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The Who – My Generation
Generations: America’s 5 living generations
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Generations Throughout History
Generations and the Next America: Paul Taylor
Generations: The History of America’s Future
Neil Howe & William Strauss discuss the Silent Generation on Chuck Underwood’s Generations | 2001
Neil Howe & William Strauss discuss the book “Generations” on CSPAN | 1991
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Neil Howe Interview: “We Are 8 Years Into the Fourth Turning” What’s Next? | MWC 2017
Neil Howe: The World Is on the Verge of Generational Crisis
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Neil Howe: It’s going to get worse; more financial crises coming
Neil Howe discusses the Fourth Turning with Don Krueger of The Motley Fool | 2011
Are Generations Real? The History, The Controversy.
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Generations and the Next America: Panel 2, Politics and Policy
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Jordan B. Peterson | Full interview | SVT/TV 2/Skavlan
Neil Howe (born October 21, 1951) is an American author and consultant. He is best known for his work with William Strauss on social generations regarding a theorized generational cycle in American history. Howe is currently the managing director of demography at Hedgeye and he is president of Saeculum Research and LifeCourse Associates, consulting companies he founded with Strauss to apply Strauss–Howe generational theory. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies‘ Global Aging Initiative, and a senior advisor to the Concord Coalition.
Howe was born in Santa Monica, California. His grandfather was the astronomer Robert Julius Trumpler. His father was a physicist and his mother was a professor of occupational therapy. He attended high school in Palo Alto, California, and earned a BA in English Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1972. He studied abroad in France and Germany, and later earned graduate degrees in economics (M.A., 1978) and history (M.Phil., 1979) from Yale University.[1]
During the 1990s, Howe developed a second career as an author, historian and pop sociologist,[4] examining how generational differences shape attitudes, behaviors, and the course of history. He has since written nine books on social generations, mostly with William Strauss. In 1997 Strauss and Howe founded LifeCourse Associates, a publishing, speaking, and consulting company built on their generational theory. As president of LifeCourse, Howe currently provides marketing, personnel, and government affairs consulting to corporate and nonprofit clients, and writes and speaks about the collective personalities of today’s generations.
Howe has written a number of non-academic books on generational trends. He is best known for his books with William Strauss on generations in American history. These include Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) which examine historical generations and describe a theorized cycle of recurring mood eras in American History (now described as the Strauss–Howe generational theory).[5][6] The book made a deep impression on Steve Bannon, who wrote and directed Generation Zero (2010), a Citizens United Productions film on the book’s theory, prior to his becoming White House Chief Strategist.[7]
Howe and Strauss also co-authored 13th Gen (1993) about Generation X, and Millennials Rising (2000) about the Millennial Generation.[8][9] Eric Hoover has called the authors pioneers in a burgeoning industry of consultants, speakers and researchers focused on generations. He wrote a critical piece about the concept of “generations” and the “Millennials” (a term coined by Strauss and Howe) for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Michael Lind offered his critique of Howe’s book “Generations” for The New York Times Book Review.[10][11]
Howe has written a number of application books with Strauss about the Millennials’ impact on various sectors, including Millennials Go to College (2003, 2007), Millennials and the Pop Culture (2006), and Millennials and K-12 Schools (2008). After Strauss died in 2007, Howe authored Millennials in the Workplace (2010).[12]
In 1988, he coauthored On Borrowed Time with Peter G. Peterson, one of the early calls for budgetary reform (the book was reissued 2004). Since the late 1990s, Howe has also coauthored a number of academic studies published by CSIS, including the Global Aging Initiative’s Aging Vulnerability Index and The Graying of the Middle Kingdom: The Economics and Demographics of Retirement Policy in China. In 2008, he co-authored The Graying of the Great Powers with Richard Jackson.[12]
Selected bibliography
On Borrowed Time (1988)
Generations (1991)
13th-GEN (1993)
The Fourth Turning (1997)
Global Aging: The Challenge of the Next Millennium (1999)
Millennials Rising (2000)
The 2003 Aging Vulnerability Index (2003)
Millennials Go To College (2003, 2007)
The Graying of the Middle Kingdom (2004)
Millennials and the Pop Culture (2005)
Long-Term Immigration Projection Methods (2006)
Millennials and K-12 Schools (2008)
The Graying of the Great Powers (2008)
Millennials in the Workplace (2010)
Notes
^Howe, Neil. “Profile”. LinkedIn. Retrieved 4 October 2010.
^Howe, Neil; Jackson, Richard; Rebecca Strauss; Keisuke Nakashima (2008). The Graying of the Great Powers. Center for Strategic and International Studies. p. 218. ISBN978-0-89206-532-5.
^“Neil Howe”. Center for Strategic and International Studies. Archived from the original on 2010-10-08. Retrieved 4 October2010.
This article is about the American historian. For the South African footballer, see Bill Strauss (footballer). For the American state legislator, see William M. Straus.
William Strauss (December 5, 1947 – December 18, 2007) was an American author, playwright, theater director, and lecturer. As an author, he is known for his work with Neil Howe on social generations and for Strauss–Howe generational theory. He is also known as the co-founder and director of the satirical musical theater group the Capitol Steps, and as the co-founder of the Cappies, a critics and awards program for high school theater students.
After receiving his degrees, Strauss worked in Washington, DC as a policy aid to the Presidential Clemency Board, directing a research team writing a report on the impact of the Vietnam War on the generation that was drafted. In 1978, Strauss and Lawrence Baskir co-authored two books on the Vietnam War, Chance and Circumstance, and Reconciliation after Vietnam. Strauss later worked at the U.S. Department of Energy and as a committee staffer for Senator Charles Percy, and in 1980 he became chief counsel and staff director of the Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation, and Government Processes.[1]
In 1981, Strauss organized a group of senate staffers to perform satirical songs at the annual office Christmas party of his employer, Senator Percy. The group was so successful that Strauss went on to co-found a professional satirical troupe, the Capitol Steps, with Elaina Newport. The Capitol Steps is now a $3 million company with more than 40 employees who perform at venues across the country.[1] As director, Strauss wrote many of the songs, performed regularly off Broadway, and recorded 27 albums.
During the 1990s, Strauss developed another career as an historian and pop sociologist,[3] examining how generational differences shape attitudes, behaviors, and the course of history. He wrote seven books on social generations with Neil Howe, beginning with Generations in 1991.[4] In 1997, Strauss and Howe founded LifeCourse Associates, a publishing, speaking, and consulting company built on their generational theory. As a partner at LifeCourse, Strauss worked as a corporate, nonprofit, education, and government affairs consultant.
In 1999, Strauss received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. This prompted him to found the Cappies, a program to inspire the next generation of theater performers and writers.[1] Now an international program including hundreds of high schools, Cappies allows students to attend and review each other’s plays and musicals, publish reviews in major newspapers, and hold Tonys-style Cappies award Galas, in which Strauss acted as MC for the Fairfax County program. Strauss also founded Cappies International Theater, a summer program in which top Cappies winners perform plays and musicals written by teenagers.[5] In 2006 and 2007, Strauss advised creative teams of students who wrote two new musicals, Edit:Undo and Senioritis. Senioritis was made into a movie that was released in 2007.[6]
Strauss authored multiple books on social generations, as well as a number of plays and musicals.
In 1978, he and Lawrence Baskir co-authored Chance and Circumstance, a book about the Vietnam-era draft. Their second book, Reconciliation After Vietnam (1978) “was said to have influenced” President Jimmy Carter‘s blanket pardon of Vietnam draft resisters.[1]
Eric Hoover has called the authors pioneers in a burgeoning industry of consultants, speakers and researchers focused on generations. He wrote a critical piece about the concept of “generations” and the “Millennials” (a term coined by Strauss and Howe) for the Chronicle of Higher Education.[12] Michael Lind offered his critique of Howe’s book “Generations” for the New York Times.[13]
Strauss also wrote a number of application books with Howe about the Millennials’ impact on various sectors, including Millennials Go to College (2003, 2007), Millennials in the Pop Culture (2005), and Millennials in K-12 Schools (2008).
Strauss wrote three musicals, MaKiddo, Free-the-Music.com, and Anasazi, and two plays, Gray Champions and The Big Bump, about various themes in the books he has co-authored with Howe. He also co-wrote two books of political satire with Elaina Newport, Fools on the Hill (1992) and Sixteen Scandals (2002).[14]
US deficit hits nearly $1 trillion. When will it matter?
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
The Trump administration reported a river of red ink Friday.
The federal deficit for the 2019 budget year surged 26% from 2018 to $984.4 billion — its highest point in seven years. The gap is widely expected to top $1 trillion in the current budget year and likely remain there for the next decade.
The year-over-year widening in the deficit reflected such factors as revenue lost from the 2017 Trump tax cut and a budget deal that added billions in spending for military and domestic programs.
Forecasts by the Trump administration and the Congressional Budget Office project that the deficit will top $1 trillion in the 2020 budget year, which began Oct. 1. And the CBO estimates that the deficit will stay above $1 trillion over the next decade.
Those projections stand in contrast to President Donald Trump’s campaign promises that even with revenue lost initially from his tax cuts, he could eliminate the budget deficit with cuts in spending and increased growth generated by the tax cuts.
Here are some questions and answers about the current state of the government’s finances.
___
WHAT HAPPENED?
The deficit has been rising every year for the past four years. It’s a stretch of widening deficits not seen since the early 1980s, when the deficit exploded with President Ronald Reagan’s big tax cut.
For 2019, revenues grew 4%. But spending jumped at twice that rate, reflecting a deal that Trump reached with Congress in early 2018 to boost spending.
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WHY DOESN’T WASHINGTON DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
Fiscal hawks have long warned of the economic dangers of running big government deficits. Yet the apocalypse they fear never seems to happen, and the government just keeps on spending.
There have been numerous attempts by presidents after Reagan to control spending. President George H.W. Bush actually agreed to a tax increase to control deficits when he was in office, breaking his “Read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes.
And a standoff between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich did produce a rare string of four years of budget surpluses from 1998 through 2001. In fact, the budget picture was so bright when George W. Bush took office in 2001 that the Congressional Budget Office projected that the government would run surpluses of $5.6 trillion over the next decade.
That didn’t happen. The economy slid into a mild recession, Bush pushed through a big tax cut and the war on terrorism sent military spending surging. Then the 2008 financial crisis erupted and triggered a devastating recession. The downturn produced the economy’s first round of trillion-dollar deficits under President Barack Obama and is expected to do so again under Trump.
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SHOULD WE WORRY?
As far as most of us can tell, the huge deficits don’t seem to threaten the economy or elevate the interest rates we pay on credit cards, mortgages and car loans. And in fact, the huge deficits are coinciding with a period of ultra-low rates rather than the surging borrowing costs that economists had warned would likely occur if government deficits got this high.
There is even a new school of economic theory known as the “modern monetary theory.” It argues that such major economies as the United States and Japan don’t need to worry about running deficits because their central banks can print as much money as they need.
Yet this remains a distinctly minority view among economists. Most still believe that while the huge deficits are not an immediate threat, at some point they will become a big problem. They will crowd out borrowing by consumers and businesses and elevate interest rates to levels that ignite a recession.
What’s more, the interest payments on the deficits become part of a mounting government debt that must be repaid and could depress economic growth in coming years. In fact, even with low rates this year, the government’s interest payments on the debt were one of the fastest growing items in the budget, rising nearly 16% to $375.6 billion.
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HAVEN’T ECONOMISTS BEEN MAKING THESE WARNING FOR DECADES?
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says the day of reckoning is still coming but isn’t here yet. Most analysts think any real solution will involve a combination of higher taxes and cost savings in the government’s huge benefit programs of Social Security and Medicare.
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ANY SIGN THAT WASHINGTON MAY TAKE THE POLITICALLY PAINFUL STEPS TO CUT THE DEFICIT?
In short, no. There has been a major change since the first round of trillion-dollar deficits prompted the Tea Party revolt. This shift brought Republicans back into power in the House and incited a round of fighting between GOP congressional leaders and the Obama administration. A result was government shutdowns and near-defaults on the national debt.
But once Trump took office, things changed: The president focused on his biggest legislative achievement, the $1.5 trillion tax cut passed in 2017. This appeared to satisfy Republican lawmakers and quelled concerns about rising deficits.
Democratic presidential candidates have for the most part pledged to roll back Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. But they would use the money not to lower the deficits but for increased spending on expensive programs such as Medicare for All.
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SO THE DEFICITS WON’T ANIMATE THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN?
It doesn’t seem likely, though former Rep. Mark Sanford, who has mounted a long-shot Republican campaign against Trump, is urging Republican voters to return to their historic concerns about the high deficits.
And economists note that today’s huge deficits are occurring when the economy is in a record-long economic expansion. This is unlike the previous stretch of trillion-dollar deficits, which coincided with the worst recession since the 1930s.
But analysts warn that if the economy does go into a recession, the huge deficits projected now will expand significantly — possibly to a size that would send interest rates surging. Such a development, if it sparked worries about the stability of the U.S. financial system, might produce the type of deficit crisis they have been warning about for so long.
PUBLISHED: 06:16 EDT, 8 October 2019 | UPDATED: 09:04 EDT, 8 October 2019
The US government ran a budget deficit of just under $1 trillion in the just-closed fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday.
The $984 billion deficit tally for 2019 came in more than $200 billion more than last year’s, despite very low unemployment and continuing economic growth.
The figure is also slightly worse than the $960billion projected by the budget office back in August.
The US ran a budget deficit of $984billion in 2019, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday – $200million worse than last year, and $20million worse then August projections (pictured on this graph)
The CBO noted that deficits have been growing faster than the size of the economy for four years in a row, ending 2019 at 4.7 percent of gross domestic product.
