Trump Publicly Urges China to Investigate the Bidens. He also Discussed it with president Xi in call stashed on same secret server as Ukraine transcript - and said he would keep Quiet about crackdown in Hong Kong during trade talks.

NY TIMES

Trump Denied Quid Pro Quo in Ukraine Phone Call, but Envoys Had Their Doubts.
President Trump denied any quid pro quo in pushing Ukraine to investigate his foes, but text messages indicate that his team saw it otherwise.
The messages could shape the impeachment inquiry that is threatening Mr. Trump’s presidency





President Trump denied again on Friday that there was any quid pro quo attached to his pressure on Ukraine to investigate his political enemies, but text messages and testimony collected by congressional investigators indicated that his own representatives saw it differently.

Envoys representing Mr. Trump sought to leverage the power of his office to prod Ukraine into opening investigations that would damage his Democratic opponents at home. They made clear to Ukrainian officials that the White House invitation their newly inaugurated president coveted depended on his commitment to the investigations.

And the senior American diplomat posted in Ukraine suspected it went even further than a trade of an Oval Office visit. He told colleagues that it appeared that unfreezing $391 million in American aid that Mr. Trump had blocked was contingent on the former Soviet republic following through on the politically charged investigations sought by the president and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a conclusion sharply denied by another diplomat who said there were “no quid pro quo’s.”

The text messages, provided to three Democrat-led House committees by the former special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt D. Volker, may shape the impeachment inquiry now threatening the future of Mr. Trump’s presidency. They provided new pieces of a timeline of events in recent months and a road map for further investigation by House Democrats.


The portrait that emerged from the texts and Mr. Volker’s own testimony depicted a team scrambling to satisfy a deeply suspicious president and his relentless personal lawyer, Mr. Giuliani, who saw the United States’ relationship with Ukraine as predicated on its willingness to look into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.

Among other things, the messages demonstrated that the president’s team made clear to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, even before the now-famous July 25 call with Mr. Trump, that he would have to agree to the investigations to confirm a visit to the White House that had been promised and then held up for two months.

“Heard from White House — assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington,” Mr. Volker wrote to Andrey Yermak, a top Ukrainian presidential adviser at 8:36 a.m. the day of the phone call.

Twenty-seven minutes later, Mr. Trump picked up the line and during a half-hour conversation pressed Mr. Zelensky to “do us a favor” and investigate supposed Ukrainian efforts to help Democrats in the 2016 election, pursuing a conspiracy theory that even the president’s own homeland security adviser had told him was “completely debunked.” The president also pressed Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

Mr. Zelensky assured the president he would follow up, according to a reconstructed transcript released by the White House. The text messages indicated that the Ukrainians were then given possible dates for the White House visit Mr. Zelensky had been so zealously seeking.


Phone call went well,” Mr. Yermak wrote Mr. Volker afterward. “President Trump proposed to choose any convenient dates. President Zelenskiy chose 20,21,22 September for the White House Visit. Thank you again for your help!”

The text messages underscored the danger to Mr. Trump as the House Democratic impeachment inquiry gains steam. So far, the House committees have interviewed only a single witness, Mr. Volker, and already uncovered information damaging to the president’s case. But the Democratic chairmen of the committees said in a letter that the texts were “only a subset of the full body of materials” that Mr. Volker turned over and that others would be released in time.


Testimony and Evidence Collected in the Trump Impeachment Inquiry

The status of the documents and witness testimony being collected by congressional investigators.


Mr. Trump has asserted he did nothing wrong and was only trying to uncover wrongdoing by Democrats. Undaunted, he doubled down on Thursday, publicly calling on Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden and adding a call to China to do the same.

“If we feel there’s corruption, like I feel there was in the 2016 campaign — there was tremendous corruption against me — if we feel there’s corruption, we have a right to go to a foreign country,” Mr. Trump told reporters outside the White House on Friday. “I don’t care about Biden’s campaign,” he added, “but I do care about corruption.”

