CEU PROGRESS REPORT FROM MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
Mixed progress. Hungarian government intransigent.
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
This has been a week of disappointment and promise. The chief disappointment was this week’s meeting with the Hungarian inter-ministerial working group, the first official face-to-face encounter with the government side since the passage of lex CEU. We came to the meeting hoping that the government would begin talks, but the government side made it clear that they will not negotiate with CEU. They also were unwilling to answer the simplest questions about the law’s operation following the first deadline for compliance on October 11. While we are always willing to talk to the government, further meetings of this kind are pointless. After the meeting, CEU called on the government, once again, to stop holding our 1,440 students and 980 faculty and staff hostage for political purposes, and bring this situation to a conclusion (see our May 17 press release).
The element of promise came from Brussels. On the same day as our meeting with government officials, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for the repeal of lex CEU. We at CEU now await the government’s response, expected at the end of next week, to the European Commission’s finding that lex CEU violates European law. We are also awaiting the Hungarian Constitutional Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of the law.
Meanwhile, the vital work of the university goes on. Our public outreach lecture series, Rethinking Open Society, will feature talks this month by renowned historian Niall Ferguson (Monday, May 22) and distinguished author Robert Kaplan (May 31), among several others. On May 26, Hungarian universities and educational organizations will hold a Teach-In at CEU to bring academics and educational professionals into dialogue around rethinking the role of universities.
We look forward to seeing students, staff, and faculty at the annual CEU Picnic on Saturday May 20.
Finally, as many of you know, there will be a demonstration on Sunday May 21, 5:30-8:30pm in favor of Europe, academic freedom, and freedom of association. As always, the university does not endorse or associate itself with any public demonstration, but faculty, staff, and students are, of course, free to take part or not, as they wish.
We are grateful for your strength and encouragement, and given this week’s developments, we need your continued support more than ever. #istandwithCEU / #aCEUvalvagyok
Best regards,
Michael Ignatieff, President and Rector
Liviu Matei, Provost and Pro-Rector
President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call.
Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureau’s investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquiries to the Justice Department, according to those people.
It’s Trump, so it’s not a surprise, but it is. How can he be dumb enough to think that if he were under investigation by the FBI it would work to keep pestering the head of the FBI to shut that whole thing down? How can he not have realized that the head of the FBI is the last person to pester to do anything about that?
But maybe other people can pester the FBI director on Trump’s behalf?
The day after the Flynn conversation, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Comey to help push back on reports in the news media that Mr. Trump’s associates had been in contact with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign.
Oh dear god. No. Why would they think Comey would help them with their PR at all, let alone in that situation?
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Thursday that “the sworn testimony” of both Mr. Comey and Andrew G. McCabe, the F.B.I.’s acting director, “make clear that there was never any attempt to interfere in this investigation. As the president previously stated, he respects the ongoing investigations and will continue working to fulfill his promises to the American people.”
Well that’s an enormous lie.
The F.B.I.’s longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, had close relationships with several presidents. But in the modern F.B.I., directors have sought an arm’s length relationship with the presidents they serve and have followed Justice Department guidelines outlining how the White House should have limited contact with the F.B.I.
Those guidelines, which also cover the F.B.I., prohibit conversations with the White House about active criminal investigations unless they are “important for the performance of the president’s duties and appropriate from a law enforcement perspective.” When such conversations are necessary, only the attorney general or the deputy attorney general can initiate those discussions.
But reality tv stars don’t know anything about guidelines and wouldn’t care if they did. They’re amateurs, intent on 1. enriching themselves and 2. trashing the joint.
Mr. Comey has spoken privately of his concerns that the contacts from Mr. Trump and his aides were inappropriate, and how he felt compelled to resist them.
“He had to throw some brushback pitches to the administration,” Benjamin Wittes, a friend of Mr. Comey’s, said in interviews.
Mr. Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the editor in chief of the Lawfare blog and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, recalls a lunch he had with Mr. Comey in March at which Mr. Comey told him he had spent the first two months of Mr. Trump’s administration trying to preserve distance between the F.B.I. and the White House and educating it on the proper way to interact with the bureau.
Mr. Wittes said he never intended to publicly discuss his conversations with Mr. Comey. But after The New York Times reported earlier this month that shortly after his inauguration Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey for a loyalty pledge, Mr. Wittes said he saw Mr. Trump’s behavior in a “more menacing light” and decided to speak out.
