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Jeremy Scahill | Biden Should End Espionage Act Prosecutions of Whistleblowers and Journalists
Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept
Scahill writes: "It's time to stop the war on journalism."
efore Donald Trump began his run for president, there was a war against journalism in the United States. President George W. Bush used the Espionage Act and sought to jail reporters who refused to give up their sources, not to mention killing journalists in war zones. When President Barack Obama, a constitutional law scholar, came to power, he did so claiming that he and Joe Biden would represent the most transparent administration in history. But then reality set in. During his eight years in power, Obama’s Justice Department used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers more than all of Obama’s predecessors combined. They continued the Bush Justice Department’s war on journalists, including threatening to jail then-New York Times reporter James Risen if he did not testify against his alleged source.
Despite its prosecutions of whistleblowers, Obama’s administration understood that use of the Espionage Act was controversial and widely denounced by press freedom organizations. Attorney General Eric Holder sought to implement some guardrails against spying on journalists, though the administration maintained it had the right to do so in some circumstances. Still, Obama commuted whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s draconian 35-year prison sentence. During Trump’s tenure Manning was jailed again for nearly a year for refusing to testify in front of a Grand Jury. Obama’s administration also declined to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and at least one other alleged whistleblower accused of leaking documents about the drone assassination program. Trump’s administration dug both cases out and moved forward with espionage prosecutions, which remain active.
Trump came to power following a political campaign in which he attacked the free press, adopted fascist slogans to denounce reporters, and denied that basic facts were true. Trump harbored a Nixonian hatred of the press and lived in constant fear of leaks, particularly about his personal finances.
In a clear effort to send chills through the government and as a warning to any would-be whistleblowers, Trump’s Justice Department went on a rampage using the Espionage Act. Its first major prosecution was against a National Security Agency contractor named Reality Winner. The Justice Department accused Winner of leaking to a “news outlet” an NSA document that showed Russian efforts to penetrate software used in some U.S. voting systems in 2016. Other news organizations have stated that the outlet was The Intercept. Winner accepted a plea agreement to one count of felony transmission of national defense information and was sentenced to five years, the longest prison term of any whistleblower convicted under the Espionage Act. It was an unconscionable act by a vindictive administration.
The Trump Justice Department weaponized its indictment of Winner in an effort to smear The Intercept and to encourage the media to focus on other journalists rather than the contents of the NSA document in question or the unjust use of the Espionage Act. Unfortunately, many publications took the bait and played into Trump’s malignant anti-press crusade.
When indictments of whistleblowers happen and FBI investigations are launched, journalists should scrutinize and confront the actions of intelligence and law enforcement agencies and assess what these attacks mean for the freedom of the press. Instead, so many media outlets seemed to want to aid the Trump administration in making this about what journalists did or did not do — making the publication the target, instead of focusing on the secrets that whistleblowers exposed or the dangerous weaponizing of the Espionage Act by both Democratic and Republican presidents.
I believe that The Intercept made serious errors in its editorial process on the Russia story, and I advocated both publicly and internally for The Intercept to explain exactly what happened. I believe that some of these mistakes were preventable. At the same time, there were serious legal concerns that anything The Intercept said in public could be used against Winner and other sources, and our attorneys implored The Intercept’s editors to say nothing. I understood the legal logic. Our editor-in-chief ended up making a statement acknowledging that we had failed to live up to our standards and taking responsibility for the institutional failure.
This was a complicated situation, and I believe the facts make clear that Winner would likely have been arrested regardless of any mistakes made by The Intercept. She was one of just six people in the entire U.S. national security apparatus to print the document in question and the only one to use a government computer to send emails (which were unrelated to the Russia story) to The Intercept. That doesn’t absolve The Intercept, but it is an important part of this story that is seldom mentioned. And we all know the Trump administration prioritized punishing leakers and was willing to use the full force of the state to do so. It was disturbing that the overwhelming focus of the reporting on Winner by some media outlets was not on the contents of the document she allegedly revealed or that the Trump administration was wielding the Espionage Act like a weapon in order to threaten any would-be whistleblowers. The lead prosecutor made the outrageous statement that Winner was “the quintessential example of an insider threat.” The Intercept deserved criticism and scrutiny, but the problem was that it often came at the expense of holding the chief villains of the story accountable.
