Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency

An explosive book by journalist Bob Woodward has revealed new accounts of backbiting and insults among Donald Trump's senior staff – with many of the most cutting digs directed at the president. The Watergate journalist dug up multiple instances of senior aides trashing Trump. Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly called him an 'idiot' and compared his job situation to 'Crazytown.' Trump reportedly called AG Jeff Sessions a 'dumb Southerner' and 'mentally retarded.' 

• Bob Woodward's latest book adds to the existing literature of dysfunction and backstabbing inside the Trump White House. 
• Defense Secretary James Mattis said Trump acted like 'a fifth- or sixth-grader'
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• Former top economy advisor Gary Cohn snatched a memo off Trump's desk to preserve a trade deal. Trump did not notice that it was missing. 
• Under orders from the president, staff secretary Rob Porter drafted a notification letter withdrawing from NAFTA. But he and other advisers worried that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis. So Porter consulted Cohn, who told him, according to Woodward: “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”
• Despite repeated threats by Trump, the United States has remained in NAFTA. The administration continues to negotiate new terms with its NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico. 
• Cohn came to regard the president as “a professional liar” and threatened to resign in August 2017 over Trump’s handling of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Cohn, who is Jewish, was especially shaken when one of his daughters found a swastika on her college dorm room.

Trump complained on a recorded phone call no one ever contacted him about veteran journalist Bob Woodward's interview request, then revealed he knew about it. Woodward, relying on his usual methods of deeply sourced reporting with use of information provided on 'background' – presents White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis each deriding the president's mental capacity.Woodward depicts Trump’s anger and paranoia about the Russia inquiry as unrelenting, at times paralyzing the West Wing for entire days. Learning of the appointment of Mueller in May 2017, Trump groused, “Everybody’s trying to get me”— part of a venting period that shellshocked aides compared to Richard Nixon’s final days as president.The book’s title derives from a remark that then-candidate Trump made in an interview with Woodward and Post political reporter Robert Costa in 2016. Trump said, “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, ‘Fear.’”Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.Woodward portrays an unsteady executive detached from the conventions of governing and prone to snapping at high-ranking staff members, whom he unsettled and belittled on a daily basis.

With Trump’s rage and defiance impossible to contain, Cabinet members and other senior officials learned to act discreetly. Woodward describes an alliance among Trump’s traditionalists — including Mattis [above] and Gary Cohn, the president’s former top economic adviser — to stymie what they considered dangerous acts.

“It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually,” Porter is quoted as saying. “Other times, we would fall over the edge, and an action would be taken.”

After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

Woodward illustrates how the dread in Trump’s orbit became all-encompassing over the course of Trump’s first year in office, leaving some staff members and Cabinet members confounded by the president’s lack of understanding about how government functions and his inability and unwillingness to learn.

Trump lawyer John Dowd urged him not to testify to Robert Mueller due to legal peril. 'Don't testify. It's either that or an orange jumpsuit'

• But Trump, concerned about the optics of a president refusing to testify and convinced that he could handle Mueller’s questions, had by then decided otherwise.
  “I’ll be a real good witness,” Trump told Dowd, according to Woodward.
• “You are not a good witness,” Dowd replied. “Mr. President, I’m afraid I just can’t help you.” 
  The next morning, Dowd resigned.

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS


LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Wrongfully Convicted

LINDA GREENHOUSE, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS


Week after week, the story unfolds before our eyes: “Wrongfully Imprisoned, Groundskeeper Returns” (The New York Times, March 28, 2018); “$10 Million for Man Wrongly Convicted of Murdering Parents” (The New York Times, April 21, 2018); “Philadelphia Man Freed After Serving 11 Years for Murder He Did Not Commit” (The New York Times, May 16, 2018). Since 1989, when what’s known today as the innocence movement started gaining momentum, over 2,200 convicted people have been exonerated in the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

That suggests, of course, that a worrisome number of guilty people may never have been caught (although about half of DNA exonerations actually result in the conviction of the true perpetrator). Estimates of wrongful convictions range between 2 and 5 percent, meaning that as many as 100,000 innocent people may be sitting in the country’s vast prison network. Death row exonerations have, at last count, reached 162. The image of these exonerees (an awkward word that entered the dictionary only in 2002) blinking in the sunlight after years or decades in prison is touching, troubling, and infuriating.