Republican lawmakers said that Mr. Volker’s testimony, taken behind closed doors on Thursday by House investigators, did not support the sinister interpretation of Mr. Trump’s actions advanced by Democrats like Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

“The facts we learned today undercut the salacious narrative that Adam Schiff is using to sell his impeachment ambitions,” Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Devin Nunes of California, the ranking Republican members on two of the committees, wrote in a letter. “We hope the American people get to read the transcript of today’s testimony and see the truth.”

Mr. Volker, a former ambassador to NATO who served unpaid and part-time as Ukraine special envoy, abruptly resigned last week after revelations of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign. He also plans to resign as the executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership, a Washington-based research group affiliated with Arizona State University, but a scheduled Friday announcement never came.


The institute leadership has privately expressed discontent with his twin roles and a person familiar with Mr. Volker’s views said he wanted to avoid being a distraction for the institute. For Mr. Volker, it has been a week of transitions. He is also scheduled to marry on Saturday in Washington.


Mr. Volker was not a hostile witness who went into the testimony intending to make accusations against the president. Instead, he told investigators that he was devoted to helping Ukraine resolve its grinding five-year conflict with Russian-armed separatists and tried to counter the president’s disdain for Ukraine but was never fully kept in the loop.

Mr. Volker sought in his testimony to distance himself from the pressure campaign by the president and Mr. Giuliani, noting that he was not on the July 25 call nor told that Mr. Trump had raised Mr. Biden on it. “At no time was I aware of or took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden,” he told investigators, according to a copy of his opening statement.

Likewise, he said that while he learned about the president’s decision to freeze security assistance to Ukraine, he considered it part of Mr. Trump’s general antipathy for foreign aid, not a tool to force the country to investigate Democrats. “I did not perceive these issues to be linked in any way,” Mr. Volker said.

But Mr. Volker testified that he “became concerned that a negative narrative about Ukraine” was tainting Mr. Trump’s view of the country and impeding efforts to bolster the country against Russian aggression.

“I therefore faced a choice: do nothing, and allow this situation to fester, or try to fix it,” he told congressional investigators. “I tried to fix it.”

ImageText messages among Trump administration diplomats underscore the danger to President Trump as the House Democratic impeachment inquiry gains steam.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times


Mr. Trump signaled during an Oval Office meeting on May 23 that Mr. Giuliani was central in shaping his view that Ukrainians were “terrible people” who “tried to take me down” in 2016, according to people familiar with the session. Mr. Volker told investigators that Mr. Trump referred specifically to conversations with Mr. Giuliani, leading him to the conclusion that Mr. Giuliani was feeding the president’s “deeply rooted negative view on Ukraine.”

Some of those who attended the Oval Office meeting were left with the impression that Mr. Trump wanted them to coordinate their efforts with Mr. Giuliani. In the next weeks, Mr. Volker and Gordon Sondland, a Trump campaign donor serving as ambassador to the European Union, did just that, according to the text messages.

[What was Gordon Sondland’s mission to Ukraine for Trump all about?]

The new Ukrainian government sought Mr. Volker’s help in managing Mr. Giuliani. In July, Mr. Yermak asked Mr. Volker to connect him with Mr. Giuliani. To arrange an introduction, Mr. Volker met with Mr. Giuliani for breakfast on July 19 and sought to dispel his theory about corruption involving Mr. Biden.

Mr. Volker said he told Mr. Giuliani that “it is not credible to me that former Vice President Biden would have been influenced in any way by financial or personal motives in carrying out his duties as vice president.” While Ukrainians may have acted out of corrupt motives, he said, he did not believe Mr. Biden had.

Ukraine’s newly installed government was wary of being dragged into American domestic politics. “President Zelenskyy is sensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, re-election politics,” William B. Taylor Jr., the acting American ambassador to Ukraine, wrote in a text message a couple of days later.

