Dispatches

JOURNALIST MURDER APPARENTLY WON’T SOUR TRUMP RELATIONS WITH SAUDI ROYALS

Donald Trump was ready to go along with nearly every preposterous explanation the Saudi Arabian regime came up with to explain the disappearance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul for wedding-related papers (10/2).

At first, the Saudis claimed Khashoggi left the consulate unmolested, though he would have had to walk past his fiancée waiting for him outside the consulate. Later, they apparently floated the theory that Khashoggi was a victim of “rogue killers.” Oct. 19, the Saudis apparently settled on an explanation that Khashoggi was inadvertently dismembered after a “brawl” with officials who had been sent to meet him. The Saudi story is contradicted by evidence collected by Turkish authorities who reportedly have recordings of Khashoggi’s torture and murder shortly after he entered the consulate, and the US intelligence community have reports of their own. All signs point to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as the instigator of a premeditated, cold-blooded and brutal murder that included the dismemberment of Khashoggi’s body with a bone saw that was brought to the “interrogation” — and the dismemberment apparently started while Khashoggi was still alive.

The hit squad apparently included 15 men sent from Saudi Arabia for the job, including a forensic pathologist. At least five of those men were identified as members of the crown prince’s personal security detail.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, has been urging the president to stand by MBS, the New York Times reported Oct. 18. Kushner reportedly has argued that the crown prince can survive the outrage over the brutal slaying of Khashoggi, just as he has weathered past criticism.

Republicans who have gone along with every wild conspiracy theory Trump has aired to support his agenda raised an uproar over Rep. Joaquin Castro’s suggestion that Kushner might have played a role in targeting Khashoggi for elimination.

Castro, D-Texas, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, during a CNN appearance (10/19), cited unspecified “reporting that Jared Kushner may have, with US intelligence, delivered a hit list, an enemies list, to the crown prince, to MBS, in Saudi Arabia and that the prince may have acted on that, and one of the people he took action against is Mr. Khashoggi.”

When CNN’s Poppy Harlow interjected that she was unfamiliar with such reporting and the network had not reported that, Castro reiterated that “I’ve seen reporting to that effect … that needs to be investigated.”

After his remarks were challenged, Spencer Ackerman noted at DailyBeast (10/19), Castro issued a statement that he “did not intend to accuse Jared Kushner of orchestrating the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.” He tweeted links to several pieces of reporting on Kushner’s extensive ties to MBS, including a March dispatch from TheIntercept.com reporting that Kushner passed on material from the CIA-compiled President’s Daily Brief containing names of anti-MBS Saudis to the crown prince. Castro clarified that he wants Congress to investigate whether Kushner “or any other administration official shared any US intelligence with the Saudis that led to any political persecution, including the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Twitter called Castro’s comments an “outrageous slanderous lie without a shred of proof,” adding, “it’s reprehensible for a sitting Congressman and supposed ‘news’ outlets to continue citing an article that used unnamed sources and was completely debunked.” That’s pretty rich, coming from a White House press secretary who has low credibility and whose boss often attributes suspicious claims to unnamed sources, and refuses to apologize or correct his statements when he is caught telling lies. Instead, he often repeats them, as the Washington Post’s Fact Checker has noted. And Sanders should know “denied” is not “debunked.”

Kushner in October 2017 caught some intelligence officials off guard when he made an unannounced trip to Riyadh for private meetings with the crown prince. After the meeting, MBS told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who had been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown, Alex Emmons, Ryan Grim and Clayton Swisher reported at The Intercept (3/21). Kushner denies having done so, but a week after Kushner returned to the US, the crown prince began a crackdown on critics, including members of the Saudi royal family, who had been named in the President’s Daily Brief, which Kushner had access to.

Kushner was stripped of his security clearance last February. He regained it in May, possibly on orders of his father-in-law.

