Trump offered Ukrainian president Justice Dept. help in an investigation of Biden, memo shows

By Devlin Barrett ,Matt Zapotosky ,Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey

The Washington Post September 25 at 8:32 PM

President Trump repeatedly urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden, one of his chief political rivals, and offered to enlist the U.S. attorney general in that effort while dangling the possibility of inviting the foreign leader to the White House, according to a rough transcript of the call released Wednesday.

The July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised alarms among some intelligence officials, leading in August to a secret whistleblower complaint and a Justice Department referral to determine whether the president’s conduct amounted to a violation of a campaign finance law that bars foreign contributions to U.S. politicians.

[Official readout: President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky]

Prosecutors reviewed the rough transcript and last week declined to investigate, concluding that the president had not violated campaign laws, senior Justice Department officials said Wednesday.

The document touched off a wide spectrum of reactions on Capitol Hill, where Democrats accused Trump of violating his oath of office by soliciting political payback from a foreign leader, having only a day earlier announced they have launched a formal impeachment inquiry of the president. Republicans defended the president and lobbed counteraccusations at Biden.

Trump continued to insist he did nothing wrong, and Zelensky, seated beside him during an awkward joint appearance at the United Nations in New York, described their July phone call as “normal,” saying, “I’m sorry but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open elections of U.S.A.”

The drumbeat of revelations about the Trump-Zelensky call is likely to continue this week. After the White House allowed some lawmakers Wednesday to review the whistleblower’s complaint, Democrats signaled they were increasingly convinced that the president’s behavior justified their drive for impeachment.

“He copped to asking a foreign power to help him in his election,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said. “That’s impeachable.”

[Cracks emerge among Senate Republicans over Trump urging Ukrainian leader to investigate Biden]

In keeping with White House practice, the memo is not a verbatim account. A cautionary note on the document warns that the text reflects the notes and memories of officials in the Situation Room and that a number of factors, including accents and translations, “can affect the accuracy of the record.”

The phone call began with Trump congratulating Zelensky on his election victory, and Zelensky effusively praised Trump in return, according to the White House memo.

Trump said the United States “has been very, very good to Ukraine,” and Zelensky replied by agreeing “1,000 percent.” The Ukrainian president went on to suggest his country may soon buy more antitank missiles from the United States. “We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes,” Zelensky said.

Trump replied: “I would like you to do us a favor because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” He then asked for help in finding the Democratic National Committee computer server that U.S. 

officials say was hacked by Russian intelligence in the run-up to the 2016 election. Trump also called special counsel Robert S. Mueller III “incompetent” for his performance a day earlier while testifying to Congress about his investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.

“The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump says according to the memo. “I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”

 

[Giuliani pursued shadow Ukraine agenda as key foreign policy officials were sidelined]

Trump repeatedly said Zelensky should work with Attorney General William P. Barr or Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Giuliani had separately pressed Ukrainian officials for a Biden inquiry.

“I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said, according to the White House memo.

As the half-hour conversation went on, Trump’s requests of Zelensky shifted to a different topic: investigating the Bidens.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump said, according to the memo. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. … It sounds horrible to me.”

Zelensky replied, according to the White House memo, that “my candidate” for the prosecutor job “will look into the situation.” After he noted he stayed at Trump Tower on his last visit to New York City, Trump invited him for a White House meeting — something the Ukrainian leader had wanted.

“Whenever you would like to come to the White House, feel free to call,” Trump says, according to the White House’s rough transcript.

Since Zelensky’s election in April, Ukraine had urgently sought a meeting for the new president at the White House, a sit-down to demonstrate Washington’s backing as it fights a long-simmering war with Russian-backed separatists. U.S. officials and members of the Trump administration wanted the meeting to go ahead, but Trump personally rejected efforts to set it up, The Washington Post reported last week.

The White House has not yet set a date for an Oval Office meeting.

[Justice Dept. rejected investigation of Trump phone call just weeks after it began examining the matter]

Although the Justice Department concluded the call did not violate campaign finance law, Democrats said the president’s conduct endangered national security. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the call “reads like a classic mob shakedown.”

At a news conference later in New York, Trump savaged Schiff, Democrats and the media.

“It’s all a hoax, folks. It’s all a big hoax,” the president said. “When you look at the information, it’s a joke. Impeachment for that? When you have a wonderful meeting or a wonderful phone conversation.”

Trump denied any wrongdoing and suggested the Biden family deserved to be investigated for possible corruption, making unsubstantiated allegations they’ve taken millions of dollars out of China. He insisted his hands were clean.

“I didn’t do it, I didn’t threaten anyone,” the president said. “No push, no pressure, no nothing.”

Not all Republicans agreed. Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) said the matter “remains troubling in the extreme. It’s deeply troubling.”

On Wednesday afternoon, select lawmakers were allowed to read classified versions of the whistleblower’s complaint. Officials are preparing to declassify a version of it and make it public later this week, according to people familiar with the discussions.

White House officials said the call memo does not show the president seeking any quid pro quo to kneecap a political rival because the president did not tie his requests to aid from the U.S. government.

While political fights surrounding the phone call have raged for the last 10 days, government officials at a host of agencies have been privately dealing with the matter for more than a month.

Senior Justice Department officials said the director of national intelligence referred concerns about the call to the Justice Department in late August, after the intelligence community inspector general found that it was a possible violation of campaign finance laws. Days later, the inspector general referred the matter to the FBI.

