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The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Schiff Storm

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What We’re Following Today

It’s Thursday, March 28. President Donald Trump and the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee called for Democratic Chairman Adam Schiff to resign, arguing that he “abused [his] position to knowingly promote false information” about the Russia investigation. Schiff hit back:

And the Department of Housing and Urban Development is suing Facebook for allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act. HUD says that Facebook’s advertising tools, which allowed advertisers to restrict an ad’s reach on the basis of categories including race and religion, enabled housing discrimination.

2020’s Mueller Shadow: President Trump wants to shape his presidential campaign around Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s finding that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election. But Republican strategists aren’t sure that’s a good idea. Elaina Plott and Peter Nicholas take us inside GOP discussions over Trump’s campaign for reelection.

Meanwhile, many of Trump’s critics are frustrated that the Russia probe didn’t end his 2020 run. However, Trumpism would still be up for reelection even if the man himself wasn’t, argues Ron Brownstein, and “there’s a far better chance of uprooting [Trump’s] influence over the long run if his presidency is ended by the voters, not the courts or Congress.”

Fly Me to the Moon: Vice President Mike Pence announced this week that the U.S. plans to put American astronauts back on the moon—which no human has visited since 1972—in the next five years. That plan has a couple of holes, writes Marina Koren. How will the U.S. pay for it? During the Apollo program’s peak, NASA’s budget made up more than 4 percent of federal spending. Today it’s less than half a percent. And why go to the moon at all? As Barack Obama said in 2010, “We’ve been there before.”

The Never-Ending Audition: Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has the dubious honor of being the longest-serving interim head of the Department of Defense ever. Many onlookers thought he’d be the department’s permanent leader by now, writes Kathy Gilsinan, but presidential politics keeps getting in the way.

Lasting Grief: For people affected by mass shootings, trauma can deepen over time, especially around anniversaries of the event—and recovery is often nonlinear. Support for survivors often doesn’t address the complicated realities of grief and trauma, writes Ashley Fetters.

— Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal

Snapshot

Fans gather outside the Great American Ball Park before an Opening Day baseball game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates in Cincinnati. (Gary Landers / AP)

Ideas From The Atlantic

The Strange, Unsatisfying End to the Jussie Smollett Case (Conor Friedersdorf)
“Still, so long as hate-crime laws are on the books, there is a strong case for treating hate-crime hoaxes as among the most serious nonviolent crimes.” → Read on.

After Christchurch, Commentators Are Imitating Sebastian Gorka (Graeme Wood)
“A funny thing happened after the tragedy of Christchurch: Everyone discovered, all at once, that ideology matters. Four years ago, commentators were contorting themselves to attribute jihadism to politics, social conditions, abnormal psychology—anything but the spread of wicked beliefs that lead, more or less directly, to violence. Ideology for thee but not for me.” → Read on.

What Else We’re Reading

‣ How Donald Trump Inflated His Net Worth to Lenders and Investors (David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell, The Washington Post) (? Paywall)
‣ Betsy DeVos Is Right: Feds Shouldn’t Be Funding Special Olympics (Nick Gillespie, Reason)
‣ How to Confront the Courts (Jesse Williams, Dissent)
‣ Congressional Republicans Have Been Friendly With Nativist Leaders Long Before Trump (Sarah Posner, The New Republic)
‣ Beto O’Rourke Is Genuinely Inauthentic (Christian Schneider, The Bulwark)

We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Comments, questions, typos, grievances and groans related to our puns? Let us know anytime here.

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Honor the Existing Nuclear Deal, Don’t Pursue a ‘New’ One

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Robert Einhorn and Richard Nephew want the U.S. to pursue a new agreement with Iran instead of simply rejoining the JCPOA:

The Trump administration’s current approach has little chance of succeeding. But simply returning the United States to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a long-term solution. By the time the United States would return to the 2015 deal, key nuclear restrictions would soon expire. Moreover, achieving the wide domestic support needed to make a nuclear deal with Iran politically sustainable in the United States would not be served by simply turning the clock back to before Trump took office.

The United States needs to pursue a renewed nuclear bargain with Iran, building on the solid foundation of the original and addressing its shortcomings.

Pursuing a new agreement suffers from the same flaws as a conditional return to the JCPOA. In both cases, it assumes that Iran would be willing to renegotiate the same issue with a government that has not yet honored its side of the last bargain. Iran agreed to the current restrictions under broad international pressure that does not exist today and won’t exist in the future. It is fanciful at best to expect that Iran would be interested in extending those restrictions any further when the U.S. is effectively the only one insisting on this. Focusing on the provisions that expire is a mistake. It ignores that Iran agreed to those provisions in order to demonstrate that their nuclear program is peaceful. Once they have done that, they will expect to be treated like any other member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Coming back to them and demanding extensions will make it seem as if we are trying to hold them to a different standard in perpetuity, and they aren’t going to respond well to that.

