Donald Trump – Page 4

The media rushed to publish the DNC’s hacked emails in 2016. So what about Trump?

Leaked emails from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign have made their way to major news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico.

Given what happened in 2016, when the press published a number of embarrassing emails that WikiLeaks had hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s email server, you might expect that the Trump files would be published as soon as they were vetted. Right? Well, no.

As Jon Passantino and Liam Reilly report for CNN:

But while the hacking incident, which occurred in June, set off a scramble in the Trump campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, the three news organizations that had received the files held off on publishing information from the trove. The decision marked a reversal from the 2016 election, when news outlets breathlessly reported embarrassing and damaging stories about Hillary Clinton’s campaign after Russian hackers stole a cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee, publishing them on the website Wikileaks.

The news media — especially the Times — have a long and mostly honorable tradition of publishing newsworthy documents regardless of how they obtained them, including the Pentagon Papers, the government’s own secret history of the Vietnam War, and reporting on the George W. Bush administration’s secret and illegal eavesdropping program.

So why the hesitance over the Trump files, which may have been hacked by Iran? As I told CNN:

News organizations should proceed with caution when dealing with hacked documents. As long as they’re verified and newsworthy, then they’re fair game, but motive is an important part of the story, too. In 2016, too many news outlets ran with stories about the Democratic National Committee’s emails without questioning why WikiLeaks, which had ties to the Russian government, had hacked them in the first place.

In other words, do two things at once. Report on the documents, and report on the motives of the leakers. It’s a standard that retired Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron espoused in his memoir, “Collision of Power,” in writing about his second thoughts regarding the Post’s decision to go big with the WikiLeaks files during the 2016 campaign:

There was a far more significant story taking shape, and it took the press too long to fully communicate it: Russia was aggressively interfering in a presidential election. A superpower adversary was doing what it could to propel Donald Trump into the White House. At The Post we learned a lesson: If there was a hack like this in the future, we would be putting greater emphasis on who was behind it and why, not letting the content of stolen information distract us from the motives of the hackers.

Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring told CNN: “Politico editors made a judgment, based on the circumstances as our journalists understood them at the time, that the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents.”

Let’s see for ourselves.

Rachel Maddow’s ‘Ultra’ connects the dots from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump

Joseph McCarthy was even worse than I realized.

I knew about his reign of terror in the 1950s, when he falsely accused government officials, Hollywood figures and others of being communists, ruining lives and leading to the still-used ephithet “McCarthyism.”

What I didn’t know was that he consorted with and defended actual Nazis — that is, German war criminals and their surprisingly numerous supporters in the U.S. And that there are some echoes down to the present day.

That’s the main takeaway from the second season of “Ultra,” a podcast series hosted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. It’s good stuff, and you should listen to it if you get a chance. It’s a wide-ranging look at Nazis and their sympathizers in the U.S. after World War II — a follow-up to the first season, which examined the Nazi movement before and during the war.

And though “Ultra” features a wide cast of characters, the focus is on McCarthy, who defended German soldiers who massacred U.S. troops after they had already surrendered and whose entire Senate career was what you might call Nazi-adjacent.

Two interesting tidbits:

Although Richard Nixon graciously conceded after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, behind the scenes both he and top Republican officials gave at least tacit support to efforts by extreme right-wing forces to overturn the results in several states and hand the election to Nixon.

And Trump thug Steve Bannon, currently behind bars, has favorably cited an Italian fascist who in turn wrote the introduction for “Imperium,” a Nazi screed written by American fascist Francis Yockey, a shadowy fugitive throughout “Ultra” who kills himself after he is finally taken into custody by the FBI.

The reference to Bannon is the only direct tie Maddow makes to Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to subvert democracy. But the Trump parallels are clear throughout, as they were during the first season.

If there’s a hopeful takeaway from “Ultra,” it’s this: We’ve defeated fascism in the U.S. before, and we can do it again.

50 years after Nixon’s resignation, some eerie parallels with Trump and the Egypt story

A week ago today, The Washington Post reported (free link) that Donald Trump may have helped fuel his 2016 presidential campaign with an illegal, last-minute infusion of $10 million from the Egyptian government.

The FBI investigated the money trail but was called off the case by Attorney General Bill Barr — the same Bill Barr whose lies about the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia helped warp public perceptions.