So let’s read the post Wittes wrote last night, after the Times story appeared, since the rest of the article is based on Schmidt’s interview with Wittes. The post is riveting.
A few words of elaboration are in order.
I called Schmidt Friday morning after reading his earlier story, which ran the previous evening, about Comey’s dinner with President Trump and the President’s demands at that dinner for a vow of loyalty. Schmidt had reported that Trump requested that Comey commit to personal loyalty to the President, and that Comey declined, telling the President that he would always have Comey’s “honesty.” When I read Schmidt’s account, I immediately understood certain things Comey had said to me over the previous few months in a different, and frankly more menacing, light. While I am not in the habit of discussing with reporters my confidential communications with friends, I decided that the things Comey had told me needed to be made public.
I think he’s right about that. They are of public interest, to put it mildly, plus there’s Trump’s bullshit about “leaks.”
I did this interview on the record because the President that morning was already issuing threatening tweets suggesting that Comey was leaking things, and I didn’t want any room for misunderstanding that any kind of leak had taken place with respect to the information I was providing. There was no leak from Comey, no leak from anyone else at the FBI, and no leak from anyone outside of the bureau either—just conversations between friends, the contents of which one friend is now disclosing.
…
Comey was preoccupied throughout this period with the need to protect the FBI from these inquiries on investigative matters from the White House. Two incidents involving such inquiries have become public: the Flynn discussion and Reince Priebus’s query to Andrew McCabe about whether the then-Deputy FBI Director could publicly dispute the New York Times’ reporting regarding communications between Trump associates and Russian officials. Whether there were other such incidents I do not know, but I suspect there were. What I do know is that Comey spent a great deal of energy doing what he alternately described as “training” the White House that officials had to go through the Justice Department and “reestablishing” normal hands-off White House-Bureau relations.
Teaching the clueless tv star and his hacks how to do their jobs, in short. Imagine how trying that would be to someone who has other things to do.
Comey understood Trump’s people as having neither knowledge of nor respect for the independence of the law enforcement function. And he saw it as an ongoing task on his part to protect the rest of the Bureau from improper contacts and interferences from a group of people he did not regard as honorable. This was a general preoccupation of Comey’s in the months he and Trump overlapped—and the difference between this relationship and his regard for Obama (which was deep) was profound and palpable.
See all three are people who give a damn about the law, while Trump and Co are the opposite of that.
That’s one of the things I hate most about Trump and people like him – this refusal to respect knowledge and expertise no matter how significant and valuable it may be. I hate this cynical, frivolous, contemptuous indifference in people who know nothing but how to Market.
Second, Comey described at least two incidents which he regarded as efforts on the part of the President personally to compromise him or implicate him with either shows of closeness or actual chumminess with the President.
Which despite its infamy I didn’t know about. I’ve seen the clip of the final few seconds many times lately, but I didn’t know it was the end of any infamous hug. The story is fascinating.
The hug took place at a White House meeting to which Trump had invited law enforcement leadership to thank them for their role in the inauguration. Comey described really not wanting to go to that meeting, for the same reason he later did not want to go to the private dinner with Trump: the FBI director should be always at arm’s length from the President, in his view. There was an additional sensitivity here too, because many Democrats blamed Comey for Trump’s election, so he didn’t want any shows of closeness between the two that might reinforce a perception that he had put a thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor. But he also felt that he could not refuse a presidential invitation, particularly not one that went to a broad array of law enforcement leadership. So he went. But as he told me the story, he tried hard to blend into the background and avoid any one-on-one interaction. He was wearing a blue blazer and noticed that the drapes were blue. So he stood in the back, right in front of the drapes, hoping Trump wouldn’t notice him camouflaged against the wall. If you look at the video, Comey is standing about as far from Trump as it is physically possible to be in that room.
And for a long time, he reported, Trump didn’t seem to notice him. The meeting was nearly over, he said, and he really thought he was going to get away without an individual interaction. But when you’re six foot, eight inches tall, it’s hard to blend in forever, and Trump ultimately singled him out—and did so with the most damning faint praise possible: “Oh, and there’s Jim. He’s become more famous than me!”
Comey took the long walk across the room determined, he told me, that there was not going to be a hug. Bad enough that he was there; bad enough that there would be a handshake; he emphatically did not want any show of warmth.
