The Week’s Most Interesting Reads

On March 24, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Four years on, the Yemen war remains Saudi Arabia’s albatross. Bruce Riedel reviews four years of the Saudi coalition’s failed war and the devastating consequences it has had for the people of Yemen.

Hunger stalks Yemen’s remote villages after four years of war. Reuters reports on the increasingly severe conditions for people in Yemen.

It is time for the U.S. to downgrade its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Steven Metz makes the case for reducing U.S. support for the Saudis.

The ‘Caliphate’ Is Dead, but Americans Might Not Be Any Safer

On March 24, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Islamic State is gone, even if only in strict geographic terms. Once estimated to span territory up to about the size of Maine, the group’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria has disappeared entirely in less than five years. As of early February, the group held just about a square mile on the Syrian border, and though the final assault took six weeks, the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces conducting the operations announced the collapse on Saturday.

The collapse is a major achievement for the U.S. and its allies, even though it won’t stop the group from conducting attacks in the region or inspiring them overseas. At its peak strength in 2014 and 2015, ISIS was considered unique among terrorist organizations for controlling so much territory. But that very distinction underscored how terrorist groups throughout history have waged violence perfectly well without states of their own. So why did territory in particular help make ISIS look so threatening to the United States? And is America safer now that the “caliphate” has fallen?

“I remember seeing the pictures of locations in … al-Anbar province, in particular in Fallujah, where I’d actually fought, with the black flag flying over them,” says John R. Allen, the retired Marine general who helped organize the coalition to defeat ISIS during the Obama administration. “And it had largely all happened under our visible horizon, off the radar.” At that point, early in 2014, officials tended to see the group as focused on local power struggles, not on attacking the United States. But even as President Barack Obama infamously compared ISIS to a “JV team,” its local power kept spreading.

Hassan Hassan: The true origins of ISIS

As ISIS accumulated territory, the Obama administration engaged in a wrenching debate about whether to again commit the American military to Iraq, a country it had quit just a few years before. The scale of the Islamic State’s abuses—the sex slavery, the violent enforcement of its interpretation of Islamic law, the mass executions—was growing clearer, but it was still obscure.

Meanwhile, there were also indications that the group could use its territory to plot attacks against Western targets, but that still didn’t necessarily mean it would succeed. Decades of debate before ISIS had brought no consensus on how important territory really is to terrorist groups. The deadliest terrorist attack in American history, on September 11, 2001, had been largely planned from a safe haven in Afghanistan; the second-most-fatal, the Oklahoma City bombing, had been planned in the United States.

ISIS also wasn’t the first group to use terrorism and then control territory; the terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman pointed out that many groups, from the Communists in China after World War II to the Vietcong in Vietnam to the FARC in Colombia, had operated along a spectrum of violence, from terrorist attacks on civilians to massing forces for guerrilla-style attacks to mass mobilization into an insurgent group that could hold territory. Where ISIS differed, Hoffman told me, was mainly in how quickly it moved through this process—even as it kept up its campaign of terrorism against civilians.

By the summer of 2014, ISIS was routing entire Iraqi army divisions, some of which simply “evaporated” rather than fighting, Allen says. The group had taken over one of Iraq’s largest cities, Mosul, where its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a caliphate. The fall of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad to the militants seemed like a real possibility. The group aimed to seem irresistible and invincible, Allen says. And they were turning their attention toward Iraq’s northern Kurdish enclave. U.S. officials began to worry that the group could overrun the Kurds, who had been some of America’s best partners in Iraq. The officials were also horrified by the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding on Iraqi Kurdistan’s Mount Sinjar, where the group had besieged members of the Yazidi religious minority.

The territory ISIS had amassed, meanwhile, gave the group freedom to maneuver, access to financial resources, and a powerful recruitment tool for thousands of foreign fighters seeking a physical place to live and fight for their version of Islam. There was a growing sense within the administration that the more the group was allowed to expand, the harder it would be to dislodge.

