November 20 and 21, 2016


News and Views


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article116162588.html

Donald Trump met with Bernie Sanders supporter Tulsi Gabbard to discuss Syria
BY ALEX DAUGHERTY
adaugherty@mcclatchydc.com
NOVEMBER 21, 2016 9:58 AM

Photograph -- Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-HI., nominates Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT., for President of the United States during the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia , Tuesday, July 26, 2016. Gabbard is meeting with President-elect Donald Trump on Monday, Nov. 21, 2016. J. Scott Applewhite AP


WASHINGTON
Tulsi Gabbard is willing to go out on a limb.

The Democratic U.S. congresswoman from Hawaii was one of the first Democrats to support Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and now she is one of the first Democrats to meet with President-elect Donald Trump.

[READ MORE: Bernie Sanders: I can do business with Donald Trump]

Gabbard met with Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Monday morning, but Trump spokesman Jason Miller said it was “premature” to discuss Gabbard’s potential role in the Trump administration.

Instead, Gabbard and Trump talked foreign policy.

Gabbard is a noted critic of intervention in Syria, and does not support a no-fly zone or using U.S. resources to topple Syrian president Bashir al-Assad’s regime. She argues that fighting Assad makes it harder to resist ISIS and al-Qaeda.

“Where I disagree with President-elect Trump on issues, I will not hesitate to express that disagreement. However, I believe we can disagree, even strongly, but still come together on issues that matter to the American people and affect their daily lives,” Gabbard said in a statement after the meeting.

“President-elect Trump and I had a frank and positive conversation in which we discussed a variety of foreign policy issues in depth. I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zonewould be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country, and the world.”

Gabbard is a noted opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and was part of a rally on Capitol Hill on Saturday to protest the deal that is supported by Barack Obama.

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Trump also opposes the TPP.

Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, reportedly likes Gabbard because of her stance on guns, refugees and Islamic extremism along with her ability to invoke strong anti-establishment populist sentiment on the left.

Gabbard did not join the majority of her Democratic colleagues in the House by co-sponsoring gun control legislation this summer. She was one of 47 Democrats who voted in favor of a Republican-sponsored bill that requires refugees from Iraq and Syria to receive background checks from the FBI.

Her district is geographically diverse and rural, it includes all of Hawaii except for Honolulu and some of its suburbs.

Last week, 169 Democrats signed a letter condemning Bannon’s appointment by Trump – but Gabbard was not among the signers.

Gabbard, who voted for Hillary Clinton, was a write-in candidate for vice president among dissenting backers of Sanders who refused to vote for Clinton or Trump.

The Democrat was elected to the Hawaii legislature at age 21 and stepped down from her post to serve two tours of duty in Iraq. Gabbard worked in local politics after leaving active duty and is in her second term in Congress. She is one of two female veterans to serve in Congress and is the first Hindu member.

Gabbard resigned from the Democratic National Committee in protest of Clinton’s foreign policy stance to support Sanders.

A request for comment from Gabbard’s Washington office was not immediately returned.

Trump also met with former Texas governor Rick Perry on Monday, among others. His transition team is not expected to name any new Cabinet picks today.

UPDATE 2:30 pm: Read the entire text of Gabbard’s statement below:

“President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face. I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government—a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.”

“While the rules of political expediency would say I should have refused to meet with President-elect Trump, I never have and never will play politics with American and Syrian lives.”

“Serving the people of Hawaiʻi and our nation is an honor and responsibility that I do not take lightly. Representing the aloha spirit and diversity of the people of Hawaiʻi, I will continue to seek common ground to deliver results that best serve all Americans, as I have tried to do during my time in Congress.”

“Where I disagree with President-elect Trump on issues, I will not hesitate to express that disagreement. However, I believe we can disagree, even strongly, but still come together on issues that matter to the American people and affect their daily lives. We cannot allow continued divisiveness to destroy our country.”

“President-elect Trump and I had a frank and positive conversation in which we discussed a variety of foreign policy issues in depth. I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zonewould be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country, and the world. It would lead to more death and suffering, exacerbate the refugee crisis, strengthen ISIS and al-Qaeda, and bring us into a direct conflict with Russia which could result in a nuclear war. We discussed my bill to end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government, and the need to focus our precious resources on rebuilding our own country, and on defeating al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups who pose a threat to the American people.”

“For years, the issue of ending interventionist, regime change warfare has been one of my top priorities. This was the major reason I ran for Congress—I saw firsthand the cost of war, and the lives lost due to the interventionist warmongering policies our country has pursued for far too long.”

“Let me be clear, I will never allow partisanship to undermine our national security when the lives of countless people lay in the balance.”

Alex Daugherty: 202-383-6049, @alextdaugherty




http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article115360103.html

Bernie Sanders: I can do business with Donald Trump on wages, trade, Social Security
BY KEVIN G. HALL
khall@mcclatchydc.com
NOVEMBER 17, 2016 11:08 AM

Video -- Bernie Sanders calls on President-elect Trump to rescind appointment of Stephen Bannon


WASHINGTON
A day after joining the Senate Democratic leadership, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders signaled Thursday he’s a willing ally if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on a number of promises to working Americans.

“He’s talked about the collapsing working class in America. He’s right,” Sanders said Thursday at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

In a roundabout way, Sanders praised the billionaire businessman and expected they could cooperate on campaign pledges to raise the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour, to force big pharmaceutical companies into lower prices for seniors and to preserve Social Security.

“Donald Trump is nobody’s fool. He is a smart guy,” said Sanders, adding that “you are going to see some of us working with him.”

Speaking in the animated fashion that brought him surprising success in his bid to win the Democratic nomination, Sanders identified trade as another area of cooperation.

