A potential reprieve for Michael Flynn



VOX

• On Wednesday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals sided with President Trump’s Justice Department and directed a lower court to dismiss criminal charges against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. [Reuters / Sarah N. Lynch]
• The decision is part of a sudden reversal in Flynn’s fortunes; Flynn had twice pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about conversations with Russia during the transition between administrations, but the DOJ moved to dismiss his case last month. [CNN / Katelyn Polantz]
• A district court judge had planned to examine the DOJ’s decision to do so in a hearing scheduled for next month, but Wednesday’s ruling — in which the majority argues that “a hearing cannot be used as an occasion to superintend the prosecution’s charging decisions” — puts a damper on that plan. [ABC News / Alexander Mallin]



Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in 2009. (Dominic Bracco II for The Washington Post)

• Previously, a former federal judge appointed to oppose the DOJ decision to end prosecution argued in a court filing that dismissing the case against Flynn was a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power ... to benefit a political ally of the President.” [Washington Post / Ann E. Marimow]
• It’s unclear where Flynn’s case, which has spanned virtually the entire Trump administration, will go from here. The decision could be reconsidered before the full court or appealed to the Supreme Court, but as Politico points out, it would be “extraordinary” for a district court judge to take either step. [Politico / Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney]
• It's also possible the full appeals court will choose to reconsider the decision even without a request — as Vox's Ian Millhiser writes, judges Neomi Rao and Karen Henderson, who were the majority in Wednesday's 2-1 decision, "are far-right outliers" on the court. [Vox / Ian Millhiser]
• Flynn’s case isn’t the only active storyline involving criminal conduct by Trump allies: Two prosecutors involved in the case of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday regarding political interference in Stone’s sentencing. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
• In written testimony, DOJ prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky accused senior Justice Department leadership of exerting “significant pressure ... to water down and in some cases outright distort the events that transpired in [Stone's] trial and the criminal conduct that gave rise to his conviction.” [NPR / Carrie Johnson]
• Zelinsky, who was also a member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, quit Stone’s case earlier this year along with three other DOJ prosecutors after the acting US attorney for DC overrode Zelinsky’s sentencing recommendation for Stone. [Daily Beast / Spencer Ackerman]
• Stone was convicted in November and sentenced to 40 months in prison for obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress; however, he has yet to begin serving his time and earlier this week requested a postponement because of the coronavirus risk in prison. [CBS News / Melissa Quinn]

When the Mask You’re Wearing feels Unmasculine

THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES

The Covid-19 pandemic has divided Americans into two camps. To no one’s surprise, lockdown politics have joined the legion of issues that pit Democrats against Republicans.

Take Daniel Horowitz, senior editor of Conservative Voice.

Objecting to the lack of attention that has been paid to what he considers the relatively light impact of the coronavirus on nonurban — largely white — areas of the country, Horowitz writes: “We now know that geography played a large role. 54 percent of all U.S. deaths were in the 100 counties in or within 100 miles of NYC.”

Covid-19 deaths — more than 90,000 so far — are “concentrated among the elderly,” Horowitz continues, and the “virus lopsidedly targets people with particular underlying conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes.”

The death rate, Horowitz claims, “doesn’t even climb above 1% until you reach over 70, with a steep and dangerous growth of risk over 75 and 80.”

To deal with a threat Horowitz sees as focused on “specific” groups, he writes,

We destroyed our entire country and sacked the Constitution all for a very narrow and specific problem that required a precise and balanced approach.

From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Laura McGann, editorial director of Vox.com, wrote, in an article posted on April 22,

We do know that gatherings spread the virus. Again and again, when groups get together, attendees get sick. Some have died. And we don’t know the extent to which they’ve spread it to others, though we know it’s a terribly contagious virus.

Don’t “be fooled by Fox News, Donald Trump, or the same type of groups that produced the Tea Party a decade ago,” McGann warned.

“In 21st century American politics, truth is tribal.”

WASHINGTON POST

In other nations, there is no such divide. In many Asian countries, surgical masks were socially acceptable long before the coronavirus pandemic, partly as a result of experience in past pandemics, like SARS in 2003.

“In Hong Kong, it is pretty common, even without an outbreak, to see people going around in masks because they may be sick and they don’t want to infect other people,” Keiji Fukuda, head of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, told Today’s WorldView in March. 

A spate of studies released this summer supported mask-wearing. One review funded by the World Health Organization and published in the Lancet journal looked at data from 172 observational studies and concluded that wearing face masks reduced the risk of coronavirus infection.

For many, this was all the evidence needed. Other policies for controlling the spread of the virus are enormously costly and practically difficult, from shutting down schools and offices to setting up complicated contact tracing. A mask, on the other hand, is cheap and has little downside.

THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES

This partisan fight over the lockdown has shown us, once again, how differently the choices government leaders make look to different constituencies of our society. Whether you emphasize the imperative to save lives or the consequences of economic devastation, with more than 46 million unemployed as of June 24, determines what you think the proper response to the outbreak should be, to a degree that is astonishing even in our deeply polarized society.