Again, look at the video, and you’ll see Comey preemptively reaching out to shake hands. Trump grabs his hand and attempts an embrace. The embrace, however, is entirely one sided.
Comey was disgusted. He regarded the episode as a physical attempt to show closeness and warmth in a fashion calculated to compromise him before Democrats who already mistrusted him.
The loyalty dinner was five days after that.
Comey never told me the details of the dinner meeting; I don’t think I even knew that there had been a meeting over dinner until I learned it from the Times story. But he did tell me in general terms that early on, Trump had “asked for loyalty” and that Comey had promised him only honesty. He also told me that Trump was perceptibly uncomfortable with this answer. And he said that ever since, the President had been trying to be chummy in a fashion that Comey felt was designed to absorb him into Trump’s world—to make him part of the team. Comey was deeply uncomfortable with these episodes. He told me that Trump sometimes talked to him [in] a fashion designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking. While I was not sure quite what this meant, it clearly disquieted Comey. He felt that these conversations were efforts to probe how resistant he would be to becoming a loyalist. In light of the dramatic dinner meeting and the Flynn request, it’s easy to see why they would be upsetting and feel like attempts at pressure.
I have a guess at what he meant by “in a fashion designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking.” It’s what Trump does to all of us, in a way, but no doubt more so: he talks as if we all share his assumptions, no matter how crass and disgusting they are. My guess is that he says revolting things that Comey won’t feel he can dispute or rebuke, and that’s designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking. We all feel slightly dirtier after watching Trump talk, I think?
There’s another story about Trump’s calling Comey up just to chat – as if they were chat-bros.
What bothered Comey was twofold—the fact that the conversation happened at all (why was Trump calling him to exchange pleasantries?) and the fact that there was an undercurrent of Trump’s trying to get him to kiss the ring.
Or maybe just to buy an overpriced condo in Boca del Vista.
He said one other thing that day that, in retrospect, stands out in my memory: he expressed wariness about the then-still-unconfirmed deputy attorney general nominee, Rod Rosenstein. This surprised me because I had always thought well of Rosenstein and had mentioned his impending confirmation as a good thing. But Comey did not seem enthusiastic. The DOJ does need Senate-confirmed leadership, he agreed, noting that Dana Boente had done a fine job as acting deputy but that having confirmed people to make important decisions was critical. And he agreed with me that Rosenstein had a good reputation as a solid career guy.
That said, his reservations were palpable. “Rod is a survivor,” he said. And you don’t get to survive that long across administrations without making compromises. “So I have concerns.”
In retrospect, I think I know what Comey must have been thinking at that moment. He had been asked to pledge loyalty by Trump. When he had declined, and even before, he had seen repeated efforts to—from his point of view—undermine his independence and probe the FBI’s defenses against political interference. He had been asked to drop an investigation. He had spent the last few months working to defend the normative lines that protect the FBI from the White House. And he had felt the need personally to make clear to the President that there were questions he couldn’t ask about investigative matters. So he was asking himself, I suspect: What loyalty oath had Rosenstein been asked to swear, and what happened at whatever dinner that request took place?
And under all this…there’s the fact that Comey himself may be the reason Trump is president.
Ah well as long as it’s only cishetero white people she’s calling cockroaches that’s fine.
No it isn’t. The Hutus saw the Tutsis as oppressors too; the Nazis saw the Jews as all-powerful and oppressive; othering dehumanizing language is not always aimed downward.
That’s a peculiarly dense question. Historically, “cockroach” has been a racist epithet, but the word isn’t inherently limited as such. It’s a fungible epithet; it works to dehumanize anyone.
______________________________________
Zoé Samudzi says it’s fine to call people cockroaches.
It’s not “fake” and it’s not “offended.” She sounds like Rush Limbaugh. It’s a principled criticism of using othering language like that, with a note of the way it has been used by e.g. the Nazis, Hutus inciting genocide against Tutsis, Katie Hopkins inciting loathing of migrants.
Her “argument” is of no interest. What interests me about her is her way of bullying people on social media. The fact that she calls them “cockroaches” is the subject, while her “argument” is not.
“I believe it hurts our country terribly, because it shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country,” Mr Trump told CNN and CNBC .
