told me. “So it has consequences and resonates outside the narrow four corners of impeachment.” If Congress were to impeach Trump, whatever short-term surge he might enjoy as supporters rallied to his defense, his long-term political fate would likely be sealed.
In these five ways—shifting the public’s attention to the president’s debilities, tipping the balance of power away from him, skimming off the froth of conspiratorial thinking, moving the fight to a rule-bound forum, and dealing lasting damage to his political prospects—the impeachment process has succeeded in the past. In fact, it’s the very efficacy of these past efforts that should give Congress pause; it’s a process that should be triggered only when a president’s betrayal of his basic duties requires it. But Trump’s conduct clearly meets that threshold. The only question is whether Congress will act.
Here is howimpeachment would work in practice. The Constitution lays out the process clearly, and two centuries of precedent will guide Congress in its work. The House possesses the sole power of impeachment—a procedure analogous to an indictment. Traditionally, this has meant tapping a committee to summon witnesses, subpoena documents, hold hearings, and consider the evidence. The committee can then propose specific articles of impeachment to the full House. If a simple majority approves the charges, they are forwarded to the Senate. The chief justice of the United States presides over the trial; members of the House are designated to act as “managers,” or prosecuting attorneys. If two-thirds of the senators who are present vote to convict, the president is removed from office; if the vote falls short, he is not.
Although the process is fairly clear, the Founders left us only vague instructions about when to implement it. The Constitution offers a short, cryptic list of the offenses that merit the impeachment and removal of federal officials: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The first two items are comparatively straightforward. The Constitution elsewhere specifies that treason against the United States consists “only in levying War” against the country or in giving the country’s enemies “Aid and Comfort.” As proof, it requires either the testimony of two witnesses or confession in open court. Despite the appalling looseness with which the charge of treason has been bandied about by members of Congress past and present, no federal official—much less a president—has ever been impeached for it. (Even the darkest theories of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia seem unlikely to meet the Constitution’s strict definition of that crime.) Bribery, similarly, has been alleged only once, and against a judge, not a president.
It is the third item on the list—“high crimes and misdemeanors”—on which all presidential impeachments have hinged. If the House begins impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, the charges will depend on this clause, but Congress will first need to decide what it means.
At the Constitutional Convention, an early draft included “treason, bribery, and corruption,” but it was shorn of that last item by the time it arrived on the floor. George Mason, of Virginia, spoke up. “Why is the provision restrained to Treason & bribery only?” he asked, according to James Madison’s notes. “Treason as defined in the Constitution will not reach many great and dangerous offences … Attempts to subvert the Constitution may not be Treason as above defined.” Mason moved to add “or maladministration.”
Madison, though, objected that “so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” Gouverneur Morris further argued that “an election of every four years will prevent maladministration.” Mere incompetence or policy disputes were best dealt with by voters. But that still left Mason’s original concern, for the “many great and dangerous offences” not covered by treason or bribery. Instead of “maladministration,” he suggested, why not substitute “other high crimes & misdemeanors (agst. the State)”? The motion carried.Constitutional lawyers have been arguing about what counts as a “high crime” or “misdemeanor” ever since. The phrase itself was borrowed from English common law, although there is no reason to suppose Mason and his colleagues were deeply familiar with its uses in that context. The Nixon impeachment spurred Charles L. Black, a Yale law professor, to write Impeachment: A Handbook, a slender volume that remains a defining work on the question.Black makes two key points. First, he notes that as a matter of logic as well as context and precedent, not every violation of a criminal statute amounts to a “high crime” or “misdemeanor.” To apply his reasoning, some crimes—say, violating 40 U.S.C. §8103(b)(2) by willfully injuring a shrub on federal property in Washington, D.C.—cannot possibly be impeachable offenses. Conversely, a president may violate his oath of office without violating the letter of the law. A president could, for example, harness the enforcement powers of the federal government to systematically persecute his political opponents, or he could grossly neglect the duties of his office. That sort of conduct, in Black’s view, is impeachable even when it is not actually criminal.
His second point rests upon the principle of eiusdem generis—literally, “of the same kind.” As the last item in a list of three impeachable offenses, surely “high crimes and misdemeanors” shares some essential features with the first two. Black suggests that treason and bribery have in common three essential features: They are extremely serious, they stand to corrupt and subvert government and the political process, and they are self-evidently wrong to any person with a shred of honor. These, he argues, are features that a “high crime” or “misdemeanor” ought to share.
Black’s views on these points are not uncontested. Nixon’s attorneys argued that impeachment did require a crime. In 1974, before Black published his book, a report from the Justice Department split the difference, concluding that “there are persuasive grounds for arguing both the narrow view that a violation of criminal law is required and the broader view that certain non-criminal ‘political offenses’ may justify impeachment.”
John Doar, the attorney hired by the House Judiciary Committee to oversee the Nixon investigation, handed off the question of what constituted an impeachable offense to two young staffers: Bill Weld and Hillary Rodham. They determined that the answers they were seeking were to be found not in old case law, but in the public debates that raged around past impeachment efforts. The memo Weld and Rodham helped produce drew on that context and sided with Black: “High crimes and misdemeanors” need not be crimes. In the end, Weld came to believe that impeachment is a political process, aimed at determining whether a president has fallen short of the duties of his office. But that doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary. In fact, the Nixon impeachment left Weld with a renewed faith in the American system of government: “The wheels may grind slowly,” he later reflected, “but they grind pretty well.”
Some democrats havealready seen enough from the Trump administration to conclude that it has met the criteria for impeachment. In July 2017, Representative Brad Sherman of California put forward an impeachment resolution; it garnered a single co-sponsor. The next month, though, brought the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump’s defense of the “very fine people on both sides.” The billionaire activist Tom Steyer launched a petition drive calling for impeachment. A second resolution was introduced in the House that November, this time by Tennessee’s Steve Cohen, who found 17 co-sponsors. By December 2017, when Representative Al Green of Texas forced consideration of a third resolution, 58 Democrats voted in favor of continuing debate, including Jim Clyburn, the House’s third-ranking Democrat. On the first day of the new Congress in January, Sherman reintroduced his resolution.
These efforts are exercises in political messaging, not serious attempts to tackle the question of impeachment. They invert the process, offering lists of charges for the House to consider, rather than asking the House to consider what charges may be justified. The House should instead approve a resolution authorizing an impeachment inquiry and allocating the staff, funding, and other resources necessary to pursue it, as the resolution that initiated the proceedings against Richard Nixon did.
Still, the resolutions proposed so far offer a valuable glimpse at the issues House Democrats are likely to pursue in such an inquiry. Some have made a general case that Trump has done violence to American values—Green’s stated that Trump “has betrayed his trust as President … to the manifest injury of the people of the United States”—but others have claimed specific violations of statutes or constitutional provisions. Both types of allegations may turn out to be important.
Despite the consensus of constitutional scholars that impeachable offenses need not be crimes, Congress has generally preferred to vote on articles that allege criminal acts. More than a third of representatives, and an outright majority of senators, hold law degrees; they think like lawyers. Democrats are thus focused on campaign-finance regulations, obstruction of justice, tax laws, money-laundering rules, proscriptions on bribing foreign officials, and the Constitution’s two emoluments clauses, which bar the president from accepting gifts from state or foreign governments.
They have studiously avoided, however, the primary area of public fascination when it comes to Trump’s alleged misdeeds: whether the president or his campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. Lawmakers are clearly wary of bringing charges that could bear on Robert Mueller’s report, lest they interfere with an ongoing investigation that they hope will somehow force Trump from office. “It all depends on what we learn from hearings and from the Mueller investigation,” Representative Cohen told me. But the highly anticipated Mueller report is unlikely to provide the denouement lawmakers are seeking. Whether a president can be impeached for acts committed prior to assuming office is an unsettled question. As Trump himself never tires of pointing out, collusion with Russia is not itself a crime. And even if Mueller produces a singularly damning report, one presenting evidence that the president himself has committed criminal acts, he cannot indict the president—at least according to current Justice Department guidelines. Congress will have to decide what to do about it.
Once the House authorizes an impeachment inquiry, the committee must distill the evidence of Trump’s alleged crimes into articles capable of garnering a majority vote in that chamber. But that’s just the first challenge. To remove Trump from office, the House managers will then have to persuade the Senate to vote to convict the president. When the articles of impeachment are filed with the Senate, where the president will be tried, each article will be considered and voted on individually.
And then, suddenly, the members of the United States Senate will be forced to answer a question that many have long evaded: Is the president fit to continue in office? There will be no press aides to hide behind, no elevators into which they can duck. Some Democrats have already made their opinions clear. Others will have to decide whether to vote to remove a president backed by a majority of their constituents. For Republicans, the choice will be even harder.
This is where the dual nature of impeachment as both a legal and a political process comes into sharpest focus. The Founders worried about electing a president who lacked character or a sense of honor, but Americans have long since lost the moral vocabulary to articulate such concerns explicitly, preferring to look instead for demonstrable violations of rules that illuminate underlying character flaws. It is Trump’s unfitness for office that necessitates impeachment; his attacks on American democracy are plainly evident, and should be sufficient. But some Republican senators may continue to dismiss the more sweeping claims against the president, particularly where no statutory crimes attach. And so the strength of the evidence supporting narrower charges such as obstruction of justice and campaign-finance violations may ultimately determine his fate. If the committee can substantiate these charges, it will place even the most reluctant senators in a bind. When the moment finally comes to cast their vote, and the world is watching, how many will acquit the president of things he has clearly done?
The closest the senatehas ever come to removing a president was in 1868, after Andrew Johnson was impeached on 11 counts. Remembered today as a lamentable exercise in hyper-partisanship, in fact Johnson’s impeachment functioned as the Founders had intended, sparing the country from the further depredations of a president who had betrayed his most basic responsibilities. We need to recover the real story of Johnson’s impeachment, because it offers the best evidence that the current president, too, must be impeached.
The case before the United States in 1868 bears striking similarities to the case before the country now—and no president in history more resembles the 45th than the 17th. “The president of the United States,” E. P. Whipple wrote in this magazine in 1866, “has so singular a combination of defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation of Providence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his will, he unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of demagogue and autocrat.” Johnson, he continued, was “egotistic to the point of mental disease” and had become “the prey of intriguers and sycophants.”
Whipple was among Johnson’s more verbose critics, but hardly the most scathing. A remarkable number of Americans looked at the president and saw a man grossly unfit for office. Johnson, a Democrat from a Civil War border state, had been tapped by Lincoln in 1864 to join him on a national-unity ticket. A fierce opponent of the slaveholding elite and a self-styled champion of the white yeomanry, Johnson spoke to voters skeptical of the Republican Party’s progressive agenda. He horrified much of the East Coast establishment, but his raw, even profane style appealed to many voters. The National Union Party, seeking the destruction of slavery and the Confederacy, swept to victory.
No one ever thought Johnson would be president. Then, in 1865, Booth’s bullet put him in office. The end of the war exposed how different Johnson’s own agenda was from the policies favored by Lincoln. Johnson wanted to reintegrate the South into the Union as swiftly as possible, devoid of slavery but otherwise little changed. Most congressional Republicans, by contrast, wanted to seize the moment to build a new social order in the South, enshrining equality and protecting civil rights. Johnson sought to restore America as it had been, while the Republicans hoped to make it more perfect.
The two visions were irreconcilable. As the feud deepened, each side pushed its commitments to their logical extremes. Congressional Republicans approved the Fourteenth Amendment, voted to enlarge the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and passed the Civil Rights Act. Taken together, these measures established the equality of Americans before the law and, for the first time, made its preservation a federal concern. They amounted to nothing less than a social revolution, a promise of an America that belonged to all Americans, not just to white men.
Johnson and his supporters found this intolerable. In federal efforts to establish racial equality, they saw antiwhite discrimination. Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act, insisting that “the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.” For the first time in American history, Congress overrode a veto to pass a major piece of legislation. Three months later, he vetoed the renewal of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, complaining that its plan to distribute land to former slaves constituted “discrimination” that would establish a “favored class of citizens.” Congress again overrode his veto. That set up an unprecedented situation, as the president was asked to administer laws he had tried to block. Instead of the promised peace, the nation found itself gripped by an accelerating crisis.
The Senate trial of Andrew Johnson. Recalled today as a folly, in fact Johnson’s impeachment spared the U.S. from the further depredations of a president who had betrayed his most basic responsibilities. (Library of Congress / Getty)The question facing Congress, and the public, was this: What do you do with a president whose every utterance and act seems to undermine the Constitution he is sworn to uphold? At first, Republicans pursued the standard mix of legislative remedies—holding hearings and passing bills designed to strip the president of certain powers. Many members of Johnson’s Cabinet worked with their congressional counterparts to constrain the president. Johnson began to see conspiracies around every corner. He moved to purge the bureaucracy of his opponents, denouncing the “blood-suckers and cormorants” who frustrated his desires.It was the campaign of white-nationalist terror that raged through the spring and summer of 1866 that persuaded many Republicans they could not allow Johnson to remain in office. In Tennessee, where Johnson had until the year before served as military governor, a white mob opposed to black equality rampaged through the streets of Memphis in May, slaughtering dozens of people as it went. July brought a second massacre, this one in New Orleans, where efforts to enfranchise black voters sparked a riot. A mob filled with police, firemen, armed youths, and Confederate veterans shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and mutilated dozens, many of them black veterans of the Union Army. Johnson chose not to suppress the violence, using fear of disorder to build a constituency more loyal to him than to either party.Congress opened impeachment hearings. The process unfolded in fits and starts over the next year and a half, as Johnson’s congressional opponents searched vainly for some charge that could gain the support of a majority of the House. Then Johnson handed it to them by firing his secretary of war, defying a law passed, in part, to stop him from undermining Reconstruction. The House passed 11 articles of impeachment, forcing Johnson to stand trial before the Senate. But the effort fell short by a single vote.When Johnson’s supporters learned that he had been spared, they were ecstatic. In Milwaukee, they careened down the street in a wagon, shouting for Johnson and liberty, sharing a keg of beer. In Boston and in Hartford, Connecticut, they fired 100‑gun salutes; in Dearborn, Michigan, they settled for 19 guns and bonfires. “We have stood for the last few months upon the verge of a precipice, a dark abyss of anarchy yawning at our feet,” the Maryland Democrat Stevenson Archer said, sketching an alternative result whereby “dark-skinned fiends and white-faced, white-livered vampires might rule and riot on the little blood they could still suck out by fastening on helpless throats.”But the euphoria proved short-lived. The New York Times urged Johnson’s supporters to look at the bigger picture: “Congress has assumed control of the whole matter of reconstruction, and will assert and exercise it.” Any effort to wrest control back from the House and Senate was held in check by the specter of another impeachment, which haunted Johnson’s remaining months in office. The Democrats took up Johnson’s political cause; their convention theme in 1868 was “This Is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.” But when the politically damaged Johnson made a bid for the Democratic nomination—“Why should they not take me up?”—he was refused. Ulysses S. Grant won on the Republican ticket, and threw the full force of the Army behind the project of Reconstruction. Johnson went home to Tennessee.
If the goal of impeachment was to frustrate Johnson’s efforts to make America a white man’s country again, it was an unqualified success. Instead of being remembered as a triumph, however, in the years that followed, it was memorialized as a failure. Defending the impeachment on substantive grounds required believing that all people born in the United States—white and black alike—deserved the same civil liberties. And a decade later, America changed its mind about that, abandoning the project of Reconstruction and reneging on its promise of civil rights for African Americans. Johnson had said he was fighting to preserve a “white man’s government,” and for the next century, that’s what the country largely had. Robbed of its animating force, the bill of particulars against Johnson began to seem hollow, petty, and misguided. How could it have been proper to impeach a president for undermining the Constitution’s guarantee of equality, when the nation as a whole had subsequently done the same?
The chorus of experts who now present Johnson’s impeachment as an exercise in raw partisanship are not learning from history but, rather, erasing it. Johnson used his office to deny the millions freed from bondage the equality that God had given them and that the Constitution guaranteed. To deny the justice of Johnson’s impeachment is to affirm the justice of his acts. If his impeachment was partisan, it was because one party had been formed to defend the freedom of man, and the other had not yet reconciled itself to that proposition.
Today, the United States once more confronts a president who seems to care for only some of the people he represents, who promises his supporters that he can roll back the tide of diversity, who challenges the rule of law, and who regards constitutional rights and liberties as disposable. Congress must again decide whether the greater risk lies in executing the Constitution as it was written, or in deferring to voters to do what it cannot muster the courage to do itself. The gravest danger facing the country is not a Congress that seeks to measure the president against his oath—it is a president who fails to measure up to that solemn promise.
President Donald Trump may avoid impeachment proceedings unless investigations uncover a whopper. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images file photo)
House Democrats will be hesitant to use their newly regained majority to launch impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump unless investigations uncover such major misdeeds that even Republicans would support the effort.
A vocal portion of House Democrats still are expected to call for Trump’s impeachment over allegations he has misused the office or committed crimes, and dozens backed an effort to force the House to consider articles of impeachment within the past year.
Watch: Now That That’s Over (Mostly) Roll Call Looks Ahead to 2020
But key Democrats did not support that effort and have made only cautious comments when talking about the subject. They include Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the expected chairman of the House Judiciary Committee where the impeachment process would begin, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and other party leaders.
“I think there’s some idea out there that impeachment is on the top of the agenda and this is something Democrats want to run with,” said John Hudak, a Brookings Institution fellow who has written about the topic. “I don’t think that’s the case.”
Margaret Tseng, a history and politics professor at Marymount University and author of “The Politics of Impeachment,” said it “is very unlikely Democrats would pursue something of that nature, even if they take control of the House.”
Here are three reasons Democrats would be reluctant to start impeachment proceedings against Trump:
It won’t succeed
House Democrats could impeach Trump, but two-thirds of the Senate would have to vote to remove him from office and there’s really no path to getting there with what is known about Trump today, Hudak said.
Depending on how many Democrats are in the Senate next term, about 18 Republicans would have to risk their political futures to remove a president who is popular among their party base and has criticized members of Congress from his own party.
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Hudak said the political argument would be difficult, short of a bombshell from a congressional investigation or from Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III — such as finding impeachable crimes in his probe into connections between Russian operatives and the president’s 2016 campaign.
Tseng agreed. “You’re talking about actual Republicans having to cross over the aisle and say, ‘We think these are impeachable offenses,’ ” she said.
That’s something Nadler himself has cautioned against when asked about impeachment, saying that you shouldn’t remove a president from office unless you get “an appreciable fraction” of Trump voters to agree that Democrats had to do it.
“If evidence arises that is of sufficient gravity to justify impeaching the president, and of sufficient persuasiveness to persuade people, at least by the end of the process, some of the people who voted on the other side, then you consider an impeachment, but not before,” Nadler said in a February appearance on MSNBC.
And even if Democrats could successfully remove Trump from office, they would face a President Mike Pence who would not have much different policy preferences than Trump. “What does that really do for you? Not that much,” Hudak said.
It’s a distraction
An impeachment effort would be a huge deal that would sap attention and resources from the other oversight investigations into the Trump administration that Democrats could use as a platform for the bigger prize of retaking the White House in 2020, Hudak and Tseng said.
“It would be smart for them to actually think about an agenda they could promote instead of being anti-Trump,” Tseng said.
Short of an obvious and clear violation of laws and violation of constitutional duties that would compel them to act, Democrats “can get a better bang for their buck elsewhere on their investigations,” Hudak said.
If Democrats want to highlight the incompetence and corruption they perceive in the Trump administration, then they can push investigation after investigation. That can be a more powerful narrative heading into the 2020 presidential elections than a failed impeachment effort, Hudak said.
It’s politically risky
An impeachment effort could risk appearing like a party that’s more intent on opposing Trump than improving or changing policies. And the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998 actually led to higher job approval ratings for the president.
“It seemed to fly in the face of what the public wanted,” Tseng said. “And the lesson would be, ‘Is this something we want to pursue because this would be a reflection of us as a party, especially ahead of a presidential election?’ ”
Pelosi recognizes that being perceived as overreaching on impeachment could hurt Democrats, even as it stirs the base of both political parties, Hudak said.
The question for Pelosi “is not whether Democrats want her to move forward with impeachment, it’s whether independents want her to move forward with impeachment,” Hudak said.
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n January 2011, Chinese President Hu Jintao visits a Beijing-funded Confucius Institute in Chicago — housed at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School. (Pool photo via AP )
BySamuel Brazysand
Alexander Dukalskis
January 11
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made a huge effort to promote China’s image as a global leader. In a Jan. 2 speech, Chinese leader Xi Jinping reiterated the theme of China’s “great rejuvenation,” a view that emphasizes the “Chinese Dream,” a return to the nation’s former glory as a global powerhouse.
But do these efforts actually work? In October, Vice President Pence complained that the “Chinese Communist Party is spending billions of dollars on propaganda outlets in the United States, as well as other countries.” This week, reports emerged that at least 10 U.S. universities had closed their Confucius Institutes(CIs), saying a polite “no thanks” to these Chinese-funded language and cultural programs on college campuses.
What’s the story on China’s big PR drive and the ensuing pushback — and how do CIs fit in? Here’s what you need to know.
China looks to tighten control of its image
The CCP and Xi have launched a full-fledged campaign to “tell China’s story well,” spending billions of dollars on propaganda efforts — including the purchase of paid supplements in major news outlets like the Economist and The Washington Post. Yet while an authoritarian state like China can control political discussion at home, it is more difficult to craft a message of benevolent paternalism abroad. China’s efforts to improve its image overseas at times have been ham-handed and the subject of parody, or sometimes ignored.
Nevertheless, the CCP continues to try. In recent years it has grown increasingly concerned with what it calls “China Threat Theory,” and has looked for ways to counter foreign claims that China is a military and economic danger. The CIs are a part of the government’s response to reframe the country in positive terms.
Confucius Institutes are part of this grass roots effort
China is working actively to improve its image abroad from the ground up. CIs are arrangements on university campuses across the globe to host Chinese culture and language instructors. The Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, oversees these institutes. This effort falls under the Ministry of Education, which ultimately is supervised by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department.
The proliferation of Confucius Institutes since the first one opened in South Korea in 2004 is remarkable — there are more than 500 CIs operating on every continent, in locations ranging from Anchorage to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. At their peak, CIs were on more than 100 North American college campuses.
What impact do these CIs have?
While the expansion of Confucius Institutes is impressive, it remains unclear what impact they have on promoting China’s image abroad. AidData recently investigated the impact of China’s public diplomacy efforts in East Asia and the Pacific, and the Pew Research Center has periodically checked public opinion on China at various locations across the globe — but there are few consistent and comparable surveys of local-level attitudes toward China over time. This lack of data has made it challenging to assess the extent to which China’s more localized overseas image management strategies have been successful.
Our research in a new AidData working paper addresses this issue by using data from the Global Database on Events, Language and Tone (GDELT), which algorithmically captures the tone of hundreds of thousands of media reports at thousands of locations across the world. In other words, it measures how positive or negative a story about China is. While the database has received some criticism over the accuracy of its algorithms, with careful analysis it can still be used to extract useful information, particularly about media tone.
Using geospatial techniques, our research evaluates how tone about China changes in media reports regarding events near a Confucius Institute before and after the CI opens. We find the opening of a CI subsequently enhances tone in stories about China relevant to that geographical area by about 6 percent — a small, but meaningful improvement.
Two examples illustrate how a seemingly small tone change may make a big difference to the reader. A 2014 Reuters story about protests in Hong Kong, coded by the GDELT algorithm at a score very near the average tone, used relatively neutral language like “leaving the two sides far apart in a dispute over how much political control China should have over Hong Kong.” In contrast, a 2016 story from Pakistan’s Express Tribune, which was scored 6 percent more positively by the GDELT algorithm, uses noticeably more upbeat language including phrases like “projects had taken the two countries’ friendship to a new height.”
Winning the battle, losing the war?
While our research suggests Confucius Institutes help facilitate an improved portrayal of China abroad, the gains may be overtaken by broader trends. In fact, despite the opening of hundreds of Confucius Institutes from 2005 to 2017, the GDELT data indicates overall global media tone about China has become markedly more negative over that time, with particular downturns from 2012 to 2013 and from 2014 to 2015. CIs might be swimming against the tide.
Despite its best efforts, China may still find molding public perception abroad of the CCP-run state is much more difficult than at home. Xi’s Chinese Dream ideal, for now, may struggle in the glare of a global spotlight. But we can be sure the CCP will continue its attempts to soften its image overseas and make adjustments when necessary.
Samuel Brazys (@sbrazys_ucd) is associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin.
Alexander Dukalskis (@AlexDukalskis) is assistant professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin.
The Chinese government has infiltrated nearly every sector of the U.S. education system via a package of programs and monetary schemes that seek to indoctrinate American children and bring the Communist government’s propaganda into the classroom, according to a new report by a Senate investigatory body.
The wide-ranging report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has found that China has spent nearly $200 million on educational entities known as Confucius Institutes. These programs have been instated in U.S. schools across the country with the mission of indoctrinating students and painting a sympathetic portrait of the Chinese Communist government, according to the report.
The institutes are shrouded in mystery and have been the cause of much consternation on Capitol Hill and elsewhere as information about their reach and power in the United States becomes clearer.
While the programs appear on their surface to be mundane—mainly focusing on language and cultural issues—the Senate committee found that these institutes constitute a threat to the United States. The Chinese government, the committee found, “is attempting to change the impression in the United States and around the world that China is an economic and security threat.”
There are more than 100 Confucius Institutes currently operating in America—the most of any country—and China has plans to open many more, according to the report.
“As China opened over 100 additional Confucius Institutes in the United States over the last 15 years, the Department of Education remained silent,” the Senate committee warns in its report.
While Confucius Institutes have become a mainstay on college campuses across the United States, the Chinese government also has plans to expand into the kindergarten through 12th grade curriculum.
“The Chinese government also funds and provides language instructors for Confucius Classrooms, which offer classes for kindergarten through 12th grade students,” according to the report. “Confucius Classrooms are currently in 519 elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States. Continued expansion of the program is a priority for China.”
Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio), a member of the Senate committee that conducted the investigation, said the bipartisan report shows a “stunning lack of transparency” about how these Chinese institutes function in the United States
“As China has expanded Confucius Institutes here in the U.S., it has systematically shut down key U.S. State Department public diplomacy efforts on Chinese college campuses,” Portman said in a statement. “We learned that schools in the United States—from kindergarten to college—have provided a level of access to the Chinese government that the Chinese government has refused to provide to the United States.”
“Absent full transparency regarding how Confucius Institutes operate and full reciprocity for U.S. cultural outreach efforts on college campuses in China, Confucius Institutes should not continue in the United States,” Portman said.
As the committee investigated these programs, it found that some U.S. schools contractually agree to uphold both Chinese and U.S. laws in order to get money for various programs.
Additionally, “the Chinese teachers sign contracts with the Chinese government pledging they will not damage the national interests of China,” according to the report. “Such limitations attempt to export China’s censorship of political debate and prevent discussion of potentially politically sensitive topics.”
U.S. school officials who spoke to Senate investigators disclosed that Confucius Institutes shun controversial topics, such as China’s poor human rights record and other hot button topics that could be damaging to the country’s reputation.
“Confucius Institutes exist as one part of China’s broader, long-term strategy,” the Senate committee concluded. “Through Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government is attempting to change the impression in the United States and around the world that China is an economic and security threat.”
There are provisions mandating that Chinese law be upheld on U.S. soil and the amount of public disclosure surrounding the institutes is extremely low. If a U.S. school were to spill the beans about these programs, the contracts—and money—would dry up.
“The Subcommittee obtained a contract between Chinese teachers and Hanban that requires Chinese instructors at U.S. schools to “‘conscientiously safeguard national interests.'” The contracts are terminated if the Chinese instructors “‘violate Chinese law’ or ‘engage in activities detrimental to national interests,'” according to the report.
Chinese teachers tied to these programs report directly to government bodies. They also are made aware that any deviation from the program will result in their termination.
“While school officials have the opportunity to interview candidates for these positions, there is little-to-no transparency into how the Chinese government selects the individuals that schools must choose from,” the report found. “Nor did U.S. school officials interviewed by the Subcommittee know if candidates would meet the school’s hiring standards.”
“Confucius Institutes report to the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education Office of Chinese Language Council International, known as ‘Hanban,'” according to the report. “Confucius Institutes are funded, controlled, and mostly staffed by Hanban to present Chinese-government approved programming to students at U.S. schools. Hanban approves each Confucius Institutes’ annual budget and has veto authority over events and speakers.”
Given the massive amount of money being spent by China on these programs, the Senate committee found evidence that U.S. schools are not properly reporting these donations, which amount to foreign gifts.
“Despite that legal requirement, nearly 70 percent of U.S. schools that received more than $250,000 from Hanban [a body that supports the programs] failed to properly report that amount to the Department of Education,” according to the report.
Despite evidence that some of the Chinese teachers are misleading the State Department about the nature of their work in the United States, the Confucius Institutes have remained largely unbothered by the U.S. government.
In 2018, the State Department revoked 32 visas for Confucius-tied teachers who, instead of doing research work as they claimed, were actually teaching at K-12 schools.
“The State Department also found evidence that one Confucius Institute Chinese director improperly coached the teachers to discuss their research during interviews with State Department investigators,” according to the report.
The State Department only conducts two to four field interviews a year.
The Confucius Institute program began in 2004 and is overseen by Hanban (officially the Office of Chinese Language Council International). The institutes operate in co-operation with local affiliate colleges and universities around the world, and financing is shared between Hanban and the host institutions. The related Confucius Classroom program partners with local secondary schools or school districts to provide teachers and instructional materials.[5][6]
The first Confucius Institute (CI) opened on 21 November 2004 in Seoul, South Korea, after establishing a pilot institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in June 2004. The CI in South Korea is no longer active. The second Confucius Institute was opened on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park, also in November 2004.[8] Hundreds more have opened since in dozens of countries around the world, with the highest concentration of Institutes in the United States, Japan, and South Korea.[9] In April 2007, the first research-based Confucius Institute opened in Waseda University in Japan. In partnership with Peking University, the program promotes research activities of graduate students studying Chinese.[10] As of 2014, there were over 480 Confucius Institutes in dozens of countries on six continents.[11][12] The Ministry of Education estimates that 100 million people overseas may be learning Chinese by 2010 and the program is expanding rapidly in order to keep up.[13] Hanban aims to establish 1,000 Confucius Institutes by 2020.[14]
Name
The Confucius Institute is named after the noted Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC). Throughout the 20th century, Communist Party of China (CPC) leaders criticized and denounced Confucius as the personification of China’s “feudal” traditions, with anti-Confucianism ranging from the 1912 New Culture Movement to the 1973 Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign during the Cultural Revolution.[15] However, in recent decades, interest in pre-modern Chinese culture has grown in the country, and Confucius in particular has seen a resurgence in popularity.[16] Outside of China, Confucius is a generally recognizable symbol of Chinese culture, removed from the negative associations of other prominent Chinese figures such as chairman Mao Zedong.[17]
“Confucius Institute” is a trademarked brand name, which according to a spokesman for the organisation, “Those who enjoy more brand names will enjoy higher popularity, reputation, more social influence, and will therefore be able to generate more support from local communities.”[18] A 2011 crackdown protected “Confucius Institute” from preregistration infringement in Costa Rica.[19]
A China Post article reported in 2014 that “Certainly, China would have made little headway if it had named these Mao Institutes, or even Deng Xiaoping Institutes. But by borrowing the name Confucius, it created a brand that was instantly recognized as a symbol of Chinese culture, radically different from the image of the Communist Party.”[20]
Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney, notes the irony that the CPC now lionizing Confucius had vilified him just four decades previously for his association with patriarchal, hierarchical, and conservative values.[21]
Purpose
BritishForeign SecretaryWilliam Hagueand Li Changchun at a signing ceremony in London, 17 April 2012, for the agreement between Confucius Institute of China and Bangor University on the establishment of Confucius Institute at Bangor University, United Kingdom. The agreement was signed by John Hughes, Vice-Chancellor of Bangor University, and Xu Lin, Director of the Confucius Institute.
Confucius Institutes (CIs) promote and teach Chinese culture and language around the world. CIs develop Chinese language courses, train teachers, hold the HSK Examination (Chinese proficiency test), host cultural and artistic presentations, and provide information about contemporary China.[22] The director of the CI program, Xu Lin, stated that CIs were started to cater to the sudden uptick in interest of the Chinese language around the world. They also provide Chinese language teaching staff from Mainland China. As of 2011, there were 200 such teachers working in the United States.[23]
Political goals
Confucius Institute also has non-academic goals. Li Changchun, the 5th-highest-ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee, was quoted in The Economist saying that the Confucius Institutes were “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up”. The statement has been seized upon by critics as evidence of a politicized mission.[24] Many foreign scholars have characterized the CI program as an exercise in soft power, expanding China’s economic, cultural, and diplomatic reach through the promotion of Chinese language and culture,[25][26] while others have suggested a possible role in intelligence collection.[27][28] The soft power goals also include assuaging concerns of a “China threat” in the context of the country’s increasingly powerful economy and military.[29]
While Chinese authorities have been cautious not to have CIs act as direct promoters of the party’s political viewpoints, a few suggest that the Confucius Institutes function in this way. Officials say that one important goal of the Institutes is to influence other countries’ view of China.[30]Peng Ming-min, a Taiwan independence activist and politician, claims that colleges and universities where a Confucius Institute is established have to sign a contract in which they declare their support for Beijing’s “One China” policy. As a result, both Taiwan and Tibet become taboo at the institutes.[31] However, this claim is in dispute. Michael Nylan, professor of Chinese historyat the University of California at Berkeley, stated that CIs have become less heavy-handed in their demands, and have learnt from “early missteps”, such as insisting that universities adopt a policy that Taiwan is part of China. Nylan’s survey of faculty and administrators at fifteen universities with Confucius Institutes revealed two reports that institutes had exerted pressure to block guest speakers, but both events went ahead anyway.[32]
Hanban is a non-profit government organization,[35] though it is connected with the Ministry of Education and has close ties to a number of senior Communist Party officials. The Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing establishes the guidelines which the separate Confucius Institutes worldwide follows. The headquarters is governed by a council with fifteen members, ten of whom are directors of overseas institutes.[36] The Institutes themselves are individually managed under the leadership of their own board of directors, which should include members of the host institution.[37] The current chair of the Confucius Institute Headquarters council is Liu Yandong,[38][39] a Chinese vice premier and member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo who formerly headed the United Front Work Department. Other leaders of the council are similarly drawn from the Communist Party and central government agencies, such as the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education, and the State Council Information Office (also known as the Office of Overseas Propaganda).[1][40] The council sets the agenda for the Confucius Institutes and makes changes to the bylaws while other tasks and ongoing management of the Confucius Institute Headquarters are handled by the professional executive leadership headed by the director-general.[41][42]
The Chinese Government shares the burden of funding Confucius Institutes with host universities, and takes a hands-off approach to management.[43] The Institutes function independently within the guidelines established by Hanban and the Confucius Institute Headquarters. Each Institute is responsible for drawing up and managing their own budget, which is subject to approval by the headquarters. The Confucius Institute Headquarters provides various restrictions on how their funds may be used, including earmarking funds for specific purposes.[44] Institutes in the United States are generally provided with $100,000 annually from Hanban, with the local university required to match funding.[45]
In addition to their local partner university, Confucius Institutes operate in co-operation with a Chinese partner university.[46] Many Institutes are governed by a board which is composed of several members from the Chinese partner school and the remaining of the members affiliated with the local partner university.[47] At most Institutes, the director is appointed by the local partner university.[43]
Hiring policy controversy
The Hanban website stated that Chinese language instructors should be “aged between 22 to 60, physical and mental healthy, no record of participation in Falun Gong and other illegal organizations, and no criminal record.”[48] In many universities, the employer is the Chinese government, not the university.[citation needed]
Human rights lawyer Clive Ansley has argued that the part of the hiring policy that discriminates against Falun Gong believers is in contravention of anti-discrimination laws and human rights codes.[49] Marci Hamilton, Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Yeshiva University, called this policy “unethical and illegal in the free world.”[50]
In 2013, McMaster University in Canada closed its Confucius Institute due to hiring issues over Falun Gong.[51]
Curriculum
The curriculum of Confucius Institutes revolves around the institute’s role as a language center.[30] Confucius Institutes teach simplified Chinese characters, which are standard in Mainland China, rather than the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Reception and controversies
This article’s Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article’s neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section’s contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material.(April 2018)
Controversy regarding Confucius Institutes in the US, Australian, and Canadian press include criticism that unlike other governments’ language and culture promotion organizations, the Confucius Institutes operate within established universities, colleges, and secondary schools around the world, providing funding, teachers and educational materials.[1][27][66] This has raised concerns over their influence on academic freedom, the possibility of industrial espionage,[67] and concerns that the institutes present a selective and politicized view of China as a means of advancing the country’s soft power internationally.[1][66][68]
In December 2014, Stockholm University, the first university in Europe to host a Confucius Institute, announced it was terminating the program. Press coverage of the Braga incident in the Swedish press was said to have influenced the decision. “Generally it is questionable to have, within the framework of the university, institutes that are financed by another country,” said the university’s chancellor.[69]
Underlying such opposition is concern by professors that a Confucius Institute would interfere with academic freedom and be able to pressure the university to censor speech on topics the Communist Party of China objects to.[70] An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that here is little evidence of meddling from China although the same article did go on to say the Institutes were “distinct in the degree to which they were financed and managed by a foreign government.”[45] After interviewing China scholars, journalists and CI directors, a writer for The Diplomat also found little support for the concern that CIs would serve as propaganda vehicles, though some of her sources did note that they would face constraints in their curriculum on matters such as Tibet and human rights.[71] An article in The New York Times quotes Arthur Waldron, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, that the key issue is academic independence. “Once you have a Confucius Institute on campus, you have a second source of opinions and authority that is ultimately answerable to the Chinese Communist Party and which is not subject to scholarly review.”[72]
In October 2013, University of Chicago professor Marshall Sahlins published an extensive investigative article criticizing the Confucius Institutes and the universities hosting them.[73] Later, more than 100 faculty members signed a protest against the Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago.[74] In September 2014, the University of Chicago suspended its negotiation for renewal of the agreement with Hanban.[75] Two months later, the Canadian Association of University Teachers urged Canadian universities and colleges to end ties with the Confucius Institute.[76]
In June 2014, the American Association of University Professors issued a statement urging American universities to cease their collaboration with the Confucius Institute unless the universities can have unilateral control of the academia affairs, that the teachers in Confucius Institutes can have the same academic freedom enjoyed by other university faculty members, and that the agreements between universities and Confucius Institutes are available to the community.[77] The AAUP statement was widely noticed by US media and prompted extensive further debate in the US.[78][79][80][81]
Two months later, in August 2014, Xu Lin, Director-General of the Hanban and Chief Executive of the CIs worldwide, became embroiled in an incident in Braga, Portugal, when Xu ordered her staff to rip pages referring to Taiwanese academic institutions from the published program for the European Association for Chinese Studies conference in Braga, claiming the materials were “contrary to Chinese regulations”.[82]The Wall Street Journal described Xu’s attempted censorship as the “bullying approach to academic freedom”.[83]
In September 2014, the University of Chicago closed their CI after pressure from faculty members, blaming Xu’s comments that her threatening letter and phone call forced the university to continue hosting the institute.[61][84] The Business Spectator concludes that the Xu Lin’s hardline behavior highlights one of the biggest problems for Beijing’s charm offensive. “It still relies on officials like Xu, who still think and act like party ideologues who like to assert their authority and bully people into submission.”[85] Less than a week later, Pennsylvania State University also cut ties with the Confucius Institute after coming to the conclusion that “its objectives were not in line with the Institute’s”.[86]
In December of that same year, the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations held a hearing entitled “Is Academic Freedom Threatened by China’s Influence on U.S. Universities?”.[87] Chairman Chris Smith said, “U.S. colleges and universities should not be outsourcing academic control, faculty and student oversight or curriculum to a foreign government”, and called for a GAO study into agreements between American universities and China.[88] On 5 December 2014, PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying denied the House testimony and said “We have assisted with supplying teachers and textbooks at the request of the U.S. side but have never interfered with academic freedom.”[89]
Controversy continued to exist in 2018 as U.S. congress members from Texas wrote a letter to four universities in that state urging them to close their Confucius Institutes. Texas A&M did so shortly after receiving the letter. In their coverage of the closure, Inside Higher Edreported that the concerns about the institutes had shifted “from one about academic freedom and integrity to one about the Chinese government’s overseas influence activities and concerns about espionage on U.S. campuses.”[90] On 19 February 2019, Leiden University in The Netherlands has promised to end agreement with Confucius Institute in August 2019. [91]
Story 1: President Trump Meeting With Chairman Kim and U.S/Communist China Signing Trade Agreement — What Happened To Complete Verifiable Irreversible Denuclearization and Destruction of 60+ Nuclear Weapons — Trump Backpedaling — Ultimately Denuclearization — Much Talk No Action — Total U.S. Embargo On Communist China’s Imports Necessary To Have North Korea Denuclearization — No Real Progress Expected At Summit Nor On Trade Issues — Conclusion: Trump Being Played For Fool By Communist Dictators — Videos —
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Kim Jong Un impersonator deported from Vietnam ahead of summit
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Vietnam ahead of summit meeting
PUBLISHED: 10:02 EST, 26 February 2019 | UPDATED: 14:36 EST, 26 February 2019
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are in place ahead of their second summit on Wednesday to address perhaps the world’s biggest security challenge.
Mr Kim’s pursuit of a nuclear programme that stands on the verge of viably threatening targets around the planet will be central to discussions in Vietnam that will build on last year’s encounter in Singapore.
Mr Trump arrived late on Tuesday in Air Force One after a long flight that included refuelling stops in the UK and Qatar.
He waved from the stairs of the presidential plane, then shook hands with dignitaries and walked along a red carpet to his motorcade.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, receives bouquets on his arrival (Minoru Iwasaki/Kyodo/AP)
Mr Kim arrived in Hanoi earlier and spent the day travelling around the Vietnamese capital in his armoured limousine, his squad of bodyguards in tow as he visited the North Korean Embassy, with hundreds of visiting journalists and thousands of local citizens following in his wake.
He took a train through southern China and then travelled to Hanoi by car from a Vietnamese border town.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Just arrived in Vietnam. Thank you to all of the people for the great reception in Hanoi. Tremendous crowds, and so much love!
The two leaders are slated to meet over two days, first at dinner on Wednesday followed by meetings on Thursday.
They first met last June in Singapore, a summit that was long on historic pageantry but short in any enforceable agreements for North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal.
+5
President Donald Trump meets officials on his arrival (Evan Vucci/AP)
Mr Trump has praised Pyongyang for ceasing middle tests and has appeared to ease up on demanding a timeline for disarmament.
Mr Kim is expected to ask for relief from crushing US sanctions.
But before the summit began, Mr Kim took some time to venture out of his locked-down hotel and check out parts of Hanoi, including his nation’s embassy, where a loud cheer went up as he entered the compound.
Soldiers, police and international journalists thronged the streets outside Hanoi’s Melia Hotel where Mr Kim is staying, and hundreds of eager citizens stood behind barricades hoping to see the North Korean leader.
As Vietnamese, North Korean and US flags fluttered in a cold drizzle, dozens of cameras flashed and some citizens screamed and used their mobile phones to capture Mr Kim’s rock-star-like arrival.
A worker helps arrange American and Vietnamese flags (Andrew Harnik/AP)
“I like him,” local resident Van Dang Luu, who works at a nearby bank, said of Mr Kim.
“He is very young and he is very interesting. And he is very powerful,” she said.
“Trump is not young, but I think he is very powerful.”
Vietnam’s authoritarian leaders set up a huge security apparatus to welcome Mr Kim, shutting long stretches of road and locking down swaths of the bustling capital city.
Earlier in the morning, Mr Kim, grinning broadly and waving, stepped off his armoured train at the end of a long ride that started in Pyongyang and wound through China to the Vietnamese border.
+5
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves from a car (Minh Hoang/AP)
He shook hands with officials as Vietnamese troops in crisp, white uniforms and black boots stood at attention on a red carpet at the Dong Dang railway station on the China-Vietnam border.
