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Category: Politics

How Lev Parnas worked his way into Trump’s world — and now is rattling it

How Lev Parnas worked his way into Trump’s world — and now is rattling it

The Washington Post reports: Parnas, with his Brooklyn-by-way-of-Odessa accent, has sought to fashion himself as the Joe Pesci version of John Dean — the former White House counsel who was star witness in the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon — casting himself an avowedly repentant participant in a rogue operation. Some of his most explosive claims that Trump, Vice President Pence and Attorney General William P. Barr knew of his activities remain unsubstantiated and disputed. The president’s allies say…

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Schiff says NSA, CIA withholding Ukraine info due to White House pressure

Schiff says NSA, CIA withholding Ukraine info due to White House pressure

Politico reports: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged that the NSA and CIA may be withholding documents on Ukraine from Congress due to pressure from the White House, even as the Senate prepares to move forward on the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Schiff was asked about a POLITICO report that intelligence agencies officials don’t want to testify in public during an upcoming hearing in the House Intelligence panel on global…

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Trump is on trial for abuse of power – the Davos elites should be in the dock too

Trump is on trial for abuse of power – the Davos elites should be in the dock too

Robert Reich writes: As the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers and politicians will descend on Davos in the Swiss Alps for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism. The events are not unrelated. Trump is charged with abusing his power. Capitalism’s global elite is under assault for abusing its power as well: fueling inequality, fostering corruption and doing squat about climate change. Chief executives of the largest global corporations are raking in more money and at a…

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Why Trump had to hire this legal odd couple

Why Trump had to hire this legal odd couple

George T. Conway III writes: This is what happens when you don’t pay your legal bills. President Trump, whose businesses and now campaign have left a long trail of unpaid bills behind them, has never discriminated when it comes to stiffing people who work for him. That includes lawyers — which is part of the reason he found the need to make some curious last-minute tweaks to his team, announcing the addition of the legal odd couple of Alan Dershowitz…

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Bill Barr doesn’t get to decide what’s in the Constitution

Bill Barr doesn’t get to decide what’s in the Constitution

Garrett Epps writes: Quick: What’s the most common word in the English language that does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution? The answer is a revealing one: she. Presidents, senators, and representatives are always designated as “he.” Even the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, simply bans abridgment of that right “on account of sex.” That resolutely masculine language will not change, no matter what happens over the next few months. But something more significant may:…

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Fighting the fossil fuel economy in Appalachia

Fighting the fossil fuel economy in Appalachia

Michael Sainato writes: About 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River, lies one of the largest active construction projects in the United States. Dozens of cranes dominate the more-than-300-acre site, where hundreds of construction workers assemble a massive petrochemical facility set to convert natural gas into plastic pellets used to develop a range of products from plastic bottles to car parts. The ethane cracker plant being developed in Monaca, Pennsylvania, by Royal Dutch Shell is one of at…

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Lev Parnas describes Trumpworld’s cult-like obsession with George Soros

Lev Parnas describes Trumpworld’s cult-like obsession with George Soros

The Daily Beast reports: George Soros, an American billionaire who has invested heavily in progressive political causes and philanthropies around the world, has long been a bête noire of conservatives and regularly vilified in Russian propaganda—the same kind that Trumpworld is accused of subscribing to in its Ukraine dealings. Giuliani, diGenova, and Toensing were particularly opposed to Soros’ work, Parnas said. “Soros became Enemy Number One, and it was understood that Soros infiltrated the U.S. government and State Department over…

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The Sanders-Warren ‘feud’ and Ukraine revelations are nowhere near equal in importance

The Sanders-Warren ‘feud’ and Ukraine revelations are nowhere near equal in importance

Margaret Sullivan writes: A sense of proportion — what’s significant and what’s trivial — seems strangely missing. What truly deserves our all-out attention and outrage? What’s the small stuff? Numbed by the barrage of news, dazzled by distraction, many citizens don’t seem to know anymore. And news sources, particularly TV and social media, show little ability or desire to help. (As Pew Research in late 2018 revealed, TV is still the main way that all Americans get their news; and…

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Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people

Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people

Simon Tisdall writes: News that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s latter-day tsar, is making plans to cling to power indefinitely comes as no surprise. All the same, it is deeply worrying for Putin’s prey – principally the Russian people and the western democracies. Putin, 67, has run Russia, as president and prime minister, for 21 years, a feat of political longevity surpassed only by Joseph Stalin. Like Stalin, he has made many enemies and caused untold misery along the way. Russia under…

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National Archives exhibit censors images critical of Trump

National Archives exhibit censors images critical of Trump

The Washington Post reports: The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives exhibit celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. The 49-by-69-inch photograph is a powerful display. Viewed from one perspective, it shows the 2017 march. Viewed from another angle, it shifts to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania…

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The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The New York Times reports: Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and…

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‘Faithless elector’: Supreme Court will hear case that could change how presidents are chosen

‘Faithless elector’: Supreme Court will hear case that could change how presidents are chosen

NBC News reports: The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up an issue that could change a key element of the system America uses to elect its president, with a decision likely in the spring just as the campaign heats up. The answer to the question could be a decisive one: Are the electors who cast the actual Electoral College ballots for president and vice president required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states? Or are…

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New reporting restrictions on the Senate impeachment trial suppress freedom of the press

New reporting restrictions on the Senate impeachment trial suppress freedom of the press

NPR reports: News organizations and journalists’ advocates are battling restrictive new ground rules for reporters assigned to cover the Senate impeachment trial. Correspondents who submit to an official credentialing process are granted broad access throughout the Capitol complex and usually encounter few restrictions in talking with members of Congress or others. But now Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger has imposed new requirements for the impeachment trial, negotiated in part with Republican leadership: Reporters are being confined to small cordoned-off sections of…

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William Barr is going after Trump’s enemies one by one

William Barr is going after Trump’s enemies one by one

Jonathan Chait writes: In May of 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had wrapped up his party’s nomination, but when the notion he might win the presidency seemed remote at best, Benjamin Wittes wrote one of the very early essays attempting to analyze how an obviously authoritarian president might abuse his powers. “The soft spot, the least tyrant-proof part of the government, is the U.S. Department of Justice,” he argued, laying out how prosecutorial discretion could allow a president to harass…

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The murderous conflict in Syria has been simplified and distorted by both right and left

The murderous conflict in Syria has been simplified and distorted by both right and left

Ben Ehrenreich writes: It is happening again. Over the last year protest movements – some of them deep and broad enough that we might dare to call them revolutions – have once more been shaking the Middle East and North Africa, ending decades-long dictatorships in Sudan and Algeria, forcing the prime ministers of Lebanon and Iraq to resign. And yet the war brought to Syria by the last wave of revolutionary upheaval – the Arab spring that began in 2011…

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Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals in the Pentagon in 2017

Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals in the Pentagon in 2017

In an article adapted from “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker write: Trump by now was in one of his rages. He was so angry that he wasn’t taking many breaths. All morning, he had been coarse and cavalier, but the next several things he bellowed went beyond that description. They stunned nearly everyone in the room, and some vowed that they would never repeat them. Indeed, they have not…

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