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20 November 20
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Trump's Election Power Play: Persuade Republican Legislators to Do What US Voters Did Not
Michael Martina, Karen Freifeld and Jarrett Renshaw, Reuters
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump's strategy for retaining power despite losing the U.S. election is focused increasingly on persuading Republican legislators to intervene on his behalf in battleground states Democrat Joe Biden won, three people familiar with the effort said."
Having so far faced a string of losses in legal cases challenging the Nov. 3 results, Trump’s lawyers are seeking to enlist fellow Republicans who control legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which went for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020, the sources said.
Michigan’s Republican House Speaker Lee Chatfield has said the person who wins the most votes will win the electoral votes of his state, where Trump trails by more than 150,000 votes.
But Chatfield and Michigan’s Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey will on Friday visit the White House at the president’s request, a source in Michigan said, adding they were going to listen and see what Trump had to say.
In the United States, a candidate becomes president by securing the most “electoral” votes rather than by winning a majority of the national popular vote. Electors, allotted to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on their population, are party loyalists who pledge to support the candidate who won the popular vote in their state.
Typically, a state certifies a slate of electors based on which candidate won the popular vote, as Biden did in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
States have until Dec. 8 to meet a “safe harbor” deadline for resolving election disputes and choosing the electors who will select the president. The electors will convene as a so-called “Electoral College” on Dec. 14 to formally select the next president, who will take office on Jan. 20.
Trump’s lawyers are seeking to take the power of appointing electors away from the governors and secretaries of state and give it to friendly state lawmakers from his party, saying the U.S. Constitution gives legislatures the ultimate authority.
A person familiar with the campaign’s legal strategy said it has become a “more targeted approach towards getting the legislators engaged.”
As things stand, Biden has captured 306 electoral votes nationwide to Trump’s 232, well ahead of the 270 needed for victory. Were the combined 36 electoral votes in Michigan and Pennsylvania to go to Trump, he would trail by 270-268 electoral votes, meaning his campaign would still need to flip at least one more state to retain the White House.
A senior Trump campaign official told Reuters its plan is to cast enough doubt on vote-counting in big, Democratic cities that Republican lawmakers will have little choice but to intercede.
The campaign is betting that many of those lawmakers, who come from districts Trump won, will face a backlash from voters if they refuse to act. The campaign believes the longer they can drag this out, the more they will have an opportunity to persuade lawmakers to intervene, the official said.
A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll published this week suggested the Trump campaign had succeeded in stirring doubt — however unfounded — about the presidential election. The survey found about half of Republicans think Trump “rightfully won” the election he lost.
UPHILL FIGHT
Trump faces an uphill fight. Officials have said repeatedly there is no evidence of widespread voting irregularities.
Legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania have sought not to become involved. Several leading Republicans in Michigan privately express dismay at the extent to which Trump has tried to game the election results, believing it will irreversibly tarnish the party’s image in the state for years to come.
Part of the Trump campaign effort involves trying to delay certification, the normally routine process by which election results are finalized, either through recounts or by stalling at the local level, the campaign official said.
That happened on Tuesday in Detroit, Michigan, where Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers briefly refused to certify the results, citing small discrepancies in the number of votes. The Republicans reversed themselves after hours of heated public comment, only to say in affidavits late on Wednesday that they felt threatened and wanted to rescind the certification.
One of the Republicans, Monica Palmer, said in an affidavit that the election in Wayne County “had serious process flaws which deserve investigation.” She said she voted to approve the results because she thought the state would conduct an audit.
Palmer told Reuters in a text on Thursday that Trump called her after she voted to certify the results. She said “there was no discussion of an affidavit” during the call, but did not say whether the two discussed the certification vote in detail.
Trump’s campaign dropped a federal lawsuit on Thursday challenging the election results in Michigan, citing the Wayne County officials’ affidavits.
But Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Michigan’s secretary of state, said it was too late for the Republicans to rescind their certification. “Their job is done,” she said.
Asked at a news conference on Thursday about Trump’s outreach to Michigan officials, Biden called it “outrageous” and added it was the latest evidence that Trump is among the “most irresponsible presidents in American history.”
“Most of the Republicans I’ve spoken to, including some governors, think this is debilitating. It sends a horrible message about who we are as a country,” he said.
Trump’s lawyers already have implemented the strategy in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results of Pennsylvania, where Trump trails by 82,000 votes. In a court filing on Wednesday, his lawyers said they would ask a federal judge to either block the state from certifying the results or to declare that they were “defective” and allow the state’s Republican-led legislature to choose its own slate of electors.