So far, there has been very little follow-up — not by the Post and, most significant, not by The New York Times. I have to assume that the Post, at least, is still digging. But this story, if all the dots can be connected, amounts to a massive scandal that in saner times would drive a candidate out of the race.

Of course the media are to blame for not pushing this story. But so is the Democratic Party, which is guilty of malpractice for not opening an investigation in the Senate immediately. What makes a story stick is repetition — and without prominent Democrats coming out every day and giving journalists something to report on, it quickly withers away.

Today is not just the one-week anniversary of the Post’s Egypt story. It’s also the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as president, a consequence of the Watergate scandal, which was pushed relentlessly by the press (especially the Post), elected officials and the courts.

And here’s a parallel that is worth pondering. Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order to help finance his 1968 campaign.

Barron tells the story in his book “The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate.” Demetracopoulos, a liberal Greek journalist, tried to warn people in the U.S. that the right-wing junta then running his country had paid off Nixon, but his efforts came to naught.

In shades of today’s somnolent Democrats, Barron writes that party chair Larry O’Brien didn’t tell President Lyndon Johnson what he knew and turned down frantic requests from Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s campaign to use it in political ads. The Boston Globe tried to get at the story, but then-Globe reporter Christopher Lydon was unable to pierce the veil. In an interview for GBH News, Barron told me:

Watergate is a metaphor for abuse of power during the Nixon years. The scandal didn’t begin with the planning for the June 1972 break-in. Its roots are in the illegal financing of the 1968 election, the potential disclosure of which caused, in the words of the historian Stanley Kutler, the “most anxiety” in the Nixon administration “for the longest period of time.”…

There is strong circumstantial evidence that at least part of what the burglars were directed to find was whatever derogatory information the Democrats had on Nixon, especially financial documents related to foreign contributions.

These days, of course, Trump would just go running to Sean Hannity, and what should be a campaign-ending scandal, if proved, would simply degenerate into another muddle over the mainstream media and “fake news.” But that doesn’t mean journalists and Democrats shouldn’t be pounding away at this every day.

A mysterious $10 million cash withdrawal in Egypt may be linked to Trump’s 2016 campaign

Anti-Sisi demonstration in London. Photo (cc) 2015 by Alisdare Hickson.

I want to make sure you have access to this astonishing story (free link) in The Washington Post reporting that Donald Trump may have boosted his 2016 presidential campaign with a last-minute, highly illegal $10 million payment from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi.

The story, by Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig, includes all kinds of provocative details: a meeting between Trump and Sisi in September 2016; a mysterious cash withdrawal of $10 million from an Egyptian bank; and Trump’s decision to put $10 million of his own money into his campaign, possibly in the expectation that he could pay it back with Egyptian money.

The FBI spent several years investigating the allegations but were eventually shut down by none other than Attorney General Bill Barr, whose lies about the Mueller report contributed to a public perception that there was less to the Russia collusion claims than was actually the case.

Another day, another report documenting the Secret Service’s failures

The New York Times has been doing tremendous work on the failures of the Secret Service and local law enforcement that led to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13. The latest (free link) shows that officials had multiple warning signs that should have led them to shut down the rally before Trump ever took the stage. It was truly a failure of epic proportions.

Last week the Times published a visual investigation with similar conclusions: the shooter had been spotted and seemed suspicious enough to have attracted the notice of security officers. They lost track of him. And they allowed the rally to go ahead, leading to the death of a retired firefighter and serious injury to two other attendees.

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President Biden emphasizes democracy as he begins his long goodbye

President Biden in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Photo via the Biden White House.

I found President Biden’s address Wednesday night to be sad and moving. His theme was democracy and how we can preserve it. His 2020 victory over Donald Trump saved us from authoritarianism to an extent that no one realized when they cast their ballots. After all, it was only afterwards that Trump launched his effort to steal the election by any means necessary, including fomenting violence in the halls of Congress.

Biden proved not to be up to the challenge of defeating Trump again. Fortunately, by stepping aside and handing off his campaign to Vice President Kamala Harris, he has energized the anti-Trump movement and given it a chance of prevailing this November, though there are no guarantees.