By now we know all this. The question is how and why wrongful convictions occur. The four books under review are among the latest to tackle aspects of the subject, through anecdote, personal testimony, and meticulous historical reconstruction. In different ways, each of the four contributes to a deeper understanding of the problem in its several dimensions: poor police work, unreliable witnesses, prosecutorial misconduct, juror gullibility, defense inadequacy, bad forensics passing for science, racism, and more.

Want diversity? Target choice: The system exacerbates our racial and socioeconomic divides

DAILY NEWS

Puerto Rico Raises Hurricane Maria Death Toll to Almost 3,000

NEW YORK INTELLIGENCER

Diamonds are forever. Federal judges are the next-best thing.

Democrats have themselves to blame for Trump’s judicial juggernaut.




WASHINGTON POST

The three illegal acts that may have helped Trump win the presidency



WASHINGTON POST

Trump campaign, tabloid publisher hatched plan to bury damaging stories, 




WASHINGTON POST


Yet legal experts interviewed Wednesday said such cases are difficult to prove and they thought it unlikely that prosecutors would pursue campaign finance charges against AMI or its executives. The prosecution of former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards on similar campaign finance allegations fell apart in 2012, as many jurors doubted the government had proved that he and an aide tried to cover up his extramarital affair simply to protect his presidential campaign. Edwards’s attorneys said that he worked to conceal the relationship to protect his marriage.
---------------------------------------------------

In 2011, Edwards was indicted on six counts of conspiracy and campaign finance fraud. He was accused of violating election law, criminally conspiring with donors to protect his presidential campaign by accepting hundreds of dollars in donations above the federal contribution limit to conceal his extramarital affair and his mistress’s pregnancy. The money was used to pay for her living and medical expenses, prosecutors alleged.

But jurors were not persuaded that the payment was an illegal campaign contribution. Edwards was acquitted on a charge of accepting illegal campaign contributions that were related to payments made after he dropped out of the race, and the jury deadlocked on the rest of the charges.

Paul Manafort is found GUILTY of eight counts of fraud

Paul Manafort is found GUILTY of eight counts of fraud after first trial brought by Robert Mueller's prosecutors - and now faces years in prison for multi-million dollar scam 

Jury of six men and six women return verdict on Paul Manafort at end of the first trial brought by Robert Mueller's special counsel probe 

He is found guilty of eight of the ten counts of fraud on the fourth day of deliberations - the jury is deadlocked on the other ten 

Prosecutors had outlined how he used tax and bank fraud to fund a lavish lifestyle, with his spending including a now notorious $15,000 ostrich jacket 

Guilty verdict on 69-year-old will increase pressure on Trump and comes at start of intense campaigning for mid-term elections 

Jury defied Trump's extraordinary description of Manafort as 'a very good person' and trial as 'sad' to reach their verdict 

Manafort now faces possibility of a lengthy prison sentence from Judge T.S. Ellis III who will ask for background reports and recommendations from both sides 

Manafort remains in custody ahead of a second trial in Washington D.C. next month on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent

• Manafort could be tried again on those 10 counts if prosecutors choose; In the trial in D.C. he faces charges of money laundering, witness tampering, lying under oath, and not registering as a foreign agent. [AP / Matthew Barakat]
• Five people in Trump’s orbit during the 2016 campaign — his onetime national security adviser, campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, personal attorney, and foreign policy adviser — have now either pleaded guilty or been found guilty of federal crimes. [Vox / Alex Ward]

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, said the president told him to pay off an adult film star and a former Playboy model, and that the payments were “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”
Mr. Cohen made the claim as he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations in federal court.

He told a judge in United States District Court in Manhattan that “I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election” for president in 2016, Mr. Cohen said.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have, for months, said privately that they considered Mr. Cohen’s case to be potentially more problematic for the president than the investigation by the special counsel.

John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash

That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.

By John O. Brennan

NY TIMES

How Trump Won Re-election in 2020

A sneak peek at the Times’s news analysis from Nov. 4, 2020.

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

BRET STEPHENS, NY TIMES  ↑




BRET STEPHENS, NY TIMES   ↓

The Rules for Beating Donald Trump

Don’t argue with 4.1 percent growth.

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

A "systematic cover-up" in the Pennsylvania Catholic Church.