GOP SEEKS TO WEAPONIZE CENTRAL AMERICAN IMMIGRANT THREAT. A caravan of families fleeing violence in Central America was heading north toward the US in October, giving Donald Trump an opportunity to declare a “national emergency,” threaten to cut aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and use the threat of an immigrant invasion to boost his party’s chances in the Nov. 6 elections.

“Remember the Midterms!” Trump wrote in Twitter posts (10/22) decrying the caravan and attacking Democrats on immigration, as Republicans sought to energize their xenophobic political base.

A caravan of Honduran migrants crossed the border into Guatemala on Oct. 15. The next day, Trump threatened Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández on Twitter, saying that if the group didn’t turn around, there would be “no more money or aid.”

US Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., tweeted a video (10/17) that purported to show women and children in Honduras offered cash to join the caravan and storm the US border. Without offering evidence, Gaetz implied that liberal billionaire George Soros or nongovernmental organizations were paying the migrants.

The day after the Gaetz tweet, Trump tweeted the same video and noted, “Can you believe this, and what Democrats are allowing to be done to our Country?” Hours later, at a Montana rally (10/18), Trump floated his own conspiracy theory: that this was all a big ruse financed by his political opponents. The caravan “didn’t just happen,” and “a lot of money has been passing through to people to come up and try to get to the border by Election Day because [Democrats] think that’s a negative for us,” Trump told the crowd.

During a speech Friday night (10/19) in Arizona, Trump baselessly claimed Democrats will soon support providing undocumented immigrants with free luxury cars.

“Give ’em a driver’s license. Next thing you know, they’ll want to buy ’em a car,” Trump said. “Then they’ll say the car’s not good enough, we want — how about a Rolls-Royce? Give us — we want a Rolls-Royce.”

Trump’s claim that Democrats will soon want to give undocumented immigrants free cars is completely absurd — there’s no basis for it.

But by the time he delivered a speech in Nevada on Saturday (10/20), Aaron Rupal noted at ThinkProgress (10/22) Trump’s lie had evolved. He treated his own baseless comment on Friday as actual evidence for an escalated lie that Democrats in fact “want to give [undocumented immigrants] cars.”

The rapid evolution of Trump’s lies was noted by Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star, who tweeted (10/21): “In one speech yesterday, the president invented nonexistent riots in California and a nonexistent Democratic policy of giving luxury cars to unauthorized immigrants. Afterward, he touted a nonexistent plan to pass a major tax cut in the next 10 days.”

During his speech in Nevada, Trump fabricated a story about anti-sanctuary city riots in California, claiming that “a lot of people in California don’t want them either. They are rioting now. They want to get out.”

In fact, no such riots have occurred.

Then, during a brief question-and-answer session with reporters following the rally, Trump claimed that his administration is “looking at putting in a very major tax cut for middle-income people … sometime just prior to November.”

Congress, however, won’t even be in session until weeks after the midterm elections on Nov. 6.

Trump also told reporters (10/22), without providing evidence, “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” are mixed in with the caravan, a claim immigration advocates and members of the caravan disputed.

GOP’S DESPERATE STRATEGY: MIMIC TRUMP’S FEAR OF IMMIGRANTS. Republicans fighting for their political lives this November can’t run on killing the popular Affordable Care Act, they can’t run on decimating Social Security for your grandma, and they certainly can’t run on massive tax cuts for fat cats with membership to Mar-a-Lago, so they’re doubling-down on what they know best: making you afraid of brown people, Gabe Ortiz noted at DailyKos (10/18).

“A review of nearly five dozen Republican-backed TV ads revealed a messaging strategy rooted in painting a dark portrait of immigrants, with a fixation on violence and crime,” The Guardian reported. ”The threat of MS-13 and so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ are frequent themes, juxtaposed with Republican candidates vowing to support Trump’s promised wall along the US-Mexico border.”