Trump’s effort to enlist state lawmakers emerged after the president turned his legal efforts over to his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a person familiar with the effort said. Trump, the person said, “didn’t like the results and he put a guy in he knows and trusts, emulates his style.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday if the campaign’s aim was to block state certifications so Republican lawmakers could pick electors, Giuliani laughed and said the goal was to get around what he called an “outrageous iron curtain of censorship.”
Election officials and experts believe the Trump campaign has little chance of success.
“The results in Michigan and Pennsylvania are not particularly close, and the Trump campaign has come forth with no facts or legal theory that would justify disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters or throwing out the election results,” said Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law.
“This is a dangerous though almost certainly ineffective attempt to thwart the will of the voters or to delegitimize a Biden presidency based upon false claims of a stolen election,” he said.
Trump family. (photo: Jabin Botsford/Getty)
Trump Tax Write-Offs Are Ensnared in 2 New York Fraud Investigations
Danny Hakim, Mike McIntire, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Two separate New York State fraud investigations into President Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter."
wo separate New York State fraud investigations into President Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The inquiries — a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil one by the state attorney general, Letitia James — are being conducted independently. But both offices issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks for records related to the fees, the people said.
The subpoenas were the latest steps in the two investigations of the Trump Organization, and underscore the legal challenges awaiting the president when he leaves office in January. There is no indication that his daughter is a focus of either inquiry, which the Trump Organization has derided as politically motivated.
Stacey Abrams speaks to voters on Election Day alongside Rev. Raphael Warnock in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
ALSO SEE: Joe Biden Confirmed as Georgia Winner After Recount
In Georgia, Get-Out-the-Vote Operations That Helped Biden Win Haven't Stopped
Vanessa Williams and Reis Thebault, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "For Deborah Scott, executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, it's as if Election Day never ended."
The get-out-the-vote efforts of civic engagement groups like hers, which helped Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in nearly three decades, have been ongoing since Nov. 3. The group is still knocking on doors, calling voters and signing up new registrants, with a big push involving 100 volunteers planned for this weekend. Another group that works to mobilize voters of color set up tables at a recent high school graduation to register newly eligible young voters. A third group is reaching voters at transit stations.
The efforts are a continuation of the groups’ relentless push to register, engage and turn out voters ahead of a pair of high-stakes Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, which will determine which party controls the Senate and potentially whether a President Biden will be able to enact an ambitious agenda or be blocked by a restive upper chamber.
“At this point, it’s a turnout game,” said Scott, whose group focuses on Atlanta. As excited and proud Black voters are about their role in the outcome of the general election, Scott said the challenge is to remind them “we’re not done yet. We have to get them to go back. We have to show them why this race is so important because a lot of people will not be as engaged.”
Republicans have historically outperformed Democrats in Georgia’s runoff elections, which is one reason some political strategists suggest the Democratic Party and these groups have a steep climb ahead of the runoffs, which pit challenger Jon Ossoff (D) against incumbent Sen. David Perdue (R) and the Rev. Raphael Warnock (D) against Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R). The runoffs were triggered when none of the candidates got more than 50 percent of the vote in the Nov. 3 election.
But President Trump’s aggressive attempts at overturning the results of the presidential race could prompt a backlash from Democratic voters, particularly Black voters, whose support was critical to Biden’s success in the election. Many view Trump’s false accusations of voter fraud — targeting heavily Black cities including Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit — as racist attempts to invalidate African American votes.
“I’ve definitely met people in rural parts of the state who say, ‘Oh they’re trying to take away our vote? We’re not going to have that,’ ” said Wanda Mosley, senior coordinator for Black Voters Matter in Georgia. “It absolutely motivates Black voters across the state when they see our voting rights under attack.”
She said voters are paying close attention to what is unfolding in Michigan, where Republican election officials are seeking to block certification of votes in Wayne County, home to majority-Black Detroit. Georgia has also been the site of fierce fights over allegations of voter suppression of people of color.
“We brace ourselves,” Mosley said. “We’re looking and watching and seeing what they’re doing in Michigan, but we’re also keeping an eye on what’s happening in Georgia. We’re watching now so that were ready on January 5th and 6th and 7th.”
Lauren Groh-Wargo, chief executive of Fair Fight, predicted this runoff would be different from past cycles anyway, after Democrats pulled off a victory for President-elect Biden.
“We absolutely are going to be competitive. We have the wind in our sails on the Democratic side and two great candidates,” she said. “The big question is what is turnout going to be, and we feel like turnout is going to be relatively high.”
Since 2000, Georgia’s White population has declined from 65 percent to 52 percent, according to the most recent census estimates.
Democrats have slowly improved their statewide electoral game during the past several years, thanks to rapid demographic changes and grass-roots organizing. One of the best-known architects of the coalition of liberal voters is Stacey Abrams, whose 2018 campaign for governor was the best statewide performance for a Democrat in Georgia until Biden’s upset. Abrams, a former Democratic leader of the state House, had worked for years to register more people of color and young voters. Her campaign, which she lost by 1.4 percentage points, inspired her followers and independent groups to continue to register voters and educate them about the importance of participating in the political process.
