James.galbraith

If there’s one consistent legal theory that Rudy Giuliani has embodied over his entire stint as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, it is this: It can’t be illegal if you’re doing it out in the open. Whether it’s blackmailing a porn star, lying to Congress, or attacking Trump’s previous lawyer, Giuliani is willing not just to defend the action on national television, but to double down on how okay, no, how perfectly legal, no, dammit, how great this move really is. Again and again Giuliani has been Trump’s criminal icebreaker, out in front, making claims that seem incredibly over the top … until they turn out to be just exactly what Trump has been doing all along.

So it seems only right that, in the midst of impeachment proceedings in which the main concern is Donald Trump’s attempt to solicit false information about political opponents from Ukrainian officials, Giuliani is … in Ukraine, soliciting false information about Trump’s political opponents. And no one should be surprised to learn that he’s bragging about it.

Giuliani is meeting with corrupt officials who lost their posts in past anticorruption efforts and pro-Russian legislators who oppose Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to create a “documentary” that openly supports the conspiracy theories that Trump was demanding of Zelensky. But he’s not waiting for that documentary to mount his attacks.

In a series of tweets on Thursday night and Friday morning, Giuliani unspooled a series of attacks on Vice President Joe Biden, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and President Barack Obama. Giuliani claimed that Yovanovitch disbursed billions of dollars in aid to her “favored NGOs” and that she “directed the police not to investigate.” That claim—that Yovanovitch was somehow providing “do not prosecute” lists—was part of the original smear that Giuliani brought against Yovanovitch in his successful campaign to get her removed from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

But Giuliani didn’t stop there. He leveled the same charges against Obama and Biden. In his latest series of tweets, Giuliani claims that over $5 billion was “wasted” in Ukraine, with Biden acting as the “point man” in the disbursal and Obama ordering Ukrainian police not to investigate.

Giuliani’s claims are beyond ridiculous, his witnesses are on the far side of disreputable, and what he is doing is impossibly dangerous.

With Giuliani’s actions, Trump has moved beyond backroom demands for claims against his political opponents. This is Trump’s personal attorney, in the open, on the air, in front of the public, conspiring with foreign officials—and foreign criminals—for the express purpose of generating claims meant to hurt Trump’s political opponents.

There’s no doubt that Trump will claim Giuliani is doing this on his own. There’s no doubt that Giuliani will claim his actions are protected. And there’s no doubt that the media will fail to refute either of those claims.

With Russia, Trump learned he could get away with foreign collusion. With Ukraine, Trump confirmed that Republicans would back him no matter what. This is what comes next.

Several correctional officers at the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation have been suspended after a basic training class photo surfaced of approximately 30 trainees giving the Nazi salute.

BREAKING: Photo released that has led to numerous DOC employees being suspended pic.twitter.com/Lee98ldVl2

— Leslie Rubin (@LeslieRubinWCHS) December 5, 2019

"A number of employees of the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation have been suspended amid an investigation into a photograph showing a training class apparently giving a Nazi salute, officials said."

Apparently? https://t.co/oeXs6KpkRv

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 6, 2019

WCHS reports: “The cabinet secretary for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety has sent a letter to all employees of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation condemning the photo. The class was conducted Oct. 21 through Nov. 27.”

Governor Jim Justice released a statement: “I condemn the photo of Basic Training Class #18 in the strongest possible terms. I have directed Secretary Jeff Sandy of the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety to continue actively investigating this incident and I have ordered the termination of all those that are found to be involved in this conduct. This will not be tolerated on my watch – within the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation – or within any agency of state government.”

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Anyone else think talking to (some) people just feels like a cutscene with quick-time events you have to pass in order to maintain your cover as a polite, socially interested human being in order to progress to the more actually interesting parts of your day?

No, just me?

The post Quick Time appeared first on Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic.

A full evaluation of the information collected by the House impeachment inquiry shows that Rudy Giuliani’s role in Ukraine was far from a solo act. In addition to the more visible connections that Giuliani made in pulling the strings of U.S. ambassadors, his scheme involved a whole host of Republican heavyweights, including attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, the indicted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and The Hill editor John Solomon. All of them were working together in a giant ratf#ucking conspiracy to smear both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden while exonerating Russia of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and giving Donald Trump a boost for 2020. But there was one more critical player in this conspiracy whose importance wasn’t really appreciated until all the evidence was in: Republican Rep. Devin Nunes.

Nunes’ role in all the House investigations of Donald Trump has been … unique. From the moment Trump arrived, Nunes has appeared desperate to prove his loyalty, even if that meant leaping from an Uber, disappearing into the night, or skulking around the White House bushes. Nunes was one of the first Republicans to go all-in for Trump, utterly humiliating himself as he turned the House Intelligence Committee into not just a rubber stamp, but an active defense for Trump’s Russia scandal. Nunes’ actions ultimately resulted in his stepping down from chairing hearings on the Russia investigation and having to make a trip to the Ethics Committee after he repeatedly mishandled classified information in a way that threatened U.S. intelligence assets.

When Nunes was pushed out of the lead chair, it took away his power to crank out Trump-friendly reports stamped with the Intelligence Committee seal, but it only seems to have deepened Nunes’ resolve to prove himself the most amphibian of toadies. As it turns out, well before the whistleblower made a peep, Nunes was neck-deep in Trump’s Ukraine scandal, on multiple fronts. 

In the middle of the public impeachment hearings, it became clear that Nunes was sitting on the wrong side of the table. And, as CNN reports, further evidence has only made it more clear that Nunes may have been second only to Giuliani in terms of his involvement. Not only was Nunes deeply involved, but he was also deeply deceptive about his role. Even as testimony about Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and other figures in the scandal was coming from witnesses before the committee, Nunes continued his daily act of attacking the process, demeaning witnesses, and shouting about “Chalupa!” all the while failing to mention that both his office, and his person, had been integral parts of the scheme.

Nunes not only participated in the Ukraine scandal for months before the hearings took place; he also was absolutely dishonest about his actions in his dealings with fellow members of the Intelligence Committee. And analysis of the evidence shows that it’s even worse than it at first seems.

It’s now clear that, at a very minimum, both Nunes and two of his senior aides were directly involved in working with Giuliani, Parnas, and others to forward the Ukraine scandal well before it became the subject of hearings. Nunes and his aides took part in a series of “strategy meetings” with Giuliani and others in which they planned the actions Giuliani would take to force out U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, solicit lies concerning past investigations, and pressure Ukrainian officials to give Trump the announcements of investigations he wanted. Nunes mentioned none of this to his fellow representatives.

Phone records released as part of the inquiry report show that both Nunes and his staff were working closely with Giuliani, Parnas, and Solomon in coordinating the efforts to solicit foreign interference. 

Despite multiple back-and-forth calls—including one lasting over 8 minutes just in the brief period covered by the records—Nunes claims he doesn’t know Parnas. Nunes also denies claims by Parnas that he met with Ukrainian officials in Vienna. Nunes is even denying that he made a trip to Vienna. However, as several sources have pointed out, if he was not in Vienna, then Nunes is guilty of another crime: falsifying expense reports to the House.

It’s clear that Devin Nunes has lied about his role in the Ukraine scandal. He’s still lying about it.

Federal prosecutors, who are still adding charges against Parnas and Fruman, may work their way through Giuliani and eventually find cause to indict Devin Nunes. But the House shouldn’t wait.

Nunes needs to climb down from his chair on the sidelines and take the one at center stage, where he and his aides need to answer questions about his actions in Ukraine. He can do it for the Intelligence Committee, or he can do it for the Ethics Committee, but he needs to do it soon.

Customs and Border Protection officials claimed that it was an agent who found the body of a 16-year-old boy who died under their watch this past May, but new surveillance video obtained by ProPublica shows that’s a lie: it was the child’s cell mate, another young boy, who found the body and alerted staff.

In fact, the video continues to further confirm that Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez didn’t get the urgent attention he needed after developing a 103-degree fever while in custody in Texas. He was prescribed Tamiflu, but the video shows “that Border Patrol agents and health care workers at the Weslaco holding facility missed increasingly obvious signs that his condition was perilous,” according to ProPublica. For one, officials’ “subject activity log” doesn’t match up with what video is known to exist.

“An agent checked on him three times during the early morning hours in which he slipped from unconsciousness to death, but reported nothing alarming about the boy,” ProPublica said. “The video shows the only way CBP officials could have missed Carlos’ crisis is that they weren’t looking.” In the video, Carlos can be seen writhing in agony, finally stumbling to the toilet, where he dies. His cellmate, who was wrapped in a foil blanket and asleep, wakes up and finds his body. Only when he alerted staff does an agent finally appear on video.

“The video and other records reviewed by ProPublica document numerous missteps in the days leading up to Carlos’ final hours on the floor of Cell 199,” the report continues. “Independent medical experts pointed in particular to the decision to send a 16-year-old suffering from the flu to a holding cell rather than a hospital as a pivotal mistake.” Border officials had already put Carlos’ health in harm’s way before this: kids aren’t supposed to be in Border Patrol custody for more than three days, but he was kept in custody for nearly a week.