President Joe Biden has an opportunity to right some of these wrongs. He should publicly commit to ending the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers. Congress could also amend or repeal the act so that it cannot be used for such purposes. Biden should also take actions to end the persecution of Assange and return to the Obama-era position that Assange should not be prosecuted by the United States. “We thought it was a dangerous precedent to prosecute Assange for something that reporters do all the time,” said Matthew Miller, an Obama Justice Department spokesperson. “The Espionage Act doesn’t make any distinction between journalists and others, so if you can apply it to Assange, there’s no real reason you couldn’t apply it to [the New York Times].” Biden should immediately pardon Winner and secure her release from a coronavirus-infested prison. He also should drop the case against former intelligence contractor and war veteran Daniel Hale, who is facing trial under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking documents on the U.S. drone and assassination programs.
We have just seen the end of a dangerous administration that openly waged war against journalism. For four years, the president of the United States used the Justice Department as his personal law firm and a political cudgel against his perceived enemies, including the press. Even if Biden doesn’t agree with the principles I am advocating, he could declare these Espionage Act indictments to be the toxic fruit of the poisonous and discredited Trump Justice Department. And media outlets should remember the next time a whistleblower is arrested that the most important task for journalists is to hold those in power to account rather than allow themselves to be used in a government distraction campaign.
The NRA's lobbyists and political allies have fought for permissive state gun laws, turning Florida in particular into the 'Gunshine State.' (photo: Daniel Acker/Getty)
Judge Rejects NRA's Bid to Throw Out or Transfer Lawsuit That Could Shut It Down
Reese Oxner, NPR
Oxner writes: "A New York judge has rejected a National Rifle Association bid to dismiss, pause or transfer to another court a lawsuit by the state of New York that could shut down the organization."
The lawsuit, filed by the New York attorney general in August, seeks to dissolve the nonprofit and alleges that executives diverted millions of dollars of NRA funds to luxury vacations, private jets and more. The lawsuit, backed by a 18-month investigation, alleges the organization is "fraught with fraud and abuse."
The ruling by Justice Joel Cohen of Manhattan Supreme Court comes six days after the gun-rights group said in its filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that it wants to relocate to Texas.
Typically bankruptcy filings halt existing litigation. But New York Attorney General Letitia James pushed for an exemption, saying she was enforcing her "police and regulatory power."
The NRA announced it wants out of New York due to its "corrupt political and regulatory environment." The organization said it would reincorporate in Texas and hoped the lawsuit would either be thrown out or handled in another court.
James had vowed she would not allow the NRA to "use this or any other tactic to evade accountability and my office's oversight."
"It would be inappropriate to find that the attorney general couldn't pursue her claims in state court just because one of the defendants wants to proceed in federal court," Cohen said at a video hearing Thursday, according to Reuters.
The NRA, in a previous statement, called the lawsuit a "baseless premeditated attack on our organization and the Second Amendment freedoms it fights to defend."
The organization said it was abandoning New York — its home for 150 years — to escape a "toxic political environment." The NRA's various legal battles have cost it over $100 million, NPR's Tim Mak reported.
Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (photo: Al Drago/Getty)
Fauci Says Lack of Candor From Trump Administration 'Very Likely' Cost Lives
Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
Stracqualursi writes: "Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday that the lack of truthfulness from the Trump administration regarding the Covid-19 pandemic 'very likely' cost American lives."
"Particularly when you're in the situation of almost being in a crisis with the number of cases and hospitalizations and deaths that we have -- when you start talking about things that make no sense medically and no sense scientifically, that clearly is not helpful," Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, said on CNN's "New Day" Friday.
Asked by CNN's John Berman if the lack of candor over the last year and lack of facts, in some cases, cost lives, Fauci said, "You know, it very likely did."
He warned that it's "not helpful" when "you're starting to go down paths that are not based on any science at all," adding that he doesn't wish to rehash the ways in which the Trump administration steered away from science.
Fauci, who sat on former President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force, said Thursday that the Biden administration's approach to handling the Covid-19 pandemic will be "completely transparent, open and honest" with the American people.
"If things go wrong, not point fingers but to correct them. And to make everything we do be based on science and evidence," he told reporters Thursday during a White House briefing.
Fauci, who is also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had disagreed with Trump on how to approach the pandemic, with the former president consistently downplaying the threat of Covid-19. Trump attacked Fauci publicly and had suggested at one point he was considering firing him, and by the end of the Trump administration, Fauci was largely sidelined.
Fauci admitted Thursday that it was "uncomfortable" when things like hydroxychloroquine were promoted as treatments for Covid-19 when they weren't based on fact, and that he takes "no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the President."
He called it a "liberating feeling" to now be able to "talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is," without fear of repercussions.