Charles Bullock, a veteran political scientist at the University of Georgia, said demographic changes and the stakes both parties have in the outcome of the runoff could make for a slightly better playing field for Democrats this year.
That the two Georgia seats could determine the balance of power in the Senate has drawn more attention to the runoff than in past election cycles, Bullock said.
Warnock, the African American pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where slain civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, could bring out more Black voters, whose numbers have tended to decline more steeply than White voters in runoff contests. Bullock said Democrats could be more competitive “if Reverend Warnock can help punch up Black participation,” Bullock said.
Black voters are the Democratic Party’s largest and most loyal supporters in Georgia and turning them out, along with Latinos, Asian Americans, LGBTQ individuals and young people, will be the focus of grass-roots organizations.
Although many of those organizations are nonpartisan, their focus on voters more likely to support Democratic candidates — as they did overwhelmingly for Biden in the general election — will help the party in the upcoming runoff.
The groups plan to apply lessons they learned in the 2020 general election to try to punch up turnout among traditionally Democratic groups.
For instance, Felicia Davis, convener of the Clayton County Black Women’s Roundtable, estimates that turnout there was about 10 percent lower than usual in the presidential election. The pandemic severely curbed the amount of door-to-door canvassing that she and other grass-roots activists usually do, she said, and she thinks they will have to increase their activity for the runoff.
“We have to put on face masks and shields because we have to canvass. People do have to have that personal touch,” Davis said, adding that infrequent voters especially need to be personally persuaded.
Democrats are also putting more focus on persuading the state’s Latinos, who currently account for 5 percent of eligible voters, to show up for the runoffs.
“With the strength of the Latino electorate being at 250,000 strong, that is a sizable enough chunk in a tight, competitive race to make a difference,” said Jerry Gonzalez, CEO of Galeo, a nonprofit civic engagement organization that works in Georgia’s Latino communities.
Latino voters in Georgia, who favored Biden by 25 points in exit polls, have historically turned out at higher rates than in other states.
Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist who has worked on many campaigns in Georgia, expressed skepticism that Democrats could improve their performance over the general election, which drew historic turnout because of the strong feelings about Trump.
“If they didn’t participate in one of the most intense elections in our lifetime, it strikes me as a tall order to get someone who didn’t care enough to vote in this election to come back to vote in a runoff in January,” Ayres said.
Republicans will be hyper-focused on convincing the voters that cast ballots for Loeffler and Perdue the first time around to return to the polls, Ayres said. But some of those voters may be turned off by the two Republican senators’ support for allegations of fraud in the 2020 election in Georgia, he added.
The campaigns expect both races to be tight, which means turnout — and perhaps first-time voters — will be key.
New Georgia Project, which was founded by Abrams in 2013, has focused on registering young voters of color across the state. Nse Ufot, the organization’s chief executive, said her staff has identified 100,000 people they’ll try to register before the Dec. 7 deadline and expects to sign up as many as 20,000 of them.
That group, mostly 18- to 34-year-olds, is spread around the state and concentrated in places with historically low participation rates and where the gap between registered White voters and registered voters of color is the largest.
Last week, in Atlanta, New Georgia Project set up tables outside a joint graduation for city high schools whose spring ceremonies were canceled. As the graduates streamed out of a football stadium on the city’s south side, staffers handed out voting material.
“It was beautiful, we were rushed by kids in caps and gowns in different colors from different schools,” Ufot said. “We told them their community welcomes them to adulthood — and here’s a voter registration form.”
But the group has also ramped up online organizing efforts. On Election Day, they convened “Twitch the Vote,” an all-day event live-streamed on the gamer-focused platform that drew half a million visitors and encouraged them to head to the polls. New Georgia Project estimates there are up to 30,000 17-year-olds who will turn 18 between Election Day and the Jan. 5 runoffs — another pool of voters the group will target.
Ahead of the runoffs, Ufot and her team will focus on the state’s rural areas, which the state’s political establishment often writes off as homogenous and solidly Republican.
“When we would talk about rural voters, people would have a confused look on their face,” Ufot said. “We realized when people hear rural voters, they think of White conservatives and that is just not the case in Georgia.”
On the eve of the election, Mosley and her group were crisscrossing the state in their self-appointed “Blackest bus in America.” The nonpartisan group made several stops in the southwestern corner of the state, reminding residents to turn out the next day — but also registering new voters, even though the deadline to be eligible for the Nov. 3 contest had long passed.
“Voter registration is a 365-day-a-year proposition for us,” Mosley said.