Huh. That’s funny, because his campaign was all about how divided and not-unified we are, and also all about making us more so. His whole shtick is Us versus Them. Drain the swamp; the people versus the experts; good people versus bad hombres; real Murkans versus scary immigrants; real voters versus fake voters; Trump versus women he dislikes. His inaugural address was about what a toilet the country is. His tweets are all about the press as enemies of the people and demons persecuting Donald Trump.
The decision came 10 days before Donald Trump had been sworn in as president, in a conversation with President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, who had explained the Pentagon’s plan to retake the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa with Syrian Kurdish forces whom the Pentagon considered the U.S.’s most effective military partners. Obama’s national security team had decided to ask for Trump’s sign-off, since the plan would all but certainly be executed after Trump had become president.
Flynn didn’t hesitate. According to timelines distributed by members of Congress in the weeks since, Flynn told Rice to hold off, a move that would delay the military operation for months.
Did he tell her he was a paid agent of the Turkish government? No he did not. He told no one.
If Flynn explained his answer, that’s not recorded, and it’s not known whether he consulted anyone else on the transition team before rendering his verdict. But his position was consistent with the wishes of Turkey, which had long opposed the United States partnering with the Kurdish forces – and which was his undeclared client.
But hey – he’s a good guy.
Now members of Congress, musing about the tangle of legal difficulties Flynn faces, cite that exchange with Rice as perhaps the most serious: acting on behalf of a foreign nation – from which he had received considerable cash – when making a military decision. Some members of Congress, in private conversations, have even used the word “treason” to describe Flynn’s intervention, though experts doubt that his actions qualify.
And yesterday Erdogan’s bodyguards were beating up protesters in DC.
WASHINGTON — Supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, including his government security forces and several armed individuals, violently charged a group of protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence here on Tuesday night in what the police characterized as “a brutal attack.”
Eleven people were injured, including a police officer, and nine were taken to a hospital, the Metropolitan Police chief, Peter Newsham, said at a news conference on Wednesday. Two Secret Service agents were also assaulted in the melee, according to a federal law enforcement official.
The State Department rebuked Turkey.
Photos and videos posted on social media by witnesses showed a chaotic scene of flying fists, feet and police batons — all in the middle of rush hour traffic along stately Embassy Row. The video showed two men bleeding from the head and men in dark suits punching and kicking protesters, some lying on the ground.
Erdogan is the guy Trump congratulated recently when he won a referendum granting him new authoritarian powers.
The confrontation came after President Trump welcomed Mr. Erdogan to the White House on Tuesday and praised him as a stalwart ally in the battle against Islamic extremism. Mr. Trump did not speak of Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian crackdown on his own people.
The White House has thus far been silent on the episode. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, referred reporters to the State Department and declined to comment further.
So we’ll conclude that Trump & Co like that sort of thing.
The episode was not the first time that Turkish security forces have ignited violence in the American capital. The police and members of Mr. Erdogan’s security team clashed with demonstrators last year outside the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Erdogan was giving a speech. Brookings wrote on its website that his bodyguards had “behaved unacceptably — they roughed up protesters outside the building and tried to drag away ‘undesired’ journalists, an approach typical of the Russians or Chinese.”
Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, who posted a video of Tuesday’s clash on his organization’s Facebook page, said that when Mr. Erdogan and his entourage arrived at the ambassador’s residence around 4 p.m., the president’s supporters gathered and rushed across the street and into the park where the protest was taking place.
Several of the protesters said they were caught off-guard when the group rushed through the police and into their ranks, which included some small children. All nine demonstrators who were hospitalized have since been released, but Mr. Hamparian said many left with stitches.
And the White House people couldn’t bring themselves to say that’s not cool.
Lucy Usoyan of Arlington, Va. was among them. Ethnically Yazidi and raised in Armenia before moving to the United States, she said she had expected a mostly quiet afternoon expressing her displeasure at Mr. Erdogan’s government.
Instead, she said, she ended up knocked to the ground and kicked until she was briefly unconscious.
“When I opened my eyes I saw people all around,” said Ms. Usoyan, 34. “Some were bleeding, and I could not get up.”
Sayid Reza Yasa, one of the organizers of the demonstration, said he lost at least one tooth and his nose was bloodied as he was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly before the police intervened.
Mr. Yasa, 60, an American citizen who was born in Turkey and is of Kurdish descent, said he was familiar with the brutality of Mr. Erdogan’s forces, but surprised by their audacity on Tuesday.
