Mike Bloomberg speaks at his Super Tuesday night event in West Palm Beach, Florida, on March 3, 2020. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Bloomberg’s worst investment yet might be his presidential campaign.
Turns out half a billion dollars can’t get you very far in the Democratic primary, at least if you’re Mike Bloomberg in 2020.
The billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and former New York City mayor pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into television, radio, and digital ads to propel his campaign. He hired more than 2,000 staffers across 43 states after launching his presidential bid in November 2020. His bet: All that money would translate intobig wins on Super Tuesday and beyond. But it appears not to be the case — on Tuesday, Bloomberg sort of crashed and burned, or at the very least picked up fewer votes and delegates than he might have hoped. He dropped out of the race the next day.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Mike Bloomberg greets staff and volunteers as he stops by one of his campaign offices in Miami, Florida, on March 3, 2020.
It became relatively clear early in the evening that Bloomberg’s performance might not be as strong as he’d hoped. Bloomberg came in a distant fourth in Virginia, which former Vice President Joe Biden won, and appears to have failed to pass the threshold to get delegates. Not a great sign, given that he poured $18 million into television and digital ads there, spent millions of dollars there in the 2018 midterms, and held multiple campaign events and rallies there. A Bloomberg aide told CNN that though Bloomberg’s operation was good, it’s a “breeding ground” for Biden voters.
Bloomberg appears poised to potentially pick up some delegates in states such as Arkansas, Colorado, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, and he appears to be close but not quite there in North Carolina and Oklahoma. But he’s not leading in any, and he’s very close to the 15 percent threshold across most.
Bloomberg did pull out one early victory — he won American Samoa and five delegates — but in multiple states, he probably wishes he’d done better, including Texas and Oklahoma. It will be days or weeks before we know the final results of the California primary because counting mail-in votes take so long, and that will determine whether Bloomberg hits the 15 percent threshold to pick up delegates.
On Tuesday night, he was campaigning in Florida, and he had other states — including swing states Michigan and Pennsylvania — on his schedule this week. But at least some of his decision to run in the first place was tied to Biden’s perceived weakness, and now that Biden is rising, Bloomberg is getting out of the way. When he dropped out on Wednesday, he endorsed Bloomberg.
Speaking at a campaign event in West Palm Beach on Tuesday as the results came in, Bloomberg struck a humble tone: “No matter how many delegates we win tonight, we have done something no one else thought was possible. In just three months, we’ve gone from just 1 percent in the polls to being a contender for the Democratic nomination.”
On Wednesday, he acknowledged he didn’t see a path for himself. “I remain clear-eyed about my overriding objective: victory in November. Not for me, but for our country. And so while I will not be the nominee, I will not walk away from the most important political fight of my life,” he said in a statement.
Before everyone piles on the Bloomberg hate, it’s important to note he has said he’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is and plans to keep his massive operations up and running through November.
If the lesson of having two billionaires in the race is that you can’t buy the presidency, that’s probably fine
Was it great to have two billionaires in the primary? To a lot of Democrats, no. But if the takeaway is that you have to have more than your own money to propel you forward in presidential politics, that seems good.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Tom Steyer speaks to voters during a campaign event in Las Vegas, Nevada, on February 14, 2020.
Many progressives bristled at Steyer being in the race — he’s a former hedge funder, though he turned to activism years ago — but it was Bloomberg who really set off a firestorm. He came into the race in November as the billionaire white knight no one invited to the party (at least not any of the cool kids). Over the past few months, it has really felt like Bloomberg is everywhere — even in New York City, where he is a known quantity and which votes on April 28, you watch a half-hour of Jeopardy in the evening and chances are you’re going to see a Bloomberg ad.
Perhaps what especially undercuts Bloomberg’s spending on his candidacy is that his riches are one of the prime reasons he and his supporters argued he could win. He never has to meet with donors because he never took a dime from anyone else for his campaign, and he has the money immediately to beat the Trump machine. The sentiment was that Trump is a fake, in terms of his bank account, and Bloomberg, with more than $50 billion in the bank, is the real thing.
But Democratic voters couldn’t be convinced so easily, no matter how many ads they saw.
Bloomberg has done a lot of good things for the Democratic Party, and Democrats probably hope that will continue
While progressives — Sen. Elizabeth Warren in particular — have been hypercritical of him in the 2020 race, Bloomberg has done a lot of good things for the Democratic Party and the left. He has spent years fighting against climate change and illegal guns, and he’s been an important supporter of Democrats down the ballot, which I explained earlier this year:
Bloomberg injected $110 million into the midterms, and where he played, he overwhelmingly won: Of the 24 House races he sought to influence, Democrats won 21, and about half of those districts had been considered Republican-leaning or toss-ups. Through Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control organization he co-founded and backs, Bloomberg was able to target contributions and mobilization efforts at the state and federal level in 2018. Even the GOP admitted Bloomberg had made a difference.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Mike Bloomberg greets supporters during a stop at one of his campaign offices in Manassas, Virginia, on March 2, 2020.
At the same time, it’s hard not to wonder what Bloomberg could have done with the hundreds of millions of dollars he spent on his presidential campaign. Plenty of down-ballot candidates desperately leave money, and if Democrats really want to build power, they need to do it from the ground up. The White House is nice, but one of the lessons of Barack Obama’s presidency is that if you’re not paying enough attention to the rest, it can do a lot of harm.
The role of big money in the Democratic Party will continue to be a debate going forward — how Biden is funding his campaign, compared to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, is different. But at the very least, if Democrats reject both Bloomberg and Steyer, they are saying that winning their votes is about more than dollars.
The World Health Organization is warning that the novel coronavirus could be far more dangerous than the flu, with a mortality rate of 3.4%. The new estimates come as the U.S. death toll from the virus reaches 9. From a report: The global mortality rate -- which includes more than 3,000 deaths -- is many times higher than the "mortality rate" of the flu, which is less than 1%. WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that is at least partly because COVID-19 is a new disease, and no one has built up an immunity to it. Still, Tedros reiterated the WHO's belief that containment was still within reach. "We don't even talk about containment for seasonal flu," Tedros said. "It's just not possible, but it's possible for COVID-19." Officials say they have learned the coronavirus is less transmissible than the flu, which is often spread by people who are infected yet don't have symptoms. That doesn't seem to be the case for COVID-19, he said. "There are not yet any vaccines or therapeutics, which is why we must do everything we can to contain it."
Tedros said he's concerned by shortages of masks, gowns and other equipment needed by healthcare workers to stop the spread of disease "caused by rising demands and hoarding and misuse." "We can't stop COVID-19 without protecting our health workers," said Tedros, noting that prices of surgical masks have increased sixfold.
As coronavirus begins making its way across the U.S., from Washington to Florida, testing people showing symptoms, along with people who’ve been in contact with these folks, is critical to containing the virus and preventing or slowing the spread.
In the U.S. there are currently 103 confirmed cases, with six deaths reported thus far. Needless to say, that number is expected to rise dramatically as early testing kits were defective and the Centers for Disease Control used strict criteria when determining who should and shouldn’t be tested. As testing kits finally make their way to major cities, the number of reported cases is expected to rise dramatically.
One Seattle woman who thinks she may have coronavirus has publicly shared her story on her quest to get tested and let me just warn you now, this is both infuriating and downright scary. Twitter user “sketchy lady,” whose real name appears to be Emily Bush, used the platform of her quest for the test and for lack of a better term, her story is quickly going … viral.
I called the Corona hotline, was on hold for 40 minutes and gave up. So I looked at the CDC and Washington public health websites. They told me to see a primary care doctor, but there's no information about testing.
I called the hospital. They do not have tests, but transferred me to the COVID-19 hotline to "answer my questions". Since I was transferred on a medical provider line, I actually got through. Progress!
So. Who does qualify? Those who have been out of the country in the last 14 days, and those who have had contact with one of the few people who have been tested and come up positive. That's it.
This is all incredibly frustrating because I am trying to do everything right in a system that punishes moments of "weakness" like taking days off. It's also scary to know that I won't be able to get help until I need life support.
I warned you that thread would be infuriating. Once it took off, Emily Bush shared one last bit of vital information. She said: “COVID-19 HOTLINE: 1-800-525-0127 DON'T CALL unless you are experiencing all symptoms or have been exposed to a case. Leave the lines open to people who need it most. Any other questions can be answered on the CDC, WHO, or WA public health sites.”
Why are people like Emily Bush getting the runaround when it comes to testing? Early kits were found to be defective and new kits have been delayed for weeks. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control inexplicably used strict guidelines when determining who to test early on and potential patients and carriers when untested. Experts are baffled at the C.D.C’s bungled response out of the gate. Harvard University epidemiologist Dr. Michael Mina told the New York Times, “The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect with the C.D.C. This is not a difficult problem to solve in the world of viruses.”
The good news is C.D.C. officials say they expect a million kits to be distributed by the end of the week. The bad news is, it is difficult to trust anyone in the Trump administration at this point and C.D.C. officials aren’t exactly gaining public trust with mismanagement and secrecy about how the agency has handled the threat.
Despite repeated inquiries from The New York Times, C.D.C. officials have never provided a full account of the obstacles the agency faced in producing a diagnostic test. On Monday, officials appeared to have removed figures on the agency website counting how many Americans had been tested, and abruptly canceled a news conference just as it was to begin.
Unfortunately, extreme budget cuts to public health departments may have also slowed the response to COVID-19. USA Today reports on the cuts to these government entities, cuts that are now coming back to haunt us.
In the last 15 years, public health, the country's frontline defense in epidemics, lost 45% of its inflation-adjusted funding for staff, training, equipment and supplies. The Public Health Emergency Fund, created for such disease or disaster relief is long depleted. And much of the money the federal government is racing to come up with now to combat the COVID-19 outbreak will be pulled from other often-dire health needs and likely will arrive too late to hire the needed personnel.
As Republicans hit the campaign trail in the coming months to further the notion tax cuts will cure all that ails us, let us all remind them their tax cuts might be the very reason you get sick in the first place.
Enlarge / SEATTLE, WA - FEBRUARY 29: Healthcare workers transport a patient on a stretcher into an ambulance at Life Care Center of Kirkland on February 29, 2020, in Kirkland, Washington. Dozens of staff and residents at Life Care Center of Kirkland are reportedly exhibiting coronavirus-like symptoms. (credit: Getty | David Ryder)
As ramped-up testing for COVID-19 by individual US states exposes hidden cases, disease transmission, and deaths, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are urging citizens to do their part to stop the spread of the new virus—including taking an extended hiatus from their daily lives.
“You may need to take a break from your normal daily routine for two weeks,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a briefing Tuesday.
Hillary Clinton testifies before Congress in October 2015. | Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
It’s Super Tuesday and the coronavirus is spreading, but Facebook is talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails.
There are a lot of consequential and important things going on. Not only is today Super Tuesday, but Americans are on edge about the spread of the novel coronavirus that could reach pandemic proportions.
But if you consume your news on Facebook, the biggest news of the day has to do with Hillary Clinton’s emails. Yes, really.
According to data compiled by CrowdTangle, the most total interactions on Facebook came on a Fox News article about a federal judge granting a request from a right-wing group named Judicial Watch to make Clinton sit for a sworn deposition about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
In fact, as this is written early Tuesday afternoon, stories from right-wing sources about Clinton’s emails represent three of the top 10 and five of the 20 top-performing news stories on Facebook over the past 24 hours. The No. 4 story of the day is one about Clinton’s emails from Breitbart, and the eighth-ranked story is one on the same topic from Dan Bongino’s website. Coverage of her Emails from National Review and Ben Shapiro also appear in the top 20.
What you won’t find in Facebook’s top 20 news stories, however, is Super Tuesday coverage, anything published by a left-of-center outlet, or anything that’s critical of President Donald Trump or his administration.
Here’s a look at the full top 20 Facebook stories:
1 — Fox News story about Clinton’s emails
2 — CNN story about Australian wildfires
3 — CNN story about coronavirus
4 — Breitbart story about Clinton’s emails
5 — Daily Mail story about new Krispy Kreme doughnut
6 — Fox News story about Monday’s stock market rebound
7 — Ben Shapiro story on Monday’s stock market rebound
8 — Dan Bongino story on Clinton’s emails
9 — Fox News story comparing Bernie Sanders with Hugo Chávez
10 — CNN story on Apple iPhone settlement
11 — Fox News story about Chris Matthews’s retirement
12 — Robert Reich’s post on CNN story about John Lewis’s surprise appearance in Selma
13 — National Review story about Clinton’s emails
14 — BBC News story on Putin trying to ban same-sex marriage in Russia
15 — Bernie Sanders post with link to polling places info
16 — NBC News story story about UPS worker planning mass shooting
17 — TMZ story about Kobe Bryant’s death
18 — Ben Shapiro story on Clinton’s emails
19 — Dan Bongino story about Devin Nunes wanting to subpoena law enforcement and intelligence community officials
20 — NBC story about coronavirus
Facebook has been reluctant to crack down on right-wing media
What explains the predominance of right-wing outlets on Facebook? According to Judd Legum, who reports extensively on Facebook in his Popular Information newsletter, part of the answer has to do with the sort of content that’s optimized for Facebook.
“Facebook is optimized for Trump supporters,” Legum wrote in a direct message. “It rewards engagement, which mostly reflects an emotional reaction to things. Support for Trump is largely emotional, not factual. So pro-Trump content does very very well.”
Chicanery could also be playing a role. Legum has detailed how Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire spreads its content around Facebook with help from “a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.” That sort of “inauthentic coordinated behavior” seemingly violates Facebook rules, but the Daily Wire gets away with it anyway.
Parker Molloy, editor at large for Media Matters, argued that Facebook “is essentially afraid of conservatives,” and noted that the group of third-party sites that fact-check news posts for the network includes right-wing ones like the Daily Caller and Breitbart.
“Facebook gives them free rein to set the online agenda,” Molloy told Vox.
The irony is that even as the right wing dominates the news marketplaces on Facebook, Republicans like Donald Trump Jr., House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Sen. Josh Hawley continue to push baseless conspiracy theories about Republicans being victimized by left-wing bias among the social media and tech behemoths.
During last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), for instance, Trump Jr., McCarthy, and Hawley hosted an event in which the president’s son accused Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, of being biased against Republicans because he searched his handle and couldn’t quickly find his account — a development he attributed to Instagram execs trying to silence him.
Despite what Don Jr. would have you believe, conservatives’ voices are the loudest on Facebook. According to an investigation put together last year by David Uberti for Vice:
Fox News’ main Facebook page, with 17 million followers, has racked up 80 percent more reactions, comments, and shares than CNN, which has 31 million followers. The Fox page’s engagement rate — the average number of engagements per post per follower — was higher than any major news organization over the same period, and some five times that of The New York Times.
This is a good way to get rid of political appointment positions entirely
A staple of Donald Trump's "presidency" has been the round-the-table invitations to top officials to offer their praise of Dear Leader during televised administration meetings, one of the more visible (and deeply weird) manifestations of Trump's insistence on lavish adulation and quick anger toward anyone who does not provide it. See, for example, the White House's briefings on COVID-19, which have featured very little substantive information but have been peppered with praise for Trump's supposed effectiveness in dealing with an outbreak for which we still have no competent measurements after early administration bungles.
Now the demands that government officials offer up praise for Dear Leader are being expanded to a brand new venue: New hires in the Trump administration will be asked to write down what it is about Dear Leader they like best, and we are not even kidding on that one.
CNN is reporting that new questions on the hiring questionnaire for would-be political appointments to government agencies now contain more explicit tests of loyalty for applicants, including a question asking job seekers to explain what part of Trump's campaign message "most appealed" to them. The changes were put out by ex-Trump "body man" John McEntee, chosen by Trump as the new head of the Presidential Personnel Office, as part of McEntee's program to re-vet administration appointees, weeding out the ones seen as insufficiently loyal to Trump and replacing them with more reliable toadies.
Other questions ask applicants to list the "thinkers" and "books" that have "influenced" them, and which "political commentator" is closest to their own views. Fortunately for would-be cheaters, the most "correct" answers will likely consist of whoever Donald Trump praised most recently in his Twitter feed.
Why stop there? Here’s a better way to determine which new hires are the best fits for a Donald Trump administration: Put a ten-dollar bill on the interview table. If the would-be hire looks like they would rather bite their interviewer to death than let those ten bucks slip back out of their range, there you go—there’s your new Trump guy.
This is legal, by the way. Like nearly everything else surrounding Trump, it is creepy, paranoid, and grotesque, but political appointees in the executive branch, as opposed to career federal servants, serve at the pleasure of the president and can be held to whatever standards of "loyalty" an Oval Office boil might demand of them. In an administration in which subject matter expertise is distinctly not a requirement for top government posts, making hires instead based on who can best complete an essay question about their love for Dear Leader and his campaign promises is within presidential powers.
CNN quoted White House press secretary and possible crisis actor Stephanie Grisham as making that point clear, framing the move as the "right" of a president. If it's technically legal to do, there's nobody on Trump's team who's worried it's going to look overly authoritarian or cultish.
Team Trump has, in fact, seemed to abandon most efforts to even pretend at prior norms or normality, now that the Republican Senate has effectively green-lit a retaliation spree across all of government. It is important to Dear Leader's well-being (and more importantly, to the lackeys forced to deal with him in person) that he be fed a constant stream of praise and that absolutely nobody under his control contradict even his most outlandish and dangerously incoherent statements. Trump has steadily lost the ability to pretend at nonnarcissistic concerns during his tenure, and is now tasking the few people he trusts with sweeping anyone who will not praise him from government.
And this is what he's doing in the months leading up to an election. It's difficult to imagine what he’d do if safely reelected to another four-year term.
Good riddance. He's a neandrethal who pretends to be a democrat while representing the GOP.
Chris Matthews received criticism for his interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren following the ninth Democratic primary debate where he pressed her on her line of questioning toward Mike Bloomberg and his treatment of women. | Bridget Bennett/AFP via Getty Images
Let’s not lionize a journalist who demeaned women on air and in office.
Since Chris Matthews announced his retirement from MSNBC Monday night, his friends and colleagues are praising the now-former Hardball host as a lion of the field of political journalism, as if he were leaving the network for a reason other than on-air sexism.
“Chris Matthews is a giant. He’s a legend; it’s been an honor for me to work with him,” MSNBC journalist Steve Kornacki said on air after Matthews announced he was stepping down.