In July, a medical report concluded that the boy, who was just weeks away from turning 17, died from flu complicated by pneumonia and sepsis. A boy in his condition should have been rushed to a hospital right away, not thrown into a cold border cell. “A veteran forensic pathologist who reviewed Hernandez’s autopsy, as well as the three other autopsies available for migrant children who died in custody, said she was alarmed at the conditions the children were kept in,” Texas Monthly reported.

What’s also alarming is that we are being lied to about the deaths of kids under U.S. watch. “We now know that CBP lied about Carlos Vasquez’s death—CBP failed to provide critically necessary medical care and failed to notice his death until his cellmate discovered his body,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus tweeted. “This is criminal negligence,” the group continued, saying members “will demand answers and accountability from CBP.”

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Cory Booker and Julián Castro are taking aim at the Democratic National Committee over a primary process they say is excluding them from this month’s debate but allowing a billionaire to buy his way on to the stage.

California Sen. Kamala Harris’ abrupt departure from the 2020 race Tuesday has exposed the lack of diversity among the remaining group of top candidates. Despite falling from the top tier, Harris was the leading candidate of color and the only minority candidate to qualify for the Dec. 19 debate in Los Angeles.

With her exit, prompted by a lack of financial resources to sustain a viable campaign, the current lineup of qualified debate participants are all white: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, however, are on the cusp of making the cut.

The Booker and Castro campaigns say Harris’ announcement triggered an outpouring of financial support for them. Booker had the best online fundraising day of his campaign on Wednesday, and Castro had the best fundraising day of this quarter on Tuesday. But that momentum is unlikely to earn them a lectern at the upcoming debate, as both candidates have little chance of reaching the 4 percent threshold in four approved polls before next Thursday’s deadline.

At a campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday morning, Booker opened his address by praising his “friend” Harris as a barrier-breaking politician whose candidacy he said inspired black youth. But at the same time, he blasted the system that he said caused her to end her campaign before a single vote was cast.

“What message is that sending, that we heralded the most diverse field in our history, and now we’re seeing people like her dropping out of this campaign, not because Iowa voters had the voice?” Booker said. “Voters did not determine her destiny.”

“I cannot tell you how much I believe in our primaries. And I’ve seen folk here in Iowa belie what all the predictions are and show us what real viability is,” Booker added, implicitly criticizing DNC rules that factor polling and grassroots fundraising into who can qualify for the debates. “It was this state that set a trajectory for the first black man in American history to become president — and, frankly, somebody that was way behind Hillary Clinton right now in the polls [at] that time.”

Later Thursday, Castro will host a campaign call with reporters to discuss the state of the presidential primary and Democratic debates. In a fundraising email Wednesday, he, too, criticized the DNC’s debate rules for hurting candidates of color and disenfranchising minority voters.

“[W]ith the news of Senator Harris dropping out of the race, there are currently no candidates of color who have met the DNC’s requirements to qualify for the next debate,” Castro wrote. “This process needs to be fixed.”

Even Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist who has spent more than $60 million since launching his campaign in July, called for the DNC to “open the debate requirements for January so that more candidates can participate.”

“One of the strengths of the Democratic Party is that it represents every community in our great nation,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “In order to defeat Donald Trump, Democrats need to engage voters from every part of the country, and that means making sure voters hear from a diverse group of candidates before they select our nominee.”

Despite the criticism from candidates, no campaigns have recommended an alternative set of criteria for debates.

In a statement to POLITICO, the DNC defended its process, which allowed up to 20 candidates to participate in the first two set of debates and has had at least 10 candidates on every stage so far.

“This has been the most inclusive debate process with more women and candidates of color participating in more debates than billionaires,” DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said. “While we are legally required to have objective criteria for each debate, our qualifying criteria has stayed extremely low throughout this entire process.”

December’s qualification criteria included having 200,000 unique donors and at least 4 percent support in four approved polls.

“Nobody who has failed to reach 4 percent at this point in the race has gone on to be the nominee, and our debate criteria reflects that,” Hinojosa said. “In addition, we have made diversity a priority by requiring that every debate have women and people of color as moderators. We’ve never seen a political party take this many steps to be inclusive.”

Booker, whose campaign has shifted resources in a so-far failed effort to boost his polling numbers, made a direct plea Thursday.

“I’m here to ask for your support,” he told the audience, who applauded and briefly chanted “Cory! Cory!” “Hold on, let me be more blunt: I’m asking you when your caller ID is showing that some pollster’s calling you, pick up the phone and answer, please. Choose me. Choose us.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Just how far will Republicans go in following President Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia? An answer may be crystallizing as the GOP mobilizes its defense of the president against impeachment.

Both congressional Republicans and conservative commentators are defending Trump from impeachment partly by accusing Ukraine of intervening against him in the 2016 presidential election—despite repeated warnings from national-security and intelligence officials that those claims are not only baseless, but advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of discrediting Ukraine.

Earlier in Trump’s presidency, many Republicans sought to distance themselves from his warm tone toward Putin. But just this week alone, a number of Republican lawmakers, the official House Republican report rebutting impeachment, and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson have repeated Kremlin lines on Ukraine.

This flurry of GOP rhetoric comes as Democrats are raising alarm about the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to take action on the DETER Act, a bipartisan bill that would impose sanctions on Russia if it interferes again in 2020.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the act’s sponsor, has been unsuccessfully pressing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to attach the bill to a defense-authorization bill now in conference between the House and Senate, which would ensure its passage.

“Nobody has provided any substantive justification for opposing this measure,” Van Hollen told me in an interview. “All the testimony has been supportive of the DETER Act. And yet when you get behind closed doors, it’s not that anyone says they are opposed to it; they just won’t engage. McConnell would like to see this defeated without any of his fingerprints on it, but his fingerprints are there because he has refused to engage.”

Against the backdrop of Trump’s rhetorical warmth toward Putin, congressional Republicans have produced a mixed record on Russia. In 2017, virtually all Republicans joined with Democrats to pass legislation that prevented Trump from unwinding sanctions on Russia that former President Barack Obama imposed after the Kremlin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Most House Republicans also voted earlier this year to block the administration from ending sanctions against the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. And many congressional Republicans loudly criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria earlier this year, which was widely viewed as benefiting Russia’s position in the region.

But at the same time, the Republican-controlled Senate allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with lifting sanctions against Deripaska in January. Democrats also grouse that Senate Republicans have looked the other way as Trump has failed to fully implement the sanctions legislation passed in 2017. And Senate GOP leaders have blocked action on the two bipartisan bills targeting Russia, the DETER Act and the broader Defending American Security From Kremlin Aggression Act.

Impeachment is now providing a new test case to measure how far Trump has steered congressional Republicans toward greater accommodation of Russia.

This new front opened when Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly insisted during last month’s impeachment hearings that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election against Trump. That drew a stern rebuke from one witness asked to testify, the former Trump National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill, who warned that congressional Republicans were spreading “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

[Read: The first impeachment witness to go after Republicans]

But Hill’s words have not stopped Republicans from reprising those arguments. In late November, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana claimed during a television interview that Ukraine, not Russia, might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016. After retreating from that claim, he went on Meet the Press on Sunday and equated public criticism of Trump by some Ukrainian officials with Russia’s systematic interference campaign in 2016.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, during its investigation of 2016 election meddling, found no evidence of Ukrainian interference. But when asked about Kennedy’s comments this week, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s chairman, came closer to endorsing rather than repudiating them.

“Every elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton,” Burr told NBC. “Is that very different than the Russians being for Donald Trump?” Burr went on to liken Russia’s massive intelligence and hacking campaign to occasional public comments by Ukrainian officials critical of Trump. “The president can say that they meddled because they had a preference, the elected officials,” Burr said. Other Republican senators, including John Barrasso of Wyoming, offered similar arguments this week.

The report released on Monday by House Republicans likewise blurred the difference. “Publicly available—and irrefutable—evidence shows how senior Ukrainian government officials sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in opposition to President Trump’s candidacy,” the report insisted.

Tucker Carlson took these arguments to new heights on his show Monday night, not only minimizing Russian involvement in 2016 but questioning why the U.S. was opposing its incursion into Ukraine at all. “I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine,” Carlson insisted.

[Read: Why Trump’s Republican Party is embracing Russia]

No leading congressional Republicans have yet gone so far. But Republican foreign-policy experts are still worried about the attempts by GOP leaders to defend Trump by disparaging Ukraine.

“For starters, you end up validating the Kremlin line which they have been peddling since 2016: Yes, something happened, but it was because Ukraine did it and not us,” says Richard Fontaine, who runs the nonpartisan Center for a New American Security and was the top foreign-policy adviser to the late Senator John McCain of Arizona. “It’s one thing if Putin says these things, or if Kremlin spokespeople say these things; people, I hope, will take it with a gigantic mountain of salt. But when you have U.S. elected leaders saying these things, it gives it a significant dose of credibility, and that’s not a good thing.”