Many mainstream economists have long taken the position that deficits and the nation’s $22trillion national debt are unsustainable.
Others say deficits are manageable and note continued low interest rates despite steadily growing debt.
There’s no appetite in Washington to try politically painful medicine to deal with the deficit.
Democrats have noted the spike in deficits since President Donald Trump’s tax cut plan was passed in 2017, while Trump has promised not to touch popular retirement benefits like Social Security and Medicare.
Donald Trump (pictured during a press conference announcing a US trade deal with Japan) repeatedly pledged to cut the deficit during the 2016 election, but it has grown faster than the size of the economy during every year of his presidency
Though the deficit has yet to hit the symbolic $1 trillion mark it registered during former President Barack Obama’s first term, it could jump if the economy slides into a recession.
The Treasury Department will release the final deficit figures mid-month. CBO’s preliminary estimate is based on daily Treasury reports.
During the election campaign in 2016, Trump repeatedly pledged to start cutting the size of the deficit when he became president, at one point suggesting that he could eliminate it entirely in eight years.
However, tax laws Trump championed in 2017 when limited the amount of revenue the government could collect, combined with spending pledges that breached agreed limits in the 2018 budget deal, have combined to entrench the problem.
Federal deficit increases 26% to $984 billion for fiscal 2019, highest in 7 years
The U.S. Treasury on Friday said that the federal deficit for fiscal 2019 was $984 billion, a 26% increase from 2018 but still short of the $1 trillion mark.
The U.S. government also collected nearly $71 billion in customs duties, or tariffs, a 70% increase compared to the year-ago period.
The gap between revenues and spending was the widest in seven years. Defense, Medicare and interest payments ballooned the shortfall.
Federal deficit baloons to $984 billion for fiscal 2019, highest in 7 years
The U.S. Treasury on Friday said that the federal deficit for fiscal 2019 was $984 billion, a 26% increase from 2018 but still short of the $1 trillion mark previously forecast by the administration.
The gap between revenues and spending was the widest it’s been in seven years as expenditures on defense, Medicare and interest payments on the national debt ballooned the shortfall.
The government said corporate tax revenues totaled $230 billion, up 12%, thanks to a rebound in the second half of the year. Individual tax revenues rose 2% to $1.7 trillion.
Receipts totaled $3.4 trillion, up 4% through September, while federal spending rose 8%, to $4.4 trillion.
The U.S. government also collected nearly $71 billion in customs duties, or tariffs, a 70% increase compared to the year-ago period. As a percentage of U.S. economic output the deficit was 4.6%, 0.8 percentage points higher than the previous year.
“President Trump’s economic agenda is working: the Nation is experiencing the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years, there are more jobs to fill than there are job seekers, and Americans are experiencing sustained year-over-year wage increases,” said U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a press release.
“In order to truly put America on a sustainable financial path, we must enact proposals—like the President’s 2020 budget plan—to cut wasteful and irresponsible spending,” he added.
Annual deficits have nearly doubled under President Donald Trump’s tenure notwithstanding an unemployment rate at multidecade lows and better earnings figures. Deficits usually shrink during times of economic growth as higher incomes and Wall Street profits buoy Treasury coffers, while automatic spending on items like food stamps decline.
Two big bipartisan spending bills, combined with the administration’s landmark tax cuts, however, have defied the typical trends and instead aggravated deficits. The Congressional Budget Office projects the trillion-dollar deficit could come as soon as fiscal 2020.
Still, the Treasury’s report will likely come as a relief to the Trump administration, which had previously forecast that the deficit would hit $1 trillion during the 2019 fiscal year. The White House pushed through a $1.5 trillion tax cut nearly two years ago that President Trump vowed would pay for itself.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – Steve Jobs with a new LISA computer during a press preview in 1983. Baby boomers like to claim this visionary for their own.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – On November 30, 1965, about 20,000 marchers protested in Washington against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those who were born in 1945 were on the tail end of the “greatest generation,” and some participated in anti-war rallies in their youth.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – Many Millennials love “The Daily Show,” previously hosted by Jon Stewart.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – For generation X, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was a cultural icon.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – Steve Jobs with a new LISA computer during a press preview in 1983. Baby boomers like to claim this visionary for their own.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – On November 30, 1965, about 20,000 marchers protested in Washington against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those who were born in 1945 were on the tail end of the “greatest generation,” and some participated in anti-war rallies in their youth.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – Many Millennials love “The Daily Show,” previously hosted by Jon Stewart.
Photos:From millennials to the greatest generation
From millennials to the greatest generation – For generation X, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was a cultural icon.
(CNN)Here’s a look at six generations of Americans in the 20th century: the Greatest Generation (or GI Generation), the Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials and Generation Z. In order to examine economic trends and social changes over time, demographers compare groupings of people bracketed by birth year. There are sometimes variations in the birth year that begins or ends a generation, depending on the source. The groupings below are based on studies by the US Census, Pew Research and demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss.
The Greatest Generation (or GI Generation)
Born in 1924 or earlier.
Tom Brokaw coined the term the Greatest Generation as a tribute to Americans who lived through the Great Depression and then fought in WWII. His 1998 bestselling book, “The Greatest Generation,” popularized the term.
The Silent Generation helped shape 20th century pop culture, with pioneering rock musicians, iconic filmmakers, television legends, beat poets, gonzo journalists and groundbreaking political satirists.
No members of the Silent Generation have served as president.
Baby Boomers Born 1946-1964 (Sometimes listed as 1943-1964)
Baby boomers were named for an uptick in the post-WWII birth rate.
Generation X
Born 1965-1980 (Sometimes listed as 1965-1979)
“Class X” was the name of a chapter in a 1983 book, “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System,” by historian Paul Fussell. Novelist Douglas Coupland used the term as the title of his first book, “Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture,” published in 1991.
No members of Generation X have served as president.
About 39% of millennials ages 25-37 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, a larger percentage than previous generations, according to Pew. Millennials with a bachelor’s degree or higher had a median annual earnings valued at $56,000 in 2018, about the same earnings as Generation X workers in 2001. Millennials without a college education had lower earnings that prior generations. About 46% of millennials ages 25-37 were married in 2018, a lower percentage than Generation X (57%), baby boomers (67%) and the Silent Generation (83%).
About 15% of millennials age 25-37 lived at home with their parents as of 2018, according to Pew.Fewer members of older generations lived at home with their parents between the ages of 25-37. The rate for Generation-X was 9%. The rate for Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation was 8%. Education factors into the percentage of millennials living at home. Among millennials without college degrees, 20% lived at home with their parents.
2016 was the first year any millennial was eligible to run for president (the minimum age is 35).
Generation Z or Gen Z (sometimes called post-millennials) Born 1997-current
According to Pew, Gen Z is the most racially and ethnically diverse cohort. One in four members of Gen Z are Hispanic while 52% are non-Hispanic white and 14% are black. A total of 6% are Asian and the remaining 4% are of another racial identity, primarily two or more races. The majority of individuals in Gen Z live in metropolitan areas and western states, with just 13% residing in ruralareas.
High school completion and college enrollment rates for Gen Z are up, with significant increases for young adults who are Hispanic or African-American, according to Pew. In 2017, 64% of Gen Z women aged 18-20 were enrolled in college, an increase over millennials (57%) and Generation X (43%).
WASHINGTON — For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.
Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.
The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.
Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. That view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry. House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.
The move also creates an unusual situation in which the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into itself.
Mr. Barr’s reliance on Mr. Durham, a widely respected and veteran prosecutor who has investigated C.I.A. torture and broken up Mafia rings, could help insulate the attorney general from accusations that he is doing the president’s bidding and putting politics above justice.
It was not clear what potential crime Mr. Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.
Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation. In May, Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that the F.B.I. officials who opened the case — a counterintelligence investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow’s election sabotage — had committed treason.
“We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president,” Mr. Trump said. He has called the F.B.I. investigation one of the biggest political scandals in United States history.
Federal investigators need only a “reasonable indication” that a crime has been committed to open an investigation, a much lower standard than the probable cause required to obtain search warrants. However, “there must be an objective, factual basis for initiating the investigation; a mere hunch is insufficient,” according to Justice Department guidelines.
When Mr. Barr appointed Mr. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, to lead the review, he had only the power to voluntarily question people and examine government files.
Mr. Barr expressed skepticism of the Russia investigation even before joining the Trump administration. Weeks after being sworn in this year, he said he intended to scrutinize how it started and used the term “spying” to describe investigators’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers. But he has been careful to say he wants to determine whether investigators acted lawfully.
“The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” he told lawmakers in April. “And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”
The F.B.I. did not use information from the C.I.A. in opening the Russia investigation, former American officials said. But agents’ views on Russia’s election interference operation crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey about it.
The C.I.A. did contribute heavily to the intelligence community’s assessment in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and tried to tip it in Mr. Trump’s favor, and law enforcement officials later used those findings to bolster their application for a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.
The special counsel who took over the Russia investigation in 2017, Robert S. Mueller III, secured convictions or guilty pleas from a handful of Trump associates and indictments of more than two dozen Russians on charges related to their wide-ranging interference scheme.
In his report, Mr. Mueller said that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Mr. Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it.
Mr. Barr is closely managing the Durham investigation, even traveling to Italy to seek help from officials there to run down an unfounded conspiracy that is at the heart of conservatives’ attacks on the Russia investigation — that the Italian government helped set up the Trump campaign adviser who was told in 2016 that the Russians had damaging information that could hurt Clinton’s campaign.
But Italy’s intelligence services told Mr. Barr that they played no such role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said in a news conference on Wednesday. Mr. Barr has also contacted government officials in Britain and Australia about their roles in the early stages of the Russia investigation.
Revelations so far about Mr. Durham’s investigation have shown that he has focused in his first months on the accusations that Mr. Trump’s conservative allies have made about the origins of the Russia inquiry in their efforts to undermine it. Mr. Durham’s efforts have prompted criticism that he and Mr. Barr are trying to deliver the president a political victory, though investigators would typically run down all aspects of a case to complete a review of it.
Mr. Durham is running the investigation with a trusted aide, Nora R. Dannehy, and a pair of retired F.B.I. agents. Other prosecutors are also assisting, people familiar with the investigation said.
In interviewing more than two dozen former and current F.B.I. and intelligence officials, Mr. Durham’s investigators have asked about any anti-Trump bias among officials who worked on the Russia investigation and about one aspect of the investigation that was at the heart of highly contentious allegations that they abused their powers: the secret application seeking a court order for a wiretap on Mr. Page.
Law enforcement officials suspected Mr. Page was the target of recruitment by the Russian government, which he has denied.
Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation.
Mr. Durham has indicated he wants to interview former officials who ran the C.I.A. in 2016 but has yet to question either Mr. Brennan or James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked them as part of a vast conspiracy by the so-called deep state to stop him from winning the presidency.
Some C.I.A. officials have retained criminal lawyers in anticipation of being interviewed. It was not clear whether Mr. Durham was scrutinizing other former top intelligence officials. Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the former director of the National Security Agency, declined to say whether he had spoken with Mr. Durham’s investigators.
Mr. Durham also has yet to question many of the former F.B.I. officials involved in opening the Russia investigation.
As Mr. Durham’s investigation moves forward, the Justice Department inspector general is wrapping up his own inquiry into aspects of the F.B.I.’s conduct in the early days of the Russia investigation. Among other things, the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is scrutinizing the application for a warrant to wiretap Mr. Page.
Mr. Barr has not said whether Mr. Durham’s investigation grew out of the inspector general’s findings or something that prosecutors unearthed while doing interviews or reviewing documents. But the inspector general’s findings, which are expected to be made public in coming weeks, could contribute to the public’s understanding of why Mr. Durham might want to investigate national security officials’ activities in 2016.
Though the inspector general’s report deals with sensitive information, Mr. Horowitz anticipates that little of it will be blacked out when he releases the document publicly, he wrote in a lettersent to lawmakers on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Durham has delved before into the secret world of intelligence gathering during the Bush and Obama administrations. He was asked in 2008 to investigate why the C.I.A. destroyed tapes depicting detainees being tortured. The next year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed Mr. Durham to spearhead an investigation into the C.IA. abuses.
Career prosecutors had already examined many of the same cases and declined to bring charges, and in an echo of the Russia investigation, they fumed that Mr. Holder was revisiting the issue. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the abuses had been “exhaustively reviewed” and that a new inquiry could put national security at risk.
After nearly four years, Mr. Durham’s investigation ended with no charges against C.I.A. officers, including two directly involved in the deaths of two detainees, angering human rights activists.
President Trump has ratcheted up his claim that the Obama White House spied on his 2016 campaign, charging in a new book that it was a “treasonous” act by the former Democratic president.
“The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election. They were spying on my campaign. So you know? What is that all about?” said Trump.
“I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying,” said Trump who then added, “Obama.”
President Trump (seated) meets with Doug Wead in the Oval Office of the White House. Wead provided the photo to Secrets.
(Official White House Photo/Tia Dufour)
In 2017, Trump tweeted that he felt the Obama White House “had my wires tapped” in Trump Tower. He later said he didn’t mean it literally but that he felt his campaign was being spied on.
Attorney General William Barr earlier this year said he was looking into whether “improper surveillance” may have occurred in 2016. “I think spying did occur,” he said.
He has tasked a prosecutor to look into Obama officials and other officials who sparked the Russia collusion investigation into Trump after a report showed no collusion. New reports on that investigation described it as “criminal” in nature.