In a matter of three weeks, Republican voters shifted from a modest majority (51-48) concerned that the restrictions would be lifted too quickly, to a similarly modest majority (53-47) concerned that the restrictions will not be lifted quickly enough. Democrats, on the contrary, went from a decisive majority who feared (81-18) that restrictions would be lifted too quickly to an even stronger concern (87-13).

Robert Griffin, research director of the nonpartisan Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, provided The Times with demographic data from a May 7-13 survey describing voters who oppose lockdown policies. They are decisively Republican (at 55 percent) compared with 27 percent Democratic and 17 percent independent; majority male, at 58 percent; largely white (69 percent compared with 7 percent black and 17 percent Hispanic); and less well educated, 74 percent without college degrees, 24 percent with degrees.

What are some of the forces driving the split between those who prioritize the economy and those whose primary concern is the physical health of the population?

W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, emailed in response to my inquiry:

Progressives have grown more likely to embrace a culture of “safetyism” in recent years. This safetyism seeks to protect them and those who are deemed the most vulnerable members of our society from threats to their emotional and physical well-being.

In the case of Covid-19, he continued,

progressives are willing to embrace the maximal measures to protect themselves, the public, and the most vulnerable among us from this threat.

In contrast, according to Wilcox,

many conservatives are most concerned about protecting the American way of life, a way of life they see as integrally bound up with liberty and the free market.

Because many on the political right see the lockdowns as impinging “on their liberty, the free market’s workings, and their financial well-being,” he continued, “many conservatives want the lockdowns ended as quickly as possible.”

In addition, Wilcox noted, “some (especially male) conservatives see the lockdowns and mask wearing as expressions of cowardice that they reject as unmanly.”

This last point touches on “the white male effect,” a theme that regularly emerges in studies of risk taking and risk aversion.

In their 2012 paper “Bringing ideology in: the conservative white male effect on worry about environmental problems in the USA,” Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap found that conservative white men

express significantly less personal worry about the quality of the environment and about eight environmental problems than do other adults in the general public, even controlling for the effects of several relevant social, demographic, political, and temporal variables.

In a separate 2011 paper, “Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States,” McCright and Dunlap found that the most intense rejection of climate change was found not just among conservative white men, but that opposition was “even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well.”

They found, for example, that 71.6 percent of white males conservatives who claim to understand global warming very well agreed that “recent temperature increases are not primarily due to human activities.” Among all conservative white men, the percentage in agreement fell to 58.5. Among everyone else, the percentage dropped to 31.5.

All of which brings to mind President Trump’s assessment of his own ability to understand the health issues surrounding the pandemic: “I like this stuff. I really get it,” he declared during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on March 6. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said ‘How do you know so much about this?’”

The McCright and Dunlap papers were written years before the current pandemic, but their analysis is directly relevant to the present. McCright emailed in response to my queries:

If you are a conservative, a key tenet of your ideology is that unregulated markets naturally produce good; they are the most efficient way that humans have ever seen for distributing goods, services, wealth, etc. Any attempts to regulate, intervene upon, steer, etc. an economic market will make it necessarily less efficient. A government driven by some sense of altruism — ‘dogooderism’ by ‘bleeding hearts’ — will only muck up the functioning of an efficient market.

Liberals, McCright continued,

do not hold nearly as much belief in the power of unregulated markets to necessarily produce good without substantial negative side effects. As such, liberals are more supportive of governmental intervention to protect public health, environmental quality, the poor, etc. In other words, liberals accept some degree of economic regulation, and perhaps slower growth, reduced profits, etc., if it means improving public health, environmental quality, etc.

I asked: Do liberals and conservatives value life in different ways? McCright replied, “Liberals and conservatives certainly value different things — and ‘life’ gets caught up in these different things in different ways.”

In general, he contended,

conservatives value economic growth; markets with little or no governmental intervention; little to no constraints on ‘individual liberty’ and private property rights; etc. Liberals value educational opportunities; support for the vulnerable; environmental protection; checks on economic power; the extension of rights to previously oppressed groups; etc.

In a separate email, Dunlap wrote that there was a clear link between “climate change denial and the mixed reaction to Covid19.”

Dunlap argued that “with the rise of ‘right-wing’ populism,” conservatives and Republicans have developed

a strong hostility toward expertise in general, as obvious in the Trump Administration. Both of these strands build upon a tradition of anti-intellectualism in the U.S., but have taken it to far greater lengths than ever before. We see this in the current dismissal of scientific evidence and expertise in dealing with Covid-19, and more recent outright attacks on the experts — because experts do not play along with the charade that the coronavirus does not represent a serious threat.

The “white male effect,” in turn, interacts with differing responses of men and women to the pandemic.

Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote me that

there is good evidence of sex differences in responses to the coronavirus; women are more likely to report favoring and practicing social distance measures than are men.

This, in turn, fits with “the general sense that liberals are the more ‘feminine’ of the two parties,” Ditto argues, which results in the following pattern:

While liberals adopt their nurturant role, bemoaning the climbing infection and death rates and are willing to accept economic carnage in favor of minimizing the loss of human life, conservatives are more likely to, in effect, tell the American people to “walk it off,” increasingly staking out the position that some loss of life must be endured for the greater economic good.