“Trade is a good thing, but we need trade policies that work for the American worker and not just for the CEO’s of large multinational corporations,” Sanders said, dodging a direct question of whether he supported Trump’s pledge to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement. “Unfettered free trade has been a disaster for Americans workers.”

The incoming president also vowed on the campaign trail to slap tariffs – a tax on goods crossing borders – on Mexican and Chinese products exported by U.S. companies that moved jobs abroad. It’s an idea to which Sanders is open.

“A tariff may well be one of those options,” he said. “If Mr. Trump has the guts to stand up to those corporations, he will have an ally with me.”

Trump won election, in part, by co-opting Democratic messages on trade, promising to tear up trade deals and get tough on China. Free trade and a soft-touch on China as it develops have traditionally been Republican planks.

IF HE IS CONSISTENT WITH HIS VIEWS THAT OUR TRADE POLICIES HAVE FAILED AMERICAN WORKERS ... YES I WILL WORK WITH HIM.

Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on working with President-elect Donald Trump.

In yet another area of potential cooperation, Sanders noted that candidate Trump vowed to get tough on Wall Street and that the two favor more curbs to ensure than banks create a wall between lending and their investment activities.

Questioned about the future of the Democratic Party after Trump’s unexpected victory, Sanders repeatedly pointed to views outlined in his new book “Our Revolution,” which call for more engagement with younger voters who stayed home in 2016.

Asked if his bid for the White House weakened Hillary Clinton, Sanders was unequivocal.

“I think at the end of the day, my candidacy was … helpful to her, if we believe that candidates should not be anointed,” the senator said, noting that Trump overcame more than a dozen rivals in the primaries. “My campaign brought millions of people into the process.”

Sanders was given a Senate leadership position of Outreach Chair, a job he admitted he hadn’t quite defined yet, other than to bring in younger voters.

“I initially understand my role is to bring those people into the political process,” he said. “How we go about doing it, I don’t know.”

Sanders repeated his support for Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee, noting he has support from the incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

Although he ran to become the Democratic nominee, the fiery socialist from Vermont said he will not officially join the party.

“I was elected as an independent, I will finish this term as an independent,” Sanders said.



EXCERPT – “Asked if his bid for the White House weakened Hillary Clinton, Sanders was unequivocal. “I think at the end of the day, my candidacy was … helpful to her, if we believe that candidates should not be anointed,” the senator said, noting that Trump overcame more than a dozen rivals in the primaries. “My campaign brought millions of people into the process.” …. Sanders repeated his support for Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee, noting he has support from the incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. …. In a roundabout way, Sanders praised the billionaire businessman and expected they could cooperate on campaign pledges to raise the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour, to force big pharmaceutical companies into lower prices for seniors and to preserve Social Security. “Donald Trump is nobody’s fool. He is a smart guy,” said Sanders, adding that “you are going to see some of us working with him.” …. “A tariff may well be one of those options,” he said. “If Mr. Trump has the guts to stand up to those corporations, he will have an ally with me.”


Sanders’ working class roots show in this article. He and Trump both speak their minds in ways that are sometimes irritating to traditional and financially comfortable people. The Working Class speak that way, too, and people who have been living “lives of quiet desperation” for years are attracted to this. It may be aggressive, but it’s honest. Hillary’s yuuge amount of personal baggage may have been what “done her in,” but her failure to speak about the issues of the truly average American in a clear, direct and forceful way was the issue of the times. If Sanders can “work with Trump” I feel more secure than I have in over a year now, since it became clear that the RIGHT is a more populous segment of the American voters than was clear before.



THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE BRAVE


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bureau-of-prisons-officials-visited-cia-salt-pit-dungeon/

Prison officials visited CIA "dungeon," but kept no record of the trip
By GRAHAM KATES CBS NEWS November 21, 2016, 1:38 PM

Photograph -- image6368643x.jpg Gul Rahman (pictured) died in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002, after being shackled to a cold cement wall in a secret CIA prison in northern Kabul known as the Salt Pit. AP PHOTO/HABIB RAHMAN, HO


NEW YORK — The Bureau of Prisons has acknowledged for the first time that two of its officials traveled 14 years ago to a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan, where they provided training to staff at a facility once described by an intelligence official as “the closest thing he has seen to a dungeon.”

The admission came Thursday in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, which sued in April after the Bureau of Prisons denied having any record of involvement with the detention site.

The Bureau of Prisons’ November 2002 visit to the site — known interchangeably as “The Salt Pit” and COBALT — was documented in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, interrogation and detention, which was released in 2014.

The report notes that prison officials determined the site was “not inhumane” despite seeing detainees who were forced to stand for days naked and shackled to walls in total darkness, “in a facility that was described to be 45 degrees Fahrenheit.” Loud music played nearly constantly and the detainees were given only buckets for their waste.

The CIA asked for the Bureau of Prisons inspection, because agents worried conditions were too harsh for them to elicit reliable intelligence, according to the Senate report.

Some detainees “’literally looked like (dogs) that had been kenneled,” one interrogator said, according to the Senate report. “When the doors to their cells were opened, ‘they cowered.’”

During the prison officials’ visit, one detainee, Gul Rahman, died from apparent hypothermia, “naked except for a sweatshirt,” the report said. Rahman was well-known in Afghanistan after an earlier incident in which he rescued the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, while wading through rocket and small-arms fire.

Prison officials said they were “wow’ed” and had “never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived,” according to the Senate report.

The Bureau of Prisons is a domestic law enforcement agency that does not have the authority to classify intelligence information. The agency explained in the legal filing on Thursday that the two officials who visited the detention site were told by the CIA “that they were not permitted to discuss their participation in this training, or to create or retain any records of the training or their involvement.”