Mr. Giuliani talked with Mr. Yermak the next day and then pushed for a phone call between the two presidents. Mr. Trump had just ordered aides to hold up the $391 million in congressionally approved aid to Ukraine, with no explanation to the agencies involved. Then he got on the phone with Mr. Zelensky to ask for “a favor.”

A week after the call, on Aug. 2, Mr. Giuliani met in Madrid with Mr. Yermak and then told Mr. Volker that the Ukrainian president should issue a statement committing to fighting corruption. A week later, Mr. Volker spoke with Mr. Yermak and then reached out to Mr. Giuliani.

“Had a good chat with Yermak last night,” Mr. Volker wrote. “He was pleased with your phone call. Mentioned Z making a statement. Can we all get on the phone to make sure I advise Z correctly as to what he should be saying? Want to make sure we get this done right.”

Later the same day, Mr. Sondland reported that the president was ready to schedule the White House visit that Mr. Zelensky had been seeking.

Mr. Volker asked Mr. Sondland how he swayed the White House. “Not sure i did,” Mr. Sondland replied. “I think potus really wants the deliverable,” he added, using the acronym for president of the United States.

Mr. Sondland then raised the proposed statement by Mr. Zelensky. “To avoid misunderstandings, might be helpful to ask Andrey for a draft statement (embargoed) so that we can see exactly what they propose to cover,” he wrote.


Trump’s Efforts to Push Ukraine Toward a Biden Inquiry: A Timeline

A guide to the key figures and dates as President Trump and his allies pressured Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.


“Agree!” Mr. Volker replied.

The next day, Mr. Yermak pressed for a date for the White House visit, clearly seeing it as linked to the statement. “I think it’s possible to make this declaration and mention all these things. Which we discussed yesterday,” he wrote. “But it will be logic to do after we receive a confirmation of date.”

In other words, the Ukrainians would issue their statement committing to the investigations Mr. Trump wanted only after the White House visit was scheduled. “Once we have a date, will call for a press briefing, announcing upcoming visit and outlining vision for the reboot of US-UKRAINE relationship, including among other things Burisma and election meddling in investigations,” Mr. Yermak wrote.

Mr. Yermak’s first draft of the statement was a generic commitment to fight corruption and did not mention Burisma, the company that Hunter Biden served for $50,000 a month, or the 2016 election. Mr. Giuliani “said that in his view, the statement should include specific reference to ‘Burisma’ and ‘2016,’” Mr. Volker told the House investigators, otherwise there was no point.

“There was no mention of Vice President Biden in these conversations,” Mr. Volker added, but the Ukrainians clearly understood that Mr. Giuliani’s interest in Burisma was aimed at finding damaging information about the former vice president, who led Obama administration dealings with Ukraine while in office.

Hoping to satisfy Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Volker drafted more specific language for the proposed Ukrainian statement and sent it to Mr. Yermak: “We intend to initiate and complete a transparent and unbiased investigation of all available facts and episodes, including those involving Burisma and the 2016 U.S. elections, which in turn will prevent the recurrence of this problem in the future.”

But Mr. Yermak objected to specifically citing Burisma or 2016 in the statement. “I agreed,” Mr. Volker testified, “and further said that I believe it is essential that Ukraine do nothing that could be seen as interfering in 2020 elections.”

The statement was shelved. Then on Aug. 28, Politico reported the Ukrainian aid freeze. Mr. Taylor, the diplomat in Kiev, saw a connection. “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” he asked Mr. Sondland in a text message on Sept. 1.

“Call me,” Mr. Sondland replied.

Mr. Taylor clearly was not convinced. A week later, he expressed fear that the Ukrainians would go ahead with the statement Mr. Giuliani wanted and Mr. Trump would still not release the aid.

“The nightmare is they give the interview and don’t get the security assistance,” he wrote. “The Russians love it. (And I quit.)”

The next day, Mr. Taylor again made clear that he believed the aid freeze and the investigations were linked. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” he wrote Mr. Sondland.

“Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions,” Mr. Sondland replied. “The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.”