A new report accuses 300 priests of decades-long abuse in the Pennsylvania Catholic Church;

VOX

• More than 300 priests from Pennsylvania's Roman Catholic Church have been accused of sexual abuse over a 70-year period, according to a new report from a grand jury. The report also identified more than 1,000 victims (and implied there are many more) who were silenced in a cover-up scheme by various Pennsylvania bishops and church leaders. [AP / Mark Scolforo]
• The Pennsylvania Supreme Court released the report, which discussed hundreds of church leaders who "largely escaped public accountability" and the Vatican officials who wanted to "avoid scandal," on Tuesdayfollowing an 18-month-long investigation into eight Catholic dioceses. [BBC]
• The overarching theme of the report was the "systematic coverup by senior church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican," as evidenced by the church's own records, according to Pennsylvania state Attorney General Josh Shapiro. [WPXI]
• The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the chair of the bishops' Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People said the Catholic Church is "shamed by and sorry for the sins and omissions" by its bishops and priests. [CNN / Daniel Burke and Susannah Cullinane]
• The grand jury report is a result of the most extensive American investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church to date. [Washington Post / Michelle Boorstein]
• Sex abuse survivors have called on the government to look into the US Catholic Church's history of abuse on a national level. But no federal investigation has been launched. [NYT / Laurie Goodstein]
• The discovery follows a particularly rough year for the Vatican: Cardinal Theodore McCarrick — DC's former archbishop — resigned following accusations of sex abuse, dozens of Chilean church leaders resigned after an abuse cover-up went public, and an Australian archbishop was convicted of child sex abuse. [Vox / Emily Stewart]
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Trump maintains not knowing in advance about meeting with Russians, disputing Cohen claim




WASHINGTON POST

As midterms near, fears grow that U.S. is not protected from Russian interference

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) shakes hands with New Knowledge Director of Research Renée DiResta at the end of a committee hearing in Washington on foreign influence operations on Aug. 1. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Experts say the lack of administration leadership on the issue — with President Trump at times questioning conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about Russia’s disinformation and hacking campaign — renders less effective the efforts of agencies to mount a coordinated government action to protect the nation.

• By Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg

Trump's Hold on His Supporters. Why His People Stay With Him.

RICHARD COHEN, WASHINGTON POST

The results of the Helsinki summit are in. President Trump couldn’t handle statecraft or, for that matter, double negatives, but he came out of the meeting undefeated and invincible. Like with the Charlottesville hatefest or the “Access Hollywood” tape, it was just another day at the office for Trump. Unlike the mocking balloon that soared over London, Trump never loses air.

The post-summit poll numbers are instructive. While 50 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Trump handled Vladimir Putin, his Republican base stayed both loyal and comatose. In a Post-ABC News poll, 66 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance. An earlier Axios-SurveyMonkey poll put the GOP figure at 79 percent, not only more impressive but also downright eerie.

It is safe to say that these numbers might have surprised even the shaken White House staffers who flew back to Washington with Trump. The commentariat was already on the air, reporting on the summit as if it were a multicar Beltway collision. Even Fox News was critical, and Newt Gingrich, whose wife is Trump’s ambassador to the Holy See, called the meeting “the most serious mistake” of Trump’s presidency — an extremely high bar.

National security adviser John Bolton got to work. On the plane, according to the Wall Street Journal, he went about the painful business of damage control and hammered out talking points advising Trump on how to reclaim reality. One idea was for Trump to assert his support for the U.S. intelligence community, the sort of prosaic statement, like a belief in God, that no president had ever had to make. Trump, of course, did so — and maintained this stance for almost a day.

There is such a thing, we are told, as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It is an ideological version of a speech disorder, which causes certain people to denounce Trump in obscene ways. It has come over the likes of Robert De Niro and, when it came to Ivanka Trump, Samantha Bee. It has prompted others to call Trump a traitor, which is a slanderous accusation too often used for crass political reasons. Sen. Joseph McCarthy called the Roosevelt-Truman administrations “20 years of treason.”

Yet, the more dangerous variant of the syndrome is the willingness of most Republicans to support Trump no matter what. 

Take the evangelical community. Trump has been accused of adultery and of buying the silence of his alleged paramours. He has referred to impoverished nations as “shithole countries” and — unforgivably — belittled the wartime torture of Sen. John McCain. None of this shook his base. On the contrary, his support within the Republican Party has risen and solidified. It now stands at around 90 percent, which is what tin-pot dictators get in rigged elections.