NO RECORDS RETAINED. (p. 11)
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Despite the extraordinary, and rare, assignment to travel to a war zone, one of the two officials told a Bureau of Prisons lawyer this year that he “never saw a written request .... rather, his supervisor orally tasked him to participate.”

That same prisons official conducted training for the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, and was allowed to produce limited documentation of that assignment.

Carl Takei, the ACLU attorney who first asked the Bureau of Prisons for information about the COBALT visit in a Freedom of Information Act request, said Thursday’s acknowledgement raises new questions about the agency’s role at the detention site.

“These two particular individuals, according to the Senate report, saw a place that was simply horrifying and they had a chance to raise alarms about these conditions of confinement. Instead of doing that, they allowed to proceed unopposed,” Takei said.

He added that it’s an issue that has suddenly become pressing in the days since members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have indicated an interest in reinstating approval for certain controversial interrogation techniques.

“As we transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, this entire question of official torture is being raised anew,” Takei said. “This is an illustration of how when there’s an administration that officially endorses torture, that endorsement effects every level of government.”

The ACLU said Monday it is dropping its lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons, as a result of Thursday’s disclosure.

The Bureau of Prisons disclosure to the ACLU includes a series of emails sent in 2011 and 2014 about the visit.

The 2014 email includes a link to a CBS News article about the agency’s visit to the detention site, and the email’s subject line is the title of the article.

In the body of the email, the sender wrote just one sentence: “They just won’t let it go.”

CBS NEWS STORY (p. 63)
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The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to a request for comment on this case.



https://www.laprogressive.com/how-democrats-lost/

The Struggle: Let’s All Hang Together (or We’ll Hang Separately!)
BY RICHARD GREEMAN
POSTED ON NOVEMBER 20, 2016

A Foreseeable Surprise

If Donald Trump’s electoral revolution came as a surprise, the profound disgust of the citizenry for the ruling elites has long been no surprise to anyone. The folks in the middle and at the bottom, left high and dry by the post-2008 “recovery” in favor of the top 1%, were totally fed up and ready for a political revolution. That slogan was successfully used in the Democratic primaries by the old Jewish socialist Bernie Sanders, whose genuine popularity came near to dethroning Hillary Clinton, the pre-selected candidate of Wall Street and the DNC, considered “inevitable” by the media.

While Hillary was campaigning behind closed doors in luxury hotels to win the financial support of bankers and traders, Bernie was out on the hustings drawing crowds of up to 20,000 enthusiastic supporters, who were hard at work in their constituencies. Yet while the TV cameras followed Trump everywhere, we never got to see those mass meetings of Sanders supporters. And as we later learned from Wikileaks, the DNC and media barons were working together to marginalize Bernie’s candidacy by denigrating it as “futile.”

Nonetheless, Sanders kept rising in the polls, which consistently gave him a majority over Trump or any other Republican candidate in a hypothetical general election. These polls, deliberately ignored at the time by the Democratic leadership, were confirmed by the November 8 election results. Trump won in the very states and even down to the identical Rust Belt counties where Sanders carried the primaries. Clearly, what those voters wanted was a political revolution.

Yet the Democratic leadership, operating behind the scenes, obstinately imposed on the party the predictably disastrous candidature of Hillary Clinton. She was and is a shopworn, visibly unpopular personality (polls), the symbol of the arrogance of the Washington elite, weighed down with the heavy negative baggage the two terms of her husband. The Clintons’ neo-liberal, globalist ‘New Democrat’ policies are considered responsible for the poverty and insecurity into which millions of working families have fallen, black and white together. These former “middle class” working people have not forgotten that their lives were destroyed by deliberate de-industrialization of the Middle West, off-shoring of jobs to low-wage countries, financial deregulation, and the elimination of welfare and aid to dependent children under the Clintons’ presidencies. For these disenchanted Democrats as well as for the enthusiastic Democratic activists of Bernie’s “political revolution,” the imposed (if not rigged) candidacy was an arrogant slap in the face.

Is it really such a mystery why down-scale voters, deeply discontented with the Establishment and deprived of the option of a Leftist “political revolution” chose the option of a political revolution of the Right?

The elite Democrats’ electoral strategy was as disastrous and as far from reality as was their choice of candidate. Unbelievable as it may seem, they decided to turn the election by focusing on the narrow demographic of “college-educated Republicans” (who of course voted Republican). The Democrats were apparently so confident they owned the votes of their historical (since FDR and LBJ) base of unionized and other working people and ethnic minorities that Clinton barely campaigned in the devastated areas (which voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but not for Clinton in 2016). Nor did she address the suffering of the millions who are upset about growing inequality, economic insecurity, unemployment, overwork (two jobs), low wages, race and gender discrimination, lost savings, underwater mortgages, debts, and bankruptcies. (At least Bill Clinton pretended to “feel our pain”.) Instead, Hillary stood for the status quo when everyone was crying out for change.

Thus, in the very first fifteen minutes of the first televised debate, Trump was able to present himself as the champion of the working class. All he needed to do was keep reminding the audience of the Clintons’ responsibility for imposing the disastrous (for workers) 1994 North American Free Trade Association Treaty (NAFTA) and to Trumpet his own opposition to the semi-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP, or “NAFTA on steroids,” favors the rights of multinational corporations over the welfare of workers, the environment and human rights. Long supported by globalists Obama and Clinton, it would have reduced U.S. wages to Asian levels and completed the ruin of “working-middle-class” viewers — and they knew it. So after those fifteen minutes, many turned off their TVs and went bed. They had seen enough, it was already late, and tomorrow is work.

So is it really such a mystery why down-scale voters, deeply discontented with the Establishment and deprived of the option of a Leftist “political revolution” chose the option of a political revolution of the Right?