If Mr. Taylor still had concerns, Mr. Sondland added, he should give the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo “a call to discuss them directly.”

Mr. Trump eventually restored the aid under bipartisan pressure from Congress and met with Mr. Zelensky in New York. But the Ukrainian president has not yet made it to the White House.

DEBT TALKS IN HOUSE FALL APART. SEN LEADERS TRYING TO FORGE A PASSABLE PLAN.

Today Washington has been an absolute madhouse, with rumors, proposals, and counter-proposals swirling around like swarms of biting insects.  {Washington Post}

N.Y. TIMES

With the federal government on the brink of a default, a House Republican effort to end the shutdown and extend the Treasury’s borrowing authority collapsed Tuesday night as a major credit agency warned that the United States was on the verge of a costly ratings downgrade.

After the failure of the House Republican leadership to find enough support for its latest proposal to end the fiscal crisis, the Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders immediately restarted negotiations to find a bipartisan path forward.With so little time left, chances rose that a resolution would not be approved by Congress and sent to President Obama before Thursday, when the government is left with only its cash on hand to pay the nation’s bills.

A day that was supposed to bring Washington to the edge of resolving the fiscal showdown instead seemed to bring chaos and retrenching. And a bitter fight that had begun over stripping money from the president’s signature health care law had essentially descended in the House into one over whether lawmakers and their staff members would pay the full cost of their health insurance premiums, unlike most workers at American companies, and how to restrict the administration from using flexibility to extend the debt limit beyond a fixed deadline.



House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and his leadership team failed in repeated, daylong attempts to bring their troops behind any bill that would reopen the government and extend the Treasury’s debt limit on terms significantly reduced from their original push against funding for the health care law. The House’s hard-core conservatives and some more pragmatic Republicans were nearing open revolt, and the leadership was forced twice to back away from proposals it had floated, the second time sending lawmakers home for the night to await a decision on how to proceed Wednesday.

The House setback returned the focus to the Senate, where the leadership had suspended talks after the Senate Republican leadership opted to give the House a chance to produce an alternative to the Senate measure taking shape.

Under the emerging Senate deal, the government would be funded through Jan. 15 and the debt limit extended until Feb. 7. House and Senate negotiators would be required to reach accord on a detailed tax-and-spending blueprint for the next decade by Dec. 13. A proposal to delay the imposition of a tax on medical devices had been dropped from the deal, as had a complicated tax on self-insured unions and businesses participating in the health care exchanges. All that remained for Republicans was language tightening income verification for people seeking subsidies on the insurance exchanges, but that language was still being negotiated.

 

It remained unclear if the Senate plan could pass the House or even if Mr. Boehner would bring it forward for a vote. The hopes for a resolution by Thursday also appeared to rest with the senators who had begun the failed movement to tie any further government funding to the gutting of the Affordable Care Act: Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah.

If Mr. Reid and Mr. McConnell reach a final accord, Senate leaders expect to use a parliamentary maneuver that will allow the majority leader to quickly move the deal to the Senate floor on Wednesday. With unanimous consent, a final vote would come the same day. But if Senate hard-liners object, the Senate would have to wait until Friday, then muster 60 votes to cut off debate. Further obstruction would mean the final vote would happen Saturday, when the bill would go back to the House, where it would probably have to pass with overwhelming Democratic support and the votes of a minority of Republicans.

 

 

 

Given the progress that had been made in the Senate, Congressional Democrats and officials at the White House criticized Mr. Boehner’s move on Tuesday as an attempt to sabotage the bipartisan Senate talks  as they seemed to be nearing an agreement.  Initially, Mr. Boehner proposed a bill to reopen the government until Jan. 15, extend the debt ceiling until Feb. 7, delay a tax on medical devices two years and deny members of Congress, the president, the vice president and White House political appointees taxpayer subsidies to help buy insurance on President Obama’s health insurance exchanges.