ISIS had seized banks and oil refineries; it was also generating income by taxing the population in the areas under its control. By one estimate, these sources added up to revenues of more than $800 million for the group in 2015. Launching terrorist attacks is cheap—sometimes it’s just the cost of a car rental. And the more resources ISIS had, the more damage it could potentially inflict. Not just with guns and U-Hauls—Hoffman pointed out that early on, the group seized the University of Mosul, where it conducted research on chemical weapons. Al-Qaeda had done similar research at facilities in Afghanistan.

Finally, though, there was the ideological appeal of establishing a “caliphate,” a supposed holy land that the group’s adherents argued Muslims around the world were duty-bound to defend and expand. It was partly this project that drew so many thousands of foreigners to Iraq and Syria—not just to fight, but also to help administer the newly declared “state.” The entity’s very existence looked like a powerful statement, not only that ISIS could threaten the most powerful military on Earth, but also that it had succeeded in remaking the map of the Middle East.

ISIS managed to carry out some audacious attacks abroad, such as the combined bombing and shooting spree in Paris, planned from the caliphate’s self-declared capital in Raqqa, Syria, that killed about 130 people. But the West’s worst fear—of multiple Paris-style attacks carried out in different countries simultaneously by foreign fighters sent back home—did not happen. In the United States and Europe, it was far more typical for individuals with only online connections to ISIS, if any, to stage attacks in the group’s name. These, too, could kill in large numbers, like the 2016 truck attack in Nice that killed more than 80 people, or the shooting in Orlando that same year that killed 50. The overwhelming majority of the group’s victims, though, were not in the West; they were mainly the Iraqis and Syrians living under its control, who have died by the thousands at the group’s hands since 2014. Over 1,000, and perhaps thousands, more people have died in the coalition campaign against the group (there is a wide discrepancy between official and independent estimates).

As ISIS’s core territory has collapsed, so has the group’s prowess in other realms. The Islamic State’s propaganda output has diminished with the destruction of some of its media centers in Syria. The flow of foreign fighters to the shrinking territory has slowed dramatically. The number of deaths in attacks claimed by the group worldwide has declined steadily since its peak in 2014. The deadliest recent attack the group has claimed against a Western target was in August 2017, when a van struck pedestrians in Barcelona, killing 13 people.

Read: How can America hit ISIS “harder” when the caliphate is gone?

Yet the group continues to stage massive suicide bombings in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere—in late January, it claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed 20 people in Indonesia. It maintains eight declared branches in countries around the world; estimates from the Pentagon and the United Nations routinely place its fighting force at up to 30,000, which isn’t much of a change from the CIA estimate of ISIS fighters in 2014, though it’s difficult to put a precise figure on the fighting force. The group’s production of new propaganda may have slowed down, but there’s plenty out there already for any interested zealot with an internet connection. If someone wants to drive a car into a crowd and claim that ISIS made him do it, it’s no easier stopping him today than it was yesterday.

“We know right now that there are ISIS fighters scattered still around Syria and Iraq, and that ISIS itself is growing in other parts of the world,” National Security Adviser John Bolton told ABC earlier this month. “The ISIS threat will remain.”

Allen likens ISIS to a “three-headed monster”: core ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the eight ISIS provinces, and digital ISIS. With one of the heads gone, the question is how the other heads will react. “Does a defeat mean that people are less attracted to [ISIS] because it’s no longer the winning trend, or does it imply that people are going to want to take revenge?” asks Rob Malley, who served as Obama’s senior adviser on countering ISIS. “I would suspect that there is perhaps a lesser ability to get people to be motivated when the caliphate is defeated.”

But ISIS itself grew out of previous supposed defeats of insurgent groups in Iraq, and it’s not clear how long this particular defeat will last. A recent report to Congress warned that “conditions are ripe for extremists to return to Mosul,” which remains largely decimated more than a year after Iraq’s then–prime minister declared it freed from the Islamic State’s grip. The Shiite-led Iraqi government is engaged in some of the same kinds of reprisals against the Sunni population that stimulated the rise of ISIS in the first place. The report noted, of recent counterterrorism campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria, and Mali: Following “each supposed defeat, extremist groups return having grown increasingly ambitious, innovative, and deadly.”