Career prosecutors and officials in the Justice Department’s criminal division reviewed the rough transcript, which they obtained voluntarily from the White House, and determined the facts “could not make” the appropriate basis for an investigation, a senior Justice Department official said Wednesday. The final decision was made by Brian Benczkowski, who leads the Justice Department’s criminal division. As part of their reasoning, Justice Department lawyers determined that help with a government investigation could not be quantified as “a thing of value” under the law, officials said.

Their primary source for reaching that conclusion was the memo, according to the officials. While prosecutors did gather information about how the White House memorializes presidential calls with foreign heads of state, they did not interview other White House officials because they had not formally opened an investigation. Justice Department officials still do not know who the whistleblower is, officials said Wednesday.

In a statement, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the Justice Department’s criminal division “reviewed the official record of the call and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted.”

“All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the Department has concluded the matter,” Kupec said.

Kupec also said Trump had never spoken with Barr “about having Ukraine investigate anything related to former vice president Biden or his son,” nor had Barr talked about “anything related to Ukraine” with Giuliani.

She noted, though, that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is exploring the origins of the FBI’s probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, was “exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

Trump ordered the memo released following days of mounting pressure from Congress, and a new surge of Democrats who favor impeachment. The president’s decision followed reports that he pressed Zelensky to investigate Biden, considered a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump in 2020, and his son, Hunter Biden.

White House officials said there were discussions for several days about releasing details of the call, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo objecting to its release on the grounds that doing so would make it harder for Trump to speak frankly with foreign leaders, and senior Justice Department officials urging it be made public to quell the growing debate over Trump’s conduct.

Trump has acknowledged publicly that he asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that came under scrutiny by authorities there. Hunter Biden was not accused of any wrongdoing in the investigation. As vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who Biden and other Western officials said was not sufficiently pursuing corruption cases. At the time, the Ukrainians’ investigation was dormant, according to former Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

[Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress]

Initially, the parameters of the whistleblower allegations were mysterious. Although whistleblower complaints to the intelligence community inspector general are often forwarded to the intelligence committees in Congress, the Justice Department determined this one should not be provided to lawmakers for their review.

Justice Department officials released their legal reasoning for doing so Wednesday, asserting that because the matter did not concern the “funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence community” matter — but instead was an allegation of possible criminal conduct by the commander in chief — it should be more properly handled as a criminal referral.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel noted the inspector general had found “some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate.”

Lawmakers have raised concerns about Trump’s directive to freeze nearly $400 million in military assistance for Ukraine in the days leading up the phone call with Zelensky.

[Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president]

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced she was launching a formal impeachment inquiry, saying “the actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

The rapidly escalating confrontation between the White House and Congress comes just months after Trump freed himself from the cloud of the investigation led by Mueller. Now, he is back in the crosshairs of a resurgent impeachment effort over a fresh allegation of election season misconduct.

One senior White House official said that while the call summary was “not entirely helpful for our side,” it also showed there was not an explicit quid pro quo — which could be a crime. “Everyone is going to see in that transcript what they want to see,” this person said, adding there were robust discussions about whether it would help or hurt Trump.

Trump is strangling Iran. It’s raising tensions across the Middle East.

By Fareed Zakaria

The best illustration of the incoherence of the Trump administration’s strategy toward Iran came last week in a White House news release. “There is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms,” it read. The White House has not subsequently explained how a country can violate the terms of a deal before that deal existed.

This is not the only example of incoherence. When President Trump announced last month that he had called off military strikes against Iran, he said it was because he learned that an estimated 150 Iranians would have died in those attacks. Instead he has further tightened economic sanctions against Iran. The sanctions being levied are having a “massive and crippling” effect on the country, said Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who has studied the effects of such measures. “Sanctions like these are known to cause a significant rise in mortality,” he noted. “Given the size of Iran’s population, around 81 million, this is sure to be far larger than 150 deaths.”

And keep in mind, the people who would have died in the military strikes probably would have been Iranian soldiers. Those who are now dying because of sanctions are newborn babies, mothers, the elderly and sick. An academic study points out that sanctions produce widespread drug shortages, and that those who suffer most are “patients struggling with cancer, multiple sclerosis, blood disorders, and other serious conditions.”

The Trump administration has created a humanitarian crisis in Iran and a geopolitical crisis in the Middle East with no strategy for resolving either. The Iran pact had forced Tehran to commit that it would never develop nuclear weapons, to ship away 98 percent of its enriched uranium, destroy its plutonium reactor, and agree to limits and intrusive inspections for 10 to 25 years. The international inspectors — as well as the intelligence agencies of the major powers — confirmed that Iran was adhering to the deal.

By withdrawing from the pact, the Trump administration has allowed Iran to start moving away from these limits. For example, Tehran had agreed that it would not develop more than 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium until 2030. It had kept within those parameters since 2015. Iran exceeded that limit last week, justifying its move by pointing out that the United States had itself abrogated the pact.

The United States’ actions toward Iran have also created a rift within the Western alliance. Europe had been strongly supportive of Washington’s Iran policy, and the joint pressure had worked well in bringing Tehran to the negotiating table. Now the Europeans are in open revolt against Washington’s unilateralism and have even made efforts to establish an alternative payment mechanism to the dollar for trade with Iran.