They plan to keep focusing on places like Georgia’s rural southwest — cities like Blakely, for example, one of the last Mosley visited before the general election. And while questions swirl in Washington and elsewhere about the presidential election, most voters are focused on issues closer to home.
In Blakely — the seat of Early County, which was devastated by a coronavirus outbreak in April — there are few issues more important to voters than health care, Mosley said.
“Georgia is one of only 12 states that does not have Obamacare, so we have struggled with access to health care prior to covid,” Mosley said. “Now not having health care, coupled with hospital closings, it is glaring and it is top of mind for a lot folks, especially Black folks.”
Mosley said get-out-the-vote efforts in rural areas are vital not just for the Senate contest, but also for the lesser-known race for public service commission, which regulates the state’s utilities and has a direct, immediate impact on residents’ lives.
“Their lives are on the ballot in many ways,” Mosley said.
Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Agency, testifies before Congress in Washington, March 13, 2019. (photo: Bill Clark/Getty)
Democrats Demand Briefing From GSA Chief on Delay in Biden Transition
Kyle Cheney, POLITICO
Cheney writes: "Four senior House Democrats are demanding that GSA Administrator Emily Murphy brief them Monday on the reason she has yet to ascertain Joe Biden's win in the presidential election, warning that her answers will determine whether they intend to haul her to Capitol Hill for a public hearing, along with other senior General Services Administration officials."
Administrator Emily Murphy has delayed the relatively routine step as President Donald Trump contests the election results.
our senior House Democrats are demanding that GSA Administrator Emily Murphy brief them Monday on the reason she has yet to ascertain Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election, warning that her answers will determine whether they intend to haul her to Capitol Hill for a public hearing, along with other senior General Services Administration officials.
“We have been extremely patient, but we can wait no longer,” said House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey, in a four-page letter joined by Reps. Gerry Connolly and Mike Quigley.
Biden’s team can’t begin accessing federal resources to aid the transition until Murphy makes an official “ascertainment” of his victory, a relatively routine step based on the unofficial but clear results of a presidential election. As Trump has contested the election results, Murphy has withheld a decision despite enormous pressure from Democrats to begin the process. Trump recently praised her on Twitter, saying she’s doing a “great job.”
“White House officials claim they are not pressing you to block the ascertainment determination and that you have made this determination entirely on your own,” the Democrats wrote, adding, “If this is accurate, it is critical that you now follow the law and make the ascertainment designation without any further delay.”
The Democrats say Murphy’s refusal to act is having “grave effects,” from impeding the transition of power and blocking Biden’s ability to begin assuming national security responsibilities and preparing a pandemic response plan.
They also pointed to the 2016 election, a race that featured closer margins in key swing states won by Trump and a smaller popular-vote win for Hillary Clinton. Yet that year, the GSA administrator ascertained Trump’s victory by Nov. 9, the day after the general election.
A GSA spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
USS Theodore Roosevelt Aircraft Carrier. (photo: US Navy)
Cassandra Stimpson and Holly Zhang | A Washington Echo Chamber for a New Cold War
Cassandra Stimpson and Holly Zhang, TomDispatch
Excerpt: "War: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington's world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line."
ar: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington’s world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line.
In fact, as the Biden presidency approaches, an era of great-power competition between the United States and China is already taken for granted inside the Washington Beltway. Much less well known are the financial incentives that lurk behind so many of the voices clamoring for an ever-more-militarized response to China in the Pacific. We’re talking about groups that carefully avoid the problems such an approach will provoke when it comes to the real security of the United States or the planet. A new cold war is likely to be dangerous and costly in an America gripped by a pandemic, its infrastructure weakened, and so many of its citizens in dire economic straits. Still, for foreign lobbyists, Pentagon contractors, and Washington’s many influential think tanks, a “rising China” means only one thing: rising profits.
Defense contractors and foreign governments are spending millions of dollars annually funding establishment think tanks (sometimes in secret) in ways that will help set the foreign-policy agenda in the Biden years. In doing so, they gain a distinctly unfair advantage when it comes to influencing that policy, especially which future tools of war this country should invest in and how it should use them.
Not surprisingly, many of the top think-tank recipients of foreign funding are also top recipients of funding from this country’s major weapons makers. The result: an ecosystem in which those giant outfits and some of the countries that will use their weaponry now play major roles in bankrolling the creation of the very rationales for those future sales. It’s a remarkably closed system that works like a dream if you happen to be a giant weapons firm or a major think tank. Right now, that system is helping accelerate the further militarization of the whole Indo-Pacific region.
In the Pacific, Japan finds itself facing an increasingly tough set of choices when it comes to its most significant military alliance (with the United States) and its most important economic partnership (with China). A growing U.S. presence in the region aimed at counterbalancing China will allow Japan to remain officially neutral, even as it reaps the benefits of both partnerships.