Conservatives’ Disingenuous Attacks on Democratic Reforms

On March 24, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

If their presidential candidates are any indication, Democrats may finally be getting serious about structural reforms to American democracy. Some proposals, such as packing the court with additional liberal judges, are premature and unpersuasive, as I argued last week. But others are common sense, such as statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. The Electoral College is indefensible under any conceivable metric: Five Americans have won the popular vote for president in my lifetime; only three of them actually held the office. It should be eliminated—as should the filibuster, which, thanks to the Senate’s warped geography, gives sparsely populated states an undeserved veto over the nation’s legislative agenda.

Now conservatives are crying foul over these plans, even after two years of public debate over Trump’s war on American democracy. “Yet for all Trump’s sins, it is the Democrats who are now threatening to abuse power on a much grander scale than anything Trump has tried or even threatened,” The Washington Examiner warned in an editorial. “No sooner has the Democratic party lost control of an institution that it had assumed it would retain in perpetuity than that institution has been denounced as retrograde and unfair,” National Review’s editors opined. Commentary’s Noah Rothman framed it as civic apostasy: “Democrats are now openly pursuing policies that the Constitution implicitly or expressly forbids.”

Many of these critics seem to understand that the current system can’t be defended on its own merits. So they’re portraying reform efforts as a would-be putsch instead. Mitch McConnell, the nihilistic Republican senator from Kentucky, pushed this narrative in January while condemning H.R. 1, the Democrats’ election-reform package. “They’re trying to clothe this power grab with cliches about ‘restoring democracy’ and doing it ‘For the People,’ but their proposal is simply a naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “It should be called the Democrat Politician Protection Act.”

Is it fair to paint these proposals as a norm-shattering power grab? Yes, and no. The Obama era showed how a small conservative minority can thwart popular liberal policies, while the Trump era has demonstrated how that same minority can exploit the nation’s political system to defy the public will. Democrats’ only choices are to fix the system or break it further. So far, they’ve largely chosen the former over the latter.

And McConnell is a major reason why Democrats are resorting to such measures. As the Republican leader in the Senate, he spent the last decade using every parliamentary tool to obstruct Barack Obama’s agenda, then turned the chamber into a conveyor belt for confirming right-wing judges. Newt Gingrich pulled off a similar feat in the 1980s and 1990s in the House, transforming the people’s chamber from a functional legislative body into a crass partisan arena. Small wonder that Democrats are also warming up to a maximalist approach to wielding power in Washington.

Things are even worse in the states. Republicans rode an anti-Obama wave to victory in the 2010 midterms, then went on a gerrymandering spree that gave them a nearly insurmountable advantage in statehouses and the House of Representatives. (The Democratic wave in last fall’s midterms should have resulted in much worse losses for Republicans, the Associated Press reported on Thursday.) Once in power, GOP lawmakers clamped down on elections across the country by enacting restrictive voter-ID laws, closing polling places, and cutting early-voting days. The right-wing turn towards illiberal democracy may be known as Trumpism today, but its origins long predate the president’s rise to power.

How far does this contempt for popular rule go? When voters in North Carolina and Wisconsin elected Democratic governors in recent years, Republican legislators passed laws to strip the offices of their powers. (A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled against those efforts on Thursday.) Voters in Idaho, Maine, Utah, and other states approved ballot initiatives last fall on progressive issues ranging from Medicaid expansion to marijuana legalization; instead of respecting the electorate’s wishes, some GOP lawmakers in those states immediately worked to reverse the measures over the last few months. These laboratories of oligarchy are a far cry from the democratic norms that Americans expect in their political system.

This context is also essential to understanding why Democrats and the American left are placing so much emphasis on structural reforms. No major component of the party’s policy agenda, including the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, can survive without it. One can’t begrudge conservatives for their ideological qualms about left-of-center policies on healthcare and climate change. But it’s audacious to use every unfair mechanism at their disposal to hamstring Democratic policies and priorities for more than a decade, then get mad when Democrats try to dismantle those mechanisms.