But this was no ordinary retirement. CNN media writer Brian Stelter confirms that Matthews preempted being fired by departing voluntarily. The proximate cause was a string of recent controversies, including making an on-air comparison between Sen. Bernie Sanders (who is Jewish) and the Nazi advance on Europe, getting into an embarrassing back-and-forth with Sen. Elizabeth Warren over Mike Bloomberg’s history of sexist comments, and then finding himself the subject of a piece in GQ by journalist Laura Bassett, who described how he made creepy, suggestive comments to her in the MSNBC green room — an experience many women on Twitter said they shared.
All these instances are part of a pattern with Matthews, particularly those related to gender. For years, he’s used his daily televised platform to undermine women — sizing up his female guests’ looks and belittling politicians like Hillary Clinton, whom he’s called “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity” over the years.
Matthews is not accused of criminal behavior like other men in his field who’ve been called to task in the Me Too era. But he shares a set of sexist attitudes that have profoundly shaped political journalism and attitudes that are just beginning to be confronted.
Matthews’s supporters are right that he was a giant in political journalism. They are right that he left a mark on how we understand politics. But his departure isn’t a loss. It’s an opportunity to rethink how we should and should not cover politics and power.
Matthews has made misogynistic remarks on TV for many years
The hallmark of Matthews’s on-air behavior over the years was to diminish the credibility of a female guest by commenting on her looks. During his sign-off Monday night, Matthews offered this apology:
Compliments on a woman’s appearance that some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were okay were never okay. Not then and certainly not today, and for making such comments in the past, I’m sorry.
One particularly egregious example comes from 2007. Amid a turbulent moment for the economy, Matthews had on respected financial journalist Erin Burnett of CNBC. Instead of treating her as a serious guest, he toyed with her and demeaned her:
“Could you get a little closer to the camera?” Matthews said to Burnett. “My — what is it?” Burnett asked, seeming to think something was wrong with the equipment. Matthews then said: “Come on in closer. No, come in — come in further — come in closer. Really close.” As Burnett adjusted, he said: “Just kidding! You look great! Anyway, thanks, Erin, it’s great to — look at that look. You’re great.”
He concluded “you’re a knockout.”
In the video Burnett looks a bit annoyed, but she mostly smiles through the ordeal. She’s a professional and there to advance her career, not to make an enemy out of Matthews. But by allowing these types of scenarios to play out again and again, MSNBC was telling TV viewers that this behavior was okay.
There are many, many examples of similar behavior by Matthews. Media Matters has documented him commenting on the looks of many women in public life.
During a post-debate night panel during the 2008 primary, for example, Matthews responded to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s point about Clinton’s Iraq War vote problem among the Democratic base by changing the subject.
“The cosmetics tonight are very important,” Matthews said. “First of all, her pearls, Grace Kelly. Dynamite. The pearls were great!”
In the next breath, he moved on to Michelle Obama:
“Whatever you say about [Barack] Obama, his wife looked perfect! Perfect for the occasion. Perfect-looking wife. She had the pearls as well. Another Grace Kelly, well turned out, very dignified, not dignified, attractive, classy.”
He uses the same language with conservative women. Here’s how he spoke to Laura Ingraham, according to Media Matters:
On the September 12, 2007, edition of Hardball, Matthews began an interview with right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham by stating: “You are — I’m not allowed to say this, but I’ll say it — you’re beautiful and you’re smart. And you’ve got a huge radio audience.” When the interview ended, Matthews asked: “Can I sing your praises?” adding, “I get in trouble for this, but you’re great looking, obviously. You’re one of the gods’ gifts to men in this country. But also, you are a hell of a writer.”
Repeating these stereotypes over and over contributed to a culture in political journalism that devalues women, that puts their looks before their smarts or intellectual contributions. And doing it on TV just makes it worse — presenting an image to viewers that goes completely unchecked.
Matthews routinely smeared Hillary Clinton
Matthews also disparaged female candidates and officeholders. On the night Nancy Pelosi led Democrats to a historic victory in the House in 2006, he pointed out that she would have to go head-to-head with George W. Bush on all kinds of policies. “How does she do it without screaming? How does she do it without becoming grating?” he wondered.
Hillary Clinton was a continual target.
He once pinched her cheek after an interview.
In 2006, Matthews attempted to compliment Clinton, saying, “she was giving a campaign barnburner speech, which is harder to give for a woman; it can grate on some men when they listen to it — fingernails on a blackboard, perhaps.”
Before an interview during the 2016 Democratic primary, footage posted by The Cut captures Matthews making a joke about drugging her with a “Bill Cosby pill,” shocking his staff:
Network footage obtained by the Cut shows Matthews, during the interview setup, making a couple of “jokes” about Clinton. He asks, “Can I have some of the queen’s waters? Precious waters?” And then, as he waits for the water, he adds, “Where’s that Bill Cosby pill I brought with me?” Matthews then laughs, delighted with the line, for an extended moment, as the staffers around him react with disbelief, clearly uncomfortable
Clinton’s loss in 2016 was so narrow that it’s difficult to point to any single issue as the reason she lost. But it’s nonetheless true that Clinton had to deal with media figures who were eager to embrace old, sexist tropes that signal to their audiences what leadership doesn’t look like.
In the Me Too era, women have called out serial harassers Leon Wieseltier, the influential culture editor of the New Republic; and Mark Halperin, the former head of ABC Politics and co-author of the best-selling Game Change series. Halperin pioneered a style of politics-as-sports journalism embraced by Matthews and other cable news hosts. These men claimed they were looking down on politics from the stands, objectively assessing the plays of the game.
But we are starting to see the reality of this “objectivity.” Halperin dismissed sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. Matthews got into a fight last week with Warren over whether to believe a well-supported claim by a former Bloomberg employee that he told her to end her pregnancy. Matthews became indignant with Warren, essentially calling the accuser a liar:
“Do you believe that the former mayor of New York said that to a pregnant employee?” Matthews said to Warren. “You believe he’s that kind of person who did that? You believe he’s lying? You’re confident of your accusation?”
Warren is confident of her accusation. And unlike for so many years when women felt they couldn’t confront Matthews, Warren did. Then something else happened — journalist Laura Bassett said “me too,” publishing a scathing account of Matthews’s green room behavior. Then Bassett’s Twitter replies lit up with more “me too” accounts of Matthews’s conduct.
The dynamic that forced Burnett and others to smile through Matthews’s indignities shifted under his feet this week — a change for the better for political journalism and for our culture as a whole. Perhaps Matthews’s friends who are lauding him as a great American journalist should look to the women who stood up for truth as the real heroes of this story.
At least the GOP is open about their one true constituency
The Congress is working toward a $7.5 billion emergency spending package for the COVID-19 response, and it was supposed to have been made public early Tuesday. It provides additional funding to the Department of Health and Human Services for programs within its agencies; funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health for vaccine development, medical supplies, and equipment; and aid to states and local governments. But there's a hurdle: Republicans who don't like language in it that would keep drug companies from price gouging on vaccines and treatments.
"Democrats want the supplemental to include significant funding for the federal government to purchase large quantities of coronavirus diagnostics, treatments and vaccine [when it becomes available], which will then be made available to the public without cost," a Democratic aide told Roll Call. The government did this in 2009 during the swine flu outbreak. Democrats are also pushing language to ensure that "fair and reasonable price" standards that are included in existing contracting regulations are vigorously applied to drug companies supplying the eventual vaccine and treatments to the government. Republicans, however, want people to have to pay up.
Roll Call reports that Republicans "are raising concerns that Democrats' proposals would chill research and development and interfere with the development of a vaccine, according to sources who spoke without being identified so they could talk freely." Apparently the only way the drug industry will do the right thing and try to save lives is if it can profit. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a former drug company official himself, said essentially that at a House hearing on the issue last week: "We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can't control that price because we need the private sector to invest."
Lord help us if we ever have to fight a world war with this team. They'll be more worried about defense contractors getting paid than about protecting the population. What am I saying? That's exactly what's happening now!
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) announced Tuesday he would introduce a bill that would make Medicaid cover testing for and treatment of Covid-19 for every American, no matter how they get their insurance. This would be an important change to US health care: The federal government would assume responsibility for medical care for every American under these particular circumstances.
Research shows people skip treatment, even for serious conditions, all the time because they worry they can’t afford the cost. In other countries, this is generally not a problem because the government sets hard limits, usually quite low, on what patients can be required to pay for care and everybody has health coverage.
Millions of Americans either have no insurance or their insurance doesn’t provide very good benefits (about one in four are uninsured or underinsured, according to the Commonwealth Fund). With the coronavirus, a disease that is often mild for many patients though they can then spread it to more vulnerable people, it’s in the interest of public health to have people get tested if they think they have the virus. You don’t want costs to be a barrier.
Gallego’s spokesperson said he was working with his legislative counsel to finalize the exact text, and he would release it in the coming days. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is one of the 2020 presidential candidates calling on Congress to pass a bill requiring health insurers to fully cover Covid-19 tests and treatments.
One advantage of using Medicaid is there would be no wait for the new benefits to start, said Sara Rosenbaum, a law professor at George Washington University. Under current law, there is a one-year waiting period between when federal regulators decide a service must be covered for free as preventative care and when private insurers are actually required to satisfy that mandate.
“It makes a lot of sense to have Medicaid cover it, at least in the meantime,” Tim Jost, a health law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said.
Some states are doing what they can as well. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced he would require insurers in New York and Medicaid to cover treatment and testing cost-free with an emergency declaration. States have some discretion with what their Medicaid programs cover, and more states may follow his example.
But ERISA, the federal law that regulates health insurance for large employer plans that cover many Americans, is a barrier to state officials who want to do more. Cuomo’s order, for example, noted it applied to health plans regulated by the state — plans available to small businesses or individuals — but not the self-funded employer plans covered by ERISA. About half of New Yorkers are covered by those plans untouched by Cuomo’s order.
Democrats want to make Covid-19 testing and treatment free
The final text is still in the works, but the basic idea of Gallego’s bill sounds pretty simple: Medicaid would cover any trip to the primary care doctor or emergency room or any lab tests, any treatment at all, for people who fear they have the coronavirus and people who end up needing treatment for it.
For now, there are just over 100 cases in the US and there have been six deaths. But if the virus spreads, some people might skip getting testing or treated, which can worsen the outbreak or lead to more complications for patients. Even modest cost barriers seem to decrease use of medical services.
Under Gallego’s bill, the provision would apply when a national emergency is declared for an outbreak. Everybody would have their treatment covered by Medicaid, which generally covers any medical service with no cost for the patient.
In an outbreak, you don’t want people avoiding the doctor or hospital because they think they can’t afford it. And the research shows they will do exactly that. According to Gallup, one in three Americans say they have skipped a medical treatment in the last year because of the cost, and one in four say they’ve avoided care for a serious condition. More narrowly focused studies have yielded the same kinds of results.
That trend has increased steadily for years and has recently spiked. It may be relevant that various studies show out-of-pocket costs for people who do have health insurance keep rising faster than inflation.
Gallup
This is not a problem in other countries. As a WHO expert told Vox’s Julia Belluz recently, China — which actually relies on commercial health insurance much like the US — had the government start covering the cost for Covid-19 care so patients wouldn’t have to pay:
China took a whole bunch of steps when they realized they had to repurpose big chunks of their hospital systems to [respond to the outbreak]. The first thing is, they said testing is free, treatment is free. Right now, there are huge barriers [to testing and treatment] in the West. You can get tested, but then you might be negative and have to foot the bill. In China, they realized those were barriers to people seeking care, so, as a state, they took over the payments for people whose insurance plans didn’t cover them. They tried to mitigate those barriers.’
The other thing they did: Normally a prescription in China can’t last for more than a month. But they increased it to three months to make sure people didn’t run out [when they had to close a lot of their hospitals]. Another thing: Prescriptions could be done online and through WeChat [instead of requiring a doctor appointment]. And they set up a delivery system for medications for affected populations.
In countries with national health plans, like Taiwan and Australia, patients can go to their doctor to get checked for the coronavirus at a low cost. The Netherlands, with its universal private insurance, still sets limits on cost-sharing and primary care visits are free.
JESUS CHRIST. They can't even understand the most basic precautions. On the plus side, fine, get it and pass it on to the White House. That'd be fun.
A mother and son from Sarasota Military Academy in Florida are being quarantined for COVID-19, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.On the Academy’s Facebook page, the school posted on Monday thatthe “mother's contact with a patient at Sarasota Doctors Hospital in her professional role,” had led to both her and her son to be quarantined as a “precautionary measure.” The two reportedly showed no symptoms of the virus.
On Friday, Feb. 28, Trump’s top coronavirus point man and non-believer in science, Mike Pence, held a fundraiser in Sarasota at the home of Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan. At the event, Pence talked about “possible changes in travel status to the United States,” while shaking hands with dozens of supporters and 44 cadets from Sarasota Military Academy. Ruh-roh.
The school’s executive director Col. Christina Bowman told the Tribune that "We have been in touch with the Pentagon, so we assured them that particular cadet was not present for that occasion." Of course, his fellow students were and it sounds like Vice President Pence shook all of their hands. Hopefully none of the people involved test positive for COVID-19—including Pence.
So far there are only two confirmed cases in Florida, however the Florida Department of Health reports that there are eight pending cases, pending test results; 184 people under “public health monitoring”; and 15 negative test results so far. The Trump administration’s heel-dragging response to the virus and public health concerns has been distressing, and the fears of how easily an undetected illness might spread without a more robust response, are driving a lot of panic across the country.
On Monday, Bowman posted an email to families and students of the school reiterating the serious work they have done to keep the schools clean and the student body safe, including sanitizing the school ten days ago. The Tampa Bay Times reports that school workers sanitized classrooms once again over the weekend, and students returned to school Monday as usual.
Trump during a meeting with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and pharmaceutical executives on Monday. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The president is pushing to get a Covid-19 vaccine before the election. It doesn’t work like that.
It’s understandable that during a White House meeting on Monday with pharmaceutical executives and public health officials, President Donald Trump pressed them to develop and deploy a vaccine to Covid-19 (the disease caused by the novel coronavirus) as quickly as possible. Beyond the obvious public health benefits, a vaccine could help allay fears, stabilize markets, and quell criticisms that his administration was unprepared for or mismanaged the response to the outbreak.
What is harder to wrap one’s brain around, however, is the level of ignorance Trump displayed about how vaccines work.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has already said it will take up to 18 months to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — a time frame much shorter than the usual two- to five-year window. There are straightforward reasons it’s impossible to roll out new vaccines for public consumption overnight: They need to be developed, tested for effectiveness and safety during trials, approved by regulators, manufactured, and then distributed. Each of those steps takes time.
But not only does Trump not seem to get that, he also doesn’t seem clear about the difference between a vaccine, which provides immunity against a disease, and treatments, which are meant to combat diseases and reduce symptoms.
“This would be a combination of a vaccine and also it will — put it in a different way — make you better, quicker?” he asked a pharmaceutical exec at one point during the White House meeting, conflating the two.
TRUMP asks a pharmaceutical CEO: "This would be a combination of a vaccine and also it will -- put it in a different way -- make you better, quicker?" pic.twitter.com/N7Wti1UByC
At another point, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tried to explain to the president that it would be at least a year and probably closer to 18 months before a coronavirus vaccine could be available to the public. But Trump didn’t want to hear it, and kept pressing the executives to come up with something before November’s election.
“I mean, I like the sound of a couple months better, if I must be honest,” Trump said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the “couple months” time frame execs mentioned merely referred to a vaccine being ready for trials.
Trump on it taking up to a year to develop a coronavirus vaccine: "I mean, I like the sound of a couple months better, if I must be honest." pic.twitter.com/zvvrE9JnPS
Later, Trump pressed the pharmaceutical leaders on why they can’t just release the coronavirus drugs their companies are working on tomorrow — in the process revealing that he doesn’t understand the concept of clinical trials.
“So you have a medicine that’s already involved with the coronaviruses, and now you have to see if it’s specifically for this. You can know that tomorrow, can’t you?” he said.
“Now the critical thing is to do clinical trials,” explained Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead Sciences, which has two phase-three clinical trials going for remdesivir, a potential treatment for the coronavirus. “We have two clinical trials going on in China that were started several weeks ago ... we expect to get that information in April.”
"So you have a medicine that's already involved with the coronaviruses, and now you have to see if it's specifically for this. You can know that tomorrow, can't you?" -- Trump has no idea what a clinical trial is pic.twitter.com/PoA2usKZ9Z
Trump also wondered aloud why the flu vaccine can’t just be used for coronavirus, asking, “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
“No,” one of the experts at the table replied.
Following the meeting, an unnamed administration source told CNN that they thought the scientists and experts were able to convince Trump that a vaccine would not be available for a year or longer.
“I think he’s got it now,” the source told CNN.
But if Trump does get it now, that wasn’t apparent during a political rally in Charlotte hours later, during which the president claimed pharmaceutical companies “are going to have vaccines I think relatively soon.”
"We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great companies, and they're going to have vaccines I think relatively soon. And they're going to have something that makes you better, and that's going to actually take place we think even sooner" -- Trump on the coronavirus pic.twitter.com/oujTse5Lnp
Trump went on to portray the coronavirus problem in ethnonationalist terms: “There are fringe globalists that would rather keep our borders open than keep our infection — think of it — keep all of the infection, let it come in,” he said, before expressing surprise that tens of thousands of Americans die from the flu each year.
“When you lose 27,000 people [from the flu] a year — nobody knew that — I didn’t know that. Three, four weeks ago, I was sitting down, I said, ‘What do we lose with the regular flu?’ They said, ‘About 27,000 minimum. It goes up to 70, sometimes even 80, one year it went up to 100,000 people.’” (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have not been more than 51,000 flu-related deaths in the US over the past decade.)
“I said, ‘Nobody told me that. Nobody knows that.’ So I actually told the pharmaceutical companies, ‘You have to do a little bit better job on that vaccine,’” Trump continued.
"I told the pharmaceutical companies that they have to do a better job on that vaccine" -- Trump admits he just learned that the flu can be deadly and says he wants the pharmaceutical companies to do something about it pic.twitter.com/7jPDsi7WAX
Then, following the rally, the White House released a statement not detailing new federal initiatives to help stop the spread of Covid-19, but highlighting tweets from Republicans praising the administration’s response.
This is bonkers. Press release just released by the White House with tweets praising Trump's management of Coronavirus outbreak. "Top Tweets". pic.twitter.com/8lPGAsfN2h
While Trump may be confused about what’s going on, Vice President Mike Pence — head of the administration’s coronavirus task force — did claim during a news conference on Monday that treatments for Covid-19 could be available within the next couple of months. He did not provide details, however.
As COVID-19 (aka the coronavirus) spreads in different areas of the world and now in the United States, the Trump administration is trying to figure out the best way to show that it’s doing a responsible job handling the public health crisis. Donald Trump seems to think the best way to do this is to get the former host of The Apprentice behind a desk, point cameras at him, and let him pretend to know things. So Trump and his crack science force led by Vice President Mike Pence sat with pharmaceutical company heads who are working on coronavirus-related treatments and vaccines.