Hours ahead of his border crossing, footage from Japanese TV network TBS showed Mr Kim taking a pre-dawn smoke break at a railway station in China, a woman who appeared to be his sister, Kim Yo Jong, holding a crystal ashtray at the ready.
Although many experts are sceptical Mr Kim will give up the nuclear weapons he likely sees as his best guarantee of continued rule, there was a palpable, carnival-like excitement among many in Hanoi as the final preparations were made for the meeting.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Heading over to Vietnam for my meeting with Kim Jong Un. Looking forward to a very productive Summit!
There were also huge traffic jams in the already congested streets.
Vietnam is eager to show off its huge economic and development improvements since the destruction of the Vietnam War, but the country also tolerates no dissent and is able to provide the kind of firm hand not allowed by more democratic potential hosts.
T-shirts depicting US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (Andrew Harnik/AP)
“I really hope to catch a glimpse of Kim Jong Un. He is an interesting man. And he rarely travels anywhere so it would be great to see him here,” said Nguyen Trong Toan, a retired teacher who was waiting by the side of the street on Kim’s expected travel route.
There are high expectations for the Hanoi summit after a vague declaration at the first meeting in June in Singapore that disappointed many.
Mr Trump, via Twitter, has worked to temper those expectations, predicting before leaving for Hanoi a “continuation of the progress” made in Singapore but adding a tantalising nod to “denuclearisation?”
He also said that Mr Kim knows that “without nuclear weapons, his country could fast become one of the great economic powers anywhere in the world”.
North Korea has spent decades, at great political and economic sacrifice, building its nuclear programme, and there is widespread scepticism among experts that it will give away that programme cheaply.
Trump’s Hanoi summit off to rough start even before his arrival
Justin Sink and Margaret Talev, Bloomberg
Published
President Donald Trump arrived in Hanoi late Tuesday for a second summit with Kim Jong Un that has already shown flashes of disorder, as American journalists were abruptly evicted from a hotel housing the North Korean leader and key details of the meeting remained a mystery.
The White House has set low ambitions for Thursday’s talks, organized in a matter of weeks after Trump announced the summit Feb. 8. The two sides haven’t even agreed on the meaning of denuclearization or the ultimate purpose of the negotiations — and that’s unlikely to be resolved this week.
Before Kim’s arrival in Hanoi Tuesday morning, Vietnam’s foreign ministry announced that the White House media center would have to move from the Melia hotel downtown, where the North Korean leader is staying. The White House offered no explanation for the move, which forced news organizations operating from the hotel to pack up and relocate a few blocks away.
Trump will dine with Kim Wednesday evening after meetings with Vietnamese leaders, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters traveling with the president aboard Air Force One. She didn’t say where the two men would have dinner Wednesday, and the White House also hasn’t said where they will hold their formal summit on Thursday.
Trump will be joined at dinner by his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. Kim will also be joined by two aides, Sanders said. She didn’t identify them.
Sanders complained on Fox News last week that American media had manufactured “high expectations” for the summit. Trump has sought to tamp down public expectations as well, telling state governors on Sunday that he has no intention of lifting harsh U.S. sanctions on North Korea and isn’t pushing for a hasty deal with Kim.
Failure to win substantive concessions from Kim risks turning a dramatic moment into a public letdown for the U.S president, who is making his second trip to the other side of the world to try to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear weapons. After agreeing to cease military exercises with South Korea following their first summit without gaining anything substantive from Kim in exchange, Trump’s critics fear the president may again be talked into a U.S. concession.
“This is where the president’s unpredictability, his impulsiveness, his inclination not to prepare for meetings could get us into trouble,” said Victor Cha, the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, whom the Trump administration considered nominating for ambassador to South Korea.
Talks between Washington and Pyongyang have been deadlocked since the two leaders’ first summit in Singapore last June. Rather than show progress toward denuclearization, North Korea has continued to build warheads and missiles, according to satellite-imagery analysis and leaked American intelligence.
Speculation before the second summit has focused on steps the two countries could take to show warming relations while avoiding the sorer points in their nuclear negotiations. In Hanoi, the government has festooned the city with U.S., Vietnamese and North Korean flags and branded the summit as a “partnership for sustainable peace.”
The likeliest outcomes this time are symbolic. One significant possibility is that Trump and Kim conclude their meetings on Thursday with a declaration that their countries are no longer at war, a nonbinding political statement that won’t officially replace the 1953 Korean War armistice.
Some critics worry that a peace declaration — which would come more than 65 years after the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War – could erode the American justification for stationing about 28,500 troops in neighboring South Korea. That might not be of particular concern to Trump, who has openly questioned the cost of the large U.S. troop presence and recently forced the negotiation of a new cost-sharing agreement with South Korea.
Kim could agree to allow a U.S. diplomatic liaison office in Pyongyang, sought by American officials dating to Bill Clinton’s administration. But the North Korean regime has resisted, figuring the U.S. would use the outpost to expand its intelligence-gathering in the country. This summit may test Kim’s willingness to break from the past.
Patrick Cronin, chairman of the Asia-Pacific security program at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington-based think tank, said either a peace declaration or a diplomatic exchange would be useful confidence-building moves. Neither should be met with much concern — especially if Kim also gives ground on issues such as inspections of North Korean nuclear facilities or lockdowns or other controls of fissile material, he said.
Trump has repeatedly indicated he’s eager to help jump-start a post-nuclear North Korean economy. His negotiators might seek human-rights assurances that could eventually pave the way for Western companies subject to U.S. and international laws to enter the country.
The two leaders could also announce the formation of joint survey teams to look for additional remains of American soldiers killed during the Korean War, after an initial repatriation following the Singapore summit.
Senior administration officials said that progress toward any of those goals would constitute success and demonstrate the president’s efforts have been effective. A team of more than a dozen U.S. officials led by Stephen Biegun, Trump’s North Korea envoy, has met twice in recent weeks – first in Pyongyang, and more recently in Hanoi – with North Korean counterparts in a bid to craft some sort of agreement for the leaders to announce.
Kim could demonstrate his sincerity by revealing undeclared facilities, disclosing or allowing inspection of his program’s uranium pathways, permitting international inspectors on the ground, or agreeing to allow electronic monitoring or the removal of samples by inspectors. U.S. negotiators are likely to raise their concerns over the proliferation of fissile material and mobile missile launchers.
One senior administration official who requested anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations speculated that a breakdown in talks between the U.S. and North Korea late last year could have been a signal of internal pressures within the North Korean government. Kim likely faces domestic resistance to any steps toward denuclearization, Cronin said.
There have been a number of North Korean missile tests. North Korea has also fired a number of short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan (East Sea of Korea), in what have been interpreted as political gestures.[1][2][3][4]
As of 30 November 2017, North Korea has carried out 117 tests of strategic missiles since its first such test in 1984.[5] 15 were carried out under the rule of Kim Il-sung and 16 under Kim Jong-il.[6] Under Kim Jong-un, more than 80 tests have been undertaken.[7]
North Korea fires off its first ballistic missile, the Unha-1 rocket, also known as the Taepodong-1 missile, from the launch site of Musudan-ri in North Hamgyong Province.[9]
1999
North Korea agrees to a moratorium on long-range missile tests.[10]
2002
North Korea pledges to extend moratorium on missile tests beyond 2003.
North Korea launches four ballistic missiles from the Tongchang-ri launch site in the northwest.[22] Some flew 620 mi (1,000 km) before falling into the Sea of Japan.[23][9]
April 4, 2017
North Korea test-fired a medium-range ballistic missile from its eastern port of Sinpo into the Sea of Japan[24][25][9]
April 15, 2017
North Korea test-fired an unidentified land-based missile from the naval base in Sinpo but it exploded almost immediately after the takeoff .[26][27][28][29]
April 28, 2017
North Korea test-fired an unidentified missile from Pukchang airfield.[30][31] The missile, believed to be a medium-range[32] KN-17 ballistic missile,[30] faltered and broke apart minutes after liftoff.[32][33][34]
May 13, 2017
North Korea test-fired a Hwasong-12[35] missile from a test site in the area of Kusong.[36] The missile, later revealed to be an intermediate range ballistic missile,[37] traveled 30 minutes,[38] reached an altitude of more than 2,111.5 km, and flew a horizontal distance of 789 km (489 miles), before falling into the Sea of Japan.[37] Such a missile would have a range of at least 4,000, reaching Guam, to 6,000 km.[36][35]
May 21, 2017
North Korea test-fired another Pukkuksong-2 medium-range ballistic missile from Pukchang airfield,[39][40] which traveled approximately 500 km (300 miles) before falling into the Sea of Japan.[41] The missile landed about 350 km (217 miles) from North Korea’s east coast.[41]
May 29, 2017
North Korea fired a Short Range Ballistic Missile into the Sea of Japan. It traveled 450 km.[42]
June 8, 2017
North Korea fired several missiles into the Sea of Japan. They are believed to be anti-ship missiles.[43] The South Korean military said the launches show the reclusive regime’s “precise targeting capability.”
June 23, 2017
North Korea tested a new rocket engine that could possibly be fitted to an intercontinental ballistic missile.[44]
July 4, 2017
North Korea tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) named Hwasong-14 on July 4.[45][46] It launched from the Panghyon Aircraft Factory 8 km southeast of Panghyon Airport.[47] It was aimed straight up at a lofted trajectory and reached more than 2,500 km into space.[48] It landed 37 minutes later,[49] more than 930 km from its launch site,[50] into Japan’s exclusive economic zone.[51] Aiming long, the missile would have traveled 7,000–8,000 km or more, reaching Alaska, Hawaii, and maybe Seattle.[49][52][53][54][55] Its operational range would be farther, bringing a 500 kg payload to targets in most of the contiguous United States 9,700 km away.[56][57][58]
July 28, 2017
The 14th missile test carried out by North Korea in 2017 was another ICBM launched at 23:41 North Korea time (15:41 GMT) from Chagang Province in the north of the country on July 28, 2017. Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Boston, and New York appear to be within range.[59] The missile’s reentry vehicle (RV) was seen by people in Japan as it entered the atmosphere and landed near the northernmost Japanese island, Hokkaido.[60][61] Analysis later revealed that the RV broke up on re-entry; further testing would be required.[62] The CIA made an assessment expecting adequate performance of the RV under the different stresses of a shallower trajectory towards the continental US.[63]
August 26, 2017
North Korea test-fired three short-range ballistic missiles from the Kangwon province on August 26. Two travel approximately 250 kilometers in a northeastern direction and one explodes immediately after launch.[64]
North Korea launched a ballistic missile on September 15 from Sunan airfield. It reached a height of 770 km and flew a distance of 3,700 km for 17 minutes over Hokkaido before landing in the Pacific.[67]
November 28, 2017
North Korea launched an ICBM from the vicinity of Pyongsong at 1:30pm EST/3:00am Pyongyang time. The rocket traveled for 50 minutes and reached 2800 miles (4,500 km) in height, both of which were new milestones. The missile flew 600 miles (1,000 km) east into the Sea of Japan; unlike summer launches, the Japanese government did not issue cellphone alerts to warn its citizens. North Korea called it a Hwasong-15 missile. Its potential range appears to be more than 8,000 miles (13,000 km), able to reach Washington and the rest of the continental United States.[68][69] Much about the missile is unknown. The missile might have been fitted with a mock warhead to increase its range, in which case the maximum missile range while carrying a heavy warhead might be shorter than 13,000 km. Based on satellite imagery, some experts believe that North Korea may now be able to fuel missiles horizontally, shortening the delay between when a missile becomes visible to when it can be launched.[68] The rocket is believed to have broken up on re-entry into the atmosphere.[70]
Trajectories of North Korean missiles launched over Japan
Range and altitude of North Korean missiles launched over Japan
North Korean rockets flown over the Japanese archipelago
On February 7, 2016, roughly a month after an alleged hydrogen bomb test, North Korea claimed to have put a satellite into low Earth orbit. Japanese Prime MinisterShinzō Abe had warned the North to not launch the rocket, and if it did and the rocket violated Japaneseterritory, it would be shot down. North Korea launched the rocket anyway, claiming the satellite was purely intended for peaceful, scientific purposes. Several nations, including the United States, Japan, and South Korea, have criticized the launch, and despite North Korean claims that the rocket was for peaceful purposes, it has been heavily criticized as an attempt to perform an ICBM test under the guise of a peaceful satellite launch. China also criticized the launch, however urged “the relevant parties” to “refrain from taking actions that may further escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula”.[71]
While some North Korean pronouncements have been treated with skepticism and ridicule, analysts treated the unusual pace of North Korean rocket and nuclear testing in early 2016 quite seriously. Admiral Bill Gortney, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told Congress in March 2016, “It’s the prudent decision on my part to assume that [Kim Jong Un] has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on an ICBM,” suggesting a major shift from a few years earlier.[72]
North Korea appeared to launch a missile test from a submarine on April 23, 2016; while the missile only traveled 30 km, one U.S. analyst noted that “North Korea’s sub launch capability has gone from a joke to something very serious”.[73] North Korea conducted multiple missile tests in 2016.[74]
On August 29, 2017 United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has condemned the latest North Korea Ballistic Missile Launch and termed it as violation of relevant UN Security Council resolutions, as According to press reports, early Tuesday morning, the North Korea Ballistic Missile travelled some 2,700 kilometers, flying over Japan before crashing into the Pacific Ocean.[75]
On September 3, 2017, North Korea claimed to have successfully tested a thermonuclear bomb, also known as a hydrogen bomb (see 2017 North Korean nuclear test). Corresponding seismic activity similar to an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 was reported by the USGSmaking the blast around 10 times more powerful than previous detonations by the country.[76] Later the bomb yield was estimated to be 250 kilotons, based on further study of the seismic data.[77] The test was reported to be “a perfect success”.[78]
Story 2: Corrupt Drug Cartel Supporters Oppose National Emergency To Build Border Barrier — American People Support Trump — Political Elitist Establishment Support Open Borders and Drug Dealers — Trump Promises To Veto Resolution to Block National Emergency — Videos
No factual basis for Trump’s national emergency at the border say ex-national security officials
Pelosi on efforts to block Trump’s national emergency
Trump will ‘100 percent’ veto resolution to block national emergency
Graham on the Dems’ resolution to block Trump’s emergency declaration
Nunes on Pelosi’s push to terminate Trump’s emergency declaration
Former senior national security officials issue declaration on national emergency
Trump will ‘100 percent’ veto resolution to block national emergency
President Trump on Feb. 22 said he would veto a House-introduced resolution to block his national emergency declaration.(Photo: Oliver Contreras/The Washington Post)
A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials issued a statement Monday saying that “there is no factual basis” for President Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The joint statement, whose signatories include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, comes a day before the House is expected to vote on a resolution to block Trump’s Feb. 15 declaration.
The former officials’ statement, which will be entered into the Congressional Record, is intended to support lawsuits and other actions challenging the national emergency proclamation and to force the administration to set forth the legal and factual basis for it.
“Under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today that entitles the president to tap into funds appropriated for other purposes to build a wall at the southern border,” the group said.
Albright served under President Bill Clinton, and Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, served under President Barack Obama.
Lawmakers argue over Trump’s national emergency declaration
Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said he supported President Trump’s national emergency declaration to build the wall Feb. 17.(Reuters)
Also signing were Eliot A. Cohen, State Department counselor under President George W. Bush; Thomas R. Pickering, President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations; John F. Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state; Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser; Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s CIA director and defense secretary; as well as former intelligence and security officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations.
Trump’s national emergency declaration followed a 35-day partial government shutdown, which came after Congress did not approve the $5.7 billion he sought to build a wall.
In announcing his declaration, Trump predicted lawsuits and “possibly . . . a bad ruling, and then we’ll get another bad ruling” before winning at the Supreme Court.
Trump’s actions are also drawing criticism from at least two dozen former Republican congressmen, who have signed an open letter urging passage of a joint resolution to terminate the emergency declaration. The letter argues that Trump is circumventing congressional authority.
A secondary border wall is under construction in Otay Mesa, Calif. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
The former security officials’ 11-page declaration sets out their argument disputing the factual basis for the president’s emergency.
Among other things, they said, illegal border crossings are at nearly 40-year lows. Undetected unlawful entries at the U.S.-Mexico border decreased from 851,000 to nearly 62,000 between 2006 and 2016, they said, citing Department of Homeland Security statistics.
Contrary to the president’s assertion, there is no documented emergency at the southern border related to terrorism or violent crime, they said, citing administration reports and independent think tank analyses.
Similarly, they state that there is no drug trafficking emergency that can be addressed by a wall along the southern border, noting that “the overwhelming majority of opioids” that enter the United States are brought in through legal ports of entry, citing the Justice Department.
They also argue that redirecting money pursuant to the national emergency declaration “will undermine U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.” And, they assert, “a wall is unnecessary to support the use of the armed forces,” as the administration has said.
Some of the same former officials wrote a joint declaration disputing the factual basis for the president’s order shortly after he took office in January 2017 barring entry to foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The former officials asserted that the order was not based on a bona fide national security assessment but on “a deliberate political decision to discriminate against a religious minority.”
Their views were filed as a joint declaration and later as a friend-of-the court brief in lawsuits challenging the original order and subsequent revisions, and it was cited by almost every federal judge who enjoined the ban. By the time the challenges reached the Supreme Court, the administration had significantly narrowed the ban, which the high court upheld on a 5-to-4 vote.
With respect to the declared national emergency, plaintiffs have filed two cases in the District of Columbia, two in California and one in Texas.
Former US security officials to oppose emergency declaration
yesterday
A group of former U.S. national security officials is set to release a statement arguing there is no justification for President Donald Trump to use a national emergency declaration to fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The statement, which was reviewed by The Associated Press, has 58 signatures from prominent former officials, including former Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and John Kerry, former Defense Secretaries Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
The statement is set to be released Monday, a day before the Democratic-controlled House is expected to vote to block Trump from using the declaration. The measure is sure to pass, and the GOP-run Senate may adopt it as well, though Trump has already promised a veto.
“There is no factual basis for the declaration of a national emergency,” says the statement, which argues that border crossings are near a 40-year low and that there is no terrorist emergency at the border.
Trump declared an emergency to obtain wall funding beyond the $1.4 billion Congress approved for border security. The move allows the president to bypass Congress to use money from the Pentagon and other budgets.
Trump’s edict is also being challenged in the federal courts, where a host of Democratic-led states such as California are among those that have sued to overturn Trump’s order.
President Donald Trump has said he wants a 1,000-mile wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Right now there’s about 650 miles of existing barriers—most of it built during the Bush and Obama administrations. So far during the Trump years, some of those walls or fences have been upgraded, but no barrier extensions have been undertaken.
That will change in late February when a contractor called SLSCOwill begin building six miles of all-new wall in Hidalgo County, Texas, near the McAllen-Reynosa border crossing. SLSCO has two contracts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a total of 35 miles of wall this year in Texas and California, for a payment of as much as $432 million. U.S. Customs & Border Protection confirms that this project is a go. Having been funded out of a spending bill passed last March, this new wall won’t be stopped by the government shutdown.
So who is it behind SLSCO so eager to bid on one of the most acrimonious public projects in U.S. history? The company, a.k.a. Sullivan Land Services, was founded in 1995 by John, Billy and Todd Sullivan—brothers from Galveston, Texas. They’re reticent to talk about it, referring most questions to the CBP and Army Corps of Engineers, which will oversee construction. In a brief phone interview, John Sullivan said the brothers’ decision to bid on building the wall had nothing to do with politics.
If it’s not for politics, it must be pretty good business. Yet for all the hassle they go through, the big publicly traded general contractors like Fluor, KBR and Jacobs Engineering tend to generate gross margins of less than 10% and net margins south of 5%. Sullivan says it would be inappropriate to try to estimate how much they would make on a contract that hasn’t been completed yet—some contracts make money, some lose money. If they can squeeze out a 5% margin, the Sullivans could net $20 million or so getting Trump’s wall started—and with a lot of miles yet to be contracted.
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The Sullivan brothers (Todd is 43, John and Billy, 39) grew up on Galveston Island, sons of Susanne and Gerald Sullivan, who started off as a cattle rancher on the island and built a port business with Texas International Terminals, a dock for tankers and cargo ships, with petroleum storage and a rail spur. They also operate a dredging business and have built artificial reefs for wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico. Their Sullivan Brothers Builders puts up 100 or so townhomes a year around Houston.
Near Santa Teresa, New Mexico, on December 23 as work continued on replacing 20 miles of old fence with new bollards. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The bigger operations are SLSCO as well as their disaster recovery business DRC Emergency Services, which in recent years has become adept at mustering subcontractors to mobilize hundreds of heavy hauling trucks from across the region to pick up mountains of debris in the wake of hurricanes. Among DRC’s biggest jobs: In 2016, after historic flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, DRC and its subcontractors brought in 300 trucks to haul off 2.5 million cubic yards of debris and haul in $35 million (gross). When Hurricane Harvey deluged Houston in 2017, DRC hauled out 2.8 million cubic yards of debris, and about $40 million. Mark Hunter, an official with the South Carolina Department of Transportation, says of DRC in an email: “they are a great group, very intelligent approach to projects—efficient, productive and committed.” In 2014, according to DRC reports, South Carolina paid the company $44.2 million for storm cleanup.
The brothers have clearly developed a taste for disaster work. SLSCO has rebuilt homes in Haiti, as well as in New York City after Superstorm Sandy (a $290 million contract). They’ve been in Puerto Rico since soon after Hurricane Maria, with a $375 million FEMA contract to rebuild 800 homes and repair 27,000 more. In a contract last year with the commonwealth of Virginia’s office of emergency management, SLSCO grossed $31 million setting up emergency shelters to house 5,000 evacuees that went almost unused. According to Forbes’ tally, the Sullivans have around $1 billion in revenue from government contracts in recent years, from which they could have reasonably gleaned $50 million in profits.
When it comes to that barrier between the U.S. and Mexico, what SLSCO is not going to build are the solid, monolithic slab prototypes that Trump commissioned as a beauty pageant for his vision of a “big, beautiful” wall. The spending bill required that any wall building be done using existing, proven designs. That means installing a concrete base, as high as 15 feet in some flood-prone areas, topped with 18-foot-long steel beams, called “bollards.” Trump prefers the term “steel slats.”
Trump touring his wall prototypes in 2018. None of these are set to be built, at least until the shutdown is over. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Since passage of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 (with support of senators Obama, Clinton, Schumer and Biden), several hundred miles of this kind of fence have been erected. The project also involves the installation of cameras, sensors and building of a patrol road along the levee wall. Since last summer SLSCO has been building this kind of wall in a replacement project near San Diego stretching from the Pacific Ocean 14 miles inland.
Back in Hidalgo County the Catholic Church is suing, aghast that the wall will block off the tiny La Lomita Chapel, built in 1865 by French missionaries. The wall will also go through Bentsen State Park, a ranch on the river formerly owned by the late Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen. And then there’s the National Butterfly Center, a private nature preserve a few miles upriver from McAllen in Mission, Texas. Executive Director Marianna Wright laments that the fence will bisect their 100 acres, cutting off its southern acreage closest to the river. The center filed suit to stop the project last year, but the case is now “in limbo,” Wright says.
The feds have been negotiating with some landowners on compensation for the taking of their land. However, by using eminent domain “quick take” precedents, they can take land before paying for it, or even agreeing on a price. “They are going to seize this land and they are going to build this wall and there’s nothing we can do to stop them,” says Wright, who has been informed by the feds that where the wall crosses the butterfly refuge, SLSCO will be installing a secure door, accessible via numeric keypad. That way butterfly buffs can venture to the other side of the refuge. CBP shouldn’t expect the butterfly center to check their patrons’ papers. Wright says they’ll give the code out to all of their visitors. And if more people come back through the gate than went through it? Jason Montemayor, public affairs liaison with Customs & Border Protection, says that gates built into the fence will be monitored by cameras and sensors, and if there is any suspicious activity the access codes will be changed. Plenty of Republicans find this distasteful; a new bill sponsored by Reprersentative Justin Amash (R.-Ill.) would push back on federal eminent domain abuse.
And what of the butterflies? Turns out that big monarchs can soar over the wall to fulfill their migration instincts, whereas some species like the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly (euphydryas editha quino) prefer to flit closer to the ground and will not be able to get over the wall, says Wright; “They will evolve separate northern and southern subspecies.” She says the Boobs For Peace group intends to protest topless when the bulldozers arrive. If things get out of hand, there are 4,500 active duty military and national guardsmen deployed along the border through September 2019. Butterflies are low on the priority list. Customs & Border Patrol says that in 2017 its Rio Grande Valley sector apprehended 137,000 illegal aliens, 260,000 pounds of marijuana, and 1,200 pounds of cocaine. “This is sector number 1 for seizures,” says Montemayor, “a focal point of U.S. border control.”
Sullivan had no comment on the fate of the butterflies or the church, referring all questions to the feds. To be sure, SLSCO’s not alone in bidding to build President Trump’s wall. Barnard Construction of Bozeman, Montana, has been building in Arizona, while Texas Sterling Construction, Fisher Sand & Gravel, and Caddell Construction have all built prototypes. Building with the cheaper bollard system (“steel slats”), instead of solid wall, Trump’s entire 1,000 miles would likely be doable for $10 billion—leaving around $500 million in profits for the Sullivans and other opportunistic contractors.
Story 1: President Trump Surviving, Thriving and Winning Against Political Elitist Establishment and Big Lie Media Mob — American People vs. Political Elitist Establishment — Videos —
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Survival at the White House
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
February 21, 2019 11:12 AM
President Donald Trump speaks at the White House in Washington, D.C., February 19, 2019. (Jim Young/REUTERS)
The administrative state took aim at Trump, but it has not been able to destroy him
No one in Washington called Donald J. Trump a “god” (as journalist Evan Thomas in 2009 had suggested of Obama) when he arrived in January 2017. No one felt nerve impulses in his leg when Trump talked, as journalist Chris Matthews once remarked had happened to him after hearing an Obama speech. And no newsman or pundit cared how crisply creased were Trump’s pants, at least in the manner that New York Times columnist David Brooks had once praised Obama’s sartorial preciseness. Instead, Trump was greeted by the Washington media and intellectual establishment as if he were the first beast in the Book of Revelation, who arose “out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”
Besides the Washington press and pundit corps, Donald Trump faced a third and more formidable opponent: the culture of permanent and senior employees of the federal and state governments, and the political appointees in Washington who revolve in and out from business, think tanks, lobbying firms, universities, and the media. Or as the legal scholar of the administrative state Philip Hamburger put it: “Although the United States remains a republic, administrative power creates within it a very different sort of government. The result is a state within the state — an administrative state within the Constitution’s United States.”
Since the U.S. post-war era, the growth of American state and federal government has been enormous. By 2017, there were nearly 3 million civilian federal workers, and another 1.3 million Americans in the uniformed military. Over 22 million local, state, and federal workers had made government the largest employment sector.
The insidious power of the unelected administrative state is easy to understand. After all, it governs the most powerful aspects of modern American life: taxes, surveillance, criminal-justice proceedings, national security, and regulation. The nightmares of any independent trucker or small-business person are being audited by the IRS, having communications surveilled, or being investigated by a government regulator or prosecutor.
The reach of the deep state ultimately is based on two premises. One, improper government-worker behavior is difficult to audit or at least to be held to account, given that it is protected by both union contracts and civil-service law. And, two, a government appointee or bureaucrat has the unlimited resources of the state behind him, while the targeted private citizen in a federal indictment, tax audit, or regulation violation not only does not, but is assumed also not to have the means even to provide an adequate legal defense.
In theory, the deep state should have been a nonpartisan meritocratic cadre of government officials who were custodians of a civil service that had often served Americans well and transcended changes in presidential administrations. The ranks of top government regulators, justices, executive officers, and bureaucrats would take advice, and often be drawn, from hallowed, supposedly apolitical East Coast institutions — the World Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, Ivy League faculties, Wall Street, and blue-chip Washington and New York law firms.
In fact, the deep state grew increasingly political, progressive, and internationalist. Its members and cultural outlook were shaped by the good life on the two coasts and abroad. And every four or eight years, it usually greeted not so much incoming Republican or Democratic presidents as much as fusion-party representatives with reputable résumés, past memberships in similar organizations, and outlooks identical to its own.
Then the disrupter Trump crashed in.
While the deep state was far too vast to be stereotypically monolithic in the Obama and Trump years, it was a general rule that it had admired Obama, who grew it, and it now loathed Trump, who promised to shrink it. Moreover, Trump did not, like most incoming and outgoing politicians, praise in Pavlovian fashion the institutions of Washington. Nothing to Trump was sacred. During and after the campaign, he blasted the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, and Department of Justice as either incompetent or prejudicial.
When Trump cited the Department of Veterans Affairs, it was to side with its victims, not its administrators or venerable history. In Trump’s mind, the problem with federal agencies was not just that they overreached and were weaponized, but that their folds of bureaucracy led to incompetency.
Trump was not so much critical as ignorant of the deep state’s rules and its supposed sterling record of stable governance. Trump proved willing to fire lifelong public servants. He ignored sober and judicious advice from Washington “wise men.” He appointed “crazy” outsiders skeptical of establishment institutions. He purged high government of its progressive activists. And he embraced deep-state heresies and blasphemies such as considering tariffs, questioning NATO, doubting the efficacy of NAFTA, whining about federal judges, and jawboning interest rates. He also left vacant key offices on the theory that one less deep-state voice was one less critic, and one less obstacle to undoing the Obama record.
In the meantime, establishment institutions provided the seasoned opposition to almost everything Trump did. They were likely the “senior officials” to whom an anonymous New York Times op-ed writer referred when he talked about an ongoing “resistance” inside the government to thwart the Trump agenda. In the conservative old days, a Republican president could call upon New York and Washington pundits and insiders — in the present generation, names such as David Brooks, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, or George Will — for kitchen-cabinet advice. But now they were among Trump’s fiercest critics. Only in the matter of judicial appointments could Trump find seasoned and experienced conservatives eager to be appointed or advanced, and respected organizations such as the Federalist Society eager to help him ensure conservative justices.
As an initial result, Obama holdovers lingered everywhere in the executive branch and cabinet offices. They had no immediate desire to leave when obstruction, if caught, only won accolades. Almost immediately, Trump’s private phone calls with foreign leaders such as Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull were leaked to the press and appeared as transcripts in the Washington Post.
In the 1970s, the military officer corps and the top ranks of the CIA, DOJ, and FBI were, in the eyes of the Left, synonymous with conspiracies like those in Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate. Yet in 2016, these same institutions had been recalibrated by progressives as protectors of social justice against interlopers and bomb throwers such as Donald Trump. Whether it was scary or needed to have a secretive, unelected cabal inside the White House subverting presidential agendas depended on who was president.
During the Robert Mueller investigations, progressives usually defended the FISA-court-ordered intercepts of private citizens’ communications, despite the machinations taken to deceive FISA-court justices. Indeed, liberal critics suggested that to question how the multitude of conflicts of interest at the Obama DOJ and FBI had warped their presentations of the Steele dossier to the courts was in itself an obstruction of justice or downright unpatriotic.
News of FBI informants planted into the 2016 Trump campaign raised no eyebrows. Nor did the unmasking and leaking of the names of U.S. citizens by members of the Obama National Security Council. Former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper soon became progressive pundits on cable news. While retaining their security clearances, they blasted Trump variously as a Russian mole, a foreign asset, treasonous, and a veritable traitor.
Both became liberal icons, despite their lucrative merry-go-rounds between Washington businesses and government service, and they sometimes lied under oath to Congress about all that and more.
On March 17, John Brennan, in objection to the firing of deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe (who shortly would be found by the nonpartisan inspector general to have lied on four occasions to federal investigators, and was soon reportedly in legal jeopardy from a grand-jury investigation), tweeted about the current president of the United States: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history . . . America will triumph over you.”
In mid April, Brennan followed up with another attack on Trump: “Your kakistocracy [rule of the “worst people”] is collapsing after its lamentable journey. As the greatest Nation history has known, we have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger & more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those you have so tragically deceived.”
If such hysterics from the former head of the world’s premier spy agency and current MSNBC/NBC pundit seemed a near threat to a sitting president, then Samantha Power, former U.N. ambassador and a past ethics professor on the Harvard faculty, sort of confirmed that it really was: “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”
Trump was warned by friends, enemies, and neutrals that his fight against the deep state was suicidal. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, cheerfully forecast (in a precursor to Samantha Power’s later admonition) what might happen to Trump once he attacked the intelligence services: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Former administrative-state careerists were not shy about warning Trump of what was ahead. The counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd, who had worked in the CIA and the FBI under Robert Mueller, warned CNN host Jake Tapper in August 2017 that “the government is going to kill” President Donald Trump. Kill? And what was the reason the melodramatic Mudd adduced for his astounding prediction? “Because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd then elaborated: “Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. The government is going to kill this guy. The government is going to kill this guy because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd further clarified his assassination metaphor: “What I’m saying is government — people talk about the deep state — when you disrespect government officials who’ve done 30 years, they’re going to say, ‘Really?’”
It was difficult to ascertain to what degree Mudd was serious or exaggerating the depth of deep-state loathing of Trump.
Despite the predictions and expectations of nearly everyone associated with the establishment, in the first two years of his presidency, Trump has not resigned. He has not been impeached. He has not been indicted. He has not died or been declared non compos mentis. Trump did not govern as a liberal, as some of his Never Trump critics predicted. He had not been driven to seclusion by lurid exposés of his womanizing a decade earlier as a Manhattan television celebrity.
An administrative state, swamp, deep state, call it what you wish, was wrong about Trump’s nomination, his election, and his governance. It was right only in its warnings that he could be crude and profane, with a lurid past and an ethical necropolis of skeletons in his closet — a fact long ago factored and baked into his supporters’ votes.
At each stage, the erroneous predictions of the deep state prompted ever greater animus at a target that it could not quite understand, much less derail, and so far has not been able to destroy. By autumn 2018, the repetitive nightly predictions of cable-news pundits that the latest presidential controversy was a “bombshell,” or marked a “turning point,” or offered proof that “the walls were closing in,” or ensured that “impeachment was looming on the horizon,” had amounted to little more than monotonous and scripted groupthink.
Never before in the history of the presidency had a commander in chief earned the antipathy of the vast majority of the media, much of the career establishments of both political parties, the majority of the holders of the nation’s accumulated personal wealth, and the permanent federal bureaucracy.
3
And lived to tell the tale.
–This essay is adapted from Mr. Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump, which Basic Books will publish in March.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. @vdhanson
Story 2: Exposing, Investigating and Prosecuting The Plotters of The Greatest Political Scandal in United States History — Constitutional Crisis — Videos
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The Greatest Constitutional Crisis Since the Civil War
The most immense and dangerous public scandal in American history is finally cracking open like a ripe pomegranate. The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran.
For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.
The authors, accomplices, and dupes of this attempted overthrow of constitutional government are now well along in reciting their misconduct without embarrassment or remorse because—in fired FBI Director James Comey’s formulation—a “higher duty” than the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution compelled them. Or—in fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s words—“the threat” was too great. Nevermind that the nature of “the threat” was that the people might elect someone he and Comey disapproved of as president, and that that person might actually serve his term, as elected.
A Long List of Offenders—and Offenses The extent of the criminal misconduct of the former law enforcement and intelligence chiefs is now notorious, but to make the right point here, it has to be summarized. The fact that the officially preferred candidate lied to federal officials about her emails and acted in outright contempt of Congress and the legal process in the destruction of evidence, was simply ignored by the FBI director, who announced that she would not be prosecuted, though he had no authority to make that determination.
The dossier of salacious gossip and defamatory falsehoods amassed by a retired British spy from the lowest grade of intelligence sources in Russia, commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, was circulated to the media by high public officials and cited in illegal and dishonest applications to authorize surveillance of the campaign of the other presidential candidate. A special counsel was empowered on the false pretext of the necessity to get to the bottom of Trump-Russian collusion in the election, of which there was and remains no evidence, because it did not occur and was a complete partisan fabrication.
The special counsel then packed his staff with militant Clinton partisans, and acted very late and only when his hand was forced by the media to remove two officials who referred in texts to each other to the Bureau’s ability to smear and provoke the impeachment of the winning candidate as “an insurance policy” against his filling the office to which he was elected.
Large sections of the media colluded with the Democratic campaign and produced the doctrine that anything was justifiable, no matter how dishonest, to destroy the incoming president’s reputation and damage him in public opinion polls to legitimize attempts to remove him from office. Large sections of the media deliberately deluged the public with stories they knew to be false about the new president and referred to him in terms of unprecedented vituperation in what purported to be reportage and not comment.
This unorganized but widespread campaign of defamation was taken up by a great number of ordinarily newsworthy celebrities and was accompanied by false, unresearched stories denigrating President Trump’s supporters, such as the false claims about Catholic school students’ treatment of an elderly native American and the false claim that actor Jussie Smollett had been beaten up and reviled by Trump supporters. The former intelligence chiefs of the nation under President Obama repeatedly have accused this president of treason, the most heinous of all crimes, and have asserted with the authority of their former positions that the Russians determined the result of the 2016 presidential election. They knew this to be entirely false.
Distracting Public Attention
The special counsel has failed to find any evidence of the collusion and electoral interference that was the justification for establishing his inquiry, and the Democrats are already expressing disappointment in his failure to produce such evidence when the leading Democratic members of congressional investigative committees still robotically claim to have at least prima facie evidence of such collusion.
The dishonest attempt of much of the opposition and what even left-leaning media-monitoring organizations record as 90 percent of the national media, continued for more than two years to try to condition the country to believe that the president had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” required by the Constitution for impeachment and removal from office.
The special counsel, apart from smearing the president, distracted public attention from or tended to justify the ever more evident misconduct of the president’s enemies. And we now know that Comey, despite his “higher duty,” lied to the president about his not being a target of an FBI investigation, illegally leaked to the New York Times the contents of a self-serving memo he purloined from the government, and lied to Congress by claiming 245 times in one sitting to be ignorant of recent matters that no one of sound mind could have forgotten.
And now we have Andrew McCabe’s proud confirmation that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein not only continued the illegal counterintelligence investigation of President Trump, but actively discussed methods of securing his removal from office by deliberate misuse of a variety of laws, including the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment to deal with mental incompetence, and the Logan Act of 1799, which has never been used successfully and has not been tested in 150 years.
Make Those Responsible Pay at the Polls
This entire monstrous travesty is finally coming apart without even waiting for the horrible disappointment of the special counsel’s inability to adduce a scrap of evidence to justify his replication of Torquemada as an inquisitor and of the Gestapo and KGB at rounding up and accusing unarmed individuals who were not flight risks. The collapse of this grotesque putsch, under the irresistible pressure of a functioning attorney general and Senate committees that are not hamstrung by NeverTrumpers, will cause a revulsion against the Democratic Party that will be seismic and prolonged.
The disgrace of their misconduct is profound and shocking. Richard Nixon, against whom there is no conclusive evidence that he broke any laws (although a number of people in his entourage did) never did anything like this. J. Edgar Hoover in 47 years at the head of the FBI and its predecessor organization, never tried to meddle in a presidential election. Those responsible will pay for this, including at the polls.
Without realizing the proportions of the emergency, America has survived the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. All those who legitimately oppose or dislike the president, including traditional high-brow Republicans who find him distasteful, should join in the condemnation of this largely criminal assault on democracy, and then, if they wish, go out and try to beat him fair and square, the good old-fashioned way, in a free election. But they must abide by the election’s result.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
Photo Credit: Andrew Caballero-Renyolds/AFP/Getty Images
Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
Story 1: Black Russian Gay Empire Actor Busted–Jussie Smollett — Big Lie Media Mob Propagated “Despicable Lies” — Junk Journalism Aided and Abetted Criminal Hoax — Videos
Chicago Police Chief: Jussie Smollett Faked Attack ‘To Promote His Career’ | NBC News
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Jussie Smollett Arrested in Hate Crime Attack | E! News
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Jussie Smollett FULL Interview on alleged attack | ABC News Exclusive
PICTURED: Jussie Smollett leaves jail after posting $100k bail after prosecutor details video evidence against him and reveals he’d previously bought DRUGS from the brothers he paid to attack him after texting ‘might need your help on the low’
The actor’s siblings, Jazz, Jocqui, Jake, and Jojo were pictured arriving at the Cook County Criminal Court before his bond hearing on Thursday afternoon
A judge set Smollett’s bond at $100,000, which he will have to pay a portion of, and told him to give up his passport
Prosecutors shared an extremely detailed timeline of the night of the attack and the days beforehand
Smollett sent himself a threatening, racist and homophobic letter on January 22 to get more money from 20th Century Fox, police said Thursday
When that did not work, he hired brothers Abel and Ola Osundairo to attack him on January 25
On January 27, he took them to the exact location where he wanted it to happen and pointed out surveillance cameras nearby
Smollett was in contact with them an hour before the incident, an hour afterwards and when they were in Nigeria, laying low for two weeks
When they returned on February 13, they were picked up by police and later confessed ‘the entire plot’
Smollett paid $10,000, ten percent of his bond, and agreed to surrender his passport
The 36-year-old will return to court on March 14 to face a felony charge of filing a false police report
PUBLISHED: 06:56 EST, 21 February 2019 | UPDATED: 17:59 EST, 21 February 2019
ussie Smollett has been freed after posting $10,000 bond and agreeing to surrender his passport at a court hearing where he was supported by his family and prosecutors shared more details of his relationship with the two Nigerian brothers he allegedly paid to stage an attack on him in the hope that it would boost his profile.
The actor was hurried out of the Cook County Jail shortly before 5pm on Thursday and said nothing as he fought his way through photographers to get into a waiting car. He was flanked by bodyguards and driven away immediately.
Three of the actor’s five famous siblings, Jazz, Jocqui and Jake, were pictured arriving at the Cook County Criminal Court before his bond hearing wearing sunglasses. They were later joined by their brother Jojo but their other sister Jurnee and mother Janet were not seen.
They left the court before Smollett once the hearing was over, fighting their way through a scrum of photographers to get into a waiting van parked outside without answering any questions.
Smollett’s bail was set at $100,000 – the amount he gets paid for one episode of Empire. He paid 10 percent of it to win back his freedom and will return to court on March 14 to face a felony charge of filing a false police report.
Scroll down for video
Jussie Smollett was ushered out of county jail on Thursday by police officers and body guards after posting $10,000, ten percent of his $100,000 bond, and agreeing to surrender his passport. He clung on to his security guard’s shoulders as he followed him out to a waiting car
Smollett said nothing and held on to his security guard who led him through a crowd of photographers outside the jail
Smollett was sandwiched between security guards as he made his way to the car. He has to return to the court March 14
Smollett was escorted out of the jail by two police officers. He stared at news cameras waiting for him outside and kept his hands in his pockets
Even before he reached the scrum of photographers, Smollett placed his hands on his security guard’s shoulders
After the hearing, prosecutors gave a detailed description of how he allegedly put the hoax together.
Police say he knew Abel Osundairo, one of the brothers, because he bought ‘designer drugs’ from him. In text messages that predate the hoax attack, he asked Abel for ‘Molly’ – the street name for ecstasy – multiple times. The pair are believed to have met when Abel was a stand-in on Empire.
On January 25, he convinced Abel and his brother Ola to ‘simulate’ an attack on him, giving them specific instructions about which words to use and how to rough him up but not hurt him too severely, according to police.
His alleged motive was that he did not get enough attention over a letter he is said to have sent himself a week earlier and he thought that painting himself as
He knew they were going to Nigeria days later and asked them if he could trust them, saying in his initial text message to Abel: ‘Might need your help on the low. You around to meet up and talk face to face?’
Smollett took them to the location where he wanted the attack to happen outside his apartment, according to prosecutors, and even pointed to a surveillance camera he believed would capture it.
The claims came after a blistering press conference during which furious police bosses alleged that he mailed himself a threatening letter then staged a hoax attack because he was unhappy with his $1.8million Empire salary.