“It turned out I was right. By the way,” Trump told Wead in excerpts provided to Secrets. “In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said, ‘Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.’ Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?” said the president.
In the book, Trump said that the Russia investigation undercut his presidency.
“Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn’t get anything done. No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make
Stefan Halper: The Cambridge don the FBI sent to spy on Trump
When Attorney General William Barr stated “spying did occur” against the 2016 Trump campaign, most attention was focused on the FBI’s surveillance of former junior foreign policy aide Carter Page.
But the spying Barr was thinking of, and which he said may or may not have been legally authorized, is more likely to be that carried out by Stefan Halper, a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both American and British intelligence.
One could be forgiven for believing Halper was a creation of the spy novelist John Le Carré. A Cambridge don and White House veteran of the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, he has long operated in the gray area between academe and espionage. Gregarious, rumpled, and with an ample girth, Halper, now 74, was known as “Stef” to his friends and students, whom he would regale with tales of Washington intrigue.
While the FBI describes Halper as its “informant,” he did far more than report things he became privy to in the course of his normal life. Rather, he actively courted at least three Trump campaign officials, offering to pay for travel and misrepresenting himself as eager to work for Trump.
Columnist Kristen Soltis Anderson on the expanded Washington Examiner magazine
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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Halper was asked by the FBI to gather information on Page and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide with a junior but more central role than Page, and he met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis.
As Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into alleged FISA abuse nears its conclusion in either May or June, new reports have emerged indicating that Halper has been looked at as part of that probe.
Halper graduated from Stanford in 1967 and received a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1971 and Cambridge in 2004. He was the director of American studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge, where he taught classes and also delivered papers at institutions around the world, including Chatham House in London, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in D.C., and the U.S. Naval War College. Halper is now the emeritus senior fellow of the Centre of International Studies.
At Cambridge, he worked for years alongside Sir Richard Dearlove, who had spent decades with MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, the equivalent of the CIA, and was its director from 1999 to 2004.
Christopher Steele, hired by Fusion GPS and the eventual author of the Trump dossier that was used in FISA applications to target Trump associates, was in MI6 from 1987 until 2009. Dearlove has described Steele as the “go-to person on Russia in the commercial sector” and said his reputation is “superb.”
Halper organized and hosted a series of Cambridge Intelligence Seminars that were attended by intelligence community members, academics, and researchers from around the world. One such seminar in 2014, put together by both Halper and Dearlove, was attended by then-President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency Director Mike Flynn, who played a prominent role in the Trump campaign beginning in early 2016.
After Trump’s win, Flynn left his position as Trump’s national security adviser following questions about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during special counsel Mueller’s investigation regarding his contacts with the ambassador.
Dearlove and Halper both stepped down from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminars amid reports that Russian operatives were attempting to compromise the organization. Halper said he left due to “unacceptable Russian influence on the group.”
Today, Dearlove is listed as the chairman and Halper is listed as a partner at the Cambridge Security Initiative, which states it “provides a unique link between the worlds of business, government, and academia with unrivaled expertise in security and intelligence issues.”
This is not the first time that Halper has been accused of spying on a presidential campaign. In the lead-up to the 1980 presidential election between then-President Jimmy Carter and candidate Ronald Reagan, briefing documents from the Carter campaign were allegedly leaked to Reagan’s team before the one and only presidential debate on Oct. 28, 1980. Dubbed “Debategate,” the details on this scandal were not publicly revealed until 1983. And Halper was accused of being the person in charge of the operation, allegedly involving former CIA officials.
Though now on his second marriage, Halper’s father-in-law at the time was former top CIA official Ray Cline, best known for his key role in handling the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Cline denied Halper’s involvement and downplayed the alleged operation, saying, “I think this is all a romantic fallacy about an old CIA network … Such an effort would not have been worthwhile and I believe it was not executed.” Halper has denied his involvement as well.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Halper met with Page and Papadopoulos at the behest of the FBI as part of its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Halper also met with Clovis, the Iowa-based national co-chairman of the Trump campaign, although it is not known if this was done with the authorization of the FBI.
Page, who was the subject of FISA warrants in 2016 and 2017, says he first met Stefan Halper in mid-July 2016, after receiving an invitation to one of Halper’s intelligence seminars, titled “2016’s Race to Change the World,” in May or June 2016. Page said that organizers paid for his travel to and from the conference. Halper continued reaching out to Page into at least 2017.
Stefan Halper also contacted Clovis via email in late August 2016, and Halper referenced his conversations with Page as part of his offer to meet. Halper and Clovis met up in Virginia a few days later. Of their conversation, Clovis said, “It had nothing to do with emails. No mention of Russia. No mention of Hillary Clinton. No mention of her campaign. Only a mention in passing that he had met with Carter Page.”
The FBI says it began its Trump-Russia investigation, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane,” in July 2016, just a couple weeks after Halper met with Page. A meeting involving Trump dossier author Steele, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and his wife and Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr occurred just before the launch of the investigation as well.
The Justice Department says its investigation was initiated following Australian diplomat Alexander Downer telling the FBI that Papadopoulos informed him at a London bar in the spring of 2016 that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos says that Halper sent him an unsolicited email in September 2016 asking to discuss foreign policy issues with him. “I’ll pay you $3,000 and I’ll fly you to London, and let’s talk about it for a couple days and let’s see what you can do, and just write a paper for me,” Papadopoulos quoted Halper as saying. He met Halper in London and says that Halper grilled him about Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails, Russia’s involvement, and how it may have benefited the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos said, “I think I pushed back and I told him, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’”
When Halper’s role as an FBI informant was leaked to the media in May 2018, it led to accusations from Trump and Republicans in Congress that the Obama Justice Department had been using Halper as part of an illegal effort to spy on the Trump campaign. Dubbed “Spygate” by allies of the president, the revelation led Trump to tweet that this was “starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history.”
Democrats argue that Halper’s role as an FBI informant amounted to “spying,” though by any layman’s view of the term, it did. Back in 2018, Trump addressed this, saying, “The Democrats are now alluding to [sic] the the concept that having an informant placed in an opposing party’s campaign is different than having a Spy, as illegal as that may be. But what about an ‘informant’ who is paid a fortune and who ‘sets up’ way earlier than the Russian Hoax?”
Halper was the author of several books on international relations that were critical of U.S. foreign policy from a traditional realist perspective. Co-written in 2004 with former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke,America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order was deeply critical of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy of vast military action and “nation-building.”
In 2007 he wrote The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing on what he contended was the American obsession with “big idea” sloganeering rather than astute decision-making on the world stage. His 2012 book The Beijing Consensus spoke of China’s rapid rise, said that China “will not confront the West on the battlefield, but in the global information space,” and warned that U.S. foreign policy was woefully unprepared to deal with this.
When Halper contacted members of the Trump campaign, he did so under the guise of discussing foreign policy.
The FBI’s investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign was rolled into special counsel Mueller’s investigation following his appointment in May 2017. Last month, Barr provided a four-page letter outlining the baseline conclusions of Mueller’s investigation, including the fact that Mueller did not charge any Trump associates with crimes related to collusion with Russia. Barr said Mueller did not reach a conclusion one way or the other on whether Trump committed obstruction of justice.
And Barr said that the Justice Department inspector general’s investigation into possible FISA abuse by the DOJ and FBI should be done “probably in May or June.”
Congressional Republicans such as Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had fought for access to DOJ information on Halper’s relationship with the FBI. Nunes now says he has prepared a series of criminal referrals that he will be sending to the DOJ within days, and Attorney General Barr has said that he will take a serious look at the documentation that Nunes sends him. It is not known whether Halper will be part of any of the referrals.
After decades of being an accessible public figure well known to journalists, foreign policy aficionados, and intelligence officials on both sides of the Atlantic, Halper has retreated into the shadows, refusing all unknown callers to his rural home in Great Falls, Va.
In 1977, Halper became Special Counsel to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and Legislative Assistant to Senator William Roth (R-Del.).[6] In 1979 he became National Policy Director for George H. W. Bush‘s Presidential campaign and then in 1980 he became Director of Policy Coordination for the Reagan- Bush Presidential campaign.[6]
Halper played a central role in a scandal in the 1980 election. But it was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter that this scandal emerged. In connection with his position Halper’s name came up in the 1983/4 investigations into the Debategate affair, which was a spying scandal in which Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials passed classified information about Carter administration’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering (Iran hostage crisis). Reagan Administration officials cited by The New York Times described Halper as “the person in charge” of the operation.[7][8] Halper called the report “just absolutely untrue”.[9]
In 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper’s handler for this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, ex-CIA-Director George H. W. Bush, who worked with Halper’s father-in-law, ex-CIA-Deputy-Director Ray Cline.[9] After Reagan entered the White House, Halper became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs.[6] Upon leaving the Department in 1984, he remained a Senior Advisor to the Department of Defense and a Senior Advisor to the Department of Justice until 2001.[6][2][10]
Business (1984–1990)
From 1984 to 1990 Halper was chairman and majority shareholder of the Palmer National Bank of Washington, D.C., the National Bank of Northern Virginia and the George Washington National Bank.[6] Palmer National Bank was used to transfer money to Swiss Bank Accounts controlled by White House aid Oliver North.[11]
According to Peter Dale Scott‘s book The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era on the Iran-Contra scandal, Ray Cline’s son-in-law Roger Fontaine “made at least two visits to Guatemala in 1980… (with General Sumner) drafting the May 1980 Santa Fe Statement, which said that World War III was already underway in Central America against the Soviets and that Nicauragua was the enemy. And some Reagan aides felt that Halper “was receiving information from the CIA.”[12]
The Palmer National Bank, where Halper worked, was described as “the DC hub by which Lt. Col. Oliver North sent arms and money to the anti-Sandinista guerrilla Contras in Nicaragua. One of Palmer’s founders, Stefan Halper, had no previous banking experience but was George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy director during Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign.” [13]
Academic and media (1986–2000)
From 1986 to 2000 Halper wrote a national security and foreign policy-focused weekly newspaper column, syndicated to 30 newspapers.[6]
Halper has worked as a senior foreign policy advisor to various think-tanks and research institutions, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Center for the National Interest, where he is a Distinguished Fellow, and The Institute of World Politicswhere he is a Research Professor. He has served on the Advisory Board of Directors of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and contributed to various magazines, journals, newspapers and media outlets. These include: The National Interest, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the BBC, CNN, SKY NEWS, ABC, CBS, NBC, C-Span, and a range of radio outlets.
In a 2007 book, The Silence of the Rational Center, Halper analyzed “institutional failures” in United States policy-making:
“Three times since World War II, Big Ideas have seized the political discourse and driven policy experts to the sidelines: during the Red Scare of the early Cold War; during the entry to the Vietnam War, with its talk off democracy and dominos; and at the onset of the Iraq War. Each time, framing concepts rooted in Big Ideas turned complex foreign policy challenges into undifferentiated, apocalyptic threats to the nation’s very existence. Professionals and area experts were excluded from the debate if they diverged from the patriotic consensus, and the mainstream institutions and publications that could have opposed the rush to simplification were either silent or instead provided an echo chamber for the dominant narrative.”[14]
Russian Berlin-based journalist Leonid Bershidsky wrote in May 2018, that “the Trump-Russia scandal born of this operation [FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign] could be added to The Silence of the Rational Center as a fourth institutional failure.”[14]
United States government research (2012–2016)
From 2012 to 2016 Halper received $1 million in contracts for “social sciences and humanities” research from the Defense department‘s Office of Net Assessment, some of which Halper subcontracted to other researchers. Forty percent of the money had been awarded before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.[15]
FBI Operation ‘Crossfire Hurricane’
Halper acted as an FBI informant for Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, and was a subject of the Spygateconspiracy theory initiated by President Donald Trump in May 2018. The theory alleges that the Obama administration planted a paid spy in the 2016 Trump campaign “for political purposes” to gather information in support of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Beginning in summer 2016, Halper spoke separately to three Trump campaign advisers – Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos – but there is no evidence that Halper had actually joined Trump’s campaign.
Page said that he “had extensive discussions” with Halper on “a bunch of different foreign-policy-related topics”, ending in September 2017.[16] A former federal law enforcement official told The New York Times that their initial encounter at a London symposium on July 11–12, 2016 was a coincidence, rather than at the direction of the FBI.[17][16] Clovis’s attorney said that Clovis and Halper had discussed China during their sole meeting on August 31 or September 1, 2016.[16] On September 2, 2016, Halper contacted Papadopoulos, inviting him to London and to write a paper on Mediterranean oil fields, which he did.[16] On September 15, 2016, Halper asked Papadopoulos if he knew of any Russian efforts to disrupt the election campaign; Papadopoulos twice denied he did, despite Joseph Mifsudtelling him the previous April that Russians had embarrassing Hillary Clinton emails, and Papadopoulos bragging about it to Alexander Downer in May. The New York Times reported in April 2019 that the FBI had asked Halper to approach Page and Papadopoulos, although it was not clear if he had been asked to contact Clovis.[18] In May 2019, the Times reported that Page had urged Halper to meet with Clovis and that the FBI was aware of the meeting but had not instructed Halper to ask Clovis about Russia matters. The Timesalso reported that the FBI also sent an investigator using the name Azra Turk to meet with Papadopoulos, while posing as Halper’s assistant. The Times stated that the FBI considered it essential to add a trained and trusted investigator like Turk as a “layer of oversight”, in the event the investigation was ultimately prosecuted and the government needed the credible testimony of such an individual, without exposing Halper as a longtime confidential informant.[19]
Trump’s Spygate allegations were thoroughly debunked,[19][20][21] despite renewed interest in April 2019 after attorney general William Barr testified to Congress that “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign, although his characterization of “spying” was ambiguous and he declined to be specific. He stated he was assembling a team to examine the matter, although the Justice Department inspector general had been looking into it and related matters for some time and was expected to release his report within weeks. Prior to his 2016 activities, Halper had a February 2014 encounter at a London intelligence conference with Michael Flynn, then the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and later a Trump supporter and first national security advisor. Harper became so alarmed by Flynn’s close association with a Russian woman that a Halper associate expressed concerns to American authorities that Flynn may have been compromised by Russian intelligence. Flynn was forced out of the DIA six months later, although public accounts at the time cited other reasons for his removal, including his management style and views on Islam.[22] The “Russian” woman, former Cambridge academic Svetlana Lokhova, sued Halper in 2019 for $25 million, alleging he had conspired with multiple news outlets to spread the false and salacious narrative that she had seduced Flynn on orders from the Russian government. [23]
Halper’s former wife, Sibyl Cline, is the daughter of the former CIA deputy director for intelligence, Ray S. Cline.[8]
Books
He is the co-author of the bestselling book America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2004, and also co-author of The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing (2007). In April 2010, his book The Beijing Consensus: Legitimizing Authoritarianism in Our Time was published by Basic Books. Also a bestseller, it has been published in Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, and France.[citation needed]
Awards
Halper is a recipient of the State Department’s Superior Honor Award, the Justice Department’s Director’s Award, and the Defense Department’s Superior Honor Award.
