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Category: Politics

Hunter Biden and the corrupt culture of influence-peddling that has long been deemed socially acceptable

Hunter Biden and the corrupt culture of influence-peddling that has long been deemed socially acceptable

Sarah Chayes writes: How did this get to be standard practice? The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S….

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How an intelligence analyst, playing by the rules, triggered the greatest reckoning of Trump’s presidency

How an intelligence analyst, playing by the rules, triggered the greatest reckoning of Trump’s presidency

Mike Giglio writes: On his first day in office, in January 2017, Donald Trump paid a visit to the CIA. He stood before its Memorial Wall, which then had 117 stars commemorating those who lost their lives in the line of duty. “I want to just let you know, I am so behind you,” Trump told the crowd of intelligence officials who’d gathered to hear him speak. “And I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted,…

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Trump, the TV president, finally meets a media story he can’t control

Trump, the TV president, finally meets a media story he can’t control

Margaret Sullivan writes: Donald Trump’s presidency would have been impossible without his reality-TV fame from NBC’s “The Apprentice.” And he is skilled at dominating the visual medium that still matters so much — even in our digital age — from his raucous rallies to his impromptu media gaggles outside a whirring helicopter to his symbiotic relationship with Fox News. But not this week. In a tectonic shift of media attention, every major television network — broadcast and cable alike —…

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A special counsel must investigate Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr

A special counsel must investigate Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr

Noah Feldman writes: The Department of Justice must investigate Rudy Giuliani’s potential crimes in trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. It also needs to investigate whether White House officials criminally covered up evidence of Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. And because the whistle-blower complaint alleges that the top law enforcement official in the federal government, Attorney General William Barr, “appears to be involved” in these events, a special counsel must be appointed. Barr…

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Southern states energy officials push for as much deregulation as possible while Trump is still in power

Southern states energy officials push for as much deregulation as possible while Trump is still in power

Inside Climate News reports: The contrast could not have been greater between the political and economic conversations at the Southern States Energy Board meeting here Tuesday and Wednesday and the global chorus of urgent calls for action on climate change at the United Nations in New York. While dozens of world leaders committed at the UN to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, here at Louisville’s opulent Seelbach Hilton Hotel, officials from more than a dozen southern states huddled up in…

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NRA was ‘foreign asset’ to Russia ahead of 2016, new Senate report reveals

NRA was ‘foreign asset’ to Russia ahead of 2016, new Senate report reveals

NPR reports: The National Rifle Association acted as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the period leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new investigation unveiled Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Drawing on contemporaneous emails and private interviews, an 18-month probe by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin more than previously known — even though the two had declared their ties to…

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War in Syria a footnote at UN meeting

War in Syria a footnote at UN meeting

The Associated Press reports: As dozens of heads of state convene for the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, the lingering conflict in Syria is taking a back seat while tensions in the Persian Gulf and global trade wars take center stage. Now in its ninth year, many Syrians fear the unresolved war has become a footnote in a long list of world crises, with weary leaders resigned to live with President Bashar Assad ruling over a…

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How image and theater give tyrants their power

How image and theater give tyrants their power

Sue Prideaux writes: Actor, stage manager, orator and self-publicist, Mussolini allowed his ideology to remain vague while spending more than half of his time curating his image. Italy was a newspaper with Mussolini writing the front page every day. He knew that a picture of him taking flying lessons was worth any number of carefully argued editorials. After his first propaganda radio broadcast in 1925, 40,000 free radios were distributed to elementary schools between 1933 and 1938. By the onset…

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Whistle-blower had intel and foreign policy experience to see the gravity of Trump’s apparent abuse of power

Whistle-blower had intel and foreign policy experience to see the gravity of Trump’s apparent abuse of power

The New York Times reports: The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity. The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by…

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Trump insinuates that anyone who exposes his communications should be executed

Trump insinuates that anyone who exposes his communications should be executed

The New York Times reports: President Trump on Thursday morning told a crowd of staff from the United States Mission to the United Nations that he wants to know who provided information to a whistle-blower about his phone call with the president of Ukraine, saying that whoever did so was “close to a spy” and that “in the old days,” spies were dealt with differently. The remark stunned people in the audience, according to a person briefed on what took…

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Full text of the whistle-blower complaint describing evidence of Trump’s flagrant abuse of power

Full text of the whistle-blower complaint describing evidence of Trump’s flagrant abuse of power

In a letter addressed to the chairs of the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence, the whistle-blower wrote: In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political…

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Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden ‘did not violate anything’

Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden ‘did not violate anything’

The Washington Post reports: A former top Ukrainian prosecutor, whose allegations were at the heart of the dirt-digging effort by Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday he believed that Hunter Biden did not run afoul of any laws in Ukraine. “From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko told The Washington Post in his first interview since the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint alleging pressure by President Trump on Ukraine’s president, Volodymr…

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Trump’s asylum ban will result in the death, kidnapping and torture of individuals seeking safety

Trump’s asylum ban will result in the death, kidnapping and torture of individuals seeking safety

By Sarah F. Rogerson, Albany Law School The Trump administration’s latest restrictive immigration policy, known as the asylum ban, was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ban effectively ends asylum relief for the vast majority of refugees seeking it at the U.S.-Mexico border. It prevents individuals from applying for asylum in the United States if they could have pursued asylum in another country first. There are few exceptions: (1) if you lose your asylum claim in a third…

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Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

The Washington Post reports: Last year, income inequality in the United States reached its highest level since the Census Bureau started tracking it in 1967, according to federal data released Thursday. In the midst of the longest economic expansion the United States has ever seen, with poverty and unemployment rates at historic lows, the separation between rich and poor from 2017 and 2018 was greater than it has ever been, federal data show. Nine states saw spikes in that divide:…

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In seeking Ukraine favor, Trump was vulnerable to foreign spies, intelligence inspector general warned

In seeking Ukraine favor, Trump was vulnerable to foreign spies, intelligence inspector general warned

Reuters reports: U.S. President Donald Trump potentially exposed himself to “serious national security and counter-intelligence risks” when he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a leading political rival, Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, and his son, the intelligence community’s inspector general warned. The previously undisclosed warning, included in a Justice Department legal opinion released on Wednesday, reflected the concerns of a whistleblower who filed a complaint about a July 25 call between Trump and then newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr…

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Trump’s ‘complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript’ is unlikely to be a transcript or complete

Trump’s ‘complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript’ is unlikely to be a transcript or complete

Reuters reports: Trump said on Tuesday a “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of the July 25 call would be released on Wednesday. In it, the Republican president is alleged to have pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden, the U.S. Democratic presidential front-runner. The transcript would show the call was “totally appropriate,” Trump said on Twitter. However, standard practice when a president is talking to a foreign leader is not to make a recording but to have…

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