Einhorn and Nephew call for “[i]mproving the incentives (primarily sanctions relief) that would be offered to Iran, both in terms of their scope and their reliability to deliver anticipated benefits, in order to persuade Iran to accept a renewed bargain that goes beyond the JCPOA,” but they don’t explain why Iran would agree to going “beyond the JCPOA” when they have received so little benefit from their adherence to the current agreement. If returning to the JCPOA is not a “long-term solution,” trying to renegotiate the terms of an agreement that Washington already violated is no solution at all.

If there was an opportunity to build on the JCPOA, Trump squandered it when he reneged on the deal. That bell cannot be unrung, and it makes little sense to spoil an opportunity for a new beginning under a different administration by demanding additional concessions. Since the U.S. is the party that has broken faith with all of the other parties to the deal, it is incumbent on our government to make amends. At the very least, that means rejoining the agreement without new demands or conditions. At that point, the Iranian government might eventually be open to other discussions, but attempting to limit their nuclear program even further would erase whatever goodwill might be earned by rejoining.

There is no appetite in Iran to renegotiate. U.S. withdrawal from the deal and the reimposition of sanctions have done considerable damage to the supporters of the JCPOA inside Iran. If a hard-line candidate prevails in the 2021 presidential election there will definitely be no interest at all in further nuclear negotiations, and no Iranian leader is going to stick his neck out for another round of nuclear talks with the government that has been unjustly sanctioning them for years. As Dina Smeltz and John Cookson explained earlier this week, the Iranian public has soured on the current deal, and the U.S. is viewed very unfavorably:

A recent IranPoll survey suggests the Iranian people are becoming so cynical about the outcome of the process that any attempt at new negotiations between the United States and Iran could be dead on arrival.

They are referring to the same survey that I discussed here. One of the results from that poll bears repeating:

Iranians are very wary of negotiating with major powers: 72% agree that the nuclear deal experience has shown them that “it is not worthwhile for Iran to make concessions when negotiating with world powers, because Iran cannot have confidence that if it makes a concession world powers will honor their side of an agreement.” The lesson that most Iranians have taken from the nuclear deal is that their government gave away too much without getting much in return. U.S. deal-breaking has convinced them that they can’t trust foreign governments to honor their bargains.

If a new administration starts making demands for additional concessions from Iran, they are sure to encounter rejection right away. Instead of antagonizing Iran further with more demands, a new administration would be well-advised to make lifting sanctions on Iran a priority. That would signal to both Iran and our European allies that the U.S. is giving up on the Trump administration’s destructive economic warfare, and it would earn the new president some goodwill. That could form the basis for reopening channels of communication between our governments, and that in turn should make it easier for the U.S. to discuss the release and return of American citizens wrongfully detained in Iran. It will take time and patience to regain the trust that the current administration destroyed, and that isn’t going to happen if the next administration starts off with demands for bigger concessions than Iran was prepared to make earlier.

HUD Sues Facebook Over Housing Discrimination and Says the Company’s Algorithms Have Made the Problem Worse

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by Ariana Tobin

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced Thursday it is suing Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act by allowing advertisers to limit housing ads based on race, gender and other characteristics.

The agency also said Facebook’s ad system discriminates against users even when advertisers did not choose to do so.

ProPublica first reported in 2016 that Facebook allowed housing advertisers to exclude users by race. Then in 2017, ProPublica found that — despite Facebook’s promised changes — the company was still letting advertisers exclude users by race, gender, ethnicity, family status, ability and other characteristics.

“Facebook is discriminating against people based upon who they are and where they live,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement. “Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be just as discriminatory as slamming a door in someone’s face.”

In a statement, Facebook said, “We’re surprised by HUD’s decision, as we’ve been working with them to address their concerns and have taken significant steps to prevent” ad discrimination.

HUD’s suit comes a week after Facebook announced sweeping changes to its advertising portal, preventing landlords, employers and lenders from discriminating in housing, employment or credit ads.

Facebook also disputed HUD’s conclusion that the system itself discriminates beyond advertisers’ choices: “HUD had no evidence and finding that our AI systems discriminate against people.”

A Facebook spokesperson told ProPublica that the company declined to give HUD data about who is actually seeing ads because of privacy concerns.

Asked about that, HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan said, “We are bound, and Facebook itself is bound, not to disclose sensitive negotiations, and so there’s very little we can say to that point.”