There was nothing in Biden’s 11-minute Oval Office speech that would make anyone doubt the wisdom of his decision to end his re-election campaign. His voice was hoarse and halting, and before you blame COVID, keep in mind that this is the Biden we have come to know in recent months. Louise Aronson, a gerontologist who was one of the formerly anonymous physicians interviewed by The New Yorker last week, observed for The Atlantic (free link) that “his voice was weak, he stumbled occasionally over his prepared remarks, and his physical presence was diminished from what it once was.” She added:

Part of what was so excruciating about watching Biden hold on to his hope of winning a second term was seeing someone struggle to accept that their best-case scenario might be impossible. Variations of this situation play out daily in clinics and hospitals, and if you have a shred of empathy, it’s always heartbreaking. Yet few such difficult conversations — or the loud silences that too often take the place of these conversations — happen so publicly. Watching this one reminded me how unwelcome they are in American life, even in the offices of physicians delivering bad news.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has a thorough overview of Biden’s address, writing that he joins George Washington in his willingness to walk away and John Adams in presiding over a peaceful transition. “Like them, Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy,” Richardson said. “After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.”

And I’m sorry, but I have to single out Peter Baker of The New York Times for a particularly sour “news analysis” (I’m not wasting a gift link on it). Here’s an excerpt that is very much in keeping with the rest of what he wrote:

What there was not much of was introspection about how he had gotten to this moment of indignity. He may be focused on the soul of America, but he revealed little of his own. Indeed, if there has been much soul searching over these past days and weeks of personal and political trauma that led to this reluctant end of his storied half-century political career, the search has been called off. Or at least the results were not reported.

I don’t think Baker would have been satisfied unless Biden confessed he was becoming senile and thanked the Times for pointing it out. Baker takes an enormous amount of grief from liberal readers for his resolute both-sides-ism, and I often find the criticism to be overwrought. This time, though, any brickbats directed his way are well deserved.

Wednesday’s address was not a farewell for Biden. After all, he’ll be president until next January, and I’m sure he’ll be out on the campaign trail with Harris. Still, it marked the latest in a series of closing acts for the president beginning with his Sunday announcement. We are going to miss this good and decent man.

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Biden’s age and health: A legitimate story that was marred by media excess

We were on our way back from a family gathering in upstate New York when we learned that President Biden had stepped aside from his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I was checking social media at the Lee rest stop on the Mass Pike eastbound; I think I was about an hour behind. We’d been anticipating the moment for days, if not weeks. Still, it came as a surprise.

I’m hearing some people grouse that Biden should have acted sooner, but this had to be incredibly difficult. No doubt he believes he can still do the job. What he couldn’t do was govern and campaign simultaneously. Nor was it reasonable to expect voters to believe he could serve more than a fraction of a second term. He’s now given us the best chance of beating Donald Trump and the authoritarian menace he represents.

Harris is an accomplished leader who, after all, is already the elected vice president. Opening up the process to some sort of vague celebrity bakeoff could have led to disaster. Can Harris win? I don’t know. Every possible choice was a risk, but I think giving her a chance of claiming the nomination quickly is less of a risk than continuing with Biden or having an open convention. (To be clear: It will still be an open convention.)

There’s one important media angle to all this that I think needs to be addressed. It really looks like Biden was driven out of the campaign by the press, and that’s not a good perception. There have been stories over the past year or two suggesting that Biden shouldn’t run for re-election because of his advanced age, the three most notable being a Mark Leibovich piece in The Atlantic in 2022, an Ezra Klein commentary in The New York Times this past February, and a Wall Street Journal article in early June. But Biden’s age-related problems have been a 24/7 obsession since about 9:10 p.m. on June 27, when it became clear in the presidential debate that something was seriously wrong.

Many diehard Biden supporters have erupted in fury at the media, and especially the Times, for publishing story after story after story about Biden’s infirmities while not dwelling nearly as much on Trump’s far worse deficits. There are many on the left who’ve come to the conclusion that the corporate media — I’m not using quotation marks because there really is a corporate media — want to see Trump back in office for ratings and circulation. I don’t think that’s the case. Biden’s age, questions about his cognitive health, and fading electoral prospects were a huge and entirely legitimate story. But that doesn’t mean the media covered themselves in glory.

My own belief is that the media — again, led by the Times — were shocked and horrified by the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House, so they embarked on an overwrought effort to bring Biden’s campaign to a close. The Times put it this way in an editorial today: “Had he remained at the top of the ticket, he would have greatly increased the likelihood of Mr. Trump retaking the presidency and potentially controlling both houses of Congress as well.” That’s not just a statement of truth; it’s also an explanation for the media behavior we’ve seen over the past three weeks.