The upshot is that we now have two political parties — one pro-Trump and one anti-. Some celebrated Republicans — George F. Will, for instance — have already declared their apostasy. Will is now “unaffiliated,” but no one runs for president as that. In this country, if you’re anti-Trump, realism says you’ve got to vote Democratic. (Please, no more of this Libertarian or Green Party nonsense.)

It’s impossible to say at this point whether the pro-Trump/anti-Trump dichotomy is just about the man himself or represents a wider and more permanent political realignment. (Who’s the next Trump?) But it’s clear that something beyond economics — and certainly not foreign policy — motivates Trump’s people. My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism [as well as a tribalist nativism and racism-Esco]  — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant. It is, in other words, some of the same sentiment that once fueled European fascism.

Those of us who write newspaper columns know that sheer brilliance, should it happen, gets a silent nod of the head, but affirmation — saying what readers already think — gets loud hurrahs. This is Trump’s appeal as well. He validates the thinking — some of it ugly — of many Americans. To them, Helsinki doesn’t matter and even Putin doesn’t matter. Only Trump does. To them, he hates the right people.

In the Past Decade, Nearly 26,000 Murders Have Gone Without an Arrest in Major American Cities. Of Those, More Than 18,600 of the Victims — Almost Three‑Quarters — were Black.

Mary Franklin stands in front of Boston police headquarters holding a large portrait of her late husband, Melvin Franklin, who was killed in 1996. His murder is unsolved. (Yoon S. Byun for The Washington Post)

In the Past Decade, Nearly 26,000 Murders Have Gone Without an Arrest in Major American Cities. Of Those, More Than 18,600 of the Victims — Almost Three‑Quarters — were Black.

An Unequal Justice: Killings of Black People Lead to Arrests Less Often

In major U.S. cities, black victims were the least likely of any racial group to have their killings result in an arrest, according to a Post analysis of about 55,000 homicides. 

• By Wesley Lowery, Kimbriell Kelly and Steven Rich

Activist Eileen Paterson, center, the Rev. Gary Adams, left of center, and Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans, second from left, participate in a neighborhood peace walk on July 16. (Yoon S. Byun for The Washington Post)

Black victims, who accounted for the majority of homicides, were the least likely of any racial group to have their killings result in an arrest, The Post found. While police arrested someone in 63 percent of the killings of white victims, they did so in just 47 percent of those with black victims.

The failure to solve black homicides fuels a vicious cycle: It deepens distrust of police among black residents, making them less likely to cooperate in investigations, leading to fewer arrests. As a result, criminals are emboldened and residents’ fears are compounded.

In almost every city surveyed, arrests were made in killings of black victims at lower rates than homicides involving white victims.

Four cities — Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and Philadelphia — accounted for more than 7,300 of the black murders with no arrests.

In interviews with The Post, more than two dozen police chiefs and homicide commanders said they work just as hard to solve black murders but that those investigations are often hampered by reluctant witnesses.

No major U.S. city had a wider gap in arrest rates for white and black victims than Boston, where the killings of white residents are solved at twice the rate of black victims.

Police in several cities said that some types of killings are easier to solve than others. Domestic-violence cases and bar fights may present fewer hurdles to making an arrest, while gang-related shootings and drug-related killings, which are believed to account for the majority of unsolved cases, are more complicated, police said.

But residents and community leaders in many cities remain skeptical that police are doing all they can to solve black homicides.

“Black life is seen as not as important,” said the Rev. William Barber, a national civil rights leader, who called the failure by police to solve black homicides a civil rights crisis on par with questionable police shootings of minorities and wrongful convictions of black men.

“The black community gets cut by both edges of the sword,” said Barber, who until last year led the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. “There’s no big rush to solve a case when it’s considered ‘black on black.’ But if it is a black-on-white killing, then everything is done to make an arrest.”

WASHINGTON POST

Arn The Borowitz Report Kremlin Names Trump Employee of the Month “No one has worked more tirelessly for the glory of the Fatherland than Donald Trump,” Vladimir Putin said in an official statement. By Andy Borowitz old, who now resides in Hell, delivered a statement exclusively to The Borowitz Report.=

The Borowitz Report “I Was Never This Blatant,” Says Benedict Arnold in Hell “I was brought up to believe that betraying your country was something you’d do very secretively,” Arnold said. By Andy Borowitz

The Borowitz Report Obama’s Barrage of Complete Sentences Seen as Brutal Attack on Trump Appearing at his first public event since leaving office, the former President fired off a punishing fusillade of grammatically correct statements. By Andy Borowitz