Soldiers of the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team secure a helicopter landing zone after a meeting in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, March 24, 2019. (photo: Sgt. Jordan Trent/Army)
Danny Sjursen | The Future of War, American-Style
Danny Sjursen, TomDispatch
Sjursen writes: "Historically, foreign-policy paradigm shifts are exceedingly rare, especially when they tack toward peace."
More than 19 years ago, the U.S. launched the air war that would become the ground invasion and “liberation” of Afghanistan. More than 17 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared “major combat” over in that country with just 8,000 U.S. troops still stationed there. Approximately nine years after that, at the end of an Obama-era “surge,” U.S. troop levels would reach around 100,000 (not counting contingents of NATO allies, as well as private contractors, CIA agents, and those involved in the American air war in that country). Today, those troop levels are finally down to 2,500 (plus, of course, those private contractors and that air power, which actually ramped up significantly in the Trump years). That, in other words, is how Donald Trump “ended” the American war in Afghanistan. Those remaining troops are supposed to be gone by May 1, 2021, but don’t count on it in the Biden era, since our new president (who, as vice president, had indeed been against the Obama-era troop surge) is seemingly committed to keeping some kind of “counterterror” force in that country.
In any case, 19-plus years after Washington put everything it had into Afghanistan except nuclear weapons (something Donald Trump threatened to do at one point), the Taliban is the very opposite of defeated. As the PBS NewsHour described the situation in an on-screen note introducing a recent report on developments there: “The Taliban is stronger in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001, occupying one-fifth of the country with around 60,000 full-time fighters.”
Isn’t it strange when you think about it that, other than some antiwar efforts by veterans of those conflicts, Americans have been so little concerned with nearly two decades of constant military failure across the globe for which we’ve squandered trillions of taxpayer dollars? Worst of all, those “forever wars” show every sign of continuing in the Biden years and possibly beyond, as former Army officer and TomDispatch regular Danny Sjursen, author most recently of Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, explains so vividly (and painfully) today. Sjursen, who has in the past been all too accurate in his expectations about American war-making, offers a little crystal-ball look at what all of us might expect in the next four years from the country that just won’t stop fighting and a citizenry that seems as if it could care less.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
ard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the U.S. war machine. He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America’s unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns. In terms of active U.S. combat, that’s only happened once before, in the Philippines, America’s second-longest (if often forgotten) overseas combat campaign.
Yet that conflict was limited to a single Pacific archipelago. Biden inherits a global war — and burgeoning new Cold War — spanning four continents and a military mired in active operations in dozens of countries, combat in some 14 of them, and bombing in at least seven. That sort of scope has been standard fare for American presidents for almost two decades now. Still, while this country’s post-9/11 war presidents have more in common than their partisan divisions might suggest, distinctions do matter, especially at a time when the White House almost unilaterally drives foreign policy.
So, what can we expect from commander-in-chief Biden? In other words, what’s the forecast for U.S. service-members who have invested their lives and limbs in future conflict, as well as for the speculators in the military-industrial complex and anxious foreigners in the countries still engulfed in America’s war on terror who usually stand to lose it all?
Many Trumpsters, and some libertarians, foresee disaster: that the man who, as a leading senator facilitated and cheered on the disastrous Iraq War, will surely escalate American adventurism abroad. On the other hand, establishment Democrats and most liberals, who are desperately (and understandably) relieved to see Donald Trump go, find that prediction preposterous. Clearly, Biden must have learned from past mistakes, changed his tune, and should responsibly bring U.S. wars to a close, even if at a time still to be determined.
In a sense, both may prove right — and in another sense, both wrong. The guess of this long-time war-watcher (and one-time war fighter) reading the tea leaves: expect Biden to both eschew big new wars and avoid fully ending existing ones. At the margins (think Iran), he may improve matters some; in certain rather risky areas (Russian relations, for instance), he could worsen them; but in most cases (the rest of the Greater Middle East, Africa, and China), he’s likely to remain squarely on the status-quo spectrum. And mind you, there’s nothing reassuring about that.
It hardly requires clairvoyance to offer such guesswork. That’s because Biden basically is who he says he is and who he’s always been, and the man’s simply never been transformational. One need look no further than his long and generally interventionist past record or the nature of his current national-security picks to know that the safe money is on more of the same. Whether the issues are war, race, crime, or economics, Uncle Joe has made a career of bending with the prevailing political winds and it’s unlikely this old dog can truly learn any new tricks. Furthermore, he’s filled his foreign policy squad with Obama-Clinton retreads, a number of whom were architects of — if not the initial Iraq and Afghan debacles — then disasters in Libya, Syria, West Africa, Yemen, and the Afghan surge of 2009. In other words, Biden is putting the former arsonists in charge of the forever-war fire brigade.