Peter Romer-Friedman, an employment attorney involved in multiple lawsuits that Facebook settled last week, said HUD’s suit — and the contention that Facebook’s algorithm is amplifying discrimination — may have implications for other cases related to employment and Facebook ads. “The point that the HUD complaint makes about bias in the delivery algorithm is the same exact point that we’ve been making for nearly a year” in another case involving alleged age discrimination on Facebook, Romer-Friedman said.

Thursday’s charge comes after a year of litigation from housing groups. In March 2018, the National Fair Housing Alliance sued Facebook, alleging it allowed advertisers to discriminate against legally protected groups, including mothers, the disabled and Spanish speakers. A few months later, the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the case. Soon after, HUD filed a formal complaint, signaling that it had found enough evidence during its initial investigation to raise the possibility of further legal action.

Facebook’s previous response to HUD contended that advertisers — not the company — were responsible for targeting ads. In March 2018, Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said at the time: “There is absolutely no place for discrimination on Facebook. We believe this lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

HUD’s suit against Facebook is an unusual decision for the Trump administration. It has frequently moved to curtail civil rights investigations. At the same time, Facebook and other social platforms have faced criticism by conservatives who allege their posts expressing political views are being suppressed.

Carson is scheduled to testify on the Hill in budget hearings on April 3.

Inside Trump’s Strategy to Use Mueller on the Campaign Trail

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It’s been just four days since the president learned that Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion, but Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, is no longer in the mood to celebrate. He’s thrilled about the outcome, of course, as is his client. Trump told the former New York mayor that “he’s happier than he thought he would be.” But Giuliani, sipping a Diet Coke on Wednesday morning at the Trump Hotel, said it’s time to focus on the next mission: Find out who started all this—and why.

“We’re now trying to prove who did it,” Giuliani said. “The premise is, somebody had to have started the ‘He colluded with the Russians’” narrative. (Never mind that Trump’s posture toward the Kremlin has long been strange.) Asked whether the president himself wants an investigation to examine this question, Giuliani said, “Goddamn right he [does]. This is not ‘Oh, gee, it’s over, let’s forget about it.’”

A reliable barometer of Trump’s moods, Giuliani offered a glimpse into the future. Mueller might be done with his investigation, but Trump and company are loath to let it drop. They want to capitalize on the president escaping criminal charges and make Mueller’s findings a core piece of 2020 campaign messaging. In their view, Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the report is a gift that vindicates Trump, undercuts Democratic investigations, and repudiates critical news coverage. There’s time enough to talk policy on the campaign trail. Team Trump first wants to showcase the special counsel’s conclusions: According to Barr, Mueller reported no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, and he couldn’t make a judgment on obstruction of justice. Even though the probe has led to 215 criminal charges and five prison sentences, Trump and his allies have framed Mueller’s findings as total exoneration.

[Read: Trump’s opponents have one assignment now]

Yet many Republican lawmakers and strategists fear that Trump would be fixating on the wrong message at the wrong time. They worry that Trump risks repeating the same strategic blunder he made in the midterm elections, which culminated in Republicans losing control of the House. Rather than spotlight economic gains rung up on his watch, the president might wind up dwelling on collateral issues of scant interest to voters. In the midterms, Trump locked onto migrant caravans making their way north from Mexico, warning of a national-security threat that never materialized, and ultimately made little mention of the bread-and-butter issues that some strategists believe would have bolstered his party’s odds for winning.

Tensions over Trump’s campaign message underscore a split within the Republican Party that’s existed since the day he announced his candidacy for president in 2015. Then and now, he’s trampled long-held convictions about how a presidential candidate should behave, relying on his own instincts and feel for the voters’ mood, to the dismay of mainstream GOP figures. Though the establishment and Trump wings of the GOP have joined forces since the 2016 campaign, the next election will test their alliance anew, with the Mueller report emerging as an early flash point.

Trump allies see Barr’s letter as a kind of Swiss Army knife—a tool useful in all kinds of situations. Not only is it exculpatory, they say, but it also implicitly rebukes the press for its coverage of the Russia investigation, inoculating Trump from any future scandal that reporters might unearth. According to a source familiar with internal discussions at the Republican National Committee and the pro-Trump super PAC America First, both organizations are “geared up for any nonsense to come.”

They’re already prepared to attack reporters. “Any reporter who tries that will be hit with 30-second spots of all their ridiculous claims about collusion,” said the source, who, like others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. “Their tweets have all been screencapped. It’s all ready to go.”

Earlier this week, Trump’s campaign previewed the in-your-face tactics they have in mind. A campaign official sent a letter to TV producers cautioning them against booking certain guests who had alleged that Trump colluded with Russia, including Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff of California, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez.