In the clip below, you can see Trump, arms folded in his most defensive posture (because he clearly knows he doesn’t understand anything these eggheads are talking about), try to add a little magic to the science of vaccines: “So, this would be a combination of a vaccine and also it will—put it in a different way—make you better, quicker?” [This is the sound of my eyes widening and my mind trying not to explode.] Dr. Leonard Schleifer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals CEO, explains that, no, vaccines are vaccines and drugs are drugs:
DR. SCHLEIFER: Well, think of it this way, if you get immunized with one of these vaccines, you’re going to make antibodies to protect you. We are going to give you those antibodies so you don’t have to go through that process.
In Trump’s defense, he mostly believes in some archaic form of eugenics where the top of the genetic pyramid consists of Donald Trump, and then everyone else below him.
TRUMP asks a pharmaceutical CEO: "This would be a combination of a vaccine and also it will -- put it in a different way -- make you better, quicker?" pic.twitter.com/N7Wti1UByC
Regeneron has been working on a treatment drug for COVID-19 called REGN3048-3051, which is starting the first in-human clinical trials sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
More retaliation for actually caring a tiny bit about following the law.
The White House is withdrawing the nominee for a top Pentagon post, according to two Senate aides, following reports that she questioned the legality of the administration's efforts to freeze military aid to Ukraine.
Elaine McCusker was nominated late last year to be the Pentagon's comptroller. She has been the acting comptroller since the summer and was the public face of the Pentagon's budget rollout last month, briefing reporters on the details of the Defense Department's $741 billion military spending request.
One of the Senate aides told POLITICO the chamber received the withdrawal of McCusker's nomination on Monday.
The expected withdrawal of McCusker's nomination in the wake of President Donald Trump's impeachment acquittal was first reported by the New York Post last month. Trump was impeached by House Democrats on charges that he abused his power by delaying the aide to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
The move comes as Trump and his allies seek to root out members of his administration they view as disloyal following the president's acquittal. Most recently, the White House ousted Pentagon policy chief John Rood. Trump also removed Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from his job on the staff of the National Security Council and recalled Gordon Sondland from his post as ambassador to the European Union. Both Vindman and Sondland testified publicly in the House impeachment probe.
It is unclear if McCusker will continue to serve in her current role. The Pentagon did not immediately comment.
A confirmation hearing would have given Democrats a rare opening to grill an administration official with some knowledge of the Ukraine aid deliberations after they were rebuffed in their efforts to subpoena additional witnesses and documents in the impeachment trial.
McCusker featured prominently in emails, published by The New York Times and Just Security, that showed the acting Pentagon comptroller expressing concerns over the legality of White House moves on Ukraine aid.
Unredacted emails published in January by Just Security between McCusker and Michael Duffey, an official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, show her rejecting a White House talking point that said OMB wasn't blocking the aid.
In another exchange published by the New York Times in December, McCusker pushed back on Duffey when he suggested the Pentagon, not the White House, would be at fault for a potential breach of budget law.
"You can’t be serious. I am speechless," McCusker replied.
The Government Accountability Office ultimately concluded the White House broke the law with its hold on the Ukraine money.
McCusker was formally nominated for comptroller in November, a post she'd held since David Norquist was confirmed to be deputy secretary in July. She was confirmed to be deputy comptroller in 2017. Before that, she worked as a Pentagon civil servant and as a Senate Armed Services staffer.
Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), a close Trump ally, had initially planned to move quickly to advance her nomination and fill the senior vacancy. Following the New York Post report that the president may withdraw the pick, the Oklahoma Republican said he hadn't heard of any change in her status and wouldn't weigh in with the Trump administration.
On Friday, CNN Business Edition reported that Corona beer, which is well-known around the world, is taking a big hit due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. No, not because trade lines have been delayed, or manufacturing has been hampered, but because people are connecting the coronavirus to the Corona beer brand.
5W Public Relations said that 38% of Americans wouldn't buy Corona "under any circumstances" because of the outbreak, and another 14% said they wouldn't order a Corona in public.
Now, this isn’t the most scientific survey, and it reportedly encompasses a small sample size of 737 beer drinkers, but … oh man. You.Gov says that the beer brand’s negative ratings have spiked as people mistakenly correlate the drink and the virus. Constellation Brands, which distributes Corona drinks, told CNN the public should "understand there is no link between the virus and our business."
Here’s Donald Trump’s current 44% approval rating:
We live in Trump’s America. That means that enough Americans are both scared enough and stupid enough to vote for a man who probably hasn’t been able to tie his own shoes for decades, because he forgot the trick of how to tie them. As news reports continue to indicate that we are looking at a very serious pandemic around the world, and potentially on U.S. soil, the Trump administration held a press conference on Tuesday that could only be called “bizarre.” The result is that for most Americans, the world feels like it is going to hell in a handbasket. Many Trump supporters probably think the coronavirus is a conspiracy theory, but one thing is for sure: They are going to stay away from Corona beers.
Good riddance. His "I hate Bernie more than anything" schtick was not ok for a commentator, and then the sexual harassment allegations...gtfo.
Chris Matthews opened Monday night’s show with a surprise announcement, saying, “Let me start with my headline tonight. I’m retiring. This is the last Hardball on MSNBC.” Matthews went on to thank the audience and talk warmly about his career: “Every morning I read the papers, and I'm gung ho to get to work. Not many people have had this privilege.”
He also touched on recent allegations of his inappropriate behavior in the workplace, something he handled gracefully by saying it was, in part, the reason he was retiring. Times have changed, and changed for the better, he said.
MATHEWS: The younger generations out there are ready to take the reigns. We see them in politics, in the media, and fighting for their causes. They are improving the workplace. We are talking about better standards than we grew up with. Fair standards. A lot of it has to do with how we talk to each other. Compliments on a woman's appearance that some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were okay, were never okay. Not then, and certainly not today, and for making such comments in the past, I'm sorry.
He finished by saying he hoped he would be missed, as he would miss the audience. Matthews had also come under fire recently for bizarre rants against Bernie Sanders’ campaign, making analogies to authoritarianism and Nazi Germany—something Matthews apologized on-air for.
Indur Goklany is a longtime Interior Department staffer who was elevated by Team Trump into a top climate policy role soon after the great orange buffoon Donald took office. The reasons for choosing him seem evident enough: Goklany is a climate "skeptic" who won minor acclaim with conservative climate change denial groups such as the fossil fuel-funded Heartland Institute for the usual bog-standard suppositions. That “Well Actually maybe scientists do not know what the evidence shows they know about the climate,” “Well Actually maybe climate change will have upsides that you eggheads have not considered,” and “Well Actually maybe tamping down on pollution would be far more harmful to society than, you know, worldwide ocean acidification, extinctions, and those other minor unpleasantries.”
Unsurprisingly, The New York Times is now reporting that Goklany has been putting his mark on "at least nine" of the agency's key scientific reports, muddying the agency’s scientific messages in an effort to both sides the fate of the planet.
As has been standard practice in the pro-extraction, oil-funded climate denialist movement, the language Goklany has been ordering scientists to include in agency reports revolves around claiming scientific uncertainty where little actually exists. The end result of this is to defraud the public—blunting government's own scientific conclusions in an effort to stifle demands for stricter pollution controls. The Times reports that Goklany insisted climate science "may be overestimating the rate of global warming." In fact, newer climate studies have repeatedly found warming to be happening at a faster rate than previous studies had predicted.
He also, said the Times, ordered scientists to note that increasing carbon dioxide levels “may increase plant water use efficiency” and “lengthen the agricultural growing season.” This one is trotted out only by the most dishonest of denialists; while it is technically true that plant respiration may benefit slightly from higher carbon dioxide levels (and heat), the effect is minuscule compared to the effect of the planet's climate zones changing positions out from under those same plants. If deserts are expanding into agricultural areas and drought is dropping precipitation rates throughout this nation's heartland, the plus of those newly unusable lands having slightly longer growing seasons doesn't enter into it.
The short version is, once again, that we are screwed. The point of Trump-style climate denialism is not to deny climate change is happening outright but to instead insist that the science is far too "uncertain" to justify action. As with a certain coronavirus in the news, the premise is that while we cannot know what might happen, what we do know is that this is all the fault of people who want to bring the stock markets down with unpleasant news rather than letting the invisible hand of the markets decide what percentage of humanity needs to die off in order to boost the financial portfolios of Dear Leader’s friends and allies.
Within a day of Vice President Joe Biden's rise from the political dead, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin re-upped efforts to fan the flames of GOP-driven conspiracy theories about Biden.
As chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Johnson has both penned a "Dear Colleague" letter and told his colleagues on the panel that he plans to schedule a vote on subpoenaing documents supposedly related to Hunter Biden's work on the board of the Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma. Johnson claims the documents relate to Hunter Biden using his position on the board to influence the State Department—of course, he’s provided zero evidence of that.
It's idiotic really—yet another GOP effort to embroil a potential Democratic front-runner in scandal in order to distract voters from Trump's total incompetence and near singular focus on using the federal government to line his own pockets. As Lawfare editor and national security expert Susan Hennessey tweeted Monday, "Just embarrassing for media to be covering this as a serious story at this point."
It should also be embarrassing, not to mention treasonous, for the GOP to resurrect this farce. None other than the GOP chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, warned his colleagues in December that fueling unfounded conspiracy theories about Biden's corruption could play directly into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"In a Dec. 5 meeting, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told the leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Finance committees—Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, respectively—that their probe targeting Biden could aid Russian efforts to sow chaos and distrust in the U.S. political system, according to two congressional sources familiar with the meeting," wrote Politico.
But hey, if dismantling the republic is the price that has to be paid to get Trump reelected, Johnson's all in—party over country, always.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stopped reporting statistics about coronavirus testing on its website, according to journalist Judd Legum, who shared screenshots of the erasure he called a “cover-up.”
BREAKING: The CDC has stopped disclosing the number of Americans tested for coronavirus.
On the left is how the website looked last night. On the right is what it looks like now, with the testing info removed.
Politico reports that HHS Secretary Alex Azar is getting the blame internally for failing to coordinate na effective response to the virus: “Numerous problems with the Trump administration’s testing regimen have come to light: Coronavirus tests developed by CDC were flawed, possibly because the lab itself was contaminated. The resulting lack of test capacity forced U.S. officials to screen a limited number of patients across January and February, with the CDC testing fewer than 500 Americans at the same time that China was likely testing at least 1 million of its own residents. Meanwhile, public health officials had no fallback testing option until the Food and Drug Administration granted approval for hospitals and other labs to develop their own homegrown tests on Saturday — more than six weeks after the first U.S. case of coronavirus was identified.”
Meanwhile, a photograph has emerged of Mike Pence and his task force literally trying to pray away the coronavirus.
Mike Pence and his coronavirus emergency team praying for a solution. We are so screwed. pic.twitter.com/p020FBIK9J
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) March 1, 2020
A touching & powerful photo of @VP@Mike_Pence & the President’s Coronavirus Taskforce praying when they met last week in his office. Thank you VP Pence and each one who is serving. Let’s join them in asking God for His wisdom, direction, & help in the response to this virus. pic.twitter.com/9tbMhSWe7d
Did we need another reason to avoid Ryanair and the shitheads who use it?
Police said there will be no prosecution of alleged homophobic abuse from a group of men toward a lesbian couple on a Ryanair flight from Stansted to Seville in June.
The BBC reports: “Ms Muldoon and another woman made a complaint to Essex Police. Police said ‘evidential difficulties’ prevented the ‘realistic prospect of a successful prosecution’. An Essex Police spokeswoman added that officers conducted ‘extensive inquiries’ and a man was interviewed voluntarily. … In a letter to Ms Muldoon, Ryanair said it prided itself on its crew’s high standards of service. The said it regretted its high standards were ‘not reflected’ to her ‘on this occasion’.”
President Donald Trump speaks as Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch looks on during a ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House. | Eric Thayer/Getty Images
At stake is millions of people’s health care — and the rule of law.
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear California v. Texas and United States House of Representatives v. Texas,two consolidated cases that represent an existential threat to Obamacare, and that were brought by a coalition of Republican-governed states. For the third time since President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the justices will hear a lawsuit seeking to eviscerate the legislation.
Texas turns on Congress’s decision to repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate. As originally enacted, the Affordable Care Act requires most Americans to either obtain health insurance or pay higher taxes. The tax law President Donald Trump signed in 2017 reduces the amount of that tax to zero.
Because the Supreme Court upheld the fully functional mandate as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax in 2012, the Texas plaintiffs argue that the zeroed-out version of the mandate is unconstitutional — how can something be a tax if it raises no money whatsoever? They also claim that the entire Affordable Care Act must fall if the deactivated mandate is unconstitutional.
The Republican legal arguments against Obamacare in this case are widely viewed as ridiculous, even by many lawyers and scholars who spent much of the last decade trying to convince the courts to repeal President Obama’s signature achievement.
And yet, the lawsuit has received very favorable treatment from Republican federal judges. Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Senate staffer turned district judge, ordered the whole Affordable Care Act repealed in its entirety. Two Republican federal appeals court judges reached a somewhat more mild conclusion — striking down a small portion of the law and then sending the case back down to O’Connor to reconsider which other provisions should fall. But, while that holding creates more work for Judge O’Connor, he remainslikely to kill as much of the law as he can.
In addition to weighing the merits of the plaintiffs’ arguments, the Supreme Court will need to consider whether any federal court has jurisdiction to hear this case. As a general rule, no one is allowed to challenge a law in federal court unless they can show they were injured by that law. Because the zeroed-out mandate does nothing, it’s highly doubtful that anyone is allowed to challenge it.
Assuming that President Trump does not get to replace any of the current justices, the Supreme Court is unlikely to agree with the lower-court judges who ruled against Obamacare. Chief Justice John Roberts twice broke with his conservative colleagues in lawsuits attacking Obamacare, and Roberts is especially likely to reject the Texas plaintiffs’ legal arguments. But, so long as this lawsuit exists, it remains a threat to Obamacare. And there is no guarantee that the court’s membership will not change.
How we got to this point
As noted above, the Affordable Care Act originally required most Americans to either carry insurance or pay higher taxes. The Supreme Court famously upheld this provision, known as the “individual mandate,” as a valid exercise of Congress’ power to levy taxes in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012).
Congressional Republicans spent much of 2017 debating various plans to repeal Obamacare, but they ultimately did not have the votes for a broad repeal. They did, however, manage to repeal the individual mandate in the 2017 tax legislation. Though the United States Code still contains Obamacare’s language requiring individuals to pay a tax penalty if they do not have insurance, the amount of that penalty is now zero dollars.
The Texas plaintiffs claim that this shell of a mandate is unconstitutional. The fully functional mandate was constitutional because it is a tax, but a zero dollar tax is no tax at all. So the Texas plaintiffs argue that it must be unconstitutional.
That’s not a frivolous argument, but so what? The zeroed mandate already does nothing. So who cares if a provision of the law that literally does nothing at all is constitutional or not?
To achieve anything meaningful, the Texas plaintiffs don’t just need to convince the courts that a nothingburger mandate is unconstitutional. They also have to get a majority of the justices to embrace two other arguments: the claim that the Texas plaintiffs may challenge a legal provision that does nothing and the claim that the entire Affordable Care Act must fall. That, as Levin wrote, is utterly ridiculous.
By conventional standards, no federal court should be allowed to hear this case
Before anyone is allowed to challenge a law in federal court, they must show that they’ve been injured in some way by that law — a requirement known as “standing.” That alone should be enough to doom the Texas litigation. Because the plaintiffs challenge a provision that does nothing at all, no one is injured by it. So no one has standing.
The plaintiffs argue they can get around this problem by pointing to the way Obamacare’s language laying out the individual mandate is structured. The first subsection of that language says that most individuals “shall” carry health insurance; the second says that people who don’t buy insurance pay a tax penalty; the third sets the amount of that penalty — which, again, is now zero dollars.
Although the penalty for not buying insurance is nothing, the plaintiffs claim that individuals are still bound by the language saying that they “shall” carry insurance — and therefore are injured by a law that commands them to do something they don’t want to do.
The biggest problem with this argument is that it runs counter to the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB, the decision upholding the fully functional individual mandate. As Chief Justice Roberts explained:
Neither the Act nor any other law attaches negative legal consequences to not buying health insurance, beyond requiring a payment to the IRS. The Government agrees with that reading, confirming that if someone chooses to pay rather than obtain health insurance, they have fully complied with the law.
Thus, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the Texas plaintiffs’ argument that they are bound by a command to buy insurance. There are no “negative legal consequences to not buying health insurance” except having to pay a tax penalty. Anyone who pays that penalty has “fully complied with the law.” And the amount of that penalty, in case this isn’t already clear, is now zero dollars.
The “severability” problem
But let’s assume, for a moment, that these plaintiffs have the standing to challenge a law that does nothing. Let’s also assume that the ex-mandate is unconstitutional. What then?
When a court strikes down one provision of a broader statute, it often must ask whether other provisions of the statute must fall along with it. This inquiry is called “severability,” and it’s typically a speculative inquiry. Courts ask which hypothetical law Congress would have enacted if it had known that a particular provision was invalid.
There’s no need to speculate in Texas, however, because Congress already answered this question. Lawmakers spent most of 2017 debating how much of the Affordable Care Act to repeal. Ultimately, they only had the votes to repeal one provision, the individual mandate, while leaving the rest of the law intact. So we know that Congress would have enacted a law that eliminated the individual mandate and kept the rest of the law because Congress enacted a law that eliminated the individual mandate and kept the rest of the law.
This conclusion is bolstered by the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), which held that courts should apply a very strong presumption against striking additional provisions of a law when one provision is declared unconstitutional. “In order for other ... provisions to fall,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Court in Murphy, “it must be ‘evident that [Congress] would not have enacted those provisions which are within its power, independently of [those] which [are] not.’”
The question facing the Supreme Court now, in other words, is whether the Court will apply its ordinary standing rules as well as the rule it announced in Murphy, in a politically charged case involving a law that Republicans hate above all others. Roberts has twice signaled that he is not willing to embrace dubious legal claims in order to undercut Obamacare, so the Texas plaintiffs are unlikely to prevail.
But if Trump gets to fill another Supreme Court seat, all bets are off.
Good long form piece. I'm not sure the DOJ will (or should) ever recover from this.
When Donald Trump came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited.
The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk.
After three years, the adults have all left the room—saying just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the peril—while Trump is still there.