Other nations in the Middle East sense Iran’s weakness and are moving to take advantage. Israeli officials have privately briefed Western diplomats that they might decide to strike at Iran’s existing nuclear facilities in the near future. Saudi Arabia has celebrated the U.S. campaign of maximum pressure as it pursues a broad anti-Iranian policy on several fronts.

As the noose tightens around Iran, it has been reacting with incremental actions by its own military or, more often, associated militias — from Yemen to the Persian Gulf. Each of these then produces a response from Saudi Arabia or the United States.

In other words, Trump has sharply ratcheted up regional tensions with no good plan for resolving them.

The Trump administration is hoping for capitulation from the Iranians, in which they will return to the negotiating table and accept a deal far more onerous than the one they signed in 2015. It’s possible that this will happen but much more likely that this regional cold war will get more tense and the likelihood of miscalculation or accidental war will rise.

Even if there were some kind of temporary Iranian concessions, born out of desperation, they will surely not last. Wounded, embittered powers always find a way to return with a vengeance. The Trump administration seems to forget that the Iranian civilization has been a major player in the Middle East for thousands of years. It has a population more than double the size of Iraq’s and is more strategically located. It has a strong tradition of nationalism and statecraft and a history of resisting foreign domination.

The path to stability in the Middle East does not lie in strangling Iran. That will only sow the seeds of resentment and revanchism, creating a more unstable region and one in which the United States will find itself mired for decades. Alas, this is the path on which we find ourselves moving.

Judge denies Trump’s request for stay in emoluments case

By Jonathan O'Connell and David A. Fahrenthold

A federal judge on Friday denied President Trump’s request to stay a lawsuit alleging he is violating the Constitution by doing business with foreign governments, a decision that paves the way for plaintiffs to seek information about customers at his hotel in the District.

U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., denied the Justice Department’s request that he pause the case to allow a higher court to intervene. And Messitte sharply questioned the president’s position that his business does not improperly accept gifts or payments — called emoluments — as defined by the Constitution.

By Trump’s analysis, Messitte wrote, the term emoluments is the subject of such “substantial grounds of disagreement” that payments his business received from foreign governments could not qualify. The judge did not agree: “The Court finds this a dubious proposition.”

Messitte ordered the plaintiffs, the attorneys general for the District and Maryland, to submit a schedule for discovery — the process of producing evidence for the case — within 20 days. That decision is subject to appeal.

The judge has limited discovery to information related to the president’s District hotel. This is the second civil case in which Trump’s business is now subject to discovery, after Trump agreed Tuesday to produce portions of his calendar from 2007 and 2008 in a defamation lawsuit brought by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos.

In his 31-page opinion, Messitte rejected Trump’s argument that this case should be halted so it could be appealed midstream — a request typically granted in extraordinary circumstances, where an unresolved legal question makes it hard to go on.

Justice Department attorneys argued that the lawsuit should ultimately be dismissed because it was a burden for Trump, distracting from his duties as a sitting president. The department issued a statement signaling it would appeal again.

“The Department of Justice disagrees with and is disappointed by this ruling,” said spokeswoman Kelly Laco. “This case, which should have been dismissed, presents important questions that warrant immediate appellate review.”

The Trump Organization did not immediately return requests for comment.

[Read the judge’s Nov. 2 opinion]

The Justice Department “is attempting to delay discovery in our case,” said Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D), who brought the case along with D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D). “Their ultimate argument was that this the president of the United States, he’s too busy.”

But Messitte had rejected that argument earlier, and in this opinion he noted, wryly, that — instead of avoiding legal battles — Trump seems to seek them out while in the White House.

Messitte noted Trump’s threats to sue author Michael Wolff and former adviser Stephen K. Bannon, and Trump’s taunting of former CIA director John Brennan in August. After Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance, Trump wrote on Twitter: “I hope John Brennan, the worst CIA Director in our country’s history, brings a lawsuit.”

“It bears noting that the President himself seems to have had little reluctance to pursue personal litigation despite the supposed distractions it imposes on his office,” Messitte wrote.

Trump still owns his company, although he says he has stepped back from day-to-day control. The Trump Organization has held several large events paid for by foreign governments at Trump’s D.C. hotel and reported about $150,000 in what it called “foreign profits” last year.

The judge found that, “the President’s ownership interest in the Trump International Hotel and his apparent receipt of benefits from at least some foreign and state governments, as well as from the Federal Government itself, suggest that he has received ‘emoluments’ in violation of the Constitution.”

In an earlier ruling, Messitte had found that the definition of word emoluments, in the context of the late 1700s, was broad enough to include sales of goods or services. By the judge’s logic, that definition meant that Trump could be taking emoluments merely by renting ballrooms to foreign-government customers.

Trump had objected, saying that the word should be defined more narrowly, to mean only payments made to Trump specifically to influence his behavior as president.

“By every reasonable metric, [Trump’s definition] appears to describe what is tantamount to a bribe,” the judge wrote in the Friday decision, calling that interpretation “exceedingly strained.”

Trump’s legal team has some options to prevent discovery from proceeding, but they are dwindling. The judge directed Frosh and Racine to submit a schedule for discovery within 20 days.

“We will soon provide the court a new schedule to begin the process of getting information about how President Trump is profiting from the presidency,” Racine said in a statement.

Frosh and Racine will seek details about spending at Trump’s hotel in the District by foreign governments, state governments and the federal government. They want to look inside the finances of Trump’s company to see how money flows through individual Trump businesses to Trump.