So Who’s To Blame?
There are two ways to react to this disaster. We can either blame the American people or point our finger at the country’s elites, at the political Establishment, the billionaire donors, and their commercial mass media who organized this catastrophe for which the American people will pay the price for a long time. To blame the American public, particularly to stigmatize the white working class, is to fall back into the same elitism that enraged Trump’s voters, whom Clinton famously categorized as “deplorables.” Indeed, the Democratic elite are now blaming their own failure on the very voters they scorned.

Of course Trump barely hides his own racism and misogyny and did not reject the support of David Duke the former KKK leader. But everyone who voted for Trump is not necessarily a bigot. According to the analysis of the N.Y. Times, statistics show that the election was decided by voters who had gone for Obama in 2012. Obviously, they all aren’t racists. Nor were the Brits who voted for Brexit all xenophobes. That electoral bomb also exploded “by surprise” when the Oxbridge elites of the ruling Conservative party, completely cut off from the people, called that referendum to settle an intra-mural contest, like a ball in one of their Public School sports. They thus gave the millions of common folk humiliated by neo-liberal globalization a target for their anger and alienation.

Michael Moore was one of the few to see the parallel. Well before the US election he noted that those portions of the U.S. that have been most ravaged by free trade orgies and globalism are filled with rage and “see [Trump] as a chance to be the human Molotov cocktail that they’d like to throw into the system to blow it up.”

On the other hand, the fact that 53% of white women found it in their hearts to vote for a bully who brags about sexually abusing women is astounding and disturbing. “Elite white feminism gave Us Trump,”writes Liza Featherstone, the editor of a prescient pre-election collection of left-feminist essays False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton which examines her track record on welfare, Wall Street, criminal justice, education, and war. “She has advanced laws and policies that have done real harm to the lives of women and children across the country and the globe. That certainly accounts for part of the problem.

“Nevertheless,” writes the Marxist-humanist scholar Peter Hudis, “those who place the entire blame on Clinton for Trump’s victory are missing a critical point. Male chauvinism clearly was pivotal in the electoral outcome. That Trump could manage to grow his support even after the evidence of his history of sexual abuse became widely known is a very disturbing sign of the sexism that is endemic to this society.” Alas, aggressive verbal and physical male behavior toward women is already becoming “normalized” since Trump’s election. Turning next to the economy, Hudis continues:

Clinton’s defeat may show that neoliberalism is in crisis, but that does not in any way mean that it points to a weakening of the hegemony of capitalism. In fact, it is now clear how wrong it was for many leftists to focus their politics for the past two decades on attacking “neoliberalism”—without ever getting to explicitly oppose the logic of capital as a whole and articulate an alternative to it…. Capitalism may be turning away from its neoliberal phase as convincingly as it earlier dropped Keynesianism… Trump is part of a worldwide rejection of neoliberalism on the part of reactionary forces, who feel it has failed to live up to its promise. However, today’s collapse of neoliberalism does not represent a step forward, but a reactionary move to atavistic nationalism, racism, and misogyny.

We should have no illusions about the impact of Donald Trump’s victory. It is a disaster. The prospect of a unified right-wing government, led by an authoritarian populist, represents a catastrophe for working people. Some may have hoped that Trump’s outlandish campaign threats were not meant to be taken seriously; but the man means business, and he is not going to waste his crucial first hundred days pussyfooting around, as Obama did.

Trump has already chosen Stephen Bannon the alt/right blogger as his chief White House Strategist. He will now have Sen. Jeff Sessions, an outspoken, unrepentant racist, as Attorney General, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a notorious Islamophobe, as national security adviser, and hawkish Rep. Mike Pompeo, who wants to tear up the treaty with Iran, as CIA director. Under consideration for Homeland Security is immigrant-hunter Joe Arpaio, recently-ousted Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, now under indictment for his excessive brutality to prisoners.

With such enemies in power, the struggle for equality and social justice will be long and hard. No sense counting on Obama and the Democrats, who are keeping a low profile and will play at conciliation — unlike the Republicans who rejected Obama’s legitimacy and blocked him from day one of his administration.

Above all, let us not divide our ranks by scapegoating the members of the famous “white working class” (no more racist than other whites) on whom the Democrat elites (having scorned them) are now blaming this catastrophe. These frustrated Rust Belt voters, many of them former Bernie supporters and Obama voters, having tossed their Molotov cocktail into the White House, are now waiting eagerly to see if President Trump will keep his promise to immediately end outsourcing of jobs.

richard-greemanWhen their right-wing pro-business billionaire president lets them down, as he inevitably will, we will find them along side us again in the labor and social struggles of the next four years. “As long as power was split between a Democratic Presidency and a Republican Congress, each side could blame the other for the lack of positive accomplishments.” Writes Ken Knabb from Oakland, California. “But now that the Republicans have got a monopoly, there will be no more excuses.”

United we stand. Divided we fall.

Richard Greeman



http://heatst.com/politics/bernie-sanders-democratic-leadership-independent/

Bern-exit: Bernie Sanders Leaves the Democratic Party High and Dry Again
By Emily Zanotti | 4:05 pm, November 18, 2016

Bernie Sanders says he won’t rescind his status as an Independent, even though he’s accepted a position in Democratic Party leadership.

In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Sanders said that he was “elected as an Independent and I will finish this term as an Independent.”

That means that, for the next year at least, Sanders will serve as the Congressional Democrats’ chairman of outreach, in charge of bringing new and underrepresented demographics into the Democrats’ camp — though he won’t be a Democrat.

The idea, of course, is that Sanders can serve the Democratic Party by expanding its appeal to those people who joined his decidedly anti-Establishment campaign. Unfortunately for Democrats, seeking fresh blood means looking outside party ranks.