James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many government officials, not excluding himself, went into the administration convinced “that they are either smarter than the president, or that they can hold their own against the president, or that they can protect the institution against the president because they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be, I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And I think they are fooling themselves. They’re fooling themselves. He’s light-years ahead of them.”
The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.
But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate themselves—particularly in believing that other Americans saw them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high-minded commitment to the good of the nation.
When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy—the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness—the very qualities his supporters loved—he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept commissars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own.
But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.
This is the story of how a great republic went soft in the middle, lost the integrity of its guts and fell in on itself—told through government officials whose names under any other president would have remained unknown, who wanted no fame, and who faced existential questions when Trump set out to break them.
Photo rendering by Patrick White
1. “We’re Not Nazis”
Erica Newland went to work at the Department of Justice in the last summer of the Obama administration. She was 29 and arrived with the highest blessings of the meritocracy—a degree from Yale Law School and a clerkship with Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Court of Appeals, whom President Obama had recently nominated to the Supreme Court (and who would never get a Senate hearing). Newland became an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel, the department’s brain trust, where legal questions about presidential actions go to be answered, usually in the president’s favor. The office had approved the most extreme wartime powers under George W. Bush, including torture, before rescinding some of them. Newland was a civil libertarian and a skeptic of broad presidential power. Her hiring showed that the Obama Justice Department welcomed heterodox views.
The election in November changed her, freed her, in a way that she understood only much later. If Hillary Clinton had won, Newland likely would have continued as an ambitious, risk-averse government lawyer on a fast track. She would have felt pressure not to antagonize her new bosses, because elite Washington lawyers keep revolving through one another’s lives—these people would be the custodians of her future, and she wanted to rise within the federal government. But after the election she realized that her new bosses were not likely to be patrons of her career. They might even see her as an enemy.
She decided to serve under Trump. She liked her work and her colleagues, the 20 or so career lawyers in the office, who treated one another with kindness and respect. Like all federal employees, she had taken an oath to support the Constitution, not the president, and to discharge her office “well and faithfully.” Those patriotic duties implied certain values, and they were what kept her from leaving. In her mind, they didn’t make her a conspirator of the “deep state.” She wouldn’t try to block the president’s policies—only hold them to a high standard of fact and law. She doubted that any replacement would do the same.
Days after Trump’s inauguration, Newland’s new boss, Curtis Gannon, the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, gave a seal of approval to the president’s ban, bigoted if not illegal, on travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries. At least one lawyer in the office went out to Dulles Airport that weekend to protest it. Another spent a day crying behind a closed office door. Others reasoned that it wasn’t the role of government lawyers to judge the president’s motives.
Employees of the executive branch work for the president, and a central requirement of their jobs is to carry out the president’s policies. If they can’t do so in good conscience, then they should leave. At the same time, there’s good reason not to leave over the results of an election. A civil service that rotates with the party in power would be a reversion to the 19th-century spoils system, whose notorious corruption led to the 1883 Pendleton Act, which created the modern merit-based, politically insulated civil service.
In Trump’s first year an exodus from the Justice Department began, including some of Newland’s colleagues. Some left in the honest belief that they could no longer represent their client, whose impulsive tweets on matters such as banning transgender people from the military became the office’s business to justify, but they largely kept their reasons to themselves. Almost every consideration—future job prospects, relations with former colleagues, career officials’ long conditioning in anonymity—goes against a righteous exit.
Newland didn’t work on the travel ban. Perhaps this distance allowed her to hold on to the idea that she could still achieve some good if she stayed inside. Her obligation was to the country, the Constitution. She felt she was fighting to preserve the credibility of the Justice Department. That first year, she saw her memos and arguments change outcomes.
Things got worse in the second year. It seemed as if more than half of the Office of Legal Counsel’s work involved limiting the rights of noncitizens. The atmosphere of open discussion dissipated. The political appointees at the top, some of whom had voiced skepticism early on about the legality of certain policies, were readier to make excuses for Trump, to give his fabrications the benefit of the doubt. Among career officials, fear set in. They saw what was happening to colleagues in the FBI who had crossed the president during the investigation into Russian election interference—careers and reputations in ruins. For those with security clearances, speaking up, or even offering a snarky eye roll, felt particularly risky, because the bar for withdrawing a clearance was low. Steven Engel, appointed to lead the office, was a Trump loyalist who made decisions without much consultation. Newland’s colleagues found less and less reason to advance arguments that they knew would be rejected. People began to shut up.
After Erica Newland concluded that her work in the Justice Department involved saving Trump from his own lies, she resigned. Photographed at home in Maryland, February 11, 2020. (Peyton Fulford)
One day in May 2018, Newland went into the lunchroom carrying a printout of a White House press release titled “What You Need to Know About the Violent Animals of MS-13.” At a meeting about Central American gangs a few days earlier, Trump had used the word animals to describe undocumented immigrants, and in the face of criticism the White House was digging in. Animals appeared 10 times in the short statement. Newland wanted to know what her colleagues thought about it.
Eight or so lawyers were sitting around a table. They were all career people—the politicals hadn’t come to lunch yet. Newland handed the printout to one of them, who handed it right back, as if he didn’t want to be seen with it. She put the paper faceup on the table, and another lawyer turned it over, as if to protect Newland: “That way, if Steve walks in …”
Newland turned it over again. “It’s a White House press release and I’m happy to explain why it bothers me.” The conversation quickly became awkward, and then muted. Colleagues who had shared Newland’s dismay in private now remained silent. It was the last time she joined them in the lunchroom.
No one risked getting fired. No one would become the target of a Trump tweet. The danger might be a mediocre performance review or a poor reference. “There was no sense that there was anything to be gained by standing up within the office,” Newland told me recently. “The people who might celebrate that were not there to see it. You wouldn’t be able to talk about it. And if you’re going to piss everyone off within the department, you’re not going to be able to get out” and find a good job.
She hated going to work. In the lobby of the Justice Department building, six blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Newland had to pass under a large portrait of the president. Every morning as she entered the building, she avoided looking at Trump, or she used side doors, where she wouldn’t be confronted with his face. At night she slept poorly, plagued by regrets. Should she have pushed harder on a legal issue? Should she engage her colleagues in the lunchroom again? How could she live with the cruelty and bigotry of executive orders and other proposals, even legal ones, that crossed her desk? She was angry and miserable, and her friends told her to leave. She continued to find reasons to stay: worries about who would replace her, a determination not to abandon ship during an emergency, a sense of patriotism. Through most of 2018 she deluded herself that she could still achieve something by staying in the job.
In 1968, James C. Thomson, a former Asia expert in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, published an essay in this magazine called “How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy.” Among the reasons Thomson gave for the war was “the ‘effectiveness’ trap”—the belief among officials that it’s usually wisest to accept the status quo. “The inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of the great men—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be ‘effective’ on later issues—is overwhelming,” he wrote. The trap is seductive, because it carries an impression of principled tough-mindedness, not cowardice. Remaining “effective” also becomes a reason never to quit.
As the executive orders and other requests for the office’s approval piled up, many of them of dubious legality, one of Newland’s supervisors took to saying, “We’re just following orders.” He said it without irony, as a way of reminding everyone, “We work for the president.” He said it once to Newland, and when she gave him a look he added, “I know that’s what the Nazis said, but we’re not Nazis.”
“The president has said that some of them are very fine people,” Newland reminded him.
“Attorney General Sessions never said that,” the supervisor replied. “Steve never said that, and I’ve never said that. We’re not Nazis.” That she could still have such an exchange with a supervisor seemed in itself like a reason not to leave.
But Newland, who is Jewish, sometimes asked herself: If she and her colleagues had been government lawyers in Germany in the 1930s, what kind of bureaucrat would each of them have been? There were the ideologues, the true believers, like one Clarence Thomas protégé. There were the opportunists who went along to get ahead. There were a handful of quiet dissenters. But many in the office just tried to survive by keeping their heads down. “I guess I know what kind I would have been,” Newland told me. “I would have stayed in the Nazi administration initially and then fled.” She thinks she would have been the kind of official who pushed for carve-outs in the Nuremberg Race Laws, preserving citizenship rights for Germans with only partial Jewish ancestry. She would have felt that this was better than nothing—that it justified having worked in the regime at the beginning.
Newland and her colleagueswere saving Trump from his own lies. They were using their legal skills to launder his false statements and jury-rig arguments so that presidential orders would pass constitutional muster. When she read that producers of The Apprentice had had to edit episodes in order to make Trump’s decisions seem coherent, she realized that the attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel were doing something similar. Loyalty to the president was equated with legality. “There was hardly any respect for the other departments of government—not for the lower courts, not for Congress, and certainly not for the bureaucracy, for professionalism, for facts or the truth,” she told me. “Corruption is the right word for this. It doesn’t have to be pay-to-play to be corrupt. It’s a departure from the oath.”
In the fall of 2018, Newland learned that she and five colleagues would receive the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award for their work on executive orders in 2017. The news made her sick to her stomach; her office probably thought she would feel honored by the award. She marveled at how the administration’s conduct had been normalized. But she also suspected that department higher-ups were using the career people to justify policies such as the travel ban—at least, the award would be seen that way. Newland and another lawyer stayed away from the ceremony where the awards were presented, on October 24.
On October 27, an anti-Semitic extremist killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Before the shooting, he berated Jews online for enabling “invaders” to enter the United States from Mexico. That same week, the Office of Legal Counsel was working on an order that, in response to the “threat” posed by a large caravan of Central Americans making its way north through Mexico, temporarily refused all asylum claims at the southern border. Newland, who could imagine being shot in a synagogue, felt that her office’s work was sanctioning rhetoric that had inspired a mass killer.
She tendered her resignation three days later. By Thanksgiving she was gone. In the new year she began working at a nonprofit called Protect Democracy.
The asylum ban was the last public act of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump fired him immediately after the midterm elections. Newland felt that Sessions—who had recused himself from the Russia investigation because he had spoken with Russian officials as an adviser in the Trump campaign—cared about protecting some democratic rights, but only for white Americans. He was eventually replaced by William Barr, a former attorney general with a reputation for intellect and competence. But Barr quickly made Sessions seem like a paragon of integrity. After watching him run her former department for a year, Newland wondered why she had stayed inside at all.
2. Cashing In
There’s always been corruption in Washington, and everywhere that power can be found, but it became institutionalized starting in the late 1970s and early ’80s, with the rise of the lobbying industry. The corruption that overtook the capital during that time was pecuniary and mostly legal, a matter of norm-breaking—of people’s willingness to do what wasn’t done. Robert Kaiser, a former Washington Post editor and the author of the 2010 book So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, locates an early warning sign in Gerald Ford’s readiness to “sign up for every nasty piece of work that everybody offered him to cash in on being an ex-president.” Cashing in—once known as selling out—became a common path out of government, and then back in and out again. “There was a taboo structure,” Kaiser told me. “You don’t go from a senior Justice Department position to a senior partner in Lloyd Cutler’s law firm and then go back. It was a one-way trip. That taboo is no more.”
Former members of Congress and their aides cashed in as lobbyists. Retired military officers cashed in with defense contractors. Justice Department officials cashed in at high-paying law firms. Former diplomats cashed in by representing foreign interests as lobbyists or public-relations strategists. A few years high up in the Justice Department could translate into tens of millions of dollars in the private sector. Obscure aides on Capitol Hill became millionaires. Trent Lott abandoned his Senate seat early in order to get ahead of new restrictions on how soon he could start his career as a lobbyist. Ex-presidents gave six-figure speeches and signed eight-figure book deals.
As partisanship turned rabid, making money remained the one thing that Democrats and Republicans could still do together. Washington became a city of expensive restaurants, where bright young people entered government to do some good and then get rich. Luke Albee, a former chief of staff for two Democratic senators, learned to avoid hiring aides he would lose too quickly. “I looked out for who’s going to come in and spin out after 18 months, to renew and refresh their contacts in order to increase their retainers,” he told me. The revolving door didn’t necessarily induce individual officeholders to betray their oath—they might be scrupulously faithful public servants between turns at the trough. But, on a deeper level, the money aligned government with plutocracy. It also made the public indiscriminately cynical. And as the public’s trust in institutions plunged, the status of bureaucrats fell with it.
The swamp had been pooling between the Potomac and the Anacostia for three or four decades when Trump arrived in Washington, vowing to drain it. The slogan became one of his most potent. Fred Wertheimer, the president of the nonprofit Democracy 21 and an activist for good government since the Nixon presidency, says of Trump: “He was ahead of a lot of national politicians when he saw that the country sees Washington as rigged against them, as corrupted by money, as a lobbyist’s game—which is a game he played his whole life, until he ran against it. People wanted someone to take this on.” By then the federal government’s immune system had been badly compromised. Trump, in the name of a radical cure, set out to spread a devastating infection.
To Trump and his supporters, the swamp was full of scheming conspirators in drab D.C. office wear, coup plotters hidden in plain sight at desks, in lunchrooms, and on jogging paths around the federal capital: the deep state. A former Republican congressional aide named Mike Lofgren had introduced the phrase into the political bloodstream with an essay in 2014 and a book two years later. Lofgren meant the nexus of corporations, banks, and defense contractors that had gained so much financial and political control—sources of Washington’s corruption. But conservatives at Breitbart News, Fox News, and elsewhere began applying the term to career officials in law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, whom they accused of being Democratic partisans in cahoots with the liberal media first to prevent and then to undo Trump’s election. Like fake news and corruption, Trump reverse-engineered deep state into a weapon against his enemies, real or perceived.
The moment Trump entered the White House, he embarked on a colossal struggle with his own bureaucracy. He had to crush it or else it would destroy him. His aggrieved and predatory cortex impelled him to look for an official to hang out in public as a warning for others who might think of crossing him. Trump found one who had been nameless and faceless throughout his career.
3. “How Is Your Wife?”
Andrew McCabe joined the FBI in 1996, when he was 28, a year younger than Erica Newland was when she entered government service. He was the son of a corporate executive, a product of the suburbs, a Duke graduate, a lawyer at a small New Jersey firm. The bureau attracted him because of the human drama that investigations uncovered, the stories elicited from people who had crossed the line between the safe and predictable life of McCabe’s upbringing and the shadow world beyond the law. His wife, Jill, who was training in pediatric medicine, encouraged him to apply. He took a 50 percent salary cut to join the bureau. At Quantico, it was almost a pleasure for him to be subsumed into the uniform and discipline and selflessness of an agent’s training.
McCabe specialized in Russian organized crime and then terrorism. He rose swiftly through the ranks of the bureau and stayed out of the public eye. He had a reputation for intellect and unflappability, a natural manager. In early 2016—by then McCabe was in his late 40s, trim from triathlon competitions, his short hair going gray, the frames of his glasses black above and clear below—James Comey promoted him from head of the Washington field office to deputy director, the highest career position in the bureau, responsible for overseeing its day-to-day operations. In ordinary times the FBI’s No. 2 remains invisible to the public, but McCabe’s new job gave him a role in overseeing the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, just as the 2016 presidential race was entering its consequential phase. By summer the FBI would be digging into Trump’s campaign as well.
In July, Comey decided to announce the closing of the email case, calling Clinton’s conduct “extremely careless” but not criminal. McCabe supported this extraordinary departure from normal procedure (the FBI doesn’t comment on investigations, especially ones that don’t result in prosecution) because the Clinton email case, played out on the front pages in the middle of the campaign, was anything but normal. Comey was a master at conveying ethical rectitude—he would rise above the din to his commanding height and convince the American people that the investigation had been righteous.
But Comey’s statement created fury on both the left and the right and badly damaged the FBI’s credibility. McCabe came to regret Comey’s decision and his own role in it. “We believed that the American people believed in us,” McCabe later wrote. “The FBI is not political.” But he should have known. He had worked on the wildly overblown Benghazi case in the aftermath of the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in 2012, which “revealed the surreal extremes to which craven political posturing had gone,” and led to the equally overblown email case.
When Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, found himself in the president’s crosshairs, his world turned upside down. Photographed in Washington, D.C., February 10, 2020. (Peyton Fulford)
Having spent two decades as an upstanding G-man in a hierarchical institution, McCabe didn’t understand what the country had become. He was unarmed and unready for what was about to happen.
Jill McCabe, a pediatric emergency-room doctor, had run for a seat in the Virginia Senate as a Democrat in 2015 in order to work for Medicaid expansion for poor patients. She lost the race. On October 23, 2016, two weeks before the presidential election, The Wall Street Journal revealed that her campaign had received almost $700,000 from the Virginia Democratic Party and the political-action fund of Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton friend who had encouraged her to run. “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife,” read the headline, with more innuendo than substance. McCabe had properly insulated himself from the campaign and knew nothing about the donations. FBI ethics people had cleared him to oversee the Clinton investigation, which he didn’t start doing until months after Jill’s race had ended. One had nothing to do with the other. But Trump tweeted about the Journal story, and on October 24 he enraged a crowd in St. Augustine, Florida, with the made-up news that Clinton had corrupted the bureau and bought her way out of jail through “the spouse—the wife—of the top FBI official who helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s illegal email server.” He snarled and narrowed his eyes, he tightened his lips and shook his head, he walked away from the microphone in disgust, and the crowd shrieked its hatred for Clinton and the rigged system.
This was the first time Trump referred to the McCabes. He didn’t use their names, but the scene was chilling.
Within a few days, The Wall Street Journal was preparing to run a second story with damaging information about the FBI and McCabe—this time, that he had told agents to “stand down” in a secret investigation of the Clinton Foundation. The sources appeared to be senior agents in the FBI’s New York field office, where anti-Clinton sentiment was expressed openly. But the story was wrong: McCabe had wanted to continue the investigation and had simply been following Justice Department policy to keep agents from taking any overt steps, such as issuing subpoenas, that might influence an upcoming election. For the second time in a week, his integrity—the lifeblood of an official in his position—was unjustly maligned in highly public fashion. He authorized his counsel, Lisa Page, and the chief FBI spokesperson, Michael Kortan, to correct the story by disclosing to the reporter a conversation between McCabe and a Justice Department official—an authorization he believed to be appropriate, because it was in the FBI’s interest as well as his own.
The leak inadvertently confirmed the existence of an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, and it upset Comey. The director was already unhappy with the revelations about Jill McCabe’s campaign. He prepared to order McCabe to recuse himself from the Clinton email investigation, which the FBI reopened on October 28, 11 days before the election. Comey later claimed that when he’d asked McCabe about the leak, McCabe had said something like “I don’t know how this shit gets in the media.” (McCabe later said that he’d told Comey he had authorized the leak.)
This incident, so slight amid the large dramas of those months, set in motion a series of fateful events for McCabe.