David Hale, an undersecretary in Trump’s own State Department, expressed that concern at a Senate hearing on Tuesday. When asked about the national-security ramifications of the rhetoric, Hale said pointedly, “It does not serve our interests.”

The accusations against Ukraine have drawn forceful pushback this week from Democrats, but only a few Republicans—most directly Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—have openly condemned them. “What you are seeing unfortunately is Republicans wanting to just adopt and parrot the Trump talking points, which also coincide with the Putin talking points,” Van Hollen said.

The big question now is how much of the GOP’s shifting tone on Russia reflects a lasting change, versus a temporary alignment with Trump or a tactical maneuver in the impeachment struggle.

Under Trump, the two party’s coalitions have unquestionably switched places on Russia. Through the early part of this century, more Republican than Democratic voters typically expressed negative views toward Russia. But since Trump’s election in 2016, Republicans have been more likely than Democrats to express a positive view about Russia.

Even before Trump’s election, some social conservatives lauded Putin as a defender of conservative social values and a potential partner in the fight against Islamic extremism, as Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top campaign aide and White House adviser, did in a 2014 speech. But the big movement in the GOP, according to polls, came after Trump started touting the potential benefits of closer relations with Putin—and questioning whether Russia actually interfered in 2016. In a poll by the Chicago Council released last February, just over half of Republican voters said the U.S. should seek a cooperative relationship with Russia, while nearly two-thirds of Democrats said America should mostly seek to contain Moscow. Among Republicans younger than 45, three-fifths wanted the U.S. to pursue a friendlier relationship with Russia.

Still, while more Republicans than Democrats now express positive opinions about Russia, even a large chunk of Republican voters express unfavorable views about Moscow and Putin, surveys have found. That encourages some GOP foreign-policy experts to believe the party’s flirtation with Russia may not outlast Trump.

Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who served as a National Security Council aide to President George W. Bush, told me Trump’s accommodation of Russia is unlikely to precipitate any sort of lasting change. He argued that there is still enough skepticism in the party about Trump’s policy toward Russia—and the country’s international role more broadly—that the president risks eruptions of discontent that force him to retreat, like those he confronted over his withdrawal from Syria. Even inside the administration, he noted, most foreign-policy experts remain dubious of Putin, which helps explain why the administration’s actions toward Russia have sometimes been tougher than Trump’s accommodating rhetoric.

“No one knows for sure, including the president,” how far he can push the party, Feaver said. “The president is wandering around a mine field and doesn’t always know when he is going to step on a mine.”

That may be true. But the willingness of more congressional Republicans to amplify widely discredited arguments against Ukraine—despite repeated warnings from conservative national-security professionals that they are advancing Russian propaganda in the process—suggests that their tolerance for Trump’s repositioning of the party on Russia is only growing.

As Fontaine told me, historically, “one of the reasons people were attracted to the Republicans was because they were the party skeptical of the regime in Moscow.” That’s one more Republican tradition Trump has tossed onto the ash heap of history.

Republicans have already deployed their primary defense of Donald Trump through constant attacks on the impeachment process and by attacking Democrats. But simply throwing up a constant stream of objections and tarring Rep. Adam Schiff for simply chairing a committee, or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for insisting on the role of Congress, isn’t sufficient. As The Washington Post reports, Republicans have already floated 26 different claims in defense of Donald Trump’s actions in Ukraine. Twenty-six.

Those defenses run the gamut from no quid pro quo, to no corrupt intent, to Lindsey Graham claiming that Trump isn’t competent enough to engage in a quid pro quo. And that’s not even all the excuses that include the word “quid.” At the outskirts, the excuses start with Trump’s claim of phone call perfection, and go all the way to Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy going all-in on the CrowdStrike conspiracy to openly promote the idea that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC in 2016.

In the next two weeks, as the House drafts articles of impeachment, brings them before the House Judiciary Committee for review, then moves them to the full House for a vote, Republicans will continue to tear at the process and attempt to undermine the seriousness of the charges. But it’s when things move to the Senate after the first of the year that Republicans can be expected to fully unload every every act of a three-ring circus in an attempt to make the impeachment of Donald Trump a good thing for Republicans.

Republicans in the House have already made clear what that process would look like for them—they would drag Hunter Biden into the Senate in an attempt to flip the script and make this not an impeachment of Trump, but a fulfillment of his conspiracy theory claims. They would strip the whistleblower of anonymity and place him solidly in the glare of the spotlights, burying Trump’s actions beneath personal attacks. And they would pull Schiff into the hearing in an attempt to make conducting an impeachment inquiry itself an offense.

Most of all, Republicans are determined that, despite months of claiming that they were concerned that Trump’s impeachment be handled in the same way as previous impeachments, there will be no statement—either live or recorded—from Trump himself. Meanwhile, other witnesses will be expected to appear in person, as they were not in 1998, so that they can be properly punished for daring to speak up.

Republican senators have actually been meeting with White House counsels for weeks, working out a process that protects Trump and turns the impeachment trial into a trial of Democrats. On Wednesday, as the House Judiciary Committee was holding its first hearing, White House attorneys were again meeting with Republican senators to “strategize” on the hearings.

Both Trump and White House attorneys were giving “bring it on” signals via Twitter and interviews on Thursday morning. That could be because they’re happy with their strategy. Or it could have been a last-minute attempt to get Nancy Pelosi to delay. If the latter … it didn’t work.

Donald Trump’s personal attorney is back in Kyiv. And this time Rudy Giuliani isn’t just trying to find down-and-out Ukrainians willing to lie about Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton; he’s there to set up a whole alternative “justice” system, one that connects crooked legislators in Ukraine with equally crooked legislators in the United States. It’s like a pipeline deal, where what’s flowing through the pipe is pure corruption.

In all the testimony that was heard in the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry, there was one factor that came up over, and over, and over—Giuliani’s derailing of the normal diplomatic process and attempts to suborn lies to support Trump’s conspiracy theories. Witness after witness made it clear that Trump’s personal attorney was undercutting normal government channels, confusing Ukrainian officials, and deeply damaging efforts to deal with genuine corruption. So naturally, even as the House Judiciary Committee was conducting its first day of hearings on Trump’s impeachment, Giuliani was back in Ukraine … undercutting diplomats, confusing officials, and showing Ukrainians what real corruption looks like.

Back in May, Giuliani declared that he had someone ready to testify in support of Trump’s favorite conspiracies in the form of former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. These claims became the centerpiece of an article in The New York Times and multiple scathing editorials from The Hill’s John Solomon. But Lutsenko was lying—and he admitted as much only days later. 

But now, with his work out in the open and defended by the whole Republican Party, Giuliani isn’t just looking for liars—he’s looking to build a whole smear network. The Washington Post reports that Giuliani has connected to a group of former and current Ukrainian officials in an effort to create an entire anti-Biden “documentary” filled with any lies they can dream up. And this effort includes letters sent back to the United States to secure participation from “key Republicans”—including Lindsay Graham, Devin Nunes, and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

Donald Trump’s personal attorney is openly, actively engaged in a conspiracy with foreign officials to generate propaganda to damage a candidate in a U.S. election. And he’s inviting Republican members of Congress and a White House official to join in.

Already, the Ukrainians who have teamed up with Giuliani are giving Trump what he wanted. Two members of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s single-body legislature, appeared in Kyiv last week to announce that the prosecutor general was opening a new investigation into Burisma Holdings, the company’s founder, and Hunter Biden, who served on the company’s board. On the other hand, the actual prosecutor general’s office made it clear that there were no such investigations either underway or planned.

But then, as was pointed up many times during the impeachment, Trump doesn’t care about an investigation. He just wants the announcement.

Giuliani is getting Trump exactly what he wanted—people willing to lie on camera, to support two conspiracy theories that not only justify Trump’s attacks on Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, but also exonerate Vladimir Putin. He’s doing this even as his former partners in this effort are stuck in the United States after being indicted on a whole raft of federal charges. He’s doing this because he, like Trump, is resting comfortably in thinking that he’s not just above the law, but completely outside it. That there is absolutely nothing he can do, no matter how blatant, that won’t be defended by the Republican Party. If he had any doubts, watching the Republican actions in the Wednesday impeachment hearing surely made him feel all better.

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A new Joe Biden ad shows world leaders laughing at Trump and includes footage from this week’s NATO summit in London.

The world is laughing at President Trump. They see him for what he really is: dangerously incompetent and incapable of world leadership.

We cannot give him four more years as commander in chief. pic.twitter.com/IR8K2k54YQ

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 5, 2019

Says Biden in the ad: “The world sees Trump for what he is. Insincere, ill-informed, corrupt, dangerously incompetent, and incapable in my view of world leadership. And if we give Donald Trump four more years, we’ll have a great deal of difficulty of ever being able to recover America’s standing in the world, and our capacity to bring nations together.”