 

By Tuesday afternoon, House Republican leaders were back with a new proposal to fund the government through Dec. 15, extend the debt ceiling into February and deprive not only lawmakers but all their staff members of employer assistance to buy their health care. By extending that provision to staff members, Republican leaders hoped to appeal to its far-right flank, but it angered more moderate Republicans and was not enough for the conservative hard core. Boehner acknowledged “there are a lot of opinions” among his rambunctious members.

 

 

 

Complicating the speaker’s task, Heritage Action, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s political arm, which wields great influence with the most conservative elements of the Republican Party, opposed the plan.

“I think there’s always hope there can be a final package I can vote on, but this is not the one,” said Representative Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, as he and two other Tea Party conservatives left the speaker’s office.

Republican leaders had initially hoped the loss of members like Mr. Yoho could be made up with support from Democrats. But Democratic leaders made it clear they would offer no assistance. Democrats [opposed a]House proposal that would have forbidden the Treasury to juggle government accounts — so-called extraordinary measures — to meet obligations beyond a debt-ceiling deadline.

 

 

 

 

In the midst of the turmoil, the credit rating agency Fitch put the United States on a “negative ratings watch,” warning that Congressional intransigence has put the full faith and credit of the government at risk.

The news came as the Treasury Department said it had only about $35 billion in cash on hand. It expects to run out of “extraordinary measures” to keep on paying all of the government’s bills on Thursday, at which point outgoing payments might exceed that cash, plus any revenues, on any day going forward.

As the United States nears default, investors have demanded more compensation for lending to the government, with yields on short-term debt spiking to their highest levels in years.

Fitch warned that Congress has not “raised the federal debt ceiling in a timely manner.” It said it “continues to believe that the debt ceiling will be raised soon,” but that “political brinkmanship and reduced financing flexibility could increase the risk of a U.S. default.”

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JONATHAN CHAIT NEW YORK

 

The crucial fact about the emerging Senate plan is that it fulfills the core Democratic demand that the debt ceiling not be ransomed for policy concessions. Democrats prefer to simply lift the debt ceiling, or abolish it altogether. For the sake of appearance, Republicans have asked to tie policy changes onto the debt-ceiling bill. But Democrats have insisted they won’t pay a ransom: The policy changes must be reciprocal. The Senate compromise accommodates that, by adding on two changes — beefed-up Obamacare income verification and the delay of a small tax — which are both minor in nature and a trade Democrats would have made without a debt-ceiling threat. Attaching mutually acceptable deals onto debt-ceiling hikes is historically normal. Using the debt ceiling as a hostage to force a party to accept policies it doesn’t like is not. [...]

The principle undergirding the emerging Senate bill — ending hostage tactics, and making all deals reciprocal — is unacceptable to House Republicans, who want to preserve debt-ceiling hostage-taking as a form of policy leverage. So, rather than wait for the Senate to act on its own, the House [attempted] to move its own bill, which demands a small ransom: suspending the medical device tax, and eliminating employer health-care subsidies for congressional staff. The ransom is minor, but preserves the principle that the House can use the threat of default to force the president to accede to otherwise unacceptable policy demands, without making any policy concessions of its own.

The frequent GOP claim that Dems “refuse to negotiate” has obscured the true nature of the difference paralyzing the system. It is not over whether to negotiate over spending and debt. It’s an argument over what conditions under which budget negotiations should proceed.
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A possibility is that ...the House [will pass a] bill Obama can’t sign, and the Senate will have passed a bipartisan bill he can sign, forcing Boehner to either give in and pass the Senate bill at the last minute or allow default. Boehner has previously told colleagues he won’t allow default, which would imply he is trying to show his conservative members he’s fighting the good fight before giving in at the last possible moment.