When Trump won, the McCabes thought that the new president might drop the conspiracy theory about Jill’s campaign and stop his attacks on them. “He got what he wanted,” she told me recently, “so maybe he’ll just leave us alone now. For, like, a moment I thought that.”
As Trump prepared to take power, the Russia investigation closed in on people around him, beginning with Michael Flynn, his choice for national security adviser, who lied to FBI agents about phone calls with the Russian ambassador. Trump made it clear that he expected the FBI to drop the Flynn case and shield the White House from the tightening circle of investigation. At a White House dinner for two, the new president told his FBI director that he wanted loyalty. Comey replied with a promise of honesty. Trump then asked if McCabe “has a problem with me. I was pretty rough on him and his wife during the campaign.” Comey called McCabe “a true professional,” adding: “FBI people, whatever their personal views, they strip them away when they step into their bureau roles.”
But Trump didn’t want true professionals. Either you were loyal or you were not, and draining the swamp turned out to mean getting rid of those who were not. His understanding of human motivation told him that, after his “pretty rough” treatment, McCabe couldn’t possibly be loyal—he would want revenge, and he would get it through an investigation. In subsequent conversations with Comey, Trump kept returning to “the McCabe thing,” as if fixated on the thought that he had created an enemy in his own FBI.
“We knew that we were doomed,” Jill McCabe told me. “Our days were numbered. It was gradual, but by May we knew it could end really terribly.”
On May 9, 2017, McCabe was summoned across the street to the office of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who informed him that Trump had just fired Comey. McCabe was now acting director of the FBI.
Trump wanted to see him that evening. Comey had told McCabe about Trump’s demands for loyalty, his attempts to interfere with the Russia investigation, and his suspicion of McCabe himself. McCabe fully expected to be fired any day. When he was ushered into the Oval Office, he found the president seated behind his imposing desk, with his top advisers—the vice president, the chief of staff, the White House counsel—perched submissively before him in a row of small wooden chairs, where McCabe joined them. Trump asked McCabe whether he disagreed with Comey’s decision to close the Clinton email case in July. No, McCabe said; he and Comey had worked together closely. Trump kept pushing: Was it true that people at the FBI were unhappy about the decision, unhappy with Comey’s leadership? McCabe said that some agents disagreed with Comey’s handling of the Clinton case, but that he had generally been popular.
“Your only problem is that one mistake you made,” McCabe later recalled Trump saying. “That thing with your wife. That one mistake.” McCabe said nothing, and Trump went on: “That was the only problem with you. I was very hard on you during my campaign. That money from the Clinton friend—I was very hard. I said a lot of tough things about your wife in the campaign.”
“I know,” McCabe replied. “We heard what you said.” He told Trump that Jill was a dedicated doctor, that running for office had been another way for her to try to help her patients. He and their two teenage children had completely supported her decision.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. She’s great. Everybody I know says she’s great. You were right to support her. Everybody tells me she’s a terrific person.”
The next morning, while McCabe was meeting with his senior staff about the Russia investigation, the White House called—Trump was on the line. This was disturbing in itself. Presidents are not supposed to call FBI directors, except about matters of national security. To prevent the kind of political abuses uncovered by Watergate, Justice Department guidelines dating back to the mid-’70s dictate a narrow line of communication between law enforcement and the White House. Trump had repeatedly shown that he either didn’t know or didn’t care.
The president was upset that McCabe had allowed Comey to fly back from Los Angeles on the FBI’s official plane after being fired. McCabe explained the decision, and Trump exploded: “That’s not right! I never approved that!” He didn’t want Comey allowed into headquarters—into any FBI building. Trump raged on. Then he said, “How is your wife?”
“She’s fine.”
“When she lost her election, that must have been very tough to lose. How did she handle losing? Is it tough to lose?”
McCabe said that losing had been difficult but that Jill was back to taking care of children in the emergency room.
“Yeah, that must have been really tough,” the president told his new FBI director. “To lose. To be a loser.”
As McCabe held the phone, his aides saw his face go tight. Trump was forcing him into the humiliating position of not being able to stand up for his wife. It was a kind of Mafia move: asserting dominance, emotional blackmail.
“It elevates the pressure of this idea of loyalty,” McCabe told me recently. “If I can actually insult your wife and you still agree with me or go along with whatever it is I want you to do, then I have you. I have split the husband and the wife. He first tried to separate me from Comey—‘You didn’t agree with him, right?’ He tried to separate me from the institution—‘Everyone’s happy at the FBI, right?’ He boxes you into a corner to try to get you to accept and embrace whatever bullshit he’s selling, and if he can do that, then he knows you’re with him.”
McCabe would return to the conversation again and again, asking himself if he should have told Trump where to get off. But he had an organization in crisis to run. “I didn’t really need to get into a personal pissing contest with the president of the United States.”
Far from being the political conspirator of Trump’s dark imaginings, McCabe was out of his depth in an intensely political atmosphere. When Trump demanded to know whom he’d voted for in 2016, McCabe was so shocked that he could only answer vaguely: “I played it right down the middle.” The lame remark embarrassed McCabe, and he later clarified things with Trump: He was a lifelong Republican, but he hadn’t voted in 2016, because of the FBI investigations into the two candidates. This straightforward answer only deepened Trump’s suspicions.
But the professionalism that left McCabe exposed to Trump’s bullying served him as he took charge of the FBI amid the momentous events of that week. “Once Jim got fired, Andy’s focus and resolve were quite amazing,” James Baker, then the FBI general counsel, told me. McCabe had two urgent tasks. The first was to reassure the 37,000 employees now working under him that the organization would be all right. On May 11, in a televised Senate hearing, he was asked whether White House assertions of Comey’s unpopularity in the bureau were true. McCabe had prepared his answer. “I can tell you that I hold Director Comey in the absolute highest regard,” he said. “I can tell you also that Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does to this day.” He was saying to the country and his own people what he couldn’t say to Trump’s face.
The second task was to protect the Russia investigation. Comey’s firing, and the White House lies about the reason—that it was over the Clinton email case, when all the evidence pointed to the Russia investigation—raised the specter of obstruction of justice. On May 15, McCabe met with his top aides—Baker, Lisa Page, and two others—and concluded that they had to open an investigation into Trump himself. They had to find out whether the president had been working in concert with Russia and covering it up.
The case was under the direction of the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. McCabe doubted that Rosenstein, whose memo Trump had used to justify firing Comey, could be trusted to withstand White House pressure to shut down the investigation. He urged Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to take over the case. Then it would be beyond the reach of the White House and the Justice Department. If Trump tried to kill it, the world would know. McCabe pressed Rosenstein several times, but Rosenstein kept putting him off.
On May 17, McCabe informed a small group of House and Senate leaders that the FBI was opening a counterintelligence investigation into Trump for possible conspiracy with Russia during the 2016 campaign, as well as a criminal investigation for obstruction of justice. Rosenstein then announced that he was appointing Robert Mueller to take over the case as special counsel.
That night McCabe was chauffeured in the unfamiliar silence of the director’s armored Suburban to his house in the Virginia exurbs beyond Dulles Airport. Jill was making dinner while their daughter did her homework at the kitchen island. McCabe took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and opened a beer. Ever since Comey’s firing he’d felt as though he were sprinting toward a goal—to make the Russia investigation secure and transparent. “We’ve done what we needed to do,” he said. “The president is going to be out for blood and it’s going to be mine.”
“You did your job,” Jill said. “That’s the important thing.”
In the coming months, when things grew dark for the McCabes, Jill would remind Andy of that evening together in the kitchen.
The tweets abruptly resumed on July 25: “Problem is that the acting head of the FBI & the person in charge of the Hillary investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from H for wife!” By now Trump knew McCabe’s name, but Jill would always be the “wife.” The next day, more tweets: “Why didn’t A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got … big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives. Drain the Swamp!”
The tweets mortified McCabe. He had no way of answering the false charge without calling more attention to it. He went into headquarters and made a weak joke about the day’s news and tried to keep himself and his organization focused on work while knowing that everyone he met with was thinking about the tweets. Baker, who also became a target of Trump’s tweets, described their effect to me. “It’s just a very disorienting, strange experience for a person like me, who doesn’t have much of a public profile,” he said. “You can’t help having a physiological reaction, like getting nervous, sweating. It’s frightening, and you don’t know what it’s going to mean, and suddenly people start talking about you, and you feel very exposed—and not in a positive way.”
The purpose of Trump’s tweets was not just to punish McCabe for opening the investigation, but to taint the case. “He attacks people to make his misdeeds look like they were okay,” Jill said. “If Andrew was corrupt, then the investigation was corrupt and the investigation was wrong. So they needed to do everything they could to prove Andrew McCabe was corrupt and a liar.”
Three days after the tweets resumed, on July 28, McCabe was urgently summoned to the Justice Department. Lawyers from the Office of the Inspector General who were looking into the Clinton email investigation had found thousands of text messages between McCabe’s counsel, Lisa Page, and the bureau’s ace investigator, Peter Strzok. Both of them had been central to the Clinton and Russia cases; Strzok was now working for Mueller. During the campaign, Page and Strzok had exchanged scathing comments about Trump. They had also been having an extramarital affair. Page and Strzok were among McCabe’s closest colleagues; Page was his trusted friend. This was all news to him—terrible news.
The lawyers fired off questions about the texts. Because McCabe was a subject of the inspector general’s investigation of the Clinton case, he told the lawyers in advance that he wouldn’t answer questions about his involvement without his personal attorney present. In spite of this, their questions suddenly veered to the second Wall Street Journal article, with its suggestion that McCabe had been corrupted by Clinton. One of the lawyers wondered whether “CF” in a text from Page referred to the Clinton Foundation. “Do you happen to know?” he asked McCabe.
“I don’t know what she’s referring to.”
“Or perhaps a code name?”
“Not one that I recall,” McCabe said, “but this thing is, like, right in the middle of the allegations about me, and so I don’t really want to get into discussing this article with you. Because it just seems like we’re kind of crossing the strings a little bit there.”
“Was she ever authorized to speak to reporters in this time period?” a lawyer asked.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
This wasn’t true. McCabe himself had authorized Page to speak to the Journal reporter. But he had stopped paying attention to the lawyers’ questions, which weren’t supposed to have come up at all—he wanted to put an end to them. He had to think through how he was going to deal with this new emergency. The Page-Strzok texts were bound to leak, and they would be claimed by Trump and his partisans as proof that the FBI was a cesspool of bias and corruption. Page and Strzok would be personally destroyed. In New York City that day, Trump made his remark about Central American “animals,” and he urged law-enforcement officers to rough up suspected gang members. The bureau would have to formulate a response and reaffirm its code of integrity. And the McCabes were back in the president’s crosshairs.
McCabe had the sense that everything was falling apart. It’s not hard to imagine the state of mind that led him to say, “Not that I’m aware of.” He had done it before, on the other terrible day of that year, May 9, when a different internal investigation had blindsided him with the same question about the long-ago Journal leak, and McCabe had given the same inaccurate answer. A right-down-the-middle career official, his integrity under continued assault, might well make such a needless mistake.
That was a Friday. Over the weekend he realized that he had left the lawyers with a false impression. On Tuesday he called the inspector general’s office to correct it. That same week the Senate confirmed Christopher Wray as the new FBI director, and McCabe went back to being the deputy. After 21 years as an agent, he planned to retire as soon as he was eligible, in March 2018, when he turned 50, and go into the private sector. But it was already too late.
On December 19, testifying before a House committee, McCabe confirmed Comey’s account of Trump’s attempt to kill the Russia investigation. Two days later, before another House committee, he was asked how attacks on the FBI had affected him. “I’ll tell you, it has been enormously challenging,” McCabe said. He described how his wife—“a wonderful, brilliant, caring physician”—had run for office to help expand health insurance for poor people. “And having started with that noble intention, to have gone through what she and my children have experienced over the last year has been—it has been devastating.”
Two days before Christmas, Trump let fly a menacing tweet: “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!” No personnel issue was too small for the president’s attention if it concerned a bureaucrat he considered an enemy. Another tweet that same day and one on Christmas Eve repeated the old falsehoods about Jill’s campaign. She couldn’t stop blaming herself for all the trouble that had come to her family.
Just after the holidays, McCabe learned that his part of the inspector general’s report on the Clinton email investigation would be released separately. Instead of later in the spring, the McCabe piece would be finished in just a couple of months. In January 2018, Wray, the new director, forced McCabe out of the deputy’s job. Rather than accept a lower position, he went on leave in anticipation of his retirement in mid-March. At the end of February, the inspector general completed his 35-page report with its devastating conclusion: McCabe had shown “lack of candor” on four occasions in his statements about the Wall Street Journal leak. The Office of Professional Responsibility recommended that he be fired. To some in the Justice Department, this represented accountability for a senior official.
McCabe received the case file on March 9. FBI guidelines generally grant the subject 30 days to respond, but the Justice Department seemed determined to satisfy the White House and get ahead of McCabe’s retirement. He was given a week. On Thursday, March 15, he met with a department official and argued his case: He’d been blindsided by questions about an episode that he’d forgotten in the nonstop turmoil of the following months, and when he realized that he’d made an inaccurate statement, he had come forward voluntarily to correct it. McCabe thought he made a solid argument, but he knew what was coming.
On Friday night, watching CNN, McCabe learned that he had been fired from the organization where he had worked for 21 years. He was 26 hours away from his 50th birthday.
An hour after the news broke, Trump broadcast his delight: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI—A great day for Democracy.” It was his eighth tweet about McCabe; there have been 33 since then, and counting.
“To be fired from the FBI and called a liar—I can’t even describe to you how sick that makes me to this day,” McCabe told me, nearly two years later. “It’s so wildly offensive and humiliating and just horrible. It bothers me as much today as it did on March 16, when I got fired. I’ve thought about it for thousands of hours, but it still doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.”
The extraordinary rush to get rid of McCabe ahead of his retirement, with the president baying for his scalp, appalled many lawyers both in and out of government. “To engineer the process that way is an unforgivable politicization of the department,” the legal expert Benjamin Wittes told me. McCabe lost most of his pension. He became unemployable, and “radioactive” among his former colleagues—almost no one at headquarters would have contact with him. Worst of all, the Justice Department referred the inspector general’s report to the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. A criminal indictment in such cases is almost unheard of, but the sword of the law hung over McCabe’s head for two years, an abnormally long time, while prosecutors hardly uttered a word. Last September, McCabe learned from media reports that a grand jury had been convened to vote on an indictment. He and Jill told their children that their father might be handcuffed, the house might be searched, he might even be jailed. The grand jury met, and the grand jury went home, and nothing happened. The silence implied that the jurors had found no grounds to indict. One of the prosecutors dropped off the case, unusual at such a crucial stage, and another left for the private sector, reportedly unhappy about political pressure. Still, the U.S. Attorney’s Office kept the case open until mid-February, when it was abruptly dropped.
Andrew and Jill McCabe (Peyton Fulford)
McCabe discusses his situation with the oddly calm manner of the straight man in a Hitchcock movie who can’t quite fathom the nightmare in which he’s trapped. Jill, who is more demonstrative, compares the ordeal to an abusive relationship: Every time she feels like she can finally breathe a little, another blow lands. On any given night, a Fox News host can still be heard denouncing her husband. Just recently, a reporter for a right-wing TV network, One America News, announced on the White House lawn that McCabe had had an affair with Lisa Page. It was a lie, and the network was forced to retract it, but not before McCabe had to call his daughter at school and warn her that she would see the story on the internet.
McCabe has written a book, and he appears regularly on CNN, and he volunteers his time with the Innocence Project, working on the cases of wrongly convicted prisoners. Jill is getting an M.B.A. while continuing to do the overnight shift at the emergency room. But they’ve come to accept that they will never be entirely free.
Every member of the FBI leadership who investigated Trump has been forced out of government service, along with officials in the Justice Department, and subjected to a campaign of vilification. Even James Baker, who was never accused of wrongdoing, found himself too controversial to be hired in the private sector. But it is McCabe’s protracted agony that provides the most vivid warning of what might happen to other career officials if their professional duties ever collide with Trump’s personal interests. It struck fear in Erica Newland and her colleagues in the Office of Legal Counsel. It chilled officials farther afield, in the State Department. “There’s a lot of people out there,” Jill said, “who are unwilling to stand up and do the right thing, because they don’t want to be the next Andrew McCabe.”
4. Ends and Means
Nothing constrained Trump more than independent law enforcement. Nothing would strengthen him like the power to use it for his own benefit. “The authoritarian leader simply has to get control over the coercive apparatus of the state,” Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes write in their new book, Unmaking the Presidency. “Without control of the Justice Department, the would-be tyrant’s tool kit is radically incomplete.”
When Trump nominated William Barr to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general, the Washington legal establishment exhaled a collective sigh of relief. Barr had held the same job almost 30 years earlier, in the last 14 months of the first Bush presidency. He was now 68 and rich from years in the private sector. He had nothing to prove and nothing to gain. He was considered an “institutionalist”—quite conservative, an advocate of strong presidential power, but not an extremist. Because he was intimidatingly smart and bureaucratically skillful, he would protect the Justice Department from Trump’s maraudings far better than the intellectually inferior Sessions and his ill-qualified temporary replacement, Matthew Whitaker. Barr told a friend that he agreed to come back because the department was in chaos and needed a leader with a bulletproof reputation.
Before Barr’s confirmation hearings, Neal Katyal, a legal scholar who was acting solicitor general under Obama, warned a group of Democratic senators not to be fooled: Barr’s views were well outside mainstream conservatism. He could prove more dangerous than any of his predecessors. And the reasons for concern could be found by anyone who took the trouble to study Barr’s record, which was made of three durable, interwoven strands.
The first was his expansive view of presidential power, sometimes called the theory of the “unitary executive”—the idea that Article II of the Constitution gives the president sole and complete authority in the executive branch, with wide latitude to interpret laws and make war. When Barr became head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George H. W. Bush, in 1989, he wrote an influential memo listing 10 ways in which Congress had been trespassing on Article II, arguing, “Only by consistently and forcefully resisting such congressional incursions can executive branch prerogatives be preserved.” He created and chaired an interagency committee to fight document requests and assert executive privilege.
One target of Barr’s displeasure was the Office of the Inspector General, created by Congress in 1978 as an independent watchdog in executive-branch agencies. “For a guy like Barr, this goes to the core of the unitary executive—that there’s this entity in there that reports to Congress,” says Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush. When Barr became attorney general in 1991, he made sure that the inspector general’s office in the Justice Department had as little power as possible to investigate misconduct.