There’s further reason to fear that he may even reject Trump’s “If Obama was for it, I’m against it” brand of war-on-terror policy-making and thereby reverse The Donald’s very late, very modest troop withdrawals in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Yet even if this new old hand of a president evades potentially existential escalation with nuclear Russia or China and offers only an Obama reboot when it comes to persistent low-intensity warfare, what he does will still matter — most of all to the global citizens who are too often its victims. So, here’s a brief region-by-region flyover tour of what Joe’s squad may have in store for both the world and the American military sent to police that world.
The Middle East: Old Prescriptions for Old Business
It’s increasingly clear that Washington’s legacy wars in the Greater Middle East — Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular — are generally no longer on the public’s radar. Enter an elected old man who’s charged with handling old business that, at least to most civilians, is old news. Odds are that Biden’s ancient tricks will amount to safe bets in a region that past U.S. policies essentially destroyed. Joe is likely to take a middle path in the region between large-scale military intervention of the Bush or Obama kind and more prudent full-scale withdrawal.
As a result, such wars will probably drag on just below the threshold of American public awareness, while avoiding Pentagon or partisan charges that his version of cutting-and-running endangered U.S. security. The prospect of “victory” won’t even factor into the equation (after all, Biden’s squad members aren’t stupid), but political survival certainly will. Here’s what such a Biden-era future might then look like in a few such sub-theaters.
The war in Afghanistan is hopeless and has long been failing by every one of the U.S. military’s own measurable metrics, so much so that the Pentagon and the Kabul government classified them all as secret information a few years back. Actually dealing with the Taliban and swiftly exiting a disastrous war likely to lead to a disastrous future with Washington’s tail between its legs is, in fact, the only remaining option. The question is when and how many more Americans will kill or be killed in that “graveyard of empires” before the U.S. accepts the inevitable. Toward the end of his tenure, Trump signaled a serious, if cynical, intent to so. And since Trump was by definition a monster and the other team’s monsters can’t even occasionally be right, a coalition of establishment Democrats and Lincoln-esque Republicans (and Pentagon officials) decided that the war must indeed go on. That culminated in last July’s obscenity in which Congress officially withheld the funds necessary to end it. As vice president, Biden was better than most in his Afghan War skepticism, but his incoming advisers weren’t, and Joe’s nothing if not politically malleable. Besides, since Trump didn’t pull enough troops out faintly fast enough or render the withdrawal irreversible over Pentagon objections, expect a trademark Biden hedge here.
Syria has always been a boondoggle, with the justifications for America’s peculiar military presence there constantly shifting from pressuring the regime of Bashar al-Assad, to fighting the Islamic State, to backing the Kurds, to balancing Iran and Russia in the region, to (in Trump’s case) securing that country’s meager oil supplies. As with so much else, there’s a troubling possibility that, in the Biden years, personnel once again may become destiny. Many of the new president’s advisers were bullish on Syrian intervention in the Obama years, even wanting to take it further and topple Assad. Furthermore, when it comes time for them to convince Biden to agree to stay put in Syria, there’s a dangerous existing mix of motives to do just that: the emotive sympathy for the Kurds of known gut-player Joe; his susceptibility to revived Islamic State (ISIS) fear-mongering; and perceptions of a toughness-testing proxy contest with Russia.
When it comes to Iran, expect Biden to be better than the Iran-phobic Trump administration, but to stay shackled “inside the box.” First of all, despite Joe’s long-expressed desire to reenter the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran that Trump so disastrously pulled out of, doing so may prove harder than he thinks. After all, why should Tehran trust a political basket case of a negotiating partner prone to significant partisan policy-pendulum swings, especially given the way Washington has waged nearly 70 years of interventions against Iran’s politicians and people? In addition, Trump left Biden the Trojan horse of Tehran’s hardliners, empowered by dint of The Donald’s pugnacious policies. If the new president wishes to really undercut Iranian intransigence and fortify the moderates there, he should go big and be transformational — in other words, see Obama’s tension-thawing nuclear deal and raise it with the carrot of full-blown diplomatic and economic normalization. Unfortunately, status-quo Joe has never been a transformational type.
Keep an Eye on Africa
Though it garners far less public interest than the U.S. military’s long-favored Middle Eastern playground, Africa figures significantly in the minds of those at the Pentagon, in the Capitol, and in Washington’s influential think-tanks. For interventionist hawks, including liberal ones, that continent has been both a petri dish and a proving ground for the development of a limited power-projection paradigm of drones, Special Operations forces, military advisers, local proxies, and clandestine intelligence missions.