Of course, all of that ignores the facts. Immigrants are less likely than US-born Americans to commit crime (and Donald Trump’s former campaign chair is sitting in jail right now), so-called “sanctuary cities” make communities safer, and MS-13—which was actually formed in the USA following US interventionism in Central America — represents less than 1% of gangs in the US.

But, then again, facts don’t really matter to an anti-truth party only interested in stoking up Trumpian fearmongering. Seeing how hate helped Trump in 2016, they’re following suit, with immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice reporting “that more than $150 million has been spent on immigration attack ads this year—up fivefold over 2014.” There have been so many ads, that the group has created a searchable tracker. But the question is, will it pay off?

The conventional wisdom is that racism is a slam-dunk for the Republican base. But recent polling shows Americans support immigration at a record level, and voters going into the midterm elections are pretty peeved about things like state-sanctioned kidnapping. Racism certainly didn’t pay off for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie last year, despite the conventional wisdom, and it’s not paying off for Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., who has adopted Gillespie’s failed MS-13 strategy but is now down 12 points to Democratic challenger Jennifer Wexton in the closely-watched Virginia 10th congressional district.

CIVIL RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS RAMP UP ELECTION EFFORT TO PROTECT VOTING RIGHTS. Election Protection, a nonpartisan voter protection coalition, is setting up hotlines to help potential voters who run afoul of voter suppression efforts.

Election Protection is particularly concerned with voter ID laws in states like Missouri, North Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin; the consequences of aggressive voter purges in states like Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, Nebraska, Nevada and New York; cybersecurity lapses and the impact of technology problems on access to the polls; and improper challenges and voter intimidation at the polls.

Election Protection is training volunteers nationwide to monitor Election Day activities and will provide ongoing analysis of the impact of restrictive voting laws and provide voters up-to-date information about the voting process.

Given that this is the first election in more than 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act and without a proactive defense of voting rights by the US Justice Department, and over the past decade 23 states have made voting more difficult through stricter voter ID requirements, curbs on early voting opportunities, restrictions on voter registration, purges of voter rolls, polling place closures and other measuress, it’s essential that voters who have historically faced discrimination at the polls can fulfill their civic duty without fear of intimidation. Election Protection offers three nonpartisan voter helplines where trained volunteers are available to address voters’ questions or problems with voter registration, early voting, voter ID requirements and other related voting issues to ensure that every vote counts.

Toll-free hotlines include:

• English-language hotline operated by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law at 1-866-687-8683 (OUR VOTE) weekdays from 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. EST and Election Day 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. EST.

• Spanish and English hotline at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) at 1-888-839-8682 (VE-Y-VOTA) weekdays from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST and Election Day 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. EST.

• Asian languages and English hotline at 1-888-274-8683 (API-VOTE) weekdays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST and Election Day 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST.

• Arabic and English hotline at 1-844-925-5287 (YALLA-US) weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST and Election Day 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST.

Voters can also get assistance from Election Protection volunteers by texting “Election Protection” to 97779. Voters who are deaf or hearing impaired can contact 301-818-VOTE (301-818-8683) for assistance in American Sign Language, a service provided by the National Association for the Deaf.

DEFICIT IS DUE TO GOP WARS AND TAX CUTS, NOT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE, DEMS SAY. While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed the federal deficit of $779 billion in fiscal year 2018 on “entitlement spending,” such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Democratic staff on the Senate Budget Committee reported (10/15) that the federal government would be running a surplus today if not for four Republican policies.

Without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the enormous post-9/11 defense buildup and two rounds of costly, regressive tax cuts, the federal government would be running a $156 billion surplus instead of a $779 billion deficit. The Trump Tax Cuts – which coupled permanent corporate tax cuts with temporary individual tax cuts – added $164 billion to the 2018 deficit.

The Bush tax cuts contributed $488 billion to the deficit in FY 2018, the Trump tax cuts added $164 billion, the direct costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ran up $127 billion and base defense increases led to $156 billion in spending.