Barr has even expressed skepticism about the guidelines, established after Watergate, that insulate the Justice Department from political interference by the White House. In a 2001 oral history Barr said, “I think it started picking up after Watergate, the idea that the Department of Justice has to be independent … My experience with the department is that the most political people in the Department of Justice are the career people, the least political are the political appointees.” In Barr’s view, political interference in law enforcement is almost a contradiction in terms. Since presidents (and their appointees) are subject to voters, they are better custodians of justice than the anonymous and unaccountable bureaucrats known as federal prosecutors and FBI investigators. Barr seemed unconcerned about what presidents might do between elections.
The Iran-Contra scandal that took place under Ronald Reagan shadowed Bush’s presidency in the form of an investigation conducted by the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. Barr despised independent counsels as trespasses on the unitary executive. A month before Bush left office, Barr persuaded the president to issue full pardons of several Reagan-administration officials who had been found guilty in the scandal, in addition to one—former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger—who had been indicted and might have provided evidence against Bush himself. The appearance of a cover-up didn’t trouble Barr. But six years later, when the independent counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction in a sex scandal, Barr, by then a corporate lawyer, criticized the Clinton White House for attacks on Starr that could impede the investigation and even intimidate jurors and witnesses.
Here is a glimpse of the second strand in Barr’s thinking: partisanship. Less conspicuous than the first, which sheathes it in constitutional principles, it never disappears. Barr is a persistent critic of independent counsels—except when they’re investigating a Democratic president. He’s a vocal defender of presidential authority—when a Republican is in the White House.
This partisanship has to be understood in relation to the third enduring strand of Barr’s thinking: He is a Catholic—a very conservative one. John R. Dunne, who ran the Justice Department’s civil-rights division when Barr was attorney general under Bush, calls him “an authoritarian Catholic.” Dunne and his wife once had dinner at Barr’s house and came away with the impression of a traditional patriarch whom only the family dog disobeyed. Barr attended Columbia University at the height of the anti-war movement, and he drew a lesson from those years that shaped many other religious conservatives as well: The challenge to traditional values and authority in the 1960s sent the country into a long-term moral decline.
In 1992, as attorney general, Barr gave a speech at a right-wing Catholic conference in which he blamed “the long binge that began in the mid-1960s” for soaring rates of abortion, drug use, divorce, juvenile crime, venereal disease, and general immorality. “The secularists of today are clearly fanatics,” Barr said. He called for a return to “God’s law” as the basis for moral renewal. “There is a battle going on that will decide who we are as a people and what name this age will ultimately bear.” One of Barr’s speechwriters at the time was Pat Cipollone, who is now Trump’s White House counsel and served as one of his defenders during impeachment. In 1995, as a private citizen, Barr published the same argument, with the same military metaphors, as an essay in the journal then called TheCatholic Lawyer. “We are locked in a historic struggle between two fundamentally different systems of values,” he wrote. “In a way, this is the end product of the Enlightenment.” The secularists’ main weapon in their war on religion, Barr continued, is the law. Traditionalists would have to fight back the same way.
What does this apocalyptic showdown have to do with Article II and the unitary executive? It raises the stakes of politics to eschatology. With nothing less than Christian civilization at stake, the faithful might well conclude that the ends justify the means.
Barr spent the quarter century between Presidents Bush and Trump in private practice, serving on corporate boards, and caring for the youngest of his three daughters as she battled lymphoma. Barr and Cipollone also sat together on the board of the Catholic Information Center, an office in Washington closely affiliated with Opus Dei, a far-right Catholic organization with influential connections in politics and business around the world. During those years, the Republican Party sank into its own swamp of moral relativism, hitting bottom with Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s arrival brought Barr out of semi-retirement as a reliable advocate. When Comey reopened the Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election, Barr wrote an approving op‑ed. When Trump fired Comey six months later, supposedly for mishandling the same investigation, Barr published another approving op-ed. The only consistent principle seemed to be what benefited Trump. Then, in June 2018, Barr wrote a 19-page memo and sent it, unsolicited, to Rod Rosenstein. The memo argued that Robert Mueller could not charge Trump with obstructing justice for taking actions that came under the president’s authority, including asking Comey to back off the Flynn investigation and then firing Comey. In Barr’s expansive view of Article II, it was nearly impossible for Trump to obstruct justice at all.
Writing that memo was a strange thing for a former attorney general to do with his spare time. Six months later, Trump nominated Barr to his old job.
After Barr assumed office, his advocacy for Trump intensified. When Mueller completed his report, in March 2019, Barr rushed to tell the world not only that the report cleared Trump of conspiring with Russia, but that the lack of an “underlying crime” cleared the president of obstruction as well—despite 10 damning examples of possible crimes in the report, which Barr finally released, lightly redacted, three weeks later. Those extra weeks allowed Trump a crucial moment to claim complete exoneration. Then he turned his rhetorical gun on his pursuers. He wanted them brought down.
Two investigations of the investigators were already in the works—one by the Justice Department’s inspector general, focusing on electronic surveillance of a Trump-campaign adviser (Barr called it “spying”), and a broader review by John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, under Barr’s supervision. In an interview with CBS in May, Barr prejudged the outcome of Durham’s review, strongly implying that the Russia investigation had been flawed from the start. He located the misconduct in the deep state: “Republics have fallen because of [a] Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences, and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state. And, you know, there is that tendency that they know better and that, you know, they’re there to protect as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essentially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own way as a government official.”
Even if this were true of the Russia case, the attorney general had no business foreshadowing the result of investigations. And when, in December, the inspector general released his report, finding serious mistakes in the applications for surveillance warrants but no political bias—no “Praetorian Guard”—in the Russia investigation, Barr wasn’t satisfied. He announced that he disagreed with the report.
President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr at the White House, November 26, 2019 (Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux)
Barr uses his official platform to gaslight the public. In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society in Washington in November, he devoted six paragraphs to perhaps the most contemptuously partisan remarks an attorney general has ever made. Progressives are on a “holy mission” in which ends justify means, while conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics,” Barr claimed. “One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this president constantly accuse this administration of ‘shredding’ constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law. When I ask my friends on the other side, ‘What exactly are you referring to?,’ I get vacuous stares, followed by sputtering about the travel ban or some such thing.”
The core of the speech was a denunciation of legislative and judicial encroachments on the authority of the executive—as if presidential power hasn’t grown enormously since 9/11, if not the New Deal, and as if Trump’s conduct in office falls well within the boundaries of Article II. In October, at Notre Dame, the attorney general recycled his old jeremiad on religious war. For Barr the year is always 1975, Congress is holding hearings to enfeeble the presidency, and the secular left is destroying the American family. He is using his short time remaining onstage to hold off the coming darkness, and if Providence has played the cosmic joke of vesting righteous power in the radically flawed person of Donald Trump, Barr will do what he must to protect him: distort the Mueller report; impugn Justice Department officials; try to keep the Ukraine whistle-blower’s complaint from Congress via spurious legal arguments; give cover to White House stonewalling of the impeachment inquiry; create an official channel for the delivery of political dirt on the president’s opponents; overrule his prosecutors on behalf of Trump’s friend Roger Stone.
Barr and Trump are pursuing very different projects—the one a crusade to align government with his idea of religious authority, the other a venal quest for self-aggrandizement. But they serve each other’s purpose by collaborating to destroy the independence of anything—federal agencies, the public servants who work in them, even the other branches of government—that could restrain the president.
“Barr is perhaps the most political attorney general we’ve ever had,” a longtime government lawyer told me. He described the devastating effects on law enforcement of Trump’s unending assault and Barr’s complicity. “I know from talking to friends that many of the career people are distressed about two related things. One is the sense that legal decisions are being driven to an exceptional degree by politics.” The Justice Department, disregarding the views of career lawyers, has taken extreme positions—for example, that the White House could refuse to provide any evidence in the impeachment hearings, and that neither the House of Representatives nor the Manhattan district attorney can subpoena Trump’s personal financial records. The other cause of distress, the lawyer said, is Barr’s willingness to attack his own people, joining Trump in accusing government officials of conspiring against the president.
Even far afield from Washington, morale has suffered. A federal prosecutor in the middle of the country told me that he and his colleagues can no longer count on their leaders to protect them from unfair accusations or political meddling. Any case with a hint of political risk is considered untouchable. The White House’s agenda is driving more and more cases, especially those related to immigration. And there’s a palpable fear of retaliation for any whiff of criticism. Prosecutors worry that Trump’s attacks on law enforcement are having a corrosive effect in courtrooms, because jurors no longer trust FBI agents or other government officers serving as witnesses.
As a result, many of the prosecutor’s colleagues are thinking of leaving government service. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘If there’s a second term, there’s no possible way I can wait it out for another four.’ A lot of people feared how bad it could be, but we had no idea it would be this bad. It’s hard to weather that storm.” What keeps this prosecutor from leaving is a commitment to his cases, to the department’s mission, and to the thought “not so much that you could make a difference in this administration, because that doesn’t seem possible anymore, but so you can be here in place when what we think will be a need to rebuild comes.”
When Trump launched his campaign, he was suspected of seeking only to enrich himself. The point of the presidency was more high-paying guests at the Trump International Hotel, down the street from the White House. If Trump’s tax returns and financial records are ever made public, we’ll know just how much the presidency was worth to him.
But Trump’s ambitions have swelled since the election. He hasn’t crushed the independence of the Justice Department simply to be able to squeeze more money out of his businesses. Financial self-interest “is why he ran,” Fred Wertheimer, of Democracy 21, says. “But power is a drug. Power is an addiction—exercising power, flying around in Air Force One, having motorcades, having people salute you. He thinks he is the country.”
5. “No Statement”
As a candidate, Trump learned that a foreign country can provide potent help in subverting an American election. As president, he has the entire national-security bureaucracy under his command, but he needed several years to find its weak spot—to figure out that the State Department could be as corruptible as Justice, and as useful to his hold on power.
When Mike Pompeo took over as secretary of state, in April 2018, the State Department was already ailing. Diplomacy has been an atrophying muscle of American power for several decades, and the status of Foreign Service officers has steadily diminished. In the mid-1970s, 60 percent of the positions at the level of assistant secretary and above were filled by career officials. By the time of the Obama administration, the figure was down to 30 percent, while ambassadorships had become a common way for presidents to thank big donors. “This wasn’t invented in the beginning of 2017 with this administration,” William Burns, a deputy secretary of state under Obama, told me. “Unqualified political appointees have been with us long before Donald Trump. As in so many areas, what he’s done is accelerated that problem and made it a lot worse.”
Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, bled the department dry. To purge it of bloat, he tried to gut the budget, froze hiring, and pushed out a large cadre of senior diplomats. Offices and hallways in the headquarters on C Street grew deserted. When Pompeo became secretary, he promised to restore “swagger” to diplomacy. He ended the hiring freeze, promoted career officials, and began to fill empty positions at the top—but he brought in mostly political appointees. According to Ronald Neumann, a retired career ambassador who is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, the politicization of the State Department represents “the destruction of a 100-year effort, from Teddy Roosevelt on, to build professional government separate from the spoils system.” The destruction, Neumann told me, is a “deliberate process, based on the belief that the federal government is hostile, and now you have to put in loyal people across the board in senior positions to control the bastards—the career bureaucrats. In the past it has been primarily a frustration that the bureaucracy is sclerotic, that it is not agile. But it was not about loyalty, and that’s what it’s about now.”
Under Pompeo, 42 percent of ambassadors are political appointees, an all-time high (before the Trump presidency the number was about 30 percent). They “are chosen for their loyalty to Trump,” Elizabeth Jones, a retired career ambassador, told me. “They’ve learned that the only way to succeed is to be 100 percent loyal, 1,000 percent. The idea that you’re out there to work for the American people is an alien idea.” Of the department’s positions at the level of assistant secretary and above, only 8 percent are held by career officials, and only one Foreign Service officer has been confirmed by the Senate to a senior position since Trump took office—the others are in acting positions, a way for the administration to sap the independence of its senior officials. Many mid-level diplomats now look for posts outside Washington, in foreign countries that the president is unlikely to tweet about.
The story of how the first family, Rudy Giuliani, his two former business associates, a pair of discredited Ukrainian prosecutors, and the right-wing media orchestrated a smear campaign to force Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch out of her post in Kyiv because she stood in the way of their corrupt schemes has become famous as the origin of Trump’s impeachment. The story of how Yovanovitch’s colleagues in the State Department responded to the crisis is less well known. It reveals the full range of behavior among officials under unprecedented pressure from the top. It shows how an agency with a long, proud history can be hollowed out and broken by its own leaders.
Tom Malinowski, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey and former State Department official, was born in Communist Poland to a family that had lived through World War II. “I’ve often asked myself the alternative-history question of what might happen if the Nazis took over America,” he told me. “Who would become, out of opportunism or maybe even shared outlook, one of them? Some people would. Most people would keep their head down. Some number of people would be courageous and do useful things. A smaller number would do recklessly useful things. And then some number, hopefully also small, would take advantage of the situation to help themselves.”
Masha Yovanovitch, like Andy McCabe, had no public profile but was widely respected among colleagues. She joined the Foreign Service in 1986, when she was 28 years old, and rose through the ranks of the State Department to become the U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, then Armenia, and then, in 2016, Ukraine. At the embassy in Kyiv she became known as a dedicated fighter of the corruption rampant among Ukrainian political and business leaders. And, as with McCabe, her professionalism left her vulnerable when a gang of thugs set out to destroy her career. Corruption, the theme of her work in Ukraine, was also the theme of its abrupt end. “You’re going to think that I’m incredibly naive,” she told the House during her testimony, “but I couldn’t imagine all the things that have happened.”
In early March 2019, David Hale, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, paid a visit to the embassy in Kyiv. He asked Yovanovitch, who planned to end her tour that summer and then retire, to stay another year. With Ukrainian elections coming up, the embassy couldn’t afford to be temporarily leaderless. She thought about it overnight and agreed.
Two weeks later, on March 20, The Hill, a Washington newspaper, published an interview with Yuriy Lutsenko, one of the dirty Ukrainian prosecutors who had been thwarted by Yovanovitch. Lutsenko accused her of trying to stop legitimate prosecutions. The article also reported that the ambassador was heard to have openly criticized Trump. The president retweeted the story, which was composed almost entirely of lies. It was followed by several more articles filled with conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The reporter, John Solomon (who stands by his stories), was getting his information from Giuliani and his associates. Solomon had come to The Hill from Circa News, a right-wing site that had published an identical falsehood about McCabe—that he had openly trashed Trump in a meeting—two years earlier. The Russia and Ukraine scandals are best understood as a single web of corruption and abuse of office, and Solomon is one of many strands connecting them.
Another is Joseph diGenova, a right-wing Washington lawyer, former appointee of Barr, and friend of Giuliani’s who had asserted in 2016 that FBI agents were furious with James Comey for closing the Clinton investigation. On the same day the first Hill story about Yovanovitch was published, diGenova appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and said that Yovanovitch “has bad-mouthed the president of the United States to Ukrainian officials and has told them not to listen or worry about Trump policy because he’s going to be impeached. This woman needs to be called home to the United States—” “Oh, immediately,” Hannity interjected. Two nights later, Laura Ingraham repeated the story on her show. Victoria Toensing, diGenova’s law partner (and wife) and a frequent Fox News guest, texted one of Giuliani’s cronies: “Is the Wicket [sic] Witch gone?” On March 24, in a tweet, Donald Trump Jr. called Yovanovitch a “joker.”
The State Department called The Hill’s original story a “complete fabrication.” But as the lies spread among conservative media, triggering a barrage of attacks, Yovanovitch found herself in a crisis. Hale, the department’s No. 3 and its senior career diplomat, sent an email to two colleagues: “I believe Masha should deny on the record saying anything disrespectful and reaffirm her loyalty as Ambassador and FSO to POTUS and Constitution.” Gordon Sondland, a Trump donor who, with no relevant experience, had been made ambassador to the European Union, gave her the same advice directly. “Tweet out there that you support the president, and that all these are lies,” Yovanovitch recounted him saying during her impeachment testimony. “You know the sorts of things that he likes. Go out there battling aggressively and praise him.”
Yovanovitch felt that she couldn’t do it. Like Erica Newland, she had taken an oath to defend the Constitution, not the president. Instead of tweeting allegiance to Trump, Yovanovitch recorded a public service announcement urging Ukrainians to vote in that country’s upcoming presidential election. She tried to connect this civic duty to her role as a nonpartisan government official. “Diplomats like me make a pledge to serve whomever the American people, our fellow citizens, choose,” she told the camera. Presidents Bush and Obama had both appointed her to ambassadorships, “and I promote and carry out the policies of President Trump and his administration. This is one of the marks of a true democracy.”
Whatever impression this civics lesson made on Ukrainians, it did nothing to stop the vicious campaign against her back home. The United States was no longer the democracy that American diplomats hold up as a model to foreigners.
On March 24, unable to function in her post, Yovanovitch wrote a desperate email to David Hale. She asked for a statement from the secretary of state saying that she had his full confidence, that she spoke for the president and the country. Hale called Yovanovitch that afternoon and asked her to put her concerns in writing. She sent a longer email, describing the figures who were attacking her—including Giuliani and Lutsenko—and attempting to interpret their motives.
The next day, at a weekly meeting of senior officials in the secretary’s office, Hale brought up Yovanovitch’s request. Pompeo was confronted with a dilemma—stand up for his people or appease the White House. He solved it by punting, saying that no statement would be made on her behalf until Giuliani, Hannity, and others were asked for their evidence. Later that week Hale sent word to the European bureau: “No statement.”
Yovanovitch herself never got an answer from Hale. “Basically, we moved on,” Hale said during his testimony at the impeachment inquiry. “For whatever reason, we stopped working on that—at least, I stopped working on that issue. I was not involved in doing it, so I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to it.” Expressing support for Yovanovitch might have made things worse, he noted. “One point of view was that it might even provoke a public reaction from the president himself about the ambassador.”
A couple of bureaucratic levels below Hale, George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe, was fighting on behalf of the besieged ambassador. Kent had been her second in command at the embassy in Kyiv, where corruption had been his major focus. He knew all the Ukrainian players involved in the campaign against her, and he was outraged by the slanders, which had begun to tar his name as well. He had strengthened the original State Department response to the first Hill article, inserting the phrase complete fabrication, and when the attacks intensified he told Hale that the department needed to stand behind Yovanovitch. He spoke up despite his vulnerable status as a mid-level officer in line for a promotion to a senior position.
“Moments like this test people; they bring out one’s true character,” said Malinowski, who, as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, heard days of testimony from ex-colleagues during the impeachment inquiry. “In normal times, it’s hard to know who would do what under those circumstances.” Kent’s first impulse was to prevent American policy from being corrupted in Kyiv and Washington. Hale, in a more powerful job, put bureaucratic hierarchy and his own secure place in it first. As a result, Yovanovitch had no one to press the urgency of her case with her leadership.