They also want to seek information from Trump on “his communications with foreign, state and domestic government officials” regarding the District hotel. And they want information about Trump’s lease with the federal government, as his hotel is located in a federally owned historic building, which Trump leased long before he ran for office.

Trump’s lawyers have asked for their own discovery — demanding details about whether the District or Maryland governments have been harmed, financially, by foreign-government customers leaving other hotels for Trump’s.

The threat to democracy — from the left

By Fareed Zakaria

For several years now, scholars have argued that the world is experiencing a “democratic recession.” They have noted that the movement of countries toward democracy has slowed or stopped and even, in some places, reversed. They also note a general hollowing out of democracy in the advanced, industrial world. When we think about this problem, inevitably and rightly we worry about President Trump, his attacks on judges, the free press and his own Justice Department. But there is also a worrying erosion of a core democratic norm taking place on the left.

It has become commonplace to hear cries on the left to deny controversial figures on the right a platform to express their views. Colleges have disinvited speakers such as Condoleezza Rice and Charles Murray. Other campuses were unwilling or unable to allow conservative guests to actually speak, with protests overwhelming the events.

A similar controversy now involves Stephen K. Bannon, who, in recent months, has been making the rounds on the airwaves and in print — including an interview I did with him on CNN. Some have claimed that Bannon, since leaving the administration, is simply unimportant and irrelevant and thus shouldn’t be given a microphone. But if that were the case, surely the media, which after all is a for-profit industry, would notice the lack of public interest and stop inviting him.

The reality is that the people running the Economist, the Financial Times, “60 Minutes,” the New Yorker and many other organizations that have recently sought to feature Bannon know he is an intelligent and influential ideologist, a man who built the largest media platform for the new right, ran Trump’s successful campaign before serving in the White House, and continues to articulate and energize the populism that’s been on the rise throughout the Western world. He might be getting his 15 minutes of fame that will peter out, but, for now, he remains a compelling figure.

The real fear that many on the left have is not that Bannon is dull and uninteresting, but the opposite — that his ideas, some of which can reasonably be described as evoking white nationalism, will prove seductive and persuasive to too many people. Hence his detractors’ solution: Don’t give him a platform, and hope that this will make his ideas go away. But they won’t. In fact, by trying to suppress Bannon and others on the right, liberals are likely making their ideas seem more potent. Did the efforts of communist countries to muzzle capitalist ideas work?

Liberals need to be reminded of the origins of their ideology. In 1859, when governments around the world were still deeply repressive — banning books, censoring commentary and throwing people in jail for their beliefs — John Stuart Mill explained in his seminal work, “On Liberty,” that protection against governments was not enough: “There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose . . . its own ideas and practices . . . on those who dissent from them.” This classic defense of free speech, which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes later called the “freedom for the thought that we hate,” is under pressure in the United States — and from the left.

We’ve been here before. Half a century ago, students were also shutting down speakers whose views they found deeply offensive. In 1974, William Shockley, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who in many ways was the father of the computer revolution, was invited by Yale University students to defend his abhorrent view that blacks were a genetically inferior race who should be voluntarily sterilized. He was to debate Roy Innis, the African American leader of the Congress of Racial Equality. (The debate was Innis’s idea.) A campus uproar ensued, and the event was canceled. A later, rescheduled debate with another opponent was disrupted.

The difference from today is that Yale recognized that it had failed in not ensuring that Shockley could speak. It commissioned a report on free speech that remains a landmark declaration of the duty of universities to encourage debate and dissent. The report flatly states that a college “cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility or mutual respect. . . . it will never let these values . . . override its central purpose. We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox.”

The report added: “We take a chance, as the First Amendment takes a chance, when we commit ourselves to the idea that the results of free expression are to the general benefit in the long run, however unpleasant they may appear at the time.” It is on this bet for the long run, a bet on freedom — of thought, belief, expression and action — that liberal democracy rests.

America is slouching toward autocracy

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Columnist -The Washington Post

 

In their book, “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: “How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often the assault on democracy begins slowly. . . . The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”

Our nation is divided in many ways, and one of the most important chasms involves the question of whether President Trump poses a threat to our constitutional foundations. Is he merely a loud-mouthed demagogue, or is he an autocrat in the making, willing to strike at the underpinnings of republican government?

Those of us fearful that Trump is subverting basic freedoms and the arrangements that sustain them are frequently dismissed as alarmists who fail to recognize the endurance of checks, balances and other circuit-breakers. In this view, asserting that Trump imperils our liberties demonstrates a lack of appreciation for the genius that is the American experiment.

It is certainly true that most of our rights are still intact. We still have free speech and a free press, despite Trump’s assaults on both. After all, I am writing this column, and you are able to read it — and to disagree with it if you wish.

The opposition party, moreover, has a good chance of taking over at least one house of Congress in this fall’s elections. At levels below the Supreme Court, judges have blocked many of Trump’s most egregious actions, among them the separation of immigrant children from their parents.

For all of this, one can be grateful. But it is precisely because citizens of enduring republican democracies easily fall into complacency that Levitsky and Ziblatt’s warnings are so pertinent.

Begin with those much-touted checks and balances. Their health depends — as my colleagues Norman Ornstein, Thomas Mann and I argued in our book, “One Nation After Trump” — on the willingness of those in the legislative and judicial branches to put their institutional loyalties and their stewardship of the system as a whole above their partisan loyalties.