To walk that tightrope (along with the defense contractors that will benefit financially from the further militarization of the region), Japan spends heavily to influence thinking in Washington. Recent reports from the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Initiative (FITI), where the authors of this piece work, reveal just how countries like Japan and giant arms firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing functionally purchase an inside track on a think-tank market that’s hard at work creating future foreign-policy options for this country’s elite.
How to Make a Think Tank Think
Take the prominent think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which houses programs focused on the “China threat” and East Asian “security.” Its Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which gets funding from the governments of Japan and the Philippines, welcomes contributions "from all governments in Asia, as well as corporate and foundation support.”
Unsurprisingly, the program also paints a picture of Japan as central “to preserving the liberal international order” in the face of the dangers of an “increasingly assertive China.” It also highlights that country’s role as Washington’s maritime security partner in the region. There’s no question that Japan is indeed an important ally of Washington. Still, positioning its government as a lynchpin in the international peace (or war) process seems a dubious proposition at best.
CSIS is anything but alone when it comes to the moneyed interests pushing Washington to invest ever more in what now passes for “security” in the Pacific region. A FITI report on Japanese operations in the U.S., for instance, reveals at least 3,209 lobbying activities in 2019 alone, as various lobbyists hired by that country and registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act targeted both Congress and think tanks like CSIS on behalf of the Japanese government. Such firms, in fact, raked in more than $30 million from that government last year alone. From 2014 to 2019, Japan was also the largest East Asian donor to the top 50 most influential U.S. think tanks. The results of such investments have been obvious when it comes to both the products of those think tanks and congressional policies.
Think-tank recipients of Japanese funding are numerous and, because that country is such a staunch ally of Washington, its government can be more open about its activities than is typical. Projects like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “China Risk and China Opportunity for the U.S.-Japan Alliance,” funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, are now the norm inside the Beltway. You won’t be surprised to learn that the think-tank scholars working on such projects almost inevitably end up highlighting Japan’s integral role in countering “the China threat” in the influential studies they produce. That threat itself, of course, is rarely questioned. Instead, its dangers and the need to confront them are invariably reinforced.
Another Carnegie Endowment study, “Bolstering the Alliance Amid China’s Military Resurgence,” is typical in that regard. It’s filled with warnings about China’s growing military power -- never mind that, in 2019, the United States spent nearly triple what China did on its military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Like so many similarly funded projects inside the Beltway, this one recommended further growth in military cooperation between the U.S. and Japan. Important as well, it claimed, was developing “the capability to wage combined multidomain joint operations” which “would require accelerating operational response times to enhance firepower.”
The Carnegie project lists its funding and, as it turns out, that foundation has taken in at least $825,000 from Japan and approximately the same amount from defense contractors and U.S. government sources over the past six years. And Carnegie’s recommendations recently came to fruition when the Trump administration announced the second-largest sale of U.S. weaponry to Japan, worth more than $23 billion worth.
If the Japanese government has a stake in funding such think tanks to get what it wants, so does the defense industry. The top 50 think tanks have received more than $1 billion from the U.S. government and defense contractors over those same six years. Such contractors alone lobby Congress to the tune of more than $20 million each election cycle. Combine such sums with Japanese funding (not to speak of the money spent by other governments that desire policy influence in Washington) and you have a confluence of interests that propels U.S. military expenditures and the sale of weapons globally on a mind-boggling scale.
A Defense Build-Up Is the Order of the Day
An April 2020 report on the “Future of US-Japan Defense Collaboration” by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security offers a typical example of how such pro-militarization interests are promoted. That report, produced in partnership with the Japanese embassy, begins with the premise that “the United States and Japan must accelerate and intensify their long-standing military and defense-focused coordination and collaboration.”
Specifically, it urges the United States to "take measures to incentivize Japan to work with Lockheed Martin on the F-2 replacement program,” known as the F-3. (The F-2 Support Fighter is the jet Lockheed developed and produced in partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for the Japanese Defense Forces.) While the report does acknowledge its partnership with the embassy of Japan, it fails to acknowledge that Lockheed donated three quarters of a million dollars to the influential Atlantic Council between 2014 and 2019 and that Japan generally prefers to produce its own military equipment domestically.
The Atlantic Council report continues to recommend the F-3 as the proper replacement for the F-2, “despite political challenges, technology-transfer concerns,” and “frustration from all parties” involved. This recommendation comes at a time when Japan has increasingly sought to develop its own defense industry. Generally speaking, no matter the Japanese embassy’s support for the Atlantic Council, that country’s military is eager to develop a new stealth fighter of its own without the help of either Lockheed Martin or Boeing. While both companies wish to stay involved in the behemoth project, the Atlantic Council specifically advocates only for Lockheed, which just happens to have contributed more than three times what Boeing did to that think tank’s coffers.