John Durham, U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut. Courtesy photo.
News reports indicate U.S. Attorney General William Barr has tapped U.S. Attorney John Durham of the District of Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, and to determine if intelligence collection involving President Donald Trump’s campaign was appropriate.
But who is Durham, the 68-year-old who’s had a four-decade-long career as a federal prosecutor, and who has now been named to lead that part of the investigation?
1. Durham prosecuted the Boston Mob.
A Republican, Durham is the 52nd U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut. He began in his role as the lead federal prosecutor in that state in February 2018.
He has been a Justice Department attorney since 1982. He is a former acting U.S. attorney and deputy U.S. attorney, and was chief of the Criminal Division. He also once headed the New Haven field office and the Boston Strike Force on Organized Crime, and was involved in special investigation projects under four attorneys general.
In 2002, Durham helped secure the conviction of retired FBI agent John Connolly Jr., who was sentenced to 10 years in prison on federal racketeering charges tied to his relationship with well-known mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.
2. He led investigations into a former Connecticut governor.
Durham also helped prosecute former Republican Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, who served two prison stints for not paying taxes and accepting $107,000 in gifts from people doing business with the state. He was also responsible for prosecuting mobsters in the Boston area, and led an inquiry into allegations that FBI agents and Boston police had ties with the mob.
3. He investigated the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 2009, then-Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat, appointed Durham to lead the Justice Department’s investigation into the legality of the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.
4. Durham’s reputation as nonpartisan made him Barr’s ‘surprise choice.’
Those who know Durham said they are surprised that Barr, who many view as a partisan Trump ally, would pick a prosecutor who is reputed not to allow politics to enter into his work.
“Frankly, I’m very surprised Barr picked John Durham,” attorney and ethics expert Jamie Sullivan said. “Like [Robert] Mueller, Mr. Durham has an impeccable reputation. Barr did not pick someone who is in any way political.”
Sullivan, a managing partner with Hartford-based Howard, Kohn, Sprague & FitzGeraldand the co-author of a book on Connecticut legal ethics, added that Durham has a reputation for being “extremely tenacious and skilled and driven to come to the correct result.”
“He gives the process integrity,” Sullivan said.
For instance, when Durham conducted his investigation of Rowland, who had been a popular and well-liked governor, both men were staunch Republicans, Sullivan said.
“There was no political basis of any kind in that investigation and prosecution,” he said.
5. Observers say he permits no leaks.
Stan Twardy Jr., Day Pitney partner and U.S. attorney for Connecticut from 1985 to 1991, has known Durham for more than three decades and says the career prosecutor “is straight down the middle.”
“He is a person of tremendous integrity and is completely apolitical,” Twardy said Tuesday. “He does not have a political bias in any way. … He avoids it by keeping his head down and conducting the investigation without leaks. He is as close to Bob Mueller as anyone can be. He will conduct the investigation thoroughly.”
After Durham’s volunteer work, he became a state prosecutor in Connecticut. From 1977 to 1978, he served as a Deputy Assistant State’s Attorney in the Office of the Chief State’s Attorney. From 1978 to 1982, Durham served as an Assistant State’s Attorney in the New Haven State’s Attorney’s Office.[8]
Federal government
Following those five years as a state prosecutor, Durham became a federal prosecutor, joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.[7] From 1982 to 1989, he served as an attorney and then supervisor in the New Haven Field Office of the Boston Strike Force in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. From 1989 to 1994, he served as Chief of the Office’s Criminal Division. From 1994 to 2008, he served as the Deputy U.S. Attorney, and served as the U.S. Attorney in an acting and interim capacity in 1997 and 1998.[8][9]
In December 2000, Durham revealed secret FBI documents that convinced a judge to vacate the 1968 murder convictions of Enrico Tameleo, Joseph Salvati, Peter J. Limone and Louis Greco because they had been framed by the agency. In 2007, the documents helped Salvati, Limone, and the families of the two other men, who had died in prison, win a $101.7 million civil judgment against the government.[10]
On November 1, 2017, he was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as U.S. Attorney for Connecticut.[11] On February 16, 2018, his nomination was confirmed by voice vote of the Senate. He was sworn in on February 22, 2018.[8]
Appointments as special investigator
Whitey Bulger case
Amid allegations that FBI informantsJames “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi had corrupted their handlers, US Attorney GeneralJanet Reno named Durham special prosecutor in 1999. He oversaw a task force of FBI agents brought in from other offices to investigate the Boston office’s handling of informants.[10] In 2002, Durham helped secure the conviction of retired FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr., who was sentenced to 10 years in prison on federal racketeering charges for protecting Bulger and Flemmi from prosecution and warning Bulger to flee just before the gangster’s 1995 indictment.[10] Durham’s task force also gathered evidence against retired FBI agent H. Paul Rico who was indicted in Oklahoma on state charges that he helped Bulger and Flemmi kill a Tulsabusinessman in 1981. Rico died in 2004 before the case went to trial.[10]
In August 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Durham to lead the Justice Department’s investigation of the legality of CIA’s use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the torture of detainees.[17] Durham’s mandate was to look at only those interrogations that had gone “beyond the officially sanctioned guidelines”, with Attorney General Holder saying interrogators who had acted in “good faith” based on the guidance found in the torture memos issued by the Bush Justice Department were not to be prosecuted.[18] Later in 2009, University of Toledo law professor Benjamin G. Davis attended a conference where former officials of the Bush administration had told conference participants shocking stories, and accounts of illegality on the part of more senior Bush officials.[19] Davis wrote an appeal to former Bush officials to take their accounts of illegality directly to Durham. A criminal investigation into the deaths of two detainees, Gul Rahman in Afghanistan and Manadel al-Jamadi in Iraq, was opened in 2011. It was closed in 2012 with no charges filed.[20][21]
Special Counsel Investigation
In April 2019,[22] Attorney General William Barr announced that he had launched a review of the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections[23] and it was reported in May that he had assigned Durham to lead it several weeks earlier.[24] Durham was given the authority “to broadly examin[e] the government’s collection of intelligence involving the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians,” reviewing government documents and requesting voluntary witness statements.[24]
On October 24, 2019, it was reported that the Justice Department had elevated the inquiry to a criminal investigation.[25][26]
Accolades
In November 2011, Durham was included on The New Republic’s list of Washington’s most powerful, least famous people.[27]
Story 1: The Big Fail: Democrat Coup 2.0 Against Trump and American People Blown — Fear and Trembling Over Justice Department Inspector General’s Report on FISA Abuse in Obama Administration — Spygate Indictments and Prosecutions Coming — Videos —
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Glenn reveals the facts that the media refuse to share and breaks down the entire Ukraine timeline on the chalkboard. Tune in to watch as Glenn makes yet another complex issue simple. BlazeTV Presents a Glenn Beck Special – Ukraine: The Democrats’ Russia.
‘COUP’: Trump blasts Democrats’ impeachment efforts in tweet
The Trump tweet came about 12 hours after Trump adviser Peter Navarro called the impeachment inquiry an “attempted coup d’etat’
President-elect Donald Trump looks on during a rally at the DeltaPlex Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Dec. 9, 2016.Drew Angerer / Getty Images file
By Dareh Gregorian
President Donald Trump on Tuesday escalated his attacks on Democrats’ impeachment efforts, referring to the inquiry as a “coup.”
“As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP,” he said.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the….
The House last month launched a formal impeachment inquiry stemming from a July 25 phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president as well as a related whistleblower complaint.
The tweets came hours after reports that former Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker and former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch would be sitting for depositions before the House committees involved in the impeachment inquiry.
The State Department’s Inspector General also scheduled a surprise briefing for Wednesday with staffers from a group of House and Senate committees on documents related to the State Department and Ukraine, multiple Congressional sources told NBC News.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro told Fox Business Network he thought the president was the victim “of an attempted coup d’etat.”
“This is a very dangerous game that I think the Democrats could play,” Navarro said.
Trump has claimed to be the victim of takeover attempts before — he called former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election an “attempted coup.”
“They tried for a coup, it didn’t work out so well. And I didn’t need a gun for that one, did I?,” Trump told a crowd at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Indianapolis in April.
The president on Sunday also promoted a quote from a pastor who told Fox News that impeaching the president would lead to a “Civil War-like fracture in this nation.”
The Justice Department’s inspector general told lawmakers Friday his team is nearly finished with its long-awaited review of alleged surveillance abuses by the DOJ and FBI during the Russia investigation, saying they have submitted a draft to Attorney General Bill Barr and are “finalizing” the report ahead of its public release.
“We have now begun the process of finalizing our report by providing a draft of our factual findings to the department and the FBI for classification determination and marking,” Michael Horowitz wrote in a Friday letter to several House and Senate committees. “This step is consistent with our process for reports such as this one that involve classified material.”
Barr has received the draft report from Horowitz and will begin the process of reviewing it, according to a source familiar with the situation. The inspector general said his team has “reviewed over one million records and conducted over 100 interviews, including several of witnesses who only recently agreed to be interviewed.”
Horowitz and his investigators have probed how the infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was used to secure the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant for former Trump aide Carter Page in October 2016, as well as for three renewals. Horowitz’s team has questioned why the FBI considered Steele a credible source, and why the bureau seemed to use news reports to bolster Steele’s credibility.
In his letter Friday, Horowitz indicated that once the Justice Department and the FBI send back a marked document relating to classified material, his team will “proceed with our usual process for preparing final draft public and classified reports, and ensuring that appropriate reviews occur for accuracy and comment purposes.”
Meanwhile, a key FBI player during the time frame, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, is facing the prospect of federal charges after Horowitz faulted him in a separate inquiry over statements he made during a Hillary Clinton-related investigation. The review found that McCabe “lacked candor” when talking with investigators, but the former FBI official has denied wrongdoing.
As Fox News reported Thursday, Washington D.C. U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu has recommended moving forward with charges against McCabe, a CNN contributor, though no indictment has been handed down.
The Horowitz letter also comes amid other similar inquiries related to the 2016 election:
Barr has assigned John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to conduct an inquiry into alleged misconduct and alleged improper government surveillance on the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
And U.S. Attorney John Huber was appointed by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to review not only alleged surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and the FBI but also their handling of the investigation into the Clinton Foundation and other matters.
PUBLISHED: 19:46 EDT, 30 September 2019 | UPDATED: 09:34 EDT, 1 October 2019
Two U.S. officials say Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine‘s president that is at the center of a whistleblower complaint.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an internal matter.
It was the first confirmation that a Cabinet official was on the call in which Trump pressed President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Hunter Biden’s membership on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
It also increases the number of people known to have first-hand knowledge of a call that has sparked an impeachment inquiry by Congress.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is seen at United Nations in New York last week
Pompeo overheard the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (seen far left next to Trump), according to two U.S. officials
Pompeo leaves for Italy amid reports he took part in Ukraine call
Pompeo boarded a plane to fly to Italy on Monday.
Joining him aboard the official State Department flight was Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide and Trump supporter.
‘It’s not quite Air Force One, but it’s very close,’ Gorka, who is now a media personality, tweeted.
News of Pompeo’s involvement broke after it was learned that another associate of the president is more deeply ensnared in the ongoing impeachment inquiry.
Democrats on Monday subpoenaed Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer who was at the heart of Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden’s family.
That was after one of Trump’s staunchest defenders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said he would have ‘no choice’ but to consider articles of impeachment if the House approved them.
With Congress out of session for observance of the Jewish holidays, Democrats moved aggressively against Giuliani, requesting by Oct. 15 ‘text messages, phone records and other communications’ that they referred to as possible evidence.
They also requested documents and depositions from three of his business associates.
McConnell, a steadfast Trump defender, nonetheless swatted down talk that that the GOP-controlled Senate could dodge the matter of impeachment if the House approved charges against Trump.
‘It’s a Senate rule related to impeachment, it would take 67 votes to change, so I would have no choice but to take it up,’ McConnell said on CNBC.