None of the defenses of these mechanism are very persuasive. The Wall Street Journal argues that the Electoral College, which Elizabeth Warren recently said she wants to eliminate, “helps check polarization by forcing presidential candidates to campaign in competitive states across the country, instead of spending all their time trying to motivate turnout in populous partisan strongholds.” Does polarization feel very checked right now? If anything, the Electoral College seems to have the opposite effect, since nearly every state uses a winner-take-all system for allocating electoral votes that flattens their internal differences.

Indeed, that flattening is taken by National Review as a reflection of each state’s true nature. The Electoral College, the magazine wrote, “guarantees that candidates who seek the only nationally elected office in America must attempt to appeal to as broad a geographic constituency as possible—large states and small, populous and rural—rather than retreating to their preferred pockets and running up the score.” But the Electoral College stifles the country’s diversity instead of nourishing it. The average Floridian’s vote is currently far more influential than that of a Republican in D.C. or a Democrat in Utah. Without the Electoral College, they would all matter equally.

Defenders also raise the bizarre specter of a systemic breakdown without the Electoral College. “The freak occurrence that was Bush v. Gore is often raised as an objection against the status quo,” National Review argued. “Less attention is paid to the obvious question: What if that recount had been national?” So does the Journal: “The uncertainty arising from a nationwide recount for President amid myriad regional irregularities—as happened in North Carolina and Florida in 2018—would make Florida 2000 look tame.” It’s unclear why a nationwide recount would happen if something went awry, since states and counties would presumably still run the actual voting process.

The most common defense of the Electoral College is also its greatest weakness: that it sometimes elects a president who didn’t receive the most votes. “Like the Supreme Court, the Electoral College sometimes frustrates the will of political majorities,” the Journal reminds us. “That makes it an easy target in this populist age. But while ‘majority rules’ has always been an appealing slogan, it’s an insufficient principle for structuring an electoral system in the U.S.” This is a baffling comparison. Yes, the Supreme Court is supposed to stand slightly apart from Americans’ fleeting whims. That’s the purpose of an independent judiciary. But elections, by definition, are supposed to reflect the people’s whims, to give them force and verve and corporeality, to translate the potential into the real. At its best, the Electoral College doesn’t stop the popular vote from doing that, and at its worse, it actively prevents that. Too much majoritarianism can be a bad thing, of course. But not enough of it can be far worse.

It’s a little rich for conservatives to denounce abolishing the filibuster or the Electoral College as a bridge too far when Republicans have championed their own set of structural reforms. The party’s 2016 platform calls for constitutional amendments that would impose term limits on federal lawmakers, require Congress to pass a balanced budget, allow states to ban same-sex marriages, and require new federal regulations to be approved by a majority of both houses of Congress—a mini-revolution for American governance, if it became reality. Over the last decade, almost three dozen Republican-led state legislatures have even quietly passed motions to call for a “convention of the states” to propose amendments without Congress’ approval. That’s a far more dramatic step than any Democratic proposal currently up for discussion.

So why reform the system now? Most of the Democrats’ proposals have been floating around for years. The country came closest to scrapping the Electoral College in the 1970s when Congress almost passed a constitutional amendment to end it. But there’s heightened urgency. Trump’s presidency has been extraordinarily good at exposing flaws and weaknesses in American democracy. And his effect on the public debate won’t end when he leaves office because the even greater threat of climate change looms over the horizon. Democrats can no longer afford to spend the next decade trying to convince Republicans to support even the most meager plans to decarbonize the American economy.

National Review’s David French correctly attributes some of this reformist energy to Twitter, where activists on both sides have a disproportionate ability to shape the public debate. “The people who care the most about anything—from politics to sports to pop culture—set the tone,” he wrote. “And in American politics, the people who care the most tend not to be moderate, either in temperament or ideology. By the time progressive Twitter has done its work on the Democratic field, the American people may no longer have the ability to choose true American norms in 2020.”