It mattered little that over eight years of the Obama administration — from Libya to the West African Sahel to the Horn of East Africa — the war on terror proved, at best, problematic indeed, and even worse in the Trump years. There remains a worrisome possibility that the Biden posse might prove amenable yet again to the alarmism of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) about the rebirth of ISIS and the spread of other al-Qaeda-linked groups there, bolstered by fear-mongering nonsense masquerading as sophisticated scholarship from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, and the Pentagon’s perennial promises of low-investment, low-risk, and high-reward opportunities on the continent. So, a savvy betting man might place chips on a Biden escalation in West Africa’s Sahel and the Horn of East Africa, even if for different reasons.
American Special Forces and military advisors have been in and out of the remote borderlands between Mali and Niger since at least 2004 and these days seem there to stay. The French seized and suppressed sections of the Sahel region beginning in 1892, and, despite granting nominal independence to those countries in 1960, were back by 2013 and have been stuck in their own forever wars there ever since. American war-on-terror(izing) and French neo-colonizing have only inflamed regional resistance movements, increased violence, and lent local grievances an Islamist resonance. Recently, France’s lead role there has truly begun to disintegrate — with five of its troops killed in just the first few days of 2021 and allegations that it had bombed another wedding party. (Already such a war-on-terror cliché!)
Don’t be surprised if French President Emmanuel Macron asks for help and Biden agrees to bail him out. Despite their obvious age gap, Joe and Emmanuel could prove the newest and best of chums. (What’s a few hundred extra troops between friends?)
Especially since Obama-era Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her then-favored errand boy, inbound national security adviser Jake Sullivan, could be said to have founded the current coalition of jihadis in Mali and Niger. That’s because when the two of them championed a heavy-handed regime-change intervention against Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, thousands of his Tuareg fighters blew back into that region in a big way with more than just the clothes on their backs. They streamed from post-Gaddafi Libya into their Sahel homelands loaded with arms and anger. It’s no accident, in other words, that Mali’s latest round of insurgency kicked off in 2012. Now, Sullivan might push new boss Biden to attempt to clean up his old mess.
On the other side of the continent, in Somalia, where Trump began an eleventh-hour withdrawal of a long-failing and aimless U.S. troop presence (sending most of those soldiers to neighboring countries), there’s a real risk that Biden could double-down in the region, adding soldiers, special operators, and drones. After all, if Trump was against it, even after exponentially increasing bombing in the area, then any good Democrat should be for it, especially since the Pentagon has, for some time now, been banging the drum about Somalia’s al-Shabaab Islamist outfit being the biggest threat to the homeland.
However, the real selling point for Biden might be the fantasy that Russia and China are flooding into the region. Ever since the 2018 National Defense Strategy decisively shifted the Pentagon’s focus from counterterror wars to “great power competition,” or GPC, AFRICOM has opportunistically altered its own campaign plan to align with the new threat of the moment, honing in on Russian and Chinese influence in the Horn region. As a result, AFRICOM’S come-back-to-the-Horn pitch could prove a relatively easy Biden sell.
Toughness Traps: Poking Russian Bears, Ramming Chinese (Sea) Dragons
With that new GPC national security obsession likely to be one Trump-era policy that remains firmly in place, however ill-advised it may be, perhaps the biggest Biden risk is the possibility of stoking up a “new,” two-theater, twenty-first-century version of the Cold War (with the possibility that, at any moment, it could turn into a hot one). After making everything all about Russia in the Trump years, the ascendant Democrats might just feel obliged to follow through and escalate tensions with Moscow that Trump himself already brought to the brink (of nuclear catastrophe). Here, too, personnel may prove a key policy-driver.
Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, is a resident Russia hawk and was an early “arm-Ukraine” enthusiast. Jake Sullivan already has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills on the subject, as when he described a minor road-rage incident as constituting “a Russian force in Syria aggressively attack[ing] an American force and actually injur[ing] American service members.” Then there’s the troubling signal of Victoria Nuland, the recent nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs, a pick that itself should be considered a road-rage-style provocation. Nuland has a history of hawkish antagonism toward Moscow and is reportedly despised by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her confirmation will surely serve as a conflict accelerant.
Nevertheless, China may be the lead antagonist in the Biden crew’s race to risk a foolhardy cataclysm. Throughout the election campaign, the new president seemed set on out-hawking Trump in the Western Pacific, explicitly writing about “getting tough” on China in a March 2020 piece he penned in Foreign Affairs. Joe had also previously called Chinese President Xi Jinping “a thug.” And while Michèle Flournoy may (mercifully) have been passed over for secretary of defense, her aggressive posture toward Beijing still infuses the thinking of her fellow Obama alums on Biden’s team.
As TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich pointed out last September, a Flournoy Foreign Affairs article illuminated the sort of absurdity she (and assumedly various Biden appointees) think necessary to effectively deter China. She called for “enhancing U.S. military capabilities so that the United States can credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” Consider that Dr. Strangelove-style strategizing retooled for an inbound urbane imperial presidency.
Endgame: War as Abstraction
Historically, foreign-policy paradigm shifts are exceedingly rare, especially when they tack toward peace. Such pivots appear almost impossible once the immense power of America’s military-industrial complex, invested in every way in endless war, as well as endless preparations for future Cold Wars, has reached today’s grotesque level. This is especially so when each and every one of Biden’s archetypal national security nominees has, metaphorically speaking, had his or her mortgage paid by some offshoot of that war industry. In other words, as the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair used to say: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Count on tactics including drones, commandos, CIA spooks, and a mostly amenable media to help the Biden administration make war yet more invisible — at least to Americans. Most Trump-detesting, and domestically focused citizens will find that just dandy, even if exhausted troopers, military families, and bombed or blockaded foreigners won’t. More than anything, Biden wishes to avoid overseas embarrassments like unexpected American casualties or scandalous volumes of foreign civilian deaths — anything, that is, that might derail his domestic agenda or hoped-for restorative leadership legacy.
That, unfortunately, may prove to be a pipe dream and leads me to two final predictions: formulaic forever war will never cease boomeranging back home to rot our republican institutions, and neither a celestial God nor secular History will judge Biden-the-war-president kindly.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major, contributing editor at Antiwar.com, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and director of the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN). He taught history at West Point and served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War. He co-hosts the “Fortress on a Hill" podcast.
Trump supporters in Washington, D.C. (photo: Samuel Corum/Getty)
Shell Companies and 'Dark Money' May Hide Details of Trump Ties to DC Protests
Anna Massoglia, OpenSecrets
Massoglia writes: "Former President Donald Trump's presidential campaign aides played key roles orchestrating a rally protesting certification of President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election before hundreds of rioters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6."
But the full extent of the Trump campaign’s ties to the protests may not be not fully known due to its use of shell companies that hide details of its financial dealings and the central role “dark money” played in the protests.
Multiple individuals listed on the permit granted by the National Park Service worked for Trump’s presidential campaign, as first reported by the Associated Press over the weekend. That raises new questions about the Trump campaign’s lack of spending transparency and the unknown extent of the event’s ties to Trump aides.
Trump’s campaign disclosed paying more than $2.7 million to the individuals and firms behind the Jan. 6 rally. But FEC disclosures do not necessarily provide a complete picture of the campaign’s financial dealings since so much of its spending was routed through shell companies, making it difficult to know who the campaign paid and when.
The permit lists the rally’s “VIP Lead” as Maggie Mulvaney, a niece of former top Trump aide Mick Mulvaney, who quit his position as Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland after the Jan. 6 events. Maggie Mulvaney’s LinkedIn profile shows her current position as the Trump campaign’s director of finance operations and manager of external affairs. Trump’s 2020 campaign paid her at least $138,000 through November 2020.
One of two operations managers on the rally permit is Megan Powers, whose LinkedIn profile says she was the Trump campaign’s director of operations as recently as this month. Powers was paid around $290,000 by Trump’s campaign while on its payroll from February 2019 through at least November 2020, FEC records show.
Caroline Wren, a veteran GOP fundraiser, is listed as a “VIP Advisor.” Wren received at least $20,000 from the campaign each month as its national finance consultant for its joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee, totaling $170,000 from March through November.
James Oaks, the rally’s operations associate, received $126,000 in salary from the Trump campaign through at least November.
Trump’s campaign paid Ronald Holden, the rally’s backstage manager, around $72,000 for payroll and consulting in early 2020. The campaign started paying William Wilson, also listed in the permit, in October 2020 with around $6,000 in payments for advanced consulting through November 2020 alone. The rally’s production manager is listed as Justin Caporale, the Trump campaign’s advance director who received more than $144,000 in direct payroll payments from the campaign in the one-year period leading up to November 2020.
Caporale’s business partner, Tim Unes, was the rally stage manager and was paid more than $117,000 by the Trump campaign through at least November 2020. Event Strategies Inc., their firm, was paid more than $1.7 million from Trump’s campaign and joint fundraising committee.