FILE – In this May 5, 2018, file photo, Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Donald Trump, speaks in Washington. Giuliani says he’d only cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry if his client agreed. Central to the investigation is the effort by Giuliani to have Ukraine conduct a corruption probe into Joe Biden and his son’s dealings with a Ukrainian energy company. Trump echoed that request in a July 2019 call with Ukraine’s president. The House Intelligence Committee is leading the inquiry, and Chairman Adam Schiff hasn’t decided if he wants to hear from Giuliani. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
The lawmakers cited claims by Giuliani in a series of TV interviews over the past week
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has coffee with Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, U.S. September 20, 2019. Committees are seeking documents related to his mission to seek information from Ukraine
President Trump again Monday called his phone call with the President of Ukraine where he urged him to get in touch with Giuliani ‘perfect’
Giuliani has repeatedly pushed unsubstantiated claims that Joe Biden pushed Ukraine to fire a prosecutor to keep it from probing a company tied to his son
UP TO HERE: ‘If (Trump) decides that he wants me to testify of course I’ll testify – even though I think Adam Schiff is an illegitimate chairman,’ Giuliani said.
‘How long you’re on it is a whole different matter.’
Trump took to Twitter to defend anew his phone call with Zelenskiy as ‘perfect’ and to unleash a series of attacks, most strikingly against House intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
The Democrat, he suggested, ought to be tried for a capital offense for launching into a paraphrase of Trump during a congressional hearing last week.
‘Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people,’ the president wrote.
‘It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?’
Trump tweeted repeatedly through the day but was, for the most part, a lonely voice as the White House lacked an organization or process to defend him.
Senior staffers, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, were to present Trump this week with options on setting up the West Wing’s response to impeachment, officials said.
A formal war room was unlikely, though some sort of rapid response team was planned to supplement the efforts of Trump and Giuliani.
But Trump was angry over the weekend at both Mulvaney and press secretary Stephanie Grisham for not being able to change the narrative dominating the story, according to two Republicans close to the White House not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
+13
Democrats have orders from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to keep momentum going despite a two-week recess that started Friday.
Staff for three committees are scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday to depose Marie ‘Masha’ Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who was removed by the Trump administration earlier this year, and Kurt Volker, who resigned last week as America’s Ukrainian envoy.
Members of intelligence committee on Friday will interview Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community who first received the whistleblower’s complaint.
Democrats are driving the proceedings toward what some hope is a vote to impeach, or indict, Trump by year’s end.
They have launched a coordinated messaging and polling strategy aimed at keeping any political backlash in closely divided districts from toppling their House majority.
Meanwhile, an outside group that supports GOP House candidates was starting anti-impeachment digital ads on Monday against three House Democrats from districts Trump won in 2016.
The ads by the Congressional Leadership Fund accuse Reps. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, Elaine Luria of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan of ‘tearing us apart,’ and are among the first in which Republicans are trying to use the impeachment issue against Democratic candidates.
However, support across America for impeachment has grown significantly from its level before the House launched its formal inquiry last week.
A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows 47 per cent of registered voters say Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 47 per cent say he should not.
Just a week before, it was 37 per cent for impeachment and 57 per cent against.
That was before the White House released its rough version of the call between Trump and Ukraine’s president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of a formal impeachment inquiry.
SMOKING TABLET: Rudy Giuliani claims he has 15 texts which will show his Ukraine activities were fully coordinated with the State Department
Rudy Giuliani reiterated previous claims that the State Department asked him to reach out to Ukraine to inquire about Ukrainian investigations, including into Joe and Hunter Biden, in an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox
TALK AGAIN: Giuliani shared his texts with U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker
In the CNN poll, 47 per cent said Trump should be impeached and removed from office, up from 41 per cent in May.
Both polls showed dramatic partisan polarization remains on impeachment: most Democrats expressing support, the vast majority of Republicans opposed.
The polls disagreed over whose opinions are changing – Quinnipiac showing increased impeachment support coming more from Democrats, CNN from Republicans.
Schiff said on Sunday that his intelligence panel would hear from the still-secret whistleblower ‘very soon’ but that no date had been set and other details remained to be worked out.
A day after Trump demanded to meet the whistleblower, whom he has repeatedly assailed, he said when asked about the person: ‘Well, we’re trying to find out about a whistleblower,’ who made his perfect call ‘sound terrible.’
The whistleblower’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj, said Monday that the person ‘is entitled to anonymity. Law and policy support this, and the individual is not to be retaliated against. Doing so is a violation of federal law.’
Separately, the Justice Department disclosed that Trump recently asked Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and other foreign leaders to help Attorney General William Barr with an investigation of the origins of the Russia investigation that has shadowed his administration for more than two years.
Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Trump made the calls at Barr’s request.
Trump was requesting help for U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The investigation outraged Trump, who cast it as a politically motivated ‘witch hunt.’
The Russia probe remains Trump’s motivating factor, according to Tom Bossert, the president’s former homeland security adviser.
‘I honestly believe this president has not gotten his pound of flesh yet from past grievances on the 2016 investigation,’ Bossert said Sunday on ABC.
‘If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.’
The Pronk Pops blog is the broadcasting and mass communication of ideas about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, truth, virtue and wisdom.
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The Pronk Pops Show Podcasts
Pronk Pops Show 1345 October 25, 2019
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Pronk Pops Show 1340 October 14, 2019
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Pronk Pops Show 1284 July 2, 2019
Pronk Pops Show 1283 July 1, 2019
Story 1: Totally Out-of-Control Federal Government Spending With $984 Billion Deficit For Fiscal Year 2019 and National Debt Approaching 23,000 Billion — Videos —
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
10 Myths About Government Debt
Federal deficit baloons to $984 billion for fiscal 2019, highest in 7 years
Trump Bankrupting America as The US Budget Deficit is Exploding in 2019
US budget deficit tops $1 trillion as government spending increases
Government watchdog says federal budget deficit will top $1 trillion next year
Federal deficit might pass $1T in 2019
Blueprint for Balance: A Federal Budget for FY 2019
U.S. Economy 101: national debt vs. national deficit | Just The FAQs
Deficits & Debts: Crash Course Economics #9
The Who – My Generation
Generations: America’s 5 living generations
Who Are the Generations?
Generations Throughout History
Generations and the Next America: Paul Taylor
Generations: The History of America’s Future
Neil Howe & William Strauss discuss the Silent Generation on Chuck Underwood’s Generations | 2001
Neil Howe & William Strauss discuss the book “Generations” on CSPAN | 1991
The Fourth Turning: Why American ‘Crisis’ May Last Until 2030
Neil Howe Interview: “We Are 8 Years Into the Fourth Turning” What’s Next? | MWC 2017
Neil Howe: The World Is on the Verge of Generational Crisis
The Zeitgeist According to Steve Bannon’s Favorite Demographer Neil Howe
Neil Howe: Is Trump America’s ‘Gray Champion’ Like Lincoln or FDR?
Neil Howe: It’s going to get worse; more financial crises coming
Neil Howe discusses the Fourth Turning with Don Krueger of The Motley Fool | 2011
Are Generations Real? The History, The Controversy.
Generations and the Next America: Panel 1, Family and Society
Generations and the Next America: Panel 2, Politics and Policy
Jordan Peterson to Millennials: “Don’t Be A Damn Victim!”
Our Generation Is FAILING, Why Jordan Peterson Is One Remedy
Jordan Peterson Explains WHY The Youth Today are So Unhappy + Why you Shouldn’t Lie!
Jordan B. Peterson | Full interview | SVT/TV 2/Skavlan
The Next America: Generations
Barry McGuire – Eve of Destruction
EVOLUTION OF DANCE
Neil Howe
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Neil Howe (born October 21, 1951) is an American author and consultant. He is best known for his work with William Strauss on social generations regarding a theorized generational cycle in American history. Howe is currently the managing director of demography at Hedgeye and he is president of Saeculum Research and LifeCourse Associates, consulting companies he founded with Strauss to apply Strauss–Howe generational theory. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies‘ Global Aging Initiative, and a senior advisor to the Concord Coalition.
Contents
Biography
Howe was born in Santa Monica, California. His grandfather was the astronomer Robert Julius Trumpler. His father was a physicist and his mother was a professor of occupational therapy. He attended high school in Palo Alto, California, and earned a BA in English Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1972. He studied abroad in France and Germany, and later earned graduate degrees in economics (M.A., 1978) and history (M.Phil., 1979) from Yale University.[1]
After receiving his degrees, Howe worked in Washington, D.C., as a public policy consultant on global aging, long-term fiscal policy, and migration. His positions have included advisor on public policy to the Blackstone Group, policy advisor to the Concord Coalition, and senior associate for the Global Aging Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).[2][3]
During the 1990s, Howe developed a second career as an author, historian and pop sociologist,[4] examining how generational differences shape attitudes, behaviors, and the course of history. He has since written nine books on social generations, mostly with William Strauss. In 1997 Strauss and Howe founded LifeCourse Associates, a publishing, speaking, and consulting company built on their generational theory. As president of LifeCourse, Howe currently provides marketing, personnel, and government affairs consulting to corporate and nonprofit clients, and writes and speaks about the collective personalities of today’s generations.
Howe lives in Great Falls, Virginia, and has two young adult children.[citation needed]
Work
Howe has written a number of non-academic books on generational trends. He is best known for his books with William Strauss on generations in American history. These include Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) which examine historical generations and describe a theorized cycle of recurring mood eras in American History (now described as the Strauss–Howe generational theory).[5][6] The book made a deep impression on Steve Bannon, who wrote and directed Generation Zero (2010), a Citizens United Productions film on the book’s theory, prior to his becoming White House Chief Strategist.[7]
Howe and Strauss also co-authored 13th Gen (1993) about Generation X, and Millennials Rising (2000) about the Millennial Generation.[8][9] Eric Hoover has called the authors pioneers in a burgeoning industry of consultants, speakers and researchers focused on generations. He wrote a critical piece about the concept of “generations” and the “Millennials” (a term coined by Strauss and Howe) for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Michael Lind offered his critique of Howe’s book “Generations” for The New York Times Book Review.[10][11]
Howe has written a number of application books with Strauss about the Millennials’ impact on various sectors, including Millennials Go to College (2003, 2007), Millennials and the Pop Culture (2006), and Millennials and K-12 Schools (2008). After Strauss died in 2007, Howe authored Millennials in the Workplace (2010).[12]
In 1988, he coauthored On Borrowed Time with Peter G. Peterson, one of the early calls for budgetary reform (the book was reissued 2004). Since the late 1990s, Howe has also coauthored a number of academic studies published by CSIS, including the Global Aging Initiative’s Aging Vulnerability Index and The Graying of the Middle Kingdom: The Economics and Demographics of Retirement Policy in China. In 2008, he co-authored The Graying of the Great Powers with Richard Jackson.[12]
Selected bibliography
Notes
External links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Howe
William Strauss
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William Strauss (December 5, 1947 – December 18, 2007) was an American author, playwright, theater director, and lecturer. As an author, he is known for his work with Neil Howe on social generations and for Strauss–Howe generational theory. He is also known as the co-founder and director of the satirical musical theater group the Capitol Steps, and as the co-founder of the Cappies, a critics and awards program for high school theater students.
Biography
Strauss was born in Chicago and grew up in Burlingame, California. He graduated from Harvard University in 1969. In 1973, he received a JD from Harvard Law School and a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government,[1] where he was a member of the program’s first graduating class.[2]
After receiving his degrees, Strauss worked in Washington, DC as a policy aid to the Presidential Clemency Board, directing a research team writing a report on the impact of the Vietnam War on the generation that was drafted. In 1978, Strauss and Lawrence Baskir co-authored two books on the Vietnam War, Chance and Circumstance, and Reconciliation after Vietnam. Strauss later worked at the U.S. Department of Energy and as a committee staffer for Senator Charles Percy, and in 1980 he became chief counsel and staff director of the Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation, and Government Processes.[1]
In 1981, Strauss organized a group of senate staffers to perform satirical songs at the annual office Christmas party of his employer, Senator Percy. The group was so successful that Strauss went on to co-found a professional satirical troupe, the Capitol Steps, with Elaina Newport. The Capitol Steps is now a $3 million company with more than 40 employees who perform at venues across the country.[1] As director, Strauss wrote many of the songs, performed regularly off Broadway, and recorded 27 albums.
During the 1990s, Strauss developed another career as an historian and pop sociologist,[3] examining how generational differences shape attitudes, behaviors, and the course of history. He wrote seven books on social generations with Neil Howe, beginning with Generations in 1991.[4] In 1997, Strauss and Howe founded LifeCourse Associates, a publishing, speaking, and consulting company built on their generational theory. As a partner at LifeCourse, Strauss worked as a corporate, nonprofit, education, and government affairs consultant.
In 1999, Strauss received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. This prompted him to found the Cappies, a program to inspire the next generation of theater performers and writers.[1] Now an international program including hundreds of high schools, Cappies allows students to attend and review each other’s plays and musicals, publish reviews in major newspapers, and hold Tonys-style Cappies award Galas, in which Strauss acted as MC for the Fairfax County program. Strauss also founded Cappies International Theater, a summer program in which top Cappies winners perform plays and musicals written by teenagers.[5] In 2006 and 2007, Strauss advised creative teams of students who wrote two new musicals, Edit:Undo and Senioritis. Senioritis was made into a movie that was released in 2007.[6]
Death
Strauss died of pancreatic cancer in his home in McLean, Virginia. His wife of 34 years, Janie Strauss, lives in McLean and is a member of the Fairfax County School Board. They have four grown children.
Work
Strauss authored multiple books on social generations, as well as a number of plays and musicals.