In addition, in Ditto’s view, there is a fundamental tension arising “from how the two sides view the value and integrity of scientists.” Conservatives, Ditto wrote, are

more likely to question conclusions of scientists because they are more likely to question their motives — seeing them as typical liberal pansies who just can’t accept the reality that people die. At the extreme, hard right conservative thinking manifests in conspiracy theories painting Fauci, the CDC and the WHO as malevolent agents whose hidden agendas having nothing to do with saving American lives.

In analyses of partisan divergence in response to the pandemic, two different outcomes emerge.

An extensive 2017 examination of research on threats, “The politics of fear: Is there an ideological asymmetry in existential motivation?,” by John Jost, Chadly Stern, Nicholas O. Rule and Joanna Sterling, of N.Y.U., the University of Illinois, the University of Toronto and Princeton, found, for example, that:

Exposure to objectively threatening circumstances, such as terrorist attacks, was associated with a “conservative shift” at individual and aggregate levels of analysis. Psychological reactions to fear and threat thus convey a small-to-moderate political advantage for conservative leaders, parties, policies, and ideas.

So far, however, the threat posed by the pandemic has not produced a shift to the right.

The current level of support for Joe Biden as Nathaniel Rakich of 538 writes, suggests that there might yet be “a Democratic wave of truly epic proportions,” although Rakich is quick to caution that “it’s hard to know at this point if these polls indicators of an overwhelming Democratic electoral environment.”

Recent work shows that voters tend to move in either a conservative or liberal direction depending on the specific source of the threat.

A 2018 paper, “Can Threat Increase Support for Liberalism? ” by Fade Eadeh, of Carnegie Mellon, and Katharine K. Chang, of the National Institute of Mental Health, reported that some threats push voters to the right, while others push the electorate to the left. Threats to health are among those that push the electorate to the left.

The authors argue that a health care threat of the kind the country now faces, along with threats of pollution and corporate corruption, produce “increased support for components of liberalism.”

The critical factor determining whether voters respond to threat by turning left or right, according to Eadeh and Chang, is the partisan “ownership” of the issue and which side “is best seen as ‘fixing’ that threat.”

In the United States, they write:

conservative parties (i.e., Republicans) are perceived as more effective dealing with terrorism, whereas liberal parties (Democrats) are perceived as better at handling health care and environmental issues.

Pool shot of audience at Pres. Trump’s speech in Arizona - the nation’s latest coronavirus hotspot - shows a single mask-wearer among the students sitting shoulder-to-shoulder

The opposition among conservative Republicans to the lockdown — designed to protect American from contact with the coronavirus — presents an interesting corollary to the moral foundations theory developed by Jonathan Haidt of N.Y.U. and Jesse Graham of the University of Utah. In essence, the theory posits that conservatives are more preoccupied with notions of purity and disgust than liberals.

In an email, Ditto has deftly summarized the work of Haidt et al:

From the perspective of moral foundations theory, conservatives’ greater concern for purity and fear of contamination would suggest that they would respond more vigorously to a virus than would liberals. This was indeed the case with the Ebola crisis during the Obama Administration when conservative voices often expressed extreme concern about and even fear of Ebola spreading in the United States, while roundly criticizing President Obama’s more measured reaction.

 

Haidt, Graham and colleagues have deployed a “scale” to measure preoccupation with disgust. The battery includes 27 questions, for example, “how true about you is: ‘I might be willing to try eating monkey meat, under some circumstances’ or ‘I never let any part of my body touch the toilet seat in public restrooms,’ ” Other questions ask respondents to rank “How disgusting would you find the following experiences,” including “while you are walking through a tunnel under a railroad track, you smell urine” or “You discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week.”

The Graham-Haidt study suggests that conservatives would show a higher level of fear of the pandemic and a readiness to comply with restrictions on interpersonal contact.

A group of four California-based scholars is exploring why this is not the case.

In an intriguing ongoing study, Colin Holbrook, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California-Merced, and Daniel M. T. Fessler, Theodore Samore and Adam Sparks, all of the anthropology department at U.C.L.A., find a sharp split in the behavior of conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans.

Holbrook wrote by email that he and his colleagues

assessed disgust sensitivity and found conservatism in our present sample predicted greater disgust-proneness. The emotion of disgust functions to curtail disease-transmission, suggesting that conservatives should, all else equal, be likely to take greater disease precautions.

They then “measured precautionary behaviors, such as hand-washing, mask-wearing, social distancing, seeking cleaning supplies, etc.” and found that conservatism, measured in a number of distinct ways, positively and highly significantly predicts precautionary behaviors among the Democrats in our sample, but not among the Republicans.

Holbrook wrote that this apparent contradiction grows out of the responsiveness of the conservative Republicans

to authority messaging, from the president as well as other conservative political and media figures. There are theoretical reasons to expect that, had conservative authority figures encouraged them to do so, conservative Republicans would be as likely — perhaps even more likely — as conservative Democrats to engage in precautionary behaviors.