The opposite is happening in the GOP-led Congress. With the exception of a few Republican elected officials at the periphery, Congress has worked to enable Trump’s abuses (witness the behavior of California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes to undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation) and to minimize the outrageousness of his conduct.

When Trump revoked former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance in retaliation for Brennan’s criticism of him (and, as Trump confessed in a Wall Street Journal interview, because he objected to Brennan doing his job in 2016 by probing connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia), the response from most Republicans was pathetic.

Trump’s actions were an abuse of presidential power far beyond anything Republicans used to complain about bitterly during President Barack Obama’s term. They are aimed directly at intimidating critics and interfering with a legitimate investigation. Where was House Speaker Paul D. 

Ryan on the issue? When Trump first threatened the security clearances of his critics last month, Ryan (R-Wis.) shrugged it off and said Trump was “just trolling people.” We still await a robust response from party leaders now that the president has shown he had more than “trolling” in mind.

And long before Trump ran for office, Republicans were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their purposes, as Michael Tomasky argued last week in the Daily Beast. Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.”

This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending.

We know what a military coup looks like. But as Levitsky and Ziblatt note, a slow-motion dismantling of rules, norms and expectations can be more insidious because we don’t even notice what’s happening to us.

Trump lies. And lies. And lies.

by E.J. Dionne Jr.

“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

When the history of the Trump era is written, this quotation from our president will play a prominent role in explaining the distemper of our moment and the dysfunction of his administration. Trump was talking about media coverage of his trade war, but he was also describing his genuinely novel approach to governing: He believes that reality itself can be denied and that big lies can sow enough confusion to keep the truth from taking hold.

This has advantages for Trump, because it dulls the impact of any new revelation. Old falsehoods simply get buried under new ones. Take the recording of his September 2016 conversation with his onetime lawyer Michael Cohen that was released Tuesday night.

Cohen’s attorney put out the tape, which, as The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Robert Costa reported, shows that Trump “appeared familiar with a deal that a Playboy model made to sell the rights to her story of an alleged affair with him.” Karen McDougal sold her tale to the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media. The tabloid never ran her account, which clearly protected Trump from this embarrassing tale before the election, although its management has denied that this was its intention.

Trump’s lawyer and battering ram Rudolph W. Giuliani insisted that the recording portrayed a Trump who “doesn’t seem that familiar with anything” that was discussed. This was, shall we say, an eccentric way of hearing the conversation.

Obfuscated in this back-and-forth is the fact that four days before the 2016 election, Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, denied the affair altogether and said that the campaign had “no knowledge” of any payoff.

Trump’s behavior would be bad enough if it were only about his personal life and his treatment of women. But the big-lie strategy extends to policy and national security as well.

For example, the Commerce Department, which runs the census, claimed this year that it added a question asking if respondents were citizens in response to the Justice Department’s desire to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The question is a terrible idea. Six former Census Bureau directors under both Republican and Democratic presidents urged Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross not to include it. They warned that doing so “will considerably increase the risks to the 2020 enumeration.”

The fear is that many immigrants, documented and especially undocumented, would be reluctant to answer the census if the question were part of it, leading to an undercounting of places with substantial foreign-born populations.

But for the Trump administration, this is not a problem. It’s the goal. Undercounting immigrants would have the effect of shifting political power — as well as federal money — largely to Republican areas that have lower immigrant populations.

And documents turned over this week in response to a lawsuit against the addition of the citizenship question showed that Ross lobbied for its inclusion much earlier and more actively than his later sworn testimony had indicated. “Lying to Congress is a serious criminal offense, and Secretary Ross must be held accountable,” said Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon had also pushed for the question when he was in the White House.

The Justice Department acted months later, a clear sign that the department’s alleged concern for civil rights was simply a pretext for a politically motivated skewing of valuable public information. Distorting data collection is an attack on the truth, too.

And when it comes to creating new and unhinged narratives to displace those rooted in fact, Trump has no equal. Thus did the man who stood next to Vladimir Putin when the Russian leader said he wanted Trump to win in 2016 declare this week — with no evidence whatsoever — that Russia “will be pushing very hard for the Democrats” in this fall’s elections.

Contrary to liberal fears, most of the country doesn’t believe him. Trump’s core support, measured by the proportion in Wednesday’s NPR/“PBS NewsHour”/Marist poll who strongly approve of him, is down to 25 percent.

The bad news is that, among Republicans, his strong-approval number stands at 62 percent. Trump’s hope of clinging to power rests on the assumption that he can continue inventing enough false story lines to keep his party at bay. His theory seems to be that a lie is as good as the truth as long as the right people believe it.

Why people like Trump

by Richard Cohen

The results of the Helsinki summit are in. President Trump couldn’t handle statecraft or, for that matter, double negatives, but he came out of the meeting undefeated and invincible. Like with the Charlottesville hatefest or the “Access Hollywood” tape, it was just another day at the office for Trump. Unlike the mocking balloon that soared over London, Trump never loses air.

The post-summit poll numbers are instructive. While 50 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Trump handled Vladimir Putin, his Republican base stayed both loyal and comatose. In a Post-ABC News poll, 66 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance. An earlier Axios-SurveyMonkey poll put the GOP figure at 79 percent, not only more impressive but also downright eerie.