Instead of spending nearly $1 trillion on the military and tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations, the federal government could have paid for any of the following proposals – multiple times over for some – in FY 2018 and still balance the budget.

• Very nearly eliminate poverty for all Americans of any age. Estimated cost: $174 billion.

• Pay the one-year average of the 10-year infrastructure funding gap. Estimated cost: $144 billion.

• Provide high-quality early care and education (ECE) for children from birth to kindergarten. Estimated cost: $140 billion.

• Eliminate child poverty by simply boosting the income of all families with children (and children who do not live with their families) over the poverty line. Estimated cost: $69 billion.

• Double the budget of the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United States Geologic Survey. Estimated cost: $61 billion.

• Make public colleges and universities tuition-free for working families, cut student loan interest rates in half, and allow every American with student debt to refinance at the lowest interest rate possible. Estimated cost: $60 billion.

• Double the $1.40 per-meal allowance in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Estimated cost: $70 billion.

• End homelessness in America. Estimated cost: $22.5 billion.

TRUMP PULLOUT FROM ARMS TREATY RANKLES RUSSIANS. Donald Trump’s decision to pull out from the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has led to a concerted round of criticism from Russia.

The treaty, signed in 1987 between Ronald Reagan and Soviet head Mikhail Gorbachev, presented one of the lasting agreements between Moscow and Washington, effectively barring all short- and intermediate-range land-based missiles. (Similar missiles could still be launched from the air or from sea-based vehicles.)

Washington, though, has spent years accusing Moscow of ignoring the treaty’s restrictions — a point both the Obama and Trump administrations have agreed on.

On Oct. 20, Trump finally confirmed rumors and reports from the past few weeks, saying that the US would be pulling out of the treaty entirely. “We’re not going to let [Russia] violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we’re not allowed to,” he said.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet commented on the US withdrawal directly, high-ranking Russian officials expressed their animus toward the US’s move.

“We condemn the continuing attempts to achieve Russia’s concessions through blackmail,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov said. Ryabkov added that the INF Treaty “creates problems for pursuing the line towards US total domination in the military sphere.”

Another Russian official, Russian Federation Council member Konstantin Kosachev, claimed that the US withdrawal could trigger outright war.

Trump’s move appears to stem from a pair of realities. On the one hand, as both the current and previous administrations have said, Russia has repeatedly violated the tenets of the INF Treaty, especially in the aftermath of Moscow’s invasion and ongoing occupation of parts of Ukraine.

On the other hand, as the New York Times noted, the US withdrawal may actually have less to do with Russia and more to do with China, which is not a signatory to the treaty. Washington’s decision to scrap its participation in the treaty could theoretically help the US push back against Chinese expansionism in the Western Pacific.

Charles Pierce commented at Esquire (10/22): “This has to be [National Security Adviser John] Bolton. Or [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo. Or both. [Chief of Staff John] Kelly’s too smart for this reckless nonsense and the president* doesn’t know a Pershing missile from a wombat. In any case, it’s a profoundly perilous and stupid thing for the United States to do, injecting the old Cold War into whatever it is we have for an international order these days. Like I said, this combination of ambition and idiocy has to be Bolton.”

As it is, the US withdrawal will almost certainly dent Russians’ views on Trump, which have plummeted after a brief post-2016 honeymoon. As the Pew Research Center found in early October, a poll querying Russians about their confidence in Trump’s leadership saw his numbers collapse from 53% to 19% over the past year — lower now than the rate of Americans’ confidence in Putin.

TWO-THIRDS OF AMERICANS SUPPORT LEGALIZING MARIJUANA. A record high 66% of Americans support legalizing marijuana, marking a record-high approval rate, according to a Gallup poll released (10/22). 

In 2000, 31% endorsed legalization.

Support for legalization among Americans 55 and older also increased, from 50% to 59% since last year. Support across the East, West, South and Midwest regions is now about equal. A majority of Republicans joined Democrats last year in supporting legalization.