Put another way, loyalty to Trump and others on the right was more powerful than the strong inclination among these Republican voters to take steps to insulate themselves from the threat of the coronavirus.

Jesse Graham, in an email, wrote that “when people ask me the question ‘if conservatives are more concerned with purity, why are red states being so slow to act against a viral contagion?’” he replies:

I don’t think these political differences are due to any underlying values differences between liberals and conservatives. I think it’s due to the almost immediate politicization of the threat, with Trump and Fox News downplaying the seriousness of Covid-19, and ‘left-leaning’ reality-based sources issuing the more dire warnings.

The pandemic has become another example of Trump’s mastery over his most loyal subjects, his ability to manipulate them into violating their own instincts. It is this power over a substantial bloc of the electorate that has put him in the White House — and continues to make him so dangerous.

Coronavirus recommendations ignored as case numbers rise

WASHINGTON POST

Coronavirus infections continued to rise in many parts of a divided nation on Monday, with public health recommendations under attack from communities tired of staying home and officials eager to restart local economies.

Even as the number of infections rose and hospital beds filled in some places, voices clamored for an end to mandatory mask-wearing. And relaxation of restrictions designed to curb the novel coronavirus continued.

“They’re either just over it, or they’ve come to believe it’s a phony pandemic because their own personal grandmother hasn’t been affected yet,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine, in Orange County. Elected officials last week forced the county health department to scale back a mask-wearing order. “People just think this is a nothingburger. So they think the risk is exaggerated.”

Two associations of local health officials released a statement warning that “public health department officials and staff have been physically threatened and politically scapegoated,” and “the vital work of public health departments is also being challenged.”

“Public health departments are facing lawsuits over their authority to close businesses, schools, and places of worship in order to protect the community at large — the very action that is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of American lives from this virus,” the National Association of County and City Health Officials and the Big Cities Health Coalition said.

Ten states — Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — hit new highs for hospitalized patients on Sunday, according to data maintained by The Washington Post.

“While we are coping with it now, this is not sustainable in the long term,” said Don Williamson, president and chief executive of the Alabama Hospital Association and a former state health officer. “We’re sort of at a tipping point. . . . What I am concerned about is that we are not seeing the response to that from the citizens that we have to [have] if we’re going to get this under control. We are not seeing people wear masks, we are not seeing social distancing in the way that needs to happen.”

Experts said a combination of factors is sharpening the tension between warnings issued by public health experts and the reality in places where cases are increasing. People are moving around more in good weather, said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington, which produces an influential model that predicts future deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Some political leaders, from President Trump on down, are refusing to issue a consistent public health message about wearing masks and maintaining social distance, said Vin Gupta, an assistant professor at the same University of Washington institute. Gupta called Trump’s planned rally this month in Tulsa “medical malpractice.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 80,000 registered nurses, said “the idea that we are going to tolerate a certain number of deaths as a nation is outrageous. . . . It’s irresponsible of these governors to be so blasé about the idea that more people are going to be infected and die because they made a decision to reopen without the safety precautions that workers and consumers need.”

However, an Axios-Ipsos poll shows that, nationally mask-wearing has not declined in about a month. In a poll conducted June 5-8, 48 percent of Americans said they wear a mask “at all times” when they leave home and 28 percent said they wear one “sometimes, but not all the time.” That figure does not vary significantly from the responses in a survey taken May 8-11.

The battle over masks in a pandemic: An all-American story

WASHINGTON POST

Max Parsell hasn't been wearing a mask during the coronavirus pandemic and doesn't intend to start. It's a matter of principle.“Making individual decisions is the American way,” Parsell, a 29-year-old lineman for a power company, said as he picked up his lunch at a barbecue joint at a rural crossroads south of Jacksonville. “I’ll social distance from you if you want, but I don’t want the government telling me I have to wear a mask.”

Parsell need not worry: Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has not made mask-wearing mandatory here in Florida. That’s in sharp contrast with what’s happening more than 2,000 miles away in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Thursday reacted to rising ­caseloads by making ­mask-wearing mandatory.

In this sprawling, heterogeneous country, the pandemic has become yet another thing on which Americans are divided. Mask-wearing for some people is an identifier of broader beliefs and political leanings. Like so many issues rooted in science and medicine, the pandemic is now fully entangled with ideological tribalism. This has played out before: helmets for motorcyclists, seat belts in cars, smoking bans in restaurants. All of those measures provoked battles over personal liberty.

“I don’t like to see people out in bars congregating without masks right now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview, but he added, “We may have mayors and may have governors who are saying the right thing, but because of the individual spirit of our country, we don’t listen to authority. You go to Korea, you go to Japan, when the authorities say something, man, it gets done.” The independent American trait can complicate public health measures, he acknowledged. "When you’re dealing with infectious diseases, a small percentage of people who don’t comply can have an impact on the entire population,” he said.

The United States has far more coronavirus infections than any other country. It has the most covid-19 deaths.

