Author Archive for: Rupture.Capital

By a nearly two-to-one margin, Americans do not want to see former President Donald Trump run for president again, a recent poll suggests – but Trump is still in a good position to secure the Republican Party’s nomination in 2024 should he choose to run.

According to a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted last week, just 35 percent of voters in the U.S. want Trump to run again, while 65 percent of voters oppose another Trump presidential campaign.

However, those numbers flip when looking only at data from Republican-leaning respondents. Sixty-nine percent of those respondents said that they want Trump to run again, while just 31 percent said that he shouldn’t.

Those numbers contrast with other polls, which show that Republicans may want their party to nominate another candidate. A CNN/SSRS poll conducted this month found that only 50 percent of Republican-leaning voters wanted Trump to run again, while 49 percent said he shouldn’t do so.

Regardless of the contrast in findings, the former president will likely become the GOP’s nominee should he choose to run.

Trump has not yet said whether he intends to run in 2024, but has hinted numerous times that he will do so, even referring to himself as the 45th and 47th president of the United States during a recent golf outing.

However, Trump currently faces a number of investigations into his finances, as well as his actions following his loss to current President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building is also looking into a scheme orchestrated by Trump’s campaign team to overturn the presidential election results.

The CBS News/YouGov poll found that most Americans disapprove of Trump’s attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.

In the days leading up to January 6, 2021, Trump pressured his former vice president, Mike Pence, to reject certain electors’ votes in the Electoral College — a power that the vice president doesn’t actually have, according to the U.S. Constitution. Pence ultimately refused to go along with the idea, and hours after the Capitol building was cleared of the mob of Trump loyalists that attempted to interrupt the certification of the election, Biden was certified the winner.

By a three-to-one margin, Americans disapprove of Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence, the poll found, with 75 percent of respondents saying that they disapproved of Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, while only 25 percent said that they approved.

The majority of the poll’s respondents said that they wanted the January 6 commission’s work to continue moving forward. Sixty percent of Americans in the survey said that Congress should investigate Trump-aligned representatives and other public officials for their actions leading up to the Capitol attack, while 40 percent said they should drop the inquiry.

Former Judge J. Michael Luttig said in a New York Times opinion piece yesterday that the current Republican Party is cleaved in two. On one side are those who believe the last election was legitimate, including Luttig, a prominent conservative appeals court judge from 1991 to 2006. The other side are those who, loyal to Trump, insist the 2020 election was stolen—and includes at least two of Luttig’s former clerks, John Eastman and Ted Cruz.

Luttig helped nurture both men’s careers; for more than a year now, he’s been trying protect the country against them.

In the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection, Luttig found himself pitted against Eastman. Trump was putting pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to delay certification of the election that day. One of his lawyers, John Eastman, was the architect of this insane legal strategy. He wrote a memo to Pence outlining his supposed authority to stop the certification of Biden’s win. Under pressure, Pence turned to Luttig for advice, and Luttig refuted Eastman. When Pence announced on January 6 that he would not interrupt Congress’ counting of the electoral votes, he quoted Luttig. Eastman, meanwhile, stood beside Rudy Giuliani and whipped up the crowd at the “Save America” rally with bogus allegations of election fraud. Today, Eastman is in a legal struggle with the January 6 committee, which is seeking access to his communications with Trump about overturning the election. 

Inside the US Capitol, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), another former Luttig clerk, was also working to subvert American democracy, by urging his colleagues to delay proceeding so they could investigate specious claims of election fraud. Even after the Capitol was violently breached, Cruz exploited the Electoral Count Act to object to certification. Now, Luttig is trying to clean up that mess, too, so that his former protege cannot use it to try to derail democracy a second time. 

Luttig is advising multiple Republican Senators on reforming the Electoral Count Act, according to the Times. In his Times op-ed, Luttig pointed, by name, to Cruz’s and his efforts on January 6:

After the 2020 election, Republican senators like Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri tried to capitalize on those ambiguities in the law to do Mr. Trump’s bidding, mounting a case for overturning the results in some Biden-won states on little more than a wish. …

Trump acolytes like Mr. Cruz and Mr. Hawley should appreciate the need to reform this unconstitutional law. 

Before they found themselves on opposite sides of the Trump divide, Cruz was not just an ex-clerk but something of a Luttig acolyte. According to a 2016 Times article, Cruz has described Luttig as “like a father to me.” The two deeply bonded while Cruz clerked for Luttig on the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court, where the future presidential candidate reportedly developed his zeal for the death penalty. In his 2016 campaign, Cruz, complaining about John Roberts, said he would have nominated a “rock-ribbed” conservative like Luttig as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

But yesterday, Luttig was a long way from displaying that sort of appreciation, writing that what Cruz did on January 6 would threaten American democracy if repeated in 2024. “The clear and present danger to our democracy now is that former President Donald Trump and his political allies appear prepared to exploit the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the law governing the counting of votes for president and vice president, to seize the presidency in 2024 if Mr. Trump or his anointed candidate is not elected by the American people,” he warned. 

As Luttig advises Republican senators on reforming the law that could abet an election heist in three years, Cruz is loudly opposed to effort. Earlier this month, Politico reported he came out “most forcefully against the group’s ongoing work to raise the bar for challenging elections in Congress.” 

Perhaps Luttig was thinking of his former clerk when he wrote the last lines of his op-ed: The “only members in Congress who might not want to reform this menacing law are those planning its imminent exploitation to overturn the next presidential election.” 

Special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia scandal has turned into a conspiracy-theory-generating machine for feverish right-wingers. And his latest filing raises the question of whether that is by design.