Sanders’s position as an Independent was central to his run for President, as it allowed him to say that, despite 26 years in Congress, he had remained independent of Party hierarchy and influence. He is reportedly considering a second run for President in 2020, when he’ll be 80 years old.

If he does choose to change his party affiliation, Sanders will have to wait until his next term in office; he’ll come up for re-election to his Senate seat in 2018. But Sanders told reporters after concluding his Presidential run that he would likely remain a Congressional independent even then, caucusing with Democrats.



Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Elijah Cummings push for Congressional Hearings on Election 2016

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/will-congress-investigate-russian-interference-2016-campaign

The NSA Chief Says Russia Hacked the 2016 Election. Congress Must Investigate.
It's up to Capitol Hill to protect American democracy.
DAVID CORNNOV. 16, 2016 3:24 PM

Image: Congress: aoc.gov/Wikimedia Commons; Soviet flare: serkorkin/iStock; Soviet background: badvviser/iStock


Despite all the news being generated by the change of power underway in Washington, there is one story this week that deserves top priority: Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, was asked about the WikiLeaks release of hacked information during the campaign, and he said, "This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect." He added, "This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily."

This was a stunning statement that has echoed other remarks from senior US officials. He was saying that Russia directly intervened in the US election to obtain a desired end: presumably to undermine confidence in US elections or to elect Donald Trump—or both. Rogers was clearly accusing Vladimir Putin of meddling with American democracy. This is news worthy of bold and large front-page headlines—and investigation. Presumably intelligence and law enforcement agencies are robustly probing the hacking of political targets attributed to Russia. But there is another inquiry that is necessary: a full-fledged congressional investigation that holds public hearings and releases its findings to the citizenry.

If the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies are digging into the Russian effort to affect US politics, there is no guarantee that what they uncover will be shared with the public. Intelligence investigations often remain secret for the obvious reasons: they involve classified information. And law enforcement investigations—which focus on whether crimes have been committed—are supposed to remain secret until they produce indictments. (And then only information pertinent to the prosecution of a case is released, though the feds might have collected much more.) The investigative activities of these agencies are not designed for public enlightenment or assurance. That's the job of Congress.

When traumatic events and scandals that threaten the nation or its government have occurred—Pearl Harbor, Watergate, the Iran-contra affair, 9/11—Congress has conducted investigations and held hearings. The goal has been to unearth what went wrong and to allow the government and the public to evaluate their leaders and consider safeguards to prevent future calamities and misconduct. That is what is required now. If a foreign government has mucked about and undercut a presidential election, how can Americans be secure about the foundation of the nation and trust their own government? They need to know specifically what intervention occurred, what was investigated (and whether those investigations were conducted well), and what steps are being taken to prevent further intrusions.

There already is much smoke in the public realm: the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Also, Russian hackers reportedly targeted state election systems in Arizona and Illinois. Coincidentally or not, the Russian deputy foreign minister said after the election that Russian government officials had conferred with members of Trump's campaign squad. (A former senior counterintelligence officer for a Western service sent memos to the FBI claiming that he had found evidence of a Russian intelligence operation to coopt and cultivate Trump.) And the DNC found evidence suggesting its Washington headquarters had been bugged—but there was no indication of who was the culprit. In his recent book, The Plot to Hack America, national security expert Malcolm Nance wrote, "Russia has perfected political warfare by using cyber assets to personally attack and neutralize political opponents…At some point Russia apparently decided to apply these tactics against the United States and so American democracy itself was hacked."

Several House Democrats, led by Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, have urged the FBI to investigate links between Trump's team and Russia, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has done the same. According to various news reports, Russia-related probes have been started by the FBI targeting Americans associated with the Trump campaign. One reportedly was focused on Carter Page, a businessman whom the Trump campaign identified as a Trump adviser, and another was focused on Paul Manafort, who served for a time as Trump's campaign manager. (Page and Manafort have denied any wrongdoing; Manafort said no investigation was happening.)

Yet there is a huge difference between an FBI inquiry that proceeds behind the scenes (and that may or may not yield public information) and a full-blown congressional inquiry that includes open hearings and ends with a public report. So far, the only Capitol Hill legislator who has publicly called for such an endeavor is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). On Tuesday, Graham, who was harshly critical of Trump during the campaign, proposed that Congress hold hearings on "Russia's misadventures throughout the world," including the DNC hack. "Were they involved in cyberattacks that had a political component to it in our elections?" Graham said. He pushed Congress to find out.

The possibility that a foreign government covertly interfered with US elections to achieve a particular outcome is staggering and raises the most profound concerns about governance within the United States. An investigation into this matter should not be relegated to the secret corners of the FBI or the CIA. The public has the right to know if Putin or anyone else corrupted the political mechanisms of the nation. There already is reason to be suspicious. Without a thorough examination, there will be more cause to question American democracy.



SOME JEWISH GROUPS IN FAVOR OF PACIFYING ALT-RIGHT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-embrace-of-bannon-sparks-divisions-angst-among-jewish-groups/2016/11/17/8a0442c2-ac19-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html?wpisrc=nl_politics-pm&wpmm=1

Politics
Trump’s embrace of Bannon sparks divisions, angst among Jewish groups
By Greg Jaffe November 17

Play Video3:46 -- Video showing Bannon’s comments and views -- Clips from Breitbart radio show reveal Trump's relationship with Stephen Bannon
Video -- Before Stephen K. Bannon became a close advisor to Donald Trump, he hosted “Breitbart News Daily,” a radio show, on which he interviewed Trump nine times. The Washington Post's David A. Fahrenthold discusses what those interviews tell us about their relationship. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)


In the days after President-elect Donald Trump appointed a far-right senior adviser to his White House staff, the Anti-Defamation League sent out a searing condemnation. The appointment of Stephen K. Bannon to a top White House job was an act “hostile to core American values,” the group said.