In Wisconsin, the Republican state legislature successfully sued to strike down Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s stay-at-home order, which many local leaders declared they would ignore. And in several states with Republican governors, including Arizona, Arkansas and Oklahoma, Democratic mayors have expressed frustration with a lack of aggressive action to halt the viral spread.

In Orange County, Calif., the board of supervisors said it would no longer enforce mask mandates locally, going against the wishes of health department officials. In Nebraska, Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) told local authorities in his state not to mandate masks in municipal buildings — unless they wanted to lose out on their allocation of money from the federal Cares Act.

AMC, the sprawling movie house chain, made a proclamation of its own earlier in the week, declaring it would not mandate masks so as “not to be drawn into political controversy” — thereby drawing itself into political controversy anyway. But by Friday, reflecting the fluid nature of the pandemic and the decisions enveloping it, AMC had reversed course, announcing that it would insist on mask-wearing after all.

Compared with most countries, the United States has been quick to reopen, according to researchers at the Oxford University Blavatnik School of Government who have crafted a Stringency Index that tracks government shutdown orders and other interventions. But multiple states, particularly in the South, Midwest and Southwest, are experiencing spikes in infections.

Adding to that confusion is the fact that successful public health measures, including shutdowns and mandates to wear masks, can appear to be unnecessary. There is no easy way to calculate what might have happened if the measures hadn’t been imposed.

Memorial Day weekend facilitated an explosion of self-determination, as pictures of packed pools and overflowing clubs — all enjoyed by people bereft of masks — left public health officials wringing their hands. Pictures of crowds packed into a pool at Backwater Jack’s, a beloved local spot at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, drew national attention.

So far, health officials in the state say they do not think the gathering resulted in the catastrophic spread of the coronavirus that some predicted. 

 Since Memorial Day, at least 10 states have seen covid-19 hospitalizations rise at least 10 percent, according to a Post analysis of data.

Not all states report covid-19 hospitalizations, so the list may be longer. Florida, for example, is experiencing an explosion in cases but does not report hospitalization data.

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey (R) succumbed to pressure from local leaders and revised an executive order that had barred city leaders from instituting their own policies on face coverings.

Within 48 hours of Ducey’s reversal, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego (D) had announced a mask mandate would be on the next city council agenda. Tucson Mayor Regina Romero (D) announced an executive order mandating masks in her city, too.

Montgomery, Ala., has emerged as a virus hot spot in recent weeks, with cases increasing 73 percent in the surrounding county during June. Hospitals in the region are experiencing a strain on intensive care units and other resources. But when the city council voted on a measure that would have mandated masks in public among groups of 25 or more, the measure failed.

A day later, Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed (D) announced he would sign an executive order mandating masks in public anyway.

Cuomo And De Blasio Say NYC Is "On Track" To Enter Phase 2 Of Reopening On Monday, June 22nd

GOTHAMIST

At his daily briefing on Wednesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that New York City is "on track" to enter Phase 2 of reopening on Monday, June 22nd. It was previously expected that the city would enter Phase 2 later in June, or early July. Just hours before the governor's comment, Mayor Bill de Blasio said there were several indicators he was looking over the next several days to decide if the city was ready for the next phase, and an announcement would be forthcoming.

"The earliest date we could go is Monday," de Blasio said. "It’s a decision we’re going to make very closely with the State. We’re all mindful that we had a very unusual situation with the protests. And we’re going to see, we believe the fuller impact if any, of the protests in terms of our health indicators around this weekend, maybe into the first few days of next week. That’s an important factor here."
De Blasio added that the impact of Phase 1 also needs to be considered, and "is much bigger than the protests in the sense of, you know, several hundred thousand people each day going back to work, every day for the full workday. We are watching to see how these things are affecting the reality. There’s always the danger that things go in the wrong direction."

If the data continues to be favorable, New York City will make a giant leap into something resembling normalcy, but we're still in a pandemic. Earlier this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned, "When I see pictures of people congregating at bars when the location they are indicates they shouldn’t be doing that, that’s very risky. People keep talking about a second wave. We’re still in a first wave.”
What will reopen in Phase 2?

• Outdoor dining will be allowed (here's the plan to make that happen)
• In-Store Retail, with new safety guidelines (this does not apply to malls, which will remain closed in Phase 2)
• Salons and barbershops
• Real estate services
• Car dealerships
• Commercial building management
• Offices (though many companies will keep working remotely, offices will be reopening with new safety guidelines)

Over the past week, some of the city's bars and restaurants have already reopened for outdoor dining, ahead of Phase 2, leading to crowds congregating on streets for lengthy day-drinking sessions. Many were not wearing masks.

It's become increasingly clear that masks are an essential element in slowing the spread of the virus. In Florida, a group of 16 friends tested positive after a night out drinking at a recently reopened bar there; no one in the group wore a mask. In Missouri, two hairstylists who were positive for COVID-19 kept working, but none of the 140 customers they interacted with tested positive; they all wore masks.