The actor wore a stony expression as he was seen for the first time publicly since being labeled ‘shameful’ and ‘despicable’ by the police department
Smollett was wearing black pants and a black puffer jacket. He turned himself into police at 5am on Thursday
A sketch from inside the courtroom shows Smollett appearing before Cook County Judge John Fitzgerald to have his bond set. The judge said that if true, the allegations against him are ‘utterly outrageous’. He was particularly disturbed by the use of a noose in the attack, saying it is an image which ‘conjures up such evil in this country’s history’
Jocqui (in beige coat), Jake (in black, right) and Jazz Smollett (center in fur-trimmed coat) arrive at the Cook County Criminal Court on Thursday to attend their brother Jussie’s bond hearing. There was no sign of the actor’s mother Janet, his other sister Jurnee or his brother Jojo
Jocqui Smollett is show entering the court and waiting for proceedings to begin. The Smollett family issued a statement when the attack was first reported to condemn hate crimes and stand by Jussie. Jocqui has since accused the media of vilifying his brother in social media posts
Jazz, Jocqui and Jake entered the courthouse without speaking on Thursday. Their other two siblings, Jojo and Jurnee, did not join them
Surveillance footage emerged on Wednesday showing Ola and Abel Osundairo buying ski masks the day before the attack. Smollett gave them a $100 bill to pay for the bleach, ski masks, red hat and gloves that they used, according to prosecutors
After his bail hearing, the state’s attorney gave a press conference where she described in painstaking detail how the hoax came together.
On January 25, he texted Abel asking him when he was planning to go to Nigeria, a trip that had been prearranged.
Jussie Smollett is shown in his mugshot on Thursday morning. The Empire actor handed himself in at 5am on charges of filing a false police report. Police now say he concocted the fake attack because he wanted a raise
They were familiar with one another because Abel had once filled in as a character on Empire who was a love interest of Smollett’s character, Jamal Lyon.
Abel replied that he and his brother were leaving on January 29 to which Smollett replied: ‘Might need your help on the low.
‘You around to meet up and talk face to face?’
That afternoon, they met up at the CineSpace studio and Smollett drove Abel home.
During the car ride, he told him about his ‘displeasure’ over 20th Century Fox’s reaction to the letter he allegedly sent himself days earlier.
He said he wanted to stage an attack and suggested that Ola, Abel’s younger brother, get involved.
Once they got to the brothers’ home, they summoned Ola outside and Smollett asked the pair if he could trust them.
Smollett then allegedly laid out what he wanted them to do and gave them a $100 bill to buy ski masks, a red hat, gloves, rope and bleach to use.
‘He stated that he wanted the brothers to catch his attention by calling him an Empire f****t Empire n****r. He detailed that he wanted Abel to attack him but not to hurt him too badly and give him a chance to fight back.
HOW THE ATTACK WAS PUT TOGETHER
January 22: Jussie Smollett receives a letter at the CineSpace studio which threatens his life and has ‘MAGA’ written on it in red pen. He reports it to police
January 25: Smollett sends a text to Abel Osundairo asking him when he is going to Nigeria and if they can meet up face-to-face
Abel goes to the studio where he is working and Smollett drives him home. During the ride, he said he was ‘displeased’ with the reaction to the letter.
Once at their home, Abel’s brother Ola gets in the car and Smollett tells them what he wants them to do. He gives them a $100 bill to buy the goods they will need to fake the attack
January 27: Smollett picks the brothers up then drives them to the spot where he wants them to fake the attack.
He then goes to New York.
January 28: Smollett is in New York City for a reading of the play Take Me Out.
The brothers are filmed buying ski masks, a red hat and gloves
January 29 – Day of attack
The attack was due to take place at 10pm on January 28 but because Smollett’s flight was delayed, it was pushed back.
12.30am: Smollett arrives back in Chicago
12.49am: He calls Abel Osundairo and they talk for three minutes
Abel orders an Uber minutes later.
1.22am: The brothers arrive in the area of the attack
1.45am: Smollett leaves his building to go to Subway
2.04am: The attack takes place in the arranged location
2.10am: Brothers get a taxi from a hotel nearby
2.25am: The brothers arrive back in their neighborhood in a taxi
2.27am: Smollett’s manager calls the police
2.42am: Police arrive at Smollett’s building and he asks them to turn off their body cameras
7.45pm: Smollett calls Abel. The conversation lasts five seconds.
7.47pm: Abel calls back and they speak for 1 minute 34 seconds.
The brothers then board their flight.
January 30, 10:46am: Smollett calls Abel who is by now in Istanbul, Turkey.
They speak for 8 minutes and eight seconds.
‘He also included that he wanted Ola to place a rope around his neck, pour gasoline on him and yell: “This is MAGA country” and “Make America Great Again,”‘ a proffer that was released by the State’s Attorney’s office said.
Police have found surveillance footage of the ride and have phone records which put Smollett in the area of the brothers home at the time.
On January 27, he picked the brothers up from their home and drove them to where he wanted the attack to happen in the late morning.
He warned them not to bring their cell phones with them and showed them a surveillance camera on the corner which he believed would capture the incident.
Smollett drove the brothers home and provided them with a $3500 personal check made payable to Abel, which was backdated to January 23, 2019.
He then flew to New York City to take part in a reading of a play.
The attack was scheduled to take place at 10pm on January 28 but was set back several hours by Smollett’s delayed flight from New York to Chicago on the day of the incident.
His flight landed at 12.30am, January 29.
At 12.49am, he called Abel and their conversation lasted three minutes. During this call, he instructed him to carry out the attack at 2am.
Abel then ordered an Uber to pick the pair up at their home and take them to the crime scene.
They took the Uber part of the way but then got out and hopped in a taxi to take them the remainder of the distance.
At 1.22am, they arrived within three blocks of it. At 1.45am, Smollett left his apartment building to go to a Subway and the brothers made their way towards the intended spot.
Smollett, however, was late. They did not cross paths until 2.04am which is when they carried out the attack. At the exact moment it was occurring, an NBC News employee was getting out of her car nearby. She told police later that she did not hear anything suspicious, despite Smollett alleging that the attackers yelled racial slurs.
The attack only lasted 45 seconds and was ‘just outside the view of the desired nearby camera that Smollett had pointed out to the brothers approximately 15 hours earlier.’
The brothers then ran away on foot, heading southbound towards the Chicago River. They then got in a taxi at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Fifteen minutes later, they got out of the cab a few blocks from their house.
Two minutes later, at 2.27am, Smollett’s manager reported it to police and police arrived at Smollett’s apartment at 2.42am, 12 minutes later.
While being interviewed, he not only described the attack but claimed to have received a phone call on January 26 from someone who said ‘hey you little f****’ and hung up. He said the call happened near a camera and that it captured the attack. It was the same camera he pointed out to the brothers in the hope that it would capture their staged ambush.
Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson abhorred him as a ‘troubled young man’ who has ‘taken advantage of the pain and anger of racism to further his career’ by allegedly lying that he was attacked by racist and homophobic assailants on January 29.
Smollett makes $100,000 per episode on Empire, according to an associate who spoke to DailyMail.com, and there are 18 episodes in the current season which earns him $1.8million.
He also has a record deal with Columbia Records but, according to police, was ‘dissatisfied’ and wanted to boost his profile.
When police learned that Smollett’s motive was to get more money, it ‘p****d everybody off’, Superintendent Johnson said, adding that Smollett’s repeated ‘lies’ were ‘shameful’ and ‘despicable’.
He called for ‘absolute justice’ which he said amounted to Smollett apologizing and offering to pay for the police resources he wasted.
20th Century Fox, which defended the actor on Wednesday, is now ‘considering its options’ in light of his arrest.
President Trump has also called for Smollett to apologize for making it appear as though he was being targeted by one of his supporters.
This is the state’s case against Smollett, as laid out in their bond proffer that was submitted in court on Thursday
Police say they have found phone records which prove Smollett spoke with brothers Abel and Ola Osundairo an hour before the attack, an hour afterwards and while they were in Nigeria, keeping their heads down, while the case gained global attention.
Prosecutor Risa Lanier laid bare the allegations in a press conference after the bond hearing
They also say they have the check that Smollett used to pay them $3,500.
The brothers ‘confessed’ to the ‘entire plot’ once they were in custody on Thursday.
It began on January 22 when Smollett allegedly mailed himself a threatening letter to the Empire studio in Chicago which had ‘MAGA’ written on it and included racist and homophobic slurs.
It read: ‘Smollett Jussie, you will die’ and included a drawing of a stick figure with a gun pointed towards it.
He reported it to the police along with producer Dennis Hammer.
When that did not win him a pay rise from 20th Century Fox, however, he allegedly hired the brothers to attack him at 2am on January 29 in what he then told police was a random, racist and homophobic attack.
The attack did happen but was not caught on camera. According to the brothers, they punched him after meeting at an arranged spot and time then ran away and got into a taxi.
President Trump tweeted on Thursday after the details of his arrest emerged to demand an apology from the actor who said his attackers shouted ‘This is MAGA country!’
Smollett then went home to his friend, 60-year-old Frank Gatson, who was in the apartment and told him that he had been jumped by two masked assailants who shouted: ‘Empire f****t n****r’, poured bleach on him, tied a noose around his neck and screamed: ‘This is MAGA country!’
Police say that the actor gave himself the scratches on his face that were visible in a hospital-bed selfie he took after reporting it.
The same day, the brothers went to the airport and boarded a flight to Nigeria.
While Smollett received an outpouring of sympathy from politicians, celebrities and public figures around the world, they laid low but were allegedly in contact with the star.
As the police investigation heated up, officers honed in on them by tracking taxis that were in the area at around the time of the incident.
In particular, a ride-share the brothers took to the location gave police their details.
They were then picked up when they returned to Chicago on February 13.
Once in custody, they told police that Smollett had hired them and said it was because he wanted a higher salary.
Smollett, a vocal Trump critic, said his attackers shouted ‘This is MAGA country!’ and later suggested he was targeted because he is so critical of the president
He paid them a reported $3,500 to carry out the attack, they said, and promised them $500 more when they returned from their trip.
Smollett is in custody awaiting his first court appearance on felony charges of filing a false police report. He will appear before a judge at 1.30pm.
His lawyers issued a statement on Wednesday to protest his innocence and condemn the police for leaking so many details of the investigation.
During the press conference, Superintendent Johnson revealed Smollett went from being treated as the victim in the case to a suspect when the brothers ‘confessed’ the ‘entire plot’ in the final hour of a 48 hour hold.
That is when they, in their lawyer’s words, ‘manned up’ and revealed that they had been hired to carry out the attack by the actor himself.
Smollett actually furthered the investigation along by going on Good Morning America and confirming that the two people in a grainy surveillance footage still were the men who attacked him.
He was unaware when he made the remark that Chicago PD had identified those men as the Osundairo brothers and that they had them in custody.
‘I come to you today not only as the Superintendent of Chicago Police Department but as a black man who has spent his entire life living in the city of Chicago.
‘I know the racial divide. I know how hard it has been for our city and our nation to come together.
‘Empire actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career.
‘I’m left hanging my head and asking why? Why would anyone, especially an African American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations?
Chicago PD also shared this map of Smollett’s movements on the night of the attack and show where it happened. The cameras in the area where it happened were not facing him, to his dismay
Another map shows where the assailants were dropped off in a ride-share, top right, then walked to the attack and fled to get in another taxi afterwards
Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson tore through Smollett at a press conference on Thursday where he labeled him ‘shameful’ and ‘despicable’
‘How could someone look at the hatred and suffering associated with that symbol and see it as an opportunity to manipulate his own public profile?’ Superintendent Johnson said, adding it was a ‘slap in the face ‘ to ‘everyone’ in Chicago.
‘I love the city of Chicago, warts and all, but this publicity stunt was a scar that Chicago didn’t earn and certainly didn’t deserve.
‘The accusations within this phony attack received national attention for weeks…Celebrities, news commentators and even presidential candidates weighed in on something that was choreographed by an actor,’ he went on.
When we discovered the actual motive, it p****d everybody off
Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson
He added that he was ‘angry and offended’ and said it was a travesty that other crimes do not garner as much attention.
‘I just wish that the families of the victims of gun violence in this city got as much attention. That is who really deserves this amount of attention.’
He was emphatic, later, about the fact that no other investigations suffered as a result of Smollett’s claims, but said: ‘Bogus police reports cause real harm.
‘They do harm to ever legitimate victim who is in need of support by police.’
Johnson finished his remarks by saying: ‘I’ll continue to pray for this troubled young man who resorted to both drastic and illegal tactics to gain attention.
Police say Smollett cut his own cheek to make it look like he had suffered injuries in the attack. He is shown in a hospital bed selfie FaceTiming Lee Daniels, the show’s creator, hours after the attack
‘I’ll also continue to pray for our city asking that we can move forward from this and begin to heal.’
Police examined footage from 55 surveillance cameras, obtained more than 50 search warrants and conducted more than 100 interviews.
If convicted, Smollett may be asked to repay the money that was spent investigating the crime.
Smollett has not made any statements since he was taken into custody.
His lawyers said on Wednesday night that he would fight the charges with an ‘aggressive defense’.
In previous statements, his representatives have angrily hit out at the media and insisted that he is the victim.
Within hours of him being charged, Smollett’s attorneys arranged for him to hand himself in quietly at Chicago’s 1st District afterwards.
He appeared in his mugshot wearing a black puffer jacket, staring blankly at the camera.
After being processed at the station, he was transferred to the Cook County courthouse where he will appear at 1.30pm. He is being held separately from other detainees.
20th Century Fox, which released a statement hours before he was charged to say it was standing by him, is now reportedly suspending the actor.
20th Century Fox said on Thursday that it was now considering its options. It had been standing by the actor
A press conference is scheduled for 9am CT during which detectives will give more details about the arrest. It is not yet known where he was or what time he was taken into custody.
‘Like any other citizen, Mr. Smollett enjoys the presumption of innocence, particularly when there has been an investigation like this one where information, both true and false, has been repeatedly leaked,’ the actor’s attorneys Todd Pugh and Victor Henderson said.
‘Given these circumstances, we intend to conduct a thorough investigation and to mount an aggressive defense.’
The Osundairo brothers testified before the grand jury for about two and a half hours on Wednesday.
Addressing reporters outside afterwards, their attorney Gloria Schmidt said they’d ‘manned up’ by speaking out against Smollett.
The brothers bought their masks, gloves and a hat in this store the day before the attack
The rope they put around Smollett’s neck was bought in this hardware store
They have not been arrested or charged and their lawyer said they had not been offered any form of immunity deal in exchange for testifying against Smollett.
‘There was a point where this story needed to be told, and they manned up and they said: “We’re gonna correct this.”
‘Plea deal, immunity, all of that — they don’t’ care about that.’
She said that Smollett was lying, and that she didn’t know how his conscience could let him sleep at night.
There was a point where this story needed to be told and they manned up and they said, “we’re going to correct this”
Gloria Schmidt, lawyer for two Nigerian brothers
‘I think Jussie’s conscience is not letting him sleep right now and he should unload that conscience and come out and tell the American people what happened,’ she added.
‘I think the biggest thing for the American people to know. Is that this story, has a lot of complications to it.
‘We’re not trying to hide anything from the press. But we wanted to make sure that everything checked out.
‘When I say that the police spent countless man-hours trying to piece this together, I mean that, I absolutely mean that.
‘When I say that my clients spent countless hours getting their story out there to the police so that they could do their work, I mean that, too,’ she said.
The brothers’ testimony came after footage emerged of them buying ski masks, a red hat and gloves in a store the day before the attack.
The brothers said Smollett also sent himself this letter to the Fox studio where Empire is filmed a week before the attack. If he did, he faces another 5-10 years in prison on a federal mail fraud charge
Abel and Ola Osundairo’s lawyers said on Wednesday night that they ‘manned up’ by telling police that Smollett paid them. Ola once appeared on the show as an extra. He is shown with creator Lee Daniels, right
It was taken on January 28 and shows brothers Abel and Ola Osundairo inside what looks like a drug store buying the masks and one hat.
Smollett told police that he was attacked by two masked assailants who punched him, poured bleach on him, tied a noose around his neck and called him ‘Empire n****r f****t’.
No footage has ever emerged of the incident itself.
In the video taken inside the store the day earlier, the brothers look calm as they bring the items to the register.
Smollett follows the brothers’ joint Instagram account where they post videos and photographs of themselves working out
Abel, whose full name is Abimbola, is dressed in a blue plaid jacket. About 30 seconds into the video, he puts his hood up while standing at the register.
His younger brother Ola, who once appeared on Empire as an extra, is in a green jacket.
The brothers were picked up by police at Chicago O’Hare Airport on Wednesday night as they returned from Nigeria.
Police seized a red hat from the brothers’ home along with ski masks when they raided it last week. Smollett said his attackers were wearing masks but there was not a description of a red hat in the initial reports.
Police have since shared their belief that at least one of them was wearing a red hat at the time of the attack.
Smollett’s family, many of whom are also actors, have spoken out repeatedly in support of him since the January 29 attack as have many of his co-stars on Empire.
Among them is Gabby Sidibe, his roommate at one time, who said on Instagram on Wednesday: ‘I know him. I believe him.’
Fox also insisted that he was not being written out of the show, as had been claimed, and called him a ‘consummate professional’ in a statement.
Smollett’s lawyers include Mark Geragos, who has represented Michael Jackson and Colin Kaepernick, in the past.
Last Thursday, the actor wept as he said ‘who the f*** would make that up’ when addressing the skepticism surrounding his version of events during an interview on Good Morning America. He has also called himself the ‘gay Tupac’ and issued statements via attorneys and representatives condemning coverage of the incident
When news of the attack first emerged on January 29 and 30, Smollett was inundated with support across the political spectrum.
Among those who tweeted their condemnation of him were Democratic presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
But as days went by with no suspects on the horizon, details about the case and the police’s investigation into it began to cast doubt on Smollett’s version of events.
One of the earliest sources of speculation was the fact that Smollett waited 42 minutes to call the police then refused to hand over his phone to the police for them to verify his story.
He then handed over redacted files that police described as ‘insufficient’.
Frustrated with the coverage of his case, he hit out at the media for reporting on leaked information coming from within the Chicago police department and insisted he was the victim.
He then went on Good Morning America to protest his innocence.
In an hour-long interview with Robin Roberts, he wept as he recalled the attack and abhorred the reaction to it.
CELEBRITIES REACT TO JUSSIE SMOLLETT’S ARREST
Celebrities have lashed out at Empire actor Jussie Smollett following his arrest after many of them publicly voiced support for him when he first claimed he had been targeted in a racist and homophobic attack.
Actor and comedian Tyler Perry penned a lengthy Facebook post saying he had personally spoken to Smollett who insisted he was telling the truth.
Perry added that the evidence seemed to contradict Smollett’s version and that he was ‘lost for words’.
‘I have personally spoken to Jussie, and he is adamant that he’s telling the truth. Also, everyone that I know who knows him says that he is not the kind of person who would make up such a horrible and awful thing,’ he said.
50 Cent mocked Smollett and his Tupac reference with an Instagram photo of the actor’s face imposed on the cover of the rapper’s album, saying: ‘All Liez On Me’
Snoopdog posted a Scooby Doo cartoon with Smollett’s face edited in
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‘Yet the evidence seems to state otherwise. I’m lost for words. To stoke fears and raise racial tensions is wrong in every situation on ALL SIDES! Yet my prayers are still with him and his family and our Nation.’
Straight Outta Compton actor O’Shea Jackson Jr was scathing in a series of lengthy tweets about the developments.
‘What upsets me about this Jussie situation is that people were genuinely worried about you man. And the things that you said happened could have led to some serious outcomes. People were prepared to fight for you bruh. Things coulda got ugly…… and you made it up.
‘The world has plenty of real monsters. You don’t have to make up any. And what for? Just further dividing people for personal gain? It sucks for the people who actually have to deal with that type of hate.
‘And why did you call yourself the gay Tupac. What does Tupac have to do with anything that happened to you? Did you do this to sell records bro? Did you fake a hate crime, Enrage the Black community. The LBGT community and anti-Trump community just to sell records bruh?
Actor and comedian Tyler Perry penned a lengthy Facebook post saying he had personally spoken to Smollett who insisted he was telling the truth but later added that the evidence seemed to tell a different story
Straight Outta Compton actor O’Shea Jackson Jr was scathing in a series of lengthy tweets about the developments
‘People could’ve gotten hurt. Thinking they’re protesting and standing up for you. This is not a game.’
Smollett had compared himself to Tupac during a performance in West Hollywood earlier this month. He ended his set saying he fought back against his so-called attackers and said he was ‘the gay Tupac’.
50 Cent mocked Smollett and his Tupac reference with an Instagram photo of the actor’s face imposed on the cover of the rapper’s album, saying: ‘All Liez On Me’.
Andy Cohen tweeted that his ‘head is exploding’ following news of Smollett’s arrest before calling the story ‘pathetic’.
Actor Patton Oswalt retweeted a tweet from President Donald Trump, saying: ‘Way to go Jussie. You just handed this racist dips**t a ‘Get Out Of Race-Baiting Free’ card that he’s gonna wave around like a soiled diaper until he’s re-elected.’
Trump had tweeted: ‘.@JussieSmollett – what about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA’.
Choking back tears, he explained when asked why it took so long for him to contact the authorities: ‘There is a level of pride there.
‘We live in a society where as a gay man you are considered somehow to be weak and I am not weak. I am not weak and we as a people are not weak.’
Later, he added how desperate he was for them to find footage of the attack.
‘I want that video found so badly because, for probably four reasons.
‘Number one, I want them to find the people that did it.
‘Number two, I want them to stop being able to say ‘alleged’ attack.
‘Number three, I want them to see that I fought back,’ he continued, welling-up.
‘I want a little gay boy who might watch this to see that I fought the f*** back. They ran off,’ I didn’t,’ he said.
After it emerged that Smollett knew the brothers and may have been involved in the staging of the attack, the celebrities and politicians who rushed to support him walked back their claims.
Nancy Pelosi deleted her tweet about it and Cory Booker said he would now be ‘withholding judgement’ until more information emerged.
Kamala Harris said, when questioned about her tweet that it was a ‘modern day lynching’, that she was ‘very concerned’.
Key moments in reported attack on actor Jussie Smollett
January 29, 2019
Smollet is seen with a cut cheek on Jan. 29
Jussie Smollett tells Chicago police he was physically attacked by two men in downtown Chicago while walking home from getting food from a Subway restaurant at 2am.
The black and openly gay actor tells authorities the men used racial and homophobic slurs, wrapped a rope around his neck and poured an ‘unknown substance’ on him.
Smollett told detectives that the attackers yelled he was in ‘MAGA country,’ an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign slogan, which some critics of Trump have claimed is a racist dog whistle.
January 30
Chicago police say they’ve reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance camera footage, including of Smollett walking downtown, but none of the videos show the attack.
Police obtain and release images of two people they would like to question.
Reports of Smollett’s attack draw outrage and support on social media, including from U.S. Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.
Both Booker and Harris called the incident a ‘modern day lynching’.
Joe Biden said: ‘We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts.’
Police released this image of ‘persons of interest’ taken near the reported attack
January 31
Trump tells reporters at the White House that he saw a story the night before about Smollett and that, ‘It doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned.’
Smollett’s family issues a statement calling the attack a racial and homophobic hate crime.
Smollett’s family says he ‘has told the police everything’ and ‘his story has never changed,’ disputing assertions leveled on social media that he has been less than cooperative and changed his story.
February 1
Smollett issues a statement telling people that he is OK and thanking them for their support.
He says he is working with authorities and has been ‘100 percent factual and consistent on every level.’
February 2
Smollett gives sold-out concert in West Hollywood, California, opening with an emotional speech, saying he had to play the show because he couldn’t let his attackers win.
At the end of the set, he announces that he fought back against his attackers, calling himself ‘the gay Tupac’.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters is in attendance at the concert.
Smollet is seen performing on February 2, where he called himself ‘the gay Tupac’
February 5th: Chicago PD releases incident report which reveals Smollett did not want to call police. There is no mention of the MAGA country remark which he gave in a follow-up interview
Brandon Z. Moore, his manager, gives police a screenshot to prove their call.
February 11th: Smollett finally hands over redacted phone records to prove the phone call but police label them ‘insufficient’.
His neighbors say they don’t believe his version of events.
February 12th: Smollett’s rep releases statement to say he is the victim and that he has been telling the truth
February 14th: Good Morning America airs the full interview with Smollett, in which he blasts speculation that the attack was staged as itself racist and hateful.
Hours later, it emerges that two Nigerian brothers were picked up at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on their return from Nigeria the night before.
Cops identify the two men as the individuals seen in the surveillance images released from the night of January 29 but will not share their names.
Two television stations in Chicago simul report the widespread belief among investigators that Smollett staged the attack as a hate hoax.
Chicago’s police superintendent later said that he had no evidence to prove that the attack was a hoax.
Producers of ‘Empire’ dispute media reports that Smollett’s character was being written off the show.
High-powered criminal defense attorney Michael Monico reveals that he is representing Smollett.
Brothers Olabinjo ‘Ola’ Osundairo, 27, and Abimbola ‘Abel’ Osundairo, 25, were detained by police on February 13
Police logs show the items that cops seized from the Nigerian brothers’ Chicago home
February 15
DailyMail.com confirms they are brothers Olabinjo ‘Ola’ Osundairo, 27, and Abimbola ‘Abel’ Osundairo, 25.
Later, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielimi says the two ‘persons of interest’ are now considered suspects. He says the men are in custody but have not been charged with a crime.
Chicago police release two men without charges after arresting them on suspicion of assaulting Smollett and holding them for nearly 48 hours.
A police spokesman said the two are no longer considered suspects and that investigators have ‘new evidence’ to consider as a result of questioning them.
February 16
A police spokesman said that the investigation had ‘shifted’ after detectives questioned the two brothers about the attack and released them without charges.
Smollett hired Michael Cohen’s high-powered criminal defense attorney, Michael Monico, as the police investigation into the attack he reported last month took a sudden shift amid allegations of a hoax.
Smollett’s lawyers said on Saturday the actor felt ‘victimized by reports he played a role in the assault, and that Smollett would continue cooperating with police.
February 17
A police spokesman said that Chicago police have told Smollett’s attorneys they want to do a follow-up interview with the actor.
A spokesperson for Smollett’s lawyers said she couldn’t comment on whether Smollett had agreed to another interview.
This is the letter Smollett allegedly received at the Fox studio, a week before the January 29 incident. No photographs of it emerged until after the alleged attack. He reported the letter to the police when he received it along with Empire producer Dennis Hammer
February 18
Stars and politicians who spoke out in support of Smollett walk back their condemnation of the attack amid growing suspicion that it is a hate hoax
February 19
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recused herself from the Smollett case
The Osundairo brothers speak with police and prosecutors in Chicago but are halted at the last minute before going to testify before a grand jury.
Smollett hires Colin Kaepernick’s attorney Mark Geragos and his legal team present a ‘hail Mary’ piece of evidence which stops the brothers’ testimony
State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx recuses herself from the case citing her ‘familiarity with potential witnesses’
Leaked information from the brothers’ meetings with prosecutors and police emerges. They reportedly claimed Smollett was involved in sending himself the letter on January 22
February 20
Fox says Smollett is not being written out of Empire contrary to reports and Smollett’s co-stars speak out in support of him.
He is named as a suspect later in the afternoon and the brothers are seen entering grand jury offices at the courthouse.
Smollett is criminally charged with filing a false police report, a Class 4 felony which carries a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment and a $25,000 fine.
Prosecutor: Actor Gave Detailed Instructions For Fake Attack
By DON BABWIN
Associated Press
Kamil Krzaczynski, ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHICAGO (AP) — “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett gave detailed instructions to two brothers who helped him stage a racist, anti-gay attack on himself, including giving them specific slurs to yell, telling them to shout “MAGA country” and pointing out a surveillance camera that he thought would record the beating, a prosecutor said Thursday.
Police said Smollett planned the hoax because he was unhappy with his salary and wanted to promote his career. Before the attack, he also sent a letter that threatened him to the Chicago studio where “Empire” is shot, police said.
Smollett, who is black and gay, turned himself in to face accusations that he filed a false police report last month when he told authorities he was attacked in downtown Chicago by two masked men who hurled racist and anti-gay slurs and looped a rope around his neck, police said.
The actor “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said.
“This publicity stunt was a scar that Chicago didn’t earn and certainly didn’t deserve,” he added.
As part of the instructions, Smollett also told the brothers to put the rope around his neck, Assistant State’s Attorney Risa Lanier told a news conference.
His plans for the surveillance camera were thwarted. Police say it was pointed another way and did not have a view of the beating.
At Smollett’s first court appearance, a judge set bond at $100,000, meaning that he had to post $10,000 to be released. Smollett’s attorneys asked for him to be freed on his own recognizance, but the judge, who is also black, rejected that idea and said he was particularly bothered by the allegations involving the noose.
Smollett, who was released a couple of hours after the hearing, said little during the proceedings, except to state his name. The actor, his attorneys and supporters left without speaking to reporters.
One of the attorneys, Jack Prior, told the judge that Smollett “maintains these are outrageous allegations” and denies they are true.
The FBI has been investigating the threatening letter. Johnson would not say whether Smollett could face additional charges for that.
The companies that make “Empire,” Fox Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Television, issued a statement Thursday saying that they were “evaluating the situation” and “considering our options.”
In less than a month, Smollett went from being the seemingly sympathetic victim of a hate crime to being accused of fabricating the entire thing. The 36-year-old was charged Wednesday with felony disorderly conduct, a charge that could bring up to three years in prison and force the actor to pay for the cost of the investigation into his report of a Jan. 29 beating.
Police treated Smollett as a victim until the two brothers , who had been taken into custody for questioning, admitted to helping him stage the attack, Johnson said.
It was the brothers who also explained Smollett’s motive to detectives. Authorities have a check for $3,500 that Smollett paid the brothers, he said.
Smollett, who plays a gay character on the show that follows a black family as they navigate the ups and downs of the recording industry, said he was attacked as he was walking home from a downtown Subway sandwich shop. He said the men yelled “This is MAGA country” — an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” — before fleeing.
In describing what police believe actually happened, Johnson made it sound as if Smollett was casting and directing a short movie.
“He probably knew he needed somebody with bulk,” he said of Smollett’s decision to hire the two muscular brothers. Police have said at least one of the brothers worked on “Empire,” and Smollett’s attorneys said one of the men is the actor’s personal trainer.
The brothers, who are not considered suspects, wore gloves during the staged attack and “punched him a little bit,” Johnson said. The scratches and bruising Smollett had on his face were “most likely self-inflicted,” Johnson said.
Detectives found the two brothers after reviewing hundreds of hours of video. They released images of two people they said they wanted to question and last week picked up the pair at O’Hare Airport as they returned from Nigeria. Police questioned the men and searched their apartment.
The brothers, who were identified by their attorney as Abimbola “Abel” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, were held for nearly 48 hours on suspicion of assaulting Smollett.
The two appeared before a grand jury on Wednesday to “lock in their testimony,” according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. Smollett was charged by prosecutors, not the grand jury.
Speaking outside the courthouse where the grand jury met, the brothers’ attorney said the two men testified for about two and a half hours.
“There was a point where this story needed to be told, and they manned up and they said we’re going to correct this,” Gloria Schmidt said.
She said her clients did not care about a plea deal or immunity. “You don’t need immunity when you have the truth,” she said.
Smollett has been active in LBGTQ issues, and initial reports of the assault drew outrage and support for him on social media, including from Sen. Kamala Harris of California and TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.
Referring to a published account of the attack, Trump said last month that “it doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned.” On Thursday, he tweeted to Smollett: “What about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA.”
A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime[1]) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership (or perceived membership) in a certain social group or race.
“Hate crime” generally refers to criminal acts which are seen to have been motivated by bias against one or more of the social groups listed above, or by bias against their derivatives. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, mate crime or offensive graffiti or letters (hate mail).[5]
A hate crime law is a law intended to deter bias-motivated violence.[6]Hate crime laws are distinct from laws against hate speech: hate crime laws enhance the penalties associated with conduct which is already criminal under other laws, while hate speech laws criminalize a category of speech. Hate speech laws exist in many countries. In the United States, hate crime laws have been upheld by both the Supreme Court[7] and lower courts, especially in the case of ‘fighting’ words and other violent speech, but they are thought by some people to be in conflict with the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but hate crimes are only regulated through threats of injury or death.[8]
History
The term “hate crime” came into common usage in the United States during the 1980s, but the term is often used retrospectively in order to describe events which occurred prior to that era.[9] From the Roman persecution of Christians to the Nazi slaughter of Jews, hate crimes were committed by both individuals and governments long before the term was commonly used.[4] A major part of defining a crime as a hate crime is that it is directed toward a historically oppressed group.[10][11]
Postcard of the Duluth lynchings of African-American men on June 15, 1920
The verb “to lynch” is attributed to the actions of Charles Lynch, an 18th-century VirginiaQuaker. Lynch, other militia officers, and justices of the peace rounded up Tory sympathizers who were given a summary trial at an informal court; sentences handed down included whipping, property seizure, coerced pledges of allegiance, and conscription into the military. Originally, the term referred to extrajudicial organized but unauthorized punishment of criminals. It later evolved to describe execution outside “ordinary justice.” It is highly associated with white suppression of African Americans in the South, and periods of weak or nonexistent police authority, as in certain frontier areas of the Old West.[4]
Hate crimes can have significant and wide-ranging psychological consequences, not only for their direct victims but for others as well. A 1999 U.S. study of lesbian and gay victims of violent hate crimes documented that they experienced higher levels of psychological distress, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, than lesbian and gay victims of comparable crimes which were not motivated by antigay bias.[14] A manual issued by the Attorney-General of the Province of Ontario in Canada lists the following consequences:[15]
Impact on the individual victim
psychological and affective disturbances; repercussions on the victim’s identity and self-esteem; both reinforced by a specific hate crime’s degree of violence, which is usually stronger than that of a common crime.
Effect on the targeted group
generalized terror in the group to which the victim belongs, inspiring feelings of vulnerability among its other members, who could be the next hate crime victims.
Effect on other vulnerable groups
ominous effects on minority groups or on groups that identify themselves with the targeted group, especially when the referred hate is based on an ideology or a doctrine that preaches simultaneously against several groups.
Effect on the community as a whole
divisions and factionalism arising in response to hate crimes are particularly damaging to multicultural societies.
A review of European and American research indicates that terrorist bombings cause Islamophobia and hate crimes to flare up but, in calmer times, they subside again, although to a relatively high level.[17] Terrorist’s most persuasive message is that of fear and fear, a primary and strong emotion, increases risk estimates and has distortive effects on the perception of ordinary Muslims.[17] Widespread Islamophobic prejudice seems to contribute to anti-Muslim hate crimes, but indirectly: terrorist attacks and intensified Islamophobic prejudice serve as a window of opportunity for extremist groups and networks.[17]
Laws
Hate crime laws generally fall into one of several categories:
laws defining specific bias-motivated acts as distinct crimes;
criminal penalty-enhancement laws;
laws creating a distinct civil cause of action for hate crimes; and
Discriminatory acts constituting harassment or infringement of a person’s dignity on the basis of origin, citizenship, race, religion, or gender (Penal Code Article 313). Courts have cited bias-based motivation in delivering sentences, but there is no explicit penalty enhancement provision in the Criminal Code. The government does not track hate crime statistics, although they are relatively rare.[18]
Armenia
Armenia has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes with ethnic, racial, or religious motives (Criminal Code Article 63).[18]
Austria
Austria has a penalty-enhancement statute for reasons like repeating a crime, being especially cruel, using others’ helpless states, playing a leading role in a crime, or committing a crime with racist, xenophobic or especially reprehensible motivation (Penal Code section 33(5)).[20]
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes motivated by racial, national, or religious hatred (Criminal Code Article 61). Murder and infliction of serious bodily injury motivated by racial, religious, national, or ethnic intolerance are distinct crimes (Article 111).[18]
Belarus
Belarus has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes motivated by racial, national, and religious hatred and discord.[18][21]
Belgium
Belgium‘s Act of 25 February 2003 (“aimed at combating discrimination and modifying the Act of 15 February 1993 which establishes the Centre for Equal Opportunities and the Fight against Racism”) establishes a penalty-enhancement for crimes involving discrimination on the basis of gender, supposed race, color, descent, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, civil status, birth, fortune, age, religious or philosophical beliefs, current or future state of health and handicap or physical features. The Act also “provides for a civil remedy to address discrimination.”[18] The Act, along with the Act of 20 January 2003 (“on strengthening legislation against racism”), requires the Centre to collect and publish statistical data on racism and discriminatory crimes.[18]
Bosnia and Herzegovinavina (enacted 2003) “contains provisions prohibiting discrimination by public officials on grounds, inter alia, of race, skin colour, national or ethnic background, religion and language and prohibiting the restriction by public officials of the language rights of the citizens in their relations with the authorities (Article 145/1 and 145/2).”[22]
The Croatian Penal Code explicitly defines hate crime in article 89 as “any crime committed out of hatred for someone’s race, skin color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other belief, national or social background, asset, birth, education, social condition, age, health condition or other attribute”.[24] On 1 January 2013, a new Penal Code was introduced with the recognition of a hate crime based on “race, skin color, religion, national or ethnic background, sexual orientation or gender identity”.[25]
Czech Republic
The Czech legislation finds its constitutional basis in the principles of equality and non-discrimination contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms. From there, we can trace two basic lines of protection against hate-motivated incidents: one passes through criminal law, the other through civil law. The current Czech criminal legislation has implications both for decisions about guilt (affecting the decision whether to find a defendant guilty or not guilty) and decisions concerning sentencing (affecting the extent of the punishment imposed). It has three levels, to wit:
a circumstance determining whether an act is a crime – hate motivation is included in the basic constituent elements. If hate motivation is not proven, conviction for a hate crime is not possible.
a circumstance determining the imposition of a higher penalty – a hate motivation is included in the qualified constituent elements for some types of crimes (murder, bodily harm). If hate motivation is not proven, the penalty is imposed according to the scale specified for the basic constituent elements of the crime.
general aggravating circumstance – the court is obligated to take the hate motivation into account as a general aggravating circumstance and determines the amount of penalty to impose. Nevertheless, it is not possible to add together a general aggravating circumstance and a circumstance determining the imposition of a higher penalty. (see Annex for details)
Current criminal legislation does not provide for special penalties for acts that target another by reason of his sexual orientation, age or health status. Only the constituent elements of the criminal offense of Incitement to hatred towards a group of persons or to the curtailment of their rights and freedoms, and general aggravating circumstances include attacking a so-called different group of people. Such a group of people can then, of course, be also one defined by sexual orientation, age or health status. A certain disparity has thus been created between, on the one hand, those groups of people who are victimized by reason of their skin color, faith, nationality, ethnicity or political persuasion and enjoy increased protection, and, on the other hand, those groups that are victimized by reason of their sexual orientation, age or health status and are not granted increased protection. This gap in protection against attacks motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation, age or health status cannot be successfully bridged by interpretation. Interpretation by analogy is inadmissible in criminal law, sanctionable motivations being exhaustively enumerated.[26]
Denmark
Although Danish law does not include explicit hate crime provisions, “section 80(1) of the Criminal Code instructs courts to take into account the gravity of the offence and the offender’s motive when meting out penalty, and therefore to attach importance to the racist motive of crimes in determining sentence.”[27] In recent years judges have used this provision to increase sentences on the basis of racist motives.[18][28]
Since 1992, the Danish Civil Security Service (PET) has released statistics on crimes with apparent racist motivation.[18]
Estonia
Under section 151 of the Criminal Code of Estonia of 6 June 2001, which entered into force on 1 September 2002, with amendments and supplements and as amended by the Law of 8 December 2011, “activities which publicly incite to hatred, violence or discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, colour, sex, language, origin, religion, sexual orientation, political opinion, or financial or social status, if this results in danger to the life, health or property of a person, are punishable by a fine of up to 300 fine units or by detention”.[29]
Finland
FinnishCriminal Code 515/2003 (enacted January 31, 2003) makes “committing a crime against a person, because of his national, racial, ethnical or equivalent group” an aggravating circumstance in sentencing.[18][30] In addition, ethnic agitation (Finnish: kiihotus kansanryhmää vastaan) is criminalized and carries a fine or a prison sentence of not more than two years. The prosecution need not prove that an actual danger to an ethnic group is caused but only that malicious message is conveyed. A more aggravated hate crime, warmongering (Finnish: sotaan yllyttäminen), carries a prison sentence of one to ten years. However, in case of warmongering, the prosecution must prove an overt act that evidently increases the risk that Finland is involved in a war or becomes a target for a military operation. The act in question may consist of
illegal violence directed against a foreign country or its citizens,
systematic dissemination of false information on Finnish foreign policy or defense
public influence on the public opinion towards a pro-war viewpoint or
public suggestion that a foreign country or Finland should engage in an aggressive act.[31]
Nepal
France
In 2003, France enacted penalty-enhancement hate crime laws for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s actual or perceived ethnicity, nation, race, religion, or sexual orientation. The penalties for murder were raised from 30 years (for non-hate crimes) to life imprisonment (for hate crimes), and the penalties for violent attacks leading to permanent disability were raised from 10 years (for non-hate crimes) to 15 years (for hate crimes).[18][32]
Georgia
“There is no general provision in Georgian law for racist motivation to be considered an aggravating circumstance in prosecutions of ordinary offenses. Certain crimes involving racist motivation are, however, defined as specific offenses in the Georgian Criminal Code of 1999, including murder motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 109); infliction of serious injuries motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 117); and torture motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 126). ECRI reported no knowledge of cases in which this law has been enforced. There is no systematic monitoring or data collection on discrimination in Georgia.”[18]
Germany
The German Criminal Code does not have hate crime legislation, but instead criminalizes hate speech under a number of different laws, including Volksverhetzung. In the German legal framework motivation is not taken into account while identifying the element of the offence. However, within the sentencing procedure the judge can define certain principles for determining punishment. In section 46 of the German Criminal Code it is stated that “the motives and aims of the perpetrator; the state of mind reflected in the act and the willfulness involved in its commission.”[33] can be taken into consideration when determining the punishment; under this statute, hate and bias have been taken into consideration in sentencing in past cases.[34]
Hate crimes are not specifically tracked by German police, but have been studied separately: a recently published EU “Report on Racism” finds that racially motivated attacks are frequent in Germany, identifying 18,142 incidences for 2006, of which 17,597 were motivated by right wing ideologies, both about a 14% year-by-year increase.[35] Relative to the size of the population, this represents an eightfold higher rate of hate crimes than reported in the US during the same period.[36] Awareness of hate crimes and right-wing extremism in Germany remains low.[37]
Greece
Article Law 927/1979 “Section 1,1 penalises incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence towards individuals or groups because of their racial, national or religious origin, through public written or oral expressions; Section 1,2 prohibits the establishment of, and membership in, organisations which organise propaganda and activities aimed at racial discrimination; Section 2 punishes public expression of offensive ideas; Section 3 penalises the act of refusing, in the exercise of one’s occupation, to sell a commodity or to supply a service on racial grounds.”[38] Public prosecutors may press charges even if the victim does not file a complaint. However, as of 2003, no convictions had been attained under the law.[39]
Hungary
Violent action, cruelty, and coercion by threat made on the basis of the victim’s actual or perceived national, ethnic, religious status or membership in a particular social group are punishable under article 174/B of the Hungarian Criminal Code.[18] This article was added to the Code in 1996.[40]
Iceland
Section 233a of the Icelandic Penal Code states “Anyone who in a ridiculing, slanderous, insulting, threatening or any other manner publicly abuses a person or a group of people on the basis of their nationality, skin colour, race, religion or sexual orientation, shall be fined or jailed for up to two years.”[41]
India
In past few years, a number of hate crimes in India against minority communities especially against Muslims and Christians rise tremendously. To monitor this rising trend of hate crime based on religious identity a web portal is launched name DOTO Database to track these incidents.[42]
From the 3035 reported incidents August 2018, 1892 were Muslims. That is 62% of the total violence and 740 were Christians. That is 24% of the total violence.[43]
Ireland
“The Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989″ makes it an offense to incite hatred against any group of persons on account of their race, color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origins, or membership of the Traveller community, an indigenous minority group.”[18]
Ireland does not systematically collect hate crime data.[18]
Italy
Italian criminal law, at Section 3 of Law No. 205/1993, the so-called Legge Mancino (Mancino law), contains a penalty-enhancement provision for all crimes motivated by racial, sex/gender, ethnic, national, or religious bias.[18]
Kazakhstan
In Kazakhstan, there are constitutional provisions prohibiting propaganda promoting racial or ethnic superiority.[18]
Kyrgyzstan
In Kyrgyzstan, “the Constitution of the State party prohibits any kind of discrimination on grounds of origin, sex, race, nationality, language, faith, political or religious convictions or any other personal or social trait or circumstance, and that the prohibition against racial discrimination is also included in other legislation, such as the Civil, Penal and Labour Codes.”[44]
Article 299 of the Criminal Code defines incitement to national, racist, or religious hatred as a specific offense. This article has been used in political trials of suspected members of the banned organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir.[18][45]
Russia
Article 29 of the penal code of the Russian Federation bans incitement to riot for the sake of stirring societal, racial, ethnic, and religious hatred as well as the promotion of the superiority of the same. Article 282 further includes protections against incitement of hatred (including gender) via various means of communication, instilling criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.[46]
Spain
Article 22(4) of the Spanish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s ideology, beliefs, religion, ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, illness or disability.[18]
Sweden
Article 29 of the Swedish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s race, color, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or “other similar circumstance” of the victim.[18][47]
Article 10 : “In Ukraine, free development, use and protection of Russian and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine are guaranteed”.