“This is not acceptable,” Mr. Yasa said. “This is America. This is not Turkey.”
Both Dolezal and Tuvel demonstrate the infallibility and virtuosity of cis white womanhood: despite the harm they enact, they are still always worthy of understanding, protection, kid-gloves…It is not enough to simply hope that Dolezal, or any other career appropriator, simply disappears. As long as there is a structural and systemic investment in discrediting gender non-conforming and Black identities and subordinating the understandings they possess, these gaslighting genealogies that define and regulate humanity will continue, and the Dolezals of the world (and their defenders, and their defenders’ defenders) will spawn and flourish like the cockroaches they are.
In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.
Der Sturmer ran contests encouraging German children to write in. One little girl wrote, “People are so bothered by the way we’re treating the Jews. They can’t understand it, because [Jews] are God’s creatures. But cockroaches are also God’s creatures, and we destroy them.”
The Board of Directors of Hypatia would like to clarify the nature of the controversy, since there are misrepresentations in the press and on social media. Further, we would like to articulate the principles we are committed to as we move forward beyond this controversy.
1. The Board acknowledges the intensity of experience and convictions around matters of intersectionality, especially in the world of academic philosophy, which has an egregious history of treatment of women of color feminists and feminists from other marginalized social positions. To those unfamiliar with the issues, outrage about a particular academic publication is often dismissed as nothing more than the censoriousness of hypersensitive groups. The objectionable features of the particular case, considered in isolation, seem too minor to outsiders to warrant the degree of outrage focused upon it. Such dismissal reflects ignorance of the cumulative history of marginalization, disrespect, and misrepresentation of oppressed groups. Usually, objections to a particular academic publication reflect the objectors’ knowledge of a history of grievances of which outsiders are unaware. It is difficult to assess how much of the outrage is properly directed at Hypatia, and how much at other public, academic, or philosophical institutions. Nevertheless, the Board would like to take this opportunity to learn from the expressed outrage. Hypatia has always held itself to a higher standard of inclusion than most other philosophy journals. During the years in which Sally Scholz has served as editor, it has continued to develop these commitments to diversity (including organizing a major conference on diversifying philosophy, the solicitation of special issues and clusters specifically focused on diversity, and the creation of podcasts and video interviews to make Hypatia articles more widely accessible). Going forward, with consultation amongst those who perform various roles for our organization, Hypatia will review its governance structure, procedures, and policies, aiming to continue to improve its inclusiveness and respect for marginalized voices in a manner consistent with the continuation of Hypatia as a scholarly enterprise committed to feminist values.
I’m sorry but no. That gives too much credit to “the expressed outrage” without probing to ask whether the outrage was at all justified, whether it was worked up, whether it was a contagion, whether it was exaggerated, whether it was properly directed, and so on. Not all outrage is justified. The cause can be bad, or the outrage can be misdirected, or both. White supremacists express outrage. Trump expresses outrage. Theocrats express outrage. MRAs express outrage. The mere fact that outrage was expressed is not automatically a reason to “learn from” said outrage.
Also, that part suggests that Tuvel really did do something wrong that set off this outrage. The Board should not be suggesting that.
Ok but people will say you’re not trans so you can’t judge. True, but I’m also not a white supremacist, and yet I judge. The “lived experience” thing is not a conversation-ender.
Eventually they do tepidly defend the publication of Tuvel’s article.
6. The Board stands behind the judgment of Hypatia’sEditor, Sally Scholz, concerning the publication of Professor Tuvel’s paper. On May 6, 2017, Professor Scholz released a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education affirming that Professor Tuvel’s paper went through the usual double-masked peer review process and was accepted by the reviewers and by the Editor. We endorse her assessment that, barring discovery of misconduct or plagiarism, the decision to publish stands. We also approve her willingness to refer the matter to Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
The Board also recognizes Professor Tuvel for her work and condemns any ad hominem and personal attacks that may have been directed against her. As a scholarly publication, Hypatia supports our authors and appreciates their contributions to advancing understanding of contemporary social issues.
That is very tepid. It is inadequate. It’s especially inadequate since they promptly all but withdraw it.