The post Brutal Joe Biden Ad Shows World Leaders Laughing at ‘Dangerously Incompetent’ Trump: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Constitutional scholars Noah Feldman and Pamela Karlan arrive to testify before the House JudiciaryCommittee about impeachment in December 2019. | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A witness at an impeachment hearing used a play on words using Barron Trump’s name to make a point about presidential powers and Republicans are very mad about it.

Barron Trump is apparently not a name you’re supposed to bring up — even in the most benign of circumstances — lest you want to spark manufactured outrage. Or at least, that was the result of an impeachment witness’s play on words in a point about presidential powers and the Constitution.

Here’s what happened: During the House Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing on Wednesday, one of the witnesses, Stanford University professor Pamela Karlan, made a reference to President Donald Trump’s 13-year-old son, Barron, in explaining the difference between the president and a king.

“Contrary to what President Trump says, Article Two [of the Constitution] does not give him the power to do anything he wants,” Karlan said. “And I’ll just give you one example that shows you the difference between him and a king, which is the Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he cannot make him a baron.”

The quip sparked some chuckles in the audience, but the situation quickly spun out of control. The White House and some Republicans cried foul at the use of Barron’s name, since he’s a child. It’s true that it is a norm to leave the president’s children out of partisan attacks, but this wasn’t really an attack. Karlan wasn’t making a dig at Barron Trump, she was just making a point about presidential powers. But here we are.

Soon after the remarks were made, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that Karan had made a “classless move” in using a “teenage boy who has nothing to do with this joke of a hearing (and deserves privacy)” in her testimony. “And what’s worse, it’s met by laughter in the hearing room. What’s being done to this country is no laughing matter,” she wrote.

Then the first lady, Melania Trump, jumped on the issue. “Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it,” she said in a tweet.

Vice President Mike Pence said the impeachment hearings had “reached a new low” when Barron Trump’s name was used. Trump’s reelection campaign sent out a statement claiming that Karlan’s remarks “reinforced for all Americans that Democrats have no boundaries when it comes to their hatred of everything related to President Trump.” And plenty of other Republicans piled on as well.

By the end of the hearing, Karlan apologized. “I want to apologize for what I said earlier about the president’s son. It was wrong of me to do that. I wish the president would apologize, obviously, for the things that he’s done that’s wrong, but I do regret having said that,” Karlan said.

If this entire controversy feels extremely asinine, it’s because … it is. Karlan wasn’t making any sort of attack on Barron Trump, she was making a point about the limits of presidential powers in the Constitution. Republicans are mad about impeachment, and so they’re grasping at anything they can to further their argument that it’s a partisan witch hunt run by out-of-control Democrats. Speaking the name of a teenage boy is not the end of the world — which, of course, plenty of people pointed out on Twitter, where chatter about weird controversies flourishes.

There are conversations to be had about talking about presidential kids. This is not that.

How and whether to talk about a president’s children, especially when they are young, has long been a question in American politics. There’s a general agreement in American society and the press that they’re off-limits. But Chelsea Clinton, Jenna and Barbara Bush, and Malia and Sasha Obama were all the subject of public scrutiny and discussions about its fairness while their fathers were in the White House. Barron Trump has been, too.

During Trump’s inauguration, Barron Trump was the subject of a lot of jokes and memes, some of which were pretty questionable. One SNL writer remarked that “Barron will be this country’s first homeschool shooter.” She later apologized and was suspended from the show. In August 2017, a Daily Caller reporter criticized Barron Trump’s attire and wrote that “it’s about time the president’s son starts dressing the part.”

These episodes are direct criticisms of Barron Trump and obviously more egregious that Karlan’s play on words. “Barron Trump deserves the chance every child does-to be a kid. Standing up for every kid also means opposing POTUS policies that hurt kids,” Clinton wrote in a Facebook post after the inauguration.

What Trump and Republicans are doing in crying foul about Karlan’s remark is trying to manufacture outrage over a misstep that barely was or, frankly, wasn’t. It’s a play they’ve run over and over again. They’re going to take any opportunity to criticize impeachment they can, including, apparently, this.

Republicans have been defending impeachable offenses by Donald Trump from the beginning of his administration, when he refused to divest from his business interests and instead began a campaign of using his office as advertising venue and booking agent for those interests. The motives for overlooking his corruption have remained the same as well: the hard-right Republican functionaries (and white nationalists, and industry lobbyists) who attached themselves to the Trump team have been able to make great strides on their goals of dismantling government, weakening the restrictions placed on industry, and being Very Damn Racist.

One of those goals has long been the slashing of aid to the poor—necessary, say Republicans, to reduce the tax burdens of the "job creators" that fund Republican campaigns. It's happening yet again, as Team Trump goes around Congress to cut food aid given by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Set to take effect next year, it's being done under the guise of a "work requirement"—specifically, the new rules prohibit states from waiving the three month time limit on the work requirements for food aid beneficiaries, as they are currently allowed based on local circumstances, unless the local unemployment rate is 7% or higher—much higher than current levels.

The net result will be to end food assistance to about 3 million people.

HuffPo notes that even the USDA itself, in their own analysis of the changes, raises civil rights concerns over those changes potentially "disparately impacting certain protected groups" due to disparate factors affecting those groups. But the USDA suggests only "mitigation strategies" to reduce the damage. As for that "disparate" damage itself, we can at this point presume it to be a Team Trump-intended feature.

Even as Trump is getting impeached, his two accomplices are keeping the corrupt plot going.

A neuroscientist’s studies show that altruism isn’t always attractive.

Picture this: You’ve worked hard all year. You’re burned out. Every atom in your brain and body is crying out for a relaxing vacation. Luckily, you and your partner have managed to save up $3,000. You propose a trip to Hawaii — those blue waves are calling your name!

Just one problem: Your partner refuses, arguing that you both should donate the money to charity instead. Think how many malaria-preventing bednets $3,000 could buy for kids in developing countries!

You might find yourself thinking: Why does my partner seem to care more about strangers halfway around the world than about me?

A philosopher would tell you that your partner may be a utilitarian or consequentialist, someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences and that everyone equally deserves to benefit from the good, not just those closest to us. By contrast, your response suggests you’re a deontologist, someone who thinks an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and we have special duties toward special people, like our partners, so we should prioritize our partner’s needs over a stranger’s.

According to research out of the Crockett Lab at Yale University, if you’re put off by the consequentialist’s anti–Hawaiian vacation response, you’re not alone. Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has conducted several studies to determine how we perceive different types of moral agents. She found that when we’re looking for a spouse or friend, we strongly prefer deontologists, viewing them as more moral and trustworthy than consequentialists.

In other words: When we’re looking for someone to date or hang out with, extreme do-gooders of the consequentialist variety need not apply. (It’s worth noting that deontologists can be hardcore do-gooders, too, just in their own very different way.)

Crockett’s studies raise a lot of questions: Why do we distrust consequentialists despite admiring their altruism? Are we right to distrust them, or should we try to override that impulse? And what does this mean for movements like effective altruism, which says we should devote our resources to causes that’ll do the most good for people, wherever in the world they might be?

I reached out to Crockett to discuss these issues. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Sigal Samuel

In the past, it’s typically been philosophers who’ve investigated issues of morality and altruism, and they’ve focused a lot on sacrificial dilemmas.

The most famous one is the Trolley Problem: Should you make the active choice to divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, you can save five people along a different track from getting killed? The consequentialist says yes, because you’re maximizing overall good and outcomes are what matter. The deontologist says no, because you have a duty to not kill anyone as a means to an end, and your duties matter.

In your studies, you do examine these types of sacrificial dilemmas, which involve doing harm. But you also examine “impartial beneficence” dilemmas, which involve doing good, and specifically the idea that we shouldn’t prioritize our family and friends when we do good. Why did you decide to study those dilemmas?

Molly Crockett

Studying impartial beneficence is really psychologically juicy, because it gets at the heart of a lot of the conflicts we face in our social relationships as the world becomes global and we think about how our actions are affecting people we’re never going to meet. Being a good global citizen now butts up against our very powerful psychological tendencies to prioritize our families and friends. So we wanted to study the social consequences people might experience as a result of having consequentialist views.

Sigal Samuel

And what did you find?

Molly Crockett

When it comes to sacrificial dilemmas, we find that generally people strongly favor nonconsequentialist social partners. We trust people a lot more if they say it’s not okay to sacrifice one person to save many others.

When it comes to impartial beneficence dilemmas, we see the same pattern. The preference is not as strong, which I think makes sense because a helpful action tends to weigh less heavily on us psychologically than a harmful action. But we still see that when it comes to deciding who we’ll be friends or spouses with, we tend to prefer nonconsequentialists.

Sigal Samuel

There was an exception in the impartial beneficence dilemmas, right? It turned out that when we’re looking for a political leader, we actually prefer the consequentialist. To me, it makes a ton of intuitive sense that we’d prefer different types of moral agents in different social roles. Were your results seen as surprising?