Article 11 : “The state shall promote the development of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of all indigenous peoples and national minorities of Ukraine”.
Article 24 :”There can be no privileges or restrictions on the grounds of race, color of the skin, political, religious or other beliefs, sex, ethnic or social origin, property status, place of residence, language or other grounds”.[48]
II. “CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE” :
in Ukraine, all criminal punishments for crimes committed under the law are required to be registered in only one law, it is the only one: “CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE”
The crimes committed for Hate crime reinforce the punishment in many articles of the criminal law. There are also separate articles on punishment for Hate crime.
“CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE” :
Article 161 : “Violations of equality of citizens depending on their race, nationality, religious beliefs, disability and other grounds
1. Intentional acts aimed at incitement to national, racial or religious hatred and violence, to humiliate national honor and dignity, or to repulse citizens’ feelings due to their religious beliefs, as well as direct or indirect restriction of rights or the establishment of direct or indirect privileges citizens on the grounds of race, color, political, religious or other beliefs, sex, disability, ethnic or social origin, property status, place of residence, language or other grounds”(Maximum criminal sentence of up to 8 years in prison)
Article 300 : “Importation, manufacture or distribution of works promoting a cult of violence and cruelty, racial, national or religious intolerance and discrimination” (Maximum criminal sentence of up to 5 years in prison)[49]
United Kingdom
For England, Wales, and Scotland, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 makes hateful behaviour towards a victim based on the victim’s membership (or presumed membership) in a racial group or a religious group an aggravation in sentencing for specified crimes.[50] The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (c. 24) amended sections of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.[51] For Northern Ireland, Public Order (Northern Ireland) Order 1987 (S.I. 1987/463 (N.I. 7)) serves the same purpose.[52] A “racial group” is a group of persons defined by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins. A “religious group” is a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief. The specified crimes are assault, criminal damage, offences under the Public Order Act 1986, and offences under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.
Sections 145 and 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 require a court to consider whether a crime which is not specified by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 is racially or religiously aggravated, and to consider whether the following circumstances were pertinent to the crime:
(a) that, at the time of committing the offence, or immediately before or after doing so, the offender demonstrated towards the victim of the offence hostility based on—
(i) the sexual orientation (or presumed sexual orientation) of the victim, or
(ii) a disability (or presumed disability) of the victim, or
(b) that the offence is motivated (wholly or partly)—
(i) by hostility towards persons who are of a particular sexual orientation, or
(ii) by hostility towards persons who have a disability or a particular disability.[53][54]
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) reported in 2013 that there are an average of 278,000 hate crimes a year with 40% being reported according to a victims survey, although police records only identified around 43,000 hate crimes a year.[55] It was widely reported that police recorded a 57% increase in hate crime complaints in the four days following the UK’s European Union membership referendum, however a press release from the National Police Chief’s Council stated that “this should not be read as a national increase in hate crime of 57 per cent”.[56][57]
On December 4, 2013 Essex Police launched the ‘Stop the Hate’ initiative as part of a concerted effort to find new ways to tackle hate crime in Essex. The launch was marked by a conference in Chelmsford, hosted by Chief Constable Stephen Kavanagh, which brought together 220 delegates from a range of partner organisations involved in the field. The theme of the conference was ‘Report it to Sort it’ and the emphasis was on encouraging people to tell police if they have been a victim of hate crime, whether it be based on race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or disability.[59]
Crown Prosecution Service guidance issued on 21 August 2017 stated that online hate crimes should be treated as seriously as offences in person.[60]
Perhaps the most high-profile hate crime in modern Britain occurred in Eltham, London, on 24 April 1993, when 18-year-old black student Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in an attack by a gang of white youths. Two white teenagers were later charged with the murder, and at least three other suspects were mentioned in the national media, but the charges against them were dropped within three months after the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. However, a change in the law a decade later allowed a suspect to be charged with a crime twice if new evidence emerged after the original charges were dropped or a “not guilty” verdict was delivered in court. Gary Dobson, who had been charged with the murder in the initial 1993 investigation, was found guilty of Stephen Lawrence’s murder in January 2012 and sentenced to life imprisonment, as was David Norris, who had not been charged in 1993. A third suspect, Luke Knight, had been charged in 1993 but was not charged when the case came to court nearly 20 years later.
Scotland
Under ScottishCommon law[citation needed] the courts can take any aggravating factor into account when sentencing someone found guilty of an offence. There is legislation dealing with the offences of incitement of racial hatred, racially aggravated harassment, prejudice relating to religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.[61] A Scottish Executive working group examined the issue of hate crime and ways of combating crime motivated by social prejudice, reporting in 2004.[62] Its main recommendations were not implemented, but in their manifestos for the Scottish Parliament election, 2007 several political parties included commitments to legislate in this area, including the Scottish National Party who now form the Scottish Government. The Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) (Scotland) Bill was introduced on 19 May 2008 by Patrick Harvie MSP,[63] having been prepared with support from the Scottish Government, and was passed unanimously by the parliament on 3 June 2009.[64]
“In Canada the legal definition of hate crime can be found in sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code”. [65]
In 1996 the federal government amended a section of the Criminal Code that pertains to sentencing. Specifically, section 718.2. The section states (with regard to the hate crime):
A court that imposes a sentence shall also take into consideration the following principles:
(a) a sentence should be increased or reduced to account for any relevant aggravating or mitigating circumstances relating to the offence or the offender, and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing,
(i) evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or any other similar factor, . . . shall be deemed to be aggravating circumstances.”[65]
A vast majority (84 per cent) of hate crime perpetrators were “male, with an average age of just under 30. Less than 10 of those accused had criminal records, and less than 5 per cent had previous hate crime involvement (ibid O’Grady 2010 page 163.).” [66] “Only 4 percent of hate crimes were linked to an organized or extremist group (Silver et al., 2004).” [67]
As of 2004, Jewish people were the largest ethnic group targeted by hate crimes, followed by blacks, Muslims, South Asians, and homosexuals (Silver et al., 2004).[67]
During the Nazi regime, anti-Semitism was a cause of hate related violence in Canada. For example, on August 16, 1933 there was a baseball game in Toronto and one team was made up of mostly Jewish players. At the end of the game, a group of Nazi sympathizers unfolded a Swastika flag and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’. That event erupted into a brawl that had Jews and Italians against Anglo Canadians and the brawl went on for hours.[65]
The first time someone was charged with hate speech over the internet occurred on 27 March 1996. “A Winnipeg teenager was arrested by the police for sending an email to a local political activist that contained the message ‘Death to homosexuals’ it’s prescribed in the Bible! Better watch out next Gay Pride Week.’ (Nairne, 1996).”[67]
Hate crime laws have a long history in the United States. The first hate crime[68] laws were passed after the American Civil War, beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1871, to combat the growing number of racially motivated crimes being committed by the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan. The modern era of hate-crime legislation began in 1968 with the passage of federal statute, 18 U.S. 245, part of the Civil Rights Act which made it illegal to “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone who is engaged in six specified protected activities, by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin.” However, “The prosecution of such crimes must be certified by the U.S. attorney general.”.[69]
The first state hate-crime statute, California’s Section 190.2, was passed in 1978 and provided for penalty enhancement in cases where murder was motivated by prejudice against four “protected status” categories: race, religion, color, and national origin. Washington included ancestry in a statute passed in 1981. Alaska included creed and sex in 1982 and later disability, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. In the 1990s some state laws began to include age, marital status, membership in the armed forces, and membership in civil rights organizations.[70]
Defined in the 1999 National Crime Victim Survey, “A hate crime is a criminal offense. In the United States, federal prosecution is possible for hate crimes committed on the basis of a person’s race, religion, or nation origin when engaging in a federally protected activity.” In 2009, the Matthew Shepard Act added actual or perceived gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability to the federal definition, and dropped the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity.
Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have statutes criminalizing various types of hate crimes. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have statutes creating a civil cause of action in addition to the criminal penalty for similar acts. Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have statutes requiring the state to collect hate crime statistics.[72]
According to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics report for 2006, hate crimes increased nearly 8% nationwide, with a total of 7,722 incidents and 9,080 offenses reported by participating law enforcement agencies. Of the 5,449 crimes against persons, 46% were classified as intimidation and 32% as simple assaults. 81% of the 3,593 crimes against property were acts of vandalism or destruction.[73]
However, according to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics for 2007, the number of hate crimes decreased to 7,624 incidents reported by participating law enforcement agencies.[74] These incidents included 9 murders and 2 rapes(out of the almost 17,000 murders and 90,000 forcible rapes committed in the U.S. in 2007).[75]
Attorney General Eric Holder said in June 2009 that recent killings show the need for a tougher U.S. hate crimes law to stop “violence masquerading as political activism”.[76]
The 2011 hate crime statistics show 46.9% were motivated by race and 20.8% by sexual orientation.[77]
In 2015, the Hate Crimes Statistics report identified 5,818 single-bias incidents involving 6,837 offenses, 7,121 victims, and 5,475 known offenders[78]
Prosecutions of hate crimes have been difficult in the United States. Recently though, state governments have attempted to re-investigate and re-try past hate crimes. One prominent example is Mississippi’s decision in 1990 to retry Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, a prominent figure in the NAACP.[79] This would be the first time in U.S. history that an unresolved civil rights case would be re-opened. Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was tried for the murder on two previous occasions and it resulted with a hung jury. However, he was finally sentenced to life in prison in 1994. Presented with testimony of two FBI informants who had infiltrated the KKK, the missing transcript from the first trial, the relocation of missing witnesses, numerous witness admissions of Beckwith bragging about his role in the murder and Beckwith’s own racist writings, a mixed race jury found Beckwith guilty of murder. Even though De La Beckwith was 73 years of age when he was sentenced to life in prison, the 1994 conviction has been interpreted as a way for Mississippi to shed its racist past.[80]
According to a November 2016 report issued by the FBI hate crime statistics are on the rise in the United States.[81] The number of hate crimes increased from 5,850 in 2015, to 6,121 hate crime incidents in 2016, an increase of 4.6 percent.[82][83][84]
Victims in the United States
One of the largest waves of hate crimes took place during the civil rights movement. During the 1950s and 1960s, both violence and threats of violence were common against African Americans, and hundreds of lives were lost due to such acts. Members of this social class faced violence from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan as well as violence from individuals who were committed to maintaining segregation.[85] At the time, civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and their supporters fought hard for the right of African Americans to vote as well as for equality in their everyday lives. African Americans have been the target of hate crimes since the Civil War,[86] and the humiliation of this social class was also desired by many Anti-black individuals. Other frequently reported bias motivations were bias against a religion, bias against a particular sexual orientation, and bias against a particular ethnicity/national origin.[87] At times, these bias motivations overlapped, because violence can be both anti-gay and anti-black, for example.[88]
Analysts have compared groups in terms of the per capita rate of hate crimes committed against them, to allow for differing populations. Overall, the total number of hate crimes committed since the first hate crime bill was passed in 1997 is 86,582.[89]David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act
Hate Crimes in the US (2008–2012) by Population Group
Among the groups currently mentioned in the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the largest number of hate crimes are committed against African Americans.[100] During the Civil Rights Movement, some of the most notorious hate crimes included the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the 1964 murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the 1955 murder of Emmett Till,[86] as well as the burning of crosses, churches, Jewish synagogues and other places of worship of minority religions. Such acts began to take place more frequently after the racial integration of many schools and public facilities.[100]
High-profile murders targeting victims based on their sexual orientation have prompted the passage of hate crimes legislation, notably the cases of Sean W. Kennedy and Matthew Shepard. Kennedy’s murder was mentioned by Senator Gordon Smith in a speech on the floor of the US Senate while he advocated such legislation. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed into law in 2009. It included sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, the disabled, and military personnel and their family members.[101][citation needed] This is the first all-inclusive bill ever passed in the United States, taking 45 years to complete.[clarification needed]
In May 2018, ProPublica reviewed police reports for 58 cases of purported anti-heterosexual hate crimes. ProPublica found that about half of the cases were anti-LGBT hate crimes that had been miscategorized, and that the rest were motivated by hate towards Jews, blacks or women or that there was no element of a hate crime at all. ProPublica found not a single case of a hate crime spurred by anti-heterosexual bias.[105]
South America
Brazil
In Brazil, hate crime laws focus on racism, racial injury, and other special bias-motivated crimes such as, for example, murder by death squads[106] and genocide on the grounds of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion.[107] Murder by death squads and genocide are legally classified as “hideous crimes” (crimes hediondos in Portuguese).[108]
The crimes of racism and racial injury, although similar, are enforced slightly differently.[109] Article 140, 3rd paragraph, of the Penal Code establishes a harsher penalty, from a minimum of 1 year to a maximum of 3 years, for injuries motivated by “elements referring to race, color, ethnicity, religion, origin, or the condition of being an aged or disabled person“.[110] On the other side, Law 7716/1989 covers “crimes resulting from discrimination or prejudice on the grounds of race, color, ethnicity, religion, or national origin”.[111]
In addition, the Brazilian Constitution defines as a “fundamental goal of the Republic” (Article 3rd, clause IV) “to promote the well-being of all, with no prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age, and any other forms of discrimination”.[112]
Chile
In 2012, the Anti-discrimination law amended the Criminal Code adding a new aggravating circumstance of criminal responsibility, as follows: “Committing or participating in a crime motivated by ideology, political opinion, religion or beliefs of the victim; nation, race, ethnic or social group; sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, affiliation, personal appearance or suffering from illness or disability.”[113][114]
Middle East
Israel is the only country in the middle east who has hate crime laws. Hate crime, as passed by the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), is defined as crime for reason of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation
Justifications for harsher punishments for hate crimes focus on the notion that hate crimes cause greater individual and societal harm.[citation needed] It is said[115] that, when the core of a person’s identity is attacked, the degradation and dehumanization is especially severe, and additional emotional and physiological problems are likely to result. Society then, in turn, can suffer from the disempowerment of a group of people.[citation needed] Furthermore, it is asserted that the chances for retaliatory crimes are greater when a hate crime has been committed. The riots in Los Angeles, California that followed the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist, by a group of White police officers are cited as support for this argument.[12] The beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny by black rioters during the same riot is also an example that supports this argument.
In Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that penalty-enhancement hate crime statutes do not conflict with free speech rights, because they do not punish an individual for exercising freedom of expression; rather, they allow courts to consider motive when sentencing a criminal for conduct which is not protected by the First Amendment.[116] Whilst in the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire the court defined “fighting words” as “those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”[117]
Opposition
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance amounted to viewpoint-based discrimination in conflict with rights of free speech, because it selectively criminalized bias-motivated speech or symbolic speech for disfavored topics while permitting such speech for other topics.[118] Many critics further assert that it conflicts with an even more fundamental right: free thought. The claim is that hate-crime legislation effectively makes certain ideas or beliefs, including religious ones, illegal, in other words, thought crimes.[119][120] Heidi Hurd argues that hate crimes criminalize certain dispositions yet do not show why hate is a morally worse disposition for a crime than one motivated by jealousy, greed, sadism or vengeance or why hatred and bias are uniquely responsive to criminal sanction compared to other motivations. Hurd argues that whether or not a disposition is worse than another is case sensitive and thus it is difficult to argue that some motivations are categorically worse than others.[121]
In their book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter criticize hate crime legislation for exacerbating conflicts between groups. They assert that by defining crimes as being committed by one group against another, rather than as being committed by individuals against their society, the labeling of crimes as “hate crimes” causes groups to feel persecuted by one another, and that this impression of persecution can incite a backlash and thus lead to an actual increase in crime.[122] Jacobs and Potter also argued that hate crime legislation can end up only covering the victimization of some groups rather than all, which is a form of discrimination itself and that attempts to remedy this by making all identifiable groups covered by hate crime protection thus make hate crimes co-terminus with generic criminal law. The authors also suggest that arguments which attempt to portray hate crimes as worse than normal crimes because they spread fear in a community are unsatisfactory, as normal criminal acts can also spread fear yet only hate crimes are singled out.[122] Indeed it has been argued that victims have varied reactions to hate crimes, so it is not necessarily true that hate crimes are regarded as more harmful than other crimes.[123][124] Heidi Hurd argues that hate crime represents an effort by the state to encourage a certain moral character in its citizen and thus represents the view that the instillation of virtue and the elimination of vice are legitimate state goals, which she argues is a contradiction of the principles of liberalism. Hurd also argues that increasing punishment for an offence because the perpetrator was motivated by hate compared to some other motivation means that the justice systems is treating the same crime differently, even though treating like cases alike is a cornerstone of criminal justice[125]
Some have argued hate crime laws bring the law into disrepute and further divide society, as groups apply to have their critics silenced.[126] American forensic psychologist Karen Franklin said that the term hate crime is somewhat misleading since it assumes there is a hateful motivation which is not present in many occasions;[127] in her view, laws to punish people who commit hate crimes may not be the best remedy for preventing them because the threat of future punishment does not usually deter such criminal acts.[128] Some on the political left have been critical of hate crime laws for expanding the criminal justice system and dealing with violence against minority groups through punitive measures.[6]
Story 2: Open Border Democrats and Republicans Are Supporting Drug Cartels By Aiding and Abetting Criminal Illegal Alien and Illegal Drug Smuggling — Videos
Six illegal immigrants linked to notorious Mexican drug cartel are arrested for trafficking meth and cocaine after police sting
Cops arrested Oscar, Regulo, Raul, and Rigoberto Rangel-Gutierrez in a raid
They also busted Francisco Garcia-Martinez and Rodolfo Martinez in the bust
The gang transported huge amounts of cocaine and meth to Charlotte, NC
PUBLISHED: 05:53 EST, 18 February 2019 | UPDATED: 06:16 EST, 18 February 2019
Six illegal immigrants linked to one of Mexico‘s most dangerous cartels have been arrested in North Carolina during a drug trafficking operation – it has been revealed.
Police documents revealed by WSOC show that the operation involved the transportation of large amounts of cocaine and methamphetamine to Charlotte, North Carolina.
The suspects were identified as Oscar Rangel-Gutierrez, Regulo Rangel-Gutierrez, Francisco Garcia-Martinez, Rodolfo Martinez, Raul Rangel-Gutierrez and Rigoberto Rangel-Gutierrez.
Oscar Rangel-Gutierrez (left), Rodolfo Martinez (center), and Regulo Rangel Gutierrez (right)
Federal officials said more than 1,800 grams of meth were delivered from Oscar Rangel-Guiterrez’s home in Statesville in August and October last year
‘Members of the investigative team believe – based on wire intercepts, surveillance and other facts discovered from the investigation – that Oscar and Regulo transport illicit proceeds, derived from the sales of narcotics, when they travel from Myrtle Beach to Charlotte,’ the court documents read.
Court documents indicated that Rangel-Guiterrez and the five other suspects were in the country illegally..
The person who lived there, Oscar Rangel-Guiterrez, is an alleged high-level cartel member.
Francisco Garcia-Martinez (left), Rigoberto Rangel-Gutierrez (center) and Raul Rangel-Gutierrez (right)
Court documents indicated that Rangel-Guiterrez and the five other suspects were in the country illegally
Misty Joyner, who reportedly lived near the home in Charlotte where investigators said Rangel-Gutierrez stored drug money, was in disbelief about her neighbors.
‘Just devastating,’ Joyner told WSOC. ‘They were good people.’
The group were said to have been affiliated with the Jalisco New Generation cartel which has been engaged in a blood feud with ‘El Chapo’s’ infamous Sinaola cartel.
Sinaloa’s leader, Guzman, was convicted last Tuesday in New York, likely meaning he will spend decades behind bars in the United States.
The group were said to have links to El Chapo who was convicted by a New York court last week
Story 3: Under Communist China’s Social Credit System Jussie Smollett Would Be Labeled As Untrustworthy And Unable To Travel Because of A Low Social Credit Score Due To Criminal Behavior and Blacklist Banning — Vast Surveillance Facial Recognition System — Safe, Secure, State Socialism in The Police Surveillance State of Communist China — Videos
China: facial recognition and state control | The Economist
Trust and consequences: China’s evolving ‘social credit system’
Everyone In China Is Getting A ‘Social Credit Score’
China bans millions with low ‘social credit’ from rail, air travel | Al Jazeera English
China Behavior Rating System V/S Sweden Microchip implants | Must watch technology
China rolls out social credit system to spy on population
Inside China’s High-Tech Dystopia
China’s social credit system shows its teeth, banning millions from taking flights, trains
Annual report shows the businesses and individuals added to trustworthiness blacklist as use of the government system accelerates
System aims to pressure citizens to avoid bad behaviour, although human rights advocates argue it does not take into account individual circumstances
About 17.46 million “discredited” people were restricted from buying plane tickets and 5.47 million were restricted from purchasing high-speed train tickets, the reportsaid. Photo: Handout
Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses have been labelled as untrustworthy on an official blacklist banning them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train, as the use of the government’s social credit system accelerates.
The annual blacklist is part of a broader effort to boost “trustworthiness” in Chinese society and is an extension of China’s social credit system, which is expected to give each of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score.
The social credit system assigns both positive and negative scores for individual or corporate behaviour in an attempt to pressure citizens into behaving.
Human rights advocates, though, worry that the arbitrary system does not take into account individual circumstances and so often unfairly labels individuals and firms as untrustworthy.
Over 3.59 million Chinese enterprises were added to the official creditworthiness blacklist last year, banning them from a series of activities, including bidding on projects, accessing security markets, taking part in land auctions and issuing corporate bonds, according to the 2018 annual report released by the National Public Credit Information Centre.
The centre is backed by the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, to run the credit rating system.
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According to the report, the authorities collected over 14.21 million pieces of information on the “untrustworthy conduct” of individuals and businesses, including charges of swindling customers, failing to repay loans, illegal fund collection, false and misleading advertising, as well as uncivilised behaviour such as taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.
About 17.46 million “discredited” people were restricted from buying plane tickets and 5.47 million were restricted from purchasing high-speed train tickets, the report said.
China to bar people with bad ‘social credit’ from trains, planes
Besides restrictions on buying tickets, local authorities also used novel methods to put pressure on untrustworthy subjects, including preventing people from buying premium insurance, wealth management products or real estate, as well as shaming them by exposing their information in public.
A total of 3.51 million untrustworthy individuals and entities repaid their debts or paid off taxes and fines last year due to pressure from the social credit system, the report said.
The report highlighted untrustworthy problems at peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms and recent high-profile scandals in medical care that have caused public anger.
A total of 3.51 million untrustworthy individuals and entities repaid their debts or paid off taxes and fines last year due to pressure from the social credit system, the report said. Photo: Xinhua
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A total of 1,282 P2P operators, more than half located in Zhejiang, Guangdong and Shanghai, were placed on the creditworthiness blacklist because they could not repay investors or were involved in illegal fundraising.
were added to the creditworthiness blacklist because of their involvement in major health sector scandals.
From drones to social credits, 10 ways China watches its citizens
Quanjian was accused of making false marketing claims about the benefits of a product that a four-year-old cancer patient drank, while Changsheng, the major Chinese manufacturer of rabies vaccines, was fined US$1.3 billion in October after it was found to have fabricated records.
Lawyers worry that the accelerated use of the creditworthiness system will violate an individuals right to privacy.
“Many people cannot pay their debt because they are too poor but will be subject to this kind of surveillance and this kind of public shaming,” a lawyer said. “It violates the rights of human beings.”
Story 1: Putin Threatens United States With New Hypersonic Missiles — A New Nuclear Missile Arms Race and Cold War With China and Russia — Restoring Nuclear Parity — Videos —
How Will Trump Respond to Putin’s Threats?
Putin Warns U.S. Not To Discount Russia’s Weapons Capabilities
Trump Admin To Withdraw From Cold War-Era Nuclear Weapons Treaty With Russia | NBC Nightly News
US and Russia Potentially Re-Enter Nuclear Arms Race
US suspends nuclear missile treaty with Russia, may withdraw in six months
INF Treaty walks U.S., Russia back from a Cold War nuclear showdown
Withdrawal From INF Nuclear Treaty Brings us “Closer to Doomsday” Than any Time Since 1950’s
Russia, China on Defense and No Iranian Nuclear Bomb – US Intelligence Report
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US military build-up on Russia border – days after Putin’s ‘mock invasion’ drills REVEALED
Peter Brookes on INF Treaty Withdrawal: “The President’s Policy Is Right”
Russia reacts to U.S. withdrawal from nuclear arms treaty
Putin Gets Serious: If Europe Accepts US Missiles, Russia Will Rearm and Retaliate!
Vladimir Putin’s missile threat is serious, but nothing we couldn’t handle: Today’s talker
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GLIDE BREAKER – THIS DARPA PROJECT WILL KILL RUSSIAN & CHINESE HYPERSONIC WEAPONS
Unbeatable! Here’s How America’s Quietly Winning the Hypersonic-Missile race over Russia and China
Revealed: How America’s Quietly Winning the Hypersonic-Missile race over Russia, China and N-korea
Putin claims new missile will make defense systems useless
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Putin’s new nuclear threat to Trump: Russian leader promises more missiles targeting the US if America deploys warheads to Europe after tearing up arms treaty
Vladimir Putin hit out at America over its withdrawal from key arms control pact
Warned Russia will target weapons at US should it deploy new missiles in Europe
The 66-year-old also said Russia will deploy a new hypersonic missile for its navy
Putin made remarks during his annual state of the nation address this morning
PUBLISHED: 05:40 EST, 20 February 2019 | UPDATED: 11:25 EST, 20 February 2019
Vladimir Putin has promised to target more missiles at the US if America deploys new weapons to Europe in the wake of Washington’s withdrawal from a key arms pact.
In his toughest remarks yet on a potential new arms race, Putin said Russia would deploy more missiles if the Trump administration put short or intermediate range missiles in Europe – after the President’s decision this month to quit a treaty banning nuclear missiles with a range of less than 3,415 miles.
Putin said U.S. policy-makers, some of whom he said were obsessed with U.S. exceptionalism, should calculate the risks before taking any steps and said any new Russian missiles would target US ‘decision-making centres’.
He said: ‘It’s their right to think how they want. But can they count? I’m sure they can. Let them count the speed and the range of the weapons systems we are developing,’ Putin told Russia’s political elite to strong applause this morning.
‘Russia will be forced to create and deploy types of weapons which can be used not only in respect of those territories from which the direct threat to us originates, but also in respect of those territories where the centres of decision-making are located,’ he said.
Putin also boasted about Russia’s expanding array of new weapons and said it will deploy a new hypersonic missile for its navy as part of efforts to counter what he described as hostile U.S. moves.
Vladimir Putin (pictured this morning) says Russia will target weapons at the US should it deploy new intermediate-range missiles in Europe following America’s withdrawal from a key arms control pact
The US repeatedly accused Russia of violating the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by developing banned weapons and earlier this month Donald Trump (pictured) said Washington was starting a process to withdraw from the deal
America’s withdrawal from the Cold War-era Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has sparked fears of a new arms race (file picture)
Vladimir Putin criticises America for ‘neglecting’ the INF treaty
How the INF played a key role in ending the Cold War
The 1987 International Nuclear Forces Treaty signed the U.S. and the then-USSR up to a ban on mobile ground-based nuclear missiles with ranges from 310 to 3,415 miles.
The immediate effect was to eliminate the U.S.’s Pershing II missiles – which had a range of 1,100 miles – and the Soviet Union’s SS-20s, which had a range of 2,700 miles.
Both were deployed in Europe and their removal under the pact – signed by then US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev – was a key part in ending the Cold War.
However, no restrictions were placed on other major military actors such as China.
During the 2014 crisis in Ukraine, the US accused Russia of violating the pact by deploying banned tactical nuclear weapons designed to intimidate Europe and Western-aligned former Soviet states.
US officials say the Kremlin is deploying a prohibited ‘SSC-8’ land-based cruise missile.
Alleging Russian violations, Washington said earlier this month it was suspending its obligations under the pact and starting the process of quitting it, untying its hands to develop new missiles.
With the deal having banned either side from stationing short and intermediate-range, land-based missiles in Europe, its demise raises the prospect of a new arms race between Washington and Moscow.
Russia denies violating the treaty and Putin responded to the U.S. move by saying Russia would mirror the U.S. by suspending its own obligations and quitting the pact.
The new Zircon missile will fly at nine times of the speed of sound and have a range of 620 miles, he warned, adding that the missile is designed to equip existing surface ships and submarines.
Other new weapons announced last year, including the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile and the Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone, have been undergoing tests successfully, he said.
Putin, facing an unprecedented fall in his approval ratings, made the remarks during his first address to both houses of parliament since he was elected to a fourth presidential term a year ago, extending his long rule until 2024.
In his toughest remarks yet on a potential new arms race, the Kremlin strongman warned the US against further missile deployments in Europe.
‘Russia does not intend to be the first to deploy such missiles in Europe,’ he said.
‘If (the US) develops and deploys them in Europe… this will dramatically exacerbate the international security situation, creating serious threats to Russia.
‘I’m saying this clearly and openly, Russia will be forced to deploy weapons that can be used… against the decision-making centres that are behind the missiles systems which threaten us.’
Putin said Russia was not seeking confrontation ‘particularly with such a global power as the U.S’.
But he added that Russia’s reaction to any deployment would be resolute and that U.S. policy-makers, some of whom he said were obsessed with U.S. exceptionalism, should calculate the risks before taking any steps.
‘It’s their right to think how they want. But can they count? I’m sure they can. Let them count the speed and the range of the weapons systems we are developing,’ Putin told Russia’s political elite to strong applause.
Signed in 1987 towards the end of the Cold War by then US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty bans ground-launched missiles with a range of between 315 miles to 3,415 miles.
The deal resolved a crisis over Soviet nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles targeting Western capitals, but put no restrictions on other major military actors such as China.
The 66-year-old, facing an unprecedented fall in his approval ratings, is making his first address to both houses of parliament since he was elected to a fourth presidential term a year ago, extending his long rule until 2024
Zircon: Russia’s feared hypersonic weapon
Vladimir Putin used his speech today to give an update on Russia’s new hypersonic missile – dubbed Zircon.
The Russian leader said the weapon will be capable of flying at nine times the speed of sound and have a range of 620 miles.
He said it would be designed to equip existing ships and submarines.
In 2017, reports claimed Zircon’s capabilities put Russia half a decade’ ahead of the US’.
One expert said that the missile could enter Russia’s arsenal between 2018 and 2020′.
Putin said he understood concerns about the INF agreement, namely that other countries could continue to develop weapons that are banned for the US and Russia.
‘The current state of affairs of course raises questions,’ he said during his annual state of the nation address.
‘Our American partners should have been honest… and not use far-fetched accusations against Russia to justify their unilateral withdrawal from the treaty,’ he said of the deal, during his annual state of the nation address.
Last year, Putin used the address to unveil a new arsenal of weapons in a nearly two-hour speech that stunned the West and many in Russia.
Speaking two weeks before his re-election, Putin promised Russians higher standards of living and hailed Moscow’s military might as relations with the West reached post-Cold War lows.
In his toughest remarks yet on a potential new arms race, Putin said Russia was not seeking confrontation and would not take the first step to deploy missiles in response to Washington’s decision this month to quit the INF treaty
The missile that can ‘fly forever’ and a nuclear-powered underwater drone
Vladimir Putin warned today that successful tests have been carried out on a new nuclear-powered cruise missile and underwater drone as he talked up Russia’s military capabilities.
Putin, updating members of Russia’s elite this morning, made reference to the Burevestnik cruise missile which is supposedly capable of flying for days on end.
Russia’s state news agency released a video just days ago claiming to show a test of the missile, which the Kremlin says is designed to strike over ‘unlimited’ range and with with unprecedented ability to manoeuvre.
The Russian state news agency released a video claiming to show a test of the Burevestnik missile which the Kremlin says is designed to strike over ‘unlimited’ range and with with unprecedented ability to manoeuvre
In theory, the Burevestnik could fly forever because it has a nuclear power source, potentially circling the globe until remotely ordered to approach a target and hit it with a nuclear warhead.
Scientists claim to have developed a nuclear power plant small enough to fit inside the missile and power a turbojet engine – but these claims have been met with scepticism in the West.
The missile is designed to use a conventional engine for takeoff, switching to a nuclear powered power source for flight – hence its theoretical ability to be in the air for days.
If the Burevestnik actually works, the heat from the nuclear reaction inside the small reactor would be used to heat the air inside a jet engine, replacing the need for fuel.
In March last year, Vladimir Putin spoke about the weapon. He said: ‘One of them is a small-scale, heavy-duty nuclear energy unit that can be installed in a missile like our latest X-101 air-launched missile or the American Tomahawk missile—a similar type but with a range dozens of times longer, dozens—basically an unlimited range.
Russia unveils nuclear-powered and armed underwater drone
‘It is a low-flying stealth missile carrying a nuclear warhead, with almost an unlimited range, unpredictable trajectory and ability to bypass interception boundaries. It is invincible against all existing and prospective missile defense and counter-air defense systems.’
A source in the missile program told the agency: ‘A major stage of trials of the cruise missile of the Burevestnik complex – tests of the nuclear power unit – have been successfully completed at one of facilities in January.’
The trials ‘sustained stated specifications of the reactor ensuring the missile’s unlimited range’, claimed the source. No further details were given about the top secret trials.
Last month, state media claimed Moscow was set to deploy more than 30 underwater drones capable of carrying a two megaton nuclear warhead.
Four submarines fitted with the torpedo drones, named Poseidon, will join the Northern and Pacific Russian fleets, state news agency Tass reported.
Each submarine can fit eight Poseidons, designed specifically to destroy ‘enemy navy bases’ and able to travel at up to 70 knots.
After the speech he enjoyed his highest approval rating since he came to power in 1999.
But a year on, Putin has seen his popularity slide against a backdrop of economic problems.
A hugely unpopular reform raising the retirement age that Putin signed into law in October led to a major dip in his support.
A survey by Russia’s independent Levada Center released in January found his approval rating at 64 per cent, the lowest since before Moscow’s annexation of Crimea five years ago.
Another Levada poll in October found only 40 percent of Russians would vote for Putin if an election were held.
HOW U.S. MISSILES LED TO PROTEST IN EUROPE IN THE 1980s – AND TOOK THE WORLD CLOSE TO THE NUCLEAR BRINK
Both the U.S. and the Soviets expected that if they went to war, Europe would be their battleground.
By the early 1980s, the U.S. under Ronald Reagan was outspending the Soviets and introducing dramatically improved new weapons in the air and on the ground.
In particular, the Soviet SS-20 medium-range nuclear missiles, launched from mobile carriers, were seen as the biggest threat to NATO forces if there were to be an exchange of weapons.
Nuclear missiles which could match their destructive power were a priority and the Pershing II was developed which could destroy underground bunkers and silos and reach Soviet territory in just six minutes – making them both undetectable and capable of largely killing off the Soviet ability to respond.
But moving the missiles into the places where they would be used in battle created a whole new dimension of conflict for the U.S. and its NATO allies – this time with peace protesters who made their deployment the focus of their rage.
Target: The land-based nuclear cruise missiles brought to the UK sparked public protests when they were deployed to the USAF base at Greenham Common west of London in 1983
Women’s protests: Women formed a peace camp at Greenham Common from the time it was identified as the host for the cruise and Pershing missiles and remained there long afterwards. In December 1982 one of their protests was a human chain around its perimeter
Blocking tactic: Anti nuclear protesters from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp tried to stop cruise missiles arriving by stopping access to its main gates
Beginning in 1983, two deployments in particular were to become infamous flashpoints.
In the UK, the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common, Berkshire, to the west of London, would be used for 160 medium-range nuclear cruise missiles, and a smaller number of Pershing II rockets. RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire would receive 64 cruise missiles.
In Germany, three bases – Neu-Ulm, Mutlangen and Neckarsulm – would receive a total of 108 Pershing IIs.
But in both countries the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament launched huge and widespread protests.
Focus: The Perishing II missile was deployed in 1983 to German bases in the face of huge public anger, with demonstrations of hundreds of thousands who saw it as a threat to West Germany’s existence
Cold war welcome: In West Germany there were protests regularly against the missiles and their deployment. They entered active duty in 1983 and by 1987 a deal for their destruction was done
In Germany, Mutlangen became the focal point, while in Greenham Common, a peace camp of women against nuclear weapons sprang up at the perimeter. Attempts to move munitions were met with sit-down protests on roads outside.
In Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, as many as 400,000 people took part in one anti-Pershing protest, part of a day of demonstrations across Europe, while other protests saw a human chain from U.S. headquarters in Stuttgart to the gates of Mutlangen.
1983 also saw one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War when NATO’s Able Archer war games, which involved activating troops and giving dummy instructions to fire nuclear weapons, were misunderstood by the Soviets.
Soviet threat: An SS-20 preserved in Russia shows the weapon which the Pershing II and cruise missiles were designed to counter. The SS-20 rocket launched multiple warheads and could reach all of Western Europe from Soviet-controlled territory including East Germany
They thought the exercise was really preparations for a first strike with the new Pershing arsenal part of the plan.
The Soviets ordered its nuclear arsenal to be prepared for action and placed bombers on high alert.
If NATO forces under U.S. command had moved to an increased state of readiness, the Soviets could well have launched their own nuclear weapons.
Spy Oleg Gordiesky later wrote an account of the tense moments, which ended when Able Archer concluded on November 11 1983.
What peace protesters had not realized was that behind the scenes, the U.S. had made an offer in the late 1970s to the Soviets, that if it agreed to get rid of its SS-20s, the U.S, would withdraw the Pershings and the cruise missiles.
By 1986, the Soviet Union was lead by Mikhail Gorbachev, and a deal began to take shape.
By September 1987, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in Washington D.C.
It eliminated all the weapons being protested against in the space of four years, leaving just a handful of mementos in museums.
Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty, formally Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles; Russian: Договор о ликвидации ракет средней и меньшей дальности / ДРСМД, Dogovor o likvidatsiy raket sredney i menshey dalnosti / DRSMD) was an arms controltreaty between the United States and the Soviet Union (and its successor state, the Russian Federation). U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the treaty on 8 December 1987.[1][2]The United States Senate approved the treaty on 27 May 1988, and Reagan and Gorbachev ratified it on 1 June 1988.[2][3]
The INF Treaty eliminated all of two nations’ land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers with ranges of 500–1,000 kilometers (310–620 mi) (short medium-range) and 1,000–5,500 km (620–3,420 mi) (intermediate-range). The treaty did not apply to air- or sea-launched missiles.[4][5] By May 1991, the nations had eliminated 2,692 missiles, followed by 10 years of on-site verification inspections.[6]
President Donald Trump announced on 20 October 2018 that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the treaty, citing Russian non-compliance.[7] The Western press has been dismissive of Russian claims that U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe, ostensibly meant to intercept missiles from Iran, presents a formidable offensive force near Russian borders. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a report in February 2019, using publicly available documents, on how the Aegis-based missile defense installations in Poland and Romania are not capable of providing missile defense against Iran due to the limited range of the Aegis radar, but retain offensive capabilities that are in violation of the INF.[8]
The U.S. formally suspended the treaty on 1 February 2019,[9] and Russia did so the following day.[10]
Background
In March 1976, the Soviet Union first deployed the RSD-10 Pioneer (called SS-20 Saber in the West) in its European territories, a mobile, concealable intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) with a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) containing three nuclear 150-kiloton warheads.[11] The SS-20’s range of 4,700–5,000 kilometers (2,900–3,100 mi) was great enough to reach Western Europe from well within Soviet territory; the range was just below the SALT II minimum range for an intercontinental ballistic missile, 5,500 km (3,400 mi).[12][13][14] The SS-20 replaced aging Soviet systems of the SS-4 Sandal and SS-5 Skean, which were seen to pose a limited threat to Western Europe due to their poor accuracy, limited payload (one warhead), lengthy preparation time, difficulty in being concealed, and immobility (thus exposing them to pre-emptive NATO strikes ahead of a planned attack).[15] Whereas the SS-4 and SS-5 were seen as defensive weapons, the SS-20 was seen as a potential offensive system.[16]
The US, then under President Jimmy Carter, initially considered its strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable aircraft to be adequate counters to the SS-20 and a sufficient deterrent against possible Soviet aggression. In 1977, however, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany argued in a speech that a Western response to the SS-20 deployment should be explored, a call which was echoed by NATO, given a perceived Western disadvantage in European nuclear forces.[14]Leslie H. Gelb, the US Assistant Secretary of State, later recounted that Schmidt’s speech pressured the US into developing a response.[17]
SS-20 launchers
On 12 December 1979, following European pressure for a response to the SS-20, Western foreign and defense ministers meeting in Brussels made the NATO Double-Track Decision.[14] The ministers argued that the Warsaw Pacthad “developed a large and growing capability in nuclear systems that directly threaten Western Europe”: “theater” nuclear systems (i.e., tactical nuclear weapons[18]). In describing this “aggravated” situation, the ministers made direct reference to the SS-20 featuring “significant improvements over previous systems in providing greater accuracy, more mobility, and greater range, as well as having multiple warheads”. The ministers also attributed the altered situation to the deployment of the Soviet Tupolev Tu-22Mstrategic bomber, which they believed to display “much greater performance” than its predecessors. Furthermore, the ministers expressed concern that the Soviet Union had gained an advantage over NATO in “Long-Range Theater Nuclear Forces” (LRTNF), and also significantly increased short-range theater nuclear capacity.[19]
To address these developments, the ministers adopted two policy “tracks”. One thousand theater nuclear warheads, out of 7,400 such warheads, would be removed from Europe and the US would pursue bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union intended to limit theater nuclear forces. Should these negotiations fail, NATO would modernize its own LRTNF, or intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), by replacing US Pershing 1a missiles with 108 Pershing IIlaunchers in West Germany and deploying 464 BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCMs) to Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom beginning in December 1983.[13][20][21][22]
Negotiations
Early negotiations: 1981–1983
The Soviet Union and United States agreed to open negotiations and preliminary discussions, named the Preliminary Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Talks,[13] which began in Geneva in October 1980. On 20 January 1981, Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as President after defeating Jimmy Carter in an election. Formal talks began on 30 November 1981, with the US then led by Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union by Leonid Brezhnev. The core of the US negotiating position reflected the principles put forth under Carter: any limits placed on US INF capabilities, both in terms of “ceilings” and “rights”, must be reciprocated with limits on Soviet systems. Additionally, the US insisted that a sufficient verification regime be in place.[23]
Paul Nitze, a longtime hand at defense policy who had participated in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), led the US delegation after being recruited by Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Though Nitze had backed the first SALT treaty, he opposed SALT II and had resigned from the US delegation during its negotiation. Nitze was also then a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a firmly anti-Soviet group composed of neoconservatives and conservative Republicans.[17][24] Yuli Kvitsinsky, the well-respected second-ranking official at the Soviet embassy in West Germany, headed the Soviet delegation.[16][25][26][27]
Paul Nitze, 1983
On 18 November 1981, shortly before the beginning of formal talks, Reagan made the Zero Option proposal (or the “zero-zero” proposal).[28] The plan called for a hold on US deployment of GLCM and Pershing II systems, reciprocated by Soviet elimination of its SS-4, SS-5, and SS-20 missiles. There appeared to be little chance of the Zero Option being adopted, but the gesture was well received in the European public. In February 1982, US negotiators put forth a draft treaty containing the Zero Option and a global prohibition on intermediate- and short-range missiles, with compliance ensured via a stringent, though unspecific, verification program.[25]
Opinion within the Reagan administration on the Zero Option was mixed. Richard Perle, then the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs, was the architect of the plan. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who supported a continued US nuclear presence in Europe, was skeptical of the plan, though eventually accepted it for its value in putting the Soviet Union “on the defensive in the European propaganda war”. Reagan later recounted that the “zero option sprang out of the realities of nuclear politics in Western Europe”.[28] The Soviet Union rejected the plan shortly after the US tabled it in February 1982, arguing that both the US and Soviet Union should be able to retain intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Specifically, Soviet negotiators proposed that the number of INF missiles and aircraft deployed in Europe by one side be capped at 600 by 1985 and 300 by 1990. Concerned that this proposal would force the US to withdraw aircraft from Europe and not deploy INF missiles, given US cooperation with existing British and French deployments, the US proposed “equal rights and limits”—the US would be permitted to match Soviet SS-20 deployments.[25]
There was little convergence between the two sides over these two years. A U.S. effort to separate the question of nuclear-capable aircraft from that of intermediate-range missiles successfully focused attention on the latter, but little clear progress on the subject was made. In the summer of 1982, Nitze and Kvitsinsky took a “walk in the woods” in the Jura Mountains, away from formal negotiations in Geneva, in an independent attempt to bypass bureaucratic procedures and break the negotiating deadlock.[30][16][31] Nitze later said that his and Kvitsinsky’s goal was to agree to certain concessions that would allow for a summit meeting between Brezhnev and Reagan later in 1982.[32]
Nitze’s offer to Kvitsinsky was that the US would forego deployment of the Pershing II and continue deployment of GLCMs, but limited to 75 missile launchers. The Soviet Union, in return, would also have to limit itself to 75 intermediate-range missile launchers in Europe and 90 in Asia. Due to each GLCM launcher containing four GLCMs and each SS-20 launcher containing three warheads, such an agreement would have resulted in the US having 75 more intermediate-range warheads in Europe than the Soviet Union, though SS-20s were seen as more advanced and maneuverable than GLCMs. While Kvitsinsky was skeptical that the plan would be well received in Moscow, Nitze was optimistic about its chances in Washington.[32] The deal ultimately found little traction in either capital. In the US, the Office of the Secretary of Defense opposed Nitze’s proposal, as it opposed any proposal that would allow the Soviet Union to deploy missiles to Europe while blocking US deployments. Nitze’s proposal was relayed by Kvitsinsky to Moscow, where it was also rejected. The plan accordingly was never introduced into formal negotiations.[30][16]
Thomas Graham, a US negotiator, later recalled that Nitze’s “walk in the woods” proposal was primarily of Nitze’s own design and known beforehand only to William F. Burns, another arms control negotiator and representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and Eugene V. Rostow, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In a National Security Council following the Nitze-Kvitsinsky walk, the proposal was received positively by the JCS and Reagan. Following protests by Richard Perle, working within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Reagan informed Nitze that he would not back the plan. The State Department, then led by Alexander Haig, also indicated that it would not support Nitze’s plan and preferred a return to the Zero Option proposal.[16][31][32] Nitze argued that one positive consequence of the walk in the woods was that the European public, which had doubted US interest in arms control, became convinced that the US was participating in the INF negotiations in good faith.[32]
In early 1983, US negotiators indicated that they would support a plan beyond the Zero Option if the plan established equal rights and limits for the US and Soviet Union, with such limits valid worldwide, and excluded British and French missile systems (as well as those of any other third party). As a temporary measure, the US negotiators also proposed a cap of 450 deployed INF warheads around the world for both the US and Soviet Union. In response, Soviet negotiators expressed that a plan would have to block all US INF deployments in Europe, cover both missiles and aircraft, include third parties, and focus primarily on Europe for it to gain Soviet backing. In the fall of 1983, just ahead of the scheduled deployment of US Pershing IIs and GLCMs, the US lowered its proposed limit on global INF deployments to 420 missiles, while the Soviet Union proposed “equal reductions”: if the US cancelled the planned deployment of Pershing II and GLCM systems, the Soviet Union would reduce its own INF deployment by 572 warheads. In November 1983, after the first Pershing IIs arrived in West Germany, the Soviet Union walked out of negotiations, as it had warned it would do should the US missile deployments occur.[33]
Restarted negotiations: 1985–1987
Reagan and Gorbachev shake hands after signing the INF Treaty ratification during the Moscow Summiton 1 June 1988.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher played a key role in brokering the negotiations between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1986–1987.[34]
In March 1986, negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union resumed, covering not only the INF issue, but also separate discussions on strategic weapons (START I) and space issues (Nuclear and Space Talks). In late 1985, both sides were moving towards limiting INF systems in Europe and Asia. On 15 January 1986, Gorbachev announced a Soviet proposal for a ban on all nuclear weapons by 2000, which included INF missiles in Europe. This was dismissed by the US and countered with a phased reduction of INF launchers in Europe and Asia to none by 1989. There would be no constraints on British and French nuclear forces.[35]
A series of meetings in August and September 1986 culminated in the Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev on 11 October 1986. Both agreed in principle to remove INF systems from Europe and to equal global limits of 100 INF missile warheads. Gorbachev also proposed deeper and more fundamental changes in the strategic relationship. More detailed negotiations extended throughout 1987, aided by the decision of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in August to unilaterally remove the joint US-West German Pershing 1a systems. Initially, Kohl had opposed the total elimination of the Pershing Missiles, claiming that such a move would increase his nation’s vulnerability to an attack by Warsaw Pact Forces.[36] The treaty text was finally agreed in September 1987. On 8 December 1987, the Treaty was officially signed by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev at a summit in Washington and ratified the following May in a 93-5 vote by the United States Senate.[37][38]
Contents
The treaty[39] prohibits both parties from possessing, producing or flight-testing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500-5,500km. Possessing or producing ground-based launchers of those missiles is also prohibited. The ban extends to weapons with both nuclear and conventional warheads, but does not cover air-delivered or sea-based missiles.
Existing weapons had to be destroyed, and a protocol for mutual inspection was agreed upon.
Each party has the right to withdraw from the treaty with six months’ notice, “if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests”.
(1988) A Soviet train with SS-12 Scaleboard medium-range ballistic missiles ready to leave for the Soviet Union from Czechoslovakia’s Hranice na Morave railroad station
By the treaty’s deadline of 1 June 1991, a total of 2,692 of such weapons had been destroyed, 846 by the US and 1,846 by the Soviet Union.[40]
As provided by the treaty, onsite inspections ended in 2001. After that time, compliance was checked primarily by satellites.[41]
Russian criticism
In February 2007, the Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he said the INF Treaty should be revisited to ensure security, as it only restricted Russia and the U.S. but not other countries.[43]
Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute wrote that the actual Russian problem with the INF was that China is not bound by it and continued to build up their own intermediate-range forces.[44]
Alleged violations
In 2007, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Yuri Baluyevsky said that Russia was planning to unilaterally withdraw from the treaty in response to deployment of adaptable defensive NATO missile system and because other countries were not bound to the treaty.[45]
In 2013, the United States launched test launches from the ground of the AGM-158B aviation cruise missile with a range of a thousand kilometers and in December 2017, President Trump signed a bill on defense, which, among others, provided for the allocation of $ 25 million to develop a new cruise missile of this type. According to Russian diplomats this was a violation of the INF Treaty.[46]
According to US officials, Russia violated the treaty by testing the SSC-8 cruise missile in 2008.[47] The US representatives briefed NATO on a Russian nuclear treaty breach again in 2014[48][49] and 2017.[47][50] In 2013, reports came out that Russia had tested and planned to continue testing two missiles in ways that could violate the terms of the treaty: the SS-25 road mobile intercontinental ballistic missile and the newer RS-26 ICBM, although neither missile is considered intermediate range.[51]
The United States declared its intention to withdraw from the treaty on 20 October 2018.[56][57][58] Donald Trump mentioned at a campaign rally that the reason for the pullout was because “they’ve [Russia has] been violating it for many years”.[57] This prompted Putin to state that Russia would not launch first in a nuclear conflict but would “annihilate” any adversary, essentially re-stating the policy of “Mutually Assured Destruction“. Putin claimed Russians killed in such a conflict “will go to heaven as martyrs”.[59]
It was also reported that the United States’ need to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific was another reason for their move to withdraw, because China is not a signatory to the treaty.[56][57][58] US officials extending back to the Obama period have noted this. For example, Kelly Magsamen, who helped craft the Pentagon’s Asian policy under the Obama administration, said China’s ability to work outside of the INF treaty had vexed policymakers in Washington, long before Trump came into office.[60] A Politico article noted the different responses U.S. officials gave to this issue: “either find ways to bring China into the treaty or develop new American weapons to counter it” or “negotiating a new treaty with that country”.[61] Bringing an ascendant China into the treaty, or into a new comprehensive treaty including other nuclear powers, was further complicated by relationships between China, India and Pakistan.[62]
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said a unilateral U.S. withdrawal would have a negative impact and urged the United States to “think thrice before acting”. John R. Bolton, US National Security Advisor, said on Echo of Moscow that recent Chinese statements indicate that it wants Washington to stay in the treaty, while China itself is not bound in a treaty.[60]
On 26 October 2018, Russia called but lost a vote to get the U.N. General Assembly to consider calling on Washington and Moscow to preserve and strengthen the treaty.[63] Russia had proposed a draft resolution in the 193-member General Assembly’s disarmament committee, but missed the 18 October submission deadline[63] so it instead called for a vote on whether the committee should be allowed to consider the draft.[63] On the same day, John R. Bolton said in an interview with Reuters that the INF Treaty was a cold war relic and he wanted to hold strategic talks with Russia about Chinese missile capabilities.[64]
Four days later, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called on Russia to comply with the treaty at a news conference in Norway saying “The problem is the deployment of new Russian missiles”.[65]
Russian president Vladimir Putin announced on 20 November 2018 that the Kremlin was prepared to discuss INF with Washington but would “retaliate” if the United States withdrew.[66]
Starting on 4 December 2018, the United States said Russia had 60 days to comply with the treaty.[67] On 5 December 2018, Russia responded by revealing their Peresvet combat laser, stating they had been deployed to Russia armed forces as early as 2017 “as part of the state procurement program”.[68]
Russia presented the 9M729 (SSC-8) missile and its technical parameters to foreign military attachés at a military briefing on 23 January 2019, held in what it said was an exercise in transparency it hoped would persuade Washington to stay in the treaty.[69] The Russian Defence Ministry said diplomats from the United States, Britain, France and Germany had been invited to attend the static display of the missile, but they declined to attend.[69] The United States had previously rejected a Russian offer to do so because it said such an exercise would not allow it to verify the true range of its warheads.[69]
The summit between U.S. and Russia on 30 January 2019 failed to find a way to preserve the treaty.[70]
The United States withdrew from the INF Treaty on 2 February 2019 following an announcement by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the day prior. In addition the US said there was a six-month timeline for full withdrawal and INF Treaty termination if the Russian Federation did not come back into compliance within those six months given.[71][62] The same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had also suspended the INF Treaty in a ‘mirror response’ to President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend the treaty, effective that day.[10] The next day, Russia started work on new intermediate range (ballistic) hypersonic missiles along with land based (club kalibr – biryuza) systems (both nuclear armed) in response to the USA announcing it would start to conduct research and development of weapons prohibited under the treaty.[72]
Reactions to the withdrawal
Numerous prominent nuclear arms control experts, including George Shultz, Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn, urged Trump to preserve the treaty.[73]Mikhail Gorbachev commented that Trump’s nuclear treaty withdrawal is “not the work of a great mind” and that “a new arms race has been announced.”[74][75]
The decision was criticized by chairmen of the United States House of Representatives Committees on Foreign Affairs and Armed Services who said that instead of crafting a plan to hold Russia accountable and pressure it into compliance, the Trump administration has offered Putin an easy way out of the treaty and has played right into his hands.[76] Similar arguments were brought previously, on 25 October 2018 by European members of NATO who urged the United States “to try to bring Russia back into compliance with the treaty rather than quit it, seeking to avoid a split in the alliance that Moscow could exploit.”[63]
Stoltenberg has suggested the INF Treaty could be expanded to include countries such as China and India, whose non-inclusion, Stoltenberg said, Russia had previously admonished.[77]
According to military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, USA and NATO currently do not have a significant number of ballistic high-precision medium-range missiles, and it will take at least five years for them to create such missiles. Therefore, the withdrawal from the treaty will provide Russia with a total nuclear superiority, and this superiority should be enough to guarantee the West from any interference if Russia decides to take over any former Soviet republics.[78]
On 15 February 2019, Tulsi Gabbard introduced the proposed INF Treaty Compliance Act (H.R. 1249), designed to stop the United States from withdrawing from the treaty.[79][80][81]
The Avangard (then called Yu-71 and Yu-74) was reportedly tested during a series of flight tests between February 2015 and June 2016 on board the UR-100UTTKh ICBMs launched from the Dombarovsky ICBM siteduring which the glider reached a speed of 11,200 kilometres per hour (7,000 mph; 3,100 m/s) and successfully hit its targets at the Kura Missile Test Range.[10][11]
Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces Vladimir Putin watching the launch of the Avangard missile complex carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle at the National Centre for State Defence Control in Moscow. December 26, 2018.
Another flight test was carried out in October 2016 with use of the R-36M2 heavy ICBM launched from Dombarovsky ICBM site, hitting a target at the Kura Missile Test Range. This was reportedly the first fully successful test of the glide vehicle.[12][13]
The latest flight test occurred on 26 December 2018 when the glider was launched on board a UR-100UTTKh ICBM from the Dombarovsky missile base in the Ural Mountainsand subsequently hit a target at the Kura Missile Test Range.[20] The Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Yury Borisov stated a day later on a Russian TV channel that the missile flew at 27 times the speed of sound, thus making it invulnerable to interception.[20]
Design
The Avangard has been demonstrated to operate at up to Mach 27 during the latest flight test.[3]When approaching a target, the glider is capable of sharp high speed horizontal and vertical evasive maneuvers in flight, making it “absolutely invulnerable for any missile defence system,” according to Russian officials.[21][22][23][24][25] According to Russian President Putin, Avangard strikes “like a meteorite, like a fireball”.[26] The blast yield of a nuclear warhead carried by the Avangard is reportedly more than 2 megatons TNT.[27]
Putin confirms development of Russia’s hypersonic cruise missile called Tsirkon
Russia has successfully tested a ship-based hypersonic missile the United States is currently unable to defend against, according to people with direct knowledge of U.S. intelligence reports.
The Russian president said the new missile will travel at Mach 9, almost 2 miles per second.
Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives to deliver his annual state of the nation address in Moscow on February 20, 2019.
Russia has confirmed it is building a new hypersonic missile that can be launched from ships or submarines and travel at almost 2 miles per second.
Russian President Vladimir Putin used his state of the nation address on Wednesday to publicly confirm that the cruise missile was well under development.
“This is a hypersonic missile called Tsirkon. It will have the speed of mach 9, it has a range of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) and can hit navy or land targets.”
The Russian leader added the missile could be launched from a ship or submarine and costs would be kept low by its compatibility with the existing Kalibr missile system.
In December, CNBC learned that a U.S. Intelligence report had highlighted testing of the Tsirkon hypersonic system, noting that five tests had been carried out by the Russian military since 2015.
Putin has previously described Russia’s hypersonic prowess as “invincible” and accused “those who have fueled the arms race over the last 15 years” of failing to contain Russia.
Publicly confirming the project on Wednesday, the Russian president again took a pot-shot at the West and specifically the United States.
“The U.S. once sought global domination through its missiles program. They should abandon illusions, we will always respond with a reciprocal response,” said Putin.
US doesn’t see ‘changing world’
In February this year, the U.S. and Russia both confirmed they would suspend participation in the decades-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF treaty, which bans ground-launched medium-range missiles with a range of 310-3,400 miles.
The U.S. administration, who withdrew first, said it had taken the measure following Russia’s refusal to accept that its SSC-8 missile directly contravenes the Cold War-era agreement.
NATO calls on Russia to comply with missile treaty
Addressing the topic Wednesday, Putin said Russia “doesn’t threaten anyone” and its military build-up was a defensive measure.
“We do not want confrontation with a global power, especially like the U.S., but it seems like the U.S. doesn’t see how the world is changing,” he said, before adding that he was ready for further talks on arms control but “we are not going to keep knocking on a locked door.”
Now that both countries have suspended the INF treaty, it will expire in August if Washington and the Kremlin don’t find agreement.
The White House and the U.S. Department of Defense didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
About 17.46 million “discredited” people were restricted from buying plane tickets and 5.47 million were restricted from purchasing high-speed train tickets, the report said. Photo: Handout
Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses have been labelled as untrustworthy on an official blacklist banning them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train, as the use of the government’s social credit system accelerates.
The annual blacklist is part of a broader effort to boost “trustworthiness” in Chinese society and is an extension of China’s social credit system, which is expected to give each of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score.
The social credit system assigns both positive and negative scores for individual or corporate behaviour in an attempt to pressure citizens into behaving.
Human rights advocates, though, worry that the arbitrary system does not take into account individual circumstances and so often unfairly labels individuals and firms as untrustworthy.
Over 3.59 million Chinese enterprises were added to the official creditworthiness blacklist last year, banning them from a series of activities, including bidding on projects, accessing security markets, taking part in land auctions and issuing corporate bonds, according to the 2018 annual report released by the National Public Credit Information Centre.
The centre is backed by the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, to run the credit rating system.
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According to the report, the authorities collected over 14.21 million pieces of information on the “untrustworthy conduct” of individuals and businesses, including charges of swindling customers, failing to repay loans, illegal fund collection, false and misleading advertising, as well as uncivilised behaviour such as taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.
About 17.46 million “discredited” people were restricted from buying plane tickets and 5.47 million were restricted from purchasing high-speed train tickets, the report said.
China to bar people with bad ‘social credit’ from trains, planes
Besides restrictions on buying tickets, local authorities also used novel methods to put pressure on untrustworthy subjects, including preventing people from buying premium insurance, wealth management products or real estate, as well as shaming them by exposing their information in public.
A total of 3.51 million untrustworthy individuals and entities repaid their debts or paid off taxes and fines last year due to pressure from the social credit system, the report said.
The report highlighted untrustworthy problems at peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms and recent high-profile scandals in medical care that have caused public anger.
A total of 3.51 million untrustworthy individuals and entities repaid their debts or paid off taxes and fines last year due to pressure from the social credit system, the report said. Photo: Xinhua
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A total of 1,282 P2P operators, more than half located in Zhejiang, Guangdong and Shanghai, were placed on the creditworthiness blacklist because they could not repay investors or were involved in illegal fundraising.
were added to the creditworthiness blacklist because of their involvement in major health sector scandals.
From drones to social credits, 10 ways China watches its citizens
Quanjian was accused of making false marketing claims about the benefits of a product that a four-year-old cancer patient drank, while Changsheng, the major Chinese manufacturer of rabies vaccines, was fined US$1.3 billion in October after it was found to have fabricated records.
Lawyers worry that the accelerated use of the creditworthiness system will violate an individuals right to privacy.
“Many people cannot pay their debt because they are too poor but will be subject to this kind of surveillance and this kind of public shaming,” a lawyer said. “It violates the rights of human beings.”
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Millions labelled as untrustworthy and banned from travel
Story 3: Socialist Sanders Rakes in $6 Million From Over 225,000 Contributors — Videos
Bernie Sanders Raises $6 Million After Announcing Presidential Bid
Bernie Sanders Raises $3.3 Million Hours After 2020 Announcement | Hardball | MSNBC
Bernie Sanders Joins Democratic Presidential Race
Bernie Sanders Raises $6 Million After Announcing Presidential Bid
Senator Bernie Sanders at a rally in April before the start of a march honoring the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. CreditTamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Senator Bernie Sanders at a rally in April before the start of a march honoring the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.CreditCreditTamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Just over 24 hours after announcing his presidential bid, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has already raised $6 million from more than 225,000 donors, his campaign said Wednesday morning.
That amount far surpasses what any of his rivals have disclosed raising after their own announcements this year.
Previously, Senator Kamala Harris of California had claimed the biggest early fund-raising haul that had been made public, with $1.5 million in 24 hours. In comparison, Mr. Sanders’s campaign said its fund-raising in the first 24 hours came to $5.9 million.
Later Wednesday, President Trump’s campaign cited Mr. Sanders’s windfall in its own fund-raising pitch, sending a text message to supporters telling them about the $6 million that “Socialist Bernie” had raised. “Now I’m calling on you to CRUSH that number,” the message said.
Mr. Sanders’s early fund-raising success is not unexpected: After all, he raised well over $200 million when he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 election, and his list of online donors dwarfs those of his Democratic rivals.
But in a crowded presidential field, where candidates are eager to demonstrate the enthusiasm behind their campaigns, early fund-raising hauls offer bragging rights, at least for a moment.
A recent New York Times analysis found that Mr. Sanders began his 2020 candidacy with about 2.1 million online donors who had given him money over the last six years, an enormous lead among proven contributors that is roughly equivalent to the donor base of all the other Democratic hopefuls combined.
Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who ran unsuccessfully for Senate last year, has twice as many online donors as anyone running or considering running besides Mr. Sanders. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Ms. Harris each had drawn money from at least 230,000 online donors ahead of their candidacies.
A more complete view of the candidates’ fund-raising will eventually be available through the Federal Election Commission. Several well-known Democratic candidates have not released early fund-raising totals, including Ms. Warren, Ms. Gillibrand and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
If you have put a windmill in your yard or some solar panels on your roof, bless your heart. But we will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid – moving it away from dirty coal or oil to clean coal and renewables. And that is a huge industrial project – much bigger than anyone has told you. Finally, like the New Deal, if we undertake the green version, it has the potential to create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.[11]
This approach was subsequently taken up by the Green New Deal Group,[12] which published its eponymous report on July 21, 2008.[13] The concept was further popularized and put on a wider footing when the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) began to promote it. On October 22, 2008 UNEP’s Executive Director Achim Steiner unveiled the Global Green New Deal initiative that aims to create jobs in “green” industries, thus boosting the world economy and curbing climate change at the same time.[14] It was then turned into an extensive plan by the Green Party of the United States. It was a key part of the platform of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in 2012 and 2016, as well as Howie Hawkins, who helped to write it, in his campaign for governor of New York.[15]
Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and former economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.[25]
Joe Kennedy III, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts’s 4th congressional district[26]
Ro Khanna, U.S. Representative from California’s 17th congressional district
Martin O’Malley, former Maryland Governor, made his call for an ambitious global climate plan – aiming for the U.S. to go 100% clean energy by 2050 – the centerpoint of his 2016 Presidential campaign.
Ayanna Pressley, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts’s 7th congressional district[34]
Lori Trahan, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts’s 3rd congressional district[44]
Organizations
The Climate Mobilization, which advocates a “World War II-scale economic mobilization to restore a safe climate.”
The think tank Data for Progress laid out a progressive vision in their policy report “A Green New Deal” in September 2018.[45]
The Democracy in Europa Movement 2025 ( DieM25), a pan-european political activist group of over 100.000 members for progressive EU and global economics policy, founded by Yanis Varoufakis[46]
The Heinrich Böll Foundation published proposals for a Green New Deal in Germany, the European Union, as well as North America,[49] Israel,[50] and Ukraine.[51]
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (center) speaks on the Green New Deal with Senator Ed Markey (right) in front of the Capitol Building in February 2019.
Ocasio-Cortez’s first piece of sponsored legislation: H.Res.109 – 116th Congress (2019–2020) Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.
A possible program in 2018 for a “Green New Deal” assembled by the think tank Data for Progress was described as “pairing labor programs with measures to combat the climate crisis.”[63][64]
A November 2018 article in Vogue stated, “There isn’t just one Green New Deal yet. For now, it’s a platform position that some candidates are taking to indicate that they want the American government to devote the country to preparing for climate change as fully as Franklin Delano Roosevelt once did to reinvigorating the economy after the Great Depression.”[40]
By the end of November, eighteen Democratic members of Congress were co-sponsoring a proposed House Select Committee on a Green New Deal, and incoming representatives Ayanna Pressley and Joe Neguse had announced their support.[68][69] Draft text would task this committee with a “’detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization plan’ capable of making the U.S. economy ‘carbon neutral’ while promoting ‘economic and environmental justice and equality,'” to be released in early 2020, with draft legislation for implementation within 90 days.[70][71]
Opponents noted that the costs of a Green New Deal had not been fully determined, and that achieving 100% renewable energy might not be possible.[72]
Paul Bledsoe of the Progressive Policy Institute expressed concern that setting unrealistic “aspirational” goals of 100% renewable energy, as in the Ocasio-Cortez proposal, “does a disservice to the real seriousness of climate change“, and could undermine “the credibility of the effort.”[72]
A Sunrise Movement protest on behalf of a Green New Deal at the Capitol Hill offices of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer on December 10, 2018 featured Lennox Yearwood and speakers as young as age 7, resulting in 143 arrests.[43]Euronews, the pan-European news organization, displayed video of youth with signs saying “Green New Deal,” “No excuses”, and “Do your job” in its “No Comment” section.[73]
On December 14, 2018, a group of over 300 local elected officials from 40 states issued a letter endorsing a Green New Deal approach.[74][75]
That same day, a poll released by Yale Program on Climate Change Communication indicated that although 82% of registered voters had not heard of the “Green New Deal,” it had strong bi-partisan support among voters. A non-partisan description of the general concepts behind a Green New Deal resulted in 40% of respondents saying they “strongly support”, and 41% saying they “somewhat support” the idea.[76]
On January 10, 2019 over 600 organizations submitted a letter to Congress declaring support for policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This includes ending fossil fuel extraction and subsidies, transitioning to 100% clean renewable energy by 2035, expanding public transportation, and strict emission reductions rather than reliance on carbon emission trading.[77]
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey released a fourteen-page resolution for their Green New Deal on February 7, 2019. The approach pushes for transitioning the United States to use 100% renewable, zero-emission energy sources, including investment into electric cars and high-speed rail systems, and implementing the “social cost of carbon” that has been part of Obama administration’s plans for addressing climate change. Besides providing new jobs, this Green New Deal is also aimed to address poverty by aiming much of the improvements in the “frontline and vulnerable communities” which include the poor and disadvantaged people. To gain additional support, the resolution includes calls for universal health care, fair minimum wages, and preventing monopolies. While this resolution did not identify where the funding for this would come from, the conservative American Action Forum estimated that a similar proposal would cost US$1 trillion without taking into account new investments to achieve the resolution’s goals.[78][79][80]
Various perspectives emerged in late 2018 as to whether to form a committee dedicated to climate, what powers such a committee might be granted, and whether the committee would be specifically tasked with developing a Green New Deal.
Proposals for the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis did not contain “Green New Deal” language and lacked the powers desired by Green New Deal proponents, such as the ability to subpoena documents or depose witnesses.[82][83][84]
January 2019 letter to Congress from environmental groups
On January 10, 2019, a letter signed by 626 organizations in support of a Green New Deal was sent to all members of Congress. It called for measures such as “an expansion of the Clean Air Act; a ban on crude oil exports; an end to fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel leasing; and a phase-out of all gas-powered vehicles by 2040.”[86][87]
An article in The Atlantic quoted Greg Carlock, who prepared “a different Green New Deal plan for the left-wing think tank Data for Progress” as responding, “There is no scenario produced by the IPCC or the UN where we hit mid-century decarbonization without some kind of carbon capture.”[86]
The MIT Technology Review responded to the letter with an article titled, “Let’s Keep the Green New Deal Grounded in Science.” The MIT article states that, although the letter refers to the “rapid and aggressive action” needed to prevent the 1.5 ˚C of warming specified in the UN climate panel’s latest report, simply acknowledging the report’s recommendation is not sufficient. If the letter’s signatories start from a position where the options of carbon pricing, carbon capture for fossil plants, hydropower, and nuclear power, are not even on the table for consideration, there may be no feasible technical means to reach the necessary 1.5 ˚C climate goal.[89]
A report in Axios suggested that the letter’s omission of a carbon tax, which has been supported by moderate Republicans, did not mean that signatories would oppose carbon pricing.[90][87]
The Director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy at George Mason University was quoted as saying, “As long as organizations hold onto a rigid set of ideas about what the solution is, it’s going to be hard to make progress … And that’s what worries me.”[89]
Models for implementation
As of January 2019, models for structuring a Green New Deal remain in the initial stages of discussion.
Although Chuck Schumer has indicated that measures to address climate change and renewable energy must be included in a 2019 infrastructure package, as of December 2018, articles describing his position referred to it as “green infrastructure” rather than as a Green New Deal.[91][92]
On January 17, 2019, prospective presidential candidate Jay Inslee called for Green New Deal goals of “net-zero carbon pollution by midcentury” and creating “good-paying jobs building a future run on clean energy” in a Washington Post op-ed. However, he framed these efforts in terms of national mobilization, saying “Confronting climate change will require a full-scale mobilization — a national mission that must be led from the White House.”[93]
Economic policy and planning for environment and climate
An article in The Intercept characterizes a Green New Deal more broadly, as economic planning and industrial policy measures which would enable mobilization for the environment, similar to the economic mobilization for World War II, and similar to the internal planning of large corporations. The article quotes an expert who states that imposing jail terms for failure to meet emissions targets “may sound aggressive by today’s standards, but [it] has been par for the course at other points in American history when the country has faced existential threats.”[94]
Economist Stephanie Kelton (a proponent of Modern Monetary Policy) and others [95] argue that natural resources, including a stable, livable climate, are limited resources, whereas money -following the abandonment of the gold standard- is really just a legal and social tool that should be marshalled to provide for sustainable public policies. To this end, a mix of policies and programs could be adopted, including tax incentives and targeted taxes, reformed construction and zoning standards, transportation fleet electrification, coastal shoreline hardening, Farm Bill subsidies linked to carbon capture and renewables generation, and much more. Practically, Kelton argues that the key to implementation is garnering enough political support, rather than becoming fixated on specific “pay-fors.” Many proposed Green New Deal programs would generate significant numbers of new jobs.[96]
One proposed model for funding says that “funding would come primarily from certain public agencies, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and ‘a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks.'” This model, which has been endorsed by over 40 House members, has been compared to the work of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW, or “Reconstruction Credit Institute,” a large German public sector development bank), the China Development Bank, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.[97]
Employment programs coupled with business investment for environment and climate[edit]
New Deal improvisation as a model
Although the non-specific nature of current GND proposals has become a concern for some Greens,[98] one writer from the Columbia University Earth Institute views the lack of specificity as a strength, noting that: “FDR’s New Deal was a series of improvisations in response to specific problems that were stalling economic development. There was no master plan, many ideas failed, and some were ended after a period of experimentation. But some, like social security and the Security and Exchange Commission’s regulation of the stock market, became permanent American institutions …”[99]
Green skills worker training programs
Existing programs training workers in green skills include a program called Roots of Success, founded in 2008 to bring low-income people into living wage professions. Funding for Roots of Success came from the $90 billion in green initiatives incorporated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.[100]
Green stimulus under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
About 12% of ARRA funding went to green investment,[101] and some of these initiatives were successful. A Jan. 2019 article in Politico stated that, “U.S. wind capacity has more than tripled since 2008, while solar capacity is up more than sixfold. LEDs were 1 percent of the lighting market in 2008; now they’re more than half the market. There were almost no plug-in electric vehicles in 2008; now there are more than 1 million on U.S. roads.”[102]
Although ARRA’s green stimulus projects are of interest for developing proposals for a Green New Deal, its mixed results included both “boosting innovative firms” such as Tesla, and the $535 million failure of the Solyndra solar company.”[102][103] These initial efforts at green stimulus are described as a “cautionary tale.” It remains necessary to develop mechanisms for promoting large-scale green business development, as it is unclear whether focusing on job creation programs alone will result in optimizing the climate impact of new jobs.[102]
Criticism
Economist Edward Barbier, who developed the “Global Green New Deal” proposal for the United Nations Environment Programme in 2009, opposes “a massive federal jobs program,” saying “The government would end up doing more and more of what the private sector and industry should be doing.” Barbier prefers carbon pricing, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, in order to “address distortions in the economy that are holding back private sector innovation and investments in clean energy.”[101]
In the US, Robert Pollin characterized the concept of a “Green New Deal” as “egalitarian green growth,” indicating that the seriousness of concerns about climate is also giving rise to alternative Degrowth proposals to contract economies.[104]
On February 9, 2019, US President, Donald Trump voiced his opposition using political sarcasm via Twitter as follows: “I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called “Carbon Footprint” to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military – even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!” [105]
Other Republican politicians have pointed to language found in a “Frequently Asked Questions” draft summary document originally posted to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s website, now only viewable on the Wayback Machine.[106] Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has entered the document into congressional record.[107] Specifically, Republicans have focused on two points in the document, which call for “economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work” and “fully [getting] rid of, for example, emissions from cows or air travel.”
On February 13, 2019, Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) released a parody video on his verified Twitter account comparing the Green New Deal to the failed Fyre Festival, using the hashtag #GNDisFyre.[108][109][110]
In a February 2019 interview with Politico, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi openly mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s and Markley’s recent resolution for a Green New Deal, saying “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”[17] The following day, speaking at a news conference, Pelosi said that while she hasn’t yet seen the details of the proposal, she said “I do know that it’s enthusiastic, and we welcome all the enthusiasm that’s out there…I’m very excited about it all, and I welcome the Green New Deal and any other proposals.” [111]
Harris has had by far the best launch of any candidate.
Her speech declaring her candidacy was delivered powerfully before a large and appreciative crowd in Oakland. Her appearances in early states have been well-received, as have her initial round of media interview. More generally, she has effectively presented herself as a fresh and charismatic presence.
Harris has also rolled out some early endorsements including Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and, on Friday alone, both California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Hispanic civil rights icon Dolores Huerta.
There are still plenty of questions that Harris will have to answer — including how her long record as a prosecutor will be scrutinized by a Democratic base focused on questions of police misconduct and racial inequities.
Early front-runners can easily come unstuck, but for now Harris is the most formidable candidate in the race.
For all the excitement around Harris, it is the former vice president who still heads every significant nationwide poll of Democratic voters.
In an Emerson poll released on Saturday, he was 10 points ahead of his closest rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with Harris third, a further 2 points behind. A Morning Consult poll earlier last week put Biden 7 points clear of Sanders and 16 points ahead of Harris.
In 2016, Biden mulled a run for a long time before deciding against it. His son Beau had died from brain cancer in May 2015, and Biden ultimately chose not to force himself thorough the rigors of a presidential campaign.
This time around, The Hill has reported that he is almost certain to declare a candidacy soon.
Biden has weaknesses in the race, including his age — he would be 78 on Inauguration Day 2021 — and past votes that sit uneasily with the current Democratic base on everything from the Iraq War to a 1994 crime bill.
But his skills as retail politician, his experience and the loyal service he rendered for eight years to President Obama would all stand in his favor.
Previous ranking: 3
3. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
Sanders entered the race early Tuesday, following weekend reports that he had recorded a video announcing his candidacy.
Sanders will clearly be a top-flight contender. Polls generally put him second, behind Biden.
He could end up being a victim of his own relative success in one sense, however. His stronger than expected challenge to eventual Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 showed there was an appetite in the party for more left-wing policies. Now, several other declared or likely candidates are running on progressive platforms that could blunt Sanders’s formerly unique appeal.
He has other problems as well, including the enmity he earned among Clinton supporters in 2016.
In January, he apologized to women who say they were harassed or mistreated by male staff during his 2016 campaign.
His decision to give his own rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union speech aggravated some activists who believed he was taking the spotlight from the Democrats’ official speaker of the night, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Age is an issue for Sanders, too. He is 77.
Previous ranking: 2
4. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas)
Will he or won’t he?
That’s the key question around O’Rourke, who ignited enormous Democratic enthusiasm in his ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last year.
O’Rourke’s intentions are far from clear. He embarked on a road trip in January, earning some mockery from detractors for his introspective musings in an online diary.
On the other hand, when Trump held a rally in O’Rourke’s home base of El Paso recently, the former Texas congressman headlined his own event nearby, which drew a crowd several thousand strong.
The longer O’Rourke stays out of the race, the greater the danger that someone like Harris could really catch fire. On the other hand, his prodigious fundraising ability — he raised an eye-popping $38 million in 2018’s third quarter during his Senate bid — ensures he would be a serious candidate.
It’s been a largely uninspiring start to the campaign for Warren, who had been considered one of the leading candidates in the early running.
Part of the problem is the issue that won’t quit — her prior self-identification as a Native American and her decision last year to take a DNA test to prove that she was telling the truth.
The test affirmed that she had a Native American ancestor six to 10 generations ago. But even some Democrats believe the whole episode played into the hands of Trump, who continues to deride Warren, whom he has long mocked as “Pocahontas.”
Warren is betting that there is a strong electoral market for someone who can combine her professorial in-depth knowledge, especially of financial regulation, with a style that savors confrontation with Trump.
But her initial poll ratings are average at best, fueling suspicions that she is being overtaken by other figures, particularly Harris, who may have a stronger personal magnetism.
Booker is one of the most recent entrants into the race — he announced on Feb. 1.
The New Jersey senator divides opinion, especially inside the Beltway. To his supporters, he is a likable, energetic candidate who speaks passionately and has the capacity to fire up young and nonwhite voters with particular vigor.
His detractors, however, assail him as an inauthentic lightweight, who has long been more interested in promoting himself than anything else. That critique stretches from his time as the Twitter-friendly mayor of Newark to his self-proclaimed “Spartacus moment” during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Booker will likely need to show he can get traction fairly soon, before the expected arrival of other big stars on the stage — including Biden — threatens to push him toward the margins of the race.
Klobuchar certainly had an eye-catching campaign launch — she gave a speech declaring her candidacy in the midst of a heavy snowstorm.
The visuals were memorable and underlined Klobuchar’s core message that she is a down-to-earth contender from the heartlands.
But that in itself won’t assuage the doubts about Klobuchar’s ultimate chances of success: Do Democrats really want someone who leans toward centrism as their standard-bearer against Trump?
Recent allegations that she mistreated staff have further complicated Klobuchar’s chances.
Some of the milder accusations against her carry more than a whiff of sexism, but it is harder to make that case when it comes to the most dramatic allegations, including one instance where she purportedly threw a binder that struck a staff member.
Brown has long been a political curiosity: a progressive Democrat who continues to win reelection in the increasingly red state of Ohio by wide margins.
Brown has been building up some momentum with a tour of early-voting states. But it is not clear he is getting into the race, and the likely entrance of Biden — who has a similar blue-collar appeal — would greatly complicate the Ohioan’s possible path to the nomination.
Gillibrand launched her campaign in mid-January with an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on CBS. Sadly for the New York senator, that’s the most memorable thing she has done so far.
Gillibrand always faced an uphill climb toward the nomination. There is nothing to suggest the gradient has become any less steep.
Previous ranking: 10
10. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Bloomberg continues to toy with a bid, but it is enormously difficult to see a credible route for the former New York City mayor, despite his vast fortune.
Bloomberg’s business-friendly centrism seems a poor fit for today’s Democratic Party, and he is far from a natural politician on the stump, which would hinder him in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
The DSA has its roots in the Socialist Party of America (SPA), whose most prominent leaders included Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington.[2] In 1973, Harrington, the leader of a minority faction that had opposed the SPA’s rightward shift and transformation into the Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) during the party’s 1972 national convention, formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). The other faction that split following that convention was the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA), which remains an independent democratic socialist political party. The DSOC, in Harrington’s words “the remnant of a remnant”, soon became the largest democratic socialist group in the United States. In 1982, it merged with the New American Movement (NAM), a coalition of intellectuals with roots in the New Left movements of the 1960s and former members of socialist and communist parties of the Old Left, to form the DSA.[3]
Initially, the organization consisted of approximately 5,000 ex-DSOC members and 1,000 ex-NAM members. Upon the founding of the DSA, Harrington and the socialist feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich were elected as co-chairs of the organization. The DSA does not run candidates on its own ballot line in elections, but instead “fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people”. These reforms include decreasing the influence of money in politics, empowering ordinary people in workplaces and within the economy and restructuring gender and cultural relationships to be more equitable.[4] The organization has at times endorsed Democratic electoral candidates—notably Walter Mondale, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders—and the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.[citation needed]
The DSA is not only by far the largest socialist organization in the United States in the 21st century, it is also the largest socialist organization in the United States in over a century.[5][6] By the end of 2017, membership in the organization had risen to 32,000, primarily because of the influx of youth in reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump. As of September 2, 2018, membership stood at 50,000[7] and the number of local chapters had increased from 40 to 181.[8] As of December 2017, the median age of its membership was 33, compared to 68 in 2013.[9] In the 2017 election, fifteen candidates who were members of the DSA were elected to office in thirteen states, most notably Lee Carter in the Virginia House of Delegates, adding to the twenty members already holding elected office nationwide.[10] In November 2018, two DSA members, namely Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, were elected to the House of Representatives while eleven were elected to state legislatures.[11]
A member of the Socialist International (SI) from its founding in 1982, the DSA voted to leave the SI in August 2017 over its acceptance of what the DSA perceived as neoliberal economic policies.[12]
Formed in 1982 after a merger between the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM),[13][14] the DSA is a 501(c)(4)nonprofit organization.[15] At the time of the merger of these two organizations, the DSA was said to consist of approximately 5,000 former members of the DSOC, along with 1,000 from the NAM.[16] The combined Old Left and New Left heritage of the DSA was created from this merger. The DSOC was founded in 1973 from a minority anti-Vietnam War caucus in the Socialist Party of America (SPA)—which had been renamed Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) while the NAM was created as a successor organization to the disintegrated Students for a Democratic Society. At its start, the DSOC had 840 members, of whom 2% had served on its national board—approximately 200 of whom previously held membership in the SDUSA or its predecessors (the Socialist Party–Social Democratic Federation, formerly part of the SPA) in 1973, when the SDUSA stated its membership at 1,800 according to a 1973 profile of Harrington.[17]
Earlier iteration of the DSA logo
The red rose is part of the official logo of the DSA,[18] having traditionally been a symbol of socialism[19] since the 1886 Haymarket Affair and the resulting May Day marches from the 19th century to the current day.[20] It was drawn from the logo of the DSOC, its precursor organization, and previously of the Socialist International, which shows a stylized fist clenching a red rose, the fist being substituted with a bi-racial handshake pertaining to the DSA’s staunch anti-racism.[21][22] The fist and rose logo had been originally designed by Didier Motchane and others for the new French Socialist Party founded in 1971[23] and was later shared by socialist and labor political organizations worldwide.
In electoral politics, the DSA was very strongly associated with Michael Harrington‘s position that “the left wing of realism is found today in the Democratic Party”. In its early years, the DSA opposed Republican presidential candidates by giving critical support to Democratic Party nominees like Walter Mondale in 1984.[24] In 1988, the DSA enthusiastically supported Jesse Jackson‘s second presidential campaign.[25] Since 1995, the DSA’s position on American electoral politics has been that “democratic socialists reject an either-or approach to electoral coalition building, focused solely on a new party or on realignment within the Democratic Party”.[26] During the 1990s, the DSA gave the Clinton administration an overall rating of C-, “less than satisfactory”.[27]
The DSA’s elected leadership has often seen working within the Democratic Party as necessary rather than forming or support third parties. That said, the DSA is very critical of the corporate-funded Democratic Party leadership.[28] The organization has stated:[29]
Much of progressive, independent political action will continue to occur in Democratic Party primaries in support of candidates who represent a broad progressive coalition. In such instances, democratic socialists will support coalitional campaigns based on labor, women, people of color and other potentially anti-corporate elements.
Electoral tactics are only a means for democratic socialists; the building of a powerful anti-corporate coalition is the end.
While we have no illusions about how a Kerry administration would govern — absent mass pressure from below — and are not impressed with his delayed criticism of the war and his earlier commitments in favor of ‘free trade,’ we also realize that the Bush administration is as reactionary as Reagan’s. A Kerry defeat would be taken not as a defeat of the US political center, which Kerry represents, but of the mainstream Left. As a result, it would embolden the Right and demoralize the Left (as well as trade unionists and people of color) as much as Reagan‘s 1984 defeat of Mondale did. On the other hand, a Kerry victory will let us press onward, with progressives aggressively pressuring an administration that owed its victory to democratic mobilization from below.