A 2019 report by the Hudson Institute on the Japan-U.S. alliance echoed similar sentiments, outlining a security context in which Japan and the United States should focus continually on deterring “aggression by China.” To do so, the report suggested, American-made ground-launched missiles (GCLMs) were one of several potential weapons Japan would need in order to prepare a robust “defense” strategy against China. Notably, the first American GCLM test since the United States withdrew from the Cold War era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 used a Lockheed Martin Mark 41 Launch System and Raytheon’s Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile. The Hudson Institute had not only received at least $270,000 from Japan between 2014 and 2018, but also a minimum of $100,000 from Lockheed Martin.
In 2020, CSIS organized an unofficial working group for industry professionals and government officials that it called the CSIS Alliance Interoperability Series to discuss the development of the future F-3 fighter jet. While Japanese and American defense contractors fight for the revenue that will come from its production, the think tank claims that American, Japanese, and Australian industry representatives and officials will “consider the political-military and technical issues that the F-3 debate raises.” Such working groups are far from rare and offer think tanks incredible access to key decision-makers who often happen to be their benefactors as well.
All told, between 2014 and 2019, CSIS received at least $5 million from the U.S. government and Pentagon contractors, including at least $400,000 from Lockheed Martin and more than $200,000 from Boeing. In this fashion, a privileged think-tank elite has cajoled its way into the inner circles of policy formation (and it matters little whether we’re talking about the Trump administration or the future Biden one). Think about it for a moment: possibly the most crucial relationship on the planet between what looks like a rising and a falling great power (in a world that desperately needs their cooperation) is being significantly influenced by experts and officials invested in the industry guaranteed to militarize that very relationship and create a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War.
Any administration, in other words, lives in something like an echo chamber that continually affirms the need for a yet greater defense build-up led by those who would gain most from it.
Profiting from Great Power Competition
Japan is singled out in this analysis because the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, where we work, had striking access to its influence data. There are, however, many other nations with defense agendas in the Indo-Pacific region who act similarly. As a Norwegian think-tank document put it, “Funding powerful think tanks is one way to gain such access, and some think tanks in Washington are openly conveying that they can service only those foreign governments that provide funding.” A Japanese official publicly noted that such funding of U.S. think tanks “is an investment.” You can’t put it much more bluntly or accurately than that.
Foreign governments and the defense industry debate the nitty-gritty of how best to arm a region whose continued militarization is accepted as a given. The need to stand up to the Chinese “aggressor” is a foregone conclusion of most thought leaders in Washington. They ought, of course, to be weighing and debating the entire security picture, including the potential future devastation of climate change, rather than simply piling yet more weaponry atop the outdated tools of war.
To be sure, think tanks don’t make U.S. foreign policy, nor do foreign lobbyists and defense contractors. But their money, distributed in copious amounts, does buy them crucial seats at that policymaking table, while dissenters are generally left out in the cold.
What’s the solution? For starters, a little transparency in Washington foreign-policy-making circles would be useful so that the public can be made more aware of the conflicts of interest that rule the roost when it comes to China policy. All think tanks should be required to publicly disclose their donors and funders. At least the Atlantic Council and CSIS report their funders by levels of donations and note certain sponsors of events or reports (a basic level of transparency that makes a piece like this possible). Such a standard of transparency should minimally be practiced by all think tanks, including prominent organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Earth Institute, neither of which releases any information about its funders, to highlight potential conflicts of interests.
Without transparency, the defense contractors and foreign governments that donate to think tanks help create foreign-policy thinking in which this world is, above all, in constant need of more weapons systems. This only increases military tensions globally, while helping to perpetuate the interests and profits of a defense industry that is, in truth, antithetical to the interests of most Americans, so many of whom would prefer diplomatic, peaceful, and coordinated solutions to the challenges of a rising China.
Unfortunately, as foreign policy is now made, a rising China is also guaranteed to lift all boats (submarines, aircraft carriers, and surface ships) as well as fighter planes aiding the military-industrial complex on a planet increasingly at war with itself.
Cassandra Stimpson is a research project director with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative (FITI) at the Center for International Policy (CIP). Holly Zhang is a researcher with FITI at CIP.
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Vice President Joe Biden speaks to the U.S. military personnel at a Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, March 7, 2016. (photo: Kanran Jebreili/AP)
On Arms Sales to Dictators and the Yemen War, Progressives See a Way in With Biden
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes: "Biden has taken a tough stance against longtime U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Progressives are keen to hold him to his promises."
he defense industry celebrated Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, with contractors saying they expected their companies to continue flourishing under his administration as they have under Donald Trump. But while Biden is no peacenik — waging wars has long been an area of bipartisan consensus in Washington — he has already signaled that he’ll take a radically different approach from Trump — particularly when it comes to making overseas arms sales.