“Like support for gay marriage ― and in prior years, interracial marriage ― support for marijuana legalization has generally only expanded, even if slowly, over the course of multiple decades ― raising the question of where the ceiling in support might be,” Gallup’s Justin McCarthy wrote. 

The record-high support comes in spite of Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolling back Obama-era rules on marijuana usage and paving the way for federal crackdowns on 29 states and Washington, D.C., that have passed laws authorizing use of recreational marijuana, medical marijuana or both.

The substance remains federally classified as a Schedule I drug that has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” despite broad research findings to the contrary. And although there are no recorded instances of anyone dying from a fatal dose of marijuana alone, the federal government considers it to be more dangerous than cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl.

The Gallup poll was conducted from Oct. 1 to Oct. 10, just before Canada became the second country in the world to legalize marijuana. In the US, voters in four states are considering ballot measures in the upcoming midterm elections that would allow recreational or medical marijuana use. 

JUSTICE SAYS TRUMP CLAIM THAT OBAMA HAD HIS ‘WIRES TAPPED’ WAS UNFOUNDED. The US Department of Justice confirmed there was no basis for Donald Trump’s claims in March 2017 that President Barack Obama had ordered Trump’s wires tapped during his campaign, Frank Dale noted at ThinkProgress (10/21).

In a 178-page court filing released late Friday night (10/19), the Department of Justice noted, “[t]he Government has made two acknowledgments” regarding claims that the previous administration of Obama wiretapped Trump near the tail-end of the 2016 general election.

Trump made those claims in a series of four tweets posted on the morning of March 4, 2017.

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” Trump wrote. “Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

The three remaining tweets expanded on the theory and suggested some sort of legal violation:

“Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election! How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act requests from the James Madison Project and others for any orders by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for wiretaps of Trump, the Trump Organization, Trump’s campaign for president or people associated with Trump, the DOJ, based upon the congressional testimony of then-FBI Director James Comes, said it has no records of alleged wiretapping of then-candidate Trump in Trump Tower by the Obama administration.

The DOJ also admitted it has “no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets” in a September 2017 court filing. It acknowledged there were orders to conduct surveillance of Trump adviser Carter Page but declined to confirm or deny the existence of records for any other FISA surveillance.

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which are controlled by Republicans, previously have said there is no evidence that Trump Tower was wiretapped.

GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES CLIMATE COLLAPSE. A disturbing new study finds that global warming helped drive as much as a 60-fold decline in insect population in Puerto Rico’s tropical rainforest between 1976 and 2013, Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress (10/18).

“Our results suggest that the effects of climate warming in tropical forests may be even greater than anticipated,” said lead author, biologist Brad Lister, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

And that’s a potentially catastrophic problem given that the forest saw 3.6°F (2°C) warming during that time — yet warming this century is on track to be far greater.

These new findings follow several studies in recent years that found collapsing insect populations around the world.

A 2014 review of scientific literature and data in the journal Science found the number of insects “such as beetles, butterflies, spiders and worms has decreased by 45%” since 1980. The reason: “loss of habitat and global climate disruption.”

And a 2017 Dutch study found that in the past three decades, a stunning three-fourths of the total insect population was lost in 63 protected nature reserves in Germany. The decline was even bigger in mid-summer. The researchers speculate that pesticides may have played a role in the decline — but the RPI biologists argue in their new study that the Dutch scientists “did not thoroughly analyze a number of climate-change variables.”

Along with the insect crash in Puerto Rico, the study found “synchronous declines in the lizards, frogs, and birds that eat” the insects. The study’s bottom line: “Climate warming is the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web.”

What’s especially worrisome about the sharp decline in insects in so many places is that insects play an essential role in the food chain. They also provide crucial services such as pollinating crops.

So these findings are “a real wake-up call — a clarion call — that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems,” invertebrate expert David Wagner (who was not involved in the study) told the Washington Post.

He added, “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.”

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2018

Populist.com