The only resolution on upcoming elections at the DSA’s 2005 convention focused on Bernie Sanders‘s independent campaign for the Senate in Vermont.[32] The organization’s 2007 convention in Atlanta featured record-breaking attendance and more participation by the organization’s youth wing. Sanders gave the keynote address.[33]
In 2008, the DSA critically supported Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in his race against Republican candidate John McCain. In an article written in the March 24 edition of The Nation, senior DSA strategists Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr., along with Tom Hayden and Danny Glover, announced the formation of Progressives for Obama.[34] In the article, the four issued a joint statement arguing that Obama was the most progressive viable Democratic presidential candidate since Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.[34]
Following Obama’s election, many on the political right[35] began to allege that his administration’s policies were “socialistic”, a claim rejected by the DSA and the Obama administration alike. The widespread use of the word “socialism” as a political epithet against the Obama administration by its opponents caused National Director Frank Llewellyn to declare that “over the past 12 months, the Democratic Socialists of America has received more media attention than it has over the past 12 years”.[36]
For the 2016 presidential election, the DSA endorsed Sanders as the favored presidential candidate. While making it clear that Sanders’ New Deal-inspired program did not fulfill the socialist aim of establishing social ownership of the economy, the DSA considered his campaign as a positive development in the context of contemporary American politics.[37] The DSA noted the importance of his candidacy as a self-identified democratic socialist candidate as well as “a lifelong champion of the public programs and democratic rights that empower working class people”.[38] The DSA managed the #WeNeedBernie campaign, an internally focused initiative directed towards mobilizing DSA supporters for Sanders.[38] After Sanders’ defeat in the 2016 Democratic primaries, the DSA called for the defeat of Donald Trump, but it did not officially endorse Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.[39]
On June 26, DSA member and endorsee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary against incumbent Representative Joseph Crowley in New York’s 14th congressional district in a surprise upset, virtually guaranteeing her the congressional seat in the heavily Democratic district which spans parts of the Bronx and Queens.[53][54] However, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dismissed the win as “not to be viewed as something that stands for anything else”[55] and argued that it only represented change in one progressive district.[56] Conversely, head of the Democratic National CommitteeTom Perez proclaimed her to be “the future of our party”[57] whereas the TrotskyistInternational Committee of the Fourth International critiqued her and the DSA as being a “left” cover for the “right-wing Democratic Party”, particularly in regard to foreign policy.[58] Six weeks after Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory, DSA member and endorsee Rashida Tlaib won the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 13th congressional district.[59] Both Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib went on to win their respective general elections to become members of Congress. Ultimately, about a dozen members (or non-members who were endorsed) won office in their state legislatures.[60] In the aggregate, the DSA had backed 40 winning candidates at the state, county and municipal levels.[11][61]
Ocasio-Cortez’s victory and the subsequent publicity for the DSA led to more than 1,000 new members joining the organization the next day, approximately 35 times the daily average[62] and their largest ever one-day increase in membership.[63] These signups helped boost the organization to 42,000 members nationally in June 2018.[64] That number increased to 50,000 by September 1, 2018.[65]
Membership in the DSA can be obtained through the payment of annual dues, but no one is turned away for lack of funds.[66] Every member receives a paid subscription to the organization’s quarterly newsletter, Democratic Left.[67] The organization also offers “family memberships” at the rate of $80 which includes only one subscription to Democratic Left[68] and sells subscriptions to the publication to non-members for $10 per year.[69]
In the early 1980s, the estimated membership of the DSOC was 5,000, but after its merger with the NAM[70] the membership of the organization grew to an estimated 7,000 in 1987.[71] In 2002, Fox News said there were 8,000 members in the DSA[72] and three years later the organization announced on its website that its membership had increased by some 13% since July 2003 as the result of a direct mail campaign.[73]
The DSA does not release annual membership numbers, nor do officials of the organization state them with precision in the press. However, it does publish annually its sworn declaration of “Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation” in its official magazine so as to qualify for subsidized postage rates from the United States Postal Service. As this publication is sent out to paid members, with few copies sold through other channels, this provides an excellent proxy for paid membership. The total paid distribution numbers of Democratic Left over recent years are as follows:
Two founding Idahoan DSA members at a big tent event in late September 2018
Following the election of Donald Trump as President, the DSA experienced a rapid expansion of its paid membership. In 2017, the organization passed a resolution calling for the national office to provide the group’s paid members with a copy of a financial report in non-convention years. A first such report covering the whole of 2017 and the first half of 2018 was published in August 2018.[74]
According to this August 2018 report, DSA membership was “consistently about 6,000” for the 2011 to 2015 period[74] before experiencing the following growth pattern:
This rise comes mainly from supporters of Bernie Sanders (the Senator from Vermont who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 as a self-described “democratic socialist”) as well as a growth in interest in left-wing politics amongst American youth, spurred on by social media organizing on Twitter,[19] publications such as The Baffler and Jacobin and the popular podcast Chapo Trap House.[75] Independent of the Sanders effect, polling indicates that Americans under age thirty have been warming up to the idea of socialism since the Obama administration and the Occupy movement.[76][77]
Given its burgeoning membership, the DSA faces several tactical and strategic issues, such as its relationship to the Democratic Party (particularly electoral politics vis-à-vis base building),[44] the administrative and ideological role of the national leadership in a bottom-up, deeply democratic organization, and its own demographic representation in an increasingly diverse country.[78][79]
As a big tent on the left with an emphasis on inclusivity,[80] the DSA is not politically monolithic and its decisions are often made by topic-specific committees.[81] Furthermore, chapters may organize themselves as horizontally or vertically as they see fit,[82] a matter of some contention.[83] While DSA chapters may choose to follow national initiatives, they sometimes focus on local, on-the-ground concerns such as brake light clinics to reduce interactions with the police,[84]disaster relief[85] or Medicaid expansion.[86] In late March 2018, for example, as a matter of policy the Denver Democratic Party adopted an anti-capitalist plank thanks to fifteen DSA members who had been elected at their caucus earlier that month. Issues ranging from municipal Wi-Fi to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctionsmovement against Israel had been discussed, but ultimately “something along the lines of the original Clause IV of the British Labour Party’s constitution, which explicitly advocated for common ownership of the means of production” was decided upon.[87]
Structure
The DSA is organized at the local level and works with labor unions, community organizations and campus activists on issues of common interest. Nationwide campaigns are coordinated by the organization’s national office in New York City. As of 2017, the DSA website listed 85 local chapters, two statewide chapters, 29 Young Democratic Socialist chapters and 63 organizing committees.[88] As of April 2018, 181 chapters were extant.[8]
Governance of the DSA is by the group’s National Political Committee (NPC), which since 2001 has been a 16-person body.[89] The DSA’s constitution states that at least eight of the NPC’s members shall be women and at least four members of “racial or national” minority groups.[90] A 17th vote is cast by the representative of the DSA’s youth affiliate who elect one male and one female delegate who split the vote. The NPC meets four times a year.[91]
The NPC elects an inner committee of six, including five of its own members and one representative of the youth section, called the Steering Committee. At least two of these are constitutionally required to be women and at least one a “person of color”, with the National Director and the Youth Section Organizer also participating as ex officio members. This Steering Committee meets bimonthly, either in person or by conference call.[92] The DSA has a Religion and Socialism Commission in which Cornel West has played a leading role. John Cort was a founding editor of the Commission’s magazine Religious Socialism.
The DSA publishes Democratic Left, a quarterly newsletter of news and analysis. This publication continues in an uninterrupted run from the original Newsletter of the Democratic Left published by the DSOC (the DSA forerunner) since its establishment in 1973. In 2008, DSA members active in the American labor movement founded Talking Union, a blog that focuses on labor politics, working class struggles and strategies.[93]
The Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) is the official student section of the DSA. The YDSA chapters and members are encouraged to pursue and promote a democratic socialist political education and participate in social justice activism, often taking part in anti-war, labor and student-issue marches and rallies. The YDSA publishes a newsletter called The Red Letter[94] and until recently also a blog titled The Activist.[95] The organization’s national activities revolve around supporting the DSA campaigns and initiatives and organizing various student conferences, usually held in New York City.
National conferences have taken place in February 2016 in Brooklyn[96] and August 2015 in Atlanta.[97]
The highest decision-making authority of the organization is the organization’s national conventions which are held biennially. These gatherings of the organization are as follows:
Put it this way. Marx was a democrat with a small “d”. The Democratic Socialists envision a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning […] and racial equality. I share an immediate program with liberals in this country because the best liberalism leads toward socialism. […] I want to be on the left wing of the possible.
Harrington made it clear that even if the traditional Marxist vision of a marketless, stateless society was not possible, he did not understand why this needed to “result in the social consequence of some people eating while others starve”.[100]
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the DSA voiced opposition to that nation’s bureaucratically managed economy and control over its satellite states.[101] The DSA welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev‘s reforms in the Soviet Union. Sociologist Bogdan Denitch wrote in the DSA’s Democratic Left (quoted in 1989):[102]
The aim of democrats and socialists should be […] to help the chances of successful reform in the Soviet bloc. […] While supporting liberalization and economic reforms from above, socialists should be particularly active in contacting and encouraging the tender shoots of democracy from below.
Harrington voiced admiration for German Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt‘s Ostpolitik, which sought to reduce antagonism between Western Europe and Soviet states.[103] As co-chairman of the DSA, Michael Harrington wrote:
[Willy Brandt] launched his famous ostpolitik (Eastern policy), and moved toward detente with the Soviets and Eastern Europeans–a strategy that was to win him the Nobel Peace Prize. Disaster came in 1974. There was a spy scandal–a member of Brandt’s inner circle turned out to be an East German agent–and the chancellor resigned his office.[104]
Social democracy and welfare
One older leaflet detailing the group’s official ideas, “What is Democratic Socialism? Questions and Answers from the Democratic Socialists of America”, states that “no country has fully instituted democratic socialism”. Nonetheless, according to the DSA there are lessons to be learned from “the comprehensive welfare state maintained by the Swedes, from Canada’s national healthcare system, France’s nationwide childcare program, and Nicaragua’s literacy programs“.[105] The “tremendous prosperity and relative economic equality” established by the social democratic parties of the countries of Scandinavia and parts of Western Europe are lauded.[105]
Policy and ideology
The DSA’s ideas are somewhat influenced by those of its first chairman Michael Harrington, Chairman of the League for Industrial Democracy (1964) and member of the National Executive Board of the Socialist Party of America (1960–1968). Opposed to capitalism and then-existing versions of socialism alike as cruel and anti-libertarian social systems, Harrington advocated working for a realignment of the Democratic Party, transforming it from an amorphous amalgam of conservative, centrist and left-liberal politicians into something like a Western European social democratic party, within which the DSA would be the anti-capitalist left-wing. The DSA Constitution outlines the basic notion behind its ideology as follows:[106]
We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability status, age, religion, and national origin, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships. We are socialists because we are developing a concrete strategy for achieving that vision, for building a majority movement that will make democratic socialism a reality in America. We believe that such a strategy must acknowledge the class structure of American society and that this class structure means that there is a basic conflict of interest between those sectors with enormous economic power and the vast majority of the population.
The DSA regards the end of capitalism and the realization of socialism as a gradual long-term goal, therefore the organization focuses its immediate political energies on reforms within capitalism that empower working people while decreasing the power of corporations:[114]
As we are unlikely to see an immediate end to capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people.
Socialism
On its website page “What is Democratic Socialism? Q & A”, the DSA characterizes its vision of socialism as an economic system based on maximum decentralization that can be supportive of a range of models for social ownership, including publicly owned enterprisesand worker-owned cooperatives. The DSA rejects centralized economic planning in favor of a combination of democratic planning and market mechanisms:[115]
Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives. Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods.
Because the DSA does not believe capitalism and private corporations can be immediately replaced with socialism, it is favorable to using government regulations and organized labor to make private businesses more accountable to the public interest:[116]
In the short term we can’t eliminate private corporations, but we can bring them under greater democratic control. The government could use regulations and tax incentives to encourage companies to act in the public interest and outlaw destructive activities such as exporting jobs to low-wage countries and polluting our environment. Public pressure can also have a critical role to play in the struggle to hold corporations accountable. Most of all, socialists look to unions to make private business more accountable.
Internationalism
The DSA uses both its former and current logo on its stationery in sending out its membership cards, with the latter on its letterhead being illustrated below
At the 2017 DSA Convention, the group announced its withdrawal from the Socialist International (SI). The resolution passed states that the DSA will “[build] direct relationships with socialist and left parties and social movements around the world that we can learn from and which share our values. […] Our affiliation with the Socialist International hinders our ability to develop stronger relationships with parties and social movements that share our values and which, in many cases, are bitterly opposed to their country’s SI affiliate(s)”.[117][118] It also passed a resolution which solidified the DSA’s solidarity with the cause of the Palestinian people and with the movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: “Democratic Socialists of America condemns all efforts to deny the right of Palestinians in the United States and their allies to free speech, assembly, and academic freedom”.[117] The resolution further condemned Israeli actions, comparing those actions to apartheid.[118]
The DSA has shown its solidarity with Ahed Tamimi. The organization called for immediate release from detention. The statement also reiterated the DSA’s support for the liberation of the Palestinian people.[119]
In 2016, the DSA issued a statement of solidarity with Venezuela. The statement called the sanctions placed on Venezuela by the Obama administration unjust and illegal. It called for the United States to cease its interference in Venezuelan affairs, saying: “We call on the President and Congress to reverse these actions and stop seeking to undermine the Venezuelan people and their legitimate, democratically elected government”.[120]
The DSA opposes United States intervention in the Syrian Civil War. A statement issued in April 2017 called the intervention by the Trump administration both a violation of domestic and international law. In the same statement, the DSA called for protests of Trump’s actions and for the lobbying of Congress to halt any further intervention.[121]
The DSA connects this fight with fascist groups to its broader struggle against capitalism, saying on its website: “We believe that the terror unleashed on our comrades can be defeated. We also believe that the wider system of racist oppression can be defeated, but only with the ending of the capitalist system which birthed it”.[123] The organization believes in defending communities from neofascist violence and building a multi-racial working class movement.[124] This involves deplatformingreactionary and racist groups and events, believing that a united front of left-wing organizations need to confront these forces wherever they appear.[125]
Labor movement and worker’s rights
The DSA has long been a supporter and defender of the labor movement in the United States and has also argued for the increase of international worker solidarity.[126] The DSA believes in a livable minimum wage for all workers, but it notes that this fight only goes so far and is only the first step in building a more humane economic system: “Ultimately the minimum wage only works for those lucky enough to find a job – even a low paying one – and it doesn’t really “work” for them, because it doesn’t come with health benefits, adequate schools, or enough money to set aside for retirement”.[127] The DSA members have been supporters and active participants in fights to increase the minimum wage across the country, including the Fight for $15 protests,[128][129] stating:
As socialists we believe there is no strong socialist movement without a militant and powerful labor movement.
The DSA opposes right to work laws, which are seen as an attack on the rights of workers and the historic advances or the labor movement.[131] It is argued that the enactment of these laws reduces the efficacy of collective bargaining agreements, putting workers at a disadvantage.[131] In a statement released in 2014, the organization said: “Such “right to work” laws consciously aim to weaken union strength; they are the main reason why the “right to work” is, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “the right to work for less”.[131]
The DSA argues that financial elites have consciously fought to destroy union power in an effort to solidify the hegemony of markets and corporate power.[126] The organization believes that for an equitable and sustainable economic system that the production of wealth should be under the democratic control of those who produce it.[126] The DSA also emphasizes the role played by immigrants, women, disabled workers, LGBTQIA+ and workers of color in the broader labor movement, believing that all barriers between working people must be broken in order to help create and maintain a broad and unified labor movement.[130]
LGBT rights
The DSA is committed to the rights of the LGBT community, connecting anti-gay prejudice to capitalist exploitation. This includes pushes for equal rights and protections for all those who identify as LGBTQIA+ as well as rights to housing, jobs, education, public accommodations and healthcare. The DSA recognizes that those who are most discriminated against based on identity are disproportionately women and people of color. The organization also seeks to ensure public schools are safe places for LGBTQIA+ students and that students should have total access to facilities which reflect their gender. The DSA supports protection of same-sex marriages, but it “views marriage as only a first step in recognizing the diversity of human relationships”.[132]
Socialist feminism
The DSA aligns itself with the socialist-feminist movement. The organization holds that capitalism is built on white supremacy as well as male supremacy. The DSA maintains that reproductive rights are central to the feminist movement. Connecting democratic socialism and socialist feminism, the DSA says “that birth control and safe abortion should be provided as part of a comprehensive single-payer healthcare program”. Believing that electoral politics can only take socialist feminism so far, the organization also says that the emphasis must be on community based grass roots movements. The DSA further says that socialist feminism must include the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.[133]
The DSA is opposed to Zionism and the current form of the State of Israel. Members view them as imperialism and a form of ethnostate.[134][135] The DSA formerly supported Israel throughout much of its history, including socialist and progressive individuals and movements inside the state. As late as 2012, one former DSA leader described the group as “the place to go on the left if you were a socialist and you were pro-Israel”.[135]Alternet noted that this has been a dividing issue, with older members “tried to reconcile socialism with Zionism” while younger members recognizes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as a “time-tested means of nonviolent protest” and “the most powerful force to combat Israeli apartheid in the 21st century”.[134] On August 5, 2017, members of the organization voted almost unanimously to pass a motion to formally endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.[134][135] Jewish Solidarity Caucus, a subgroup formed by Jewish DSA members prior to the motion, stated in their founding declaration that “Zionism cannot vanquish antisemitism” and “as socialists we detest all exclusivist nationalisms”.[135]
Story 2: Bernie Sanders Running Again For President — Transforming America Into A Socialist State — Bernie Sanders/Kamala Harris 2020 Presidential Ticket? — No Sale — Videos —
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Bernie Sanders enters 2020 presidential race: ‘Complete the revolution’
The Vermont senator, 77, enters a very different Democratic primary contest than the one he faced in 2016 versus Hillary Clinton.
/ Updated
By Alex Seitz-Wald
WASHINGTON — Bernie Sanders is campaigning for president again, officially entering the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential field on Tuesday with a vow to finish what he started in his last race for the White House.
“Together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution. Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for,” Sanders said in an email to supporters and a video announcing his candidacy.
The 77-year-old independent senator from Vermont, who started his political career as a gadfly perennial candidate, remains a pacesetter of progressive politics in America, helping to craft a liberal agenda that includes everything from Medicare for All to a $15 minimum wage to free college tuition.
He broke the news confirming another presidential bid early Tuesday on Vermont Public Radio, saying in an interview that he promises to “take the values that all of us in Vermont are proud of — a belief in justice, in community, in grassroots politics, in town meetings — that’s what I’m going to carry all over this country.”
Early polls show him far ahead of the rest of the pack and trailing only former Vice President Joe Biden in the nascent 2020 field.
“Three years ago, during our 2016 campaign, when we brought forth our progressive agenda we were told that our ideas were ‘radical,’ and ‘extreme,'” Sanders said in the email. “These policies and more are now supported by a majority of Americans.”
But with greater expectations comes less room for error, and given the size of the still-growing 2020 field, potentially less room to grow.
Sanders will come under more scrutiny than ever before from both the press and political rivals, including questions about sexual harassment allegations against 2016 campaign staffers that have roiled his campaign-in-waiting in recent months.
And instead of being the main alternative to a prohibitive front-runner, as he was against Hillary Clinton, Sanders now faces stiff competition from a wide array of candidates for his core supporters of progressives and young people.
Even some of Sanders’ former staffers have already signed on with other candidates, though many have remained loyal.
And some Democrats remain bitter about 2016, accusing Sanders and his followers of damaging Clinton in ways that contributed to her defeat to Donald Trump.
But at the same time, Sanders will be much less lonely in the Democratic Party of 2019 than the one that existed in 2015 when he entered the presidential race.
A small but vocal political ecosystem sympathetic to Sanders has sprung up since his first run, including political groups, left-leaning media organizations, such as the Intercept, and elected officials, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Meanwhile, the so-called establishment of the party that Sanders rails against is now fractured among several competing candidates.
Thanks in large part to pressure from him, the Democratic National Committee has greatly diminished the power of superdelegates in the nominating process, after they almost uniformly opposed Sanders in 2016.
And in a crowded field, a candidate who can hang onto a loyal base of supporters can win the nomination, even without a majority, as Trump proved in the GOP primary.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany labeled Sanders’ past policy proposals as socialism in a statement Tuesday.
“Bernie Sanders has already won the debate in the Democrat primary, because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism,” McEnany said. “But the American people will reject an agenda of sky-high tax rates, government-run health care and coddling dictators like those in Venezuela.”
Sanders 2020 will likely focus more on racial and gender inequality than did Sanders 2016, as he suggested in his announcement email and on Vermont Public Radio.
“I think the current occupant of the White House is an embarrassment to our country,” he said. “I think he is a pathological liar. … I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”
Jeff Weaver has said he will not return as campaign manager, though he is expected to play a different senior role, to make way for a more diverse team of senior aides.
And Sanders is also expected to focus more on his personal history, something he chafed at doing last time around, highlighting his Brooklyn roots and activism in the Civil Rights Movement as a student at the University of Chicago.
Sanders became interested in politics at an early age: “A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.”[a][20][21][22] In the 1940s, many of Sanders’ relatives in German-occupied Poland were killed in the Holocaust, including Bernie’s uncle Abraham Schnützer, who was killed in 1942.[9][15][23][24][25]
Sanders lived on East 26th Street in Midwood, Brooklyn.[26] He attended elementary school at P.S. 197 in Brooklyn, where he won a borough championship on the basketball team.[27][28] He attended Hebrew school in the afternoons, and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954.[24] Sanders’s older brother, Larry, said that during their childhood, the family never lacked for food or clothing, but major purchases, “like curtains or a rug,” were difficult to afford.[29]
Sanders attended James Madison High School, also in Brooklyn, where he was captain of the track team and took third place in the New York City indoor one-mile race.[27] In high school, Sanders lost his first election, finishing last out of three candidates for the student body presidency. Not long after his high school graduation, his mother died at the age of 46;[15][24] his father died a few years later on August 4, 1962, at the age of 57.[11]
Sanders studied at Brooklyn College for a year in 1959–60[30] before transferring to the University of Chicago and graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1964.[30] He has described himself as a mediocre college student because the classroom was “boring and irrelevant,” while the community provided his most significant learning.[31]
While at the University of Chicago, Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League (the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America),[32] and was active in the Civil Rights Movement as a student for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[23][33] Under Sanders’s chairmanship, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of SNCC.[34] In January 1962, Sanders went to a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle‘s segregated campus housing policy. “We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments,” Sanders said at the protest. Sanders and 32 other students then entered the building and camped outside the president’s office.[35][36] After weeks of sit-ins, Beadle and the university formed a commission to investigate discrimination.[37]Joan Mahoney, a member of the University of Chicago CORE chapter at the time and a fellow participant in the sit-ins, described Sanders in a 2016 interview as “…a swell guy, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but he wasn’t terribly charismatic. One of his strengths, though, was his ability to work with a wide group of people, even those he didn’t agree with”.[38] Sanders once spent a day putting up fliers protesting against police brutality, only to eventually notice that a Chicago police car was shadowing him and taking them all down.[39]
After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he initially worked at a variety of jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter.[31] In 1968, Sanders moved to Vermont because he had been “captivated by rural life.” After his arrival there he worked as a carpenter,[32] filmmaker, and writer[47] who created and sold “radical film strips” and other educational materials to schools.[48] He also wrote several articles for the alternative publication The Vermont Freeman.[49]
Liberty Union campaigns
Sanders began his electoral political career in 1971 as a member of the Liberty Union Party, which originated in the anti-war movement and the People’s Party. He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976 and as a candidate for U.S. senator in 1972 and 1974.[50] In the 1974 senatorial race, Sanders finished third (5,901 votes; 4%), behind 33-year-old Chittenden County State’s Attorney Patrick Leahy (D, VI; 70,629 votes; 49%) and two-term incumbent U.S. Representative Dick Mallary (R; 66,223 votes; 46%).[51][52]
The 1976 campaign proved to be the zenith of Liberty Union’s influence, with Sanders collecting 11,000 votes for governor and the party. This forced the races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state to be decided by the state legislature when its vote total prevented either the Republican or Democratic candidates for those offices from garnering a majority of votes.[53] The campaign drained the finances and energy of the Liberty Union, however, and in October 1977, less than a year after the conclusion of the 1976 campaign, Sanders and the Liberty Union candidate for attorney general, Nancy Kaufman, announced their retirement from the party.[53]
Following his resignation from the Liberty Union Party in 1977, Sanders worked as a writer and the director of the nonprofit American People’s Historical Society (APHS).[54] While with the APHS, he made a 30-minute documentary about American Socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.[32][55]
In 1980, Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington, Vermont (pop. 38,000), at the suggestion of his close friend and political confidante Richard Sugarman, a professor of religion at the University of Vermont. He was mayor for eight years, from April 6, 1981, to April 4, 1989.[56]
Campaigns
The 39-year-old Sanders ran against incumbent Democratic mayor Gordon “Gordie” Paquette, a five-term mayor who had served as a member of the Burlington City Council for 13 years before that, building extensive community ties and a willingness to cooperate with Republican leaders in controlling appointments to various commissions. Republicans had found Paquette so unobjectionable that they failed to field a candidate in the March 1981 race against him, leaving Sanders as his principal opponent. Sanders’s effort was further aided by the decision of the candidate of the Citizens Party, Greg Guma, to exit the race so as not to split the progressive vote. Two other candidates in the race, independents Richard Bove and Joe McGrath, proved to be essentially non-factors in the campaign, with the battle coming down to Paquette and Sanders.[53]
Sanders castigated the pro-development incumbent as an ally of prominent shopping center developer Antonio Pomerleau, while Paquette warned of ruin for Burlington if Sanders was elected. The Sanders campaign was bolstered by a wave of optimistic volunteers as well as by a series of endorsements from university professors, social welfare agencies, and the police union. The final result came as a shock to the local political establishment, with the maverick Sanders winning by just 10 votes.[53]
Sanders was reelected three times, defeating both Democratic and Republican candidates. He received 53% of the vote in 1983 and 55% in 1985.[57] In his final run for mayor in 1987, Sanders defeated Paul Lafayette, a Democrat endorsed by both major parties.[58] In 1986, Sanders unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Governor Madeleine Kunin (D) in her run for reelection. Running as an independent, Sanders finished third with 14% of the vote. Kunin won with 47%, followed by Lt. Governor Peter P. Smith (R) with 38%.
During his mayoralty, Sanders called himself a socialist and was so described in the press.[60][61] During his first term, his supporters, including the first Citizens Party City Councilor Terry Bouricius, formed the Progressive Coalition, the forerunner of the Vermont Progressive Party.[62] The Progressives never held more than six seats on the 13-member city council, but they had enough to keep the council from overriding Sanders’s vetoes. Under Sanders, Burlington became the first city in the country to fund community-trust housing.[63]
During the 1980s, Sanders was a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.[64] In 1985, Burlington City Hall hosted a foreign policy speech by Noam Chomsky. In his introduction, Sanders praised Chomsky as “a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America” and said he was “delighted to welcome a person who I think we’re all very proud of.”[65][66]
Sanders’s administration balanced the city budget and drew a minor league baseball team, the Vermont Reds, then the Double-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, to Burlington.[15] Under his leadership, Burlington sued the local television cable franchise, winning reduced rates for customers.[15]
As mayor, Sanders led extensive downtown revitalization projects. One of his primary achievements was the improvement of Burlington’s Lake Champlain waterfront.[15] In 1981, Sanders campaigned against the unpopular plans by Burlington developer Tony Pomerleau to convert the then-industrial[67] waterfront property owned by the Central Vermont Railway into expensive condominiums, hotels, and offices.[68] Sanders ran under the slogan “Burlington is not for sale” and successfully supported a plan that redeveloped the waterfront area into a mixed-use district featuring housing, parks, and public space.[68] Today, the waterfront area includes many parks and miles of public beach and bike paths, a boathouse, and a science center.[68]
In 1987, U.S. News & World Report ranked Sanders as one of America’s best mayors.[73] As of 2013, Burlington was regarded as one of the most livable cities in the nation.[74][75]
Sanders’s 1990 victory made him the first independent candidate to be elected to Congress since Frazier Reams in 1950. It was noted by The Washington Post and others as the first election of a socialist to the United States House of Representatives in decades.[76][77] Sanders served in the House from 1991 until he became a senator in 2007.
Elections
In 1988, incumbent Republican Congressman Jim Jeffords decided to run for the U.S. Senate, vacating the House seat representing Vermont’s at-large congressional district. Former Lieutenant GovernorPeter P. Smith (R) won the House election with a plurality, securing 41% of the vote. Sanders, who ran as an independent, placed second with 38% of the vote, while Democratic State Representative Paul N. Poirier placed third with 19% of the vote.[78] Two years later, Sanders ran for the seat again and defeated the incumbent Smith by a margin of 56% to 39%.[79]
Sanders was the first independent elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Frazier Reams‘s election to represent Ohio 40 years earlier.[77] He served as a representative for 16 years, winning reelection by large margins except during the 1994 Republican Revolution, when he won by 3%, with 50% of the vote.[80]
Legislation
Sanders meeting with students at Milton High School in Milton, Vermont, 2004
During his first year in the House, Sanders often alienated allies and colleagues with his criticism of both political parties as working primarily on behalf of the wealthy. In 1991, Sanders co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of mostly liberal Democrats that Sanders chaired for its first eight years,[15] while still refusing to join the Democratic Party or caucus.[81]
Banking reform
In 1999, Sanders voted and advocated against rolling back the Glass–Steagall Legislation provisions that kept investment banks and commercial banks separate entities.[82] He was a vocal critic of Federal Reserve ChairAlan Greenspan; in June 2003, during a question-and-answer discussion with the then-Chairman, Sanders told him that he was concerned that Greenspan was “way out of touch” and “that you see your major function in your position as the need to represent the wealthy and large corporations”.[83][84] In October 2008, after Sanders had been elected to the Senate, Greenspan admitted to Congress that his economic ideology regarding risky mortgage loans was flawed.[85][86]
Gun-related
In 1993, Sanders voted against the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks when buying guns and imposed a waiting period on firearm purchasers in the United States; the bill passed by a vote of 238–187.[87][88]
In 1994, Sanders voted in favor of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Sanders said he voted for the bill “because it included the Violence Against Women Act and the ban on certain assault weapons”. He was nevertheless extremely critical of the other parts of the bill.[89][90] Although he acknowledged that “clearly, there are some people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them”, he maintained in his intervention before the House that the government’s ill-thought policies played a large part in “dooming tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence”. In this same intervention, he argued that the repressive policies introduced by the bill were not addressing the causes of violence, stating that “we can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails”.[91]
In 1998, Sanders voted for a bill that would have increased minimum sentencing for possession of a gun while committing a federal crime to 10 years in prison, including nonviolent crimes such as marijuana possession.[92][93][94]
In 2005, he voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.[95] The act’s purpose was to prevent firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable for negligence when crimes have been committed with their products.[96] As of 2016 Sanders has said that he has changed his position and would vote for legislation to defeat this bill.[97]
Patriot Act
Sanders was a consistent critic of the Patriot Act.[98] As a member of Congress, he voted against the original Patriot Act legislation.[99] After its 357-to-66 passage in the House, Sanders sponsored and voted for several subsequent amendments and acts attempting to curtail its effects,[100] and voted against each re-authorization.[101] In June 2005, Sanders proposed an amendment to limit Patriot Act provisions that allow the government to obtain individuals’ library and book-buying records. The amendment passed the House by a bipartisan majority, but was removed on November 4 of that year in House–Senate negotiations and never became law.[102]
War in Iraq
Sanders voted against the resolutions authorizing the use of force against Iraq in 1991 and 2002, and opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He voted for the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists[103] that has been cited as the legal justification for controversial military actions since the September 11 attacks.[104] Sanders voted for a non-binding resolution expressing support for troops at the outset of the invasion of Iraq, but gave a floor speech criticizing the partisan nature of the vote and the George W. Bush administration’s actions in the run-up to the war. Regarding the investigation of what turned out to be a leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame‘s identity by a State Department official, Sanders stated: “The revelation that the President authorized the release of classified information in order to discredit an Iraq war critic should tell every member of Congress that the time is now for a serious investigation of how we got into the war in Iraq and why Congress can no longer act as a rubber stamp for the President.”[105]
Other
In 1996, Sanders voted against a bill that would have prohibited police purchasing of tanks and armored carriers.[92][106]
On November 2, 2005, Sanders voted against the Online Freedom of Speech Act, which would have exempted the Internet from the campaign finance restrictions of the McCain–Feingold Bill.[107]
Sanders entered the race for the U.S. Senate on April 21, 2005, after Senator Jim Jeffords announced that he would not seek a fourth term. Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, endorsed Sanders, a critical move as it meant that no Democrat running against Sanders could expect to receive financial help from the party. Sanders was also endorsed by Senate Minority LeaderHarry Reid of Nevada and Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean said in May 2005 that he considered Sanders an ally who “votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time.”[108] Then-Senator Barack Obama also campaigned for Sanders in Vermont in March 2006.[109] Sanders entered into an agreement with the Democratic Party, much as he had as a congressman, to be listed in their primary but to decline the nomination should he win, which he did.[110][111]
In the most expensive political campaign in Vermont’s history,[112] Sanders defeated businessman Rich Tarrant by an approximately 2-to-1 margin. Many national media outlets projected Sanders as the winner just after the polls closed, before any returns came in. He was reelected in 2012 with 71% of the vote,[113] and again in 2018 with 67% of the vote.[114]
Legislation
Prior to his 2016 presidential run, Sanders was known as a legislator who advocated for progressive causes, but “rarely forged actual legislation or left a significant imprint on it.”[115] According to The New York Times, “Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate … Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others.”[116] During his time in the Senate, Sanders had lower “legislative effectiveness” than the average Senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made.[117]
In 2008 and 2009, Sanders voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (also referred to as the Wall Street bailout) which was a program to purchase toxic banking assets and provide loans to banks which were in free fall at the time.[129][130] Among Sanders’ proposed financial reforms is the auditing of the Federal Reserve, which would reduce the independence of the Federal Reserve in monetary policy deliberations; Federal Reserve officials say that ‘Audit the Fed’ legislation would expose the Federal Reserve to undue political pressure from lawmakers who do not like its decisions.[131][132][133]
On March 17, 2016, Sanders said he would support Merrick Garland‘s nomination to the Supreme Court, though he added, “there are some more progressive judges out there.”[134]
Sanders opposed Neil Gorsuch‘s nomination to the Court, saying that Gorsuch had “refused to answer legitimate questions.”[135] Sanders also objected to the possibility of Senate Republicans using the nuclear option to “choke off debate and ram the nomination through the Senate.”[135] Sanders voted against confirmation of Gorsuch as Associate Supreme Court Justice.[136]
Taxes
On December 10, 2010, Sanders delivered an 81⁄2–hour speech against the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, the proposed extension of the Bush-era tax rates that eventually became law, arguing that the legislation would favor the wealthiest Americans. “Enough is enough! … How many homes can you own?” he asked.[137][138][139] A long speech such as this is commonly known as a filibuster, but because it did not block action, it was not technically a filibuster under Senate rules.[140]
In response to the speech, hundreds of people signed online petitions urging Sanders to run in the 2012 presidential election, and pollsters began measuring his support in key primary states.[141]Progressive activists such as Rabbi Michael Lerner and economist David Korten publicly voiced their support for a prospective Sanders run against President Barack Obama.[141] Sanders’s speech was published in February 2011 by Nation Books as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class, with authorial proceeds going to Vermont nonprofit charitable organizations.[142]
Labor
Sanders introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, April 2017
In April 2017, Sanders introduced a bill that would raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour – an increase over an earlier Democratic $12 an hour proposal – which was co-sponsored by two other progressive Democrats.[143]
On May 9, 2018, Sanders introduced the Workplace Democracy Act, a bill that would expand labor rights by making it easier for workers to join a union, ban right-to-work laws and some anti-union provisions of the Taft Hartley Act, and outlaw some union-busting tactics. It was endorsed by several Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown. Announcing the legislation, Sanders said, “If we are serious about reducing income and wealth inequality and rebuilding the middle class, we have got to substantially increase the number of union jobs in this country.”[144]
On September 5, 2018, Sanders partnered with Ro Khanna to introduce the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act, which would require large corporations to pay for food stamps and Medicaid benefits their employees receive, rather than shifting the burden onto taxpayers.[145] Khanna said, “if you bag groceries, you should be able to buy groceries.” Sanders said, “Taxpayers in this country should not be subsidizing a guy who’s worth $150 billion, whose wealth is increasing by $260 million every single day,” referring to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.[146][147] The bill has received some support from conservatives; Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson endorsed the proposal on air.[148] On October 2, 2018, Bezos raised the minimum wage at Amazon to $15, effective November 1; Sanders commended him.[149]
Senators participate in committees that are responsible for certain types of legislation and in caucuses that build a legislative constituency for shaping legislation of interest to its members.
Committee assignments
As an independent, Sanders worked out a deal with the Senate Democratic leadership in which he agreed to vote with the Democrats on all procedural matters unless the Democratic whip, Dick Durbin, agreed that he need not (a request rarely made or granted). In return, he was allowed to keep his seniority and received the committee seats that would have been available to him as a Democrat; in 2013–14, he was chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (during the Veterans Health Administration scandal).[150][151]
Sanders was only the third senator from Vermont to caucus with the Democrats, after Jeffords and Leahy. His caucusing with the Democrats gave them a 51–49 majority in the Senate during the 110th Congress in 2007–08. The Democrats needed 51 seats to control the Senate because Vice PresidentDick Cheney would have broken any tie in favor of the Republicans.[155] He is a member of the following caucuses:
Polling conducted in August 2011 by Public Policy Polling found that Sanders’s approval rating was 67% and his disapproval rating 28%, making him then the third-most popular senator in the country.[157] Both the NAACP and the NHLA have given Sanders 100% voting scores during his tenure in the Senate.[158] In 2015, Sanders was named one of the Top 5 of The Forward 50.[159] In a November 2015 Morning Consult poll, Sanders had an approval rating of 83% among his constituents, making him the most popular senator in the country.[160] Fox News found Sanders to have the highest net favorability at +28 points of any prominent politician included in its March 2017 poll.[161] He ranked third in 2014 and first in both 2015 and 2016.[160][157][162]
In April 2017, a nationwide Harvard-Harris Poll found Sanders had the highest favorability rating of the leading political figures included in the poll,[163] a standing confirmed by subsequent polling.[164][165] Several 2018 national polls have shown that former Vice President Joe Biden is Democrats’ top choice for the party’s 2020 nomination, with Sanders second.[166] In a June 2018 poll, Sanders was third, behind Clinton in second and Biden in first.[167]
Sanders announced his intention to seek the Democratic Party‘s nomination for President of the United States on April 30, 2015,[168][169][170] and his campaign was officially launched on May 26, 2015, in Burlington.[169] In his announcement, Sanders said, “I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where billionaires own the political process,” and made this a central idea throughout his campaign.[168][169] Senator Elizabeth Warren welcomed Sanders’s entry into the race, saying, “I’m glad to see him get out there and give his version of what leadership in this country should be,” but never endorsed him.[171][172]Initially considered a long shot, Sanders won 23 primaries and caucuses and approximately 46% of pledged delegates to Clinton’s 54%. His campaign was noted for its supporters’ enthusiasm, as well as for his rejection of large donations from corporations, the financial industry, and any associated Super PAC. On July 12, 2016, Sanders formally endorsed Clinton in her unsuccessful general election campaign against RepublicanDonald Trump, while urging his supporters to continue the “political revolution” his campaign had begun.[173]
Campaign methods
Unlike the other major candidates, Sanders did not pursue funding through a Super PAC or by wealthy donors, instead focusing on small individual donations.[174] His presidential campaign raised $1.5 million within 24 hours of his official announcement.[175] At year’s end the campaign had raised a total of $73 million from more than one million people making 2.5 million donations, with an average donation of $27.16.[176] The campaign reached 3.25 million donations by the end of January 2016, raising $20 million in that month alone.[177]
Sanders used social media to help his campaign gain momentum,[178] posting content to online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and answering questions on Reddit. He gained a large grassroots organizational following online. A July 29, 2015 meetup organized online brought 100,000 supporters to more than 3,500 simultaneous events nationwide.[179]
Sanders’s campaign events in June 2015 drew overflow crowds around the country, to his surprise.[180][181][182] When Hillary Clinton and Sanders made public appearances within days of each other in Des Moines, Iowa, Sanders drew larger crowds, even though he had already made numerous stops around the state and Clinton’s visit was her first in 2015.[183] On July 1, 2015, Sanders’s campaign stop in Madison, Wisconsin, drew the largest crowd of any 2016 presidential candidate to that date, with an estimated turnout of 10,000.[184][185] Over the following weeks he gained even larger crowds: 11,000 in Arizona,[186] 15,000 in Seattle,[187] and 28,000 in Portland.[188]
The 2016 Democratic Party presidential debates occurred among candidates in the campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the President of the United States. The DNC announced in May 2015 that there would be six debates. Critics alleged that the small number of debates and the schedule, with half of the debates on Saturday or Sunday nights, were part of the DNC’s deliberate attempt to protect the front-runner, Hillary Clinton.[189] In February 2016, Clinton’s and Sanders’s campaigns agreed in principle to holding four more debates for a total of ten.[190] Clinton dropped out of the tenth debate, scheduled to take place just before the California primary, citing a need to devote her time to making direct contact with California voters and preparing for the general election.[191] Sanders expressed disappointment that Clinton canceled the debate “before the largest and most important primary in the presidential nominating process”.[192]
Polls and news coverage
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in May found Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in a “dead heat”, but the same poll found that if Sanders were the Democratic nominee, 53% of voters would support him to 39% for Trump.[193] Clinton and Trump were the least popular likely candidates in the poll’s history, while Sanders received a 43% positive, 36% negative rating.[194] Polls showed that Democratic voters older than 50 preferred Clinton by a large margin but those under 50 overwhelmingly favored Sanders.[195]
Some supporters raised concerns that publications such as The New York Times minimized coverage of the Sanders campaign in favor of other candidates’, especially Trump’s and Clinton’s. The Times’s own “public editor” or ombudsman reviewed her paper’s coverage of Sanders and found that as of September 2015 her paper “hasn’t always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused on the candidate’s age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to say.” She also found that the Times’s coverage of Sanders’s campaign was much scanter than its coverage of that of Trump, the Republican candidate also initially considered a long shot, with 63 articles covering the Trump campaign and 14 covering the Sanders campaign.[196][197] A December 2015 report found that the three major networks – CBS, NBC, and ABC – had spent 234minutes reporting on Trump and 10minutes on Sanders, despite their similar polling results. The report noted that ABC World News Tonight had spent 81minutes on Trump and less than oneminute on Sanders during 2015.[198]
In November 2016, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted that on March 15, Super Tuesday III, the speeches of Trump, Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz were broadcast in full. Sanders was in Phoenix, Arizona, on that date, speaking to a rally larger than any of the others, but his speech was not mentioned, let alone broadcast.[199] Other analysts disputed that the media was biased against Sanders. According to Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, the media was biased in his favor, as it had a “systematic self-interested bias toward exaggerating how close the race is.”[200] In September 2015, George Washington University political scientist John Sides failed to find evidence that there was less coverage of Sanders than would be expected for a candidate who was considered unlikely to win,[201]saying, “if anything, you could make the case for the opposite: that Sanders is getting more coverage than he ‘should’ based on his chances of winning, perhaps because the media’s framing the Democratic race as competitive makes it more interesting to readers.”[201]The media coverage that Sanders did get was far less negative than Clinton’s, according to Sides.[201] Jonathan Stray of Harvard University’s Nieman Lab found in January 2016 that media coverage of Sanders was proportional to his standing in the polls.[202]
A 2016 report by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that Sanders did not get much media coverage in early 2015 due to initial low poll numbers, but as he “began to get coverage, it was overwhelmingly positive in tone. Sanders’ coverage in 2015 was the most favorable of any of the top candidates, Republican or Democratic”,[203] while Clinton received “by far the most negative coverage of any candidate.”[203] A second 2016 Shorenstein Center report found that “Sanders was the only candidate during the primary period to receive a positive balance of coverage”[204] and that the ratio of Clinton-Sanders coverage in 2016 was 54–46% in weeks 5–11 and 61–39% in weeks 12–19, while the ratio of Trump-Clinton-Sanders coverage was 43–37–20% in weeks 20–24.[204] As the primary progressed, coverage of Sanders was increasingly dominated by his electoral defeats and increasingly smaller chance to win the Democratic nomination.[204]
An analysis in Newsweek found that 12% of those who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary voted for Trump in the general election, enough to swing the election in his favor. However, by comparison, 25% of those who voted for Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary voted for Republican nominee John McCain in the general election.[205]
After the final primary election, Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee.[206] On July 12, Sanders formally endorsed Clinton[207] but he continued to work with the Democratic National Convention organizers to implement the progressive positions he had been campaigning for. Sanders spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention on July 25, giving Clinton his full support. Some of Sanders’s supporters attempted to protest Clinton’s nomination and booed when Sanders called for party unity. Sanders responded, “Our job is to do two things: to defeat Donald Trump and to elect Hillary Clinton … It is easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face if we are living under a Trump presidency.”[208]
On November 8, in the general election, Sanders received almost 6% of the vote in Vermont, though no longer a candidate. This was the highest share of a statewide presidential vote for a write-indraft campaign in American history.[209] He also received more votes in Vermont than Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, and Jill Stein, the Green candidate, combined.[210]
Elsewhere, it was possible to vote for Sanders as a write-in candidate in twelve states,[211] and exact totals of write-in votes for Sanders were published in three states: California,[212]New Hampshire,[213] and Vermont.[210] In those three states, Sanders received 111,850 write-in votes, which was approximately 15% of the write-in votes nationwide, and <1% of the nationwide number of votes overall.[211]
In November 2016, Sanders’s book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In was released; upon its release, it was number 3 on The New York Times Best Seller list. The audiobook received a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album.[214] In 2016, Sanders formed Our Revolution, a political organization dedicated to educating voters about issues, getting people involved in the political process, and electing progressive candidates. In February 2017, Sanders began webcasting The Bernie Sanders Show on Facebook. Polls taken in 2017 have found Sanders to be the most popular politician in the United States.[163][164][165]
In February 2018, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election revealed that Russians communicated false information during the primary campaigns to benefit Sanders and Stein and to harm Clinton.[216] Sanders rejected the Mueller investigation’s conclusion, saying that he had seen no evidence that Russians helped his campaign.[217] Sanders furthermore blamed the Clinton campaign for not doing more to prevent Russian interference.[217] Sanders later said his campaign had taken action to prevent Russian meddling in the election, and that a campaign staffer had alerted the Clinton campaign.[218]Politico noted that a Sanders campaign volunteer contacted a political action committee (PAC) that supported the Clinton campaign to report suspicious activities but that the Sanders campaign did not contact the Clinton campaign as such.[218]
Effect of the Sanders campaign on the Democratic party
A variety of analysts have suggested that Sanders’ campaign shifted both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party politically leftward. Speaking on the PBS Newshour about the upcoming 2018 elections and discussing the main principles of the two major parties, Susan Page described the Republican party as “Trump’s party” and the Democratic party as “Bernie Sanders’ party”, saying that “Sanders and his more progressive stance has really taken hold.”[219] Noting the increasing acceptance of Sanders’ national single-payer health-care program, his $15-an-hour minimum wage stance, free college tuition and many of the other campaign platform issues he introduced, an April 2018 opinion article in The Week suggested, “Quietly but steadily, the Democratic Party is admitting that Sanders was right.”[220] In July 2016, a Slate article called the Democratic platform draft “a monument to his campaign”, noting not only Sanders’ call for a $15 per hour minimum wage, but other Sanders campaign issues, including Social Security expansion, a carbon tax, Wall Street reform, opposition to the death penalty, and a “reasoned pathway for future legalization” of marijuana.[221]
To build on momentum gained during the 2016 election campaign, Sanders and supporters founded a political action committee and a political education organization:
Brand New Congress – In April 2016, former Sanders presidential campaign staffers formed a political organization, Brand New Congress, to elect Congressional representatives in line with the campaign’s political platform.[223]
Our Revolution – In August 2016, Sanders founded Our Revolution, an organization dedicated to educating voters about political issues, getting people involved in the political process, and recruiting and supporting candidates for local, state, and national office.[224][225]
In September 2018, The Guardian published two op-ed pieces on the need for international progressive cooperation to challenge the rising threat of globalism, threat of authoritarianism and wealth inequality, one by Sanders[228] and another by European progressive Yanis Varoufakis.[229] In late October, Varoufakis announced the upcoming launch of Progressives International on November 30 in Vermont.[230]
In a statement after the Senate’s passage of the bill, Sanders said the following about his rationale for leading the bipartisan effort to pass it:[236]
“I want to stress the bipartisan nature of this legislation. We have brought Republicans and Democrats together in a very historic moment. And what that moment is about is that the Senate this afternoon stated that we will not continue participation in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has resulted in the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth.