“I believe moral courage is more difficult than physical courage,” Ronald Neumann, the retired ambassador, told me. “I was an infantry officer in Vietnam. Some courageous officers on the battlefield became very cautious bureaucrats.” Physical courage in battle is made easier by speed, adrenaline, comrades. “Moral courage—you have, in many cases, lots of time, it’s a solitary act,” he said. “You are fully aware of potential repercussions to your career, and it’s harder. It shouldn’t be harder—you’re not going to get killed—but that’s the way it is.”
Things quieted down for a few weeks. On April 21 Volodymyr Zelensky, who ran on an anti-corruption platform, was elected president of Ukraine in a landslide. Right away, the White House let Pompeo know that Trump wanted Yovanovitch gone. The media storm kicked up again. On the evening of April 24, Yovanovitch hosted an embassy event to honor a young Ukrainian woman, an anti-corruption activist who had died after a sulfuric-acid attack and whose murder remained unsolved. After midnight, a call came in from the State Department: Yovanovitch was to get on the next plane home. She asked for a reason but was given none, other than concern for her security.
She was back in Washington on April 26. That was the day Pompeo, with great fanfare, unveiled his “Ethos” initiative, which included a new mission statement that the secretary himself recited before hundreds of Foreign Service officers: “I am a champion of American diplomacy … I act with uncompromising personal and professional integrity. I take ownership of and responsibility for my actions and decisions. And I show unstinting respect in word and deed for my colleagues and all who serve alongside me.” Pompeo didn’t meet with his ambassador to Ukraine after summarily recalling her, or ever again, nor did he say a public word on her behalf. Other officials told Yovanovitch that she had done nothing wrong but had somehow “lost the confidence of the president.” The department found her a temporary teaching post at Georgetown, but her career as a diplomat was over.
“I, on a personal level, felt awful for her,” Kent told the impeachment inquiry, “because it was within two months of us asking her—the undersecretary of state asking her—to stay another year.” When, in late May, Giuliani resumed his campaign of lies, telling Ukrainian journalists that Yovanovitch and Kent were part of a plot against Trump led by George Soros, there was no rebuttal from the State Department. Hale sent word that Kent should keep his head down and lower his profile on Ukraine. Kent canceled several scheduled appearances at Washington think tanks.
By then America’s Ukraine policy had fallen out of the regular State Department channels and into the hands of the “three amigos”—Ambassadors Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine, wanted to arrange a meeting between Zelensky and Trump, and in July he told Kent that he was going to see Giuliani to discuss Ukrainian investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden’s family and the 2016 election. Kent later said that when he asked Volker why he would do that, Volker replied, “If there’s nothing there, what does it matter? And if there is something there, it should be investigated.” Kent told him, “Asking another country to investigate a prosecution for political reasons undermines our advocacy of the rule of law.” But if this principle had ever had currency in the Trump administration, it no longer did.
On July 25, after Ukraine’s parliamentary elections, Trump called Zelensky and asked for “a favor”—an investigation of the Bidens that was tantamount to Ukrainian interference in the U.S. presidential campaign in exchange for the release of American military aid and a personal meeting in the Oval Office. A day or two later, Kent heard about the call from Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert in the White House, who had been among those—including Pompeo—listening in. Vindman told Kent that Trump had called Yovanovitch “bad news,” and that the conversation had gone into highly sensitive matters—so sensitive that Vindman couldn’t share them with his colleague. Kent didn’t try to learn more. For all his outspokenness in Yovanovitch’s defense, Kent wasn’t the type of official who wanted “to be in the middle of everything.” In his impeachment testimony, he never mentioned writing a dissenting cable, or speaking to the inspector general. He carefully avoided the media.
The professional code of Foreign Service officers nearly kept the story of Trump’s attempted shakedown of Zelensky a secret. “It’s not in their DNA” to go public, Tom Malinowski said. Only one bureaucrat—the whistle-blower—made it possible for the American people to find out about the quid pro quo. The complaint surfaced on September 9, just days before Zelensky was scheduled to meet CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to discuss an interview, during which he likely would have announced the investigations that Trump wanted.
On September 25, the White House released a rough transcript of the July 25 call. In it, Trump said that “the former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news” and “she’s going to go through some things.” During the impeachment inquiry Hale explained, in high bureaucratese, “That was not an operational comment that had been operationalized in any way.”
At the State Department,Ambassador Michael McKinley read the transcript and had a visceral, almost physical reaction: He was appalled. McKinley was Pompeo’s senior adviser, having been brought back from his post in Brazil to serve as a link between the secretary and the Foreign Service. He and Hale were the only career officers among the department’s leadership, but he never made it into the secretary’s inner circle of political appointees, which included Pompeo’s former business partners. Until September 25, McKinley hadn’t paid enough attention to connect the dots of the Ukraine story. Now he found that Trump’s words spoke for themselves.
The next day, McKinley picked up where Kent had left off the previous spring. According to his impeachment testimony, he went to see Pompeo and asked, “Wouldn’t it be good to put out a statement on Yovanovitch?” Pompeo listened, and then he said, “Thank you.” The conversation lasted about three minutes.
In the last days of September, McKinley kept pushing for a statement praising Yovanovitch’s professionalism and courage. He heard from eight or 10 colleagues that the State Department’s silence in the face of an ugly presidential attack was demoralizing. On September 28 he emailed five senior colleagues, including Hale, insisting that the department needed to say something. Four wrote back agreeing. Hale didn’t reply; he told a colleague that he didn’t think McKinley’s effort would go anywhere. A few hours later Pompeo’s spokesperson informed McKinley that, in order to protect Yovanovitch from undue attention, the secretary would not release a statement.
The next day, a Sunday, McKinley told his wife that, after 37 years in the Foreign Service, he had to get out right away. Though he never spoke publicly until he was subpoenaed to appear before the House during the impeachment inquiry, his departure was so sudden that it had the quality of a resignation in protest. Pompeo, known in the department for his temper and bullying, spent 20 minutes on the phone from Europe with McKinley and gave him a tough time. Later, the secretary lied in an interview with ABC, saying that McKinley could have come to see him about Yovanovitch anytime but never had.
Before leaving, McKinley paid a visit to Hale and told him, one Foreign Service officer to another, that the department’s silence was having a terrible effect on morale. Hale flatly disagreed—he asserted that morale was high. Afterward, Hale met with Pompeo and identified a different threat to morale—McKinley’s negativity.
“I was flying solo,” McKinley told the House during the impeachment inquiry. “I didn’t know what the rules of engagement were. But I did know that, as a Foreign Service officer, I would be feeling pretty alone at this point.” So he got in touch with Yovanovitch, whom he knew, and with Kent, whom he didn’t. McKinley wanted to find out how they were doing. He was surprised to learn that he was the first senior official to contact them about the transcript of the Ukraine call. Kent was picking apples with his wife in Virginia when McKinley reached him. Afterward, he had to Google McKinley to find out who he was. “He appeared to me … to be a genuinely decent person who was concerned about what was happening,” Kent said in his impeachment testimony.
In early October, after House committees issued subpoenas for documents and scheduled depositions, the State Department ordered its personnel not to cooperate. Pompeo sent a letter to Congress calling the requests “an attempt to intimidate, bully, and treat improperly the distinguished professionals of the Department of State.” He also said publicly that Congress had prevented Foreign Service officers from talking to the department’s lawyers, which wasn’t true—the lawyers wouldn’t talk to Kent, who had received a subpoena and was willing to testify. Kent felt bullied not by Congress, but by his own agency.
On October 3, the State Department’s European bureau met to discuss how to respond to the subpoenas. When Kent noted that the department was being unresponsive to Congress, a department lawyer raised his voice at Kent in front of 15 colleagues, then called him into the hall to yell some more. He was putting Kent on notice not to cooperate. Kent wrote a memo about the encounter, which he gave to McKinley, who sent it to Hale and others … and then the memo disappeared into the files with all the other documents that the department refused to turn over to Congress.
The career people testified anyway. None of them had ever received this kind of public scrutiny. Some were being regularly attacked by name on social media and right-wing websites. All of them were facing steep lawyers’ bills. (Former colleagues set up a legal fund and raised several hundred thousand dollars.) Pompeo and his State Department continued to say nothing in their defense. But one after another they came forward. Marie Yovanovitch, whose mother had just died, didn’t lose her composure when Representative Adam Schiff read aloud a nasty tweet Trump had just written about her. George Kent testified in a bow tie and matching pocket square like a throwback from an era of great diplomacy, saying with a wry smile, “You can’t promote principled anti-corruption action without pissing off corrupt people.” David Hale, pale and terse, also testified. Toward the end of his testimony, Democratic Representative Denny Heck of Washington begged Hale to say that Yovanovitch was a courageous patriot and that what had happened to her was wrong. Hale’s voice faltered as he replied, “I believe that she should have been able to stay at post and continue to do the outstanding work—”
Heck wasn’t having it. “What happened to her was wrong?”
“That’s right,” Hale said.
“Thank you for clarifying the record. Because I wasn’t sure where it was that she could go to set the record straight if it wasn’t you, sir, or where she could go to get her good name and reputation back if it wasn’t you, sir.”
Tom Malinowski, listening to his former colleagues, thought that their testimony said something about what has happened to the State Department. “There’s a lot of pent-up anger and trauma, and this was an outlet for the institution,” he said. “These men and women were speaking for their colleagues about more than just what happened with Ukraine.”
Bureaucrats never received such public praise as they did during the weeks of the impeachment inquiry. But the hearings left a misleading...
And now they're both gone. Maybe we shouldn't lead off the primary process with two of teh whitest and oldest states in the country? geez.
former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg participates in a health equity discussion in Greenville, South Carolina, on February 27, 2020. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
More data is still trickling in, but the early numbers show the two struggling to pick up support.
Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar’s campaigns have had a problem since the start. And early South Carolina exit polls confirm it: Black voters don’t back them.
According to a survey from the Washington Post, Buttigieg and Klobuchar picked up little support from black voters in the state, who make up 60 percent of the South Carolina Democratic electorate.
The exit polls, which of course are not necessarily reflective of the entirety of the final results still trickling in, show former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Buttigieg with 3 percent support among black voters and 17 percent among white voters, and Sen. Klobuchar with 1 percent support among black voters and 6 percent support among white voters. Warren, too, had a marked contrast in backing: 5 percent of black voters favored her, compared to 12 percent of white voters who did.
Zach Gibson/Getty Images
Sen. Amy Klobuchar campaigns in Richmond, Virginia, on February 29, 2020.
Their respective lack of support mean that all three are trailing Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders significantly in the state, coming in a likely distant fourth place finish at best.
South Carolina is the first big test of the amount of backing candidates can rally from black voters — and it suggests that former Vice President Joe Biden still has strong support from this key Democratic constituency. It also indicated that multiple candidates continue to struggle to connect with black voters, who make up 20 percent of the Democrats’ electorate across the country and are among the party’s most loyal voters.
Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren have all dealt, in part, with familiarity issues, which has led them to lag Sanders and Biden among black voters. But Buttigieg and Klobuchar, too, have gotten significant questions about their records on race.
These numbers indicate that all three still need to build support among black voters — and fast — if they want to establish a broad-based coalition for the nomination, and perform better in a series of diverse states, moving forward.
The latest escalation mirrors growing anti-democratic sentiment in the national GOP.
In Oregon right now, a handful of white people from the far right are holding the state government hostage.
No, it’s not another armed occupation of government buildings, like in 2016. This time it’s a handful of Oregon lawmakers who refuse to enter government buildings, thereby holding the business of the legislature hostage.
It ought to be getting more national attention, if for no other reason than it perfectly encapsulates larger national political trends. It is like a snow globe, a perfect miniature representation of what the Republican Party is becoming.
In a nutshell, Oregon Republicans are exploiting an arcane constitutional provision in order to exert veto power over legislation developed by the Democratic majority, on behalf of an almost entirely white, rural minority. Five times in the past 10 months, they have simply refused to show up for work, preventing the legislature from passing bills on guns, forestry, health care, and budgeting. The fifth walkout, over a climate change bill, is ongoing.
It is an extraordinary escalation of anti-democratic behavior from the right, gone almost completely unnoticed by the national political media. Nevertheless, it is a big deal, worth pausing to consider, not only because it is preventing Oregon from addressing climate change, but because it shows in stark terms where the national GOP is headed.
To begin with, let’s look at what’s enabling these walkouts and trace their history over the last year.
The Oregon GOP has taken up tantrums as routine practice
The Oregon state constitution contains a somewhat quirky provision in Article IV, Section 12, regarding what constitutes a quorum — the minimum number of legislators necessary for the legislature to do its business. Many state constitutions specify a quorum, but most, like Washington to the north, set it at a simple majority. That way, if a minority walks out, the legislature can still do its work.
In Oregon, a quorum is two-thirds of the legislative body — 40 out of 60 representatives or 20 out of 30 senators. Is there some governing rationale for this higher requirement? Not really. It’s just something the fledgling state of Oregon copied from Indiana when it was assembling its constitution.
As of 2018, Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, with 18 out of 30 Senate seats and 38 out of 60 House seats. This needs emphasizing, since much of the media coverage of this story bizarrely omits it: Democrats represent a large majority of Oregon voters. They have much more public support than Republicans in the state.
However, even given their small minority, if every Republican chooses to walk out of the Senate — literally refuses to show up and do their job — they can prevent a quorum, thus preventing any legislative business from being done in the Oregon legislature. (It’s especially effective in even-numbered years, when the session is only 35 days long.)
Of course, either party could have done this at any time in Oregon history when it was in the minority. They just didn’t. It was commonly understood, without needing to be stated, that walking out on the job would be a gross dereliction of duty and an insult to Oregon voters. If both parties made a practice of it, governance in the state would become completely impossible.
But these days, such democratic norms no longer restrain Republicans.
State Democrats, in the face of state schools being held hostage, caved. To persuade Republicans to come back and do their damn jobs, they agreed to table both bills for the session.
As part of the agreement, Republicans signed a one-page document pledging not to walk out again during the session and to allow work to resume on HB 2020, the carbon cap-and-trade bill.
In June 2019, just as the Oregon legislature was about to pass that cap-and-trade bill, Republicans walked out again, violating the agreement they had signed a month earlier.
In the face of this betrayal, Brown threatened to send state police after the lawmakers, but congressional Democrats mostly simpered. “I’m begging you to come back,” said Senate President Peter Courtney on the Senate floor. “I don’t want to send the state police. I don’t. I don’t.”
None of the Republicans were ever bothered by police, but in response to the threat, GOP state Sen. Brian Boquist said, on camera, addressing himself to state troopers: “Send bachelors and come heavily armed.”
People didn’t have much time to absorb the fact that an elected official had openly threatened the lives of state police, because that weekend, large crowds, including members of Oregon’s far-right militias, began amassing in the capitol. At one point, state police found the many threats from those militias sufficiently alarming to shut down the state capitol for a day. Republicans subsequently mocked Democrats for being afraid.
In the face of lies and intransigence backed by the threat of extralegal violence, Democrats ... caved again. Courtney dragged himself to the Senate floor and announced, to the great surprise of many of the bill’s supporters, that Democrats didn’t have the votes for the bill, so the Republicans could come back. (Environmental groups and bill supporters dispute Courtney’s characterization.)
Republicans thus got everything they wanted, including killing the cap-and-trade bill, with no consequences. Except for Boquist — he can only come to the capitol if he gives state police 12 hours advance notice.
Walkout No. 3
Republicans had learned their lesson. It took only until February 2020 for the first walkout of the new session, when Republicans, en masse, skipped an evening meeting.
What was the problem this time? What issue was so dire as to justify an extraordinary breach of longstanding norms?
Oh, it’s just that Democrats were working everyone too hard, moving a little too fast. “Tonight is really about pacing,” said House Minority Leader Christine Drazan. “The schedule is a little bit grueling.” It seems some of the Republicans had plans that were disrupted by the late-announced meeting.
Drazan promised to continue using walkouts to adjust the pace of the schedule. “We’ll have this conversation again tomorrow,” she said. “What does the floor look like on that day?”
Walkouts Nos. 4 and 5
In January 2020, Oregon Democrats unveiled a new version of their cap-and-trade bill, which reflected intense discussions with minority lawmakers and industry trade groups. It was a heavily compromised version of the already compromised bill that had been ready to pass in 2019.
The new plan would be implemented over three phases, with rural areas affected last. Rural fuels were exempted, along with several industries and new classes of natural gas users. It was a substantial capitulation.
This month, Republican senators walked out again, using rhetoric unchanged from before all the concessions. This time, Courtney immediately ruled out sending state troopers after them. Instead, he redoubled his begging. “I need you. I need you to help my fellow Oregonians — all of us. I need you,” he said plaintively in a radio interview. “Let’s fight other ways. Please come back to Oregon my Oregon.”
Brown was, once again, “extremely disappointed,” as was the Senate majority leader.
Today 11 Oregon Senate Republicans walked out on their responsibility to serve their constituents when they refused to show up for work. Here is my statement in response. #orpol#orlegpic.twitter.com/G5thKNHKgm
Republican process complaints have always been in bad faith
The primary Republican talking point about the cap-and-trade bill, the supposed reason it is so objectionable, is that it has been “crammed down their throat.” They said it in 2019:
And they’re still saying it today. “We think this issue is something that’s being crammed down our throats,” said the owner of a logging company, protesting in the capitol this month. The head of the state Republican Party said the bill was being “rammed through” the legislature.
The claim is demonstrably false. The cap-and-trade bill has been under development in Oregon, in some form or another, for 10 years. Just over the past two years, it has arguably been through a more comprehensive process than any bill in state history.
Over the last two years, this #orleg bill to address the climate crisis has had: 35 hours of public hearings A statewide tour with public town halls Six hours of floor debate between House Republicans and Democrats in 2019 ✅ No bill has ever had this much process. EVER. https://t.co/vG2FLQsx2X
Republicans’ objections have been heard and addressed. They just haven’t stopped the bill, and that’s what they want. It was never really about process, it’s about state government doing something they don’t want it to do (pricing carbon) in a state where they believe they ought to have veto power. They believe that rural white people and the kinds of jobs they do are more authentically Oregonian than those of city dwellers working service jobs, and thus they ought to have a greater voice in politics.
“This state was built by the timber industry and by farms, ranchers, construction and other blue collar industries,” said John Hanlin, sheriff for rural Douglas County in southern Oregon, at a protest in 2019. “Not on coffee businesses and marijuana dispensaries.”