Molly Crockett

Well, what’s remarkable is that moral psychology up until now has mostly been about hypothetical cases involving strangers. But new research suggests that actually relational context is super important when it comes to judging the morality of others.

I’ve recently started collaborating with Margaret Clark at Yale, who’s an expert in close relationships. We’re testing some predictions that moral obligations are relationship specific.

Here’s a classic example: Consider a woman, Wendy, who could easily provide a meal to a young child but fails to do so. Has Wendy done anything wrong? It depends on who the child is. If she’s failing to provide a meal to her own child, then absolutely she’s done something wrong! But if Wendy is a restaurant owner and the child is not otherwise starving, then they don’t have a relationship that creates special obligations prompting her to feed the child.

Sigal Samuel

Totally. Philosophy abhors inconsistency, and applying deontology in some cases and consequentialism in others might come off as inconsistent. But maybe it’s actually the most rational thing to apply different moral philosophies in different relational contexts.

In your study, the story you tell about why we prefer to marry or befriend deontologists is that, naturally, if I’m looking for someone to marry I’m going to want someone who’ll give me preferential treatment over a stranger in another country. But just to kick the tires on that story a bit: Is it possible that our preference comes about not because we want someone who’ll prioritize us but because being with radical do-gooders makes us feel crappy about ourselves — because we feel like immoral jerks compared to them?

Molly Crockett

That’s a fascinating question and something we haven’t tested empirically, but it would be very consistent with the Stanford psychologist Benoit Monin’s work on “do-gooder derogation.” He essentially showed exactly what you predict, which is that people feel less warm toward people who are extremely moral and altruistic. His studies showed that the extent to which people dislike vegetarians is related to their own feelings of moral conflict around eating animals.

Sigal Samuel

Yeah, we don’t tend to love being around people who make us grapple with uncomfortable questions. Especially if they’re very in-your-face or self-righteous about it and you have to be around them all the time, like with a romantic partner.

Your study also refers to something called the “partner choice model.” Can you explain that a bit?

Molly Crockett

“Partner choice” is a mechanism through which traits evolve because they promote being chosen as a social partner. There’s a lot of work suggesting that our preferences for cooperation evolved through partner choice mechanisms, because people who were naturally more cooperative were more likely to be chosen as social partners. They reaped the benefits of being chosen, both through social capital and through reproduction, and then they passed those traits to the next generation.

My idea is that some of our moral intuitions might be explained through the same mechanism. Our deontological intuitions, to the extent that they signal to others that we’re better social partners, make us more likely to be chosen, and therefore they get passed onto the next generation.

Sigal Samuel

Wait, unpack this evolutionary explanation a bit. By “through reproduction,” do you mean that parents with deontological views are more likely to rear their kids with deontological views?

Molly Crockett

Both that, and ... This is more speculative, but to the extent that deontological moral intuitions have a genetic component, it could be passed on that way as well. Obviously there’s not going to be a gene for deontological intuitions. There’s not a one-to-one mapping between genetics and complex psychological traits. But to the extent that these traits arise from brain processes (and there’s a lot of evidence that they do), there may be a heritable component.

Sigal Samuel

This reminds me of the neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland’s new book, Conscience, about the biological basis of morality. Churchland and I recently talked about how brain differences, which are underwritten by differences in our genes, shape our moral attitudes — and how those can be highly heritable. So genetics isn’t everything, but it is playing some role.

Molly Crockett

Absolutely. Broadly, my work is quite compatible with Churchland’s views.

I think the argument she makes is consistent with some of our empirical work showing that when people are deciding whether to benefit themselves by harming another person, their brain activity tracks with how blameworthy other people would find the harmful choice. Conscience might manifest as the brain predicting how other people would view our actions.

Sigal Samuel

When you write about the implications of your studies, you talk specifically about effective altruism, a movement supported by Peter Singer, who’s probably the most influential utilitarian philosopher alive. You say the studies’ findings suggest that if you’re an effective altruist you’re going to face some stumbling blocks in terms of how people perceive you, which could impact the movement’s ability to grow. What can effective altruists do to mitigate the potential negative perception of them?

Molly Crockett

I think there are a few possibilities. Here’s one: We’ve shown in some other work that when people are judging the praiseworthiness of good deeds, they consider both the benefits that those deeds bring about and also how good it feels to perform those actions. If anything, our data suggests people weight how good it feels more strongly in judging praiseworthiness, such that people might think that a good deed that brings very little benefit but gives you a really warm fuzzy glow is actually more praiseworthy than a good deed that feels detached and emotionless but brings about a lot of benefit.

Drawing on this insight, effective altruists might emphasize the personal satisfaction that can arise from donating to effective causes, and talk about their own personal experience with the movement in ways that convey what it means to them.

In my lab now, we’re starting to think a lot about narrative — how the stories we tell about our own and others’ behavior give rise to our sense of ourselves as moral beings, and how that can actually change our behavior over the long run. I think the effective altruism movement in some sense misses an opportunity to draw on the very powerful role that narratives play in shaping our psychology.

Sigal Samuel

So, if I have a narrative about myself that emphasizes why having a more evidence-backed, cost-effective approach to giving actually makes me feel really good and gives me that glow, conveying that might get people more interested in my approach?

Molly Crockett

Potentially. Of course, conveying that may butt up against the “do-gooder derogation” effect. So you’d have to be careful about that.

I think this conversation just goes to show how much of a challenge it is to change moral behavior. There are so many different levers you can press to try to change behavior, but often they’re working at odds with one another. So if you press one, that inadvertently presses other levers that counteract its effect. It’s a complex system we’re dealing with.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

A protester in favor of abortion rights outside the Ohio State House in Columbus on December 12, 2018. | LightRocket via Getty Images

It could be the future of the anti-abortion movement.

Ohio legislators last month introduced a measure that would, if passed, become the most restrictive abortion law in the country.

The bill creates a new felony called “abortion murder,” making people who have or perform abortions subject to life in prison. It also includes a provision suggesting that doctors should attempt to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy in a patient’s uterus, a procedure medical experts say is not possible with current medical technology.

The legislation has not yet received a vote, but it’s already generated controversy around the world. For its sponsor, Ohio State Rep. Candice Keller, it’s a way to root out abortion in her state once and for all: “The time for regulating evil and compromise is over,” she said in a November statement.

But abortion-rights advocates say the bill puts Ohioans at risk of being jailed over an abortion or even dying as a result of an untreated ectopic pregnancy. “If this bill was to become law, the lives of anyone who can become pregnant would be endangered,” Lauren Blauvelt-Copelin, vice president of government affairs and public advocacy at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, told Vox.

Ohio has been the source of bills in the past that, initially disregarded as extreme, ended up becoming law: the first so-called “heartbeat” bill, banning abortion around six weeks into pregnancy, was introduced there in 2011. In 2018 and 2019, such laws passed not just in Ohio but in Iowa, Georgia, and elsewhere (though all have for now been blocked by courts).

Now, advocates say Ohio is again at the forefront of a drive to restrict abortion — this time, one that could erode protections for the life and health of pregnant people. Bills like the one in Ohio are meant to give fetuses and even fertilized eggs the same legal rights as pregnant people themselves, Mary Alice Carter, a senior adviser at the reproductive-rights group Equity Forward, told Vox. “When we do that, we create a very dangerous situation for people that are pregnant.”

The Ohio bill includes a provision for reimplanting an ectopic pregnancy, a procedure that doesn’t exist

Ohio House Bill 413, introduced on November 18, is 723 pages long. The bill has gotten attention in part for its striking language — it creates a new felony called “abortion murder.” Under the legislation, people would be guilty of this crime if they purposely “perform or have an abortion,” and could face 15 years to life in prison.

The bill also creates a crime called “aggravated abortion murder,” of which people could be found guilty if they “purposely perform an abortion while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping, rape, aggravated arson, arson, aggravated robbery, robbery, aggravated burglary, burglary,” or other crimes. For aggravated abortion murder, the maximum penalty is death.

The circumstances under which someone could be accused of aggravated abortion murder are somewhat unclear. “Show me the person that can perform an abortion while committing arson, and I’ll show you a person who is remarkably good at multitasking,” Imani Gandy wrote at Rewire.News.

But the new crimes are notable in large part because they would apparently allow patients to be charged with a felony for ending their pregnancies. A spokesperson for Keller told Vox that “the intent of the bill is towards the doctors, it’s not toward punishing the women that are going through these crisis situations.” But as written, the bill would appear to allow Ohioans to be sentenced to life in prison for getting an abortion.

Mainstream anti-abortion groups typically do not support punishments for pregnant people who seek or get abortions. But Ohio isn’t the first state to introduce the possibility of such punishment — a Texas bill introduced earlier this year would make it possible for people who get abortions to be sentenced to death.

Ohio does appear to be first in something else, however. HB 413 includes an exception for doctors who perform an abortion in order to save a patient’s life. In order to be exempt from prosecution, though, the doctor must take “all possible steps to preserve the life of the unborn child, while preserving the life of the woman.”