The House’s small-ransom bill has ratcheted its demands way down from its original level. The only point of the demands is to maintain the precedent that the House can hold the debt ceiling hostage. But of course the chaos and frenetic timing of the events serve only to show why it is so crucial that Democrats — or any sane American — not allow this precedent to be enshrined. The white-knuckle terror being inflicted on the world economy is the conservative movement’s vision of how divided government should be conducted from now on. Paying even a tiny ransom now means that debt-ceiling ransoms will continue in perpetuity until one party finally miscalculates and the explosives go off.
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N.Y. TIMES

 

 China has become shrill in its criticism of the fiscal train wreck in the United States, arguing that the answer to a potential government default is to begin creating a “de-Americanized world.” Beijing’s alarm is understandable, given that it is the world’s largest investor in American public debt, with at least $1.3 trillion in holdings.

 

But China does not have many options beyond wringing its hands. Despite its efforts to steer its economy away from exports and toward domestic demand, China generates billions of dollars of excess cash that it needs to park somewhere. And for all the chaos in Washington, Treasury bonds remain a safer investment than most of the alternatives.

That dependence may help explain the stridency of a recent commentary published by the official Xinhua news agency. It called for the replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency “so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States.”

“As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about,” the news agency said, “it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.”

Chinese officials made similar noises five years ago, when the United States was being buffeted by a banking crisis. In March 2008, the leader of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, proposed creating a new “supersovereign currency” that would diminish the importance of any individual national currency, not least the dollar.

But economists who follow China’s monetary policy say that while Beijing has somewhat diversified its foreign exchange reserves, it continues to rely heavily on Treasury bills and other American government-backed debt.

Part of the problem is the lack of easy alternatives: euro-denominated debt has been hurt by the European Union’s crisis, except in Germany. Analysts estimate that 60 percent of China’s $3.66 trillion in reserves are still in dollar-denominated debt, though the precise numbers are a secret.

CHINA ALLOWS SNOWDEN TO LEAVE. HE GOES TO RUSSIA, AVOIDING EXTRADITION

N.Y. TIMES

The Chinese government made the final decision to allow Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, to leave Hong Kong on Sunday, a move that Beijing believed resolved a tough diplomatic problem even as it reaped a publicity windfall from Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, according to people familiar with the situation.

Hong Kong authorities have insisted that their judicial process remained independent of China, but these observers — who like many in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about confidential discussions — said that matters of foreign policy are the domain of the Chinese government, and Beijing exercised that authority in allowing Mr. Snowden to go.

From China’s point of view, analysts said, the departure of Mr. Snowden solved two concerns: how to prevent Beijing’s relationship with the United States from being ensnared in a long legal wrangle in Hong Kong over Mr. Snowden, and how to deal with a Chinese public that widely regards the American computer expert as a hero.

 

The Chinese government was pleased that Mr. Snowden disclosed the extent of American surveillance of Internet and telephone conversations around the world, giving the Chinese people a chance to talk about what they describe as American hypocrisy regarding surveillance practices, said Mr. Jin and the person familiar with the consultations between Hong Kong and China.

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Mr. Snowden has denied giving China classified documents and said he had spoken only to journalists. But his public statements, directly and to reporters, have contained intelligence information of great interest to China.

Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies, said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong, and that he said were with him during his stay at a Hong Kong hotel.
If that were the case, they said, China would no longer need or want to have Mr. Snowden remain in Hong Kong.
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Diplomats and law enforcement officials from the United States warned countries in Latin America not to harbor Mr. Snowden or allow him to pass through to other destinations after he fled Hong Kong for Moscow, possibly en route to Ecuador or another nation where he could seek asylum.

The foreign minister of Ecuador confirmed receiving an asylum request from Mr. Snowden. As of early Monday morning in Russia, Mr. Snowden was believed to be staying the night inside the transit zone of a Moscow airport where he was visited by an Ecuadorean diplomat. It remains unclear whether he would be allowed to travel further or, if he were, whether Ecuador would indeed be his final destination.