Trump-affiliated dark money group America First Policies paid the firm another $2.1 million from 2018 to 2019, the most recent years for which data is available. America First Policies’ tax returns obtained by OpenSecrets show it also provided funding to Women for America First, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that submitted the rally’s permit records to the National Park Service.
Trump’s top 2020 campaign vendor was American Made Media Consultants LLC, a firm created by Trump campaign aides to act as a clearinghouse for its spending. The firm routed more than $759 million of the campaign and its joint fundraising committee’s spending, hiding information about the identities of some individuals being paid by the campaign, how much money changed hands and when those payments took place.
“The Trump campaign’s FEC reports really only provide a snapshot of who was paid by the campaign,” Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, told OpenSecrets. “Using FEC reports to identify Trump campaign aides involved in the January 6 riot has its limits, because we don’t fully know who the campaign was paying.”
Federal campaign finance law requires political groups to disclose spending to the FEC but imposes few restrictions on merely disclosing payments to opaque firms or shell companies that channel money to ultimate vendors whose identities remain hidden.
Following OpenSecrets investigations into the Trump campaign’s use of shell companies, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a July 2020 FEC complaint asserting that the Trump campaign and its joint fundraising committee may have violated federal election reporting rules by “laundering the funds through firms” concealing details of the campaign’s financial dealings.
Trump’s implicit endorsement of this opaque practice could have repercussions beyond his 2020 campaign as other groups across the political spectrum begin to deploy similar tactics with increased frequency.
On Dec. 23, Trump pardoned former Ron Paul campaign aides John Tate and Jesse Benton for charges tied to hiding bribes in a 2012 scandal by paying a vendor who then paid a subvendor — one of few cases showing consequences for violating the FEC’s ultimate vendor disclosure rules.
Trump’s pardons may be “intended to send clear messages,” excusing alleged crimes and corruption so long as the purported perpetrator remains loyal to Trump, according to reporting by multiple media outlets. If that is indeed the case, Trump’s John Tate and Jesse Benton pardons seem to send a very specific message effectively excusing alleged wrongdoing in one of the few high-profile cases where enforcement of the FEC’s ultimate vendor rules resulted in significant consequences.
Dark money groups that hide their funders and disclose minimal other information at best played a major role in organizing the rally, further obscuring detail of its financing and ties to operatives in Trump’s orbit.
Women for America First submitted the permit to the National Park Services and other 501(c)(4) nonprofits from Turning Point Action to the Rule of Law Defense Fund also helped organize and promote the rally. Since these groups only report minimal information about their financial dealings, information on who they pay and who provides their funding remains hidden.
The Trump campaign did not respond to request for comment prior to publication.
People hold letters reading #NUCLEARBAN in New York City, in support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which took effect on Friday. (photo: Erik McGregor/Getty)
UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Takes Effect, Without the US and Others
Bill Chappell, WAMU
Chappell writes: "A U.N. treaty outlawing nuclear weapons went into effect on Friday, having been ratified by at least 50 countries. But the ban is largely symbolic: The U.S. and the world's other nuclear powers have not signed the treaty."
“For the first time in history, nuclear weapons are going to be illegal in international law,” Elayne Whyte, Costa Rica’s former U.N. ambassador who oversaw the treaty’s creation, tells NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel.
The ban prohibits countries from producing, testing, acquiring, possessing or stockpiling nuclear weapons. It also outlaws the transfer of the weapons, and forbids signatories from allowing any nuclear explosive device to be stationed, installed or deployed in their territory.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted in the summer of 2017, in hopes of bringing new momentum to the push to curb the deadliest armament in the world. But even then, it was seen more as a moral statement than an enforceable ban.
The treaty is a 96-page reminder to nuclear weapons states, Whyte said, that “they need to be moving forward” with disarmament.
“How did the international community deal with slavery, colonialism? Once you delegitimize that conduct, it completely has an impact on the policy-making process,” she said.
The problem with the ban, global security analysts say, is that while dozens of countries say an outright prohibition is the best way to move ahead with disarmament, others – particularly those who possess nuclear weapons – disagree. The new treaty has also been seen as potentially undercutting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that took effect in 1970. But its backers argue that non-proliferation has stagnated, decades after the U.S. and others agreed to that treaty.
“Supporters of the ban treaty say it serves to delegitimize nuclear weapons and reinforce global norms against use,” the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Isabelle Williams wrote in 2017. She added later, “the new treaty is clear evidence of the worrying polarization of states—polarization driven, in part, by a perceived complacency among the nuclear-armed states and unwillingness to take serious steps to reduce the risks posed by nuclear weapons.”