It is safe to say that these numbers might have surprised even the shaken White House staffers who flew back to Washington with Trump. The commentariat was already on the air, reporting on the summit as if it were a multicar Beltway collision. Even Fox News was critical, and Newt Gingrich, whose wife is Trump’s ambassador to the Holy See, called the meeting “the most serious mistake” of Trump’s presidency — an extremely high bar.

National security adviser John Bolton got to work. On the plane, according to the Wall Street Journal, he went about the painful business of damage control and hammered out talking points advising Trump on how to reclaim reality. One idea was for Trump to assert his support for the U.S. 

intelligence community, the sort of prosaic statement, like a belief in God, that no president had ever had to make. Trump, of course, did so — and maintained this stance for almost a day.

There is such a thing, we are told, as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It is an ideological version of a speech disorder, which causes certain people to denounce Trump in obscene ways. It has come over the likes of Robert De Niro and, when it came to Ivanka Trump, Samantha Bee. It has prompted others to call Trump a traitor, which is a slanderous accusation too often used for crass political reasons. Sen. Joseph McCarthy called the Roosevelt-Truman administrations “20 years of treason.”

Yet, the more dangerous variant of the syndrome is the willingness of most Republicans to support Trump no matter what. One of the first outbreaks of this occurred in the 2016 South Carolina Republican primary, which Trump won handily. He did so running against fellow Republicans, not the reliably useful Hillary Clinton. He even swept the evangelical Christian vote, beating such staunch conservatives as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Ben Carson, both of whom have been married only once. The thrice-married Trump, in vivid contrast, had run casinos and exchanged countless smirky remarks with Howard Stern. His piety was in question.

As far as the evangelical community is concerned, nothing has changed. Trump has been accused of adultery and of buying the silence of his alleged paramours. He has referred to impoverished nations as “shithole countries” and — unforgivably — belittled the wartime torture of Sen. John McCain. None of this shook his base. On the contrary, his support within the Republican Party has risen and solidified. It now stands at around 90 percent, which is what tin-pot dictators get in rigged elections.

The upshot is that we now have two political parties — one pro-Trump and one anti-. Some celebrated Republicans — George F. Will, for instance — have already declared their apostasy. Will is now “unaffiliated,” but no one runs for president as that. In this country, if you’re anti-Trump, realism says you’ve got to vote Democratic. (Please, no more of this Libertarian or Green Party nonsense.)

It’s impossible to say at this point whether the pro-Trump/anti-Trump dichotomy is just about the man himself or represents a wider and more permanent political realignment. (Who’s the next Trump?) But it’s clear that something beyond economics — and certainly not foreign policy — motivates Trump’s people. My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant. It is, in other words, some of the same sentiment that once fueled European fascism.

Those of us who write newspaper columns know that sheer brilliance, should it happen, gets a silent nod of the head, but affirmation — saying what readers already think — gets loud hurrahs. This is Trump’s appeal as well. He validates the thinking — some of it ugly — of many Americans. To them, Helsinki doesn’t matter and even Putin doesn’t matter. Only Trump does. To them, he hates the right people.

U.S. withdraws from U.N. Human Rights Council over perceived bias against Israel

by Carol Morello

The Trump administration withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday in protest of what it perceives as an entrenched bias against Israel and a willingness to allow notorious human rights abusers as members.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has sought major changes on the council throughout her tenure, issued a blistering critique of the panel, saying it had grown more callous over the past year and become a “protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias.” She cited the admission of Congo as a member even as mass graves were being discovered there, and the failure to address human rights abuses in Venezuela and Iran.

“I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments,” she said during a joint appearance with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the department. “On the contrary. We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights.”

Haley accused governments with woeful human rights records of seeking seats on the council to avoid scrutiny and then resisting proposals for reform.

“When we made it clear we would strongly pursue council reform, these countries came out of the woodwork to oppose it,” she said. “Russia, China, Cuba and Egypt all attempted to undermine our reform efforts this past year.”

The decision to leave the 47-nation body was more definitive than the lesser option of staying on as a nonvoting observer. It represents another retreat by the Trump administration from international groups and agreements whose policies it deems out of sync with American interests on trade, defense, climate change and, now, human rights. And it leaves the council without the United States playing a key role in promoting human rights around the world.

The United States is midway through a three-year term on the council, which is intended to denounce and investigate human rights abuses. A U.S. departure deprives Israel of its chief defender at a forum where Israel’s human rights record comes up for discussion at every meeting, a standing “Item 7” on the agenda.

“By withdrawing from the council, we lose our leverage and allow the council’s bad actors to follow their worst impulses unchecked — including running roughshod over Israel,” said Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House committee that oversees the State Department.

“However, this administration’s approach when it sees a problem is to take the United States off the field,” he added. “That undermines our standing in the world and allows our adversaries to fill the void.”

But Pompeo was scathing in his assessment of the council, calling it an “exercise in shameless hypocrisy, with many of the world’s worst human rights abuses going ignored, and some of the world’s most serious offenders sitting on the council itself.” 

“The only thing worse than a council that does almost nothing to protect human rights is a council that covers for human rights abuses, and is therefore an obstacle to progress and an impediment to change,” he said. 

The decision came a day after the U.N. human rights chief slammed the administration’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children after they enter the United States at the Mexican border, calling it “unconscionable” and akin to child abuse.