Jon Keller of WBZ-TV asked me the other day if this was evidence of “bias.” I responded that yes, I suppose it was. But it was bias in favor of democracy, something that media observers such as Margaret Sullivan and Jay Rosen have been calling for from the start of the campaign. This is not Bill Clinton versus Bob Dole in 1996. Trump represents an existential threat to democracy.

Still, the media excesses were notable, especially a Times report that a physician who specializes in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House repeatedly. That was just irresponsible journalism. It didn’t pan out, and no evidence has emerged that Biden has Parkinson’s. Another example of excess was published by The New Yorker last week, in which nine physicians were allowed to speculate anonymously about the state of Biden’s neurological health. Now, I have to say that the story was interesting and possibly shed some light. But that doesn’t mean it should have been published.

President Biden said he will address the nation later this week. He could do Harris a lot of good if he acknowledges that he’s leaving not because of the media, not because fundraising had dried up, not because Nancy Pelosi told him to, but because his age and his health had finally caught up with him. And the media should ask themselves how they once again managed to turn a legitimate story into the only story for the past three weeks, embarrassing themselves and calling their judgment and fairness into question.

Biden has been an outstanding president, and he cements his legacy by knowing when it’s time to leave. He deserves our respect and gratitude. We are all going to miss his steady hand come next January, regardless of who succeeds him.

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Unexpectedly, a good night for Democrats. Can they make the most of it?

If you watched Donald Trump deliver his meandering, 90-minute acceptance speech, then you know what the main takeaway is: The Democrats can still win this if they pull themselves together and figure out what to do about the top of the ticket.

My own view is that President Biden needs to step aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, and he needs to do it soon. Today? This weekend? But regardless of what happens, the Trump we saw last night — after 15 minutes of play-acting at being a unifying figure — was the same angry, lying, grievance-filled figure he’s always been.

I like how David Brooks put it: “There is no cure for narcissism. The part after the assassination-attempt story was one of the truly awful and self-indulgent political performances of our time. My brain has been bludgeoned into soporific exhaustion.”

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An assassination attempt that could have been prevented

Donald Trump at a 2016 campaign event in Arkansas. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore.

The New York Times has published a visual investigation into the attempted assassination of Donald Trump that is absolutely unnerving. It’s impossible not to conclude that it could have been prevented; if it had, Corey Comperatore would still be alive. Here’s the video as well as the accompanying story. I’m pretty sure that both are free. And maybe it’s time to revisit The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of scandal at the Secret Service.

I’m not questioning the courage of either the Secret Service agents or of local police officers. What the Times’ reporting and other accounts are calling into question is their judgment. Their job is to anticipate and to act before the worst happens. In this case, the shooter was spotted ahead of time and flagged as suspicious — and then the Secret Service allowed the rally to go ahead after they lost sight of him. A police officer climbed up and spotted the shooter, by then wielding an assault rifle, only to fall back. Another opportunity to stop the rally.

Finally, a witness yelled out, “He’s on the roof! He’s got a gun!” By then, it was too late. From the Times report:

The call to let the rally go ahead while law enforcement looked for a potentially dangerous person is one of many Secret Service decisions now being called into question. The agency is also under scrutiny for allowing a building within a rifle’s range to be excluded from its secure perimeter, creating a blind spot close to the former president that the gunman exploited.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the main criticism of the Secret Service was that they allowed Trump to pop back up and rally the crowd rather than hustling him off immediately. And yes, that was a significant failure given that no one could be sure that the shooter had been disabled (in fact, he’d been shot and killed by that point). But this never had to happen.

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Lester Holt inadvertently provides Biden with his best moment since the debate

In case you missed it, Lester Holt really got under Biden’s skin and inadvertently did the president a big favor in Monday night’s interview. It was Biden’s best moment by far since June 27. Not such a great moment for Holt, though, as he was aggressive, which was fine, but also asked questions that were dumb and repetitive.

My favorite part was when Holt kept asking Biden if he had watched video of the debate, which became a point of contention after Biden told George Stephanopoulos that he couldn’t remember. Biden’s exasperated response to Holt: “I was there!”

Biden offered some pointed media criticism as well, flashing some anger and demanding that Holt explain why he and other members of the media weren’t doing more to hold Donald Trump to account. Overall, a good night for Biden.

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