Such steps, the law states, “include, if applicable, attempting to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy into the woman’s uterus.”

Doctors, however, say no procedure to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy into a woman’s uterus exists. Ectopic pregnancies happen when a fertilized egg attaches, not to the uterine wall, but elsewhere in the reproductive system, usually in a fallopian tube. These pregnancies are not viable, and if left untreated, they can result in a ruptured fallopian tube, hemorrhage, and even death. In most cases, doctors say the only treatment is to terminate the pregnancy with medication or surgery.

However, there’s a growing movement among abortion opponents to argue that ectopic pregnancies can be moved and reimplanted. Earlier this year, writer Georgi Boorman at the conservative website the Federalist mentioned the possibility as part of a larger argument that abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancies was unnecessary. Medical professionals — including some who identify as pro-life — responded that reimplantation is not possible. “To my knowledge we are nowhere near having the technology to do that,” Ingrid Skop, chair of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), told Vox at the time.

Boorman ended up issuing a retraction and apology. But she wasn’t the only one talking about the idea of reimplantation. The idea had already made its way into a different Ohio bill, this one restricting insurance coverage for abortion. The bill contained a special provision allowing insurance companies to cover “a procedure for an ectopic pregnancy that is intended to reimplant the fertilized ovum into the pregnant woman’s uterus.”

The sponsor of that bill, Republican Ohio State Rep. John Becker, is a co-sponsor of HB 413 as well.

It could be part of a nationwide trend toward banning abortion with no exceptions — even for a pregnant person’s life

Neither bill has yet passed, and supporters say they’re just looking to the future, when reimplantation could be possible. “If there is a way to save both mother and child, we’d like to see that demonstrated,” the Keller spokesperson told Vox.

But others say the emphasis on a medical procedure that doesn’t exist could set a dangerous precedent. Language about reimplantation — along with the broader argument that abortion is not necessary in cases of ectopic pregnancy — could result in a narrowing of protections for the life and health of pregnant people in abortion law, Carter, the Equity Forward adviser, said.

The current standard of care for ectopic pregnancies in most cases is to treat them with medication or surgery as soon as they are identified, Carter noted. But by introducing the idea that ectopic pregnancies can be saved, abortion opponents could push doctors to wait until a patient is near death before taking action — potentially making serious or even fatal complications more likely.

And ultimately, the focus on ectopic pregnancies may be part of a larger argument that abortion is never necessary, even to save a person’s life. Keller, the sponsor of HB 413, said in November that “the time has come to abolish abortion in its entirety and recognize that each individual has the inviolable and inalienable right to life.”

While the Ohio bills appear to be the first in the country to include language around ectopic pregnancy, the idea could spread, abortion-rights advocates say.

“Ohio has been a breeding ground for very dangerous anti-abortion, anti-reproductive health bans and restrictions” in the past, Blauvelt-Copelin, the Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio vice president, said. She noted that the first-ever “heartbeat” bill, banning abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, was introduced in Ohio in 2011. The bill didn’t pass at the time and wasn’t even supported by some anti-abortion groups in the state.

But over time, such legislation, which bans abortion at as early as six weeks’ gestation, before many people know they are pregnant, gained traction around the country, and similar bans have now passed in multiple states.

Something similar happened with the idea of exceptions in abortion law for people who become pregnant as a result of rape or incest. A few years ago, Carter said, most abortion opponents accepted the idea that abortion restrictions should include such exceptions. Now, several laws around the country, including a ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in Alabama, have no exception for rape or incest. A similar thing could happen with exceptions for the health and life of the pregnant person, Carter said: “What we’re seeing is an upping of the ante.”

The Alabama law and all of the six-week bans have been blocked by courts, and Blauvelt-Copelin said that if HB 413 were to pass, Planned Parenthood would fight it in court as well. However, she said, “we see that this is the direction that anti-abortion politicians want to move our state and our country in, so we have to take these bills very seriously.”

Apple's Activation Lock is an anti-theft feature built into iOS, watchOS, and macOS Catalina that prevents people from restoring your Apple devices without your permission. "With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that's equipped with Apple's new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock," writes iFixit's Craig Lloyd. What this means is that there will likely be thousands of perfectly good Macs being parted out or scrapped instead of being put into the hands of people who could really use them. From the report: Activation Lock was designed to prevent anyone else from using your device if it's ever lost or stolen, and it's built into the "Find My" service on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When you're getting rid of an old phone, you want to use Apple's Reset feature to wipe the phone clean, which also removes it from Find My iPhone and gets rid of the Activation Lock. But if you forget, and sell your old iPhone to a friend before you properly wipe it, the phone will just keep asking them for your Apple ID before they can set it up as a new phone. In other words, they won't be able to do much with it besides scrap it for parts. That seems like a nice way to thwart tech thieves, but it also causes unnecessary chaos for recyclers and refurbishers who are wading through piles of locked devices they can't reuse. This reduces the supply of refurbished devices, making them more expensive -- oh, and it's an environmental nightmare. [...] The T2 security chip, however, erases any hope and makes it impossible to do anything on a Mac without the proper Apple ID credentials. Attempting any kind of hardware tinkering on a T2-enabled Mac activates a hardware lock, which can only be undone by connecting the device to Apple-authorized repair software. It's great for device security, but terrible for repair and refurbishment. While recyclers may not be dealing with as many locked Macs as locked iPhones (especially since Activation Lock on Macs is still very new, and there are specific software criteria that need to be met), it's only a matter of time before thousands upon thousands of perfectly working Macs are scrapped or shredded, for lack of an unknown password.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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His obsession and greatest fear has come true.

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Here’s how they fit into the timeline.

In addition to summing up the findings from weeks of testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, Intelligence Committee Democrats’ new report has a surprising inclusion — the phone records of several major players involved in the scandal, including President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a member of the committee, confirmed on CNN that investigators subpoenaed these phone records. And while the records can’t reveal what was actually said during these phone calls, they make clear that Giuliani was in close contact with the White House at key moments.

Giuliani also exchanged several calls with an unknown number identified in the report as “-1” — and though this isn’t confirmed, the report certainly seems to imply that this number is President Trump.

The records also raise further questions about the potential involvement of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, in the Ukraine affair. He has been accused of participating in the push for Ukrainian investigations into Trump’s rivals, and the records show he exchanged calls with Giuliani and his “fixer” Lev Parnas (who was arrested in October for campaign finance violations).

Overall, though, the records serve to remind us that, despite all the text messages and witness testimony we’ve seen so far in the inquiry, there’s a circle of people at the center of this scandal whose actions, and communications, remain mysterious. And more broadly, it’s just rather remarkable that impeachment investigators managed to obtain the phone records of the president’s personal lawyer.

The records shed light on the campaign against Ambassador Yovanovitch

The Democrats’ report refers many times to a “scheme” carried out by President Trump and his allies to try and get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. And in their telling, this scheme began with an effort to oust the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was standing in the way of these demands.

The outlines will be familiar to those who watched Yovanovitch’s testimony: Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, spoke with Giuliani and Giuliani’s fixer Lev Parnas, making false accusations against Yovanovitch and claiming there were scandals involving the Bidens. John Solomon, a conservative journalist, then wrote up Lutsenko’s claims for the Hill beginning in March. Then, in late April, Yovanovitch suddenly got word she was being recalled from her post, at the White House’s instruction.

The new phone records in the report add further detail to this story, and document contacts between the key players at important moments. For instance, Democrats say:

• In the 48 hours before Solomon published his first article based on Lutsenko’s claims, Parnas spoke with Solomon at least six times. They spoke another time after the article, which attacked Yovanovitch, went live.
• Between April 1 and April 7, Parnas exchanged about 16 calls with Giuliani and about 10 with Solomon. On April 7, Solomon published another article attacking Yovanovitch.
• On April 10, Giuliani or Parnas exchanged calls with Solomon and with two other key players here — conservative lawyer Victoria Toensing, who was reportedly working with Giuliani on the Ukraine dirt-digging operation, and Rep. Devin Nunes.

Then, on April 12, there are a series of calls, each involving either Giuliani or Parnas, and the following other people or numbers:

• a “White House phone number”
• an “OMB phone number” (potentially acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who is still the OMB director)
• “-1” (an unknown number, which may, from context, be President Trump)
• Victoria Toensing
• John Solomon
• Devin Nunes
• Jay Sekulow, another lawyer for Trump

On April 21, however, outsider reformer Volodymyr Zelensky won the Ukrainian presidential election. In the days after that, Giuliani and his allies moved against Yovanovitch. The phone records for April 23 and 24 show the following:

• Multiple calls between Giuliani and Parnas
• A call between Parnas and Solomon
• Several short Giuliani calls to the White House, followed quickly by a call back for him from an unknown “-1” number
• A call from Giuliani to a phone associated with then-National Security Adviser John Bolton
• Three calls from Giuliani to an OMB number (which again, could be Mulvaney), and eight with a White House number

Finally, on the night of April 24, a State Department official called Yovanovitch and told her she had to return to Washington, due to White House “concerns.” Those concerns, another State official later explained to her, were coming from President Trump.