This is the first time since the Human Rights Council was formed in 2006, replacing the disbanded Human Rights Commission, that a sitting member volunteered to step aside, though Libya was suspended in 2011 after a government crackdown on unarmed protesters.

The United States initially shunned the panel over President George W. Bush’s concerns that so many human rights offenders could be seated through noncompetitive elections for members nominated by their regional colleagues. The Obama administration sought a seat in 2009 in an effort to showcase that human rights were an important aspect of U.S. foreign policy.

Before the United States joined, half the country-specific votes condemned Israel. During the first six years the United States was a member, resolutions critical of Israel dropped to one-fifth. U.S. membership also led to a sharp decrease in the number of special sessions that focused exclusively on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

“It’s true, the Human Rights Council continues to disproportionately focus on Israel,” said Peter Yeo, an official with the United Nations Foundation that connects the organization with private and nongovernmental groups and foundations. “But with U.S. leadership, the attention Israel brought has dropped significantly. U.S. leadership matters. We’re still the only ones with credibility on human rights on the world stage.”

The Trump administration’s irritation with the council makeup and its agenda has been telegraphed with drumbeat regularity by Haley. A year ago, she denigrated it as a “forum for politics, hypocrisy and evasion,” and threatened a U.S. exit if the council did not kick out abusive regimes and remove Item 7, the standing resolution critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. She repeated her ultimatum two weeks ago.

Since 2006, the Human Rights Council has passed more than 70 resolutions critical of Israel, 10 times as often as it has criticized Iran. On one day alone in March, the council passed five resolutions condemning Israel.

The council’s current membership includes 14 countries that are ranked as “not free” by Freedom House: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, China, Cuba, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

Haley said many countries agree with U.S. accusations of anti-Israel bias on the council and hypocrisy by abusers but would not openly challenge the status quo.

“We gave them opportunity after opportunity, and many months of consultations, and yet they would not take a stand unless it was behind closed doors,” she said. “Some even admitted they were fine with the blatant flaws of the council, as long as they could pursue their own narrow agenda within the current structure.”

Bret Schaefer, a Heritage Foundation scholar who analyzes U.N. actions, called the withdrawal a “measured” response.

“The Trump administration seems to be the only government that seriously wanted the Human Rights Council to promote universal respect and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in a fair and equal manner,” he said.

But some questioned whether a U.S. withdrawal will lead to reforms, or further undermine the council’s mission.

“The Trump administration’s withdrawal is a sad reflection of its one-dimensional human rights policy: defending Israeli abuses from criticism takes precedence above all else,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The U.N. Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel.”

John Brennan: I will speak out until integrity returns to the White House

by John Brennan

John Brennan served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 to January 2017.

 

My first visit to the Oval Office came in October 1990, when I was a 35-year-old CIA officer. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait two months before, and President George H.W. Bush wanted to discuss the implications of a U.S.-led military coalition that would ultimately push the Iraqis out.

 

I remember the nervousness I felt when I entered that room and met a president of the United States for the first time. By the time the meeting ended, his intellectual curiosity, wisdom, affability and intense interest in finding the best policy course to protect and promote U.S. interests were abundantly evident.

Over the next quarter-century, I returned to the Oval Office several hundred times during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The jitters that accompanied my first Oval Office visit dissipated over time, but the respect, awe and admiration I held for the office of the presidency and the incumbents never waned. The presidents I directly served were not perfect, and I didn’t agree with all of their policy choices. But I never doubted that each treated their solemn responsibility to lead our nation with anything less than the seriousness, intellectual rigor and principles that it deserved. Many times, I heard them dismiss the political concerns of their advisers, saying, “I don’t care about my politics, it’s the right thing to do.”

The esteem with which I held the presidency was dealt a serious blow when Donald Trump took office. Almost immediately, I began to see a startling aberration from the remarkable, though human, presidents I had served. Mr. Trump’s lifelong preoccupation with aggrandizing himself seemed to intensify in office, and he quickly leveraged his 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. address and his Twitter handle to burnish his brand and misrepresent reality. 

Presidents throughout the years have differed in their approaches to policy, based on political platforms, ideologies and individual beliefs. Mr. Trump, however, has shown highly abnormal behavior by lying routinely to the American people without compunction, intentionally fueling divisions in our country and actively working to degrade the imperfect but critical institutions that serve us.

Although appalling, those actions shouldn’t be surprising. As was the case throughout his business and entertainment careers, Mr. Trump charts his every move according to a calculus of how it will personally help or hurt him. His strategy is to undercut real, potential and perceived opponents; his focus is to win at all costs, irrespective of truth, ethics, decency and — many would argue — the law. 

His disparagement of institutions is designed to short-circuit legitimate law enforcement investigations, intelligence assessments and media challenges that threaten his interests. His fear of the special counsel’s work is especially palpable, as is his growing interest in destroying its mandate. 

For more than three decades, I observed and analyzed the traits and tactics of corrupt, incompetent and narcissistic foreign officials who did whatever they thought was necessary to retain power. 

Exploiting the fears and concerns of their citizenry, these demagogues routinely relied on lies, deceit and suppression of political opposition to cast themselves as populist heroes and to mask self-serving priorities. By gaining control of intelligence and security services, stifling the independence of the judiciary and discrediting a free press, these authoritarian rulers followed a time-tested recipe for how to inhibit democracy’s development, retard individual freedoms and liberties, and reserve the spoils of corrupt governance for themselves and their ilk. It never dawned on me that we could face such a development in the United States. 