But, as he admits, presidential primaries are always boundary-testing moments. Conservatives know this all too well: The Republicans’ current standard-bearer won the 2016 primaries by calling for a wall along the nation’s southern border, demanding mass deportations across the country, and proposing a Muslim ban. Now all three positions are GOP orthodoxy. Is scrapping the Electoral College or the filibuster truly more extreme than any of those demands?

And with the unfortunate exception of court-packing, these proposals aren’t about revenge for the Trump era or furthering the vicious cycle of partisan warfare. If anything, they’re about breaking the cycle. Each of the other proposals will enhance popular representation in American democracy. So if Democrats benefit from eliminating the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the filibuster, and enacting meaningful campaign-finance reform, it will only be because their proposals tend to be more in line with the American public as a whole.

This may be why some conservatives are so worried about this debate. They aren’t actually afraid of an unfair system where a Chairman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will impose communism on America. They’re afraid of a fair system where voters will have an opportunity to decisively reject their views.

Ari Fleischer Lied, and People Died

On March 24, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Ari Fleischer, the former White House Press Secretary under President George W. Bush, ignited a firestorm of controversy Wednesday when, while commenting on the 16th  anniversary of the U.S invasion of Iraq, he sought to defend the reputation of his boss when it came to the veracity of the claims about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that underpinned President Bush’s case for war.

“The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow,” Fleischer tweeted on March 19. “There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed ‘Bush lied. People died.’ This accusation itself is a lie. It’s time to put it to rest.”

Fleischer goes on to declare that “The fact is that President Bush (and I as press secretary) faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded,” before noting that “The CIA, along with the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD. We all turned out to be wrong. That is very different from lying.”

As a Chief Weapons Inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq from 1991 through 1998, I was intimately familiar with the intelligence used by the U.S.  Intelligence Community to underpin the case for war (which I debunked in June 2002 in an article published in Arms Control Today). Armed with the unique insights that came from this experience, I can state clearly and without any reservation that Ari Fleischer, once again, has misrepresented the facts when it comes to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

The fact is, the Iraq War was never about WMD. Rather, it was waged for one purpose and one purpose only—regime change. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the sole focus of this effort, and the so-called “intelligence” used to justify this act was merely an excuse for action. Ari Fleischer knows this, and to contend otherwise—as he does via twitter—is simply a continuation of the lies he told from the very beginning about the U.S.  case for war with Iraq.

UNSCOM had, by the fall of 2002, been relegated to the pages of history, replaced by a new inspection organization, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). It is through the work of UNMOVIC that Ari Fleischer’s defense of George W. Bush collapses. In November 2002 the Bush administration pushed for the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1441, which found Iraq to be in “material breach” of its disarmament obligations. Inspectors from UNMOVIC were dispatched to Iraq shortly thereafter in a last-ditch effort to account for the totality of Iraq’s WMD.

The work of the inspectors was undermined from the start by the Bush administration, led by Ari Fleischer. “It is very well true that the inspectors who are working as diligently as they can in an environment made very difficult for them by Iraqi actions, may not be giving notice,” Fleischer explained in a press conference, “but that does not mean Iraq is not receiving notice as a result of their electronic means and other means to know what the inspectors are doing. Which puts the inspectors in a very hard position.”

But Fleischer had no evidence that Iraq was getting advance notice, and the experience of UNMOVIC inspectors on the ground suggested otherwise. When asked by a reporter about the possibility of giving the UN weapons inspectors more time to complete their task, Fleischer fired back, asking “More time for what? More time to be run-around by a regime that has not complied, that has concealed its weapons, and that has grown throughout the years—particularly the four years when no one was in the country—extraordinarily good at hiding what they have and deceiving those who are there to do their level best.”