And that crisis is about 85,000 children starving to death; 10,000 new cases of cholera every single week; and the United Nations telling us that Yemen is on the verge of imminent famine, with the possibility of millions of people dying, all because of Saudi activities in that civil war.
And today what the United States Senate said in a very loud way is that we will not continue to have our military posture dictated by a despotic, murderous regime in Saudi Arabia – a regime which does not respect democracy, which does not respect human rights, a regime whose leader nobody doubts was involved in the horrific murder of a dissident journalist in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, Jamal Khashoggi.”[236]
The bill must also be passed by the House and signed by President Trump before it becomes law;[231] if it does, it will be the first-ever invocation of the War Powers Resolution.[231]
On February 19, 2019, Sanders announced on Vermont Public Radio that he would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States in the 2020 election.[237]
Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist,[242] and progressive who admires the Nordic model of social democracy and has been a proponent of workplace democracy.[243][239][244] In November 2015, Sanders gave a speech at Georgetown University about his view of democratic socialism, including its place in the policies of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.[245][246] In defining what democratic socialism means to him, Sanders said: “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad.”[245] Based on Sanders’s positions and votes throughout his political career, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Frank have described Sanders as “a New Dealer“.[b][247]
Evaluations of his ideology
Commentators have noted the consistency of Sanders’s views throughout his political career.[248][249]Many have examined his political platform and variety of democratic socialism and found it to be based on tax-funded social benefits rather than social ownership of the means of production.
Academics have variously described Sanders’s political philosophy as “welfarism“[250] or “social democracy“[251] but not democratic socialism as defined as “an attempt to create a property-free, socialist society”.[252]
Members of various US socialist parties have said that Sanders is a reformer of capitalism, not a socialist.[253][254][255]
Others distinguish among socialism, social democracy, and democratic socialism, and describe his philosophy as an extension of such existing social democratic programs in the US as Social Security and Medicare[256][257][247] and more consistent with the social democracy found in much of Europe, especially the Nordic countries.[258][259]
Bush Administration
In March 2006, after a series of resolutions passed in various Vermont towns calling for him to bring articles of impeachment against George W. Bush, Sanders stated that it would be “impractical to talk about impeachment” with Republicans in control of the House and Senate.[260] Still, Sanders made no secret of his opposition to the Bush Administration, which he regularly criticized for its cuts to social programs.[261][262][263]
Born into a Democratic-voting family, Sanders was first introduced to political activism when his brother Larry joined the Young Democrats of America and campaigned for Adlai Stevenson II in 1956.[269] Although elected Mayor of Burlington as an independent, Sanders endorsed Democratic presidential candidates Walter Mondale in 1984 and Jesse Jackson in 1988. His endorsement of Mondale was lukewarm (telling reporters that “if you go around saying that Mondale would be a great president, you would be a liar and a hypocrite”), but he supported Jackson enthusiastically.[270]The Washington Post reported that the Jackson campaign helped inspire Sanders to work more closely with the Democratic Party.[270][46]
Once elected to the House of Representatives, Sanders joined the Democratic caucus, though some conservative southern Democrats initially barred him from the caucus as they believed that allowing a self-described socialist to join it would harm their electoral prospects.[46] He soon came to work constructively with Democrats, voting with the party more than 90 percent of the time during his tenure in the House and Senate.[46]
Starting in November 2015, in connection with his presidential campaign, Sanders’s announcements suggested that not only was he running as a Democrat, but that he would run as a Democrat in future elections.[271][272][273] When challenged by Clinton about his party commitment, he said, “Of course I am a Democrat and running for the Democratic nomination.”[274] During the campaign, news sources often referred to him as a Democrat.[275][276][277] Since he remained a senator, elected as an independent, the United States Senate website continued to refer to Sanders as an independent during the campaign and upon his return to the Senate.[278] He confirmed at the end of the campaign that he remained an independent in the senate for the balance of his term, since that was how he was elected.[279]
Sanders advocated that, following Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections, the Democratic Party undergo a “series of reforms” and that it had to “break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor.”[280]
Sanders drew parallels between his campaign and that of the Labour Party in the 2017 UK general election.[281][282] He wrote in The New York Times that “the British elections should be a lesson for the Democratic Party” and urged the Democrats to stop holding on to an “overly cautious, centrist ideology”, arguing that “momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers”.[283][284] He had earlier praised Jeremy Corbyn‘s stance on class issues.[285]
In October 2017, Sanders stated that he would run for reelection as an independent in 2018 though pressured to run as a Democrat.[286]
Distribution of wealth
Sanders opposed the 2017 Trump/Republican federal budget plan, calling it “a budget for the billionaire class, for Wall Street, for corporate CEOs, and for the wealthiest people in this country … nothing less than a massive transfer of wealth from working families, the elderly, children, the sick and the poor to the top 1%”.[287]
Following the November 2017 revelations from the Paradise Papers and a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies which says just three people, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, own more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population, Sanders stated that “we must end global oligarchy” and that “we need, in the United States and throughout the world, a tax system which is fair, progressive and transparent.”[288]
Foreign policy
On June 12, 2017, U.S. senators reached an agreement on legislation imposing new sanctions on Russia and Iran. The bill was opposed only by Sanders and Republican Rand Paul.[289]
Addressing Westminster College in a September 2017 speech, Sanders laid out a “progressive foreign policy” that pushes for greater international collaboration, an adherence to U.S.-led international agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal framework, and the promotion of human rights and democratic ideals. He emphasized the evils associated with “outrageous” global economic inequality and climate change, and urged reining in the use of U.S. military power, saying it “must always be a last resort”. Sanders also heavily criticized U.S. support for “murderous regimes” during the Cold War, such as those in Iran, Chile and El Salvador, and said that those actions continue to make the U.S. less safe.[290][291] He also spoke critically of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and the way President Trump has handled the crisis.[292]
In September 2017, Sanders said that Saudi Arabia is “an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism. … They are not an ally of the United States.”[293] In an October 2018 column for The New York Times, Sanders called on the United States to end its backing of the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, saying that US support for this war makes it complicit in crimes against humanity and is unconstitutional because its participation has not been authorized by Congress.[294]
Gun laws
Sanders supports banning assault weapons, universal federal background checks, and closing the gun show loophole.[295][296][297] In 1990, Sanders was supported by the NRA in his bid to become a U.S. Representative in exchange for opposing both the competing campaign of Peter Smith, who had reversed his stance on firearm restrictions, and waiting periods for handgun purchases.[298] In 1993, while a U.S. Representative, he voted against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (which established background checks and wait periods), and in 2005 he voted for legislation that gave gun manufacturers legal immunity against claims of negligence, but as of 2016 he has said that he would support repealing that law.[97] In 1996, he voted against additional funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for research on issues related to firearms, but in 2016 he called for an increase in CDC funding for the study of gun violence.[97]
Health care
Don’t Take Our Health Care rally in Columbus, Ohio, June 2017
Sanders is a staunch supporter of a universal health care system, and has said, “If you are serious about real healthcare reform, the only way to go is single-payer.”[299] He advocates lowering the cost of drugs that are expensive because they remain under patent for years; some drugs that cost thousands of dollars per year in the U.S. are available for hundreds, or less, in countries where they can be obtained as generics.[300] As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, Sanders has introduced legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Older Americans Act, which supports Meals on Wheels and other programs for seniors.[301] He supported the Affordable Care Act, though he said it didn’t go far enough.[302]
On May 4, 2017, in response to the House vote to repeal and replace The Affordable Care Act, Sanders predicted “thousands of Americans would die” from no longer having access to health care.[303]Politifact rated Sanders’s statement “mostly true”.[304]
In September 2017, Sanders and 15 Senate co-sponsors submitted the “Medicare for All” bill, a single-payer health care plan. The bill also covers vision and dental care, unlike Medicare. Some Republicans have called the bill “Berniecare” and “the latest Democratic push for socialized medicine and higher taxes.” Sanders responded that the Republican party has no credibility on the issue of health care after voting for legislation that would take health insurance away from 32 million people under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”).[305]
Immigration
In 2007, Sanders helped kill a bill introducing comprehensive immigration reform, arguing that its guest-worker program would depress wages for American workers.[306] In 2010, he supported the DREAM Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors.[306] In 2013, he supported the Gang of Eight‘s comprehensive immigration reform bill after advocating for the provision of a $1.5 billion youth jobs program, which he argued would offset the harms of labor market competition with immigrants.[306]
Calling international trade agreements a “disaster for the American worker”, Sanders voted against and has spoken for years against NAFTA, CAFTA, and PNTR with China, saying that they have resulted in American corporations moving abroad. He also strongly opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he says was “written by corporate America and the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street.”[326][327]
Trump Administration
Sanders criticized President Trump for appointing multiple billionaires to his cabinet.[328] He criticized Trump’s rolling back the Clean Power Plan of former President Barack Obama, noting the scientifically reported effect on climate change of human activity and citing Trump’s calling those reports a hoax.[329] He called for caution on the Syrian Civil War, noting that “it’s easier to get into a war than out of one.”[330] Sanders has promised to defeat “Trump and Trumpism and the Republican right-wing ideology”.[331]
Sanders gave an online reply to Trump’s January 2018 State of the Union address in which he called Trump “compulsively dishonest” and criticized him for initiating “a looming immigration crisis” by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He voiced concern about Trump’s failure to mention the finding that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and “will likely interfere in the 2018 midterms we will be holding … Unless you have a very special relationship with Mr. Putin.”[332]
In 1963, Sanders and Deborah Shiling Messing, whom he met in college, volunteered for several months on the Israeli kibbutzSha’ar HaAmakim. They married in 1964 and bought a summer home in Vermont; they had no children and divorced in 1966.[32][339][340][341] Sanders’s son, Levi Sanders, was born in 1969 to girlfriend Susan Campbell Mott.[31] In 1988, Sanders married Jane O’Meara Driscoll (née Mary Jane O’Meara), who later became president of Burlington College, in Burlington, Vermont.[342] The day after their wedding, the couple visited the Soviet Union as part of an official delegation in his capacity as mayor.[343][344] Sanders considers Jane’s three children—Dave Driscoll (born 1975), Carina Driscoll (born 1974), and Heather Titus (née Driscoll; 1971)—to be his own.[32][345] He also has seven grandchildren.[346]
In December 1987, during his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Sanders recorded a folk album, We Shall Overcome, with 30 Vermont musicians. As he was not a skilled singer, he performed his vocals in a talking blues style.[347][348]Sanders appeared in a cameo role in the 1988 comedy-drama film Sweet Hearts Dance, playing a man who distributes candy to young trick-or-treaters.[349] In 1999, he acted in the film My X-Girlfriend’s Wedding Reception, playing Rabbi Manny Shevitz. In this role he mourned the Brooklyn Dodgers‘ move to Los Angeles, reflecting Sanders’s own upbringing in Brooklyn.[350] On February 6, 2016, Sanders was a guest star alongside Larry David on Saturday Night Live, playing a Polish immigrant on a steamship that was sinking near the Statue of Liberty.[351]
On December 4, 2015, Sanders won Time‘s 2015 Person of the Year readers’ poll with 10.2% of the vote[352][353] but did not receive the editorial board’s award. On March 20, 2016, he was given an honorary Coast Salish name, dxʷshudičup,[c] by Deborah Parker in Seattle to honor his focus on Native American issues during his presidential campaign.[354]
After complaints made in 2016 by Donald Trump’s Vermont campaign chairman, the FBI launched an investigation into Sanders’s wife Jane’s involvement in a bank loan for Burlington College when she was its president.[361][362][363][364]The Washington Post reported on June 25, 2017, that Sanders himself was not under FBI investigation.[365] Both Sanders and his wife have retained prominent counsel during the investigation.[363][364]
After receiving nearly $900,000 in royalty advances for his recently published books, Sanders reported earnings of just over $1 million in 2016.[366] He and his wife own three homes, two in Vermont and one in Washington.[367][368][369]
As Mayor of Burlington, Sanders allowed a Chabadpublic menorah to be placed at city hall, an action contested by the local ACLU chapter. He publicly inaugurated the Hanukkah menorah and performed the Jewish religious ritual of blessing Hanukkah candles.[370] His early and strong support played a significant role in the now widespread public menorah celebrations around the globe.[376][377][378][379] When asked about his Jewish heritage, Sanders has said he is “proud to be Jewish”.[375][21]
Sanders rarely speaks about religion.[371] He describes himself as “not particularly religious”[21] and “not actively involved” with organized religion.[371] A press package issued by his office states “Religion: Jewish”.[380] He has said he believes in God, though not necessarily in a traditional manner: “I think everyone believes in God in their own ways,” he said. “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”[371][381] In October 2015, on the late-night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel asked Bernie, “You say you are culturally Jewish and you don’t feel religious; do you believe in God and do you think that’s important to the people of the United States?” Sanders replied:[382]
I am who I am, and what I believe in and what my spirituality is about is that we’re all in this together. That I think it is not a good thing to believe as human beings we can turn our backs on the suffering of other people … and this is not Judaism, this is what Pope Francis is talking about, that we can’t just worship billionaires and the making of more and more money. Life is more than that.
In 2016, he stated he had “very strong religious and spiritual feelings” and explained, “My spirituality is that we are all in this together and that when children go hungry, when veterans sleep out on the street, it impacts me.”[383]
Sanders does not regularly attend synagogue, and he works on Rosh Hashanah, a day when Jews typically take a holiday from work. He has attended yahrzeit observances in memory of the deceased, for the father of a friend, and he attended a Tashlikh, an atonement ceremony, with the mayor of Lynchburg on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah in 2015.[370] According to Sanders’s close friend Richard Sugarman, a professor of religious studies at the University of Vermont, Sanders’s Jewish identity is “certainly more ethnic and cultural than religious”.[384]Deborah Dash Moore, a Judaic scholar at the University of Michigan, has said that Sanders has a particular type of “ethnic Jewishness” that is somewhat old-fashioned.[385] Sanders’s wife is Roman Catholic, and he has frequently expressed admiration for Pope Francis, saying that “the leader of the Catholic Church is raising profound issues. It is important that we listen to what he has said.” Sanders has said he feels “very close” to Francis’s economic teachings, describing him as “incredibly smart and brave”.[14][386][387]In April 2016, Sanders accepted an invitation from Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an aide close to the pope, to speak at a Vatican conference on economic and environmental issues. While at the Vatican, Sanders met briefly with the pontiff.[388][389]
^Hitler lost the election for the presidency of Germany on March 13, 1932, when Hindenburg received 49.6 percent of the vote to Hitler’s 30.1 percent.[18] But the Nazi Party, led by Hitler, won a plurality in the Reichstag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, in July 1932, and retained its status as the largest party thereafter.[19]
35% say government/leadership is top problem facing the country
Mentions of government jumped during the shutdown, and increased since
Views of government as the top problem have gained since 2001
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Thirty-five percent of Americans name the government, poor leadership or politicians as the greatest problem facing the U.S. This is the highest percentage Gallup has recorded for this concern, edging out the previous high of 33% during the 2013 federal government shutdown.
The latest update is from a Feb. 1-10 Gallup Poll. Full results from this month can be found at the end of the article.
Gallup has asked Americans what they felt was the most important problem facing the country since 1939 and has regularly compiled mentions of the government since 1964. Prior to 2001, the highest percentage mentioning government was 26% during the Watergate scandal. Thus, the current measure is the highest in at least 55 years.
The current percentage of Americans naming government as the most important problem is nearly twice as high as the 18% recorded in November. That increase likely reflects public frustration with the government shutdown that occurred from late December through most of January. Gallup observed a similar double-digit spike spanning the 2013 government shutdown, from 16% in September 2013 to 33% in October 2013.
Americans have different things in mind when they name the government as the most important problem. An analysis of the verbatim responses to the question from the latest survey finds that 11% of Americans specifically cite “Donald Trump” as the most important problem, while 5% name “the Democrats” or “liberals” and 1% “Congress.” About half of those who say the government is the most important problem — 18% of U.S. adults — blame both parties or cite “gridlock,” “lack of cooperation” or the shutdown more generally. The latter figure has grown from 6% in December and 12% in January.
Since January 2017, about the time Donald Trump took office, the government has been the top problem each month except in the November poll, and in July 2018. In both of those months, immigration edged out the government at the top of the list.
Views of Problematic Government Have Been on the Rise Since 2001
Americans have become more likely to name the government and/or leadership as the country’s greatest problem over the past decade. From 2001 through 2009, yearly averages of this measure were consistently below 10%, but mentions of government as the foremost challenge have become more pervasive in the decade since. In 2010 to 2016, average mentions of the government as the biggest problem ranged from 12% to 19%.
President Donald Trump’s first two years in office so far have produced the highest average mentions of government as the most important problem for recent presidents, at 20% and 22%. Though just six weeks into the new year, 2019 could top Trump’s first two years if this trend continues.
Few Problems Have Registered Such a High Percentage of Mentions
Gallup began asking about the most important problem on a monthly basis in 2001; since then, few other issues have matched or exceeded the 35% currently mentioning the government.
In the immediate months after the 9/11 attacks, mentions of terrorism topped the list as the most important problem, peaking at 46% in October 2001.
Mentions of the situation in Iraq as the greatest U.S. problem escalated in early 2007 after President George W. Bush’s announcement of a “surge” in the numbers of American troops sent to the country. The highest percentage naming Iraq as the biggest problem was 38% in February of that year.
In the year leading up to and after the global financial crisis of 2008, the percentage of Americans naming “the economy” reached record heights for any mention on Gallup’s list, reaching 58% in November 2008.
Mentions of unemployment/jobs as the greatest problem surpassed those of “the economy” at certain points in the years after the financial crisis, with the percentage naming unemployment as the greatest problem peaking at 39% in September 2011, when President Obama unveiled an ambitious jobs plan at a time of high unemployment.
Republicans, Democrats About Equally Likely to Name Government
Mentions of the government have become more frequent among all party groups in recent months — especially Republicans, among whom there has been a 14-point increase in mentions of the government this past month.
While Democrats were more likely than Republicans to name government and leadership as the top problem facing the nation in the year leading up to the latest poll, both party groups are now about as likely to name government as the top U.S. problem.
Roughly half of Republicans, Democrats and independents who say the government is the most important problem point to gridlock, lack of bipartisanship, both parties or other general concerns about the way government is operating. As would be expected, Republicans disproportionately mention Democrats or liberals as the problem, while Democrats (as well as independents) disproportionately mention Trump. The number of Democrats who mention Trump specifically has been quite stable in recent months, but there has been a surge in the percentage of Democrats seeing both parties as the problem or citing general concerns about gridlock and lack of cooperation. Likewise, there has been a sharp increase in the number of Republicans and independents seeing both parties, gridlock or related issues as the problem.
Bottom Line
Federal government shutdowns have clear, negative effects on Americans’ views on a variety of measures, including their general satisfaction with the direction of the country. But shutdowns aside, Americans’ views of the government itself as a problem — rather than the means of solving problems — have increased over the past two decades. On one end of Gallup’s 2001-2019 trend is the record low of 1% naming the government as the greatest problem, recorded one month after 9/11. On the other end is the latest 35%, as the longest shutdown on record left bad feelings on both sides of the political aisle.
At the moment, Democrats and Republicans are aligned in this view, though likely for different reasons. For Democrats, the shutdown was a stalemate over a border wall they overwhelmingly reject — from a president of whom few in the party approve. For Republicans — who show an even greater recent increase in mentions of government as the top U.S. problem — the ramifications of losing control of the House of Representatives and the party’s inability to pass legislation it favors may be dawning on the party’s rank and file.
Americans’ Views of the Top Problem Facing the U.S.
Problems mentioned by at least % of respondents in February
The weekend release of a highly-redacted version of the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap onetime Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page has renewed the argument over the Nunes memo — the brief report produced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes detailing problems in the application. From the time of the memo’s release in February, Democrats and some in the press have denounced it as a collection of lies and mischaracterizations. On Saturday night, the denouncing started again. “The only thing the newly released FISA documents show is that Republicans have been lying for months,” the lefty think tank Center for American Progress saidin a typical response.
Now, however, we have both the memo and the FISA application, if in a blacked-out state. We can compare the two. And doing so shows the Nunes memo was overwhelmingly accurate. Perhaps some Democrats do not believe it should have been written, or they dispute what it included and left out, or they do not agree with its conclusions, but it was in fact accurate.
The memo comprised a short introduction followed by 13 substantive paragraphs. Here is a look at each one.
On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a US citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.
That is accurate. The second paragraph:
The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. 1805 (d)(1)) a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.
That is accurate. The third paragraph:
Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard, particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the FISC’s rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.
That is accurate, but a reading of the last sentence, of course, depends on one’s definition of “material and relevant.” There is no doubt, however, that Nunes made a case that the information left out of the application, like the specific source of funding for the Steele dossier, was “material and relevant” to the Page case.
The fourth paragraph:
1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
That is accurate. When the Nunes memo was released, there was controversy over its assertion that the dossier formed an “essential” part of the Page FISA application. But Senate Judiciary Committee staff, who reviewed the FISA application separately from the House, concluded that the dossier allegations made up the “bulk” of the application. Even a Washington Post articleSunday purporting to debunk the Nunes memo in light of the FISA application conceded that the dossier played “a prominent role” in the FISA application. Finally, the Nunes memo’s assertion, noted below, that former FBI number-two Andrew McCabe agreed that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information,” was not challenged by Democrats when the Nunes memo was made public.
The fifth paragraph:
a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.
That is accurate. Readers will search the FISA application in vain for any specific mention of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign funding of the dossier. For the most part, names were not used in the application, but Donald Trump was referred to as “Candidate #1,” Hillary Clinton was referred to as “Candidate #2,” and the Republican Party was referred to as “Political Party #1.” Thus, the FISA application could easily have explained that the dossier research was paid for by “Candidate #2” and “Political Party #2,” meaning the Democrats. And yet the FBI chose to describe the situation this way, in a footnote: “Source #1…was approached by an identified U.S. person, who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia…The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.”
Democrats argue that the FISA Court judges should have been able to figure out, from that obscure description, that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the dossier. That seems a pretty weak argument, but in any case, the Nunes memo’s statement that the FISA application did not disclose or reference the role of the DNC and the Clinton campaign is undeniably true.
The sixth paragraph:
b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of — and paid by — the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.
That is accurate. The seventh paragraph:
2) The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News — and several other outlets — in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington DC in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.
Most of that is accurate. But when the Nunes memo was released, Democrats argued that the FISA application did not use the Yahoo article to corroborate the dossier, but rather — as it used other news accounts of varying reliability — to describe part of the Carter Page story. As it turned out, the application used part of the Yahoo piece in a way that suggested it was corroborating the dossier, but it also used part of it as a news account. So call the Nunes memo’s corroboration claim only partly accurate.
The eighth paragraph:
a) Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations — an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September — before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October — but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.
That is accurate. The ninth paragraph:
b) Steele’s numerous encounters with the media violated the cardinal rule of source handling — maintaining confidentiality — and demonstrated that Steele had become a less than reliable source for the FBI.
That is accurate. In the initial FISA application, the FBI argued that Steele had not leaked to the media. In later applications, the bureau admitted Steele had leaked but maintained that he was still credible because he only leaked after providing the dossier allegations.
The tenth paragraph:
3) Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files — but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.
That is accurate. The eleventh paragraph:
a) During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.
That is accurate, although one could argue whether the information here was really required for the FISA application; also, the “inexplicably concealed” reference is the opinion of the House committee.
The twelfth paragraph:
4) According to the head of the counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the initial Page FISA application. After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated. Yet, in early January 2017, Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a summary of the Steele dossier, even though it was — according to his June 2017 testimony — “salacious and unverified.” While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.
That is accurate. The thirteenth, and final, paragraph:
5) The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also reflect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an “insurance” policy against President Trump’s election.
That is accurate.
Parts of the Nunes memo, like references to the Strzok-Page texts or Bruce Ohr’s testimony, contain information that was not in the application. But that does not make it any less accurate. The bottom line is that, whatever the criticism it has received, the Nunes memo was almost entirely accurate. The release of the FISA application supports that view.
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
For a seditious conspiracy charge to be effected, a crime need only be planned, it need not be actually attempted. According to Andres Torres and Jose E. Velazquez, the accusation of seditious conspiracy is of political nature and was used almost exclusively against Puerto Ricanindependentistas in the twentieth century.[1] However, the act was also used in the twentieth century against communists and radicals (United Freedom Front,[2] the Provisional IRA in Massachusetts), neo-Nazis,[3] and Islamic terrorists including Omar Abdel-Rahman.[4]
In 1980, Puerto Rican Nationalist Carmen Valentín Pérez and nine other women and men were charged with seditious conspiracy for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States in Puerto Rico, and were each given sentences of up to 90 years in prison.[6]
^Leonard Zeskind. Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. pp. 144−171. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2009.
^Richard Perez, “The Terror Conspiracy—The Charges—A Gamble Pays Off as the Prosecution Uses an Obscure 19th-Century Law”, The New York Times, October 2, 1995.
^“Nine Members of a Militia Group Charged with Seditious Conspiracy and Related Offenses”, press release, United States Department of Justice, March 29, 2010.
Sources
Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)
Story 1: President Trump Declares National Emergency Over Cartel Massive Smuggling of Illegal Aliens and Illegal Drugs Over U.S./Mexican Border For Decades — Reprograms $8 Billion of Defense and Homeland Security Funds To Build Border Barrier To Stop Invasion of United States — Videos
Trump’s full speech declaring a national emergency for border wall funding
Rush Limbaugh on whether Trump is justified in securing wall funding
Hannity: My message to the media
The Rush Limbaugh Show Friday – Feb 15, 2019
Trump Declares National Emergency, Claims Media Backers Don’t Influence Decisions | THR News
Graham: Trump made “persuasive case” for national emergency
WHERE THE $8 BILLION COMES FROM
$1.375 billion will come from the Homeland Security appropriations bill
$600 million from the Treasury Department’s drug forfeiture fund
$2.5 billion from the Defense Department’s drug interdiction program
$3.6 billion from the Defense Department’s military construction budget
Trump declares a national emergency at the border to get $8 BILLION for his wall, claiming it will stop an ‘invasion’ but is sued immediately by California and told by Democrats he is ‘shredding the constitution’
President signed emergency declaration, taking control of the border battle
Congress gave him less than $1.4 billion in funding for his wall
He’ll supplement that with another $6.5 billion in repurposed money from existing accounts that Congress never intended for use building barriers
President continues to insist the nation is being invaded by illegal immigrants and that most of the country’s drug epidemic is fueled by border-jumpers
Pointed to ‘Angel moms’ in the front row of the White House Rose Garden, holding up pictures of loved ones killed by illegal immigrants
Predicted he would be sued in federal court for redirecting money to his wall project, just like with his travel ban
PUBLISHED: 10:53 EST, 15 February 2019 | UPDATED: 18:22 EST, 15 February 2019
President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on the border on Friday, a move calculated to allow him to spend $8 billion building his wall after signing a bill to avoid a second government shutdown after a bitter standoff with Congress.
He signed the declaration behind closed doors prior to a Rose Garden announcement, which he delayed while he met with women whose children were either killed by illegal immigrants or died because of drug cartels.
‘We’re going to be signing today, and registering, national emergency. And, it’s a great thing to do, because we have an in of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it’s not acceptable,’ the president said.
Congress appropriated $1.375 billion that Trump can use for ‘bollard’ fencing in a spending bill that has not reached the president’s desk, yet, but is expected to make its way to him before funding for a host of federal agencies runs out at midnight.
Trump is cobbling together the rest of the money through a patchwork operation that has him taking $600 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund and $2.5 billion from an account within the Department of Defense that is used for counter-drug activities, in order to build his wall. Another $3.6 billion will come from DOD’s military construction and facility improvement funds.
Democratic lawmakers are already plotting to void his national emergency through legislation that would call it off. Opponents of the policy are also hustling to put together legal challenges.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer immediately characterized it as an ‘unlawful declaration over a crisis that does not exist’ that makes America less safe.
‘This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process,’ they said in a joint statement.
Video playing bottom right…
President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on the border to allow him to spend $8 billion building his wall after signing a bill to avoid a government shutdown after bitter standoff with Congress
Trump signed the national emergency declaration before his Rose Garden remarks
The president’s Rose Garden announcement turned into a news conference, with him fielding questions on his national emergency declaration
An hour after the president’s Rose Garden event, the state of California said it would sue. The state of Washington signaled that it could do the same.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) also said it was filing suit against the Department of Justice.
‘Americans deserve to know the true basis for President Trump’s unprecedented decision to enact emergency powers to pay for a border wall,’ the organization’s executive director, Noah Bookbinder, said in a statement. ‘We’re suing because the government has so far failed produce the requested documents or provide an explanation for their delay.’
Free-speech organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit, as well.
Trump acknowledged in his announcement that the national emergency he signed today would end up in court before the Ninth Circuit and eventually make its way to the Supreme Court.
‘So the order is signed. And I’ll sign the final papers as soon as I get into the Oval Office,’ the president said. ‘And we will have a national emergency. And we will then be sued, and they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit even though it shouldn’t be there.’
The San Francisco-headquartered Court of Appeals has tripped up Trump’s other major executive orders, including his first travel ban.
Continuing to play out the court process aloud, the president said: ‘We will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we will get another bad ruling, and then we will end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we will get a fair shake, and we’ll win in the Supreme Court.’
Trump said he was confident that he would win at the high court, where two conservative justices he out on the bench are the deciders, just like he did before.
‘They sued us in the Ninth Circuit and we lost, and then we lost in the appellate division, and then we went to the Supreme Court and we won,’ he stated.
The president may have harmed his legal case with some of his own public statements, however.
He said during the press conference that followed his announcement, ‘I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather get it done faster.’
Administration lawyers will face the burden in court with arguing that there is an authentic crisis on the border that required the emergency designation.
Taking on critics of the emergency and his instance that a border wall is the only way to stop it, he said, ‘It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s just a lie. It’s all a lie. They say walls don’t work. Walls work 100 percent.’
‘I’m going to be signing a national emergency, and it’s been signed many times before,’ he said several minutes in. ‘It’s rarely been a problem. They sign it, nobody cares.’
Trump said national emergencies have been used ‘many’ times by past presidents as he harangued Obama for the economic slowdown that hung like a dark cloud over much of his tenure.
He said he is considering a second emergency that would target to the cartels directly that is rooted in an emergency declaration his predecessor signed.
‘It’s a very good emergency that he signed. And we’re going to use parts of it on our dealings on cartels. But that would be a second national emergency,’ he said.
He claimed that the country was ‘heading south, and it was going fast’ under the previous administration. Trump meanwhile said that he’s done a ‘fantastic job’ and that he is making America great again despite facing significant hurdles.
Aside from the border, a problem for which Democrats have been loathe to provide him any money, he said, ‘We have so much money, we don’t know what to do with it.
‘I don’t know what to do with all the money they are giving us. It’s crazy,’ he bragged.
Then, in remarks pointed at former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the president said that he didn’t have the best people by his side the first year and a half that he was on the job.
‘I was a little new to the job and profession. We had a little disappointment for the first year and a half, people that should have stepped up did not step up,’ he said. ‘It would have been easy. Not that easy, but it would have been a lot easier. Some people didn’t step up. We are stepping up now.’
He made it clear that he was thinking of someone specific: ‘I’m very disappointed in certain people, a particular one, for not having pushed this faster,’ he said.
Trump declined to say later if his criticism was meant for Ryan, who retired last month from Congress.
‘Let’s not talk about it. What difference does it make? They should have pushed it faster. They should have pushed it harder, and they didn’t. They didn’t. If they would have, it would have been a little bit better,’ the president said.
President Trump said he would like to take it a step further and pass a total overhaul of the immigration system. ‘Maybe that is something we can all work on where we all get together and do major immigration reform,’ he observed.
It was hardly likely that Trump’s executive action was paving the path for new congressional partnerships.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and senior senator who sits on the Judiciary committee, said the emergency is a ‘disturbing abuse of power’ that is the very definition of executive overreach.
‘I will do everything in my power to ensure this flagrant power grab is not successful and our democracy remains strong for generations to come,’ she said.
Democrats broadly panned the president’s claims in his speech as fiction and his executive order as a power grab.
‘There is no national emergency. No one who subscribes to reality can claim otherwise,’ Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Senate Appropriations Committee vice chairman, said.
Leahy said in Democrats’ official radio and television response to Trump’s weekly actions, ‘He failed to get a deal with his own party, even during the two years when Republicans controlled all levers of government. And he failed to get a deal now. The President’s inartful failure to get a deal does not justify him manufacturing a false national emergency.’
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leading the charge in the House to stop the executive action. She says she’ll introduce a resolution to terminate it.
She charged in a tweet: ‘ “I didn’t need to do this” is admitting this isn’t an emergency at all. “I didn’t need to do this” means he’s faking a crisis.’
House Judiciary Committee Democrats said late Friday afternoon that they’ll open an investigation.
They demanded that White House make its lawyer, Pat Cipollone, and Department of Justice officials involved in the declaration available for questioning in the coming days.
‘We believe your declaration of an emergency shows a reckless disregard for the separation of powers and your own responsibilities under our constitutional system,’ they said. ‘Congress has entrusted you and your predecessors with emergency authority in order to respond quickly and effectively to real crises, such as wars and natural disasters.’
Their committee has jurisdiction over the National Emergencies Act that Trump is tapping to build his wall. They said it was intended for ‘real crises’ such as natural disaster and not the fulfillment of political wish lists.
‘By fabricating an emergency in order to bypass the political process for allocating a budget,’ they wrote, ‘you appear to be abusing both this trust and your own oath of office.’
Trump’s delay in calling a national emergency after reopening the government following a partial shutdown angered some conservatives, as well.
Commentator Ann Coulter has been needling the president non-stop for failing to deliver on his most famous campaign promise. She said Friday that the national emergency declaration is a ‘scam’ that only the ‘stupidest people’ in his base will believe.
Trump dismissed Coulter as ‘off the reservation’ as he addressed reporters later in the day.
‘Anybody that knows her understands that. I haven’t spoken her. I don’t follow her,’ he said.
The president who spends several hours a day watching television has signaled that his views are being shaped by the coverage that his policies receive on channels like Fox News.
But he said Friday that neither they nor Coulter are pulling the strings within his administration. ‘They don’t decide policy,’ he said.
He was complimentary to Fox primetime hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. However, the president openly mocked longtime radio host Rush Limbaugh and Coulter, telling one journalist, ‘I hardly know her.’
‘She is probably really nice. I just don’t have the time to speak to her. I have nothing against her,’ he added.
Appearing on Fox News during ‘The Daily Briefing’ later in the day, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that Coulter doesn’t have any influence over the White House.
‘I don’t think Ann Coulter has any influence over the White House or influence over much of anything,’ Sanders said. ‘I don’t think she did before the president became the president and I don’t think she does now. I just don’t see her as being an influential voice in this country and certainly not one in this building.’
Coulter noted in a series of tweets that ’25th Amendment’ had been a trending topic on Twitter as she responded to the president’s derisive comments.
‘He seems to think “the reservation” is HIM, not his campaign promises,’ she tweeted.
She also claimed that the blame for the border wall fiasco lies at Trump’s feet, and not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s or Ryan’s.
‘This is not Paul Ryan’s fault. It’s not Mitch McConnell’s fault. Trump ran AGAINST the GOP and won. Responsibility is 100% his,’ she said.
Conservatives like Coulter believe that Trump should have stayed the course on the government shutdown.
On Capitol Hill, Republican senators openly called the president’s national emergency declaration a mistake.
Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate from Maine, said prior to the announcement, ‘Such a declaration would undermine the role of Congress and the appropriations process.’
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called it a ‘bad idea,’ and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said he was ‘not in favor’ of one.
‘I wish he wouldn’t have done it,’ ex-Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, the senior senator from Iowa, told Politico. ‘I imagine we’ll find out whether he’s got the authority to do it by the courts.’
Republican lawmakers sued Obama for overstepping on immigration. They say he ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution when he created DACA, a program that gave illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children proper papers.
The party’s sudden change of heart on executive power, at least from the perspective of President Trump, was the subject of mockery on Friday from Democrats.
‘Tonight, after years of complaining about executive overreach, President Trump decided to do just that by redirecting federal spending without Congressional approval,’ Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle said in a statement.
In declaring the national emergency, the president can claim as he seeks reelection that he did everything in his power, and beyond it, depending on what the courts determine, to build a border barrier, just like he promised he would, if they put him in office.
He insisted Friday that the election has nothing to do with his declaration.
‘I’ve already done a lot of wall, for the election — 2020. And the only reason we’re up here talking about this is because of the election, because they want to try and win an election, which it looks like they’re not going to be able to do,’ he said of the opposing political party.
Trump continued to insist Friday that he’s building a wall because it’s the best way to keep criminals from secretly entering the country.
‘Take a look at Israel. They’re building another wall. Their wall is 99.9 percent effective, they told me, 99.9 percent. That is what it would be with us, too,’ he said. ‘The only weakness is they go to a wall and then they go around the wall … It’s very simple.’
The president also returned to a claim that human traffickers are tying up women and taping their mouths so they can sneak them over the border in the back of trucks unnoticed.
‘You can’t take human traffic, women and girls, you can’t take them through ports of entry. You can’t have them tied up in the back seat of a car or a truck or a van. They open the door, they look. They can’t see three women with tape on their mouth or three women whose hands are tied. They go through areas where you have no wall. Everybody knows that,’ he claimed. ‘Nancy knows it. Chuck knows it. They all know it.’
The president’s contention has actually been disputed, and some theorists believe he or someone advising him took the talking point from a fictional film.
‘It’s all a big lie. It’s a big con game,’ Trump contended on Friday. ‘You don’t have to be very smart to know: You put up a barrier, the people come in and that’s it. They can’t do anything unless they walk left or right and they find an area where there’s no barrier and they come into the United States. Welcome!’
Members of “angel families” arrive with pictures of violent crime victims to listen to U.S. President Donald Trump deliver remarks on security at the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rose Garden
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Trump met with the women before his Rose Garden remarks, which he was more than a half hour late to
Trump continued to claim on Friday that a wall would be 99.9 percent effective at keeping criminals out
For weeks, the president had been suggesting he would declare an emergency on the border and made it official on Friday morning in a Rose Garden announcement.
Trump is pulling power from the National Emergencies Act, which U.S. presidents have used 58 time since its 1976 creation.
The checkerboard was set after Trump agreed to sign a bill to avoid another government shutdown. A national emergency was the only way he could secure the money for the wall in the fiscal year that covers 2020.
Pelosi called it an ‘end-run around the will of the people,’ speaking to reporters minutes after news of Trump’s position broke on Thursday, while warning it could come back to bite Republicans.
‘We will review our options, we’ll be prepared to respond appropriately to it,’ Pelosi said when asked about Trump’s planned emergency declaration.
The House speaker chaffed at the ‘precedent’ that the Republican president is establishing — she noted that Republican lawmakers have said that a national emergency is not their first preference for the very same reason.
‘I know the Republicans have some unease about it, no matter what they say. Because if the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people,’ she said.