In 1978, he and Lawrence Baskir co-authored Chance and Circumstance, a book about the Vietnam-era draft. Their second book, Reconciliation After Vietnam (1978) “was said to have influenced” President Jimmy Carter‘s blanket pardon of Vietnam draft resisters.[1]
Strauss’s books with Neil Howe include Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997), which examine historical generations and describe a theorized cycle of recurring mood eras in American History (now described as the Strauss-Howe generational theory).[7][8] The book made a deep impression on Steve Bannon, who wrote and directed Generation Zero (2010), a Citizens United Productions film on the book’s theory, prior to his becoming White House Chief Strategist.[9]
Howe and Strauss also co-authored 13th Gen (1993) about Generation X, and Millennials Rising (2000) about the Millennial Generation.[10][11]
Eric Hoover has called the authors pioneers in a burgeoning industry of consultants, speakers and researchers focused on generations. He wrote a critical piece about the concept of “generations” and the “Millennials” (a term coined by Strauss and Howe) for the Chronicle of Higher Education.[12] Michael Lind offered his critique of Howe’s book “Generations” for the New York Times.[13]
Strauss also wrote a number of application books with Howe about the Millennials’ impact on various sectors, including Millennials Go to College (2003, 2007), Millennials in the Pop Culture (2005), and Millennials in K-12 Schools (2008).
Strauss wrote three musicals, MaKiddo, Free-the-Music.com, and Anasazi, and two plays, Gray Champions and The Big Bump, about various themes in the books he has co-authored with Howe. He also co-wrote two books of political satire with Elaina Newport, Fools on the Hill (1992) and Sixteen Scandals (2002).[14]
Selected bibliography
Books
Plays and musicals
Notes
External links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strauss
US deficit hits nearly $1 trillion. When will it matter?
The Trump administration reported a river of red ink Friday.
The federal deficit for the 2019 budget year surged 26% from 2018 to $984.4 billion — its highest point in seven years. The gap is widely expected to top $1 trillion in the current budget year and likely remain there for the next decade.
The year-over-year widening in the deficit reflected such factors as revenue lost from the 2017 Trump tax cut and a budget deal that added billions in spending for military and domestic programs.
Forecasts by the Trump administration and the Congressional Budget Office project that the deficit will top $1 trillion in the 2020 budget year, which began Oct. 1. And the CBO estimates that the deficit will stay above $1 trillion over the next decade.
Those projections stand in contrast to President Donald Trump’s campaign promises that even with revenue lost initially from his tax cuts, he could eliminate the budget deficit with cuts in spending and increased growth generated by the tax cuts.
Here are some questions and answers about the current state of the government’s finances.
___
WHAT HAPPENED?
The deficit has been rising every year for the past four years. It’s a stretch of widening deficits not seen since the early 1980s, when the deficit exploded with President Ronald Reagan’s big tax cut.
For 2019, revenues grew 4%. But spending jumped at twice that rate, reflecting a deal that Trump reached with Congress in early 2018 to boost spending.
___
WHY DOESN’T WASHINGTON DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
Fiscal hawks have long warned of the economic dangers of running big government deficits. Yet the apocalypse they fear never seems to happen, and the government just keeps on spending.
There have been numerous attempts by presidents after Reagan to control spending. President George H.W. Bush actually agreed to a tax increase to control deficits when he was in office, breaking his “Read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes.
And a standoff between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich did produce a rare string of four years of budget surpluses from 1998 through 2001. In fact, the budget picture was so bright when George W. Bush took office in 2001 that the Congressional Budget Office projected that the government would run surpluses of $5.6 trillion over the next decade.
That didn’t happen. The economy slid into a mild recession, Bush pushed through a big tax cut and the war on terrorism sent military spending surging. Then the 2008 financial crisis erupted and triggered a devastating recession. The downturn produced the economy’s first round of trillion-dollar deficits under President Barack Obama and is expected to do so again under Trump.
___
SHOULD WE WORRY?
As far as most of us can tell, the huge deficits don’t seem to threaten the economy or elevate the interest rates we pay on credit cards, mortgages and car loans. And in fact, the huge deficits are coinciding with a period of ultra-low rates rather than the surging borrowing costs that economists had warned would likely occur if government deficits got this high.
There is even a new school of economic theory known as the “modern monetary theory.” It argues that such major economies as the United States and Japan don’t need to worry about running deficits because their central banks can print as much money as they need.
Yet this remains a distinctly minority view among economists. Most still believe that while the huge deficits are not an immediate threat, at some point they will become a big problem. They will crowd out borrowing by consumers and businesses and elevate interest rates to levels that ignite a recession.
What’s more, the interest payments on the deficits become part of a mounting government debt that must be repaid and could depress economic growth in coming years. In fact, even with low rates this year, the government’s interest payments on the debt were one of the fastest growing items in the budget, rising nearly 16% to $375.6 billion.
___
HAVEN’T ECONOMISTS BEEN MAKING THESE WARNING FOR DECADES?
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says the day of reckoning is still coming but isn’t here yet. Most analysts think any real solution will involve a combination of higher taxes and cost savings in the government’s huge benefit programs of Social Security and Medicare.
___
ANY SIGN THAT WASHINGTON MAY TAKE THE POLITICALLY PAINFUL STEPS TO CUT THE DEFICIT?
In short, no. There has been a major change since the first round of trillion-dollar deficits prompted the Tea Party revolt. This shift brought Republicans back into power in the House and incited a round of fighting between GOP congressional leaders and the Obama administration. A result was government shutdowns and near-defaults on the national debt.
But once Trump took office, things changed: The president focused on his biggest legislative achievement, the $1.5 trillion tax cut passed in 2017. This appeared to satisfy Republican lawmakers and quelled concerns about rising deficits.
Democratic presidential candidates have for the most part pledged to roll back Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. But they would use the money not to lower the deficits but for increased spending on expensive programs such as Medicare for All.
___
SO THE DEFICITS WON’T ANIMATE THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN?
It doesn’t seem likely, though former Rep. Mark Sanford, who has mounted a long-shot Republican campaign against Trump, is urging Republican voters to return to their historic concerns about the high deficits.
And economists note that today’s huge deficits are occurring when the economy is in a record-long economic expansion. This is unlike the previous stretch of trillion-dollar deficits, which coincided with the worst recession since the 1930s.
But analysts warn that if the economy does go into a recession, the huge deficits projected now will expand significantly — possibly to a size that would send interest rates surging. Such a development, if it sparked worries about the stability of the U.S. financial system, might produce the type of deficit crisis they have been warning about for so long.
https://apnews.com/caeb6d6c4eff45e4bc5da12db06004bc
Federal budget deficit climbs to $984billion – the highest in seven years – despite economic growth and low unemployment
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED: 06:16 EDT, 8 October 2019 | UPDATED: 09:04 EDT, 8 October 2019
The US government ran a budget deficit of just under $1 trillion in the just-closed fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday.
The $984 billion deficit tally for 2019 came in more than $200 billion more than last year’s, despite very low unemployment and continuing economic growth.
The figure is also slightly worse than the $960billion projected by the budget office back in August.
The US ran a budget deficit of $984billion in 2019, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday – $200million worse than last year, and $20million worse then August projections (pictured on this graph)
The CBO noted that deficits have been growing faster than the size of the economy for four years in a row, ending 2019 at 4.7 percent of gross domestic product.
Many mainstream economists have long taken the position that deficits and the nation’s $22trillion national debt are unsustainable.
Others say deficits are manageable and note continued low interest rates despite steadily growing debt.
There’s no appetite in Washington to try politically painful medicine to deal with the deficit.
Democrats have noted the spike in deficits since President Donald Trump’s tax cut plan was passed in 2017, while Trump has promised not to touch popular retirement benefits like Social Security and Medicare.
Donald Trump (pictured during a press conference announcing a US trade deal with Japan) repeatedly pledged to cut the deficit during the 2016 election, but it has grown faster than the size of the economy during every year of his presidency
Though the deficit has yet to hit the symbolic $1 trillion mark it registered during former President Barack Obama’s first term, it could jump if the economy slides into a recession.
The Treasury Department will release the final deficit figures mid-month. CBO’s preliminary estimate is based on daily Treasury reports.
During the election campaign in 2016, Trump repeatedly pledged to start cutting the size of the deficit when he became president, at one point suggesting that he could eliminate it entirely in eight years.
However, tax laws Trump championed in 2017 when limited the amount of revenue the government could collect, combined with spending pledges that breached agreed limits in the 2018 budget deal, have combined to entrench the problem.
Federal deficit increases 26% to $984 billion for fiscal 2019, highest in 7 years
The U.S. Treasury on Friday said that the federal deficit for fiscal 2019 was $984 billion, a 26% increase from 2018 but still short of the $1 trillion mark previously forecast by the administration.
The gap between revenues and spending was the widest it’s been in seven years as expenditures on defense, Medicare and interest payments on the national debt ballooned the shortfall.
The government said corporate tax revenues totaled $230 billion, up 12%, thanks to a rebound in the second half of the year. Individual tax revenues rose 2% to $1.7 trillion.
Receipts totaled $3.4 trillion, up 4% through September, while federal spending rose 8%, to $4.4 trillion.
“President Trump’s economic agenda is working: the Nation is experiencing the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years, there are more jobs to fill than there are job seekers, and Americans are experiencing sustained year-over-year wage increases,” said U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a press release.
“In order to truly put America on a sustainable financial path, we must enact proposals—like the President’s 2020 budget plan—to cut wasteful and irresponsible spending,” he added.
Annual deficits have nearly doubled under President Donald Trump’s tenure notwithstanding an unemployment rate at multidecade lows and better earnings figures. Deficits usually shrink during times of economic growth as higher incomes and Wall Street profits buoy Treasury coffers, while automatic spending on items like food stamps decline.
Two big bipartisan spending bills, combined with the administration’s landmark tax cuts, however, have defied the typical trends and instead aggravated deficits. The Congressional Budget Office projects the trillion-dollar deficit could come as soon as fiscal 2020.
Still, the Treasury’s report will likely come as a relief to the Trump administration, which had previously forecast that the deficit would hit $1 trillion during the 2019 fiscal year. The White House pushed through a $1.5 trillion tax cut nearly two years ago that President Trump vowed would pay for itself.
— CNBC’s Ylan Mui contributed to this report.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/25/federal-deficit-increases-26percent-to-984-billion-for-fiscal-2019.html
American Generation Fast Facts
CNN Library
Updated 9:36 AM ET, Sat August 17, 2019
(CNN)Here’s a look at six generations of Americans in the 20th century: the Greatest Generation (or GI Generation), the Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials and Generation Z. In order to examine economic trends and social changes over time, demographers compare groupings of people bracketed by birth year. There are sometimes variations in the birth year that begins or ends a generation, depending on the source. The groupings below are based on studies by the US Census, Pew Research and demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss.
Born in 1924 or earlier.
Born 1925-1945 (Sometimes listed as 1925-1942).
Born 1946-1964 (Sometimes listed as 1943-1964)
Born 1965-1980 (Sometimes listed as 1965-1979)
Born 1981-1996 (Sometimes listed as 1980-2000)
Born 1997-current
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SPYING: William Barr Says Trump Campaign Was Spied On By Feds
Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation
The move is likely to open the attorney general to accusations that he is trying to deliver a political victory for President Trump.
By Katie Benner and Adam Goldman
WASHINGTON — For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.
Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.
The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.
Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. That view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry. House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.
Mr. Barr’s reliance on Mr. Durham, a widely respected and veteran prosecutor who has investigated C.I.A. torture and broken up Mafia rings, could help insulate the attorney general from accusations that he is doing the president’s bidding and putting politics above justice.
Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation. In May, Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that the F.B.I. officials who opened the case — a counterintelligence investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow’s election sabotage — had committed treason.
“We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president,” Mr. Trump said. He has called the F.B.I. investigation one of the biggest political scandals in United States history.
Federal investigators need only a “reasonable indication” that a crime has been committed to open an investigation, a much lower standard than the probable cause required to obtain search warrants. However, “there must be an objective, factual basis for initiating the investigation; a mere hunch is insufficient,” according to Justice Department guidelines.
When Mr. Barr appointed Mr. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, to lead the review, he had only the power to voluntarily question people and examine government files.
Mr. Barr expressed skepticism of the Russia investigation even before joining the Trump administration. Weeks after being sworn in this year, he said he intended to scrutinize how it started and used the term “spying” to describe investigators’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers. But he has been careful to say he wants to determine whether investigators acted lawfully.
“The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” he told lawmakers in April. “And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”
The F.B.I. did not use information from the C.I.A. in opening the Russia investigation, former American officials said. But agents’ views on Russia’s election interference operation crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey about it.
The C.I.A. did contribute heavily to the intelligence community’s assessment in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and tried to tip it in Mr. Trump’s favor, and law enforcement officials later used those findings to bolster their application for a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.
The special counsel who took over the Russia investigation in 2017, Robert S. Mueller III, secured convictions or guilty pleas from a handful of Trump associates and indictments of more than two dozen Russians on charges related to their wide-ranging interference scheme.
In his report, Mr. Mueller said that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Mr. Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it.
Mr. Barr is closely managing the Durham investigation, even traveling to Italy to seek help from officials there to run down an unfounded conspiracy that is at the heart of conservatives’ attacks on the Russia investigation — that the Italian government helped set up the Trump campaign adviser who was told in 2016 that the Russians had damaging information that could hurt Clinton’s campaign.
But Italy’s intelligence services told Mr. Barr that they played no such role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said in a news conference on Wednesday. Mr. Barr has also contacted government officials in Britain and Australia about their roles in the early stages of the Russia investigation.
Revelations so far about Mr. Durham’s investigation have shown that he has focused in his first months on the accusations that Mr. Trump’s conservative allies have made about the origins of the Russia inquiry in their efforts to undermine it. Mr. Durham’s efforts have prompted criticism that he and Mr. Barr are trying to deliver the president a political victory, though investigators would typically run down all aspects of a case to complete a review of it.