On the international front, Mr. Trump pursues policies that are rooted in uninformed campaign promises, a determination to upend actions of his predecessors and an aversion to multilateral engagements. His ad hoc and frequently impulsive approach to national security is short-sighted and dangerous, as allies and partners are left uncertain about U.S. strategy and objectives. 

The impact of the Trump presidency will be felt for many years to come. Most worrisome is that his use of falsehoods, his mean-spirited and malicious behavior, and his self-absorption will be emulated by many young Americans — indeed, young people globally — who look to the president of the United States as a role model. 

The damage also will be felt by the millions of Americans who believe in Mr. Trump because of their concern about being left behind in a rapidly changing globalized world. These Americans have a legitimate gripe that politicians and political parties of all stripes have failed to deliver on the promise that America is the land of opportunity for all, irrespective of race, creed or place of residence. At a time when deep-seated fears of socioeconomic and cultural change need to be addressed honestly and without prejudice, Mr. Trump grandstands like a snake-oil salesman, squandering his formidable charisma and communication skills in favor of ego, selfishness and false promises.  

Many have condemned my public criticism of Mr. Trump, arguing that as a former CIA director, I should bite my tongue. My criticisms, however, are not political; I have never been and will never be a partisan. I speak out for the simple reason that Mr. Trump is failing to live up to the standards that we should all expect of a president. 

As someone who had the rare privilege of directly serving four presidents, I will continue to speak out loudly and critically until integrity, decency, wisdom — and maybe even some humility — return to the White House.

Why does Trump lie? Just ask Billy Bush.

by Erik Wemple

The tireless mendacity of President Trump has roared back into the top of the news. “How to know when Trump is lying,” notes the headline on a CNN piece. Slate: “Trump’s Saturday of Lies: 

President Says Official Who Briefed Reporters ‘Doesn’t Exist.’ ” The New York Times has an article on how Trump’s repeated allegations about an FBI informant who cultivated sources on his 2016 presidential campaign squares with his history: “With ‘Spygate,’ Trump Shows How He Uses Conspiracy Theories to Erode Trust.”

Bring up Trump’s frequent lies, and White House officials will seek to change the topic. They’ll talk about the robust economy; they’ll talk about the move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; they’ll talk about the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; they’ll talk about the blameworthiness of Trump’s Democratic critics. All of the programs of the Trump administration, however, are built to some degree of deception; lying, after all, was the central plank of Trump’s presidential election campaign.

In their look at Trump’s hyping of “Spygate,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times summed up the latest in presidential misinformation:

Last week, President Trump promoted new, unconfirmed accusations to suit his political narrative: that a “criminal deep state” element within Mr. Obama’s government planted a spy deep inside his presidential campaign to help his rival, Hillary Clinton, win — a scheme he branded “Spygate.” It was the latest indication that a president who has for decades trafficked in conspiracy theories has brought them from the fringes of public discourse to the Oval Office.

Citing two former Trump officials, the New York Times reports that Trump resisted deploying the term “deep state” in his rhetoric, “partly because he believed it made him look too much like a crank.” So the guy who gripes incessantly and with no evidence about the “fake news” media is worried about appearing like a crank.

 Notes the New York Times: “Students of Mr. Trump’s life and communication style argue that the idea of conspiracies is a vital part of his strategy to avoid accountability and punch back at detractors, real or perceived, including the news media.”

True, no doubt. Yet the most clarifying point on this matter comes from Billy Bush, who is, if nothing else, a student of Mr. Trump’s life and communication style. Bush was the fellow chatting with Trump on the infamous 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which the mogul bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. Bush was fired from the “Today” show over the incident. It just so happened, however, that Bush had spent a lot of time with Trump back in his years as an entertainment correspondent, and he discussed his experiences on an episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher” in March. Maher noted that Trump had exaggerated the ratings of his program “The Apprentice,” prompting Bush:

Well, he’s been saying No. 1 forever, right. Finally I’d had enough. I said, “Wait, Donald. Hold it. Wait a minute. You haven’t been No. 1 for five years, four years — whatever it is. Not in any category, not in any demo.” He goes, “Well, did you see last Thursday? Last Thursday, 18-49 … last five minutes.” I said, “No. I don’t know that stat.” So he was like, “I told you.” And then later, when the cameras were off … he says, “Billy, look, look, you just tell them and they believe it. That’s it, you just tell them and they believe it. They just do.” And I said, “Ah, okay.”

That’s called telling the truth about lies.

Being a blabbermouth, Trump apparently cannot stop himself from confiding about his malicious tactics — to media types, of all people. Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” recently revealed that Trump had told her about the thinking behind his media-bashing ways. “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe it,” Trump told Stahl shortly after his election, as she recalls it.

On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted:

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!

News outlets scrambled to characterize the allegation. CNN: “Trump says, without proof, that Mueller team will meddle in midterm elections.” Associated Press via New York Times: “Trump: Mueller’s Team Is ‘Meddling’ in Midterm Elections.” Politico: “Trump says Mueller probe will meddle in midterms.”

“Without proof,” huh? CNN cannot call this particular tweet a lie because it doesn’t know 100 percent for certain that Mueller won’t meddle; and it doesn’t know 100 percent for certain that Trump doesn’t believe this allegation. Which is to say, the media has standards in covering a president who doesn’t. It has been a mismatch from Day 1.