7. We regret the harms to current and prospective authors, editors, and peer reviewers of Hypatia that were created by this controversy. We are working hard to respond responsibly to this troubling and difficult controversy. We acknowledge the history and continuation of injustices around matters of intersectionality, and know that many of us have much to learn from those who have lived in and worked on intersections of marginalized racial and gender identities.
That implies that Tuvel committed an injustice around matters of intersectionality. That’s crap.
The Trump presidency is the discovery that what you thought was a man in a bear suit is just a bear. Suddenly the fact that he wouldn’t play by the rules makes total sense. It wasn’t that he refused to, that he was playing a long game. It was that he was a wild animal who eats fish and climbs trees, and English words were totally unintelligible to him. In retrospect, you should have suspected that after he just straight-up ate a guy. But at the time everyone cheered. It was good TV. Also, he was your bear.
…
Who can help? The people in there with him are the people who did not realize that what they had on their hands was an animal. Now they are trying to whisper him, like a horse. Do horses understand whispering? Horses probably think that people are just conspiring against them all the time. Horses are probably quite paranoid and delusional. But at least a horse would not fire the FBI director.
…
It is bringing your drunk relative to a party where you need to impress people for work, but 24 hours a day, and your co-workers are the entire world, and some of them have nukes.
It is like expecting a cardboard cutout of a pro wrestler to perform open-heart surgery.
It is like watching a golden retriever try to disable a bomb. The dog can’t determine which is the red button and which is the green button. It can’t see color. It’s a dog, for Pete’s sake. What did you expect?
…
He’s a human Failure to Read the User’s Manual.
He’s a cartoon character. He only looks real on TV. When real things are put into his hands he drops them, and people get hurt.
Confidence is good, up to a point. Now here is someone who thinks juggling hand-painted Fabergé eggs will impress you. Not because he is so supremely confident in his ability to juggle, but because he literally doesn’t know what they are. That they’re breakable. Only your house is in the egg. You are in the egg. Everything you care about is in the egg.
Michael T. Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case.
Despite this warning, which came about a month after the Justice Department notified Mr. Flynn of the inquiry, Mr. Trump made Mr. Flynn his national security adviser. The job gave Mr. Flynn access to the president and nearly every secret held by American intelligence agencies.
So does that seem like a wise and responsible move? No it does not.
Mr. Flynn’s disclosure, on Jan. 4, was first made to the transition team’s chief lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, who is now the White House counsel. That conversation, and another one two days later between Mr. Flynn’s lawyer and transition lawyers, shows that the Trump team knew about the investigation of Mr. Flynn far earlier than has been previously reported.
Which means they acted even more recklessly than has been previously reported.
Retired Gen. Michael Flynn will not cooperate with the Senate intelligence committee’s subpoena request for documents regarding the former national security adviser’s interactions with Russian officials.
Gen. Flynn’s lawyers said he would not honor the subpoena, and that’s not a surprise to the committee, but we’ll figure out on Gen. Flynn what the next step, if any, is,” committee chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told reporters Thursday morning.
If President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan attends the meeting this weekend with Mr. Trump, human rights advocates said, it would be a destructive breach of longstanding American policy.
The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court but has long sought to ostracize defendants who defy the court’s arrest warrants, including Mr. Bashir, who has led Sudan for nearly three decades.
He was indicted in 2009 and 2010 on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan’s Darfur region. In refusing to honor the indictments, he has come to symbolize impunity toward the Hague-based court.
The White House had no comment, the Times said politely. My guess is that that’s because they have no clue what the problem is.
Rights advocates expressed alarm at the possibility.
“Any interaction by President Trump with al-Bashir in Saudi Arabia, should al-Bashir attend the meeting, would send a terrible signal to the victims of the crimes and raise major questions about U.S. commitment to justice for them,” said Elise Keppler, associate director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. “Al-Bashir belongs in The Hague facing the charges against him, not hobnobbing with officials in Saudi Arabia.”
Mind you, we’d be in a better position to express outrage if we hadn’t refused to join the ICC ourselves.
The Saudis have internationalized the event, organizing a sprawling “Arab Islamic American Summit” with leaders from dozens of Muslim countries, as well as talks with the king, the inauguration of a counterterrorism center, and public forums for business executives and young people.
Saudi Arabia, home to some of Islam’s holiest sites, will be pulling out all the stops for a man who has declared “Islam hates us” and said the United States is “losing a tremendous amount of money” defending the kingdom.
But Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies were so angry over former President Barack Obama’s policies toward the Middle East that they appear prepared to dismiss Mr. Trump’s remarks as campaign rhetoric, and to see in him a possibility of resetting relations.
Yes, secretly he’s a big fan of Islam. I’m sure this will go swimmingly.
There are three summit meetings planned: between Mr. Trump and King Salman, the Saudi monarch; between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Persian Gulf states; and between Mr. Trump and more than 50 leaders and representatives from across the Muslim world.
Mr. Trump and King Salman will also inaugurate the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, where Mr. Trump is to give a speech about Islam.
A speech about Islam. Trump. In Saudi Arabia. Oh yes, that should go well.
I mock, but they do in fact have a lot in common.
Some aspects of Mr. Trump’s tenure that have caused criticism in the United States do not seem to bother the Saudis.
His reliance on his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom will join him in Riyadh — for policy advice is business as usual in a monarchy where princes run the government and the king has appointed one son as defense minister and another as ambassador to Washington.
And worries that Mr. Trump could use his presidency to benefit Trump hotels and golf courses get little traction in a country that is named after its royal family, and where the line between public and private wealth is vague.
Mr. Trump’s apparent lack of interest in human rights also suggests that he is unlikely to complain about the Saudi justice system or the limited rights of Saudi women.
Nepotism, corruption, and contempt for human rights: friendship glue.
Also invited to Riyadh is President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes including genocide, although it remains unclear whether he will attend or, if he does, whether he will meet Mr. Trump.
Well no, because it’s not a witch hunt at all. It’s an investigation, authorized by the Acting Attorney General (because the compromised Attorney General had to recuse himself), and overseen by a former FBI head.
Is Donnie Twoscoops being unfairly singled out by mean bad people who are just jealous of how awesome and huge he is?
No. Donnie Twoscoops is corrupt and incompetent and reckless, and there is plenty to investigate.
With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special counsel appointed!
Members of both parties view Mr. Mueller as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country. He served both Democratic and Republican presidents, from 2001 to 2013, and was asked by President Barack Obama to stay on beyond the normal 10-year term until Mr. Comey was appointed.
…
“He’s an absolutely superb choice,” said Kathryn Ruemmler, a former prosecutor and White House counsel under Mr. Obama. “He will just do a completely thorough investigation without regard to public pressure or political pressure.”
She added: “I cannot think of a better choice.”
John S. Pistole, who served as the F.B.I.’s deputy director under Mr. Mueller, also praised the appointment.
“You need an independent assessment of what the president has done, how he has done it and perhaps why he has done it,” said Mr. Pistole, who is now president of Anderson University in Indiana. “The appointment of Director Mueller is exactly what is needed to attempt to bring credibility to the White House when there are so many questions about the president’s actions and motives.”
The order to appoint Mr. Mueller was signed by Mr. Rosenstein on Wednesday, drawing on a regulation granting the attorney general the authority to appoint a special counsel for only the second time in history. The first time it was used was in 1999 by Janet Reno, who appointed Jack Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, to lead an investigation into the botched federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., in 1993 that killed 76 people.
People are pointing out that Trump could fire him. Am I naïve to think even Trump would see the problems with doing that?
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, praised the pick of Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor, calling him a “a respected public servant of the highest integrity.”
She said that did not go as far, however, as the creation of an independent commission. Pelosi said that would be more free of the Trump administration.
“The Trump Administration must make clear that Director Mueller will have the resources and independence he needs to execute this critical investigation,” Pelosi said in a statement.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was more positive, though [he] echoed Pelosi’s praise of Mueller.
“Former Director Mueller is exactly the right kind of individual for this job. I now have significantly greater confidence that the investigation will follow the facts wherever they lead,” Schumer said in a statement.
Plus he’s a former FBI head. I have a feeling people who fit that description don’t like seeing a corrupt dishonest president messing with the FBI to protect his own lies and corruption.
On Wednesday, President Trump spoke at the commencement ceremony at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.
During the commencement, Trump was presented with a ceremonial saber. After accepting it to applause, he returned to his seat next to Secretary of Homeland Security Gen. John F. Kelly.
Smiling, Kelly leaned over the president and said, of the saber, “You can use that on the press.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Trump, as Kelly laughed.
Then Kelly gave Trump a few affectionate licks on the face.