In interviewing more than two dozen former and current F.B.I. and intelligence officials, Mr. Durham’s investigators have asked about any anti-Trump bias among officials who worked on the Russia investigation and about one aspect of the investigation that was at the heart of highly contentious allegations that they abused their powers: the secret application seeking a court order for a wiretap on Mr. Page.
Law enforcement officials suspected Mr. Page was the target of recruitment by the Russian government, which he has denied.
Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation.
Mr. Durham has indicated he wants to interview former officials who ran the C.I.A. in 2016 but has yet to question either Mr. Brennan or James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked them as part of a vast conspiracy by the so-called deep state to stop him from winning the presidency.
Some C.I.A. officials have retained criminal lawyers in anticipation of being interviewed. It was not clear whether Mr. Durham was scrutinizing other former top intelligence officials. Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the former director of the National Security Agency, declined to say whether he had spoken with Mr. Durham’s investigators.
Mr. Durham also has yet to question many of the former F.B.I. officials involved in opening the Russia investigation.
Mr. Barr has not said whether Mr. Durham’s investigation grew out of the inspector general’s findings or something that prosecutors unearthed while doing interviews or reviewing documents. But the inspector general’s findings, which are expected to be made public in coming weeks, could contribute to the public’s understanding of why Mr. Durham might want to investigate national security officials’ activities in 2016.
Though the inspector general’s report deals with sensitive information, Mr. Horowitz anticipates that little of it will be blacked out when he releases the document publicly, he wrote in a lettersent to lawmakers on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Durham has delved before into the secret world of intelligence gathering during the Bush and Obama administrations. He was asked in 2008 to investigate why the C.I.A. destroyed tapes depicting detainees being tortured. The next year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed Mr. Durham to spearhead an investigation into the C.IA. abuses.
Career prosecutors had already examined many of the same cases and declined to bring charges, and in an echo of the Russia investigation, they fumed that Mr. Holder was revisiting the issue. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the abuses had been “exhaustively reviewed” and that a new inquiry could put national security at risk.
After nearly four years, Mr. Durham’s investigation ended with no charges against C.I.A. officers, including two directly involved in the deaths of two detainees, angering human rights activists.
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
OPINION: WASHINGTON SECRETS
Trump accuses Obama of treason for ‘spying’ on his 2016 campaign
President Trump has ratcheted up his claim that the Obama White House spied on his 2016 campaign, charging in a new book that it was a “treasonous” act by the former Democratic president.
“What they did was treasonous, OK? It was treasonous,” he told author Doug Wead for his upcoming book, “Inside Trump’s White House: The Real Story of His Presidency.”
“The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election. They were spying on my campaign. So you know? What is that all about?” said Trump.
“I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying,” said Trump who then added, “Obama.”
[Read more: Trump presidency disrupts family, for good and not]
In 2017, Trump tweeted that he felt the Obama White House “had my wires tapped” in Trump Tower. He later said he didn’t mean it literally but that he felt his campaign was being spied on.
Attorney General William Barr earlier this year said he was looking into whether “improper surveillance” may have occurred in 2016. “I think spying did occur,” he said.
He has tasked a prosecutor to look into Obama officials and other officials who sparked the Russia collusion investigation into Trump after a report showed no collusion. New reports on that investigation described it as “criminal” in nature.
“It turned out I was right. By the way,” Trump told Wead in excerpts provided to Secrets. “In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said, ‘Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.’ Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?” said the president.
In the book, Trump said that the Russia investigation undercut his presidency.
“Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn’t get anything done. No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make
Stefan Halper: The Cambridge don the FBI sent to spy on Trump
When Attorney General William Barr stated “spying did occur” against the 2016 Trump campaign, most attention was focused on the FBI’s surveillance of former junior foreign policy aide Carter Page.
But the spying Barr was thinking of, and which he said may or may not have been legally authorized, is more likely to be that carried out by Stefan Halper, a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both American and British intelligence.
One could be forgiven for believing Halper was a creation of the spy novelist John Le Carré. A Cambridge don and White House veteran of the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, he has long operated in the gray area between academe and espionage. Gregarious, rumpled, and with an ample girth, Halper, now 74, was known as “Stef” to his friends and students, whom he would regale with tales of Washington intrigue.
While the FBI describes Halper as its “informant,” he did far more than report things he became privy to in the course of his normal life. Rather, he actively courted at least three Trump campaign officials, offering to pay for travel and misrepresenting himself as eager to work for Trump.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Halper was asked by the FBI to gather information on Page and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide with a junior but more central role than Page, and he met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis.
As Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into alleged FISA abuse nears its conclusion in either May or June, new reports have emerged indicating that Halper has been looked at as part of that probe.
Halper graduated from Stanford in 1967 and received a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1971 and Cambridge in 2004. He was the director of American studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge, where he taught classes and also delivered papers at institutions around the world, including Chatham House in London, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in D.C., and the U.S. Naval War College. Halper is now the emeritus senior fellow of the Centre of International Studies.
At Cambridge, he worked for years alongside Sir Richard Dearlove, who had spent decades with MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, the equivalent of the CIA, and was its director from 1999 to 2004.
Christopher Steele, hired by Fusion GPS and the eventual author of the Trump dossier that was used in FISA applications to target Trump associates, was in MI6 from 1987 until 2009. Dearlove has described Steele as the “go-to person on Russia in the commercial sector” and said his reputation is “superb.”
Halper organized and hosted a series of Cambridge Intelligence Seminars that were attended by intelligence community members, academics, and researchers from around the world. One such seminar in 2014, put together by both Halper and Dearlove, was attended by then-President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency Director Mike Flynn, who played a prominent role in the Trump campaign beginning in early 2016.
After Trump’s win, Flynn left his position as Trump’s national security adviser following questions about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during special counsel Mueller’s investigation regarding his contacts with the ambassador.
Dearlove and Halper both stepped down from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminars amid reports that Russian operatives were attempting to compromise the organization. Halper said he left due to “unacceptable Russian influence on the group.”
Today, Dearlove is listed as the chairman and Halper is listed as a partner at the Cambridge Security Initiative, which states it “provides a unique link between the worlds of business, government, and academia with unrivaled expertise in security and intelligence issues.”
This is not the first time that Halper has been accused of spying on a presidential campaign. In the lead-up to the 1980 presidential election between then-President Jimmy Carter and candidate Ronald Reagan, briefing documents from the Carter campaign were allegedly leaked to Reagan’s team before the one and only presidential debate on Oct. 28, 1980. Dubbed “Debategate,” the details on this scandal were not publicly revealed until 1983. And Halper was accused of being the person in charge of the operation, allegedly involving former CIA officials.
Though now on his second marriage, Halper’s father-in-law at the time was former top CIA official Ray Cline, best known for his key role in handling the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Cline denied Halper’s involvement and downplayed the alleged operation, saying, “I think this is all a romantic fallacy about an old CIA network … Such an effort would not have been worthwhile and I believe it was not executed.” Halper has denied his involvement as well.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Halper met with Page and Papadopoulos at the behest of the FBI as part of its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Halper also met with Clovis, the Iowa-based national co-chairman of the Trump campaign, although it is not known if this was done with the authorization of the FBI.
Page, who was the subject of FISA warrants in 2016 and 2017, says he first met Stefan Halper in mid-July 2016, after receiving an invitation to one of Halper’s intelligence seminars, titled “2016’s Race to Change the World,” in May or June 2016. Page said that organizers paid for his travel to and from the conference. Halper continued reaching out to Page into at least 2017.
Stefan Halper also contacted Clovis via email in late August 2016, and Halper referenced his conversations with Page as part of his offer to meet. Halper and Clovis met up in Virginia a few days later. Of their conversation, Clovis said, “It had nothing to do with emails. No mention of Russia. No mention of Hillary Clinton. No mention of her campaign. Only a mention in passing that he had met with Carter Page.”
The FBI says it began its Trump-Russia investigation, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane,” in July 2016, just a couple weeks after Halper met with Page. A meeting involving Trump dossier author Steele, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and his wife and Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr occurred just before the launch of the investigation as well.
The Justice Department says its investigation was initiated following Australian diplomat Alexander Downer telling the FBI that Papadopoulos informed him at a London bar in the spring of 2016 that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos says that Halper sent him an unsolicited email in September 2016 asking to discuss foreign policy issues with him. “I’ll pay you $3,000 and I’ll fly you to London, and let’s talk about it for a couple days and let’s see what you can do, and just write a paper for me,” Papadopoulos quoted Halper as saying. He met Halper in London and says that Halper grilled him about Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails, Russia’s involvement, and how it may have benefited the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos said, “I think I pushed back and I told him, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’”
When Halper’s role as an FBI informant was leaked to the media in May 2018, it led to accusations from Trump and Republicans in Congress that the Obama Justice Department had been using Halper as part of an illegal effort to spy on the Trump campaign. Dubbed “Spygate” by allies of the president, the revelation led Trump to tweet that this was “starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history.”
Democrats argue that Halper’s role as an FBI informant amounted to “spying,” though by any layman’s view of the term, it did. Back in 2018, Trump addressed this, saying, “The Democrats are now alluding to [sic] the the concept that having an informant placed in an opposing party’s campaign is different than having a Spy, as illegal as that may be. But what about an ‘informant’ who is paid a fortune and who ‘sets up’ way earlier than the Russian Hoax?”
Halper was the author of several books on international relations that were critical of U.S. foreign policy from a traditional realist perspective. Co-written in 2004 with former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order was deeply critical of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy of vast military action and “nation-building.”
In 2007 he wrote The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing on what he contended was the American obsession with “big idea” sloganeering rather than astute decision-making on the world stage. His 2012 book The Beijing Consensus spoke of China’s rapid rise, said that China “will not confront the West on the battlefield, but in the global information space,” and warned that U.S. foreign policy was woefully unprepared to deal with this.
When Halper contacted members of the Trump campaign, he did so under the guise of discussing foreign policy.
The FBI’s investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign was rolled into special counsel Mueller’s investigation following his appointment in May 2017. Last month, Barr provided a four-page letter outlining the baseline conclusions of Mueller’s investigation, including the fact that Mueller did not charge any Trump associates with crimes related to collusion with Russia. Barr said Mueller did not reach a conclusion one way or the other on whether Trump committed obstruction of justice.
And Barr said that the Justice Department inspector general’s investigation into possible FISA abuse by the DOJ and FBI should be done “probably in May or June.”
Congressional Republicans such as Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had fought for access to DOJ information on Halper’s relationship with the FBI. Nunes now says he has prepared a series of criminal referrals that he will be sending to the DOJ within days, and Attorney General Barr has said that he will take a serious look at the documentation that Nunes sends him. It is not known whether Halper will be part of any of the referrals.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/stefan-halper-the-cambridge-professor-the-fbi-sent-to-spy-on-trump
Stefan Halper
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University of Cambridge (PhD)
Stefan A. Halper (born June 4, 1944) is an American foreign policy scholar and Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge where he is a Life Fellow at Magdalene College.[1] He served as a White House official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, and was reportedly in charge of the spying operation by the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign that became known as “Debategate“. Through his decades of work for the CIA, Halper has had extensive ties to the Bush family.[2] Through his work with Sir Richard Billing Dearlove he had ties to the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6.
Halper acted as an FBI informant for its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and was a subject of the Spygate conspiracy theory.[3][4]
Contents
Education
Halper[5] graduated from Stanford University in 1967.[6] He received a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1971.[6] He was appointed Director of American Studies at the University of Cambridge‘s longstanding Department of Politics and International Studies in 2001.[1][6] He received a second Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2004.[6]
Career
United States government (1971–1984)
Halper began his United States government career in 1971 in the United States Domestic Policy Council, part of the executive office of the president, serving until 1973.[6] He then served in the office of management and budget until 1974, when he moved to the office of the White House chief of staff as assistant to the chief of staff where he had responsibility for a range of domestic and international issues. During this time, Halper worked as an assistant for three chiefs of staff, Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. He held this position until January 20, 1977.[6]
In 1977, Halper became Special Counsel to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and Legislative Assistant to Senator William Roth (R-Del.).[6] In 1979 he became National Policy Director for George H. W. Bush‘s Presidential campaign and then in 1980 he became Director of Policy Coordination for the Reagan- Bush Presidential campaign.[6]
Halper played a central role in a scandal in the 1980 election. But it was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter that this scandal emerged. In connection with his position Halper’s name came up in the 1983/4 investigations into the Debategate affair, which was a spying scandal in which Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials passed classified information about Carter administration’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering (Iran hostage crisis). Reagan Administration officials cited by The New York Times described Halper as “the person in charge” of the operation.[7][8] Halper called the report “just absolutely untrue”.[9]
In 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper’s handler for this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, ex-CIA-Director George H. W. Bush, who worked with Halper’s father-in-law, ex-CIA-Deputy-Director Ray Cline.[9] After Reagan entered the White House, Halper became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs.[6] Upon leaving the Department in 1984, he remained a Senior Advisor to the Department of Defense and a Senior Advisor to the Department of Justice until 2001.[6][2][10]
Business (1984–1990)
From 1984 to 1990 Halper was chairman and majority shareholder of the Palmer National Bank of Washington, D.C., the National Bank of Northern Virginia and the George Washington National Bank.[6] Palmer National Bank was used to transfer money to Swiss Bank Accounts controlled by White House aid Oliver North.[11]
According to Peter Dale Scott‘s book The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era on the Iran-Contra scandal, Ray Cline’s son-in-law Roger Fontaine “made at least two visits to Guatemala in 1980… (with General Sumner) drafting the May 1980 Santa Fe Statement, which said that World War III was already underway in Central America against the Soviets and that Nicauragua was the enemy. And some Reagan aides felt that Halper “was receiving information from the CIA.”[12]
The Palmer National Bank, where Halper worked, was described as “the DC hub by which Lt. Col. Oliver North sent arms and money to the anti-Sandinista guerrilla Contras in Nicaragua. One of Palmer’s founders, Stefan Halper, had no previous banking experience but was George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy director during Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign.” [13]
Academic and media (1986–2000)
From 1986 to 2000 Halper wrote a national security and foreign policy-focused weekly newspaper column, syndicated to 30 newspapers.[6]
Halper has worked as a senior foreign policy advisor to various think-tanks and research institutions, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Center for the National Interest, where he is a Distinguished Fellow, and The Institute of World Politicswhere he is a Research Professor. He has served on the Advisory Board of Directors of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and contributed to various magazines, journals, newspapers and media outlets. These include: The National Interest, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the BBC, CNN, SKY NEWS, ABC, CBS, NBC, C-Span, and a range of radio outlets.