Throughout the history of the bill, Democrats have bent over backward to accommodate Republican objections, layering on more and more process, making more and more concessions, but it hasn’t changed Republican rhetoric or behavior a whit. The objections were never made in good faith; they aren’t to the bill’s contents or process, but to its existence.
“The Democrats were just pushing it and pushing it and pushing it,” complained Republican Senate leader Herman Baertschiger Jr., justifying the latest walkout. “We had no other choice.”
But of course there was another choice: to abide by the democratic process. “We must get our way, no matter what” is not a reasonable premise to carry into a dispute in a democracy.
The ludicrous Republican demand for referendum
The second main GOP talking point is that, instead of simply voting the bill through the normal way legislatures do, Democrats should send it to voters as a direct ballot referendum.
It’s clear enough why this would serve Republican purposes. It would kick the can down the road and give them months to access billions of dollars of oil money to crush the referendum, just as oil billions crushed ballot initiatives in Washington and Colorado in 2018.
What I don’t understand is why this proposal is being taken seriously, by anyone, for even a second. It is facially absurd. The rules of the democratic process are written down in black and white. Democrats played by them. They campaigned — on cap-and-trade, among other things — and got a large majority of votes. So they are developing a bill and now they’re going to pass it. That’s how democracy works.
Republicans don’t just get to arbitrarily decide, as a defeated minority, how the majority’s bills pass, or what form they take. Their enormous sense of entitlement notwithstanding, they don’t get to rewrite the rules of democracy on the fly as it suits them, from bill to bill.
Oregon Republicans are pocketing gobs of corporate money
To hear Republicans talk, they’re just looking out for the interests of beleaguered yeoman farmers. The money tells a different story.
As this great exposé from the Oregonian’s Rob Davis documents, Oregon has the country’s loosest laws on money in politics, with no restrictions whatsoever on what corporations or individuals can donate to politicians. This has led to a flood of cash into state politics and the steady erosion of the state’s once-proud pollution and environmental laws.
Oregon is now first in the country in per-capita corporate donations to politicians; almost half the total money donated to Oregon legislators comes from corporations, far more than comes from unions or individuals.
As Davis notes, the Republicans who keep walking out on their jobs get 65 percent of their donations from corporations, in particular corporations like Koch Industries with assets that stand to be affected by cap-and-trade.
The Kochs and other energy-intensive companies covered by #HB2020 have given $160,000 to state senators' campaigns since 2009. The partisan divide is stark.
The Republicans who walked out: $117,619. The Democrats who stayed to vote: $43,250.
This is a story about large, resource-intensive corporations buying the support of legislators who then do their bidding under cover of a bunch of distracting culture-war rhetoric about elites vs. just-folks.
No, it’s not both sides
Anyone who acts alarmed about Republican behavior is inevitably reminded that state lawmakers have walked out before.
In 2001, Oregon Democrats walked out of the legislature, and in 2003, Texas Democrats did the same thing. In both cases, they were objecting to efforts by the majority to engage in the kind of gerrymandering that would stitch together future Republican majorities even if they got fewer voters.
In 2011, Wisconsin Democrats walked out; later that year, Indiana Democrats did the same. In both cases, they were objecting to bills being rushed through by small majorities, opposed by most state voters, to permanently cripple unions.
Republicans cite these cases as a defense of their actions. The media, hopelessly ensorcelled by any kind of both-sides story, has dutifully run with it, failing to note the differences in context. So it’s worth pointing out:
These examples are from almost 10 and almost 20 years ago, respectively.
Each of them was meant as an extraordinary gesture, to highlight extraordinary circumstances, taken at extraordinary political risk.
Each episode ended with the majority getting what it wanted after a short delay.
Oregon Republicans have walked out more times in the past 10 months than all Democrats have in modern history.
There is simply no precedent for what Oregon Republicans are doing, treating walk-outs as routine, using them to prevent passage of what is a fairly milquetoast set of carbon policies (less stringent than in many other states) and even to set the pace of work in the legislature. Democrats have never done anything like this, anywhere.
Calling white supremacy what it is
This is an extraordinary situation. An overwhelmingly white, rural minority of voters is holding an entire state’s business hostage. Oregon Democrats played by the rules, got more votes, and developed legislation through appropriate channels. Now fewer than a dozen lawmakers, heavily funded by the very industries they are defending, are blocking it, at will, using an anachronistic quirk of the state constitution.
There is no conceivable justification for it, no possible democratic rationale. It only makes sense in the context of white supremacy: the notion that rural white Americans are more authentically American than other groups and deserve outsized representation in its politics and veto power over its legislation.
It is no surprise that there are copious ties between the Oregon GOP and the far right. Consider TimberUnity, which passes itself off as a grassroots group of rural Oregonian loggers and truckers against the climate bill. At a January 11 “Vanguards of Victory” awards ceremony, the Oregon GOP gave the group an award.
On February 6, TimberUnity held a rally in the state capitol. The poster advertising it explicitly mirrored the poster for the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charleston, Virginia.
TimberUnity poster on the left; Unite the Right poster on the right.
Several members of the white supremacist group the Three Percenters, who also provided security at the Unite the Right rally, were seen in the crowd. Also spotted was the slogan from the far-right conspiracy network Q-Anon — “Where we go one, we go all” (WWG1WWA) — on frequent display, as it typically is at Three Percenter events.
Q-Anon slogan at a TimberUnity rally.
Angela Roman was a Republican legislative staffer and Three Percenter who ended up doing jail time for providing a firearm to a fellow Three Percenter and convicted felon. (She’s running for Congress now.) Here she is posing with Matteo Dagradi of the Proud Boys, a right-wing group that has brawled in the streets of Portland, and making the white nationalist “okay” gesture. That guy photobombing in the background? TimberUnity leader Todd Stoffel.
Angela Roman, Proud Boy Matteo Dagradi, and TimberUnity’s Todd Stoffel.
It’s all an interconnected network in the state: the far-right groups, the GOP, and the resource industries that fund them. Over and over again, this minority is allowed to assert its will at the expense of its fellow citizens, the norms of conduct that hold state government together, and democracy itself — without consequence or accountability.
It is no coincidence that Oregon is the state where a group of far-right extremists occupied government buildings in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for over a month, armed and explicitly threatening violence. Amon Bundy, the leader of that criminal occupation, was acquitted of all charges and back to his life within a year.
That makes no sense except against the background assumption of white supremacy. Who else would be allowed to do that and get away with it?
So too in the legislature. Over and over again, a handful of Oregon Republicans have held the state hostage to their demands. Yet the national media seems incapable of calling it what it is.
For example, have a look at this story from the Associated Press. It is positively surreal in its devotion to the exhausted tropes of mainstream political coverage. The debate in Oregon has become “pitched” and the episode “reveals sharp divisions.” Republicans say this, Democrats say that, he says, she says, the end.
Nowhere in the story will the reader be told that Democrats have a supermajority in the legislature. Nowhere will they be told that a small, demographically homogeneous minority is using once-extraordinary measures to routinely thwart the will of the democratically elected majority. Nowhere will they be told that the white minority holding the state hostage has been backed in the past year by the threat of far-right militia violence.
Mainstream political coverage, as we’ve seen again and again in the Trump years, is simply incapable of communicating a sense of crisis. There is only one model of story — what each side says, in equal measure — and it only serves to blur and obscure a situation in which one party, not the other, has lurched in a radically anti-democratic direction. (The local coverage from outlets like OPB is much better.)
Meanwhile, Democrats in state government wring their hands and cave to Republican demands again and again, as though it is simply a matter of course that a large majority must bend the knee to a small minority.
A recent poll showed that the Oregon public favors political accountability for the legislators walking off their jobs, but there is never accountability for tantrum-throwing white men who take government hostage. It’s not just that the law won’t punish them. They won’t even be held reputationally or rhetorically accountable. Their opponents in the Democratic Party won’t call it white supremacy. The media won’t. So they get away with it, again and again, and keep escalating.
Rob Kerr/AFP via Getty Images
Trump, at a rally in Oregon.
Oregon Republicans are national Republicans in miniature
The situation facing the Oregon GOP mirrors the one facing the GOP at the national level; every chapter of the story above mirrors a national chapter.
In national US politics, as in Oregon, it’s increasingly clear that the population is urbanizing and diversifying and there simply aren’t enough rural and suburban white Christians to constitute a majority anymore. If that demographic — which has now become an intense, all-encompassing political identity — is to maintain its traditional hold on power, it can only do so through increasingly anti-democratic means.
In Oregon, that means exploiting the quorum rule and unlimited corporate money. At the national level, it means exploiting rural overrepresentation in the Senate, the electoral college, voter suppression, the filibuster ... and unlimited corporate money.
In national politics, as in Oregon, anti-democratic tactics and rhetoric are escalating on the right, but there is little pushback or accountability. They pay no penalty for lying, violating norms, or taking legislative hostages, so they keep doing it, keep escalating. The institutions around them seem unwilling or unable to draw lines in the sand, and when they do, as when Democrats impeached Trump, they find those lines blown aside by partisan unity.
Republicans learn again and again that if they stick together, they can get away with anything — stolen elections, misbegotten wars, botched disaster responses, recessions, and now an openly criminal president. As long as they are a unified “side,” media and other institutions will treat them as a legitimate side, no matter what they do.
Oregon still has a chance to reject — or at least contain — white supremacy. Hopefully it does a better job than the country of which it is a part.
"Intel's security plans sound a lot like 'we're going to catch up to AMD,'" argues FOSS advocate and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter at Ars Technica, citing a "present-and-future" presentation by Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate at Intel's Security Day that promised a future with Full Memory Encryption but began with Intel SGX (launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015).
Salter describes SGX as "one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorized users, up to and including the system administrators themselves."
SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU -- and even then, it is only decrypted at the request of instructions executed from within the enclave itself. As a result, even someone with root (system administrator) access to the running system can't usefully read or alter SGX-protected enclaves. This is intended to allow confidential, high-stakes data processing to be safely possible on shared systems -- such as cloud VM hosts. Enabling this kind of workload to move out of locally owned-and-operated data centers and into massive-scale public clouds allows for less expensive operation as well as potentially better uptime, scalability, and even lower power consumption.
Intel's SGX has several problems. The first and most obvious is that it is proprietary and vendor-specific -- if you design an application to utilize SGX to protect its memory, that application will only run on Intel processors... Finally, there are potentially severe performance impacts to utilization of SGX. IBM's Danny Harnik tested SGX performance fairly extensively in 2017, and he found that many common workloads could easily see a throughput decrease of 20 to 50 percent when executed inside SGX enclaves. Harnik's testing wasn't 100 percent perfect, as he himself made clear -- in particular, in some cases his compiler seemed to produce less-optimized code with SGX than it had without. Even if one decides to handwave those cases as "probably fixable," they serve to highlight an earlier complaint -- the need to carefully develop applications specifically for SGX use cases, not merely flip a hypothetical "yes, encrypt this please" switch....
After discussing real-world use of SGX, Rao moved on to future Intel technologies -- specifically, full-memory encryption. Intel refers to its version of full-memory encryption as TME (Total Memory Encryption) or MKTME (Multi-Key Total Memory Encryption). Unfortunately, those features are vaporware for the moment. Although Intel submitted an enormous Linux kernel patchset last May for enabling those features, there are still no real-world processors that offer them... This is probably a difficult time to give exciting presentations on Intel's security roadmap. Speculative prediction vulnerabilities have hurt Intel's processors considerably more than their competitors', and the company has been beaten significantly to market by faster, easier-to-use hardware memory encryption technologies as well. Rao and Woodgate put a brave face on things by talking up how SGX has been and is being used in Azure. But it seems apparent that the systemwide approach to memory encryption already implemented in AMD's Epyc CPUs -- and even in some of their desktop line -- will have a far greater lasting impact.
Intel's slides about their own upcoming full memory encryption are labeled "innovations," but they look a lot more like catching up to their already-established competition.
Pete Buttigieg’s decision to drop out of the race two days before Super Tuesday has hurt Sen. Bernie Sanders in our primary forecast. Sanders’s chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates fell from 28 percent to 23 percent. And the likelihood that no candidate gets a majority rose slightly from 59 to 64 percent. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s majority chances were unchanged.
Sanders is still the favorite to win a plurality of delegates, but those chances dropped slightly too, from 63 percent to 60 percent, while Biden’s plurality chances increased from 34 to 36 percent.
Buttigieg himself had almost no chance of getting a delegate plurality or majority, according to the model, so these changes purely reflect the effects that his dropping out has on the other candidates.
At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. How does a candidate dropping out increase the likelihood of no majority? Shouldn’t it clear the field up and make it easier to achieve a majority?
The key is in how the Democrats’ delegate math works. The rules require candidates to receive at least 15 percent of the vote, typically, to win delegates statewide or at the district-level.
Buttigieg was projected to get under 15 percent in the vast majority of states and districts on Super Tuesday. Thus, his votes were essentially wasted. Redistributing his votes to other candidates will help them to meet the 15 percent threshold, however. In particular, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were both close to the 15 percent line in many states or districts. So even an extra percentage point or two would help them get over that line in more places. For instance, both Bloomberg and Warren were projected to finish with an average of 14 percent of the vote in California before Buttigieg’s dropout. Now, they’re forecasted for 16 percent instead.
Biden was also projected to finish under 15 percent in some states and districts — so Buttigieg’s dropout helps him out also in a few places. Biden went from a projected 14 percent of the vote to 16 percent in Minnesota, for example.
Conversely, Sanders was already projected to get 15 percent almost everywhere. So although he will pick up a few Buttigieg voters, they don’t necessarily translate to more delegates.
How does our model decide where to assign Buttigieg’s voters? As described here, we use a series of priors based on the positioning of the candidates on ideological and other dimensions. These are not purely based on left-right ideology either. For instance, the model recognizes that both Buttigieg and Warren tend to appeal to college-educated voters, and thus they share some voters despite their ideological differences.
The model also considers the overall popularity of each candidate. So because Sanders is currently the most popular Democrat in the field, he’s likely to pick up some of Buttigieg’s support too.
Overall, the model has Buttigieg’s support being divided relatively evenly between Warren, Biden, Bloomberg, Sanders and — in the places where she’s strong — Sen. Amy Klobuchar. That seems broadly in line with polls, which are somewhat inconsistent about where Buttigieg’s support will go.
Of course, neither the model nor previous polling of the race consider the context in which Buttigieg dropped out, which comes amidst an increasing effort by moderate Democratic voters and party leaders to get behind Biden. If his voters take Buttigieg’s dropout as a signal that they should switch to Biden, there’s more upside for Biden than our model implies.
And overall, Buttigieg’s dropout contributes to the uncertainty surrounding what will happen on Super Tuesday. There were already a lot of challenges in assessing the current state of the race following Biden’s dramatic surge in South Carolina — but this adds yet another complication. Although the model may point in broadly the right direction — this is not great news for Sanders — this is one of those times when we mostly just have to wait and see what happens.
Signs began to show Monday that key pillars of the agreement to negotiate an end to the Afghanistan war were starting to buckle, just hours after the United States signed what was billed as a historic agreement with the Taliban.
Also on Monday, the Taliban refused to take part in intra-Afghan talks, one of the conditions of a full withdrawal of U.S. troops, until the Afghan government releases roughly 5,000 Taliban prisoners. The agreement calls for the prisoners to be released in exchange for up to 1,000 Afghan government captives by March 10.
Less than 24 hours after the agreement was signed, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, whose government was not involved in the U.S.-Taliban deal, rejected the Taliban’s demand.
"The reduction in violence will continue with a goal to reach a full ceasefire,” he told reporters in Kabul. "There is no commitment to releasing 5,000 prisoners."
The deal, which would result in all U.S. troops withdrawing from the country in 14 months, is facing some pushback on the homefront from one of President Donald Trump's closest allies.
"Let's don't do in Afghanistan what Obama did in Iraq: pull the plug on the place and allow radical Islam to come roaring back," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday on "Fox & Friends". "We got a chance to end this Afghanistan war smartly and well but we're gonna need a residual U.S. force, a counterterrorism presence for years to come because I don't trust the Taliban to police al Qaeda and ISIS."
On the most recent attacks, Afghan ambassador to the U.S. Roya Rahmani, who has just returned from Kabul, pointed to Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s comments in Kabul on Saturday promising a U.S. response if the Taliban do not abide by their commitments to maintain the reduction in violence.
“I have been told that the U.S. forces are ready, that if there is a violation they have full preparedness to react to that, “ Rahmani said at the embassy in Washington on Monday. “If Taliban want peace they should stop killing Afghans,” Rahmani said.
Rahmani noted that the one-week reduction in violence, which Esper said on Saturday marked the lowest level in years, has given the Afghan people “a glimmer of hope” for an enduring peace. But at the same time, officials in Kabul are concerned about the continued differences between the Taliban and Afghan government on key issues such as protecting women’s rights and other democratic values.
“We are hoping that we will arrive to a political settlement, that instead of meeting on the battlefield we will see them in a political arena,” she said.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Sunday explained the discrepancies in a now-contentious story he's told about being arrested while attempting to meet Nelson Mandela.
Biden has come under fire after claiming — then retracting — that he was arrested while traveling to South Africa in the 1970s while trying to see the then-imprisoned anti-apartheid leader. He claimed he was arrested along with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, but Young said he was never arrested while in the country.
Biden recanted the story Friday and explained on “Fox News Sunday” that though he was not arrested, he was held up at the airport for refusing to use a whites-only entrance shortly after arriving in the country.
"The Afrikaners took me off the plane and took me in one direction, wanted me to go through a white-only door, and in fact I wouldn't move," Biden said. "I said everybody else is going through another door, I'm going with the black delegation that I came with."
He continued: "They would not let me move anywhere. I guess I should've said I was detained; I was not able to move forward."
South Africa in the apartheid era was marred by police brutality and arbitrary detentions. Biden said that was not what happened to him but that the anecdote was still a testament to his fierce opposition to apartheid at the time.
Mike Bloomberg speaks at his Super Tuesday night event in West Palm Beach, Florida, on March 3, 2020. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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Hillary Clinton testifies before Congress in October 2015. | Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
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Chris Matthews received criticism for his interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren following the ninth Democratic primary debate where he pressed her on her line of questioning toward Mike Bloomberg and his treatment of women. | Bridget Bennett/AFP via Getty Images
People wear face masks at Los Angeles International Airport on March 2, 2020. | Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
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Trump during a meeting with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and pharmaceutical executives on Monday. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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President Donald Trump speaks as Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch looks on during a ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House. | Eric Thayer/Getty Images
former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg participates in a health equity discussion in Greenville, South Carolina, on February 27, 2020. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
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Moving toward minority rule. | Shutterstock
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