The more conservative Zionist Organization of America also mounted an attack. But its target was the ADL, which it accused of engaging in “character assassination.” It has invited Bannon to speak at its annual gala in New York on Sunday.

Most of the rest of the major Jewish groups in Washington, eager to maintain influence with a Trump administration and unsure about the extent of Bannon’s ties to the white nationalist movement, have stayed silent.

Among the country’s leading Jewish organizations, Trump’s election has provoked an unusual level of angst and uncertainty, widening the rifts among groups that have largely tried to stay out of partisan political fights. The debate has divided those who believe the Jewish community’s support for Israel requires leaders to build good relations with the new president from those who argue that Jewish groups should speak out against views they see as anti-Semitic.

“It has been disappointing to watch organizations in the American Jewish community avoid comment,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former member of the U.S. team working on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under President Obama. “What’s the point of building political influence if not for a situation like this?”

For the moment, most Jewish groups — especially those focused on the security of Israel — are asking a different question. They are wondering at what point, if any, they will feel compelled to take a stand against Trump’s connections to the alt-right movement, a far-right ideology that includes opposition to immigration and globalism.

Those views have found a home in the Breitbart News empire, which was led by Bannon before he joined Trump’s campaign. The movement has attracted support from white nationalists, although Bannon has said it is not racist.

“There are lots of questions and concerns and a lot I would like to say,” said a senior executive of a group focused on the U.S.-Israeli relationship, who like some other Jewish organizational leaders, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “But I have a mission and a job to do, and I can’t blow it up.”

Other groups have taken a slightly more forward-leaning posture. The Israel Policy Forum, which has advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, expressed “deep concern” about Bannon, describing him as “someone who has purveyed ugly and divisive rhetoric.”

“At what point do you set aside the mission?” asked David Halperin, the group’s executive director. “The challenge is: How do we balance our desire to wait and be a positive influence [on a Trump administration] versus expressing our concern when it is absolutely necessary?”

The uncertainty among Jewish groups reflects the contradictions of Trump, a 70-year-old political neophyte with little experience in foreign affairs and virtually no policy record.

Some Jewish leaders, pointing to painful lessons of history, expressed discomfort with the rise of a populist figure who seemed to embrace authoritarian tendencies. Others objected to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States as an unconstitutional religious test and decried as anti-Semitic a Trump campaign tweet that portrayed a red Star of David shape over a stack of $100 bills, an image that had origins in the online white-supremacist movement.

But Trump has won accolades from some groups for his consistently strong support for Israel’s security. Some of those views “would seem to outflank even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, recently opined. And many American Jewish leaders are heartened that Trump takes close counsel from Jared Kushner, his Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, and from his daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism.

“Trump is pretty clearly not an anti-Semite — look at his family, for goodness sake,” said Eliot Cohen, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration who is an outspoken Trump critic and an Orthodox Jew.

Some more politically conservative Jews were attracted to Trump’s stances on social issues, such as school choice and freedom of religion. Many also were drawn to Trump for his fierce opposition to the Obama administration’s deal to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The agreement was strongly opposed by the Israeli prime minister, who argued that it did not do enough to constrain Iranian aggression in the region or permanently dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump also has suggested that he would not pressure Netanyahu to halt West Bank settlement construction, a major point of contention between Israel and the Obama administration.

Many of these supporters will judge Trump primarily through the lens of how he manages the relationship with Israel, said Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center. “They will be looking for Trump and his administration to follow through,” Diament said.

But, as with many Trump policies, even the president-elect’s staunch professions of support for Israel come with questions and contradictions. Trump’s courtship of Russia, his intimations of support for the Syrian regime, and his suggestions that the United States should play a less-prominent role in the Middle East all could run counter to Israeli interests.

“Israel wants a strong United States in the region, not [an America] disengaged from it,” said Dennis B. Ross, a senior adviser on the Middle East to Republican and Democratic administrations. In other instances, Trump has suggested that his policies regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and settlements might be negotiable. “He talks about this being the ultimate deal,” Ross said.

The general confusion about Trump is straining relationships within the Jewish community. Some of the breakdowns are taking place along normal political lines, which have grown more pronounced as the country has become more polarized. In other instances, differences have sprung up between groups focused on the defense of Israel and those focused on combating anti-Semitism.

The Republican Jewish Coalition has slammed the Anti-Defamation League as going too far in its criticism of Bannon and some of the Trump campaign’s rhetoric, which the ADL said relied on classic anti-Semitic tropes.

The ADL has defended its actions and vowed to call out anti-Semitism and racism.

The controversy also has exposed the increasingly divergent worldviews and priorities of American and Israeli Jews. Many Israeli Jews view a Trump presidency through a “pragmatic policy” lens, focused on the security of the Jewish state, Halperin said.

American Jews, meanwhile, are more worried about civil liberties and the people representing their country, he added.

Chief among those groups counseling patience has been the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has declined to comment on the Bannon appointment. So far, most other Jewish groups with influence in Washington have taken the same stance as AIPAC.

That has left the ADL and its new leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, as the most outspoken critic of Trump’s selection of Bannon.

“It is a sad day when a man who presided over the premier website of the ‘alt-right’ — a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists — is slated to be a senior staff member in the ‘peoples’ house,” Greenblatt said in a statement.

Greenblatt, a former Obama administration official, has said that his stance is nothing new for a group that in earlier decades fought for civil rights in the South and took on the anti-communist crusader Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Greenblatt took over the ADL from Abraham Foxman, whose view of the ADL’s work was defined by his own history as a Holocaust survivor.

Greenblatt, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, is aiming to update the group without fundamentally altering its core mission. One view into how a Trump presidency might shape the group could come this week in New York when the ADL holds its “Never Is Now” summit on anti-Semitism.