June 13th, 2020, East Village. No masks[

Alternate Side Parking Regulations will be suspended through Sunday, June 21st

Safety Protocols

• Reduced occupancy to under 50 percent
• There will be stringent cleaning protocols
• One person per elevator
• Six-feet between people
• Employees must have PPE and partake in daily healthcare screenings

What will reopen in Phase 3?

Currently there is less guidance for Phases 3 and 4, but we will update as more becomes available. Phase 3 is currently centered around the hospitality industry.

• Restaurants and bars will be able to open their indoor spaces to the public, but again, things may look different, with reduced capacity and other measures (reopening this industry is a work in progress)
• Hotels can reopen amenities like gyms, pools, and their dining establishments

Bolton Says Trump Impeachment Inquiry Missed Numerous Troubling Episodes

In his new book, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, describes instances when the president sought to halt criminal inquiries. He also says President Trump’s loyalists mocked him behind his back.

NY TIMES

John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine but for a variety of instances when he sought to use trade negotiations and criminal investigations to further his political interests.

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, saying that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new accusation by describing how Mr. Trump overtly linked tariff talks with China to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping to buy American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.” Mr. Bolton said that Mr. Trump “stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”[The request for electoral assistance from Xi is one of many instances described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favors or approval from authoritarian leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the U.S. president and attempt to manipulate him, Bolton writes, often through simplistic appeals to his various obsessions.In one May 2019 phone call, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Clinton, part of what Bolton terms a “brilliant display of Soviet style propaganda” to shore up support for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. ( Trump said it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela.) Putin’s claims, Bolton writes, “largely persuaded Trump.”--Washington Post]

[[In another eye-opening exchange published in the Wall Street Journal, Trump also seems to support Xi’s idea of eliminating presidential term limits. “Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him,” Bolton writes. “Xi said the US had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.”--Guardian]]

The book, “The Room Where It Happened,” was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled publication next Tuesday and has already become a political lightning rod in the thick of an election campaign and a No. 1 best seller on Amazon.com even before it hits the bookstores. The Justice Department went to court on Wednesday for the second time this week seeking to stop publication even as Mr. Trump’s critics complained that Mr. Bolton should have come forward during impeachment proceedings rather than save his account for a $2 million book contract.

Mr. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official who participated in major foreign policy events and has a lifetime of conservative credentials. It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.

[The 592-page memoir, obtained by The Washington Post, is the most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far, coming from a conservative who has worked in Republican administrations for decades and was a longtime contributor to Fox News. It portrays Trump as an “erratic” and “stunningly uninformed” commander in chief and lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top advisers and foreign leaders-Washington Post]
Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain was a nuclear power and asked if Finland was a part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. The president never tired of assailing allied leaders and came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known.[During a NATO summit in the summer of 2018, Bolton recounts a moment when Trump had decided to inform U.S. allies that the United States was going to withdraw from NATO if allies didn’t substantially increase defense spending by January.--Washington Post]

At times, Mr. Trump seemed to almost mimic the authoritarian leaders he appeared to admire. “These people should be executed,” Mr. Trump once said of journalists. “They are scumbags.” When Mr. Xi explained why he was building concentration camps in China, the book says, Mr. Trump “said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.” He repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to prosecute former Secretary of State John F. Kerry for talking with Iran in what he insisted was a violation of the Logan Act. [And Trump once told Xi that Americans were clamoring for him to change constitutional rules to serve more than two terms, according to the book.--Washington Post] ]In the face of such behavior, even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock Mr. Trump behind his back. During the president’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of shit.” A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”

Washington Post]

[In the memoir, Bolton describes the president’s advisers as frequently flummoxed by Trump and said a variety of officials — including Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Bolton himself — all considered resigning in disgust or frustration. Even some of the president’s most loyal advisers hold a dim view of him in private, he writes.

“What if we have a real crisis like 9/11 with the way he makes decisions?” Kelly is quoted as asking at one point as he considers resigning.

“He second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government,” Bolton writes, always looking to “personal instinct” and opportunities for “reality TV showmanship.”

For Trump, Bolton writes, one singular goal loomed above all: securing a second term.

“I am hard pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Bolton writes.

Bolton says Trump said he wanted out of Afghanistan during his second year instead of his third year so he could blame his predecessor for the war. Screaming about the border wall in a meeting with top advisers in 2018, Trump described why illegal immigration had to go down and the wall had to go up, according to Bolton’s book.“I got elected on this issue and now I’m going to get unelected,” Trump said, startling those around him.

For all his public bluster, Bolton describes Trump as frequently uncertain, fretful and wobbly during difficult policy choices.

For instance, driven by a desire to please Florida Republicans, Trump talked tough about his desire to oust Maduro throughout much of 2018. But Bolton portrays Trump as inconsistent and worry-worn when presented with the opportunity to support Guaidó, who declared himself Venezuela’s president in January 2019. Though Trump approved of a proposal from Bolton to publicly declare the United States recognized Guaidó rather than Maduro, within 30 hours Trump was already worrying that Guaidó appeared weak — a “kid” compared to “tough” Maduro — and considering changing course. “You couldn’t make this up,” Bolton writes.