Professor Halper is a member of the Cosmos Club in Washington, and the Travellers Club in London.
In a 2007 book, The Silence of the Rational Center, Halper analyzed “institutional failures” in United States policy-making:
Russian Berlin-based journalist Leonid Bershidsky wrote in May 2018, that “the Trump-Russia scandal born of this operation [FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign] could be added to The Silence of the Rational Center as a fourth institutional failure.”[14]
United States government research (2012–2016)
From 2012 to 2016 Halper received $1 million in contracts for “social sciences and humanities” research from the Defense department‘s Office of Net Assessment, some of which Halper subcontracted to other researchers. Forty percent of the money had been awarded before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.[15]
FBI Operation ‘Crossfire Hurricane’
Halper acted as an FBI informant for Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, and was a subject of the Spygate conspiracy theory initiated by President Donald Trump in May 2018. The theory alleges that the Obama administration planted a paid spy in the 2016 Trump campaign “for political purposes” to gather information in support of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Beginning in summer 2016, Halper spoke separately to three Trump campaign advisers – Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos – but there is no evidence that Halper had actually joined Trump’s campaign.
Page said that he “had extensive discussions” with Halper on “a bunch of different foreign-policy-related topics”, ending in September 2017.[16] A former federal law enforcement official told The New York Times that their initial encounter at a London symposium on July 11–12, 2016 was a coincidence, rather than at the direction of the FBI.[17][16] Clovis’s attorney said that Clovis and Halper had discussed China during their sole meeting on August 31 or September 1, 2016.[16] On September 2, 2016, Halper contacted Papadopoulos, inviting him to London and to write a paper on Mediterranean oil fields, which he did.[16] On September 15, 2016, Halper asked Papadopoulos if he knew of any Russian efforts to disrupt the election campaign; Papadopoulos twice denied he did, despite Joseph Mifsudtelling him the previous April that Russians had embarrassing Hillary Clinton emails, and Papadopoulos bragging about it to Alexander Downer in May. The New York Times reported in April 2019 that the FBI had asked Halper to approach Page and Papadopoulos, although it was not clear if he had been asked to contact Clovis.[18] In May 2019, the Times reported that Page had urged Halper to meet with Clovis and that the FBI was aware of the meeting but had not instructed Halper to ask Clovis about Russia matters. The Timesalso reported that the FBI also sent an investigator using the name Azra Turk to meet with Papadopoulos, while posing as Halper’s assistant. The Times stated that the FBI considered it essential to add a trained and trusted investigator like Turk as a “layer of oversight”, in the event the investigation was ultimately prosecuted and the government needed the credible testimony of such an individual, without exposing Halper as a longtime confidential informant.[19]
Trump’s Spygate allegations were thoroughly debunked,[19][20][21] despite renewed interest in April 2019 after attorney general William Barr testified to Congress that “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign, although his characterization of “spying” was ambiguous and he declined to be specific. He stated he was assembling a team to examine the matter, although the Justice Department inspector general had been looking into it and related matters for some time and was expected to release his report within weeks. Prior to his 2016 activities, Halper had a February 2014 encounter at a London intelligence conference with Michael Flynn, then the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and later a Trump supporter and first national security advisor. Harper became so alarmed by Flynn’s close association with a Russian woman that a Halper associate expressed concerns to American authorities that Flynn may have been compromised by Russian intelligence. Flynn was forced out of the DIA six months later, although public accounts at the time cited other reasons for his removal, including his management style and views on Islam.[22] The “Russian” woman, former Cambridge academic Svetlana Lokhova, sued Halper in 2019 for $25 million, alleging he had conspired with multiple news outlets to spread the false and salacious narrative that she had seduced Flynn on orders from the Russian government. [23]
Consideration for Trump administration role
Axios reported in May 2018 that during the transition Trump top trade advisor Peter Navarro had recommended Halper for an ambassadorship.[24]
Personal life
Halper’s former wife, Sibyl Cline, is the daughter of the former CIA deputy director for intelligence, Ray S. Cline.[8]
Books
He is the co-author of the bestselling book America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2004, and also co-author of The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing (2007). In April 2010, his book The Beijing Consensus: Legitimizing Authoritarianism in Our Time was published by Basic Books. Also a bestseller, it has been published in Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, and France.[citation needed]
Awards
Halper is a recipient of the State Department’s Superior Honor Award, the Justice Department’s Director’s Award, and the Defense Department’s Superior Honor Award.
References…
External links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Halper
5 Things to Know About John Durham—Barr’s Pick to Probe Root of Russia Investigation
U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham is a career prosecutor, said to be taking the lead in examining the origins of the Russia probe.
News reports indicate U.S. Attorney General William Barr has tapped U.S. Attorney John Durham of the District of Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, and to determine if intelligence collection involving President Donald Trump’s campaign was appropriate.
But who is Durham, the 68-year-old who’s had a four-decade-long career as a federal prosecutor, and who has now been named to lead that part of the investigation?
1. Durham prosecuted the Boston Mob.
A Republican, Durham is the 52nd U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut. He began in his role as the lead federal prosecutor in that state in February 2018.
He has been a Justice Department attorney since 1982. He is a former acting U.S. attorney and deputy U.S. attorney, and was chief of the Criminal Division. He also once headed the New Haven field office and the Boston Strike Force on Organized Crime, and was involved in special investigation projects under four attorneys general.
In 2002, Durham helped secure the conviction of retired FBI agent John Connolly Jr., who was sentenced to 10 years in prison on federal racketeering charges tied to his relationship with well-known mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.
2. He led investigations into a former Connecticut governor.
Durham also helped prosecute former Republican Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, who served two prison stints for not paying taxes and accepting $107,000 in gifts from people doing business with the state. He was also responsible for prosecuting mobsters in the Boston area, and led an inquiry into allegations that FBI agents and Boston police had ties with the mob.
3. He investigated the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 2009, then-Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat, appointed Durham to lead the Justice Department’s investigation into the legality of the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.
4. Durham’s reputation as nonpartisan made him Barr’s ‘surprise choice.’
Those who know Durham said they are surprised that Barr, who many view as a partisan Trump ally, would pick a prosecutor who is reputed not to allow politics to enter into his work.
“Frankly, I’m very surprised Barr picked John Durham,” attorney and ethics expert Jamie Sullivan said. “Like [Robert] Mueller, Mr. Durham has an impeccable reputation. Barr did not pick someone who is in any way political.”
Sullivan, a managing partner with Hartford-based Howard, Kohn, Sprague & FitzGeraldand the co-author of a book on Connecticut legal ethics, added that Durham has a reputation for being “extremely tenacious and skilled and driven to come to the correct result.”
“He gives the process integrity,” Sullivan said.
For instance, when Durham conducted his investigation of Rowland, who had been a popular and well-liked governor, both men were staunch Republicans, Sullivan said.
“There was no political basis of any kind in that investigation and prosecution,” he said.
5. Observers say he permits no leaks.
Stan Twardy Jr., Day Pitney partner and U.S. attorney for Connecticut from 1985 to 1991, has known Durham for more than three decades and says the career prosecutor “is straight down the middle.”
“He is a person of tremendous integrity and is completely apolitical,” Twardy said Tuesday. “He does not have a political bias in any way. … He avoids it by keeping his head down and conducting the investigation without leaks. He is as close to Bob Mueller as anyone can be. He will conduct the investigation thoroughly.”
Read More:
Trump Nominates John Durham as Next US Attorney for Connecticut
https://www.law.com/ctlawtribune/2019/05/14/5-things-to-know-about-john-durham-barrs-pick-to-probe-root-of-russia-investigation/?slreturn=20190925232738
John Durham (lawyer)
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October 27, 2017
Acting: October 27, 2017 – February 22, 2018
1997 – 1998
Acting
1950 (age 68–69)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
University of Connecticut (JD)
John Henry Durham (born 1950)[3][4] has been the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut since February 2018. Durham had been an Assistant U.S. Attorney in various positions in the District of Connecticut for 35 years. He is known for leading an inquiry into allegations that FBI agents and Boston police had ties with the mob,[5] and his role as special prosecutor in the 2005 CIA interrogation tapes destruction.[3] In May 2019, U.S. Attorney General William Barr tasked Durham with overseeing a review of the origins of the Russia investigation and to determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was “lawful and appropriate”.[6]
Education and volunteer work
Durham received a B.A. degree with honors from Colgate University in 1972.[7] He received a J.D. degree in 1975 from the University of Connecticut School of Law.[3]
After graduation, he was a VISTA volunteer for two years (1975-1977) on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana.[8]
Career
Connecticut state government
After Durham’s volunteer work, he became a state prosecutor in Connecticut. From 1977 to 1978, he served as a Deputy Assistant State’s Attorney in the Office of the Chief State’s Attorney. From 1978 to 1982, Durham served as an Assistant State’s Attorney in the New Haven State’s Attorney’s Office.[8]
Federal government
Following those five years as a state prosecutor, Durham became a federal prosecutor, joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.[7] From 1982 to 1989, he served as an attorney and then supervisor in the New Haven Field Office of the Boston Strike Force in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. From 1989 to 1994, he served as Chief of the Office’s Criminal Division. From 1994 to 2008, he served as the Deputy U.S. Attorney, and served as the U.S. Attorney in an acting and interim capacity in 1997 and 1998.[8][9]
In December 2000, Durham revealed secret FBI documents that convinced a judge to vacate the 1968 murder convictions of Enrico Tameleo, Joseph Salvati, Peter J. Limone and Louis Greco because they had been framed by the agency. In 2007, the documents helped Salvati, Limone, and the families of the two other men, who had died in prison, win a $101.7 million civil judgment against the government.[10]
Durham also led a series of high-profile prosecutions in Connecticut against the New England Mafia and corrupt politicians, including former governor John G. Rowland.[10]
From 2008 to 2012, Durham also served as the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.[8]
On November 1, 2017, he was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as U.S. Attorney for Connecticut.[11] On February 16, 2018, his nomination was confirmed by voice vote of the Senate. He was sworn in on February 22, 2018.[8]
Appointments as special investigator
Whitey Bulger case
Amid allegations that FBI informants James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi had corrupted their handlers, US Attorney General Janet Reno named Durham special prosecutor in 1999. He oversaw a task force of FBI agents brought in from other offices to investigate the Boston office’s handling of informants.[10] In 2002, Durham helped secure the conviction of retired FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr., who was sentenced to 10 years in prison on federal racketeering charges for protecting Bulger and Flemmi from prosecution and warning Bulger to flee just before the gangster’s 1995 indictment.[10] Durham’s task force also gathered evidence against retired FBI agent H. Paul Rico who was indicted in Oklahoma on state charges that he helped Bulger and Flemmi kill a Tulsabusinessman in 1981. Rico died in 2004 before the case went to trial.[10]
CIA interrogation tapes destruction
In 2008, Durham was appointed by Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations.[12][13][14] On November 8, 2010, Durham closed the investigation without recommending any criminal charges be filed.[15]Durham’s final report remains secret but was the subject of an unsuccessful lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act filed by The New York Times reporter Charlie Savage.[16]
Torture investigation
In August 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Durham to lead the Justice Department’s investigation of the legality of CIA’s use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the torture of detainees.[17] Durham’s mandate was to look at only those interrogations that had gone “beyond the officially sanctioned guidelines”, with Attorney General Holder saying interrogators who had acted in “good faith” based on the guidance found in the torture memos issued by the Bush Justice Department were not to be prosecuted.[18] Later in 2009, University of Toledo law professor Benjamin G. Davis attended a conference where former officials of the Bush administration had told conference participants shocking stories, and accounts of illegality on the part of more senior Bush officials.[19] Davis wrote an appeal to former Bush officials to take their accounts of illegality directly to Durham. A criminal investigation into the deaths of two detainees, Gul Rahman in Afghanistan and Manadel al-Jamadi in Iraq, was opened in 2011. It was closed in 2012 with no charges filed.[20][21]
Special Counsel Investigation
In April 2019,[22] Attorney General William Barr announced that he had launched a review of the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections[23] and it was reported in May that he had assigned Durham to lead it several weeks earlier.[24] Durham was given the authority “to broadly examin[e] the government’s collection of intelligence involving the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians,” reviewing government documents and requesting voluntary witness statements.[24]
On October 24, 2019, it was reported that the Justice Department had elevated the inquiry to a criminal investigation.[25][26]
Accolades
In November 2011, Durham was included on The New Republic’s list of Washington’s most powerful, least famous people.[27]
See also
References
External links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Durham_(lawyer)
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