The two-day conference is to include several panels with topics drawn directly from the contentious election campaign, including a “Conversation on Hate Online” with prominent political journalists and a discussion of “Pepe the Frog,” an Internet meme popular with some white nationalists and some Trump supporters.

One more sign of the times: The conference is expected to draw more than 1,000 people. “We are turning people away,” said Todd Gutnick, an ADL spokesman.



Jews and Blacks are so often the recipients of truly vicious assaults by Whites that I’m surprised to see any division in their ranks on this, but, apparently, everybody – including myself – are closely watching him, to see how to get along with this new reality and where it is heading. He is profoundly unappealing to me, but if he doesn’t turn out to be the next Hitler, I’ll try to relax. Unless Congress, the FBI, and the press corps are able to defang him and force him out, however, we’re in for a long forced march into an unknowable future. If he weren’t so unpredictable, I would feel better. I’ve seen comments from only three or four members of the legislature who have come out in statements directly against Trump, and I’m waiting for more to emerge. I will continue to work for what seems to me to be decency and progress, speaking out as I have so far.



QUESTIONS ANSWERED ABOUT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE – “It exists for one day every four years and then vanishes, like Brigadoon ….”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-electoral-college-isnt-a-real-place-but-someone-has-to-answer-its-phones-these-days/2016/11/16/816f3838-aaa7-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_2_na

The electoral college isn’t a real place. But someone has to answer all the angry phone calls these days.
By Dan Zak November 17

Photograph -- Miriam Vincent, staff attorney at the Office of the Federal Register, has been bombarded with emails from citizens … Electoral College


Tuesday of last week was quiet.

Wednesday was quiet, too.

The pitchforks started arriving last Thursday, about 36 hours after the presidential election was called. They were virtual pitchforks, but still. Email after email. Tweets. Phone calls. Facebook posts. Some profane. Some pleading.

One subject line: “electoral votes are wrong”

Another: “Vote in Hillary Clinton Dec. 19”

Another: “Letter to America”

Another: “HELP”

So it goes at the Office of the Federal Register, which administers the electoral college and now finds itself at the center of a populist brouhaha.

The electoral college is not an actual place — no grassy quad, nor group of people sharing a space. It exists for one day every four years and then vanishes, like Brigadoon, until the next presidential election. The closest thing to a physical headquarters is this office, one half of the seventh floor of a neoclassical brick building over an Au Bon Pain, six blocks north of the Capitol, in a neighborhood historically referred to as Swampoodle. Over the past week, the Office of the Federal Register has been inundated by Americans wanting to learn about — or somehow control — the college, which is composed of 538 party officials who will actually go about the formal business of electing Donald Trump president Dec. 19, based on the popular votes of each state.

Many people have something to say about that, partly because Hillary Clinton won the most votes nationwide, partly because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

“It’s just that they keep coming,” says Miriam Vincent, staring at her inbox Wednesday morning. “And every time we get close to having a handle on it, we get more. It goes on. And on.”

Her email pings.

“And on.”

The electoral college is not a physical space until [sic] itself. But it is administered by this Washington agency, the Office of the Federal Register, north of Capitol Hill. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)

Vincent has 558 unread emails, a grande chai in her hand, and a big bottle of Excedrin Migraine on her cluttered desk. She is a staff attorney in the Legal Affairs and Policy Division in the Office of the Federal Register under the National Archives and Records Administration.

[The president-elect typically stays here before inauguration. Take a look inside]

What that really means, right now, is that she is dealing with the nation’s collective freakout about the electoral college. Millions of Trump haters who can’t handle Clinton’s loss are signing petitions to persuade electors to vote as the plurality of Americans did, which would be completely permissible and also pretty unpre­cedented. Actual electors are being lobbied and harassed, according to the Idaho Statesman, and this frantic energy has also funneled toward the Office of the Federal Register, whose website is the second Google hit when you search “electoral college.”

Death threats. Promises of civil war. Inappropriate photographs. Students with homework questions. A daughter of Holocaust survivors who called to sob into the ear of a government bureaucrat. A woman in Florida who wanted Vincent to do something about Russian hacking.

Only four employees work in Vincent’s division. In the past week, each has taken on the role of civics teacher, and the role of therapist.

“You really need a thick skin,” says Amy Bunk, the division director. “People are venting their frustration. This woman, who didn’t understand the system at all, ended up accusing me of interrupting her and thinking she was stupid.” She sighs. “I spent an hour on the phone with her.”

The Office of the Federal Register, photographed on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2016. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)
Electoral college paperwork on file in the legal section of the Office of the Federal Register. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)

The Office of the Federal Register has pale blue walls and a ceiling of fluorescence. It looks like any warren of nonpartisan bureaucracy: Cubicles. Giant binder clips. Stacks of blank paper. Boxes labeled “FAA Airworthiness Directives.” Boxes of material labeled “BURN.” An old-fashioned card catalogue for the president’s executive orders.

An email from Troy, Mich., sent 93 minutes before Trump was declared the winner last week: “OK I little confused. . . . . . . . . tell why do we have a general election if our vote does not count for the Presidential election?”

The normal work in this office is the publishing of the daily Federal Register, which includes government agencies’ notices and proposed rules, plus presidential documents such as speeches and proclamations. It’s America’s paper trail, wide open for anyone to see, textual government transparency in action. They’ve processed over 28,000 documents so far this year. They publish every business day, even if D.C. is closed for snow, even if the government is shut down.