Left unsaid was the fact that the inspectors had repeatedly asked the U.S.  for access to the very intelligence being used to underpin the American claims that Iraq was holding on to prohibited WMD and were denied. “If the UK and the U.S. are convinced and they say they have evidence,” Hans Blix, the head of UNMOVIC, had noted on December 20, 2002, “then one would expect they would be able to tell us where is this stuff.” When asked if they were getting cooperation from U.S.  and Western intelligence agencies, Blix replied, “Not yet. We get some, but we don’t get all we need.”

In 2010, Blix commented on the provisions of Security Council resolution 1441, which had declared Iraq to be in “material breach” of its obligation to disarm, and which was cited by Ari Fleischer to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003. “The declaration, I felt, might give Iraq a chance for a new start,” Blix noted, “except that it was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they didn’t have any.”

This is the conclusion that anyone taking umbrage with Ari Fleischer over his attempt to whitewash the role he played—as an extension of President George W. Bush—in facilitating the Iraq War should rely on. Deflecting blame onto the U.S.  intelligence community ignores the fact that the decision to go to war was the exclusive purview of the Executive Branch that Fleischer served. Iraq’s alleged retention of proscribed WMD were merely an excuse to achieve the higher goal of regime change. The inspection process initiated in November 2002 to investigate Iraq’s WMD programs was, from the U.S. perspective, a façade created to justify a decision to go to war that was made long before the inspectors ever set foot on the ground.

“Intelligence,” therefore, was an artifice manufactured by the Bush administration as a smoke screen. A memorandum prepared by the head of the British MI-6 intelligence service, Richard Dearlove, following a July 23, 2002 meeting in Washington, DC, underscores this truth: “There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Bush knew that the engagement with the United Nations, including the crafting of resolution 1441 and the dispatch of inspectors to Iraq, was simply an elaborate charade, cruel theatrics meant to dangle the prospects of peace, all the while preparing for war—something Ari Fleischer knew all along, as this exchange with the press aptly demonstrates:

Question: “Does regime change mean that you want to change the leader of Iraq, or you want to change the nature of the regime?”

Fleischer: “The objective is for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to disarm, to stop threatening its neighbors, to stop repressing minorities within its own country. And that’s why Congress passed the policy of regime change.”

Press: “Well, which of those definitions is correct?”

Fleischer: “Well, let’s do it—let me cut to the bottom line on it. What I would propose is that in the event Saddam Hussein gives the order, and under his leadership and direction disarms Iraq, gives up its weapons of mass destruction, has no more chemical weapons, no more biological weapons, stops using hostility as a way to deal with its neighbors, stops repression of minorities with his own country, give me a call. After you cover Saddam Hussein doing these things, let’s talk about it. Until then, the president is focused on making sure that these developments take place as a result either of the UN resolutions being enforced, or by whoever in Iraq taking these actions to make it happen. But this is probably the mother of all hypotheticals. Give me a phone call when it happens.”

Press: “So Saddam could stay in power if those objectives were carried out?”

Fleischer: “Again, call me up when Saddam Hussein gives the directions for all those factors to take place.”

Press: “So, that’s a yes?”

Fleischer: “I think this is a question of how many devils can dance on the head of a pin.”

Press: “It’s not. Can he stay in power and have regime change?”

Fleischer: “You’re asking the mother of hypotheticals. And I think it’s a rather…”

Press: “Does it refer to a leader or a government regime change?”

Fleischer: “It refers to actions that have to be taken to keep the peace.”

Press: “So it’s a question of policy, not personnel?”

Fleischer: “That’s a good way to put it.”

Press: “So he could stay in power if those things happen?”

Fleischer: “If you want to fool yourselves into believing that that’s what Saddam Hussein would do in policy, that’s an interesting way to approach it.”

The fact of the matter is that Saddam did, in fact, do everything listed by Ari Fleischer to effect a change in the policies of Iraq in order to preserve his regime. But President Bush—whom Fleischer represented—never had any intention of recognizing such change, even when it occurred. President Bush, Ari Fleischer and every representative of the U.S.  administration involved in formulating and implementing U.S. policy on Iraq was being dishonest in the extreme when dangling the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the Iraq problem.