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The turn of events opened a startling new chapter in a case that had already captivated many in the United States and around the world. Mr. Snowden’s transcontinental escape was seen as a fresh embarrassment for the Obama administration and raised questions about its tactics in the case, like its failure to immediately revoke Mr. Snowden’s passport....they did not revoke Mr. Snowden’s passport until Saturday

It also further complicated Washington’s ties with Russia and China, where at least some officials take delight in tweaking what they call American double standards.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared to rule out sending Mr. Snowden back to the United States to face espionage charges, leaving him in limbo even as Moscow and Washington seemed to be making an effort to prevent a cold-war-style standoff from escalating. The United States and Russia do not have an extradition treaty.

Mr. Putin said Russian intelligence agencies had not questioned him, although some independent analysts cast doubt on that assertion. “If I still worked there, I would talk to him,” said Aleksandr Kondaurov, a retired K.G.B. general

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Mr.Snowden  planned his escape from Hong Kong over a surreptitious dinner of pizza, fried chicken and sausages, washed down with Pepsi.

It was a cloak-and-dagger affair. Mr. Snowden wore a cap and sunglasses and insisted that the assembled lawyers hide their cellphones in the refrigerator of the home where he was staying, to block any eavesdropping. Then began a two-hour conversation during which Mr. Snowden was deeply dismayed to learn that he could spend years in prison without access to a computer during litigation over whether he would be granted asylum here or surrendered to the United States.

Staying cooped up in the cramped Hong Kong home of a local supporter was less bothersome to Mr. Snowden than the prospect of losing his computer.
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DAVID CARR N.Y. TIMES

Almost lost in the international drama was a journalistic one in which Glenn Greenwald, the columnist from The Guardian, found himself in the gunsights on a Sunday morning talk show. The episode was part of a continuing story about the role of the press in conveying secrets to the public.

If you add up the pulling of news organization phone records (The Associated Press), the tracking of individual reporters (Fox News), and the effort by the current administration to go after sources (seven instances and counting in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media), suggesting that there is a war on the press is less hyperbole than simple math.

For the time being, it is us (the press) versus them (federal officials), which is part of the reason David Gregory ended up taking a lot of incoming fire for suggesting on NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Glenn Greenwald may have committed crimes, not journalism, when he published leaks by Mr. Snowden.

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“To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” he said in the interview.

Mr. Greenwald responded assertively.

“I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” Mr. Greenwald responded.

“The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence — the idea that I’ve ‘aided and abetted’ him in any way.”

Mr. Gregory may have thought he was just being provocative, but if you tease apart his inquiry, it suggests there might be something criminal in reporting out important information from a controversial source.

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The current administration’s desire for control of information is not a new phenomenon, but at this juncture, there is a clear need for a countervailing force in favor of openness.

There will be, as Ben Smith pointed out on BuzzFeed, an attempt to depict the sources of information as rogues and traitors, a process that will accelerate now that WikiLeaks has begun assisting Mr. Snowden. “Snowden is what used to be known as a source,” Mr. Smith wrote. “And reporters don’t, and shouldn’t, spend too much time thinking about the moral status of their sources.”

Politicians would like to conflate the actions of reporters and their sources, but the law draws a very clear and bright line between the two in an effort to protect speech and enable transparency. Mr. Greenwald may have a point of view and his approach to journalism is through the prism of activism, but he functioned as a journalist and deserves the protections that go with the job.

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Igor Morozov, a Russian lawmaker, wrote that the case exposed an American “policy of double standards.” Xinhua, the state-owned Chinese news agency, editorialized that “the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyberattacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”

American officials said such arguments were false equivalences, saying that there was no comparison between Congressionally sanctioned and court-monitored surveillance programs, or the prosecution of Mr. Snowden, and the actions taken by the governments in Moscow and Beijing. But it is an argument that Washington may find difficult to sell in some parts of the world, even among some American allies, and it is fueling criticism inside the United States.

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Mr. Obama has insisted that there is a difference between common espionage and China’s behavior. “Every country in the world, large and small, engages in intelligence gathering,” he told Charlie Rose in an interview on PBS. But intelligence gathering is different from “a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple’s software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product,” he said.

“That’s theft,” the president added, “and we can’t tolerate that.”