‘You want to talk about a national emergency? Let’s talk about today, the one-year anniversary of another manifestation of the epidemic of gun violence in America,’ Pelosi said, referencing the one-year anniversary of the Parkland, Florida school shooting.
‘That’s a national emergency. Why don’t you declare that emergency, Mr. President? I wish you would. But a Democratic president can do that. [A] Democratic president can declare emergencies as well,’ she threatened.
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told press during a call that preceded the president’s remarks that today’s action creates ‘zero precedent’ and Democrats would have declared national emergencies for their priorities already if they believed they had the authority to do so.
‘There’s been some concern in the media about whether this creates a dangerous precedent. It actually creates zero precedent. This is authority given to the president in law already,’ Mulvany said. ‘It’s not as if he just didn’t get when he wanted so he’s waving a magic wand and taking a bunch of money.’
Invoking the House speaker, he said, ‘I saw Nancy Pelosi yesterday aid this sets the precedent for the Democrats to declare a gun emergency the next time they’re in the Oval Office. That’s completely false.
‘If the Democrats could have figured out a way to do it they would have done that already. And the authority to do so has been on the books since ’76. So it’s not like they haven’t had a chance to do that already. There’s no precedential value to doing this.’
Hours after the president’s declaration, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota said that it does, and the next executive from her party should issue a proclamation to protect the planet.
WHERE THE $8 BILLION COMES FROM
$1.375 billion will come from the Homeland Security appropriations bill
$600 million from the Treasury Department’s drug forfeiture fund
$2.5 billion from the Defense Department’s drug interdiction program
$3.6 billion from the Defense Department’s military construction budget
‘Our next President should declare a #NationalEmergency on day 1 to address the existential threat to all life on the planet posed by Climate Change,’ she tweeted.
Trump quietly signed the national emergency proclamation from the Oval Office on Friday morning and gave his approval to the spending bill in the same manner hours later.
It only became public that Trump had signed the bill that keeps the lights on until the end of the current fiscal year, Sept. 30, when Sanders told reporters about it in a quick Q and A session immediately after her appearance on Fox.
Congress gave Trump $1.375 billion for ‘bollard’ fencing that he can deploy across 55 miles on the southern border in the legislation.
His national emergency will allow him to build more, if he can move the funds.
A senior White House official told reporters prior to the announcement that his goal is to build 234 miles of bollard fencing.
‘In terms of how many miles does this buy us, as you know we sent a request to the Hill for $5.7 billion that would have gotten us 234 miles. That’s our goal, to try to accomplish that amount of miles,’ the person said.
‘It’s going to be a little mix-and-match because instead of Congress just providing the money, the different pots have different authorizations for how and where we can use that money,’ the person explained. ‘And so we are in the process to make sure that we can make those dollars go as far as they possibly can. And we expect that they will be able to go farther than 234 miles.’
PROCLAMATION DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY ON THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE U.S.
The current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency.
The southern border is a major entry point for criminals, gang members, and illicit narcotics.
The problem of large-scale unlawful migration through the southern border is long-standing, and despite the executive branch’s exercise of existing statutory authorities, the situation has worsened in certain respects in recent years.
In particular, recent years have seen sharp increases in the number of family units entering and seeking entry to the United States and an inability to provide detention space for many of these aliens while their removal proceedings are pending.
If not detained, such aliens are often released into the country and are often difficult to remove from the United States because they fail to appear for hearings, do not comply with orders of removal, or are otherwise difficult to locate.
In response to the directive in my April 4, 2018, memorandum and subsequent requests for support by the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense has provided support and resources to the Department of Homeland Security at the southern border. Because of the gravity of the current emergency situation, it is necessary for the Armed Forces to provide additional support to address the crisis.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including sections 201 and 301 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), hereby declare that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States, and that section 12302 of title 10, United States Code, is invoked and made available, according to its terms, to the Secretaries of the military departments concerned, subject to the direction of the Secretary of Defense in the case of the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
To provide additional authority to the Department of Defense to support the Federal Government’s response to the emergency at the southern border, I hereby declare that this emergency requires use of the Armed Forces and, in accordance with section 301 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1631), that the construction authority provided in section 2808 of title 10, United States Code, is invoked and made available, according to its terms, to the Secretary of Defense and, at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense, to the Secretaries of the military departments.
I hereby direct as follows: Section 1. The Secretary of Defense, or the Secretary of each relevant military department, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall order as many units or members of the Ready Reserve to active duty as the Secretary concerned, in the Secretary’s discretion, determines to be appropriate to assist and support the activities of the Secretary of Homeland Security at the southern border.
Sec. 2. The Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and, subject to the discretion of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretaries of the military departments, shall take all appropriate actions, consistent with applicable law, to use or support the use of the authorities herein invoked, including, if necessary, the transfer and acceptance of jurisdiction over border lands.
Sec. 3. This proclamation is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of February, in the year of our Lord two thousand nineteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-third.
DONALD J. TRUMP
The White House stressed on Friday that Trump is not taking the money from disaster relief funds for Puerto Rico or anywhere else.
It also couldn’t say what projects within the Department of Defense the money was being taken away from. They were merely described as ‘lower priority military construction projects’ such as facility improvements that can wait until next year.
‘So we’re going through a filter to ensure that nothing impacts lethality and readiness on the part of our military construction budget, which is a budget that’s substantially larger than $3.6 billion,’ an official said.
Senior administration officials cited two previous national emergencies, both declared by Republican presidents, as precedent for moving around funds.
President George H.W. Bush used the authority in November of 1990, when he declared certain chemical and biological weapons an emergency, an official said, and President George W. Bush tapped into federal funds in 2001.
‘Combined, this has been used to transfer $1.4 billion. So is not something that is unprecedented,’ an official said.
Trump is proposing to confiscate more than three times the combined amount for the border crisis — a total of $6.7 billion.
WHAT HAPPENS IF DEMOCRATS CHALLENGE A TRUMP-DECLARED BORDER ‘EMERGENCY’ IN COURT?
If President Trump declares that a national emergency exists on the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s likely that court challenges will quickly seek to stop him from exercising the powers federal law would give him.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said Thursday that ‘the Constitution grants Congress the authority to appropriate federal dollars, so I’m sure such action will be litigated in the courts.’
Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1975 in order to force post-Watergate presidents to explain themselves if they claim powers beyond what Congress has authorized.
Trump would have to cite the specific laws he’s relying on for emergency spending power.
The most likely basis is found in Section 2808 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code. It allows presidents to order the Defense Department to ‘undertake military construction projects’ during times of emergency ‘that are necessary to support … use of the armed forces.’
Trump began sending military troops to the southern border last year, tasking them with supporting border patrol units. Among their jobs has been hanging more than 150 miles of razor wire as a barrier to protect the border agents.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who met with Trump in the Oval office on Thursday afternoon, said in a Feb. 4 speech ‘they’re putting up barbed wire. What’s the difference between barbed ware and a steel slat? I’m confident the president has the legal ability to do this.’
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Thursday that ‘it will be challenged in court and is of dubious constitutionality.’
Trump’s opponents will have to find a loophole in Section 2293 of Title 33, which allows presidents to repurpose military ‘civil works’ budgets to build ‘authorized’ projects ‘that are essential to the national defense.’
That law applies in times of war or ‘national emergency.’
The largely civilian Army Corps of Engineers has already spent the past 18 months contracting out the work of building miles of border walls. It’s the Pentagon’s civil-works construction agency
It’s unlikely a federal court would weigh in on whether Trump has the legal authority to use his own discretion in declaring declare a national emergency. The 1975 law leaves that judgment up to the White House.
Every president since Gerald Ford has used it at least once. Barack Obama did it 12 times. Americans are still living under the conditions of 31 of the 58 declared ’emergencies.’ The U.S. Supreme Court has never invalidated one.
But his opponents would likely argue that Section 2808 can’t be used to build permanent walls that go beyond what’s necessary to protect the troops on border deployments.
And lawyers will squabble over whether Section 2293’s reference to ‘national defense’ includes border security in the first place.
A White House official said Thursday that the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which provided for wall construction along the border, is enough to show Congress has ‘authorized’ what Trump might want to fund unconventionally.
The official said the administration is betting that federal judges won’t want to weigh in on what is and is not related to national defense, a concept federal law has never clearly defined.
Trump said on Feb. 1 that while he expects legal challenges, ‘we have very, very strong legal standing to win.’
It would be ‘hard’ for Democrats to stymie him, he claimed, ‘but they tend to go to the Ninth Circuit,’ traditionally America’s most liberal and most often-overturned bank of judges.
‘And when they go to the Ninth Circuit, things happen.’
Trump Promised to ‘Build That Wall,’ Then Ran Out of Time and Options
The president’s declaration of a national emergency to fund a southern border barrier comes after divisions and competing priorities in the White House allowed the project to languish
President Trump during a rally Monday at the El Paso County Coliseum in El Paso, Texas.JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
By Michael C. Bender
President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a wall on the U.S. southern border comes after two years of political neglect of his signature campaign promise, lost amid competing priorities and divisions within his administration, according to current and former White House officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers.
Mr. Trump on Friday said the move would allow him to supplement the $1.38 billion allotted for border barriers in the spending package approved by Congress—far short of the $5.7 billion Mr. Trump wanted. “We’re talking about an invasion of our country,” Mr. Trump said speaking from the Rose Garden in urgent terms familiar during his campaign.
Yet in the two years since Mr. Trump took office, there had been no single official appointed within his administration to champion the wall. A revolving cast handled negotiations with Congress over paying for it. And the picture of what, exactly, the wall should be kept shifting. In late 2017, Mr. Trump talked privately to his staff about limiting the length of new wall construction because such natural barriers as a “valley of snakes” on the border already deterred passage.
The wall’s reemergence as a top priority within the White House came after the Republican Party’s loss of the House in November’s midterm election, and after goading from conservative media kept Mr. Trump focused on the border wall, current and former White House officials said.
Note: Due to the scale of the map, some gaps in the border fence may not be visible.
Sources: Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and OpenStreetMap contributors (border fence); Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s LandScan population data (population density); U.S. Customs and Border Protection (border patrol sectors) Renée Rigdon/The Wall Street Journal
It wasn’t until December, as some government offices entered a 35-day shutdown amid the fight over wall funding, that Mr. Trump assembled a team of advisers devoted to getting it built. They turned out to be a divided group.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, pushed for a broader deal with Democrats to provide protections for some immigrants living in the U.S. without permission, while Vice President Mike Pence sought to limit the scope of the negotiations. Mr. Kushner cautioned the president about issuing a national emergency order; Mick Mulvaney, newly installed as acting chief of staff, pressed for it.
One senior White House official played down internal divisions. “We’re all been working different angles, because we have different relationships,” the official said. “We hoped to be more productive, but just haven’t been.”
Mr. Trump’s first-term wins had clear leaders: Former economic adviser Gary Cohn delivered on tax cuts. Former White House counsel Don McGahn shepherded two Supreme Court nominations onto the High Court, and Mr. Kushner is credited with pushing a criminal-justice overhaul that reduced prison sentences on some drug convictions.
The wall project had no such director. Last summer, a White House official seeking a senior aide in charge of the border wall was sent to Doug Fears, a deputy to national security adviser John Bolton. Mr. Fears, a rear admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, is neither a senior administration official nor in charge of border-wall issues, a spokesman said.
By then, frustration was setting in with the president, and in August, he asked Mr. Mulvaney about declaring a national emergency. “You know, that makes a lot of sense,” Mr. Mulvaney told him. The then-budget director started working on plans, which were only finalized last week, according to a senior White House official.
A worker at a construction site in Tijuana, Mexico, close to the U.S.-Mexico border. PHOTO: MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
The spending agreement on the president’s desk provides less than the offer Mr. Trump declined two months ago, triggering the shutdown.
Some conservative lawmakers and commentators have bashed the deal for not having more wall funding, including Fox News host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity, who called it a “garbage compromise.”
The president’s plan to make up for the funding by shifting money within the executive branch is likely to draw legal challenges that could slow construction ahead of the 2020 election.
“Easy”
As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump described building the wall as a simple job. He tied it to his identity as a builder, a career that dates to the 1960s when he joined his father’s real-estate company. As the author of “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump put his reputation as a negotiator on the line.
“Will be so easy,” he told North Carolina voters in 2016. “Very simple,” he said in South Carolina. “Not even a doubt,” he added in Florida.
As Mr. Trump prepares for re-election—and for voters to scrutinize his record as president—he has adjusted his message. “If you think it’s easy with these people, it’s not easy,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Congress, during a rally last summer in West Virginia.
Cracks in the Wall
President Trump’s support for a southern border wall is wildly popular with his most devoted supporters, but opposed by most of the country. Americans are also more divided over border security issues than Mr. Trump’s base of support.
*Those who said they consider themselves to be more of a supporter of the president than of the Republican Party
Source: WSJ/NBC News poll of 900 adults conducted Jan. 20-23; margin of error +/–3.27 pct. pts.
Yet “build the wall” chants continue to resound at the president’s public appearances. Among Mr. Trump’s political base, polls show that 96% support the border wall. More broadly, a majority of Americans oppose such a barrier, the same Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found in January.
During the 2016 Republican primary race, Mr. Trump called his build-the-wall campaign promise, “My best line.”
When Mr. Trump took office, one of his longest serving senior aides, Stephen Miller, was an early supporter of declaring a national emergency on the southern border. Mr. Miller was known for taking a hard line on immigration, but he also sought to expand his reach.
The news release that announced his White House job described Mr. Miller’s portfolio as developing policy on national security, energy and veterans care—with no mention of the border wall.
Another early advocate of the wall was Stephen K. Bannon, the Trump campaign’s chief executive who became Mr. Trump’s top strategist and senior counselor. The promise to build a wall “and eventually make Mexico pay for it” was written on a dry erase board in Mr. Bannon’s West Wing office, competing for attention among other campaign promises. It was one of more than four dozen pledges on the white board, organized by policy area.
Under immigration, the wall didn’t top the list. It was 12th.
On another office wall, Mr. Bannon listed the goals for Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office, listed on 36 pages of computer paper taped together. The legislative agenda included the “End Illegal Immigration Act,” proposed legislation that would have made the wall a priority. It was never introduced.
An American Welcome
When asked how immigration affects the U.S., a growing majority of Americans say they feel it helps more than it hurts.
The project was made tougher without a supportive constituency in Washington to pressure lawmakers. Labor unions don’t view the border wall as a job stimulus, and business didn’t see clear benefits to the bottom line.
“The mistake they made was not coming in right away and coming up with a plan,” said Tom Davis, a Republican former House lawmaker. “You wonder why they didn’t try to jam this through when Republicans controlled the House because it’s a lot more complicated now trying to convince Nancy Pelosi.”
Mr. Trump, who sought $5.7 billion in wall funds to shield the U.S. southern border from drug smuggling and unauthorized crossings, has privately accused Republican leaders of hoodwinking him, and publicly blamed Democrats for a deal that provided about a quarter of the money he wanted.
In the first weeks of the Trump administration, Mr. Kushner raised tensions inside the West Wing when he entertained suggestions by Democratic lawmakers to secure wall money in exchange for supporting protections for immigrants protected under the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.
Mr. Kushner and Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, also left some West Wing aides with the impression that the president should put the wall on hold while renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Trump Declares National Emergency Over Border Wall
President Trump declared a national emergency Friday to get more funding for border barriers. Downplaying the significance of past presidents declaring emergencies, Trump said “They sign it. Nobody cares.” Photo: Getty
Messers. Kushner and Cohn later suggested outfitting the wall with solar panels, and possibly selling the energy to Mexico. The president loved the idea so much he adopted it as his own.
“You were joking about solar, right?” a reporter asked aboard Air Force One on July 12, 2017, after Mr. Trump after first mentioned the idea.
“No,” Mr. Trump said. “Not joking.”
Mr. Trump’s determination to make Mexico pay for the wall, and Mexico’s refusal, created demand for new ideas; The White House considered border-crossing taxes, new work-permit fees and higher tariffs on cars. Advisers suggested that Mexico would indirectly pay for the wall through a renegotiated Nafta. The revised trade deal, which hasn’t been approved by Congress, includes no language about a border wall.
“We were trying to get creative to keep the president happy,” one administration official said. “We were trying to find a way for him to say that Mexico was indirectly paying for the wall without pissing them off. That was the goal.”
President Trump at a cabinet meeting Tuesday where he said, “I can’t say I’m happy,” with the preliminary budget deal reached by lawmakers that provided $1.375 billion for border fencing. PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Trump’s demand for a wall was complicated by his shifting positions on other immigration issues that were tied to it. He has supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, but he also canceled deportation protections for them.
“He’s spoken, many times, about the Dreamers in different ways,” Mr. Kushner said about the president to reporters at the White House last month.
Lawmakers reached the deal this week only after the White House took a back seat in the negotiations.
“Left to their own devices, these were all people who were trying to get a result,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R., S.D.) “If you allow the regular order to work, we can get some things done around here.”
Veto threat
Several White House officials said there wasn’t an urgency to secure border-wall funding until early last year, after it was clear a comprehensive immigration deal was out of reach.
The president in January 2018 had rejected an offer from Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to pair $25 billion in wall money over 10 years with a path to citizenship for DACA immigrants.
A month later, a bipartisan group of senators hashed out a similar compromise. They believed it could have passed a Republican-controlled Senate if Mr. Trump supported it. The president was opposed, and it failed by six votes.
Border wall prototypes in San Diego, Calif. PHOTOS: DANIEL OCHOA DE OLZA/ASSOCIATED PRESS(6)
In March, Congress completed a $1.3 trillion spending package, but included just $1.6 billion for a border barrier, with most of the money intended to replace existing fencing. It banned the money from being spent on concrete slabs or any other of the wall prototypes the White House was considering.
Upset there wasn’t more money for the wall, Mr. Trump threatened to veto it. At an emergency meeting at the White House with his staff and Republican leaders, Mr. Trump learned that the spending bill incorporated all of the border wall money that was requested in the White House budget proposal.
“Who the f— put that in my request?” Mr. Trump shouted.
Mr. Trump directed his fury at Marc Short, then his legislative affairs director, while John Kelly, the former chief of staff was silent. Mr. Kelly was the Department of Homeland Security secretary when the agency made the request for border funds the year before.
Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, bottom left, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and Vice President Mike Pence, following a meeting with congressional staffers last month.PHOTO: ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Mulvaney, who assembled the White House’s budget proposal, privately encouraged the president to veto it and suggested Mr. Trump blame then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, who should have sought more wall money.
Mr. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Mr. Trump they would push for more wall money in the next round of spending bills at the end of the year. During the fall, Mr. Trump was energized by crowds chanting “built the wall” during his many midterm-election rallies.
Soon after the November election, it became clear to the White House that lawmakers weren’t interested in a fight over border-wall money. Mr. Trump decided to carry out his threat to close what he could of the U.S. government.
During the shutdown last month, Mr. Trump complained to conservative allies that Mr. Ryan should have pushed harder for wall funds. Last weekend, the president complained about it again during a meeting with a Republican member of the committee that negotiated the latest deal.
“Mr. President,” the Republican lawmaker said, “we gave you everything you asked for.”
Story 1: President Trump To Declare A National Emergency and Keeps Big Government Open Instead of Downsizing and Laying Off Permanently Non-essential Government Employees and Closing Departments– Trump Sides With Rollover Republicans and Radical Extremist Democrats– American People vs. Washington Political Elitist Establishment — Democrats and Republicans Continue To Betray Their Voter Base By Siding With Drug Cartels Massive Smuggling of Illegal Aliens and Illegal Drugs Into United States — Time For New Viable Political Party — Videos —
BREAKING NEWS: White House says Trump will sign spending bill to avoid shutdown but will declare border emergency TOO – as Pelosi warns GOP a future Democratic president could use the same tactic to impose gun control
President’s approval is required to avoid another government shutdown
Trump said he was ‘not happy’ with the compromise but White House signals he will accept it
White House said Trump ‘will sign the government funding bill’
But at the same time he will declare a national emergency to build the wall
Pelosi didn’t rule out legal action to block the move
She warned Republicans of the precedent it could set for the future
Rep. James C. Clyburn of South Carolina said he’s ‘sure’ it will pass
Deal must be signed into law by midnight Friday to avoid another shutdown
Senate adopted the measure by a vote of 83-16
House was set to vote Thursday evening on $328 billion package
President Donald Trump will sign a bipartisan spending deal – but will declare a ‘national emergency’ in an effort to procure funds to build a border wall, the White House said Thursday.
The move drew both statements of relief from lawmakers who wanted to avoid another government shutdown – and a threat from Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the emergency declaration.
Pelosi called it an ‘end-run around the will of the people,’ speaking to reporters minutes after news of Trump’s position broke, while warning it could come back to bite Republicans.
‘We will review our options, we’ll be prepared to respond appropriately to it,’ Pelosi said, asked about Trump’s planned emergency declaration.
President Donald Trump has expressed misgivings about a bipartisan deal, but will sign it, the White House said
She also brandished the threat a future Democratic president could use the same tactic of Trump moves forward
‘I know the Republicans have some unease about it, no matter what they say. Because if the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people,’ she said.
‘You want to talk about a national emergency? Let’s talk about today, the one-year anniversary of another manifestation of the epidemic of gun violence in America,’ Pelosi said, referencing the one-year anniversary of the Parkland, Florida school shooting.
‘That’s a national emergency. Why don’t you declare that emergency, Mr. President? I wish you would. But a Democratic president can do that. [A] Democratic president can declare emergencies as well,’ she threatened.
Within minutes after the White House announced its support, the Senate adopted the legislative package by a vote of 83-16. The House was to follow suit Thursday night.
Sen. Mitch McConnell updated colleagues on his conversation with Trump, saying he ‘indicated’ he is ‘prepared to sign’ the budget bill minutes before the White House announced his support
‘The precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans,’ said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
But Pelosi, even while touting the package as the product of compromise, bristled at Trump’s stated move to get around strict funding limits it included, namely $1.4 billion for border fencing.
‘So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans. And of course we will respond accordingly when we review our options,’ Pelosi said.
Pelosi also blasted Trump for ‘making an end run around Congress.
‘The power of the purse, the power to declare war … and of course the responsibility to have oversight.’ Although she said Democrats would ‘review our options,’ and did not commit to filing a lawsuit against the move.
Pelosi said Congress maintains ‘the power of the purse, the power to declare war … and of course the responsibility to have oversight.’
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York blasted the move in even more scathing language. ‘Declaring a national emergency would be a lawless act – a gross abuse of the power of the presidency and a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that President Trump broke his core promise to have Mexico pay for the wall,’ Schumer told colleagues moments after the deal passed the Senate.
‘It would be another demonstration of President Trump’s naked contempt for the rule of law and congressional authority. Congress just debated this very issue. There was not support for the president’s position on this issue,’ Schumer said, pointing to the legislative history that a court would likely consider.
‘For the president to declare an emergency now would be an unprecedented subversion of Congress’s constitutional prerogative,’ he said.
WHAT HAPPENS IF DEMOCRATS CHALLENGE A TRUMP-DECLARED BORDER ‘EMERGENCY’ IN COURT?
If President Trump declares that a national emergency exists on the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s likely that court challenges will quickly seek to stop him from exercising the powers federal law would give him.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said Thursday that ‘the Constitution grants Congress the authority to appropriate federal dollars, so I’m sure such action will be litigated in the courts.’
Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1975 in order to force post-Watergate presidents to explain themselves if they claim powers beyond what Congress has authorized.
Trump would have to cite the specific laws he’s relying on for emergency spending power.
The most likely basis is found in Section 2808 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code. It allows presidents to order the Defense Department to ‘undertake military construction projects’ during times of emergency ‘that are necessary to support … use of the armed forces.’
Trump began sending military troops to the southern border last year, tasking them with supporting border patrol units. Among their jobs has been hanging more than 150 miles of razor wire as a barrier to protect the border agents.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who met with Trump in the Oval office on Thursday afternoon, said in a Feb. 4 speech ‘they’re putting up barbed wire. What’s the difference between barbed ware and a steel slat? I’m confident the president has the legal ability to do this.’
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Thursday that ‘it will be challenged in court and is of dubious constitutionality.’
Trump’s opponents will have to find a loophole in Section 2293 of Title 33, which allows presidents to repurpose military ‘civil works’ budgets to build ‘authorized’ projects ‘that are essential to the national defense.’
That law applies in times of war or ‘national emergency.’
The largely civilian Army Corps of Engineers has already spent the past 18 months contracting out the work of building miles of border walls. It’s the Pentagon’s civil-works construction agency
It’s unlikely a federal court would weigh in on whether Trump has the legal authority to use his own discretion in declaring declare a national emergency. The 1975 law leaves that judgment up to the White House.
Every president since Gerald Ford has used it at least once. Barack Obama did it 12 times. Americans are still living under the conditions of 31 of the 58 declared ’emergencies.’ The U.S. Supreme Court has never invalidated one.
But his opponents would likely argue that Section 2808 can’t be used to build permanent walls that go beyond what’s necessary to protect the troops on border deployments.
And lawyers will squabble over whether Section 2293’s reference to ‘national defense’ includes border security in the first place.
A White House official said Thursday that the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which provided for wall construction along the border, is enough to show Congress has ‘authorized’ what Trump might want to fund unconventionally.
The official said the administration is betting that federal judges won’t want to weigh in on what is and is not related to national defense, a concept federal law has never clearly defined.
Trump said on Feb. 1 that while he expects legal challenges, ‘we have very, very strong legal standing to win.’
It would be ‘hard’ for Democrats to stymie him, he claimed, ‘but they tend to go to the Ninth Circuit,’ traditionally America’s most liberal and most often-overturned bank of judges.
‘And when they go to the Ninth Circuit, things happen.’
‘President Trump couldn’t convince Mexico, he couldn’t convince the American people, he couldn’t convince their elected representatives to pay for his ineffective and expensive wall. So now he’s trying an end run around Congress in a desperate attempt to put taxpayers on the hook for it,’ said Schumer.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told fellow senators Thursday that Trump was ‘prepared to sign’ the budget deal, and the White House soon confirmed it with stronger language.
Said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders in a statement: ‘President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before he will also take other executive action – including a national emergency – to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border. The President is once again delivering on his promise to build the wall, protect the border, and secure our great country,’ she added.
With the flurry of action Thursday afternoon, the Senate and House were set to vote in sequence on the $328 billion package.
McConnell made his announcement on the Senate floor after signals of indecision from the White House were once again raising fears of a government shutdown after Friday.
Joint statement from Democratic leaders Schumer and Pelosi on possible declaration of ‘national emergency’
‘Declaring a national emergency would be a lawless act, a gross abuse of the power of the presidency and a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that President Trump broke his core promise to have Mexico pay for his wall.
It is yet another demonstration of President Trump’s naked contempt for the rule of law.
This is not an emergency, and the president’s fear-mongering doesn’t make it one.
He couldn’t convince Mexico, the American people or their elected representatives to pay for his ineffective and expensive wall, so now he’s trying an end-run around Congress in a desperate attempt to put taxpayers on the hook for it.
The Congress will defend our constitutional authorities.’
McConnell spoke to Trump Thursday, and told his colleagues the president ‘indicated he’s prepared to sign’ the deal, which was inked Wednesday night.
Declaring a national emergency will allow Trump to repurpose billions of dollars Congress approved last year for other projects at the Pentagon and other agencies. The White House and Democrats have indicated that they expect interest groups to sue, challenging the president’s power to sidestep lawmakers’ power of the purse.
With Washington on edge a day before another shutdown deadline with no clear signal from the White House, McConnell told colleagues: ‘I’ve just had an opportunity to speak with President Trump, and he would, I would say to all my colleagues, has indicated that he’s prepared to sign the bill.’
‘He will also be issuing a national emergency declaration at the same time. And I’ve indicated to him that I’m going to prepare – I’m going to support the national emergency declaration. So for all of my colleagues, the President will sign the bill. We’ll be voting on it shortly,’ McConnell said.
A top Democrat immediately blasted the move to declare an emergency for funds Congress would not approve.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland intruded on an NBC live broadcast to say ‘declaring a national emergency when there is no national emergency is not good for a President to do, and frankly I don’t think it’s good for precedent for future Presidents.’
A leading Senate Republican opened Thursday’s session with a prayer that President Trump would have the ‘wisdom’ to sign a bipartisan spending deal – after another day of mixed signals from the White House.
‘Let’s all pray that the president will have wisdom to sign the bill so the government doesn’t shut down,’ said Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, who has been a powerful defender of Trump’s but who also is pushing to make sure Special Counsel Mueller’s report gets shared with Congress.
Grassley’s appeal to a higher authority came hours after a senior Trump advisor said only that Trump was ‘taking a look’ at the legislation, which a bipartisan panel of House and Senate lawmakers agreed to Wednesday night.
Vice President Mike Pence, traveling in Poland, said Trump is ‘not happy’ with the deal – which includes just a quarter of the amount he wanted for a border wall, with funds restricted to existing forms of fencing.
‘I think he’s been very clear that he’s not happy with it. Seeing less than $ 1.4 billion dollars in border wall funding I know is a disappointment to the president, but he’s considering the bill,’ Pence said.
The president himself was circumspect, tweeting: ‘Reviewing the funding bill with my team at the @WhiteHouse!’
Trump’s earlier Twitter effort was even less revealing. It said simply ‘funding bill’, and was an apparent typo.
Other senior Republicans were taking a wait-and-see approach to avoid getting out ahead of the president. Prominent voices on the right came out Thursday to urge Trump not sign onto the deal.
‘This bill must NOT be signed by @realDonaldTrump,’ wrote conservative host Laura Ingraham. She added: ‘This bill is tantamount to an illegal immigration ‘stimulus’ — de facto amnesty to any ‘sponsor,’ family member or ‘potential sponsor’ of an unaccompanied minor. #ChainMigrationAmnesty,’ and in another swipe, wrote: ‘This 1,169 page monstrosity will green light more ‘family units’ crossing illegally—without a doubt.’
‘Let’s all pray that the president will have wisdom to sign the bill so the government doesn’t shut down,’ said Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa
The president said only he was ‘reviewing’ the bill
TAKE ONE: Trump deleted his initial tweet
On Thursday morning, the White House had yet to signal Trump was certain to sign the deal, after high-profile conservative commentators balked at the arrangement, which gives the president far less than the $5.7 billion he demanded for a border wall.
White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow told reporters Thursday Trump was still ‘looking at’ the compromise that finally reached written form late Wednesday.
‘He’s looking at it. I think it came in very late last night. He’s taking a look at that, you’ll hear more about it when he’s ready,’ Kudlow said.
Lawmakers released the text of the 1,159-page bill Wednesday night.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said he is ‘sure’ the deal will pass
‘I think he’s been very clear that he’s not happy with it,’ Vice President Mike Pence said of Trump
White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow told reporters Thursday Trump was still ‘looking at’ the compromise that finally reached written form late Wednesday
The deal restricts fencing to existing types already in use
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama tweeted Wednesday that Trump ‘was in good spirits,’ and once again called the bill a ‘down-payment’ on the wall. Trump has indicated he will use other methods to procure wall funds.
Following the 35-day shutdown, Trump allowed a bipartisan group of lawmakers from both parties to negotiate a compromise. Pulling away from it could once again tag Trump with producing a shutdown.
The agreement provides $1.4 billion for border fencing, but not the $5.7 Trump demanded for wall construction. Trump has been tweaking his rhetoric as the deal approached. His Tuesday rally at the Texas border city of El Paso had banners that said ‘finish the wall,’ and Trump says repeatedly that it is already being built.
Trump said Wednesday he is taking a ‘very serious’ look at a bipartisan compromise deal to give him just a quarter of the $5.7 billion he wants for a border wall – following reports sourced to his advisors that he is preparing to sign it.
Government funding legislation is once again hinging on President Trump’s support for a border wall.
‘A pretty good deal’: Senators react to border spending bill
‘We haven’t gotten it yet,’ Trump said, in reference to the bipartisan compromise that has yet to be turned into final bill language. ‘We’ll take a very serious look at it,’ Trump added during a meeting with the president of Colombia.
He said he would look for ‘landmines’ surreptitiously buried in the legislation negotiated by Republicans and Democrats from both chambers of Congress, but would not formally commit to signing it.
There was a last minute standoff over back-pay for federal contractors who lost millions during the shutdown that began in December.
Republican Sen. Roy Blunt said he was told the president would not back the effort.
Senate Appropriations chair Richard Shelby of Alabama says he told Trump the wall funding was a ‘down payment’
A bipartisan compromise would provide $1.37 billion for new border fencing
‘We’ll be looking for landmines, because you could have that,’ Trump said, indicating his advisors would be scrubbing legislation to fund the government in search of any surprises. Trump said he would take a ‘very serious’ look at bipartisan legislation to fund the government
‘I’ve been told the president won’t sign that,’ Blunt said Wednesday, adding ‘I guess federal contractors are different in his view than federal employees.’ Negotiators left the proposal out of the final compromise.
‘I’m sure it’s going to pass. I don’t know of any drama,’ said House Democrats’ chief vote-counter, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., told the Associated Press.
President Donald Trump hasn’t given his final signal that he will sign a bipartisan compromise with $1.37 billion for border fencing, after a lengthy shutdown where he was demanding $5.7 billion for wall construction, though he is expected to do so
By accepting the compromise, Trump avoided yet another shutdown after the 35-day partial federal shutdown that began in December, battering Trump and Republicans in public opinion polls.
McConnell’s announcement caught Capitol Hill off guard. The Senate then voted to overwhelmingly approve the measure 83-16, sending it to the House for a vote late Thursday. The House approved the measure 300-128.
ABC News has learned the president plans to announce on Friday his intention to spend about $8 billion on the border wall with a mix of spending from Congressional appropriations approved Thursday night, executive action and an emergency declaration.
A senior White House official familiar with the plan told ABC News that $1.375 billion would come from the spending bill Congress passed Thursday; $600 million would come from the Treasury Department’s drug forfeiture fund; $2.5 billion would come from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction program; and through an emergency declaration: $3.5 billion from the Pentagon’s military construction budget.
(Erik S. Lessser/EPA/Shutterstock) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell walks onto the Senate floor at the Capitol, Feb. 14, 2019.
Many Republicans, including McConnell, had advised the president against declaring a national emergency, which is a challenge to Congress’ “power of the purse” — the power to decide how and where taxpayer money is spent. However, McConnell, in announcing the president’s decision Thursday afternoon, said he now supported the move.
“I will fully support the enactment of a joint resolution to terminate the President’s emergency declaration, in accordance with the process described in the National Emergencies Act, and intend to pursue all other available legal options,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “The Judiciary Committee will also use its authority to hold the Administration to account and determine the supposed legal basis for the President’s actions.”
Democrats and some Republicans came out against the president’s plans.
(J. Scott Applewhite/AP) Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi talks to reporters during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 31, 2019.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a joint statement, said the declaration would be a “lawless act” and a “gross abuse of the power of the presidency.”
“It is yet another demonstration of President Trump’s naked contempt for the rule of law,” their statement said, calling it “a desperate attempt to put taxpayers on the hook” for his border wall, adding that Congress “will defend our constitutional authorities.”
In a statement late Thursday, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said, “If President Trump declares a national emergency to fund his border wall, I’m prepared to introduce a resolution to terminate the President’s emergency declaration.”
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Thursday afternoon, “This approach does set a very bad precedent for future presidents, whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican, to feel that they can get around Congress’s constitutional role to allocate funding.
“It’s very serious and troubling to me,” she added.
Senior House Democrats and aides were waiting for Trump’s emergency declaration Thursday before deciding on how to best respond, but one aide said the House could take up and pass a joint resolution disapproving of any national emergency declaration — a move that would force Republican senators to go on the record on Trump’s controversial move.
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images) People work on the U.S./Mexican border wall, Feb. 12, 2019, in El Paso, Texas.
“We’re going to fight him,” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Rules Committee, said of Trump’s plans. “I think he’s going well beyond his constitutional powers, and he’s in for a hell of a fight.”
The spending deal crafted by top appropriators funding for the Department of Homeland Security and a handful of other federal agencies impacted by the 35-day government shutdown last month.
It includes $1.375 billion to build a physical barrier on the southern border – enough to construct about 55 miles of new fencing in new geographic areas, but less than the proposal rejected by the president late last year ahead of the shutdown.
(Joshua Roberts/Reuters) Rep. Hakeem Jeffries questions acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker as he testifies to the House Judiciary Committee on oversight of the Justice Department on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 8, 2019.
It also includes hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for new border security and inspection technology at points of entry, and humanitarian relief, along with additional funding to increase the number of immigrant detention beds.
The increase in funding for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was enough for a handful of prominent progressive House Democrats to oppose the deal.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rep. Kay Granger speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol, Feb. 13, 2019, in Washington, DC.
“We want to be abundantly clear: this is not a rebuke of federal workers or those who depend on the services they provide, but a rejection of the hateful policies, priorities, and rhetoric of the Trump Administration,” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., said in a statement.
Hours later, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also said she would vote against the deal.
“Congress must pass a strong DHS appropriations bill to bring accountability and humanity to our detention system. Unfortunately, this bill did not accomplish this and that is why I will vote no,” she wrote.
ABC News’ Sarah Kolinovsky and Trish Turner contributed to this report.
We’re now $22 trillion in debt, yet despite all that red ink, the Mexican cartels have control of our border and we’re not one bit closer to spending money on our own security. We’ve gone into deep debt for everything except the core function of the federal government.
It feels like it was yesterday when I was watching the news as a kid with my parents in 1995, listening to Newt Gingrich, during the infamous shutdown fight, warn about the dire consequences of crossing the $5 trillion debt milestone. It feels like it was yesterday when I was writing press releases for candidates in “the year of the Tea Party” on how Obama and the Pelosi Congress took the debt to $14 trillion in such a short period of time. Now, over eight years into varying degrees of GOP control of Congress and the White House, we have crossed the $22 trillion mark, expanding the debt more rapidly than at any time in our history. Whereas the debt exploded by $5 trillion during Bush’s eight-year tenure, a shocking figure at the time, it has now increased $8 trillion just since Republicans controlled the House in 2011 and by $4 trillion over the past four years, since they controlled at least two of the three political organs of government.
Now, the only question Republicans have is how many pennies of border security they will fight for, while refusing to challenge any of the nonessential and even harmful programs of the federal government. The GOP platform on debt and spending is a lie from top to bottom, as Republicans plan to pass more budget bills allowing us to blow through the budget caps without any effort to systemically reform the way we budget.
Even more indefensible, unlike during the end of Bush’s years and the beginning of Obama’s tenure, when we first began accruing trillion-dollar annual deficits, we are not facing a deep recession. In fact, we are enjoying the most robust period of job growth since the late 1990s, and revenue is at a record high baseline.
Let it be known for all of time that dire predictions of revenue slumping as a result of the tax cuts were fake news. The entirety of the current deficit problem is due to increased spending. According to the latest monthly report released by the Treasury Department yesterday, spending was up 9.6 percent for the first three months of fiscal year 2019 relative to the first three months of FY 2018. What about revenues? They actually rose slightly by 0.2 percent, despite some declines in certain revenue categories. This is an important statistic, because it is the first clean metric we have comparing a period of time with the tax cuts in full implementation to a period before the tax cuts.
Moreover, some of the increased tax revenue from more payroll taxes likely would not have occurred without the job creation spawned by the tax cuts. If you isolate the revenue tallies for individual and corporate taxes, the government obviously did lose some revenue in certain categories, but it was made up by a $15 billion increase in payroll tax revenue (FICA, Social Security taxes), in addition to increased revenue from excise taxes.
The annual deficit after just three months stood at $319 trillion, well on pace to smash the trillion-dollar deficit mark for the first time in a booming economy.
Thus, this bipartisan era of debt is worse than anything we’ve seen this generation, and it is all happening with record revenue and a booming economy – with no world war consuming our economy and budget.
Thanks to Republican-approved budget deals, for the first three months of the fiscal year, outlays for HHS are up 12.5 percent, outlays for the Department of Education spiked 23 percent, and outlays for the Department of Commerce have doubled! Meanwhile, outlays on Homeland Security have actually been down by 30 percent because of less disaster spending under FEMA than last year. But it’s not like we went on a spending binge for Border Patrol and ICE. Outlays on military spending are up 8.45 percent, but again, what is the purpose of the military if we use it everywhere else in the world except against those who most directly harm us at our own border?
All of this spending is creating a crisis with interest payments on the debt. Net interest payments for the first quarter are up to $100 billion. That is an annualized pace of $400 billion, almost twice the level it has been in recent years. And this is just the beginning.
What is driving the most debt? The issue where Republicans now agree with Democrats: socialized medicine. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is now bashing the Freedom Caucus for opposing the key element of Obamacare responsible for driving up the cost of insurance, thereby generating the massive spending and the monopoly created by the health care industry.
Health care is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Federal spending on health care (not including state expenditures) is projected to be $17 trillion over the next 10 years, dwarfing the cost of Social Security and the military. By 2047, health care spending will be about 25 percent greater than the insolvent and crushing cost of Social Security. As such, health care in itself is the largest driver of the other great crisis, as noted: the mushrooming cost of the interest on the debt itself. Health care spending alone will be greater than all the revenue from payroll taxes and corporate income taxes combined and almost as large as individual income tax revenue.
This is all going to the creation of a monopoly in a circuitous death spiral of price inflation and increased government spending. It’s no mystery why our national expenditures on health care have popped from $27 billion in 1960 to over $3.3 trillion today. Assuming health care would rise at the same rate as the rest of the economy, that number would be under $250 billion today. If we flushed $1.6 trillion down the toilet every year, we’d come out with a better result because we’d just waste money. Now, we are taking that wasted money and artificially inflating the cost of health care to the point that nobody can afford it without government continuing the death spiral of spending, monopolizing, and price inflation.
Yet Republicans have acquiesced to every degree of this baseline and are only debating how much more socialized medicine they will countenance while fake-fighting the rest. Then they will say we have to agree to the new socialized medicine in order to fight the next plan. Rinse and repeat.
With the deficits for FY 2019 skyrocketing just as much as the illegal immigration numbers, at some point conservatives need to asses their rate of return on the Republican Party.
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McCabe: There were 25th Amendment discussions at DOJ to remove Trump from office
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe says that after President Trump fired his boss, FBI Director James Comey, there were discussions within the Department of Justice about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Last year, the New York Times reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.
“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Pelley said.
In a statement released by the Justice Department, Rosenstein said McCabe’s account of a discussion of invoking the 25th amendment was “inaccurate and factually incorrect.”
Trump responded in a pair of tweets later Thursday morning.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a “poor little Angel” when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax – a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of “insurance policy” in case I won….
….Many of the top FBI brass were fired, forced to leave, or left. McCabe’s wife received BIG DOLLARS from Clinton people for her campaign – he gave Hillary a pass. McCabe is a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
The discussions occurred between the time of Comey’s firing in May of 2017 and the appointment eight days later of special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
According to the Times, Rosenstein also suggested that he secretly record Trump in the White House. Rosenstein disputed the account, and a Justice Department official said he made the remark sarcastically. But McCabe told Pelley that Rosenstein’s offer to wear a wire was made more than once and that he ultimately took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss.
McCabe, who was named acting director of the bureau after Comey’s firing, launched obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations into whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey.
He told Pelley he did so in order to preserve the FBI’s Russian probe in case there was an effort by Trump to terminate it.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe said. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
Former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe and President Trump. (Photo Illustration: Yahoo News; photos; Alex Wong/Getty Images, AP)
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McCabe’s comments come ahead of the release of his new book, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” due out next week.
In an excerpt of the book published Thursday in the Atlantic, McCabe describes a phone call he received from Trump on his first full day on the job as acting director of the FBI. According to McCabe, Trump told him that he had “hundreds of messages from FBI people [saying] how happy they are that I fired [Comey].”
“You know — boy, it’s incredible, it’s such a great thing, people are really happy about the fact that the director’s gone, and it’s just remarkable what people are saying,” Trump said, according to McCabe. “Have you seen that? Are you seeing that, too?”
McCabe was eventually fired in March 2018, less than two days before he would have collected a full early pension for his FBI career.
Trump has since railed against McCabe dozens of times on Twitter. “He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey – McCabe is Comey!” he exclaimed last April. “No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
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