None of this is surprising, exactly — but in filling out the story of what happened, it’s useful to show that Giuliani was calling the White House right before Yovanovitch was recalled.

Giuliani responded by tweeting, “The mere fact I had numerous calls with the White House does not establish any specific topic. Remember, I’m the President’s attorney.” That is true. But the Democrats’ report also cited Giuliani’s tweets and media appearances to establish what may have been on his mind around the time of these calls — and, usually, it was Ukraine.

Why “-1” often appears to be President Trump

While the Democrats’ report doesn’t outright say that the calls coming from the unknown “-1” number are from President Trump, they certainly imply it — and the context shows that’s with good reason.

The key is what happens before the “-1” calls. Take, for instance, these records from on August 8.

In them:

• Giuliani initially texts the White House
• A little over an hour later, Giuliani gets a flurry of calls from “-1” to two different cell phones (the calls have very short durations so he appears not to have picked up).
• But minutes later, Giuliani then calls three numbers in succession — one listed as an “OMB number” (for the White House Office of Management and Budget), one for the Situation Room’s White House Switchboard, and one for the White House Switchboard. On the third, he connects.
• Then, in a call highlighted in the report, a “-1” unknown number calls Giuliani back and they speak for over four minutes.

So this certainly seems like a series of efforts from Trump and Giuliani to get in touch with each other, eventually succeeding. (The “OMB number” could be for acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who is still technically the director of OMB.)

Obviously, we’d expect Trump to be talking to his lawyer on the phone. That’s not scandalous in and of itself. But the placement and timing of these calls involving “-1” may be informative.

For instance, the series of calls on August 8 happened shortly after Giuliani met an aide to Zelensky in Madrid, and shortly before Giuliani, Gordon Sondland, and Kurt Volker started trying to dictate a statement for Zelensky in which he would commit to the investigations. So a phone call here could suggest that Trump was in the loop — and that Giuliani was speaking for him. (Though, theoretically, it could have been about another topic.)

Finally, one other reason why the “-1” number may be Trump is that we actually know he’s used a blocked number that shows up in other phone records this way. During the recent trial of Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone, prosecutors revealed that Trump’s phone had a blocked number in 2016, and showed up on Stone’s phone records as “-1.”

The role of Devin Nunes

Finally, the phone records have also focused renewed attention on the possible role of Nunes, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, in this whole saga.

As mentioned above, Nunes and Giuliani exchanged a series of brief calls on April 10. Theoretically, they could have been talking about any number of matters.

So it’s even more interesting that Nunes was also in contact with Giuliani’s fixer for Ukraine, Lev Parnas. On April 12 — amidst Parnas’s calls with Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and John Solomon — Parnas also traded calls with Nunes, eventually speaking with him for about eight-and-half minutes.

Giuliani also had a series of contacts with Nunes or people close to Nunes around the time of his aborted trip to Ukraine this May.

• For instance, on May 8, according to the report, Giuliani separately spoke on the phone with someone at the White House, with Solomon, with Parnas — and Nunes staffer Derek Harvey.
• Then, on May 9, the New York Times revealed that Giuliani was planning a trip to Kyiv, to urge the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens. “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Giuliani told the paper.
• The next day, May 10, Giuliani traded calls with and eventually spoke with Kashyap “Kash” Patel — a former Nunes aide who is now an NSC staffer. A call from the “-1” number went to Giuliani shortly afterward.
• Shortly afterward, Giuliani spoke with Parnas. And that night, on Fox News, Giuliani announced he was calling off his trip to Ukraine.

Parnas’s attorney has previously claimed Nunes was in the loop for the Ukrainian dirt-digging effort, and these call records could well corroborate that statement. Nunes, of course, did not disclose any of this during the House Intelligence Committee’s hearings on the impeachment inquiry, during which he has argued the president has done nothing wrong with respect to Ukraine.

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The FBI warned in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) Monday that it considers mobile applications developed in Russia, including the popular photo-aging app "FaceApp," to be "potential counterintelligence threats." Axios reports: FaceApp is a Russian-owned mobile application that allows users to upload photos of themselves and see what they may look like at a different age. Experts warned about potential privacy and national security concerns when the app spiked in popularity this past summer, prompting Schumer to request that the FBI and Federal Trade Commission look into the matter in July. "The FBI considers any mobile application or similar product developed in Russia, such as FaceApp, to be a potential counterintelligence threat, based on the data the product collects, its privacy and terms of use policies, and the legal mechanisms available to the Government of Russia that permit access to data within Russia's borders." The agency goes on to say: "Russia's intelligence services maintain robust cyber exploitation capabilities [...] the [Russian Federal Security Service] can remotely access all communications and servers on Russian networks without making a request to ISPs." The FBI said it will coordinate for notifications and investigations, and will work with applicable task forces if the app is perceived as a threat to "elected officials, candidates, political campaigns or political parties." Schumer said in a statement: "In light of FBI's warning that FaceApp, and similar applications developed in Russia, poses a potential counterintelligence threat to the United States, I strongly urge all Americans to consider deleting apps like FaceApp immediately and proceed with extreme caution when downloading apps developed in hostile foreign countries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The IRS employee who emerged as a second whistleblower on Donald Trump has declined to provide a transcribed interview to the Republican Senate Finance Committee. The employee had first contacted the House Ways and Means Committee about concerns that at least one political appointee in the Treasury Department had tried to interfere in a routine annual audit of Donald Trump's or Mike Pence's tax returns.

These presidential and vice presidential audits are supposed to be walled off from political appointees and political influence. The whistleblower has talked with bipartisan Finance Committee staff, but has declined the formal interview "after an official informed the whistleblower that it could be considered a violation of IRS code to provide the committee with any information related to an individual taxpayer," a source told CNN. The employee could be fined, fired, or "even jailed for disclosing taxpayer information" under IRS code.

The Treasury Department declined to comment to CNN, but it seems that this opens up another line of questioning for Congress: Has an IRS official interfered to prevent the whistleblower from moving forward, and is that official a career or political appointee? It's unclear whether this whistleblower is protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act. Federal employees whose service is deemed to be of a "confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character" aren't covered by the protections of the law, and this person could be in the "confidential" category.

The IRS inspector general is conducting an investigation into the core of the whistleblower's complaint and whether political appointees interfered in the House Ways and Means Committee's request for Trump’s tax returns. Maybe the IG should also be checking into whether the whistleblower is being intimidated.

If you use a work-issued laptop or desktop computer, you’ve likely been tempted to check your personal email, store private files on the company’s Google Drive, or avoid work entirely by diving into a research rabbit hole that has absolutely nothing to do with your job. You probably shouldn’t do any of this on a computer provided by your employer.

Employers can install software to monitor what you do on your work-issued laptop or desktop. In the most watchful of workplaces, this may include keyloggers that can see everything you type or screenshot tools that track your productivity. What type of surveillance and security software is installed on your company computer is often based on two factors: how large the company is (and what resources it has to dedicate to this) and what type of information you deal with in your role. If you work with sensitive materials, such as health records, financial data, or government contracts, you can count on your employer keeping a careful eye on what you do.

For most of us, the fear of being heavily surveilled at work is unwarranted. Jesse Krembs, senior information security analyst at The New York Times, said, “Without supporting evidence, at scale this is pretty rare. It tends to generate a lot of useless data, rope the employer into liability issues, and generally make the team that monitors these surveillance systems miserable. That being said, almost all large companies have a targeted program for doing this, especially for dealing with suspected insider threat or fraud.”

Even if your every move isn’t being watched, it’s still best to assume your work computer is monitored and act accordingly. Here are some less obvious tasks you should be mindful of.

Don’t store personal files on your work-issued laptop or phone

Every security expert I spoke with mentioned one no-no: storing personal files on an employer-issued phone or computer. If you’re fired, your laptop is usually the first thing it’ll take from you, and if your company ends up in a lawsuit, any files on your laptop or desktop are fair game. Tracy Maleeff, an information security analyst at The New York Times, pointed to security concerns as well: “From the employer's perspective, it just adds to the threat model of potential infected documents.”

Isaac Blum, director of applications and system services at logistics real estate company Prologis, added that even if you feel like you have job security, you might not have data security, depending on the security tools your company uses. “Some of these tools, if they detect a breach, they’ll start wiping files,” Blum said. If your computer gets infected with malware, the security measures taken to try to get rid of problems might clear out your personal files, too.

Don’t use Google Docs, Slack, or similar tools for anything you don’t want your employer to see

Since it’s online and not software installed on our computers, it’s easy to think of G Suite, which includes services like Gmail, Google Docs, and Sheets, as private productivity software. But the Freedom of the Press Foundation notes several reasons why you shouldn’t use a company-issued Google account to store your private data.

Administrative users with G Suite Enterprise can search for specific phrases in an employee’s emails and documents, just like you can in your own account. Employers can set up audits to be notified of suspicious behaviour and create custom scripts for retaining data.