The treaty currently has 86 signatories. It has been ratified in 51 of those member states. Early signatories included the Holy See, New Zealand, Thailand and Austria. In the past year, countries such as Belize, Benin and Ireland have ratified or approved the treaty.
Nations that signed the treaty cite “the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons,” including by accident or miscalculation, saying those effects would transcend international borders.
Detonating a nuclear weapon, the signatories say, would “pose grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, including as a result of ionizing radiation.”
The treaty sets the goal of achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world, saying it would serve “both national and collective security interests.” Any use of nuclear weapons, it adds, “would be contrary to the rules of international law” for armed conflict.
Climate campaigners in Lisbon last year. (photo: Horacio Villalobos/Getty)
A Million Young People Urge Governments to Prioritize Climate Crisis
Fiona Harvey, Guardian UK
Harvey writes: "More than 1 million young people around the world have urged governments to prioritize measures to protect against the ravages of climate breakdown during the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic."
World leaders will meet for Climate Adaptation Summit to consider how to adapt to extreme weather
World leaders are due to meet by video link on Monday to consider how to adapt to the extreme weather, wildfires and floods that have become more common as temperatures rise. Ban Ki-moon, the former UN secretary general, will lead the Climate Adaptation Summit, and leaders including Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Narendra Modi are expected to attend.
Ban said: “We must remember there is no vaccine to fix our changing climate. As climate change impacts continue to intensify, we must put adaptation on an equal footing with [cutting emissions]. Building resilience to climate change impacts is not a nice-to-have, it is a must, if we are to live in a sustainable and secure world.”
He said efforts to repair the damage done to economies by Covid-19 were in danger of compounding the problem. “I am deeply concerned that in domestic stimulus plans dirty measures that increase carbon emissions outnumber green initiatives by four to one,” he said.
Patrick Verkooijen, the chief executive of the Global Centre on Adaptation, said it was time to redirect spending. “As governments begin to invest trillions of dollars to recover from the pandemic, they have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a more resilient, climate-smart future – to build adaptation in the next round of fiscal stimulus,” he said. “A coordinated green resilient infrastructure push with the right policy incentives could boost global GDP by 0.7% in the first 15 years and create millions of jobs.”
Climate-related disasters are estimated to have cost about $650bn (£474bn) globally in the past three years, amounting to more than 0.25% of total GDP. The UN has warned that by 2040 damages associated with climate breakdown could soar to $54tn.
Activists from the Youth Adaptation Network signed a call to action urging government interventions over the next decade “to prepare younger generations for the transition towards green and climate-resilient development”.
They called for a greater focus on climate change in education around the world, and for educational resources to help communities adapt to the impacts of climate change to be provided online. They also called for more funding for projects that increase resilience to the impacts of climate breakdown.
Many of the measures needed to reduce people’s vulnerability to extreme weather are well understood and relatively cheap to implement, from early warning systems against storms, to planting trees that help prevent flooding and landslides, or regrowing coastal mangrove swamps that provide a natural barrier to storm surges and sea level rises.
However, despite their proven efficacy, little funding is available for taking such preventive measures. A recent report from the UN Environment Programme found that the world was badly lagging behind on the actions needed.
The youth document called for “a timely and innovative financing mechanism, and technical assistance to support youth-focused projects that build resilience and adaptive capacity among marginalised communities”, and for assistance to young people in vulnerable communities seeking to install adaptation measures.
The need for adaptation measures is increasing. Last year saw numerous examples of escalating extreme weather around the world, from a heatwave in Siberia to devastating wildfires in Australia and the US, a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season, and storms and floods in Asia. The pandemic took a further toll on the ability of many countries to cope with these disasters, according to a report on climate adaptation to be presented at the summit.
“Extreme climate events compounded the challenges of responding to the pandemic in 2020. Evacuating populations from the path of cyclones, hurricanes with the threat of contagion. Covid-19 and climate disasters intersected to create a set of cascading risks, highlighting the interconnected nature of the impact of systemic shocks and the importance of a coordinated global and local response,” the report said.
Thousands of scientists from around the world, including four Nobel prize winners, have signed a separate call to world leaders at the summit, demanding that adaptation be prioritised.
They said in their statement: “As our failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated, the world is simply not ready to face the investable impacts of our climate emergency. Unless we step up and adapt now, the results will be increasing poverty, water shortages, agricultural losses and soaring levels of migration with an enormous toll on human life.
“We must avoid inaction where those who are not rich lose out, and cannot react in the timeframe necessary and without resources to make the required changes.”
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