Foreign policy was not a top campaign issue during the presidential election, especially as the news cycle was dominated by the health and economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, nationwide demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice, and Trump’s efforts to sow doubt in the legitimacy of U.S. voting systems. But within a week of the election, Trump pushed through a $23 billion weapons deal with the United Arab Emirates. It was the latest manifestation of Trump’s cozy relationships with Gulf dictatorships that have become anathema to U.S. progressives.
Biden, meanwhile, ran on ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, a position that gained bipartisan support in Congress because of the efforts of progressive activists and lawmakers — until Trump vetoed a 2019 resolution that would have accomplished that goal. The former vice president said last month that his administration would “reassess” the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, which he called a “pariah” during a primary debate last year. He has also said the U.S. would not sell more weapons to the country, deviating from the position taken by his former boss, Barack Obama. Biden has also expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s security assistance to Azerbaijan, which signed a peace deal with Armenia last week after a decadeslong conflict broke into clashes in late September.
Progressive activists and lawmakers have welcomed Biden’s positioning thus far and are hoping that foreign policy is an area they may have influence with in the incoming administration.
In July, more than 30 progressive groups sent a letter to Biden urging him to select foreign policy personnel in a manner that would “challenge the institutions and groupthink that have led to a disastrous, overly-militarized, unilateral approach to foreign affairs” of past administrations.
Kate Kizer, policy director for Win Without War, a progressive foreign policy organization that signed the letter, said the recent UAE arms sale is a good place to start. “President-elect Biden has promised to chart a different path than Trump, and we’re hopeful that he starts by immediately undoing as many of the just-notified sales to the UAE as possible, and by putting the breaks on transfers that Congress has previously tried to reject under Trump.”
The president-elect “should leverage the renewed bipartisan commitment to recentering human rights concerns in U.S. weapons transfers, as well as accountability for past misuse of weapons,” Kizer continued. “We expect both Congress and President-elect Biden to really fix this broken arms sale status quo next year and finally end the decadeslong practice of arming human rights abusers and using weapon sales to achieve misperceived, often militarized national interests.”
The Trump administration brokered an agreement between Israel and the UAE this summer, with the UAE agreeing to normalize diplomatic relations in exchange for Israel stopping a planned annexation of parts of occupied settlements in the West Bank. Biden’s top foreign policy adviser Tony Blinken, who has praised the controversial agreement, cautioned that the sale appeared to be part of a “quid pro quo” related to the normalization agreement, the Times of Israel reported. Blinken said a Biden administration would need to review the sale in order to preserve Israel’s edge in the region.
Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s undersecretary for defense policy and a top contender for defense secretary in the Biden administration, signaled opposition to a ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia during talks on Yemen during a biannual meeting last January for the liberal think tank Foreign Policy for America, The American Prospect reported. She suggested instead a policy of conditional use, which the defense industry wouldn’t lobby against, according to TAP. But as Politico reported last week, Flournoy convened a call with top progressive foreign policy groups several days before the election to assuage their concerns about her position on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, saying that she opposed the sale of offensive weapons that could be used in Yemen. The Biden campaign declined to comment for this story, but pointed to Biden’s past comments on Saudi Arabia and Blinken’s comments on the UAE deal.
Alex McCoy, political director at the veterans group Common Defense, said Biden’s transition team has reached out to his group and a number of other progressive foreign policy organizations and engaged their critiques in good faith — even though there’s not yet much progressive representation on transition teams for national security agencies. Common Defense’s signature issue is a pledge to “end forever wars,” which Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris did not officially sign on to, though similar language appears in Biden’s platform.
But when it comes to arms sales, McCoy said he expects it will be an area of agreement with the new administration. It helps that the middle of the party is broadly in agreement that the U.S. shouldn’t sell arms to authoritarian countries, McCoy explained. “I think this is a clear area where public opinion has become more evident to policymakers. And so I am seeing commensurate movement by those policymakers.”
The Democratic Party has made it a priority to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which has devastated the country and pushed it to the edge of famine. The Democratic National Committee included it in its platform, and Biden has called to end U.S. support for the Saudi coalition in Yemen. Biden came out in opposition to U.S. support for the war in Yemen last May, shortly after Trump had vetoed the War Powers Resolution. In a Q&A with the Council on Foreign Relations last August, Biden criticized Trump for giving Saudi Arabia a “dangerous blank check” to extend the war in Yemen.