In short, they all lied, and Ari Fleischer was the mouthpiece for disseminating these lies, a task he continues to perform to this day.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War.

Even Without Mueller’s Report, Congress Had All the Facts It Needed

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

No matter what Attorney General William Barr reveals—or doesn’t—about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, everything Congress needed to know about Donald Trump and Russia was already clear.

October 7, 2016, was the near-death experience of the Trump campaign. That Friday afternoon, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post reported on an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women. The shock battered the campaign. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared publicly that he was “sickened” by Trump, canceled a joint appearance with him, and declined to answer whether he still supported the Trump candidacy.

Less than one hour later, WikiLeaks dumped its largest and most damaging trove of hacked emails to and from Democratic operatives. It included two emails sent years before to the future Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The messages criticized the teachings of the Catholic Church on women and sexuality. The Trump campaign instantly seized on them as proof of the Clinton campaign’s supposed anti-Catholic animus—a useful weapon to help erase memories of Trump’s Twitter attacks on the pope earlier in 2016.

[Ken Starr: Mueller cannot seek an indictment. And he must remain silent.]

Even more lethally, the trove included extracts from Clinton’s lucrative speeches to banking groups. In one of those speeches—sponsored by a Brazilian bank—Clinton expressed her hope for a “hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future, with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” In another speech in the trove, Clinton suggested that many politicians hold “both a public and a private position” on contentious issues—implying that public words cannot be trusted.

The huge dump took a while to be analyzed and absorbed. It did not immediately displace the salacious Access Hollywood story from the top of the news.

But by the second week of October, WikiLeaks was profoundly engaging the U.S. voting public. Using the Google Trends tool, the website Five Thirty Eight tracked how public interest in the hacked emails surged. Not coincidentally, it seems, Clinton’s poll lead over Trump peaked on October 17, and steadily shrank thereafter. FBI Director James Comey’s October 28 letter reopening the Clinton email case delivered the final blow to the reeling Clinton campaign.

This timeline is one thing to keep in mind as details emerge from the Mueller report.

[Read: Imagining Trump’s America without Robert Mueller]

It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Vladimir Putin’s Russia hacked American emails and used them to help elect Trump to the presidency.

It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that agents purporting to represent Putin’s Russia approached the Trump campaign to ask whether help would be welcome, to which Donald Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Donald Trump publicly welcomed this help: “I love WikiLeaks!”

It’s solid political science that this help from Russia via WikiLeaks was crucial, possibly decisive, toTrump’s success in the Electoral College in November 2016.

Mueller was asked to investigate how much the Trump campaign knew in advance about this Russian help. Along the way, the special counsel also apparently became interested in the question of why Putin was so eager for a Trump presidency. Did Putin have some kind of prior hold over Trump, financial or otherwise?

For two years, Americans and the world have speculated and argued about the inquiry. But along the way, we have often lost sight of the core truth of the Trump presidency: For all its many dark secrets, there have never been any real mysteries about the Trump-Russia story.

[Read: What Mueller leaves behind]

The president of the United States was helped into his job by clandestine Russian attacks on the American political process. That core truth is surrounded by other disturbing probabilities, such as the likelihood that Putin even now is exerting leverage over Trump in some way.

Along the way, we have also lost sight of something that I warned about here in The Atlantic in May 2017: It’s very possible that Trump himself broke no criminal law in accepting campaign help from Putin. This ultra-legalistic nation expects wrongdoing to take the form of prosecutable crimes—and justice to occur in a courtroom.

But many wrongs are not crimes. And many things that are crimes are not prosecutable for one reason or another—for instance, when a statute of limitations expires.

Mueller served his country by advancing the inquiry into Trump-Russia at a time when Trump’s enablers in Congress sought to cover up for the president. Since the midterm elections, Congress has regained its independence and can recover its integrity. Mueller’s full report will surely inform and enlighten Americans about many details of what exactly happened in 2016. But the lack of further indictments by Mueller underscores that the job of protecting the country against the Russia-compromised Trump presidency belongs to Congress. It always did.