In describing his White House experience on Russia-related issues, Bolton presents a picture of a president who is impulsive, churlish and consistently opposed to U.S. policy designed to discourage Russian aggression and to sanction Putin’s malign behavior.

Bolton spends little effort trying to explain Trump’s sympathetic approach to Putin. But the book makes the case that there is a disturbing and undeniable pattern of presidential reluctance to embrace policies designed to inhibit Russian aggression. He describes in detail the events leading up to the widely panned Helsinki summit in July 2018, when Trump sided with Putin against U.S. intelligence agencies over Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“This was hardly the way to do relations with Russia, and Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki,” Bolton writes.

Soon after he arrived at the White House, Bolton said Kelly gave him a warning. “You can’t imagine how desperate I am to get out of here,” Kelly said, according to Bolton’s book. “This is a bad place to work, as you will find out.”

“Has there ever been a presidency like this?” Kelly asks Bolton at one point, after telling Trump that his moves to remove security clearances from political foes such as John Brennan are “Nixonian” and “unpresidential.”

Throughout the book, he describes Trump and top advisers repeatedly slashing each other, lying to each other and maneuvering to gain advantage.

At one point, Bolton says he learned that Kushner was going to be calling the finance minister of Turkey because he was also Erdogan’s son-in-law.

“I briefed Pompeo and Mnuchin on this new ‘son-in-law channel’ and they both exploded. Pompeo was furious, Bolton writes, “because this was one more example of Kushner’s doing international negotiations he shouldn’t have been doing (along with the never quite ready Middle East peace plan).”

In November 2018, Trump came under fire for writing an unfettered defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, littered with exclamation points, over the killing of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. But according to Bolton’s book, the main goal of the missive was to take away attention from a story about Ivanka Trump using her personal email for government business.

“This will divert from Ivanka,” Trump said, according to Bolton’s book. “If I read the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing.”He repeatedly describes Trump lashing out at military leaders, demanding to withdraw troops from the Middle East and from Africa and Europe, too. “I want to get out of everything,” Trump said during a meeting at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, according to Bolton, as military leaders pressed him to take more nuanced positions.

Determined to make friends with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump decided that he wanted to give Kim some American gifts — gifts that violated U.S. sanctions that eventually had to be waived, per Bolton’s book.

When Bolton recounts the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore, the first summit of U.S. and North Korean leaders in history, Bolton castigates Trump’s diplomatic efforts, saying the president cared little for the details of the denuclearization effort and saw it merely as a “an exercise in publicity.”

He describes it extensively — including what Kim and his advisers say, and what Trump and his advisers say in return, giving a fly-on-the-wall account of a historic event.

“Trump told . . . me he was prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have his press conference to declare victory and then get out of town,” Bolton wrote.]

NY TIMES

Calling in to Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump did not address the content of Mr. Bolton’s book and only attacked him as “a washed-up guy” who “broke the law” by preparing to publish a book that the president claimed had classified information, an assertion Mr. Bolton has denied. As for Mr. Pompeo, the State Department had no comment.

Mr. Trump publicly belittled his intelligence chiefs last year after a congressional hearing where they offered assessments at odds with the White House.Credit...Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time, Mr. Bolton writes, “since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers.” Mr. Trump likes pitting staff members against one another, at one point telling Mr. Bolton that former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson had once referred to Nikki R. Haley, then the ambassador to the United Nations, by a sexist obscenity — an assertion Mr. Bolton seemed to doubt but found telling that the president would make it.

Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” after some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy, but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”

Mr. Bolton is a complicated, controversial figure. An official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush and George W. Bush’s United Nations ambassador, Mr. Bolton has been one of Washington’s most vocal advocates for a hard-line foreign policy, a supporter of the Iraq war who has favored possible military action against rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

Mr. Bolton used his 17 months in the White House to accomplish policy goals that were important to him, like withdrawing the United States from a host of international agreements he considers flawed, like the Iran nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and others.

Mr. Bolton thought Mr. Trump’s diplomatic flirtation with the likes of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia were ill advised and even “foolish” and spent much of his tenure trying to stop the president from making what he deemed bad deals. He eventually resigned last September — Mr. Trump claimed he fired him — after they clashed over Iran, North Korea, Ukraine and a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bolton did not agree to testify during the House impeachment inquiry last fall, saying he would wait to see if a judge would rule that former aides like him should do so over White House objections. But after the House impeached Mr. Trump for abuse of power for withholding security aid while pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Bolton offered to testify in the Senate trial if subpoenaed.

Senate Republicans blocked calling Mr. Bolton as a witness even after The Times reported in January that his then-unpublished book confirmed that Mr. Trump linked the suspended security aid to his insistence that Ukraine investigate his political rivals. The Senate went on to acquit Mr. Trump almost entirely along party lines. But Mr. Bolton greatly angered critics of the president for waiting to make his account public until now.

The book confirms House testimony that Mr. Bolton was wary all along of the president’s actions with regard to Ukraine and provides firsthand evidence of his own that Mr. Trump explicitly linked the security aid to investigations involving Mr. Biden and Hillary Clinton.

On Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the aid.

Mr. Bolton, however, had nothing but scorn for the House Democrats who impeached Mr. Trump, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons. Instead, he says they should have also looked at how Mr. Trump was willing to intervene in investigations into companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor Mr. Xi.Mr. Bolton writes that he raised concerns about both cases with Mr. Barr, who shared them. “Barr said he was very worried about the appearances Trump was creating,” Mr. Bolton writes. Similarly, he recalls, Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, “was plainly stunned at Trump’s approach to law enforcement, or lack thereof.”

Just as Mr. Trump sought Ukraine’s help against his domestic rivals, he similarly married his own political interests with policy during a meeting with Mr. Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting last summer in Osaka, Japan, according to the book. Mr. Xi told Mr. Trump that unnamed political figures in the United States were trying to start a new cold war with China.

“Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats,” Mr. Bolton writes. “Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.”

Mr. Bolton does not say these were necessarily impeachable offenses and adds that he does not know everything that happened with regard to all of these episodes, but he reported at least some of them to Mr. Barr and Mr. Cipollone. They should have been investigated by the House, Mr. Bolton says, and at the very least they constituted abuses of a president’s duty to put the nation’s interests ahead of his own.

“A president may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest,” Mr. Bolton writes. “Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests,” he adds, then “there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ had been perpetrated.”

NY TIMES

Known as a fastidious note taker, Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies, both abroad (Iran, North Korea) and at home (the media, “the High-Minded,” the former defense secretary Jim Mattis). The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.

The moment he cites as the real “turning point” for him in the administration had to do with an attack on Iran that, to Bolton’s abject disappointment, didn’t happen.

In June 2019, Iran had shot down an unmanned American drone, and Bolton, who has always championed what he proudly calls “disproportionate response,” pushed Trump to approve a series of military strikes in retaliation. You can sense Bolton’s excitement when he describes going home “at about 5:30” for a change of clothes because he expected to be at the White House “all night.” It’s therefore an awful shock when Trump decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning they would kill as many as 150 people. “Too many body bags,” Trump told him. “Not proportionate.”

Bolton still seems incensed at this unexpected display of caution and humanity on the part of Trump, deeming it “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do.” In the book, Bolton is vague about the targets themselves, though it was later reported that he wanted one of them to be the Iranian commander Qassim Suleimani, killed on Jan. 3 by American airstrikes, four months after Bolton left the administration.

His chapter on Ukraine is weird, circuitous and generally confounding. It’s full of his usual small-bore detail, but on the bigger, more pointed questions, the sentences get windy and conspicuously opaque. He confirms what Fiona Hill [above], a White House aide, recalled him saying to her when she testified at the House impeachment hearings (including his memorable comparison of Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to a “hand grenade”). But Bolton declines to offer anything comparatively vivid in his own book, taking cover in what he depicts as his own bewilderment.

He recalls a meeting in the Oval Office during which Trump said he wanted Giuliani to meet with Ukraine’s then President-Elect Volodymyr Zelensky “to discuss his country’s investigation of either Hillary Clinton’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign or something having to do with Hunter Biden and the 2020 election, or maybe both.” Yet Bolton — known for what a 2019 profile in The New Yorker called his “tremendous powers of recall” — said it was too much for him to fully understand. “In the various commentaries I heard on these subjects, they always seemed intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed.” He resorts to making noises of concern about what he refers to as “the Giuliani theories.”

In an epilogue, Bolton tries to have it multiple ways, saying that while he may have found Trump’s conduct “deeply disturbing,” it was the Democratic-controlled House that was guilty of “impeachment malpractice.” Instead of a “comprehensive investigation,” he sniffs, “they seemed governed more by their own political imperatives to move swiftly to vote on articles of impeachment.” He says they should have broadened their inquiry to include Halkbank and ZTE, but then neglects to mention that nothing was stopping him from saying as much, or from testifying if he was so terribly concerned.

“Had I testified,” Bolton intones, “I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House’s impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome.” It’s a self-righteous and self-serving sort of fatalism that sounds remarkably similar to the explanation he gave years ago for preemptively signing up for the National Guard in 1970 and thereby avoiding service in Vietnam. “Dying for your country was one thing,” he wrote in his 2007 book “Surrender Is Not an Option, “but dying to gain territory that antiwar forces in Congress would simply return to the enemy seemed ludicrous to me.”

When it comes to Bolton’s comments on impeachment, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness would seem to indicate some sort of ambivalence on his part — a feeling that he doesn’t seem to have very often. Or maybe it merely reflects an uncomfortable realization that he’s stuck between two incompatible impulses: the desire to appear as courageous as those civil servants who bravely risked their careers to testify before the House; and the desire to appease his fellow Republicans, on whom his own fastidiously managed career most certainly depends. It’s a strange experience reading a book that begins with repeated salvos about “the intellectually lazy” by an author who refuses to think through anything very hard himself.

The American Tradition of Anti-Black Vigilantism

Darryl Pinckney on the History of Patrols, Body Cams, and More

LITERARY HUB