Progressives intend to hold Biden to that promise. The joint War Powers Resolution to halt U.S. activity in the ongoing war, which was shepherded by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., gives them a road map. It was passed in both chambers last year, with support from 23 Republicans.
“Progressives are really interested in encouraging the Biden administration to follow through very quickly on the commitment to end the Yemen war, for starters,” said Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Sanders. “It’s not just a progressive priority, it’s a bipartisan issue at this point. You have a number of conservative groups that were part of the coalition, and this could be a good early bipartisan win.”
Speaking to The Intercept, Khanna expressed confidence that Congress would pass another War Powers Resolution ending involvement in Yemen and “that Biden would sign that in the first month or two of his presidency.” He added: “We need to have much greater restraint in terms of intervention, not be getting into more confrontations overseas. … I think that a good place to see where we could get progress is to ban any arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”
Kizer, of Win Without War, said Biden could “unilaterally cut off further intelligence-sharing and security cooperation” with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. “These immediate steps must be followed by concrete steps to hold the Saudi and Emirati governments accountable for their abuses in Yemen — in the civil war and counterterrorism operations — not only by banning weapons to these countries for the foreseeable future and putting other security cooperation under review, but also by supporting multilateral efforts to create justice for the countless victims of this six-year conflict in an effort push for sustainable peace.”
In addition to Saudi Arabia, Biden has called to restrict the flow of weapons to Azerbaijan. As of October, the U.S. was just behind Turkey in arms sales to the country. In a press release last month, Biden called on the Trump administration to stop sending equipment to Azerbaijan and to push Turkey and Russia to stop fueling conflict in Armenia. “The administration must fully implement and not waive requirements under Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act to stop the flow of military equipment to Azerbaijan, and call on Turkey and Russia to stop fueling the conflict with the supply of weapons and, in the case of Turkey, mercenaries,” Biden said. Instead, he added, the U.S. should be leading the effort to end fighting and push for international humanitarian assistance. “Under my administration that is exactly what we will do.”
Biden has addressed other foreign policy issues that are important to progressives, stating that he wants to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement. Progressives are also hoping he can be pushed to roll back crippling sanctions in countries like Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, said a congressional aide who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to comment publicly on the Biden transition. “I think there’s going to be a case hopefully that we can make as a progressive movement that providing real economic relief, and sanctions relief, and humanitarian assistance, and so on is going to be vital to bolstering the U.S. economy, which rightly should be the early focus of a Biden administration.”
Biden called last year in a CFR questionnaire for maintaining U.S. sanctions and implementing tougher multilateral sanctions in Venezuela. His advisers have hinted that sanctions are still on the table in Syria, according to one report, although he has not spoken publicly about the matter. Biden has also said his administration would maintain sanctions on Iran, but has not outlined a plan on how they might shift under a return to the nuclear agreement. In April, he said that humanitarian exceptions should be made to allow the country to receive adequate supplies and equipment to respond to the ongoing pandemic. Biden has also signaled that he might be open to using sanctions against Russia.
Congressional progressives hoping to secure foreign policy wins will have to contend with a much slimmer majority in the House next session, having lost 11 seats to Republicans so far from their 35-seat majority, with some congressional races yet to be called. The upshot is that the Squad has expanded to include Jamaal Bowman, who unseated foreign policy hawk Rep. Eliot Engel, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus is restructuring in a way that will allow it to leverage its growing power. Progressives have their eyes on proposals like one advocated for by Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., that would allow the International Monetary Fund to dispense a global stimulus package to boost countries most impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent global economic downturn. “There’s kind of a global poverty aspect to this,” the aide said, “and I think that under a Biden administration, we’re gonna be able to see a lot more of that.”
The Castle Fire burned through portions of giant sequoia groves on the western slopes of California's Sierra Nevada mountains, the only place on the planet where they naturally grow. (photo: Al Seib/LA Times)
1,000 Giant Sequoias Killed This California Fire Season, Many Had Lived for Over 500 Years
Climate Nexus
Excerpt: "The Castle Fire killed likely more than a thousand giant sequoias - including many that had stood for well over 500 years and some for 1,000 - on the western slopes of California's Sierra Nevada mountains."
"This fire could have put a noticeable dent in the world's supply of big sequoias," Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told the Times. Sequoias are designed to survive and thrive with fire — their cones cannot release their seeds without it. But, tinder-like fuel, dried by climate change, and centuries of fire suppression by European settlers combined to set the stage for monstrous conflagrations so intense they burned the gargantuan, fire resilient "monarchs" into what Christy Brigham, science chief at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, described as "blackened toothpicks."
Prior to this year, the worst known fire season for sequoias was in 1297, the year in which William Wallace defeated the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, during the Medieval Warm Period. The September 2020 Castle Fire, Stephenson said, however, was probably worse.
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