A few days ago, Durham, appointed by Trump Attorney General William Barr, filed what normally is a routine and technical motion in a legal proceeding as part of his case against Michael Sussmann, a Democratic lawyer who Durham has indicted for allegedly lying to an FBI official. The filing concerned a possible conflict of interest involving Sussmann’s attorneys. But the motion included several paragraphs of supposed “factual background” that exploded within right-wing media. It led to a Fox News story with a dramatic headline: “Clinton Campaign Paid to ‘Infiltrate” Trump Tower, White House Servers to Link Trump to Russia, Durham Finds.” Other conservative outlets followed suit. The Washington Examiner howled, “Durham says Democrat-allied tech executive spied on Trump’s White House office.”

Donald Trump got into the act. He issued a statement claiming Durham’s latest filing “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.” He huffed that this was a scandal “far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate” and (dangerously) noted that in “a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.” He demanded “reparations.”

All this hyperbolic harrumphing—call it disinformation—arises from imprecision and perhaps false information in Durham’s filing. 

Durham’s case is based on the allegation that during a 2016 meeting with then-FBI general counsel James Baker, Sussmann, who was sharing with the bureau information assembled by cyber-researchers that raised the prospect of an unusual computer link between a Trump-related business and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank, lied when he said he wasn’t representing the Clinton campaign related to this matter. (Sussmann denies this charge.) In the conflict-of-interest filing, Durham referenced a meeting that Sussman had on February 9, 2017 with the CIA, in which he presented an “updated set of allegations” that included information compiled by a tech executive named Rodney Joffe and other researchers. Joffe and the others believed they had come across cyber data called “DNS lookups” that indicated suspicious links between both Trump Tower and the White House and a Russian mobile phone provider. Durham claimed that Sussmann told the CIA, as the document characterizes the conversation, “that these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.” Durham added, “The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations.”

In this recent filing, Durham also suggested that Joffe had been working on behalf of the Clinton campaign without providing specifics about the nature of any such relationship, and that Joffe had “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data” for this research work. Durham alleged that Joffe’s company “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers” for the White House, “as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services” to the White House and that Joffe and his associates “exploited this arrangement…for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

Putting together all the allegations and suggestions—a tech exec possibly tied to the Clinton campaign “exploiting” data related to the White House and Trump Tower—right-wing journalists reached a dramatic conclusion: The Clintonites hacked Trump at his home (or office) and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and spied on him. But this leap was based on cyber ignorance and possibly misinformation presented by Durham.

Researching DNS lookups is not hacking a server. It is tracking the pattern of connections between servers and computers or smartphones. Much of this information—DNS logs—is not private. The researchers examining the DNS data were not infiltrating anything. Lawyers for Joffe and David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the research Sussmann shared with the CIA, have challenged Durham’s representations. Dagon’s attorneys note that the DNS logs examined related to the Russian phone service came from the time of Barack Obama’s presidency. That appears credible, given that Sussmann’s meeting with the CIA was only three weeks after Trump had taken office. And they told the New York Times that Dagon and associates were using “nonprivate” DNS data and “were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign.”

Joffe, too, says that this research was focused on whether Russian malware had infected the White House and the Trump campaign. (Trump’s campaign office was in Trump Tower.) As the New York Times reports,

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data—including from the White House—for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

On Monday, Sussmann’s lawyer’s filed a response to Durham’s conflict-of-interest motion that insisted the research discussed at the CIA meeting “pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President.” This filing also claimed that Durham was “well aware” of this—suggesting that the special counsel had purposefully fudged this particular and critical point. Sussmann’s legal team, in this document, accused Durham of making “a filing in this case that unnecessarily includes prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.”

Sussmann and others who are part of the investigation should not be taken at their word. But it’s clear from Durham’s own filing that there is no evidence that Trump and White House servers were infiltrated. This charge originated with Kash Patel, a onetime aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and pro-Trump operative who has long toiled to discredit the Trump-Russia scandal. Discussing the Durham motion, he made an inaccurate claim to Fox that the document showed that Clinton lawyers had tried to “infiltrate” Trump Tower and White House servers. (Patel, who was a top Pentagon aide at the end of the Trump administration, has been subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot.)

Ultimately, the fault for this phony bombshell rests with Durham. His filing did not specify the exact time period the DNS lookup research covered. It did not include sufficient details of the alleged links between Joffe and the Clinton campaign to provide a clear picture. And a central issue remains a matter of dispute between Durham and Sussman, Joffe, and the researchers: What allegations did Sussmann present to the CIA? Durham maintains that Sussmann and the researchers were falsely claiming that Trump and his crew were using Russian-made wireless phones, as part of an underhanded effort to tar Trump with a nefarious connection to Moscow. The researchers say their concern was Russian security breaches of the Obama White House and the Trump campaign. This seems to be a question that Durham could easily resolve with a piece or two of evidence. If he wanted to. 

Prosecutors have much discretion when it comes to telling the stories of their cases. They can stick to the narrow specifics of the allegations. They can elaborate. Through his tenure as special consul, Durham has chosen to use narrow indictments to disseminate information that suggests wider conspiracies. That ought to place a weighty burden on him to be fair and accurate—and to not feed any partisan conspiracy fever. Yet Durham’s latest filing falls short of that standard and fuels the suspicion that he might be more conspirator than investigator. 

As inflation spirals and growth rates slow, the case for investing in emerging markets has rarely been weaker

Human-caused climate change significant driver of destructive conditions as even drier decades lie ahead, researchers say

The American west has spent the last two decades in what scientists are now saying is the most extreme megadrought in at least 1,200 years. In a new study, published on Monday, researchers also noted that human-caused climate change is a significant driver of the destructive conditions and offered a grim prognosis: even drier decades lie ahead.

“Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the west has been dry for most of the last couple decades,” says Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and the study’s lead author. “We now know from these studies that is dry not only from the context of recent memory but in the context of the last millennium.”

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