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Category: Politics

The proof that Trump’s ‘no quid pro quo’ call never happened

The proof that Trump’s ‘no quid pro quo’ call never happened

Susan Simpson writes: At the heart of the impeachment inquiry, members of Congress may have been mistakenly led to believe that there were two phone calls between President Donald Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in early September—with the second call having the possibility of helping the President’s case. That’s not what happened. There was only one call, and it was highly incriminating. The call occurred on September 7th. In this call, Trump did say there was “no quid pro quo”…

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In Afghanistan, Trump sows confusion over U.S. policy on Taliban

In Afghanistan, Trump sows confusion over U.S. policy on Taliban

The New York Times reports: After abruptly axing nearly a year of delicate peace talks with the Taliban in September, President Trump put the negotiations back on the front-burner this week in a similarly jolting fashion by seeming to demand a cease-fire that his negotiators had long concluded was overly ambitious. Despite a sense of relief at the prospect of resuming talks to end the 18-year conflict, Western diplomats and Taliban leaders were scrambling to figure out whether Mr. Trump…

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Boris Johnson to Donald Trump: Don’t interfere in UK election

Boris Johnson to Donald Trump: Don’t interfere in UK election

Reuters reports: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was best if U.S. President Donald Trump did not get involved in Britain’s upcoming election when he visits London for a NATO summit next week. “What we don’t do traditionally as loving allies and friends, what we don’t do traditionally, is get involved in each other’s election campaigns,” said Johnson, whose Conservative Party has a commanding lead in the polls ahead of the Dec. 12. “The best (thing) when you have…

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A detailed account of the record in the Ukraine affair

A detailed account of the record in the Ukraine affair

Lawfare‘s Scott R. Anderson, Margaret Taylor, Benjamin Wittes write: In the Ukraine affair, there is no Robert Mueller. There is no Kenneth Starr. If the House is going to get a detailed report on the conduct of President Trump with respect to Ukraine and the Biden family, it’s going to have to write that report itself. The House has authorized its intelligence committee to do just that. Under House Resolution 660, the Intelligence Committee “is directed to issue a report…

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Richard Spencer: I was fired as Navy secretary. Here’s what I’ve learned because of it

Richard Spencer: I was fired as Navy secretary. Here’s what I’ve learned because of it

Richard Spencer writes: Earlier this year, [Chief Petty Officer Edward] Gallagher was formally charged with more than a dozen criminal acts, including premeditated murder, which occurred during his eighth deployment overseas. He was tried in a military court in San Diego and acquitted in July of all charges, except one count of wrongfully posing for photographs with the body of a dead Islamic State fighter. The jury sentenced him to four months, the maximum possible; because he had served that…

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Turkey’s motley crew of proxy fighters in Syria

Turkey’s motley crew of proxy fighters in Syria

Elizabeth Tsurkov writes: A small Turkish flag was standing on the desk of the offices of the Turkish-backed faction in a residential area of Şanlıurfa, in southern Turkey. The men in the room, most of them veteran fighters from eastern Syria, were expecting me and did their best to locate a Syrian revolutionary flag in time for our meeting in the summer of 2019. They could not find one. Everything about the meeting, its location, décor, and content, indicated to…

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Tipping points signal a climate emergency

Tipping points signal a climate emergency

Timothy M. Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber write: Politicians, economists and even some natural scientists have tended to assume that tipping points in the Earth system — such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet — are of low probability and little understood. Yet evidence is mounting that these events could be more likely than was thought, have high impacts and are interconnected across…

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The war-crimes president

The war-crimes president

Adam Serwer writes: Donald Trump is a war-crimes enthusiast. This is not an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or a misrepresentation. As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently invoked a false story about General John Pershing crushing a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, declaring, “There was no more radical Islamic terror for 35 years!” He vowed to…

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Trump knew about whistle-blower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

Trump knew about whistle-blower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

The New York Times reports: President Trump had already been briefed on a whistle-blower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter. Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said. The revelation could shed light on…

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The absurdity of Trump trying to distance himself from Giuliani’s work on Ukraine

The absurdity of Trump trying to distance himself from Giuliani’s work on Ukraine

Philip Bump writes: President Trump certainly wouldn’t be the first employer to retroactively try to designate a staff member as an independent contractor, but he might be the first to do so to aid his fight against being impeached and removed from the White House. His assertion to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was acting independently on Ukraine, perhaps for other clients, has an obvious goal. Giuliani was the point of contact…

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Giuliani privately pursued business in Ukraine while publicly pushing for inquiries for Trump

Giuliani privately pursued business in Ukraine while publicly pushing for inquiries for Trump

The New York Times reports: As Rudolph W. Giuliani waged a public campaign this year to unearth damaging information in Ukraine about President Trump’s political rivals, he privately pursued hundreds of thousands of dollars in business from Ukrainian government officials, documents reviewed by The New York Times show. Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has repeatedly said he has no business in Ukraine, and none of the deals were finalized. But the documents indicate that while he was pushing Mr….

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‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates

‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates

The Washington Post reports: Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data. The report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was immediately hailed by outside researchers for its comprehensive…

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The inside story of Christopher Steele’s Trump dossier

The inside story of Christopher Steele’s Trump dossier

Jane Mayer writes: For nearly three years, President Trump has spun an alternate reality in which he was not helped and tainted by Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign but, rather, his political opponents and his accusers were. During a rambling fifty-three-minute live phone interview with “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump insisted again that the plot to block his election and bring him down once he was installed in the White House was “perhaps the biggest scandal in the…

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Inside Iran’s plot to attack Saudi Arabia

Inside Iran’s plot to attack Saudi Arabia

Reuters reports: Four months before a swarm of drones and missiles crippled the world’s biggest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia, Iranian security officials gathered at a heavily fortified compound in Tehran. The group included the top echelons of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite branch of the Iranian military whose portfolio includes missile development and covert operations. The main topic that day in May: How to punish the United States for pulling out of a landmark nuclear treaty…

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Chief rabbi’s criticism of Labour strikes a chord among many Jews in UK

Chief rabbi’s criticism of Labour strikes a chord among many Jews in UK

The Guardian reports: Plenty of Jews in the UK would say the chief rabbi does not speak for them. They may be from different traditions in Judaism – progressive or ultra-Orthodox – or they may be secular. But many, probably most, agree with the thrust of his unprecedented intervention in next month’s general election. Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s most senior Jewish leader who represents Orthodox Judaism, accused Jeremy Corbyn of allowing a “poison sanctioned from the top” to take root…

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Why Giuliani singled out two Ukrainian oligarchs to help look for dirt on Biden

Why Giuliani singled out two Ukrainian oligarchs to help look for dirt on Biden

The New York Times reports: They were two Ukrainian oligarchs with American legal problems. One had been indicted on federal bribery charges. The other was embroiled in a vast banking scandal and was reported to be under investigation by the F.B.I. And they had one more thing in common: Both had been singled out by Rudolph W. Giuliani and pressed to assist in his wide-ranging hunt for information damaging to one of President Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President…

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