For example, an employer could establish a process by which your email drafts are saved even if they’re never sent. If you’ve ever considered drafting a resignation email calling your boss a jerk, do so elsewhere.

As for non-Gmail employee email accounts, you can safely assume they’re being monitored too. Blum told me, “We can see people’s emails. There’s only a select few people, but nothing is technically not viewable.” Due to the risk of sharing insider information, the number of individuals who have access to employee emails is usually small.

The same goes for chat software, including Slack. Admins have access to private messages, and Slack saves messages on its servers.

You should avoid signing in to other personal messaging apps, like Apple Messages or Google Hangouts. Not only would your employer potentially have access to those messages, but you also make yourself susceptible to embarrassing moments, like receiving a private message when you’re screen sharing. If you want to trash-talk your co-workers or your company, do it over a third-party app (like Signal) on your personal phone.

Assume your Internet traffic is monitored

Your employer almost certainly monitors your Internet traffic. But beyond watching out for the obvious stuff, this probably isn’t as nefarious as you think. Blum said it’d be aware of “basic web traffic” only. Though, if you’re routinely not getting your work done, don’t be surprised if a boss rolls out data on how much time you spend scrolling Facebook.

If you think you can use a VPN to hide what you do, think again. “We deploy endpoint protection,” Blum said. “Even in the event you install a local VPN on a laptop, we can still see the DNS traffic. We have an agent so when it connects back up, it’ll shoot over whatever history was there. But while you’re connected to the VPN, it’ll still be anonymized by the VPN you’re using.”

Even if your employer doesn’t care much about your browsing habits, it’s still best to avoid doing any personal business—like side hustles or hobbies—on your work computer. But you don’t have to be paranoid about everything. “You can pay all your bills,” Blum noted. “That’s not the kind of thing people should be concerned with.” Joanna Grama, senior consultant at Vantage Technology Consulting Group, suggested, “Use your smartphone when you want to access your personal social media.”

Be more careful with your computer when you’re in public

You should treat your work computer with the same care as you would your personal computer. That means being secure on public Wi-Fi and using common sense. Maleeff suggested using a VPN for public Wi-Fi (Wirecutter recommends using TunnelBear).

Maleeff also suggested locking your computer when you step away from it. “I have a great story of a U.S. government employee traveling next to me on Amtrak [who] left his laptop open and unlocked while he left his seat,” Maleeff said. “Without even touching the computer, I was able to determine a lot of information.” If you’re at a coffee shop, on an airplane or train, or anywhere else in public, log out or shut your laptop.

How to see what’s running on your computer

When you use employer-owned equipment, it’s good to remember you don’t have a right to privacy—but that doesn’t mean your employer shouldn’t also clearly state what kind of monitoring it does and how. Grama noted that your employee handbook is a good place to look to find out what software may be running on your computer. “Probably anybody who works in HR will say that yes, this type of information must be in an employee handbook,” she said. “It’s a really good practice and would engender good feeling about your employer if you knew that type of monitoring was taking place.”

If your handbook doesn’t have details but you’re still curious about which monitoring software your computer has, the information is usually easy to find. Blum said, “[Such software] may not launch on a task bar, but many are still located in add/remove programs. On a Mac, they’ll show as an application or service.” A quick Google search should reveal the software’s capabilities. As weird as it can feel to have your employer monitor you, everyone I spoke with recommended against deleting the software, which will call attention to you.

Most employers include screen-sharing software, like VNC or TeamViewer, which gives your IT department access to your computer remotely. If you’ve ever been freaked out because an IT worker “took control” of your mouse to fix your computer, this is what they used. It’s usually obvious when this software is running, so don’t fret about your IT department watching you mistype emails all day long.

The central tenet of this advice is to avoid saying or doing anything on a work-issued computer or account that you don’t want your employer to see. It’s probably fine to pay a bill now and again—or to create a lineup for your office’s fantasy football league—but avoid doing anything personal or unprofessional.

Donald Trump's public behavior continues to get worse with each passing week. Whether caused by the escalating strain of an impeachment trial, a severe case of jet lag or something (cough) medical, Trump's performance in London earlier Tuesday was a spray of nonsense, bizarre claims, bullshitting, gaslighting, and possibly straight-up forgetting his own supposed policies. Pity other world leaders, forced to sit alongside a Twitter account turned real boy. Pity us, for being governed by one.

Some, I repeat some, of the most bizarre moments:

• Asked whether the United States supports Iranian protesters challenging their government: "I don't want to comment on that, but the answer is no. But I don't want to comment." Aside from the indistinguishable-from-parody phrasing, both Trump's secretary of state and Donald Actual Trump himself publicly stated the exact opposite position in the last 24 hours. Does Trump even know what protesters the questioner was taking about? Did he forget his own stance? We don't know—but he soon reversed that position yet again.

• Trump badgered the French president in an excruciatingly strange exchange, asking him "Would you like some nice ISIS fighters? I could give them to you."

• Trump straight-up embraced the imperialist argument his staff apparently used as leverage to convince him to keep some U.S. troops in Syria, claiming that "We have taken the oil. I've taken the oil. We should have done it in other locations, frankly, where we were. I can name four of them right now, but we've taken the oil ... our great soldiers are right around the oil where we've got the oil."

• He again bragged of his close relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, even while calling him "Rocket Man." "I’m possibly the only one he has that kind of relationship with in the world."

• He refused to confirm that the United States would come to the aid of other NATO members who came under military attack.

• On climate change: "Climate change is very important to me. I've done many environmental impact statements over my life and I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear, clean water and clean air. That's a big part of climate change." Donald Trump has previously declared climate change to be a "hoax" propagated by China in an attempt to weaken American industry. Further, pollution levels in the United States have increased during Trump's tenure, due in part to Trump administration refusals to enforce violations of the Clean Air Act. Those elevated pollution levels have caused nearly 10,000 premature deaths.

• He again revised his claims of how much his own actions have hurt China, claiming the Chinese economy is "down $32 trillion" because of his acts. This unexplained number continues to vary every time he makes the claim; since China's total gross domestic product in 2017 was $12 trillion, Trump is claiming that he harmed China to the tune of roughly three times their annual GDP.

• He called the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee "a maniac" and "a deranged human being." Further claimed, of his own phone call(s?) with the Ukrainian president: "I had legal scholars looking at the transcripts the other day and they said 'these are absolutely perfect, Trump is right when he uses the word.'" There is no evidence these legal scholars exist.

• He mused that in the future, when there is a "Democrat" president and a Republican House, Republicans will "hopefully" impeach that president in retaliation for the current impeachment inquiry. "They’ll do the same thing. Because somebody picked an orange out of a refrigerator and you don’t like it, so let’s go and impeach him." This is a baffling statement in any number of ways, but is perhaps dangerous to dwell on.

This is just from one morning's worth of press appearances. He appears to have no idea what his own policies are, no recollection of what they were, and is still inventing invisible supporters and imaginary successes. And he is still, and with fervent Republican support, in charge of the nation's military and its nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian officials knew. They knew as far back as July that as much as $400 million in military aid had been put on hold, according to multiple sources, including a Ukrainian deputy foreign minister tasked with reviewing diplomatic cables from diplomats at posts across the globe. That's how former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine for the European Integration Olena Zerkal came across a communiqué in late July relaying that the security assistance was being withheld by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.

“We had this information,” Zerkal told the Times in an interview. “It was definitely mentioned there were some issues.”

Donald Trump and his allies have made the dubious argument that President Volodymyr Zelensky couldn't have felt pressured to investigate the Bidens in his July 25 call with Trump because he didn't know U.S. military aid was on the line. It was a bogus defense from the start that has since been blown out of the water by mounting evidence to the contrary. 

But Zerkal's recollection marks the first time a Ukrainian official has gone on the record publicly about a fact that the Zelensky administration tried to bury in order to sidestep the entanglements of U.S. domestic politics. According the Zerkal, the Ukrainian government even quashed her October trip to the U.S. to meet with members of Congress out of the fear that her discussions could sink Ukraine further into the U.S. impeachment imbroglio. “They said, ‘This is not the time for you to travel to D.C.,'" Zerkal said of Zelensky's aides. Congressional staffers confirmed that Zerkal had been scheduled to visit the U.S.

Zerkal's assertions also match up with testimony from a Department of Defense official that her Ukrainian counterparts began inquiring about the delay in military aid as early as July 25, hours after Trump and Zelensky spoke on the phone and Trump explicitly asked for "a favor."

The Zelensky administration's official line has been that he wasn't informed about the freeze until shortly before a Sept. 1 meeting with Vice President Mike Pence. Zerkal resigned from her position last week and apparently came forward with the information in part to reveal the Ukrainian government's "back channel diplomacy with both the Trump administration last summer and Russia this fall," as the Times put it.

The main purpose of Zerkal's cancelled trip to the U.S. had been to talk about sanctions on Russia with congressional members of both parties.