The Justice Department on Wednesday appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to the position in a letter obtained by CNN.
Sessions of course has recused himself, and occasionally remembers that he has.
As special counsel, Mueller is “authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters,” according to the Justice Department order Rosenstein signed.
Mueller was Bush Junior’s FBI Director and stayed on in the Obama admin until 2013, when Comey took over.
Don from the outer boroughs gave a commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy just now. He talked about himself.
President Donald Trump, amid his own swirling controversies, advised United States Coast Guard Academy graduates that while things aren’t always fair, “you have to put your head down and fight, fight, fight.”
The comment was a clear reference to the fact that Trump’s White House is now besieged by bipartisan questions about his alleged request that former FBI Director James Comey to halt an investigation into his former top national security aide.
“Never, never, never give up. Things will work out just fine,” he said in New London, Connecticut, Wednesday.
Right. Good advice. Always assume you’re right, no matter what; always assume that any disagreement is wildly unfair and that you should fight fight fight fight fight fight fight fight. Unless of course you’re disputing Donald Trump, in which case you should prostrate yourself and beg for clemency.
Then he went to directly talking about himself – as he always does.
“Look at the way I have been treated lately, especially by the media,” he said. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly. You can’t let them get you down, you can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.”
White House advisers insisted Trump was up to speed on the Middle East, having already hosted Arab, Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the White House.
“His way of doing diplomacy, which really contrasts with President Obama’s approach, is to … prioritize the personal relationship,” said Michael Singh, a foreign policy adviser to former Republican President George W. Bush.
In other words his way of doing diplomacy contrasts with the sane adult approach. The personal relationship is largely beside the point, even though a good one doubtless does make discussion and negotiation easier. But of course Trump is Trump. It’s not that prioritizing the personal relationship is a considered approach, it’s that it’s all he knows.
Conversations with some officials who have briefed Trump and others who are aware of how he absorbs information portray a president with a short attention span.
He likes single-page memos and visual aids like maps, charts, graphs and photos.
National Security Council officials have strategically included Trump’s name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” according to one source, who relayed conversations he had with NSC officials.
The Post’s Daily 202 points out that all this underlines how clueless Trump always was and still is about what exactly his job entails.
The same president who allegedly asked James Comey to drop the FBI’s probe into Michael Flynn – potentially imperiling his grip on power – has also said “nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” volunteered that he only learned containing North Korea is “not so easy” when the Chinese president tutored him on the region’s history and expressed surprise that government cannot be run like a business.
He seems to have thought it was like being a pretend boss on tv – you just give orders and say “you’re fired” when you feel like it. The end.
— Only an amateur would be surprised that Comey took notes after a meeting like this and that they would emerge if he got fired while the investigation in question was still ongoing. How the last several days have played out was entirely foreseeable for anyone who has even a basic grip of how Washington works and how Comey operates.
Dud theory of mind yet again. Trump saw it all from his point of view and didn’t even pause to remember that Comey has one too and it won’t consist solely of “must do whatever Trump wants because Trump awesome.”
Why did the president ask Pence and Sessions to leave the room when he talked to Comey? “This is the kind of conversation that rational, experienced presidents know not to have,” Ruth Marcus writes. “It is the kind of conversation that a White House counsel should make sparklingly, crystal clear to a president that he is not to engage in, not even close. It is the kind of conversation that seems completely in character for Trump, who, over the course of the campaign and now in office, has betrayed no — zero — understanding of the necessary separation of the president and his Justice Department when it comes to making independent judgments about political matters and political opponents.”
It’s not clear to me either how explicit that necessary separation is. News talkers keep pointing out that the president can fire anyone in the DOJ, the DOJ works for the president, the DOJ is part of the executive branch, yadda yadda. The message seems to be that Trump can do whatever he likes when it comes to the Justice Department and no one can stop him. They don’t talk nearly as much about this necessary separation.
Clearly though there should be such a separation when it comes to questions about the president’s own actions, because the president should be accountable and subject to the law. It’s pretty appalling seeing all these “actually, legally speaking, he has the right to ______” – to fire anyone in the DOJ, to declassify information on the spur of the moment while chatting with Russians with only Russian state media present, to fire prosecutors, to…what? Apparently asking the FBI director to let something go is a step too far, but it’s not clear to me where that bright line is.
