Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: House investigators are demanding that the White House turn over documents related to the security clearances of top officials by Monday, an escalation of a fight between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration that could lead to subpoenas in the coming days. The move follows the revelation that President Trump interceded to give his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance despite concerns from intelligence and White House officials about Kushner’s contacts with foreign individuals and…

Read More Read More

Amy Hawthorne and Andrew Miller write: Consumed by domestic politics, exhausted by the Middle East, and complacent about the stability of Arab allies, Washington has stopped paying close attention to Egypt. But something alarming is happening in the most populous Arab country and a key U.S. security partner: President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is moving Egypt closer toward totalitarianism than strongman Hosni Mubarak ever did and, in the process, laying the groundwork for more instability in a region that has already…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said. Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he…

Read More Read More

Jeffrey Lewis writes: As President Trump flew to Hanoi this week, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had a surprise announcement: Trump and Kim would meet earlier than expected, at a dinner on the first evening. The late announcement led skeptics to describe the dinner as an attempt to overshadow Michael Cohen’s embarrassing testimony about his work for Trump. But the last-minute dinner raised unexpected challenges. The two sides apparently struggled over the menu, with the White House pressing for…

Read More Read More

David Frum writes: Michael Cohen’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee was uncontradicted. The former personal attorney of the president of the United States today accused him of a litany of crimes, improprieties, immoralities, and betrayals of national security. And not one Republican member of the committee breathed one word in defense of the leader of their party. Those Republicans have learned the hard way never to trust President Donald Trump’s denials. Read: Eight striking moments from Michael Cohen’s testimony…

Read More Read More

Jeffrey Lewis writes: The summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi this week is a sideshow to the titanic struggle underway for the Trump administration’s North Korea policy. On one side appears to be U.S. envoy Stephen Biegun and, perhaps, the president himself. They are willing to toss aside decades of U.S. policy to engage with North Korea along the lines of the so-called Sunshine Policy, the approach embraced by progressive South…

Read More Read More

John Sipher writes: According to this year’s National Intelligence Worldwide Threat Assessment and Senate testimony by top-ranked intelligence officials, Americans can expect Vladimir Putin’s Russia to continue its efforts to aggravate social, political and racial tensions in the United States and among its allies. So, to best prepare for future Russian assaults, we should look to the past and study the mind-set of the Cold War K.G.B. — the intelligence service in which President Putin spent his formative years. The…

Read More Read More

  The Guardian reports: Jeremy Corbyn has finally thrown his party’s weight behind a second EU referendum, backing moves for a fresh poll with remain on the ballot paper if Labour should fail to get its own version of a Brexit deal passed this week. The decision to give the party’s backing to a second referendum comes after a concerted push by shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer and deputy leader Tom Watson, who fear any further delay could have led…

Read More Read More

Jeremy Corbyn’s stated preference is that the media should pay more attention to those Jews who claim that there isn’t a serious problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party than to those who say the opposite: If I were in CCHQ, my next PPB (and every other PPB) would just be this video pic.twitter.com/y2RN90BmGo — Robert Colvile (@rcolvile) February 23, 2019 The letter signed by 200 Jewish Labour Party members to which Corbyn referred in this Sky News interview, states:…

Read More Read More

Kenan Malik writes: For anti-Zionists like [the late historian Tony] Judt, “self-determination” in that piece of contested land that is Israel/Palestine should adhere to principles of civic, not ethnic, nationalism; that is, be the self-determination of the people, and only the people, who live there, whether Jews or Palestinians. This kind of anti-Zionism is very different from that which calls for the “destruction of the state of Israel”, usually (a not very veiled) code for the destruction of Jews. The…

Read More Read More