“It’s not hard to figure where we’re going to go with this,” a current campaign official told The Atlantic. “We’re still in victory-lap mode, but it will turn into a message that [Democrats] will say or do anything to stop us from making America great again, including making up lies about the president and ruining a lot of people’s lives.”

[Read: Mueller was Trump’s nemesis—now he’s his greatest asset]

White House officials suggested that the president has no plans to move on from the report because Democrats aren’t moving on. Instead, “they are doubling and tripling down,” says the White House spokesman Hogan Gidley.

At some level, letting go would be out of character. From the first, Trump has personalized the presidency. He still obsesses over the crowd size at his inauguration, along with perceived betrayals from Senator John McCain of Arizona, who died last summer. The Mueller investigation shadowed Trump for nearly two years. Now that it’s over, he is indulging in a bit of triumphalism.

But the president’s allies on Capitol Hill take a more clinical view. Having lost their House majority in 2018, they’re not persuaded that the Mueller report is the path back to power. “We have to be able to pivot to something,” one House Republican leadership aide told The Atlantic. “You can certainly use the findings to shine a light on any kind of frivolous investigations, but at the same time, we have to start thinking about moving on.”

Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a close Trump ally, suggested that focusing on the press in particular would be unproductive. “Calling on the media to apologize is not something that most people would advocate for, as much as hitting the remote and changing to a different channel,” Meadows said.

No less than the leadership of a pro-Trump political-action committee is ready for a new script. “What we’re gonna try to do is get things back on the economic front—I don’t think we want to stay in the mud slopping for another year,” says Ed Rollins, the lead strategist of the Great America PAC. “I hope he can stay focused on his agenda, keep things positive.”

In any event, fresh developments could keep the Mueller probe alive. Barr’s letter isn’t the last word on the subject. Mueller’s report clocked in at more than 300 pages, The New York Times reported Thursday, raising the possibility that Trump’s handpicked attorney general elided more troubling conduct on the president’s part. Congressional Democrats are demanding to see the full report, raising the prospect of a standoff with the Justice Department. But should more damaging material come out, Trump’s legal team says they have a lengthy rebuttal at the ready.

Trump’s lawyers had drafted a counter-report in preparation for Mueller’s findings. Coming in at nearly 90 pages, it was kept locked in a safe in the Trump attorney Jay Sekulow’s office, ready to be released if the Mueller report found that Trump colluded with Russia or obstructed justice.

Throughout Mueller’s investigation, Trump’s lawyers were far more concerned about the obstruction part of the inquiry than the collusion question. Giuliani summarized parts of their defense in the counter-report to The Atlantic. If Mueller wrote that Trump obstructed justice after allegedly telling then–FBI Director James Comey to “let go” of his inquiry into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump’s lawyers would respond by laying out a timeline that suggests Comey inexplicably sat on the information. Comey said the conversation with Trump took place in February, but he didn’t raise alarm until May, Trump’s lawyers note. “If I’m the director of the FBI, and you call me in, and you are obstructing my investigation, I know it right away,” Giuliani said. “How can he decide … three months later, that this is obstruction?”

Trump’s lawyers could still put out some of the counter-report if, in the coming weeks, the Justice Department turns over more material from Mueller’s findings that suggests malfeasance on Trump’s part. Indeed, Mueller’s indecision on obstruction leaves many questions unanswered, which Trump’s team finds frustrating. “It’s kind of absurd that he couldn’t decide,” Giuliani said. “‘Difficult issues of law and fact’—that’s what you’re there for, pal! It’s like saying, ‘Well, I’m a brain surgeon, but I’m not gonna operate because this is a difficult brain situation.’”

[Read: The Trump scandals that have slipped by Congress]

In the coming weeks and months, the president will not only press for answers on how the investigation began, Giuliani said, but he’ll also potentially consider pardoning its casualties: Though “he hasn’t decided” if he wants to take that step, “that doesn’t mean down the road he’s given up the power to do it.

“I mean, are there cases that are worthy of it? Probably. People have been pardoned for far worse,” he continued. “Flynn is a very sympathetic case, and in some ways [the former Trump campaign chairman Paul] Manafort is, because he’s already spent a year in jail.”

It’s those emotions that will likely motivate Trump moving forward: a conviction that he and his allies were victims of a devastating miscarriage of justice. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Wednesday evening, the president made clear that the nation should remain riveted to all things Russia, saying that “this was an attempted takeover of our government, of our country.” And his biggest fans affirmed that they have no intention of letting him let go. As Hannity put it, “The deep state’s day of reckoning has now come.”

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