“And every four years we have this dropped on us,” Vincent says. It goes back to a 1950 government reorganization that moved administrative responsibility for the electoral college from the State Department to the National Archives. “And we have it because the archivist said, ‘You’re doing it.’ Maybe the [Register] director was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

After a presidential election, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, the electors gather at their respective state capitals to cast their votes. Who are they? Just regular people, entrenched in party politics, who have been selected by their parties for this very specific task. Among other standing requirements, they cannot have fought for the South in the Civil War.

An emailed response to one of the many citizens who has recently contacted the Office of the Federal Register with questions about how the electoral college works. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)

They sign their state’s electoral certificates, which are then sent to Congress and to Vincent’s division. There are usually a handful of states that screw something up. Either the governor didn’t sign the certificate, or they didn’t put the state seal on it, or they got the election date wrong — in which case Vincent’s division says “try again.” Then she and her colleagues compare its 51 certificates to the ones received by Congress, to make sure everything checks out.

And then we have a president.

[Did Trump get a debate question in advance? Megyn Kelly says no, but questions linger]

The past three elections were easy for Vincent’s office. The election of 2000 was a challenge. Citizens kept showing up to scrutinize the signatures on Florida’s certificate, which had been laid out for public inspection.

This year, though, is unreal.

A tweet to @ElectoralCollege from a woman named Jeanne: “Please do not discard my Ohio vote. Trump IS my president.”

A tweet from an anonymous 18-year-old: “F--- YOU. Hillary got the most popular votes and then you chose a guy who can’t even do his fake tan right.”

But Vincent and Bunk are not in charge of choosing the president. Their role here in this moment is simply to respond to these emails with information, excise offensive posts from the Facebook page, and screenshot the threats to send to the inspector general.

“We’re really sick of the phrase ‘We the People,’ ” Vincent says.

“On both sides,” Bunk adds.

“Someone sent us the text of the Declaration of Independence,” Vincent says.

“What happened to civics in school?” Bunk says. “I’m serious about that.”

“A lot of people have been asking or advocating or yelling that we need to go back to the popular vote, but there is no ‘back,’ ” Vincent says. “Because this is how it’s been since 1789.”

For now, then, there are emails to deal with, callers to educate, and a process to follow that helps to formally elect a president. And a couple weeks after the inauguration, Vincent will enjoy her first vacation since August, on the beaches of Miami, far from the paper and the pinging.



“Death threats. Promises of civil war. Inappropriate photographs. Students with homework questions. A daughter of Holocaust survivors who called to sob into the ear of a government bureaucrat. A woman in Florida who wanted Vincent to do something about Russian hacking. …. An email from Troy, Mich., sent 93 minutes before Trump was declared the winner last week: “OK I little confused. . . . . . . . . tell why do we have a general election if our vote does not count for the Presidential election?” …. This year, though, is unreal. A tweet to @ElectoralCollege from a woman named Jeanne: “Please do not discard my Ohio vote. Trump IS my president.” A tweet from an anonymous 18-year-old: “F--- YOU. Hillary got the most popular votes and then you chose a guy who can’t even do his fake tan right.” …. “A lot of people have been asking or advocating or yelling that we need to go back to the popular vote, but there is no ‘back,’ ” Vincent says. “Because this is how it’s been since 1789.”


I really can’t add anything to these comments. I will simply say that this article should get the Pulitzer Prize!



http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/first-amendment-faces-unusual-threats-following-trumps-win

First Amendment faces unusual threats following Trump’s win
11/14/16 08:40 AM
By Steve Benen

photograph -- People line up for taxi across the street from the New York Times head office in New York, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters


Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) didn’t issue a statement responding to the election results right away. He took a few days to think about it, letting his frustrations simmer over time.

And when Reid did speak, he didn’t hold back, calling Donald Trump “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate.” The retiring Nevada Democrat added, “Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans.”

Asked about Reid’s statement on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, said the senator “should be very careful about characterizing somebody in a legal sense.”

Conway hedged soon after on the precise nature of the threat, but it certainly seemed as if a leading member of the president-elect’s team was threatening possible legal action against a senator because the lawmaker publicly criticized Trump. In case it’s not obvious, these kinds of intimidation tactics aren’t normal in modern American life – national leaders are not supposed to try to silence detractors with threats of litigation.

It was around this time that Trump himself decided to interrupt his busy transition schedule to complain via Twitter about the New York Times.

“Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena.’”

And then again.
“The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change - doubt it?”

And then again.
“The @nytimes states today that DJT believes ‘more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.’ How dishonest are they. I never said this!”

Remember, all of this came just five days after Trump shocked the world by actually winning the American presidency.

There are, of course, multiple problems with antics like these. First, there’s the simple matter of Trump’s inability to focus on what matters: the president-elect is supposed to be preparing to take office, not picking petty fights with newspapers.

Second, there’s just no precedent for mini-tantrums like these. Americans have never seen a national leader, preparing to lead the free world, whine about a news outlet for no particular reason, literally less than a week after Election Day.

Third, Trump’s complaints happen to be wrong. To the extent that reality still has any meaning whatsoever in politics, the New York Times is not losing thousands of subscribers; it did not send an apologetic letter to subscribers; and Trump did endorse broader nuclear proliferation in countries like Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. In other words, Trump isn’t just whining; he’s also lying.

But even putting aside these details, consider Trump’s ridiculous tweets in the broader context. One of the president-elect’s top aides raised the prospect of legal action against a critical senator; the president-elect himself is dishonestly attacking one of the nation’s top news outlets; Trump’s team is already taking new steps to limit press access; and the incoming Republican administration has taken aim at protesters voicing dissent in the wake of last week’s elections.

If this is what we’re seeing in the first week – two months before Trump officially takes power – the First Amendment and its proponents are in for a very rough ride.



Dear Heavenly Father, Help us all down here on Gaia's back as we stay safe, productive and caring. I don't know what it's going to mean now to be a US citizen. Please pardon my lack of faith.