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Mueller’s case is a slam dunk but is Roger Stone too slimy to get flipped?

Mueller’s case is a slam dunk but is Roger Stone too slimy to get flipped?

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Peter Zeidenberg writes: The long-anticipated indictment of Roger Stone finally dropped on Friday, and it landed on Stone like the proverbial ton of bricks. As someone who prosecuted Scooter Libby and others on similar charges and defended white-collar cases involving similar charges as those alleged here—false statements, obstruction of justice and witness tampering—my takeaway is that Stone should begin getting his affairs in order. Barring a presidential pardon (always the wild-card possibility with a POTUS like Trump) Stone will be…

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Europe is being attacked by false prophets drunk on resentment

Europe is being attacked by false prophets drunk on resentment

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Bernard-Henri Lévy, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek, Orhan Pamuk and 25 others write: The idea of Europe is in peril. From all sides there are criticisms, insults and desertions from the cause. “Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity” often exist only in the imagination…

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U.S. and Taliban edge toward deal to end America’s longest war

U.S. and Taliban edge toward deal to end America’s longest war

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The New York Times reports: The United States and the Taliban are closing in on a deal to end America’s longest war after six days of some of the most serious Afghan peace negotiations to date wrapped up on Saturday. The talks in Doha, Qatar, lasted much longer than planned and longer than any previous attempt to end the 17-year conflict, and both sides publicly reported progress — a rarity. The chief American negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, said on Twitter that…

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How Roger Stone could become a cooperating witness

How Roger Stone could become a cooperating witness

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Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, writes: At first glance, Stone seems both extraordinarily slippery and exceedingly unlikely to cooperate. His career is marked by overarching hostility to the law, fair play and the truth. Stone started his political career in the 1970s, working for Richard Nixon. As would become a career hallmark, it was unclear what exactly Stone did; he boasted that he worked as a scheduler during the day but “[b]y night, I’m trafficking in the black arts.”…

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What to make of Roger Stone’s indictment

What to make of Roger Stone’s indictment

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Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, Matthew Kahn, Lev Sugarman, Benjamin Wittes write: The White House line throughout L’Affaire Russe has been that there was “NO COLLUSION” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Days before his inauguration, Donald Trump declared on Twitter, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” In September 2018, he wrote, “Russian Collusion with the Trump Campaign, one of the most successful in history, is a TOTAL HOAX.” Special Counsel Robert Mueller…

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Roger Stone’s last dirty trick

Roger Stone’s last dirty trick

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Michael Kruse writes: Stone met Trump in 1979. The matchmaker was the infamous Roy Cohn, and the context was the fledgling Ronald Reagan presidential bid. Just 27 at the time, six years younger than Trump, Stone was in New York working as the campaign’s regional political director. He needed people to help raise money. Trump was a Jimmy Carter donor but joined Reagan’s finance committee as well. “We hit it off immediately,” Stone recalled. Ever since, off and on, but…

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Call U.S. move on Venezuela what it is: Regime change

Call U.S. move on Venezuela what it is: Regime change

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Noah Feldman writes: The U.S. and about a dozen other countries recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela on Wednesday, even as President Nicolás Maduro maintained his grip on the office. But is that even a thing? Under ordinary principles of constitutional and international law, can one country simply declare that someone who manifestly isn’t the president of the country actually is, and act accordingly? Well, no. Not really. Maduro is a terrible president who has…

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Why do so few Aussies speak an Australian language?

Why do so few Aussies speak an Australian language?

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By Laura Rademaker, Australian National University Linguistically speaking, Australia is special. With around 250 languages spoken when Australia was first colonised, Australia was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. But few people speak our Indigenous languages. As of 2016, only 10% of Australia’s Indigenous population spoke an Indigenous language at home. Most Indigenous languages are now “asleep”, waiting to be woken up by language revivalists. Australian languages did not simply fade away; they were actively silenced…

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Why I’m suing Max Blumenthal and Benjamin Norton

Why I’m suing Max Blumenthal and Benjamin Norton

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Sulome Anderson writes: Reporting as close to the truth as possible and correcting inaccuracies when they occur are hallmarks of real journalism. Knowingly publishing lies to serve a political purpose is not journalism. It’s propaganda, and people who deal in that kind of information are not journalists. When their lies put others in danger, there should be consequences. That’s why I’m about to do something that makes me uncomfortable, as someone with a healthy respect for freedom of speech. I’m…

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Trump’s wall would be a monument to the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history

Trump’s wall would be a monument to the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history

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Jamelle Bouie writes: The wall of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency has always operated both as a discrete proposal — an actual structure to be built under his leadership — and as a symbol with a clear meaning. Whether praised by its supporters or condemned by its opponents, the wall is a stand-in for the larger promise of broad racial (and religious) exclusion and domination. It’s no surprise, then, that some Americans use “Build the wall” as a racist chant,…

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Trump administration uses U.S. diplomats as pawn in standoff with Venezuela’s Maduro

Trump administration uses U.S. diplomats as pawn in standoff with Venezuela’s Maduro

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The Washington Post reports: The United States and Venezuela were locked in a tense international standoff Thursday as the Trump administration kept embassy staff in the country despite an official order to eject them, and Russia demanded that the Americans cease “intervention” in the teetering oil-rich nation. Moscow and Beijing have propped up the socialist South American state for years, investing billions through loans and energy deals and setting up what is now a dramatic global power play over Venezuela’s…

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Bishop says pro-life activism ‘has become separated from the even more basic truth of the dignity of each human person’

Bishop says pro-life activism ‘has become separated from the even more basic truth of the dignity of each human person’

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Catholic Bishop John Stowe writes: A perennial complaint from participants in the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., is that the secular news media largely ignore this massive protest of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. In light of the viral news story of last weekend, of a group of Catholic high school students from Kentucky in a confrontation with a Native American elder after this year’s march, that claim no longer holds. As the leader of the…

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Older, right-leaning Twitter users spread the most fake news in 2016, study finds

Older, right-leaning Twitter users spread the most fake news in 2016, study finds

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The Washington Post reports: The notion that fake news exists in its own universe turns out to be doubly true: One universe is the realm outside truth. The other is its own seedy pocket of social media. In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, political scientists surveyed the inhabitants of this Internet pocket around the time of the last presidential election, from Aug. 1 to Dec. 6, 2016. They found that people who shared fake news were…

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